and this will all end…

“In dreams we remember what was, we think about what is, we imagine what might be, what can be, what will be” (Eva-Jane Gaffney speaks Sarah Coffey’s words in “The Pheonix”). These words are taken from a really beautiful Irish Covid-19-inspired video about love, loss, hope and strength (if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you do so by clicking here).

The video manages to captures many of the emotions we’re all feeling at the present time… the sense of gratitude; the kindness shown by others; the awful suffering; the amazing heroes; the precious lives lost; and the enormous strength shown…

We probably all have our ‘wish lists’ of the things we will treasure when all this ends. Those MANY things that perhaps some of us have taken for granted… those simple pleasures… those things that help to make us who we are.

We will never ever forget it and we will never ever let go again.

And this will all end…

But before we get carried away by it all, it’s VITALLY important that we also never allow the people in power to forget the things that they got SO wrong and at such cost:

• The Prime Minister is very good at putting a ‘positive gloss on things’, but conveniently fails to acknowledge that the death toll in the UK is amongst the highest in the world; that NHS staff and other healthcare workers have not had the protective clothing and equipment they needed and would have expected; that the government could have increased testing, tracking and tracing capacity weeks earlier than the current timetable; and that care homes have been woefully under-protected.
• The Prime Minister skipping five crucial meetings on the virus (as reported by The Sunday Times on 19 April, in its massively-critical assessment); when he did attend in early March, it was almost certainly too late (the virus was already upon us) - failings in February probably cost thousands of lives; calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears (check out this week's 'Panorama' programme if you think I'm being unfair).
• The Home Secretary making disparaging remarks about low-skilled workers (when it transpires that the majority of people employed by the sector are low-paid care workers - who are responsible for providing daily help to older and disabled adults in care homes and the community).

Writer Philip Pullman doesn’t hold back in his criticisms of the existing system (in an essay in ‘Perspectives’ for Penguin Books): “It’s all got to change. If we come out of this crisis with all the rickety, fly-blown, worm-eaten old structures still intact, the same vain and indolent public schoolboys in charge, the same hedge fund managers stuffing their overloaded pockets with greasy fingers, our descendants will not forgive us. Nor should they. We must burn out the old corruption and establish a better way of living together… And let’s reform the voting system. At the very least, let’s do that without delay. It’s no wonder that people feel disconnected from politics when most of us live in safe seats, and might as well not vote at all. We must be able to see that our opinions are accurately reflected in the composition of our government, not completely disregarded as they are now. So it might lead to coalitions: excellent. Discussion, compromise, working together are exactly how to run a decent country”.

And when this will all end, you’ll ask me dance.

And I will say, yes, let’s dance.

I desperately hope that we come out of it all determined to make the world a better place.

I desperately hope that we remember the people and the jobs that make our day-to-day lives worth living.

I desperately hope that we truly decide to care for our planet.

I desperately hope that we can move away from the old world of greed and power, of the haves and the have-nots. My fear is that some will have very short memories and revert back (if ever they budged) to lives governed by wealth and influence.

I desperately hope that such individuals and corporations are overwhelmed by the voices of those who know there’s a better way.

We’ve learnt so much from this awful coronavirus experience. Let’s use what we’ve learnt to make the world a better place.

And this WILL all end…

We will cry… oh we will cry!

Photo: Banksey’s ‘Girl With Pierced Eardrum’ gets a Covid-19 facemask.

