Category Archives: Analysis

After a campaign scarred by bigotry, it’s become OK to be racist in Britain

Aditya Chakrabortty writes: On chaos of the kind Britain now faces, history is clear: some people always get hurt more than others. Just which groups stand to suffer most this time round is already becoming worryingly clear. Take a look at the hate reports that have come pouring in over the past few days.

In Huntingdon, Polish-origin schoolkids get cards calling them “vermin”, who must “leave the EU”. They come with a Polish translation, thoughtfully enough. From Barnsley, a TV correspondent notes that within five minutes three different people shout, “Send them home.” On Facebook, a friend in east London tells how, while trying to sleep on a hot night, he hears a man bellowing outside his open window: “We’ve got our country back and next I’ll blow that fucking mosque up.”

None of this is coincidental. It’s what happens when cabinet ministers, party leaders and prime-ministerial wannabes sprinkle arguments with racist poison. When intolerance is not only tolerated, but indulged and encouraged. For months leading up to last week’s vote, politicians poured a British blend of Donald Trumpism into Westminster china. They told 350m little lies. They made cast-iron promises that, Iain Duncan Smith now admits, were only ever “possibilities”. And the Brexit brigade flirted over and over again with racism. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

What do Syrians want?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: When the British House Foreign Affairs Committee convened hearings in September 2015 to reassess the government’s Syria policy, it invited seven witnesses to present evidence. The Committee chair, Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, acknowledged “that there have been observations that none of the people who are giving us witness evidence today are actually Syrian.” But this, he explained, was because “the Committee wants to understand all the perspectives in this conflict.”

Syrians, it seems, weren’t the only ones excluded from the hearing — so was irony.

Halfway in, a committee member asked: “What is it that the Syrians want?” The chair, who had ignored public calls to include Syrian witnesses on the panel, seemed intrigued. “What do the Syrians want?” he echoed.

The committee seemed interested in Syrian opinion, but only through the prophylactic medium of a Syrian-free panel. And the composition of the panel ensured that only one type of opinion would be heard.

The star of the proceedings was Patrick Cockburn, the Irish correspondent for the Independent and author of the bestselling The Rise of Islamic State. In articles and public appearances, the controversial journalist has made a case for providing military support not to Syria’s beleaguered opposition but to its murderous regime. Cockburn reiterated the argument before dismissing Syrian civil society as “not really players” and Syrian rebels as mere “jihadi groups” indistinguishable from the Islamic State (per his book, “there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies”).

The Syrian voice Cockburn was ventriloquizing might well have been a regime spokesman’s, since few others would present as a lesser evil a state that, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, is responsible for 95 percent of civilian deaths, and which the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria has indicted for “the crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts.”

But the Conservative-led parliamentary committee wasn’t alone in excluding Syrian voices. Britain’s main antiwar organization, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC—led until recently by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn), has also denied platforms to Syrians (except on one occasion when, three months after the August 2013 chemical massacre, it invited a close ally of Assad to its “antiwar” conference). Indeed, at a recent conference on Syria, chaired by the radical left-wing MP Diane Abbott, organizers called the police to evict a Syrian who tried to speak from the floor (StWC denies that it called the police). StWC later argued that in supporting a no-fly zone, the Syrians had embraced a “pro-war” position, which disqualified them from an “antiwar” platform. However, at the same event, StWC chair Andrew Murray made a case for providing military support to Assad in the fight against ISIS.

If Syrians haven’t been heard, it’s not for lack of trying. There are compelling voices covering the conflict — reporting, analyzing, prescribing. All are ignored. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A lesson from Brexit: Stop ignoring Syria

Joyce Karam writes: The political earthquake that Great Britain witnessed last Thursday with the victory for the Brexit camp setting the stage to the UK’s exit from the EU, is not only a product of David Cameron’s mistakes and Europe’s struggle with its own demons, but has its roots 2,000 miles away in the raging war, the counterterrorism nightmare and the humanitarian disaster called Syria.

