Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s  reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

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But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the  Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

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Blakeway receives a lot of complaints. More than one in six people in England live in social rentals (compared to fewer than one in twenty in Australia). That’s about four million households, and Blakeway’s office is the place to go if they have a beef with their landlords, whether those institutions are not-for profit housing associations or local councils.

In 2022–23, the ombudsman made 6590 orders and recommendations designed to make things right for residents, including £1.1 million (A$2.1 million) in compensation. The call on Blakeway’s services is escalating at a phenomenal rate. “This financial year we’re up 91 per cent for formal investigations,” he tells me in an online interview. “We’re trending towards 10,000 formal investigations a year.”

Demand will grow even faster if the ombudsman is empowered to extend its services to another 4.4 million households in the private rental market, a change Blakeway would welcome. Most private tenants can’t currently access the free, independent, impartial redress his office provides, but a Renters Reform Bill could make his office the single venue for managing conflicts without the need to go to court.

Blakeway took up his role in 2019. His previous experience included serving as London’s deputy mayor for housing (when Boris Johnson was mayor) and as a director of the government housing agency, Homes England. Answering my questions, he is thoughtful and considered, and not prone to strong statements. In official verdicts on the failures of social housing providers, though, he is more direct.

Last July, for instance, he delivered a scathing judgement on the consistent failings of London’s largest social landlord, L&Q, which provides homes to a quarter of a million people. He found L&Q demonstrated little empathy in responding to residents’ complaints and in some cases was overtly dismissive, heavy-handed and lacking in respect. He ordered the organisation to pay £142,000 in compensation and apply 500 remedies including apologies and repairs. He has been equally critical of other big housing providers.

Resolving individual cases, though, only achieves so much. In a new report analysing complaints by vulnerable tenants, the ombudsman identifies patterns of landlord failure around attitudes, respect and rights. A fundamental reset is needed, he writes, and a royal commission into housing and health is the way to do it.

Remarkably, the ombudsman reaches back to the 1880s for inspiration. The Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes was, he writes, the “only inquiry of its kind to explore the relationship between housing and public health.” The commission was set up in 1884 by Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, who appointed himself — along with the Prince of Wales, former union leader Henry Broadhurst and several others — as one of its its members.

Salisbury believed that government-sponsored housing initiatives were vital to improve morality and health — a view criticised by the Manchester Guardian, among others, which described it as “state socialism pure and simple.” Despite the critics, the commission’s report produced “an explosion of transformative government-backed interventions, from council homes to garden suburbs.”

Britain’s subsequent tradition of regarding housing as a health issue saw significant housing developments led by health ministries. The ambitious 1919 Housing Act, for instance, which made housing a national responsibility, is generally called the Addison Act in reference to Dr Christopher Addison, the health minister who introduced it. After the second world war, Labour’s health minister Anuerin Bevan not only created the National Health Service but also, as minister responsible for housing, oversaw the construction of more than a million new dwellings in five years.

Public inquiries like Britain’s 1884 commission have also played an important role in Australia. Most notable is the Commonwealth Housing Commission initiated by postwar reconstruction minister Ben Chifley in 1943. Its report concluded that “a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need, but the right of every citizen” and recommended that the national government “sponsor a government-financed housing programme.”

Up to that point, federal engagement in what was seen as a state issue had been limited. The commission provided the impetus for Commonwealth–state housing agreements over subsequent decades. While the scale of its ambition was never realised, more than 14 per cent of dwellings completed nationally between the end of the war and 1956 were built as public housing.

Richard Blakeway’s call for a royal commission “to reimagine the future of social housing” in the twenty-first century echoes similar calls in Australia. A 2021 report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre argued for a royal commission to tackle “the scale and complexity” of the housing problem. More recently, the Centre for Equitable Housing urged the federal government to review its many and disparate housing-related outlays and bring them together in a single portfolio with clear objectives.

But both England and Australia are awash in reports from a succession of inquiries and housing research. Is the problem really a lack of data? Or is it a lack of political will?

One barrier in both countries is a basic disagreement about how to move forward. Proponents of the supply side argument say planning restrictions are limiting home building, driving up prices and rents. For them, the solution lies in looser planning and zoning rules to free up private development. Build more housing and rents will fall.

The contrary position is that market players have no incentive to build the type of homes that low-income earners can afford, especially when the tax system encourages investment in housing as an asset rather than a public good. The corollary of this critique is that government must reform taxation to reduce speculation and invest more public funds in low-rent housing.

These views are not mutually contradictory, and some action is happening on both fronts, but the supply-side argument seems to hold more sway with governments in both countries. In its 2019 election manifesto, Britain’s Conservative Party promised that it would lift residential construction to make sure 300,000 new homes are built annually in England. As parliament approaches the end of its term, completions are falling short of that figure, with about 234,000 new dwellings added to the housing stock in each of last two financial years. In a new initiative, secretary of state Michael Gove hopes to turbocharge development by compelling councils to speed up approvals for home building on former industrial or “brownfield” sites.

In Australia, the Albanese government aspires to deliver 1.2 million homes over five years, spurred by incentives to streamline planning and zoning rules at state and local levels. To hit this target developers would need to increase construction from 40,000 to 60,000 dwellings per quarter. Expert observers like Alan Kohler doubt the industry can build at such an unprecedented rate, particularly in current market conditions.

Investment in social housing has surged in Australia thanks to federal Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund, or HAFF, and renewed state government initiatives. But after decades of neglect these projects won’t be enough to put roofs over the heads of Australians with unmet housing needs, including the 175,000 households on state and territory waiting lists for social housing.

In England, almost 1.3 million households are waiting for social housing, a dire statistic that manifests in clusters of tents pitched on the pavements of central London. In some parts of the city, more than one in ten children and teenagers live in temporary accommodation and are effectively homeless.

The Tory government says it has invested £11.5 billion since being elected to fund an affordable homes programme. It has just doubled a low-cost loan scheme from £3 billion to £6 billion to enable providers to build an extra 20,000 dwellings.

Historically, though, these numbers appear modest. In the thirty-five years after the second world war, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million dwellings; by 1981 almost a third of the English population lived in social housing. The share has halved in the decades since, not because demand has fallen but because there are far fewer socially provided homes. This month, the magazine Inside Housing reported that the number sold or demolished in England last year was nearly three times greater than the number completed.

An alliance of England’s largest housing associations has urged Michael Gove to invest £15 billion annually over the next decade to build 90,000 homes a year, a third of them in London. But having just lost two seats to Labour in recent by-elections and facing a wipe-out at the next election, prime minister Rishi Sunak is more inclined to woo voters by cutting taxes than by investing billions in public services.

Labour, meanwhile, is playing a cautious hand. It has promised the “biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation” but not the funding to match. Anxious to appear economically responsible, Labour has just scaled back the £28 billion green investment plan that was to be a central plank of its election manifesto. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, a big spend on housing looks unlikely.

As waiting lists for social housing grow, tenants lucky enough to have a subsidised roof over their heads can still find themselves in dire circumstances, reminiscent of the conditions that gave rise to Britain’s first housing inquiry in the 1880s.

In December 2020, in a case that’s become emblematic of the problem, two-year old Awaab Ishak died from a severe respiratory condition caused by persistent mould in the council home his family rented in Rochdale north of Manchester. Mould — one of the systemic problems identified in the ombudsman’s files — is also recognised as a major health threat to tenants in Australia.

Awaab’s parents had been complaining about the mould since 2017 but the local authority failed to act, saying the problem was caused by the family’s “lifestyle.” The ombudsman found many cases of social landlords adopting an accusatory approach rather than investigating other possible causes.

“Health and housing are closely aligned,” says Blakeway, “but the system doesn’t necessarily respond in that integrated way. There’s a real risk that complaints are treated in a kind of transactional way or become personalised. The risk is that they are treated in isolation, and you lose thematic qualities that complaints have, or you don’t do a root cause analysis.”

One housing worker told the ombudsman that tenants who challenge providers are “seen as troublemakers to be quashed.” This view gels with management’s dismissive response to Grenfell Tower residents who warned of urgent fire safety problems ahead of the 2017 inferno that killed seventy-two people.

Community outrage at Awaab’s death has prompted Michael Gove, the minister responsible for housing, to include Awaab’s Law in a new Social Housing Regulation Act. Landlords will now be required “to investigate and fix reported health hazards within specified timeframe.” But whether local authorities and housing associations have the resources to make quick repairs is another question.

More than one in ten dwellings in the social rented sector fail to live up to the Decent Homes Standard, the government benchmark for minimum housing conditions. And the English Housing Survey found that almost two-thirds of tenants who complain to their landlords are not happy with the response.

Tenants told the ombudsman that social landlords were quick to inform them about increased rents and service charges but poor in communicating about all other matters. Not surprisingly, this created a perception that social housing providers are “only interested in money, rather than the condition of their homes or the landlord/tenant relationship.”

An expert panel concluded that communication between tenants and their social landlords is hampered by the high turnover of stressed frontline housing workers. The panel’s Better Housing Review also found that tenants lack a strong voice and face-to-face contact with staff. Blakeway’s research confirms this finding: residents told his office that a simple knock at the door can help to maintain and improve the landlord/tenant relationship.

Funding shortfalls undoubtedly underpin these problems, and the housing crisis has been compounded by the perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, higher interest rates, labour shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. But Blakeway sees other factors at play too.

With around 2000 councils and not-for-profit associations providing social housing in England, a great variability is inevitable. Understandably, the providers’ focus has been on increasing housing supply, but Blakeway says that’s rarely balanced by consideration of what to do about ageing houses and flats in urgent need of upgrades.

He believes that providers hold to a fixed view that social housing is better than any alternative on offer to low-income tenants in the private rental market, which leads them to neglect residents’ needs.

Then there are long-term societal shifts. “If nothing else had changed,” says Blakeway, “the current population in social housing would have got older, above the national average.” That means more vulnerable residents, often concentrated coastal and rural areas.

Housing providers need to think about how to respond says Blakeway: “What does that mean for our services, for adaptations, for understanding of issues like dementia?”

This demographic transition has coincided with residents’ growing understanding of what they can demand under recent human rights, equality and care legislation. The ombudsman says housing providers haven’t done enough to modify residents’ homes in line with these laws. This has been exacerbated by cuts to other government supports. “Social landlords will very clearly say that they feel like they become a surrogate for social and health services,” says Blakeway. “That’s because they are one of the most visible and immediate touch points.”

To survive financially, housing associations are also compelled to become savvy commercial operators. Torus, for instance, claims not only to be the largest affordable housing provider in northwest England, but also “one of its biggest and fastest-growing developers and commercial contractors.” One Housing describes itself as “a group of complementary businesses driven by a clear social purpose, with a charitable housing association at its core.” Alongside social and affordable housing, it offers homes for private rent and private sale.

A lack of funding has forced providers to sweat their assets, a strategy the Better Housing Review panel said “is fast reaching its limits.” The expert panel worried that commercial considerations are distracting providers from their core purpose of providing “decent, safe homes for those who can’t afford the market.” It warns that mergers to achieve economies of scale run the risk of “working to KPIs more related to business efficiency” rather than “complex indicators such as tenant experience and satisfaction.”

Blakeway says consolidation in the social housing sector is driven by noble ambitions but notes organisations become more reliant on processes and systems as they grow. “If a resident doesn’t fit into the neat box or their issues are more complex than the system can cope with, that’s where we can see things being fractured and people through falling through gaps.”

In a 1942 pamphlet, Housing the Australian Nation, prominent Melbourne social reformers F. Oswald Barnett and W.O. Burt surveyed the appalling housing conditions experienced by Australia’s working classes and called for much greater government investment than previously imagined. Health was at the top of their concerns. Without better housing, they worried, efforts to improve health would be “seriously retarded.”

Today, the evidence is even more compelling. In England, the research group BRE calculates that it costs the National Health Service an annual £1.4 billion to treat people made sick by poor housing. Yet there are relatively inexpensive and cost-effective ways of dealing with the major risks: insulation to counter excessive cold, hard-wired smoke detectors to alert residents to fires, handrails to cut the risk of falls, ventilation to minimise mould and damp.

BRE estimates that spending to reduce these hazards would quickly pay for itself in savings to the NHS. In the private rental sector, the payback time would be between eight and nine years; in the social housing sector it would be twelve to thirteen years. (Social housing tales longer to generate a positive return because overcrowding is a major hazard and is more expensive to fix.)

The costs of poor housing go beyond healthcare to include such things as lost earnings for those who fall ill and those who must care for them. BRE calculates that total annual cost to society of leaving people living in poor housing is around £18.5 billion. As well as generating NHS savings, fixing housing hazards would create jobs, reduce energy costs, lower carbon emissions and improve property values.

Looked at this way, public investment in housing seems like a no-brainer, whether as a way of improving lives or as a prudent fiscal move. As the housing crisis deepens, the social and economic price we pay further outstrips the cost of action.

Australia is moving down a similar path to England where, in the 1980s, not-for-profit housing associations began taking on a role traditionally played by local government. Since 2006, the number of dwellings owned or managed by Australia’s not-for-profit providers has more than tripled, mostly thanks to stock being transfers from public housing authorities.

Funding from the HAFF and state programs to build new dwellings will increase the size of the not-for-profit sector and raise pressure on providers to consolidate to achieve efficiencies.But as in England, there is a risk that commercial imperatives could distract from the core business of providing decent homes for Australians priced out of the private market. This is more likely to happen in the absence of consistent public funding and clear government direction.

England has also had sixteen housing minsters in the fourteen years since the Conservatives took office. As the Better Housing Review panel commented, this revolving door means “a lack of consistent and strategic thinking and action.”  Yet the panel insists that government cannot outsources its obligations and must remain “fully accountable for the provision of decent housing nationally,” just as it remains responsible for health and education.

Like England, Australia lacks a coherent housing strategy and consultations to develop one have proved disappointing. For almost a decade, Coalition governments in Canberra insisted that housing was a state matter. While this has changed under Labor, we still have a housing minister with no housing department. As the Centre for Equitable Housing argues, the lack of a dedicated department or a consolidated housing budget statement makes impossible to properly shape or evaluate public policy.

Housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway thinks a royal commission could help solve England’s housing challenge and revive understanding of the close connection between decent homes and good health. Housing, he says, is a complex problem where solutions must be built on expertise, impartiality, independence and a long-term perspective — all things that a royal commission has the potential to deliver. Australia’s problems might be different, but they are just as serious. Perhaps here, too, it’s worth considering a public inquiry with the capacity to probe, publicise and make recommendations. •

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Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

The post Jokowi’s high-wire succession appeared first on Inside Story.

There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.

The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.

With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

The post Lost in the post appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s been like that for more than three weeks since investigative journalists from the independent newsroom Correctiv revealed a “secret plan” hatched at a “secret meeting” in November last year. According to the report, twenty-two far-right politicians and businesspeople met in a hotel outside Berlin to talk about expelling millions of people living in Germany, among them “non-assimilated” German citizens. The attendees included office holders of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and members of the Werteunion, an organisation set up in 2017 by ultraconservative Christian Democrats unhappy about the refugee policies of then chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few hours after news of the meeting broke, eighty people protested in front of Hamburg’s local AfD headquarters. Two days later, 2000 took to the city’s streets. All over the country, the protests quickly gathered momentum. When a Turkish-born member of the Hamburg state parliament called for another protest on 19 January, he expected 4000 to join him. According to the police, 50,000 turned up, and the rally had to be cut short because the riverside venue was so overcrowded it was a miracle nobody ended up in the icy water. The following weekend around 100,000 people rallied in Hamburg.

Protests have continued every day in all parts of the country. Many of those taking part haven’t been to a demonstration in many years or are protesting for the first time in their lives. Altogether, millions have taken to the streets. The protests give no sign of fizzling out.

What exactly has prompted such outrage? The proposal to deport asylum seekers, other non-citizens and “non-assimilated” Germans to North Africa came as part of a master plan presented by Martin Sellner, a prominent far-right activist from Austria, at the November meeting. Sellner is known for propagating French writer Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement myth, which claims that Western elites are trying to replace white European populations using mass immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East.

The term “great replacement,” first used in Camus’s 2010 book L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence, is a reference to an ironic poem by Bertolt Brecht. After the 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Brecht asked in his poem “The Solution” whether, as the people had seemingly forfeited the confidence of their government, it might not be easier “for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”

It was the proposed deportation of German citizens that may have startled many Germans most. But Camus and others from the European and North American far right have long advocated a Great Repatriation, or “remigration,” as a response to the Great Replacement. The concept of “remigration” shouldn’t have been news in Germany: Dresden’s Pegida movement and other far-right activists have long called for a cleansing of the nation by means of “remigration.” Nor was it a surprise that prominent members of the AfD want to turn Germany into a country only for ethnic Germans. Björn Höcke, the most influential AfD politician — a leader of its Thuringia state branch and occasional speaker at Pegida rallies — has made no secret of his intention to rid Germany of many of its current residents should he ever be in a position to do so.

The idea of Höcke as Thuringia’s state premier, let alone in power in Berlin, has long seemed fanciful. No more. It seems almost certain that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party in three forthcoming state elections in East Germany. In Saxony, it’s possible that only the Christian Democrats and the AfD will reach the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament. Provided the latter polled more votes than the former, the far right would command an absolute majority in parliament and form government. In Thuringia, where the left-wing Die Linke is particularly strong, the Christian Democrats could be tempted to strike a deal with the AfD rather than allow Die Linke’s Bodo Ramelow to remain as state premier.

The AfD’s performance is particularly alarming in East Germany, where the pollsters have the party at between 28 per cent (in Brandenburg) and 35 per cent (in Saxony). News of November’s “secret meeting” was just the trigger needed to prompt millions of people to protest.

At the Hamburg rallies I attended, the main focus was squarely on the AfD. “Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD” (All of Hamburg hates the AfD) was the most popular battle cry, “FCK AFD” the most common slogan on placards. Judging by their hand-painted signs, many of the demonstrators equate the current mood with that of the early 1930s, before the Nazi party’s electoral success prompted the German president to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. “It’s five to ’33,” some demonstrators claimed. Although many explicitly rejected “remigration,” other elements of the AfD’s program attracted comparatively little critical attention.

Besides, the focus on the AfD is not entirely justified. In Saxony, a party even more extremist than the AfD, the Freie Sachsen (Free Saxonians), is gaining ground. It may well win seats at the local elections in June. At the other end of the spectrum, the left-wing Die Linke, the successor of the East German communists, split last year. A group led by the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht has since established their own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW. It is as populist as the AfD and its migration and asylum policies hardly differ from those of the far-right party. The Werteunion too has decided to form a party ahead of the three state elections in East Germany in September. Some of its policies are likely to mirror those of the AfD.

Germany’s intake of refugees has been the number one political issue for the past six months or so, with most public commentators and politicians claiming that the country’s capacity to take in refugees has been exhausted. They say the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany needs to be drastically reduced, despite the fact that the overall number of refugees arriving in Germany was much lower in 2023 than the year before. The authorities in Hamburg, for instance, registered 23,000 new arrivals in 2023, compared with 54,000 in 2022, the year Germany accommodated approximately one million Ukrainian refugees.

In response to Russia’s attack, the European Union invoked the European Council’s 2001 mass influx directive “to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” More than 4.2 million Ukrainians currently benefit from the EU’s temporary protection mechanism. On a per capita basis, most have been taken in by the three Baltic states and by Poland, Czechia, Slovakia und Bulgaria.

About 1.2 million of those Ukrainians are living in Germany. They are not required to apply for asylum, have immediate access to the labour market and receive the same social benefits available to Germans. Overall, their arrival has been surprisingly uncontroversial, not just in Germany but also in the other EU member states.

It’s not the Ukrainians who have prompted the current panic about new arrivals but refugees from elsewhere, who must go through the standard asylum process. Last year, about 330,000 new protection claims were lodged in Germany, compared with about 218,000 in 2022. Ordinarily, Germany should be able to cope with such numbers. But federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the rise, giving local authorities good reason to complain. Of course, capacities would be freed up if Syrian and Afghan refugees, who still make up almost half of all asylum seekers, were treated like the Ukrainians: if they too were granted temporary protection with immediate work rights and access to social benefits.

The AfD, whose success is linked to its vilification of asylum seekers, has tried hard to create a moral panic about the number of new arrivals. That it was successful has been due in no small part to the fact that other parties jumped on the bandwagon in the hope that they too would benefit from scare-mongering.

Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat premier of Saxony, was among them. He demanded that Germany establish stationary controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, abolish the last remnants of the constitutionally guaranteed individual right to asylum, transfer asylum seekers to third countries, set an upper limit on the annual number of asylum applications, and cut benefits paid to refugees. His proposals were either unfeasible or would have little effect, but they added to the sense of a situation spiralling out of control. The much-evoked “firewall” against the AfD may still work when it comes to forming coalitions, but it’s permeable as far as political rhetoric is concerned.

Kretschmer was backed by his party leader Friedrich Merz, who last September said of asylum seekers: “They go to the doctor and have their teeth done, while Germans can’t even get an appointment.” Members of Germany’s hapless Ampel coalition — the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens — have also talked of emergencies and crises rather than trying to steer the public conversation towards a rational debate about Germany’s responsibilities and its record of meeting them.

Ampel politicians have endorsed the idea that all those whose asylum claims were rejected need to leave Germany. In October, the cover of the news magazine Spiegel depicted a serious-looking Olaf Scholz demanding ramped-up deportations. It is true that about 300,000 people living in Germany are technically supposed to leave the country, mainly because their protection claims were rejected. But four out of five are not — indeed must not be — deported, because (for example) the country they hail from is not safe.

New legislative measures in Germany aim to reduce asylum seeker numbers, as do new EU-wide changes to the Common European Asylum System, or CEAS. The EU wants to set up Australian-style centres at Europe’s external borders to detain applicants while they’re being screened. Unsuccessful applicants would be swiftly removed. Several EU governments — and some prominent German Christian Democrats — want to go further by transferring protection claimants to third countries such as Rwanda.

Germany last experienced a comparable momentum — albeit with far fewer street protesters — in 2018 and 2019, when many cities and towns hosted demonstrations in support of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean. Since then, relatively few protests have been held in support of migrant and refugee rights. When the European Commission and the European Council agreed on the CEAS reforms last year, dozens rather than hundreds of protesters rallied in Hamburg.

For the last movement of a similar size we need to go back to the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, Germany experienced a wave of racist violence. Asylum seeker hostels were torched, and many “foreigners” assaulted. According to an investigation by journalists, fourteen people died as a result of racist violence in the first two years after German reunification on 3 October 1990 alone. On 23 November 1992, two men associated with the far right firebombed a house in the small town of Mölln in northern Germany. A woman and two children of Turkish descent died. The murders startled Germans as much as the revelations about the “secret” deportation plans startled them more than three decades later. Large spontaneous demonstrations took place all over the country. In Munich alone, 400,000 people attended a candlelight protest.

Then, as now, the protests were triggered by an attack on long-term residents of Germany. Then, previous murders of asylum seekers had not prompted similar demonstrations of solidarity. Now, too, calls for the deportation of everybody whose asylum claim has been rejected have prompted little opposition. Then, the protests followed the opposition Social Democrats’ agreement to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum. Now, the protests followed the Scholz government’s introduction of a harsh new law to expedite deportations and backing for the far-reaching CEAS reforms.

There are also key differences between the events of late 1992 and early 2024. When the Social Democrats met for an extraordinary party congress to decide whether to change the constitution and restrict the right to asylum, hundreds of thousands of people protested against the proposed reform; when parliament voted on the change in May 1993 large numbers of people once more descended on the German capital. And some Social Democrats and Free Democrats did actually vote against the changes.

This year’s protests against the CEAS reforms have been insignificant by comparison. And while some Greens and Social Democrats have publicly grumbled, their opposition is not as principled as that on display in 1993.

Millions of people have rallied over the past few weeks and railed against the AfD. But have they also expressed solidarity with asylum seekers threatened with deportation under the Scholz government’s new regime? Have they spared a thought for the refugees pushed back at the Polish and Croatian borders or in the Aegean? For those who drowned in the Mediterranean? Or have the demonstrations rather been an exercise in self-reassurance?

The postwar architects of the Federal Republic’s constitution were convinced that the Weimar Republic failed because it gave its enemies too much leeway. They thought that those out to undermine or destroy democracy must not abuse democratic rights and freedoms to achieve their aims.

Thus, the constitution makes this provision: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” The High Court has twice deemed a party to be unconstitutional: in 1952 a party of the far right, and in 1956 the Communist Party. More recently, in 2017, the High Court ruled that the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany aimed to abolish democracy but that its influence was not substantial enough to warrant its prohibition.

The AfD has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to gauge whether it is seeking “to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” In three East German states, including Saxony, the state intelligence agencies have already ruled the AfD’s respective state branches to be “without doubt extremist.”

Since the revelations about the “secret meeting” in November, calls for the government to make use of the constitutional provisions and initiate a High Court ruling about the AfD’s unconstitutionality have become louder. A petition signed by 1.69 million people is requesting that the government make use of another constitutional provision. According to Article 18, a person who abuses civil and political rights (such as the freedom of expression) “to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights.” In this instance, too, only the High Court can order such a forfeiture and the proceeding needs to be initiated by the federal government, a state government or federal parliament.

It’s tricky, to say the least, to declare a party unconstitutional when it’s supported by a third of the electorate, or to target one of its most influential leaders. As the attempt to ban the National Democratic Party demonstrated, the High Court case would take a very long time and its outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Using the constitution to restrict Höcke’s democratic rights and outlaw the AfD would also allow him and his party to portray themselves as victims of “the system” and “the elites.”

The constitution is, however, an asset in the fight against the AfD. Thus far, its opponents have tended to focus on the alleged similarities between the AfD and Hitler’s Nazi party and to suggest the AfD’s leaders aim for a return to the dark days of the Third Reich. But politicians like Höcke aren’t unreconstituted Nazis. They even claim that the German army officer who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is their role model.

Their critics’ focus ought instead to be on how they deny the constitution’s most important principle, expressed in the first sentence of Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” But that may get some of those currently applauding the demonstrators into trouble, because AfD politicians aren’t the only ones who disregard that line or pretend it applies only to German citizens.

Will the demonstrations against the AfD have any impact on its electoral performance at the local and European elections in June and the three state elections in September? Italian researchers have shown that Italy’s anti-far-right Sardines movement in late 2019 and early 2020 muted the electoral showing of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. But if such an effect resulted only in a better-than-expected performance of politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, who have tried to deprive the AfD of oxygen by endorsing key concerns of the party’s followers, then little would have been gained.

“Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Zweite Liga!” proclaimed a speaker at the rally in St Pauli on Saturday. It was a double-headed hope: never again should Germany experience fascism, and never again would the St Pauli Football Club play in the second division. For many St Pauli supporters the club has returned to Germany’s first division in all but fact, but in reality, more often than not, the Zweite Liga has been where St Pauli has played its football.

While “Never again second division!” gives the impression that the St Pauli Football Club has already left its past behind, “Never again fascism!” suggests that fascism was buried on 8 May 1945 and must not be resurrected now. But the break with the past was never complete. Elements of Nazi Germany survived well beyond the end of the second world war. The AfD would not have thrived in the past ten years if it hadn’t been able to exploit the widespread acceptance of — or even longing for — authoritarian structures. Racism was not only alive in the early 1990s when asylum seeker hostels burned, but has been an enduring feature of postwar German society.

From Lörrach to Kappeln, the admonition “Never again!” defines the current protests. Often the protesters don’t name the past that must not reappear, because to them it is obvious they are referring to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It’s highly unlikely that Germany will experience a repeat of that time. But an unholy alliance of the AfD on the one hand and Christian Democrats and Ampel politicians on the other could pave the way for a re-run not of Nazi Germany but of the early 1990s, when fear-mongering engendered racist violence.

For the current movement to have a lasting impact, the protesters will need to identify what exactly they do not want. There is more to the AfD’s wishlist than “remigration.” A close reading of the party’s program could prompt more startlement.

I also wish the protesters were less preoccupied with the past. Germany is in crisis not because it is moving backwards but because it lacks a positive, widely shared vision for the future. Surely the St Pauli supporters won’t be content with avoiding relegation once the club has been promoted to the Bundesliga. What comes after “Nie wieder Faschismus!”? It’s easy to understand what those millions who rallied in recent weeks do not want. But it’s unclear what they are hoping for. •

The post “Never again”? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s little surprise that five of the six abstentions came from nuclear weapon states: the United States, China, Israel, Pakistan and India (joined, oddly, by South Sudan). But in a dismaying display of power politics, France and Britain voted with Russia and North Korea to oppose assistance to people and landscapes irradiated during decades of nuclear testing.

Diplomats representing Western powers are prone to talk about “the international community,” “the rules-based order” and “democratic versus authoritarian states.” But on this occasion the jargon was undercut by the willingness of London and Paris to line up alongside Moscow and Pyongyang to avoid responsibility for past actions and to limit reparations.

With the International Court of Justice debating genocide in Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine and UN agencies seeking to defend international humanitarian law, the hypocrisy of major powers has been polarising international opinion. Developing nations are increasingly challenging an international order that sanctions official enemies, at the same time as absolving major powers of the responsibility to deal with their own breaches of international law.

Over the past three years, ambassadors Teburoro Tito of Kiribati and Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan have coordinated international consultations on how the nuclear assistance provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, should be implemented. Articles 6 and 7 of the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, include unprecedented obligations on parties to the treaty to aid nuclear survivors and contribute to environmental remediation.

Kiribati and Kazakhstan might seem an unlikely couple, but they have bonded over a common twentieth-century legacy. Both nations’ lands, waters and peoples have been devastated by cold war nuclear testing, and in each case the responsible countries refuse to take responsibility. Britain and Russia have bonded, too, but in their case, they’re united in their refusal to assist their former colonies.

After conducting twelve atmospheric atomic tests in Australia in 1952–57 — at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga — Britain sought a new location for developing and testing more powerful hydrogen bombs. During Operation Grapple, the British military conducted nine atmospheric thermonuclear tests at Malden and Christmas (Kiritimati) islands in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati.

Just as Britain chose the “vast empty spaces” of the South Australian desert and the isolated atolls of Kiribati for its tests, Moscow sought similar expanses within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over more than four decades, it held 456 nuclear tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The history of Soviet testing in the Central Asian republic and its radioactive legacies, spread across more than 18,000 square kilometres, has been documented by Kazakh scholar Togzhan Kassenova in her compelling 2022 book Atomic Steppe.

Once the TPNW was adopted, Kiribati and Kazakhstan led efforts to develop mechanisms for dealing with the health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout. After seeking technical advice from survivors, nuclear scientists and UN agencies, they developed a set of proposals for action and a UN resolution seeking international support.

Now adopted by the UN General Assembly, that resolution proposes bilateral, regional and multilateral action and the sharing of technical and scientific information about nuclear legacies, and “calls upon Member States in a position to do so to contribute technical and financial assistance as appropriate.” It requires UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to seek members’ views and proposals about assistance to nuclear survivors and report back to the General Assembly.

Like most non-binding UN resolutions, this one is couched in the cautious diplomatic terminology required to forge a consensus among 193 UN member states. How then do the French and British governments justify their vote against assistance to nuclear survivors, a decision echoed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un?

When I put questions to France’s ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, the French foreign affairs ministry replied, justifying its decision to stand with North Korea and Russia “because this resolution does not recognise the efforts already undertaken and because it aims to establish an international liability regime which ignores ongoing bilateral or national efforts, to which we are committed.”

According to the ministry, the French “fully” assume their “responsibilities and do everything we can to compensate all victims of nuclear tests, in accordance with the law of 5 January 2010 relating to the recognition and compensation of victims of French nuclear tests, modified in 2017. In this respect, France has in recent years strengthened its human and financial resources allocated to managing the consequences of the tests, including the identification and assistance of potential victims.”

It’s true that in 2010 France established the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission to evaluate compensation claims from civilian and military personnel who staffed French nuclear test sites. But CIVEN’s significant flaws mean it is disingenuous to suggest that successive governments are “managing the consequences of the tests.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respond fully to demands for assistance have been widely condemned by Mā’ohi political, church and community leaders in French Polynesia, where France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966 until as recently as 1996. They note, for example, that during its first five years of operation CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims submitted by personnel exposed to hazardous levels of ionising radiation at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but CIVEN still rejects more than half of all applications. Political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms as well as an apology for the ongoing trauma caused by thirty years of testing.

In 2022 the French government created a special Mémoire des Hommes website dedicated to the Mā’ohi Nui nuclear testing program and began declassifying some relevant documents. But only archives relating to the Pacific Testing Centre are eligible for declassification — not those that cover France’s atmospheric and underground tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1965. France used its North African colony to conduct four atmospheric nuclear tests at Reggane and thirteen underground tests at In Eker in the Sahara desert, tests that continuing three years beyond Algerian independence in 1962 to give Paris time to build its testing bases in the South Pacific.

Indigenous survivors and researchers from the Nuclear Truth Project continue to call for better access to nuclear archives and the release of the documentary evidence required for compensation programs. They have also developed protocols to ensure any efforts for remediation and assistance are focused on redress for both historic and future harms from nuclear activities.

December’s UN resolution is just one step in a longer campaign to deal with the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons under the TPNW. Seventy countries have now ratified that treaty, and the nuclear weapon states are getting anxious.

The United States, France and Britain — the three states that tested nuclear weapons in Oceania — first tried to ignore the TPNW, but as the number of ratifications mounted, they began to actively oppose it. In our region, eleven Pacific island countries and territories have ratified or acceded to TPNW and the remaining colonial dependencies have also joined the call for assistance to nuclear survivors, even though they can’t sign the treaty.

In September last year the Assembly of French Polynesia unanimously passed a resolution in support of the TPNW. As ICAN France, the local affiliate of the International Campaign to Abolish the Nuclear Weapons, noted, “while French Polynesia cannot currently access the assistance and rehabilitation outlined in Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW due to France’s non-ratification, it sends a resounding message in favour of the treaty to Paris.”

President Moetai Brotherson of French Polynesia says the Assembly resolution sends an important message to Paris. “It’s not legally binding, so that’s probably one of the reasons they don’t really care about it,” Brotherson told me in November. “But it has a symbolic value that is very strong. For us, it’s only natural that we have this kind of position taken at the parliament. It’s a message we want to send to the world — that nuclear weapons are dangerous and we can destroy this planet if we are not cautious about it.”

In Australia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing want the weapons states to provide funds for independent, comprehensive radiological surveys of nuclear test sites and surrounding communities. They also want the nuclear powers to monitor, secure and remove nuclear wastes on a scale and standard comparable to the clean-up of domestic nuclear sites in their home territory.

As they ended their twentieth-century test programs, the Western powers used the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground. A 2017 French government report on ocean dumping of nuclear waste admits that 2580 tonnes of nuclear waste in concrete drums was dumped in the ocean at site Oscar off Moruroa atoll in the eight years from 1974. Seventy-six tonnes of untreated radioactive waste had already been submerged at the nearby November site between 1972 and 1975.

ICAN France has also documented significant amounts of nuclear waste buried in the Sahara desert after France’s seventeen nuclear tests in Algeria, even though the French government still refuses to communicate details of the waste and landfill locations to Algerian authorities.

British nuclear test sites in the Monte Bello Islands and South Australian desert are also scarred with the radioactive legacies of atmospheric tests and the hundreds of experiments — including burning uranium and plutonium — conducted on the land of the Anangu people. The nuclear threat to these sacrifice zones is not over. Last year, Barngarla traditional owners won a long battle to protect their country and storylines from the proposed establishment of a radioactive waste on their land near Kimba in South Australia.

France’s answers to my questions about why it joined Russia and North Korea to vote against the Kiribati/Kazakhstan resolution might have been less than satisfactory, but British high commissions in the Pacific declined to respond at all.

Unlike France and the United States, Britain doesn’t have a compensation commission for survivors of nuclear testing. In fact, Britain has a shameful record of nuclear secrecy: in 2018, the National Archives withdrew public access to key files about British nuclear testing in Oceania.

Over more than thirty years, British, Australian, NZ and Fijian military veterans who served at British nuclear test sites in Kiribati and Australia have unsuccessfully lodged a series of cases and appeals before British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. They have sought damages under civil law for the illnesses they attribute to their service at nuclear test sites. Britain’s defence ministry has consistently opposed these claims, unfailingly appealing against lower court rulings that assisted veterans.

A fatal problem for the veterans is that they lack documentary evidence of rates of radioactive exposure for military personnel — evidence still buried in the British archives. Last month, the UK Daily Mirror reported how successive governments have maintained the cover-up, with government agencies refusing to release relevant data. “In 2018, the UK Ministry of Defence claimed it ‘had no information’ about blood testing during the nuclear trials,” the newspaper reported. “Last year the Atomic Weapons Establishment, an MoD agency, admitted it holds up to 5000 files, including a list of 150 specific documents mentioning blood and urine tests taken during the weapons program.”

At a time of warfare in Europe and the Middle East, the actions of these nuclear weapon states highlight their hypocrisy. As civilians are massacred in Ukraine and Gaza, developing nations are mobilising through the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court to end a culture of impunity for states that declare themselves democratic. •

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During the preceding two days an agreement had by no means been guaranteed. After two weeks of negotiation, the core issue, on the future of fossil fuels, was deadlocked. On the one side were around one hundred small island states, developing countries and EU members, plus Australia, insisting that fossil fuels must ultimately be phased out. Anything less would be “signing our death certificate,” as Samoan natural resources and environment minister Cedric Schuster put it. On the other side were the petrostates and China. Rallied by an instruction from the secretary-general of OPEC, subsequently leaked, they were determined to hold out against any language committing the world to ending fossil fuel production. This would spell, they claimed, their own economic demise.

There are three ways for negotiators to overcome polarised conflict of this kind, and all three were duly used in the final text.

First, find another verb. If “phased out” is not acceptable to one side and “phased down” to the other, the negotiators will have tried alternatives. “Eliminate,” “end the use of,” “take urgent and rapid action towards the alternative”… Ultimately, it was “transition away from” that proved acceptable to all sides. The key sentence in the final agreement reads:

28 (d): Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

Linguistic style is not a COP concern.

Second, include several subtly different paragraphs covering the same topics. That way the different sides can each find some text to suit their needs. Immediately before the clause above is this one, which makes essentially the same point, but not quite:

28 (c): Accelerating efforts globally towards net zero emission energy systems, utilizing zero- and low-carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century.

And a little later:

29: Recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.

In UN-speak, “transitional fuel” means gas, so this clause gives comfort to the gas producers, whatever else is included about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Third, employ “constructive ambiguity.” Find terms that can mean different things to different audiences, allowing each to claim that it says what they want it to. The key term here is “energy systems.” This is ambiguous: does it just cover power, heating and cooling, which is what most people would say constitutes a country’s “energy system”? Or does it include energy used in transport?

The uncertainty is critical, because if transport is not included, this is not a fossil fuel phase-out. In particular, it would let the oil producers off the hook, since oil is the primary transport fuel. Expect the petrostates to argue that that is indeed what it means — and they will point to a separate clause about transport to support their case. (Why have one of those if this already includes transport? But see point two above.) Meanwhile the advocates of phase-out will say that this is evident nonsense.

If the agreed text can be read in different ways, what does it mean? There isn’t in fact much doubt about this, as the Saudi minister’s expression revealed. The UNFCCC’s official press release spelled it out: the agreement “signals the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” The petrostates had their interpretable clauses — “a litany of loopholes,” said the Alliance of Small Island States — but Team Phase-out had definitely won.

Does it matter, though? There’s a good case for saying no. This text is not binding on anyone. It is the outcome of the Global Stocktake, or GST, an assessment process mandated by the 2015 Paris agreement to guide the national targets and plans that will actually do the emissions cutting. On the Paris five-year cycle, these Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, must be delivered in 2025. The GST text is meant to be heeded when countries set out those plans, but in truth it can be ignored if they so wish. The new NDCs will be for 2035 and 2040, some time before phase-out is meant to happen.

But there’s another way to look at it. Odd as it sounds, this is the first time that any UNFCCC text has mentioned fossil fuels. They’ve been the effective elephant in the room. Every other kind of goal has been used: a temperature limit (2°C above pre-industrial times, then 1.5°C); an emissions target (net zero by 2050); a renewable energy aspiration (the COP28 text specifies a tripling by 2030). COP26, two years ago, finally managed to single out (unabated) coal, and called for its phase-down. But the petrostates had always resisted the naming of fossil fuels as a whole.

This really is where the rubber hits the road. It simply isn’t possible to limit warming to 1.5°C, or cut emissions to net zero, without more or less eliminating the production and consumption of all fossil fuels. It’s only “more or less” because some can be abated through carbon capture and storage technologies, or biological sequestration, or — though we don’t know how to do this at scale yet — the direct drawing down of carbon from the air. But the essential point stands: a safe climate means pretty much phasing out fossil fuels.

In this sense the real impact of the COP28 agreement will not be so much on the immediate behaviour of fossil fuel producers as on the longer-term global debate about energy policy. It will become harder, in short, to argue for an expansion of fossil fuel exploration and mining. If the world has agreed to phase out fossil fuels, how can a new coalmine, or a set of new oil and gas drilling licences, be justified?

Phasing out may not mean the immediate abandonment of fossil fuel production — on the contrary, the COP28 call is for a “just, orderly and equitable” transition — but it surely cannot mean finding and extracting more of the stuff. As the International Energy Agency has made clear, currently exploited reserves hold more than enough carbon to meet the global carbon budget allowable for a 1.5°C world. There is no space for any more.

Of course, changing the debate doesn’t guarantee that the case will be won. But UN textual agreements could never do that. The Paris agreement itself can’t do that — it is founded on the principle of national sovereignty over climate policy. (That’s why there is an “emissions gap” between the aggregate of national emissions commitments and the total that would be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.) But the terms of the debate do matter. Before 2013 there was no articulated concept of “net zero” emissions. But within eight years every major economy was committed to a net zero target. In very few major countries can an electable politician say they’re not in favour of reaching net zero. In time, the phase-out of fossil fuels may come to have the same political power. And that will then change how fossil fuel policies are made.

The focus in Dubai was all on the production side because the producers were in the room. Fossil fuel phase-out is going to be genuinely difficult for many countries, particularly those highly dependent on coal, oil and gas for export revenue. Australia provides a case in point. Poorer countries in this group — Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique — will demand that the developed world help them make the transition; they were angry there was not more in the COP28 text obliging this. But the real work of phase-out is going to be done on the demand side. Consumers are going to require less.

This is already happening. From the start of the Industrial Revolution, Britain spent nearly 250 years burning coal; today it has more or less been eliminated from the UK power grid. Around 80 per cent of all global investment in electricity production now goes to renewables, grids and storage. In Europe electric heat pumps are beginning to make inroads into gas-based heating systems. On a lifetime basis electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol and diesel ones within two or three years. The first ships to run on green hydrogen and ammonia are now in production. It’s only really in aviation, where biofuels are not yet viable at scale, that it is hard to see how demand for fossil fuels will fall. The transition has already started.

And we know how it works. Scientists and engineers develop new green technologies. They start out being very expensive, so governments subsidise them. As more are produced, innovation and scale reduce their costs. Governments then mandate a proportion of total supply to take a green form. This creates increased demand for the technology, leading to more innovation and economies of scale and a further reduction in costs. As costs fall, government targets can be raised. Gradually a tipping point is hit where the green technology is cheaper than its fossil rival, and the subsidies become unnecessary. As the capital stock gradually turns over, the green transition becomes complete.

This is precisely the story we have seen in solar and wind power and batteries, where since 2010 costs have fallen around 85 per cent, 55 per cent and 85 per cent respectively. A similar fall in costs can be seen in electric vehicles, and heat pumps will follow. There is a virtuous circle connecting policy, innovation and scale.

The real question, however, is of speed. Had the world started acting seriously on climate change when it was first understood in the 1990s (the initial assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in 1990), a gradual path could have been followed to a low-carbon future. But it has really only been since 2008–10 that climate policy around the world has become serious. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are therefore much higher than they would otherwise have been, and we need to get to net zero more quickly.

This tardiness has made the required trajectory of emissions reduction very steep: the IPCC calculates that, for a 1.5°C pathway, emissions in 2030 need to be cut to around half of their 2019 levels. In turn this has made the politics of transition much more difficult. It would have been hard to replace a coal, oil or gas industry over a period of fifty years. Doing it over twenty-five will stretch governments to the maximum. Many will surely baulk at the prospect.

This then is what the next two years will be about. COP28 has provided the guidance. COP30 in 2025 is when governments must publish their targets and plans. There will of course be a COP between the two: there always is. COP29 will be in the even more improbable location of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, another oil producer. But it won’t have very much to do. The real focus turns to the city of Belém in northeastern Brazil, gateway to the Amazon, in November 2025. The beginning of the end has begun. •

The post The beginning of the end appeared first on Inside Story.

For Edelman, the global public relations company hired by the United Arab Emirates to support its COP28 presidency, the answer is sixty-four. That’s the size of the company’s team at the UN climate conference, now into its second week in Dubai. (Thirty per cent by 2030 is the UAE’s modest new “clean energy” target.) But the host country is taking no chances: it has also hired communications firm BCW, whose COP team is twenty-five-strong. Yet even these eighty-nine communications specialists were not enough to prevent a PR disaster dominating the media coverage of the COP’s first week.

Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s controversial choice to chair the conference — his other job is chief executive of the country’s giant oil company ADNOC — was seen in a leaked video denying that climate science required an end to fossil fuels. In a conversation with former Irish president Mary Robinson, as revealed by the Guardian, Al Jaber lost his cool when questioned about the future of the oil and gas industry. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there,” he said tetchily, “that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”

Unfortunately for Al Jaber, plenty of scientific scenarios say exactly that. In its last global assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, analysed hundreds of results from economic climate models in which global warming is limited to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. When they use realistic assumptions about the proportion of carbon that might be captured and stored or removed directly from the atmosphere, they show that on average coal, oil and gas consumption will have to be cut from 2020 levels by 99 per cent, 70 per cent and 84 per cent respectively by 2050.

Al Jaber’s comments attracted immediate criticism from climate scientists. They were “verging on climate denial,” said Bill Hare, veteran Australian IPCC author and COP-watcher. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, acknowledged that a 70 per cent reduction in oil production didn’t mean bringing it to an end altogether, but stressed the importance of clear messaging: “I cannot see scientifically there being any other communication than that we need to phase out fossil fuels.”

Messaging was indeed Al Jaber’s problem, for the central point of contention at COP28 is precisely what language should be used in respect of fossil fuels. “Phasing out” is the demand of the most climate-vulnerable countries, supported by the European Union. “Phasing down” is the weaker alternative preferred by China, India and Saudi Arabia. (John Kerry, the US climate envoy, was trying “largely phased out.”) As the neutral chair of the conference, Al Jaber is meant to be mediating between these positions, not supporting one of them.

This should have been the point at which the PR people earned their fees. Edelman’s website boasts that crisis management is one of its specialities. But either they’re kidding themselves, or Al Jaber didn’t take their advice. In a hastily convened press conference the following day, the COP president put on another ill-tempered show. Flanked by the chair of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea — looking decidedly uncomfortable — Al Jaber insisted that “we very much believe and respect the science.” But he could not help himself also attacking his critics. “I am quite surprised,” he said, “with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency.”

Al Jaber’s ill-judged remarks and thin political skin are the result of not having to face a free media in his own country. They probably won’t derail the final outcome of the conference, where the search is now on for other forms of words (neither phasing out nor down, but another verb altogether) that can reconcile the opposing positions on the future of fossil fuels. But the episode in many ways exemplified the wider problem at this and recent COPs.

The problem is the focus on glossy announcements that satisfy the PR people but often do little to clarify what countries and companies are actually doing to bring down their emissions or support developing countries to become more climate-resilient.

In the first week of the COP the UAE announced no fewer than ten official declarations, pledges and coalitions in which various combinations of countries and companies signed up to various degrees of commitment to action on climate. These covered Agriculture, Food and Climate, endorsed by 146 countries; Climate and Health, 133 countries; Renewables and Energy Efficiency, 128 countries; Climate Relief, Recovery and Peace, seventy-five; Gender-Responsive Just Transitions, seventy-four; Cooling, sixty-six; Hydrogen, thirty-seven; Climate Finance, a disappointing thirteen; along with an Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter (fifty-two companies) and a Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships pledge (sixty-five countries).

This was not all. Strangely absent from the official website but much vaunted on the day of launch was a Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy by 2050 endorsed by twenty countries. And alongside all these the UAE has also announced a raft of other new initiatives: a Global Decarbonisation Accelerator, an Industrial Transition Accelerator, a Coal Transition Accelerator (joining the existing Powering Past Coal Alliance), a Global Education Solutions Accelerator, a Net Zero Mobilization Charter, an Innovate for Climate Tech Coalition, a Charter on Finance for Managing Risk, a Net Zero Export Credit Agencies Alliance, a Roadmap for Islamic Sustainable Finance, an African Green Industrialisation Initiative, a Global Electric Cooling Coalition, a Waste to Zero Coalition, a Buildings and Cement Breakthrough, and a Global Youth Statement.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. It’s clear that for the UAE this welter of announcements has been a major focus of the overall PR effort. Every day four or five new press releases have landed in the inboxes of the 4000 journalists attending the COP, overwhelming them with new pledges, targets, carefully honed quotes from government and business leaders, and triumphant group photos in front of giant declaratory backdrops. The impression given is undoubtedly impressive, a reflection of a busy year of coalition-building and commitment-cajoling by Al Jaber and his team. Yet at the same time it is almost impossible to know how many of these pledges — particularly the government ones — will actually lead to new policies or spending in the countries that have signed up to them.

The nuclear pledge provides a case in point. The press release trumpeted the commitment to tripling nuclear energy capacity. Both France and Britain signed up. But France’s electricity system is 72 per cent nuclear already, so clearly tripling does not mean “in France.” Britain has nine nuclear power stations but has been struggling since 2007 to build a tenth, which is now due to come onstream in 2027. So tripling is not on the cards there either. It turns out that what these countries have signed up to is an aspiration for other countries to triple their nuclear capacity: not quite as much of a commitment as it looked at first sight.

The financial pledges attached to the announcements are even more obscure. The UAE website boasts a dazzling array of new financial pledges announced at COP: a total of US$6.8 billion for energy, US$8.5 billion for lives and livelihoods, US$1.2 billion for inclusion, and a puzzling US$61.8 billion for “finance.” But whether these sums are really new money or a recycling of old commitments is impossible to know. Forensic examination by NGOs has shown that much “climate finance” is only tangentially related to climate, and internationally comparable accounting is woeful. It is doubtful that most of these COP announcements will buck the trend.

Yet wholesale cynicism would also be misplaced. The reason there are so many initiatives in the UAE’s list is that climate mitigation and resilience are needed in every industrial sector, and there are a lot of sectors. What’s been striking at this year’s COP is the much deeper level of engagement of many business representatives than previously.

In the past many business-led events were largely exercises in self-promotion. There’s been a fair amount of that in Dubai, but also many more events and conference sessions genuinely exploring the challenges of decarbonisation and adaptation in different sectors and countries. Green technologies are advancing rapidly — there have been multiple sessions on the potential of artificial intelligence to support climate action — and investors are pouring in money.

In effect there’s been a parallel conference going on here — while the UN negotiators do their increasingly abstruse thing in the formal sessions, the real world has broken in and is taking over the space. It’s messy, it’s not properly accountable, it’s all still largely voluntary rather than regulated. But it reflects a sea change in the scale and seriousness of business action on climate around the world.

All round the COP conference venue the PR people have put up little slogans and homilies to inspire the delegates. “Let’s lead change.” “The urgency of the climate challenge demands courage, not caution.” “Action inspires hope.” Strangely enough, they might be right. •

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This year, though, the series would have to be pitched as a documentary. COP28 opened on Wednesday in the improbable location of Dubai, where futuristic glass towers and a palm-shaped luxury resort raised from the sea cater for the world’s gas-guzzling classes. Dubai is the principal city of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. The head of the UAE’s state-owned oil giant ADNOC, Sultan Al Jaber, is the person its government has appointed to be president of the UN climate conference. And last week the BBC published leaked briefing notes for Al Jaber’s meetings with twenty-seven countries over the past year revealing that, as well as discussing the COP negotiations, he was pursuing energy investment deals for ADNOC and another UAE investment company he heads, Masdar.

For the climate NGOs this was merely confirmation that the UAE should not have been made host of the COP in the first place, and that Al Jaber was a completely inappropriate person to preside over it. “A brazen conflict of interest,” said Amnesty International, calling for him to resign.

But there was never any chance of that, and most of the country delegates in Dubai have reacted to the revelations with a world-weary shrug. “So the UAE is pursuing its oil interests?” said one. “And your point is…?”

The UAE’s energy interests overseas are large. The Financial Times estimates that it has invested almost US$200 billion in energy projects in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe in the last year alone. Around half of this is in oil and gas, including for a major expansion of new drilling. This blatantly ignores the International Energy Agency’s warning that meeting the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times effectively means no more fossil fuel exploration. The UAE’s plans alone will blow the global “carbon budget” out of the water.

The UAE argues that the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction: it is merely responding to demand. On all realistic projections, countries will still be using oil and gas till well into the mid-century, and the UAE’s is the cheapest and among the least polluting.

And look at the other half of the UAE’s energy deals, adds Al Jaber: huge new solar, wind and geothermal investments helping provide power and air conditioning to developing and emerging economies from Azerbaijan to Zambia, China to Turkey. For many poorer countries, the UAE’s investments are critical — and far larger than anything they receive from Western governments or private sector companies. You don’t hear many developing country delegates criticising the UAE here.

Yet the revelations about Al Jaber’s Janus-like activities in the run-up to COP28 can’t be wholly dismissed. The UN rules are clear: the COP president must be neutral and impartial, and must not act to further their own interests. In Dubai over the next two weeks probably the single most contentious issue on the agenda will be the future of fossil fuels.

A distinctive feature of this year’s COP will be the “global stocktake.” This is one of the key processes set out in the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015. Every five years, the agreement says, countries must take stock of their progress, or otherwise, over the last five, and set out global ambitions for the future. In this way the stocktake should inform the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, countries must make two years later, in which they must each set out new and stronger emissions reduction targets. The next round of NDCs is due in 2025.

Over the past year the global stocktake negotiations have been fraught. Climate scientists have made it very clear that collectively the world is not remotely on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In its annual report on the emissions gap, the UN Environment Programme observes that the difference between the emissions trajectory the world needs to be on for 1.5°C and the one it actually is on has widened rather than narrowed.

Last year it looked as if countries’ plans would take the world to around 2.6°C of warming; today it is probably 2.9°C. At that level much of the world’s agricultural output and water supplies will be at serious risk of failing, the incidence of extreme weather events regularly catastrophic, and large numbers of species would be wiped out. Countries’ current plans for emissions in 2030, UNEP says, need to be cut by another 42 per cent to be on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway.

The stocktake negotiators have focused on the future rather than dwelling on past and present failures. Everyone agrees there should be more investment in renewable energy: COP28 is likely to set a new goal of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. That will not be easy: solar and wind power are being installed around the world at record rates, but market forecasts currently expect capacity only to double by then.

The COP will also agree on a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency has long been the cheapest way of cutting emissions — the International Energy Agency describes it as the “first fuel” — but has always been something of the Cinderella of energy policy, requiring regulatory tightening in many different sectors. Doubling the rate of global improvement will require accelerated innovation in heat pumps, vehicles, consumer goods and industrial processes.

COP28 may well also reach an agreement on methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, more powerful as a cause of warming than carbon dioxide. It is produced by livestock, by waste disposal and as a by-product of fossil fuel production. Here the UAE is playing up its status as an oil giant. Only a country like his, says Al Jaber, can bring the global oil and gas sector to the COP table. Expect a historic announcement of a new tough methane target for 2030, and the major oil and gas companies — traditional opponents of climate policy, and enemies of the climate movement — pledging their support.

As ever, though, it won’t be the things that everyone can agree on, however important, that will dominate negotiations. The major battle this year will be over what the COP says about the future of the fossil fuel industry itself.

The small island states and other nations most vulnerable to climate impacts are insisting on the science. The goal of 1.5°C means reducing carbon emissions to net zero by sometime before 2050. That means ending fossil fuel use more or less entirely. (“Net” zero allows some residual emissions, but only if they are captured and stored, either by increased vegetation or geologically.) So COP28 should agree that fossil fuels must be phased out.

The European Union, with its strong pro-climate-action lobby, is sympathetic. But for China, India, the United States and Saudi Arabia it is a step much too far. They want the text to say merely that fossil fuels should be “phased down,” not out. They also want this to cover only “unabated” fossil fuels: if coal, oil and gas plants are fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to capture the emissions and bury them underground, then they should be exempt from the phase-down.

With the two groups of countries so far apart, agreeing on the text will be very difficult. So the question being asked is: will the UAE be a neutral and impartial chair of the negotiations on this crucial issue? Many observers think it is hard to believe so. Al Jaber is only COP president for a year; he will be chief executive of ADNOC for much longer. The interests of the UAE are not exactly a secret. So expect another bruising conclusion to the conference, we are told, with NGOs crying foul, and the negotiations running acrimoniously into extra time, as they so often do (last year by nearly two whole days).

But there’s another possibility. Al Jaber is a deal-maker. That’s what he does in the day job, and what he’s been doing at those meetings over the last year. He wants to show that this is what you get with a serious player from a serious oil state. So he’ll find some clever new wording to bridge the gap between “phasing out” and “phasing down,” acknowledging that the use of fossil fuels will no doubt come to an end, eventually, but in the meantime they are needed to help the world’s poor escape their poverty. And then he’ll bring the gavel down on a successful COP before, not after, the scheduled end.

