Labour's leave voters might be less certain than some think. Wikicommons/Ilovetheeu. Some rights reserved. Prevailing wisdom dictates that to avoid harm being done to you by politicians, you must not trust them. There are good and valid reasons for this, but the logic leaves us vulnerable to one key risk : that we doubt politicians when they are in fact telling the truth. As a result we are left exposed to the threat we anticipate rather than a security we refuse to believe in.

In recent times there have been no political soap operas with so ready a supply of bad faith actors as Brexit and the saga of Corbyn and Labour. Shadowy think tanks (Legatum), misrepresented wills of people (Farage et al), billionaire media (Murdoch, Barclay Brothers, Rothermere) the machinations of Labour’s Blairite rump, still spurned and licking its wounds. As so many of these quarters bemoan a supposed loss of truth, new research from the British Election Study (very neatly summarised here) details attitudes that reveal much about Labour’s crucial Leave voters, and in so doing offer useful, and corrective, advice to those still hoping to clinch remain from the jaws of leave. The research points strongly towards the idea that leaving the EU was a means and not an end.

The research, first of all, shows that Labour’s leave voters still care more about housing and public services than about the leaving of the EU, with 26 per cent of respondents citing it as their number 1 concern (24 per cent cite Brexit). The proportion citing foreigners or immigration is lower again, at 17 per cent. It goes almost without saying, but nevertheless still should be said, that the same does not go for Tory voters - just 15 per cent of leave-voting Tories prioritise housing and public services (interestingly, in what it says of the assumed progressivism of remain voters, a higher rate of concern than the 10 per cent of remain-voting Tories), while 24 per cent of leave-voting Tories have a primary concern of immigration and foreigners.

Labour’s Remain voters – its ridiculed and supposedly out of touch urbanites – meanwhile, share priorities every bit as ‘left’ as Labour’s traditional base, with 20 per cent of them citing public services and housing as an issue bigger than the EU. Between these two groups, you find a party that either wants the EU and the fairer society project of Corbynism, or wanted to leave the EU in 2016 but nevertheless care more about the fairer society than about doing so. You find a party that either wants the EU and the fairer society project of Corbynism, or wanted to leave the EU in 2016 but nevertheless care more about the fairer society than about doing so.

On other relevant themes, Labour’s leave camp also stack up as 44 per cent in favour of a ratification referendum on the final deal (compared to just 18 per cent of Tories), and also self-identify as paying less attention to politics, so that their 2016 vote might more readily be regarded as an accurate mood of the times, rather than a firm commitment. For this group, and unlike their Tory equivalents, the research points strongly towards the idea that leaving the EU was a means and not an end.

Much of that which has been written on Corbyn and the apocryphal “Lexit” has felt more like the obsession of a voiceless political centre getting a taste of the disenfranchisement already familiar to most. Against that, a thought experiment: 

Imagine that Jeremy Corbyn gave the EU “seven and a half out of ten” because he felt the EU warranted, if pressed to give one, a rating of seven and a half out of ten. Contrary to the outsized ‘Lexit’ narrative, imagine that Labour voters back and backed remain, voting for it to the tune of 63 per cent, favourably comparable to the 64 per cent of the remain-backing SNP and the 70 per cent of the avowedly Europhile Lib Dems. 

Whether it was accurate or deceitful (it was deceitful), imagine that voters did simply want £350million a week for the NHS, as promised on the side of the bus. Imagine that to leave the EU really was no more than the  project of a Tory fringe that eventually lucked-in on post-financial crisis timing and the rise of a referendum thanks to a political chancer such as David Cameron.

Stripped of the certainty that Labour are engaging in deceit, or that a section of the electorate (half of it) is a homogenous out-group determined to leave the EU for nefarious reasons, there is a clear constituency – present in the recent data – for Labour under Corbyn to deliver the fair society without the EU departure, or at least with further public consultation on it.

The proviso, also evident in the data, is that it must be a joint-project that does not jettison one for the other, a trade that would anyway ensure both failed together.

This is, admittedly, a far cry from Labour’s first response to Brexit, encapsulated on June 24, 2016, by Corbyn’s ill-thought through and snap call for an immediate Article 50 notification to be delivered. The moment, understandably enough, is something critics will long hold onto as evidence of his Eurosceptic bent, where a more forgiving reading is that it was rather a sign of the poorly-drilled outfit from which Labour have since drastically upped their game.

This accidentally full-blooded beginning in the brave new world of Brexit nevertheless set the Labour Party’s tone for the following year. Not yet strong enough to contend a general election as a party against the ‘will of the people’, Labour overhauled the Tory majority on the backs of dissatisfaction with a naked Tory haughtiness, and fuming, energised remain voters. With that result of June 8 , 2017, a confidence has emerged, and with it the potential to differentiate the Labour EU offer from that of the Tory Party. The new direction is typified by a Labour now comfortable enough to assert that there will be a customs union with the EU, and industrious enough to make the announcement together with the CBI. The party is, without doubt, the UK political centre.

Screenshot: British Election Study tweet.

Tory Remainer votes?

That process will be done no harm at all by the information on offer in this latest research, suggesting that Labour leave are ready to compromise in return for the fair society promised by project Corbyn. The data, however, does present a few important questions still to be asked. While the Labour leave vote has been scrutinised almost exhaustively, its equivalent, the Tory Remain vote, has not – this despite the latter having more votes in it.

If Labour’s leavers seem to dislike the Tories more than the EU, and value fair society above an EU exit anyway, might Tory remainers be brought on-side at no political cost to Labour’s own base? The question then will be the inverse – do Cameroon Tories like the EU more than they dislike Labour? The key test, as it always has been, will be if George Osborne will vote Jeremy Corbyn. While there is often the refrain from remainers that Corbyn should back remain to win an election, more seldom comes the assertion that centrist remainers must back Corbyn to win a remain.

If this is the current mood of the electorate, then it will need to be matched by changes in the thinking of the Corbyn team. Where Labour seemed once to operate with an assumption that they must cede Brexit to get socialism, a bargain many in the Corbyn team would have been happy to strike, the contrary logic now becomes more valuable: Labour get socialism by giving remainers their EU, or at least a stab at a ratification referendum. While there is often the refrain from remainers that Corbyn should back remain to win an election, more seldom comes the assertion that centrist remainers must back Corbyn to win a remain. True, politicians are our servants – let them come to you – but Corbyn is also servant to 17 million leave voters, some hard, most lukewarm, but disregarding the nature of that duty is not only the attitude that brought us to Brexit, but will also be sure to lose the day.

As the political centre and momentum moves, as it was inevitably always going to, towards customs union and reason – Labour’s interrogation will now also shift from domestic priorities (what degree of Leave to accommodate in getting Corbynism) to European ones (what degree of Corbynism will the EU accommodate). These sort of questions become possible with a sense that hard Brexit can be taken from the table, and that what John Major once called "the Bastards” of the Tory Party would break their own government sooner than concede to common sense over the EU. At that point, Labour becomes ever more the government in waiting that they already take efforts to present themselves as.

Evidence of this process can be seen in the opening up of space for serious discussion of particulars in the Corbyn project. George Peretz QC, of Monckton Chambers, recently provided an open-minded but neat rebuttal of how that sacred cow of some left-wing leavers, EU state aid law, actually does little harm and even much good to the aims of Corbyn. The tone is instructive, however, in that it assumes Labour's position on the EU to be misunderstood, not malicious. 

First by accident and then by design, Labour have for two years given the Tories enough rope for them to be strung up in the knots of their own Brexit. As the electorate becomes more amenable to, and even hungry for, rationality on the matter, now comes the time to question, seriously, if the EU is at-odds with the Labour Manifesto, and if not, to mend for good the rift that once existed between Corbyn’s Labour and remain voters. The external variable to this, beyond our control and with a clock ticking, is whether or not – come that time – Brussels can still be made to care.

Photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved.Russian elections used to be all about dramaturgiya, meaning an artificial and carefully-scripted drama. Elections may not have had the normal interest, like an uncertain outcome, but they buzzed with all the drama of artificial conflict. In fact, one of the tricks of local “political technology” was to deliver emotive narratives to marginalise subjects that the Kremlin didn’t want to see discussed.

The 2018 presidential election, however, isn’t just boring. It’s devoid of any politics at all. If it is about anything, it’s about the politics of nothingness. It may therefore apparently not be worth paying too much attention, but dramaturgiya has been a functional part of the Russian political system for over 20 years, and it’s not clear how things will work without it.

Switching the tracks

Dramaturgiya has changed its function several times. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was part of a weak state’s box of magic tricks. Russia’s leaders were presented as either a lesser evil against exaggerated threats (Yeltsin against the “red-brown” coalition in 1993 or against the Communists in 1996), or as a crusader against soft targets or threats that the state didn’t have the capacity or desire to properly confront (the oligarchs in 2003, the Chechens in 1999 were arguably both). Dramaturgiya’s main function was thus distraction, changing the dominant narrative away from the authorities’ corruption or incompetence.

Under “mature Putinism”, dramaturgiya became the key means of maintaining Putin’s mega-rating, at 70% or more

Under “mature Putinism”, dramaturgiya became the key means of maintaining Putin’s mega-rating, at 70% or more. This wasn’t about popularity in a bipartisan system like the USA, where the leader hovers either side of 50%. It was about creating and maintaining what the political technologist Gleb Pavlovsky and others used to call the“Putin majority”. Seventy percent or 80% was the level of loyalty that was expected in the system; a degree of opposition in discredited 1990s circles or amongst the intelligentsia mattered little, so long as the “majority” was intact.

The majority marginalised other voices, but most importantly it aligned political elites via a loyalty test to the script of the dramaturgiya. Political debate was replaced by a virtual chorus. The majority functioned as a post-modern equivalent of Václav Havel’s greengrocer in his well-known 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Back in the era of Leonid Brezhnev and Gustav Husák, it didn’t matter whether Havel’s conformist really believed in the slogan he was supposed to put in his window (“Workers of the world unite”) – what mattered was his display of loyalty to the official party line. The modern-day Kremlin script functions in the same way. It’s pointless to ask whether the Russian elite actually believes all the tropes, myths, propaganda and downright lies. The point is their loyalty to the overall narrative, and maintaining the closed circle of its reproduction.

A further change under late Putinism is that the dramaturgiya acquired a harder edge. Russian political technologists had always read too much Carl Schmitt for their own good. They now revelled in his “Theory of the Partisan”, creating a “state of exception” to justify constant, even escalating conflict between “Fortress Russia” and its enemies. And far from dramaturgiya somehow fading away, the authorities needed constantly to create new episodes to renew fading impact effects. Or, most worryingly of all, ever higher doses to maintain the effect.

One final change is that the record got stuck. In the 1990s, political technologists never really played the same trick twice. Since 2012, the refrain has constantly been foreign enemies, orchestrated by the USA, and channelled by the domestic fifth column. And in so far as the script didn’t change too much, its intensity changed instead.

The empty election

This all meant that dramaturgiya was increasingly permanent. It wasn’t just deployed to win elections. The majority became the means by which the mythical “power vertical” actually worked – not by the orders given, but by the need for the administrative machine to join in the virtual chorus. But there were dangers of too much drama. If Gleb Pavlovsky was one of the original architects of the system, one reason why he fell out of favour in 2011 was that he began to warn of the dangers of over-mobilisation, and of creating too many enemies. When I interviewed him in 2007, he said, “we have to prepare tranquilisation, not mobilisation”. And by 2011, Pavlovskii was in the Dmitry Medvedev camp. He thought he had saved Russia, job done.

“2017 is the year when the Kremlin’s domination over the ‘scenario’ ends, although it’s far from being the end of the Kremlin’s hegemony over politics”

But the Medvedev project was beset by internal tensions. Medvedev was designed to be a virtual liberal, but protesters wanted him to act like a real one. He was supposed to de-mobilise protest potential, but the spark for the Bolotnaya protests was the desire for a first term of rhetoric to be succeeded by a second term of action.

What the protesters got instead was reaction. Putin overdosed on dramaturgiya with his conservative values project in 2012, and we have been living with the consequences ever since. The Kremlin was grappling with the need for internal-external enemies after Putin’s re-election, even before the crisis in Ukraine. Who now remembers the row about American foster parents? Then confrontation with Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, sanctions and constant rows with the west took things to a whole new level. Ukraine segued into Syria. And America was always the Great Satan.

But now we have nothing. In Pavlovsky’s words:

“2017 is the year when the Kremlin’s domination over the ‘scenario’ ends, although it’s far from being the end of the Kremlin’s hegemony over politics. All year Putin’s scenarios have been late, catching up with issues emerging inside the public domain. But in the minds of TV viewers, even Kremlin critics, the inertia of his former power reigns… The views of observers, their language and vocabulary, are aimed at ‘Putin’s campaign’. But there is no campaign.”

Unlike 2012, there is no overriding theme. There is no manifesto. There are no Putin articles in the press. The mythology of “Fortress Russia” is still there in part, but ritualised, with the option of taking it to a higher level excluded for now. The Kremlin toyed with the idea of a victory campaign, declaring an end to Syria operations many times over, and even toying with peace proposals for Ukraine. Putin would run on accumulated dramaturgiya, banking his fake victories abroad. But this proved hard to deliver – or more exactly, to stage convincingly.

Over-mobilisation has recently become more of a concern. The 2016 Duma campaign was almost deliberately boring

There are mini-dramas. Ksenia Sobchak seems to be running both to create a new pseudo-opposition and to discredit a certain type of caricatured liberalism. Pavel Grudinin seems to have passed his screen test to join the ranks of Kremlin outriders, a fake populist to ride the global wave of populism rather than letting it crash against the Kremlin unchecked. But there is nothing to make sense of the whole. (Though Grudinin, at least, does hint at one possible future direction.)

The changing nature of the Kremlin’s dramaturgiya is illustrated by the shift from Vladislav Surkov to Vyacheslav Volodin to Sergey Kiriyenko as information overlord. According to one Ukrainian expert on information war I interviewed recently: “Surkov was a creator, Volodin a brutish builder, but Kiriyenko is only a manager. He’s not developing the system, just controlling it. This shows that Putin thinks propaganda works well, it doesn’t need further development. But it’s probably a short-term appointment, just for the elections.”

A pause or a re-calculation?

But because the election is a great big blank, we don’t know whether this is because of short-term or long-term factors. Whether this is just a pause or a strategic re-calculation.

Over-mobilisation has recently become more of a concern. The 2016 Duma campaign was almost deliberately boring. The obvious price to be paid was the fall in official turnout to 47.8%, although independent estimates calculated it as low as 36.5%. In part, this revived a point made by Ivan Krastev in 2011; one of the paradoxical strengths of Putin’s regime before 2012 was its lack of ideology, without which there was little for protesters to mobilise against. The Kremlin is clearly afraid of the opposite scenario to 2012 (protesters after rather than before the election) because the election will not actually decide anything. So turnout, or more exactly real turnout, will undoubtedly be low this time (65.2% was claimed in 2012). Hence all the methods used to make it look higher, with a virtual civil society campaign fronted by ersatz NGOs like “Volunteers of victory” collecting signatures for Putin.

The Kremlin is unlikely to risk further disengagement; it will not want to leave the old Putin majority strategically adrift

Russia’s “conservative turn” after 2012 seemed for the longer term. But there were reasons to pause for breath in 2018. There were too many tigers to ride. There was the danger of what Mark Galeotti called“fantasy fatigue”. There was the real world, and the real-world consequences of too much virtual conflict, blowing back to Russia from Ukraine, Syria and the USA. And there was the accumulation of real world demands. Putin’s annual address in March 2018 didn’t solve the problem of defining what the election was actually about; but it made some nods in the direction of development rather than drama, without of course addressing the reasons why so many practical issues had been neglected. And Putin’s nuclear machismo pointed in the opposite direction.

In part, the Kremlin was relying on the momentum of existing dramaturgiya, on the script remaining the same. Everyone should know it by now. But the system looks old. Putin is tired. According to Pavlovsky again, everyone can see “the wear and tear of the outdated scenario-planning machine in the Russian Federation”. The whole show is empty. “Putin has become a pilgrim in his own country. Puzzled, he wanders around in the fogs of politicisation, visiting cities and ministries, like a pensioner, moving from dacha to dacha. The “theatre of depoliticization has exhausted itself”.

Life without drama

I won’t attempt to predict what will happen to Russia over the next six years. But logically, we can say what will happen without dramaturgiya, at least at election time.

First, the population is less mobilised. It is more of a spectator for whatever Putin decides to do next. Inevitable low turnout for the election, whatever the official statistics may claim, will be a damp start to the new term. The Kremlin is unlikely to risk further disengagement; it will not want to leave the old Putin majority strategically adrift.

Elites may also gain a certain destructive freedom. In ideal type democracies, competitive elections confer a mandate. The losers acquiesce in the winners’ right to rule. But if Russia no longer has a propaganda chorus to align elites, then they may go off-script. Clan politics will be more prominent; though individual clans will likely claim their own mini-dramarturgiyas, posing as “nationalists” or “reformers”. Ramzan Kadyrov is already trying out his narrative, as leader of a more radical version of Russian Islam. There may be a new Time of Troubles, but with competition between false narratives rather than false Dmitrys. And if a hypothetical succession struggle hots up, it will not be for the keys to the Kremlin, but the keys to NTV.

Russia may also be buffeted from abroad, or by the simple force of events. The whole world now faces narrative volatility, and Russia has played its far from small part in encouraging that trend. It would be deeply paradoxical, and unlikely, if Russia now took a back seat. As the election has been so devoid of debate and meaning, there is nothing to stop Putin ramping up the rhetoric again if he wants.

An alternative explanation for the current, possibly temporary, lack of drama might be the 2018 World Cup. The most prosaic answer of all might be that Putin just wants a free hand in a very uncertain next term. But he is unlikely to get it, having failed to define the script in advance.

Image: Liam Fox, International Trade Secretary, speaking last week. Jonathan Brady/PA Images, all rights reserved.

The last twenty years of my professional career have been spent working to support UK business in European and global markets, most recently at the Department of International Trade. We now face the challenge of how public policy can best help UK firms to compete effectively as we leave the European Union. My focus here is on the practical realities, not the politics, of Brexit.

I want first to set out the economic implications of the choices the UK faces in 2018; and then put forward some policies to support the competitiveness of UK firms trading in global markets.

Trade requires both effective access to markets, and competitive firms producing quality products. It is firms not governments that determine how much is exported.

Governments influence market access through agreements on how markets are regulated, acceptable product standards, competition policy and, less importantly, tariff levels; as well as through exchange rates.

Public policy also helps in the longer term to shape the available skills, research base, infrastructure and access to capital which determine longer term productivity, and support the competitiveness of firms.

“an immediate, significant and lasting negative impact”

Against that background it is important to bear in mind that today’s UK economy is very much service based – around 80% of value added comes from services.

UK exports account for around 21% of UK GDP (on a value-added basis) with services representing more than half of that total. Business services, finance and insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors provide as much UK export value as the top twelve industrial sectors.

The EU takes 46% of UK service exports; nearly four times what we export in services to the US, which in turn is roughly twice our total service exports to India and China combined. No other overseas services market is significant.

The UK’s exports of goods to the EU are around 49% of our total sales abroad; just over four times our exports to the US and twelve times current exports to China.

The distinction between what the statisticians define as services or goods is no longer as robust as it used to be. Recent estimates from the CER and Trade Policy Observatory find that services valued added directly linked to manufacturing exports, design, software etc., is worth more than £50bn annually, about the same magnitude as UK financial service exports.

The income gained by manufacturers and their supply chains in servicing advanced products from aircraft to medical diagnostic machinery is often half or more of the total value of a contract.

So economic activity is more like a bowl of entangled spaghetti than separate dishes neatly labelled as goods or services; and this is particularly true of trade inside the EU.

The European single market in services is still less developed than in goods. But it is the only functioning cross-border services market in the global economy, because the EU is the only organisation combining mutual recognition of qualifications, technical standards, and free movement of workers with shared regulatory structures and a legal dispute resolution system able to provide certainty to suppliers and consumers.

Losing guaranteed access to service markets currently open across the EU will therefore have an immediate, significant and lasting negative impact. The UK is predominantly a service economy; around half of our service exports go the EU; and there are no plausible alternative markets for these services which combine the scale and depth of current service exports to Europe.

Impact goes way beyond ‘financial services’

Examples of this impact which do not involve financial services include UK legal services, where net exports amounted to over £3bn in 2015. Outside the single market UK law firms would no longer be able to represent clients in European court hearings, nor engage directly with the Commission on competition investigations. Similarly, international arbitration work depends on being able to plead before the European Court of Justice; and intellectual property disputes require representation rights before the EU IPO tribunals.

The creative services sector exports over £4bn to the EU, with more than half of fashion, graphic design, film and video exports going to EU countries. The UK could no longer be the hub for pan-European broadcasting it has become since the audio-visual market was opened up, as broadcasters are required to base themselves in an EU member state; and current EU free trade deals do not cover broadcasting and programme production rights.

