John Harris

The coalition has sneaked a coup on a sleeping public | John Harris

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Its project to drastically remodel British society is speeding ahead without any regard for what it told voters last year

As people elsewhere are killed for their belief in democracy and the rule of law, the supposed controversies of British politics inevitably rather fade. By comparison, we live in an Eden of stability, and argue over mere increments: to be getting in a lather about Cameron and Clegg can easily feel not just indulgent, but indecent.

Still, in the broadest terms, there is a tale to be told that includes Westminster as well as Tripoli and Cairo, and underlines what watershed times these are. Much of the world’s current tumult is traceable to the long and tangled fall-out from the crash of 2008 (note the role of rising food prices in Middle Eastern unrest). And though most commentators seem either too polite or deluded to recognise it, the British side of this story is rapidly being revealed: not just cuts, but the most far-reaching attempt to remodel British society in 60 years, undertaken at speed, and with a breathtaking disregard for what was offered to the country only months ago. Last week, Labour MP John McDonnell wrote to the Guardian arguing that the increasing gap between claims of fiscal necessity and a transparently ideological project merited another election. It won’t happen, but he has a point.

The other day, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s underrated book The Shock Doctrine, and was reminded of a celebrated quotation from Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

The Klein book, published in 2007, examines how Friedman’s instructions were followed, and free-market “disaster capitalism” forced on Iraq, eastern Europe, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, in the wake of wars, natural disasters and revolutions (watch out Libya and Egypt). Four years after it came out, I was struck by a simple and mind-boggling fact. Here, as the coalition sets about the benefits system, marketises the NHS, threatens to do the same to schools and now apparently plans to put the entire public sector out to tender, what crisis was it that set the stage? Answer: that of the very economic model that is being pursued as never before. Welcome, then, to a new phase of history, when a crisis of laissez-faire capitalism begets that same system triumphant, something which brings to mind not so much Friedman, as Marshal Foch: “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking.”

Around the time of last year’s comprehensive spending review, some highlighted a “democratic deficit” between what was being proposed and what the Tories and Lib Dems had put before the public. The Fabian Society’s Sunder Katwala accused David Cameron of “amnesia about what he did and did not ask for a mandate for”. As Katwala pointed out, the central deceit was embodied in a reading of the election in Cameron’s 2010 conference speech: “The result may not have been clear-cut when it came to the political parties. But it was clear enough when it came to political ideas.” It takes Etonian chutzpah to spin a line as disingenuous as that.

From there, via Cameron’s famous insistence that “frontline reductions” weren’t an option and a jaw-dropping commitment in the coalition agreement to “end top-down reorganisation of the NHS”, the about-turns and unexpected proposals have extended into the distance. Certainly, on VAT, child benefit, the educational maintenance allowance, increasing NHS spending “in real terms every year”, incapacity benefit and more, the merchants of anti-politics have conclusive proof that some politicians will say anything to get elected. By way of a contrast, you may think back to Labour’s travails over the introduction of top-up fees in 2003, which was ruled out in their pitch to the electorate two years earlier. “It is not a lot for the electorate to expect the government to keep their manifesto commitment,” the Lib Dems’ then education spokesman told the House of Commons. Now, an entire legislative programme contravenes scores of pledges and offers transformative plans of which there was no warning. No one even flinches.

What are we faced with? A polite kind of coup, in the service of an all-encompassing project that Klein and her followers surely recognise, and of which Friedman would be proud. The Labour party seems punch-drunk, and racked with confusion about how much the coalition has taken from peak-period Blairism (a simple solution: disown those aspects of your disgraced past, and start truly opposing). Every lurch to the free-market right shreds the idea that the Lib Dems are there to pull the Tories back to the centre. With Lib Dem backbench MPs and such grandees as Shirley Williams, I keep having the same conversation. They say they oppose some policies, but are heartened by others, and all is just about OK. In response, the old hippie phrase comes to mind: you are either on the bus, or off the bus.

It speeds on, anyway. And it really is the most amazing thing: not just that this most illegitimate of revolutions is happening, and fast, but that we are sleepwalking into it.