In fact, he’s shown what he can do already. The first day of a COP normally manages to do no more than agree on the agenda — and that often takes hours of wrangling in itself. But the first day of COP28 on Wednesday ended with an unprecedented agreement on one of the most significant issues of the entire two weeks.

Developing countries have been arguing for years for a fund to compensate them for the “loss and damage” climate change is now inflicting on their economies. Last year they won the fund — but it had no money in it, and everyone expected the negotiations about how it was to be organised to last several more years. Yesterday, though, the UAE pulled a remarkable rabbit out of the conference hat. Not just an agreement on the arrangements for the fund, but US$440 million of financial pledges to it — including US$100 million from the UAE itself.

Curmudgeons noted that these sums are not nearly enough — the economic costs of loss and damage already run into the billions, and with the UAE’s oil revenues having soared last year to almost US$100 billion a group of former world leaders led by Gordon Brown urged it only this week to provide US$3 billion for climate change. In comparison, US$100 million is small beer.

But Al Jaber didn’t look too worried at the press conference closing the day. He had pulled off a stunning coup, developed and developing nations alike expressed themselves delighted, and the UAE was in its rightful place. •

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In an election noted for the number of male candidates promising to take on a female running mate, Hsiao was not the first woman to make an appearance. In September, independent presidential candidate Terry Gou, billionaire founder of Foxconn, made headlines with his choice of running mate: actress and motivational speaker Tammy Lai, familiar to Taiwanese Netflix subscibers as the fictional presidential candidate in the series Wave Makers. Gou has withdrawn from the race but Terry and Tammy posters can still be seen on buses all over Taipei.

In contrast to Tammy Lai, Hsiao Bi-khim’s political experience is firmly grounded in Taiwanese party politics. She first came to prominence in 1999, when at the age of twenty-seven she was invited to serve as international affairs director for the DPP. Appearing on television for the first of many such interviews, she explained who she was: born in Japan in 1971 to a Taiwanese father and American mother, educated in the United States, Taiwanese in her heart. In transliterating her personal name into English, she uses the Taiwanese pronunciation, Bi-khim, not the Mandarin.

Her career unfolded within the occasionally uncomfortable embrace of the DDP. She grew up under martial law in Taiwan, before multi-party elections were a possibility, and left for the United States in 1986, the very year the DPP was founded. By the time she returned as an adult, Taiwan was in transition to democracy and the DPP was beginning to challenge the ascendancy of the ruling Kuomintang, or KMT.

Hsiao was working for DPP leader Chen Shui-bian in 2000 when he inflicted on the KMT its first crushing defeat in a general election. She surrendered her American citizenship that same year in order to qualify for public office. The following year, aged thirty, she was herself elected to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. She has now spent close to quarter of a century working in political or para-political roles in or for Taiwan.

This second homecoming comes at a crucial time in the political cycle. The 2024 election is less than two months away. President Tsai Ing-wen, who brought the DPP back to power in 2016, has completed two terms of office and by the terms of the constitution is ineligible to stand again. Next May she will hand over to whoever wins the 13 January election. The DPP will be hoping that it is Lai Ching-te, and so far opinion polls have him in the lead.

Although the lead is steady, it is slim, and popular sentiment favours a change of government. If Taiwan had a two-party preferred system of voting, Lai would be staring at defeat. Last week that possibility seemed closer to realisation when the dynamic new Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, signed an agreement with the KMT to run a unity ticket. In the lead-up to the agreement, support for Lai dropped to well below the 35 per cent “safety bar.” This marriage of convenience quickly collapsed, but with Lai’s approval ratings so low, even a victory in the presidential election would mean political chaos if a correspondingly low number of DPP legislators were to be returned.

Under these circumstances, Hsiao Bi-khim’s appearance at Lai’s side on Monday could not have been better timed. For the preceding five days, the media had been in a frenzy first over the deal between the KMT and the TPP and then over its spectacular collapse. For longer still, the potential deal and its brokers had dominated the local political news. The DPP’s loss of visibility over this period contributed to its decline in opinion polls. With the deal in shambles, the sight of the high-achieving and well-regarded Hsiao standing alongside the current vice-president should have been reassuring to more than simply DPP supporters. That has yet to show in the polls.

Disaffection with the DPP government in the electorate is attributable to Taiwan’s economic slowdown. Projected growth this year is the lowest in eight years — since Tsai Ing-wen took office, that is. Outside an enviable high-tech industry, manufacturing on the island is disappearing. Salaries are stagnant and prices are rising. The workforce is ageing. Youth unemployment is high and job security low. A young male “precariat” is flocking to alternative parties.

Adding to the malaise are sanctions by China, including bans on tourism to the island and imports of Taiwanese produce, which are slated home by critics government to the deterioration of relations with China under Tsai Ing-wen. Markets responded positively to news of the opposition unity ticket — while it persisted — last week.

If the economy were booming, other things would matter less. As it is, opposition parties have found plenty of other targets for attack: the government’s handling of Covid; corruption on the part of legislators; incidents of sexual harassment and their cover-up (not limited to the DPP but particularly damaging to it as the party in office); food safety; energy security; sleeping with the enemy; and even the shelf life of eggs.

Hsiao, who is close to the current president as well as the wannabe future one, can’t avoid being associated with the DPP’s failures, such as they are. But she has a strong record as a legislator and political campaigner, and strong ties to the south and east, important factors in a country where the capital and much of the population are in the north. She grew up in Tainan, where her father served as pastor in the Presbyterian church. Between 2012 and 2020 she was the DPP representative in Hualien, on the east coast, once a “deep blue” KMT stronghold. Hsiao is credited with weakening the KMT’s grip there in 2012 and breaking it in 2016, when she won the seat.

In the Chinese press she stands accused of serving American rather than Taiwanese interests: the expression “running dog of the Americans,” so often used in Mao’s time, has been used of her. But in a country with a favourable view of the United States, her native-level English, American heritage and strong performance as Taiwan’s representative in Washington all count in her favour. Her commitment to Taiwan is unassailable. She speaks Taiwanese as well as English and Mandarin.

True to her Presbyterian upbringing (Presbyterian being synonymous with progressivism in Taiwan), she stands for progressive politics. Taiwanese society is socially conservative and in a referendum in 2018 a majority voted against marriage reform. When the legislature nonetheless passed the reform bill, Hsiao didn’t brush over the contradiction but pointed to the responsibility of a government to all its citizens. “We need to take responsibility for the referendum last year,” she declared, “and we need to take responsibility for people who have suffered from incomplete laws or faced discrimination.”

If she is more progressive than the majority of her compatriots on social issues, Hsiao is at one with them on the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. A majority of people in Taiwan now identify as Taiwanese rather than as hybrid Chinese–Taiwanese and hostility to China is deep-seated among DPP supporters.

It follows that China regards the DPP in general as anathema. As de facto ambassador in the United States, Hsiao was subject to vitriolic attacks in the Chinese media. News of her pending appointment as presidential running mate was criticised as portending a phenomenon of “independence on top of independence” in Taiwanese politics. Ever responsive to signals from China, the KMT called the announcement a recipe for disaster, bringing “troubles at home, perils abroad.”

It is difficult to tell how greatly China features as a factor in the minds of electors. Taiwanese have virtually no appetite for unification under the Chinese Communist Party but they have lived for a long time with the threat of forced unification hanging over their heads. It is impossible not to be struck by a certain sangfroid in the attitudes of people on the street. As they will point out, they have no means of preventing a war. While they wait for the threat either to eventuate or to evaporate, they want to be able to buy fresh eggs, see a doctor when they need to, and house their families if they have them. The birth rate in Taiwan has itself become a political issue, with rival candidates offering rival policies to get women to have more babies (KMT) or get more women to have babies (TPP).

The dangers of provocation posed by the DPP’s leaning towards independence nonetheless make cross-strait relations an obvious issue for opposition parties. Accordingly, KMT campaign posters are running the slogan “We don’t want war; peace on two shores.” Both the KMT and the TPP have promised to resurrect the Cross Straits Services Agreement in the interests both of boosting the economy and easing political tensions. This very agreement inspired a massive protest in 2014 and helped to bring down the KMT government in 2016. During the 2014 student occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Hsiao Bi-khim was one of the legislators who supported the protestors by keeping watch at the premises. But times have changed since then, as everyone knows. One of the leaders of the 2014 protest is now himself running for the TPP.

Hsiao won’t be able to avoid talking about cross-strait relations in the lead-up up to the election. At an international media conference on Thursday she had to field a barrage of questions on exactly this issue. Contrary to statements from China, however, she is not one of the independence diehards of the DPP. To the extent that Lai is regarded as leaning just a bit too far in that direction, Hsiao may help give balance to his campaign and claw back some middle ground. This would be true to her established image as a “cat warrior” who — in contrast to China’s “wolf diplomacy” — treads a delicate line between self-determination and confrontation.

Election campaigns in Taiwan are restricted by law to a period of twenty-eight days counting backwards from the eve of the election day. The pre-campaign has been rumbling on for most of this year, pending the formal registration of candidates on or before Friday 24 November. Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim registered on Tuesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week it still seemed possible that the KMT and TPP would patch things up, but the chance was faint. TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je had said publicly that he hates three things: “mosquitoes, cockroaches, and the KMT.” Granted that he was in a bad temper, it was a difficult statement to unsay. A poll taken in the middle of the week showed, moreover, that the gap between the DPP and KMT had narrowed to less than one percentage point, reducing the KMT’s incentive to seek an alliance.

On Friday morning, all speculation ended when separate TPP and KMT tickets were announced.  Ko Wen-je would team with TPP legislator Wu Hsin-yeh — a woman, as he had promised. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih had also said he provisionally favoured a woman as running mate, but in the end he came up with senior party figure, Jaw Shaw-kong. If the mid-week poll is right, the contest will boil down, again, to a two-party race between the DPP’s Lai-Hsiao team and the KMT’s Hou-Jaw.

Seventy-two years old, the son of a KMT soldier and an advocate of unification, Jaw could hardly provide a starker contrast to Hsiao Bi-khim. More clearly than the presidential candidates themselves, the two symbolise the different choices facing the electorate in January. •

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From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

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After the Marshall Islands entered into a compact of free association with Washington in 1986, its new parliament, the Nitijela, created a Nuclear Claims Tribunal to adjudicate claims for compensation for health and environmental legacies. Over the next twenty years Marshallese survivors and scientific experts provided the NCT with detailed information about the nuclear era and its impacts.

By the time the NCT began winding up in 2010, its judges had awarded a total of US$2.3 billion in compensation for property damage, loss of land use, personal injury, hardship and suffering, as well as for clean-up of contaminated lands. But the trust fund set up under the 1986 compact, with Washington’s one-off injection of US$150 million, fell well short of that figure. To this day, hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation remains unpaid.

That could have been the end of the story, but for a provision in the 1986 compact. The Marshall Islands government, says the compact, can seek further funding for nuclear legacies if it can demonstrate “changed circumstances.” Circumstances have changed, and that change came from an unexpected quarter: new archival material transferred from Washington to the Marshallese capital, Majuro, in the mid 1990s.

The cache of new material not only threw new light on the scope of the nuclear tests and their effects but also highlighted the importance of archival material for poorer countries seeking restitution for past injuries. In the Marshall Islands case, it came with an extra message: the need to preserve the archives assembled by the NCT over its two decades of operation, which were at risk of neglect and decay.

In December 1993, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, US energy secretary Hazel O’Leary announced the scheme that would help the Marshallese. Under the Clinton administration, O’Leary’s Openness Initiative aimed to increase transparency by opening up the United States’ cold war–era nuclear archives to scrutiny. Among the material to be made available would be many of the documents held by institutions involved in developing and testing nuclear weapons.

In March 1994, the Clinton administration created the Office of Human Radiation Experiments, or OHRE, to collate and release evidence of radiation research using human subjects during the second world war and the cold war. OHRE identified and catalogued documents drawn from 3.2 million cubic feet of archival records scattered across the United States. By the end of 1997, it had declassified more than ten million pages, including many records covering the Marshall Islands.

The US Department of Energy then released to the Marshall Islands government more than seventy boxes of newly declassified documents. They revealed that the spread of radioactive fallout from the 1954 Bravo test, as well as from other atmospheric tests that year, was much wider than previously acknowledged.

As one example, a US Atomic Energy Commission report from January 1955, “Radioactive Debris from Operation Castle, Islands of the Mid-Pacific,” listed two dozen islands and atolls in the Marshalls that received varying levels of fallout from all six of the 1954 hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

The study shocked Marshallese leaders. For nearly forty years the US military had hidden documentary evidence showing fallout from the Bravo test series spreading across more than 11,000 square kilometres. Plumes of contamination had affected virtually every atoll in the island nation — not just the northern atolls close to the Bikini test site.

When I met then Marshallese president Dr Hilda Heine in Majuro in 2017, she told me these documents confirmed that eighteen other inhabited atolls or single islands had been contaminated by the tests. “The myth of only four ‘exposed’ atolls of Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik has shaped US nuclear policy on the Marshallese people since 1954,” she said, “which limited medical and scientific follow-up and compensation programs.”

It’s little surprise that the Openness Initiative was shuttered within a few years. In Restricted Data, his history of US nuclear secrecy, researcher Alex Wellerstein explains that Hazel O’Leary’s campaign for accountability and transparency was short-lived because openness “was increasingly seen as a political liability that had mollified few critics and drawn lots of attention to past misdeeds.”

As the shutters came down, documents about the testing program at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls began disappearing from the US Department of Energy website. In response, Wellerstein established a mirror site, the Marshall Islands Nuclear Document Database, preserving public access to more than 13,700 official documents that would otherwise be buried in the archives.

Prospects for further transparency are dire. When the US Public Interest Declassification Board examined the feasibility of declassifying more Marshall Islands records last year, it concluded that any reopening of nuclear-era archives would take up to six years, would cost between US$100 million and $200 million, and would need around a hundred staff “who are fully cleared at the Top Secret and Q levels” and “trained to identify and review technical nuclear weapons data.”

NCT staff recognised the importance of the survivor and expert testimony given to the tribunal’s hearings in the 1990s and early 2000s. These witness statements, recorded on audio and video cassettes, are vital evidence for any future litigation, especially with many of the witnesses ageing, ill or dying. Preserved, the recordings would also serve as an irreplaceable historical asset for future generations. But the Marshall Islands lacked the staff, finance and archival facilities to protect the fragile recordings. Who could assist?

Enter Trudy Huskamp Peterson, an archival luminary from the United States. Peterson spent twenty-four years with the US National Archives, including a period acting as the US Archivist. Since leaving government service, she has worked as an adviser and consultant for many developing countries, including archival training with Truth and Justice Commissions in South Africa and Honduras, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and worked with human rights groups preserving police archives in Guatemala.

Over many years, she has tackled the conundrum facing governments around the world: how do you protect information for reasons of privacy or national security while holding the security state to account?

“You do have the impulse from the security agencies that everything has got to be locked up forever,” she tells me, “but you also have the real impulse from the public to see what the government is doing in our name. Without public pressure, you do not get things declassified.”

The security agencies are generally over-cautious, says Peterson. “When we’ve opened things over their objections, the sky in general hasn’t fallen. Governments need to come to the realisation that these things can’t be closed forever. There has to be a time set in which you let the documentation go out. If it makes the security services look bad, so be it! But this is a terrible conundrum in most societies that have a modern security network.”

Recognising that the Marshall Islands lacked the resources to protect memory and history, Peterson seized the opportunity to work with staff in Majuro. “When I first got involved in the Marshall Islands,” she tells me, “we found a number of videos and many audio recordings of hearings of the tribunal. They were in terrible shape, as they’d been sitting in tropical heat for years.”

She says that preserving physical material is a real problem for poorer countries, but protecting electronic records also has its challenges. “It isn’t that the principles of creating archives change from paper to electronic, but the techniques do. All the technical equipment and skills that you have to have are different. Most countries like Palau or Kiribati can’t afford that. Internationally, we don’t have a good answer to that challenge.”

Throughout this period, NCT public advocate Bill Graham was a driving force in the effort to preserve the tribunal’s records. A former teacher and lawyer who arrived in the Marshall Islands as a Peace Corps volunteer, Graham retained an encyclopedic knowledge of the nuclear testing era, until his untimely death in March 2018.

Drawing on Peterson’s global network of archivists, Graham found support for the project halfway around the world, in the Catalan municipality of Girona in Spain. Peterson was friendly with Joan Boadas i Raset, who has served as the Girona Municipal Archivist since 1990 and is one of the world’s leading audiovisual preservation specialists.

Girona has a large museum of moving images and hosts an international conference most years to discuss the preservation of audiovisual heritage. As director of the city’s Centre for Image Research and Diffusion, Boadas had the technology that could assist the NCT. With some prodding from Trudy Peterson, he agreed to assist.

“I was sitting across the table from Joan at dinner one night,” she explains. “I said to him, ‘Let me tell you about this problem that I’ve got. Would you consider taking these materials in, cleaning them up, making a digital copy, then holding a copy and giving the originals back to the Marshall Islands?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I can do that’ and we shook hands across the table.”

The Marshall Islands government and the municipality of Girona signed an agreement in October 2012, agreeing to digitise and store irreplaceable NCT documents along with seventy-five videos and 428 cassette recordings. Bill Graham, travelling to a human rights conference in Geneva, took a suitcase filled with video and cassette tapes across the borders of the United States, Switzerland and Spain.

Staff at the Municipal Archive of Girona, known as AMGi, began work the following year to digitise the records — work donated by the city at no cost to the Marshall Islands government. At the time, the mayor of Girona was the Catalan politician Carles Puigdemont i Casamajó, a champion of self-determination and independence for the Catalan people. (Today, Puigdemont lives in exile, after Spain issued charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds against him and other independence activists who had overridden rulings by the Constitutional Court of Spain and organised a referendum on self-determination.)

For Joan Boadas, the role of the archivist is to recognise the power of memory: “Power for the benefit of administration and, therefore, institutions, businesses and people’s rights. Power to preserve memory. Power to avoid forgetting and, also, power itself because documents, archives, are an extraordinary tool for the future.” His centre returned the original documents along with hard drives of the digitised material to Majuro in early 2017.

Trudy Peterson then turned to another task: to find a third country that could safely store a copy of the Marshallese records in perpetuity.

“Most countries don’t want another institution holding important records,” she said. “But if you’re going to go underwater or the climate is so inhospitable, then getting a digital copy out is better than nothing. When we set out to find a safe haven for the Marshallese records, we probably could have found one in the United States. But that was the last place anyone would want those records to be stored, because they were the perpetrators of the nuclear testing.”

She turned to Switzerland, and obtained a grant from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to digitise key documents. Once again, she drew on her global network to find a Swiss non-government organisation to help NCT staff scan and save documentary records.

SwissPeace has a record of seeking safe havens for records, she says, whether the danger is from war, revolution, civil unrest or climate change. “That’s certainly the case for the Marshall Islands and probably for many other small island states in the Pacific and Caribbean,” says Peterson. “If you want to make a security copy to take outside the nation in danger, you have to make a copy first. But in general, in many cases, you don’t have a way of getting those records digitised in the first place.”

SwissPeace now administers a grant from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs to preserve the records in perpetuity. “Working out this process with Swiss lawyers, for whom every comma and semi-colon has three meanings, was extraordinarily difficult,” Peterson laughs. “What can you see if you are a nuclear victim, or the victim’s lawyer, or a trustee? If you are an academic researcher, what can you access? If you’re a medical researcher, can you look at medical records but promise not to reveal people’s names? All of these kinds of questions had to be discussed laboriously between the two parties. We had to determine what would be restricted, and for how long, and who could have open access.”

In March 2016, the Marshall Islands Nitijela passed a resolution thanking the city and people of Girona, recognising “that the outstanding skills, talents and dedication involved in digitising and preserving the records of the Tribunal constitute a gift of inestimable value and serve to ensure that a major part of the documentation of the legacy and effects of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands will endure and not be lost or forgotten.”

Accepting an award for his archival work in 2022, Joan Boadas declared that “documents are the stuff of memory, even in this age of intangibility. One could even say that they are memory’s memory.”

He went on: “Are we to be in favour of amnesiac amnesties in the face of aggressive violations of human rights? Or should we go to the archives and the documents to find out what happened, who was responsible, who suffered the consequences and, from there, open up to reconciliation? If you like, it is as simple as this: documents allow forgiveness, but also prevent forgetting.” •

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The Australian media greeted the news warmly. Marcos’s predecessor, the uncouth Rodrigo Duterte, was rightly described as a serial human rights abuser, had shown signs of embracing China and distancing his country from the United States. Marcos, by contrast, was described by journalists as “suave” and “personable.” But most important of all, he is resisting Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea. And he backed AUKUS more enthusiastically than any other Southeast Asian leader.

As the ABC’s Tom Lowrey reported, “There has been a level of surprise among some in government ranks about the pace at which the Philippines has pivoted towards the West under the Marcos administration.” Albanese left Marcos with an invitation to visit Australia next March for a summit marking the fiftieth anniversary of ASEAN–Australian dialogue relations.

Meanwhile, away from governing circles in Manila, Vincent Go is thinking of becoming a chef. For the past seven years he has been one of a group of Filipino photojournalists trying to document deaths in the “war on drugs” that Duterte kicked off when he took the presidency in 2016.

At the height of that “war,” when dozens of corpses could be found on the streets every night, Go and his fellow “nightcrawlers” would follow the police from shooting to shooting. For a few months, with the extraordinary unleashing of state-sanctioned violence against the poor making world headlines, the nightcrawlers were accompanied by members of the world’s media. The official narrative was always the same: the accused fought back — sometimes despite being handcuffed — and were killed by police in self-defence.

On top of that were extrajudicial killings, or EJKs as they are known: the shootings by masked motorcycle-riding gunmen. In filings before the International Criminal Court, the Philippines authorities have acknowledged what everyone else has long understood — that these killings were probably also linked to the police.

Duterte has gone but the deaths continue. The difference, says Go, is that nobody cares anymore. The world’s attention has shifted, and Go’s fellow journalists can no longer be bothered reporting the stories. Go himself needs to earn a living, and he can’t sell his photos to a largely supine local media. So his Facebook page carries his photos of corpses and wakes, interspersed with videos of the dishes he is learning to cook.

Go and I met a fortnight ago in a tiny Quezon City cafe called Silingan, which was set up to provide jobs and support for the widows of the dead. Accompanied by his fellow nightcrawler, Raffy Lerma, the photojournalist had just come from another wake.

The killing being commemorated was the third in a series over the past two months. The first came on 2 August, when twenty police descended on a slum looking for an alleged murder suspect. Spotting two young men preparing to set out on a fishing boat, they opened fire, killing seventeen-year-old Jerhode “Jemboy” Baltazar. It was a case of mistaken identity, though they didn’t stop to check.

Unusually — because many witnesses contradicted the police version of events and because Baltazar was clearly entirely innocent — the media covered the outrage. Baltazar’s family have filed murder charges against all but one of the police officers involved in his killing. At hearings on the killing, the Philippines Senate has held several officers in contempt for evasive and inconsistent evidence. But nobody I asked is hopeful of a meaningful result.

A month after Baltazar’s death, two of his friends arrived at a 7-Eleven store expecting to meet an acquaintance. It was a set up: they were shot by masked gunmen who had been waiting for them. One of them, Daniel Soria, was wounded but managed to flee into the maze of slum alleyways. As CCTV footage shows, he was on his knees in the middle of the street when the gunmen circled back and shot him dead. They took his phone and replied “Patay na asawa mo” (“Your husband is dead”) to a text message left by his girlfriend.

Baltazar’s other friend, John Rey Basie, also wounded in the 7-Eleven attack, knew he was likely to be next to die. Sure enough, his body was found on a bridge in Navotas City at dawn on 6 October. He had been shot in the back of the head. It was his wake that Go and Lerma had just attended.

After our meeting, Go posted pictures of the wake on his Facebook page. “Three friends from the same neighborhood, three friends who played basketball together, three friends who shared joys and sorrows with what little they had, and the gruesome death of three friends who was killed one after the other,” he wrote. “Have we become too frightened to be labelled as enemy of the state or have we become too callous that we could not even demand answers and accountability from those who have been elected or appointed to keep peace and justice?”

In any Western country, deaths like these would cause demonstrations, even riots, and assertions of the obvious — that these lives matter. In the Philippines, those who care are too frightened to speak. And the West has other reasons to ignore the violence and the human rights abuses it represents.

The Philippines archipelago cradles the eastern edge of the South China Sea. Colonised by Spain in 1565, taken over by the Americans in 1902 and briefly captured by Japan during the second world war, its strategic location is again bringing it superpower attention.

The archipelago is home to a series of American military bases, including the well-known naval installation at Subic Bay. But Duterte made a point of flirting with Beijing. Just before he came to power, the international courts had found in the Philippines’ favour in a dispute over islands also claimed by China. As president, he proved tolerant of Beijing’s ambitions.

If the Philippines had fallen into China’s sphere of influence, the world’s balance of power would have tilted. And so the West was happy to consign Duterte to history as a human rights abuser and welcome his successor.

Marcos Junior came to power promising a more humane approach to the country’s undoubted drug problem. In a news release to mark his first hundred days in office he claimed the war on drugs was now “less bloody, more holistic.”

It’s true that the number of killings is lower than the peak in 2016–17. But the best available figures, compiled by the Dahas project of the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines, show that deaths, far from easing under Marcos, are more common than in the last years of the Duterte administration. (Dahas acknowledges that its figures are underestimates; they are drawn entirely from the media, which doesn’t report many fatalities.)

The project recorded 150 killings by state agents in Duterte’s last year, twenty-seven by non-state agents, ninety-eight where the identity of the killer was not known, and twenty-seven “body dumps” — a total of 302-drug related killings. But in the fifteen-and-a-half months of Marcos’s presidency up to 15 October this year, state agents have killed 195 people, with fifty-six killings by non-state agents, 143 by unknown killers and forty-four body dumps: a total of 438. In other words, more people have been killed under Marcos than under Duterte in his last years.

Unlike some of its other cases, the International Criminal Court’s investigation of the Philippines’ war on drugs has attracted very little attention. In July this year the ICC rejected an attempt by the Philippines government to have the inquiry dropped; contrary to the Marcos government’s claims, it found no evidence of a credible domestic investigation of the killings. Marcos maintains he won’t cooperate with the court’s investigators.

In the two weeks I spent in the Philippines talking to victims and human rights groups, I found no one who had heard from the ICC since July’s decision. Whatever the investigators are doing, they are certainly not “on the ground.” When I requested an interview, the ICC responded that no one was available. In any case, it can only investigate the pre-2019 killings under Duterte because the Philippines withdrew from its jurisdiction that year.

Go says the ICC is believed to be drawing on media reports for evidence and talking to peak human rights bodies. But this is not the same as doing what he does and seeing what he sees — traversing the fetid slums, feeling in his pores the ever-present threat of violence and the helplessness of poverty, and interviewing the grieving families. The ICC’s dry, legalistic and protracted proceedings — the video footage might be recommended for insomniacs — could hardly be more of a contrast.

During my visit I was told of at least seven killings that weren’t reported by the media and therefore not included in the Dahas figures. I was shown a video circulating among victim-support groups that was taken last year by a terrified family member hiding in a darkened bedroom.

Harsh voices can be heard over the barking of dogs. The camera shakes. Four men encircle a man whimpering on the floor. According to his family, the men — police in civilian clothes — had been torturing the man and were forcing him to drink soapy water from the tubs of laundry in his home. The video shows them grabbing their victim under his armpits and dragging him out of the house and out of the camera’s view.

In the official police record of what happened that night, he had been arrested along with two others in a “buy bust” drug operation. There is nothing in the official record to indicate that he died.

But the day after the video was recorded, his body was found in a nearby street. Pictures taken by family members in the morgue show bruising to his face and chest, yet the death certificate records the cause of death as a heart attack. As a result this death was not reported by media, and doesn’t show up in the Dahas figures.

Now, family members don’t want to depart from that narrative or release the video, because they are frightened. People who make a fuss — like the family and friends of Jemboy Baltazar — know what to expect.

Deaths aren’t the only result of the “war.” I met a woman whose brother was charged with drug offences. He says he was a stand-in for the true guilty party, who had paid off police. He was eventually found not guilty and was released late last year. By then, he had spent ten years in jail, and his health was ruined.

More recently, a sixty-year-old British health worker, Elden Chamberlain, went public after spending two years in jail, with court hearings repeatedly delayed, on what he says are fabricated drugs charges. Chamberlain’s case is exceptional not only because he is a well-to-do foreign national but also because he has the resources to fight.

The Philippines jails are filling up with similar cases involving locals, many of whom can’t afford to contest the charges but make plea bargains in return for freedom. Bail is rarely granted in drug cases, which can take many years to come to court.

Late last month the World Justice Project released its annual index on the rule of law in 142 nations, based on national surveys of more than 149,000 households and 3400 legal practitioners. The Philippines had dropped three spots from its ninety-seventh ranking in 2022. In the East Asia and Pacific region, the Philippines is at thirteenth place out of fifteen nations.

What does the “suave” Marcos make of all this? Many things about the Philippines are opaque, but the best guess of the human rights activists I interviewed is that Marcos is not entirely in control of the police force. On top of an already violent law-enforcement culture, Duterte encouraged a culture of impunity. Marcos seems helpless to combat this.

Or perhaps he doesn’t want to. His vice-president, after all, is Sara Duterte, daughter of the former president.

Many Filipinos have voted with their feet. The country has one of the largest diasporas in the world, including 400,000 Australians of Filipino heritage — a figure Albanese cited when describing what the two countries have in common.

One of the 400,000, a nurse at a major capital city hospital, is the daughter of the man who was tortured in the video I saw, and later killed. She has communicated with me, but won’t go public. Her family is in Manila, and vulnerable. She’s one who won’t be celebrating Marcos’s visit in March.

Vincent Go, meanwhile, is perfecting his Chinese braised pork. •

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Billionaire Foxconn founder and independent presidential candidate Terry Gou quickly came out in support of Ma, criticising the country’s leaders for their position on national identity. Ko Wen-je, presidential candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, demurred, arguing that National Day should be above party politics; but on the day itself he left the ceremony early to attend a demonstration.

In a country that has yet to declare its own independence — a country, moreover, claimed by another country — a “national day” is inherently problematic. Taiwan’s National Day is the anniversary of the 1911 uprising that led to the founding of the Republic of China, or ROC, the following year, at a time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. After the People’s Republic was created by the Communist Party in 1949, the ROC survived in rump form in Taiwan. The island itself, governed by the Kuomintang under martial law until 1987, was technically nothing more than a province.

All this was a long time ago. The participants in the original conflict are mostly dead; martial law has given way to multi-party democracy. With every new generation, Taiwan’s connection to the Chinese past has become increasingly attenuated and “Republic of China” less meaningful to them as a name for their country. Identification with the People’s Republic is much weaker again.

Around two-thirds of people in Taiwan now think of themselves as Taiwanese without qualification — in other words, they don’t even describe themselves as Taiwanese-Chinese. Judging by the level of electoral support for President Tsai Ing-wen’s independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party, they would have opted by now for independence if it were not for fears of triggering war with China.

In these circumstances, the question “Whose National Day is it, after all?” has become progressively sharper. At Taipei’s monumental East Gate, not far from the site of the annual ceremony, the tensions underpinning the day are openly expressed each year. Separated by a thin blue line of police, a unification-with-China group and an independence-for-Taiwan group hurl abuse at each other in what has become a National Day ritual.

Under President Tsai, in office since 2016, the response to this question has been to allow greater leeway for expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, which in turn has reduced the visibility of the name “Republic of China.” Passport covers have been one scene of action. Within a few months of Tsai’s election, increasing numbers of Taiwanese travellers were covering up the words “Republic of China” on passport covers with a sticker carrying the inflammatory words “Republic of Taiwan.” The current passport design, issued early in Tsai’s second term, altogether omits the English words Republic of China from the cover.

Another site for subversion of the island’s ROC status is the National Day logo. This is generally designed around the Double Tenth symbol “++” (the Chinese character for ten, repeated), which evokes the date of the 1911 uprising, 10 October. Since 2017, this symbol has by degrees become more abstract and the accompanying references to the Republic of China less clear, if they’re retained at all. “Better Taiwan,” “Taiwan Together” and “Taiwan Forward” are among the slogans used in logos issued during Tsai’s first term of office.

Since 2020 the designs have become more assertive again. The Kuomintang criticised the 2021 logo because it carried no mention of the Republic of China. The logo for 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, for the first time carried no reference to the Double Tenth. It instead featured a stylised sun — its blue and yellow rays read by some as a salute to Ukraine — accompanied by the words “Protect the Land, Guard the Country.”

The Double Tenth sign was resurrected for this year’s design. But the slogan of “democratic Taiwan,” resonating with the name of the Democratic Progressive Party, was provocative. In combination with the absence of any reference to the ROC, it was enough to prompt the Kuomintang’s boycott of the last National Day ceremony to be presided over by Tsai Ing-wen. In May next year, Tsai will hand over to whoever wins the presidential election in January.

The trend towards erasing references to the ROC can of course be reversed if the Kuomintang is returned to office, but at present that seems unlikely. The Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te, has been leading the polls since the race began. As long as none of his opponents join forces, Taiwan’s first-past-the-post voting system means he is likely to succeed Tsai Ing-wen next year.

Lai’s forward position on independence for Taiwan is well known but as vice-president and now presidential candidate he has had to juggle the fact of Taiwanese self-determination with the realities of cross-strait relations. In a recent interview he summed up the complexities of talking about a country that not everyone agrees is even a country in saying: “Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country called the Republic of China.”

And there’s the rub. As “Republic of China” under Kuomintang rule, Taiwan was a recognised enemy of the People’s Republic during the Mao Years, 1949–76. The 1992 consensus — entailing both sides recognising the core principle of “One China” — ushered in a period of neutrality. Hostility was replaced by pragmatism, trade and migration between the two places. As the Republic of China, Taiwan remained formally “Chinese” and paradoxically compliant with the One China principle.

Had the Chinese Communist Party been prepared at any stage to put One China ahead of One Party, Taiwan might have joined with China to form a reconfigured republic — neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party version, but something attuned to the briefly hopeful, democratising world of the late twentieth century.

This chance appears to have evaporated, and the very term “Republic of China” is again becoming anathema in China. In Hong Kong this year, commemoration of the Double Tenth was prohibited because of its association with Taiwan independence. Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, born and raised in Hong Kong, recalls that in his boyhood the largest number of Chinese flags displayed there each October were the Republic of China’s, in commemoration of the Double Tenth. This year, Hong Kong was a sea of mainland China’s “five-star red flags” — 70,000 of them, around sixty-three per square kilometre.

It was the prospect of a sea of five-star red flags on Taiwanese soil that brought voters out to return Tsai Ing-wen to office in 2020. In her final National Day address on Tuesday, Tsai mentioned Taiwan over fifty times and the Republic of China just seven. Occasionally the two terms were coupled, most notably in her reference to national defence and the “resolve to defend the Republic of China (Taiwan).”

Needless to say, this is a rather different ROC from the one that China’s leaders have imagined might voluntarily return to the ancestral fold. From a Taiwanese point of view, it is an open question whether it ever belonged to that fold at all. •

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The visual contrasts with Australia mask many similarities. Taiwan is a young democracy, but its robust institutions underpin a remarkably progressive society. Democratisation has fostered a degree of civic consciousness unknown in the decades of martial law between 1949 and 1987. Multicultural policy has allowed local cultures to flourish after decades of repression, fostering a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.  A substantial body of law, still growing, protects and advances Indigenous rights to land, language maintenance and participation in government. A  marriage equality bill was passed on constitutional grounds in 2019.

Among these measures, Indigenous rights must resonate keenly for the visiting parliamentarians, themselves about to vote in a referendum on constitutional recognition of First Nations in Australia. On their way down Ketagalan Boulevard to the presidential office building on Tuesday, they may have been told that the road had been renamed in honour of the Aboriginal people who first lived in the Taipei area. They may also have seen the small “tent embassy” that has stood in adjacent parkland since 2017, the year that marked the beginning of a protest movement aimed at achieving something like a Wik determination (or better) in land rights.

It won’t be news to the visitors that Taiwan has a substantial Indigenous population. Indigenous studies and arts have been an increasingly important area of interaction and cultural exchange between Taiwan and Australia. In 2018, the Northern Territory government and the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre launched a six-week artist-in-residence exchange program. In 2019, the first combined Yirramboi–Pulima festival brought together dance performers from Australian and Taiwanese First Nations in Melbourne. This year, the Narrm Oration at Melbourne University will be delivered by Akawyan Pakawyan of Taiwan’s Pinuyumayan people.

Beyond their First Nation status, little obviously connects the Aboriginal peoples in the two places. The First Nations people of Taiwan are Austronesian. Their languages (and there are many) link them to populations scattered across the Indo-Pacific, from Madagascar in the west to Hawaií in the east and New Zealand in the south.  But Austronesians never settled in Australia.

As colonial subjects, moreover, Taiwanese Aboriginals have a rather “tangled history” that seems not to fit neatly into the model provided by the European settler-colonial states. Since the Dutch occupation of the early seventeenth century, the island has been taken over by a series of competing powers in Northeast Asia. An independent settler-colonial state has emerged, populated largely by descendants of Chinese immigrants, but it is overshadowed and to some extent forestalled by the threat of war from its large neighbour, the People’s Republic of China.

Nonetheless, there are striking points of correspondence in the histories of First Nations in Taiwan and Australia. In both places, immigration, albeit from largely different sources, led to massive population growth during the nineteenth century. In both cases, the influx of newcomers was accompanied by a severe diminution of the Aboriginal population. Forced relocation of whole tribes sundered links with ancestral lands. In both cases, the process of dispossession continued into the second half of the twentieth century, leaving a legacy of trauma and social disadvantage reflected most poignantly in shorter life expectancy for Taiwanese and Australian Aboriginals alike.

Momentous developments meant a fundamental shift in relations between First Nations and the majority society in both places in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Australia, the Mabo and Wik High Court cases quashed forever the doctrine of terra nullius, altering perceptions of land ownership in Australia and returning a considerable degree of authority over Country to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. In Taiwan, Aboriginal activism gathered momentum as the whole society shifted into democratic mode; the development of opposition political parties in non-Indigenous society was matched by the formation of Indigenous associations that were soon asserting their rights to self-determination.

Since then, First Nations’ issues have rarely been absent from the political landscape in either place. In 2007, prime minister Kevin Rudd, having brought Labor to power after a period of eleven years of conservative government, apologised to members of the stolen generations. In 2016, newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen, bringing the Democratic Progressive Party to power after eight years of conservative government under the Kuomintang, apologised to Taiwan’s First Nations for crimes committed against them after the island was handed over to China at the end of the second world war. Even the sharp division between political parties on Aboriginal issues shows parallels.

Constitutional changes, however, present different problems in the two places. In Australia, the Constitution can be changed by the people, who may or may not prove willing to support the changes about to be presented to them in the referendum. In Taiwan, the constitution is an historical relic, a document drawn in another time for another place — the Republic of China in 1947. Constitutional amendments are impeded by China’s tendency to view any such moves as “a path that seeks independence.” It was in the face of strident criticism from Beijing that Taiwan’s constitution was amended in 2005 to reserve six seats in the national assembly for Aboriginal representatives. With this and one other “additional article” the then president, Chen Shui-pien, made good on his promise that Indigenous Taiwanese would receive constitutional recognition.

Needless to say, all this is bound up with the development of democracy in Taiwan. The formation of political parties and the introduction of open elections in the late twentieth century meant shaking off the Chinese yoke. Politically, acknowledgement of and alignment with Aboriginal rights, especially land rights and cultural rights, has stamped Taiwan as different from China and established Aboriginal people as prior owners of a land that China regards as its own.

Incorporation into China would be damaging to Taiwan’s First Nations.  The very terms Aboriginal/Indigenous — in Chinese, literally “the peoples who originally lived here” — are frowned on in China for their suggestion of prior claim on the land and a history that might privilege them over the Han majority. China has effectively defined its own Indigenous peoples out of existence; all that is left are ethnic minorities (xiaoshu minzu).

Whether this complex of issues has been discussed by the visitors during their time in Taiwan has not been reported. Prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pending trip to China has anyway meant that their visit has been low key. But if some future parliamentary delegation to Taiwan includes a First Nations MP, we can expect indigenous issues here to feature in political debates about Australia’s relations with both China and Taiwan. •

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We learned his answer last week. You abandon and attack climate change policy, invent unpopular measures you claim your opponents support, and pledge you will never force such monstrous burdens on hard-working voters.

To the dismay of many in his own Conservative Party but the joy of the right-wing press, Sunak has come out fighting on the territory his predecessors had been careful to avoid. Climate change policy has been the subject of consensus among all of Britain’s major political parties for nearly two decades, giving the United Kingdom an enviable reputation as a global leader not just in emissions reduction but also in making climate policy with public consent.

Sunak has decided to rip all that up. The government is still committed to achieving its statutory target of net zero emissions by 2050, he said in his much-anticipated speech last week, but it isn’t willing to impose “unacceptable costs” on ordinary households to achieve it. It would therefore reverse three key policies introduced by previous Conservative administrations. The ban on new petrol and diesel cars would be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. The ban on new gas boilers (to be replaced by heat pumps and biofuels) would be pushed back to the same date and would no longer apply to poorer households. And landlords would not be required to insulate tenants’ homes. Sunak also took the opportunity to rule out four other policies: taxes on meat, higher taxes on flying, the compulsory separation of household waste into seven different recycling bins, and compulsory car sharing.

As intended, Sunak’s speech caused an immediate uproar. Environmentally minded MPs in his own party condemned the decisions. Green groups proclaimed themselves appalled. Business groups decried the ad hoc changes to regulatory frameworks and warned that investment would fall in sectors generating rising numbers of green jobs.

At the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, meanwhile, there were celebrations. Their collective view was expressed in a triumphant Mail editorial congratulating Sunak for finally “shatter[ing] the cosy consensus, which has let an out-of-touch Westminster elite think it can bully a compliant public into footing a mind-blowing climate bill… This motley assortment of eco-zealots, the liberal Left and posh Tory rebels — egged on, of course, by the BBC — are invariably comfortably enough off to be able to swallow such costs. But for hard-working and practical-minded voters… Mr Sunak’s rethink will make life less tough, less cold and less poor.”

Sunak’s election strategists didn’t write the Mail’s leader, but they might as well have done. The prime minister’s purpose is transparent. He wants to create a clear dividing line between his government and the Labour Party, which has made strong climate policy a central plank of its platform, and in doing so to present the opposition as an out-of-touch elite and his own party as the defenders of ordinary people. He has, in short, decided to drag climate change into a culture-war battle and make that war the foundation of his election strategy.

If this sounds somewhat Australian, it is. Sunak’s chief election strategist is Isaac Levido, protégé of famed Liberal Party election guru Lynton Crosby and architect of Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory. His strategy for Sunak comes straight from the Crosby playbook: use culture-war framing to drive a wedge between your opponents and their own supporters, forcing them to defend unpopular policies on your favoured territory. And don’t worry too much if this requires a measure of blatant dishonesty.

As many commentators observed — and as a BBC interview with Sunak expertly highlighted — it was the dishonesty that most marked out the prime minister’s speech. Every single policy Sunak claimed to have overturned was falsely described.

Neither the ban on new petrol and diesel cars nor the prohibition on gas boilers would have required consumers to fork out “£5000, £10,000, £15,000” more on their alternatives, as Sunak claimed. Innovation in battery technology has so rapidly reduced their cost that electric cars are expected to be cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors as soon as 2027. In practice, postponing the petrol and diesel ban will have very little effect on consumers’ decisions. In any case, 80 per cent of cars bought each year are second hand, to which the ban would not apply.

Heat pump costs are also falling rapidly — driven by the government’s phase-out plans. Consumers also get generous subsidies to install them, making their actual costs to households far less than Sunak claimed. And the requirement to insulate their homes was not on all property owners, as Sunak implied. It was only on private landlords. So, far from saving money for ordinary households, its abolition will actually leave tenants facing higher energy bills.

As for the four other measures Sunak claimed to have scrapped — from taxes on meat to compulsory car sharing — not one of them was government policy, or had even been considered. Nor are any of them Labour policy. They are all mythic inventions of the tabloid press designed to whip up public anger at the general notion of stronger climate policy. The claim to have got rid of them was pure Crosby/Levido: imply that these “extremist” absurdities are supported by your opponents and only you can save voters from them. Within minutes of Sunak finishing his speech Tory central office had put out social media messages highlighting these apparently abolished policies and linking them to Labour’s green spending plans.

(Within another few minutes a whole series of memes had appeared ridiculing Sunak’s remarks and listing a variety of other policies Sunak had saved a grateful public from, including compulsory badger-racing and limits on the number of invisible friends children would be allowed.)

Rishi Sunak’s new strategy has finally revealed his political character, and it is not what his supporters claimed it would be when Conservative MPs made him — without a contest or a vote — Britain’s fifth prime minister in five years last November. He was intended to represent a return to normality, a sensible hand on the tiller who could steady the country’s rocking ship of state.

After David Cameron (who called an unnecessary referendum on Brexit and lost it), Theresa May (who called an unnecessary general election, lost her majority in the House of Commons and failed to get Brexit through parliament), Boris Johnson (who illegally suspended parliament, oversaw 180,000 Covid deaths, associated with Russian spies, failed to disclose personal loans from party donors, promoted corrupt government procurement, lied to parliament about lockdown parties, tried to overturn rules on MPs’ standards of behaviour, and promoted supporters accused of bullying and sexual harassment) and Liz Truss (who introduced a budget that crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring, and was forced to resign by her own MPs after only forty-nine days in the job), it was generally agreed that British politics needed something a little more stable. Though he had only been an MP since 2015, the smooth, very rich and apparently sensible former hedge-fund manager Sunak seemed to fit the bill.

But he has struggled to keep the Tories’ heads above water. On the five modest priorities he spelt out at the beginning of the year, he has so far failed to make any progress. Economic growth has been anaemic, with the economy teetering all year on the edge of recession. Inflation has fallen from 11 per cent to just under 7 per cent, but only after fourteen straight rises in interest rates (from 0.1 to 5.25 per cent) which have led to huge increases in monthly mortgage costs for householders. Sunak pledged to bring down National Health Service waiting lists, but instead they have reached a record high, with more than seven and a half million people now waiting for treatment in England, over three million of them for more than eighteen weeks.

Sunak’s most high-profile pledge, to reduce the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, has also been his most conspicuous failure. Not only have the numbers continued to increase, but each of the measures aimed at tackling the problem (or, to be more precise, aimed at appearing to tackle the problem) has hit the rocks. The courts have prevented anyone at all from being deported to Rwanda, as the government wanted, to seek asylum there. And the hired-in barge moored off a south-coast port, intended to house 500 asylum seekers, had to be closed after a week when Legionella was found in its water supply.

Meanwhile Britain’s privatised water companies have been discharging raw sewage into the country’s rivers and seas, schools have been forced to shut because they contain dangerously unsafe concrete, and the country’s air-traffic control system was closed down by an error in a single flight plan. Callers to radio phone-in programs and newspaper columnists alike lament that nothing in Britain works anymore and the country has gone to the dogs.

All of which has duly been reflected in Sunak’s polling numbers. Labour has been fifteen to twenty points ahead of the Conservatives in national polling for a year now, sufficient to return it to government with a comfortable majority. Sunak’s approval ratings have fallen to minus 30 per cent, with Labour leader Keir Starmer ahead on almost every leadership quality listed by pollsters. Voters now say they trust Labour over the Conservatives on every major issue.

A general election doesn’t have to be called until January 2025, but May or October next year are seen as the likeliest dates. That gives Sunak a year or less to turn his dire fortunes around. After this week’s relaunch and with Levido in charge, we know how he will seek to do it. Reinforced by relentless tabloid attacks on Labour in general and Starmer in particular, the culture-war framing will be used to try to separate the opposition from its traditional working-class base.

This was how the Brexit referendum was won, and it was how Boris Johnson increased the Conservatives’ majority in the general election of 2019. Labour’s heartland voters in towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England were told that the party they and their families had always supported had become detached from their concerns: pro-EU, insufficiently patriotic, too supportive of immigration, soft on crime, uninterested in the armed services, and too London-centric (read, culturally liberal).

With Labour having governed while the post-2000 globalisation was creating an economic boom in London and the affluent southeast, but largely leaving old industrial areas behind, and having then presided over the great financial crash, many of these voters proved ripe to change their allegiance. Johnson’s stunning election victory in 2019 included a whole swathe of former Labour seats thought to be unwinnable by the Tories. That was why, despite everything, Johnson was tolerated for so long by Tory MPs and members: he had won in areas of the country that had not for years, if ever, returned a Tory MP.

It is these “red wall” seats that Sunak must retain in order to have any chance of winning the next election — and equally that Labour must win back if it is to do so. Both parties are focused laser-like on this task. From now until he calls the election we can confidently expect Sunak to attack Labour for its profligate tax and spending plans and economic recklessness, for wanting to rejoin the EU single market, for trying to reduce prison numbers while the Tories want to lock more criminals up, for wanting higher immigration and less defence spending, and — because the party has been taken over by the woke trans-rights brigade — for being unable to define a woman. This week’s climate row-back was just the start.

Will Labour take the bait? On all but one of those issues, it won’t. Over the past year Keir Starmer — also explicitly influenced by the Australian example — has adopted a classic small-target strategy. If you’re this far ahead in the polls, his reasoning goes, and the Tories keep spectacularly demonstrating their own incompetence, don’t blow it by giving your opponents easy wins.

Like a Roman phalanx curling itself into a tight circle with its shields on the outside, Labour has been busy closing off any available lines of attack from the Tories and their media spear-bearers.

On fiscal policy, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves has insisted that Labour will cut government borrowing and only increase spending if it can identify a way of paying for it. And she has since ruled out almost any tax rise, including higher-rate income taxes, the capital gains tax and a wealth tax, that Labour supporters had hoped might allow some spending commitments to be made.

On defence policy, on crime, on immigration and asylum seekers, Labour has attacked the Tory record but has not committed to any significant changes to government policy. On trans rights, Labour has ruled out gender self-identification without a medical diagnosis.

All eyes were therefore on Starmer for his reaction to Sunak’s anti-climate policy speech. Would he take the same approach he had on all the other wedges the Tories had been trying to hammer between him and his voter base? Would he again cleave close to Tory policy and refuse to allow a gap to open up through which he could be attacked?

Signs suggested he might. Reeves had already watered down Labour’s “climate investment plan” to spend £28 billion a year on green infrastructure and innovation: facing rising borrowing costs, she announced that a Labour government would now only get spending to £28 billion by the end of the parliament.

When the party then lost a by-election in London it had been expected to win, amid widespread voter opposition to the (Labour) mayor’s plans to extend a charge on polluting cars, Starmer had a very public wobble, openly questioning the policy. The Tories took their by-election victory as evidence that green policies imposing costs on voters are unpopular and ripe for attack, and Starmer seemed to be drawing the same conclusion. The environmental movement — inside and beyond the party — was alarmed.

They need not have worried. Starmer’s response to Sunak’s anti-green speech was subtle. Refusing to fall into the trap of a debate about the costs of climate policy to ordinary households, he made no public comment at all on the speech apart from a couple of tweets emphasising that Labour’s renewable energy strategy would create jobs, reduce bills and improve energy security. He left it to his shadow climate minister, former party leader Ed Miliband, to castigate Sunak for “not giving a damn” about climate change, describing the PM as “rattled, chaotic and out of his depth.”

Labour would retain the petrol and diesel ban by 2030 and the responsibility of landlords to insulate their tenants’ homes, Miliband said, both of which would cut ordinary households’ costs. (He notably didn’t promise to restore the ban on gas boilers.) As for the four fictional policies Sunak said he was scrapping, Miliband was scathing. Not only had the Labour Party never proposed a tax on meat, he said, but it was not even the policy of the Vegan Society.

Miliband is well known as strongly committed to climate action. Yet it was not he but shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who was the decisive figure in Labour’s choice to pick up the climate gauntlet Sunak had thrown down. Reeves, who has been assiduously wooing business leaders over the past year, has been struck not merely by how fed up with Tory incompetence they have become, but also by how green they are.

With US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act driving record investment into environmental technologies and sectors in the United States, and the European Union’s Green Deal following suit, Labour has made “green prosperity” the centrepiece of its economic and industrial strategies. It will have been delighted at the furious reaction of business leaders to Sunak’s speech. Why get Starmer to attack Sunak when the UK head of Ford will do it for you?

For party members and activists, Labour’s response will have come as a relief. The leadership’s small-target positioning has been deeply frustrating for those who believe the party needs radical policies to tackle the legacy of thirteen years of Tory rule. Starmer’s bland persona and extreme policy caution have left both members and many political commentators despairing that Labour was not offering the public a positive reason to vote for it but rather merely relying on the Tories to mess up. With the NHS, social care, schools, policing and local government all in crisis, but Labour not promising to spend significant money on any of them, they fear the party will succeed in the general election but fail in government.

In this context Miliband’s climate policy platform has offered a ray of hope. He has managed to persuade Starmer and Reeves to support a bold plan to achieve 100 per cent renewable power by 2030, create a new publicly owned energy company, and insulate nineteen million homes over ten years, generating a claimed 200,000 new jobs across the country. Most radically of all, Labour has pledged to end new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea fields, which would make Britain the first major economy to do so.

Labour hasn’t committed to these policies in the hope that the public supports them. It knows the public does: it is one of the consequences of the eighteen-year cross-party consensus on climate policy. Climate change is now ranked third when voters are asked about the biggest issues facing Britain, behind only the economy and inflation. Over half of voters want to see the government take stronger action, with a quarter happy with current policies and fewer than 20 per cent believing the government is moving too fast. These numbers vary little across Labour and Tory supporters and different parts of the country. Red wall voters are as green as people in the rest of Britain.

Tory strategists think these numbers are soft. They point out that the majorities in favour of tougher climate policy fall when voters are reminded that this might involve them, not just other people, paying more. Levido is convinced that continuous campaigning on the cost of achieving net zero for ordinary households will reduce public support even further. If this means making fictitious claims about those costs, or about Labour policy, so be it. He believes the Tories can peel enough voters away from Labour to make the election competitive.

He may be right. And this is what dismays moderate Tories the most about Sunak’s new stance. They know that their own voters care about climate change, and that strong policies will attract business investment and jobs in the new global green economy. But they also know, from Australia, the United States and elsewhere, that mendacious culture wars can be remarkably effective means of undermining voter confidence in political parties and policies of all kinds.

Britain has been spared this kind of social and political division up to now. But it is about to find out what happens when concerns about the future of the planet are sacrificed on the altar of election strategy. •

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The episode rather neatly demonstrated the balancing act Lula is trying to perform on the world stage. He has been assiduously positioning Brazil as an independent global power, seeking to act as a mediator in Ukraine rather than condemning Russia as demanded by the United States and Europe, promoting the non-Western BRICS club of major economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and flying to Cuba to reiterate Brazil’s role as a leader of the G77 grouping of developing countries.

But he has also just signed a joint declaration with the United States proclaiming the G20 group of large economies the principal forum for multilateral diplomacy and declares himself a global champion of democracy, warning of the perils of authoritarian populism promoting racism and civil violence. (Brazil had its own “invasion of Congress” events in January this year when supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro stormed parliament and the Supreme Court in an attempt to overthrow Lula’s election victory, a deliberate echo of the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington, DC.)

The jury may be out on whether this balancing act can work, but no one could accuse Lula of passivity in foreign policy. In the past few weeks he has attended the Global Financing Pact summit in Paris, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, the G20 summit in Delhi, the G77 summit in Havana and the UN General Assembly and Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development summits in New York, and convened his own Amazon summit in Brazil’s northeastern city of Belem. This year Brazil chairs the Latin American trade partnership Mercosur. Next year it will hold the presidency of the G20. In 2025 it will lead the BRICS and will also host the critical UN climate summit COP30.

To appreciate what Lula is seeking to achieve from this feverish activity it helps to understand the man. Now seventy-seven, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” was an early nickname he later formally incorporated into his official name) has not had the usual politician’s life. Born to poor parents who migrated from Brazil’s northeast to São Paulo in search of work, Lula didn’t learn to read until he was ten. Starting out as a metalworker in the automobile industry, he became a trade unionist, was elected leader of the Metalworkers’ Union at the age of thirty, and then led major strikes and democratic protests against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s.

In 1980, increasingly identifying as a socialist — neither a communist nor a moderate social democrat — Lula helped form a new political party, the Workers’ Party. Though he was widely mocked for his poor Portuguese, his electrifying rhetoric and brilliant organising skills marked him out. He was elected to Congress in 1986 and subsequently stood as the party’s presidential candidate three times before finally winning in 2002.

In office, Lula immediately set about fulfilling his election promise to attack poverty, establishing the Bolsa Familia system under which mothers received welfare payments conditional on their children staying in school and being vaccinated. Aided by an economic boom, he raised the minimum wage, and expanded primary education and healthcare. Poverty in Brazil fell by more than a quarter in his first term alone. Re-elected in 2006, he turned his attention to the Amazon, succeeding in slowing deforestation for the first time. Brazil’s economy grew and its public debt fell.

When he left office after two terms in 2010 Lula had popular approval ratings of over 80 per cent and the undying enmity of Brazil’s conservative political elite. When the Trumpian populist Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2016, no one was surprised when he used a compromised judicial system to put Lula in jail.