Our manufacturing economy is, as the logic of the single market implies, now deeply integrated with the rest of the EU. Just under half of UK exports, and over half of UK imports, come from within the European Union single market. For the last 25 years there have been no customs checks or border tax adjustments on these transactions. The ability to move workers, with mutually recognised qualifications, freely between member states also makes firms more cost effective.

Much single market trade is within closely managed supply chains which require certainty of rapid delivery, clarity of technical standards, the lowest possible transport costs, and the ability to provide unified support services, for example in data analytics, design and maintenance. Larger companies make investment decisions within the EU by comparing the cost of different plants within these integrated cross-border supply chains.

Components, particularly in the automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors, often cross-national boundaries several times. VAT formalities continue to be streamlined and the EU’s digital single market ensures free data movement within a shared legal framework. So both services and goods trade are becoming ever more interdependent within the EU.

No plausible economic analysis concludes that the extra customs, tax, security and regulatory barriers necessarily required by a trading border, and the inevitable delays, expense and bureaucracy that go with them, could somehow increase UK firms’ competitive advantage. Losing level playing field access to the EU’s internal market, and to the customs union that goes with it, would immediately put UK based producers at a lasting disadvantage to their competitors within that market.

What options are available to manage this challenge?

A bilateral free trade deal between London and Brussels is an obvious candidate.

The additional costs to business of such a deal compared with the status quo would be significant. The annual administrative burden of moving out of the customs union to a free trade agreement with the EU has been officially estimated at over £5 billion, a 350% increase. Up to 5,000 new permanent Customs staff would be needed, a deadweight cost to the taxpayer, as well as additional physical infrastructure to process well over 10,000 containers a day in channel ports.

More than half of the UK’s 300,000+ traders trade only with the EU. At least 130,000 of those have no current dealings with Customs authorities. The number of customs declarations is projected to increase fivefold, from 50 million to 250 million.

Any free trade deal requires rules of origin certificates for cross border trade to ensure that there is sufficient domestic content to justify tariff free status. One UK car company estimated that it would need some 15,000 rules of origin certificates, at a minimum cost estimated at £15 each. UK supermarkets relying on just-in-time food imports could need 80,000 separate import declarations annually, costing large businesses £25 each and smaller ones without economies of scale around twice as much. Similar challenges apply to food exports. Around 70% of UK food and drink trade takes place within the EU.

Technology cannot offer frictionless solutions - and our own tech business are threatened

Technology cannot offer a frictionless solution to border controls. The need for formal product standard approvals, hygiene checks, advance security declarations, VAT calculations and payment, and the inevitable delays at the border, cannot be wished away. Together these complexities threaten just-in-time supply lines and make companies manufacturing for the European market see further investment in the UK as higher risk than in other EU economies without these added costs and delays.

The UK’s stock of inward investment is also at risk as investors seek to maintain that wider market access. Over 1000 Japanese companies in the UK employing some 140,000 people are here because of free access to the wider EU market, not simply the smaller UK home market. The 2000 German companies employing 370,000 people with 110bn Euro of direct investment are part of seamless pan-EU supply chains. In the chemical sector for example 60% of UK exports go to the EU, and 75% of imports come from the EU.

Two thirds of UK exports to the EU are estimated by the IFS to be intermediate inputs to wider supply chains; as are 55% of imports here from the EU. Investment to build these supply chains will be at risk if UK based firms can no longer access the single market on equal terms. Half of the £1 trillion stock of UK foreign direct investment comes from other EU based investors so the potential impact is large.

An important factor in the UK originally joining the European Community in 1973, in the abolition of exchange controls by Mrs Thatcher’s first administration in 1979, and in the UK’s leadership of the single market programme from the mid-1980s was to ensure a more competitive home market, as the basis for success in the global economy. For the last 25 years the EU single market has achieved that goal with a rigorous control of state aids, active pro-competition policy and open public procurement markets worth over 2000bn euros, five times that of the UK alone.

The competitive spur of the single market has provided cheaper imports for business as well as consumers, and pressured UK firms to improve their productivity or go out of business. By restricting firms’ access to the largest and most prosperous single market in the world, taking the UK out of the EU negotiated preferential trade deals which cover another 12% of UK exports, and increasing investor uncertainty about guaranteed cross-border access to skilled labour, Brexit risks undermining the global competitiveness of the UK economy.

The Brexit implications for entrepreneurship and innovation in the UK are also problematic. The welcome growth in tech start-ups, in London and more widely across the UK, has been fuelled by the ease of movement of young professionals into Britain from the rest of the EU and the freedom to transact data and digital services across the single market. £7bn was invested in the UK’s digital tech sector in 2016, 50% more than in any other European country.

The growth of available start-up and scaleup capital, incentivised by the Enterprise Investment Scheme and Seed EIS tax breaks, has been a further UK advantage. The research sector has benefitted from the UK government’s decision in 2012 to develop an industrial strategy with increased research and innovation funding; while universities have benefitted from EU Horizon 2020 funding for research programmes and their ability to recruit talent freely across the EU.

After Brexit there will be more constraints on European entrepreneurs seeking to settle and open businesses in the UK. The EIF which provided one third of the funding for UK based venture capital funds in the four years to 2015 -some £2.3bn – is now winding down its operations here. The £400 million new UK funding to be provided through the British Business bank, while welcome, will still leave a significant gap in public funding for venture capital.

For start-ups the UK risks moving from being the most open major European country to being the most bureaucratic, with no guarantee that new firms can import staff freely from within the EU, the loss of significant EU funding in the research and innovation sectors, and uncertainty over the alignment of UK and EU data protection rules. Universities already report the loss of EU staff amid worries that the UK will no longer be able to lead cross-European research teams funded by the EU, and wider concerns about the status of family members under more restrictive migration rules.

Bilateral trade deals, evidence, and wishful thinking

Can these disadvantages be remedied through new bilateral trade deals with the rest of the world?

It is right to look seriously at the alternative markets which may open to the UK outside the EU, some fast growing. But as David Hume reminded us, a wise person proportions belief to the evidence.

There is a marked lack of evidence that leaving the EU customs union and single market will lead to greater UK trade with third countries.

It is for example unclear why third countries such as China, India or the United States should agree to negotiate bilateral trade deals with the UK which favour Britain’s comparative advantage in the service sector. They will instead seek acceptance by the UK of their own national regulatory, environmental and technical standards as part of even a limited trade deal.

Given the reciprocity which runs through trade negotiations, third countries will also be aware that any concessions made to the UK will be expected by other trading partners; and the degree of their interest in the UK market will be strongly influenced by how far UK based firms continue to enjoy competitive access to the much larger European market.

In trade negotiations size does matter. Even implausibly favourable market access deals with some third countries are arithmetically unable to make up for the loss of unrestricted access to more local EU markets in which so many UK producers are currently integrated.

On current trade flows, a tripling of total services trade with China would not equal a fifth of the UK’s current services exports to the single market. Germany already does more than four times as much trade with China as the UK. The major barrier to additional UK trade with China or other markets is our lack of relative competitiveness.

Moreover for most products outside the agriculture, textiles, food and automotive sector, tariffs are an administrative burden rather than a significant cost. Few high value products are so price sensitive that a reduction in bilateral tariff levels will massively shift trade. Market access in advanced service economies is largely about regulatory standards, access to data, and effective dispute resolution. Investors require reassurance that market access will not be threatened by political disagreements or arbitrary anti-dumping decisions.

It is of course helpful to achieve more market access through negotiation. The EU as a trade negotiator has the economic weight to deal with China and the US as trade equals. The UK does not. The European Commission has negotiated trade deals with over fifty countries, most recently with Canada, Korea and Japan, and continues to engage with the US. Some £55bn of UK exports, 12% of UK trade, benefit from these third country agreements.

So for the UK to give up existing access both to the EU single market and to the preferential trade agreements which the EU has in place with over 50 countries in exchange for its own bilateral trade deals at some future date, is rather like rejecting a three-course meal now in favour of the promise of a packet of crisps later.

There is no evidence of untapped global markets waiting to welcome UK companies. The key trade deal for the UK is therefore the one with our largest market, the European Union. Here the choice is clear. We can remain connected to the EU customs union and single market if we follow the same rules as everyone else. Or we can leave.

Of cake, cherry picking and fairy godmothers

Having our cake and eating it is not an option in the real world; ‘frictionless trade’ is a phrase without legal content. The EU opposition to sectoral cherry picking in market access is grounded in a defence of the four freedoms which make up the single market. To provide UK business with guarantees of full and equal access to the single market without equal acceptance of EU regulatory structures would require not so much a skilled negotiating team as a fairy godmother specialised in trade law.

The UK could choose to unilaterally remove all tariffs and quotas, which would reduce prices of agricultural produce, textiles and steel. This would undermine the viability of many UK producers, particularly in farming. In the unlikely event that the UK took this step other countries would maintain their own restrictions in both goods and services markets. UK suppliers to Europe would therefore still face barriers.

Three priorities for damage limitation

If Parliament does vote to leave the single market and customs union after a brief transition period, what damage limitation measures could be taken to support UK competitiveness and trade in this less favourable environment? I suggest three priority areas.

First, increased supporting for entrepreneurs and innovation across the economy. This is best achieved by focussing on their need for skills, research support, access to data and a supportive tax environment. Specifically:

• -        Delivering visa decisions on staff for small businesses rapidly and easily online, with minimal restrictions so that researchers, entrepreneurs and growing companies can access the skills they need rapidly and at low cost. A user-friendly visa system becomes a key test of UK attractiveness for innovative investment. This would be best organised separately from the current visa system, with separate targets and incentives for staff in a new Business Visa Agency.
• -        Within the UK’s industrial strategy, delivering the needed doubling of public sector spending on innovation and scale ups, to compensate for the loss of European funding and to ensure that universities continue to engage locally with tech and digital start-ups;
• -        Guaranteeing that, whatever the wider relationship with the EU, the UK will continue to remain within the EU data protection regime, a vital requirement for the tech sector, and increasingly for manufacturing too. This will require continued acceptance of a role for the ECJ as legal arbiter.
• -        Committing to maintain the current favourable tax breaks for entrepreneurs and venture capital for at least the next ten years.

Second, avoiding additional UK regulatory bureaucracy. There are currently over thirty EU regulatory agencies which if duplicated in the UK would add massively to the administrative burden on firms based here and seeking to export. Where the current EU regime is satisfactory, in medicines, chemicals, intellectual property, telecoms, energy and other sectors, we should commit to staying formally aligned with it rather than diverging and thereby adding unnecessary costs and uncertainty to business faced with double regulatory standards, domestic and European.

Third, provide more active support for smaller firms seeking to export. They will face extra costs, delays, complexity of regulatory rules and uncertainty about supply chain access. Together these risk reducing UK exports significantly and increasing costs in the domestic market. UK companies are already significantly less open to exporting than their continental competitors and leaving the EU will only exacerbate this trend.

There can be no export subsidy schemes. These are illegal under WTO rules and would lead to immediate retaliation by our larger trade partners, as would market-distorting state aids. The government should however ensure its trade support bodies provide transitional funding to cover the initial cost of the extra administrative burden to smaller exporters; and use digital channels to provide targeted training to those 130,000 companies currently exporting to the EU who will be dealing with customs formalities for the first time.

Continued trade missions to developing markets are worthwhile at the margin to highlight new opportunities, but do not move the dial. Growth from a low base even in a fast-growing developing economy is not a substitute for sales to larger richer markets. Ministerial visits can have a limited role in less open markets, but it is not one that substitutes for underlying competitive advantage.

“a chilling effect on sales”

The reality is that most companies start exporting to neighbouring markets with similar rules, which for the UK usually means European Union members, then look further afield. Making exports to Belgium or Germany more expensive and complex will have a chilling effect on sales to more distant and challenging markets. Changing specific third country rules which hold back exports, for example intellectual property theft of branded goods, is something the EU with its massive trading footprint can do more effectively than the UK.

An urgent negotiation priority for 2018 must be to confirm that UK firms will continue to benefit from guaranteed market access to EU negotiated third country trade deals after the end of March next year. Otherwise Range Rovers exported to Korea will face higher tariffs; Canadian public procurement markets will be less open to UK firms; UK value added will no longer count towards EU value added in free trade deals; and UK exporters will lose a level playing field in Switzerland, Norway and other EEA members.

Similarly, the transition period must be flexible enough to dovetail smoothly with any new UK-EU trade deal – which is likely to require at least five years to agree, sector by sector. The EU has a complex set of national interests to consider when determining its negotiating position, and this takes time.

Significant damage to businesses, competitiveness and employment

To summarise, trade requires a competitive economy. Competition thrives on openness and a large domestic market with shared rules, particularly in the service sector. Leaving the customs union and creating barriers within the single market which takes around half of our trade must by definition move the UK economy away from openness and thereby reduce the ability of UK firms to attract investment, compete and export globally. Measures to maintain open labour markets, focus on entrepreneurs and innovation, and support exporters can mitigate but not remove this competitive handicap. That is what the facts tell us.

In today’s globalised economy policy choices reducing competitiveness can have long lasting effects on living standards, innovation and investment. The question is therefore how far the undoubted economic harm to UK jobs, growth, tax revenues and public services caused by moving away from full EU market access can be justified on wider grounds.

The international commitments made to ensure regulatory alignment on the island of Ireland in the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Treaty are also relevant. It is significant that, in paras 49 and 50 of the 8 December 2017 joint report with the European Union, the UK Government committed itself to maintaining full alignment if no alternative solution were to be agreed; and also stated that no new regulatory barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK would be introduced. This may lead to the UK remaining within the internal market as the only practical way to achieve both objectives.

Given the negative consequences of leaving, and the lack of any significant offsetting advantages, I believe it is likely that UK will seek to return to full membership of the EU single market in due course. But significant damage to employment, the structure of the economy and the competitiveness of UK firms can be expected in the meantime.

Image: Mark E Smith of the Fall at Camp Bestival, Lulworth Castle. David Jensen/EMPICS/PA Images

1988: Men on the street smoking weed, drinking and talking. Crazy guys.

2018: Men on the street smoking spice, drinking and talking. Men with mental health problems.

Mark E. Smith died recently. His legend was partly built on his drink and drug use. Experimenting with hallucinogenics, magic mushrooms and LSD, he then moved to speed and booze as punk arrived. Shaun Ryder moved through everything, heroin, crack. All of this has been celebrated as part of the Manchester mythscape.

Note how different it sounds to simply say that Mark E. Smith was an alcoholic and Shaun Ryder was a drug addict.

The dominant, structuring myth that obscures such a stark reading is that of Romanticism, from the Death of Chatterton - appropriately decorating the cover of editions of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater - to The Joy Division and Ian Curtis as the ultimate trope of doomed young genius. Keats and others are here, hovering above, patron saints, signs of death in life and life in death, pale, beautiful, talented, much too much so for this profane earth…

If leisure is the distorted afterimage of work, in the gym, in DIY, in consumer culture, then the current situation of the homeless on Manchester's streets is a distorted afterimage of Manchester hedonism in the 1990s. Seen one way, 'Madchester' is nothing but a premonition of the city after the crash of 2008, the big economic comedown, after which public funding is sliced and mental health services close. The rock'n'roll rollercoaster mirrors the adrenal release and crash of capitalist processes.

This is not to say that the homeless are victims of their own actions, not at all, they are the victims of a system wired to punitively push them out, Universal Credit sanctions for instance, and an utterly failed attempt to put in place a post-industrial economy. 

The waster, the scally, the loveable rogue?

Sadly, the everyday clichéd myths of working class life often contain exactly that reading, that the homeless have ‘only themselves to blame’. In Manchester, we have the cartoonish trope of the 'cheeky chappie', the cute, loveable rogue, two fingers up in defiance on one hand, can of lager in the other, hedonism as resistance. We have Ian Brown, perhaps the more considered prototype, then Liam and Noel.

This figure folds into the renegade scally, daytime leisurewear signifying an 'always off' philosophy. It may not exactly be the Situationist ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’, ('Never Work'), but it is not far off. In many ways, these people are the last truly resistant class in Britain. But they are the victims of mass derision, officially scripted into benefits porn television and typecast as stupid. They are the scapegoats of an entire nation. The endless needling of the working class is felt like a psychic stab.

Yet the blurring boundary between the celebrated rebel and the loathed waster persists in Manchester. The reality is that the mythologized scally is a mile away from the scally of the street or the estate. Mancunians have long joined forces with troublemakers and anti-intellectual scrappers. Tony Wilson, Morrissey, John Cooper Clarke, Vinnie Riley, Ian Brown, Steve Coogan, even Noel Gallagher, were all too clever, too pretentious for the self-proclaimed 'real Mancunian', but too regional and snarky for the establishment proper.

These men were often suspicious and antagonistic of each other, but also sometimes protective of the other. Mark E. Smith, ever the curmudgeon, was a Jekyll and Hyde nightmare, both sides fighting for supremacy, the worse half gradually taking centre stage over the decades.

Students came to Manchester in their thousands because they loved Joy Division, The Smiths, The Fall, The Roses, the footy, whichever infamy was currently doing the rounds. Mancunians represent first hand, home grown exoticism, the epitome of unadulterated 'authentic man' in his wild and natural state. A latter day native, l'enfant sauvage, a little dangerous close up, but tameable with the right handling.

See the junky dance

In the end, all Mancunians seem doomed to become performing monkeys, playing for laughs.

They make hilarious and lucrative court jesters for those set on clubs or recording empires. It's commodification in action. For every maverick or dead idol that couldn't be saved from themselves, there's a handler, a stringpuller, a profiteer. It rarely ends well in Manchester for the actual hellraiser. Only the biographer, record label, publishers and more to the point property owners win.

But of course it isn't just in Manchester. All over the country, from the 1960s to now, you can see the junky dance. The public fascination with The Libertines was as ill and dysfunctional as Pete Doherty. Oh how we applaud Keith Richards exactly as much as we love to hate estate junkies robbing laptops from suburban front rooms. We love these dysfunctional lads - Amy Winehouse being the female exception who proves the rule.

The face of “evil”, as Burroughs said, is the face of total need, but if that face is pretty and entertains us with tales of vicarious hedonism we can stomach it. If it's wrapped in cool clothes and captured by great photography then all the better.

Last month Liam Gallagher popped up in the Guardian. He recalled the notorious fight in Germany, during which 80 police were called to stop a brawl that reduced a hotel ground floor to 'matchwood'. Liam also has a theory that his front teeth were pulled out by the German police. There's an exceptionalism detectable in this journalism, that what is cool for Liam Gallagher would be unacceptable if it had been carried out by football fans. This exceptionalism goes right down to the assertion that Liam has is ‘sporting the kind of feather-cut hairstyle that would – and indeed does – look ridiculous on anyone who isn’t Liam Gallagher.’

The Northern boy’s club

This Manchester is defiantly laddish, brutalised and therefore brutal, a legacy of the notorious scuttlers, the prototype street gangs whose violence haunted Victorian Manchester and had to be frequently subdued by the police. 

This tension was present right at the start of the Manchester renaissance. A frequently misinterpreted fact is that Bernard Manning compered the opening night of The Hacienda. He harangued and ridiculed the audience. A notoriously foul mouthed, racist, sexist and determined public enemy of the new alternative.

This was postmodern irony engineered by the ever-subversive Tony Wilson, but a little too early for the earnest raincoat brigade. Only Wilson and a few fellow-travellers were in on the joke. It was a rude reminder to bookish outsiders that for every Burroughs reading, for every Nico sighting, there was still a blokish riposte. This might be a fresh new club, but it was still a boy's club, and a northern boy's club at that.

But the spectre of Bernard Manning serves us well in the post-Northern Powerhouse era. Whenever the braying middle classes get too much, charging £3.50 for a coffee, waxing lyrical about how much opportunity there is to make Manchester a more 'world-class' city than 'the indigenous' could ever manage, we can think of Bernard. He was the return of the repressed. The layer of the city its gentrification tries to entomb with new Farrow & Ball surfaces.  

But Manning was vile, unrecuperable. So was Mark E. Smith in his worst moments, a monster under the stairs, a terrifying story told to middle class children as a warning. 

This situation must be turned inside-out. An attempt must be made, however futile, to place the real on the outside of representation, and Frank from 'Shameless' on the inside of creative fiction. This is not to say that there is no veracity to representations such as Frank - you can walk into Manchester right now and find him - but his being writ large whitewashes - literally - a fuller, more nuanced picture. White male Manchester is still the default myth, again with exceptions that prove the rule such as Maxine Peake.

The Manchester Musical Map of artists 'born, raised or formed in Greater Manchester, UK' was unveiled recently and then largely scorned across social media. It is a whitened history. It includes the 'globalism' of the Bee Gees and Davy Jones of the Monkees, but not the global-local of the Children of Zeus in the present, or the Suns of Arqa in the past. There is no mention of the Ruthless Rap Assassins, MC Buzz B or Barry Adamson, and a list of others as long as your arm. It is also very male, the critically acclaimed LoneLady, IAMDBB and Layfullstop are conspicuous by absence.