Thomas Friedman talking at the Bristol Festival of Ideas…

Last night, Moira and I went to hear Thomas L Friedman (why do people insist on using their middle name initial?) talk about his current book ‘Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations’ as part of the excellent Bristol Festival of Ideas. The pre-talk blurb described it thus: “In today’s changing world of Brexit and Donald Trump’s promises of walls and tariffs, Friedman argues that it is only openness to ideas and trade that will allow us all to thrive. He addresses the need for politically moral leadership…”.
Born in 1953, Friedman is an American journalist, internationally-renowned author and three time Pulitzer Prize winner. He currently writes a weekly column for The New York Times.
I went along with an open mind… ‘this could be inspiring or really, really depressing’!
Well, it proved to be an absolutely fascinating, stimulating evening. He spoke for 45 minutes, without notes. Evidently, he’d been giving this talk around the world since last May… but suitably updated in the light of Mr Trump (and Brexit)! He’s a confident, articulate and engaging speaker.
I can’t begin to summarise Friedman’s wide-ranging talk… so I’ll just highlight a few things that struck me.
He talked about the significance of the year 2007: Steve Job launching the iPhone; facebook; Kindle; The Cloud; YouTube; the beginnings of Airbnb… followed, somewhat ironically, by the worldwide economic recession of 2008. Although we didn’t perhaps notice at the time, digital globilisation and the exponential growth in microchips were transforming our lives.
The pace of change and the pace of new ideas is almost overwhelming… or, as Friedman put it: “Google lives in the future and sends us letters home”.
He talked about the way many of the large Corporations were moving – analysing the capabilities of their employees and being prepared to train them, free of charge, in areas where they needed specific help or improvement… BUT for them to undertake the training in their own time… and if they didn’t fancy that, then they’d be given a redundancy package and removed from the organisation. Corporations see life-long learning as CRUCIAL.

Friedman talked about politics (and specifically US and UK politics)… and how our current political parties are designed to think and work “with an old situation”… in his view, they needed to be “blown up (not literally, hopefully) and re-started… "the age of acceleration is going to be just too fast for them”.

He talked very briefly about taxation… feeling that the current systems should be abandoned in favour of universal carbon taxes and sugar taxes.
He talked about us living in a world where “one of us can kill all of us” (he didn’t specifically mention the Trident ‘deterrent’ but, clearly, implied that such policies were hugely outdated and ineffective).
He talked about ethics; about a cyber world where no one's ‘in charge’; and, perhaps somewhat strangely in the context of the evening(?), about the need for us all to live by the old ‘golden rule’ (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”); about the need for ‘strong families’ and ‘strong communities’(?)… and about ‘applied hope’. There were lots of things I wanted him to explain more fully, but time didn’t allow… yes, I know, I should have bought his book!
It was all inspiring, fascinating stuff… but even now, writing this the morning after, I’m not sure if his words made me feel depressed or encouraged. They’ve certainly underlined my own naivety in some areas… or, as Friedman put it: “naivety is the new realism”!

living in a parallel universe?…

I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as depressed, angry and hopeless about UK politics as I’ve found myself feeling over recent months (this last week has felt particularly disheartening).
Well, to be honest, this probably goes back to the start of 2015, at least… just before the last General Election (not that I was exactly a bundle of joy following the outcome of the 2010 election!).
I remember precisely how I felt when the exit poll results were announced on television at the end of 7 May… utterly shattered. I watched in downright disbelief. How could the electorate be so stupid?*  
I also remember thinking at that time just how strange it was that I appeared to inhabit a virtual world (via facebook!) in which most of my friends shared my thoughts and aspirations for the world, poverty, war, climate change, taxation, health, education, justice… (the list is quite long!).
Unfortunately, clearly, there was a parallel virtual world inhabited by people with largely opposite political viewpoints(!)… and these were obviously in the slight majority (hence the election result).
Sadly, as far as the real world was concerned, things haven’t been helped in the UK Parliament by a completely ineffective Opposition – which continues to fail to challenge the government over a wide variety of crucial issues.

Fast forward to 23 June 2016 - EU Referendum Day – and things got massively worse! The Referendum vote (which, incidentally, is ADVISORY, not mandatory… and which surely should therefore mean that parliament needs to vote on whether or not the UK stays in the EU?) has actually resulted in the government deciding to ‘pick+choose’ which of the MANY messages in the Brexit vote it wants to listen to (mainly immigration, sovereignty… it seems) and which it decides to ignore (once again, the list is long). For goodness sake, it wasn’t like a General Election – with an opportunity to reverse the decision in 5 years’ time – no, it’s a decision that affects our children, their children and their grandchildren. It didn’t matter that the resulting 52%:48% majority was so narrow. It didn’t matter that the campaign produced lies from BOTH sides of the argument (but far more from the Brexit people in my view).