Defeating Bolsonaro in last year’s election was redemption for Lula. But in a deeply divided country — the parallels with the United States are remarkably close — the margin was tiny: 50.9 per cent versus 49.1 per cent in the run-off vote. In the Brazilian Congress, which he does not control, Lula has had to cobble together an unstable multiparty coalition, making his legislative task much harder this time round.

Nevertheless, he has high ambitions. His Ecological Transformation Plan is meant to be a comprehensive economic strategy aimed at greening the country’s industrial structure. He wants to raise agricultural productivity to expand food production while conserving the country’s abundant natural resources. He has committed to ending hunger by extending Brazil’s welfare system, and to ending the illegal incursions into the Amazon forest by miners and loggers that routinely lead to violence against indigenous people. Deforestation is already down by over 40 per cent in less than a year.

Lula’s remarkable ability to build pragmatic political alliances makes it likely that he will achieve much more of his program than his congressional numbers would suggest. But it is on the world beyond Brazil that Lula’s political gaze is now increasingly fixed.

It is not too much to say that Lula wants to redesign the global order. In his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, Lula railed against the increasing inequality of a global economy in which, as he pointed out, the ten richest billionaires have greater combined wealth than 40 per cent of the world’s population, and 735 million people go hungry. He noted that the richest tenth of the world’s population are responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions, but also insisted that developing countries did not want to follow the same economic model. And he decried the erosion of multilateralism — “the principle of sovereign equality between nations” — in global affairs.

Lula’s rhetoric has always been grandiose, even utopian. But he has a remarkable record of making things happen. At the end of this year’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Lula set out his plans for next year’s presidency. Under Brazil, he said, the G20 would focus on reducing global inequality, poverty and hunger; on making the global growth model more environmentally sustainable, in terms of both climate change and nature conservation; and on reform of the way international institutions are governed.

Because he believes it is what will unlock the others, it is the last of these goals that is really in Lula’s sights. Like almost all leaders from the global South, Lula looks at how multilateral institutions work and sees both historical obsolescence and profound injustice.

Almost all the major institutions of global governance have remained unchanged since they were established at the end of the second world war. Eighty years later, despite new economic and regional powers emerging — notably the European Union, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil — the UN Security Council still has only five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China), the great powers that had prevailed in the war. And the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are still governed by their largest shareholders, an even narrower group of Western countries dominated by the United States and the other economies of the G7 (Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada).

All members of the World Trade Organization have equal decision-making power, but partly for that reason it has increasingly been bypassed in recent years by regional and bilateral trade agreements promoted by the United States, China and the European Union. The world’s premier economic advisory body, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, remains in thrall to the free-market orthodoxies of the Western countries that run it.

And the single most powerful institution in the world economy is arguably the dollar, in which a huge amount of global trade and investment is denominated. But this means much of the world is deeply vulnerable to changes in its value, as the last two years of simultaneously rising dollar and US interest rates have shown. The dollar is not even governed by postwar international arrangements: its master is the US Federal Reserve, whose mandate is entirely focused on the US economy.

Lula wants all this changed. This is why he has loudly pursued the development of the BRICS grouping, even going so far as to suggest that it could seek to replace the dollar as a global trading currency. Lula sees the BRICS as a non-Western power bloc to counter the G7, whose cohesion in the decision-making forums of the G20, World Bank and IMF starkly contrasts with differences among the major countries of the global South.

At its recent summit in South Africa, the BRICS group admitted several new members, including the wealthy and increasingly assertive Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, with the aim of extending its reach and influence. But most Western commentators are dismissive. They note that BRICS, unlike the G7, is made up of countries whose economic and political systems are not only fundamentally different from one another but also subject to major tensions and conflicts, especially in the case of superpower rivals China and India. Nevertheless, it is a signal of Lula’s intent that he wants to strengthen an alternative alliance through which to pursue his reform agenda.

Lula’s public statements on Russia and the war in Ukraine should be seen in this light. Like most countries in the global South, Brazil regards the UN Security Council as the proper arbiter of international conflict. If the Security Council assesses and then condemns one country’s aggression, Brazil will also do so. But it has never done so when the Security Council has not come to a judgement — as in the case of Ukraine, because Russia has exercised its permanent member veto.

Talking to Brazilian foreign policy experts in Brasilia and Rio I detected no illusions about Russia’s responsibility for the war in Ukraine. They note simply that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported by almost all other Western states, was also illegal under UN law. And they observe that the West can apparently find fiscally unconstrained sums of money to defend Ukraine while simultaneously claiming it has no money to expand development aid or climate assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable countries elsewhere in the world. “And what did you do during Covid?” one asked me. “When the world cried out for vaccines, you hoarded even your surplus ones.”

Brazilians are enjoying the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Lula gets notably less criticism for his numerous foreign trips than leaders in most other countries. Along the way, he won’t hesitate to criticise the West for its moral failures. But he will also seize the chance to work with it. “Brazil is back!” the president likes to say. Preparing to assume the chairmanship of the largest powers at the G20, he doesn’t intend to waste the opportunity. •

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A few days later president Joe Biden and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi tried a different approach. Modi was given the full state visit treatment: marching troops on the south lawn of the White House, a glitzy (vegetarian) dinner, lengthy talks and a special address to both houses of Congress. The two leaders signed a series of strategic business deals in key fields such as semi-conductors and space technology, and held a joint press conference. (Though if anyone was in any doubt who Modi’s primary audience was, the fact that he spoke in Hindi may have been a clue.)

The Biden–Modi summit communiqué, covering myriad arenas of cooperation and every major global issue, ran to fifty-eight numbered paragraphs: this was clearly not the product of the meeting itself, but of months of prior negotiation by the two countries’ diplomats.

Hard on the heels of these two summits came a third, on Thursday and Friday this week, this time involving not just two leaders but more than forty. Hosted by French president Emmanuel Macron, the “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” brought together ministers from around eighty countries at the imposing Napoleonic Palais Brongniart in central Paris. And unlike the others, this encounter wasn’t largely for the photographs: over two days the meeting saw substantive and unexpected progress made on a range of issues to do with the financing of sustainable economic development in the global South.

The summit was an ad hoc event, not part of the United Nations, G20 or other regular governance mechanisms. It was proposed by Macron last November following discussions with the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, on her “Bridgetown Initiative” for global financial reform. Mottley’s plans, first articulated at the COP26 climate conference in 2021, aim to mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars in new public and private financing for climate-related investment.

Unusually, Mottley’s ideas got traction both with developed country heads like Macron and EU president Ursula von der Leyen, and with governments in Africa and among the “V20” group of climate-vulnerable nations. A remarkable consensus has arisen: on the eve of this week’s summit thirteen leaders from across the world issued a jointly written article calling for an urgent scaling-up of financial flows.

The summit filled out some of the detail. In a set of round tables on different topics on the Thursday, followed by an evening dinner for heads of government and two hours of talks on Friday morning, a number of specific proposals were presented and agreed. Well, sort of agreed: with the summit having no formal ability to make binding decisions, the French hosts asked countries to indicate which of the proposals they could support, and then set out in the final communiqué what had been discussed and how it would be taken forward. It was a clever way of preventing the biggest countries exercising veto powers and thereby generating a weak, lowest-common-denominator agreement.

The most significant announcement was that the richest countries had met their promise to reallocate US$100 billion of Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, to pay for poverty reduction and climate adaptation measures in developing countries. SDRs are the reserve currency used by the International Monetary Fund in times of financial trouble. In 2021, a huge US$650 billion of SDRs were issued to help countries through the Covid pandemic. But the problem was that the IMF constitution requires that SDRs go to countries in proportion to their shareholdings in the IMF, so the vast majority went to the richest countries who needed them least. In October 2021 they promised to give US$100 billion back, to be spent in the poorest countries — but up to now they had not done so.

After months of determined persuasion of his fellow leaders, Macron was able to announce in Paris that the figure had been reached. Only the most churlish of observers pointed out that the American contribution had still to be ratified by Congress, which might never happen.

You wait a long time for US$100 billion, and then two come along at once. Macron was also able to say that the US$100 billion in finance for climate change first promised by the developed world in 2009, and again in the Paris agreement of 2015, was also going to be achieved this year. A long time overdue, it was nevertheless a welcome statement that the developed world would (eventually) keep its promises. As several emerging economy leaders noted, those countries’ previous failure to do so has been a trust-depleting blight upon international relations for a long time.

Four issues dominated this week’s summit discussions. The first was reform of the World Bank and its regional counterparts, including the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks. Using capital provided by the richest countries, these banks provide low-interest (“concessional”) and commercial loans to emerging and developing economies, aimed especially at poverty reduction. But in recent years the banks have been heavily criticised as too slow and cumbersome, applying too many conditions and making overly cautious decisions, especially in comparison with the huge scale of lending now being undertaken by China.

Perhaps surprisingly, the United States has led the calls for reform. In Paris, treasury secretary Janet Yellen repeated her demand that the World Bank “evolve,” particularly by providing more money for climate investment. She found a willing partner in the bank’s new president, former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, whose commitment to reform has been widely welcomed. Banga’s new definition of the World Bank’s purpose — “eliminating poverty on a liveable planet” — provided a neat acknowledgement that climate change and wider environmental sustainability must now be incorporated into everything it and the other multilateral development banks do.

But this was not enough for the African leaders present. Noting that the World Bank’s lending to the poorest countries will fall this year because much of it was “front-loaded” to deal with the crises of the last two, they called for an immediate increase in contributions from the developed nations. In pointed asides, several noted that when it came to Ukraine, the West has been able to find apparently unlimited sums of money for arms and aid without any budgetary constraints. Why not similarly for Africa?

In response, Yellen did promise new funds from the United States, and Banga said the World Bank would seek to squeeze more out of its balance sheet. But the kind of quantum leap in funding demanded by Africa will only come through a recapitalisation of the bank: that is, an injection of new equity by its major shareholders. The United States won’t commit to that now. But the word on the grapevine is that Biden is open to the idea if Banga can prove he can deliver reform.

And that in turn would open up another front: reform of the bank’s governance structure. Today, Western developed countries own just above 50 per cent of its shares, thereby maintaining control of an institution they have long regarded as theirs. But a new capital injection would also bring in more money from China and India, and thereby tip the balance of shareholding away from Western control. This is of course precisely what the global South would like to see, and equally precisely what makes the US most nervous. So we can expect some serious negotiation about this over the next year.

The second major agenda item was debt. The IMF estimates that around two-thirds of the lowest-income countries are now in “debt distress” or at risk of it, meaning that they are close to defaulting on the international loans they have received from richer countries, international institutions and private lenders. The rise in US interest rates over the last year has seen many of them spending over half of their government revenues on debt service payments, with devastating impacts on health and education budgets. It is clear that their debts need relieving, but talks with the most affected have failed to yield much progress over the last two years.

So it was welcome news that two of the most heavily indebted countries, Ghana and Zambia, had now reached agreement on debt restructuring packages. Separately, the Ivory Coast and France announced a “debt reduction and development contract” to convert a portion of the former’s debts into grants for poverty reduction and education.

At the same time, a number of countries and multilateral development banks announced that they would start using “natural disaster clauses” in their debt contracts. Pioneered by Grenada and Barbados, such clauses allow debt service payments to be suspended for two years when a borrowing country is hit by an extreme weather event such as a hurricane or major flooding, thereby releasing much-needed cash for clean-up and reconstruction efforts. With such events occurring ever more frequently, the widespread use of these clauses could prevent billions of dollars leaving vulnerable countries just when they most need the money.

Another initiative emerged during the summit when presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and William Ruto of Kenya proposed the establishment of an expert review of the relationship between debt, nature and climate. The two leaders expressed concern that debt repayments were forcing countries to destroy rainforests and other biodiverse habitats. The review will examine proposals such as “debt for nature” swaps, in which creditors cancel debt in return for verifiable conservation efforts, and debt linked specifically to the achievement of climate action plans.

The third main issue was climate finance. In preparing the summit, France had called for a number of taxes to be considered as new sources of funding. But in the pre-summit negotiations, taxes on aviation, fossil fuels and financial transactions were ruled out. This left just one new tax on the table, a proposed levy on carbon emissions from shipping. Countries agreed to ask the International Maritime Organization to examine how such a levy could work. To the disappointment of some, though, the text failed to mention the possibility that some of the revenues could be used to compensate countries for the climate-related loss and damage they are experiencing. With the last round of climate talks having agreed a fund for this purpose but no money, this idea is likely to gather increasing support over the next year.

Fourth, the summit discussed how more funds can be provided by the private sector. For many years the holy grail in this field has been the mobilisation of private capital for clean energy and environmental conservation. With government budgets highly constrained, this was felt to be the only way in which the dollars flowing to developing countries could rise “from billions to trillions.” But these sums have so far proved elusive: asset managers have perceived the risks as too high and the rewards too few.

So in Paris countries welcomed an idea developed by Barbados’s economic adviser, Avinash Persaud. Persaud proposed a special facility to insure foreign investors against the risk that the returns they make could fall if the local currency declines in value. He pointed out that such risk can often be the difference between a renewable energy or agricultural project in an emerging economy looking profitable or not; he estimates that his proposed scheme could release tens of billions of new investment.

These discussions proved the value of summits in which leaders don’t turn up mainly for show but actually engage with the substance. Negotiations on the final communiqué had, of course, been taking place behind the scenes for several weeks. But they continued long after the meeting was due to close, as developing country leaders insisted that the wording on the urgency and scale of the funds required should be strengthened, and developed ones sought to limit the commitments they were being pushed into making.

It was not till late on Friday that the French government issued the final documents. They included, in addition to a statement of principles and decisions, a detailed roadmap setting out how each of the policy proposals discussed could be taken forward over the next eighteen months, at future meetings such as September’s G20 Summit in India, the World Bank Annual Meetings in October and the climate COP28 in Dubai in November–December.

No one came away from Paris thinking the job was finished. By 2030 the world will need to invest around US$2.4 trillion every year in sustainable development, of which around US$1 trillion will have to come from international flows. The world is still well short of such figures. But there was also little doubt that the summit had given new momentum to these efforts. This was perhaps best symbolised by an announcement on the sidelines of the event that a new Just Energy Transition Partnership, or JET-P, had been agreed between a range of Western countries and the government of Senegal, led by president Macky Sall.

JET-Ps are the new hope for development and climate financing: national plans for clean energy and industrial development backed by new public and private investment, both domestic and international. Three JET-Ps were announced last year, in South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, all committing to phasing out the use of coal-fired power. In Senegal the plan involves — controversially — exploiting new gas reserves, but for the first time that will happen under an explicit commitment that these will subsequently need to be phased out again as the country aims for net-zero emissions.

In the long term this will be the real test of whether the summit was worth it. Can enough money be invested to give developing countries a new path to prosperity, one that doesn’t involve trashing their natural environments as the now-rich countries largely did at the same stage of development? Will financing partnerships like JET-Ps see emerging economies find a role supplying minerals and goods for the green industrial transitions that are now a central aim of economic policy in the United States, the European Union and China?

We shall discover the answers over the next decade. In the meantime attention will shift across the Atlantic. Under its new, outspoken president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil will host next year’s G20 Summit, where the decisions made in Paris will be brought back for a progress report and new commitments. Fittingly, this will coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods summit in 1944, when the present global financial system was designed.

That meeting set a high bar. The usual summit handshakes and photo opportunities make it easy to be cynical. But sometimes meetings like these do actually change the world. •

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Taking place in the airy World Conference Centre in the former West German capital, the official title of the conference is the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, both of them subsets of the better-known UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The delegates’ task is to take forward the agreements made at the twenty-seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP27, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November last year, and prepare the 28th meeting, scheduled for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates this coming December.

If all this sound complicated, that’s not the half of it. The conference agenda sets out the many different negotiating tracks that previous COPs have set in train. It is a bewildering array of numbers, concepts, processes and former host cities.

Along with the second Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage, there’s a meeting on matters relating to the Santiago Network under the Warsaw International Mechanism, also covering loss and damage; the seventh meeting of the Paris Committee on Capacity Building; the eighth meeting of the Katowice Committee on Impacts; a workshop under the Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation; not to mention a meeting on the as-yet-unlocated “rules, modalities and procedures for the mechanism established by Article 6, paragraph 4, of the Paris Agreement and referred to in decision 3/CMA.3.”

It is easy to be cynical, of course. But the negotiating agenda is not simply a make-work scheme for government officials. It reflects the reality that tackling climate change is a complex and multifaceted task involving not just every country in the world but also many different kinds of policy.

Debate in developed countries focuses mainly on climate “mitigation” — how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonising energy, transport, industry and agriculture. But the primary issues are different for poorer countries experiencing devastating floods, droughts and hurricanes, and changes to food production and water availability from rising temperatures. They are more interested in how to adapt to the changing climate and whether they will be compensated for the loss and damage they suffer — with both issues requiring the rich world to make good on its promise of financial and technical assistance. A complicated negotiating agenda is a small price to pay if it leads to any of that support being delivered.

Yet the question remains whether it will be. Although the Bonn conference continues the official UN process, it is in many ways not even the most important climate negotiation at the moment. Just two weeks ago the richest countries, meeting at the G7 summit in Japan, declared that this year they would finally reach the US$100 billion in annual climate financing they first promised at COP15 in Copenhagen fourteen years ago. And in two weeks’ time French president Emmanuel Macron will host an even more significant summit in Paris.

Macron’s aim is to establish a new financial pact between the global North and South to guarantee finance for environmentally sustainable and climate-compatible development. In Bonn, government officials are discussing processes and modalities intended to govern finance and other forms of assistance to countries in the global South. But in Paris, heads of government will be agreeing on actual money for renewable energy, adaptation and disaster prevention, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars, via bilateral aid, World Bank lending and private sector finance. You could be forgiven for thinking that the official UN talks are a bit of a sideshow.

Not that controversy will be absent in Bonn. The fact that this year’s COP will be held in a Gulf oil state is the main focus for climate activists. With the UAE having helped water down COP27’s position on the phasing out of fossil fuels, the appointment of the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as president of COP28 looked to many like a deliberate provocation. Sultan Al Jaber is in fact an experienced climate negotiator who, as former head of UAE’s investment fund Masdar, developed the country’s extensive global portfolio in renewable energy. But it was inevitable that his appointment to chair the UN climate talks would attract criticism.

Pointing out that Al Jaber’s company is hugely expanding its oil and gas production, the campaigning group Oil Change International has described his appointment as “a truly breathtaking conflict of interest… tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.” More than 130 members of the US Congress and European Parliament have signed an open letter calling on him to be removed as COP28 president. His presence, they said, reflected the “undue influence” of fossil fuel companies over UN climate talks and “risks undermining the negotiations.” The fact that a UAE official was recently found to have edited Al Jaber’s Wikipedia page to remove such criticisms has only added fuel to the fire.

Al Jaber himself will brush off the controversy: as a close ally of the ruling family his position isn’t in jeopardy. But other countries will hope the furore embarrasses the UAE sufficiently to provoke some compensating action. The country has been making huge windfall profits from higher global energy prices in the past two years. What better way to demonstrate its commitment to the climate than by providing a few tens of billions of dollars in financing for the most vulnerable countries?

Elsewhere there is talk about reforming COPs themselves — not least in the United Nations, where the gulf between the linguistic complexity of the negotiating agenda and the practical requirements of dealing with climate change has not gone unnoticed. In quiet meetings behind the scenes this year the organisation has been canvassing views on how to bridge the gap.

It is not as if the rest of the world is absent from UN climate meetings. On the contrary: nearly 50,000 people are estimated to have attended COP27 last year, most of them representatives of businesses, investors, international organisations, NGOs and research institutes. These people come to the annual COPs to participate in a global climate conference and expo, with literally thousands of events and meetings alongside the formal negotiations.

Most of these attendees are focused on how to make progress in the real world: the new technologies being developed to cut emissions, the policies required to incentivise them, the financing available for investment, the research and data needed to monitor both the climate and climate actions, and the political campaigning to pressure corporations and politicians.

It’s in these spheres and among these kinds of players that climate action is really occurring, not in UN negotiations. The Paris Climate Agreement has been signed, and its detailed rulebook completed. Important issues are still to be resolved, not least on finance. But observers generally acknowledge that the focus of attention at COPs should really be on the real-world action, not the talks.

Up to a point, the UN already recognises this. Alongside the negotiations it convenes a wide range of partnerships between companies, countries, cities and researchers to develop and disseminate climate solutions. These cover technologies, business models and policies in a range of nine fields from energy to oceans, transport to land restoration. The question being posed for COP28 is whether this so-called Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action could move closer to centrestage.

Could a parallel conference be organised, alongside the negotiations, to present and discuss climate progress in the real world? Might this provide a forum where some of the major industries, companies and financial institutions that have made ambitious-sounding climate commitments over recent years — commitments critics often describe as little more than “greenwashing” — are called to account? As several observers have noted, this would be particularly appropriate for COP28, which will feature a “global stocktake” of action and inaction over the past eight years.

Typically, the question of whether COPs could be made more relevant to the real world won’t be on the negotiating agenda in Bonn over the next two weeks. But as ever in these thirty-year-old talks, it is as much what goes on in the corridors and during the time-outs that matters. There are six months still to go before the world reassembles in Dubai. It’s still possible that when it does so, it will find itself at a somewhat more useful gathering. •

The post Where’s the climate action? appeared first on Inside Story.

The poll was held on a Sunday to avoid a clash with the anniversary on Saturday of the restoration of Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002. Twenty-one years on and the young country has established itself as among the most democratic in Southeast Asia, with a Press Freedom Index score higher than Australia’s.

As part of the celebrations, president José Ramos-Horta presented Timor-Leste’s highest award, the Ordem de Timor-Leste, to Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery. Collaery was making his first overseas trip since his passport was confiscated by the Australian government over charges, recently dropped, that he and his client — a former ASIS agent known as Witness K — had conspired to reveal Australian bugging of the Timorese cabinet during sensitive oil and gas treaty negotiations in 2004.

Witness K’s allegations eventually led to Timor-Leste’s successful challenge to the oil and gas treaty and, in 2018, the creation of a median-line maritime boundary with Australia. Bilateral relations have been on a much better footing since then, and Collaery received a hero’s welcome at Dili airport on arrival.

Saturday’s other high-profile recipients included former Victorian premier Steve Bracks, who has served as a high-level adviser to Xanana Gusmão on government reform since 2007. Also recognised were long-term solidarity activists John Waddingham and Cecily Gilbert, key among the small number of activists who have supported Timor-Leste since 1974–75. The pair now work with the Clearing House for Archival Records on Timor to preserve documents from the independence campaign and members of the East Timorese diaspora who lived in Australia.

With some 85 per cent of the national vote counted by Monday night, Xanana Gusmão’s CNRT party is clearly heading back to government after securing a resounding 41 per cent of the vote and a clear lead over its chief rival Fretilin, presently on 26 per cent.

Despite its hopes for a majority in its own right, and despite a major swing in its favour, the CNRT seems likely to fall just short of a thirty-three-seat majority. If that happens, a coalition with the Democratic Party, performing well at around 9 per cent, is firming as a likely outcome, pending the ongoing count, inter-party negotiations and the approval of the president.

Notably, the two parties associated with the worrisome martial arts gangs, or MAGs, performed relatively strongly, receiving around 11 per cent of the vote. This represents a sizeable constituency, and highlights the uncomfortable level of disaffection with conventional party politics among younger voters and their concerns about national economic performance and job opportunities.

Despite Ramos-Horta’s repeated warning that he would not look favourably on any coalition relying on either KHUNTO or the new party, Os Verdes (the Greens), these two MAG-linked parties appear to have attracted one-in-nine voters. With more than 7 per cent of the vote, KHUNTO is set to easily clear the 4 per cent hurdle for seats, though Os Verdes seems likely to fall just short.

As the vote progressed, it became clear that Fretilin would suffer the first notable drop in its vote since 2007, down some 4 per cent on its usual vote share. This will concern the long-established party, still recovering from the leadership tensions during last year’s presidential campaign, which saw the former army commander Lere Anan Timur run against the official Fretilin candidate, former president Francisco “Lú-Olo” Guterres. Despite a smoothing over of the rift, the Fretilin vote was contained by grassroots campaigning by Gusmão, who capitalised on his time in opposition to build the CNRT party structure and support across the country.

As Timor emerges from a difficult few years — Covid-19, floods and associated economic contraction — voters have once again turned to the “old firm” of Gusmão and Ramos-Horta, as they did after the 2006–07 political–military crisis. Voters might also have recognised that this could be the last election campaign fought by the two great national leaders, and sought to indicate trust in their ability to stimulate the economy and perhaps also respect for their longer-term achievements. As ever, election day itself went smoothly, with the usual friendly and efficient performance by the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration.

The new government is likely to proceed more aggressively with the Tasi Mane oil and gas megaproject, which will cast the spotlight again on commercial negotiations with Woodside, the project operator. Woodside is still sceptical about downstream processing on Timor-Leste’s south coast and, at this point anyway, agreeable only to co-investing in the upstream elements of the project.

Woodside’s hesitation raises questions about who would co-invest in the onshore components of the projects, and how much of Timor-Leste’s oil and gas petroleum fund of US$17 billion — on which annual budgets largely depend — would be spent on the daunting capital expenditure. With annual budgets exceeding interest from the fund, Timor-Leste faces a “fiscal cliff” within a decade if new revenues don’t flow in. Reaching a settlement over the future of the Greater Sunrise gas fields will bring new focus to the bilateral relationship with Australia, which has been at a high point in recent years. No less a figure than Steve Bracks — well linked to both the Australian government and Xanana Gusmão — has been asked to represent Australia in a current joint review process examining the feasibility of different downstream processing options.

In other respects, Sunday’s election may see some policy continuity in important areas. For example, the current government is extending the Bolsa da Mae program, which gives payments to mothers, to pregnant women and linking it to their attendance at health centres. CNRT policy suggests that any incoming Gusmão-led government will adopt this important program.

The wider significance of this election relates to the generational transition question. Gusmão’s victory comes as he approaches seventy-seven, with other key leaders not far behind. This raises the expectation that a political transition will take place during this term, though old Timor hands note that the transition isn’t likely to happen without active challenges from younger leaders. One key question still up in the air is the likely future leadership of non-Fretilin politics whenever Gusmão eventually departs the stage.

As a new government takes office, a critical decade for Timor-Leste’s future commences. The country still awaits economic diversification away from oil and gas dependence, and faces a major demographic “youth bulge.” In what will likely prove their farewell terms, members of the “old firm” now get to leave their legacy. How they do this will be watched closely at this critical juncture of Timor-Leste’s development. •

The post Xanana’s triumph appeared first on Inside Story.

Kremer and I met the day after the announcement of the decision to close a daily newspaper published for more than fifty years. Staff were still coming to terms with the news, uncertain whether they would be paid their final wages and benefits.

It’s true that New Caledonia, a French Pacific dependency of 274,000 people, has a vibrant media landscape, with a range of weekly magazines, two TV stations and many commercial radio outlets. But the death of its sole daily newspaper comes at a crucial time, with supporters and opponents of independence debating future relations with France.

Founded in 1971, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes soon saw off its only daily competitor, the venerable France Australe, which closed its doors after ninety years in 1979. To begin with, the new paper was a partisan broadsheet, promoting the interests of local business owners and campaigning against independence from France. It made little pretence of impartiality during the armed conflict that divided New Caledonia in the mid 1980s, denigrating indigenous Kanak and editorialising in favour of the anti-independence party, Rally for New Caledonia in the Republic.

The paper was bought in 1987 by Groupe Hersant Média, France’s largest media conglomerate at the time. A decade later, after the death of founder Robert Hersant, a financial crisis forced Hersant to sell off many media outlets, including Les Nouvelles, at fire-sale prices. In 2013, three local business figures formed the Melchior Group to take over the paper and affiliated businesses. Melchior’s majority owner was New Caledonian businessman Jacques Jeandot, with mining magnate Charles Montagnat and former supermarket owner Charles Lavoix sharing the remaining 41 per cent.

“Hersant sold the paper for global reasons related to its media group and the great difficulties it was facing in Europe,” explains Kremer. “That wasn’t the case in New Caledonia, where it was making a lot of money. At the time, Mr Jeandot had been considering setting up a newspaper in competition with Les Nouvelles, so he seized the opportunity by investing in the paper.” It was an investment driven by the heart, adds Kremer, who believes Jeandot never made much money from the paper.

The Melchior Group also owned printing presses, a range of giveaway magazines, Les Editions du Caillou publishing house and radio station NRJ-Nouvelle-Calédonie.

From the start, the new owners faced significant competition, including from French government–owned TV and radio stations. Many advertisers moved onto social media, and partisan media organisations received subsidies from the administrations in New Caledonia’s three provinces. A long delay in upgrading the Les Nouvelles website and investing in new technology contributed to a loss of readership.

The Covid-19 pandemic added to the financial pressures. Advertising slumped further and costs rose, prompting a hiring and investment freeze and an effort to reduce expenses by refusing to replace departing staff. Then in late 2022 the company decided to drop the paper’s print edition. It sold off its largest printing presses and went completely online at the end of December, placing a question mark over the future of other Melchior publications, like the weekly Le Gratuit, which used the daily’s print distribution network.

These dramatic changes reverberated across New Caledonia. The rural Northern Province and the outlying Loyalty Islands Province relied on the paper and smaller local media such as Caledonia TV, the monthly magazine Le Pays and occasional newssheets issued by the provincial governments. For Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro, mayor of the east coast town of Ponerihouen, one of Les Nouvelles’s strengths was its local inserts and regular reports from the provinces and rural towns. “For local mayors,” he says, “it was an important way to reach out to the community. Now that’s gone and it’s unfortunate.”

As has happened elsewhere, the rapid spread of smartphone technology has transformed New Caledonia’s media landscape, though unevenly. Nearly half the population can access the web through their mobile phones, but access to quality broadband — and even electricity — varies greatly between urban centres and isolated villages in the central mountain chain and the outer islands, where the population is majority Kanak.

Tutugoro, who is also secretary-general of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, believes the decision to halt the print edition undercut the economics of Les Nouvelles. “They went online, but that effectively meant they were giving it away,” he says. “Even in the deep valleys in the mountains near Hienghène or in Ponerihouen where people have 4G, you could get the news each day at 6am. People who had a subscription were sharing the online version on social media.”

The shift to digital-only was too little, too late. On the afternoon of 10 March, less than three months after the print edition closed, Melchior’s owners announced that the company would file for liquidation. Supporters of the group’s 120 employees rallied in front of the Les Nouvelles offices, but the court announced the liquidation of the company a week later.

“It’s a brutal procedure,” the paper’s executive director, Yves Delauw, told local media. “We have to do things very quickly, because we could not make this announcement several weeks in advance and continue working in this context. From the moment the court pronounces the liquidation, everything goes very quickly.”

The thirty-strong branch of the Société des Journalistes at Les Nouvelles deplored “the refusal of management to listen to the proposals and suggestions that we have made in recent years.” Management’s reluctance to take on new journalists and invest in new technology for the digital edition had led, staff believed, to a downward spiral.

While commercial considerations drove the decision, the complex politics of French colonialism was also a factor in the demise of Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes.

In the early years of publication, Les Nouvelles and the French government broadcaster RFO were the main sources of daily news for New Caledonians. Both were fiercely critical of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, a coalition of pro-independence parties.

In 1985, faced with these dominant conservative voices, the independence movement sought support from trade unions in Australia, New Zealand and various Pacific island nations to establish a community station, Radio Djiido. Together with the short-lived magazine Bwenando, Djiido was the only outlet to provide alternative views during the violent clashes of the 1980s.

Decades later, Radio Djiido still operates on a shoestring, broadcasting news, talkback, feature interviews and music. Commercial radio stations and government broadcaster NC1ère, meanwhile, continue to air more conservative views. Coverage of competing perspectives has certainly improved in recent years, but most media outlets still editorialise against the FLNKS and oppose ending French colonial rule.

“Even though Les Nouvelles was controlled by Mr Jeandot, Mr Lavoix and Mr Montagnat — all businessmen who might be described as loyalists to the French Republic — we remained a neutral newspaper,” says Thierry Kremer. The paper’s openness was its “added value,” he goes on, “but it created problems, in that you need to be aligned to a political group or party in order to receive major subsidies.”

Independence activists don’t agree with that assessment of the paper’s strengths. While journalists like Yann Mainguet sought to maintain comprehensive coverage of statements from FLNKS leaders, many activists scoff at the notion that Les Nouvelles was an impartial voice. They haven’t forgotten the appointment of Fabrice Rouard, a former spin doctor at Noumea Town Hall, a bastion of the loyalist parties, as editor-in-chief in December 2013. Rouard notoriously told staff that the flag of Kanaky, the symbol of the independence movement and the Kanak people, should not appear in photos on the front page of the paper.

“Fundamentally, this country lacks balanced media,” says long-time independence leader Roch Wamytan. “In terms of the written press, it’s completely unbalanced. When you look at Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, you can’t say that it supported us!” In radio, by contrast, he sees more open debate. “We have a radio station that supports independence, and the other parties have stations like RRB. But for newspapers and magazines, there’s no such balance. There are monthly or quarterly newsletters, but the independence movement has never been able to find the finance to create a daily here.”

In his role as president of the Congress, New Caledonia’s legislature, Wamytan quickly issued a statement of concern about the decision to close Les Nouvelles altogether. French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc was more measured: “This emblematic daily newspaper has provided information to the population of New Caledonia for more than half a century. Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes benefited from various assistance to the press, particularly during the Covid pandemic, which, alas, was not enough to maintain activity.”

For staff members like Thierry Kremer, these sentiments provide little comfort. “We didn’t receive any support from the Southern Province, the Northern Province or the Government of New Caledonia, even when we were in some difficulty,” he says. “It is my personal opinion that, for them, it’s not a bad thing that we’ve closed. There are now people speaking out to help us as employees, but they weren’t there when we were in trouble.”

The paper’s journalists express anger or disdain at the muted response of New Caledonia’s political elite. As the Société des Journalistes noted in its formal statement, “The loss of the only daily press title in the country, with an indifferent response from politicians and institutions, is a disaster for democracy, in particular in view of the electoral deadlines awaiting New Caledonians.”

Les Nouvelles’s demise comes at a time when New Caledonians need accurate information more than ever. After three referendums on self-determination between 2018 and 2021, political leaders are now debating whether to replace the 1998 Noumea Accord, an agreement that has governed politics, society and the economy for the past twenty-five years. Time is short to strike a deal before the next provincial and congressional elections, scheduled for May 2024.

Three separate delegations travelled to Paris in mid April for bilateral discussions with French prime minister Élisabeth Borne and interior and overseas minister Gérald Darmanin. Despite the positive dialogue, fundamental differences remain over the way forward.

Embedded in the French constitution, the Noumea Accord can only be changed by a three-fifths majority in a joint meeting of the French National Assembly and the Senate — a level of support that seems unlikely at the moment. President Emmanuel Macron lost his majority in the National Assembly in France’s June 2022 legislative elections. His recent decision to force through changes to pensions and the retirement age has crippled his standing in public opinion polls and eroded his political capital.

The French government has nevertheless proposed a short timetable to agree on a new political statute that would keep New Caledonia within the French Republic. After last month’s talks, the overseas minister will visit Noumea in late May, with Macron following — possibly in July — in the hope of finalising an agreement by September. For the French government, this would open the way for reform of the French constitution in early 2024.

The independence movement, rejecting this timetable, has so far refused to engage in trilateral negotiations with the French state and loyalist anti-independence parties. Union Calédonienne’s Pierre-Chanel Tutugoro says the FLNKS wants Paris to agree to a new treaty and a clear timetable for a transition to an independent and sovereign state.

“Our proposed treaty highlights issues related to interdependence with the French state, during a period of transition after independence,” he said. “This will ensure there is no rupture with France. We’re following in the footsteps set by our forebears, seeking independence with full sovereignty, but with ongoing, albeit different, ties with France.”

Within this complex debate, Tutugoro says the closure of the daily newspaper makes it difficult to share accurate information across the community. “If we do nothing,” he says, “we leave our community at the mercy of social media, where many people get their news. But on social media, there’s not much filtering of ‘fake news’ or political posturing or outright lying — so it’s irresponsible to rely on it.”

Not surprisingly, Thierry Kremer agrees. “I hope that, for New Caledonia’s sake, a daily paper can be revived,” he says. “But would such a paper be as neutral as we were? The problem is that there will soon be provincial elections, which will be very important. I don’t understand why the French government didn’t step in, given the political context and the need to maintain neutral, accurate information in the territory.”

What’s next? The Les Nouvelles website and photo archive are a historical resource that must be preserved, but they are also a valuable asset as the liquidators seek to pay off staff, shareholders and creditors. (Disclosure: as a long-time subscriber to the newspaper I am technically a creditor, though I’m not holding my breath awaiting a small refund for the balance of my annual subscription.)

Les Nouvelles is gone, but in an increasingly polarised political context, new media may yet emerge. Local conservative politicians and business figures are discussing new projects, with conservative magazines like Actu.nc and Demain en Nouvelle-Calédonie looking at the economics of daily publishing.

Last year, businessman and former right-wing politician Didier Leroux made a significant investment in the radio station Océane FM, as the basis of a new TV station. The new channel, dubbed NC9, would likely receive significant financial subsidies from New Caledonia’s Southern Province under its president Sonia Backès, leader of the loyalist bloc in New Caledonia’s Congress.

Backès also serves as citizenship minister in the French government in Paris. With the audiovisual sector under the control of the French state rather than the government of New Caledonia, approval for editorial outlets opposed to independence will likely receive a sympathetic hearing. Commerce and politics are transforming the media landscape. •

The post Death of a newspaper appeared first on Inside Story.

The elections for local councils didn’t cover the whole of Britain. There were no contests in London, Wales or Scotland. But the elections were sufficiently widespread for a clear picture to emerge of the country’s mood six months after Sunak became PM and tried to steady a ship of state that had almost run aground under his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The picture is of the Conservatives heading for defeat at the next general election, likely to be held late next year.

The results showed something else too. Britain’s anti-Conservative majority is divided. Smart targeting by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and tactical voting by savvy citizens can help to overcome this; but it remains touch-and-go whether the next general election will produce a clear Labour victory or a hung parliament, a minority Labour government and a second election within a year or so.

Australian readers will recognise the issue — and, for progressive voters, the solution. If Britain replaced its age-old first-past-the-post system with Australia’s preferential system, the Conservatives would be heading for opposition with no early chance or reprieve.

Let’s fill the picture in. More than 8000 councillors were elected on Thursday. The Conservatives, defending 3500 seats, lost more than 1000. But the gains were spread around the Tories’ opponents: Labour gained 500 in round numbers, the Liberal Democrats 400, the Greens 250.

In a general election, fragmentation would be less. Right now, the Greens have only one member of Britain’s 650-seat parliament; at the most they might gain one or two extra next year. More likely is that they will win a million-plus votes in seats that they will come nowhere near winning. In closely fought seats between the Conservatives and Labour, or between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, these Greens votes could save a Tory from defeat, by denying the local Labour or Lib Dem challenger the few extra votes they need to win.

Britain’s parties, and some but not all voters, understand this. On Thursday, tactical voting was widespread. That is, many Labour supporters were happy to vote Lib Dem where this was the best way to defeat the Conservatives locally — and Lib Dem supporters returned the compliment in tight Conservative–Labour contests. In a way, many British voters applied the principle of preferential voting to a first-past-the-post electoral system.

But many didn’t — and many would stick to their preferred progressive party in a general election even if this meant local victory for the Conservatives. To the extent that this happens, the Tories will continue to reap the benefit of having a near monopoly of the right-of-centre vote, while the left-of-centre vote continues to be divided.

To this we must add a further complicating factor. Half a century ago, Britain’s elections were essentially simple. Blue-collar manual workers voted Labour, while white-collar office workers and professionals voted Conservative. Not everyone, of course: politics is never that simple. But it was a pretty good approximation of Britain’s electorate. As in much of the industrialised world, all that has changed. Economies have changed, education has changed, jobs have changed — and party loyalties have changed.

Social class is no longer an indicator of how Britons vote. Age and education now matter more than anything else. Voters under thirty with a degree seldom vote Conservative these days. People over sixty who left school at sixteen seldom vote anything else.

The 2016 Brexit referendum, when Britain voted to leave the European Union, accelerated this process. Many lifelong working-class Labour supporters voted for Brexit and then, in 2019, switched to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to “get Brexit done” — that is, complete the withdrawal negotiations with the European Union. That, and the fact that Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, an uncompromising, lifelong and utterly unelectable enemy of capitalism, ensured the biggest Conservative victory in 2019 since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday back in the 1980s.

Labour turned to Keir Starmer as its leader — a decent, public-spirited man with strong progressive values but light on ideology. He has asserted his leadership by, among other things, expelling Corbyn from Labour’s parliamentary ranks, following evidence of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism (a charge, it must be said, that Corbyn rejects). Whatever else happens, the man who led Labour to catastrophic defeat at the last election won’t be able to stand as a candidate for the party at the next one.

But Starmer’s larger problem remains: how to reunite the two blocks of voters that have combined to give Labour its past election victories: manual workers on average and below-average incomes; and liberal-minded graduates committed to progressive reform. In the Brexit referendum, the former group voted strongly to leave the European Union, while the latter group voted even more strongly to remain.

These issues are part of a wider and deeper debate about the future of Britain and the social basis of political loyalties. But Labour doesn’t have the luxury of waiting five or ten years for this debate to be settled. It must decide before the next election where it stands on a range of issues, of which the trickiest is Britain’s relations with the European Union.

Most (though not all) people now agree that (a) Brexit was a mistake, and has been bad for Britain’s economy, but (b) there is no realistic prospect of rejoining the EU anytime soon. So what should Labour do? In particular, is there some way it can win back the keen Leavers who used to be such a large part of its electoral base, while holding on to the pro-European graduates who never wanted Brexit in the first place?

Starmer’s answer has been to be as vague and say as little as possible, beyond making nebulous promises of a more constructive relationship between London and Brussels. His hope is that pro-Brexit ex-Labour voters will be happy enough with this to return to their old political home, while the younger, radical graduates will be so determined to see the back of the Tories that they will hold their pro-European noses and vote Labour wherever this will help remove Tory MPs.

Which brings us back to Thursday’s results and the fragmentation of the anti-Conservative vote. Part of the reason for the gains made by the Liberal Democrats and Greens is that they are now more clearly pro-European than Labour. Maybe Starmer is right to believe that pro-Europe Britons will vote Labour where it matters in a general election. But not all of them will.

The warning for Labour from the local elections is that in just enough seats (and in the absence of preferential voting), just enough anti-Brexit anti-Tories will withhold their support from Labour to enable the Conservatives to retain a number of seats they would otherwise lose. This is why the Conservatives may not win the next election at all, but Labour may struggle to win it outright.

As newly crowned King and constitutional monarch, Charles III must be relieved that this issue is, to invert the old saying, below his pay grade. •

The post King, country and the Conservatives appeared first on Inside Story.

Politico’s Jack Shafer suggested it was Murdoch rather than the Dominion Voting System company that had somehow emerged the winner, despite the size of the payout. This is what News Corp does to make messes disappear, he wrote. “A hundred million here, a hundred million there, might crimp your finances, but in the Murdoch universe, paying such settlements is just the cost of doing business Murdoch-style.”

The company’s history does suggest settlements are part of the Murdoch modus operandi. As Shafer noted, News paid $US50 million to women who suffered sexual harassment at Fox, another $US15 million to an employee who complained of wage discrimination and $US500 million to a competitor in three separate actions over allegations of anticompetitive behaviour. Of the numerous other payouts, many are subject to non-disclosure agreements. And then there’s the invasion of privacy and other unethical conduct exposed by the hacking scandal in Britain, which the company tidied away by settling with legions of people.

But the Dominion case is different. The quantum of the payout — $US787.5 million, or half the company’s annual profit — is off the scale. It dwarfs the total amount paid during the hacking scandal and is generally seen as the largest defamation payout ever, by anyone, anywhere.

And this could be just the beginning. Another voting company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $US2.7 billion and has made allegations similar to Dominion’s. If it also settles for half, then Fox can kiss goodbye to the rest of the year’s profits and much of next year’s as well.

Then there’s a derivative case in which some of the “60 per cent of shareholders who aren’t Murdochs” are suing because they claim Fox board members and managers left them exposed to financial loss. The shareholders will allege that Fox decision-makers failed, despite numerous warnings, in their fiduciary duty to stop the on-air lies. Several cases are likely, all with eye watering amounts at stake. There’s also speculation the company will struggle to find insurance cover in future, or that its premiums will become prohibitively expensive.

The settlement has been a huge news story across the nation’s rival, and often tribal, TV networks. If the coverage I’ve seen is any guide, Murdoch isn’t having a great time in the court of public opinion either. On the relatively progressive MSNBC network, presenters were lining up all day to kick Fox and its on-air presenters, but especially Rupert Murdoch.

The most scathing attack was meted out by one of the network’s hosts, Lawrence O’Donnell, who delighted in pointing out that Murdoch “surrendered today like you have never seen him surrender before.” he claimed that in any other company the boss would be kicked out for the “stupidity” Murdoch had displayed.

O’Donnell argued that Murdoch had failed to provide the most basic oversight, such as insisting hosts issue the magic words “if that’s true” when discussing contested claims on air. He also accused Murdoch of mismanaging the Dominion law suit. If the company was always going to settle, he asked, why didn’t it do so before the chief executive and the most controversial on-air hosts were forced to go on oath and hand over their phones.

On this point, other commentators expressed gratitude to Dominion for pursuing the case long enough to force Fox to disclose all those internal emails and memos. Some even argued this was central to Dominion’s strategy; that it was a kind of gift to the nation and proof that Fox’s behaviour had undermined democracy itself.

The pre-trial documents remain on the public record and will continue to provide fodder for Murdoch-watchers for years to come. They’ve already revealed dozens of embarrassing details, such as high-profile Fox presenter Tucker Carlson’s passionate hatred of Trump despite his on-air adoration. They reveal the cynical culture and radically populist agenda inside an organisation that’s often captive to its own audience’s prejudices.

Over at Fox there’s been barely an on-air mention of the settlement. It was given perfunctory treatment when the network’s media reporter read a corporate statement that ended with the claim that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” The statement also said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

Back on MSNBC, contributors were quick to point out that an acknowledgement is not the same as an admission. In fact, the statement was little more than an allusion to the fact that judge Eric Davis had already ruled that Fox’s coverage was full of falsehoods. Davis was so convinced that he also ruled this conclusion couldn’t be disputed in the trial.

Observers noted that an acknowledgement also falls a long way shy of an apology, and it quickly became apparent that Fox wouldn’t be issuing one. An intriguing question is how much extra cash News handed over to Dominion to avoid having to say sorry. One suspects quite a lot: when you think about it, an appropriate apology would be quite a mouthful. To do justice to the matter it would have to say something like “Sorry for lying, systematically and knowingly, while trashing the Dominion business and amplifying the conspiracy theories of a president trying to overturn a democratic election and incite insurrection.” I suspect News would pay a lot of money to avoid saying that out loud.

Despite the cost, there appears to be little hope that Fox will change its ways anytime soon. On the day after the ruling, Tucker Carlson was hammering on about the same old issues — the spread of trans culture, the failures of the Biden administration, perceived security threats, the culture wars. As usual, no progressive voices were on hand to temper the fear-mongering. So perhaps Shafer is right? The business may have been bruised, but the business model is still intact.

Since I started writing this article we’ve discovered what the case means for Crikey and the lawsuit brought by Lachlan Murdoch against the Private Media masthead. You may remember that Lachlan’s case centres on Crikey’s decision to publish, and then re-publish, an article that claimed the Murdochs were the “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 6 January uprising in the Washington.

The Dominion case exposed the weakness of Murdoch’s argument. Fox chose not to defend the claim that it knowingly and repeatedly published false information and conspiracy theories that favoured the side advocating an uprising. To be clear, the United States is one of the toughest jurisdictions in which to bring a case against the media. It wasn’t enough that Fox was consistently wrong, Dominion had to prove actual malice by demonstrating a wilful motivation to damage Dominion through its falsehoods. The discovery process revealed that even with that protection Fox would be hard-pressed to defend itself.

The resulting trove of internal Fox documents was a boon for Crikey’s lawyers, who had to make the much stronger case under Australian defamation law that Fox made a concerted effort to undermine public confidence in the election result, contributing to the uprising. We’ve all seen what’s in the memos, and so has Lachlan Murdoch. This morning he bowed to the inevitable. •

The post Bruised but not yet beaten appeared first on Inside Story.

Admittedly, he would barely have had to open his mouth to be seen as an improvement on his predecessor, Trump appointee David Malpass. Never popular, Malpass made something of an ass of himself last September when he appeared to deny the existence of global warming. He lasted just five more months before resigning, a year before the end of his term.

The system under which the United States appoints the president of the World Bank while Europe gets to choose the president of the International Monetary Fund is routinely denounced by developing countries. It is a postcolonial carve-up without justification in the modern age, except for the fact that the United States and European countries are the two organisations’ largest shareholders.

Banga’s positive reception can be put down to two factors: he is a genuine financier with a solid strategic and managerial record at Mastercard, and he grew up in India, where he is still regarded as one of their own. He spoke last week at a number of public and private events on the fringe of the spring meetings of the bank and the IMF. His audiences included finance ministers from well over a hundred countries, along with businesspeople, academics and representatives of NGOs, philanthropists and the financial media.

To wander among the packed fringe meetings in Washington, as I did, was to be given an education in global development policy, with topics ranging from renewable energy to emerging market currency risk, humanitarian assistance to climate-resilient agriculture, low-income country indebtedness to girls’ education. In these fields and others, the World Bank spends around US$100 billion annually via a combination of commercial loans to middle-income countries, low-interest loans to poorer countries, and grants.

The bank is the largest in the network of “multinational development banks,” or MDBs, that lends resources from developed to developing nations: the others include the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the much more recently established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which China is the major shareholder.

Banga is arriving just as reform of this system is in the air. Last year US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen called on the bank to prepare a “roadmap” for change, with the aim of clarifying its mission and streamlining its procedures. As a draft of the roadmap was published in advance of the spring meetings, other voices sought to widen the agenda further. On a state visit to China, French president Emmanuel Macron called for a “new global financial pact” to revise “the financial terms of international solidarity, whether it concerns debt issue or mobilisation of the World Bank and IMF, to address both inequalities and the consequences of climate change.” He confirmed that Paris would host a summit in June to pursue these issues.

Three principal problems underlie calls for reform of the World Bank and MDB system. The first relates to changing conditions since the institutions were designed in the decades after the end of the second world war to help the developing world out of poverty. This remains their core mission, but in recent years new challenges have become increasingly pressing.

As resource depletion and habitat destruction gathered pace, the banks were forced to redefine themselves as champions not merely of economic growth but of “green growth.” As continuing income and gender inequalities disfigured many countries’ development records, “inclusive growth” became the mantra. Now, accelerating climate change not only threatens to overwhelm past growth but also demands a new form of development altogether, one that is both resilient to rising temperatures, and decarbonised.

It was Malpass’s inability to grasp these challenges that eventually did for him. But the necessary reorientation of the World Bank won’t be straightforward. The poorest countries know how damaging climate change is for them, but they warn that a greater focus on tackling carbon emissions will inevitably reduce funding for education, health and other traditional anti-poverty measures. Backed by India and China, they insist that any broadening of the bank’s remit must be accompanied by an expansion of its lending resources. Developed countries, however, are not minded to provide new funds — at least until they can see reform under way.

Second, the World Bank’s operating procedures have been widely criticised. Determined to protect the triple-A credit rating that allows it to borrow at the same interest rates as Western governments, the bank follows highly risk-averse lending policies. In many countries it competes with private banks to lend to commercially safe projects, leading commentators to question its added value. In an early reform agreed to in Washington, the bank will now be able to lend out more funds relative to its shareholder capital. But this will yield only an extra US$4 billion annually.

Meanwhile the bank’s own operating procedures are notoriously slow and cumbersome. Forced by its developed-country shareholders and NGOs to apply stringent environmental and human rights safeguards, and still using paper-based processes, the bank can often take two years to reach a decision on a lending application. As one African leader observed at a fringe event, “If I want a new road, I can be driving on the one that China builds us before the bank has put it to their committee.”

Third, the MDBs are being urged to mobilise far more private-sector lending. In a world in which developing countries need to invest an estimated US$2.4 trillion annually in green infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, nature conservation and climate resilience, the funds at the banks’ own disposal are not nearly sufficient. But getting the private sector to invest at scale in emerging markets other than China has proved difficult.

Even in stable economies like India, the interest rate charged on borrowings is twice as high as in a rich-world country; in Africa it can often be a multiple of three. New, more innovative approaches are thus being urged on the banks, involving greater use of risk-sharing instruments such as government guarantees and insurance mechanisms to protect against exchange rate fluctuations.

Can the World Bank and its sister institutions respond to these demands? The latest version of the bank’s reform roadmap was widely criticised in Washington as too limited and incremental. But blame-shifting was also rife: country shareholders pin the weak draft on unimaginative management; the latter say privately that it is the shareholders who have watered down their much bolder initial proposals.

Ajay Banga thus faces both great expectations and tough challenges. He has been clear about his own priorities. Integrating climate change into everything the bank does will be one of them; mobilising private sector cash another. And he warns he will be forthright whenever the real problem is not the bank’s bureaucracy but the unwillingness of its country shareholders to agree to something new.

The elephant in the room is the make-up of the shareholders themselves. As in any bank, voting rights reflect equity. Since the last set of reforms in 2010, China has been the third-largest shareholder in the bank’s main arm, after the United States and Japan. With other emerging and developing economies it now has 47 per cent of total shares. If, as seems likely, the bank receives another injection of capital next year consequent on reform and an expansion in its remit, that figure could rise to more than 50 per cent. But the United States and its Western allies will be loath to allow China the possibility of amassing a majority voting coalition.

In this context June’s Paris Summit promises to be pivotal. Working closely with Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, originator of the ambitious “Bridgetown Initiative” for global financial reform, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, chair of this year’s G20, Macron has set out an ambitious agenda for world leaders.

Focused on expanding global financial flows for development, climate and environmental protection, the summit will make World Bank and MDB reform one of several priorities. Others will be a review of the system under which developing countries fall into, and might escape, unsustainable debt; new funding streams for climate “loss and damage,” such as an international levy on carbon emissions from shipping; and the reallocation of Special Drawing Rights, the reserve currency issued by the International Monetary Fund, to poverty-reduction programs. If the “3M” leaders — Macron, Modi and Mottley — succeed, each of these issues will be taken forward to detailed decisions next year.

For his part, Ajay Banga has made clear that he is up for the idea of a “new global financial pact” along these lines. He may be their nominee, but the question is whether the United States and its Western allies are up for it too. •

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The fallout of Brexit in 2016 brought an immediate souring of relations between the British and Irish governments, the likes of which had not been seen in decades. More critically, though, it rekindled communal tensions north of the border, culminating in the closure of the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and the suspension of power sharing in May last year.

Much is now riding on a new British government with Rishi Sunak at the helm, signalling a more pragmatic approach to the Northern Ireland border. The recently negotiated “Windsor framework” for regulating goods crossing the Irish Sea has produced a tentative thaw in relations with the European Union, renewing hopes that Stormont might soon be reopened. Biden’s hastily planned visit was thus a calculated move to tip the balance at a crucial juncture.

His devout Irish Catholic affinities, however, also risked achieving the very opposite by raising the question of whether a presidential visit was the very last thing Ireland — north or south — needed at this time.

At his first and only public engagement in Belfast on Wednesday morning, Biden called on the people of Northern Ireland to leave their history behind and embrace the opportunities of a shared future. “Renewal,” “progress” and “repair” were the dominant themes in a speech that made only scant reference to the divisions of the past.

It was a big ask of a community only just emerging from the “decade of centenaries” — a rapid succession of major anniversaries marking some of the most difficult moments in modern Irish history, from the Ulster crisis of 1912, through the Great War, the struggle for independence, and the fateful partition of Ireland in 1921.

Historian Ian McBride recently said of his country’s acute sensitivity to the weight of history, “We’ve come to believe that dealing with the past or working through the past is somehow good for us.” But it’s only ten years since many people feared that the coming wave of commemorations would be anything but good for the peace process in Northern Ireland. Academics, politicians and community leaders were enlisted to find ways of ensuring that raking over the past would not spark a recrudescence of communal discord.

In the end, the decade of centenaries came and went largely without incident, foreshadowed by a historic visit to Dublin by Queen Elizabeth II — the first of its kind since her grandfather George V in 1911. Even the bedrock enmities evoked by the iconic year 1916 — Dublin’s Easter Rising and the loyalist veneration of the Battle of the Somme — produced few complications when it came to the commemorative program.

But 2016 brought dim tidings of an entirely different kind with the Brexit vote of June that year. Ultimately, it was not the inner workings of Irish memory that tested the mettle of the peace process, but the entirely unforeseen exigencies of a crisis manufactured in England.

An extraordinary inattention to the past was arguably Brexit’s defining characteristic — and its most potent legacy in Ireland. The referendum was notable for the almost complete absence of debate about the possible effects of leaving the European Union on a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement — keeping the Northern Ireland border as invisible as possible. It was one thing to dispense with border checks when both sides were members of the EU single market, but another matter entirely after the imposition of a hard border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Even as these problems came painfully to light in the referendum’s protracted aftermath, advocates of a so-called “hard Brexit” continued to display a callous disregard for the Good Friday Agreement’s brittle compromise. “Softer” options were available to successive Tory governments, but any dilution of Britain’s freedom to chart its own course proved unacceptable to the Brexit ultras. Polling data corroborates this, suggesting that the most passionate leavers were less likely to care about the peace dividend in Northern Ireland.