Freedom vs laissez faire

These working-class cultures have much longer roots. E.P. Thompson explained in The Making of the English Working Class how, during the 1770s, Oldham's population at least doubled. The economy changed, the early power looms drew agricultural labourers and skilled migrant workers into the large weaving workshops of the area, the early factories:

'In consequence, the wages of the best men steadily rose until by the 1830s and 1840s they belonged to a privileged elite. In 1845, at Messrs. Hibbert and Platt's (Oldham), the premier textile machinery works in Britain, employing close on 2,000 workers, wages of 30s. and upwards were paid to good men. The engineers (a Methodist workman complained) spent freely, gambled on horses and dogs, trained whippets, and had flesh meat "twice or thrice a day"'.

Machine culture created money, and then swagger and culture: Remember this when you next watch a Hacienda video clip of people out of it dancing to Detroit techno. Yet after this point, an increase in the numbers of skilled workers began to cause wage repression, and the rapid changes stirred up political dissent. Here are the origins of all the swagger and sorrow in the shock city, the meme of the triumphant little man and the meme of the Chaplin poor.

But the politics behind it all is telling. Thompson explained that Oldham check-weavers tried to secure legal restrictions to apprenticeships, yet the Assize Judge over-ruled the attempt, saying that if apprenticeships were to be enforced, the 'liberty of trade' which gave Manchester its wealth would be threatened. These battles would flare up periodically over the next century, a bitter lock-out in 1851 centred around Hibbert and Platt's in Oldham. (303-4)

This is an example of protectionism versus laissez faire, free market capitalism. These questions, albeit in radically different forms, have recently been forced to the surface of western politics again. It is encoded in the Corbynist desire for a strong regulatory state and the Tory dream of laissez faire.

The model of capitalism and production founded in and around Manchester has moved to the new industrial cities of the Pearl River Delta in China, among other places. After the 1770s, there would be no going back, despite the romantic yearning which followed the changes around like a mournful ghost, whimpering for a lost rural idyll, which probably never existed.

We can see this in excessively cosy views of the industrial past today. In 1981, Charlie Meecham explored and photographed the Oldham Road, one of Manchester’s arteries, for an exhibition and book. He returned to the area sporadically afterwards, and then presented a body of work made during a more intensive revisit in 2011.

It is interesting to note that one of Charlie's rural images ended up on the sleeve of 'Atmosphere' by the Joy Division, who were often hailed as the authentic voice of post-industrial alienation, during the period when Charlie was first exploring the Oldham Road.

Fantasy and sacrificial lambs

Yet we can also see a kind of romanticism in the massive psychological and cultural over-investment in lead singer Ian Curtis's death, which sometimes borders on necrophilia. There is a similarity here I think, to the way that residents of the late 18th and early 19th century invested in religious practices to survive a harsh and ultimately precarious present.

But here, in Manchester now, there are the straight up fantasists too. What we might call the ‘northern bullshitter’. The character from Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, opening his tent to find Robert De Niro pitched across from him. But they are not fictions. A guy I went to school with claimed he played football with the Happy Mondays and Red Hot Chilli Peppers outside the Apollo in Ardwick. Another was a Britart fantasist, who claimed he climbed into a factory with Damien Hirst, where he saw the boxes of pharmaceuticals he would later copy. This is a northern phenomenon, not just a Manchester one. In Bradford recently as I caught up with a friend in a pub, a man stuck his head round the door and claimed that his father invented the television on Buttershaw Estate, in 1974.

Abject = bullshit. It’s an equation. Constricted lives mean recourse to fantasy, to a psychological escape where an escape from the abject economic and geographical conditions of class are not possible. Consequently there’s what we might call the brotherly love former pill-head fantasist. The seething well of aggression operating through a rhetoric of MDMA inspired togetherness.

We know Frank from Shameless is a character, audiences are clever enough to retain distance. Similarly, we don't assume that a tradition of rock stars who take heroin instantly means that whole swathes of youth will become hopeless addicts overnight. They are replacement Jesus figures. The Stone Roses song ‘I Am The Resurrection’ really wasn’t far-fetched.

This is not a moral or moralizing argument, but it is an argument that cultural clichés be dropped – they are blinkers – so that we can see all the different Manchesters that were there all along.

Manchester Evening News reporter Jennifer Williams’s latest news roundup is titled ‘from heroin to heroines’, the latter a reference to the suffragette anniversary.

Sadly, in Manchester we are not quite there yet.

Image: Andrew Milligan/PA Images

Across the world, democracy is facing a crisis in trust and participation. With this crisis comes calls to revolutionise and modernise some of the practices underpinning democracy. Electronic voting in national elections is always one of the first proposals in that discussion for reform.

The argument, blind to the realities of e-voting’s affect and its vulnerabilities, goes: “The way we vote hasn’t changed in years, while everything else about our society has, so why not introduce electronic voting to reflect these modern times? You’ll reinvigorate democratic participation and attract new voters!!”

The Scottish Government is having this conversation right now. There is a public consultation on electoral reform which includes proposals to trial electronic voting, open until 12 March 2018.

Open Rights Group have been following the development of electronic voting for a number of years. We acted as technical observers of e-voting trials in England in 2007. We were also involved in independent technical observation of the Estonian online voting system during the 2014 general election.

We are not convinced that introducing electronic voting has any positive effect on democratic participation. Where it has been trialled, electronic voting has failed to introduce a new generation to voting. Instead, e-voting introduces security and political vulnerabilities that risks undermining trust in the democratic process.

That is why Open Rights Group are urging individuals to respond to the consultation calling for trials of electronic voting to be abandoned, and encouraging everyone to get in touch with their MSPs to attend the Member’s Debate and say no to electronic voting. Scotland’s democracy deserves better than this technological non-fix.

E-voting - false logic on turnout

One of the core arguments in support of electronic voting, and the focus of the consultation from the Scottish Government, is to increase democratic participation. This is a noble pursuit and an aim that should be encouraged, but when e-voting has been trialled, it has not delivered that outcome.

Norway ran electronic voting trials in 2011. Research was conducted looking at the hard numbers of voter turnout in the trials areas, and also the experience of voters in those trials. Internet voting did not have a significant impact on turnout. The vast majority of those who voted online would have voted anyway. Analysis of Estonia’s eight elections since 2005 where electronic voting has been available show that electronic voting has not attracted a new demographic to vote.

Interestingly, the experience of individual’s voting in Norway, particularly younger voters, was recorded in interviews. While younger people had no problem with internet voting, they felt it was important to walk to the polling station, that it represented a symbolic and ceremonial act that indicated maturity. The question that really concerned the young interviewees was why young people should vote, not how they will vote.

Norway eventually dropped its electronic voting in 2014, after similar results in trials in 2013. The Norwegian Government cited both a failure to improve turnout and security concerns as reasons - more on security later.

The distinction - why people vote not how people vote - is what makes all the difference. It should be remembered that Scotland’s independence referendum had the highest turnout of any UK election or referendum since universal suffrage was reached. That wasn’t because there was a new kind of method to vote, it was everything else: the significance of the vote, the closeness of the vote, and the nature of the debate having a relevance to people across Scotland.

Electronic Voting - unsolvable problems

Elections have to satisfy three conditions, they must be:

• Secure: Your vote has to be secure, steps must be taken to make sure that it can’t be tampered with; but also
• Anonymous: Your vote can’t be traced back to you, protecting you against coercion; but also
• Verifiable: It has to be shown that one person cast this one vote, and didn’t cast another to be counted, but also continue to be secure and anonymous.

All voting systems should be subjected to this test, whether pencil and paper, electronic kiosk or online voting. Balancing these three conditions is an incredibly difficult task.

What makes it even more difficult is the additional requirement that the methods used to achieve these conditions need to be reasonably understandable to the population.

Open Rights Group’s research in this area has shown how difficult it is for electronic voting to achieve this.

In 2007, Open Rights Group were technical observers for electronic voting trials in England. E-voting systems in some constituencies were found to be running software known to be vulnerable, risking the security and anonymity of the vote. What’s more, votes were downloaded and counted by the suppliers of e-voting systems, without any candidate, agent or observer able to examine the process, undermining verifiability of the process.

In 2014 Open Rights Group participated in a peer-reviewed independent report on the security of e-voting in Estonia. The research discovered two fundamental vulnerabilities, targeting individual’s machines and the servers used to count the votes, that would allow for votes to be changed at scale potentially affecting the outcome of the election.

Some may argue that these points on the secure systems are moot, that the opportunities provided by blockchain and advanced cryptographic solutions have set all of that aside. But those arguments fail to take into account the other necessary condition for a vote: the process must be reasonably understandable for the public.

Democratic processes need to be understood by more than a handful of advanced cryptographic experts. It must be trusted by all of us, and most important of all it needs to be indisputable in an understandable way for the most sceptical of us. If a solution can’t do this, it leaves us in a very precarious position.

The key to democracy is not in the winning and taking power, it is in the counting, the losing and the acceptance of that result.

The only solution for securing electronic voting against the conditions of security, anonymity, and verifiability appears to be through using advanced security and cryptographic tools. But the problem with that is by using advanced security and cryptographic tools, most people can’t understand the process.

That lack of understanding can be exploited leading voters to distrust the outcome of an election. And there it is: the unsolvable problem with electronic voting.

Democracy is difficult. Relying purely on technology is not going to make it any easier or, as we’ve seen, more attractive to new generations. For the Scottish Government to run a consultation asking for the public’s views on electoral reform is welcome and a great way to leverage technology to support engagement. But it doesn’t replace the hard stuff.

Electronic voting isn’t a solution to the problems in the consultation. In fact, it is likely to bring more profound problems.

Denis Mikhailov. Source: Navalny Team in St Petersburg. A version of this text originally appeared on OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors politically-motivated detentions and freedom of assembly in Russia.

The well-known Moscow activist Mark Galperin has been given a two-year suspended sentence for two videos. The videos, in which Galperin discusses the possibility of revolution, were considered to contain an incitement to extremism. According to the court ruling, for the next three months Galperin is banned from taking part in the activities of civil society groups.

In Crimea, the home of left-wing activist Alexey Shestakovich was searched, after which he was taken away with a plastic bag on his head. During the search, Shestakovich was kept on the floor of the apartment in his underwear and in handcuffs. He was subsequently jailed for ten days. Along with him, trade union activist Ivan Markov was also arrested and then jailed for ten days. However, Markov was released early when an appeal court quashed the ruling to jail him.

Two jail terms in a row for one and the same thing. The coordinator of the St Petersburg headquarters of Alexey Navalny’s campaign for an election boycott, Denis Mikhailov, had not been able to leave the detention centre where he had been serving a 30-day jail sentence for organising the “Voters’ Strike” of 28 January before he was again arrested, taken to a court and once again jailed— this time for 25 days. And again for the Voters’ Strike. Only this time for being a participant in the protest.

Ekaterinburg activist Sergey Tyunov has been jailed for 15 days. He was arrested carrying a placard critical of Putin. On the placard was written: “If you want six more years of lies and thieving, then vote for Putin.” Tyunov was charged with a repeat violation of the regulations governing public assemblies. He has declared a hunger strike.

Following the preliminary investigation, the case against court secretary Alexander Eivazov has now reached the prosecutor’s office. Eivazov has been charged with hindering the course of justice and defaming a judge. The formal reason for the initiation of the case against him was that Eivazov had refused to sign an official record of a court hearing. Eivazov said that he did not sign the document because it had been drawn up by another officer of the court. The real reason for his criminal prosecution, human rights defenders believe, is the numerous complaints about violations in court proceedings that Eivazov had made to various authorities.

Twelve days in solitary confinement for bread found in a bedside table. Тhis is the punishment meted out to Alexey Mironov, a volunteer at Navalny’s Cheboksary campaign headquarters sentenced to two and a half years in prison for social media posts. Mironov asserts that he had not kept any bread in the bedside table. Meanwhile, the authorities are preparing to prosecute Egor Chernyuk, coordinator of Navalny’s headquarters in Kaliningrad, on charges of avoiding military service..

The Commission for Children’s Affairs is taking an interest in the son of an Open Russia activist. Coordinator of the Krasnodar branch of Open Russia, Yana Antonova, has been fined in connection with the public event commemorating the death of Boris Nemtsov — an event with which, she has stated, she had no connection. After the event, she was told that staff of the Commission for Children’s Affairs were seeking to establish the actual address at which her ten-year-old son lives.

Politically-motivated prosecutions are nothing new. Recent convictions of participants in protests bring to mind a case of 50 years ago. We have published the final words of Vladimir Bukovsky at his trial when he was sentenced to three years in a prison camp for taking part in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on 22 January 1967.

Thank you

As the elections draw closer there is ever more work to do. You can help us continue our work now and in the difficult coming months before and after the 2018 elections here. You can volunteer to work with us here.

Prabowo Subianto on horseback, Senayan City, Jakarta , Indonesia, 2014. Suffragio,org. Some rights reserved.

This article is seventh in the series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.

As Indonesia prepares for regional elections in 2018 and national elections in 2019, political operators try to curry favour with both the military right and radical religious groups, in the scramble for votes.

Recent months have seen an escalation of fake news, penetration of extremist views into everyday discourse and violent attacks on the imagined evils of (supposedly) resurgent leftists, religious minorities and the LBGT community. Recent months have seen an escalation of fake news, penetration of extremist views into everyday discourse and violent attacks on the imagined evils of (supposedly) resurgent leftists, religious minorities and the LBGT community. 

Symbols of the ‘New Order’ regime of President Soeharto, who was in power between 1966 and 1998, are being deployed by two new political parties, each sponsored by one of Soeharto’s children. The main rival of the current president, Joko Widodo, is Prabowo Subianto, Soeharto’s former son-in-law and military strongman. He appears at party rallies on horseback dressed like Mussolini, and once told a foreign journalist that he favoured a “benign authoritarian regime …Do I have the guts? Am I ready to be called a fascist dictator?”

What are the roots of Indonesian fascism? Why has it re-emerged on the political stage and accommodated Islamic populism? How does it shape and constrain emancipatory peasant politics?

Seeds of fascism

The seed of fascism has always been a kernel in Indonesian identity rhetoric. In the colonial time, nationalism took its first steps through an elitist movement of western-educated Javanese and aristocrats who gathered youth groups from many parts of the country and declared the existence of ‘one territory, one nation, and one language’. Inspired by the history of glorious kingdoms and sultanates, and the flourishing of fascist governments in Italy, Germany and Japan, Indonesian nationalism started to take fascism as its core idea.

The Indonesian Fascist Party founded in 1930 was chaired by a Javanese aristocrat. The group most impressed by fascism was the Parindra or Greater Indonesia Party, whose leaders expressed admiration for Hitler’s firmness, the German people’s love for their leaders, party and homeland and the strength of their organization, and encouraged the use of the German–Italian fascist salute at meetings.

The military gained a formal role in politics when the first President, Soekarno, announced martial law in 1957. Army officers were placed in the management of nationalized former Dutch enterprises, and for decades continued to be involved in state-owned plantations, mining, banking and trading corporations. The land reform law of 1960 was labeled as a leftist agenda, and all peasant struggles were suspected as communist acts. 

Military power became pervasive, especially after the 1965-66 massacres and persecution of leftists. Peasants were depoliticized through one-party domination. The land reform law of 1960 was labeled as a leftist agenda, and all peasant struggles were suspected as communist acts. State oligarchs, Chinese business conglomerates and military personnel controlled the logging, mining, plantation and financial companies. Such economic domination marginalized Islamic politics and narrowed chances for Moslems to become part of the Indonesian bourgeoisie. 

The rise of Islamic populism

Twenty years after the downfall of Soeharto, the authoritarian and paternalistic practices of his “New Order” regime have not completely vanished.

With the conservative turn of Islam and rising inequality, anti-Chinese and anti-communist sentiments were used by the military to create imaginary threats. Riding the same wave, Moslem middle class entrepreneurs launched a campaign of ‘economic jihad’, and formed a ‘212 Moslem-cooperative’.

In combination with military power and the “dull compulsion of the market”, Islamic populism exercises powerful constraints on genuinely emancipatory rural movements, despite its mainly urban and middle-class roots. The bloody 1960s genocide against the left and continuing rural depoliticization have suppressed the formation of a critical progressive rural mass.

The return of authoritarian populism and heightened agrarian conflict

Despite populist challengers, such as Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi won the presidential election in 2014, propelled by a majority in the rural areas. But, three years into his presidency, after many campaign pledges of social reforms and resolution of human rights violation cases, Jokowi seems to have turned his back on any plans for structural change. His new paradigm is pragmatic, growth-oriented, and conservative in its approach to problems of transparency, governance, human rights and justice.

There are uncanny echoes of the past in this new developmentalism, which has heightened agrarian conflicts in Indonesia. At village level the expanded presence of the military is felt directly by the assignment of military ‘Village Guidance Non-Combat Officers’ (Babinsa) to all villages and urban slums. A MoU between the Ministers of Defence and Agriculture includes 50,000 Babinsa personnel to provide security support in food production.

The implementation of these top-down measures has been challenged by various forms of peasant resistance. For example, West Sumatran rice farmers who refused to practise continuous year-round rice cropping, despite the Governor’s threat of military confiscation of their land. While in the million-hectare rice project in Merauke, Papua, military personnel took over land clearing and tilling for rice field expansion from local farmers.   

The return of authoritarian populism is also marked by the armed forces’ ‘proxy war’ rhetoric, claiming that foreign powers are trying to seize control in Indonesia through support to LGBT communities, NGOs, distribution of narcotics, foreign control of natural resources and ‘the return of communism as a latent danger’. The proxy war doctrine justifies the military’s programme of ‘Country Defence’ or Bela Negara, which supposedly is to be implemented in all campuses, Islamic education institutions (pesantren), and mass organizations.

In both the 2014 Presidential election and the 2017 Jakarta Governor elections, right-wing Islamist-supported candidates came from either a military or Islamist background. The rural poor are lured by the charisma of popular ulama, with their rhetoric of ‘defending Islam’ and ‘economic jihad’. The political strategies that have depoliticized rural peasants for the last 40 years have successfully contained rural resistance and protests.

The political strategies that have depoliticized rural peasants for the last 40 years have successfully contained rural resistance and protests. Grievances have been limited to demands by peasants to be incorporated into commodity production on more profitable terms. While such depoliticization is now hardened through a military invasion into rural life and politicization of Islam, rural resistance is limited to indigenous people’s movements and a quasi-class politics of farmers’ cooperatives. None of these situations provide a way for emancipatory peasant politics to flourish.

The crushing of emancipatory initiatives

The combination of right-wing militarism, conservative Islamic populism and the prevailing neoliberal market conditions has resulted in the co-optation and/or destruction of genuine emancipatory rural initiatives.

Three local-level studies, prepared for the ERPI conference, illustrate this. Two cases trace the trajectories of former colonial plantation workers who occupied plantation lands after the collapse of Dutch rule in the 1940s, with an initial vision to set up egalitarian agrarian communities inspired by socialist ideals.  In one case, the peasant organization was brutally dismantled by the New Order regime and its members killed, imprisoned or re-proletarianized under harsh conditions resembling a labour camp.

Following the collapse of the New Order, the next generation again struggled to re-assert their rights to land, finally achieving land redistribution and forming an independent co-operative in 2012. However, they did not find the political commitment necessary to achieve genuine emancipatory agrarian reform, and reverted to the prevailing neoliberal forms of farm management, strengthening tendencies to differentiation and land concentration. 

In the second case, the cooperative survived the New Order period thanks to links with senior (ex)-military figures, but at the cost of its original egalitarian and emancipatory ideals. It became locked in the combined traps of incorporation into the state- (and military-) dominated cooperative structure, formalization of land titles and business expansion, leading to increasing internal inequalities. In both these cases, the internal organization of the cooperative is now marked by the patriarchal and authoritarian structures found in the wider society.

The third study shows how, in the space of a few years, an emancipatory religious-agrarian movement, aiming to establish a self-sufficient agrarian settler community, was destroyed by the moral panic generated by the alignment of mainstream media, orthodox Islam and the state (military and police) apparatus. With their leaders charged with both blasphemy and treachery/secession, the 8,000 settlers were forcibly dispersed and returned to their places of origin for re-education in religion and national philosophy, and their fields and houses destroyed.

Containing resistance

The conjuncture of historical currents: the marginalization and subsequent resurgence of Islam, and growing militarism in everyday life, has produced a condition whereby right-wing populism now arises as a new style of fascism. The conjuncture of historical currents: the marginalization and subsequent resurgence of Islam, and growing militarism in everyday life, has produced a condition whereby right-wing populism now arises as a new style of fascism.

Neoliberal developmentalism has worsened inequalities and heightened rural resistance and agrarian conflicts. However, these grievances do not transform into an emancipatory peasant politics. Resistance is largely contained within the identity politics of indigenous peoples’ movements and a quasi-class politics in the farmers’ cooperative movement. The death of class-based rural movements in Indonesia has entrapped rural resistance in the clutches of market power. 

