Gary Barlow is a racist
“Sometimes as I live upon my island,
Cut off from emotion and its pain,
That’s when I am tempted by the waters, the waters that can take me far away.”
So sang Gary Barlow in the title track of his 1997 debut solo album Open Road.
Well, the temptation eventually proved too great. The waters recently took the lyrical wunderkind and X-Factor arbiter far away to the Solomon Islands, The Sun reporting that he paddled by canoe for six hours to the “remote island of Malaita” during filming for a BBC documentary about his official diamond jubilee song.
We were all white men and there were only eight of us.
“I really did think, ‘They’ve taken us all this way up the river and they could kill us and eat us alive and no one would know’.
It’s conceivable that Tony Blair’s favourite tabloid made a rare misquote, but either way the article is almost unsurpassed as an exercise in dusty clichés about foreigners.
A “mob” “ambushed” poor Gary, armed with bows and arrows and spears.
The “clan” were wearing necklaces decorated with capitalised TEETH.
The helpless eight white men found themselves “surrounded” by a “tribe”. The whole tribe? Why is it that everyone outside Europe and north America always insists on “surrounding” visitors? Can’t they just stand in front of them, like normal people do?
In the wilderness years before he became the new Simon Cowell, Gary clearly had plenty of time to swot up up on his Conrad. Where else could black men have taken him other than up a river?
Where I suspect Barlow’s song-writing imagination ran away with him just a little was when he thought he’d end up as lunch. The last case of cannibalism in Melanesia was at least half a century ago. At least he’s in good company. When Prince Philip visited Papua New Guinea he famously asked a backpacker: “You managed not to get eaten, then?”
In the unlikely event that Gary came under attack, he’s right, no one would have known — except all the people who lived there, who’d have probably phoned the police on their mobiles and got him airlifted to hospital.
Mob, clan, tribe. Whatever. Happily it turned out that they were just a performance troupe who wanted to honour Phil’s wife on her special anniversary. The Take That frontman lived to sing another day.
When I went to Malaita, the most populous island in the country, I flew. From the capital it took about half an hour. I don’t remember feeling threatened unless you count these menacing individuals I encountered near the airport on the outward journey.
In Auki, Malaita’s capital, some pleasant government officials welcomed myself and a colleague into their offices and allowed us to interview them for the research we were doing, at length, in English.
We visisted an interesting village just outside town, with green fields irrigated by the river and tucked among lush vegetation. These subsistence farmers were trying to adopt a system of sustainable rice permaculture with the help of Japanese agricultural technologists.
Afterwards we wandered round town and spoke to some fishermen on the pier. On the whole people wore jeans and T-shirts. Most were keen to chat. Granted, the range of goods available in the shops was a bit limited and there wasn’t much to do.
People in far-flung places aren’t all that different. They gossip; show curiosity about strangers; go to the toilet; surf the Internet. They’re not spear-wielding cavemen intent on maiming the white man.
Elsewhere Barlow sang: “Whatever I said,
Whatever I did I didn’t mean it.”
On this occasion, I hope not.
#Greek #euro exit may not be so horrifying
Gideon Rachman says that Greece should leave the euro. He’s probably right, because the currency was badly-designed from the start. Investors were never likely to shift funds quickly to economic black spots. Workers wouldn’t move to areas with lots of jobs on offer because they couldn’t speak the language and they wouldn’t fit in with the culture.
To compensate for the resulting inequalities, the eurozone had no central authority that could redistribute funds. The strictures on government spending were so anal that not much could be done to stimulate demand or help the unemployed — but in any case the lack of law-enforcement meant that most governments periodically thumbed their noses at the rules. As I noted in this post, a paper by the Graduate Institute in Geneva found that France breached the spending limits in seven of the 12 years after the euro began and Germany five.
A low interest rate that helped the sluggish north was never going to suit the more volatile economies of Greece, Portugal, Ireland or Spain. Cheap money helped inflate housing bubbles and allowed governments to escape the need for proper tax systems.
