28 Friday March 18 2022 | the timesComment
(official nickname: the Sunshine
State) who thinks it’s crazy that the
time change has been going on since- “One has to ask themselves
after a while: why do we keep doing
it?” he asked.
The bipartisan bill still awaits
passage in the House of
Representatives, but it has prompted
me to ask: yes, why do we still do it?
Surely there’s enough doom and
gloom without continuing to inflict
those awful dark January
afternoons on ourselves. Is it, tick
tock, time for a change here too?
1970s’ new platform
I
consider myself a child of
the Seventies, which
has always been
wildly uncool. It’s the
kids from the Sixties
who invariably get
all the good press,
what with the
flowers in their
hair, the peace
marches, the
Moon
landing,
the sex,
drugs
and
rock’n’roll. What are the
Seventies famous for?
Perhaps the colour
brown? Or streaking? But also, most
certainly, anxiety. No one expectedto grow up calm and contented in a
world were MAD (if you don’t know
what it means, you weren’t there)
was a serious possibility.
We grew up reading about nuclear
weapons, queueing for petrol and an
economy that always seemed a bit
ropey. I came to the UK
in 1979 and found a
country embraced by
gloom. As a new Cold
War and energy crisis
loom, even fashion
seems determinedly
Seventies. There’s a
skirt now so short
it’s called a skelt
(skirt and belt in
one). Then there’s
platform heels.
Terrible idea then —
and now.Bad form
S
o farewell, then,
Passenger Locator
Form, which has
been scrapped as of today.
Devised by bureaucrats
for bureaucrats.
Infuriating to fill out
and often difficult to
retrieve to show
people with
clipboards in
airports. It was
never — EVER — read by
anyone. Now they never will be.T
here is a lot of serious news
in the world right now,
which may explain why I
have become obsessed with
a story from America that
is seismic but not traumatic.
Unbelievably US senators, who these
days could not agree on how to tie a
shoe (if shoes were still tied), have
voted to scrap changing the clocks
twice a year. Yes! And it was
unanimous.
It happened this week, just days
after the time change in the States,
which comes earlier than ours. “A
Groggy Senate Approves Making
Daylight Savings Permanent,”
reported The New York Times.
Senators were apparently “groggy”
after losing one hour of sleep over
the weekend. Honestly. Wuss
Central.
It’s called the Sunshine Protection
Act (of course it is) and it is
championed by the Republican
Marco Rubio of the state of FloridaDirty money cost us something more precious
The ‘London laundry’ washing tainted riches undermines our reputation and diplomatic clout
pride, no Briton ever stood up in
public to defend our bankers. The use
of “banker” in rhyming slang is all
you need to know about the country’s
attitude to its principal industry.
Being ashamed of the way we earn
our living is bad for morale, and
hurts us in more tangible ways. The
government is disinclined to stand
up for our principal business: when
negotiating the Brexit withdrawal
deal, politicians obsessed over fishing
and left financial services out in the
cold. Young people with social
consciences don’t want to go into it.
Tainted money makes us think
worse of our politicians. Although
foreigners cannot donate to political
parties, getting British citizenship is
not hard if you’ve got enough cash,
and the financiers who make their
fortunes, at least in part, from
tainted money are among the
Conservative Party’s wealthy donors.
The contribution this cash makes to
politics helps explain the reluctance
of governments to scrutinise the
sources of foreign money. The rules
are porous and enforcement,
fragmented between 26 agencies and
thinly resourced, is weak.
The Ukraine crisis has jolted the
government. It is suddenly keen to
scrutinise money arriving from
overseas. The Economic Crime
(Transparency and Enforcement)
Act, which has been hurried through
parliament having sat on the shelf
for years, leaves plenty of loopholes
and does nothing to strengthen
enforcement. If Boris Johnson’s boast
of “the largest and most severe
package of economic sanctions that
Russia has ever seen” is to mean
anything, that needs to change.and frustration” at Britain’s tolerance
for the spoils of corruption.
But tainted money has hurt us too.
It has damaged Britain’s reputation
internationally. We like to think of
ourselves as upstanding global
citizens, and in some ways we are.
We’re unusually generous with
foreign aid and we pay our way in
Nato. But the “London laundry”
undermines our diplomatic clout. It’s
hard to lecture kleptocrats when
you’re providing the nest they’re
feathering.
Tainted money has also deepened
the division between the capital and
the rest of the country. That mutual
hostility is not new. Two centuries
ago, William Cobbett, radical
pamphleteer and champion of rural
England, called London “the great
wen”, a cyst on the face of the nation.
Nor is the division between city and
countryside particular to Britain:
America’s urban coastlines and its
“flyover country” have little respect
for each other. But London’s
particular association with tainted
money deepens the provinces’
disdain for the capital.
While tainted money has enriched
the capital, it has also hurt it. Buying
property is a good way of laundering
money, and London’s houses and flats
serve as safe-deposit boxes for those
who fear their compatriots may come
after their assets. That has helped
push property prices beyond the
reach of anybody doing a modest job.
Tainted money has also
undermined Britain’s self-respect. Just
as engineering dominates Germany’s
economy, so financial services
dominate ours. Yet while Germany’s
Mittelstand is a source of national‘P
roviding luxury lifestyle
management services to
Russia’s elite,” as the
website of
Quintessentially, a
“concierge” company, offered to do
until a fortnight ago, is neither illegal
nor unusual. The purveyor of said
services, Ben Elliot, co-founder of
Quintessentially, co-chairman of the
Conservative Party and nephew to
the wife of the heir to the throne, is
in much the same business as many
smart-suited, well-paid Londoners.