HMS Illustrious in Portsmouth Harbour Aircraft Carrier, April 2009. Wikicommons/Peter Trimming. Some rights reserved.An earlier column in this series looked at the unknown or neglected history of accidents involving nuclear weapons. Much of the secrecy that shrouds nuclear issues, above all their actual targeting, is the result of deliberate supprerssion by governments with the collusion of the media. Accidents, though, seem to occasion their added element of secrecy, probably because of the particular embarrassment arising when a supposedly ultra-safe and reliable system comes unstuck (see "North Korea: a catastrophe foretold", 29 September 2017). 

The excellent Chatham House study Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy (April 2014)  examines incidents where nuclear weapons came uncomfortably close to actual use. Among many examples, one of the most remarkable is a collision between two ballistic-missile submarines during the night of 3-4 February 2009.

"[The] United Kingdom’s HMS Vanguard and France’s FNS Le Triomphant, two nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarines (SSBNs), collided in the Atlantic Ocean”, says the study. It acknowledges that there was very little risk of an accidental nuclear detonation, but finds it difficult to say why the collision took place. A few details emerged through freedom-of-information requests, but these raised even more questions than were answered.

This incident may have been more at the level of accident than risk of detonation. But that still raises the issue of the supposed invulnerability of nuclear systems to mistakes, including potentially catastrophic ones (see "A quick guide to nuclear weapons", 8 February 2018).

The dangers are explored in another report, Playing with Fire: Nuclear Weapons Incidents and Accidents in the United Kingdom(September 2017), published by Nuclear Information Service. The meticulous research of this small UK-based NGO uncovers worrying aspects of the British nuclear system. Indeed, much of the information about these and other aspects of the nuclear world only seeps into the public domain because such dedicated independent observers are ploughing away in the background.

Playing with Fire reveals the alarming incidence of accidents, far more than is normally realised. It lists 110 accidents, near misses, and dangerous occurrences that have occurred over the sixty-five-year history of the UK’s nuclear-weapons programme. These consist of:

* fourteen serious accidents related to the production and manufacturing of nuclear weapons, including fires, fatal explosions, and floods

* twenty-two incidents that have taken place during the road transport of nuclear weapons, including vehicles overturning, road-traffic accidents and breakdowns

* eight incidents which occurred during the storage and handling of nuclear weapons

* twenty-one security-related incidents, including cases of unauthorised access to secure areas and unauthorised release of sensitive information

* seventeen incidents that involved United States forces and nuclear weapons, in the UK and its coastal waters.

The report also finds that forty-five accidents have happened "to nuclear capable submarines, ships and aircraft, including collisions, fires at sea and lightning strikes", of which twenty-four "involved nuclear armed submarines”.

Reducing the risk

To understand the background to this report, the fundamental nuclear-weapons structure in the UK is a good place to start.

These weapons are developed at the atomic-weapons establishment at Aldermaston, west of Reading; manufactured  at nearby Burghfield; deployed on ballistic-missile submarines based at Faslane, near Glasgow; the warheads stored at the Royal Navy armaments depot at Coulport.

The weapons are transported between the sites by road. Because these use public highways and are frequently tracked by anti-nuclear activists, much of what is known about accidents relates to those occurring in transit.

Playing with Fire finds that one of the worst accidents happened on a cold day in January 1987, when two large warhead-carrying trucks – part of a larger convoy transporting six tactical nuclear bombs from Portsmouth to the naval armaments depot at Dean Hill – were involved in a collision. In the course of the accident one of the trucks tipped over into a field when the road verge collapsed, landing on its side.

The overturned truck was carrying two WE177A warheads, each rated at about the power of the Hiroshima bomb. They had probably been unloaded from HMS Illustrious, an aircraft-carrier berthed at Portsmouth. A full-scale emergency was declared. Additional armed personnel and specialist troops were deployed, and logistics specialists worked through the night in sub-zero temperatures in a recovery operation that lasted eighteen hours.

There have been many other accidents affecting the UK nuclear weapons industry, the worst being the fire at one of the plutonium production reactors at what was then known as Windscale (now Sellafield) in 1957. One of the great values of Playing with Fire is that it brings into the open an element in Britain’s nuclear posture which is almost entirely ignored in the establishment press and broadcast media.

At the very least this is a report that is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It ends up with a series of recommendations, three of which summarise its overall perspective:

* introduce procedures for publicly reporting accidents involving nuclear weapons

* place ministry of defence nuclear programmes under external regulation

* support an international ban on nuclear weapons.

Not everyone will support the last proposal, but the first two should really not be controversial. Indeed, wider dissemination of this report may well help cement that view.

Screen shot. Title-page of 'Playing With Fire'.

Illustration: Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.I still remember the illustrations that captivated me as a child; they are part of me, and they are part of my imagination. They inspired me, and maybe I even draw and paint today because of them. I often feel that I breathe and I exist because I paint.

Meanwhile, what strikes me during exhibitions is that people often find something beyond what I had intended to communicate in my artwork. A small detail, such as the expression on a character’s face, can spark a memory, inspire a feeling, or open an imagination.

"A small detail, such as the expression on a character’s face, can spark a memory, inspire a feeling, or open an imagination."

Art can support us, send us messages, or give us hope. What you see and remember in an image can stay with you, impact you, and affect the decisions you take in your life. This is the potential power of illustration for a feminist future, too – which must be imagined before it can be created.

In this piece, women are gathered around a crystal ball. They are from different cultures and backgrounds. But they are physically and emotionally close to each other, united and focused on their task of imagining a better world.

Detail; Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.I also wanted to subvert the ancient and malicious trope of women being witches and enchantresses. Individually, the women in this illustration, as in our world, may be strong or weak – but together they can be stronger. This is magical, and a truth that we must remember.

In ancient Greece, people travelled from far away looking for their futures in the prophecies and visions of the Pythia oracles. During the middle ages, women who used herbs and created potions to help people were persecuted and murdered.

Throughout history, women have held power that has been accepted (or not); heard (or not); cast as good (or evil), but felt and lived nonetheless. These women are our past, present and future.

Detail; Diana Carolina Rivadossi. All rights reserved.The history of art is also male-dominated. The illustrations that captivated me as a child were in books like the Jungle Book, or those of Jules Verne. What about women illustrators?

At art schools, we learn about few women artists. One exception is the famous Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, who was persecuted and even put on trial for having been sexually assaulted. It is difficult to be a woman in Italy today, but it was even harder before.

There are more well-known women artists now, but it is an ongoing challenge to be accepted and heard. Despite this, we continue to express ourselves, our visions, our intimacy, and our perceptions of the world through art. And sometimes, what we create inspires others.

I think illustration can be particularly impactful for young people. But I want to inspire others not because I am a painter or because I am a woman. I want to speak to the hearts of all human beings, with my own heart, as another human being. This is my feminist future.

President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, Jan. 30, 2018. Yin Bogu/Press Associaition. All rights reserved.The future of USA foreign policy has been recently outlined in the ‘National Security Strategy’ (18 December 2017) and, if very briefly, in President Trump’s ‘State of the Union’ speech (30 January). Those who expect a lot of ‘fire and fury’ might and will be disappointed. The US will dedicate less time, energy, and money to the rest of the world and concentrate on domestic affairs, regardless of ‘The Donald’s blunders and whims.

The key objectives are clear: on the one hand, the Trump administration aims at strengthening the US economy and armed forces; on the other, it intends to turn its back on the rest of the world, unless vital American interests are at stake. Now America really comes first.

The Trump administration’s doctrine can be understood as protectionist and nationalist. Protectionist ideas have raised a lot of controversies but they are far from new in US history and aim at rebuilding a strong industrial base, especially at a time of competition from emerging economies and on the verge of a ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.

Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is a champion of protectionism, particularly in relation to China and Europe. While such positions remain economically and politically questionable, they have a clear goal: help America re-industrialise by changing trade deals with its competitors (China, Russia, but also Germany). Trump and his clique imagine a world of more-or-less hostile blocs in which the USA wants to sit on top. Sadly, rising nationalisms in countries like China, Russia, India, Turkey (but also Japan and Germany – ‘Alternative for Germany’ has 94 seats in the Bundestag) seem to vindicate Trump’s realism and confrontational posture. Let us hope this will not be the case.

Both economic and strategic reasons suggest that Trump’s main foreign policy focus will be East Asia, and in particular China. For a long time the latter has been the target of Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on issues such as intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, export subsidies, and in general unfair trade practices.

China is catching up also in strategic sectors like Artificial Intelligence and has vastly invested in the US economy in recent years ($ 117 billion in the past five years, according to some estimates). But who would win a possible trade war? After all, China holds a large share of US public debt and lots of American companies that do business there would oppose restrictions in trade and investments. Moreover, the USA is not innocent with regard to export subsidies: for years there have been complaints about support to farmers and aircraft producers (e.g. in the Boeing vs Airbus dispute) – a support which has given the US advantages over both developed and developing countries.   

In strategic terms, the Trump administration has made efforts to revive the Quadrilateral Alliance (USA - India - Australia - Japan) to contain Beijing’s ambitions, but little has been achieved so far. Australia is a leading Chinese trade partner and India co-operates with Beijing on initiatives such as the BRICS group or the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). Why would they choose to confront China?

Even Duterte’s Philippines, a traditional Washington ally, has opened a door to more co-operation with Beijing. Sending an aircraft carrier to neighboring Vietnam, as the USA has pledged to do in the near future, looks more like a performance or a (relative) show of strength than a sign of bellicose intentions.China is a ‘rival’, as Trump called it in the ‘State of the Union’ speech, but a confrontation, if there will be one, might take place only on trade-related issues.  Even at the WTO level, where it is possible to raise complaints and start procedures against unfair trade practices, there have been 39 disputes against China – not really much in comparison with the 84 against the EU or 135 against the USA…

East Asia will be a difficult terrain, but US diplomacy won’t have an easier life in the Middle East. Here Washington has to deal with another ‘out of area’ power, Russia, which under Putin has surprisingly punched above its weight in the region. It’s no coincidence Russia is another ‘rival’, if we trust the language used by Trump himself. After all, Moscow has managed to avoid Assad’s fall in Syria, keep traditionally good relations with Iran, accommodate Erdogan’s erratic Turkey, and strongly improve ties with oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

The USA, for its part, has re-affirmed a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, which should be approached in far more critical terms (let us not forget the issue of Wahhabism), alienated a part of the Arab world after Trump’s declarations on Jerusalem, and been unable to control an ever more unpredictable Turkey, which should probably consider whether it wants to remain under the NATO umbrella or go its own way. The problems between Washington and Ankara have been recognised by the usually cautious Secretary of State Tillerson in his recent and rather inconclusive visit to Turkey.

What will happen to US relations with Europe? The National Security Strategy makes it clear that EU countries will have to spend more on defence. On the whole the EU will be less and less important, unless Europeans truly attempt to take responsibility for their lives and politics. Institutional cosmetics in Brussels won’t be enough. States like Britain, France, or even Germany will be less and less influential and in a highly competitive world will have to struggle to defend what survives of their ‘social models’, with dire consequences in their domestic affairs.

Left to their own national devices, some EU countries might degenerate into semi-authoritarianism, confusion, or anti-European policies; the elections in Italy and Hungary constitute a potential watershed moment.

After all, the USA still has the primacy in technology, finance, and the military. This administration feels the pressure of ‘rival’ powers and intends to concentrate on strengthening US leadership without facing them head-on. There won’t be any generosity towards the rest of the democratic world. If we believe in our value as citizens we have to be aware that the world will increasingly be squeezed in a ‘battle’ among rivals, and act accordingly, starting by showing commitment to democratic institutions and casting our vote in all forthcoming elections.

Former Prime Minister and leader of the Democratic Party Matteo Renzi resigned as party leader after a major defeat, when the centre-left coalition picked up just 22.85 percent of the vote. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.The post-election map of Italy has two main traits: fear and poverty. Northern and Central regions have gone into a centre-right-wing coalition where the leader is not any more Forza Italia’s Silvio Berlusconi but the League’s Matteo Salvini, who dropped its previous ‘Lega Nord’ emphasis to turn it into a nationwide Le Pen-style National Front. Matteo Renzi is the clear loser of the election, with his Democratic Party getting 19% of the vote.

In the Northern counties of Lombardy and Veneto the centre-right is over 50%, with the League reaching 33 to 38% in its heartlands. In Piedmont outside the Turin area the centre-right is close to 50%, with a weaker League. In the rest of the North the centre-right is almost everywhere over 40%; in Emilia, Tuscany and Umbria the percentage is over 35%; in Lazio excluding Rome it is at 40%.

In Southern regions (including Marche) the Five Star movement (Cinque stelle) won heavily, reaching almost 50% of votes in Sicily and northern Campania, over 40% in Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Molise and Sardinia.

More complex is the picture of large cities. The centre-right wins some first-past-the-post seats in Turin, Milan, Venice, Palermo. The Five Stars conquer seats in Turin, Genoa, Palermo, Rome and Naples. Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome have some Democratic Party winners.

The 37-38% (respectively in the House and the Senate) won by the centre-right comes from the success of the League, gone from 4% in the 2013 general elections, to 6% in the European elections of 2014, to 18% today, while Forza Italia falls from 22% in 2013 to 17% in 2014 and to the current 14%. The 32-33% (respectively in the Senate and the House, with a younger electorate) for Five Stars should be compared with the 26% of the general elections of 2013 and with the 21% of the European elections of 2014. Matteo Renzi is the clear loser of the election, with his Democratic Party getting 19% of the vote – it had 25% five years ago and peaked at 41% in the 2014 European elections – his coalition reaching a total of 23%, including the 2.6% of the ‘More Europe’ party of  Emma Bonino. On the Left ‘Liberi e Uguali’ obtained just above 3% of votes, failing to build a significant left-wing opposition. Voters’ participation was similar to five years ago, around 75%, while in the European elections it had fallen to 57%.

Shared discontents

Those gains of the centre-right and Five Stars are parallel successes, fueled by common ingredients: protest vote, populist rhetoric, criticism of Europe, anti-immigrant feelings. In the centre-right coalition such drivers coexist with very distant other interests – those of the rich and powerful around Berlusconi; the balance of internal power relations in the coalition will be difficult to sort out, in terms of political hegemony even before the formation of a government. In the Five Stars those ingredients coexist with the attempt to achieve a transformation from protest movement to government party, with an evolution – in terms of identity and the political agenda – that is yet to be charted. Fear is now the ideology of the League; poverty is the condition breeding Five Star success.

These same drivers, however, have taken different directions in the North and South. The League’s roots in Northern regions have been expressed in demands for lower taxes, for protecting falling incomes, local and national identities. The South – which has been ‘left behind’ by political and economic developments, abandoned by a new emigration, marked by social degradation and criminal powers – has expressed a protest that demands new political power. The main limit of Salvini’s attempt to build an Italian ‘National Front’ has been his inability to overcome this regional division.

Ten years of severe economic and social crisis are the background to all these developments. Italy’s per capita income is now back to the levels of twenty years ago; behind this average there is a collapse – of about 30% – of the income of the 25% poorest Italians, living in the South or in the declining peripheries of the centre-north. Twenty years of stagnation and decline mean a generation with ever-lower expectations in terms of income, work and life. Impoverishment has become a reality for a very large swathe of Italians. The Five Star vote reflects the poverty of the South – their call for a general minimum income has been attractive in this regard. The vote for the League expresses the fear of impoverishment in the North. Only in the centres of major cities – where the richest and the highly educated live, and the economy is better – has the vote taken different directions, going to Forza Italia and the Democratic Party.

The migrant factor

Poverty is coupled with fear. The fear of worsening economic conditions and social status; the fear of having immigrants next door, other poor people competing for fewer low-skilled jobs and scarcer public services. In the elections the most prevalent fear was that of immigrants – the landings in Lampedusa, the inability to integrate them, the killing and shootings in Macerata. Salvini turned anti-immigration attitudes into his most effective political tool; Five Star expressed the same hostility – calling NGOs saving immigrants in the Mediterranean ‘water taxis’ for illegal aliens and refusing to vote for a bill granting citizenship to second generation Italians with migrant origins.

Fear and poverty, in a strange twist, have become the main forces shaping Italian politics. Fear is now the ideology of the League; poverty is the condition breeding Five Star success. Replacing the old left and right, we have now the politics of fear and the lament of the impoverished, the ones excluded from the ‘caste’ of the powerful. Replacing the old left and right, we have now the politics of fear and the lament of the impoverished, the ones excluded from the ‘caste’ of the powerful.

The tragedy of the Left is that for over for two hundred years equality, social security and solidarity have been its banners. They have been gradually lost in the loss of collective identities, in ever less participatory political practices, in government policies that were increasingly in contrast with those values. In this political degradation it must be emphasized that dangerous impulses like fear and poverty are expressed with the tools of democracy: 75% voter turnout at polling stations is the only good news of March 4, 2018.

This article was originally published on Social Europe on March 6, 2018.

Will "they shall not pass" stop Milo Yiannopoulos in his tracks? The British alt-right commentator speaks at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, December 5, 2017. Lukas Coch/ Press Association. All rights reserved.In a seemingly unusual move, Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, recently announced that it was investigating Professor of Psychology, Rick Mehta, because of complaints over controversial comments he made in class and on social media on a range of issues from the value of multiculturalism, to the nature of residential schools, to the existence of gender inequality in the workplace.

In a letter dated February 13, Acadia’s President, Heather Hemming, suggested that these views may have undermined the university’s “legal responsibility to provide an environment free from discrimination, sexual harassment and personal harassment.” According to the CBC, the university has retained emeritus law professor at Dalhousie University, Wayne MacKay, to conduct an investigation into the matter.

In contrast, this past week we’ve seen some welcome moves from other Canadian universities, Queens and McMaster in particular, to protect respectful and informed debate. As Daniel Woolf, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Queens University makes clear in a recent blog post, without “disciplined and respectful dialogue, debate and argument” the very raison d’etre of the university is threatened.

Presumably, this includes asking difficult questions about multiculturalism, residential schools, gender inequality in the workplace and so on. The moves of Queens and McMaster are in response to, among other things, recent events at Wilfrid Laurier University, located in Waterloo, Ontario, about ninety-minute drive from Toronto, and are indicative of a growing tendency of some on the left to seek to stifle debate and discussion out of a well-intentioned though, in my view, ultimately misguided attempt to prevent or mitigate harm to vulnerable communities.

While I sympathize with this impulse, my view is that the stifling of speech and expression will only, ultimately, be used against those very communities. The very arguments to minimize “offensive” speech are also currently being deployed, for example, to stifle discussion of the role of BDS in addressing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

“Nazi propaganda”

Wilfrid Laurier was the site of controversy generated last fall by a graduate student’s decision to show the class she was tutoring a five-minute clip of Professor Jordan Peterson speaking in the context of a discussion on a local television newsmagazine show about the use of gender pronouns. The tutorial assistant in question, Lindsay Shepherd, was subsequently brought into a meeting with the course director and a senior administrator and up-braided for her action, which was likened to the dissemination of Nazi propaganda.

The course director also said that one or more students had complained. We know the intimate details of this supposedly private conversation because Shepherd secretly taped and subsequently disclosed it. An investigation revealed that there had, in fact, been no student complaints whatsoever. The reason why Peterson’s views had been so controversial is because, amongst other things, he opposed the passage of Bill C-16 recently passed by Parliament last November, making it a criminal offense to fail to use correct pronouns when referring to trans-gendered persons.

He has also advocated the dismantling of entire departments such as anthropology, sociology, English as well as law schools because he saw them as purveyors of what he called “neo-Marxist, post-modern ideology.”  And such advocacy clearly clashes with his defence of free speech and academic freedom.

While he was already gaining in popularity due to his many YouTube lectures, the Laurier controversy dramatically added value to his brand and no doubt boosted sales of his recent self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. It has also fuelled the rise of the so-called alt-right in Canada.

Radical Enlightenment

That progressives now aggressively advocate limiting free speech shows the extent to which it has traded places with the Right – the traditional defender of censorship. This is an important claim recently made in the openDemocracy article by Simona Levi and Xnet2 commenting on the Spanish left’s apparent inability to understand and cope with new, digital forms of expression.

Of course, once upon a time, it was ‘the Left’ that led the battle for freedom of speech and expression, a tradition that can be traced all the way back to the origins of the Left itself in what Jonathan Israel calls the “radical Enlightenment” and the writings of Condorcet, d’Holbach, Diderot and heterodox Jew, Baruch Spinoza.

It was the radical Enlightenment that played an instrumental role in challenging an ancien regime grounded in tradition, faith and authority which culminated in the revolutionary tradition that inspired among others the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Invoking this tradition of radical Enlightenment, the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, was born in the 1964-65 term on the campus of UC Berkeley. The long-standing FSM agitated for the lifting of restrictions on free speech and for academic freedom for students.

Three years later, at Templeton Secondary, in Vancouver, Canada, a student was suspended for writing a parody of the school’s literary magazine. Five Simon Fraser University teaching assistants – subsequently known as the “Templeton Five” – were briefly suspended by the university for supporting that Templeton student.  Indeed, as late as the anti-G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, a “free speech” zone was established among the activists. This a period in which the Left was confident in the force of its own ideas. Things appear, strangely, rather different today.