The Syrian war is the elephant in the room when it comes to the rise of identity-politics, and the protectionist wave across Europe and in the United States. The unprecedented refugee influx, the largest since World War II coming primarily from Syria, and the country’s transformation into a hub for every Jihadist group and extremist recruitment machinery, has sent shockwaves through Europe and is feeding a political rhetoric of hate and racism across the continent.

This rhetoric won’t necessarily go away if Syria is resolved, but it will only grow if the conflict is left to spread and fester. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘Europe pays a heavy price for Syria – it must act to end the crisis’

Ian Black writes: Europe’s extraordinary political turbulence, triggered by the Brexit referendum, has caught the attention of the world. But the longer-running and far deadlier crisis in the continent’s backyard bleeds on while precious little is being done to help end it.

Syrians fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad are close to despair: Russia and Iranian intervention has bolstered the president’s position while Washington and Moscow have moved closer together – perhaps to the point where they will seek to impose a solution to end the five-year war. The UN deadline for agreement on a “political transition” in Damascus is looming on 1 August.

Europe, argues the country’s main western-backed opposition movement, can and must do more – however badly it is distracted by problems closer to home. That was the message it took this week to the EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, who played a key role in last year’s landmark nuclear talks with Iran but has failed to make much impact on Syria, where 400,000 people have been killed and millions made homeless.

“This last year has proven that Europe is the first continent that is paying the price of a lack of serious management of the Syrian crisis – because of the refugees and security issues, and this is unlikely to stop,” said Basma Kodmani of the Higher Negotiations Committee. “Russia has not seen any terrorist attacks – isn’t that interesting?”

The links between European instability and the carnage in Syria have never been clearer – the atrocity at Istanbul airport the latest grim reminder. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Istanbul Ataturk Airport terrorists behaved like a special forces unit

Clive Irving writes: Three months after attacking Brussels airport, terrorists have shown in the attack on Istanbul’s international airport an alarming ability to stay one move ahead of the defenses put in place to stop them — an agility in planning that could present a new and serious threat to airports in the U.S.

Most experts agree that the Istanbul atrocity has the hallmarks of ISIS. Even then, the sophistication of how the attack was carried out has surprised them.

It was carried out in a way that suggests the kind of advance intelligence, careful study of a target, and cool execution that would normally be practised by Western special forces.

There were three phases. It began with an attack in a car park adjacent to the international arrivals terminal. The purpose was to draw security staff away from the terminal.

The attackers obviously knew that security at the terminal itself had recently been hardened, as a response to the Brussels attack, where the bombers had exploited the fact that, as in many airports, there was no security threshold before the check-in desks.

In Istanbul anyone entering the arrivals terminal faced screening and checks at the doors. The car park diversion achieved its aim of drawing police and security staff from the building’s first line of defense—and left vulnerable scores of people at the taxi and drop-off area waiting to go through security. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Brexit elite

Anne Applebaum writes: That elite version of Brexit [envisioned by the Leave campaign leaders and their wealthy backers] — England as an offshore haven, a deregulated zone, an arcadian haven, a cosmopolitan business center, the Dubai of the North Atlantic — was not what the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph sold in the campaign, and it isn’t what the leave campaign put on their billboards. Instead, the papers repeated scare stories about immigration and the campaign bus promised that 350 million pounds a week, a completely invented number, would be paid to the National Health Service. The idealists want pure sovereignty; the hedge funds want deregulation; the voters voted for the welfare state.

The result is chaos. The leave campaign does not have a common vision and does not have a common plan because its members wouldn’t be able to agree on one. Iain Duncan-Smith, a pro-Brexit MP and former minister, backpeddaled on the 350 million pounds: “I never said that,” he said — although photographs show he was happy enough to travel on a bus that did. Farage laughed at the number, too. Johnson wrote a column which seemed to suggest that immigration was fine and nothing much would change. In an act of Monty Pythonesque farce, he then temporarily disappeared, refusing to turn up in the House of Commons on the first meeting after his team’s victory. How long will it be before the next revolution — this time against the pro-Brexit elite? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply

Randeep Ramesh writes: One of the genies uncorked by the referendum of the EU has been low-lying fascism and extreme nationalism. This is not to say that all leavers were racists. Far from it. But one of the political forces that have been unleashed is a form of dangerous nativism that unchecked will threaten us all.