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One road, many gods

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

Soho Road in Birmingham is a place where convent, mosque, Rasta HQ, Jesus Army centre and Buddhist temple sit side by side. John Harris visits the most religiously diverse road in Britain

Hack your way through central Birmingham’s oppressive tangle of flyovers and roundabouts, and you’re there. A two-mile thoroughfare where cultures, religions and institutions collide, seemingly at random. Convents and churches sit alongside mosques, and Buddhist temples created in shabby Victorian houses. A vast Sikh gurdwara faces an equally huge jobcentre. Close by, there is a Rastafarian headquarters, a house owned by the Jesus Army, and the offices of the Asian Rationalist Society.

This is Soho Road, which begins on the fringes of the Lozells neighbourhood and heads into Handsworth: both areas long associated with cheap property, and a refuge for people who have come from abroad. Starbucks, Wetherspoons and Peacocks are nowhere to be seen. Alongside shops selling garish religious paraphernalia for Muslims and Hindus are convenience stores opened to serve arrivals from eastern Europe and beyond. The only faces that are uniformly white belong to the mannequins in the sari shops. If you want an instant picture of the local population, a good place to start is a fast-food place called Big Johns – where the menu covers just about every strain of fast food, and a microcosm of the whole world queues for lunch. There is a plaque bolted to the wall, dedicated to the proprietors’ mother: “May Allah bless her soul and give us the strength to live her dreams and wishes.”

Photographer Liz Hingley spent 18 months visiting Soho Road, capturing the people who live here – people who have their roots in around 170 countries. Those figureheads who claim to speak for them seem to specialise in a strange, sometimes strangulated mixture of ordinary English and that awkward officialspeak in which everything comes back to “the community” and religion has long since been recast as “faith”. Many endorse a vision recently laid out in a pan-religious free newspaper called Faith In Lozells: “Polish mechanics service Pakistani-owned taxis and Vietnamese do t’ai chi in a garden close to the St Francis Centre, an organisation with its roots in Irish Catholicism.” In this view of things, gods of various kinds watch over the hubbub, and all is largely well.

During a day spent wandering around Soho Road, it is easy to be convinced of this. The array of religions and cultures is dizzying, and undeniably thrilling. By way of proof that negotiations are often less a matter of theological controversy than mundane detail, at least three people tell me they spend a lot of time consulting about how to accommodate the parking arrangements of the various churches, mosques and temples. And there are plenty of so-called inter-faith initiatives, often staged on the kind of hallowed ground where there was once room for only one view of the world.

St Mary’s Convent is by far the oldest religious community round these parts, set up in 1841 by nuns from the Sisters Of Mercy order. Now, only five live and work here, and all of them are over 60. “We’re not at all as numerous as in the past, but that doesn’t mean we’re not present,” says Sister Helen Ryan, a 66-year-old native of Tipperary. During the hour I spend in her company, she evangelises not about her own religion, but what she calls “enculturation and inclusiveness”, and programmes and schemes aimed at drawing the locals together. “We can talk to each other by name,” she enthuses. “If I’ve got a problem here, I can phone up Sayeed, who’s a Muslim down the road there. I passionately believe that you don’t go out with a faith banner, initially: you get to know each other.”

The street is a combination of drizzly ordinariness to scenes of quite mind-boggling fascination. One minute, I am walking past a Murco petrol station; the next, I am in an incense-scented room dominated by a huge Buddhist altar, in the company of a 57-year-old Sri Lankan monk called Ven K Gunawansa Thero, who describes his daily routine, starting at 6am and including a single daily meal.

In a much shabbier reception room dominated by a huge picture of baby elephants, I talk to a handful of Buddhists, who explain why their philosophy is well suited to a locality as diverse as this one. “We should aim at fixing all our thought-moments to one of the four divine attributes: compassion, kindness, equanimity and empathy with others,” says Danny Somaratne, a retired neurosurgeon. “The idea is also to rid our thought-moments of unwholesome things, like attachment, greed, lust, anger.” Sometimes, they say, the monks are called on to mediate in disputes between some of Soho Road’s other ethnic and religious groups: no one says so, but my crude interpretation of this boils down to the idea that Buddhists like everybody.