In a kind of collective neoliberal wish-in, the eurocrats hoped blindly that their scheme would somehow work. They blame the Greeks, but it was always going to be one of the poorer fringe countries that would come off worst. The Germans and French like to forget their own misdemeanours.
Because the euro is so flawed in so many ways, it almost certainly can’t continue in its current form. Rachman’s probably right to call for an ordered break-up rather than a messy balls-up. “Better an end with horror, than a horror without end.”
I’m not convinced, though, about the extent of the horror. The FT writer says that:
the exit of Greece would unleash contagion, by making it clear that membership of the euro need not be permanent. Markets would inevitably round on the next vulnerable countries.
Yes, an unplanned exist would be disastrous, and one of the only predictable outcomes is higher borrowing costs for the remaining eurozone. But surely everyone can already see that membership isn’t permanent? In that mangling of language so beloved of financiers, pundits have been worrying for weeks about the ‘Grexit’.
Markets are already rounding on the vulnerable. Bond yields periodically surge to levels that can only be associated with a euro break-up. Hundreds of billions have already been whisked from Greece and Spain. Greek shares are lower than in 22 years, while the Spanish stock market is at its lowest level in nine years.
And as Rachman points out, the long-term costs of sticking with the euro for Greece, and maybe others, may outweigh the temporary catastrophe that accompanies exit. In a country like Spain, every week with the euro is another week of misery for the quarter of adults who have no job. It’s more erosion of skills, one more young person’s potential squashed.
Germany and France could inflict as much austerity as they wanted in a smaller core eurozone — and they wouldn’t have to worry about bailing out the periphery. What the core eurozone leaders and bankers are really scared about when they talk of contagion is losing the money they’ve lent and having to pay a higher interest rate on their debt. They’d no longer benefit from the free money that’s washed around the continent for the last couple of decades.
Meanwhile a devalued south could default on its debts and work on restoring growth and building exports. Other recent defaulters and devaluers — Indonesia, Argentina, Russia — have rebounded quickly after crisis. Better to get the pain over with quickly than to inflict death by a thousand cuts, and better to think first of the poor rather than the bankers who got us into the mess in the first place.
World first for Scotland
My piece in today’s Scotsman:
Domestic rubbish reinforces the sea wall on Funafuti Atoll (Getty)
SCOTLAND’S climate justice fund, which aims to alleviate the impact of global warming on developing nations, leads the way, writes Daniel Gay
As you descend in the plane through the clouds, Funafuti looms as a half-crescent in an ocean of improbable blue. Capital of the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, houses are scattered the length of the atoll. Waves wash steadily against the coast, a broken line of coconut palms.
On the ground an all-clear siren sounds, and kids converge for a kick-about on the only place wide enough for a game – the airstrip. In places the island is no wider than the road, which is strewn with shells. The smell of manure floats on the breeze: pigs housed in small shacks by the roadside are a vital source of protein for villagers. The nearest trading partner is Fiji, 700 miles due south.
Tuvalu is at the frontline of the battle against climate change. Rising to a maximum height of 15 feet above sea level, the Maldives is the only country which is lower. Some estimates suggest that the Pacific nation will be swamped within decades as sea levels rise. When I last visited a year ago, the Prime Minister told me that a drought lasting over a month meant that 100 families in the capital had been placed on special water rations. He later declared a state of emergency.
Tuvalu may be the ideal kind of candidate to benefit from Scotland’s climate justice fund, the details of which are to be unveiled in coming weeks, but which aims to alleviate the impact of global warming on developing nations.
The fund – a world first – is part of a growing Scottish commitment to development aid in recent years, starting with the Malawi Development Programme inaugurated by Jack McConnell in 2005 and continued by the SNP Scottish Government. Now totalling £9 million, development funds are being spent on civil society, health, education, trade and sustainable development. Over a third goes to Malawi with the rest divided between Africa and South Asia, as well as being spent on emergency relief work.
At a time of cuts, why is Scotland throwing cash at far-flung places?