Engaging the world

It was precisely these battles over the right to free speech and academic freedom that, at least in part gave Berkeley and SFU the radical reputations that they once possessed. At the Institute for the Humanities at SFU, which I have directed for the past seven years, we try, in our own modest way, to keep faith with this radical period of SFU’s history.

But this pits us against contemporary left opponents of free speech. Free speech and academic freedom are vitally important to us because we feel it to be our responsibility to foster discussions on controversial subjects such as the on-going expropriation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and, relatedly, the role of extractivism in the Canadian economy, as well as the baleful fate of dissent and the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state, and the contemporary rise of the far-right.

For this, we have come under fire from mining companies and Zionist organizations who have objected to some of these activities and demanded that we “cease and desist” or for equal time to air their perspectives respectively.

Fortunately, thus far, SFU, whose motto is “engaging the world,” has stood by us. The former Director of McGill’s Institute for Canadian Studies, Andrew Potter, was not so lucky, as it seems he may have been forced out after having written what was, perhaps, an ill-advised article for Maclean’s Magazine criticizing la belle province.

Particularly concerning was the claim by McGill President, Suzanne Fortier that “it’s not the university’s role to provoke but to promote good discussion.” We respectfully beg to differ: “good discussions” around anti-slavery in the nineteenth century, or gay rights in the middle of the twentieth century, were not just promoted but had to be actively and forcefully provoked. And such provocations led to momentous and irreversible social transformation.

No platform

But it isn’t just from conservative groups that we face increasing constraints on what we do. It is for that reason that I look upon radicals, particularly within the university, with a certain amount of bemusement. In contrast to their predecessors in the 1960’s, rather than arguing for a broadening of the ambit of free speech and academic freedom, today they wish to foreshorten it. For example, Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned talk at Berkeley on September 24, 2017, was shut-down amidst the strong-arm tactics of anti-fa protestors and the ensuing mayhem of counter-protests and tear gas. Why – radicals today might ask – shouldn’t his talk have been shut down? After all, his misogynist and racist views are clearly reprehensible and therefore he ought to be actively denied a platform (or “No Platformed”) to publicly express and generate support for them.

With regard to Yiannopoulos, of course they have a point, insofar as he seems neither interested in nor capable of respectful dialogue. There are those in Canada who argue that Professor Jordan Peterson should, similarly, be prevented from speaking insofar as what he has to say is often offensive and even deeply hurtful to trans-gendered people, in particular. 

But the answer isn’t so straightforward. While it may be true that the view of these men – heroes of the so-called “alt-right” – are offensive and therefore “harm” others, when assessing the limits of individual liberties, as the influential liberal political philosopher, J.S. Mill argued, it is necessary to take into consideration the harm to others that may result from the exercise of those liberties. Mustn’t we also consider the harm done to the democracy as a whole?

The “No-platforming” of speakers with whom we fundamentally disagree can suggest that force ought to prevail over speech that is itself regarded as “violent.” This suggestion is deeply corrosive to a society whose democratic institutions have, themselves, already been shaken to the core.

Moreover, if such reprehensible views are not aired publicly they are driven underground where they often metastasize. By being brought into the light of day they can be refuted and effectively countered. Think, for example, of the racist and xenophobic views that remained repressed in the former East Germany in which the Nazi legacy was simply denied rather than being confronted and worked through in the context of an official party line of solidarity with the Third World. Once the regime fell, we saw some of the most brutal attacks on asylum seekers in eastern German cities like Rostock in the early 1990s.

As the Peterson case exemplifies, by silencing the speech of those with whom we disagree, we create martyrs who are consequently able to gain many more adherents (and, of course, customers) than may otherwise have been the case. Finally, and most importantly, limitations on free speech and academic freedom ultimately will target the left disproportionately.

Epistemic violence?

If it were simply a matter, though, of shutting down racists, transphobes and misogynists, that would be one thing. However, over the past couple of years, the practice of the left has increasingly become one of silencing its own. One of the most egregious is the case of Rebecca Tuvel, a tenure-track professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Tuvel published an article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia via the normal peer-review process. It contended that the logic that underlies trans-gender identities also applies to trans-racial identities. The article was not, to say the least, well-received.

Upon its publication, an open-letter was drafted demanding that the piece be retracted, and listing its many failings including the fact that it “dead-named” Caitlin Jenner (“dead-naming” is the act of referring to a trans-person by the name they assumed prior to their transition) despite the fact that Jenner went through a very public and lucrative transition and continued to refer to her previous name.

Tuvel’s article was therefore charged with having perpetrated what the letter called “epistemic violence” against trans people. The letter was signed by over eight hundred academics – many of them senior, tenured faculty – including high-profile figures Wendy Brown and Judith Butler.

This response can only be thought of as a kind of “academic mobbing” that utterly trampled on the academic freedom of a young female professor of philosophy – a discipline, incidentally, not exactly overrun by women. Tuvel was particularly vulnerable because the controversy could very well damage her case for tenure and therefore her future. 

My interest here is not to judge the merits of Tuvel’s article, but simply to suggest that if it were found problematic for whatever reason, despite having undergone peer-review, it should be subject to what Principal Woolf calls “disciplined and respectful dialogue, debate and argument” rather than meeting with a ham-fisted demand for its retraction.

A safe space to engage

This crisis of free speech and academic freedom runs very deep and suggests that something profoundly disturbing is afoot in North American universities. It can scarcely be denied that the far-right has effectively taken hold of free speech as its cause celebre, however, this cannot but be seen as profoundly cynical insofar as right-wing governments globally have seized every available opportunity to crack down on dissent. But one ought to expect better from the left as it presumably has a profound interest in challenging the “powers that be” via non-conforming, dissenting perspectives.

Perhaps, rather than closing down discussion of offensive opinions, such opinions ought to be met head on as is exemplified by the Indigenous actor, Garret Smith, who set up a tent in front of a Calgary courthouse to protest what he considers to be the unjust treatment of Indigenous people in Canada. He wants to create a “safe place to come and engage in conversation about reconciliation…Come and ask hard, ignorant, racist questions here,” Garret challenges, “this is a space place to actually understand each other.” Perhaps the university has much to learn from the likes of Garret Smith.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a summit of the 27 EU leaders in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 23, 2018. Ye Pingfan/Press Association. All rights reserved.The Eurozone is recovering from a long crisis; growth rates are turning positive across the Eurozone after a decade, business confidence is rising. Current accounts are balanced after the brutal adjustment in the periphery. The overall unemployment in the Euro area reached its pre-crisis level in 2017. This has been seen as a triumph.

This current euphoria emerges paradoxically from the dust and rubble of the broken social and political contract within and between countries across the Eurozone. The break-up of the convergence illusion in the periphery and the backlash against the bailouts in the North raised diverse voices against the Euro project in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

But the European Commission has recently set up a ‘grand reform’ agenda for a European Minister of Finance, a European Monetary Fund, and new Budgetary Instruments to win the hearts and minds of EU citizens for ‘a more integrated and performing Euro area to bring further stability and prosperity to all in the EU’.

The Commission proposes a common Minister of Finance – to replace the president of the Eurogroup and the EU Commissioner for economic affairs – to monitor fiscal policies and enforce structural reforms across the EU. According to the Commission, his role is to ‘strengthen the coordination of national economic policies and ensure discipline and convergence’.

However, a European Minister of Finance with the mission to enforce a set of existing fiscal rules – that have been unsuccessful so far – is bound to fail to improve the Eurozone’s poor economic coordination and structural asymmetry. The discipline of arbitrary ‘one size fits all’ fiscal targets cannot synchronise the business cycles in the Eurozone. This ‘business as usual’ approach to fixing the Eurozone’s economic disparities may force the periphery into a long-term stagnation, but will neither guarantee stability nor prevent a new crisis. 

In the same vein, the European Monetary Fund that provides financial support and safeguards for countries with accumulated public debt will not shield the union from a new asymmetric shock. This mechanism is not designed to reverse the trend of peripheral countries running current account deficits (i.e. due to imports exceeding exports) and needing massive capital inflows to sustain themselves. This trend cannot be reversed by brutal fiscal rules and monitoring. Liquidity injections at the point of crisis – although important – do not address the underlying roots of the upcoming crises. This ‘grand reform’ does not improve the existing asymmetry – in terms of output, technological capacity, and innovation – in the Eurozone that produces new crises.

The third proposal for new Budgetary Instruments to ‘support reforms and convergence’ and to ensure ‘national investments levels are stable in the moment of crisis’ are designed in a way more likely to encourage countries outside Eurozone ‘on their way to joining the Euro’ than to mitigate the persistent disinvestment in the periphery and to shrink the technology and innovation gap within the Eurozone. A potential Eurozone expansion would make the union a larger market for the core states’ exports and a stronger voice in global competition with the US and China. But the inclusion of less developed countries would increase heterogeneity and asymmetry in the Eurozone and thus make the Euro even more fragile.

Is this new architecture sustainable? The belief that those reforms ensure stability and convergence is based on shaky ground. This ‘grand reform’ does not improve the existing asymmetry – in terms of output, technological capacity, and innovation – in the Eurozone that produces new crises.

Many countries in the periphery remain below their productive capacity struggling with high debt at 130.1 per cent in Portugal, 180.8 per cent in Greece, and 132 per cent of GDP in Italy, and suffering from a high unemployment that reached 19.6 per cent in Spain and 23.6 per cent in Greece in 2016. Growth rates are fluctuating, wages are stagnating, and investment remains low in the periphery, recorded at 11.7 per cent in Greece and 15.3 per cent of GDP in Portugal in the same year. The technology and innovation gap is widening.

None of the proposals is designed to correct and prevent misalignments of productivity and competitiveness among the Eurozone countries. This ‘do more of the same’ approach based on brutal enforcement and discipline does not tackle the sources of the uneven development. The asymmetric production and trade status quo remain in place and continue to produce imbalances. The latter require large capital flows towards the peripheral countries that increase the private and public debt and open the path for instability. A Eurozone expansion will only upscale the existing problems.

This ‘grand reform’ reaffirms the status quo. The widening gap within the Eurozone is the shaky foundation of this new architecture. For the moment the loud cheers overshadow concerns: however, this is a pyrrhic victory.

Violent political activists in India, used to attacking fellow humans, have now turned their attention to statues. Within a week they demolished or damaged the statues of Lenin, Ambedkar, the Dalit icon, and Periyar, the social reformer who fought against upper-caste hegemony.

In India statues of leaders command an immense political significance which now characterises even the idols of Hindu Gods. These come in all sizes and colours. Prime Minister Modi is seeking to ensure that his home state Gujarat boasts the tallest statue of Sardar Patel, co-opted by his party, even though he was a life-long leader of the Congress and India’s Home Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet. Sardar Patel is being used as an instrument for diminishing Nehru!

Towns are dotted with statues installed by the followers of one political party or the other. Statues are erected, defaced and made controversial, all for promoting political interests. A State Governor belonging to Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist party said what a democratically elected government can do can be undone by the next elected party! He was responding to reports of the demolition of a statue of Lenin in a state where the BJP ousted a communist government that had ruled the state for 25 years.

One cynic says that after every election, the new Government can spend its first year in uninstalling the statutes erected by the previous regime. The old order changed in this north-eastern state and a commentator is sure that streets named after Lenin will now be renamed to glorify some Hindu nationalist leader!

India’s economic policy-makers had some years ago bid goodbye to Lenin, who supported India’s anti-colonial struggle and inspired many Indians to come under the influence of communism. Lenin’s statue suffered a worse fate as soon as the Hindu nationalists dislodged the long-ruling communist government in the state of Tripura. They bulldozed his statue, severed its head and played football with it. The cries of “Victory to Mother India” filled the air as the 11.5-feet tall fibre-glass statue of Lenin was brought down.

The demolition of Lenin’s statue was followed up in another state by some miscreants who vandalised a statue of iconic Dravidian leader Periyar. The statue of the social reformer and thinker was attacked soon after a BJP worker issued a statement: “Today it is Lenin’s statue in Tripura. Tomorrow it will be caste zealot E V Ramaswamy’s (Periyar) statue in Tamil Nadu.”

The social reformer is revered by large sections in the state for having led a self-respect movement against upper-caste hegemony. The BJP could hardly show respect to the memory of a leader who called the believers in god Barbarians. The state leader of the BJP did not realise that his party is now trying to extend its reach by shedding its image as an upper-caste party.

Periyar is not Lenin because the attack on his statue can upset the Prime Minister’s party’s electoral chances in the state of Tamil Nadu. Demolition of Lenin’s statue only strengthens the Indian Prime Minister’s credentials in the eyes of some western powers.

It is not just Lenin’s statue that made news. A political carnival, once started, tends to expand. In Kolkata, the statue of Syama Prasad Mookerjee was vandalised by those who felt offended by the demolition of Lenin’s statue by the BJP supporters in another state. Mookerjee was among the founder of BJP’s precursor Hindu nationalist party. He was once in Nehru’s cabinet but fell out with him and founded a new party.  The BJP Government is trying to see that history is rewritten to give Mookerjee a more prominent part in the national narrative.

A statue of B. R. Ambedkar in the state of the BJP-ruled state of UP was vandalised by some miscreants. Numerous statues of this eminent Dalit leader were installed when the state had a woman Dalit chief minister. However, other parties including the BJP also show respect towards Ambedkar, who was also one of the architects of India’s Constitution. Of course, reverence towards Ambedkar is not shared by many from the upper castes.

The focus on statues made the Shiv Sena in Goa demand the reinstallation of a statue of Shivaji, a Hindu King known for his valour. The statue was removed by the local authorities because it was installed illegally. Shiv Sena, a right-wing Hindu party, is an ally of the BJP so its demand in a BJP-ruled state matters. A Shiv Sena leader said it was not a question of legality but an issue of the people’s emotional attachment to the statue! Hundreds of tiny temples built without permission on public property in Indian cities cannot be touched lest the demolition hurts public sentiments.

Screenshot of E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar) statue, still intact at Vaikom town in Kottayam, Kerala. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.

World impact

Those who celebrated the demolition of Lenin’s statue abused the communists while some of those who expressed their shock wondered whether India was becoming Iraq or Afghanistan.

The world saw in 1992 the TV coverage of the demolition of the Babri mosque in India by the workers of the same party. The demolition of Lenin’s statute was surely seen on the TV screens by the Taliban terrorists. They must have recalled with pride their own glorious feat of demolishing the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.

Alas, Ronald Reagan could not live to see the destruction of Lenin’s statue in India. The present President of America does not consider Communism to be a threat to America’s survival, so he sent no congratulatory message to the Indian Prime Minister. In the post-Reagan era, Washington got more interested in the demolition of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq which it accomplished with great aplomb.

But the foreign service of at least one nation retains institutional memory. An unnamed foreign diplomat was quick to send a message to Ram Madhav, general secretary of the ruling Hindu nationalist party. The BJP leader publicised the certificate of good conduct: “Congrats Ram! The world needs fewer Communists.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi

No celebratory event these days passes without a reverential reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ram Madhav in his newspaper article said that in India the task of decimating Communism will most likely be completed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

While Lenin faced physical violence, even national icons such a Nehru and Gandhi have been facing verbal violence in social media. The two mass leaders had fought the sectarian forces and Gandhi was, of course, killed by a Hindu nationalist.

This in a country with such diverse traditions that a figure considered evil incarnate in one region is worshipped in another. And despite Shashi Tharoor reminding the nation about the sins of the British Empire, one village in Rajasthan has a temple of a white British military officer where devotees go and offer cigarettes in order to seek his blessings!

But this is not the BJP’s idea of India. It seeks to discredit the multi-cultural narrative and assert the supremacy of Hindus. The Prime Minister’s party has unleashed a sort of cultural revolution with its cadres targeting every institution, official, autonomous or even academic. Official plans to weaken the spirit of pluralism, to revise India’s history and to modify the text books are part of a strategy to kill the idea of India and to fashion a new Indian identity reflective of a religious ethos.

Scientific temperament, a reference to which figures in India’s Constitution, has been devalued. Scientific theories are challenged by semi-literate ministers and fictional accounts about India’s past are turned into factual treatises. Works of literary imagination glorifying India’s past are presented as reportage based on observation.

The storm-troopers for street action against the dissenters, beef-eaters, women drinkers and lovers who display affection in public are supplied by organisations affiliated with the ruling party.

The BJP’s mentor, RSS, acts as a think tank, does public service and organises military-style drills by its volunteers to highlight the importance of discipline and love for Mother India. The RSS was banned after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi but then it got free from the ban by declaring itself a “cultural organisation”.

The ongoing million mutinies in India have got intensified as a direct consequence of the Modi Government’s efforts to culturally transform India. This plan is based on a vision of India’s fabled past and on the veneration of Hindu Gods.

The process is chaotic and at times violent because it involves curbs on personal freedom, demolition of old institutions, vilification of national heroes and manufacturing new idols.

India was not pushed into the twenty-first century kicking and screaming, but now there is a systematic attempt to take it back to the medieval period. Interestingly, those leading this movement use the most modern communication technologies and constantly talk of digital nirvana.

The ruling party cadres fight some of yesterday’s battles and celebrate victories with an exuberance bordering on violence. They feel empowered after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister.

Then there is Hinduism

The Hindu ethos is somewhat different from the ruling party-led Hindutva revolution that is currently spreading in India. Hinduism, as is known, has no central church, no one single book and no single head of the religion. It projects a Parliament of gods! The multiplicity of gods and goddesses that caused occasional intra-faith clashes in the past promoted diversity of beliefs and enabled even the atheists to remain in its fold.

The Vedic literature affirms the validity of questioning in faith. Questions were even raised about whether God knows everything!

Hinduism is tempered with uncertainty. Certainty in faith unleashes a wave of intolerance. Of late, the space for scholarly debates has shrunk. India has a rich tradition of argumentation but now everyone seems to be screaming: “if you disagree, you are my enemy.” Of course, any critic of the Prime Minister is trolled and certified as the enemy of the nation.

Writers, poets and thinkers who were the first to criticise the ruling establishment were given hard time. No one has cared to recall how the poets had started expressing disenchantment with the ruling establishment in the life time of Nehru despite his being adored by the masses.

All that the officially discredited writers and poets had done was to criticise the rise of intolerance. But Modi’s devotees could not take it. So how could they allow Lenin’s statue to stand after they defeated the communists in the state elections? 

It remains to be seen whether the pieces of the statue will be preserved in a museum for visitors to come and throw stones or will be buried for ever so that no power is able to resurrect it for adoration in changed political circumstances.

Communism and communalism

Any opinion poll would show that most Indians believe in reincarnation. But Lenin has little chance since India’s poor are too busy trying to ward off hunger to join in any political revolution.

Any serious discussion on the future of communism in India in the wake of the fall of Lenin’s statue is futile. India is one democratic country where the extraordinary power of political power constantly crushes the spirit of democracy. The willing suspension of dissent and disbelief is widespread.  The media and the business leaders pay tributes to the ruling deity.

The Vicar of Bray used to change his religious doctrines depending on who ruled the country. He has been adopted as a role model by most people and many political leaders.

Political power has become a powerful tool for “awakening” the Hindus and showing other faith communities their place. It was only because the BJP was not in power that the public discourse on sectarianism could not take this vicious turn all these years. Those who used to keep their pro-Hindutva views to themselves have been emboldened to say nasty things in public.

The poor and neglected states are so dependent on the financial grants from New Delhi that the people readily switch their political loyalty to the party that forms the Union Government.

The rulers get away with anything. A Government scheme causing a widespread disaster and costing human lives, is successfully sold by invoking morality.

In the current political scenario, ideologies have lost all relevance. The BJP has been embracing its ideological opponents and forming state governments with their help. What matters is setting up a formidable electoral machine and implementing a winning strategy based on the polarisation of voters on the basis of caste or religion and attracting the opponents by promising spoils of office.

The cadres and even senior leaders defect either before a coming election if they see their party going nowhere or after an election that dislodges their party’s government. Even the ideologically distinct leftist parties are not immune to this, not to talk of the Congress that provides an umbrella to various shades of opinion.

The ruling Hindu nationalist party has benefited from this vulnerability of its opponents, attracting to its fold a large number of them who till the other day were supposed to be committed to secularism and socialism.

In its assiduous attempt to cast its net wider and wider, the BJP has displayed amazing flexibility dumbfounding the few ideological purists within its fold. Those committed to the interests of the farmers and workers feel uncomfortable with the economic policies of the Modi Government, but they can’t sever their links with a winning party.

As soon as Modi came to power, the RSS abandoned its principle of not encouraging foreign goods and capital and not having any truck with the separatists. The Prime Minister himself set an example of ideological flexibility when he began to implement many of the policies of the earlier Government that he used to attack vociferously.

It seems that sectarianism, called communalism in India, has always had more mass appeal than was estimated. It was only that strong secular governments kept divisive sentiments under check. That changed when the BJP came to power in New Delhi.

Secularism will perhaps assert itself more forcefully only because of the good sense of the majority and the pluralistic ethos of true Hinduism. The communists, who failed to counter capitalism, are more handicapped in fighting communalism which can be controlled effectively only by the true Hindu believers.

The relentless campaign to polarise Hindu voters has succeeded in several recent elections. This trend cannot be arrested by campaigns by the secularists and leftists till the BJP’s political fortunes decline because of new circumstances.