From other perspectives, though, life is more problematic. Five years ago, there were infamous riots, sparked by rumours – never substantiated – of the alleged gang rape of a teenage Afro-Caribbean girl by South Asian men, to which people still make anxious reference. As if to prove that certain groups here are not quite as in touch with the outside world as some suggest, my prior research includes a handful of occasions on which I put in calls to mosques and gurdwaras, and find nobody who confidently speaks English (a particularly comic highlight: the two minutes I spend trying to persuade one man that rather than wanting to come and dig the garden, I am phoning from the Guardian). And you do not have to try too hard to find locals who depart, albeit cagily, from the standard picture of harmony and mutual acceptance.

At the Soho Road offices of the Sikh Community and Youth Service, I share half an hour with its chairman, 50-year-old Dal Singh Dhesy, who oversees a Citizens Advice Bureau-esque set-up open to people of all faiths, and none. Like so many people here, he uses the word “community” a lot, particularly when he’s musing on how effectively he thinks Soho Road’s social model works.

“It works well with some communities, and some communities are not so good,” he claims. “In schools, there’s a lot of intimidation by the Islamic groups. Before, we used to have a lot of intimidation from Afro-Caribbeans, particularly towards the Sikh community. Racism hits Sikhs first, and everybody else later. We don’t only get racism from the white rightwing or the council estates; we get it from Afro-Caribbeans, and from the Islamists.”

Further down Soho Road, Rev Bryan Scott meets me at the Cannon Street Memorial Baptist Church. His congregation, he tells me, is 99% black, though the history of the church dates back to 1737, and a site in the centre of the city. As proved by portraits of the dozens of men who preceded him, he is the first non-white minister, called to serve here after 20 years as a weapons technician in the RAF.

“Every time I see a mosque or a temple going up,” he says at one point, “I think, ‘That should be a church.’” He unabashedly pines for Britain’s Christian past, and thinks “we’ve gone too far the other way: we’ve tried to accommodate everybody, and we’re pleasing nobody.” When he admiringly mentions David Cameron’s recent speech on the subject, I ask whether he is one of those people who thinks that multiculturalism – whatever that is – might have reached the end of the road.

“Well, it will do eventually, won’t it? One way or the other. One will take over, whether it be the Muslims… [pause] well, something will come to the top. And if Christianity continues to decline, as it’s doing, eventually, whether it’s the Sikhs or the Muslims… once they become dominant, will it be multiculturalism any more?”

But what of the idea celebrated by the likes of Sister Helen, of all the faiths simply rubbing along?

“That’s a nice happy ending, but it won’t finish like that. It can’t.”

Ten or so minutes off Soho Road is Lozells Central Mosque, completed in 2005, and my last port of call. Across the street is a huge branch of the New Testament Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination whose UK HQ is in Northampton. Inside, across two spartan and spotless floors that regularly hold around 2,000 people, classes of youths are being led through the Qur’an. I have an appointment with 30-year-old Asif Khan, the mosque’s secretary, who spends his working day in the welfare department of Birmingham city council.

The mosque, he explains, follows the Sufi path: “the more peaceful, more orthodox aspect of Islam”. When we talk about the textbook dangers of distant, foreign-born imams leaving young Muslims to drift to extremes, he tells me that though the imam was born in Pakistan, his two deputies and 13 other teachers are all British-born. And the local religious mixture? “It works well,” he says. “It’s good.” He makes the obligatory mention of negotiations about parking, and an arrangement with St Mary’s convent whereby newly arrived priests are dispatched to the mosque to improve their understanding of Islam.

We’re eventually joined by the mosque’s chairman: 73-year-old Mohammed Yaseen, who came to Britain when he was 17 to work in a nuts and bolts factory. I mention multiculturalism, and his reply falls somewhere between bathos, and a recognition that small things say a lot: he says he has watched, amazed, as the food his white workmates thought strange has sped to the heart of the British way of life, while Pakistani families queue nightly in chip shops. When I ask him about what I heard at the Sikh Community and Youth Service, he bats away suggestions of tension with the happy impatience of a man who has heard it all. His English is slightly broken, but effortless. “This is not Pakistan, this is not India, this is not Kashmir, this is not Bangladesh,” he insists, waving a hand towards the street outside. “This is England, where all the people live friendly. We are more peaceful, innit?”