But the fact that a generous slice of
the British elite has made its living
from the spoils of autocracy for
much of the past half-century has
not been good for this country.
I’m no enthusiast for pulling up
drawbridges. We’re a trading nation
and we need to go on being the
“global Britain” Boris Johnson bangs
on about. My colleague Danny
Finkelstein argued this week that we
were right to welcome oligarch
money, that it gave us leverage
against Putin, forcing rich Russians
to choose between autocracy and
freedom. I’m with him that we
should have a bias towards openness,
albeit tempered by vigilance. But I
think he’s overoptimistic in saying
“we will rub off on other less open
countries more than they will rub off
on us”. I fear the tainted money we
have serviced has left a stain on us.We will never know how much of
the money sloshing around our
financial system was illegally or
immorally acquired, for we welcome
allcomers, no questions asked, as
long as their wallets are fat and their
cheque books open. All we know is
that London has become the favoured
destination for the ruling elites in
autocracies in the former Soviet
Union, Asia and Africa. Some of their
money is clean as a whistle. Some, for
instance the cash ripped off from the
state in the chaos after the collapse of
the Soviet Union, is morally dubious.
And some is the proceeds of crime.
It wasn’t an accident that Britain
got into the business of servicing
tainted money. As Oliver Bulloughexplains in his powerful new book,
Butler to the World, our financial
services industry collectively chose
this niche because it offered a way of
propping up the pound, and thus the
City, in the aftermath of Suez.
Politicians have encouraged this
trend by resisting pressure from
campaigners to force investors to
disclose the source of their wealth.
Scrutiny would be bad for business.
The principal victims of the
“London laundry” live elsewhere. By
allowing corrupt politicians to siphon
money out of their home countries,
Britain has made it harder for their
compatriots to hold them to account.
Early in the Ukraine crisis, the US
State Department expressed “dismayWe lecture kleptocrats
while providing the
nest they’re feathering
Magical garden
I
visited Great Dixter in East Sussex
for a garden workshop and, for one
glorious day, escaped from the
world as it is. The house, designed by
Lutyens, is stunning but it is the
garden that is pure magic: even at this
time of year it sprouts piles of giant
fennel that look like a gathering of
the Cousin Itt appreciation society,
swathes of diminutive daffodils and
profusions of tiny white spiraea
flowers. Dixter has to be up there
with Sissinghurst and Chatsworth as
among the best gardens in the world.Refugee guilt
A
dmission: We are not going to
apply to house a Ukrainian
refugee. There, it’s been said.
Feeling guilty but, also, pleased that
so many others are.Decline and fall
W
ord of the week is
“cerebrotonic”, which refers
to someone who is
introverted, shy, restrained. It was
found in The Fall of Rome, a poem by
Auden, who has become something
of a social media star because he
writes so well about war and, in this
case, the way great civilisations break
down. Good word, great poem.Ann Treneman Notebook
It’s time to
stop all this
changing of
the clocks
@anntrenemanThe Lebedevs are
freedom fighters,
not Kremlin cronies
Dmitry Muratov
T
he current narrative about
the Lebedev family in the
British press is unfair and
inaccurate. Novaya Gazeta,
one of the last bastions of
free speech in Russia, survives
thanks to the Lebedevs, who took
great risks to keep it alive. My work
at Novaya Gazeta was recognised
when I won the Nobel peace prize
last year on behalf of the newspaper.
Novaya Gazeta would not have
survived if Alexander Lebedev hadn’t
financed it. The paper was set up in
1993 thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev,
who used funds from his Nobel
peace prize to do so. It has enabled
me and countless others to report on
contentious topics for decades.
Despite this, there was hardly any
money. Salaries would sometimes go
unpaid and there were serious
questions about whether we could
continue. Alexander began
supporting Novaya Gazeta after the
assassination of Anna Politkovskaya
in 2006. The paper was at risk of
folding and, entirely disheartened, I
considered letting it close. It was only
after the intervention of Alexander, a
great friend of Anna, and Gorbachev
that we decided to continue.
Between 2000 and 2021, six of our
journalists were killed. One must
only look at their tragic fates to
understand the risk for anyone who
associates themselves with the paper.
Therefore it is absurd to me, and to
other independent reporters in
Russia, that Alexander is
characterised as a security risk for
anyone abroad. He is someone who
stood up for opposition media, even
when it came at serious personal cost.
The Lebedevs have supported
independent journalism, competitive
politics and transparent corporate
governance. Why, when Alexander
tried to become mayor of Sochi, was
he disqualified, considered an
unpalatable candidate? Why, when
he was a shareholder of Aeroflot, did
he put Alexei Navalny, the outspoken
critic of the Kremlin, on the board?
The Lebedevs do not pose a security
risk to the UK, and focusing on them
is misguided. The focus must shift to
the real crooks, supporters of the
Kremlin hiding in plain sight in
Knightsbridge, or perhaps Chelsea; the
ones we have been trying to report
on for years. These thieves stole from
the Russian state and then settled in
luxurious townhouses, surrounded by
an army of PR people, lawyers and
estate agents who all enabled them
to sequester their ill-gotten riches.
They are who your government
and courts should be pursuing. If the
people of Britain truly care about a
free and independent press, about
democracy and freedom of speech,
they should not hunt down those
who have fought brave battles to
uphold these values. The Lebedevs
are not your enemy.Dmitry Muratov is editor of Novaya
Gazeta and a Nobel peace laureateEmma
Duncan