Compassion may be a woolly word these days, but there’s an undoubted cross-party commitment to bettering the lot of the worst-off. Scotland’s heritage in this area is second to none. Free-marketeers like to forget that Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, partly concerned the impact of the “invisible hand” on the less fortunate.
Civil society, that much-abused term, was forged by Adam Ferguson in the furnace of the Scottish enlightenment, a time when many of the core tenets of modern democratic society were born. Humanitarianism has long been central to the Scottish tradition. Treat others as you’d like to be treated yourself, runs the old refrain.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Scots ran many parts of the British Empire (although not as much of it as is often claimed) and that many now feel a responsibility toward the former colonies from which the nation profited and abused – hence the special links with Livingstone’s former African haunts. In a more modern vein, industrialised countries caused global warming, so they should at least be prepared to cushion its impact on the most vulnerable.
As Devo Max or independence begin to look more likely, Scotland must again make its voice heard in the world. Disbarred from foreign relations and thankfully with no imperial ambitions, aid is a more humane way of getting noticed. A strong international reputation helps Scottish businesses abroad and attracts investment and workers.
What’s unusual about the Scottish effort is that rather than following the somewhat loud-mouthed, one-size-fits-all rituals of Washington, Scots bureaucrats actually appear to be listening to what developing countries want.
Instead of hurling cash at Malawi – the European Union last year did its normal job of asking external consultants what it should spend its €50 million on – the Scottish partnership works on established personal links. The partnership pre-dates government funding, with members including schools, church and academia.
One of the government’s first investments was in Mary’s Meals, a school food charity active in Malawi since 2002. A host of charities have piggy-backed on Holyrood’s efforts, with a recent study by Edinburgh University showing that total voluntary contributions amounted to the equivalent of £30m in a single year.
Responding to the request for environmental know-how, Scots experts have made well-received recommendations on sustainable energy and water. The small-scale, relationship-driven nature of the partnership means that money is better spent.
Smallness has its problems, and some Malawians initially questioned Scotland’s experience, with one local expert doubting whether the initial programme had been properly thought out. A BBC investigation claimed that the money was difficult to trace, and there’s no doubt that the necessarily high fixed administrative costs inevitably formed a high proportion of such a small sum.
Attempts to establish an office on the ground led to difficulties as Malawians queried its neutrality. Civil society work may even be counter-productive, with the perception of European involvement undermining human rights work.
All aid is political, and Alex Salmond is never one to pass up an opportunity to play politics. He will no doubt be pleased that a recent Chatham House study argues that: “The Malawi Development Programme shows that Scotland is capable of handling its international engagement, and may not need the UK to be the final arbiter on matters of development overseas.”
After the 2010 change in Westminster government the British Department for International Development has kept a stony silence on the Malawi programme, failing even to mention the Scotland–Malawi partnership on its website.
This might be because the UK’s £82m donation to Malawi in 2008/09 dwarfed the £4.2m spent by Holyrood during the same period, but some Scottish civil servants are reported to have said that their UK colleagues dismissed their work as amateurish. The unionism of the Conservative-led government probably plays a part.
But Salmond’s politics may yet prove expensive. The UK and Scandinavian governments are among the few countries to commit to an international agreement to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on development. The problem is, 0.7 per cent of Scottish GDP is about £90m, ten times the current budget and patently unaffordable. Either Holyrood continues to play a proportional part in the wider British development programme, diluting its independence, or Salmond modifies his Scandinavian ambitions.
The likes of Tuvalu or Malawi may be a long way from home, but Scotland’s stature is heightened by its development initiatives. Perhaps the last word should be with Adam Smith: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
Laos
I’m currently in Laos, where the temperature is approaching 40 degrees Celcius. It’s a bit of a shock after an extended Scottish winter. Tomorrow the government will present the final Diagnostic Trade Integration Study that i’ve been working on over the past few months.
Vientiane seems busier every time I visit. The first time was in 2003, when it felt like little more than a village. The roads were rutted and the traffic was mainly tuk-tuks and noisy old bangers – unlike today, where Landcruisers roam the clogged streets.