Once again, I seemed to be living in facebook virtual world of people who largely shared my beliefs and aspirations, but lost out to the alternative facebook equivalent universe.
I remember feeling absolutely devastated by the vote for days and days (and, frankly, still haven’t recovered… as we continue to hear how our government interprets the voters’ wishes!).

It’s been interesting/depressing/alarming/reassuring talking to various people about the situation. One or two have suggested we all move to Scotland (only half-jokingly?) – assuming that the SNP will launch another Independence Referendum in the light of the EU decision… and that voters will opt to follow the ‘Remain’ option. Others complain about the country being London-centric – with huge concentration on the relatively small Westminster parliamentary ‘village’. Other people point to the fact that many of our population (especially in the north of England) feel ignored by politicians and that the EU Referendum represented a valid way of making an effective ‘protest’… and then there’s been the ‘Occupy’ movement too.

All this has set me thinking…
Given how much the world has changed over the past 25 years or so (since the internet, for example), would it really be possible – perhaps, before 2050 – for us to be living lives in which we could opt in or out of various ‘society options’? In other words, allow us (ok, I’m not going to be around by then!) to live our lives in a world of like-minded people – a bit like the facebook virtual world I seem to be inhabiting today, but where our life-style preferences can actually become reality?
Fantasy? Really? Who knows?
If someone had told you 10 years ago that we were going to be having driver-less cars in the near future, would you have believed them? If someone had told my father (he died 24 years ago) that we’d ALL have computers in our homes or that people would be able to contact each other instantly on tiny phones that each of us would carry around with us in our pockets, he would have laughed at our naivety…
Maybe reading Paul Mason’s book “Postcapitalism” has simply made me question how we do things… and how we’ll do things in the future, for example:  
“The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy, between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next”.
Yes, I could list a whole multitude of issues that, on the face of it, couldn’t be resolved in the sort of world I’m trying to imagine… and, no doubt, someone will also point me to extensive research currently being undertaking on a virtual reality world… or maybe it’ll just be a case of all the banks, governments, corporations or the establishment simply won’t allow it?!
Just remember this blog post in the year 2050(!)… you’ll be scratching your heads trying to remember the name of that old bloke who vaguely talked about the alternative, virtual world that had actually become a reality!
Yeh, right!

*: Actually, I’ve had huge reservations about so-called ‘democracy’ for several years: I certainly wouldn’t trust the UK electorate to vote on hanging, for example (and I obviously wouldn’t have allowed them to decide about the EU!)... I’m afraid I think we have a massively-biased press and media which are all too ready to inflict their views on what I regard as a sadly gullible population!

Photo: Hayward Gallery, London (Carsten Holler: 'Decision' exhibition 2015).

a guide to our future?...

Essentially, this is an extended review of Paul Mason’s book “Postcapitalism”. Reading it was a bit like reading a PhD thesis (actually, I’ve never read one… but this is how I imagine the experience might feel!). He paints a picture of capitalism today (as well as charting its chequered history over the past 200 years or so) and reckons that its long-term prospects are extremely bleak.
He contends that the series impacts of climate change, demographic ageing and population growth kick in around the year 2050… and that “if we can’t create a sustainable global order and restore economic dynamism, the decades after 2050 will be chaos”.

Mason, born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1960, is an articulate, intelligent and fascinating bloke. He graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in music and politics in 1981 and went on to work as a music teacher and lecturer in music at Loughborough University. He became a freelance journalist in 1991 and went on to join BBC2’s Newsnight as Business Editor in 2001. In 2013, he became Channel 4 News’s culture and digital editor and later became the programme’s Economics Editor. He left Channel 4 in February 2016 in order to be able to engage more fully in debates on the political left without the constraints of impartiality placed on UK broadcasters. He’s a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and describes himself as “radical social democrat”.

I found the book absolutely absorbing… and decided that I should jot my thoughts on it in a little more length than my usual one paragraph book review summary. In the book, Mason describes capitalism as a “complex, adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt”. He looks back on the growth of capitalism over the past 200 years or so… and refers to a whole host of key players who he sees as being influential in the development and understanding of the subject – the likes of Piketty, Kondratieff, Nachimson, Slutsky, Schumpeter, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Bukharin and Varga (no, I’d never heard of them either!).

Even though I struggled to understand some of the financial complexities, it was all fascinating stuff!