Biden’s heartfelt message to his hosts — that “for too long, Ireland’s story has been told in the past tense” — somehow failed to capture the issue in all its complexity. Much of the recent turmoil might have been avoided had the past tense — not least the astonishing gains of the last twenty-five years — been given considerably more airplay.

In any event, Biden soon dispensed with his own maxim as he crossed the border into his ancestral home of Carlingford in County Louth. Suddenly, talking “in the past tense” seemed the only thing on the president’s mind in a place that felt “like I’m coming home.” It was as though he had stepped into an entirely different world. The fifty-mile drive from Belfast might as well have been fifty years.

Addressing the Irish parliament in Dublin the following day, Biden notched up eighteen references to “history” and the “past,” reflecting on the “hope and the heartbreak” of his ancestors upon “leaving their beloved homeland to begin their new lives in America.” These stories, he urged, comprised “the very heart of what binds Ireland and America together” — a story of shared “dreams,” “values,” “heritage,” “hopes,” “journeys” and, crucially for Biden, “blood.”

The remainder of his trip was an act of personal homage, flying to County Mayo to visit a family history and genealogical centre before proceeding to the Catholic pilgrimage site of Knock Shrine (the scene of a purported holy apparition in 1879). He rounded off his visit with a major speech to a crowd of some 27,000 outside St Muredach’s Cathedral — another site of deep family significance. “I’ll tell you what,” he assured his audience, “it means the world to me and my entire family to be embraced as Mayo Joe, son of Ballina… the stories of this place have become part of my soul.”

As only the second Catholic president of the United States, Biden rivals John F. Kennedy for the sheer intensity of his identification with his Irish “soul.” As with Kennedy, his Irishness is bound inextricably to his Catholicism, which is why his equally English heritage (on his father’s side) consistently plays second fiddle. Moreover, it is a memory of Ireland rooted in a bygone age — “that fusion of ethnicity and religion,” as Fintan O’Toole puts it, “that has lost much of its grip on the homeland.”

Conspicuously, it is also an Irishness aligned with the very atavisms that the Good Friday Agreement was meant to transcend. Biden’s uncorked nostalgia for his family ties can be irresistibly endearing in its simplicity and humble authenticity. But it also carries unnerving undertones given the tragic consequences of tribal loyalties over the last fifty years.

Little wonder, then, that leading Unionist figures spent much of the week dismissing his credentials as a potential peace broker. Former first minister Arlene Foster was the most forthright in declaring that the president “hates the United Kingdom.” Other Democratic Unionist Party figures concurred that Biden was by far “the most partisan president there has ever been when dealing with Northern Ireland” — suspicions that were only compounded by Biden’s veiled criticism of a UK government that “should be working closer with Ireland” to resolve the wreckage of Brexit.

Though Biden seems largely unaware of the recidivist slant of his Irish colours, he nevertheless understands that his appeal is limited in the North. There would be no reprise of Bill Clinton’s celebrated role in brokering the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The trip itself was cobbled together hastily, at unusually short notice, with an itinerary shrouded in secrecy.

At no stage did the president sit down for direct talks with the key stakeholders or engage directly in problem-solving of any kind. Indeed, the total length of his stay in Belfast was barely sixteen hours (much of it in bed). No press conference ensued from his brief encounter with Rishi Sunak, nor was it possible to deliver his keynote address from the symbolic chair of the Stormont Assembly.

This may have represented a form of political leverage in its own right — holding Sunak and the DUP at arm’s length until they commit fully to implementing the Windsor framework and minimising the disruptions of Brexit. In that sense, the contrasting warmth in Carlingford sent its own clear message.

But if the president had hoped that his mere presence in Northern Ireland might move the dial on a rapid restoration of power sharing, the decision to mix the political with the personal was probably ill-judged. In a week when petrol bombs were hurled at police in Derry by the “New IRA,” he might have chosen instead to prolong his stay in Northern Ireland and leave the family history tour to his retirement. •

The post Mayo Joe, son of Ballina appeared first on Inside Story.

The conundrum? They flatly disagree on whether the country will have a Labour government with a clear majority within the next two years, or whether it could be heading for a closely fought contest — or even a fifth consecutive Conservative victory for the first time in British history.

The May ritual I’m referring to is the annual round of local government elections. Not every British voter will be able to take part — there are no local elections this year in Scotland, Wales or London — but most will have a chance to decide who runs 230 cities, towns and local districts across much of England. On Friday 5 May, while much of the country prepares for King Charles to be crowned the following day in Westminster Abbey, party strategists and media pundits will be paying less attention to the coronation than to the local elections’ impact on another historic building, just across the road from the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament.

In a way, this is all rather odd. Voters will be choosing who should run their local services — schools, public housing, parks, social care, libraries, refuse collection and so on. The 8000 councillors they elect will have no say on income tax, immigration, energy prices, Brexit, help for Ukraine or any of the other great national issues that decide the fates of governments. And yet decades of experience show that most people consider not the qualities of the particular candidates standing in their neighbourhoods but the rival merits of the national parties they represent.

Not everyone: thankfully for the cause of democracy, outstanding local candidates can defy national trends. And some parties — notably the Liberal Democrats — win more votes in local than national elections. But, overall, when all the votes around the country are added up, the national picture is what matters.

Older readers may recall the Falklands war in 1982. Before the war, Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular. Unemployment had trebled in three years from one to three million; the polls said the Conservatives were doomed to lose the following election. Yet Thatcher’s party triumphed in that May’s local elections because British troops were heading to the South Atlantic and most of Britain’s voters backed Thatcher’s quest to reclaim the islands from Argentina. Not a single local council in Britain had anything to do with any of this. Yet it was national sentiment, not local judgements, that decided which party should run each town and city.

Given all that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the national picture will be what really matters when this year’s local votes are counted. What gives the results added significance this time, though, are the disputes among pollsters. They agree that Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party is ahead but they disagree by how much. Some give Labour a lead of around 25 per cent, others nearer 15 per cent.

To be sure, both are big leads. (They might sound very big to Australian readers, but remember: Britain uses a first-past-the-post system and Labour’s votes are geographically concentrated, so the national vote translates into seats quite differently.) Repeated in a general election, Labour would be back in power. But there are two reasons why a big Labour victory is by no means certain.

First, governments over the past six decades or more have consistently lost support in the middle of each parliament, only to recover, at least to some extent, as the next general election approaches.

Second, changes in the relationship between votes and seats mean that Labour needs a bigger lead than in the past if it is to win outright. In 2005 — the last time Britain elected a Labour government — the party secured a comfortable majority with a lead in the popular vote of just 3 per cent (Labour 36 per cent, Conservatives 33 per cent). Today, a 3 per cent lead would leave Labour well short of a parliamentary majority; it might not even be the largest party in the House of Commons. Depending on a variety of factors, Labour will need a lead of at least 8 per cent, and might need a lead of as much as 13 per cent, to win outright. That was the margin by which Tony Blair led Labour to a landslide 179-seat majority in 1997. A repeat of those nationwide figures would mean a far closer outcome in terms of seats, and possibly a wafer-thin majority that could make it hard for Labour to remain in office for a full five-year term.

Given all that, a 15 per cent lead today would mean that even a modest Conservative recovery could jeopardise Labour’s chances of a clear victory. On the other hand, if Labour really is 25 per cent ahead, then it has a cushion against a Conservative recovery.

(A note for nerds: a narrow Labour lead in national votes at the next election is unlikely to mean the Conservatives stay in office. A more likely outcome is a hung parliament, in which neither Labour nor Conservative commands an overall majority. In those circumstances a minority Labour government is more likely than a minority Conservative government, because the great majority of smaller-party MPs, mainly Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party MPs, are viscerally anti-Conservative. But a minority Labour government would be limited in what it could do, and would probably hold another general election within a year or two. Britain’s longer-term future would effectively be on hold.)

Given all that, what will the pundits and parties be looking for on 5 May? Above all, they will want to see the BBC’s estimates of how the local vote maps nationally, taking account of the fact that parts of Britain won’t be voting at all. Assuming the Liberal Democrats repeat their usual trick of doing better in local than national elections, and Labour worse, a good rule of thumb is to add eight to ten percentage points to Labour’s lead.

So, if the national vote share in the local elections shows Labour fifteen or more points ahead of the Conservatives, this suggests a “true” Labour lead of around 25 per cent. Pollsters showing the bigger Labour leads will be vindicated and the Conservatives will have reason to be dejected. But if Labour’s lead is below 10 per cent then its “true” lead would be in line with polls reporting smaller leads just now. And any significant Conservative recovery would jeopardise Labour’s hopes of outright victory at the next general election.

Doubtless the television cameras will show us the expressions on the faces of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer as they enter Westminster Abbey for the coronation the following day. They will do their professional best to look positive; but experts in facial expressions might be able to detect their true feelings as they absorb the news of the local election results. •

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Over the following two years, NATO and the German government stuck to their guns, while the German peace movement kept growing. Even larger demonstrations were held in June 1982 and October 1983, but to no avail. In November 1983 the Bundestag consented to the stationing of additional nuclear missiles on West German soil.

The Greens, who earlier that year had entered federal parliament for the first time, naturally opposed the measure. So did the Social Democrats, even though their own Helmut Schmidt, toppled as chancellor by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in October 1982, had defied the mass protests in 1981 and 1982 and was one of the staunchest advocates of the Pershings’ deployment in Germany. After the vote, the peace movement faltered, but the Greens, whom it had nurtured and who identified as its parliamentary wing, have remained in the Bundestag ever since.

The record numbers mobilised by peace activists in the early 1980s were surpassed twenty years later, when more than half a million protesters took to the streets of Berlin in February 2003 to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. Again, the protests failed to alter the resolve of the decision-makers. The following month, the United States, supported by some of its allies (but not France and Germany), invaded Iraq. But the widespread sense of outrage soon dissipated.

Another twenty years on, Germany is again said to be witnessing a massive groundswell for peace. A prominent figure in the left-wing Die Linke party, politician Sahra Wagenknecht, called “Uprising for Peace,” the rally in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate she co-organised on 25 February, “the opening salvo of a new, powerful peace movement.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did indeed demonstrate in Berlin for an end of the war in Ukraine, but that was more than a year ago, in late February 2022. According to the police, Wagenknecht’s rally attracted a mere 13,000 protesters. The media nevertheless paid as much attention to it as they had to the February 2022 crowds, perhaps in the expectation that Wagenknecht’s prediction might come true — or maybe in response to her claim that the public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers overwhelmingly supported an escalation of the war and were trying to silence the views of the majority of Germans.

Both Berlin rallies, a year apart, were calling for peace in Ukraine, but they could not have been more different. In 2022, just three days after Russia intensified its undeclared war against its neighbour by launching a large-scale invasion, the demonstrators were demanding that Russia stop its aggression. They were waving yellow-and-blue flags and professing their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Last month, Wagenknecht and her co-organisers asked participants not to carry national symbols, but while no Ukrainian flags were on view, some of the protesters came armed with the horizontally striped white-blue-red ensign of the Russian Federation.

In 2022, the overwhelming message, directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was “Stop the war!” A year later, demonstrators demanded that Germany and its NATO allies stop supplying arms to Ukraine — in the expectation that once Ukraine was left to its own devices, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to sue for peace. Both crowds were a diverse lot — and included veterans of the German peace movement of the 1980s — but last month’s also featured prominent representatives of the extreme right, such as Jörg Urban, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Saxony, and the far-right publisher Jürgen Elsässer. Wagenknecht didn’t mind: everybody is welcome at our rally, she said, provided they sincerely “ehrlichen Herzens,” want to call for peace and negotiations.

Last month’s rally was prompted by a change in government policy. In late January, after months of procrastination and debate, Germany agreed to supply fourteen Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries to export the German-made tank to help Ukrainians repel the Russian invaders. The Leopard is considered one of the world’s best battle tanks, and Ukraine had long demanded that its allies make this particular model available.

Germany had already delivered other military hardware to Ukraine, including thirty Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, but had shied away from supplying tanks that might enable Kyiv’s forces to go on the counteroffensive and perhaps even carry the war into Russia. And the Scholz government didn’t want to be seen to make available weaponry of a kind that the United States was keeping back.

Because of a widespread wariness about German involvement in armed conflicts, it took a while for the government to supply Ukraine with any weapons at all. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in the Donbas, the Merkel government categorically ruled out arming Ukraine.

Visiting Eastern Ukraine in May 2021, Greens co-leader Robert Habeck suggested that Germany should enable Ukraine to defend itself against the pro-Russian separatists. He didn’t have in mind tanks or heavy artillery; at most, he was referring to weapons that could be used to shoot down drones. He was roundly criticised, not only by the Merkel government but also by prominent members of his own party. With a national poll looming, he backtracked.

After Merkel’s defeat in September 2021 the new government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats initially maintained its predecessor’s approach to Russia. In spite of American misgivings, Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pushed ahead with the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and continued to treat Vladimir Putin as if he could be trusted. In January 2022, when defence minister Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat, assured Ukraine that it had Germany’s full support, she proved her point by authorising the delivery of 5000 helmets to the Ukrainian army.

After Russia launched its full invasion, Scholz’s government abandoned the fifty-year-old doctrine that precluded weapons being provided to states outside NATO that are involved, or likely to be involved, in military conflicts. As Germany’s allies began talking about arming Ukraine with artillery, however, Lambrecht agreed only to dispatching bazookas to Kyiv. Much like the 5000 helmets, the offer didn’t seem overly generous: the weapons had been inherited by the Bundeswehr from its East German counterpart, the GDR’s National People’s Army, in 1990.

Over the twelve months since then, Scholz and his defence minister have appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming towards ramping up Germany’s military support, with pressure piled on by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his outspoken ambassador to Berlin, the Polish government, the opposition Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Things changed when Lambrecht was replaced by another Social Democrat, Boris Pistorius, in mid January. Once the US agreed to supply M1 Abrams tanks, which American generals consider unsuitable for the conditions in Ukraine, Germany finally decided to deliver a very limited number of battle tanks. Still, the Scholz government is committed to treading as carefully as possible, even if that’s not how its actions were perceived by those attending last month’s rally in Berlin. They were convinced that Scholz had joined the chorus of warmongers and that it might only be a matter of time until Germany crosses another red line and arms Ukraine with fighter planes, making a third world war a realistic prospect.

A couple of weeks before last month’s rally, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer, a faded icon of the German women’s movement, published a manifesto on the petition website Change.org. Its opening paragraph reads:

Today (10 February 2023) is the 352nd day of the war in Ukraine. So far, more than 200,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians have been killed. Women have been raped, children frightened, an entire people traumatised. If the fighting continues unabated, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, ravaged country. And also in Europe many people are scared of an escalation of the war. They fear for their and their children’s future.

There are two reasons why it might be easy to dismiss the manifesto. One is its language. While the text acknowledges that the “Ukrainian population” — not “Ukraine,” nor the “Ukrainian people” — was “brutally attacked by Russia,” it fails unambiguously to identify victims and perpetrators. The grammatical passive voice in the first paragraph obscures the indisputable fact that women in Ukraine were raped by Russian soldiers. Civilians died in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Wagenknecht and Schwarzer claim that Ukraine can’t win the war and that it therefore makes little sense to prolong the hostilities. They say that each day the war goes on costs up to a thousand lives and brings the world closer to a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

The manifesto calls for immediate negotiations to facilitate a ceasefire — because that’s what half of Germany’s population wants. Such negotiations, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer suggest, would require compromises on both sides. It is hard to imagine what a Russian compromise would look like, or how the government in Kyiv could agree to anything but a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory (or at least from that part occupied after 24 February 2022).

The other reason why the manifesto lacks credibility has to do with the ulterior motives of one of its authors. It’s no secret that Wagenknecht wants to leave Die Linke (as her husband and closest political ally, former Social Democrats leader Oskar Lafontaine, has already done) and form a new party. She is hoping that enough of those currently voting for either Die Linke or the AfD would support her brand of populism and push a new party over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor players out of the Bundestag.

The slogan “Peace with Russia!” would appeal to many voters, particularly in East Germany, as would two other causes currently championed by the AfD but also close to Wagenknecht’s heart: “Close the Borders!” and “War on Wokeness!” The manifesto and the rally were thinly disguised means of gauging support for a new party.

The Change.org petition was endorsed by sixty-nine prominent Germans, most of them writers, academics or actors. Many of them would have written a very different text but felt strongly enough about the manifesto’s key message to sign it. They include, for example, Margot Käßmann, a former leader of Germany’s Lutheran Church. She doesn’t want Germany to provide any more arms to Ukraine because she is convinced that they would inevitably “escalate, extend and broaden the war, and that fears of a nuclear war are not completely unfounded.” When asked how she imagines negotiations would be initiated and proceed, she said that she wasn’t an expert on diplomacy.

Another signatory is the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who suspects that the war is the result of a US ploy to shore up its global hegemony at the expense of Europe. Like many others who subscribe to the sentiments of the manifesto, he is convinced that his views have not been sufficiently aired by Germany’s public broadcasters and the press — or worse: “The government is readying the tools to unleash the police and, in particular, the security services on anyone who doubts the wisdom of pledging full-scale support to the ultranationalist government of Ukraine and the Biden administration,” he predicted in a recent interview.

But while Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace” and some of the arguments put forward by its prominent supporters are unconvincing, the manifesto can’t be readily discounted. That’s not least because around three-quarters of a million people have already signed it. It has in fact attracted more signatures than any other German petition on Change.org.

The support for the manifesto also reflects widely shared views and sentiments. According to a YouGov poll conducted last month, 51 per cent of Germans believe that their country’s supply of arms to Ukraine makes it a belligerent. Another survey, in early March, found that 31 per cent of respondents think that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far.

I didn’t sign Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, nor do I believe that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far. But I sympathise with some of those calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to stop the killing. And I have misgivings about the hawkish rhetoric of Ukraine’s German supporters.

The demands that Germany provide more, and more sophisticated, military hardware to Ukraine is often linked to the mantra that Ukraine must win the war. That aligns with the demand that Russia must lose the war, but is quite different from the suggestion that Ukraine must be put in a position where it won’t lose the war. I cannot see why a defeat of Russia should be a necessary prerequisite for a Russian withdrawal and an acknowledgment that Ukraine’s borders must be respected. Besides, it is hard to imagine Russia, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, conceding outright defeat.

I am astounded by the uncritical embrace of NATO by erstwhile pacifists, particularly among the Greens, as if the US-led alliance were a peacekeeping force on a humanitarian mission. The idea that its expansion, be it eastwards or northwards, would only be in the interest of global peace or that NATO is an alliance designed to promote democracy strikes me as preposterous. The Kurdish exiles extradited from Sweden to Turkey to facilitate Sweden’s joining of the alliance could testify that NATO doesn’t have a problem with autocratic regimes among its members, let alone dictatorial regimes outside NATO. That is if they live to tell the tale.

The forgetfulness of particularly those hawks who are recent converts baffles me. There have been numerous violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — namely that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” — since 1945. The US has been a regular culprit. Past American invasions should not serve as excuses for Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — not just since February 2022 but since 2014 — but a picture that casts the US as a defender of the UN Charter is plainly wrong.

Similarly, while moves to collect evidence in order to eventually charge the Russian leadership with crimes against humanity deserve all the support they can get, it’s worth recalling that the US is among the countries that don’t recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which in an ideal world would try Putin and his generals.

The forgetfulness of Ukraine’s hawkish supporters also extends to other aspects of postwar history. They often imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprecedented. It’s not. Arguably, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine if the West had taken a strong stance against its invasion of Georgia, its bombing of Grozny, its occupation of the Crimea and its intervention in Syria (including the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo).

Nor is Russia the only country that has tried to bomb a European country into submission. The Greens, in particular, ought to recall NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo war and its bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which then foreign minister Joschka Fischer defended by comparing what was happening in Kosovo to Auschwitz. At the time, many Greens quit the party in protest against the decision to endorse Fischer’s stance.

Incidentally, a closer look at what happened in 1999 might be instructive in more than one sense. At rallies against the NATO bombing, left-wing pacifists marched side by side with Serbian ultranationalists, admirers of the far-right Chetniks who fought against Nazi Germany (but also against Croats, Bosniaks and Tito’s partisans).

The amnesia that characterises the current debate between hawks and doves also extends to other recent conflicts. According to the UN Development Program, the war in Yemen had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Last year, the German government authorised arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the parties to that war. So much for the claim that the decision to supply arms to Ukraine has been unparalleled.

And what about Scholz’s Zeitenwende, the turning point in German policy that he announced in the Bundestag on 27 February 2022? He used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for a €100 billion funding boost for the armed forces.

Finally, I am wary of the expectation that support for Ukraine and its people must be accompanied by an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. At rallies in support of Ukraine I am uneasy when the Ukrainian national anthem is sung (which invariably happens during such events), not because I have anything against that anthem in particular, but because occasions when the Australian or German national anthems are sung make me similarly uncomfortable.

Similarly, demands that cultural events involving Russian artists ought to be cancelled or boycotted, or that the reading of Russian literature ought to be discouraged are not just plain stupid but also reek of a nationalism that is at the heart of many of the ills of today’s world, including armed conflict and forced displacement.

Some of those who signed Wagenknecht’s manifesto may have done so because they are critical of NATO, object to US foreign policy past and present, or believe that we eventually ought to overcome an international system based on nation-states. None of these beliefs is incompatible with empathy, and indeed solidarity, with a people attacked by a ruthless invader. Yet in many statements about the war by self-declared pacifists, solidarity is in short supply.

Take, for example, an open letter to Olaf Scholz by the mayor and twenty-one of thirty-four local parliamentarians of Freital, a town of 40,000 in the East German state of Saxony. “As a sovereign state, Germany, the federal government and you as chancellor have to make sovereign decisions for the benefit of the German people,” they tell Scholz, claiming that instead his government’s policies further the interests of “third parties.” Referring twice to “Leid,” meaning pain or suffering, they write that “our painful past” ought to teach Germans that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will simply produce further, indescribable suffering.

A generous interpretation would assume that unlike the historical Leid, “indescribable suffering” refers to the current and future experiences of people in Ukraine. According to a less generous reading, the latter is something likely to be experienced by “us,” once the delivery of tanks and other arms to Ukraine ignites a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Such a reading is supported by another statement in the letter. The authors claim that they are not prepared, as Germans, “to be involved in a third world war or to be made a party to belligerent acts in whatever form, either directly or indirectly.” Already, individuals and businesses are experiencing what they call “unacceptable consequences” — presumably as a result of Germany’s support for Ukraine.

Lacking any explicit reference to Ukrainian victims and Russian perpetrators, and devoid of empathy for the people in Ukraine, the Freital letter captures some of the sentiment fuelling German pacifism. It is not even an extreme example. It doesn’t spell out what many opponents of support for Ukraine are openly saying: that the sanctions against Russia are harming Germany’s economy and have been responsible for energy shortages and rising inflation, and should therefore be withdrawn immediately.

Am I being unfair by quoting a letter written by the members of a local parliament in which the AfD wields a lot of influence? True, regional Saxony is not representative of Germany. Neither is the man I am about to quote, although many Germans would like to think he is. Jürgen Habermas, the nonagenarian philosopher who is arguably Germany’s foremost public intellectual, intervened twice in the public debates about German support for Ukraine, first in May last year, and again after the publication of Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, on both occasions by writing an essay for the respected Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Habermas names perpetrators and victims. In his first contribution, he endorses Olaf Scholz’s caution rather than arguing against supporting Ukraine. More recently, he has echoed calls for a diplomatic solution and criticised the ramping up of Germany’s military aid for the government in Kyiv. His line of argument is neither simplistic nor rash. But he too seems overly concerned by what the war does to him.

He begins his first article by referring to the representation of the war in the media, which in his view has been influenced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “A Ukrainian president, who knows about the impact of images, is responsible for powerful messages.” He then concedes that notwithstanding this “skilful staging,” “the facts tug at our nerves.” He is concerned about our nerves, rather than about the very real death and destruction represented by such skilfully staged images?

In his second essay, he once more articulates Western sensitivities. “The West has its own legitimate interests and its own obligations,” he writes. Western governments

have legal obligations towards the security concerns of their own citizens and, irrespective of the attitudes of the people in Ukraine, they are morally co-responsible for victims and destruction caused by weapons from the West; therefore, they cannot shift the responsibility for the brutal consequences of an extension of the fighting, which becomes only possible thanks to their military support, to the Ukrainian government.

Although Habermas is ostensibly talking about Western governments, he appears to mean “us.” To use Margot Käßmann’s reading of Habermas’s words: “When we are supplying weapons — that’s something the philosopher Habermas has put very well — we are co-responsible for the dead. That’s not something where we could evade our responsibility.”

Might Käßmann and Habermas feel less strongly about the brutal consequences of a Russian occupation of Ukraine because they wouldn’t be broadcast into their living rooms (with the skilful stager, Zelenskyy, presumably one of the many victims of the Russian “liberators”)?

Habermas might object to Käßmann’s interpretation of his words, and would not want to be associated with either Wagenknecht or the Freital councillors. But he shares with them a call for negotiations and a conviction that such negotiations require the West to scale down, if not halt altogether, its military support for Ukraine. And the clamour for peace, whether in pursuit of cheap Russian gas or out of a desire not to be held morally responsible for the fighting, is informed by egotism.

No obvious middle path exists between abandoning Ukraine and arming the Kyiv government to the extent that its army can inflict a defeat on Russia. That is, if we assume that a solution will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

But the West has two other options. One is to do more to influence countries that have tacitly supported Putin, particularly China and India. The West would have to pay a high price if it wanted China and India to stop buying Russian coal and oil, but until we know the price-tag, it might be worth exploring that option in more detail.

The other option would be to impose meaningful sanctions in the hope that they lead to a coup against Putin. A couple of days ago, the Hamburg state government reported that last year the use of coal in Hamburg’s power stations increased by almost 15 per cent on 2021’s figure. That’s a result of Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian gas. But 35 per cent of the coal used in Hamburg last year was imported from Russia. So far, the sanctions are too selective to seriously hurt the Russian economy. In fact Russia’s revenues from selling oil and gas increased by 28 per cent last year.

The global climate might benefit from more wide-ranging sanctions targeting Russian fossil fuels. But any tightening would also hurt those imposing the sanctions, at least initially. Their impact would be grist for the mill for those who claim the price we pay for the war in Ukraine is already too high. The debate would further obscure the fact that whatever inconveniences we experience, and however much our sensitivities are offended, the war’s victims are the people of Ukraine.

German angst, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay, is clearly back, and with it the egotism that accompanied it. The current debate would benefit from a less blinkered view of the past, one that is mindful of what happened in Yemen and of Russia’s track record since the early 1990s, of unholy alliances against NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, and of the US’s insistence that its self-appointed role as global sheriff should not be subject to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

It could also be instructive to revisit the peace movement of the 1980s, which is now upheld as exemplary by German pacifists and hawks alike. Then, too, many peace activists took sides in a global conflict pitting the US and its allies against the Soviet Union. Then, too, what mattered most to many of those gathered in Bonn in October 1981 were their own sensitivities, because they imagined themselves as (future) victims. And then, too, the allaying of Germans’ fears did nothing to enhance the safety of people in faraway places. •

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Now, in early 2023, a government that began in an atmosphere of hope and enthusiasm but was reduced to minority status at the 2019 and 2021 elections is displaying nearly all the features of a midlife crisis. Talented figures are exhausted and moving on. Ethics violations are piling up. Ex-ministers have written angry books about their experiences. And the pundit class is full of unsolicited advice about the need for new ideas and directions. Sunny ways are long gone.

But one thing that shows no sign of slowing down is Justin Trudeau. The prime minister has given no indication of being ready to give up the job; nor does his party seem to want him to. He mightn’t have quite the cocky glow of 2015, but he still appears committed and all-in.

The parallels between Justin Trudeau’s career and that of his father Pierre continue to be uncanny. Both rose quickly to the Liberal leadership and won transformational elections. Each was knocked down to minority status after four years. Both came back two years later with a more stable regime (a majority government for Pierre; a written agreement with the opposition New Democrats for Justin).

If history continues to repeat itself, Canada is currently in the Trudeau mid-career trough. This was the 1970s low point of Pierre Trudeau’s government for many of the same reasons we see today: an ageing government facing a muddled policy environment of inflation, foreign crises, and an apparent sagging of public confidence and optimism.

But a trough is not a downward spiral. Pierre Trudeau only narrowly lost the 1979 election after eleven years in power, and roared back with a majority victory in 1980 to achieve the constitutional triumphs that became his greatest legacy. Justin Trudeau’s future is unknown — as is his legacy project. But even if he doesn’t repeat his father’s grand finale, he remains the leading political force in Canada.

Justin Trudeau’s 2023 is a mixed bag so far. His greatest boosts are a successful healthcare deal with the provincial governments and a judicial inquiry’s vindication of his decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the “trucker convoy” protests that clogged downtown Ottawa for three weeks last year. But his legislative agenda is bogged down. Initiatives on gun control, online regulation and expanded medically assisted dying are all stalled or being rethought. And polls regularly put his Liberals in second place behind the Conservatives.

Assessments of the problem are familiar for this stage in a government’s life: an overly controlling prime minister’s office and an administration better at day-to-day tactical politics than serious policy thinking. While progressives nurse multiple hurts and betrayals, the government is clearly more on the left than the right; for a certain part of the pundit class, indeed, the problem is that the Trudeau Liberals are far more interested in redistributing wealth than generating it. A recent book by former finance minister Bill Morneau, who was forced out of the cabinet in 2020, says all of the above, though it has had limited impact since it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know.

Arguably the main force driving the government is its agreement with the left-wing New Democrats, who promised parliamentary support until 2025 in return for a new dental insurance program and other progressive policies. While the Conservatives insist on calling this “the Liberal–NDP coalition” at every opportunity, it isn’t a formal alliance. It is the latest in a long history of arrangements that almost always end up favouring the Liberals. Indeed, the deal has squeezed the NDP into uncomfortable positions, limiting its ability to assault the government from the left.

Over on the hard right, opposition remains deeply personalised against Trudeau himself, exactly as it was fifty years ago against his father. It was people with these views who occupied downtown Ottawa and two Canada–US border crossings last year, motivated nominally by vaccine mandates but more deeply by a visceral dislike of Justin Trudeau. “Fuck Trudeau” is the ubiquitous slogan of the Canadian populist right these days; a Vancouver man, Australian by origin, was recently denied his online citizenship ceremony because he refused to take down a sign with those two words displayed behind him.

Further up the conservative hierarchy, the governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan are in open conflict with the federal government, primarily over the perennial issue of energy and natural resources policies. Both have introduced bills to expressly negate federal policies within their provinces. The Alberta Sovereignty and Saskatchewan First acts, both constitutionally nonsensical, embody just how alienated those jurisdictions are from the federal government.

All this leaves the moderate centre right unsure of where it stands — unhappy with the Trudeau government’s direction but wary of the populists at the gates. That’s partly why the federal Conservatives have yet another leader facing off against Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre; but more on him in a minute.

Another way of viewing the Trudeau government is from the perspective of Quebec. Though rooted in that province’s largest city, Montreal, the Trudeaus have a long, fractious history with Quebec nationalists. All Quebec governments are prickly over jurisdictional issues, but the current government, led by François Legault, has been particularly aggressive. Its uncompromising secularist agenda, of little interest to the rest of Canada, includes banning some public servants, including teachers, from wearing the hijab and other “religious” symbols.

Trudeau and other federal politicians have dragged their heels on directly confronting policies like these. But conflict continues to be fuelled by moves like Legault’s recent, unsuccessful demand for the resignation of the prime minister’s new special adviser on Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, over her past comments that anti-Muslim sentiment was widespread in Quebec.

Finally, in international affairs, Trudeau’s own celebrity brand may still be strong but Canada’s is not. The country struggles to demonstrate weight and credibility in the challenging new global environment. The election of Joe Biden in the United States was greeted with sighs of relief in Ottawa, but now Canada struggles not to be blindsided by the Biden administration’s restrictions on non-US goods.

The recent appearance of balloon-like objects over North America gave Trudeau an opportunity to act decisively by ordering them shot down, but an American F-22 was responsible for the only successful take-down over Canadian territory. Although that action was part of the NORAD mutual protection arrangement, it was seized on by critics as evidence of Liberal neglect of national defence.

On China, the government has slowly become more outspoken. But recent revelations suggest that Beijing actively intervened in the 2021 election with the goal of propping up the Liberal minority against the more aggressive Conservatives, an outrage the government is anxious not to dwell on.

In all, people around the country may not be entirely happy with Trudeau and his mixed policy record, but for different and conflicting reasons. It is these circumstances, and his deal with the New Democrats, that allow him to retain power, if not necessarily momentum, during his government’s midlife crisis.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, is the opposition Conservatives’ third elected leader (along with two interim leaders) since Stephen Harper’s departure in 2015. The amiable Andrew Scheer took the party into the 2019 election and held the Liberals to a minority, but this was deemed insufficient and the party soon turned on a man who had been a compromise candidate from the start.

Scheer’s successor, Erin O’Toole, was too clever by half, winning the party leadership by campaigning as a scrappy upstart from the right but then pivoting to the moderate centre. This craftiness might have worked if not for the 2022 trucker convoy: O’Toole fatally equivocated and was thrown out as leader by his caucus, an unusual occurrence in Canada.

Poilievre, by contrast, is perhaps the most on-message politician in Canadian history. He has been a combative partisan since he was first elected in 2004, at twenty-five, and was a loyal junior soldier in the Harper government, eventually rising to mid-level cabinet posts.

Now forty-three, he displays remarkable discipline. He always speaks in complete sentences, never musing out loud, fumbling for words or needing to issue later retractions or clarifications. He is relentlessly partisan and hypercritical of the government. But he is not a random bomb-thrower: his words are precise and carefully chosen, though often leaving room for interpretation.

Poilievre is a model opposition leader, at least in the cynical sense. He is quick to jump on every government failing as evidence of gross incompetence, and he rarely concedes anything. His messages are carefully calibrated to undermine the government while widening and solidifying his own support. Unlike his predecessor, O’Toole, but much like Stephen Harper, Poilievre tends first and foremost to his party base, building its trust and never moving too far out in front. And it’s all done with an air of grave urgency and selfless concern for the country’s wellbeing.

Poilievre exemplifies the new type of conservative leadership: trying to ride the populist tiger without being eaten by it. He does a masterful job of handling the xenophobia of the, er, “Fuck Trudeau” crowd, issuing endless affirmations and validations of their frustrations without descending into their incoherent rage. Like most Canadian conservative elites, he avoids getting bogged down in social conservative issues like abortion, affirms LGBT rights, if not very loudly, and generally embraces rather than rejects immigration and racial diversity, though with little interest in systemic issues.

The one social divide Poilievre is happy to exploit is class. The current inflationary environment and concerns about the cost of living give him many opportunities to contrast himself with Trudeau’s elitist image and life experience; and his most provocative pledge while running for the leadership came when he vowed to fire the head of the Bank of Canada for insufficiently controlling inflation.

Poilievre also has a gift for driving media and intellectual elites bananas with provocative statements. The president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, long a favourite target of conservatives, recently fell into his trap. Poilievre has vowed to “defund” the CBC, and the frustrated CBC president pushed back, saying, “There is a lot of CBC-bashing going on — somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition… I think they feel the CBC is a mouthpiece for the Liberal government.” Poilievre seized on this as further evidence of CBC bias against Conservatives.

And not just the CBC: Poilievre openly disdains the mainstream media in general, refused to take questions from the parliamentary press gallery for the first three months of his leadership, and prefers to communicate through social media and more friendly outlets.

With all this, Poilievre enjoys rockstar popularity within much of his party, while dissenters quietly fall into line. What remains unknown is his potential for growth. The downside of being a great opposition leader is that the country might feel no need to give you the bigger job. Poilievre has high unfavourability ratings, and is far less popular among women than men (the opposite of Trudeau). And we know little about his governing philosophy and what kind of prime minister he would be. He was not prominent enough in the Harper government to leave a clear track record, and his disciplined and relentlessly partisan personality gives few glimpses of how he may have grown over his two decades in politics.

Among the other opposition parties, Trudeau has little to fear from the New Democratic Party, though this is not necessarily the NDP’s fault. It has a perennial strategic problem: with the Liberals sucking up much of the oxygen on the progressive left, the party is left to choose between going hard left or extracting policy concessions. Current leader Jagmeet Singh chose the second route with the parliamentary deal, but once again the party is feeling it somehow got scammed as the Liberals bask in their secure minority.

The Bloc Québécois is a sharper opponent but may pose a greater threat to the Conservatives by stemming Tory growth in Quebec; as a general rule, the two parties fight for rural and small-town ridings while the Liberals maintain their Montreal base. And the Green Party of Canada, briefly a rising force, is in poor shape, riven by internal crises and at risk of returning to oblivion.

Trudeau himself remains in firm control of his party. Publicly his colleagues show nothing but undying loyalty to the family name that led the party out of third-place wilderness to the Promised Land. If anything different is happening in private, it is well hidden. This is a first for the modern Liberal Party of Canada, which was racked for decades by open tensions between leaders and overly eager heirs apparent, going back to John Turner’s rivalry with Pierre Trudeau, then Jean Chrétien’s with Turner, and then Paul Martin’s with Chrétien.

A brand-name leader leaves limited space for others to build their own political momentum. But perhaps precisely because little room exists for traditional politicking, Trudeau has been successful at building a team of credible successors, mainly women, noted for their ministerial competence.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister and minister of finance, is the government’s ubiquitous fixer after previous assignments in global affairs and international trade. But she risks the stereotypical gender trap: the woman sent in to do the dirty jobs and absorb the political mud while others take the credit. Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, doesn’t have the same track record, but boasts deeper party roots and networks.

Newcomer Anita Anand, elected only in 2019, is considered the one to watch, having deftly handled vaccine procurements during the pandemic and now cleaning up a sexual-harassment mess in national defence. François-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, demonstrates an eager competence, and is sitting on approving a telecom merger as he tries to figure out how to win credit for reducing Canadians’ phone bills.

(A fifth, non-government possibility is Mark Carney, the Canadian former head of the Bank of England, who has returned to Ottawa and is widely assumed to be interested in the job of prime minister, though he has yet to run for a parliamentary seat.)

But none of these figures remotely challenges Justin Trudeau’s pre-eminence; instead they keep his government going. He may still have many years in office. If he does suddenly choose political retirement, it will be a huge surprise to all. But it is unclear how his remaining years might unfold. Pierre Trudeau’s focus on constitutional issues was never in doubt, and his final term was all about completing unfinished business. Justin Trudeau has no obvious obsession or legacy project. But he does clearly like being prime minister. •

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By daylight, the city can feel like its near neighbours, Warsaw and Budapest. Stalinist buildings line the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, and the skyline is punctuated by the golden spires of churches. Dogs wrapped in winter jackets are out for walks, couples stroll hand in hand. But at night, once you realise the street’s illumination comes from the bobbing headlamps of pedestrians and dogs wearing glow-in-the-dark collars, it is impossible to forget the war and how it has transformed this city.

Some of the most visible changes have been to names. Russian places and heroes have been expunged from streets and squares, which have been rebaptised with Ukrainian names that better reflect the national mood. Moskovska Street, named for the Russian capital, has become Kniaziv Ostrozkykh Street, after a branch of Ukrainian medieval nobility; Piterskaya (St Petersburg) Street is now London Street. In their failed attempt to conquer Kyiv, Russia has accelerated the derussification of the city. Globally, news outlets now refer to the Ukrainian-derived “Kyiv” rather than the previously common Russian-language “Kiev.”

While the Russian advance on the capital from the north was repulsed early in the war and the front lines of battle now lie in the east and south of Ukraine, the country remains under indiscriminate attack from the sky. Civilians are at constant risk: reports come in frequently of people killed in their own homes or on streets they have known for decades. Despite a morale-lifting visit this week by US president Joe Biden, residents are tensely awaiting the anticipated anniversary bombardment.

The near-daily alarms have forced mental acrobatics of a variety that I could not previously have envisaged. Each siren that goes off — and activates a flurry of notifications on my phone, this being a truly twenty-first century war — triggers decision-making that feels life-and-death and black-and-white, and yet also very mundane.

When a siren first sounds, it typically indicates that the launch of an offensive airborne attack has been detected. Because Kyiv is in Ukraine’s central heartland, we have a window of opportunity; a heavy pause during which we track the attack’s progress through Twitter feeds and Telegram chats.

There’s usually time for me to finish my shower or brew a thermos of coffee, recognising that these attacks can trigger emergency utility shut-offs. Based on the stream of real-time updates, I decide if I will shelter in my bathroom (the safest place in my apartment, away from external walls) or in the basement shelter across the road.

Some days the attack doesn’t materialise; on others, explosions echo across the city. Later, when our mobile phones buzz to tell us the alert is over, the catch in my throat releases, and everyone moves along with their day.

Resilience is a point of collective pride. The national ballet performs to a full theatre even as the corps is thinned by displacement and enlistment. Weekends see Kyiv’s bars and restaurants packed with patrons toasting to victory (“za peremoga”) before returning home ahead of the curfew. Refusing to be cowed by cuts to electricity, venues are illuminated by candles and fairy lights, and the city hums with generators. People distribute powerbanks among their friends as though sharing cigarettes.

The city’s citizens have fashioned a new normal. Patriotism is in vogue, and Pantone’s freedom blue and energising yellow are the colours of the season. Alongside more conventional military heroes, people honour train conductors and energy workers. One of my favourite cocktail bars shakes a “Ukrainian dream” (rum, baked-apple infused vermouth and bitters) and a “return to the sun” (rum, amaretto, cardamom bitters, vanilla syrup and lemon). They taste of hope, and of supply chains from the West that have not been cut.

No blueprint exists for how best to respond to war; no guidance manual spells out which parts of life one should pause and which continue. I’ve had my hair cut by headtorch swaddled in a blanket in a dark and unheated salon, and attended candlelit concerts with packed audiences. Adaptation is the byword, and a determination that life must go on.

Ukrainians have long known war: their country’s territory has been contested for centuries, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for breakaway republics in the east have made military offensives and civilian displacement part of the everyday national narrative. But it was the launch of the full-scale invasion on 24 February last year that brought war home. Everyone remembers where they were that day, and in the terrifying weeks afterwards.

Today, Ukrainian colleagues can name the weaponry the country is requesting from its allies as though rattling off a weekly shopping list. They recite casualty statistics and updates on movement in the frontline. They give friendly advice on the nearest bomb shelter when an air-raid siren goes off.

Absorbed in conflict of a scale few imagined, the darkness of Kyiv’s night-time streets goes nearly unmentioned. Between air strikes, the bartenders keep pouring and the musicians keep playing. •

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Up to mid 2021 this looked about right. Although enthusiasm for Brexit had gently declined since 2016, sentiment had not shifted dramatically. But since then, support has fallen much faster and, fuelled by Britain’s economic malaise, debate has intensified. In August 2021, 46 per cent of people told YouGov Britain was wrong to leave the European Union and 42 per cent said it was right. Those figures are now 54 per cent and 34 per cent. Just 18 per cent think the government has handled Brexit well.

Both the government and the opposition are studiously, and understandably, ignoring this shift in opinion. Within the Tory membership and the parliamentary party, support for Brexit remains strong. Prime minister Rishi Sunak is in a weak position, doing poorly in the polls and under attack from the most aggressively anti-European faction in his party, supported by his predecessor Boris Johnson. The government can do little beyond quietly trying to improve relations with European partners, as we are seeing with its attempt to resolve vexed issues over Northern Ireland.

Labour’s base strongly opposes Brexit but, given Remainers have nowhere else to go, the opposition’s focus is on winning over socially conversative but economically left-wing voters in marginal seats. Attacking Brexit would be actively unhelpful with this group. Labour leader Keir Starmer and his team are also clearly terrified about being attacked as soft on immigration — hence his repeated emphasis that free movement of people would be off the table under a Labour government.

But if opinion continues to shift against Brexit, this can only be a temporary strategy for both parties, and will eventually become unsustainable.

Support for Brexit was always likely to decline over time because of the age profile of the groups that voted Yes and No in the 2016 referendum. A majority of under-fifty-year-olds voted Remain; pensioners were always the biggest backers of Leave. Given very few Remain voters have changed their minds over the past six and a half years, and people who were too young to vote in 2016 overwhelmingly oppose Brexit, natural voter replacement is generating an inevitable shift.

Professor Simon Hix and colleagues estimate around 35 per cent of the drop in support for Brexit since 2016 is due to this replacement effect. It’s likely that if the initial referendum took place next year Remain would now win — even if everyone who could vote in 2016 voted the same way.

Brexit enthusiasts always ran a risk in depending so greatly on older voters, which makes it all the more strange that they doubled down on appealing to their existing supporters rather than attempting to make a case that might appeal to younger, more liberal voters. As a result, alongside the replacement effect, the age gap has got even bigger. An analysis of YouGov data shows people born between 1985 and 1994 have shifted hardest against Brexit, whereas those born before 1944 are even more supportive than they were in 2016. This will exacerbate the impact of replacement over the next five to ten years.

This powerful effect means that Brexit will continue to get less and less popular even if no one else changes their mind. So those who want to stay well clear of the EU need to convince younger voters that it was a good idea. At the moment, that clearly isn’t happening — the proportion of Remain voters who’ve changed their minds is tiny. Nor is there are any reason to believe this will change in the next few years, given that no obvious benefits are about to become apparent.

The only factors that might push opinion in the other direction would be a strong economic recovery for which at least some credit was given to Brexit, deserved or not, or, more possible though still unlikely, a major crisis within the EU that makes Britain look like a safe haven. Tensions certainly exist that could turn into something more existential. For instance, in late 2022 we saw Hungary blocking a bailout to Ukraine as part of an ongoing argument over Viktor Orbán’s undemocratic rule. And many EU states, including France, are still unhappy with Germany’s behaviour over the energy crisis.

But at the moment nothing seems likely to give Remain voters pause. That puts the focus on Leave voters. If they stay supportive of Brexit then it will take longer for a major shift in policy to become a political necessity for the main parties. At the moment 18 per cent of those Leavers are telling YouGov they now think leaving was the wrong decision — higher than a year ago — but 74 per cent are sticking with their initial decision.

Yet when you dig into how people feel about Brexit, that support looks like it could drop a fair bit more, especially among younger Leave supporters. JL Partners’ polling in October showed that just 24 per cent of Leave voters think Brexit has helped the economy compared with 34 per cent who think it’s made it worse. Across every area JL Partners tested — from better public services to the cost of holidays — Leave voters were more likely to say Brexit has made their lives worse than better. A Public First poll in December for the charity More in Common found that, of Leave voters who had changed their minds, 69 per cent cited damage to the economy as a reason.

Why then do 74 per cent still say it was right to leave? Mainly, it seems, because they are still hopeful there will be benefits in the coming years. While JL Partners found little hope among Remainers that any benefits might be forthcoming, a majority of Leavers felt trade deals with the rest of the world and “better UK laws” would bring future improvements. Critically, though, most expected to see those benefits in the next five years. My sense is that if they don’t, and there’s no reason at the moment to think they will, then support among Leavers will continue to drop, on top of the age effects.

If it seems fairly clear that people are unhappy with Brexit so far, even if some are still hopeful, what people want instead is harder to read. This is partly because, as ever, most people don’t spend much time thinking about politics, let alone policy detail, and so don’t have formed views on the benefits of joining the single market versus a bespoke trade deal. It’s also down to the complexity of the issue.

Thanks to the kind people at focaldata I’ve been able to ask some of my own polling questions to test how well people understand one of the key concepts that comes up in discussions of how Britain might deal with the post-Brexit malaise. To do that, I gave four short (and by necessity simplistic) descriptions of the single market to see if people knew what it actually means. Thirty-eight per cent correctly chose “Agreeing to participate in the free movement of goods, people, services and capital with European Union states” and 35 per cent nominated another option I’d phrased to be almost right. But another 27 per cent chose options — “a bespoke deal with the EU” or “rejoining the EU” — that were completely wrong.

There’s also the matter of how you frame the questions. As ever, small changes in wording can make a huge difference. When I asked if people thought Britain should join the single market but stay out of the European Union, I found 55 per cent in favour and 26 per cent opposed. Opinium Research asked if people supported “gaining access to the European single market” and found 63 per cent supporting and 14 per cent opposed. Both JL Partners and Public First asked (different) multi-option questions that gave quite different results for how many people would prefer joining the single market versus some other type of closer relationship.

Given all this, we have to be careful about overreading the data. But I think we can say the following: not many people want to keep the status quo and only a very small minority want to move even further away from the EU. A substantial majority, including most Leavers, want some kind of better relationship, though short of rejoining. They are particularly concerned about the economy but are also bothered by the inconvenience of travelling abroad, and they support closer security relationships and sharing of police information.

What is really hard to judge is which trade-offs people are prepared to accept. Things can be done to develop a closer economic and security relationship with the EU, short of single-market membership or rejoining, but they are limited. Both single-market membership and rejoining would certainly help the economy, but both would have costs, including payments to the EU, accepting free movement (though most people don’t want higher immigration) and, if Britain were not a full member, having to follow rules that it had no say in forming.

In my poll I tried to get at this issue by asking people what would worry them most about rejoining the EU — with a list of options. My hypothesis was that free movement would be way out in front as the biggest concern. But it wasn’t at all. Just 12 per cent said it was their main concern, and only 19 per cent of Leavers. The greater worry, at 21 per cent (24 per cent of Leavers), was paying money to the EU, which I guess shouldn’t have been a surprise given the arguments about that damn bus advert. The other concerns that registered double figures were loss of sovereignty (15 per cent); going back to political arguments about membership (12 per cent); and concern about overturning the referendum (10 per cent).

Of all the public’s views at the moment, how strongly people feel about immigration is one of the hardest to get a grip on. But I can’t help thinking that politicians are overly worried about it compared with other factors, particularly the state of public services and the economy.

When YouGov and Public First explicitly cite free movement as a consequence of joining the single market or striking a “Swiss-style” deal, they seem to get similar responses to when they don’t, and in each case they register clear majority support for these options. LSE researchers explicitly tested a “free movement” deal with the EU and found majority support among Leavers.

But that doesn’t mean the real-world argument for these options, or rejoining, would be easy to win. Only 19 per cent of voters, and only 30 per cent of Remainers, had no concerns at all about rejoining. While the concerns are more diffuse than I expected, they are there, and would, of course, come more to the forefront of the debate if the government pushed for a more dramatic change in the EU relationship.

Given the shift in opinion against Brexit, and given that, barring a dramatic economic recovery or the implosion of the EU, the trend is very likely to continue, what does that mean for the current Tory/Labour positions?

Neither party faces any immediate pressure to change policy. Sunak has no room to shift even if he wanted to. The Tories will go into the election citing “Get Brexit Done” as a success, though they won’t make it a centrepiece given how little benefit voters have seen.

Labour will stick to its current position too — “Make Brexit Work” — and stay out of anything that would require the return of free movement. What making Brexit work means in practice is harder to define, but it will include closer regulatory alignment on a number of areas, trying to reduce trade barriers, and closer security arrangements. This is extremely safe ground, backed by most Leave voters and an overwhelming majority of Remainers.

I suspect Starmer could go a bit further, without talking about any specific mechanism, in his warmth towards future relationships without doing any harm electorally. And he certainly doesn’t need to pretend, as he did the other day, that joining the single market wouldn’t bring economic benefits.

But, of course, I can understand the caution. Proposing to rejoin now would undoubtedly be a mistake. As Luke Tryl notes, his More in Common polling shows that “swing voters — those who have either switched to Labour since 2019 or who voted Tory and now are undecided — say by a margin of 47 to 16 per cent that if Labour pledged to rejoin they would be less, rather than more likely to vote for the party.”

I suspect things will start to move a bit faster after the election. Labour will have to engage with the issue within its first year because Britain’s 2020 trade agreement with Europe is automatically reviewed every five years. The party base will urge the new government to maximise alignment.

My view is that Labour should, on taking office, immediately commission an analysis of the costs and benefits of Brexit to inform the review, and should try to bring in sensible Leave backers to make the conclusions as widely accepted as possible.

If a new deal, following the review, has some limited benefits, and goes down okay with key voter groups, pressure will grow for something more comprehensive. The timeline here will depend on a number of things:

• Will Leave voters start to shift in greater numbers, or will ongoing drift in opinion depend entirely on replacement?

• Will anything happen that might push against that drift (economic recovery/EU crisis)?

• Will a disgruntled Labour faction — perhaps built around ministers fired in an early reshuffle — make getting back into the EU a loudly popular cause among the base?

• Will EU states be keen to bring the UK back into the fold, given that its politics would further complicate existing dynamics and there are some advantages of keeping it outside as an example of why holding the EU together matters?

• What will the Tories do?

This last question is a hard one to anticipate. On the one hand, parties that lose elections tend to retreat into their comfort zone quickly and for some time. It’s easy to imagine someone like business and trade minister Kemi Badenoch — a figure popular with the party base and the current favourite to take over the Tories after an election loss — doubling down on Brexit and choosing to fight Labour on immigration and culture wars. But if the result is really bad it may force an earlier acknowledgement of reality than happened after 1997.

Yes, a complete reversal on Brexit among Conservative MPs seems implausible given how committed so many in the party are to it, but a gentle back-pedalling is possible if they have a leader who sees how precarious their position is among younger voters. If they choose to downplay it, and not make it a big part of their pitch, that makes it easier for Labour to change position too.

One way or another, though, things will feel very different as we approach 2030. Britain is likely to be moving towards a closer relationship with the EU rather than the intransigence that has marked the past six years. Voter opinion will very likely be overwhelmingly in favour of this and substantially in favour of a more formal relationship of some kind. It will, by then, be fourteen years since the referendum. There will be thirty-two-year-olds who weren’t old enough to vote in 2016.

I don’t know if Britain will ever formally rejoin the EU, but I would be very surprised if it doesn’t have a dramatically different relationship within a decade, and that may well include de facto, if not de jure, membership of the single market. •

The post Getting Brexit undone appeared first on Inside Story.

They weren’t offering to build or finance these new houses; they want private developers to do that.

Sitting behind these policies is the commonsense view that the key to bringing down the cost of housing is building more dwellings. This accords with our everyday experience of how markets operate: when something is scarce, prices go up, and the best way to bring prices down is to provide more of it.

When it comes to housing, though, the relationship between price and supply isn’t so clear-cut.

We know this partly because we have an alternative to house prices — rents — as an indicator of housing demand. Rents track demand for housing as a service, whereas real estate prices also reflect demand for housing as an investment.

It turns out that rents have risen far more slowly than house prices over the past twenty years (although now they are rising sharply in England and Australia). And despite low wage growth, the average share of household spending devoted to rent has also remained fairly constant in both places.

That’s not to say that rents are affordable, especially for low-income tenants in expensive cities like London and Sydney. If rents were already excessive twenty years ago, they are still excessive today, reflecting a persistent shortage of housing. The point is that rent increases over time have been relatively modest; if the pace of house building had fallen well behind the growth in demand then we might have expected sharper rises.

We know, too, that factors other than supply can have immediate and dramatic impacts on property prices. As interest rates have gone up in recent months, house and apartment prices have dropped back from their 2022 peaks.

Prices tend to go down when it’s harder to get a loan (which is why regulatory authorities tighten bank lending rules when they want to dampen the market). And prices go up when governments stimulate the market with first homeowner grants or tax concessions. The construction industry is also notoriously volatile, so the supply of new homes fluctuates as the number of dwellings completed rises or falls from year to year. What’s more, new homes make up only a small proportion of overall housing stock and real estate transactions, so the impact of construction on prices is slow and muted.

Over time, such ups and downs should even out, revealing the underlying relationship between housing supply and housing demand. So, what does twenty years of census data tell us about the housing challenge in Australia and Britain? Is the core problem that we don’t build enough houses or are other factors also at play?

Australia’s population grew by 35 per cent between the 2001 and 2021 censuses, and the stock of dwellings grew by 39 per cent. England’s population grew by 15 per cent, and its stock of dwellings 17 per cent. In short, in both countries, population and dwelling supply moved roughly in tandem.

Of course, as with rents, if there was already a housing shortage in 2001 then that shortage would have carried through to 2021, keeping prices high. In principle, if we’d built more housing then prices should have come down. Proportionally, though, the scale of the problem has stayed roughly the same, so again, a lack of building doesn’t appear to account for the rapid escalation in real estate prices over the past two decades.

But a simple comparison between population growth and dwelling growth can be misleading, for a number of reasons.

First, housing demand is driven not by the overall number of people but by the overall number of households. This might seem like splitting hairs: average household size has remained roughly constant in England and Australia over the past twenty years, and so the relationship between household numbers and dwelling numbers held steady.

Here things get complicated, though, because in an ageing society, with more people living alone, household size should fall. This means more households overall and a need for more dwellings to accommodate them. In both Australia and England, average household size was projected to fall to about 2.2 people by 2021, but has remained higher.

One view is that the projections were wrong, because they failed to anticipate social changes such as fluctuations in birth rates, falling divorce rates and a preference by some recent migrants to live with extended family.

But perhaps housing shortages prevented the decline in average household size? A lack of housing can induce adult children to stay in the parental home longer than they’d prefer or force two families to squeeze into the same accommodation. The formation of new households is suppressed, and the demand diverted into “hidden” or “concealed” households. According to one estimate, two million adults could be living in concealed households in England.

Linking population and dwelling numbers over time also disguises regional differences. Greater London, for instance, gained more than 1.6 million new residents between 2001 and 2021, but the population of Sheffield hardly changed and remains below its 1950s peak. Barring a new industrial revolution to bring factory jobs back to Sheffield, the demand for housing there is likely to remain relatively flat.