The BJP is using its rule in New Delhi to consolidate its hold and propagate its vision of a Hindu India. An occasional electoral setback apart, the Hindu nationalist party marches on triumphantly under the leadership of Narendra Modi.

Yellowstone Pond, 2012. Wikicommons/runt35. Some rights reserved.When I was 15 years old, I learned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from sprays such as shaving cream to pesticides could lead to “…the possibility of end to life on earth”. After I read that article, the world seemed smaller and humanity larger.

The article, published in The New Yorker, reviewed a science-to-public-to-politics story about CFCs and their purported impact on Earth’s ozone layer. The article recounted the rapid proliferation of aerosol products during the postwar period, from 4.5 million cans in 1947 to 2.3 billion in 1968. The postwar economy of convenience fuelled the rapid scale-up, and by 1970, Brodeur reported, “Practically every product that was conceivably sprayable either had been packaged or was being considered for packaging in aerosol form.”

When I read that article, I was in high school in Vicenza, Italy, where my dad was serving in the military. The New Yorker was among the few English-language publications we could easily find. At 15, I knew I was younger than their targeted audience, but I devoured the nonfiction, especially the science. Brodeur’s article, in particular, gripped me.

He explained how aerosol cans and the CFC gases they used as propellants were everywhere, their use doubling annually. And everyone had considered CFCs harmless because they were chemically inert. Everyone, that is, except for one Professor F. Sherwood Rowland. The ubiquity of these compounds in the environment, and even the troposphere, made Rowland, an expert in the chemistry of radioactive isotopes, wonder about their fate.

Rowland would join forces with Dr. Mario Molina, then a chemist in Rowland’s lab at the University of California, Irvine. They had conducted a set of chemical calculations once, then again, and published their findings in Nature [1]. They’d discovered that chlorine atoms, when mixed with ozone, would produce runaway chemical reactions that could destroy the ozone layer of the atmosphere – the layer that shields living beings from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. More surprisingly, they found that this destruction of the ozone layer would happen rapidly and additively, influenced by the propellants in the convenient aerosol cans that filled the cupboards and garages of consumers across the nation. By 1975, a year after their findings had been published, over 5 billion such cans were being produced annually – mostly by the United States and Russia – and products from pesticides to personal hygiene to food were streaming out of the cans thanks to these CFCs. Their calculations portended atmospheric disaster. Not believing that spray cans could do so much damage, Rowland and Molina turned to other experts to check their work, thinking they must have made a mathematical error. They hadn’t…

Not believing that spray cans could do so much damage, Rowland and Molina turned to other experts to check their work, thinking they must have made a mathematical error. They hadn’t. Instead, impending harm to the ozone layer was confirmed by others, including Paul Crutzen [2]. Their figures showed that the dangers of increased solar radiation would lead to an increase of 40,000 skin cancer cases in the US by 2050 (real dangers would turn out to be significantly higher [3]), but more significantly, their calculations intimated that stratospheric temperatures might be altered enough to cause changes in global weather patterns. A National Academy of Sciences special panel then recommended an immediate halt to the purchase of aerosol sprays. The panel recommendations were used by the Natural Resources Defense Council to petition the Consumer Product Safety Commission to demand a ban on CFC-propelled sprays.

But, not surprisingly, the businesses producing and using CFCs were not idle. As The New Yorker article revealed, they attempted to counter the scientists’ discoveries by suggesting that their conclusions were not real ­­– that CFCs were not truly threatening the ozone layer. However, in those days, our government demanded that the burden of proof be on the CFC-using businesses to show that their product was safe, not the scientists to show that it wasn’t [3,4]. They required that if manufacturers did not demonstrate that CFCs were safe within two years, CFCs would be banned. The Environmental Protection Agency was then tasked with determining what a safe level of CFC production would be, if it existed, and given the chops to enforce it.

In less than a year, the scientific community converged to call out the dangers to the future of our planet caused by spray cans, and our government acted. By 1976, nonessential use of CFCs in aerosol cans was prohibited, and by 1978, cans with CFC propellants were banned in the US [5]. In 1987, the rest of the world agreed: United Nations members signed “The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer”, which was designed to protect our atmosphere. Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen went on to win the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were planetary heroes.

It would be many years until I realized how important this 1975 article and the scientists behind it were to my intellectual development, and how it made me see the world in a new way. Until then, I had thought of Earth, with wildness thriving far from people, as vast and unexplored – a living planet possessing powerful, poorly understood forces that could wipe humanity’s imprints clean in an instant. But the article, even more than NASA’s lunar program with the voices of astronauts speaking to us Earthlings below, inspired me to zoom out and see our planet as tiny – fragile, even.

I went to college and eventually graduate school, studying a combination of fields intended to satisfy my understanding of human-environment interactions through time (including anthropology, biology, climatology, and geology) and was hired as a professor at Stanford University, where one of my departmental colleagues, Steve Schneider, became a mentor and a good friend. At the same time Rowland and Molina were working on CFCs, Steve had been conducting his own atmospheric calculations about the impacts of greenhouse gases. He would become a science champion who described to the world the dangers of “global warming” [5], served as an advisor to many presidents, and modeled life as a citizen-scientist who worked tirelessly to present his highly complex research in a way the public could understand. It was during a scientific celebration honoring Steve’s 60th birthday that I finally met Sherwood Rowland and was able to tell him what his work had meant to me.

That day, a penny dropped. As I presented my own research, witnessed by these two brilliant change-makers, I realized that Rowland’s global perspective and action, and Steve’s communication skills and energy, combined to influence the trajectory of my career and do so to this day.

My research at that time focused on the paleoecological history of Yellowstone National Park using fossil and modern animals to understand the role that climate plays on their ecology and evolution [6,7]. Although my work was targeted at understanding past climate events such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period (now Medieval Climate Anomaly), I also worked to predict the harbingers of future climatic change. What signs would appear in protected areas? Would they mimic the changes I documented from the fossil record or would they be different? After decades of working in Yellowstone, I thought I could see changes that might be answers. The small ponds that dot the northern part of the park were smaller and drying up earlier than when I first arrived in the park in 1982. Some no longer contained water, and I noticed fewer birds were nesting in the riparian vegetation around the ponds.

A beaver dam in Yellowstone National Park, viewed from the Beaver Ponds Trail, 2005. Wikicommons/Richard Wang. Some rights reserved.So, in 2008, my graduate student and I repeated a 1993 study, looking at weather data, amphibian diversity, and geomorphic evidence from 49 ponds [8]. What we found astounded me. As the climate warmed, we documented fewer permanent ponds, and ephemeral ponds that dried up earlier or never appeared at all, leaving fewer suitable habitats for amphibians. As a result, across northern Yellowstone there were significantly fewer populations of all common amphibian species – in some cases, they were reduced by half – and all ponds experienced a reduction in the number of species they harbored. Here – in the world’s first national park, theoretically protected from outside activities –was evidence of the reach of humans that I could observe with my own eyes. Climate change was affecting habitats even in wilderness, supposedly untouched by human hands, and loss of those habitats was impacting the diversity and future of species.

The 1975 New Yorker article now reads like a hopeful just-so story, a story in which science worked like it was supposed to. Scientists did their research and presented their results to the public and to our government, which in turn helped to craft evidence-based regulations to protect us and our environment. Industries meanwhile adapted and innovated by developing safer alternatives. Science can, and did, save the planet.

Fast forward to the present. Today planetary emergencies abound – biodiversity loss, climate change, sea-level rise, population increase, migration, resource limitation, and pollution [9]. Even as the impacts of human-caused climate change become clearer and clearer and scarier and scarier, those who govern our country are not responding. In fact, quite the opposite – at the national level, there is active dismantling and discrediting of the science that substantiates environmental problems and solutions.

This troubles me because that article I read over 40 years ago still inspires me. I learned that the earth was small and fragile but also that science, when combined with a responsive public and an action-driven government, can drive rapid action to protect this planet.

The irony is hard to miss – the mantra these days is “to make America great again.” But a key feature of those bygone days was listening to the lessons that science taught and acting upon them to make a better planet. Today, it is the trepidation that even though we know, we might not act. And that makes me very worried.

References

1. Molina MJ, Rowland FS. Stratospheric sink for chlorofluoromethanes: chlorine atom-catalysed destruction of ozone. 1974; Nature 249: 810–812.
2. Crutzen PJ. The influence of nitrogen oxides on the atmospheric ozone content; 1970. Quart. J. R. Met. Soc. 96: 320–325. 
3. Parson EA. Protecting the Ozone Layer: Science and Strategy; 2003. Oxford University Press, New York, 377 pp. 
4. Morrisette PM. 1989. The evolution of policy responses to stratospheric ozone depletion. Natural Resources Journal 29: 793–820. 
5. Schneider SH. Global Warming: Are we entering the greenhouse century? 1989. Sierra Club Books, 317 pp. 
6. Hadly EA. Influence of Late Holocene climate on northern Rocky Mountain mammals; 1996. Quaternary Research 46: 298–310. 
7. Hadly EA, Ramakrishnan U, Chan YL, van Tuinen M, O'Keefe K, Spaeth P, Conroy CJ. Genetic response to climatic change: insights from ancient DNA and phylochronology; 2004. PLoS Biol 2(10): e290. pmid:15361933 
8. McMenamin SK, Hadly EA, Wright CK. Climatic change and wetland desiccation cause amphibian decline in Yellowstone National Park; 2008. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 16988–16993. 
9. Barnosky AD, Hadly EA. Tipping Point for Planet Earth: How Close Are We to the Edge? 2016. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 272 pp.

The original version of this article was published as Hadly EA (2018) ‘Making America great again requires acting on scientific knowledge’ in PLoS Biol 16(2): e2004337 on February 5, 2018.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn at a Rally to Remain campaign event in Westminster, London, May 14, 2016. Dominic Lipinski/Press Association. All rights reserved.In twenty years’ time, we will look back on Brexit as a moment of terrifying global irresponsibility. We live in a world of creeping fascism in Russia, Turkey, China, Trump’s America not to mention the tendencies inside Britain, especially among the hard Brexiteers. The European Union currently represents a beacon for democracy and human rights. Of course, it is dominated by a neo-liberal ideology that threatens to undermine the euro-zone and with it the democratic values for which it stands; developments in Central Europe and the recent elections in Italy are a painful reminder of the dangerous possibilities.

Nevertheless, there are tendencies for reform inside the European Union and if a Corbyn-led Labour Party were to win the next election, there is a unique – indeed a once in a lifetime opportunity – to reform the European Union and this means an opportunity to save us, Europe and perhaps the world. The current nostalgia for Britain’s role in WWII seems to neglect the fact that this was a struggle for democracy, human rights and decency and not just about nationalism.

But we are so obsessed with the domestic British debate despite all the talk of a global Britain that nobody seems to be discussing or trying to diagnose the frightening scenario of everything going wrong and our role in that scenario. The current nostalgia for Britain’s role in WWII seems to neglect the fact that this was a struggle for democracy, human rights and decency and not just about nationalism. If we care about those values now, we should be worrying about the future of Europe and the world and how what happens in the rest of the world will affect us.

A pamphlet published by Another Europe is Possible this week makes the argument that instead of fretting about how bad Brexit will be for Britain, we need to think about what a Corbyn government inside Europe might mean for the future of the European Union. The pamphlet sets out a reform strategy for the European Union that is realistic to achieve if a Corbyn government were to ally with socialists across Europe. Such a reform strategy would enable us to address the big global problems of today, and this in turn may well be a necessary condition for implementing the Corbyn-McDonnell programme.

There are already tentative moves away from dogmatic neo-liberal economic policies, which successive UK governments were at the forefront of pushing. President Macron is talking about reform of the eurozone including a common European budget and there is a possibility that his proposals will be met more warmly by the new Social Democrat Coalition in Germany.

The left-wing Portuguese government has demonstrated how an anti-austerity policy can dramatically improve economic performance. There are proposals to close tax havens for multinational corporations and a proposal for a common consolidated corporate tax, something the UK has strongly opposed in the past.

New proposals to stop undercutting, whereby companies deliberately recruit workers abroad under the conditions in the countries where they are recruited to reduce costs, have just been passed and will mean that it will be no longer possible to use migrant workers as a way of putting putting downward pressure on wages.   

And there are proposals for a tax on financial transactions as a way of controlling financial speculation, again a proposal vetoed by the UK in the past. Yet these proposals may be difficult to implement without at least one major power seriously committed to them. For example, in the wake of Brexit, some countries are engaging in beggar-my-neighbour policies in order to take over the UK position especially in financial services. A Corbyn-led government could be key to making these reforms happen. If Labour were to pursue a ‘Remain and Reform’ strategy, there is a chance to remake Europe and initiate a process of taming and controlling the dark forces of globalisation.

The same is true for those areas where EU policy has, in the past, been relatively progressive – digital rights, climate change, and ending global conflicts, for example. Thanks to active protests across Europe, EU policy on digital rights, defending online privacy and the ownership of personal data, has been rather progressive – yet without continued active engagement, along the lines of the Labour Party’s Digital Democracy Manifesto, there is a risk that this might be undermined by anti-terror legislation.

In the case of climate change, there is considerable momentum for far-reaching efforts to keep climate change under 2 % including the ‘Clean Energy Package for All Europeans’ and the ‘EU Roadmap for 100% emission cuts by mid-century. These initiatives would mean a massive transformation of the European economy affecting almost every sector. But, given powerful vested interests in our current carbon based economy, it won’t happen without substantial pressures from parties and movements across Europe.

As for ending global conflicts, the new global strategy  presented by Federica Mogherini to the European Council the day after the British referendum, envisages an external security policy aimed at human security (the security of people and the communities in which they live) rather the security of borders. This policy was formerly blocked by the UK who preferred the geo-political approach of NATO and so is now moving ahead. Nevertheless, it requires much stronger political backing and more of the kind of resources in which the UK has a comparative advantage.

Finally, a Corbyn-led government could change the conversation about immigration. Anti-immigration sentiment promoted by unscrupulous politicians, it can be argued, produced the refugee crisis. We live in a world of migration and it is more or less impossible to control. What is more Europe with its aging population needs migrants. Instead of creating a border security complex in which smugglers and border guards are enmeshed in an impossible business that fails to prevent the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean, we need a policy of managed migration as was actually proposed by the European Commission but opposed by member states – one that involves a resettlement policy across the continent. A Corbyn-led government could push for replacing  the current exclusive and dangerous securitised approach with one based on humanitarian and development considerations. We need a policy of managed migration as was actually proposed by the European Commission but opposed by member states – one that involves a resettlement policy across the continent.

A reform strategy of this kind offers the possibility of transforming the global model of development from the old US-led model based on mass production and the intensive use of oil, to a new green, digital, decentralised and socially just set of arrangements.

This is no longer, if it ever was, something that can be pursued in one country. On the contrary, a post-Brexit Labour government could easily be derailed by predatory action from larger economic blocs and financial markets. And the alarming tendencies for European disintegration, right-wing authoritarianism not to mention criminal and ethnic violence are likely to infect us as well. But if Labour were to pursue a ‘Remain and Reform’ strategy, there is a chance to remake Europe and initiate a process of taming and controlling the dark forces of globalisation.

Leader of Opposition, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, New Democracy, on the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of restoration of Democracy at the Presidential Palace in Athens, Greece on Monday, July 24, 2017. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.Greece has had more than its fair share of European and international headlines during the past years of crisis and austerity. Whether it was a looming bankruptcy, another bailout programme, mass protests or the complete realignment of its political system, commentators around the world were quick to catch up with developments in the sunny corner of the Mediterranean.

But the last couple of years have seemed rather ‘quiet,’ giving the impression that not much is happening any more in the austerity-ridden country. Greece seems to have left deficits behind, with the economy slowly growing again, while EU Summits and Eurogroup sessions have lost their thriller-like character, reaching one positive resolution after the other on the country’s third adjustment programme anticipated to conclude in the summer of 2018.

Who is to blame for today’s polarisation?

Yet, someone taking a closer look at Greece nowadays will soon notice that the climate in the public sphere has become extremely polarised if not toxic. And it is not just the SYRIZA-led government to blame for this newfound toxicity. To be sure, both SYRIZA and ANEL, the two unlikely partners in government, have consistently pursued sharply antagonistic strategies, both while in opposition and after ascending to power in 2015, tirelessly attacking their political opponents who they depict as the ‘old party establishment.’

Not surprisingly, their populist character has often concerned analysts and commentators who speculate on the possible consequences for Greece’s liberal institutions, minority rights, the economy, etc. Nowadays it is also (if not mostly) the centre-right opposition that has violently pushed the debate towards extreme polarisation and political enmity.

But nowadays it is also (if not mostly) the centre-right opposition that has violently pushed the debate towards extreme polarisation and political enmity, feeding the public sphere with conspiracy theories, nationalist stereotypes, and even threatening that they will ‘crush’ or ‘skin’ (!) their political opponents and the PM himself.

And the reason behind this furious and indeed violent tirade? The fact is that several among New Democracy’s (ND) top officials have recently been involved in allegations about the so-called ‘Novartis scandal.’ The case started to unfold after FBI investigations into the big pharmaceutical industry that were taken up by Greek corruption prosecutors in late 2016. Details soon leaked to the media and from there into parliamentary debate. Anonymous protected witnesses have reported in their testimonies that several former ministers from ND and PASOK and even two Prime Ministers have accepted bribes from Novartis in exchange for ‘special treatment.’

Regardless of whether the allegations prove true or false, the practices of big pharma seem to have resulted in losses of billions for the Greek economy, at a time when the majority of the people have had to endure severe cuts in pensions, salaries and welfare.

First signs of New Democracy’s shift to the right

In this article I am not going to deal with the ongoing investigations into the alleged ‘scandal.’ In no position to have an informed opinion on the involvement of senior officials in the case, I do firmly believe that anyone under such serious accusation should be considered innocent until proven guilty – a stance sadly not respected by several senior members of the Greek government.

What I want to discuss is rather the turn of the main opposition party of Greece, ND, to the right, as well as its extremely polarising communicative strategy, one that draws on moralistic divisiveness and nationalist rhetoric, while attacking independent institutions like the judiciary. This strategy that has been presided over by its hard-right vice president Adonis Georgiadis (a politician notorious in the past for his anti-Semitic and racist views) and the ex-PM Antonis Samaras (whom on several occasions has chosen to wage war against ‘illegal immigrants’).

This path is leading ND in the opposite direction from what analysts and commentators expected when they saw the rather ‘technocratic’ and mild, Kyriakos Mitsotakis rise to the party leadership in 2016. Then, the party was expected to consolidate its profile as a centrist, liberal and uncompromisingly Europeanist political force. The past few months have confirmed that this is not the case. Past months have witnessed more indications of a shift to the right as the new leader of the party has found himself supporting or opposing policies that contradict his liberal profile.

But this shift to the right did not come out of the blue. On the contrary, signs that a centrist turn would be unlikely had appeared rather early on. First, immediately after his election in the party’s leadership, Mitsotakis appointed Adonis Georgiadis, a representative of the hard-right faction of the party, former MP of the radical right Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) and one of the most controversial politicians in the Greek parliament, as one of his vice presidents. Georgiadis is known for his constant presence on TV channels and his loud eccentric style, as well as for hosting a TV-sales programme selling books and sometimes obscure products like a ‘nanobionic’ vest with supposedly therapeutic properties. His flamboyant personality and vitriolic attacks on opponents have often shadowed ND’s president and PM-in-waiting, setting the tone for the party’s public presence.

Adonis Georgiadis, Vice President of New Democracy party and deputy, during the session of Hellenic Parliament, August 2017. Dimitrios Karvountzis/ Press Association. All rights reserved.Past months have witnessed more indications of a shift to the right as the new leader of the party has found himself supporting or opposing policies that contradict his liberal profile. For example, in October 2017, and despite Mitsotakis’ earlier pledges, ND opposed the legal recognition of gender identity, finding itself siding with the Greek Orthodox Church and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. The bill was also voted down by SYRIZA’s right-wing partner, ANEL, but passed with votes from the centre and centre-left (Potami and Pasok).

Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA MPs spoke that day in parliament on the need to expand the rights of the marginalised and ‘invisibles,’ advocating a politics of inclusion and tolerance. Mitsotakis, on the other side, responded by referring to a story about a teenager who had allegedly decided to change his gender after discussing this with an extra-terrestrial on a mountain near Athens. The point he wanted to make was that people at the age of 15 are too immature to decide on their gender. Leaving the absurdity of the story aside, this argument ridiculed the right of transgender people to self-identify as they wish, while ND’s choice to oppose the bill went against the decision of the Court of Athens and defied calls by human rights organisations like Amnesty International.

The Macedonia name dispute

A few months later, Greece’s dispute with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on its name would – after a decade – return to the limelight due to the resuming of negotiations between the two countries. This was facilitated by a change of government in FYROM, which now had a moderate social-democrat politician as Prime Minister. Zoran Zaev has consistently opposed the nationalism and irredentism of his predecessors and is advocating a swift solution to the name dispute towards the consolidation of a stable and mutually beneficial relationship with Greece.