I stopped scribbling in my books a very long time ago(!), but I KEPT on coming across interesting/depressing/startling/powerful/frightening extracts and, so, my copy has become absolutely covered in pencil underlining and notes! These are just a few “tasters” to give you a (somewhat random) flavour – look, I know this makes it a pretty lengthy blog post(!)… but I think he makes several important points:

“Neoliberalism is the doctrine of uncontrolled markets: it says that the best route to prosperity is individuals pursuing their own self-interest, and the market is the only way to express that self-interest. It says the state should be small…; that financial speculation is good; that the natural state of humankind is to be a bunch of ruthless individuals, competing with each other”.

“…The long-term prospects for capitalism are bleak. According to the OECD, growth in the developed world will be ‘weak’ for the next fifty years. Inequality will rise by 40%. Even in developing countries, the current dynamism will be exhausted by 2060”.  

“The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy, between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next”.

“The elite and their supporters are lined up to defend the same core principles: high finance, low wages, secrecy, militarism, intellectual property and energy based on carbon. The bad news is that they control nearly every government in the world. The good news is that in most countries they enjoy very little consent or popularity among ordinary people”.

“…Then, through austerity programmes, they transferred the pain away from people who’d invested money stupidly, punishing instead welfare recipients, public sector workers, pensioners and, above all, future generations. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked so that those currently leaving university will retire at seventy, and education is being privatized so that graduates will face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold”.

Mason frequently refers to the 2008 financial crisis (note: according to the New York Times, only ONE top banker has ever been imprisoned in connection with the financial crisis!). The following quote refers to a Lehman executive running the ‘infamous Repo 105’ tactic in an email:

“The tactic involved hiding debts away from Lehman’s balance sheet by temporarily ‘selling’ them and then buying them back once the bank’s quarterly report had been submitted. Another Lehman exec is asked: is the tactic legal, do other banks do it, and is it disguising holes in our balance sheet? He emails back: ‘Yes, no and yes’ :)”.

“We have to try to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide. If it were not for the external shocks facing us over the next fifty years, we could afford to take things slowly: the state, in a benign transition, would act as the main facilitator of change through regulation. But the enormity of the external shocks means some of the actions we take will have to be immediate, centralized and drastic”.

“In this book, I’ve avoided ‘building in’ the climate change crisis until now… Industrial capitalism has, in the space of 200 years, made the climate 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter, and is certain to push it two degrees higher than the pre-industrial average by 2050… Either we react in time and confront it in a relatively orderly way, or we don’t – and disaster follows”.

“The lesson is: a market-led strategy on climate change is utopian thinking. What are the obstacles to a non-market-led strategy? … Between 2003-2010, climate-denial lobby groups received $558million from donors in the USA. ExxonMobil and the ultra-conservative Koch Industries were major donors until 2007, when there was a tangible shift to funds channelled through anonymous third parties, under pressure of journalistic scrutiny. The outcome? The world spends an estimated $544billion on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry”.

“There is, in short, a rational case for panic about climate change – and it is compounded when you consider the interrelatedness of climate and the other great uncontrolled variant: population… demographic ageing is set to make state finances unsustainable all across the developed world… analysts predict that by 2050, even with a pension cuts, 60% of all countries in the world will have credit ratings below investment grade: it will be suicidal for anybody who does not want to risk losing their money to lend to them”.

“We have not yet considered the impact of migration… By 2050, there will be 1.2billion more people of working age in the world than today… the population of Niger will have grown from its current 18million to 69million. Chad… will see its population treble to 33million. Afghanistan… will rise from 30 to 56million”.

I could go on… and on!

I think Mason is very good in his analysis of what’s “gone before” and in his assessment of the future alarming dangers we face. Looking into the future and pointing the way forward represents a truly massive challenge and he’s brave in his assertions. But, trying to outline these in a mere 30 pages (out of a book some 300 pages long) is perhaps a little over-ambitious. Having said that, he does at least TRY and, although I don’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of his arguments(!), he has thought things through in impressive detail.
To give you just a flavour, these are the sub-headings of his concluding chapter, entitled “Project Zero” (each of these really needs a few lines of explanation… but you’ve probably already lost the will to live!): Five Principles of Transition; Top-Level Goals; Model First, Act Later; The Wiki-State; Expand Collaborative Work; Suppress or Socialize Monopolies; Let Market Forces Disappear; Socialize the Finance System; Pay Everyone a Basic Income; The Network Unleashed; Is This For Real?; and Liberate the One Per Cent.