• Photographs from Under Gods, by Liz Hingley, published by Dewi Lewis next month at £30. To order a copy for £24, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

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Involved in the trade union movement? | John Harris

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

An anti-cuts march next month will be led by trade unions. Please share your experiences of unions with us

On Saturday 26 March, thousands of people will march through London to protest against the cuts, in a demonstration staged by the organisations who currently sit at the centre of so many news stories: the trade unions. Their supposed decline into irrelevance has been forecast for decades, but they are still here; and in times like these (as I argued in this Comment is free piece) they represent by far the strongest source of opposition to the government – which may be why the coalition is considering fresh anti-union legislation.

With all that in mind, we want to focus our next Anywhere but Westminster film and article on the unions’ grassroots: the shop stewards, reps and officials who see to things well away from the attentions of the media, and often have a clear understanding of where Britain is heading. A good example: this week, David Cameron has announced plans to outsource and privatise just about every conceivable part of the public sector – a direction of travel with which thousands of union activists have been familiar for years.

So, an appeal for testimony and information. Are you a trade union activist? Are you trying to form a union in your workplace? Are you involved in a dispute or grievance with your employer (whether public or private) that says something about the role unions play in the economy and society, and why millions of people would be lost without them? Or are you dissatisfied with your trade union and think it needs reform in some way? If so, we’d like to hear from you, either via the thread below, or at anywherebutwestminster@gmail.com.

Obviously, we expect the cuts to loom large here, but we’re equally interested in other issues that might be at stake.

John Domokos and I will be checking the thread and posting at regular intervals. Now, over to you …

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The alcohol and the ecstasy: prejudice drowns out sense | John Harris

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

The government’s rank relationship with the drinks industry contributes to a twisted logic that contorts policy on intoxicants

Time, then, for another row about Britain’s alcohol policy. In case you missed it, the government announced a new minimum-pricing regime that was meant to indicate a new drive against problem drinking, but instead proved that Westminster and Whitehall are as in thrall to the brewing industry as ever. Now, three academics have used a piece in the Lancet to damn these plans as “inconsequential” and accuse ministers of lacking “clear aspiration to reduce the impact of cheap, readily available and heavily marketed alcohol on individuals and society”. This is, of course, a howling understatement.

In support of their case, they cite the fact that the UK’s death rate from liver disease is twice the figure of 25 years ago, and double that of – sobering, this one – Australia. At our current rate of increase, there will be 9,000 extra such deaths in the next 10 years – and in total, deaths traceable to alcohol between now and 2021 are likely to come in at between 160,000 and 250,000. Meanwhile, the price of booze relative to incomes sits at an all-time low, and the report’s authors thus make the kind of claim that while stating the obvious is still repeated as if it were hotly controversial: “UK drinks producers and retailers are reliant on people risking their health to provide profit.”

This is what the conversation about alcohol abuse is like: the low hum of the incontrovertibly true endlessly drowned out by the delusional pronouncements of the booze industry.

Another example: in today’s coverage of the Lancet report, there has been much mention of a study by people at the University Of Sheffield, commissioned by the last government – in which sizable amounts of public money were spent to prove that if the price of alcohol went up (no, really), we would drink less. Putting a floor on alcohol pricing of 50p per unit, the research suggested, would save 3,000 lives a year – and the suggestion was duly endorsed by the chief medical officer and the Association of Chief Police Officers. But so what? The alcohol conglomerates then lobbied like hell, and if anyone hoped the 45p minimum mooted by the SNP government in Scotland might point the way ahead, even that modest proposal quickly wilted (here, the industry was truly brazen: when provisions for minimum pricing were removed from the relevant legislation, opposition MSPs all received a crate of ale from SAB Miller, the producers of Peroni, Pilsner Urquell and Grolsch).

So on and on we go: my local corner shop is doing three bottles of Californian plonk for £10, a slab of lager at the local supermarket costs much the same, and from a pessimistic perspective, the national condition often threatens to come down to a mixture of anger, violence and slurred speech. This is not, just to make it clear, to deny that booze is a pleasant and useful drug, or that it is as central to our national culture as sarcasm and bad weather – but merely to point out that its problematic aspects are becoming unavoidable, and that there is something truly rank about the cuddly relationship between its producers and the government.