There were virtually no banks, let alone cash machines. Now, curiously, they seem to everywhere. I noticed about four within 200m on the road outside the hotel.
It’s probably the one place i’ve been over a period of a few years that’s noticeably boomed. Most of the 7% average annual economic growth over the past decade has been concentrated in the capital, Vientiane, and much of it comes from a boom in hydroelectricity and mining.
Having visited several rural areas last year, the upturn isn’t mirrored throughout the country. As in so many developing nations, some people make it into the middle class and subsequently do all the things that Europeans or Americans take for granted like going to the ATM or fiddling with their iphones. Any backpacker who only sees Vientiane could be forgiven for thinking everything’s dandy.
But almost a third of people languish below the poverty line. Nutrition remains a big problem, with around two-fifths of children underweight and a similar proportion stunted.
During a trek last year we visited a village of Lantan tribespeople near Luang Namtha in the north, emerging from the dark of the Jungle via a system of irrigation channels. We crossed a river on a tilting bridge made of vines then teetered on narrow paths cut between a series of rice paddies before coming to a fence where pot-bellied children with no trousers toddled toward us. A little naked girl held a wicker tray of wrist-bands, following us along a lumpy mud path to a hut which the tour company had built to house visitors.
A smiling lady brought out cokes and more wrist bands, motioning to me to buy one. We sat indoors eating vegetables from banana leaves on the floor while the ladies and children waited patiently outside. We bought three wrist-bands for 50p each.
We could hear coughing from inside the woven huts. Small men with their ribs showing wandered around. A water pump, built with German aid, was inscribed “April 2011”.
Like everywhere, it’s easy to be fooled by the journey from the airport into the capital. First impressions can be deceptive, and aggregates, especially gross domestic product, are sometimes almost meaningless.
The British economy is screwed, but sorting it out would be less controversial than you’d think.
People bleat on about various ‘isms’: Keynes versus Friedman, or whether the solutions lie with market or state. Some say the government could rescue us from crisis single-handed. Others — notably that a whole stratum of middle earth England — seem to have bought the notion that the UK is fatally laden with debt and that anything other than fiscal rectitude of constipatory proportions will lead us the way of Greece and Spain.
I suspect that a lot of the ideological confrontation is false. For a start, a lot of folk don’t appear to understand how government bonds work. Osborne and Cameron induce a collective national flinch by comparing national debt with a household. The narrative is that we should all tighten our belts because Labour over-indulged.
That’s the wrong analogy.
The government isn’t in hock to some crowbar-wielding loan shark. It borrows off you and me. A lot of our bank savings get reinvested in government Treasuries, which are considered super safe even though returns are low.
A better analogy is probably a father lending to his daughter: yes, she probably doesn’t want to take too much advantage, and sooner or later she’ll want to stand on her own two feet, but most dads wouldn’t turn up at their daughter’s door with a large henchman demanding repayment at 1000%.
Here, Jonathan Portes, Director of the National Institute of Social and Economic Research, points out that some of the most moderate voices suggest that Britain should spend its way out of the bust. Even conservative chancellor Norman Lamont (for whom Portes wrote speeches) purposefully held off raising taxes and lowering spending during the last recession in the early nineties.
The IMF, normally a bastion of budgetary conservatism, says that the British government could boost the economy by balancing spending with tax hikes.
the Fund wants us … to spend more on infrastructure (and housing) and increase welfare benefits for poor people (who will spend them), and pay with it by taxing the rich (those with a lower “marginal propensity to consume”). This would raise demand in the short term, without worsening the fiscal position.
Number 11 Downing Street can borrow almost for free to pay for the infrastructure precisely because the economy is floundering and there aren’t that many other places to invest. By buying government debt foreigners, too, are giving a vote of confidence in British standards.
But the current coalition has so committed itself to austerity that it can’t backtrack.
Of course, the Conservatives have ideological fixation with the free market. Some of their posh mates will stand to make millions out of the privatisation and contracting out that comes with shrinking the state. I’m not saying that ideology is dead. Debt is also high and needs to be paid down.