Whatever your thoughts about Mason’s left-leaning political stance, this is a powerful, thought-provoking book. I’m sure a right-wing political thinker could provide an altogether different view, but I think Gillian Tett (from the Financial Times) sums things up perfectly:

“Even if you love the current capitalist system, it would be a mistake to ignore this book… Politicians of all stripes should take note. And so should the people who vote for them”.
A brilliant, brave book in my view.

occupied territories...

This is the name of a book* written by Garth Hewitt (the founder of the Amos Trust: “a small, creative Christian human rights agency that works with vibrant grassroots partners around the world”). I briefly acted as one of its volunteers at Greenbelt perhaps 10 years ago and again met Garth and his wife Gill on Iona in 2012 when they attended a conference to discuss the division of the West Bank, the encroachment of Israeli settlements and the impact on the lives of Palestinians.
It's a powerful, profound, thought-provoking book and one that I think deserves to be read by anyone who cares about peace, dignity and justice in this brutal, greedy world we live in.
Again and again, I found myself underlining passages from the book (frequently quotes from prominent academics, politicians or church leaders), so I’ve collected just SOME of them together – as a reminder for me and, perhaps, to provide others with food for thought. In no particular order (I hope Garth doesn't mind me quoting from his book - believe me there are LOTS more extracts I could have included!):

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“We need to create a new reality in the Holy land, a new structure where every person that lives here – that was born here, Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Christian and Muslim, is honoured for who they are so their history and their past is respected”.
Sami Awad, executive director of Holy Land Trust, 2013.

“But this is the frontline. The wall and its offspring road are here and growing, the beautiful valley is being ripped in two. And then there is the ‘tunnel house’. A family has the ‘right’ papers to prove they belong to this land but they (the Israeli army) put them on the ‘wrong side of the line’. The ‘solution’ is to literally wall them in to their own private prison at a cost of $1million. It is obscene. It is obscene that these people in this village are being brutally shown by the wall, the settlements, the demolition orders, the soldiers and the bottomless budget that we want what is yours but we do not want you. We will dehumanise and humiliate you and make simple things so difficult. We will make your life so intolerable that you will leave… How can the world stand by and let this happen?”

Nive Hall, Amos Trust’s operations Manager at the Cremisan monastery.

“It involves difficult decisions and tough choices. However, the choice is not the support for Palestine against Isael or vice versa. Rather:

·         It is a choice for justice, against oppression; for human and political rights, against dispossession.

·         It is a choice for freedom, against an occupation that denies freedom.

·         It is a choice for equal human dignity, against racism and discrimination.

·         It is a choice for non-violent resistance, against the violence that perpetuates a cycle of hatred and recrimination”

“Time for Action”, Kairos Britain – following “The Iona Call” conference, 2012.

“I wonder… if having financial services and arms manufacturing at the core of your country… corrupts you morally?”

Alexei Sayle, The Metro, April 2013.

“As I write this, the richest people in the world are meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Of this meeting Aditya Chakrabortty says ‘More than 2,500 business executives and bankers will converge on the highest town in Europe for the annual World Economic Forum. For the next five days Davos will, it is safe to say, boast more millionaires per square foot than anywhere else on the planet’. He points out there is a basic membership and entrance price tag of £45,000 (approx. $74,000), but then adds: ‘The real business lies in private sessions with industry peers and amenable politicians and access to those start at around £98,500 ($161,600). And this is what makes Davos so fascinating: it is the most perfect case study of how practitioners of free market, globalised capitalism give the public one explanation for what they are doing and why, while privately pursuing the complete opposite. On the one hand there is an event attended by Sharon Stone, Bono and a slew of tame academics (14 Nobel laureates this week alone) the message being, “we are open to anyone”. On the other hand, there are those secret meetings off limits to anyone not in the £100K club… From its inception, the whole point of Davos has been to promulgate the gospel of free market fundamentalism. Earlier generations would have known what to call Davos set of wealth extractors and rip-off merchants’”.