Dwelling growth in the City of Melbourne has far outstripped population growth over the past twenty years thanks to a boom in high-rise residential towers. On census night 2021, a quarter of all the municipality’s homes were unoccupied. Covid alone is unlikely to account for all those empty apartments. Rental vacancy rates in the CBD are significantly higher than the rest of Melbourne.

The population of the City of Hobart, by contrast, has grown faster than dwelling supply since 2001, and the share of unoccupied dwellings was below the national average at the last census. This might help explain why Hobart is the toughest capital city for tenants, with the fewest vacancies and the highest rents relative to income.

So, is it possible that we may have been building enough houses, but in the wrong places? London School of Economics geographer Paul Cheshire blames planning failures for “actively preventing houses from being built where they are most needed or most wanted — in the leafier and prosperous bits of ex-urban England.”

Does his thesis gain more weight if we drill down to a more local level and can compare two local government areas in the same city and the same labour market?

Tower Hamlets, in London’s inner east, and Camden, in the inner north, are in many ways similar. About a third of their residents live in social housing, but both also have pockets of considerable wealth. In 2001, each of the boroughs had a population of about 200,000 people and a comparable population density.

Since then, however, their paths have diverged. Tower Hamlets has gained more than 100,000 residents, while Camden gained only 12,000 (and its population declined after 2011). Tower Hamlets is now the most densely populated local government area in England, home to 112 people per soccer pitch–sized piece of land (as the Office of National Statistics calculates it). Camden has “only” sixty-nine people per soccer pitch.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Perhaps Tower Hamlets council is more pro-development than Camden, and better planning has enabled more dwellings to be built there to accommodate new residents? Perhaps Tower Hamlets simply had more room to grow, with disused industrial sites like the docklands at Canary Wharf available for redevelopment? Or maybe the residents of Camden, which is home to an older demographic, have begun to consume more housing per head of population than their younger counterparts in Tower Hamlets?

Camden has double the share of residents who own their homes outright and more than double the share of households with at least two spare bedrooms. It also has a higher percentage of vacant dwellings than Tower Hamlets, and its residents are far more likely to own a holiday house.

The contrast between the two boroughs highlights a third objection to simple comparisons between numbers of people and numbers of dwellings: demand for housing is a product not just of population but also of income.

As leading British housing economist Professor Geoff Meen puts it, housing demand comes “not just from newly forming households, but also existing households as incomes rise.” In other words, as people get wealthier, they want bigger, better houses as well as second homes and holiday houses. Cheshire says his research shows that a 10 per cent increase in incomes leads people to spend about 20 per cent more on extra space in houses and gardens.

We could express this differently: as the rich get richer they consume more housing; as the poor get poorer, they consume less, to the point of living in severely overcrowded homes or without a home at all. If we look for the roots of the housing crises in England and Australia through this lens, then we might shift focus from the supply of housing to its distribution.

When we do that, the challenge becomes not just to build more housing but to find ways to make its use fairer and more efficient — by altering how housing and land are taxed, for example. More progressive land taxes or capital gains taxes on housing could both redistribute wealth and help dampen property speculation.

Or we could adopt the German approach to capturing the value of changes in land use. When land is rezoned from, say, agricultural to residential in England and Australia, dramatic increases in land value generally accrue to the landowner. In Germany, much of this “planning gain” goes instead to public authorities and is used to fund infrastructure or social housing.

The complex relationship between housing demand and housing supply suggests there are no simple solutions to the challenges that we face, and we should be wary of claims that the answer is just to build more dwellings. If high prices are the product of a speculative bubble rather than undersupply, then building more houses will cause a different set of problems.

Economist Ian Mulheirn from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change points out that high real estate prices fuelled residential building booms in Spain, Ireland and parts of the United States in the first decade of the 2000s. When that boom went bust, it contributed to the global financial crisis and left “a large overhang of vacant and decaying ghost estates.”

The “build more” argument often goes with the view that the supply of new houses is held back by planning and zoning “red tape.” It then becomes an argument for scrapping the rules that limit incursions into land set aside for other purposes, such as London’s green belt or Melbourne’s green wedges.

This is contested territory. Once developed, the environmental or agricultural benefits of that land are lost forever. But if green space effectively subsidises elite pursuits like “‘horseyculture’ and golf” then the case for turning some of it over to housing might carry more weight.

Planning has been the subject of persistent reform efforts in many parts of Australia without, as yet, delivering lower house prices. “Of right” approvals have been introduced for code-compliant projects, decision-making powers transferred from elected councils to expert panels, “special purpose” bodies created to deliver urban redevelopment, and ministers given greater powers to override local decisions on major projects.

Strong arguments exist for rules-based planning systems because the alternative of assessing each application individually is time-consuming and costly, especially if decisions are made at a hyperlocal rather than city-wide level. But planning regimes should align with environmental and social goals, including affordability, rather than simply empower developers to respond to a housing “demand” that may be driven by growing inequality.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the task ahead is not just to build more homes, but to build more “well-located” homes. Boris Johnson’s one million homes promise was predicated on every local government area having its own mandatory housing target, although councils were very critical of the algorithm used to determine what to build where. Those targets have since been scrapped anyway, following opposition from Conservative MPs who feared a backlash against new developments in their prosperous constituencies.

This is a reminder that building homes where they are most needed — that is, with good access to jobs, transport and services — tends to throw up the biggest challenges.

In cities like Melbourne, this could be done by replacing postwar family homes with smaller, more energy-efficient, medium-density apartments and townhouses to better accommodate today’s smaller households. But it is in exactly these suburbs that not-in-my-backyard opposition tends to be most intense.

It is also in these areas that commercial barriers are greatest. It is easier to build on a rezoned greenfield site on the edge of the city, or in a rezoned brownfield area like a former dockland, than to transform a middle-ring greyfield area, especially if the aim is to retain the benefits of suburban streetscapes like tree canopies and gardens.

In such cases, what is needed is not so much liberalised planning, as consistent and supportive planning to assist developers to consolidate individual house blocks into larger sites, while also responding to community concerns about loss of amenity.

The number of dwellings is clearly important for the affordability and availability of housing, whether to buy or rent. But along with supply we also need to think about distribution, both spatial and economic. The question is not “do we need more houses” but rather “where do we need more houses, and who needs them most?”

To put this another way, is the challenge to keep up with housing demand, or to respond to housing need?

If it is the former, then the market is likely to meet the demand for a new holiday home more quickly than it meets the need of a low-income family to move out of an overcrowded, overpriced and damp apartment. Property developers have no incentive to provide housing for people who cannot pay prevailing rents or prices. Either we need to help those households participate in the market by boosting their incomes, or we need to build homes they can afford.

Another thing that Australia and England have in common is a sustained fall in public investment in social housing. If governments in both countries had continued to subsidise social housing at the rates they did in the postwar decades, then many thousands more affordable houses would be available today.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government has no chance of delivering Boris Johnson’s 2019 pledge of a million homes before next year’s election. Let’s hope that Jim Chalmers has more success in building a million “well-located” new homes in Australia, and that a decent share of those homes are affordable for the people who need them most. •

The post Not enough houses? appeared first on Inside Story.

The story came to mind while I was reading Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, sociologist Caroline Knowles’s perambulatory new book about how wealth shapes the English capital. Inspired to tread some of the same streets myself, I soon came across one of the spectacles Knowles documents: a “basement conversion” more accurately described as a large-scale excavation to create extra rooms under an elegant Kensington terrace. Sometimes, Knowles tells us, builders find it’s not worth their while to crane a mini-digger out of a multimillion-pound project, leaving “dozens of them… buried in the foundations of houses.”

It sounds like an urban myth, though Knowles says she spoke to builders who confirm it. Either way, the extravagance of efforts to create what have been labelled “iceberg homes” makes the tale credible. On the project I came across, the planning approval posted on the builder’s hoardings said the owners had allowed ninety weeks for construction.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Some excavations go down as many floors as the original house went up, and then extend under rear gardens to create space not just for wine cellars but also for gyms, cinemas, swimming pools and car parks.

Not surprisingly, basement conversions are the source of bitter neighbourhood disputes. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and pop star Robbie Williams engaged in a five-year stoush over Page’s fear that excavations for a pool under Williams’s £17.5 million (A$32 million) Holland Park mansion might weaken the foundations of his own £12.5 million pile next door.

Williams won out in the end, but no mechanical diggers will be buried in the basement of his Woodland House — building approval is conditional on the cavern being hollowed out by hand to minimise vibrations. Avoiding cracks in the stained-glass windows of Page’s French Gothic Tower House will add £1.5 million to Williams’s renovation bill, but this is small change for the singer and his wife, Ayda Field. They recently sold estates in Switzerland and Britain worth more than £30.75 million and splashed out US$50 million on another spread in Los Angeles.

The clash between a 1960s rock star and the lead singer in a 1990s boy band might not qualify as a contest between old and new money, but it could well be an example of the conflict between the “haves” and the “have yachts.” The “haves,” in Knowles’s terminology, are the merely wealthy. The “have yachts” are super-rich. Also known as UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals), they can afford to keep fully crewed multimillion-dollar boats moored in Monaco in readiness for the occasional Mediterranean jaunt.

As for yachts, so for cities. In the words of sociologist David Madden and planner Peter Marcuse, when housing enters global investment circuits “its use as a living space barely registers.” The built form becomes “a tangible, visual refection of the organisation of society” and global wealth is “congealed” into bricks and mortar — or indeed underground swimming pools.

As a writer, Knowles places herself in a literary tradition that takes in Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin and Teju Cole, figures whose work “exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape.” As a social researcher, she upends the established focus on poverty and the poor to turn the same “unforgiving framework” of research on the very rich. She walks and talks her way across London, trying to understand how very rich people shape the city, and how they live in it.

She struggles to meet many actual billionaires. Russian oligarchs who use “complex financial instruments provided by London firms” to hide their riches from Moscow prove to be a reclusive bunch. She does meet a lesser billionaire she calls Sturgeon (she gives all her informants pseudonyms), who is investing some of his excess wealth in an “experimental sustainable caviar business” (anaesthetising and milking the fish to harvest the eggs instead of killing them). But Sturgeon is reluctant to discuss the source of his wealth, his compatriots’ lives or any security concerns wealthy Russians may have.

The same goes for the art collector and philanthropist she calls Soviet, who is only a multimillionaire anyway. Middle Eastern oil royalty, British aristocrats and other UHNWIs who moor their wealth in London’s safe financial harbour are no more forthcoming.

Instead, the bulk of Knowles’ insights are gleaned from those who work or live within the gravitational orbit of extreme wealth, like the retired civil servant she calls Officer.

Officer “patrols” the streets of Kensington, keeping an eye on basement conversions and other developments in case the residents’ association can intervene to prevent the worst excesses. Officer himself doesn’t have “serious money” and is disdainful of those who do. He says many of his super-rich neighbours rarely spend much time in the mansions they acquire. That’s if they hang on to them — others buy, renovate and move on.

The super-rich might purchase a terrace house divided into apartments and consolidate it into a single multi-storey home, or knock through the walls of adjoining terraces to create a mansion. As Officer’s friend Historian points out, the next buyer will also have to be super-rich to afford what’s now an even more expensive property, and the neighbourhood will be forever changed.

When Officer’s “ghost neighbours” are in residence, they swim in their private pools, watch films in their private cinemas, work out in their private gyms, and use the vehicle lift to enter and leave their mansions in luxury cars. They don’t frequent neighbourhood cafes or pubs, let alone walk to the corner shop, contributing nothing to the viability of local enterprises or a sense of community. “It spoils things for people who do live their normal lives here,” says Historian’s wife Opera. “Rich people,” Knowles decides, “are poor neighbours.”

Knowles gains further insights into the lives of the rich from Wig, a barrister. One of Wig’s clients wanted advice on whether to seek a divorce in London or go to the considerable expense of shifting his wealth overseas. Advising on the latter course, Wig saved his client tens of millions by avoiding English courts, which are “comparatively generous to partners who are not directly involved in generating the money.”

These manoeuvres don’t always go so well. In another case Wig represented a woman whose husband tried the same trick. Wig stymied the multimillionaire’s claim that he lived offshore by proving that he was still London-based. He had a British shotgun licence, which is only legal if the owner lives at the British address listed on the certificate, and he had a Transport for London seniors card that is only available to residents.

Alerted that divorce proceedings are public documents, Knowles does her own digging. It may be voyeuristic, but it’s also revealing. One divorcee, seeking a settlement that will enable her to live in the manner to which she is accustomed, asks the court for an annual travel budget of £2.1 million, and half as much again for fashion and jewellery — enough to cover a yearly fur coat, fifteen cocktail dresses, fifty-four pairs of shoes, eighteen handbags and much besides.

In this world of extravagant display, domestic staff adorn already elaborate homes. Butler is one of an estimated two million people who work in domestic service in Britain, “the highest number since the Victorian era.” Butler acknowledges that he “looks good in a suit,” which means he can be employed on day shifts and seen by visitors.

He also knows he is easily disposed of. He recounts how a colleague was fired after twenty years’ employment for being “a bit too old.” He witnessed another boss bawl out a valet because he didn’t know how to wind his £250,000 watch, and he saw a team of butlers draw the wrath of their employer at the end of a sixteen-hour day because they failed to serve tea in a Meissen porcelain cup. Money gives the rich the authority “to humiliate those who serve them.”

Money rises early and retires late, and Knowles follows its arc from east to west. Her walks begin amid the glass towers and brash nightclubs of Shoreditch and the City of London, where the finance machine “churns, expands and skims,” redistributing money “into ever fewer hands.” This is where “the building blocks of the plutocratic city” are manufactured, to be reinforced by bespoke advice on estate planning, tax shelters and family trusts.

She moves through Mayfair, Belgravia and St James, where new and imported money mixes with inherited wealth in places that have “the sort of hush which only lots of money can buy.” Hedge funds, private equity firms and family offices hide discreetly behind brass plaques — no names, only numbers.

She examines domestic life in Kensington and Chelsea, discovering that men still mostly go out and make the money while women mostly stay home to manage the household, staff and children who live in a triangle between city residence, country estate and elite boarding school. After hanging out with twenty-year-old Bags and her boyfriend Barbour in Sloane Square, Knowles observes that their lives mimic those of their parents, “heavily prescribed by gender and tradition” with “little room for imagination and manoeuvre.”

Knowles concludes her journey by following the “vortex of extreme wealth” upstream along the Thames to Richmond, home of Kew Gardens, then further west beyond the city fringes to Virginia Water, a London commuter suburb described by the local real estate agent as “the most expensive village in Britain.”

At the heart of Virginia Water is the Wentworth Estate — 1100 large homes built in the 1920s Arts and Crafts style. This is where Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet endured house arrest in the late 1990s while efforts were made to extradite him to stand trial for genocide and torture. An interior designer tells Knowles that it’s tricky and expensive to find the right materials for building in Wentworth. Bricks, for example, must be “tumbled… so they don’t look new and shiny, or too bling.”

The Wentworth Estate is built around a golf club of the same name, another site of struggle between the haves and the have yachts. After billionaire Chanchai Ruayrungruang bought it in 2014 he doubled the fees and halved membership numbers, pushing out the merely wealthy in favour of a richer, more exclusive clientele. Talk show host Michael Parkinson was among those who offered stiff resistance in the courts.

Knowles finds herself on “sinister and silent streets” where walkers are neither familiar nor welcome. Signs remind her Wentworth is a private estate and members of the public use its roads at the pleasure of the owners. She wonders if driving would be any better and learns that estate managers, with a direct line to Surrey Police, use number plate recognition software to identify vehicles that have no business there.

In other parts of Virginia Water, residents have clubbed together to privatise their streets as well. Road ownership “has spread through the area like a rash,” supported by CCTV cameras, private security guards and signs reading “only residents and guests.” Properties are defended by approach lights, alarms, “tactical landscaping” (fences) and yet more guards.

For Knowles, this is “Johannesburg in Surrey.” While rich white South Africans might fortify themselves “against the imagined depredations of the impoverished black masses,” the source of potential threat in Virginia Water is unclear. A private security consultant tells Knowles that London is a lucrative market because of its lack of actual risks. But if you’d like four black Range Rovers to follow you around, he can arrange it for £10,000 a day.

Like yachts and good-looking butlers, security is another performance of wealth, “an eye-catching display of money that few can afford to stage.”

Art can be spectacle too. On her way to meet “Banker” in the City of London, Knowles admires the paintings in his foyer by Damien Hirst, the British artist best known for putting a Queensland shark in formaldehyde and encrusting a skull with diamonds. In Mayfair alone Knowles counts twenty private galleries: on offer in one of them (in the catalogue’s words) is Hirst’s “delectably fresh” Summer Breeze, sixteen butterflies fluttering against a blue sky, “punctuated by soft formations of luminous white clouds.” The painting subsequently sold for £435,000, about 25 per cent above the gallery’s top estimate.

“As money accumulates,” observes Knowles, “it struts in the clothes of high culture.” But art is not just for display; like property, it is another convenient way to launder money or stash funds in a “safe deposit box.” And if you are prepared to forgo looking at it, you can also avoid Britain’s 20 per cent value added tax by warehousing it offshore.

Culture and finance share the same streets, notes Knowles, and this is true of public art too. Further east, at Canary Wharf, Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman is one of three large bronzes gracing a small square. Under a 1960s scheme to place works by leading artists in housing estates, schools and other public places, Moore sold the sculpture to the London City Council at a 25 per cent discount. For three and a half decades, residents of the Stifford Estate in Stepney enjoyed passing by the familiar figure, which they fondly dubbed “Old Flo.”

When the estate was demolished in 1997, Old Flo was loaned to a sculpture park in Yorkshire. Two decades later it was back in its original borough but remained lost to the housing estates of Stepney. Placing the statue in a forest of concrete, steel and glass “constructed on the dispossession of London’s poor” could be described as artwashing — not least because Canary Wharf, like the Wentworth Estate, isn’t a public space.

Here, you’re on private property and “no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged.”* It comes as little comfort to be told that you are also under twenty-four-hour CCTV surveillance for your “safety and security.”

As I traced Knowles’s steps I experience more direct surveillance in Belgravia’s Eaton Square, one of London’s most exclusives addresses. With its Georgian townhouses straight out of a BBC period drama, this is “a world coated in fine aggregate render [and] painted in off-white magnolia,” with matching columned porticos and black wrought-iron fences. In the late afternoon gloom, I watch a resident emerge from her taxi to be ushered inside by a doorman in bowler hat, coat and tie. Then I realise I am being observed too, by a burly figure with a military stance standing watch further along the footpath.

Eaton Square’s heritage-listed terraces surround a series of six rectangular parks accessible only to residents. All the land belongs to the Duke of Westminster: “these streets are his, the squares and the statuary.” Under the rules of primogeniture, the seventh duke, otherwise known as Hugh Grosvenor, inherited the £9 billion estate at the age of twenty-seven despite having two elder sisters.

In one of the most powerful sections of Serious Money, Knowles walks the increasingly gentrified streets of Notting Hill. Here she interviews residents who chose the area for its vibrant “social mix” but found themselves floundering after “the parallel tramlines of the rich and poor, along which the neighbourhood usually ran, suddenly, dramatically and momentarily crossed.” That was on 14 June 2017, when the shoddily renovated Grenfell Tower exploded into flames, killing seventy-one residents and rendering hundreds more homeless.

Knowles speaks to “Palace” and other well-heeled residents who rushed to help distressed Grenfell neighbours. Their efforts were earnest and genuine, but ultimately served to emphasise the gulf between them and their neighbours. “The chasm between rich and poor narrowed in the immediate aftermath of the fire, as lives entwined; and then reopened as social inequalities as usual were resumed.”

Today Grenfell Tower is shrouded in white cloth, awaiting a decision on whether it will be demolished. Across the top floors a banner with a big green heart reads “Forever in our hearts.” At ground level, the white hoardings blocking access to the site host art works, floral tributes and scribbled texta messages to lost loved ones.

Grenfell sits at the northmost end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which hosts extremes of wealth and poverty. A quarter of all homes in the borough are social housing, though the Notting Hill Housing Trust, in a sign of the times, now accommodates some of its tenants further east in the Borough of Hackney, where properties are cheaper.

You don’t need to walk far south from Grenfell Tower to enter a different social world. The plaque on a last surviving bottle kiln reminds passers-by of “the nineteenth century, when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London.” Today, the local estate agent lists a one-bedroom “mews house” in Pottery Lane at £700 a week. A worker earning the London living wage of £11.95 an hour would need to work a fifty-eight-hour week just to make rent.

Among the property’s selling points are “the green open spaces of Holland Park” just to the south, which boasts an Opera House, an elegant Japanese garden and a statue of its namesake, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, Third Baron of Holland. In 2020, activists daubed the statue’s plinth with red handprints and placed a cardboard sign in the statue’s arms reading “I owned 401 slaves.” Then as now, London’s wealth is found “in bricks, stones, bodies and bones.”

Southwest of Holland Park is Cromwell Road, where three lanes of rush-hour traffic pass more rows of white stucco, the terraces broken by the occasional squat supermarket or multi-storey hotel, including the old Holiday Inn, an ugly example of 1970s brutalism. Now empty, it’s the site of another protracted planning dispute. In 2018, when developers proposed demolition to build a larger, more contemporary hotel, the Royal Borough received 750 objections arguing that the project would “replace one ‘out-of-place monstrosity’ with an even bigger one.” Approval was denied, but two years later, London mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to give the project the green light. His price was a little bit of additional housing — the developers will build sixty-two units (up from forty-six) for residents on low incomes under the mayor’s affordable homes program.

It is a perhaps-inevitable irony that the architectural splendours we admire in London are the product of violence and exploitation. As Knowles writes, “Imperialism’s industrial, artistic and cultural swagger are stamped into the streets.”

But wealth can leave beneficial legacies. On the western side of Hampstead Heath sits a curious structure known as the Pergola. The 245-metre-long walkway, entwined with wisteria, roses and other climbing plants, affords vistas over the heath and its woodlands. It was built in the early twentieth century by Lord Leverhulme, aka William Lever, whose fortune came from the manufacture of soap and other cleaning products.

Lever was a progressive industrialist who supported universal suffrage and built housing for his workers at Port Sunlight, though there is evidence of forced labour and other abuses in his Congo and Solomon Islands operations. As part of Lever’s private estate, the Pergola was designed as a place for Lever to take a solitary walk, have a think, or stroll after lunch with fellow politicians and business figures.

Today, the Pergola is much-prized public space. As cultural geographer Timothy Edensor writes, this “structure for pleasurable walking” serves as an example of how contemporary city planners might better promote “pedestrian pleasures” into urban design.

Will London’s latest “gilded age” bequeath comparable legacies? Knowles’s observations suggest the diggers excavating the city are driven by a “vacuous rapaciousness” that hollows out urban life. A “troubling and secretive presence,” the super-rich have “a profoundly damaging impact,” with their “endless search for new frontiers of luxury” constituting an environmental disaster.

Stringent personal security, she concludes, is merely a way of hiding the indefensible from public scrutiny. And yet for the rich themselves, the money that drives such wasteful, hidden opulence seems to create increasingly isolated, lonely and paranoid lives.

In Virginia Lee Burton’s book, Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne can’t escape the pit they have dug for themselves. But their story nevertheless ends well. At the urging of a young boy who has been watching them work, the new town hall is built around them. Mary Anne is converted into the boiler that keeps the building warm and Mike is invited to be its permanent caretaker. They become the warm heart of the community. For the diggers of London, no such ending is in sight. •

Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London
By Caroline Knowles | Penguin | $55 | 320 pages

* After this article was published, Inside Story received an email from a senior account executive at the The Academy PR, a public relations firm whose clients include Canary Wharf, to say that “in fact Canary Wharf is a public space, open to the public at all times and free to access.” When I visited Canary Wharf, I read and photographed a sign with the following text:

PRIVATE PROPERTY: CONDITIONS OF ACCESS.
This is private property and no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged over it. Any use of this land is with the permission of the landowner.

Although I wrote that Canary Wharf “isn’t a public space,” it would be more accurate to describe it as a “privately owned public space” in line with the definition used by Greenspace Information for Greater London: “publicly accessible spaces which are provided and maintained by private developers, offices or residential building owners.”

My overall point is not that the residents of Stepney housing estates are no longer free to visit Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”; rather, its relocation to Canary Wharf means it now resides in an entirely different world.

— Peter Mares

The post The plutocratic city appeared first on Inside Story.

A couple of days later, a nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan was reported to have badly hurt himself when he tried to climb out of a fifth-floor window of a reception centre for asylum seekers. He had panicked at around 3am when police came to his room to deport him to Croatia, where he had first entered the European Union. His fear may well have originated in experiences he had while passing through that country on the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Germany.

All three people — the two young women from Ukraine and the young man from Afghanistan — have sought refuge in Germany from countries ravaged by war. But while the women are allowed to remain in Germany until at least the end of 2023 without applying for asylum, the nineteen-year-old is prohibited even from seeking protection here. The women are employed and live in private accommodation; the young man was put up, with some 370 others, in a hostel run on behalf of the city of Hamburg.

In both cases, the European Union uses the same term, “solidarity,” to frame its response. Solidarity means that millions of Ukrainians have been allowed to settle temporarily in the twenty-seven EU member countries, and it is also the key concept underlying the EU’s common policy on asylum. But solidarity isn’t the exclusive preserve of the EU: activists campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers have also assured the young man from Afghanistan of their solidarity.

Over the two centuries since it was first used, the English term solidarity has been “endlessly pliant,” in the words of the Swedish historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. Are we perhaps talking about different kinds of solidarity here that have nothing to do with each other? Not quite. Bear with me, while I take you on a tour of European solidarity.

Solidarity is a buzzword in and around the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. A search of the European Commission’s official website, for instance, yields more than 40,000 hits for the term, and almost 4000 for the more specific “European solidarity.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for solidarity has long been deemed a distinguishing attribute of the European project.

The term features more than a dozen times in the Treaty on European Union, which underwrites EU law. In Article 2, the treaty refers to the EU’s foundational values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” adds the article, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

Another key document, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, goes further. In its preamble it lists solidarity as one of four “indivisible, universal values” on which the EU has been founded (the others being human dignity, freedom and equality). The charter helps illuminate the kind of solidarity the drafters of the Treaty on European Union had in mind: the twelve articles in its “Title IV: Solidarity” deal with things like healthcare, workers’ entitlements and social security — that is, with social and economic rather than civil and political rights.

The EU also prides itself on extending its solidarity to other, less fortunate nations. In recent months, Ukraine has been a prominent recipient of European solidarity, and so too have the countries most affected by climate change. At the conclusion of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared the conference to have “opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage” — a reference to Europe’s support for a fund to mitigate the impact of climate change — “and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help.”

Von der Leyen’s rhetoric was echoed by governments that strongly identify with the European project. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Team Germany” had travelled to Egypt to campaign “for more solidarity with the most vulnerable states.” The EU would like to be seen internationally as a “normative superpower,” a major player whose actions are informed by ethical considerations. Affording solidarity to the weak and poor is as much the result of these considerations as are criticism, censorship and punishment of nation-states whose performance runs counter to the norms and values embraced by the EU.

More important for the EU’s identity than solidarity of, among or for its residents — or solidarity with climate-affected nations or war-torn Ukraine — is the solidarity EU member states extend towards each other. Here the EU’s rhetoric has been more innovative, applying to nation-states a concept that has been more commonly used, as it is in Title V of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to characterise relationships involving individuals.

References to such intra-EU solidarity appear in foundational texts from the 1950s. One of them — the May 1950 Schuman Declaration, incidentally published on the EU’s website under the heading “70 Years of Solidarity” — is French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s proposal for the EU’s earliest forerunner, a coal and steel community comprising France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Europe, Schumann said, would be “built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

Schuman’s idea was picked up the following year in the preamble of the treaty establishing that community, which recognises that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity.”

One apparent expression of the solidarity principle is the EU’s system of transfer payments from affluent to poor members. Croatia and Lithuania receive payments amounting to more than 4 per cent of their respective gross domestic products, and Hungary, Greece and Latvia each receive the equivalent of around 3.5 per cent of GDP. Political figures in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere might complain that tens of billions of euros are lavished each year on poor cousins in eastern and southeastern Europe — conveniently ignoring the fact that the payments amount to less than half a per cent of the GDP of wealthy member countries — but the system is nevertheless working well.

But those payments don’t prove that the solidarity principle governs relations between member states. To understand how much heed is paid to the principle, we need to look beyond the EU’s routine budget negotiations to what happens in times of crisis.

When Greece was facing national bankruptcy during the eurozone crisis, it expected countries like Germany to cancel its debts (in much the same way as German debts had been cancelled in 1953). But the Tsipras government’s understanding of solidarity couldn’t easily be reconciled with the kind of solidarity promoted by the governments in Berlin, Paris or The Hague. Where the Greeks saw European solidarity as tantamount to debt reduction, the governments of affluent European countries insisted that solidarity involved a corresponding duty — namely, substantial cuts to the Greek budget. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble famously declared that solidarity was not a one-way street.

When Schäuble’s views eventually prevailed, I wrote in Inside Story that the outcome was “appallingly bad” not just for Greece but also for Europe. I stand by that assessment, not least because the eurozone crisis demonstrated that any aspiration the EU’s leaders may have had for the “real solidarity” envisaged by its founders remained just that: an aspiration. It did not translate into action. Schuman had a valid point when he suggested that inter-state solidarity doesn’t miraculously materialise but rather is created by means of “concrete achievements.”

Solidarity among member states is not just about money. It is also about sharing other resources — medicines and intensive care beds during the Covid pandemic, for example. Here, too, member states’ performance has rarely matched their lofty rhetoric. During the early days of the pandemic, Germany and France were roundly and for good reason condemned for imposing export bans rather than sharing their (admittedly meagre) supplies of masks and ventilators.

Sharing electricity or fossil fuels during the current energy crisis could also be evidence of solidarity among member states. But will they really be prepared to help each other out during winter rather than reserve resources for their own use? In Germany, the Scholz government recently created a national €200 billion rescue shield to protect businesses and households from rising energy costs. It could have pushed instead for a European emergency fund that would have extended benefits much more widely (though not as generously as the German subsidies). Its decision indicates how national governments will react if freezing temperatures stretch Europe’s capacity to avoid power cuts, keep industries running, and heat residential and public buildings.

The most controversial aspect of European solidarity comes in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, headed “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.” Article 67(2) stipulates that the EU “shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals.” The role of solidarity is further emphasised in Article 80: “The policies of the Union… and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.”

Burden-sharing of this kind is not a new idea. Back in 1950 France suggested that the UN Refugee Convention should include the following provision: “In a spirit of international solidarity, the High Contracting Parties shall take into consideration the burden assumed by the countries having first admitted or granted temporary asylum to refugees, and facilitate the permanent settlement of the latter, more especially by relaxation of the procedure for admission.” The proposal was rejected not so much because other delegations objected to burden-sharing but because they weren’t convinced that a reference to the spirit of international solidarity was necessary. One delegate argued that the convention’s effectiveness would obviously “depend on the good will and the spirit of solidarity of the signatory States.”

Solidarity eventually appeared in the 1967 UN Declaration on Territorial Asylum (which unfortunately is barely remembered today). Article 2(2) reads: “Where a State finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum, States… shall consider, in a spirit of international solidarity, appropriate measures to lighten the burden on that State.” Subsequent references to solidarity appear in statements issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as in the 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

UN-level attempts to lighten the burden of countries that host a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers have largely failed, at least in the past forty years. Despite its continuing emphasis on the principle of solidarity, the EU hasn’t done any better. In fact, it could be argued that its common policy on asylum has flown in the face of its rhetorical commitment to that principle.

The cornerstone of the EU’s asylum policy from 2003 to 2013 was the Dublin II Regulation. It provided for protection claims to be assessed in the first EU member state an asylum seeker entered. When the EU adopted the regulation, asylum numbers not only appeared manageable but were also on a downward trajectory. When irregular arrivals picked up again in 2008, EU members that served as entry points for asylum seekers — particularly if they bordered the Mediterranean — began complaining about a system that made them responsible for the majority of new arrivals. The criticism intensified as the number of protection claims skyrocketed in the early 2010s.

The EU tinkered with its asylum policy in 2013, replacing the existing legal framework with the Dublin III Regulation. The principle underlying its predecessor remained untouched. But the regulation became increasingly dysfunctional. Italy and Greece, for example, routinely allowed asylum seekers to pass through without registering their identities. Countries in the north of Europe were compelled to stop transferring asylum seekers back to Greece, even if it could be proven that they had entered the EU via that country, because refugees, particularly children, were not afforded adequate protection there.

During the influx of refugees in 2015–16, some central and northern European members — particularly Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland — relieved the pressure on Greece and Italy by welcoming asylum seekers who had entered the EU from the Turkish mainland (via Greek islands in the northern Aegean) or from North Africa. Germany probably did so because Angela Merkel’s government naively expected that other countries, impressed by its example, would extend their solidarity in turn to Germany.

At the same time, some countries that had benefited from the Dublin regulations acknowledged that Italy, Malta and Greece were barely able — and couldn’t be expected — to cope with the large number of arrivals from across the sea. They advocated a new mechanism whereby asylum seekers would be distributed across the EU. But the so-called Visegrád group — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — supported at times by other EU members in eastern and southeastern Europe, demanded “flexible solidarity” and successfully objected to mandatory relocation.

Even the equitable distribution of relatively small numbers of people from Italy and Greece largely failed. Some member states simply refused to accommodate any asylum seekers who had first entered the EU elsewhere.

Since then the two EU heavyweights, France and Germany, have led a push for a mechanism to share the burden of processing and caring for asylum seekers equitably. This would involve either allocating each country a share of irregular arrivals depending on its capacity and size, or directing compensatory payments from countries unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers to those that are. Schemes that would have enabled relocations from countries of first asylum were welcomed, naturally enough, by the “Med 5” (Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Spain).

Because the Visegrád 4, among others, wouldn’t budge, France and Germany resorted to promoting voluntary arrangements. Finland brokered an agreement between Malta, Italy, France and Germany in 2019 covering migrants rescued by private search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. In their joint declaration of intent, the four countries pledged to set up a “more predictable and efficient temporary solidarity mechanism.” But that mechanism has not functioned well: each time migrants are rescued in the Mediterranean, the EU member states still argue over who will take responsibility for them.

In 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum designed to effect a “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity.” Rather than replacing the Dublin Regulation with a bold new scheme, the pact envisages a series of incremental steps. Implementation once again relied on the goodwill of all member states, and when Poland and Hungary, in particular, strongly resisted any moves towards enforced solidarity the French government once more proposed a voluntary mechanism.

In June this year, the end of its presidency approaching, France brokered an agreement signed by eighteen of the twenty-three EU member states, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which committed signatories to a “voluntary, simple and predictable solidarity mechanism” that would provide the Med 5 “with needs-based assistance” from other member countries “complementary to European support, by offering relocations (the preferred method of solidarity) and financial contributions.” While some of the signatories accepted asylum seekers who landed in Italy, others simply ignored the pledge they made.

The latest move by the European Commission has been a twenty-point Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean. It is largely the result of lobbying, if not blackmail, by the new Italian government, which would like to prevent any irregularised migrants from making landfall in Italy (and deport many of those already living in Italy). This plan is unlikely, though, to lead to a new common policy on asylum to replace the Dublin Regulation.

In the meantime, irregularised migrants keep breaching the EU’s external borders, with more than 90,000 having arrived in Italy alone so far this year. National immigration authorities keep trying to deport asylum seekers like the nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan to where they first set foot in the EU. According to the Hamburg state government, twenty-nine people were deported from Hamburg to other EU countries in the third quarter of this year, in line with the Dublin Regulation. These deportations tie up scarce resources and cause much anguish.

As more asylum seekers have breached Europe’s southern maritime borders it has become all too obvious that the Dublin Regulation is not “based on solidarity between Member States” but privileges the interests of some EU members over those of others. In other words, it shields central and northern European member states from irregularised migration. Because the likes of Poland and Hungary rejected a mandatory distribution mechanism — advocated by the European Commission, the Med 5 and some EU members in central and northern Europe — the EU’s response has been to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe in the first place.

In the course of making its external borders increasingly impenetrable, the EU has disregarded the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s stipulation that a common asylum policy must be fair towards third-country nationals. Not only has the much-evoked principle of solidarity among member states proven to be little more than a rhetorical gesture, but the violence of its border regime has made a mockery of the EU’s self-declared ambition to stand up for human rights worldwide. There is no greater hypocrite than the winner of the 2012 Nobel peace prize.

In some cases, the EU is paying third parties to keep irregularised migrants away from Europe. Thus Italy and the EU have funded Libyan militias to operate a “coastguard” charged with intercepting migrants and confining them to Libya’s notorious detention centres, which German diplomats once likened to concentration camps.

In other cases, the EU turns a blind eye when its members flout national and EU laws by pushing migrants back across the border, as has been happening in at least half a dozen EU countries. In June, for example, when hundreds of migrants tried to climb over the border fortifications separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, at least twenty-seven died and many of those who had managed to enter Spanish territory were returned to Morocco without being allowed to lodge a protection claim.

Or, to give another example, Latvia declared a state of emergency at its border with Belarus in August, allowing the government to restrict the movement of journalists and NGO representatives. Erik Marquardt, a Greens member of the European parliament, explains why the Latvian authorities don’t welcome monitors:

A typical horror trip in the limbo of the border region looks like this: The asylum seekers try to cross the green border through the forest to Latvian territory to apply for asylum. On Latvian territory they are picked up by border guards and taken to unregistered tent camps somewhere in the forest, far away from civil society, press and NGOs. Here… commandos harass, beat and abuse the detainees. They use batons and stun guns — sometimes even on their genitals. Their cell phones and valuables are taken from them. The shelter seekers have to sleep overnight in a tent in the middle of the forest, sometimes outdoors, at up to –20 degrees. The commandos also take away their lighters, the only way to make a fire to warm themselves against the cold temperatures and to protect themselves against wolves and bears. Often in the early morning hours, the refugees are bussed back to the border with Belarus and have to walk the rest of the way back through the forest.

Similar incidents have taken place at the borders between Croatia and Bosnia, and between Poland and Belarus. In the Turkish–Bulgarian borderlands — the setting of Haider Rashid’s haunting feature film Europa, which premiered to much acclaim last year at Cannes — migrants have to contend not only with zealous border guards but also with vigilantes.

But the Greek coastguard is probably most notorious for violating the rights of irregularised migrants. Over a two-year period from February 2020 until February 2022, a Forensic Architecture research team documented 1018 “drift-backs” in the Aegean Sea involving 27,464 people. Migrants were prevented from landing in Greece and then towed out to sea to a spot from where currents, waves and winds are likely to take them back to Turkish territorial waters. According to the researchers, this sometimes-lethal method is designed to “provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.”

The EU has regularly condoned practices that are illegal under international human rights and refugee law. In its defence, it often maintains that it is merely protecting itself against acts of hybrid warfare perpetrated by the likes of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Try telling that to migrants who are drowning or freezing to death at the European border.

But intra-EU solidarity on asylum is working in one sense: member states cover for each other when they violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights in their “defence” of the EU’s external border. The European Commission, while supposedly still committed to its 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum, has in some instances been turning a blind eye and in others actively encouraging violators — as happened in March 2020, when von der Leyen praised Greece for “being our European ασπίδα,” or shield.

It should be some consolation that the securitisation of the EU’s external borders, and the violence this entails, is contested by other European institutions. The European parliament — and particularly the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, led by the indomitable Juan Fernando López Aguilar — has frequently spoken out against human rights violations at the borders and often put itself on a collision course with the European Commission and Frontex, the European border agency. But the parliament’s powers are limited.

The European courts have also ruled against the likes of Hungary on many occasions and upheld the rights of asylum seekers. Yet, as a recent study by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee has shown, EU member states often fail to implement judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and other bodies.

In one respect, European solidarity has functioned reasonably well. Since the Russian invasion on 24 February, the EU has provided substantial financial and material assistance to Ukraine. Its response to the war hasn’t been entirely united — Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s support for the government in Kyiv is lukewarm at best — but that hasn’t stopped it from also unanimously imposing sanctions on Russia, Belarus and Iran (which supplies drones to Russia), and on numerous individuals and entities in those countries.

The EU has also welcomed people fleeing Ukraine (though citizens of Ukraine more happily than others caught up in the war). In early March it invoked its Temporary Protection Directive, adopted in 2001 but never used, which gives refugees from Ukraine a residence permit for up to three years without the need to apply for asylum. The permit provides the right to work, gives access to social security payments and healthcare, and allows its holders to move freely between countries.

Because of that free movement, and because citizens of Ukraine can enter the EU for ninety days without a visa, the exact number of refugees in EU countries is anyone’s guess. The figure is probably around 4.5 million, with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic between them accounting for well over half.

The length of residence permits and other benefits for Ukrainian refugees vary greatly. As of June, Germany paid each Ukrainian refugee living in government-provided accommodation €449 (A$690) per month, France less than half that amount, and Poland, the country that has accommodated by far the most refugees, just over €15. In some countries, Ukrainian refugees have access to free language courses, in others they don’t. Their chances of finding employment and the extent to which Ukrainian qualifications are recognised also vary greatly.

In the early weeks of the war, EU leaders demanded that refugees be spread across the twenty-three member countries. They argued that Portugal and Ireland, for example, although a long way from Ukraine, ought to help relieve the burden placed on Ukraine’s immediate neighbours. Some refugees were indeed relocated — but only from Moldova, which had received more Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis than any other country.

In practice, relative proximity to Ukraine and existing diasporic networks have proved more important than local assistance in Ukrainians’ decisions about where to stay. Calls for a redistribution of refugees have become much less frequent, not least because countries hosting a large number of refugees receive additional EU funding. Besides, a compulsory mechanism to distribute Ukrainians across the EU would probably be unworkable under the Temporary Protection Directive. It has also proved unnecessary, and is in fact undesirable because it might prevent refugees from living in places where they can rely on diasporic support networks.

What is true for the EU is also true for individual member states. Germany ordinarily places asylum seekers across its sixteen states according to the so-called Königstein formula, which takes account of a state’s economic strength and population. Within states, asylum seekers are then allocated to districts, usually according to a similar formula.

An informed estimate puts the number of Ukrainian refugees in Germany at between 630,000 and 750,000, of which approximately 100,000 are in Berlin, a city of 3.8 million people. If Ukrainian refugees had been distributed according to the Königstein formula, Berlin would have received around a third of that number. Berlin authorities have certainly been complaining loudly about the challenges posed by large numbers, but only about 3000 Ukrainian refugees actually live in government-provided accommodation.

In parts of the country where the Ukrainian diaspora is smaller and Germans are less willing to share their apartments, most refugees allocated according to the Königstein formula would have needed accommodation in hostels, sports halls and container villages. Conflicts with the locals might have ensued, much like during 2015–16.

The situation may change, of course, not just in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, if Russia succeeds in forcing more Ukrainians to flee. So far, predictions that the bombing of Ukrainian power stations would lead to a mass exodus have proven as wrong as the assumption that Poland would quickly buckle under the influx of refugees.

The reception of Ukrainian refugees suggests that efforts to distribute asylum seekers equitably across EU member states may not be what’s needed. On the contrary: rather than deporting asylum seekers back to the European country where their fingerprints were first taken, the EU may prefer to let them move to wherever they are supported by diasporic communities or civil society networks. The Ukrainian case suggests that one aspect of Article 67(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is achievable, namely “a common policy on asylum… which is fair towards third-country nationals.”

The Ukrainian case doesn’t prove or disprove the idea that a common system could be “based on solidarity between Member States.” It doesn’t allow any inferences to be drawn about the validity of the claim that nation-states can behave as if they were individuals extending solidarity towards each other.

But the EU’s undeclared war on irregular migrants, including those seeking its protection, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging individual acts of solidarity of the kind referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. They are not directed towards fellow EU residents, however, as envisaged in that article, but towards people the EU wants to keep out or expel.

As a consequence, activists have repeatedly intervened when authorities across Europe have tried to deport asylum seekers to places of danger or to where they had entered the EU. Even more significant than the anti-deportation campaigns, though, is the work of activists who assist refugees as they cross borders and who document unlawful attempts by the EU and national governments to prevent them from doing so.

In the central Mediterranean, where at least 25,000 irregularised migrants have died over the past eight years, private search-and-rescue operations have saved the lives of thousands of migrants. They enjoy considerable support not just in northern and western Europe but also in Italy and Spain.

In Poland, Grupa Granica has provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in the forests at the Polish–Belarusian border, and monitored the human rights situation there. In Greece, volunteers have been assisting irregularised migrants who have made it to the islands of the northern Aegean, as well as refugees who have been left to fend for themselves in Athens. Much like the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, these volunteers have also tried to hold Frontex and the Greek coastguard accountable.

In all these cases, activism is not just the result of an affective response to suffering, and the sufferers are not regarded only as suppliants. We are indeed seeing solidarity in action.

With member states using the EU’s Facilitation Directive of 2002 to criminalise such acts of solidarity, activists have often paid a high price. Since 2016, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain have between them initiated sixty administrative or criminal proceedings against private organisations involved in search-and-rescue operations.

To make matters worse, the twenty-point action plan recently announced by the European Commission includes the following: “17. Promote discussions in the International Maritime Organization on the need for a specific framework and guidelines for vessels having a particular focus on search and rescue activities, particularly in view of developments in the European context.” These ominous lines suggest the European Commission, goaded by Italy’s racist Meloni government, is intent on further hindering the work of Sea-Watch, SOS Mediterranée and other private search-and-rescue organisations.

Prosecutions of this kind are worrying, and the prospects of further criminalisations dire. But if Robert Schuman was right in observing that solidarity is created by a process of practical achievements, then the solidarity targeted by governments such as Meloni’s and Orbán’s, as well as by the European Commission, has become a force to reckon with. Activists have thwarted attempts to turn Europe into an impenetrable fortress. Compare their efficacy with that of the inter-state solidarity of EU member states, which often exists only in the increasingly hollow appeals of the European Commission.

Acts by the likes of French farmer Cédric Herrou and seafarer Carola Rackete have captured the imagination of Europeans and inspired others to act in solidarity. Herrou was convicted of a délit de solidarité, a “solidarity offence,” for ferrying migrants from Italy to France and inviting them to camp at his property; Rackete, who captained the Sea-Watch 3, defied the Italian government’s order not to disembark irregularised migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.

Such acts have also inspired municipal governments to take action. Some of them have challenged the national authorities to allocate more asylum seekers to them than they are required to accommodate according to the official quota.

There is another reason why I am optimistic regarding the prospects for solidarity à la Herrou — as opposed to the European shield advocated by Ursula von der Leyen and others — and that’s to do with motivation. The intra-EU solidarity so frequently conjured by the European Commission is perhaps too easy a target. Because it isn’t practised (and may in fact not be necessary, at least in the context of a common policy of asylum), the solidarity of Articles 67 and 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union remains a weasel word.

The solidarity offered by the EU to others needs to be taken more seriously, not least because climate change will require countries of the global north to reposition themselves in relation to the global south. In her statement at COP27, von der Leyen said that solidarity means those in a position to help should assist those in need. She didn’t say why Tuvalu islanders or Bangladeshi farmers were in dire straits, or why the EU is in a position to help, but talked as if the EU were a charitable organisation that happened to be able to do good. Solidarity, to be successful and sustainable, needs to be grounded in notions of justice. That is something Herrou and Rackete know but von der Leyen, if she knows it, prefers not to acknowledge. •

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After ten days of talks between officials end in deadlock, pairs of ministers (one from a developed country, the other from a developing one) are charged with seeking out compromises on the major issues. After two more days, still largely deadlocked, the ministers hand over to the host country’s COP president — this year, Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry — to try to produce a compromise text. The president initially develops what are essentially shopping lists of options that define the differences between different countries’ positions but do little to resolve them.

By now it is Friday morning, and the conference is due to end at 6pm. The negotiations fall silent as the president takes further “soundings.” The exhibition halls and food stations are dismantled; anyone who isn’t a country delegate, UN staffer, journalist or NGO analyst leaves for home, their COP done. Six o’clock comes and goes. A new text is shown to the heads of delegation at 3am on Saturday morning, but there are no printed versions and phones are confiscated so they can’t take photos. The president again retreats to his cell, inviting individual ministers in for more hours of bilateral contemplation.

Finally, at 1pm on Saturday, a new compromise text is published. The major negotiating groups go into separate meetings to discuss how much they dislike it. The compromise is “unbalanced,” each of them says, leaning too far towards the other side. The groups take a long time to work through the various documents, not least because many countries are members of more than one group. (China, for example, is part of the “G77 and China,” which includes all the countries deemed “developing” when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, but also part of a much more tightly knit and hardline “Like-Minded Group” with India, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.)

Teams of NGO analysts pore over the documents, examining what has shifted and what has not, and issue briefings to grateful journalists on-site and geeky campaigners back home. As the concluding plenary is postponed multiple times amid further consultations, and the meeting climbs up the league table of “longest-ever COPs,” bets are taken on when it will end.

By Saturday evening most COPs have at last finished, with a compromise agreement no one likes but everyone is too exhausted to oppose. The process is masochistic because it’s the delegates themselves prolonging their own irritable sleeplessness. It’s sado- because the only other people left are sad individuals who still care. Your correspondent included.

COP27 seemed determined to inflict even more pain than normal. By Saturday midnight, leaks revealed that Saudi Arabia had introduced new text not just watering down but reversing the opposition to fossil fuels. Britain’s head of delegation, Alok Sharma (president of last year’s COP26 in Glasgow), was spitting, while the venerable US deputy head Sue Biniaz — John Kerry by this time confined to his hotel with Covid — was seen talking at length on two phones. Presumably one was to Kerry; was the other the White House?

It’s now 2am and journalists and NGO staffers are sprawled out on chairs asleep. The Egyptian presidency announces there will be a plenary between 3am and 6am. It actually starts at 4am. When it does, it seems that final texts have at last been agreed. Shoukry takes no chances. Post-last-minute amendments have been made at this stage in the past (in fact, last year). He names the key document. “Seeing no objections,” he says, not looking up to the hall in case he sees any, “it is so decided,” and bangs his gavel down. Further pauses ensue, more documents are approved, but at around 6am on Sunday morning the texts have been concluded.

Not that it’s actually finished at this point. A further three hours of speeches come from the floor, as countries and negotiating groups explain their grudging welcome for some aspects of the text and their deep disappointment at others. It’s not till past 9am, fourteen days after the conference opened and nearly forty hours after it was due to close, that we can say that another COP is over.

Was it worth it? In the end, just two significant decisions caused all the conflict. The first was “loss and damage,” UNFCC-speak for the economic and human costs faced by developing countries as a result of the greenhouse gas emissions of developed ones over the past two centuries.

Loss and damage was recognised as a concept in the Paris climate agreement, but with a huge caveat: the developed countries secured an explicit exemption from legal liability for the multibillion-dollar impact of a warming world.

For the same reason the developed countries have held out against any kind of financing mechanism for loss and damage, which would require both more aid money and the tacit acceptance of moral responsibility. For the last six years, as developing countries’ demands for a loss and damage “finance facility” surged ever more strongly, the developed countries held them off with a variety of designed-to-be-useless discussion forums.

But this year the dam broke. After John Kerry had spent the first ten days insisting that the United States could not and would not support a financing facility or a fund, with the European Union equally adamant, each produced a new draft on the final Friday accepting just that. It was surprisingly poor diplomacy on their part: if they actually were prepared to concede this (and most observers thought they would have to), they would have gained much more credit by doing so early in the conference.

Crucially, this would also have given them a much better chance of winning their primary condition of support, namely that China could no longer hide behind its historical “developing country” status and would have to contribute to the funding pool as well. By leaving it so late to concede the creation of a loss and damage fund, the United States and the European Union wasted the opportunity to put public pressure on China, and the final wording included merely a vague reference to “other sources” of financing beyond the developed nations.

Nor was any actual money promised for the fund. Before that happens, further consultation on what precisely the fund can be used for, which countries will be eligible, and how it will be governed will proceed for at least a year. Nevertheless, this was a historic moment for climate-vulnerable countries, whose delegates were exhausted but jubilant at the end.

Ultimately, though, the more contentious final issue was fossil fuels. Last year, for the first time, the COP addressed not just greenhouse gas emissions in the abstract, but also their direct causes in the combustion of fossil fuels. A scientifically self-evident but nevertheless unprecedented bit of text was agreed noting that holding warming to the 1.5°C temperature limit would require the “phasing down” of coal use. (China and India baulked at the last at the aim of “phasing out.”)

In Sharm el-Sheikh the vulnerable countries’ and NGOs’ goal was an agreement that such phasing down should apply to all fossil fuels (that is, also oil and gas) and not just coal. Their cause was surprisingly taken up by India, keen to deflect attention from its still-abundant coal use.

But Saudi Arabia and next year’s COP hosts, the United Arab Emirates, were not having that. No doubt with a little gentle pressure on their import-dependent neighbour Egypt, they instead redefined “clean energy” to include “low-emission” fuels as well as renewables. By “low emission” they mean gas, a much lower-emitting fuel than oil, but not in the slightest a near-zero one in the manner of hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal or nuclear. To the anger of many, the Gulf states’ language made it into the final agreed text.

The significance of these textual niceties is often overplayed. Nothing in general COP decision text is legally binding, and no petro-state will change its behaviour as a result of it. Last year’s bitter endgame argument over whether coal should be “phased out” or merely “phased down” was a case in point: without a date for phasing out, the two phrases in practice mean the same.

Yet the Sharm el-Sheikh language approving “low-emission fuels” as part of emissions reduction plans is a serious blow to the climate action cause. It will be used to justify the expansion of gas production and consumption everywhere this is government policy, giving the apparent seal of approval of the UN climate regime. The climate-vulnerable countries and NGOs were aghast; it was this issue that took the talks into the small hours on Sunday morning.

It won’t only be the Gulf states, however, who are pleased. One of the most insistent arguments running through COP27 pitched a range of African countries against the European Union and NGOs over the financing of gas. Africa has a lot of unexploited gas resources, and the countries under whose territory they lie are understandably keen to exploit them. Yet it is also true that keeping within the 1.5°C goal will require, as the International Energy Agency has pointed out, the cessation of all new oil and gas (as well as coal) production anywhere in the world.

The European Union and NGOs insist that Africa could supply all its energy needs through solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable resources. But that’s not the issue. The value of gas is in the foreign exchange it earns — a major source of the hard currency dollars to which few African countries have much access. They are simply not going to pass the opportunity up — and particularly not at the behest of a hypocritical Europe that built its own wealth on fossil fuels and is currently scouring the world for new gas contracts to make up for lost Russian supply.

In fact, the issue of African gas heralds the emergence of a new era in climate policymaking. It’s a focus on the so-called “just transition”: the principle that decarbonisation strategies must be aimed not just at cutting emissions but also at providing alternative sources of jobs and livelihoods in the process.

As countries get serious about tackling climate change, moving from generalised target-setting to specific economic policymaking, this imperative is coming to the fore. African countries desperate to reduce poverty and develop into middle-income economies won’t allow decarbonisation to stop them. And nations already dependent on homegrown fossil fuels will only be willing to reduce their dependence if they can see a viable alternative source, not just of domestic energy, but also of employment and foreign exchange earnings.

The argument over fossil fuels in the final text was symbolic, but in this context it was not nearly the most important development at COP27. That came in two separate announcements that were not part of the formal conference but merely part of its fringe; and indeed one of which was not made in Egypt at all.

During the first week of COP27 the government of South Africa announced a new US$8.5 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership,” or JET-P, with the United States, the European Union, France, Germany and Britain. It aims to transform South Africa’s energy and industrial landscape by reducing its dependence on coal, increasing its renewable supply, upgrading its electricity grid, and developing its car manufacturing sector to become a domestic and global supplier of electric vehicles.

For a country that employs 92,000 coalminers, and whose giant, sclerotic state-owned energy company, Eskom, is unable to prevent regular blackouts across the country, this is a hugely ambitious program. The loans and loan guarantees from the donor countries will barely begin to cover the scale of the investment needed, but it is hoped they will leverage in orders of magnitude more from the private sector.

Even more importantly, the political challenges will be enormous. In a country already experiencing social unrest as a result of the rising cost of living and persistently high levels of unemployment, laying off coalminers could be a recipe for trouble. The coalmining union is one of the bastions of political support for the country’s ruling African National Congress. During the year-long consultation process the government undertook to prepare the partnership plan, it was clear that many sections of the public remain to be convinced that reducing coal consumption is in the country’s interest, or will make their own lives better.

The same challenge also faces the government of Indonesia, which, a week after South Africa, announced its own Just Energy Transition Partnership with the United States, Japan and others. This time the package of loans and guarantees was worth US$20 billion. The announcement was made not in Sharm el-Sheikh but in Bali, where Indonesia was hosting the annual G20 summit. But it had the same COP27 resonance: another huge coal-producing nation choosing ultimately to leave the coal in the ground and pledge its long-term future to renewable and geothermal energy. The partnership plan envisages Indonesia embarking on an industrial strategy designed to exploit the country’s world-leading nickel and tin mining to create battery factories and other high-technology plant.

If the world is to succeed in cutting greenhouse emissions at the same time as enabling developing countries to grow and to modernise, these JET-Ps, or something like them, are surely the form it will take. Vietnam is currently in talks with the Western powers to do the next deal, and India is making interested noises as well. It has not escaped anyone’s notice that such partnerships are potentially a means by which the West can offer developing countries financial assistance — and political influence — to rival those of China’s huge Belt and Road Initiative.