It’s clear from the barrage of reports that a form of bigotry in everyday conversation is being legitimised. It is not racist to worry about high levels of immigration but a climate of fear is being created in the name of leavers. There are reports of schoolchildren terrified of being deported. “Polish vermin”, “Paki cunt” and “send them home” seem to be becoming something that immigrants and non-whites once again have to endure.

Monday night’s BBC news report featured a neo-Nazi in a balanced piece about the fallout for eastern European immigrants of Brexit in Leeds. Outside a Polish shop, in an interview a heavily inked Lee described himself as a “nationalist” and a “fascist”. He openly displayed his swastika tattoo and talked of a “sense of relief” after the Brexit vote. It was, said Lee, time to “take our country back”.

For the leave campaigners, it must weigh on their conscience that their slogans have been easily adopted by the far right. That’s the trouble with words, you never know whose mouth they have been in. Seven years ago the country had an impassioned debate over the right of the British National party’s Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. Griffin did appear. His cause died a political death, eviscerated by his fellow panellists’ fury.

The aftermath of the Brexit vote threatens to reanimate that corpse. It is increasingly clear that the language of extremists is becoming part of the British street. Words are weapons-grade material. They can be made into political bombs. How long before “send them back” becomes a line in a manifesto that suggests voluntary repatriation for the last wave of European migrants? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pulling the Article 50 ‘trigger’: Parliament’s indispensable role

Nick Barber (Fellow, Trinity College Oxford), Tom Hickman (UCL and barrister at Blackstone Chambers), and Jeff King (Senior Lecturer in Law, UCL) write: In this post we argue that as a matter of domestic constitutional law, the Prime Minister is unable to issue a declaration under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – triggering our withdrawal from the European Union – without having been first authorised to do so by an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament. Were he to attempt to do so before such a statute was passed, the declaration would be legally ineffective as a matter of domestic law and it would also fail to comply with the requirements of Article 50 itself.

There are a number of overlapping reasons for this. They range from the general to the specific. At the most general, our democracy is a parliamentary democracy, and it is Parliament, not the Government, that has the final say about the implications of the referendum, the timing of an Article 50 our membership of the Union, and the rights of British citizens that flow from that membership. More specifically, the terms and the object and purpose of the European Communities Act 1972 also support the correctness of the legal position set out above.

The reason why this is so important is not only because Article 50, once triggered, will inevitably fundamentally change our constitutional arrangements, but also because the timing of the issue of any Article 50 declaration has major implications for our bargaining position with other European States, as we will explain. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Is Brexit the beginning of the end of Britain?

 

Scottish MEP Alyn Smith gets standing ovation at European Parliament

Alex Massie writes: So where are we now? Pretty much in the same position as the traveller who asks for directions to Limerick and is told, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ But we are where we are, for better or, more probably, for worse.

Not before time it is slowly dawning on people in England that while this was very much their referendum it has consequences for the whole of the United Kingdom. They were warned this would be the case and, if it was not something that was ever uppermost in their thoughts, they cannot claim they were not told. Because they were.

I don’t dispute English voters’ right to privilege their disgruntlement with the EU over their weakened preference for the United Kingdom to remain, well, just that. That’s a choice but choices have consequences. It has, in any case, been evident for some time that England’s commitment to the Union is just as provisional and ambivalent as Scotland’s.

All of which leaves Scotland’s Unionists, especially Scotland’s Conservative Unionists, in a dismal place right now. They are soaked in melancholy and a good number of them feel abandoned right now. They did not fight a long and exhausting referendum in 2014 for a Britain that has to choose between the politics of Boris Johnson and the politics of Nigel Farage. But that is what they now face.