But Cameron and Osborne appear handcuffed in some Bullingdonian death pact in which they have to follow through their austerity until the rancid conclusion. It’s as if they’ve squeezed inside a sports bag, somehow padlocking it from the inside, and now they can’t get out.
The revolution isn’t nigh
I love it when financiers get philosophical. The academic slaverings; the sense of certainty; the reference to political ideology.
The latest effluvia from Hugh Hendry, ‘contrarian’ Scottish fund manager, has it all:
Why does France in 2012 flirt with the notion of electing a socialist president intent on reducing the retirement age, imposing a top rate of tax of 75% and increasing the size of the public sector? Why do we hang on the every word of elected politicians when Luxembourg’s prime minister Jean Claude Junker openly admits, “When it becomes serious, you have to lie”?
You cannot make stuff like this up. It is simply too absurd.
That is perhaps a long way of saying that existentialism is alive and well in the 21st century. For, if the last ten years have taught me anything, it must be that the French philosopher Albert Camus, in his search for an understanding of the principals of ethics that can shape and form our behaviour, may have surreptitiously provided us with three basic principles for macro investing. I am perhaps doing him a gross injustice, but I would summarise as follows: God is dead, life is absurd and there are no rules. In other words, you are on your own and you must take ownership of your own destiny.
No, no injustice at all. I’m pretty sure I remember that on page 34 of The Outsider, shortly after Meursault discusses the stock market over dinner with Ayn Rand.
Like the best in the business, Hendry can’t wait to talk about himself.
[W]hat makes a great fund manager first and foremost is the ability to establish a contentious premise outside the existing belief system and have it go on to become adopted by the broader financial community. Bruce Kovner [whoever he is] expressed the idea more eloquently when he said, “I have the ability to imagine configurations of the world different from today and really believe it can happen. I can imagine…
Wait for it.
…that the dollar can fall to 100 yen”. I am sure you are nodding in agreement, except Bruce was saying this when the USDJPY was well over 200, not today’s rate of 80.
When it was above 200? Man the barricades! This is the currency-trading equivalent of Lenin arriving in St Petersburg to deliver the April theses. Contrarianism like this has the potential to rock the globe. I’ve long thought that we needed a new Keynes, but maybe he’s among us already, someone who can even conceive of a configuration of the world in which the Japanese exchange rate drops a bit.
Hold on to something stable, for it gets even more unnerving. Hendry himself has “the kind of imagination that can imagine the yen trading closer to 60″. Gosh, that kind of imagination, one that can even guess that the economies of Europe and the United States might grow differently to Asian ones.
You cannot make stuff like this up. It is simply too absurd.
How not to run an economy
Another nasty graph, at least if you’re British. Ethan Pollack of the Economic Policy Institute shows that Britain’s economy quickly stalled after the election of the Condem coalition in the summer of 2010. A year and a half later the economy had shrunk and more people were out of work. The United States didn’t cut government spending so heavily, allowing its economy to keep growing.
The UK tax hikes and spending cuts were to be worth an extra 2.2% of GDP, or £40 billion, by 2014-15. On top of the cuts already promised by the previous chancellor Alistair Darling, the total austerity package amounted to 6.3% of GDP. George Osborne made another particularly silly mistake, promising that he’d keep many of Labour’s tax rises and even implement more in the form of a VAT hike, which further strangled growth.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if the British economy is worth about £1.5 trillion a year and you rip roughly £94.5 billion out of it over three years something’s likely to go banana-shaped. By shrinking the economy Osborne shot himself in his patent leather, calf-skin brogue. When businesses earn less or go bust and people don’t work, they pay less tax and you need to hand benefits to the jobless. So the government has to borrow more and tackling the deficit becomes harder.
Osborne and co. try to blame the Europeans, but everybody knew the world economy was faltering, and anyway British exports haven’t collapsed.
The financial press made a big noise on Wednesday about news of the so-called technical recession, but Britain’s economy was already depressed and it’ll keep floundering for a long time to come.