Meanwhile, another recent spate of headlines point up the screwed-up logic that so contorts official attitudes to intoxicants, and our use of them. I’ll quote from the Observer’s coverage:

“There is no evidence that ecstasy causes brain damage, according to one of the largest studies into the effects of the drug. Too many previous studies made over-arching conclusions from insufficient data, say the scientists responsible for the research, and the drug’s dangers have been greatly exaggerated.”

Against the sound of millions of people emitting a massed sigh of relief, that story closed with a quote from one of the study’s authors:

“Ecstasy consumption is dangerous because illegally made pills often contain contaminants that can have harmful side-effects.”

In other words, the very different approaches to E and alcohol represent prejudice frozen into policy – which, while cirrhosis and the rest run rampant, looks titanically unlikely to change. The conclusion is unavoidable: at some point in the distant future, people will look back and think us quite, quite mad.

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The alcohol and the ecstasy: prejudice drowns out sense

Monday, February 21st, 2011

The government’s rank relationship with the drinks industry contributes to a twisted logic that contorts policy on intoxicants

Time, then, for another row about Britain’s alcohol policy. In case you missed it, the government announced a new minimum-pricing regime that was meant to indicate a new drive against problem drinking, but instead proved that Westminster and Whitehall are as in thrall to the brewing industry as ever. Now, three academics have used a piece in the Lancet to damn these plans as “inconsequential” and accuse ministers of lacking “clear aspiration to reduce the impact of cheap, readily available and heavily marketed alcohol on individuals and society”. This is, of course, a howling understatement.

In support of their case, they cite the fact that the UK’s death rate from liver disease is twice the figure of 25 years ago, and double that of – sobering, this one – Australia. At our current rate of increase, there will be 9,000 extra such deaths in the next 10 years – and in total, deaths traceable to alcohol between now and 2021 are likely to come in at between 160,000 and 250,000. Meanwhile, the price of booze relative to incomes sits at an all-time low, and the report’s authors thus make the kind of claim that while stating the obvious is still repeated as if it were hotly controversial: “UK drinks producers and retailers are reliant on people risking their health to provide profit.”

This is what the conversation about alcohol abuse is like: the low hum of the incontrovertibly true endlessly drowned out by the delusional pronouncements of the booze industry.

Another example: in today’s coverage of the Lancet report, there has been much mention of a study by people at the University Of Sheffield, commissioned by the last government – in which sizable amounts of public money were spent to prove that if the price of alcohol went up (no, really), we would drink less. Putting a floor on alcohol pricing of 50p per unit, the research suggested, would save 3,000 lives a year – and the suggestion was duly endorsed by the chief medical officer and the Association of Chief Police Officers. But so what? The alcohol conglomerates then lobbied like hell, and if anyone hoped the 45p minimum mooted by the SNP government in Scotland might point the way ahead, even that modest proposal quickly wilted (here, the industry was truly brazen: when provisions for minimum pricing were removed from the relevant legislation, opposition MSPs all received a crate of ale from SAB Miller, the producers of Peroni, Pilsner Urquell and Grolsch).

So on and on we go: my local corner shop is doing three bottles of Californian plonk for £10, a slab of lager at the local supermarket costs much the same, and from a pessimistic perspective, the national condition often threatens to come down to a mixture of anger, violence and slurred speech. This is not, just to make it clear, to deny that booze is a pleasant and useful drug, or that it is as central to our national culture as sarcasm and bad weather – but merely to point out that its problematic aspects are becoming unavoidable, and that there is something truly rank about the cuddly relationship between its producers and the government.

Meanwhile, another recent spate of headlines point up the screwed-up logic that so contorts official attitudes to intoxicants, and our use of them. I’ll quote from the Observer’s coverage:

“There is no evidence that ecstasy causes brain damage, according to one of the largest studies into the effects of the drug. Too many previous studies made over-arching conclusions from insufficient data, say the scientists responsible for the research, and the drug’s dangers have been greatly exaggerated.”

Against the sound of millions of people emitting a massed sigh of relief, that story closed with a quote from one of the study’s authors:

“Ecstasy consumption is dangerous because illegally made pills often contain contaminants that can have harmful side-effects.”

In other words, the very different approaches to E and alcohol represent prejudice frozen into policy – which, while cirrhosis and the rest run rampant, looks titanically unlikely to change. The conclusion is unavoidable: at some point in the distant future, people will look back and think us quite, quite mad.

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