In 2014, Better Together warned that voting for independence posed the greatest risk to Scotland’s EU membership. That was true then. It is evidently not true now. Voting, at some point, for independence is now the only way Scotland can become a full member of the EU. The suggestion any alternative is available is a suggestion for the birds. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Young people are so bad at voting – I’m disappointed in my peers

Hannah Jane Parkinson writes: I’ve had millennial peers tell me that they didn’t vote because they didn’t know the referendum was happening. This despite the big money spent on a youth voting drive. Pre-roll YouTube adverts; ads designed to look like club signs. It was an extraordinary novelty: David Cameron courting the youth vote. Celebrities such as Lily Allen, Keira Knightley, Idris Elba and Emma Watson encouraged individuals to vote. Unless you were in a six-month K-Hole, I have no idea how you could have missed all this.

I have also had peers tell me they did not vote because they were confused and didn’t understand. To which I say: barely any of us understood, regardless of age. There is no doubt that the lies promulgated on both sides showed scorn for the British people, made a mockery of our supposed new era of “good, honest politics”. But, when you don’t know about something, to paraphrase Larry David, well then you learn. You learn. £350m per week to the EU? Let Me Google That For You.

But there’s an even more curious and infuriating type of non-voter. Young people who are engaged in the political process, but don’t end up voting. Social media has much to answer for. I have argued before that tech can be helpful when encouraging engagement – Facebook’s voter status initiative, for instance – and I see that changing your profile picture to a French flag, or a Rainbow flag helps you to feel better and does contribute to a nicer, supportive tone of discourse – it has its place – but when it comes to affecting policy change, it’s as good as hovering a pencil over the box and crossing the air.

It’s the same school of thought that has Jeremy Corbyn eschewing mainstream media because he has, um, 525,000 Twitter followers. Newsflash: avatars of eggs don’t win elections. People quite rightly talk of the Westminster bubble. The media bubble. But there is a Twitter bubble and a Facebook feedback loop. Social media was supposed to widen our world, but its algorithms can shrink it entirely. I am concerned that young people – but not just young people – think that changing their name to a referendum-related pun or re-gramming Jean Jullien equals a vote. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

They survived ISIS, then disappeared

The Daily Beast reports: The way Rasool Abdullah remembers it, he was in a hall with dozens of other men in an abandoned house outside Fallujah.

He was thirsty, as he had barely any water to drink for the past two days. The heat from the summer sun made the cramped quarters unlivable. His hands were tied tightly with zip ties, and from the rooms off the hallway, where he says people were being tortured, all he could hear was screaming.

“Ahmed is dead!” someone cried.

Rasool added Ahmed to his mental count. By the time he left 11 hours later, he says he’d lost the exact number of those who had fallen around him.

“Twelve or 13 people in the hall I was in died. I’m not including the people in the rooms,” he told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know their [full] names, only the number of people who are dead.”

While the recent liberation of Fallujah is being celebrated by governments from Washington to Baghdad, hundreds of civilians like those who were arrested with Rasool remain missing. The problem is that, unlike those taken by the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS, these civilians were arrested by Shiite pro-government militant groups operating as representatives of the Iraqi government. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

When you dial 911 and Wall Street answers

The New York Times reports: A Tennessee woman slipped into a coma and died after an ambulance company took so long to assemble a crew that one worker had time for a cigarette break.

Paramedics in New York had to covertly swipe medical supplies from a hospital to restock their depleted ambulances after emergency runs.

A man in the suburban South watched a chimney fire burn his house to the ground as he waited for the fire department, which billed him anyway and then sued him for $15,000 when he did not pay.

In each of these cases, someone dialed 911 and Wall Street answered.

The business of driving ambulances and operating fire brigades represents just one facet of a profound shift on Wall Street and Main Street alike, a New York Times investigation has found. Since the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms, the “corporate raiders” of an earlier era, have increasingly taken over a wide array of civic and financial services that are central to American life. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How to stop Brexit: Get your MP to vote it down

Geoffrey Robertson writes: It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.

It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.

Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.

It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.

Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.

Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.

In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How Boris Johnson and the Brexiters lost

 

“Teebs,” a regular commenter at The Guardian, wrote on Saturday: If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost.

Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.

With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership.

How?

Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.

And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legistlation to be torn up and rewritten … the list grew and grew.