The leadership of the Greek foreign affairs ministry proceeded in a decisive yet conservative manner, picking up the negotiations from where its predecessors had left them. They adopted the position that the solution to the dispute should entail ‘a compound name with a geographical qualifier before the word “Macedonia”, which will be used in relation to everyone (erga omnes), for all uses domestic and international.’ This had been supported by ND in the past and by former PM Kostas Karamanlis when the party was in power (2004-2009). Such a position is also a retreat from the views that several key members of SYRIZA had previously expressed in favour of recognising the country by its constitutional name, the name by which it is known and referred in most of the world: simply Macedonia. Prominent members of the Greek Orthodox Church were at the very centre of the rallies, which were also embraced by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.

Reactions from ultranationalist, religious and extreme-right groups against any solution that would include the word ‘Macedonia’ soon started to gain traction. And while ND seemed at first ambivalent towards these mobilisations, it soon ended up supporting them. The two rallies that took place in Thessaloniki and Athens were expressions of pure nationalist pathos with alarming authoritarian, racist and anti-democratic elements.

At centre stage in Thessaloniki one could find a former general as well as high ranking ex-military officers, speaking about the defence of the nation’s ‘soul,’ advocating drastic solutions against the ‘traitors’ of the nation, even implying the possibility of a coup against the government.

Prominent members of the Greek Orthodox Church were at the very centre of the rallies, which were also embraced by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Instead of condemning such alarming phenomena, or at least keeping some distance, the leadership of ND accused Tsipras and his government of not being able to listen to the people’s ‘patriotic sensitivities.’ And with negotiations between Greece and FYROM still ongoing, ND now looks as if it will do whatever it can to undermine a solution to the ageing and counterproductive dispute between the two countries.

Enter the ‘Novartis scandal’

Like usually happens with perfect storms, the ‘Novartis scandal’ emerged in headlines immediately after the nationalist rally in the centre of Athens. This was an issue with a recurring presence in the media for more than a year, but this time the names of former senior officials that were involved in the investigations were revealed to the public.

The immediate reaction of ND along with that of prominent politicians of PASOK, like former deputy PM Evangelos Venizelos, was to claim that this was all ‘a villainous scheme’ of the government, a conspiracy of the PM himself, who, along with members of his cabinet had manipulated the judiciary and even guided the testimonies of anonymous witnesses to politically ‘assassinate’ the government’s opponents.

The protected witnesses were vehemently attacked by ND and PASOK as ‘slanderers,’ ‘dark figures’ or ‘hooded individuals’ and were openly threatened that soon they would ‘pay’ for involving them in their testimonies (‘they will not be protected forever’ was the threatening warning by one of the leading figures of the opposition, while another stated that he would ‘break the hands’ of anyone that touches ND). (‘They will not be protected forever’ was the threatening warning by one of the leading figures of the opposition, while another stated that he would ‘break the hands’ of anyone that touches ND.)

Former PM Samaras went a step further and filed a lawsuit against PM Tsipras, Alternate Minister on Corruption Dimitris Papaggelopoulos, but also against the chief prosecutor for corruption and the witnesses that are under protection. In the meantime, the Greek parliament was agreeing to form a committee tasked with investigating the involvement of senior officials in the case. Samaras, in his speech during parliamentary debate, did not just defend himself against allegations involving his name in briberies, but seized the opportunity to attack the SYRIZA-led government on its many alleged ‘crimes.’ Among the allegations, one stands out for its severity, conspirational and indeed xenophobic tone. The ‘crime’ of SYRIZA according to Samaras is the following: 

‘The opening of the borders in 2015; [the borders] that we had closed and which you opened in collaboration with various NGOs of human smugglers – and you’ve let into [Greece] one million and a half of illegal immigrants!’

There are so many things that feel wrong in this statement, but let me just highlight the more obvious ones: (1) the severe refugee crisis of 2015 is not acknowledged, it is as if the unprecedented flows of people from Syria and the Middle East to Europe were a result of SYRIZA’s open border policy, as if there was never was a war in the region; (2) refugees, asylum seekers and economic immigrants are not recognised as such, but all are reduced to ‘illegal immigrants’ (a derogatory and offensive expression now banned in major news agencies and explicitly avoided by EU institutions); (3) humanitarian NGOs that played a key role in saving lives across the Aegean and sheltering refugees and immigrants are presented as the agents of human smugglers; (4) the government appears to have ‘let into’ the country one million and a half ‘illegal immigrants’  – a hugely exaggerated number of the refugees and immigrants currently living in Greece (estimated at around 60,000).

In other words, the former PM and leading figure of ND seems to have fully embraced the incendiary anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric of Europe’s radical and extreme right and of people like Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders. Quite interestingly, no one in or around the party has reacted against this. What is more, the silence of Greek liberal-centrist and moderate intellectuals in front of Samaras’ anti-immigrant rant could not be more striking. What is more, the silence of Greek liberal-centrist and moderate intellectuals in front of Samaras’ anti-immigrant rant could not be more striking.

In this context, it is not an exaggeration to say that the conservative opposition’s presence in the Greek public sphere during the past months has been fuelling bitter confrontations, creating the conditions for the further alienation of citizens not just from the political system and parliamentary politics, but also from the institutions that safeguard liberties and the rule of law.

In other words, ND’s new polarising strategy is not just leading to the further moralisation of politics, it is also spreading a culture of conspiracy mongering and is severely discrediting the judiciary system of Greece as well as the government itself as an institution.

Even if in the end investigations on the Novartis case by the authorities proceed in a paradigmatic and ethically flawless way, closing the case, the fact that on an almost daily basis there are high-profile politicians of ND and PASOK in the media, advocating that prosecutors are merely puppets in the hands of a ‘corrupt government,’ has already caused severe damage to the image of the judiciary and the political system as a whole.

Add to this the fact that within the past few weeks ND has not hesitated to use the foreign relations of Greece, and more specifically recent tensions with Turkey in the Aegean Sea and Evros border, as a means to attack the government, and one can easily see the possibility of polarisation escalating further, with consequences reaching beyond Greek borders.

‘Illiberal’ populists against ‘liberal’ moderates?

A sceptical observer might suggest that I am over-stressing the negative effects of the Greek opposition’s current stance on a series of issues. That I am ignoring the fact that in such situations ‘it takes two to tango.’

Indeed, the sitting government in Greece, a coalition of a populist radical left and a populist-nationalist right party, is no stranger to polarisation. It actually rose to power by mainly following an ‘us versus them’ campaign, rallying its supporters against the parties of the ‘old establishment,’ pledging to put an end to austerity and to radically renew the political system.

In practice, after immense pressure, it has chosen to sign yet another new bailout programme, following the dictates of its EU partners and lenders in most policy areas, thus furthering austerity.

Now, if one judges by the reactions of top EU officials, it seems that the SYRIZA-led government has carried out most of the agreed structural reforms in a rather effective way. As for the ‘liberal’ component of democracy in Greece, which various commentators had considered under threat, one could point to several ambiguous tendencies, but it is obvious that there have not been any major setbacks.

On the one hand, there have been positive developments on various fronts, especially if we take into account the several bills passed to recognise and consolidate the rights of ethnic minorities and immigrants as well as the rights of the LGBTQ community.

On the other hand, it is a fact that the current government has not kept the institutional distance that it should from cases like the Novartis case, discussed above. Instead of leaving the prosecutors to do their job independently and respecting the presumed innocence of the senior officials under investigation, ministers were quick to state that this is the ‘biggest scandal’ from the very foundation of Greece as an independent state.

In this sense, the government did not respect the independence of the judiciary to the extent that it should have. Moreover, it has used the case as an opportunity to attack and discredit its political opponents.

Greece’s ‘liberal Europeanist pole’

But I have chosen to focus more on the other side here, that of the centre-right (and centre-left) ‘moderate’ opposition in Greece. On the forces that have very often been uncritically portrayed as the ‘liberal’ Europeanist pole of the Greek political system.

And I am doing this for a specific reason. The point I want to make is that things are not as simple and tidy as often presented by mainstream media, popular academics and pundits: it is not just the ‘illiberal’ populists against the ‘liberal’ moderates.

It is not necessarily the former that are threatening institutions, checks and balances, the rule of law, democratic culture and so on, against the latter, the enlightened forces of political moderation and liberal consensus that safeguard democratic values and institutions. The dynamics of the political game in Greece – as in Europe and beyond – are increasingly much more complex.

Both ‘sides’ have at times articulated their politics in ways that have been more or less liberal, more or less ‘responsible,’ and indeed more or less transparent or democratic. But while commentators around Europe are always quick to join the fight against the alleged ‘populists,’ and even write articles advising the ‘liberals’ (as if they were a coherent camp) on how to defeat them (as if all populists are the same and should all be defeated), what is often ignored is the mainstreaming of nationalism and nativism, the legitimization of illiberal and indeed of anti-democratic ideas and practices by established ‘moderate’ political forces. What is often ignored is the mainstreaming of nationalism and nativism, the legitimization of illiberal and indeed of anti-democratic ideas and practices by established ‘moderate’ political forces.

Take for example the adoption of a strong anti-immigrant rhetoric by the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and PM Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, who in their effort to defeat Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) in the recent general election, ended up legitimising his agenda and mainstreaming islamophobia in a country that has a long tradition of openness and tolerance. Or, even worse, the hard shift of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) to the right, that under Sebastian Kurz in now governing in coalition with the radical right Freedom Party (FPÖ), appointing its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache as vice chancellor. Not many years ago, such collaborations in government would cause severe reactions from other governments and intellectuals across Europe. Today, this is almost becoming the ‘new normal.’

Greece’s centre-right seems to be moving on a similar path to some of its European counterparts. And given that ND could win the next general election, this might have significant consequences for the country. In such a scenario, we could see ND’s trumpesque vice president, who constantly threatens to ‘crush,’ ‘obliterate’ or jail his political opponents, as a deputy PM or leading a key ministry. This would not be good news for Greece and its democratic institutions, nor for Europe. But it does not make any headlines. Nobody considers such a politician a ‘threat’ like they considered, for example, Tsipras or Pablo Iglesias not so long ago. In this sense, it seems that demands to reverse austerity or to even slightly deviate from Europe’s fiscal orthodoxy is a far more dangerous idea than targeting immigrants, fuelling nationalist sentiments or attacking the judiciary and protected whistleblowers. It seems that demands to reverse austerity or to even slightly deviate from Europe’s fiscal orthodoxy is a far more dangerous idea than targeting immigrants, fuelling nationalist sentiments or attacking the judiciary and protected whistleblowers.

The challenges ahead

To be sure, post-Brexit Europe is facing many challenges. The consolidation of illiberal authoritarian parties in specific countries (e.g. Hungary, Poland), as well as the further empowerment of the populist radical right in others (e.g. France, Italy), are definitely among the most serious ones.

But the story does not stop there. Democratic institutions and ideas as well as the prospects of creating an open, diverse and tolerant society are also threatened by the mainstreaming of nationalist/nativist, authoritarian and anti-democratic ideas as expressed by established political forces.

Mainstream media and commentators tend to ignore this, often creating the picture of a unified and embattled moderate ‘centre’ that is defending Europe and liberal democracy against anti-establishment populist challengers on the right and the left. But what was considered ‘moderate’ or ‘mainstream’ in the past has been changing, with the centre-right coming alarmingly closer to the radical right, especially on issues related to immigration and the ‘law and order’ agenda.

We need to acknowledge this and to critically discuss the possible consequences of this broader shift. At the same time, we need to reflect upon the very state of liberal democracy itself and on its postdemocratic tendencies, overcoming convenient yet counterproductive dichotomies such as ‘populism vs. liberalism,’ ‘rationalism vs. irrationalism,’ and so on and so forth.

The much-needed reinvigoration of democracy does not necessarily pass through ‘more liberalism’ or ‘more Europe.’ Democracy can (and should) become more inclusive, more participatory, more deliberative, more redistributive, more passionate, and in some respects even more populist– building on constructive agonistic confrontation, holding unresponsive elites accountable, taking collective identities seriously, bringing the demands of the marginalised and disenfranchised to the fore.

Credit:Flickr/Matt Brown. CC-BY-2.0.

In 2017 we reported on the work we’ve been doing with the Skills Network in south London to nurture less siloed communities in the context of the post-Brexit debate. Reactions to that article encouraged us to go one step further in deepening our learning with other groups trying to build collective forms of support and social justice. For most people divisive rhetoric isn’t new; they’ve been developing ways to counter it for years. Here are three more lessons from our experience.

1.    We have more in common than divides us, but our situations are never equal.

”You’ve got to remember when you bring all these people together in the beginning…they’ve got to have someone to shout at…Both sides have got to be equal. It’s got to be a level playing field otherwise it doesn’t work…(to do this) you need to create a ‘them and us’ situation...But the goal is to work towards the ‘us.’” (Steve Scott, long-term Groundswell activist)

When we started Skills Network we were keen to focus on our shared experiences and values. We wanted the space to feel safe and positive, to ‘enact’ our ideal world, so we played down differences between us. But as we developed as a cooperative, frustrations at these differences came out in unexpected, sometimes disruptive ways, forcing us to think about more explicit ways to confront them. 

The reality is that there are inequalities between people—financial and in terms of status, confidence to voice opinions, general life opportunities and expectations. These differences are often internalised, glossed over by well-meaning attempts to ‘bridge divides’ and ‘build communities.’ It’s difficult to get the balance right between acknowledging them and letting them define the group, but some groups manage this balancing act better than others. 

Groundswell, for example, facilitates peer-to-peer support and advocacy around homelessness, and for many years has been training local councils and other organisations in user involvement.  The organisation started in the 1990s as a movement "very explicitly campaigning for the homeless and roofless–engaging with people who were having those experiences and following their agenda" as Simone Helleren from Groundswell puts it. Over time it grew into a network of smaller groups doing localised ‘self-help’ which started to advocate for more fundamental changes to policies and attitudes around housing.

Groundswell recognised the crucial importance of taking the knowledge and anger of people at the sharp end of inequality seriously. The group pioneered the ‘Speakout’ model which brought together self-help groups, people experiencing homelessness, and people working in the sector to learn from each other through workshops and debates. These events brought homeless people into direct dialogue with policymakers and gave them an opportunity to express their opinions.

Allowing space for those who had experienced homelessness to share their feelings with those responsible for making and implementing housing policy helped the group to move past these divisions and laid the groundwork for years of productive collaboration. Over time speakouts evolved into citizens’ juries which were at the centre of the group’s radical inquiry into UK housing policy: the Homeless People’s Commission. The key was to confront, not suppress, the injustices and inequalities that divide people, and to build connections and communities that eventually overcame them. 

2.    Create frameworks that recognise we all have things to give and take.

“The difference between traditional charity and timebanking? It’s the power thing, isn’t it? It’s more equal. You get to feel good about yourself by giving and remembering ‘oh yeah I am actually quite good at things.’ And you get help back as well -rather than one set of people are always the givers and then the other lot are the passive beneficiaries.” (Alison Paule, Paxton Green Timebank Coordinator).

We initially thought at Skills Network that a flat pay-rate and shared decision-making would ensure everyone’s contributions felt equally valued. But ‘conventional’ hierarchies kept creeping into our dynamics.  Searching for learning from other organisations in South London, we discoveredRushey Green and Paxton Green Timebanks. The timebanking movement seeks to create ‘operating systems’ which consciously facilitate exchange and support in a way that makes clear that “nobody is better than anybody else.” They do this by focusing on ‘proactive’ time as the principal unit of currency.

For every hour participants ‘deposit’ in a timebank they can ‘withdraw’ the equivalent in support when they need something—“ironing or accounting…an hour is an hour.” In this context being ‘in need’ is not stigmatizing or shameful—it’s a normal part of everyone’s life.

Timebanks globally have different characteristics. In south London, they bring together individuals who live very near each other but otherwise are worlds apart. Paule notes that “it quite surprises people to start with, probably more so for the posher people – ‘oh these are different people that I don’t usually interact with!  And they are quite nice actually." One older woman member described the effects of a friendship that had grown out of her involvement:

“My friend who subsequently has died, she actually lived down the bottom of my road and I would never have listened and talked to her. She was afro-Caribbean, from Jamaica…I would never had actually been able to [sighing] comprehend, understand certain aspects of other people lives if it wasn’t for her.”

But these new relationships and insights don’t happen overnight. They evolve very gradually as people engage in mutual support. “When you first get involved it may be quite passive” according to Robert, a member of both timebanks, “just coming along (to an event), drinking a cup of tea. But the aim is to give people the opportunity to grow, to get more involved.”

This framework acknowledges that some people have had knock-backs in their lives and may need support in taking the lead on something—perhaps from something “really small like (starting) a knitting group…helping them think through the steps…Where do you want to have the group? What day of the week? What time? We’ve got spare kettles, tea, biscuits.”

The careful, slow work that happens within timebanks may seem insignificant to the untrained eye, focusing as it does on tiny interactions and exchanges and incremental shifts in people’s understanding of themselves and each other. These shifts are difficult to capture and count, but they can have profound resonance because they break down the sense of difference that those involved often have about each-other. 

“It felt very different, completely different from anything that had been going on before. You started to feel as if you have got some value to give. And lo and behold somebody is giving you something that you never expected.” (Marilyn, Paxton Green member)

3.     Having an equal conversation is a deliberate, political act.

Even a single conversation in which people feel like they are interacting as equals can help to shift the status quo in hierarchies, but it’s a challenge, and one that often overwhelmed us at Skills Network. ‘Transformative organising’ approaches (which came out of community organising in the US) have taught us a lot about how to do it better. It starts by acknowledging the entrenched hierarchies that play out in all our interactions, but which are often more obvious to those with less power who are used to subtly deferring to, agreeing with or apologising to those who have more.

These approaches use specific techniques to slowly equalise these hierarchies, like ‘Intentional Peer Support,’ which was developed in the 1990s as a challenge to top-down mental health services but has since become a wider method in community organising. Core to this method is the disruption of the tendency to replicate unequal ‘helping’ dynamics by building awareness of the power roles we all fall into, and by finding ways to be more aware of our own tendencies and assumptions.

Their listening and questioning techniques help people engage with each other with real curiosity and openness, and form connections across divides, shifting from notions of ‘helping’ towards ones of ‘learning together.’ Key to transformative approaches is the conviction that they form a continual and relentless process, and one that will keep being slightly undone by the rest of the world—meaning the job is never ‘done.’

Many people are looking for new ways to heal divides and that’s heartening. But enacting these sentiments in a long-lasting way is complex and challenging, especially when some people face very real resource shortages and others may have internalised very different notions of their power. If we are to come together across the entrenched divisions and disillusionment that many people are feeling, our starting point is clear: engage as equals.

That means a continuous, ever-evolving process in which we must all be self-aware and open to being challenged again and again. It involves challenging the structures and values that set up inequalities between us through our daily interactions and with everyone we meet. Our plea is for people who have been relatively inoculated from the effects of divisive rhetoric and policy to really try and ‘see’ the inspirational alternatives that are already being enacted around them—and bring their knowledge and skills to this existing, slow, un-photogenic, but potentially transformative experience.  

Zhanara Akhmet at Kyiv regional court, January 2018. Source: Facebook. In March 2017, Zhanara Akhmet packed two rucksacks: one for herself and one for her 10-year-old son. Soon afterward, Zhanara and her son left their home in Almaty, Kazakhstan. If she didn’t, her lawyers told her, the journalist would soon be arrested for her reporting. As they were walking out, she looked into her son’s eyes, squeezed his hand and tried to smile reassuringly. Akhmet hugged him and promised they’d find a safe place.

They spent the next 65 hours on the run.

“We first went to the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It took us almost one full day to cross it. We were hiding nearby, looking for a place to cross. The guards with guns, flashlights and dogs, were in the vicinity and could get us any time. My son became so scared, he had a panic attack. I tried to calm him down… We found a smuggler who helped us cross the border by river. He carried my son, and I carried our bags. My legs were freezing as we waded through the icy water. I could barely move my feet, but I didn’t stop… Once in Kyrgyzstan, we caught a plane to Istanbul, and then on to Kyiv. We spent a day at acquaintances’ house, and then rented an apartment.”

Since 2013, when she started covering the activities of Kazakh human rights defender Yermek Narymbayev, Akhmet had been frequently harassed by the government for her work. But in 2017, the Kazakh authorities launched three administrative and two criminal cases against her, including charges of political extremism, for her investigative reporting and news coverage, as well as jaywalking, for good measure.

Akhmet’s case is one of many in Eurasia. According to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2018 report, most Eurasian countries are at the very bottom of the list in terms of fundamental freedom indicators. With the rise of authoritarianism, the guardians of those fundamental freedoms – human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and other civil society actors – are increasingly becoming targets of state harassment. Unable to reinforce the rule of law and protection mechanisms at home, in some of the gravest cases civil society members have no other way but to flee in search of safety.

Unfortunately, the number of safe havens is rapidly dropping.