Garth Hewitt, “Occupied Territories”. Aditya Chakrabortty: “An Action-Packed Thriller Is About To Unfold In Davos, Switzerland”, The Guardian, 21 January 2013.

“The greatest threat to world peace is not from nuclear weapons and their possible proliferation, it is from drones and their certain proliferation… Drones are now sweeping the global arms market. There are some 10,000 said to be in service, of which a thousand are armed and mostly American. Some reports say they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11. I have not read one independent study of the current drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa to suggest these weapons serve any strategic purpose. Their ‘success’ is expressed solely in body count, the number of so-called ‘al-Qaeda linked commanders’ killed… Neither the legality nor the ethics of drone attacks bear examination… It is hard to imagine a greater danger to world peace”.

Simon Jenkins, “Drones Are Fool’s Gold: They Prolong Wars we Can’t Win”, The Guardian, 10 January 2013. 

“The world must urgently set goals to tackle extreme inequality and extreme wealth. It is now widely accepted that rapidly growing extreme wealth and inequality are harmful to human progress, and that something needs to be done. Already we hear the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report rated inequality as one of the top global risks of 2013. The IMF and The Economist agree. Around the world, the Occupy protest demonstrated the increasing public anger and feeling that inequality has gone too far.

In the last decade, the focus has been exclusively on one half of the inequality equation – ending extreme poverty. Inequality and the extreme wealth that contributes to it were seen as either not relevant, or a prerequisite for the growth that would help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to benefit everyone. There has been great progress in the fight against extreme poverty… (But) we cannot end poverty unless we end inequality rapidly.
That is why we are calling for a new global goal, to end extreme wealth by 2025 and reverse the rapid increase in inequality seen in the majority of countries in the last twenty years”.
Oxfam: “The Cost Of Inequality: How Wealth And Income Extremes Hurt Us All”, 18 January 2013

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron”.

US President Dwight D Eisenhower: “The Chance For Peace” speech, 16 April 1953.
Note*: “Occupied Territories” (Garth Hewitt), published by IVP Books, 2013.
Photo: part of the wall surrounding Bethlehem.

protest

Erdem Gunduz, pictured, has become a legend… just by standing completely still. He began to stand still, and silent, in Taksim Square, Istanbul last Monday at 6pm and remained there until 2am. In a matter of hours, his photograph was being shared globally.  

Dignified, powerful, passive resistance.
As someone who is frequently accused (in a friendly, light-hearted way) of ranting – via this blog or on facebook, perhaps I could learn something from Mr Gunduz!

Anyway, I’ve been reflecting on last week’s G8 Summit…
Although any solutions on Syria remain sadly far off, I’m relieved that the immediate prospect of arming the opposition to the Assad government has apparently been put on the back burner – at least for the time being. What WAS heartening, however, was that the G8 has made it clear that tax abuse is an issue of the highest priority and that tax evasion is within the G8 mandate and the requirement has been established to crack open the secrecy on tax havens.
Over the years, I’ve read several books by Peter Millar (former Warden of the Iona Community) and I’m currently reading “A Time To Mend: Reflections In Uncertain Times”. I’ve always found him a very wise man and someone well worth listening to… on a wide range of subjects. Whilst the G8 Summit’s intentions on tax are hardly mind-shatteringly new (or far-reaching), they do perhaps take account of the many protests that have taken place (especially over the past couple of years) about injustices surrounding what is sometimes termed as “predatory capitalism”.
This is an extract from one of Millar’s reflections (“Global Protest at Predatory Capitalism”):  
“Around the world people of all ages and of all faiths are saying that enough is enough in relation to our present-day pervasive predatory capitalism. We see this protest expressed in the Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street campaigns. These protests are opening up a long-needed debate about unbridled capitalism and about ethical bankruptcy which lies at the heart of many global financial institutions. This moral vacuum within financial structures has become clearer to the general public following the bailout by governments of major banks. It is also reflected in the growing divide between rich and poor…
There is a growing awareness and a legitimate anger about the unjust ways in which wealth is distributed. But there is more at stake. Many of those who believe in such protests also know that society needs a paradigm shift. As one protester put it: ‘We want to change minds and hearts’. To raise fresh questions in all our minds: Why cannot real change take place? Why are these institutions not more accountable for their behaviour? Is it inevitable that the gulf between rich and poor becomes wider year by year? The British journalist Madeleine Bunting described the aims of the protest in this way: ‘It is about seeding questions in thousands of minds, shaking certainties and orthodoxies so that there is space for new alternatives’”.
Perhaps people in authority have, at long last, started to realise the public, national and international strength of feeling when it comes to injustice and abuse of power? That might be too much to ask… but, perhaps we do all need to become Erdem Gunduzs.