More widely, the principle of the “just transition” is likely to be the basis for much climate policy over the coming years. It already informs Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, whose trillion-dollar subsidies for green energy and industrial production are conditional on components being sourced from US manufacturers (or those within the North American Free Trade Association, namely Canada and Mexico), a fact which has led the European Union to threaten to take the United States to the World Trade Organization for breaching trade rules.

This is essentially a form of green protectionism — but it is also surely the inevitable political consequence of serious decarbonisation. Moves away from fossil fuels and energy-intensive industry will only be supported by the workers and communities affected if alternative jobs and livelihoods are on offer. Imposing domestic supply chains may not be economically efficient according to neoclassical free-trade theory, but in the eyes of any politician it makes perfect political sense.

Although these issues were animatedly discussed in COP27 fringe meetings — there was an entire pavilion devoted to Just Transition policy, sponsored by the International Labour Organization — very few measures or proposals entered the decision text. But they almost certainly will in due course.

COP27 has demonstrated the notable shift that has occurred since the 2015 Paris agreement. Before then, COPs came first, setting out principles and mandating national action, which countries subsequently followed. Today the order has been reversed. Countries are designing and implementing policies for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. If a few years later they get mentioned in COP texts as important examples to follow, that is just a bonus.

This is indeed how it should be. The Paris climate agreement sets out the principles and legally binding rules of climate action, with more detailed regulation negotiated at subsequent COPs. But now the international rules are in place, the focus of debate must inevitably shift to the national political arena, where policy is made and politics rule. Given how tortuous they have become, that COPs have less and less for their negotiators to do is a boon to them as well as to the watching world. •

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It takes twenty-five minutes in an overpriced taxi, and longer in a free shuttle bus, to get from either end of the coastal strip to the UN COP27 venue, which has been specially constructed in temporary buildings around the international convention centre. When the conference palls, the bright lights, loud music and traditional Egyptian belly dancers of the Naama Bay strip inevitably have their appeal. “It’s like Las Vegas,” one delegate said, “only not as highbrow.”

Nevertheless, this is where COP27 is taking place, and it’s the scene of plenty of serious negotiation and debate. The Leaders’ Summit in the first two days was notable mainly for the traffic jams caused by presidential convoys and tight security. Although the speeches didn’t generally rise very far to the occasion, they served their allotted purpose: forcing heads of government to declare in front of their domestic TV audiences that climate change is an urgent priority and they are committed to stronger action to combat it.

The two most eagerly awaited speeches were not actually scheduled for the summit itself. Fresh from his unexpected triumph in the US midterm elections, Joe Biden arrived in the largest convoy of all a couple of days after the other leaders had left. In his usual inimitable monotone, he declared that the American Inflation Reduction Act — his administration’s unprecedented package of climate change measures, which finally got through Congress in August — would enable the United States to meet its 2030 emissions targets, driven by investment in new technologies and American enterprise.

The president also declared the United States would provide more help to developing nations to combat a climate crisis that concerned “human security, economic security, environmental security, national security and the very life of the planet.” Climate wonks poring over the text could find little new support that had not already been announced, but the general uplift from Biden’s presence was evident. A grateful audience gave him a standing ovation, not something hard-bitten COP delegates are wont to do.

The other eagerly awaited leader has only just arrived. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, fresh from his even more momentous election victory, will make his speech today, and his ovation will be even longer. Under the far-right, Trump-imitating Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has gone from climate leader to renegade destroyer of the Amazon, and the relief among the climate community to have Lula back in power is palpable.

Without control of Brazil’s Congress, the returning president may struggle to pass the environmental legislation he wants, but he will beef up security protection for forest lands and indigenous peoples, and commit to “net zero deforestation” in the future. He has already made clear that he will be a regional and global champion for climate action, and in a geopolitical world riven by tension between the big Northern hemisphere states — the United States, China, the European Union, Russia and India — there are high hopes for his Southern leadership.

If the big countries inevitably take up the largest space in UN climate conferences — commensurate with their outsized emissions pouring into the atmosphere — there is nevertheless always room at COPs for the small nations to make a mark. It is one of the more remarkable features of the thirty-year-old UN climate regime that decisions have to be reached by consensus, which gives otherwise internationally invisible and powerless countries a crucial role. Coupled with the fact that the poorest countries most vulnerable to climate change — the small islands of the Pacific and Caribbean, low-lying nations such as Bangladesh and glacier-melting ones like Nepal — are the evident victims of a climate crisis they didn’t cause, this creates a rather remarkable dynamic.

At the Paris COP in 2015, it was the tiny Marshall Islands that led the High Ambition Coalition with the European Union and the United States that drove the final treaty negotiations to an unexpectedly radical conclusion. And in Sharm el-Sheikh it is Vanuatu and Tuvalu that have made the early headlines. They have been reiterating their request for an International Court of Justice ruling on the legal liability of rich countries and companies for the historical emissions that threaten their island existence. The two countries have demanded that the world agree a “Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty” to manage the global phase-out of coal, oil and gas.

The most powerful speech at the Leaders’ Summit also came from a small island. The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was the standout speaker at last year’s COP26, and retained her top spot in the unofficial charts with another remarkable and insightful contribution here.

Mottley’s rhetoric transfixed the hall. “We have the collective capacity to transform,” she told the heads of government sitting in the rows of seats in front of her. “We’re in the country that built pyramids. We know what it is to remove slavery from our civilisation… to find a vaccine within two years when a pandemic hits us… to put a man on the moon. And now we’re putting a rover on Mars. We know what it is. But the simple political will that is necessary, not just to come here and make promises, but to deliver on them and to make a definable difference in the lives of the people whom we have a responsibility to serve — this seems to be still not capable of being produced.”

Mottley’s core argument was that the international financial system isn’t working for poor and middle-income countries, like Barbados, that want to move to net zero emissions and cope with the devastating climate change they are already experiencing. They cannot access the finance or the technology to do so. She laid the blame squarely on the World Bank, the IMF and their developed country shareholders. “This world,” she said, “looks still too much like it did when it was part of an imperialistic empire.”

Mottley is not, however, content with rhetoric. Over the last few months she has been promoting a new plan for financial reform dubbed the Bridgetown Initiative after the Barbados capital in which it was hatched with her adviser, economist and former investment banker Avinash Persaud. And it has been getting increasing traction at COP27.

At the core of the plan are three innovative reforms that between them could galvanise more than US$1 trillion of new finance for climate-compatible development, including emergency help to countries hit by extreme weather events, and low-cost lending for emissions reduction investments.

The first is to get the World Bank, along with the other multilateral development banks, or MDBs, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, to use their capital base more expansively. These banks are all funded by the richer countries to provide concessional lending to developing ones. But the World Bank in particular has become deeply risk-averse. Highly protective of the triple-A rated status of its bonds, it has refused to use its healthy balance sheet to increase its lending capacity.

A recent expert report commissioned by the G20 group of nations found that between them the MDBs could lend an extra US$500 billion or more if they slightly relaxed their risk appetite and capital accounting procedures and better utilised government guarantees.

Second, Barbados has been pioneering “disaster clauses” in its debt contracts. These are stipulations that if a country borrowing money from private or public creditors experiences a predefined extreme weather event, all its debt repayments will be postponed for two or more years. Given how much many developing countries are forking out in debt repayments, such clauses immediately release millions of dollars of liquid funds for disaster relief and reconstruction and public service budgets. The creditors get repaid on a later schedule, but with the interest they have lost made up, removing any financial loss. Barbados is proposing that such clauses should become standard practice in all sovereign debt contracts.

Third, Mottley has called for a new issuance of Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, the reserve currency the IMF is empowered to release to support the global financial system. She proposes that these SDRs be put into a trust fund that can then back new lending for emissions reduction investments such as renewable energy, methane control and forest and land management. For most developing countries, the cost of capital is simply too high to enable them to borrow for such priorities.

Where developed countries with strong currencies can borrow on international markets at 3 to 5 per cent, most developing countries — including relatively stable, growing ones such as India and South Africa — face interest costs at least three times higher. Barbados proposes that the new fund should auction its lending capacity to the projects, wherever they are located, that can achieve the highest and fastest emissions reductions.

These reform ideas are not the only ones circulating at COP27. The V20 group of climate-vulnerable nations has produced its own suggestions for new financing mechanisms, and innovative ideas are being produced by academics and civil society organisations, including a plan for the cancellation of developing country debt in return for commitments to verifiable climate action plans.

Mottley used her short stay in Sharm el-Sheikh to discuss her ideas with other leaders. French president Emmanuel Macron duly called for an expert group to look at the Bridgetown Initiative and other proposals and make rapid recommendations on their implementation to the international financial institutions and their shareholder nations next year.

And in the negotiating sessions that have followed, ministers from other countries have gone further. Several have called for a review, not just of individual funding mechanisms, but of the entire international financial system. Many countries are today experiencing once again the problem of the dominance of the US dollar. As American interest rates rise, their own currencies are depreciating, making imported energy, food and manufactured goods more expensive and raising the cost of dollar-denominated borrowing. Another global debt crisis looms, with more than forty countries in or at risk of debt distress, according to the IMF. When the United States catches a cold, one delegate noted, the rest of us get flu.

So an even bigger agenda is beginning to make its way into COP speeches and debates. The present international financial system and its institutions were designed in 1944, in a very different economic and political world. Nearly eighty years on, they could do with a refresh.

No one is yet claiming Sharm el-Sheikh will one day be as famous a venue for international financial reform as Bretton Woods. But the seeds are being planted. •

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Yes, it’s COP time again: that annual attempt by journalists to persuade their editors that this year’s UN climate conference is genuinely important and they really should give it some coverage.

Is COP27 genuinely important? At first sight it’s hard to make the case. Up to and including the twenty-first of these conferences, in Paris in 2015, COPs really were important. The international community was desperately trying to reach a new international agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and every year the torturous negotiations produced another faltering step forward. Paris itself produced a historic treaty: the first genuinely comprehensive global climate agreement, with a built-in mechanism for strengthening itself every five years.

But once we had the Paris agreement, what was there to negotiate about? There was a geeky answer: Paris was a high-level accord and many detailed implementation rules still needed to be worked out. COPs 22 (Marrakech), 23 (Bonn), 24 (Katowice) and 25 (intended for Santiago but actually in Madrid because of some local political difficulties) duly worked on these specifics, with few people outside the climate world taking much notice.

COP26, scheduled for Glasgow in 2020 but postponed for a year because of Covid, was the five-year moment when the emissions targets set in Paris had to be strengthened. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reported in 2018 that global emissions must be more or less halved by 2030 if the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was to be met. Greta Thunberg was leading an increasingly vocal movement of younger climate activists; publics were beginning to mobilise again. Countries would be under the spotlight to respond.

But the conference ran into a huge problem. Yes, many governments brought new emissions reduction commitments (“nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs) to the table, some of them quite ambitious. And many pledged themselves to net zero emissions by 2050 or a decade or two later. But when all these promises were added up, they still fell well short of the cuts scientists said were necessary to meet the 1.5°C goal.

COP26 came up with pretty much the only option it could to “keep 1.5°C alive” and rescue the conference from failure: countries admitted they were not doing enough and promised to come back in a year’s time with stronger, 1.5°C-compatible commitments.

And so COP27 was dragged from post-Paris obscurity and turned into the next critical climate moment. Will those world leaders use their six minutes to announce new targets sufficient to close the “emissions gap”?

Unfortunately we know the answer, and it’s No. Only one major economy has said that it will table a new and stronger NDC — Australia, which for a short time finds itself in the unusual position of being a global climate leader. But the other 195 signatories to the Paris agreement have offered little or no change.

As a result, the emissions gap is barely narrower than it was a year ago. In its latest annual report the UN Environment Programme calculates that current policies offer a two-thirds chance of limiting the global temperature increase to 2.8°C above pre-industrial times. Cuts pledged by governments would reduce this only to 2.6°C.

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, emissions must fall by 45 per cent more than is envisaged under current policies by 2030; for 2°C, a 30 per cent cut is needed. Launching the report, UNEP executive director Inger Andersen warned that “we had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

It is hardly surprising, of course, that so little progress has been made over the past year. It’s not been a propitious time to think about emissions reduction plans. In a world still recovering from the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered huge global energy price increases, food shortages, generalised inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, not to mention the threat of nuclear war. China and the United States are adopting increasingly belligerent stances towards one another. With the US dollar rising as the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, many developing countries are seeing trade and growth slow and are falling back into unsustainable indebtedness.

In the meantime, severe climate impacts have become more frequent. After record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan in the summer, monsoon flooding left a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated thirty-three million people and killing more than 1500. As glaciers melted in the Himalayas, extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires. In France, low river levels meant insufficient water to cool nuclear power stations, which had to be shut down, while German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine.

In the United States, Colorado River reservoirs hit record lows and major flooding occurred elsewhere, from Death Valley to eastern Kentucky. In China, an eight-week heat wave and drought dried up parts of the Yangtze River to the lowest level since the mid nineteenth century — until parts of the same area were inundated with flooding rains in August.

The need for action could hardly be clearer. But if COP27 won’t see any new commitments to cutting emissions, is it even worth holding? Could not the greenhouse gases from all those leaders’ and delegates’ flights at least have been saved?

There are two grounds for saying that, despite all this, COP27 will be a worthwhile event. The first is that climate change is not all about cutting emissions, or “mitigation” as climate negotiators call it. This aspect of the subject dominates the debate in most developed countries because they are responsible for most of the world’s historical and present emissions, and are now more or less all embarked on a difficult process of decarbonisation.

Elsewhere, though, reducing emissions is not the big national issue. Most developing countries produce very few greenhouse gases: their economies are just not large or rich enough. What they are desperately trying to do is cope with the climate change they are already experiencing, and what they want is for the developed world finally to provide them with the financial assistance they have been promised for thirty years to support climate-resilient development.

It is these issues, not mitigation, that will dominate debate at COP27. The agenda has three parts.

The first is adaptation, climate-speak for the things countries have to do to adjust to a warming world: building flood defences, planting drought-resistant seed varieties, and so on. The Paris Agreement decided that there should be a “global goal on adaptation” in the same way that there is a global goal (1.5°C) for cutting emissions.

It seemed clear to scientists and to many developing countries that the adaptation goal should logically be the obverse of the mitigation one, since the more emissions are reduced, the lower the global temperature rise will be, and therefore the less adaptation countries will have to undertake. But the developed world has so far resisted any attempt to define the adaptation goal in this way: it would cast an unforgiving light on their failures to mitigate enough. Negotiators will have another go at COP27.

Second, the subject of “loss and damage” will take centre stage. This is the term used to describe the economic costs developing countries experience from climate impacts. Such costs are in many cases large and growing, not least because of more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.

But the concept of loss and damage unnerves developed country negotiators. It looks far too close to the idea — increasingly being tested in the international courts — that the rich world is legally liable for such costs, and could therefore be forced to pay practically unlimited compensation. The Paris Agreement did recognise that loss and damage occurs but included an explicit clause ruling out any legal liability.

This has not stopped developing countries — particularly the small islands and low-lying states most vulnerable to climate impacts — from pushing for more financial aid. At COP26 they demanded a new financial facility be created for this purpose. The knockback by developed countries nearly brought the conference to a halt; a last-minute compromise in which a “Glasgow Dialogue” was established did little to assuage the vulnerable countries’ anger. They pointed out grimly that the Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage could now be added to the list of futile non-negotiations that already included the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damage and the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage created by previous COPs.

A new financial facility for loss and damage will therefore be back on the agenda in Sharm el-Sheikh; it will be the developing world’s single biggest demand. Recognising the Paris clause, many are now insisting that what they want is specific and automatic help when they are hit by an extreme weather event. They are not seeking reparations for historical emissions. Some developed countries may in turn be relenting: Denmark recently announced the first-ever pledge of specific loss and damage funding. If the financial facility is not agreed — or explicit talks are not at least promised towards it — the vulnerable countries may well walk out.

In the end, adaptation and loss and damage both come down to the third key agenda item, which is finance. Once again, the developed world will be in the dock: it has still not organised the $100 billion per year in financial flows to developing countries it promised at COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009) and again in Paris. Although the funds were meant to be secured by 2020, only $83 billion was provided that year, and the latest review suggests the $100 billion won’t be met till 2023.

The consequence is not just that insufficient money is flowing. It’s the disastrous loss of trust that the shortfall has caused. If developed countries can’t keep to their most straightforward promises, developing nations are little inclined to make commitments of their own.

At the same time, though, the $100 billion is not really the issue. That sum doesn’t get anywhere close to the trillions of dollars now needed for global investment in climate mitigation and resilience. Governments don’t have that kind of money; it’s going to have to be raised from the private sector. Intense discussions are under way looking at how this can be done.

In Sharm el-Sheikh these discussions will take place away from the formal negotiations. Veteran climate economist Nicholas Stern of the LSE will publish a new report with the executive director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, on how much money is needed for different purposes, and how it can be mobilised. Banks, insurers and investment funds will be out in force, proclaiming their commitment to net zero and green growth, while trying to defend their continued financing of fossil fuels.

The World Bank, meanwhile, will come under renewed attack for inadequate climate commitment. The International Monetary Fund will look good by comparison. Even the world’s central banks will be in on the debate, now committed to assessing their financial systems’ stability in terms of “climate risk” as well as the usual capital adequacy.

And this is where COP27 will prove itself worthwhile after all. It’s not really about the formal negotiations. COPs are the annual gatherings of the world’s climate industry. That’s not a term of abuse: acting on climate change is now a major driver of economic growth, of investment and trade, of urban regeneration and rural land restoration, and of civil society mobilisation.

People come from all those sectors: from city authorities and sub-national states, from multinational corporations and green technology innovators, from impact investment funds and academic research institutes, from non-government organisations from both the North and South of the world. They come to announce their new projects and commitments, to network and plan, and to discover what’s happening elsewhere.

And those government leaders will have to make a speech about climate change when they come to the COP. For many of them it may be the only one they make on the subject this year. Oddly enough, none of them will say “actually, you know, this climate change thing is not really happening, so we’re doing bugger all about it.” Each of the six minutes will force leaders’ attention onto the global crisis and what they should at least say they are doing in response. And most importantly, each of those speeches will be covered by those leaders’ national media outlets. They will appear to be talking to the international community, but that’s just the backdrop (and an important one). Each will be talking primarily to their national media and public.

This, in the end, is the justification for the annual UN circus. Progress on climate change will ultimately come because publics the world over will demand it from their governments. They will do this when they are better informe, and the challenge gets a higher profile in each country’s political debate.

Political leaders need to be forced to say they will act, and to be held to it. In a world where so much else is happening, that’s hard to engineer, either for civil society or for the media. Climate change is not news: it’s been the same story now for many years, and if it can be reported on any day it can always wait for another one.

So the point of COPs is to provide a focal point, a moment: one fortnight a year when climate change is unequivocally on the political agenda, and on the news. This year NGOs will find it harder than usual to make their voices heard: the Egyptian government has notoriously been cracking down on dissent and demonstration, and hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh are too expensive to allow most activists to attend.

Nevertheless, for a couple of weeks, climate will come into focus. Political leaders will make speeches, and they will be covered on the main TV news. Broadcasters will run climate change features. Editors will commission articles. •

The post What exactly is the point of COP27? appeared first on Inside Story.

The country’s second female prime minister, elected to take Britain out of the European Union, is deposed by her own MPs after torturous negotiations fail to secure a parliamentary majority. She is replaced by a chaotic, philandering buffoon who suspends parliament illegally and expels pro-Europeans from the Conservative Party — but then wins a general election promising to “get Brexit done.” He does so by agreeing to a deal he’d attacked when the previous prime minister proposed it, putting peace in Northern Ireland in jeopardy.

The world is struck by a deadly pandemic; the buffoon very nearly dies. Mishandling its response to the virus, the government presides over 180,000 deaths, among the highest per capita in the developed world. It’s revealed that while the PM was passing laws prohibiting people from socialising, he and his staff were holding regular parties at 10 Downing Street, about which he lied to parliament.

Fined by the police, the PM is then discovered to have had clandestine relationships with a former Russian spy and current party donors. After he tries to bend anti-corruption rules to save a colleague, his second in command resigns. He rapidly loses the support of his cabinet and is ousted. In the subsequent election for party leader his number two, the favourite to succeed him, is beaten by a slightly unhinged free marketeer prone to mimicking Margaret Thatcher, who becomes the country’s third female prime minister. Two days after she takes office the Queen dies after seventy years on the throne. Two weeks later the new PM’s chancellor of the exchequer announces a “mini-budget” comprising huge tax cuts, targeted at the rich, paid for by massively increased borrowing.

The pound falls to its lowest-ever level against the US dollar. The financial markets go into meltdown and the Bank of England is forced to step in to prevent pension funds going bust. Conservative MPs say they will not pass the measures. The PM sacks her chancellor. His replacement reverses almost the entire mini-budget while the PM looks on stony-faced and humiliated. She then faces chaotic scenes in parliament as she tries to force her MPs to vote in favour of fracking, which many oppose.

The next day the PM announces her resignation, making her at fifty days the shortest-lived occupant of 10 Downing Street in British history. For a brief moment it looks like the buffoon will return as the new party leader. But eventually the crown passes to his former number two, the loser of the previous race. Britain’s first-ever non-white prime minister stands in front of the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, pauses, and walks in. The credits roll.

That new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is not just the first from Britain’s Asian community — his parents came to England from East Africa in the 1960s — but at forty-two is the youngest prime minister for more than 200 years. Even more remarkably, he is the first-ever prime minister richer than the reigning monarch. This is thanks to the £730 million fortune he shares with his wife Akshata Murthy, daughter of the Indian billionaire and founder of Infosys, N.R. Narayana Murthy. (King Charles’s personal wealth is estimated to be a mere £370 million.)

Sunak’s rise to the top has been swift. A former hedge fund manager educated at one of Britain’s poshest public schools, he has only been an MP since 2015. But when Boris Johnson needed a new chancellor in February 2020, the field of economically literate Tories who had voted for Brexit was not a large one. Sunak took up the position just as Covid-19 struck.

The crisis made him unexpectedly popular. A generous furlough scheme, which at its height was paying the wages of around nine million employees, kept the British economy alive as society locked down. Later, to revive the hospitality sector, Sunak introduced an “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme giving the public £10 off restaurant meals. It seemed that Sunak could do no wrong. As it happened, the scheme was later found to have contributed to a spike in Covid cases. By this time, though, Sunak was embarked on a new project, that of restraining Boris Johnson’s spending plans.

Little was known about Sunak’s economic views before he became chancellor. But once the Covid crisis was largely out of the way, it emerged that he was a “sound money” fiscal conservative who believed in balanced budgets. After his own Covid spending and borrowing spree, that meant public spending had to be kept firmly under control.

The result was an increasingly abrasive relationship with Johnson, who wanted to spend money. Almost every one of Johnson’s political goals — reducing regional inequalities, reforming social care, moving towards net zero — required higher spending. But Sunak not only refused to provide the money Johnson demanded, he also introduced the largest series of tax rises in a generation to try to bring down debt, now approaching 100 per cent of GDP. It almost seemed as if he was trying to sabotage Johnson’s premiership.

And then — just a year ago — a strange thing happened. A leak to the press revealed that Sunak’s wife was avoiding millions of pounds in tax by claiming that she was not resident in Britain. Such information is known to very few people, so it was widely assumed the leak had come from Boris Johnson’s team. Sunak said his wife’s tax arrangements were a matter for her. But given he was chancellor, and therefore responsible for the tax rules, his response didn’t suggest the most astute political judgement.

When it then emerged that Sunak himself still held a US green card, an American work permit that has to be applied for annually, the reaction — much of it from his own colleagues — was explosive. Did this former Silicon Valley executive believe his involvement in British politics was just a temporary thing, and if he got bored with it he could always return to America to make some more money?

As pictures of Sunak’s four multimillion-pound homes (three in Britain and one in California) were paraded in the media — in one property he was installing a £400,000 swimming pool whose heating bill would exceed that of most entire households — it seemed that his ambition to be the next leader of the Conservative Party was over.

But Sunak didn’t quit and return to America. He remained chancellor, received a fine for attending one of the infamous Downing Street parties during Covid, and awaited his moment. It came in July when Johnson finally made one corrupt error too many. Sunak resigned as chancellor and called on Johnson to stand down. His departure triggered a wave of other ministerial resignations. Johnson was left unable to form a government. He resigned two days later.

Sunak started out as favourite in the Tory leadership race that followed, his former transgressions apparently forgiven, at least by his fellow Conservative MPs, who gave more of their votes to him than to any other candidate. But he had not reckoned with the party membership. Many Tory members were furious with him, both for his role in Johnson’s defenestration and for his tax rises. (While some, it was whispered, noted that he was not white.)

He warned that Liz Truss’s radical tax-cutting plans were “fantasy economics” that would not stand contact with the reality of the financial markets. He too was a Thatcherite, he declared, but one who believed (as Thatcher did) in fiscal responsibility: bringing borrowing and inflation under control first, and then cutting taxes when the economy was strong enough to do so.

His warnings went unheeded. Truss beat him comfortably to claim the party leadership and become prime minister. The rest, as they say, is history.

And so, now, is Liz Truss. In the truncated process that a traumatised party chose to elect its leader last weekend, Sunak promised to bring unity, with a cabinet appointed from across all the party’s warring factions. He duly won the support of more than half its MPs. Boris Johnson returned from a holiday in the Caribbean to try to regain the crown. But this time even the Tory Party preferred bread to circuses, and he was forced to withdraw.

Sunak was elected unopposed. The next day he was asked by King Charles to form a government. Constitutional order was restored. Who knows, the two men may even have discussed wealth management strategies. •

The post Rishi redux appeared first on Inside Story.

We must assume Truss didn’t intend these outcomes. But she can hardly have been surprised by them. They were the direct and immediate result of her first major policy initiative, a “mini-budget” announced on 23 September by her new chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng. Describing it as the government’s “Growth Plan,” Truss and Kwarteng declared that it would set the country on a new course for economic growth.

The centrepiece of the statement was a huge package of financial support to cushion households and businesses from the steep rise in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From around £1300 in 2021, the average household energy bill in Britain had already risen to almost £2000, and, had nothing been done, was projected to hit around £6000 next year. So the government announced that it would be capping domestic bills at an average of £2500 for the next two years. At the same time it would subsidise energy use by businesses for at least six months.

The cost of these measures will depend on how far wholesale gas prices rise over this period. But Treasury’s estimate for the first six months was an eye-watering £60 billion. To put this in context: the cost of the government’s furlough scheme to keep people in work for eighteen months during Covid was £70 billion.

The general verdict on these measures, nevertheless, was favourable. Costly, yes, but necessary — with the added bonus, as Kwarteng noted, that they reduced the headline rate of inflation, since the government’s subsidy is defined as cutting the price of energy, rather than adding to households’ incomes.

But it was not this part of the budget that caused such a reaction. It was the rest of it. Alongside the energy measures Kwarteng announced a £45 billion package of tax cuts, the largest made in a single fiscal statement since 1972. They included the repeal of an increase in National Insurance contributions introduced by Boris Johnson’s government just a few months before; the abandonment of another Johnson commitment, an increase in corporation tax; a cut in the stamp duty on house purchases; a cut in the main rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 19 per cent; and — in a move that took everyone by surprise — the abolition of the 45 per cent top rate of income tax, levied on people earning over £150,000 a year.

How was this largesse to be paid for? The government had nothing to say on that topic at all. Not only did the budget contain not a single revenue-raising measure; Kwarteng had explicitly prevented the independent Office for Budget Responsibility from publishing its usual analysis and forecasts. This was indeed why he was at pains to call it a “mini-budget”: had it been a proper budget, the OBR would have been required by law to publish an analysis of its impacts.

The UK’s think tanks, of course, were quick to fill the gap. They calculated that the government’s plans would require over £400 billion of extra public borrowing over the next five years — with no end in sight beyond that. That would represent a 50 per cent increase on last year’s level of borrowing every year — taking annual borrowing to five times its pre-pandemic level.

The response of the financial markets was immediate. The interest rate (or yield) on government bonds shot up, and the pound plummeted. If the government was going to borrow so much more, lenders were inevitably going to charge them more to do so. Indefinite higher borrowing suggested a government with no plan.

In reality, part of the pound’s weakness reflected the strength of the US dollar; but since the pound fell against other currencies too, there was no doubt it was also a verdict on the British government and the country’s future economic prospects.

The shockwaves were rapid. Banks started withdrawing mortgage products, as it became clear that interest rates were about to rise even further and their mortgage offers would soon be unprofitable. Pension funds revealed they could rapidly become insolvent; they were having to sell government bonds to cover heightened risk, but the value of these had plummeted. In response, the Bank of England announced overnight an emergency program under which it would buy up to £65 billion of bonds to shore up their value and prevent financial contagion.

By now — just days after Kwarteng’s fiscal statement — the financial markets were in turmoil. The Bank of England was not meant to be buying bonds — it was in the middle of a “quantitative tightening” program that involved selling bonds to push interest rates up.

A vicious spiral was now in prospect: the combination of tax cuts, monetary loosening and a falling pound would push inflation up, forcing the bank to raise interest rates further and more quickly. As interest rates rose the cost of government borrowing would increase, requiring even more borrowing to cover it. Rising mortgage rates would hit household spending and could lead to a housing market crash, both of which would exacerbate the recession into which Britain was now predicted to fall.

And just to add insult to injury, the IMF at this point decided to flout its usual rule of not commenting on individual fiscal statements in developed countries. The budget, it declared, would have serious negative consequences — not just in Britain but more widely across a still-fragile global economy. It urged the government to reconsider. Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was just one of several financial commentators who likened Britain to an emerging economy, its currency under speculative attack and being told off by the IMF.

Extraordinarily, Truss and Kwarteng went missing for almost a week while this happened, refusing to calm the markets or reassure voters. When the prime minister did emerge, it was to do a series of local radio interviews, no doubt expecting them to be easier than national TV. Confronted by presenters keen to make their names, her performance was squirmingly bad (and of course, immediately broadcast on national TV).

Truss refused to apologise, frequently seemed stumped by the questions and repeated the same talking points with wooden monotony. Resorting to the classic politician’s defence that the policies were fine, it was all a problem of poor communication, her only concession was that she could have “prepared the ground” better. But that was hardly true — all the budget measures apart from the top rate tax cut had been leaked or announced in advance.

The reaction of the financial markets was only half the problem. The distributional impact of the government’s tax cuts was extraordinarily regressive. Income tax cuts always benefit the rich more than the poor, since the rich pay more in tax; and those below the tax threshold don’t benefit at all. But the abolition of the 45 per cent rate meant the beneficiaries of the budget package were concentrated among the very rich.

Analysis quickly demonstrated that almost half the gains of the overall tax package would go to the richest 5 per cent of households. A person earning a million pounds a year would find themselves £55,000 better off, while someone on £20,000 would gain just £157. Coupled with a separate decision to abolish the cap on bankers’ bonuses imposed by the European Union after the 2008 financial crash, the budget demonstrated a remarkable desire to give money to those who already have it.

In the context of a severe cost of living crisis, with inflation now running at 10 per cent and families on the lowest incomes facing choices about whether to “heat or eat” this winter — the use of charitable food banks has rocketed over the last year — it was a politically tin-eared approach. Radio phone-in programs fairly crackled with public anger.

Tory MPs, in turn, reacted with dismay. Unfortunately timed for the prime minister, this week’s annual Conservative Party conference gave them plenty of opportunity to express their views on TV and radio. Former cabinet members indicated publicly that they would vote in parliament against the abolition of the 45 per cent tax rate. As the revolt spread, it became clear that Truss would not be able to get it through the House of Commons. Nine days after announcing it, the government declared that the cut was to be abandoned. It was never a major part of the package, Kwarteng said, and had become “a distraction.”

But Truss’s travails were still not at an end. Abandoning the top rate cut would save only £2 billion; attention now turned to how the government would pay for the rest. Would it have to inaugurate a new period of austerity, with swingeing public spending cuts to bring borrowing back under control?

The prospect caused further alarm to Tory MPs. The National Health Service faces another post-Covid winter crisis, with long waiting lists and deepening staff shortages, and most other public services have been pared to the bone by a decade of austerity. So the only obvious target for cutting was the welfare budget.

When Liz Truss duly refused to say that welfare benefits would be raised this year by the rate of inflation — a commitment given by Boris Johnson’s government — uproar ensued. Few Tory MPs were prepared to support this; several openly declared that it would be immoral and wrong (not to mention “electoral suicide,” as one put it) to pay for tax cuts for the rich by cutting the incomes of the very poorest. They would vote against this too. Truss loyalists in turn accused the rebels of organising a “coup” against their leader.

As the Conservative Party conference descended into open blue-on-blue warfare, the prime minister made a defiant speech. Truss dismissed her troubles as the inevitable “disruption” caused by a radical program and declared herself determined to take on the “anti-growth coalition” that was now ranged against her.

How did it get to this? To understand that, we need to go back to 2012, two years after both Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng entered parliament. The Conservative leader David Cameron had become prime minister at the head of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. His pitch to the electorate was that the Tories had changed: no longer the Thatcherite “nasty party” of the rich and selfish, they were now “compassionate Conservatives” in favour of a caring society and protecting the environment.

Truss and Kwarteng demurred. Together with other new Tory MPs they set up a new Free Enterprise Group in the Commons and wrote a pamphlet entitled Britannia Unchained, a strident manifesto of free market economics and libertarian politics. Their solutions to Britain’s economic and social problems were simple: lower taxes, lower public spending, a less interventionist state, more deregulation, fewer workers’ rights, freer enterprise. Two decades after Thatcher left office — and just three years after financial deregulation had almost crashed the global economy — it was Thatcherism on speed.

Truss became a minister in Cameron’s government in 2012, Kwarteng in Theresa May’s in 2018. Now close friends and neighbours as well as colleagues, by 2019 they sat in Boris Johnson’s cabinet together. When Johnson fell earlier this year, Truss seized her chance. Her campaign for the Conservative Party leadership, strongly backed by Kwarteng, proudly boasted of her Thatcherite philosophy. And now she had a receptive audience.

Convulsed by the arguments over Brexit, which has seen almost all senior pro-European MPs kicked out of the parliamentary party — and others on the left and centre abandoning it — the Tories have become much more ideologically narrow. Despite winning the support of fewer than a third of Tory MPs, in the final ballot of party members Truss won convincingly against the “sound money” fiscal conservative Rishi Sunak, architect of the tax rises they so despised.

Truss and Kwarteng see themselves as revolutionaries. The chancellor’s first act in his new job was to sack the chief civil servant at the Treasury, an experienced and respected figure but someone the new Tories demonised as a representative of the old regime. Truss installed as her chief economic adviser the leader of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a campaign for low taxes and deregulation. Other advisors were brought in from neoliberal think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Announcing his mini-budget in the Commons, the chancellor declared that “we are at the beginning of new era.” For he and Truss the last decade of Conservative rule has not been radical enough. “Treasury orthodoxy” had placed far too much emphasis on balancing the public accounts and reducing public debt. After the huge expenditures to support the economy through the pandemic, taxes had risen to a seventy-year high, which could only stifle enterprise and hold back growth. The state had grown too large.

In her Tory conference speech Truss declared her three economic priorities to be “growth, growth and growth.” In recent years, she declared, there had been far too much emphasis on redistribution and not enough on growing the economy. (As various commentators pointed out, this was a somewhat odd claim, given that the Conservatives had presided over stagnating wages and a huge increase in wealth inequality). And the way to get growth was to cut taxes, and to reform the economy’s supply side.

The government’s supply side reforms have not yet been spelled out in detail. But the Growth Plan indicated the general direction. “Investment zones” will be established across the country, where businesses will have lower taxes and fewer regulatory requirements. The planning system will be reformed to speed up infrastructure construction and housebuilding. The financial sector will be deregulated to make it more globally competitive. Childcare regulations limiting the number of children per worker, and environmental regulations affecting farmers, will be relaxed.

Such policies may or may not work to stimulate economic growth. The economic evidence on investment zones is weak, with most similar schemes simply poaching investment from other areas. Planning reform has been notoriously difficult, with Conservative MPs among the most vociferous opponents of new housing developments and infrastructure (such as windfarms) in their own constituencies. Financial deregulation did not go well last time round.

But the problem for the government is that, even if they are successful, none of these reforms will generate growth in the next couple of years. And while in theory tax cuts might provide a short-term boost, this will almost certainly be overwhelmed by the recessionary forces the government’s fiscal package has unleashed.

On the morning of the budget the interest rate on a typical two-year mortgage was well under 5 per cent. Now it is over 6 per cent. Hundreds of thousands of people whose fixed term deals are ending soon have been on rates between 2 and 3 per cent. So they will see their mortgage payments rise by hundreds of pounds per month, vastly outweighing the tax cut they will receive. Their disposable income will be lower next year, not higher. Many will not be able to pay at all.

Politically, this is disastrous for the Conservatives. Britain’s ten million mortgage holders, and the many young people who want to buy a first home, are among their core constituencies.

Across all polling companies, Labour’s lead has more than doubled to 23 per cent. In a general election, that would translate into a comfortable Labour majority. Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, is now seventeen points ahead of Truss as “best prime minister,” and Labour leads on every significant policy issue. Truss’s approval rating has dropped to minus 37 per cent, a fall of 28 per cent in a week.

The next general election is still two years away. But it is now almost impossible to find a political commentator who believes Liz Truss can recover from these figures after such a disastrous first month in office. Many are predicting an electoral rout worse than 1997, when Tony Blair won a landslide victory to end eighteen years of Conservative rule.

The mood among Tory MPs has become correspondingly grim. Many are now privately telling journalists that Truss will have to be got rid of. No one thinks it would look good for the Conservatives to impose a fifth prime minister on the country in six years. But the economic turmoil she has precipitated, and the polling deficit the party now faces, make anything better than this. If she doesn’t reverse course, warn some, she could be gone by Christmas.

One veteran Tory, a minister in John Major’s government in the 1990s, put it even more starkly. Without a fundamental change of direction, he said, Liz Truss would be “quite probably the last-ever Tory prime minister.” •

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In the leadership election, held among the OECD’s thirty-seven member states, Cormann beat the Swedish former EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström, a centrist liberal. Campaigning for the job, Australia’s longest-serving finance minister made a point of toning down his economic opinions and record, particularly on climate change. Challenged by environmental organisations, he insisted that he was in favour of “an inclusive and future-focused recovery, including a green recovery” and “accelerating the transition to a lower emissions future.” Commentators assumed that in his new position, accountable to the wide range of economic policy views held by the OECD’s member governments, he would operate with a more plural and open economic outlook.

But recent events suggest that Cormann’s free-market instincts remain intact. Among his early reforms is a move to effectively shut down one of the OECD’s most innovative programs, the New Approaches to Economic Challenges, or NAEC, initiative.

NAEC was established in 2012 by the previous secretary-general, former foreign and finance minister of Mexico Angel Gurria, as a way of bringing new thinking into the institution after the global financial crisis. Gurria’s view, shared by many leading economists, was that orthodox economic thinking had helped precipitate the 2008 crash, and new economic ideas were required to get the world out of it. NAEC was to help the OECD lead that process.

The OECD has never been a source of what you might call radical economic thinking. Throughout its sixty-year history it has more or less dutifully followed the consensus of mainstream economics and economic policy. Originally broadly Keynesian, in line with the approach adopted by almost all developed economies in the 1960s and early 70s, it took the same free-market turn as they did in the late 1970s and 80s.

Often described as “neoliberalism” or the “Washington consensus,” the policy approach originally championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — and then copied around the world — was based on the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. They saw “free” (relatively unregulated) markets as not just the best means of generating economic prosperity but also the guarantor of political liberty.

Neoliberals wanted a smaller state, with lower taxes, privatisation of nationalised industries and public services, less government regulation and greater freedom for enterprise, unencumbered by trade unions. The OECD joined its fellow international economic institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in proffering such policy advice to governments throughout the 1980s and 90s.

For its critics, neoliberalism achieved its apotheosis in 2008, when the “efficient markets theory” — the idea that well-informed financial markets would always generate optimal outcomes — took something of a beating. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and neoliberal high priest, famously admitted to Congress that the theory had a “flaw.”

Yet neoliberal policy prescriptions had not yet been exhausted. Reacting to the global economic slump and the huge increase in government borrowing to which bank bailouts had led, many governments opted for “austerity,” slashing public expenditure and raising taxes in order to balance the books and reduce public debt. With interest rates reduced to near zero, central banks flooded the financial sector with printed money under a program of “quantitative easing.”

It was what the neoliberals had prescribed; but it merely succeeded — as the Keynesians predicted — in slowing economic recoveries and exacerbating wealth inequality, as asset values inflated far above wages.

In 2010–12 the OECD took the neoliberal position, praising Greece’s austerity program, which almost brought the country to its knees, and prioritising deficit reduction and public spending cuts in its advice to governments. As the decade developed, along with mainstream economists everywhere, the OECD puzzled over stagnant productivity, and why economic growth remained so weak for so long. It began to worry about rising inequality but struggled to relate this to quantitative easing and over-flexible labour markets. It did advocate taxing carbon to tackle climate change, but such taxes were never high enough to make a significant dent in emissions.

It was in this intellectual and policy context that Gurria launched NAEC. He was not sure precisely what those “new approaches” should be, but he knew that something better was required. The OECD’s member states agreed, providing the new program with a small but significant budget and encouraging its outreach to some of the world’s leading economists.

The result has been a decade of fruitful research, analysis and events, seeking to bring new economic thinking not just to the OECD’s own policy departments but also to the wider international community. Economists contributing to NAEC’s seminars, conferences and publications have included Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz, Esther Duflo, James Heckman, Angus Deaton and Robert Shiller, along with other world-leading figures such as Mariana Mazzucato, Thomas Piketty and Adam Tooze.

NAEC has focused on some of the key problems facing the world in the post-crash period, including reform of the financial sector, climate change and economic resilience after Covid. It has brought the relatively new field of complexity economics — which sees the economy as a complex, adaptive system rather than a self-balancing mechanism — to mainstream policymakers, and explored whether policymakers should now be seeking to go “beyond economic growth” to achieve environmental sustainability, reduced inequality and greater wellbeing.

NAEC has not fundamentally changed the OECD’s economic approach. The Paris-based institution employs hundreds of economists whose views were not going to change overnight, and most of its member governments wish to continue following largely orthodox economic prescriptions. But as Gurria wanted, it has provided a space for new thinking to be developed and debated, and some of this has been taken up both within the OECD and beyond it.

Cormann, it appears, is not impressed. He has reduced NAEC to a series of internal seminars for country delegates, ending its association with external economists and policymakers. In May he ordered a NAEC seminar on globalisation featuring a senior US senator and government official to be cancelled at the last minute. As a result of these changes, donors to the program have threatened to withdraw their support.

Now a group of twenty-six economists who have spoken at NAEC events have written an open letter to Cormann expressing their alarm at its demise. Including Stiglitz, Mazzucato and Tooze, the group originally wrote privately to Cormann in January praising NAEC’s work and asking him to maintain it. Cormann didn’t reply, and so the group has gone public with its concern.

In their letter the group notes that new forms of economic analysis and policy are needed more than ever, given the multiple crises currently facing the world. Many OECD countries are now heading for a period of “stagflation” — simultaneous inflation and recession — while many low-income ones are about to run into another debt crisis. What the economists call the “existential” challenge of climate change needs to be confronted urgently. In these circumstances, they say, it is important that an organisation providing advice to governments, like the OECD, “is at the forefront, not just of the present orthodoxy, but of competing views, theoretical frameworks and policy approaches.”

Throughout the history of economics and economic policy, the economists note, orthodox economic frameworks and policies have often been superseded as the empirical evidence changes and rival theories come to be more convincing. “This to and fro between received economic ideas and new ones is an important part of how intellectual and practical progress is made,” they argue. So it is not just the OECD, they conclude, but the wider international economic policy community that would benefit from NAEC continuing. They end their letter by offering to help Cormann and his staff in developing a new work program for NAEC.

No response has been received so far from Cormann or the OECD. •

Former senior OECD official Kumiharu Shigehara responds to Michael Jacobs’s observations about the OECD orthodoxy in the 1980s and 90s:

It is not true to say that the OECD’s advice followed that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank throughout the 1990s, at least when I was OECD chief economist from May 1992 to May 1997 and a deputy secretary-general from May 1997 to the autumn of 1999. I strengthened the OECD Economics Department’s work on inequality and, unlike the IMF and the World Bank, I spoke against too hasty liberalisation of international capital movements in emerging market economies, at an IMF seminar chaired by Michel Camdessus, then IMF managing director, and more openly at a number of other international gatherings and conferences.

My recollection is supported by an article, “Don’t Blame the Victims of Asia’s Crisis,” by Anthony Rowley, a reporter for the Business Times in Singapore, who wrote: “It is instructive that a Japanese national [Mr Shigehara] writing from Paris [the OECD offices in Europe] should be able to analyse the situation with such clarity. It seems that the ideological miasma in which Washington-based institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have become entrapped, by virtue of their proximity, to the US administration and Congress, render such clear thinking impossible on their part. They dare not blame the system of unthinking trade, investment and capital market liberalisation to which they have co-opted, so they blame its victims.”

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Truss’s decisive victory over her opponent Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the exchequer, in the ballot of Tory Party members was by no means guaranteed at the beginning of the two-month leadership campaign. When Boris Johnson’s serial cronyism, misconduct and untruth-telling finally led to his ouster as Tory leader (and therefore prime minister) in early July, Sunak appeared his likely successor. He came out ahead in the initial series of votes among Tory MPs to identify the top two leadership candidates to be put to the wider membership. Truss was supported by less than a third of her own colleagues.

But over recent years the Conservative Party at large has changed. Once a broad church stretching from centrist “One Nation” Tories to ideological free marketeers, the party’s membership has narrowed since Brexit. With those who voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum now dominant, many of its pro-European moderates have quit the party altogether. The desire to leave the EU was driven partly by anti-immigration sentiment and partly by a patriotic nostalgia for Britain’s free-trading past. But leaving was also seen as a means of liberating the economy from the alleged constraints of EU law and red tape.

Above all, for many in the party, Brexit’s purpose was to restore the small state, deregulatory agenda championed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Vigorously encouraged by the still highly influential newspapers the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, the party has consequently shifted decisively to the right. And Liz Truss understood this much better than Sunak.

Truss’s campaign emphasised her Thatcherite views from the outset. Her central message was that she would cut taxes: income tax, corporation tax and possibly even the value-added tax (Britain’s GST). Never mind the impact on public finances, with debt already at 100 per cent of GDP, post-Covid health spending rising sharply, and Truss herself promising to increase the defence budget following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tory mythology remembers Margaret Thatcher as a great tax-cutter, and so Truss made this the centrepiece of her appeal to the party membership.

(Critics pointed out that Margaret Thatcher actually raised taxes in her first term of office to help reduce inflation, and only cut them when the public finances were in better shape. But this unwelcome fact failed to dent Truss’s appeal.)

For Truss — though for very few economists — cutting taxes and deregulating markets is the way to stimulate growth in the underperforming UK economy. Challenged about her proposed income tax cuts (via national insurance rates), which will give the richest ten per cent of the population an average benefit of £1800 (A$3050) a year and the poorest ten per cent less than £8, she described them as “fair,” arguing that growth was more important than distribution.

At the same time she has promised to scrap all Britain’s remaining EU-based laws by the end of 2023, including a swathe of employment, environmental and consumer protections. She proposes new low-tax and low-regulation “investment zones” to attract overseas finance. And, just in case this were not enough to ensure support among the Tory grassroots, she has promised to bring back selective grammar schools and scrap local house-building targets.

Liz Truss was not always a Thatcherite. Indeed, she was not originally a Tory at all. Born in 1975 to left-wing parents — her father was a professor of mathematics, her mother a nurse and teacher — Truss was an active Liberal Democrat as a student at Oxford. (One of the more entertaining features of the campaign has been footage of Truss at the Lib Dem national conference in 1994 proposing the abolition of the monarchy.) But two years later she joined the Conservatives, beginning her shift to the right.

After entering parliament in 2010, she founded the Free Enterprise Group of MPs, and co-wrote a right-wing manifesto entitled Britannia Unchained. Arguing for deregulation and lower taxes, the pamphlet notoriously described British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world.”

After a number of junior ministerial positions, Truss was appointed to David Cameron’s coalition cabinet as environment secretary in 2014. There, she became known primarily for a bizarre speech to the Conservative Party conference in which she criticised as “a disgrace” the fact that Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese. She campaigned for Remain in the 2016 EU referendum but changed her mind swiftly after the result, becoming a vociferous Brexit advocate.

As Boris Johnson’s international trade secretary Truss trumpeted her negotiation of a number of post-Brexit trade deals. Observers noted that most of these simply rolled over existing EU agreements. Her 2021 UK–Australia trade agreement, meanwhile, was widely criticised for giving Australian farmers greater access to the UK market without any reciprocal benefits for their British counterparts. Subsequently promoted to foreign secretary, Truss was frequently ridiculed in the media for carefully managed photo opportunities in which she appeared to be imitating Margaret Thatcher.

Truss’s performance as a minister didn’t commend her to many of her colleagues. As one put it recently, “her ambition is, undoubtedly, considerably greater than her ability.” Another branded her “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament.” But her loyalty to Boris Johnson — backing him to the end, even as many of his cabinet (including Sunak) abandoned him — made up for that among party members, a majority of whom still don’t believe Johnson should have been deposed. And during the leadership campaign her ideological fervour won her the critical support of the party’s new right.

This is perhaps the most striking feature of Truss’s victory. Her campaign was backed both by supporters of Boris Johnson and by the party’s ideological vanguard. The latter are the same MPs who pursued the hardest form of Brexit and got rid of former prime minister Theresa May when she would not deliver it. During Covid they organised a libertarian resistance to lockdowns. Today their new target is climate change policy, which they see as a left-wing cause requiring excessive state intervention in the economy.

And they have already influenced Truss. Faced with Europe’s overdependence on Russian gas, which has seen its price skyrocket, Truss has come out not for more renewable energy but for a big expansion of domestic oil and gas drilling, including fracking. Leaving aside its impact on global warming, new oil and gas would take more than a decade to come onstream, far longer than an expansion of wind and solar power. For the party’s new right, though, climate change is a “culture war” issue that divides older Conservative voters from young metropolitan graduates, and being pro–fossil fuels is part of the strategy. Next in their sights is the repeal of Britain’s target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

Liz Truss therefore starts her term as prime minister with a well-prepared agenda. Her only problem is that very little of it bears any relationship to the crisis in which the country finds itself.

Next month Britons will see their energy bills rise by 80 per cent as the persistently high price of gas on global markets feeds through to customers. Following earlier price hikes, this will raise the cost of energy to consumers to three times what it was just a year ago. And this process has not ended. Under Britain’s regulatory regime, energy prices are due to rise again over the next six months, with independent forecasters predicting that by next April prices will reach almost 600 per cent of their level a year ago.

The impact on British households can hardly be exaggerated. Next month’s increase will take a typical household’s energy bill to £3500 a year. With the UK median income standing at just over £31,000, that will mean half of all households paying over 10 per cent of their income on energy, which is the official definition of “fuel poverty.” Around four million of the poorest households, including many pensioners and families, will see their energy bills rise to almost half of their disposable income.

Poverty campaigners warn that the inevitable result of these rises will be destitution, with households unable to heat their homes during the winter or children going without food (or both). Many elderly people are predicted to die of cold-related disease. The country’s most famous consumer champion, Martin Lewis, has described the situation as a “catastrophe.” It is widely expected that many households will be unable or will simply refuse to pay. Police forces are reportedly making plans to deal with civil unrest.

Over the past six months Boris Johnson’s government has provided some help to households to cope with rising bills, including a £400 payment to all, and up to £1200 targeted at those on the lowest incomes. But this was before the latest increases were announced, and the government is now under heavy pressure to do more. During her leadership campaign, though, Liz Truss insisted that her proposed tax cuts would be sufficient, and rejected the idea of further “handouts” to consumers.

Described as “a holiday from reality” by a senior Tory during the campaign, this position is not expected to survive contact with the real world once Truss is in Downing Street. Since income tax cuts will do nothing to support the poorest households, whose incomes are too low to pay the tax at all, it is clear they will not prove a publicly acceptable solution.

The Labour Party has argued that the new energy price increase should be scrapped altogether, with government picking up the tab for the costs. This would be partially paid for by a higher windfall tax on oil and gas companies, whose profits have soared during the crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its approach is hugely popular, including 85 per cent support among Conservative voters.

It is therefore now widely expected that Truss will abandon her campaign stance and provide further help to households. A version of Labour’s approach is considered likely, with energy prices ordered to be frozen. The policy will be paid for by a mixture of public spending and a long-term financing scheme in which consumers will pay gradually for higher bills over a period of ten years or more. The government outlays will blow a further hole in the government’s budget. Truss’s team has already hinted that other areas of public spending will have to be cut, and — in a major reversal of previous Tory orthodoxy — public borrowing will need to rise substantially.

Will this spending be enough to give Liz Truss the kind of voter honeymoon usually granted to new prime ministers? Few observers think so. Having focused her leadership campaign entirely on policies designed to please Conservative Party members, Truss has said very little about other aspects of the immediate economic crisis Britain faces. With inflation running at more than 10 per cent and still rising, Britain is in the middle of a wave of strikes as workers across the economy seek to prevent further cuts in their real incomes. The Trades Union Congress has even mooted the idea of a general strike.

Meanwhile, soaring energy bills are likely to lead to a wave of company failures over the coming months: one study suggests that as many as 70 per cent of British pubs could be forced out of business. The Bank of England forecasts that Britain is about to enter a recession that will last the whole of 2023.

Liz Truss enters Downing Street with the Conservatives 9 per cent behind Labour in opinion polls. Translated into parliamentary seats, this would make Labour the next government, though not with an absolute majority. The two years before the next general election would be extremely difficult for the most gifted politician. Truss’s leadership campaign, conducted largely in a parallel universe, has left even her own supporters anxious. •

The post Who is Liz Truss — and why? appeared first on Inside Story.

Countries had to dismount from plenty of high horses in the last few days of the conference. As negotiators sought a final agreement, many nations’ red lines were crossed in the interests of compromise. But the conference ended in high drama when India stubbornly refused to get off its particular steed.

The issue was coal. Every other country had accepted a line in the final agreement calling for “the phasing-out of unabated coal” (that is, coal used without carbon capture and storage technology). But India — supported by China — would not. Even after the conference had to be adjourned because of its refusal, and after delegates were called back two hours later assuming a deal had been done, India objected again, proposing a further amendment to the now-completed text. “Phasing-out,” India said, should be replaced by “phasing-down.” The British chair of the conference, Alok Sharma, choked back tears as he apologised for the failure of the process, to much sympathy from delegates.

India’s and China’s late obstructionism highlighted both the power and limitations of these UN climate conferences. On the one hand, the largest and fifth-largest economies in the world cared enough about the precise wording of the agreement to face down the anger of 194 other nations. Other countries didn’t like many things in the text either, but had accepted them in the spirit of compromise required to reach agreement. On the other, it will make practically no difference to anything that happens in the real world beyond the conference hall. Though Greenpeace and other climate campaigners hailed the first-ever mention of getting rid of fossil fuels in a COP decision, the words are entirely symbolic. Without a date by when it must be done, neither “phasing-out” nor “phasing-down” have much practical meaning.

Part of the reason we know that it was only symbolic was that Australia had accepted “phasing-out” even though the government in Canberra has no plans to end coal use or exports at all. Poland and South Korea, two other coal-dependent nations, have agreed to a phase-out, but not till 2049. In practice, all five countries will have to end their use of coal well before that date if the Paris goal of limiting global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial times is to be achieved.

The 1.5°C limit was in fact not the principal Paris goal, which was “well below 2°C.” But the small island states in the Pacific, Caribbean and elsewhere most existentially threatened by climate change — some of the lowest-lying will not survive rising sea levels at all — have succeeded in making 1.5°C the new benchmark of tolerable warming.

Remarkably, the conference didn’t just accept the new goal. It also acknowledged that countries’ current plans to reduce emissions would not go anywhere near meeting it, and agreed to come back next year with stronger plans aimed at doing so.

On this criterion alone COP26 should probably be regarded as a relative success. Given the pre-conference hype about Glasgow being “the last chance to save the planet,” many in the public might have been forgiven for expecting countries to announce new and stronger commitments during the conference. But that was never going to happen. They came to the meeting with emissions reduction targets decided — in many cases with great difficulty — in their domestic political systems. This is why the Paris agreement calls them “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs. Countries had neither the desire nor the mandate to raise their ambition levels during this fortnight, and the possibility of doing so was not even on the agenda.

So the most this conference could ever do was to acknowledge that the global reduction in emissions was nowhere near enough to put the world on a path to limiting heating to 1.5°C; and to resolve to reconvene as soon as practically possible with stronger commitments. Which is precisely what it did.

The numbers presented were stark. If implemented, current national pledges up to 2030 would lead to average global heating of 2.4°C. At those temperatures the oceans would be stripped of all coral reefs, many land species would become extinct, major regions would lose their water supplies, and productive agriculture would become untenable in many countries. Revisiting and strengthening NDCs is crucial if such a projected temperature rise is to be averted.

The other big issue of COP26 was finance: specifically, money provided by the rich nations to the poorer ones to help them tackle climate change. For a long time the most vulnerable countries have been angry that most of the money provided so far has been for “mitigation” (emissions reduction in those countries) and has taken the form of loans. Their emissions are too small to matter much, but they are already suffering severe effects as the climate changes. So they wanted more money directed towards adaptation, and as grants rather than loans.

They won some of this. Developed countries agreed to “at least double” their finance for adaptation (which could take it to 40–50 per cent of total financial flows) and the World Bank has been told to increase its overall funding to vulnerable countries.