Regional safe havens

Ironically, the Iron Curtain may have fallen long ago for everyone except civil society actors – people who advocate for the values espoused by western states. No matter how grave the threats, without a Schengen visa, activists often have few options left. In Eurasia, possible destinations include Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Georgia – states that are somewhat more democratic and respectful of the rule of law, according to Human Rights Watch’s World Report. But recent developments show that these states are also failing to provide safety and protection to fleeing civil society actors.

Richard Kauzlarich, a former US ambassador to Azerbaijan and Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, says that authoritarian governments “don’t really feel constrained by national boundaries so that people who are unable to function in their home country are no longer safe in neighbouring countries.”

According to Kauzlarich, human rights and fundamental freedoms across the region are at stake when countries like Georgia or Ukraine, for which there was “some hope in the west that the political process was moving in the right direction”, renege on their human rights commitments.

Georgia: a drowning island

On a gloomy morning in late May 2017, Leyla Mustafayeva woke up in her Tbilisi apartment with an uneasy feeling that something was wrong. Mustafayeva, who’d been living in the city for more than two years, is a journalist and wife of Azerbaijani investigative journalist Afgan Mukhtarli.

“I realised Afgan wasn’t home. When I saw that his side of the bed was untouched, I became frantic. I called our friends with whom my husband went to dinner the night before, and they told me they’d parted company in the early evening.”

Mustafayeva rushed to the local police station a few blocks away. Walking briskly up – and downhill through the windy streets, she tried to comfort herself thinking they’d lived in a part of town very close to the city centre. The area was littered with video surveillance cameras trained in every direction, the majority operated by the Georgian police. On the way to the station, Mustafayeva passed a large number of restaurants, banks and small shops in this lively part of Tbilisi that was just waking up, taking mental note of their own surveillance cameras.

“I realised my husband was taken, and when I went to the police asking them for help, they played along, feigning concern and ignorance, and promised to help.”

Afgan Mukhtarli in Tbilisi. Image via Kavkazskiye Novosti / YouTube. Some rights reserved.“When the inquiries were made later with the police as to the footage recorded by the surveillance cameras belonging to them,” Mustafayeva adds, with notes of resignation and frustration in her voice, “the response was that there was no footage at the time of the kidnapping because the cameras were being upgraded. In addition, the border post [between Georgia and Azerbaijan through which Mukhtarli is believed to have been forcibly taken out of the country] still hadn’t supplied us with their footage. It shows that this kidnapping operation was organised at the level of the [Georgian] government. The police went to the shops that had their own surveillance cameras and erased the footage from them too.”

In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance of Mukhtarli, who exposed high-ranking corruption and foreign assets belonging to the Azerbaijani regime, the Georgian government’s official response closely mirrored their counterparts across the Azerbaijani border: “They [the Georgian government] even wanted to launch a criminal investigation similar to the one already launched in Azerbaijan regarding the illegal border crossing by Afgan, but when the issue drew public attention, I think it made them change their minds.”

“We had chosen Georgia as a place to stay permanently. Since 2016, the situation started to change”

Mustafayeva looks pained as she recalls the immediate aftermath of her husband’s disappearance from the downtown of the capital of a state where they thought they had finally found safety. From the modest surroundings of her kitchen in Germany where she had to urgently flee and subsequently seek asylum, she remembers feeling scared: “I was followed. After Afgan’s kidnapping, we forwarded the pictures of the people following me in the streets to the prosecutor’s office. These pictures were taken by my friends. But we received no response as to these people’s identities or motives.”

Unlike law enforcement, Georgia’s civil society reacted strongly to the prosecution of Afgan Mukhtarli. Natia Tavberidze, coordinator at Human Rights House Tbilisi, says that the incident was on top of the agenda for the civil society.

“The government saw how civil society reacted,” Tavberidze adds, noting that before the apparent kidnapping, the issue of Azerbaijani activists living in Georgia wasn’t a prominent one. But while Georgian civil society was strongly supportive, Azerbaijani dissidents started reporting that they didn’t feel safe in Georgia anymore. To many, this posed a question whether Georgia was no longer a safe hub for the fleeing activists.

Svitlana Valko, manager of Tbilisi City Shelter, a non-profit that hosts activists and journalists from Eurasia and MENA regions, says there are nuances. “If we look at hubs as a temporary place to make a stop and restore your resources in order to return to one’s home country and continue work, they’re there. If we talk about moving for good, it’s another issue altogether. Bishkek, Kyiv and Tbilisi are still hubs,” Valko says, adding, “…if you follow certain security measures and follow certain rules, everything will be fine if you are there temporarily.”

But for Mustafayeva, hunched over her notebook in a kitchen in Germany where she and her daughter are just starting to feel at home, the situation in Georgia looks less nuanced. “We had chosen Georgia as a place to stay permanently. Since 2016, the situation started to change. We started feeling that the government wasn’t too amenable to us staying there, but they couldn’t also directly tell us to leave because they didn’t have any legal grounds for that. In 2016, the first ‘soft rejection’ came with regards to the permanent residency. I’d officially applied for [it], and in spite of the fact that I had previously been granted such a permit twice, the third time, I was denied.”

Leyla Mustafayeva and Afgan Mukhtarli, 2016. Source: Author's personal archive.Asked to explain the reasons for this change, Mustafayeva pauses. Her tone exudes quiet confidence; her deliberate and contemplative speech mixed with detached melancholy betrays no doubt: “When the Georgian Dream party came to power, the situation changed drastically.” She said that the fact that pro-Russian politicians have replaced the pro-European wing in the Georgian state “will make these safe islands [in Georgia] drown.”

But Georgia is not the only safe haven where things started changing.

Ukraine: abusive security services, supportive civil society

On 21 October 2017, Zhanara Akhmet was reading in her apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine when the lights suddenly went off.

“I thought, this is weird. I opened the door to look into the hallway, and suddenly somebody grabbed my arm above the elbow and dragged me out. There were a few men in plain clothes, they forced me to follow them to the courtyard downstairs where there were two cars. These men started twisting my arms, pushing me into one of the cars and telling me there is an Interpol Red Notice on me. I started screaming for help, and at that time, my son who was playing in the courtyard, heard my voice and ran to me. I remember seeing horror in his eyes,” she says gasping, her voice trembling.

The men didn’t provide any credentials, so Akhmet screamed at the top of her lungs until the apartment complex’s security arrived, and then she asked to call the police. When the police came, Akhmet was taken to a detention centre.

“These men started twisting my arms, pushing me into one of the cars and telling me there is an Interpol Red Notice on me. I started screaming for help”

Ukraine is perceived as a “more or less democratic country in the post-Soviet space, but, unfortunately, there were recently a number of cases where bilateral agreements and Interpol Red Notices were used by authoritarian governments to harass activists that found refuge here,” explains Maria Tomak from the Media Initiative for Human Rights in Kyiv. Red Notice is an alert system that Interpol member countries’ law-enforcement agencies use to put criminals on “wanted” lists. Authoritarian regimes use this system to hunt critics.

Ukraine is a member of the Minsk Convention (for Eurasia region states) and the European Convention (for European states), explains Boris Zakharov, director of the Lawyers Center of the Ukraine Helsinki Union for Human Rights, adding that Ukrainian authorities claim that they only abide by the European Convention.

According to this convention, a person can be detained for 18 days until the country that submitted documents with Interpol for a Red Notice provides further clarifications and evidence. Also, according to Ukrainian legislation, temporary arrest is compulsory and cannot be substituted with a fine or a release on bail. After temporary arrest comes extradition arrest, which usually lasts for two months, but can be replaced by release on bail.

However, Zakharov says, when processes are happening “within the law [as is the case with Red Notices],” then “we can fight, and we haven’t lost a single case, even during president Viktor Yanukovych’s time.” The biggest problem, he says, is “the formal and informal collaboration between post-Soviet security services. We have lots of such cases. And we see that Ukraine's security services are for some reason interested in this”.

Zakharov cites the case of Fikret Huseynli, an Azerbaijani dissident who became a Dutch citizen, as an example of cooperation between the security services of Eurasian states. “He came to Kyiv on 7 October 2017, to open the office of the opposition Turan TV. On 10 October, the Azerbaijani authorities filed a Red Notice against him, and he was detained on 13 October.” After being trapped for months in Ukraine, Huseynli was viciously attacked at his Kyiv apartment on 5 March in a kidnapping attempt by men who presented themselves as Ukrainian police. 

Fikret Huseynli. Source: Facebook.Speaking of Zhanara Akhmet’s case, Zakharov says when Kazakh authorities filed a Red Notice against her, “they knew her exact Ukrainian address and other details of her whereabouts. Such factors either mean that Ukrainian security services are so arrogant they don’t see their colleagues from neighbouring countries operating on their soil, or, which is more likely, that they cooperate.”

“While Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies sometimes don’t know how to deal with such cases, we see good support from Ukrainian civil society and media”

Maria Tomak, who has also encountered these kind of cases in her work, adds that “while Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies sometimes don’t know how to deal with such cases, we see good support from Ukrainian civil society and media.” Akhmet echoes Tomak’s praise for Ukraine’s supportive civil society , but says her case was a vivid example of the Kazakh government’s involvement and pressure. “I was released, but I rarely go out these days. I don’t walk outside in the evenings. I don’t feel safe,” she adds.

Back in Germany, Mustafayeva is wondering whether there’s any place where dissidents feel safe.

“The deaths of Daphnie [Caruana Galizia] and Jan Kuciak several days ago,” she says, referring to the investigative journalists from Malta and Slovakia, “showed that even in Europe itself it’s meaningless to look for safe hubs. If a criminal group or a corrupt government get it in their heads that a journalist must be killed, they can carry it out regardless of the location.”

One of the most vivid examples of an authoritarian regime targeting activists inside the EU is Turkey.

The long arm of Erdoğan

The Turkish government, notorious for its determination to target dissidents globally and particularly in the EU, went to a new extreme in late February. Turkey’s authorities issued an Interpol Red Notice that resulted in Czech authorities arresting Salih Muslim, former head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party in Syria and a Syrian citizen.

A Czech court released Muslim several days later, but Rosa Burç, editor at Kurdish media outlet theregion.org and a political scientist at the University of Bonn, calls Muslim’s arrest outrageous. “He is a Syrian citizen, he has been in Europe for two and a half years, he is participating in various international conferences, he is a very public and civil person, while they accused him of being a terrorist. He was released, yet it was possible for the Turkish government to at least detain and yank him into the courtroom.”

PYD leader Salih Muslim marches during a rally in support of Kobane in November 2014 in Paris. (c) Apaydin Alain/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.According to Burç, Turkey now not only prosecutes its own citizens, but even those of other countries. She adds that it was clear that nothing would come of this as the charges were fabricated. “Muslim was one of the people who mediated between the YPG and Turkey, he was in Ankara, he was welcomed, but now the narrative changed, and now anyone in his situation is being accused,” she adds.

Jens Uwe Thomas from Reporters without Borders says the German government is generally very careful when it comes to Interpol’s requests for arrests. He says due to the high presence of Turkish dissidents in Germany and their active advocacy directed at the German authorities, the government has been continuously supportive. Thomas cites two recent cases in which the German government was actively involved – one of Turkish-German writer Doğan Akhanlı, who was released after being detained in Spain, and that of Deniz Yücel, the recently released Turkish German Die Welt journalist.

“Now our project is to get every Turkish journalist a German passport”

But Can Dündar, one of Turkey’s most prominent dissident journalists and editor of the Ozguruz media outlet, recalls that these two individuals were German citizens. He wonders about the “many other voiceless imprisoned activists or prosecuted dissidents”, joking: “now our project is to get every Turkish journalist a German passport.”

But while Germany is one of those countries taking a strong stand on Turkey’s crackdown, many other countries continuously abuse the system in order to further prosecute activists. Valko, who calls Interpol a “large, fat, clumsy machine”, says the organisation needs to review some of its practices.

Interpol: a large, fat, clumsy machine?

Bruno Min, Legal and Policy officer at Fair Trials, a London-based NGO that closely works with the Interpol, says that there have been some positive reforms at the organisation and cites Fair Trials’ 2017 report.

“In 2016, Interpol introduced timeframes. Now, requests for access to information sent to them have to be considered within four months, and requests for removals of the names from the Red Notices lists within nine months,” he says, adding that before one could wait for years prior to hearing back from the organisation. Another change is related to the organisation’s refugee policy. Now, if a person is granted a refugee status in the country to where they fled, the Red Notice against them that originated in the country they had fled is deleted.

If a Red Notice is issued concurrently with the person’s asylum application, “there’s no procedure for that case, but an argument can be made,” Min says, adding that the Interpol also has political neutrality and respect for human rights provisions under which it operates.

He also says that the Interpol is often misinterpreted, and what stands behind the Red Notices is really just the issuing country. According to Min, countries don’t always act on every Red Notice they receive, and often it “has no grounds, the situation gets resolved quickly, like in the case of Salih Muslim.”

Among solutions to the Red Notice dilemma, Min suggests closer interactions with Interpol, pointing to the increasing number of extradition lawyers who are concerned with the existing procedures.

Zhanara Akhmet, whom Fair Trials helped remove her name from the Interpol list, however, says that the solution has to be more complex than simply addressing the Red Notice system, and include multiple components that would help strengthen regional safe hubs.

Publicity, reforms and accountability

Civil society actors, victims and western diplomats involved in this process echo Akhmet’s concern. Interpol is only one of the many tools dictators use to reach activists: kidnappings, surveillance, loopholes in other countries’ legislation and close cooperation between law enforcement agencies have been used in multiple cases as well.

Valko, with Tbilisi Shelter, says that, in order to make the hubs stable, the support of the host nation’s government is essential. “We work with the office of the [Georgian] ombudsman and are trying to cooperate with the municipal government. If this works out, we will be more protected in terms of the status and reputation.”

In cases of arrests and other attacks, Rosa Burç says, public support from local communities (whether in Prague, Berlin or Kyiv) could change things for the better.

“You never know why someone is crossing the border and why he or she is coming into the country this way”

Oleksiy Skobrach, a Ukrainian lawyer who often works with persecuted dissidents, recommends reforms to Ukraine’s legislation on refugees and asylum, revisiting the arrest and detention procedures as well as increasing the accountability of the law-enforcement agencies involved. Boris Zakharov, on the other hand, says reforms of the national security agencies are essential: “They should be dealing with matters of national security, and not like now, with every sphere.”

Tavberidze wants to see a Georgia where there are no illegal migrants: “In Georgia, it’s a criminal act if someone crosses the border illegally, but I don’t think it should be criminalised. You never know why someone is crossing the border and why he or she is coming into the country this way.”

Ali Feruz, the Uzbek journalist who spent months in Russian prison in fear of extradition to Uzbekistan, and was finally able to leave for Germany in February 2018, says he’s been waiting for his Schengen visa forever, and therefore simpler visa procedures and local safe hubs in Eurasia are important.

Back in her apartment in Germany, Leyla Mustafayeva dreams about what improvements she would want to see if she were granted a wish with an unexpected laughter: “Of course, first, we would have changed the situation in our own country.” Suddenly, the well-suppressed notes of worry return: “If there’s no normal government, no democratic government at home, you can go wherever you want, reach whatever safe hub you want, those tyrants will reach you there with their long arms.”

Tortured Rohingyas escaping from Myanmar in Palongkhali, Ukhiya,Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, February 2018. Flickr/ maruf1122345. Some rights reserved.This is one of the closing articles in the series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.

At the same time as a democratic system is being revived in Myanmar after half-a-century of military dictatorship, strong challenges have re-emerged. A racist, authoritarian populism is being directed against Muslim minorities, notably the Rohingya, in order to prop up a regime that has no vision.

This is threatening not only the administration and the economy, but also more importantly, social and ethnic cohesion. While admitting that these challenges would tax any government and state, the weaknesses and inadequacies at the core have been revealed.

From military ‘socialism’ to populist ‘democracy’

Ideologically, a half-hearted attempt at socialism going by the name of “The Burmese Way to Socialism” under a military-controlled one-party state, came unstuck when this was unseated by a bloody public uprising in 1988. Re-instated military junta rule lasted till 2010.

The leading pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), contested the by-elections of April 2012, won most of the seats, and entered parliament. This victory was repeated and enlarged in November 2015, with the result that a democratically-elected civilian government has been installed.

After five decades of junta or one-party rule, there is now a multi-party system. However, two-thirds of the 93 parties registered are ethnic-based parties, and almost exclusively single-ethnic. Twenty three political parties won seats in the bicameral parliament, but the picture is dominated by just two parties – the military-linked Union Solidarity and Development Party and the NLD.

With ideological decline, rudimentary election campaign platforms and minimal policy contestation, the stage was set for a recourse to populism. Besides the Myanmar public’s widespread rejection of the military government, populism played a large part in the NLD’s electoral successes. To fan this populism, or to deploy parallel ‘brands’ of it, use was made of what has been called ‘nationalism’. To fan this populism, or to deploy parallel ‘brands’ of it, use was made of what has been called ‘nationalism’.

Nationalism may be too polite a term, though, since this nationalist-populist impetus came from inciting latent racist phobias and demonizing the ‘Other’. The brunt of this wave of discrimination and violence fell upon a vulnerable ‘foreign’ community – the Muslims, and particularly the Muslim Rohingya. 2017 saw the most extreme and brutal manifestation of this: a horrific campaign that the UN has described as amounting to genocide.

At independence, Myanmar started off a little unsure of itself ideologically, while threatened by a far-left armed rebellion. With the collapse of the left in 1989, the swerve in the opposite direction began. Since then, the political left has virtually disappeared. Now the poor, the old, minorities and the marginalized have been abandoned politically.

In the 2015 elections the electorate came out with an emphatic statement to bring down the curtain on the military dictatorship, propelling the NLD to power. Despite reservations (shared by myself for instance), there was some hope that things could be worked out. The two years that followed was an ebullient time for Myanmar internationally. The rosiness of the ambience managed to hide many of the missteps that were being made. Yet, what were once seen as Aung San Su Kyi’s strengths soon became weaknesses, and at the same time once-hidden weaknesses emerged with a vengeance.

Both the Myanmar military and the NLD government are scrambling to garner as much public support as they can. But, at the same time, there is a move to the right, facilitated by an entrenched military, big business with tentacles everywhere, ethnic assertiveness, and the resurgence of militant religion. In the absence of any political ideology, Myanmar’s rulers are falling back upon primitivism, populism and authoritarianism.

Democracy in Myanmar did not begin in 2010. Limited democracy had been enjoyed since the late 1930s; quite early for Asia. The majority of the people are therefore no strangers to a democratic system – at least of the electoral variety. Despite the Myanmar public’s longing for the resumption of a democratic system, a majoritarian democracy will not be a cure-all for what afflicts them. Instead, a genuinely plural system that presages a plural nation has to be the goal. Contrary to most popular assumptions, a nation shall not ensue with the re-advent of democracy. A genuinely plural system that presages a plural nation has to be the goal. Contrary to most popular assumptions, a nation shall not ensue with the re-advent of democracy.

Confronting discrimination and violence against minorities

Domestically, both the ruling NLD government and the military have tasted the flavour of increased public support. What really counts for them is not the racist overtones but the votes that it can bring in the next elections. Myanmar’s ethnic diversity sits uneasily with a Bamar Buddhist majority that is increasingly chauvinistic and intolerant. With an antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system, the politicians and generals know very well that if you have the ethnic and religious majority sewn up, you don’t have to bother much about the minorities.

But with Myanmar’s history of a 70-year civil armed conflict, electoral victories do not ensure the return of peace. Relying upon majoritarian politics and mono-ethnic nationalism can actively deter a peace settlement with the ethnic nationalities, and by extension, the hoped-for federal system.

The current hard-edged racism is now directed against the helpless Rohingya and against Muslims in general. At a recent workshop I participated in, non-Buddhists (mostly young) articulated the discrimination, exclusion, differentiation and denial that they are experiencing.

This is in education, employment, residence, travel, and even in the size of bribes demanded. But it is delusional to expect that this unfettered racism will stop there. It must be confronted. Shockingly, though, most ‘indigenous’ ethnic organizations are silent on the ongoing crisis.

Neither road nor chart

This is an era of electoral politics, with an electorate emerging from decades of dictatorship. Authoritarian populism holds sway. Beyond garnering votes, parties and politicians have little regard for public opinion. There seems to be little thought as to the direction in which the country is going, or needs to go. Civil society is not strong or big enough; it is divided and mostly involved in niche issues. The crony private sector is flourishing and going from strength to strength, keeping to its rentier, extractivist and exclusivist ways.

On top of it all, all these stakeholders are isolated and inward-looking. One donor has asked how a democracy can be built if people do not talk to each other. Myanmar seems to be losing its way. After expending much time and suffering, a semi-democracy has been gained. But beyond this, there is neither road nor chart. One donor has asked how a democracy can be built if people do not talk to each other.

Myanmar is being subjected to forces and influences quite unlike the past, and change, whether willing or unwilling, is going to be the order of the day. With an incompetent state and leaders without vision, pursuing their paltry little ends, Myanmar has little chance of standing up to the winds of change. The out-dated nationalism, which is found so useful now, is generating tension, division and violence. For the future, only a diverse and resilient national identity can hold its ground.