dignity of difference

I’ve just finished Jonathan Sacks’ book entitled “The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations” – written in 2002 as a response to the 9/11 tragedy. It’s a brave, radical, intelligent and hopeful book from an orthodox Jewish leader (and someone who, I think, is often regarded as a conservative thinker)… he wants to celebrate the differences among religious traditions and use them to enlarge, not stunt, our humanity.

The book is full of thought-provoking comments and quotes – and, I kept having to remind myself that it was written TEN years ago. I’m afraid I’m one of those annoying people who often underlines memorable passages in pencil and the first half of the book, in particular, is full of marked sentences! Here are just a few examples… (most of you will, no doubt, stop reading at this point - which would be a shame as they provided me with MUCH food for thought):
·   “Television, with its emphasis on the visual, creates a culture of sight rather than sound – the image speaks louder than the word. Images invoke emotion. They do not , of themselves, generate understanding. The result is that the most visual protest, the angriest voice and the most extreme slogan. If confrontation is news and conciliation is not, we will have a culture of confrontation”.
·     “On the one hand, globalisation is bringing us closer together than ever before, interweaving our lives, nationally and internationally, in complex and inextricable ways. On the other, a new tribalism – a regression to older and more fractious loyalties – is driving us ever more angrily apart”.
·     “Society depends on the existence of certain relationships that stand outside economic calculation: among them, families, communities, congregations and voluntary associations. These are the institutions of civil society, and they have become seriously eroded in consumption-driven cultures”.
·     “Globalisation has immensely differential and destabilising effects. Its benefits are not spread evenly. There are winners and losers, within and between countries. The ‘digital divide’ has heightened inequalities. The average North American consumes five times more than a Mexican, ten times more than a Chinese, 30 times more than an Indian…”.
·     “One way or another, the two most influential actors – states and markets – have effectively marginalised ethical considerations from their decision-making procedures. The same is true about the most important newcomer to the international stage: the global corporation. Today, the large multinationals wield enormous power. Of the hundred largest economies today, 51 are corporations and only 49 are nation-states”.
·     “A consumer society is kept going by an endless process of stimulating, satisfying, and re-stimulating desire. It is more like an addiction than a quest for fulfilment”.
·     “We will need to understand that just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth; no one civilisation encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind”.
·     “Morality has had a hard time of it in the past half-century. It has come to represent everything we believe ourselves to have been liberated from: authority, repression, the delay of instinctual gratification, all that went with the religious, puritanical, Victorian culture of our grandparents. Virtues once thought admirable – modesty, humility, discretion, restraint – are now dusty exhibits in a museum of the cultural curiosities. Words like ‘duty’, ‘obligation’, ‘judgement’, ‘wisdom’ either carry a negative charge or no meaning at all”.
·     “In 1968, 75% of college freshmen listed ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ as very important, while only 41% said the same for ‘being well off financially’. Three decades later, the percentages had been reversed”.
·     “International trade and global financial markets are very good at generating wealth, but they cannot take care of other social needs, such as the preservation of peace, alleviation of poverty, protection of the environment, labour conditions, or human rights – what are generally known as ‘public goods’” (George Soros).
·     “There is a real and present danger that the market, left to its own devices, will continue to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, leaving whole nations destitute and significant numbers of people, even within advanced economies, without stable employment, income or prospects. Envy, anger and the sheer sense of injustice are fertile soil for the growth of protest, violence and terror from which, given the openness on which globalisation depends, none of us are immune”.
PS: well done if you made it to the end!