But developed countries resisted the demand that they make up for their failure to hit the goal of US$100 billion in financing by 2020 — first promised over a decade ago — by providing more in 2024 and 2025. Instead the text sticks to US$100 billion a year. A new process will be established to define how much wealthy countries should pay after 2025.

It was the issue of “loss and damage,” however, that provoked the most anger — and the greatest resistance. This is the idea that rich countries should compensate poor ones for the economic and human costs caused by the former’s emissions. The idea of compensation for loss and damage represents a vital principle for the global South, one that lies at the heart of the idea of “climate justice.” Climate change is the result of the two-centuries-old economic development process that has made rich countries rich. But its most damaging effects are being experienced by the countries that contributed least to causing it — and it is making them poorer.

In climate negotiations the developed world has always fiercely resisted the idea of compensation. They fear it is a slippery slope. Accept liability for causing climate harm and before long they will find themselves in the international court, required to pay out trillions of dollars to every developing nation.

This clash of interests was never going to end harmoniously at COP26. The least developed nations and small island states demanded a new financing facility for loss and damage — with no sums or liabilities mentioned. But the United States, the European Union and other developed nations were determined not to concede. The final text called merely for a “dialogue” to discuss “arrangements.” The island nations vowed to return next year with the same demand.

So, two weeks of intense wrangling, with a leaders’ summit thrown in, ended in a nine-page main document primarily notable for asking countries to do it again next year at COP27 (to be held in the somewhat warmer location of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt). It’s easy to see why the whole process attracted so much hostile comment. Did the Glasgow jamboree actually achieve more by way of reducing emissions than it caused, in bringing 25,000 people together from across the world to merely talk about climate change? Haven’t greenhouse gas emissions risen continuously throughout the thirty years in which these annual UN climate chinwags have taken place?

Cynicism is understandable. But the right question to ask is not whether emissions have fallen since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was first signed in 1992. It is what would have happened if there had been no international treaties, and no talks.

We have an answer to this. Before COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, projected that if emissions continued on their “business as usual” path, the average global surface temperature would likely rise 4–6°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Prior to COP21 in Paris in 2015, the projected temperature rise had been reduced to around 3–5°C. In 2018, it was around 3°C. If the “nationally determined contributions” presented in Glasgow are implemented, the projected likely temperature rise is 2.4°C.

So it is not true (as Greta Thunberg is wont to say) that nothing is being done. Almost all countries have either reduced their absolute emissions (in the developed world) or slowed their rise (in the emerging economies). Not by enough, as the IPCC makes clear. But this is not a record of complete inaction.

Has this anything to do with climate negotiations? Yes. The reason we have an international climate treaty and big global “moments” like COP26 is that they internationalise what would otherwise be national policy responses to a global problem.

Climate change can only be tackled if all countries reduce their emissions. The largest single emitter, China, contributes 31 per cent of the global total; the United States 14 per cent, India 7 per cent, Russia 5 per cent. No other country’s share is above 3 per cent. Global emissions can only be reduced if every country plays its part, but if it were left to every country to act on its own, most would surely not. It would be too easy for each to say, “Our emissions are too small to make a difference; how do we know anyone else is acting?”

But it is also a problem of political circumstances. There are few countries in which climate change is a major political issue, with powerful interests favouring action. Left to themselves, most governments would no doubt do something, some time; but it is highly unlikely that this would be coordinated with every other country’s domestic political timetable.

By forcing all countries to act simultaneously, not just when it is domestically propitious to do so, the UN climate process has created much larger collective action. And in doing so it has built global scale for emissions-reducing technologies. It is no coincidence that the cost of solar power has fallen around 90 per cent since Copenhagen in 2009, and wind power up to 70 per cent. That has happened because all larger countries have introduced renewable energy policies in response to UN climate agreements (even the apparently “failed” one in Copenhagen), and the resulting scale and innovation have slashed costs. The same effect has led to the rapid and continuing fall in the price of electric vehicles and batteries since Paris in 2015.

And, of course, the declining cost of decarbonisation means that more of it can be done. It is a virtuous circle. International agreements lead to near-universal national action, which creates global markets for green technologies, which reduces costs and incentivises innovation, which allows stronger targets to be adopted next time round.

Given the requirement in the Glasgow agreement that every major country produce new 2030 commitments by COP27 next year, attention will now turn back to domestic politics. It won’t be easy for any country, barring a few with very weak plans (such as Australia), to find ways of cutting their emissions further than they have already decided. New policies and new public investment funding will be required, whether in renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, industrial emissions, or research and development into green technologies.

Can it be done? Technically and economically, yes. But politically, for many countries, it will be mighty hard. The Glasgow agreement acknowledges the need to support a “just transition” — the creation of alternative jobs and incomes for the workers and communities of high-carbon industries — but it will still be difficult to overcome the power of incumbent interests. The fossil fuel sector will defend itself vigorously for some time yet.

And yet, taking the longer view, Glasgow did feel like a turning point. Never at a COP has there been such a recognition of the injustice faced by poorer countries as a result of a problem caused by rich ones. Never have leaders been confronted so directly with the evidence of their failure. Never have they admitted that failure, and agreed to have another go. China and India’s pyrrhic victory in the dying minutes of the conference may have given heart to all those still wedded to coal. But for the rest of the world it looked like the beginning of the end for the age of fossil fuels. •

The post Glasgow kiss appeared first on Inside Story.

Colourful and noisy, the Glasgow demonstrators waved a diverse range of banners and placards. But one seemed to dominate. “Make it a fair COP!” said the bright yellow hearts waving above the marchers’ heads. “Climate justice now!” It expressed the marked shift within the climate movement over the last few years, in Britain and elsewhere. This cause is no longer just about protecting future generations from the likely ravages of a warming planet. It is about defending the poorest peoples of the world from the devastating impacts they are experiencing right now.

After all, the idea of “climate justice” expresses a profound truth. Climate change has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels over two centuries in the richest countries of the world. It is indeed what has made them rich. But it is wreaking its greatest damage on the poorest countries and people; indeed, it is making many of them very much poorer.

I walked for a while alongside a group wearing brightly coloured national costumes. They came from some of the low-lying Pacific islands that will cease to exist if sea levels rise as currently predicted. Walking with them was Tishiko King, a Torres Strait Islander and campaigns director of the Australian youth environmental organisation Seed Mob. She was there, she said, to stand shoulder to shoulder with First Nations across the world fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples. “Too often our voices are missing when decisions are being made that impact our future,” she told me. “So if world leaders won’t hear us in the conference, we’ll make sure they’ll hear us on the streets!”

Nearby another Australian, Caroline Sherwood, held a homemade banner depicting Scott Morrison with his head in the sand in front of a massive coalmine. The Sydneysider said she was ashamed of her government. “Their plan to meet net zero by 2050 is nothing more than a public relations exercise: it has no substance,” she told me. Almost everyone I spoke to, wherever they were from, expressed similar shame or disappointment. They all noted the gap between politicians’ rhetoric and what they themselves saw happening.

At the “Fridays for Future” march the previous day, though, the mood had been different. This was the demonstration by the young people galvanised by Greta Thunberg’s weekly “school strikes” — around 20,000 of them — and they, like Thunberg, were angry. Though COP26 was only halfway through, Thunberg told the crowd, it was already a failure. The politicians were all talk and no action. It’s just “blah blah blah,” she said, repeating the catchphrase that has reverberated around the global media this past week.

To the young people I spoke to, almost all of them under twenty-five, climate change feels like an existential threat. One banner put it simply: “You’re stealing my future!” At a personal level, the prospect of living in an unstable world of frequent natural catastrophes and geopolitical conflict fills many with deep anxiety. A recent Pew poll of 10,000 young people in ten countries found nearly half admitting to climate-induced feelings of distress that affected their daily lives. Almost four in ten said they were not sure if they would want to bring children into such a world.

At a political level, the young people’s concerns are much more directed. They are angry with their parents’ generation. It is those born before 1970 — as several of my interviewees made pointedly clear to me (born 1960) — who have failed to act on climate change over the past quarter century. And it is they, the millennials and “generation Z,” who will suffer from our self-indulgent and selfish lifestyles.

And many of them are angry at capitalism too. This was a powerful thread running through the assembled slogans. “Systems change not climate change!” said one banner. “Uproot the system!” demanded another. And a third: “Environmentalism without socialism is just gardening.”

Wit aside, this was no throwaway rhetoric. These young climate activists offer a powerful critique. Capitalism has caused this emergency. So only getting rid of capitalism can solve it. It’s an argument fed by some serious scholars and bestselling writers. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, the Canadian author Naomi Klein argues that the modern capitalist economy, run by huge corporations and financial interests, and feeding on mass high-carbon consumption, cannot reverse its core dynamic of material growth and human exploitation. Only economic transformation, based on the principles of ecological sustainability and social justice, can do that.

The core demand of the radical climate movement is for a “green new deal”: a thoroughgoing program of public investment in reducing emissions and restoring nature, combined with new rights and higher wages for workers and oppressed minorities, and constraints on financial capital. Its most famous champions are Klein — whose most recent book sets out the case — and the young US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram attest to the power of her inspirational rhetoric (as well as her effective interventions in the US Congress). Thousands of young people have become local and national activists for a “GND” in America, Britain, and elsewhere across the world.

Listening to young people articulating these arguments it would be easy to dismiss them as the usual activist minority. But the Pew poll should make politicians ponder. Around 65 per cent of those surveyed around the world felt governments were failing young people. These are voters (or in some cases soon will be) and it is pretty clear that climate change will determine how many of them vote.

They have already shaken up the environmental movement. Only a few years ago that movement was led by the “big logos” — Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the like. Today the running is made by young climate strikers, direct action groups blocking roads and chaining themselves to bulldozers, and students forcing their universities to divest from fossil fuels. It’s Greta Thunberg whom the media now turn to first. Here at COP the dominant civil society voices are groups from the global South rather than their Western counterparts. The new political power of radical and predominantly youth-led climate activism is everywhere apparent.

And yet there is something paradoxical about this too. Because looking at the climate science — and there is also plenty of that on show in Glasgow — it is the urgency of the required action that presses most strongly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 45 per cent by 2030, en route to net zero by around 2060. It is difficult to imagine capitalism being overthrown in that kind of time. In practice, capitalism will have to solve the climate problem, or it will not be solved.

There are plenty of capitalists here who will tell you that this can be done. Companies with climate solutions are out in force: hundreds of them boasting of their new and cheaper green technology, their expert financial and consultancy services, their innovative new product just waiting for some government policy to make it profitable.

Their business rivals are here too, of course. Global Witness has enterprisingly counted the number of representatives from the fossil fuel sector registered for the conference and noted that, at over 500, it is more than any country has brought. Most of these companies are claiming to be turning green (if gradually), but few observers are very convinced. A recent report by the UN Environment Programme found that current plans for oil and gas drilling and coalmining globally amount to twice the level that would be allowable under a scenario in which global heating were limited to the COP26 goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.

Can capitalism be greened? It is the question that underpins the entire conference, though it won’t be mentioned in the negotiating rooms and is too provocative for most of the fringe meetings. The answer in practice is likely to have two parts.

First, it won’t be greened by itself. Almost all the progress in environmental technologies and consumption patterns over the past thirty years has come about as a result of government policies. Energy efficiency standards, pollution regulations, renewable energy mandates, conservation orders, product bans, green taxes, emissions trading schemes, research and development subsidies: it is the panoply of state interventions in markets that have driven such progress as we have had. And it is much more far-reaching interventions that will be needed if fossil fuels are to be squeezed out of the global economy and investment in green solutions increased to the levels required. There might even be some people who would question whether an economy subject to such intervention should still be called entirely “capitalist.”

Second, this will be a continuous battle, for every policy put forward will be opposed by an incumbent interest. The fossil fuel representatives gathered in Glasgow are as nothing next to the number of their lobbyists who are being deployed in national legislatures. The banks and pension funds will carry on financing them until they are legally prevented from doing so. For every politician with green voters to satisfy there will be another — often the same one — with local high-carbon jobs at risk and consumers complaining about higher prices.

In this field of political conflict — one that will inevitably dominate the next decade — it matters that there are people on the streets and young people who are angry, for the demonstrators in Glasgow and elsewhere across the world are setting the terms of the debate. Climate justice, fairness for future generations, net zero, 1.5°C, a green new deal, green capitalism and anti-capitalism: we are only going to hear more of this argument. For those seeking to understand what the political and economic future might look like, this will surely be it. •

The post “System change, not climate change!” appeared first on Inside Story.

The case for pessimism was made eloquently — if perhaps unintentionally — by Sir David Attenborough in a powerful address to the Leaders’ Summit that opened the conference on Monday. Tracing the precipitous rise in the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere over the past hundred years, the ninety-five-year-old naturalist reached a simple conclusion: “We are already in trouble.”

The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, was even more brutal in her speech in response. The developed world had failed to meet its promises to cut emissions and provide financial assistance to the poorest countries. The cost, she said, would be measured in lives, and in livelihoods. “It is immoral, and it is unjust.”

Both Attenborough and Mottley insisted humanity can still turn things around. But listening to the rhetoric of the 119 leaders whose speeches filled the next two days — all of them stressing how much their countries were doing, despite most of the facts showing otherwise — it was hard for the rational brain not to feel overwhelmed by pessimism.

The facts are pretty simple. To have a reasonable chance of limiting global heating to the UN goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times, global emissions need to be cut by 45 per cent by 2030. On current trends they will rise by 16 per cent.

And yet COP26 is strangely a place of extraordinary optimism. This is mainly a function of its structure. Most of the 25,000 attendees aren’t country negotiators here for the UN climate talks, who probably number around 2500. The rest are people who work professionally on climate change, for businesses, charities and activist groups, universities, city and regional governments, and myriad others. They are here not to negotiate but to sell their wares, meet their international colleagues and network tirelessly.

For a COP is never just — or even mainly — a UN negotiating meeting. It is the world’s annual global climate expo and conference. And almost everyone who comes has a positive story to tell about how they are tackling climate change in some way. For some reason the climate sceptics and the opponents of climate action don’t seem to regard themselves as welcome, and they don’t show up.

So walk among the country and business “pavilions” in the middle of the conference centre — a slightly grandiose name for a series of pop-up stalls and exhibits — and the good news is relentless. Every country is doing so much to tackle the problem, from renewable energy to flood defences, sustainable transport to overseas aid. Every business is committed to “net zero,” engaging its eager workforce in meeting the goal. Every technology company has a world-leading solution, from green hydrogen to drought-resistant crops.

And every hour of the day all the side rooms are full, hosting hundreds of fringe meetings on every possible aspect of climate change. And here too the mood is powerfully feel-good. Of course most of them start with speakers recounting how dire the climate situation is. But they quickly move on to what can be done to tackle it; indeed what their organisation is already doing, in partnership with local communities and local businesses, supported by benevolent financiers and researched by concerned academics. The poorest people in the world may be suffering from severe climate impacts, but a lot of people claim to be helping them.

Observing all this it is easy to be cynical. But it’s also hard not to be affected. It can only be a good thing that a global climate industry of this scale and variety exists. There will surely be no solutions without it. And it has contributed to the remarkably upbeat mood of the official COP proceedings in the first few days.

The negotiations themselves have barely started. An agenda was agreed on the first day — you might think that this would be routine, but plenty of seasoned negotiators saw it as something of a triumph — and the committees and working groups on key issues have held their opening sessions. But most of the attention has been taken up by a series of side agreements carefully choreographed by the British hosts. And the extent and ambition of these have taken many by surprise.

The first was on deforestation. A new pact was announced between more than a hundred governments, representing over 85 per cent of the world’s forests and including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, pledging to halt and then reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030. Donor countries would give US$12 billion for forest protection and restoration; many of the countries, companies and financial institutions most involved in trading forest products, including timber, pulp and palm oil, would eliminate deforested areas from their supply chains.

After forests, methane. US president Joe Biden announced that ninety countries had agreed together to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade. Methane, produced from agriculture, oil and gas, and landfill sites, is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide: if fully implemented, the pledge could limit global heating by about 0.2°C by 2050.

Green technologies were next in the spotlight. Forty countries, including the United States, China, India, the European Union, Britain and Australia, signed up to a “Breakthrough Agenda” to coordinate the global introduction of clean technologies, starting with zero-carbon electricity, electric vehicles, green steel, hydrogen and sustainable farming. The governments said they would align standards and coordinate investments to scale and speed up production. The aim is to bring forward the tipping point at which green technologies are more affordable and available than fossil-fuelled alternatives.

Then it was the turn of finance. Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and Britain’s climate finance envoy, announced that financial institutions holding US$130 trillion of assets under management had committed to hitting net zero emissions targets by 2050. Including more than 450 banks, insurers and asset managers across forty-five countries, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero said it could deliver as much as US$100 trillion of financing to help economies decarbonise over the next three decades.

Not everyone applauded all this. Observers noted that a very similar agreement on forests had been announced at the UN Climate Summit in 2014. Nothing much had happened since then; would this time really be any different? It was pointed out that China, one of the world’s largest sources of methane, had not joined the new agreement. Several other green technology initiatives over the last ten years, including a “Mission 2020” platform announced with great fanfare in Paris six years ago, had proved disappointing.

The finance announcements attracted the most criticism. Non-government organisations quickly pointed out that the financial institutions were not promising that all the financing would be focused on environmentally friendly companies. Many of the banks and pension funds would only be greening a small proportion of their portfolios while happily continuing to invest in fossil fuels. The “net zero” commitments of the firms whose shares they owned were in many cases pretty dubious, resting on “offsetting” mechanisms (such as buying trees in developing countries) that can’t be guaranteed to have any effect.

And yet these agreements can’t be wholly dismissed. Many involved a large number of countries that had not previously signed up to such pledges; and most came with a lot more money — both public and private — than previous attempts. A specific agreement between South Africa, the United States and several European countries to help South Africa move away from coal particularly impressed observers: it included both significant policy reform and serious financial support.

These side agreements have a slightly strange relationship to the main negotiations. Formally, they have nothing to do with them: they do not involve the universal participation of the 197 parties to the UNFCCC (the Framework Convention that governs the talks) but rather are “coalitions of the willing.” Most of them involve private sector partners that have no formal place in the UNFCCC.

Yet in another sense they are clearly part of the process of cutting global emissions and increasing climate-related finance, which are the two main goals of COP26. Indeed, they are rather more concrete manifestations of this than anything negotiated in the conference hall. So the British government is trying to find a way of bringing them into the final COP agreement. In particular it wants to show how these agreements will help close the emissions gap between the 1.5°C trajectory demanded by the science and the current total of country pledges. Initial analysis has been uncertain: it’s possible that these sector-specific emissions reductions will be the means by which the “nationally determined contributions” of the participating countries will be achieved. Or it could be that they will enable those contributions to be exceeded.

And the nationally determined contributions themselves have also received a welcome boost in the first few days. China and India were the only two major countries who came to the COP without having announced new commitments for 2030. When it did come, China’s statement added nothing to what it had already pledged. Coupled with president Xi Jinping’s non-appearance at the Leaders’ Summit, it has made many observers question China’s current stance: a country that once prided itself on being the champion of the developing world is appearing to absent itself from this crucial moment.

India, by contrast, announced a much more ambitious contribution than anticipated. Speaking in his leader’s slot, prime minister Narendra Modi declared that India would commit to net zero emissions by 2070, and half of its electricity production from renewables by 2030. The former — a later date than China (which has committed to net zero by 2060) and apparently too late to be compatible with the 1.5°C goal — seemed disappointing to some. But scientific observers noted that this was not necessarily the case: it was indeed too late if Modi meant net zero carbon dioxide, but not if he meant net zero from all greenhouse gases. And the renewables pledge was truly ambitious: with India’s proportion of renewable electricity currently under 20 per cent, a more than doubling in less than ten years is a startlingly radical goal.

And so the early feeling in Glasgow is considerably happier than many had feared. More side agreements are still to be announced, including on phasing out coal and electrifying cars. No one will admit to expecting that COP26 will be a raging success. But some are allowing themselves a small boost of optimism. •

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COP26 is not the first “last chance,” of course. Several others have been so billed over the past decade or so. But this is indeed an important meeting because it’s the moment specified under the 2015 Paris climate agreement when countries must strengthen their commitments to tackle global heating. After three years of biblical droughts, fires and floods on every inhabited continent — and melting ice sheets on the other — no leader can claim that climate can safely be left to the future.

COP26 must tackle two big issues. The first of these is the gap between the aggregate commitments countries have made to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and the total the scientists have said is required to keep global heating to the Paris goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To have a reasonable chance of achieving this limit will require global emissions to be around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e, in 2030. Countries’ announced emissions reduction pledges will reduce global emissions to around 46–49 GtCO2e, leaving an emissions gap of 20–23 GtCO2e. Put another way, we are currently on track for an average global temperature rise not of 1.5°C but of 2.4–2.9°C, levels at which the severest climate impacts become certain.

The second issue for COP26 is the finance gap. In Paris the richest countries promised the poorest that they would mobilise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help them tackle climate change, and more thereafter. At the last count, in 2019, they had raised around US$80 billion. Developing countries have been loud in their protests.

But there’s a problem. Although the emissions and finance gaps are the big issues COP26 must address, neither will actually be negotiated in Glasgow. They are not even on the official agenda for the talks.

How is this possible? To understand it we need to delve into the past, for what might be called the “Glasgow paradox” — that the two most important issues at COP26 will not actually be the subject of its negotiations — has its origins in the turbulent history of UN climate negotiations.

The treaty underpinning these negotiations is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, agreed at the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Just a few years after the first assessment of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it set out an overall goal and some governing principles for how the international community should control emissions and adapt to a warming world. In doing so it made a very clear distinction between developed and developing countries. Countries had “common but differentiated responsibilities”: while all had a general responsibility to act, developed ones — the Western world and Eastern Europe — had the specific obligation to reduce their emissions and provide finance and technological support to developing countries. In 1992 China was still unequivocally “developing.”

These principles were then enacted in the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at COP3 in 1997. The developed countries negotiated how much each would commit to cutting its emissions by 2008–12. (Some, such as Australia, were allowed to increase them.) Developing countries took on voluntary actions only — and insisted that these depended on financial and technological assistance from the rich world.

Kyoto was a landmark agreement, backed by sanctions in international law for non-compliance. But it failed at its first hurdle. Though personally negotiated by US vice-president Al Gore, it attracted not a single vote in the US Senate. America, its legislators agreed, could not accept a treaty in which China did not have the same legal obligation to act.

The emissions reduction targets negotiated under the Kyoto Protocol were largely achieved. But the US’s absence was not acceptable to the European Union, Japan and the rest of the developed country signatories, and they sought to negotiate a new agreement at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Copenhagen foundered, though, when the United States insisted that China — now a rapidly growing “emerging economy” — must take on the same legal obligations to cut its emissions (and to be transparent about reporting them) as it had. China refused, and the negotiations broke down in acrimony and recrimination.

Fast-forward to COP21 in Paris in 2015. A third attempt was being made to agree on an implementing treaty. Now China was the world’s second-largest polluter and a major economic competitor to the United States and the rest of the developed world. Brazil, South Africa, India and other emerging economies had also become major contributors to climate change, and each was now willing to take on emissions reduction commitments. But they weren’t willing to negotiate these with other countries. And they were not prepared to have them made legally binding in international law, with Kyoto-style sanctions for non-compliance.

If the emerging economies wouldn’t do this, nor would the United States, which still insisted on legal parity. So the Paris agreement found a compromise. It set out a new and comprehensive set of rules on how governments should act, including the legal requirement that they must make a “nationally determined contribution” to the global climate process. But it was up to each country to decide for itself what that contribution should be.

The Paris agreement was undoubtedly a breakthrough. For the first time, every country in the world had to tackle its emissions, and to do so in pursuit of a specific temperature goal — limiting heating to “well below” 2°C, with an aspiration to keep it to 1.5°C. The agreement even set a “net zero” goal, albeit for some time in the second half of the century.

But Paris had a huge flaw. The contributions submitted by countries alongside the agreement didn’t add up to the agreed aggregate goal. The emissions gap was born.

Paris has a mechanism designed  to patch this up. It requires the IPCC to conduct a “stocktake” of the climate science three years after the agreement, and assess progress so far. And two years after that, countries must return to the table with stronger commitments.

The IPCC duly reported in 2018, with a much starker injunction that global emissions had to be cut by 45 per cent by 2030 to hold heating to 1.5°C. COP26 is now the five-year moment (having been postponed from 2020 because of Covid) when the emissions and finance gaps must be dealt with.

But the Paris compromise still rules. It is still up to individual countries to make their emissions cuts and finance pledges on their own. It is still not the task of the UN climate talks to negotiate these, and still not even the job of countries to discuss with one another what they each should be doing. Hence their absence from the COP agenda.

And despite much stronger commitments, countries are still not doing enough. The United States, the European Union, Britain, Japan and others have all this year strengthened their emissions reduction pledges for 2030, some very dramatically. But the gap to the 1.5°C trajectory remains. Although China and India have not yet announced their contributions (the only major emitters not to have done so), they can’t get near to closing the gap on their own.

So the emissions and finance gaps are what COP26 is primarily about, but neither is on the actual agenda. Of course, the conference will discuss emissions reductions and finance in general, and no doubt bitter speeches from developing countries about the inadequate commitments of the developed world. But there will be nowhere in the talks where the gaps can be narrowed.

So what will be negotiated at COP26? The official agenda is all about the “Paris rulebook,” the task of turning the general principles of the Paris agreement into specific, detailed regulations. Much has already been done in the intervening years, but there are still some major sticking points.

The largest of these is about “carbon markets.” These are the mechanisms by which developed countries, including Australia, and companies hope to be able to buy emissions reductions (such as tree planting) done in developing countries, to save them the difficulty and cost of reducing emissions themselves. Many companies claiming to be committed to acting on climate change (notably in the oil and gas and airline sectors) are expecting to get much of their emissions cut in this way — to the great consternation of climate campaigners, who see such “offsetting” largely as an unsustainable scam. Many developing countries are not happy about carbon markets either, and the Glasgow talks are likely to be tough.

So the Paris rulebook is not insignificant. But it is hard to argue that it is what’s really important. The negotiations over the regulations are highly technical, barely needing ministers, let alone leaders. And they are certainly not what climate activists, the public or the media think COP26 is about.

So how can this mismatch of expectation and reality be overcome? As the COP convenor, the British government hopes to bridge the gap in three ways.

First, it has brought the leaders together (which does not normally happen at COPs) precisely to discuss the shortfalls in emissions cuts and finance. In an ideal world it would be extracting stronger commitments than the assembled presidents and prime ministers have so far announced.

They might — just — achieve this on the finance gap, where recent announcements by the United States and others have offered hope that the US$100 billion promise could finally be achieved, and maintained up to 2025. But it seems extremely unlikely that any major country will improve its emissions pledge. In most cases, these have been painstakingly won in each country’s domestic politics, and no leader will want to reopen the argument at home. With China’s leader absent, the idea of a new “grand bargain” between the great powers looks out of the question, too.

But Britain still hopes that it can at least get the leaders to acknowledge that they’re not doing enough, and to commit conclusively to the 1.5°C goal and to the new goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. This certainly looks possible.

Second, Britain hopes to get some “side agreements” in four key areas where emissions need to be brought down. These are on building and financing new coal-fired power stations; slowing deforestation; accelerating the phase-out of petrol and diesel cars; and mobilising trillions of dollars of private finance for investment in green infrastructure and technologies. In each of these areas countries and companies have both been signing up to new commitments. So Britain hopes that “real economy” announcements in these areas will show that genuine progress is being made. It will try to bring these for the first time into the formal declaration at the end of the conference.

Third, Britain will encourage the demand by vulnerable countries that parties to the agreement should come back earlier to review their pledges. Under the Paris agreement this is due in 2025: given the continuing emissions gap, there will be huge pressure to agree an earlier review date, probably 2023.

But even if they are achieved, will these moves assuage the public demand for more urgent and stronger action? It is hard to see how they could. The climate scientists and campaigners — with Greta Thunberg their clear-eyed clarion — will say that it isn’t enough. In the conference hall they will be joined by the most climate-vulnerable countries. It will be hard for the media to report anything else. •

The post The Glasgow paradox appeared first on Inside Story.

Johnson’s claim — made in an upbeat, joke-strewn speech to last week’s Conservative Party conference — looked like a novel way of brushing aside Britain’s current woes. The country’s troubles, he said, were just the growing pains of the country’s post-Brexit transition to a “high-wage, high-productivity economy” no longer dependent on immigrant labour. Castigating both Labour and Tory governments over the last thirty years for failing to deal with structural weaknesses, he declared that his administration would at last fashion a different and better kind of economy.

To most observers Johnson’s optimism seemed outlandish. Britain is currently experiencing a welter of economic problems. Tens of thousands of East European workers have gone back home since Brexit, leaving critical labour shortages in key sectors. A scarcity of lorry drivers has meant long queues at garages; too few seasonal fruit pickers has left produce rotting in the fields; an exodus of abattoir workers means healthy pigs are being shot on the farm. Not just supermarkets but toy shops are warning they will be short of stock at Christmas. As global gas prices rocket, meanwhile, Britain has been hit particularly hard. The government is subsidising vital fertiliser-making plants; energy-intensive industries such as steel and paper are desperately seeking government support to stay solvent.

The idea of drawing anything positive out of this might be dismissed as fantasy. After all, Johnson can’t argue that losing so many immigrants was simply misfortune: this was precisely what the “Leave” campaign he led during the Brexit referendum promised voters. With a small exception for 5000 lorry drivers (and only till Christmas), the government has steadfastly rejected business pleas to issue more visas for key workers, instead telling industry bosses that if they want more staff they should pay higher wages. Yet it is already painfully obvious that this won’t be enough: in key sectors there simply aren’t enough workers in the population both sufficiently skilled and willing to do the manual work previously done by East Europeans.

And yet Johnson also has a point. For it is indeed the case that over the past four decades Britain has become a predominantly low-wage, low-productivity economy. Since its dramatic deindustrialisation in the 1980s, the country has lost manufacturing jobs much faster than its comparator economies. Manufacturing now makes up just 10 per cent of GDP, compared with 19 per cent in Germany and 16 per cent in Italy. The financial sector, Britain’s major export industry, continues to provide high salaries and skilled work. But the country’s once-lauded “flexible” labour market has proved a powerful driver of low productivity.

Fifteen per cent of the UK workforce is now self-employed, many of them contracted to just one client — a convenient way for the employer to avoid paying social security and providing holiday and sick leave and other employee benefits. Almost a million people are on “zero hours” contracts, with their working hours determined just a few days (or hours) in advance, and no level of work guaranteed. This has kept employment levels high — much higher than in other European economies. But it has also kept wages low, and given employers little incentive to invest in the skills or capital equipment that would raise productivity. Output per hour in Britain is around four-fifths of German and French levels.

Where Johnson is wrong is on immigration. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that immigration reduces wages. Though it does mean a bigger labour supply, it also means higher demand (immigrants are also consumers) and therefore higher employment. The two effects largely cancel one another out. And, as Britain is now painfully discovering, immigrants do (or did) jobs that Britons simply don’t want to.

If his views on immigration are put to one side, Johnson’s criticism of the British economic model is much more usually heard on the left. This is, after all, a classic critique of modern capitalism: dominated by financial capital, more concerned to extract short-term profit than invest in long-term prosperity, seeking to pay workers as little as possible. And the solutions too come more naturally from the left: a stronger role for government in directing investment through active industrial policies; stronger trade unions to bargain wages up; reforms to corporate governance and finance to end the fixation with short-term returns.

Johnson didn’t propose any of these things, of course. His conference speech was almost entirely rhetoric, with virtually no policy content. But the implication of his remarks was not lost on the Conservatives’ ideological bedfellows. “Vacuous and economically illiterate,” railed the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute. “An agenda for levelling down to a centrally-planned, high-tax, low-productivity economy.” It would be fair to say that they didn’t like it.

And the reason is not hard to identify, for Johnson is confronting the legacy of the Conservatives’ great heroine, Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who initiated the deindustrialisation of the British economy; who deregulated the financial sector and let foreign capital flow in freely to buy up Britain’s most valuable companies; who destroyed the power of the unions and created the flexible labour market. The British economic model is of the Tories’ own making, and if Johnson is serious about reforming it he will have to break decisively with the party’s free-market nostrums.

This is not just about raising Britain’s productivity and investment levels. All of Johnson’s stated priorities will require leftish policies. He has promised to reform the country’s poor-quality social care system — and has already raised income taxes to pay for it. He has pledged to “level up” Britain’s disadvantaged regions — which are more or less everywhere that isn’t London and the southeast of England. But that will require both higher public spending and more directed investment; he has already established a state-owned National Infrastructure Bank for the purpose.

He is also committed to tackling climate change, with a goal of achieving a 78 per cent reduction in emissions (on 1990 levels) by 2035 and “net zero” by 2050. That will require even more extensive regulation of the energy sector and industry, and public investment in energy efficiency and sustainable transport. None of these policies is comfortable territory for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party, and his critics on the right have not been slow to say so.

It is still possible for Johnson to differentiate himself from the Labour Party and the left. The new battleground is Britain’s version of the culture wars, in which the Conservatives cast themselves as the defenders of British nationhood and tradition against the “woke” metropolitan liberals who criticise the country’s colonial history and proclaim their multiple identities, none of them patriotic. This political dividing line, virulently reinforced by Britain’s largely conservative press, may work to bolster Tory support of a particular kind. But it doesn’t look like a strategy to win elections.

And this, in the end, is how Johnson’s foray into a new ideological positioning will surely be judged. If he can succeed in reviving the British economy with interventionist policies and higher taxes and spending after the pandemic — and if his plans to reform social care, reduce geographic inequalities and tackle climate change begin to look as if they might work — then the next election, due in 2023 or 2024, could vindicate his optimism. But if the coming months spiral downward into a Shakespearean winter of discontent, and the prime minister’s rhetoric proves to be as unhinged from reality as it looks to many today, then all Johnson will have proved is that he can wield words with boisterous skill.

But that has never been in doubt. It is on whether he can govern competently that the jury of British public opinion remains out. •

The post Between the idea and the reality appeared first on Inside Story.

Judging by the bemused looks in his audience, few were familiar with the musical oeuvre of Sesame Street circa 1970. But it was not really them that Johnson was seeking to convince. It was his own Conservative Party and his own government back home. For the prime minister has found himself facing an acute difficulty as COP26 approaches.

It’s not merely that Johnson has something of a reputational problem of his own. Only six years ago he was a paid-up climate sceptic, accusing global leaders of being “driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear — as far as I understand the science — is equally without foundation.”

Given that Johnson’s entire career has been one of political shapeshifting according to the views of his audience and his prospects of personal advancement — he’s the socially liberal mayor of London who became the figurehead of the Brexiteers’ “Leave” campaign — Johnson’s conversion to climate advocate has surprised no one. His problem, rather, is that being green is actually proving much more difficult than he had bargained for when he blithely offered to host the crucial UN climate talks a couple of years ago.

His rationale was that Britain needed to show after Brexit that it remained a big international player: no longer central to Europe, but still a “global Britain.” What could be a better signal than leading the world in tackling the climate crisis? Unfortunately for Johnson it is now clear that Britain is almost completely failing to do that.

At home, the Conservative government boasts that Britain is the first major country to put a “net zero” emissions reduction target into law: under the amended Climate Change Act, the government is obliged to achieve this by 2050. It has also adopted one of the world’s most ambitious medium-term targets, a cut in emissions of 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. (Of this, 44 per cent had already been achieved by 2019.)

But setting targets is the easy bit. Meeting them is more difficult. And here Britain is well off track. As the government’s independent Climate Change Committee has been warning for some years, policy has lagged well behind promises. In its latest report on the government’s progress, the committee didn’t mince its words. “This defining year for the UK’s climate credentials,” it declared, “has been marred by uncertainty and delay to a host of new climate strategies. Those that have emerged have too often missed the mark. With every month of inaction, it is harder for the UK to get on track.”

To respond to this criticism, the government has for some time been promising a “net zero strategy.” But this has been repeatedly delayed amid disagreements between Johnson and his ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak. The Treasury under Sunak has been preparing a review of the costs of achieving net zero, designed to show that it will hit middle- and lower-income earners hard through higher energy, transport and food prices. The review’s methodology is highly contested. It takes almost no account of innovation, which has already pushed the costs of green technologies — wind and solar power, for example, and electric vehicles — far below the levels predicted when policies to promote them were introduced. In this way, the Treasury’s critics argue, the review will considerably overstate the actual costs of achieving the net zero target.

But this is not really an argument about obscure economic methodologies. It is an entirely political one, for Sunak is pitching himself as the Conservatives’ next leader, and to do that he wants to appeal to the sizeable chunk of Tory MPs and party members who are not at all signed up to the net zero idea.

There are two sources of resistance. One is cost: the genuine anxiety that moving to a net zero economy — even over thirty years — will hurt Conservative supporters, and that any government pursuing it will pay a political price. The other is that it is patently obvious that the only way to make such a transition is for government to intervene much more actively in the economy, through industrial strategy, regulation and taxation, and such a prospect makes most Tories deeply uncomfortable.

This resistance has already spurned a new Conservative organisation, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, designed to rally political opposition and slow down the government’s climate ambitions. Not coincidentally, it was founded by the same backbench MP, Steve Baker, who led the hardline Tory Brexiteers in parliament and harried Theresa May’s government into successive concessions and defeats until Boris Johnson replaced her and acceded to their demands.

These factors mean that Johnson is feeling the squeeze. On the one hand, he needs to go into COP26 with an ambitious domestic plan to achieve net zero. It will hardly do for the conference hosts, desperately trying to persuade other countries to take stronger climate action, to be so visibly unable to produce a plan to do so themselves. On the other, Johnson can’t afford to risk producing a plan that in its implementation could cost the Conservative Party votes among its core supporters — and give Sunak the ammunition with which to succeed him.

This is not, of course, a problem unique to Britain. Some version of this political squeeze is occurring in almost every advanced economy. Most governments accept that they must take stronger action to reduce emissions. Most will say (rightly) that the green transition offers huge opportunities to develop new industries and create new jobs. But all are worried that higher-carbon industries will lose out, and that consumers and households will face higher costs and punish them at the ballot box.

And this is why Johnson has a problem with COP26. The conference in Glasgow is just a month away. But the media triumph that Johnson envisaged when he decided to host it looks increasingly unlikely. On the contrary, he could be facing a PR disaster: a conference denounced for its failure not just by Greta Thunberg but by many of the UN climate negotiators themselves.

And the reason is that, if no major advanced country is doing enough to achieve net zero, the global emissions trajectory is even further off track. With China’s economic growth having resumed after Covid, Brazil experiencing rapid deforestation, and Russia and India largely uninterested in the climate agenda, the collective commitments of governments are not nearly enough to hold the global average temperature rise to the “well under 2°C” goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, let alone the 1.5°C that the poorest countries demand.

The numbers are these. To have a reasonable possibility of being on track to hold the temperature rise to 1.5°C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global emissions in 2030 must be limited to around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e. Announced emissions reduction pledges for 2030 will reduce global emissions to 46–49 GtCO2e. The “emissions gap” of 20–23 GtCO2e, between where the world needs to be and where it is currently likely to be, represents almost an additional 100 per cent of maximum desirable emissions.

If many countries were still to announce their commitments, COP26 might still have a chance of success. But among large emitters only China has yet to make its new 2030 pledge. The European Union, the United States, Japan, Britain, Brazil, Australia and most others have already submitted their “nationally determined contributions,” the UN term for emissions pledges. As COP president, Britain is desperately trying to persuade China to announce an ambitious target — for example, to have its emissions peak earlier, in 2025, and commit to stop building coal-fired power stations. But China has never been amenable to external pressure of this kind, and after the recent defence pact announcement between the United States, Australia and Britain, it is particularly resistant to British overtures. China will make a big commitment. But it can’t bridge the global emissions gap.

So what will happen at COP26? There will be negotiations. But the gap to 1.5°C will remain. And in those circumstances it will be almost impossible for the poorest and most vulnerable countries to agree on a final communiqué, except one that acknowledges the conference has failed. And it will be very hard for the global media to report anything else.

One of the popular stories about Boris Johnson is that as a small child he wanted to become “world king.” Perhaps he thought COP26 might fulfil his dream. Right now it looks as if it could turn into his worst nightmare. •

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Scholz nevertheless presents himself as the contest’s clear winner. His claim rests partly on the fact that his party’s share of the vote, at 25.7 per cent, exceeded the combined 24.1 per cent achieved by the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU. This is only the fourth time in twenty national elections that the Social Democrats have come out ahead. More importantly, though, Scholz points to his party’s gains, and the conservatives’ losses, since the 2017 election, when the Social Democrats won just 20.5 per cent of the vote while the Christian Democrats and CSU attracted a combined 32.9 per cent. Sunday’s result was the worst ever for the two conservative parties.

If gains or losses since 2017 were the only criterion, though, the Greens would be considered Sunday’s undisputed winners, having increased their share by 5.9 percentage points. But as recently as May they were the frontrunners, with the conservatives a close second and the Social Democrats a distant third on 15 per cent. And that was before the devastating July floods in the southwest and west of the country, which reminded voters of the urgent need to deal with climate change, and before the government’s scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Greens’ candidate for the office of chancellor (and the party’s co-leader), Annalena Baerbock, could partly be blamed for its disappointing 14.8 per cent. Early in the campaign it was revealed that she had failed to declare income she had received in addition to her salary and had made inaccurate claims in her CV. As if these self-inflicted troubles weren’t enough, she released a book containing more than a hundred plagiarised passages (including some taken from a book by her Greens co-leader, Robert Habeck). Baerbock’s popularity — and with it the Greens’ position in the polls — dropped sharply.

Baerbock had good reason to feel hard done by. Her mistakes might well have been written off as oversights, and Armin Laschet of the Christian Democrats — initially her main competitor — had himself published a book containing passages copied from others without proper attribution. A few years ago, what’s more, Laschet resigned as lecturer at Aachen University after he lost his students’ exam papers and botched an attempt to award them marks said to be based on his notes. Baerbock may have exaggerated some of her achievements, but Laschet’s CV entirely omits his fifteen-year period at Aachen University. Voters nevertheless seemed to care more about Baerbock’s transgressions.

Laschet’s downfall came soon enough. He was captured on camera sharing a laugh while listening to German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier extending his condolences to the victims of the July floods. The twenty-second scene — combined with persistent sniping from the sidelines by the CSU’s Markus Söder, who considered himself the better option as the conservative parties’ joint candidate for chancellor — ruined Laschet’s chances of matching Angela Merkel’s 2017 results. Less than a month before the election, the Social Democrats overtook the conservatives in the polls.

Laschet, too, was entitled to feel aggrieved. That’s because his opponent Olaf Scholz seemed immune to criticism. The Social Democrat, who is sometimes referred to as Teflon-Scholz, was not troubled by credible claims that he condoned the Warburg Bank’s failure to pay a €47 million tax debt in 2017 when he was premier of Hamburg. Or, more recently, that he failed to act in a timely manner as finance minister after the financial services company Wirecard admitted it had cooked its books to the tune of €1.9 billion. And during the election campaign, he was barely troubled when his ministry was raided by investigators probing an anti–money laundering unit he oversees.

When the election result became clear on Sunday night, both Laschet and Baerbock put on a brave face. Baerbock pointed to the fact that the result was her party’s best ever in a national election. Laschet stressed that his party had almost caught up with Scholz’s during the final week of the campaign.

In fact, many more parties declared themselves winners than losers. The Free Democrats claimed victory despite increasing their vote by a meagre 0.8 percentage points. Politicians of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, said they were pleased by its 10.3 per cent, a fall from 12.6 per cent, with co-leader Alice Weidel arguing that if the vote for other, smaller parties with similar agendas was taken into account then the AfD increased its share of the vote.

Of course, some parties failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold necessary to gain a seat, a rule designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag. None of them would have been surprised by the fact. They include Die Basis, a newly formed party that tried to attract those opposed to masks and vaccinations to protect against Covid-19, which scored 1.4 per cent. The Freie Wähler, a party currently represented in two of sixteen state parliaments and led by Bavarian deputy premier Hubert Aiwanger (who also refuses to be vaccinated), won a respectable 2.4 per cent. Another 1.5 per cent of voters opted for the larger of two animal rights parties. And 1 per cent chose Die Partei, a party founded by the editors of the satirical magazine Titanic, which pokes fun at the programs and politics of traditional parties. Altogether, more than four million Germans voted for parties that failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold.

Of the parties represented in federal parliament, only the left-wing Linke openly admitted defeat. Its vote fell by almost half, from 9.2 per cent in 2017 to 4.9 per cent. But it snuck into the Bundestag thanks to a clause in the electoral laws that allows a party to circumvent the 5 per cent threshold if it wins at least three electorates. By holding three of the five electorates it won in 2017, it just survived as a political force — as it had in 1994, when it scored only 4.4 per cent but won four seats directly.

Another peculiarity of Germany’s electoral laws made it possible for a party that won no direct seat and attracted only 55,330 votes to be represented in the Bundestag. That’s the centre-left Südschleswigsche Wählerverband — a party appealing to ethnic Friesians and the Danish minority in Germany’s far north — to whom the 5 per cent rule does not apply. It won its first seat in federal parliament since 1953.

Stefan Seidler, the politician representing Germany’s Danish speakers, will be one of 735 members occupying a chamber designed to accommodate a parliament of 598 — 299 of them directly elected, 299 nominated by the parties. Germans have two votes: one to elect their local member and one to determine the overall composition of the Bundestag. If the number of direct seats won by a party surpasses the number of seats it has been allocated according to that party’s overall share of the vote, then all other parties need to be compensated for those extra seats. This topping-up has become routine because the number of seats directly won by the CSU regularly surpasses the number of seats calculated according to its percentage of the overall vote. In this election, the CSU won all but one of Bavaria’s forty-five electorates (the Greens won the other) but attracted only 31.7 per cent of the vote.

A focus on the overall election outcome obscures sharp geographical and demographic differences. In electorate #19, which comprises Hamburg’s western suburbs, the Greens won about 30 per cent of the vote and the Social Democrats about 25 per cent, with the AfD managing only about 3 per cent. In the East German state of Saxony, by contrast, the AfD came first on about 25 per cent, despite a fall from its result four years ago. No other party reached 20 per cent.

Among the 260,000 young people who took part in a national under-eighteen straw poll, the Greens came first overall. The AfD came sixth, with about the same number of votes as one of the animal rights splinter parties. In the two East German states of Saxony and Thuringia, however, the AfD won that poll.

According to an exit poll, two-thirds of over-sixty-year-olds voted for either the conservatives or the Social Democrats (with the vote being roughly evenly split). About half of those under twenty-two voted for either the Free Democrats or Greens, again with the vote evenly split. Only a quarter of young people for whom the 2021 poll was their first opportunity to vote chose either of the two major parties.

Further complicating the picture is the fact that neither of the two major parties can claim to speak for a sizeable proportion of the population. In fact, claims by Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on Sunday night that only a quarter of the electorate voted for Scholz actually overstate his support.

The 14.4 million Germans who chose not to vote won’t be represented in the Bundestag, and nor will the four million voters who opted for parties that didn’t reach the 5 per cent threshold. Of the 83.1 million people living in Germany, about 69.4 million are eighteen or older, but only 61.2 million are eligible to vote. More than eight million adult residents are barred from voting in national and state elections because German law makes it difficult even for second-generation migrants to take out citizenship and acquire the right to vote.

While Free Democrats and Greens don’t share many policy positions, both are committed to making it easier for migrants to become German citizens, not least by allowing them to retain the citizenship of their or their parents’ countries of origin. Both parties would also allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote, which could again increase the legitimacy of future governments.

Whoever forms the new government will need to try to represent the interests of East Germans and West Germans, young and old, whether they live in rural and regional Germany or in the cities. The new government will need to introduce far-ranging policies with an enormous impact on Germans’ day-to-day lives, and it needs to attempt to win over a majority of the population, young and old, people in the East and in the West, migrants and non-migrants, for those policies. That’s a huge ask.

The task might be slightly more manageable after this election because the new government will itself be diverse. As things stand, it will be made up of Greens and Free Democrats, plus either the Social Democrats or the conservatives. Hypothetically, the results would also allow for a continuation of the grand coalition between the conservatives and the Social Democrats, but both sides have ruled that out.

A coalition of three partners would be a first in postwar German history. Also unprecedented is the fact that the Greens and the Free Democrats have commenced negotiations rather than letting either of the two major parties (which are no longer that “major” after all) take the lead. That makes sense: whatever the final outcome — Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats; or conservatives, Greens and Free Democrats — the differences between the left-leaning Greens and the free-market Free Democrats are the most difficult to bridge.

Taking the initiative also means, once they have identified some common ground, the two parties can play off Christian Democrats against Social Democrats. The result could be that their major coalition partner, whichever that is, will have much less say in the personnel and program of the new government.

The current German government was formed over a tortuous 172 days, drawn out when the Free Democrats decided belatedly that they didn’t want to be part of a Jamaica coalition after all. The only option in that case was for the Social Democrats, who had initially been unwilling to continue their alliance with the Christian Democrats and CSU, to come to the party. Both the Greens and the Free Democrats say they have learned from the mistakes of those failed negotiations four years ago.

This time, all political leaders are committed to taking fewer than ninety-six days — the time from election day until New Year’s Eve. Nobody wants this New Year’s address, traditionally delivered by the chancellor, to be given once again by Angela Merkel.

I’m not holding my breath. After a dispiriting campaign we are probably in for drawn-out and extremely difficult negotiations. Unlike in 2017, neither Greens nor Free Democrats have the option of abandoning such negotiations (as the Free Democrats’ Christian Lindner did four years ago, when he declared that it is better not to govern than to abandon one’s principles).

There is more at stake now than in 2017. This is Germany’s last chance to change course if it wants to meet its Paris Agreement targets. With none of the parties that will sit in the Bundestag offering policies strong enough, the challenge will be far bigger than the task of reconciling ideological preferences and personal egos. •

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During the campaign the pundits had complained that this was a Seinfeld election — an election about nothing. After the results came in, the wits said that Canada had experienced a Groundhog Day election; everyone woke up to the same thing as the day before.

Minority parliaments are common in Canada. Four of the six elections prior to this one yielded a minority government, and ten of the last twenty back to 1957. Trudeau is the third prime minister to chafe at the inconveniences of minority rule, fold in his hand hoping for a better deal, and end up with much the same. In fact, the 2021 result is strikingly similar to 1965, when Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson ended up with a second minority, adding only three seats to his caucus. The other similar result was Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper, who won minorities in 2006 and 2008, boosting his count by sixteen seats largely at the expense of the Liberals.

So Justin Trudeau is back where he was two months ago. After a glorious majority in 2015, he was humbled by his minority finish in 2019 but lacked the patience to stick with that result. From the very start of the 2021 race, he struggled to articulate a clear reason why it was happening, other than the obvious: rank opportunism. Parliament was working well by minority standards; the government had no bold new initiatives for which it sought a mandate; the country faced no obvious crossroads.

As much as anything, the election displayed Trudeau’s lesser qualities — overconfidence and impetuousness. The prime minister has a gracious and idealistic side but also a formidable capacity for political aggression, and the latter clearly drove the decision to trigger an election wanted by no one else in the country, or perhaps even in his party. His campaign tone was primarily negative, as he relentlessly attacked the Conservatives and their leader Erin O’Toole. He framed the election as “maybe the most important since 1945 and certainly in our lifetimes,” but unlike the postwar election that ushered in the Canadian welfare state, this campaign offered no dramatic choices and Trudeau struggled for evidence to make his case.

But an alternative interpretation of the result would focus on the continuing durability of Justin Trudeau. For much of the election, the momentum rested with the Conservatives, and Trudeau’s successful clawback was an achievement in itself. In retrospect, the election call was ill-advised but not fatal. It can arguably be added to the long list of Justin Trudeau comebacks, some from self-inflicted injuries, since he first assumed the leadership of a weak third-place party in 2013. And by forcing the election, Trudeau may have triggered a structural crisis in Canadian conservatism. He faced his most formidable opponent yet in Erin O’Toole, who has dragged his party into the political centre. Yet O’Toole failed to deliver a bigger haul of seats, and both his leadership and his strategy are now in question.

From 2004 to 2015 the Conservative Party of Canada was in the iron grip of Stephen Harper. Having led the party to three successively stronger election victories in 2006, 2008 and 2011, Harper enjoyed enormous support in the party — support he worked to maintain by sticking close to the core membership. He openly disdained intellectuals, journalists, and other elites that most party members didn’t much care for either. Despite living for nine years in the prime minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive — on which he refused to spend taxpayer money despite its accelerating decline — he never seemed comfortable in the Ottawa bubble, which in turn was never comfortable with him.

Most of all, Harper was stubborn. While known to be thoughtful and open-minded in private, he stuck to his guns publicly, hating to retreat or be seen as playing to public opinion. Remarkably introverted for a politician of his level, he struggled to smile when he didn’t feel like it.

After Harper’s 2015 defeat and resignation of the leadership, a consensus emerged among many Conservatives that the party had grown too “mean.” It was partly that impulse that drove it to adopt as its new leader Andrew Scheer, a thirty-eight-year-old father of five who seemed incapable of not smiling. But Scheer, who had failed to make cabinet under Harper (instead spending a term as speaker of the House), lacked Harper’s tougher instincts. Vulnerable also as a socially conservative Catholic with a record of opposing marriage equality and abortion rights, Scheer only managed to hold Justin Trudeau to a minority in 2019. Within a few weeks he was consumed by intra-party squabbles and resigned.

Erin O’Toole replaced Scheer in August last year, campaigning for the leadership as a “true blue” Conservative who would “take back Canada.” Then, on the night of the leadership victory, he switched his tone, proclaiming the party was open to all. Regardless of background or identity, he said, “You are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada.” It was quite a switch from the Harper years.

O’Toole steered the party in unexpected directions, reaching out to private sector unions and expressing scepticism of the free-trade orthodoxy that had long inhabited the party. He avoided the usual rants about taxes and government spending, and finally introduced a Conservative carbon tax proposal, which had been resisted for years. He also broke with the tone of stubbornness long entrenched in the party, often with small gestures.

One hot spring day, for instance, he tweeted a picture of himself with a beer after a run, with the caption “Rebecca had a cold one waiting for me.” This attracted some snide remarks on the implied traditional gender roles, and so O’Toole responded with a tweet showing him pouring a glass of wine for his wife. Stephen Harper — who would never have tweeted himself jogging in the first place — would have refused on principle to play along and respond to the snide criticisms. But O’Toole had no problem adapting as needed.

This was Justin Trudeau’s opponent — much sunnier and nimbler than his predecessors, and set on pushing the Conservatives to the political centre. But O’Toole still led Stephen Harper’s party. A party convention in January 2021 voted down a policy resolution affirming that climate change is real, and in June the party caucus split over government legislation to ban “conversion therapy” for LGBT persons. Nostalgia for the iron leader remained; a speculative July poll found that Harper outpolled O’Toole when matched up against Justin Trudeau.

While most Canadians have supported pandemic restrictions and vaccinations, about a fifth of the population is sceptical, and that fifth is concentrated on the political right. O’Toole himself seems to have no issues with vaccines, but many potential Conservative voters do. In the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Conservative premiers lifted most Covid restrictions at the beginning of the Canadian summer in early July, with Alberta premier Jason Kenney proclaiming “the best summer ever” now that personal freedoms had been restored. (With clear evidence that a new wave loomed, most other provinces kept restrictions in place.) And the People’s Party of Canada, founded and led by former Harper minister Maxime Bernier, loudly occupied the extreme right as a haven for anti-vaxxers, xenophobes, and others unlikely to support O’Toole’s centrist agenda.

The instability on the right and O’Toole’s uncertain grip on his party probably played heavily into Trudeau’s electoral calculation. He also hoped to be credited with good pandemic management. In autumn 2020, the minority premiers of British Columbia and New Brunswick called early elections and were rewarded with majorities, a welcome precedent for Trudeau. The Saskatchewan government was also re-elected around that time, making the pandemic look good for incumbents. And Nova Scotia’s Liberal government seemed set for re-election on 17 August, two days after Trudeau made his trip to the governor-general to ask for dissolution and an election.

But the Liberals stumbled from the start. Trudeau announced the election on a Sunday morning with his line that it was the most important since 1945, but immediately struggled to explain why. The Conservatives attacked this “unnecessary election” and released their platform, while Trudeau fumbled to gain momentum and control of the agenda. And on Tuesday Nova Scotia’s Liberals were unexpectedly defeated, a poor augur for their federal cousins.

There were few key issues in the election — or, more precisely, issues the parties wanted to polarise over. Each repeatedly tried to set the agenda but couldn’t get the others to bite. Discussion focused mostly on the adequacy of each party’s response to agreed challenges — who had the best climate change plan, who could curb soaring housing prices, and so on. Promises flowed, but amid the deluge there were few sharp debates.

The Liberals’ strategy was in plain sight: to scare voters away from the Conservatives, much as they had done in 2019 with Andrew Scheer. They blasted away at the social conservative cracks in the party, such as O’Toole’s support for “conscience rights” for doctors to not refer patients for abortions. But O’Toole hit back, saying “I’m pro-choice and I’m a pro-choice leader, period.” Unlike his predecessors, his own record was clear of social conservative marks and he didn’t get bogged down defending his concessions to the social conservative wing of the party.