The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction.

The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50?

Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?

Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-maneouvered and check-mated.

If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over – Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession … broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.

The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice.

When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was “never”. When Michael Gove went on and on about “informal negotiations” … why? why not the formal ones straight away? … he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.

All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.

Facebooktwittermail

How Brexit might jeopardize the Paris Agreement on climate change

ClimateWire reports: One of the first questions to be settled is how Brexit will affect Europe’s commitment to last year’s landmark Paris climate agreement. The European Union put forward a combined promise to cut emissions at least 40 percent compared with 1990 levels by 2030, and Brussels planned to spend the summer divvying that responsibility up among its members in preparation for joining the deal. But the impending departure of the European Union’s second-largest emitter throws a monkey wrench in that plan.

Member of Parliament Barry Gardiner, the Labor Party’s shadow energy and climate minister, told ClimateWire that Brexit could jeopardize the global warming accord.

“The implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate may now be seriously undermined,” he said, noting that the United Kingdom played a leading role in pushing for greater E.U. ambition ahead of the deal and also acted as a bridge between Western European powers and Eastern and Central European countries like coal-dependent Poland on climate and other issues.

The United Kingdom is on a pathway to cut its emissions 57 percent by 2030 under a 2008 domestic law—a trajectory that would have gone a long way toward delivering the European Union’s collective commitment.

That raises the question of how the United Kingdom will formulate its own contribution to the Paris Agreement now that it is leaving, and how that exercise will affect the rest of Europe. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Nicola Sturgeon: Scottish parliament could block Brexit

The Guardian reports: Nicola Sturgeon has suggested that the Scottish parliament could block the passage of legislation necessary for the UK to leave the EU.

In an interview with the Sunday Politics Scotland, she said that “of course” she would consider asking the Scottish parliament to vote down the legislative consent motions required for the legislation.

In her fifth major political interview of the morning, Scotland’s first minister told the show’s host, Gordon Brewer: “If the Scottish parliament is judging this on the basis of what’s right for Scotland, then the option of saying we’re not going to vote for something that’s against Scotland’s interests, that’s got to be on the table. You’re not going to vote for something that is not in Scotland’s interests.” [Continue reading…]

Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge, writes: The devolved politics of Brexit are immensely complex and may turn out to be crucially important to what actually happens… But as a matter of law, neither Scotland nor any of the UK’s other constituent nations can stop Brexit from happening. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

While economists have begun to realise the failure of market orthodoxy, politicians remain in its thrall

Tony Karon writes: The policymaking elites of the industrialised West are panicking – and with good reason. The seismic shock of Britons voting to leave the European Union has sharpened awareness of the possibility that in November Donald Trump could ride a wave of xenophobia all the way to the White House. Voters in the advanced capitalist democracies appear more willing than ever to register a potentially catastrophic protest against a post-Cold War global economic order that has deified markets just as the fallen communist ideology deified the state.

A quarter century of market-driven globalisation and neo­liberal orthodoxy has systematically deregulated finance, and led to tax cuts and trade deals that favour wealthy elites and leave most of the others to fend for themselves. Its response to economic crises is to adjust interest rates, bailing out capital markets (and the fortunes of the elites) while forcing endless austerity on the most economically vulnerable. The prevailing economic consensus among western governments has steadily increased inequality and diminished hopes, but such are the rules of capitalist democracies that the economically marginalised still get to vote.

“The real story of this election is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population,” observed Francis Fukuyama recently. Fukuyama is the political scientist best known for declaring in 1989 that the collapse of the Soviet bloc heralded “the end of history”, with free-market capitalism now the undisputed ideological wisdom for the rest of time.

But the neoliberal order he proclaimed as eternal looks increasingly vulnerable, thanks to the very logic of the market economics he championed. “The gap between the fortunes of elites and those of the rest of the public has been growing for two generations, but only now is it coming to dominate national politics,” Fukuyama wrote in Foreign Affairs last month. “Now that the elites have been shocked out of their smug complacency, the time has come for them to devise more workable solutions to the problems they can no longer deny or ignore.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail