Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 19:21 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Wednesday 7 August 2019
2
University showed that the share of UK
income going to the top 0.1% is now at its
second-highest in history , not far off where
it was at the time of the great banking crash. While the
rest of us enter our second lost decade of wage growth,
those right at the top enjoy bounties. What was it Dick
Van Dyke promised? “You can dance on the breeze /
Over houses and trees.”
Pull back your lens and the entire top 1% of earners
are just as concentrated. The IFS analysis shows that,
at the start of the millennium, half of the 1% lived in 78
out of 650 parliamentary constituencies. That has now
dropped to just 65 seats, the overwhelming majority in
London and the south-east.
This isn’t a story of the capital versus the rest. Among
the parliamentary seats with the highest concentration
of top earners is Hornsey and Wood Green in north
London: it butts right up against Edmonton, where I was
born and raised and which today suff ers some of the
worst deprivation in the UK, and sees none of the power
and glory of the global metropolis.
At heart, this is about how relatively few people in
a small cluster of professions and industries, living in
a tiny number of neighbourhoods, are enjoying riches
beyond belief. And all this while wages for the median
worker barely rise, and the schools and hospitals and
libraries and parks on which the rest of us depend are
run down to breaking point.
And this, mark you, is without factoring in wealth.
Indeed, what’s striking about the super-rich is how little
we know about them – including how much they really
earn. Those at the bottom, on the other hand – well, we
intrude on their lives all the time. We interrogate that
asylum seeker for graphic detail on how she was raped,
or that benefi ts claimant for why he’d spent that amount
of money on seeing his family.W
hatever the critics might
allege, Jeremy Corbyn’s
complaints about a rigged
economy aren’t populism at
all; they are a fundamentally
accurate depiction of a
vastly unpopular system.
And until it is dealt with,
the chaos that Britain is now in will not go away. Real
material grievances sparked the vote to leave, and they
make the chess-playing indulged in by the politicians
and pundits (national unity! Cross-party alliances!)
look just that – indulgent.
Instead, we are now run by the chief wealth apologist
of our times. The man now buff ooning around No 10 not
so long ago claimed that “ a pound spent in Croydon is
of far more value ... than a pound spent in Strathclyde”.
When overlord of City Hall, he rejoiced that “London
is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the
orangutan. It is their natural habitat. ”
And his government is about to follow the same
trickle-down economics that got Britain to this political
and economic dead end. His trade secretary, Liz
Truss, jaunts off to America on fact-fi nding trips about
Reaganomics when the best bit of research she could
read on that grotesque failure comes from researchers
at the IMF, who found that the more money goes to
the rich in any country, the slower an economy grows.
They concluded: “ The benefi ts do not trickle down. In
contrast, an increase in the income share of the poor is
associated with higher GDP growth.”
A few weeks before the 2016 Brexit referendum, I
spent a morning at Newport’s Covered Market. So bored
did I get with the number of people telling me they were
voting to leave that I started asking a supplementary
question: do you consider yourself a winner or a loser?
It was a deliberately vague question. A winner how? A
loser to whom? But the thing that struck me was how
many of the leavers instantly told a complete stranger
that they were losers. And they knew who the winners
were: those refugees on the other side of the city ; the
neighbour who’d got a cushy number on benefi ts.
Well, it turns out that we’re all losers – but instead
of looking down or across at those getting ahead, we
should really have been looking up. “Up through the
atmosphere! / Up where the air is clear!”The warning signs were there. Hindu nationalists have
long desired to end the semi-autonomous status of
Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state; the ruling
Bharatiya Janata party has long said it would do so.
Suspicions rose when thousands more security forces
poured in around a week ago, and when pilgrims and
tourists were ordered out , supposedly due to fears of
a terrorist attack.
Yet the revocation and decision to split the state in
two – creating two centrally administered territories in
its place – is shocking and perilous. Several legal experts
believe it unconstitutional too. Its abrupt and ruthless
manner, with the house arrest of well-known politicians ,
imposition of a curfew and blackout of the internet and
phone lines, will likely lead to protests and infl ame
the resentment which has underpinned an insurgency
which has cost tens of thousands of lives. Though it
has ebbed since its horrifi c peak two decades ago, the
violence has crept up again more recently: 2018 was the
bloodiest year for a decade. In February, Pakistan-based
Jaish-e-Mohammed killed more than 40 soldiers in a
suicide car bombing – the deadliest attack on Indian
forces there for decades. The youth of the population,
in many cases too young to remember the full cost of
the confl ict in the 1990s, gives cause for worry.
The broader reverberations in an unstable region
are as worrying. Pakistan has already condemned New
Delhi’s move and said it will “go to any extent” to protect
Kashmiris. The two nuclear-armed neighbours have long
been at odds – and at times at war – over the disputedThe Boris Johnson government and the European
Union loathe each other. They are far apart about Brexit.
There is no secret about any of that. This week, though,
they have also got themselves into a confrontation
over whether they can even talk to one another about
Brexit. That squabbling continued yesterday. It should
be seen for what it is, a second-order procedural dispute.
The two sides should try to move on, because the
consequences of not talking will be serious, and not
just for Britain, the principal culprit.
It is possible the row is simply for show. In its
determination to leave by 31 October, the Johnson
government has already practically embraced a no-deal
Brexit. It knows it must sound open to talks. But it
absolutely does not want to be trapped in the kind of
manoeuvres that strangled the life out of Theresa May’s
government. Talks are generally more popular with the
public than no talks. Parliament is opposed to no deal.
But talks that produced a new compromise could threaten
the cohesion both of the UK government and of the
painstakingly unifi ed EU 27. Neither side is eager for that.
Both sides behave as if there is no room for manoeuvre
between them. But the slide of the pound and a surge
in support for Scottish independence are among recent
reminders of how much is at stake elsewhere. Even Mr
Johnson must know that optimistic rhetoric may not be
enough to stave off recession and keep the UK together.
And the risks of no deal are not confi ned to the UK but
to signifi cant parts of the EU, notably Ireland. Even the
Johnson government still claims to want a deal. So doesHimalayan region; Bill Clinton once described the
ceasefi re line as the most dangerous place in the
world. China, which also has a territorial dispute,
declared India’s actions unacceptable and void.
The US has been critical in defusing previous crises
in the past. But it is harder to place faith in the Trump
administration – and Washington is unlikely to be
overly interested in the plight of Kashmiris unless
the regional peace looks threatened.
Seven decades ago, independence and partition
posed Kashmir the choice between two nations.
When its ruler agreed to accede to India, New Delhi
guaranteed it autonomy except in matters such as
foreign aff airs and defence. In reality, that has been
eroded over the years. A violent insurgency, partly
fuelled by Pakistan, was brutally repressed with
severe human rights violations. The scrapping of
article 370 is in large part symbolic – but nonetheless
hazardous for that. Lifting restraints on the purchase
of land and permanent settlement by outsiders is
almost as infl ammatory: many fear a consequent
demographic shift.
India’s secularists saw Kashmir’s status as the proof
of India’s strength as a multifaith nation. But May’s
second landslide victory for the BJP has given Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, in power since 2014, free rein
to realise his Hindu nationalist vision. Some experts
think Donald Trump’s off er to mediate in the dispute
with Pakistan and progress in Afghanistan peace talks
may have also played a part. Mr Modi and his allies
understand how provocative this move is: why else
impose this lockdown? They say these changes will
support progress and development in Kashmir. It has
already earned the applause of the Hindu heartlands.
In recent years, many Kashmiris have rejected
separatism and the majority have placed their
faith in mainstream politics. Yet Delhi has cut off
communications, locked down the region and put
politicians under house arrest. The consequences
are likely to be grave.the EU. They should thus fi nd a way of holding the
talks they each say they want to hold but which each
claims the other is making impossible.
Both sides are trying to get the other to blink fi rst.
Downing Street said yesterday that Mr Johnson
“wants to meet EU leaders and negotiate a new deal ”.
At more or less the same time the EU said it wants
to talk “should the UK wish to clarify its position
in more detail ”. The Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar,
off ered another formulation. “Our position is that
the withdrawal agreement including the backstop
is closed. But there is always room for talks and
negotiations,” he said in Northern Ireland.
There are very diff erent approaches here, as well as
very diff erent goals. Yet if such words have meaning,
they mean the two sides want talks that could save
them from no deal. It is not necessarily true that these
would be doomed to fail. Mr Johnson says the EU
must drop the Northern Ireland backstop from the
withdrawal agreement. The EU says the withdrawal
agreement, including the Irish backstop, is not going
to change. In this hall of diplomatic mirrors, that
leaves some room for discussion about timing and
implementation. It should surely be taken.
The question underlying all of this for Mr Johnson
is whether there is some formulation on the backstop
that the EU is prepared to make, that can keep his
party together, win a majority in parliament and
enable him to claim a breakthrough that provides
a springboard for an election win that dishes the
Brexit party. That is a very big ask, especially
under the pressure of the 31 October deadline.
Many suspect that Mr Johnson has already decided
it is unachievable in the time remaining. But it may
all the same be a less fraught route to his risk-laden
goals than allowing a crash-out from the EU that
rallies the remainers to take their revenge and whose
consequences in the food industry and on the petrol
station forecourts frighten public opinion in ways to
which his bullish bombast proves wholly unequal. Continued from frontIf Boris Johnson is serious
about wanting a deal,
he must talk to EU leaders
Brexit
India and Pakistan
The lockdown in Kashmir
shows the BJP knows that
this change is dangerous
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53 ,793
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
The super-rich have turned
Britain into a nation of losers
Aditya Chakrabortty
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