Staking out of the left: New Democrats leader Jagmeet Singh campaigning in Halifax early this month. meanderingemu/Alamy 

Even more striking was his stance on guns. The Conservative platform pledged to relax restrictions on some classes of rifles, a move the Liberals attacked as legalising “assault-style weapons.” O’Toole deflected this by modifying the platform in the middle of the election, saying the restrictions would remain in place, pending a review after the party formed government. This was another small but powerful break from the Harper tradition of digging in. Over and over, O’Toole refused to take the bait, blunting the Liberal tactics.

The other Liberal strategy was to gain seats in Quebec, primarily against the Bloc Québécois. Over the past year Trudeau had been noticeably generous and conciliatory towards the nationalist provincial government in Quebec, led by François Legault, hoping to gain at least benign support. But the Quebec plan collapsed in two ways.

First was in the English-language leaders debate on 9 September (which always includes all major leaders including the Bloc, despite its only running candidates in Quebec). Moderator Shachi Kurl provocatively asked Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet to defend Quebec’s “discriminatory” laws banning the wearing of religious symbols among public servants and further enforcing the use of French. Blanchet took issue with the factual declaration that the laws were discriminatory, an opinion widely held in English Canada but firmly rejected in Quebec. The question resonated for the rest of the election in Quebec, likely shoring up Bloc support against English-Canadian interference.

Then came the second blow, when Legault unexpectedly endorsed the Conservatives as the best choice among the national parties to respect Quebec’s interests. The Quebec roof collapsed on the Liberals; though they managed to hold their seats, their plans of growth were thwarted.

Those two strategies negated, the Liberals were at least able to hold off the New Democrats on their left. New Democrats leader Jagmeet Singh performed well in his second election, focusing on a tax-the-rich platform with a skilled use of social media. As Trudeau’s charisma fades, Singh has become the most interesting leader in Canada, combining tailored suits with the laid-back cadence of a Californian surfer. His focus on Trudeau’s broken promises allowed him to stake out strong ground as the true progressive in the race. But not much took off, and it is unclear whether the heavy social media focus on younger voters yielded much for the effort.

The one party with momentum was the People’s Party. Leader Bernier ranged across the country, unmasked and unrepentant, drawing large, enthusiastic and undistanced crowds, railing against vaccines and vowing to cut immigration levels in half. The party rose in the polls, surpassing a hapless Green Party consumed by infighting. The People’s Party posed a clear threat to the Conservatives, though it is unclear how much of its support drew directly from the Conservative base. Polling suggests it also attracted support from former Liberals, Greens and even New Democrats, as well as chronic non-voters. Still, it undoubtedly distracted O’Toole.

Polls showed a neck-and-neck race between the Liberals and Conservatives, well within the margin of error. And while O’Toole could deflect Trudeau’s attacks, he struggled to make his party grow. While the other major parties proudly proclaimed that all their candidates were vaccinated, O’Toole refused to release such information or declare whether he would enforce a vaccination requirement on his MPs. As well, halfway through the campaign, a pattern developed of aggressive and verbally abusive anti-vaccine protesters showing up at Trudeau’s outdoor events, and one People’s Party activist was charged with throwing gravel at Trudeau.

While the protests were disturbing, Liberal strategists were likely filled with at least some glee to see their noble leader facing off against anti-vaxxers, and Trudeau tried to link the protests to the Conservatives by claiming that “Erin O’Toole is at least taking some of his cues from them.” O’Toole condemned the violence, but the images played well into Liberal attempts to polarise the election.

Then, just four days before election day, Alberta Conservative premier Kenney made a sober announcement that the “best summer ever” had been a disaster, with Covid rates skyrocketing and restrictions reimposed. Any remaining Conservative momentum was stopped in its tracks.

While many scenarios were envisaged, election night ended up fulfilling long-time Ottawa pundit Paul Wells’s First Rule of Canadian Politics: “For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.” While there was some reshuffling — after being shut out of Alberta in 2019 the Liberals won two seats in the province, likely due to Kenney’s mess — fewer than thirty of the 338 constituencies changed hands. Debate now rages about whether the election changed anything at all. Did it affirm the country is going in the right direction? Did it prompt the Liberals to offer policies they might not have otherwise pledged? Was it an “unnecessary” election? If so, what makes a “necessary” election?

The most vulnerable victim of the election is Erin O’Toole. While losing the seat count, the Conservatives surpassed the Liberals in the popular vote, approximately 33.8 per cent to 32.5 per cent (mail-in votes are still being counted). But ideological purists began to turn on O’Toole even before he made a ringing defence of his inclusive vision for the party in his concession speech. Andrew Scheer lasted only a few weeks after delivering a similar result; O’Toole’s fate remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, the People’s Party captured 5 per cent across the country, winning no seats (Bernier was trounced by the Conservative in his own home riding) but demonstrating its force as a movement on the political right. Debates about O’Toole’s leadership will thus cover not only his performance but also the entire direction of the party. Should it continue trying to impress and win over the political centre, or retreat to the Harper model and stop any leakage to the People’s Party?

Left standing is Justin Trudeau, three-time election winner but once again heading a minority government, with the lowest popular vote ever for a Canadian federal government. Although his grip on the leadership of the party remains strong, its trust has been tested by a rollercoaster experience with no obvious net gains. But Trudeau can claim a weak but tangible mandate for the direction in which he is taking the country, and has shown once again that one cannot quite count him out. •

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After the second world war, Germans often cared a lot about how they were perceived by others. They worried a great deal, for example, about the reputational damage caused by the pogrom-like riots in Rostock and Hoyerswerda in the early 1990s. Many were proud when commentators adopted Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s description of Germans as “world champions of dealing with the past.” They liked the fact that Angela Merkel was perceived as the only Western leader willing and able to stand up to Donald Trump. Some were even proud when Merkel was praised abroad for her decision in September 2015 not to close Germany’s borders, and for her refusal to flinch when Germany admitted close to 900,000 asylum seekers that year, although they might have had misgivings about Merkel’s policy when talking to fellow Germans.

Given this history, it’s surprising that the attention paid by people outside Germany to the election that will determine Merkel’s successor has not been matched by the contestants’ references to the world beyond their borders. True, both Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the current frontrunner, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, recently paid visits to French president Emmanuel Macron. But those encounters were hardly noticed, and weren’t in any case used by either candidate to talk in any detail about Germany’s crucial relationship with France or the Berlin republic’s future role in the European Union.

The candidates’ apparent blind spot was in evidence on Sunday night, when more than eleven million viewers watched a televised debate between Laschet, Scholz and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens. As the only one of the three pre-election debates aired by both the public broadcasters during this campaign, it was widely seen to be the most crucial event in the lead-up to the election. During its ninety minutes the candidates made brief comments about the foreign policy credentials of the left-wing Linke, but otherwise didn’t mention Germany’s role in the world and their own ideas for the European Union, for Germany’s relationship with China, Russia and the United States, and for the country’s relations with the developing world. Not once.

The absence is also reflected elsewhere in the campaign. The only posters I have seen that refer to foreign policy — yes, posters are still important in German election campaigns — have been Linke posters in East Germany demanding “peace with Russia.”

While correspondents for the international media have been trying to fathom what a government led by Scholz or Laschet would mean for the rest of the world, the politicians engaged in the campaign, including international law graduate Baerbock, seem oblivious to the wider world. That’s not because the world has been of no concern recently. The scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by three senior government ministers — Social Democrat foreign minister Heiko Maas, Christian Democrat defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and the Christian Social Union interior minister Horst Seehofer — could have been one of the key issues of the campaign. It wasn’t. The fact that Germany leased planes in June to evacuate Afghans who would be in danger following a Taliban victory, but then cancelled the evacuation because Seehofer’s ministry objected to Afghan employees of the German military entering Germany before the completion of all relevant paperwork, received barely any attention.

The absence of the European Union and foreign policy from Sunday’s debate is partly the responsibility of the two journalists who chaired it. But it’s also a reflection of the stature of the three candidates. It makes even Angela Merkel, a skilful diplomat but hardly a foreign relations visionary, look farsighted.

In one sense, though, the three candidates’ failure to mention other countries comes as a pleasant surprise. All three acknowledge that Germany must do its share to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. They might differ about how to do that, but none of them follows the lead of other world leaders by declaring that Germany’s approach relies on what China, the United States or other major emitters of greenhouse gases do. No mention was made on Sunday of Polish coal-fired power stations or Finnish and French reliance on nuclear energy. Emissions in Russia weren’t cited as an excuse for a lack of ambition by a future German government.

Part of the reason the candidates didn’t try to shift responsibility is that the country’s highest court committed the government to a comparatively ambitious German target earlier this year. The court found that Germany’s existing policy would unduly restrict the choices available to today’s young people after 2030. In a press release, the court said that:

fundamental rights are violated by the fact that the emission amounts allowed until 2030… substantially narrow the remaining options for reducing emissions after 2030, thereby jeopardising practically every type of freedom protected by fundamental rights… The legislator should have taken precautionary steps to ensure a transition to climate neutrality that respects freedom — steps that have so far been lacking.

The ruling forced Merkel’s coalition government to legislate to bring forward its climate neutrality goal to 2045 (rather than 2050, as in the legislation passed in December 2019) and its emissions-reduction goal to 65 per cent (rather than 55 per cent) by 2030.

So far, so good. The bad news is that a detailed study conducted by DIW Econ, the German Institute for Economic Research’s consulting company, has found that the 2021 climate protection legislation would not ensure Germany’s compliance with the Paris targets.

That study wasn’t concerned with the gap between the climate neutrality law and what the German government had committed to in Paris (although it identified such a gap); rather, it asked whether the election manifestos of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Linke included measures commensurate with the revised legislation’s targets. It concluded that a government formed by any of the first three of those parties — assuming they were in a position to implement their programs — wouldn’t even come close to meeting the targets. Perhaps more surprising was the study’s finding that the measures envisaged by the Linke would also fall short. And the Greens? The study found that their measures, while more effective than those of the other four parties, would also be insufficient.

Climate change is the election campaign’s most important issue. That’s particularly the case after the floods in the west and southwest of the country in July, which claimed 180 lives and swept away houses, bridges, roads, rail tracks and other infrastructure. The repairs and rebuilding will, on current estimates, cost about €30 billion. Yet all main contestants in this election campaign pretend that climate neutrality can be achieved without any impact on consumers’ hip pockets and without changing the way we move around, eat, work or build our houses. Christian Democrats and Free Democrats even maintain that neither new taxes nor new public debt will be needed.

Angela Merkel’s departure could have been an opportunity for Germany to talk about its place in the world and how to tackle the enormous challenges of global justice and climate change. It could have been an opportunity for all contestants to agree that procrastination à la Merkel is no longer an option.

While the composition of Germany’s parliament is determined by the percentage of votes won by parties that exceed the 5 per cent threshold, 299 seats are decided in individual electorates, where the first-past-the-post system applies. Electorate #158 (Sächsische Schweiz–Osterzgebirge), in the southeast of the country, gained notoriety in the 2017 election because it was one of three electorates won by the candidate of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

A debate last week between six of the candidates vying to win electorate #158 was even more dispiriting than Baerbock, Scholz and Laschet’s encounter on Sunday night. When it came to climate change, the Green and Social Democrat candidates, perhaps trying to appease the local audience, were even reluctant to endorse their own parties’ manifestos. The Greens candidate went as far as declining to rule out building new nuclear power stations to compensate for the decommissioning of coal-fired generators. (Perhaps in an attempt to reciprocate, the pro-nuclear AfD candidate then demanded more bicycle paths.)

Nearly all the questions from the audience came from local politicians or supporters of minor parties that hadn’t been invited to the forum. Towards the end of the debate, though, a seemingly unaligned audience member — a teacher in a vocational school — put up his hand. His students had instructed him to ask the candidates how they thought Germany would meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target. He hadn’t come unprepared: he had read the DIW Econ study and knew that whatever the parties were offering wasn’t going to be enough. He also had first-hand experience of the frustration of young people, many of them too young to vote. The candidates acknowledged that frustration, but not one of them had a satisfactory answer to the question.

Given the reluctance of politicians to promote painful decisions, the teenagers asking hard questions and demanding answers are our best bet. Fridays for Future activists, who have already had considerable influence on German policymaking, are mobilising for nationwide demonstrations on 24 September, two days before the election. “This election provides us with a once-in-a-century choice,” the group’s Luisa Neubauer wrote. “The political decisions taken during the next four years will determine the fate of my generation.”

And while they are at it, maybe Fridays for Future activists could also raise the issue of Germany’s place in the world — not in order to provide excuses for it to sit on its hands, nor to lecture the world about a German model. Global injustice is one of the key impediments to a sustainable world, and a vision for global sustainability and justice is sorely needed.

In any case, the world may soon look towards Norway, rather than Germany, when contemplating how to tackle climate change and accelerate the transformation of economies. Yesterday, an alliance of parties led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre won the Norwegian election with a mandate — and seeming resolve — to end Norway’s reliance on fossil fuel production and export, with one potential government party, the Greens, demanding an end to fossil fuel production by 2035. That should interest others whose countries rely on the production coal, oil and gas, including the people of Altona, New York and Altona, Melbourne. •

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This is the most unusual of German election campaigns. Angela Merkel’s announcement nearly three years ago that she would step down at the end of her fourth term is one of many firsts. Her predecessors were either compelled to resign (Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Willy Brandt) or voted out of office (Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder).

This is also the first time that three parties rather than two have nominated a candidate for the chancellorship. Laschet’s selection as joint candidate of the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on 20 April, marked the real beginning of the campaign, and at times each of the three candidates has looked likely to lead his or her party to victory. In April and May, the Greens were narrowly ahead of the Christian Democrats, and Baerbock seemed to be on track to become the second woman to lead Germany. In June and July, the Christian Democrats moved well ahead of the Greens. In August, the Social Democrats, whose hopes had seemed to rest on wishful thinking alone, relegated the Greens to third place and caught up with the front-runner.

It’s the first time, too, that each of the candidates for chancellor is widely considered to be weak — which partly explains why the parties’ fortunes in the polls have shifted as much as they have in the past three months.

The Greens picked Annalena Baerbock, a forty-year-old with a master’s degree in international law from the London School of Economics, in what appeared to be a unanimous decision that was also supported by the party’s other co-leader, Robert Habeck. To begin with, the Greens’ selection of a young woman who has never held a position in government over the more experienced Habeck was widely applauded, and her approval ratings seemed to confirm the choice. But her popularity soon took a dive, first because she had failed to report income to federal parliament (which she is obliged to do as an MP), then because she was found to have embellished her CV, and finally because passages in a book she wrote, rushed into print to support her candidature, turned out to have been plagiarised (from sources that included Wikipedia and a book written by Habeck).

Unlike Baerbock, sixty-year-old Armin Laschet has run a government. He has been the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia — its population of eighteen million making it Germany’s most populous state — for the past four years. He fought hard to be anointed as candidate of the Christian Democrats and its Bavarian sister party. First he saw off a challenge from his party colleague Friedrich Merz, a corporate lawyer who has long been the darling of the Christian Democrats’ conservative wing and might well have been a more popular choice. Then he prevailed against Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier and leader of the Christian Social Union, although polls were giving Söder a far better chance of winning the election. Laschet, who is also prone to put his foot in his mouth, never really recovered from these bruising contests.

The Social Democrats picked sixty-three-year-old finance minister Olaf Scholz, a former state premier of Hamburg, as early as August last year — much to the merriment of political observers, given that at the time the pollsters ranked his party a distant third, only just ahead of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the Free Democrats. As recently as 7 June this year, the Social Democrats won a paltry 8.4 per cent of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state election. Scholz carries the nickname Scholzomat; those who wrote off his chances assumed that his automaton-like persona and inability to show emotions wouldn’t endear him to the electorate.

Scholz’s claim to be a viable candidate for chancellor also seemed absurd because he didn’t appear to have much backing in his own party. He had failed in his bid to become co-leader of the Social Democrats in 2019, not least because his comparatively conservative views didn’t chime with those of the majority of his party. Surprisingly, he now has the party’s full support — presumably many members sense that he is the only chance the party has to avoid the fate of the French socialists, whose candidate finished fifth in the 2017 presidential election.

Scholz’s approval ratings are now far ahead of Laschet’s and Baerbock’s. But rather than impressing voters with his own strengths, he has benefited from the mistakes of his competitors. Worryingly, his relative popularity may also reflect the fact that he has positioned himself as Merkel’s most obvious heir. Unkind commentators have called him a Merkel clone; a recent Spiegel article was titled “The Merkelisation of Olaf Scholz.”

Like Merkel, Scholz is overly cautious, prone to prevaricating rather than acting decisively. Like her, he lacks charisma. And since Merkel too has embraced traditional Social Democratic policies, it’s not hard to imagine him following in her footsteps. Even more than the Merkel loyalist Laschet, he appears to guarantee that nothing will change, irrespective of which parties make up the governing coalition.

This is the other first: the abundance of possible coalitions. An average of the last six polls, conducted between 24 and 28 August, has the combined Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union neck and neck with the Social Democrats on 23 per cent, followed by the Greens on 18, the centre-right Free Democrats on 12, the AfD on 11, and the left-wing Linke on 7 per cent. According to the pollsters, no other small party will manage to get anywhere close to the 5 per cent needed for a representation in the Bundestag, the Federal Republic’s parliament.

If these polls mirror the distribution of votes on election day — and taking account of the fact that no other party will deal with the AfD — five different coalitions are possible: a government comprised of the parties that traditionally made up the Bundestag before the arrival of the Greens in 1983: that is, the Christian Democrats (black), the Social Democrats (red) and the Free Democrats (yellow). Because the colours associated with these parties resemble those of the German flag, this coalition is also referred to as the Deutschlandkoalition, or German coalition. The other options have been labelled “Jamaica,” after the colours of the Jamaican flag (black, green and yellow); “Kenya” (black, red and green); Ampel (traffic light) comprised of Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens; and “R2G” (Social Democrats, Linke and Greens).

Some of these options are more likely than others. Both the Free Democrats and the Greens are desperate to be back in government and will negotiate accordingly; this seems to make Jamaica and the Ampel more likely than Kenya or a Deutschlandkoalition. Either of the latter would also be less likely if the Christian Democrats had to be the minor partner in such an arrangement. In terms of a programmatic fit, R2G would be a good option, and would have the support of the majority of members of the Social Democrats, the Linke and the Greens. But neither the Greens leadership nor Scholz fancy a coalition with the Linke, because they consider the party to be too unreliable, particularly on foreign policy.

But it’s another four weeks until election day, and if the volatility of the past three months continues then last week’s polls will mean little. A government led by the Greens, which seemed a realistic option only a couple of months ago, now appears only a remote possibility — but who knows, we could still end up with a chancellor Baerbock.

In trying to gauge the mood of the electorate, I rely on the pollsters. The alternative would be to take notice of the unabashedly unscientific polls I conduct among my friends, whose response to the current offering, like my own, is despairing. That’s not just because the three main contenders to inherit Merkel’s mantle are unconvincing, but also because Germany faces the prospect of a government trying to pretend that no significant changes are necessary — or rather, a majority of voters preferring a continuation of the status quo.

That preference would make sense if the current government’s recent performance couldn’t be faulted. Yet its response to Covid-19 was mired in miscalculation and hesitation. Germany is experiencing the pandemic’s fourth wave not least because too few people have been vaccinated (even though Germany has so much vaccine it has been giving it away to other countries). The government’s other main embarrassment lately has been its failure to evacuate people who have worked for the German military in Afghanistan — not because it was unaware of the danger but because charter flights organised to evacuate local staff were cancelled at the last minute because the ministry of the interior had concerns that its bureaucratic processes would be compromised by the arrival of people who had not yet been issued visas.

But the Merkel government’s biggest failure has been its dilatory response to climate change. It wasted valuable time trying to please all possible constituencies, including the owners of coal-fired power stations and the car industry. Merkel’s achievements — most notably her decision to phase out nuclear reactors after Fukushima and her initial response to refugees in 2015 — are undeniable, but the former environment minister’s reluctance to accelerate the transformation of Germany’s economy is likely to be remembered as an ugly blot that may well define her sixteen years in office.

The fact that more of the same ought not be an option was brought home by the recent floods in the west of the country. More than 180 people died in July when small rivers turned into raging torrents, sweeping away bridges, roads and entire houses. AfD politicians aside, nobody doubts that torrential rains like the ones that hit Germany last month are largely a result of climate change. All parties, again with the exception of the AfD, say they would like Germany to do its part to combat climate change. In fact, since 29 April this year there has been no alternative: this was the day the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court, ruled that the government is doing too little to ensure that today’s young people inherit a world that is still worth living in.

Yet not only the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats but also the Greens seem to favour a continuation of Merkel’s “don’t rock the boat” approach. In the current campaign, the Greens’ timidity may reflect their low self-confidence in the wake of Baerbock’s stuff-ups. But you need only look at Baden-Württemberg, the state that has had a Greens premier for the past ten years, to be disabused of the idea that the Greens would insist on radical changes if they were part of a governing coalition.

So, is Germany in for more of Merkel? That would be disastrous. At a time when a radical rethink of how we live and how we engage with the world around us is sorely needed, Germany can hardly afford another four years of a government sitting on its hands lest too much action upset one or the other voter.

Perhaps this is also a question of leadership. On Saturday night, some media streamed what the news magazine Spiegel termed “the only true debate”: between Söder of the Christian Social Union and Habeck of the Greens, both of them wannabe contenders who lost out to Laschet and Baerbock respectively. The relative sophistication of the debate — and both leaders’ conceding that far-reaching changes, however unpopular they may be, are necessary — suggested that a government led by Habeck, with Söder as his deputy (or the other way around), may have been a more attractive option than any of those on offer. That’s also because the pair might have pulled enough votes between them to avoid having to offer ministries to the free marketeers from the Free Democratic Party.

Such a scenario is perhaps not as far-fetched as it may seem. I don’t necessarily have in mind the Greens supporters who have been clamouring for a last-minute swap, Habeck for Baerbock, or the Christian Democrats who fear that their party might lose more than a quarter of its vote from the last election, and are imploring Söder to come to the rescue. Rather, I am thinking of a scenario sketched by the Spiegel columnist Sascha Lobo, who pointed out that Laschet might fail to win a seat in parliament, which could then open the door for Söder.

In any case, four weeks is a very long time, particularly in this turbulent period. Maybe there is hope yet. If the matter weren’t quite so serious, it would even be fun to watch the complex saga of how Europe’s largest democracy chooses its next government continuing to unfold. •

The post More Merkel? appeared first on Inside Story.

Justin Trudeau won a stupendous victory of his own in 2015. Four years later he was humbled by a minority showing and also had to rely on the New Democrats to stay in power. And now, two years on, he has called an election for 20 September, hoping to repeat history and regain his majority.

But Trudeau the elder didn’t trigger his fightback election amid fears of a fourth pandemic wave. Nor did he have to contend with a law, introduced by the Conservatives in 2007, that nominally fixed the next election for October 2023. It’s true that the law allows for flexibility — and the Conservatives themselves broke its spirit by calling a snap election in 2008 — but one of the first questions Justin Trudeau faced after announcing this week’s dissolution of parliament was why an election was necessary.

The odds are not overwhelmingly in his favour. The mixed polling figures show, at most, a slight Liberal edge over the Conservatives and the other parties. The Liberals have managed the pandemic reasonably well and have some popular signature policies, but they haven’t explained why they need a new mandate. The party, and Trudeau personally, carry six years of baggage; some high-profile Liberals have chosen not to seek re-election; and a vaunted star candidate dropped out unexpectedly. Trudeau’s latest Conservative opponent, Erin O’Toole, will likely be a tougher challenge than his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, who still managed to hold the Liberals to a minority in 2019. And the Bloc Québécois and New Democrats are contenders to take their share of seats.

But we also know that Justin Trudeau is often underestimated. When he entered politics he was dismissed as a dilettante who lacked his father’s gravitas. He went into the 2015 election in third place. He has staged multiple comebacks from stunning political blows and embarrassments, like the pictures showing him in blackface that emerged in the middle of the 2019 campaign. He is a smart politician leading a party that is very good at clinging to power, but only after 20 September will we know whether he was a political genius or a fool to trigger an early election.

While Trudeau, at forty-nine, retains his boyish good looks and charm, there is nothing fresh about the party he has led for eight years. Although it remains within his iron grip, with no challengers in sight, his team is sagging. One of his key ministers, Catherine McKenna, has chosen not to stand for re-election; others, like long-time defence minister Harjit Sajjan and Indigenous relations minister Carolyn Bennett, have made major missteps and are unlikely to retain their jobs after the election.

New blood, meanwhile, is scarce. The party went temporarily wild when Mark Carney, the expatriate Canadian who had just finished his term as governor of the Bank of England, signalled a long-rumoured interest in politics via the Liberal Party. But he unexpectedly announced last month that he wouldn’t run after all, perhaps using his banker’s mind to calculate the odds were not in his favour.

No other obvious star newcomers are being offered to voters, nor any sense of rejuvenation in the Liberal package. Trudeau had some good fortune in May of this year when the Ethics Commissioner reported on his third investigation of Trudeau, concluding that the prime minister did not break ethics laws in last year’s WE charity affair — a refreshing change from the two previous findings that he broke conflict-of-interest laws in other matters.

The Liberals have some fresh policies, notably a joint federal–provincial childcare plan that has so far reached agreements with seven provinces. The government can also point to a recovering economy and a reasonable record of managing the pandemic within areas of federal jurisdiction, including generous income-replacement programs. While earlier this year there was much criticism about the slow procurement of vaccines in Canada, the nation is now flooded with doses. Seventy-one per cent of the eligible population is fully inoculated and the figure is on track to hit 80 per cent, among the highest in the world.

For his part, the Conservatives’ O’Toole has the potential to be a very good prime minister. Unlike his predecessor, he has life experience outside politics, having become a Toronto corporate lawyer after a stint as an air force navigator. He entered parliament in 2012 and served briefly as a minister in the Harper government, giving him experience without too much baggage. At his best he exudes an appealing mix of intelligence, vision and common sense.

But first he must drag his own party over the finish line. O’Toole was embarrassed earlier this year when a party convention refused to endorse a mild statement affirming that climate change is real. A significant portion of his party remains socially conservative and the party caucus recently split on government legislation to ban “conversion therapy” for LGBT people. O’Toole has tried to reach out to new constituencies and regularly affirms his own pro-choice and pro-LGBT views. But his party has not always followed.

Some of his problems are a result of his having campaigned for the leadership last year as the ideologically pure candidate against the more moderate big-tent approach of Peter MacKay. Upon winning victory he moderated his tone, managing to retain the trust of the party but leaving open the question of the real Erin O’Toole. He also struggles to catch the imagination of Canadians. Though slightly younger than Trudeau, the white-haired O’Toole looks older — easily passing for Scott Morrison’s suburban neighbour — and remains an unknown to most Canadians. If O’Toole wins, it will be because of Liberal missteps more than his own appeal.

Canada’s traditional third party, the New Democrats, remains highly unlikely to win government, but poses its usual challenge to the Liberals’ left flank. Leader Jagmeet Singh, undisputedly the hippest politician in Canada, is back for a second round; a master of TikTok who last winter played an online gaming session with American left superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his personal polling is higher than either Trudeau’s or O’Toole’s. Yet he struggles to show he has substance as well as style, and has repeatedly been outmanoeuvred by the other parties in the minority parliament.

The Bloc Québécois is the perennial wildcard. Almost extinct a few years ago, it won thirty-two seats in 2019 to gain third place in parliament under leader Yves-François Blanchet. With its exclusive platform of protecting Quebec’s interests, the Bloc is a thorn in the side of the national parties, though — as we will see — it is a major target of Trudeau’s election strategy.

A word must also be said about the unfortunate Green Party of Canada. The election of 2019, when it won three seats after a decade of having a sole MP, Elizabeth May, was a high point for the party. May retired as leader later that year, to be replaced by Annamie Paul, only for the party to descend into Byzantine intrigue, with Paul and the party establishment mired in legal battles with each other. The Green Party has always struggled in Canadian politics, with the New Democrats occupying the prime space on the political left and the party itself oscillating on direction and strategy. This leaves it weak and vulnerable to the civil war now consuming it.

In contrast, the hard-right People’s Party of Canada has had a glorious recent run. Founded by former Conservative Maxime Bernier, who remains its sole recognisable name, the party managed only 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019, scattered across the country, and not a single seat. But Covid-19 has had an energising effect, with the curtailment of individual freedoms and the foreign origins of the virus igniting its xenophobic base. While it may not win any seats again (Bernier lost his own Conservative seat in 2019), it looms as a distraction for the Conservatives if O’Toole moves too far to the centre.

The issues that will dominate the election aren’t yet clear. Notable areas unlikely to be contentious include the massive federal deficit, taxes, and general economic and trade questions. O’Toole has downplayed many of the party’s orthodox positions, being careful not to be labelled as cheap or mean-spirited. Instead he has become a mild economic nationalist, expressing scepticism about international trade and emphasising that Canadian workers must be put first. He has publicly reached out to private sector unions, long estranged from the Conservative Party, though they have not been quick to reciprocate. The party’s platform contains a remarkable list of promises, though most are relatively small-scale and not obviously outside the Liberal paradigm.

On the other side of the spectrum, the New Democrats also struggle to articulate a strong alternative message other than a kind of Liberal-plus position. Many of the key issues facing the country, such as rising housing prices, have no obvious solutions, so all parties have stuck to accusing each other of inaction without presenting substantive answers themselves. Regional divisions, so stark after the last election, have yet to assert themselves in this contest, at least at the national level.

Foreign policy has few flashpoints either. The Conservatives have tried to make China an issue, accusing the Liberal government of insufficiently standing up to aggressive Chinese behaviour, including the longstanding detention of two Canadians. But their attempts to polarise China policy, which do fire up their base, have foundered on the lack of good options. The collapse of Afghanistan is difficult to take after years of Canadian involvement, but again there is little to debate. The Canadian military itself is in free fall, with two successive defence chiefs removed from their positions after sexual misconduct allegations. Normally the Conservatives strongly align themselves with the military, but they see no advantage this time, and have instead targeted defence minister Sajjan’s handling of the allegations.

One clue to the election themes can be found back on 1 July, this year’s Canada Day holiday. Normally the national holiday’s focus is on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where a national broadcast features a carefully government-approved line-up of entertainers and celebrities. But in this pandemic year Ottawa was silent… at least as far as official celebrations go. Instead, decidedly unofficial events took over the main public spaces, allowing a peek into the real grassroots thinking of Canada.

On Parliament Hill, thousands marched to mark the recent discoveries of unmarked graves at former Indigenous residential schools. While the barbarities of the schools have long been known — an official government apology was made in 2008 and a royal commission reported in 2015 — the graves reopened the issue, with protesters arguing that insufficient progress has been made since the apology and the commission.

Down the street, meanwhile, on the grounds of the Supreme Court of Canada, a “No More Lockdowns” rally featured the aforementioned People’s Party leader, Maxime Bernier. While Canadian lockdowns have been mild by Australian standards (though much more drawn out) and restrictions have been easing in recent months, considerable tensions remain, with provinces reopening at different speeds with varying requirements for mandatory vaccination.

The two widely different events capture Canada’s silos in 2021. While it is not as polarised as its neighbour to the south, different conversations are clearly going on in the country. The election revolves around not just which will predominate, but how the Liberals and Conservatives will manage them.

For the progressive side of the country, Indigenous issues, race and anti-racism, and climate change are the key issues. The Liberals must engage in these conversations and convince voters that they have sufficiently delivered, rather than losing them to the New Democrats or Bloc. For their part, the Conservatives have little to show in these areas — though O’Toole is trying to at least look attuned to them — and must change the conversation to emphasise economic recovery and other material issues.

The conversations around Covid-19 are more complicated. While O’Toole and most leading Conservatives have backed the restrictions and the vaccination program, a significant portion of their supporters are more ambivalent. Thus, O’Toole desperately does not want to talk about these issues, while the Liberals would like nothing better than to confine him to the extremist camp. And O’Toole is stuck where he is, lest he lose supporters to Bernier and the People’s Party.

As always, Quebec has its own election dynamic. Trudeau and the Liberals think they can win back seats from the Bloc, and Trudeau has made some key moves to cultivate the support of nationalist premier François Legault. In an action that surely made his father turn in his grave, Trudeau agreed with a dubious Legault assertion that the province could unilaterally amend aspects of the Canadian constitution affecting the province. And while he bargained with other provinces over the details and funding of his childcare plan, Trudeau agreed to a largely unconditional CA$6 billion transfer to Quebec to bolster its own longstanding program — again, something that would alarm his centralist father. But Pierre Trudeau didn’t have to worry about the Bloc Québécois.

Justin’s larger strategy is clear; he wants to demonstrate that he can be counted on to respect and defend Quebec’s interests, making the Bloc superfluous.

A powerful gender dynamic is also observable. Conservative support skews male, while women are more likely to support the Liberals. Trudeau’s opponents have long mocked his enlightened masculinity, and continue to do so. In a bizarre video posted on Twitter last weekend, the Conservatives took footage from the 1971 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and imposed Trudeau’s face on the spoiled character Veruca Salt, so that a girlish Trudeau pranced and pouted about how he wanted an election that he didn’t deserve. The party then released its platform featuring a cover photo of O’Toole, who looks most comfortable in a suit, in a tight t-shirt and jeans, showing off his dad bod to best advantage.

The gendered Conservative strategy is unclear, since they already have a lock on middle-aged men who erroneously think they are in good shape. More broadly, the Conservatives constantly walk a fine line in attacking Trudeau personally. The Conservative base loathes him, as they did his father, seeing the suave pair as uniquely evil characters somehow dedicated to the dismantling of all that is good in Canada. For some Conservatives, thus, constant attacks on Trudeau, including gendered ones, are the way to go.

Yet most of the country doesn’t despise Trudeau. If anything they feel he is insufficiently progressive, especially on Indigenous issues and climate change. And since voting is not compulsory in Canada, one of the risks to the Liberals is that disillusioned voters will just not vote at all. Trudeau won in 2015 partly because of an increased turnout of enthusiastic Liberal supporters; he slipped in 2019 because many stayed home. In contrast, the Conservatives can count on a loyal turnout no matter what.

Trudeau must thus convince voters either that he is still their progressive icon… or that he is the one thing that can stop the Conservatives. The latter was effective in 2019, when he attacked the gap between Andrew Scheer’s personal social conservatism and his pledge not to pursue a social conservative agenda. But this will not work on the nimble O’Toole, who frequently affirms his pro-choice views and so far has avoided getting painted as a right-wing bogeyman.

So will Justin Trudeau repeat history? In one scenario, he will triumph in his comeback, demonstrating a continuing deftness in navigating the political centre of the country. In another scenario, his hubris will do him in. Canada’s Liberal governments do eventually fall apart because of hubris and exhaustion. (Conservative governments, except for Stephen Harper’s, typically end in insurrection.) But usually not so soon. •

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This is obviously important for British politics, but it also has wider relevance. Labour’s crisis flows from challenges facing progressive parties around the world. Indeed, there are clear parallels between Britain and Australia: in both countries support for Labour/Labor peaked at around 50 per cent in the early 1950s; both parties performed much more poorly in national elections in 2019; and both parties recorded (first-preference) support of just 33 per cent that year.

Despite many obvious differences, both countries — along with many others — have seen massive economic and social changes in recent decades. The question for progressive parties is fundamentally the same everywhere: how do they revive their appeal to voters in the twenty-first century when conditions are so different from those that enabled them to build their appeal in the twentieth century?

Much of Blair’s broadside, in the left-of-centre New Statesman, inevitably dealt with the specifics of Labour’s recent past, especially the failings of its lurch to the left in 2015 when it elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. After Corbyn led Labour in 2019 to its worst general election defeat since 1935, the party elected Sir Keir Starmer, a far more centrist leader. (Starmer received his knighthood for his time as director of public prosecutions, a senior non-party legal position to which nobody with extreme political views would ever be appointed.)

But Blair cast his net more widely: “Joe Biden’s victory in the United States apart, progressive politics across the globe is badly placed: four election defeats for the UK Labour Party and no one betting against a fifth; the German SPD placed behind a moderate Green Party; the French Socialists, who won the presidency in 2012, now polling at 11 per cent; the Italian left imploded and divided; the Spanish and Swedish socialists hanging on to power, but way below their earlier levels of support… Around today’s Western world there are only flickers of a progressive agenda with deep majority support.”

What, then, is to be done? Here are some of the key numbers that illuminate Labour’s dilemma in Britain. Those numbers will vary from country to country, but the broad direction of change is likely to have been much the same in most of the world’s better-off democracies.

Until the 1980s, more than two-thirds of Britain’s workers had manual, blue-collar jobs. They and their families provided Labour’s core vote. The party’s typical voter was a trade union member working in a coalmine, a shipyard, a steelworks, a mill or a large factory. The term “identity politics” has recently come to prominence, but the concept is not new: Labour’s core vote was as much to do with working-class identity as living standards. Rooted in solidarity, it gave Labour huge majorities on large turnouts in its industrial heartlands.

Today, the mines are gone, the shipyards closed, the steelworks shrunk, the factories automated and the mill jobs exported to Asia. Manual workers now comprise just 43 per cent of the workforce, and only a minority of them belong to a trade union. Gone is the widespread workplace culture that fostered the values of solidarity. At the last election, blue-collar voters divided six million Conservative, four million Labour.

On the other side of the scale, Labour has gained ground among white-collar voters. Until the 1980s, around 80 per cent of Labour’s vote was working-class; that proportion has since halved to 40 per cent. Today’s typical Labour voter is a white-collar social liberal, living in or around a big city and working in health, education, finance, technology or public administration.

In a way, these big, long-term changes are good news for the left, for it is capturing a growing share of a growing demographic. But two problems block the path to electoral triumph. The first is that its appeal to working-class voters is declining too fast. In England’s industrial heartlands, Labour has lost dozens of once-safe constituencies to the Tories.

The second problem is that Labour’s support has begun to fray among middle-class social liberals. In local and regional elections earlier this month, the Greens made gains in big cities at Labour’s expense. In other countries, this trend has gone much further. In Germany, the latest polls show the Greens with 25 per cent support, level-pegging with the centre-right Christian Democrats. Support for the Social Democrats has collapsed from 39 per cent in 2002 to 15 per cent ahead of this September’s election.

Germany provides a stark warning to Britain’s Labour Party — and centre-left parties around the world — of what can happen if things go badly wrong. As a broad rule, progressive parties need an alliance of working-class and middle-class voters to gain power. Historically, Britain’s Labour Party offered its working-class base a better life in a series of practical ways: through better housing, healthcare, schools, pensions and so on.

At the same time, it attracted middle-class voters who approved of that instrumental agenda but were passionate social liberals as well. Post-1945 causes such as abolishing capital punishment, legalising abortion and gay sex, and outlawing racial discrimination were adopted by successive Labour governments. Labour’s white working-class voters didn’t generally care for these policies, but, on the whole, they didn’t mind Labour MPs’ promoting them, as long as the party delivered practical improvements to everyday life.

An occasional exception was race and immigration, which in some places in some elections cost Labour working-class votes. In retrospect, those localised battles in the 1960s and 1970s provided an early warning of what has happened in the past few years.

Brexit has fractured Labour’s working/middle-class alliance. Whereas the social liberal agenda used to be irrelevant but unthreatening to Labour’s working-class base, it is now blamed by many traditional Labour supporters for the stalling of their living standards in recent years. “Brexit” is not just a huge event; it is a label that encompasses a wide range of resentments: the power of Britain’s elite and metropolitan liberals as well as specific features of Britain’s membership of the European Union, such as freedom of movement, which led to a sharp rise in immigration.

Today, then, Labour faces a challenge specific to Britain in its detail but universal in its fundamentals: how can it reconstruct the alliance across classes that it needs to return to power? Can it retain its socially liberal middle-class voters while winning back the working-class voters it has lost?

Squaring that circle won’t be easy, and might even be impossible. If it can be done, it will be through instrumental policies for a post-industrial era that improve lives in the rundown towns that have turned away from Labour, combined with a form of social liberalism that helps every part of Britain, not just the thriving cities. This means making the practical, and not just moral, case for three main efforts: revising Britain’s flawed Brexit deal with the European Union; creating an immigration policy that helps the economy without undercutting incomes or job opportunities for low-paid workers; and accelerating the switch to a low-carbon economy.

Here’s the rub: nobody can be sure that such a strategy will succeed. But it might be the only strategy that has even a chance of success. As Blair says in his New Statesman article, tackling the economy’s “most far-reaching upheaval since the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution… is the central political challenge of our time.” In Britain, as elsewhere, the big decisions that progressive parties make (or avoid) in the next few years will determine whether social democracy has a bright future or merely a glowing past — whether it improved lives in much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century but turned out to be unable to compete successfully in the twenty-first. •

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Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film — or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.

Any biography is shaped by the letters, diaries and other sources available to the biographer. In Kaufmann’s case, much could be made of the thick files created by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1950s, and those of ASIO’s East German equivalent, the Stasi, between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Even more might be made of Kaufmann’s own writings, including at least a dozen books that could be classified as either autobiographical fiction or memoir. But the life depicted by oneself is not necessarily any more accurate than the life that can be winnowed from the observations of outsiders, who in Kaufmann’s case included spies and informers. And in a life spanning nearly ten decades, many aspects won’t have been recorded by other people or deemed worth remembering by the subject himself.

The omissions start with Kaufmann’s early life. He was born Jizchak Schmeidler (or perhaps Sally Jizchak Schmeidler) on 19 January 1924 in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. His mother Rachela, originally from Poland, was among them. Aged seventeen when Jizchak was born, she was working as a shop assistant at a department store. That’s all we know about her; when Jizchak was three, she gave him up for adoption. We can only guess why.

His new parents were a couple from far-flung Duisburg, a city in the Ruhr Valley in the west of Germany. His adoptive father, Sally Kaufmann, had fought and been decorated in the first world war and afterwards practised as a lawyer and notary. Sally’s wife Johanna had been to art school, but her dreams of becoming an artist remained unfulfilled. Jizchak had no siblings, but later in life speculated that he may have been adopted not because his adoptive parents were childless but because Sally was also his biological father. But we simply don’t know why and how young Jizchak and his mother entered the Kaufmanns’ lives.

Jizchak, who became Walter upon his adoption, grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois household. Like his biological mother, his adoptive parents were Jewish. The family observed the high holidays, young Walter was required to take Hebrew classes, and Sally for many years chaired Duisburg’s Jewish congregation. Like many German Jews, though, the Kaufmanns were not overly religious.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which would have such an impact on Walter’s life, didn’t come out of nowhere. A pogrom had occurred in the Scheunenviertel only a couple of months before Walter was born there, with Jews assaulted (and one of them killed) and their businesses looted. But the systematic discrimination against Jews, and their exclusion from public life in Nazi Germany would have come as a shock to the Kaufmanns. In early November 1938, during the so-called Reichskristallnacht pogroms, Sally Kaufmann was taken for a time to the Dachau concentration camp and the Kaufmanns’ house was ransacked while Walter and his mother hid in the basement.

The violence convinced the Kaufmanns that Walter, at least, needed to be sent to safety, and in January 1939, on his fifteenth birthday, he left on a Kindertransport to England. There he attended the New Herrlingen boarding school in Faversham, Kent. In June 1940, when the Battle of Dunkirk forced the British government to prepare the country for a German invasion, sixteen-year-old Walter was among the many recently arrived “enemy aliens” to be arrested. Then, together with more than 2000 other German and Austrian refugees, he was sent to Australia on the infamous Dunera and interned in a camp in the western NSW town of Hay. Under “reason for internment,” the dossier created by the Australian military authorities stated incongruously: “Enemy Alien — Refugee from Nazi oppression.”

Released from Hay in March 1942, Kaufmann joined the Australian army — or rather, the 8th Employment Company, which provided an opportunity for “refugee aliens” to contribute to the war effort. Still with the army, he applied for an Australian entry permit for his parents; by then, however, they had been deported, first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz, where they were killed. They shared the fate of the hundreds of Jews from Duisburg who became the victims of Nazi persecution. (The letters Johanna and Sally Kaufmann wrote to their son in England and in Australia are about to be published as a book.)

In 1944 Kaufmann married Tasmanian-born Barbara Dyer, who was eleven years older than him. They had met while she was working as an officer for army intelligence — a job she lost because of the relationship. (Kaufmann may have been in the army, but he was still an alien from Germany.) He was naturalised after the war was over, in 1946.

Kaufmann had begun to write fiction, in English, while he was still with the army, and by the end of the war was already a published author. In 1944, his short story “The Simple Things” won him the first of many literary prizes. He joined the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, a group of left-wing authors, and became friends with Frank Hardy and David Martin, the latter himself a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany in 1934. Martin in particular encouraged him to write about his experiences in Nazi Germany.

Kaufmann’s first novel, Voices in the Storm, an account of anti-fascist resistance and the coming of age of a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, was published in 1953 by the Australasian Book Company, which had been set up by a group of like-minded authors. He later recalled that he himself sold 2000 copies of the book by hawking it at wharfs, mines and other workplaces during fifteen-minute stop-work meetings.

While he continued to write, Kaufmann worked in a wide range of jobs, including as a wedding photographer and a seaman. In 1955, the Seamen’s Union sent him to the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. There he met an East German publisher who convinced him that his writings, including Voices in the Storm, would find a receptive audience in communist East Germany — the German Democratic Republic, to give it its formal name, or GDR. Travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he not only met fellow writers at a GDR writers’ congress, but also searched unsuccessfully for his biological mother.

Walter Kaufmann (third from left, standing) with other members of the Australian delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955. National Archives of Australia

Kaufmann found himself attracted to the prospect of becoming a writer in a country where people tried to live according to the philosophy he and his Australian comrades were preaching. For the first time since 1939, a return to Germany presented itself as an option. But first he went back to Australia as an attaché with the German team that attended the Melbourne Olympic Games.

After a lecture tour in which Kaufmann talked about his European travels (which had also led him to the Soviet Union), he and his wife moved to East Germany — or, in his words, he “returned home to foreign parts.” Unlike another Australian who migrated to East Germany at around the same time, the anthropologist Fred Rose, Kaufmann didn’t leave Australia because he felt victimised for his political convictions. (All he shared with Rose was a tendency to philander.)

The secretary of the GDR writers’ association had told him that he could be more useful in the West than in the East, but a short visit to his home town on his first trip back to Europe had convinced him that he wasn’t welcome there. His parents’ house was now occupied by strangers who did not even ask him inside.

By the time he arrived in East Berlin, however, the deal that had initially attracted him to East Germany had fallen through. The East German authorities deemed parts of the plot of Voices in the Storm to be against the party line and demanded that he rewrite the book. Kaufmann refused. But he used some of the autobiographical material that informed his first novel to write another book, which was allowed to be published. And despite this early setback, he could be a professional writer in the GDR, something that would not have been possible in Australia.

Back in Australia, Kaufmann had been a member of the Communist Party, but he later recalled neither wanting nor being able to join East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party. One prerequisite would have been taking out GDR citizenship, which he declined to do. Retaining his Australian citizenship meant he could travel the world.

And he did: to Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, including several times to the United States. As a roving reporter, he covered the Cuban revolution and the court case against the American civil rights activist Angela Davis in the early 1970s. His journeying provided him with the material that helped him become arguably East Germany’s most widely read travel writer.

Much of his writing about foreign places is reportage in the tradition of the “racing reporter” of the 1920s and 1930s, Egon Erwin Kisch. Although probably not as accomplished a writer as Kisch, Kaufmann too married social critique with travelogues. And his occupation as a travel writer and foreign correspondent at large was also an opportunity to escape, albeit only temporarily, the confines of East Germany’s insularity. He let his readers share in these escapes, and they loved him for it.

He also wrote short stories, novels and books for children. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, Kaufmann had published twenty-six books in German and was part of the country’s literary establishment. His standing is evident in the fact that in 1984 he was able to publish Flucht, a book about a medical doctor who left the GDR for West Germany.

When all his publishers went out of business after reunification, the sixty-six-year-old Kaufmann began a new career, as a German, rather than an East German, writer. He must also have realised that he had to move on from the travel writing that had made him a household name; with air travel now possible and affordable, his readers no longer needed the window on the world that he had been able to provide.

Much of Kaufmann’s post-1990 writing is autobiographical. There was a market for that too, but he didn’t enjoy the same success that had marked his career in the GDR. And although he began to publish books with West German publishers, he also contributed regularly to two daily newspapers that have acted as reminders of a bygone era, and of a state that ceased to exist in 1990: the Neues Deutschland, formerly the paper of the Socialist Unity Party, and the Junge Welt, which used to be published by the Free German Youth, the GDR’s official youth organisation. Kaufmann’s last Junge Welt article, a review of a book of poems by another nonagenarian, the East German writer Gisela Steineckert, appeared about a month before his death.

Kaufmann had felt less at home in the GDR than in Australia. But, he told an interviewer, the GDR “became my home when it had gone.” He reasoned that this was because he felt he had been taken care of there, both as a person and as a writer.

A Jew in Nazi Germany, an enemy alien in wartime England, a communist in Robert Menzies’s Australia, an Australian in East Germany, and somebody with a GDR identity in the reunified Germany: throughout his life, Kaufmann didn’t quite belong. Sometimes that was because he had been excluded; at other times, it was because he cultivated the sense of detachment that also characterises some of his writing.

For most of his life in East Germany, he wasn’t a foreigner just because of his Australian passport. Initially, he even spoke German with an Australian accent. And he continued to write in English. All the books he published in his first twenty years in Germany had to be translated. The way he tells the story, he eventually taught himself to write in German after a Melbourne publisher reissued Voices in the Storm in the early 1970s. When he took the opportunity to submit the book again for publication in the GDR, the text was approved without changes — with the proviso that it be translated by the author himself. Stimmen im Sturm, published in 1977, thus became the first book he wrote in German. He recalled that it was hard work to turn his English prose into German, but by the end of it, he had graduated from a German writer of English to a writer of German.

His German writing retained an Australian touch, though. He privileged unadorned and succinct prose, and an uncomplicated syntax. “My German has become like English,” he told an interviewer.

Three of his books were published in English by an East German publisher, but Voices in the Storm remained the only one of his books to be published in Australia. He may have identified as an Australian writer for much of his life, but the Australian reading public didn’t warm to him, despite his writing frequently about Australian topics, such as the Maralinga atomic tests, and despite much of his autobiographical fiction being set in Australia. I hope that Australians will one day discover one of their own — although in order to do so, they might have to rely on translations, as he wrote some of his more interesting autobiographical prose in German.

Biographies are not only shaped by the material on which a biographer can draw; they are also informed by broader narratives. The website advertising the forthcoming film about Kaufmann, for example, says, “For us filmmakers, this is the main content of Walter Kaufmann’s life: the catastrophic consequences of National Socialism; the legendary trial of Angela Davis; the revolution in Cuba; the discussion about Stalinism; the impact of the atomic bomb in Japan; the never-ending history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the collapse of the GDR; the return of nationalist, anti-Semitic tendencies in Germany.” It’s not hard to anticipate the film’s drift.

Often biographies try to fit the life of an individual into a national story, or relate it to the life of a more famous person. That’s what happened to Kaufmann; in Germany he will also be remembered as the man who — albeit unwittingly and indirectly — ruined the reputation of East Germany’s most famous writer, and arguably its best, Christa Wolf.

Like Fred Rose, Kaufmann was a communist and therefore a person of interest to ASIO. Unlike Rose, Kaufmann did not become a spy himself when he moved to East Germany. On the contrary, the East German Stasi was as interested in Kaufmann as ASIO had been. Although he had chosen life in the communist East over life in the capitalist West, Kaufmann was not trusted. For good reason: while he remained faithful to socialism, including the perverted variety practised in the GDR, blind conformism was not his thing.

In the 1990s, Kaufmann’s Stasi file became the subject of a German literary controversy when it was revealed that Wolf had been among those reporting to the Stasi about Kaufmann (and, to a lesser extent, others). She was pilloried in much of the German media, including in a damning piece in the magazine Spiegel, even though Kaufmann, to whom she apologised, took her side. He did that not only because her transgressions were comparatively minor, but also because he was not somebody to hold grudges. When asked eight years ago to sum up his life, he said, “Life has been good to me. I’m not a victim. And I don’t feel like a victim.”

In Australia, Kaufmann may be remembered in the context of the uplifting and decidedly patriotic Dunera story, not least because he didn’t identify as a victim there either. Like many of those who later became known as the Dunera Boys, Kaufmann was appalled by the treatment meted out to the internees aboard the British ship but remembered fondly his first encounters with Australian soldiers, who escorted him and his fellow inmates to an internment camp in Hay. (He recalled his first impressions of Australia and Australians in a piece of autobiographical fiction published in Meanjin in 1954.)

When he interviewed Kaufmann on Late Night Live in 2014, Phillip Adams marvelled at the Dunera Boys as “the most extraordinary refugees we received” and described their contribution to Australia as “beyond parallel.” Kaufmann happily played along, referring to his stint in Hay as the “formative time of my life.” •

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Prior to its encounter with North Macedonia on 31 March, Germany had won eighteen World Cup qualifiers in a row. Just days earlier, it had beaten Iceland at home and Romania, the most highly rated team in its group, in Bucharest. “The most important question is not who will win this game,” read one pre-match assessment, “but by how much the winner of the 2014 World Cup will prevail.” After all, Germany had triumphed in the World Cup four times and in the European championship thrice, whereas North Macedonia had never even qualified for either tournament.

The teams played in an empty stadium, but that could hardly count as an excuse for the German loss. At least the lack of a crowd saved the home team the humiliation of being booed by its fans while North Macedonia proceeded to its well-deserved win. Germany’s only goal came courtesy of a questionable penalty decision. German coach Joachim “Jogi” Löw’s team was outfoxed, outplayed and outclassed by a disciplined but by no means outstanding opponent.

This was not the first time Löw and his men have stumbled badly. In a first for Germany, they were eliminated in the first round of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Then, in November 2020, they went down by six goals to Spain. As the calls for Löw to be sacked became louder, he announced in early March that he would retire right after Euro 2020, the European championship postponed until June this year by the pandemic.

Löw has been Germany’s head coach since July 2006. His contract was extended for another four years in 2018, well before Germany’s dismal performance in Russia, and it seemed at the time as if he was going to be around forever. The youngest player in the current German side, Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich, wouldn’t be able to remember a time when Löw was not in charge of Germany’s national team.

Depending on whom you ask, managing the national side is either the most important job on offer in Germany, or a close second behind the task of running Germany’s government. Angela Merkel has been in office even longer than Löw, since November 2005. Her contract was last renewed in 2017. She too is on her way out, and the parallels don’t end there.

Lately, most Germans have been as dismayed by Merkel’s team as they have been by Löw’s. That’s mostly to do with Germany’s response to Covid-19.

Germany did well in the first wave of the pandemic during last year’s northern spring. The rate of infections and the number of fatalities were much lower than in most other European countries, let alone the United States and South America. But the authorities reacted too late and not decisively enough when the second wave began building in October, even though the expert calls for a hard lockdown were hard to ignore. After shops and schools eventually had to close, the country got through that wave as well, but the price — in terms of deaths from Covid-19 — was much higher than in spring.

Early this year, virologists predicted that Germany’s caseload would once more go up because of the mutations that had emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. From mid February, case numbers began climbing as the prevalence of the so-called British variant, also known as B.1.1.7, grew. On Monday, the rate of new infections per 100,000 over seven days reached 136, the highest incidence in twelve weeks. It keeps rising. The virologists’ predictions were proving accurate, but the federal and state governments still couldn’t agree on measures to stop this third wave of the pandemic, or at least flatten the curve.

Not only did the incidence figures keep rising, so did the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care wards: from about 2800 in mid March to more than 4600 on Monday. Soon, more Covid-19 patients are likely to be in intensive care than at the height of the second wave. Because most people aged seventy-five and over have been vaccinated, hospitals are increasingly treating young people. Their chance of survival is better than that of octogenarians, but many of them will suffer what is popularly called Long Covid and referred to by scientists as post-acute Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the number of people who have been fully immunised is still too small to make a real difference. As of 11 April, about 6 per cent of the population had received both doses of any of the three available vaccines, and only about 16 per cent have been given at least one.

Behind the sluggish immunisation campaign is a shortage of vaccines. That can’t be blamed on the German authorities, because the European Commission, rather than the Merkel government, was responsible for their procurement. It’s true that Merkel lobbied her European colleagues to agree to a concerted approach rather than let each EU country buy its own supplies, but that was the right call. If the poorer EU countries had missed out, the recriminations would have damaged the European Union beyond repair. Countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Slovenia have already suffered disproportionate human losses because their hospitals are not as well equipped as those of Germany, Denmark, Austria or the Netherlands.

But the German government could be blamed for sowing confusion about the AstraZeneca vaccine. First it deemed the vaccine unsuitable for those aged sixty-five or more; now it considers the vaccine too dangerous for the under-sixties. The message that the benefits of this vaccine far outweigh its risks didn’t get through, and now a considerable number of those due to be immunised are frightened to receive one of only three vaccines available in Germany.

Strictly speaking, Merkel and her ministers aren’t responsible for the dilatory response to the spread of the virus either. It’s up to Germany’s local and state governments to impose curfews and shutdowns of schools, childcare centres, shops and restaurants. Throughout the pandemic, the federal government has tried to convince the states to agree to uniform measures. Merkel has met regularly with the sixteen state premiers, although such heads-of-government consultations are not a formal feature of German federalism.

Usually lasting many hours, the meetings have sought to bridge the divide between Merkel, the trained scientist who tends to argue for more measures to halt the spread of the virus, and some of the state premiers, who want fewer restrictions. While these meetings have usually concluded with an agreement, individual premiers have often been quick to distance themselves from decisions and deal with the pandemic as they see fit, oblivious to expert advice and seemingly unconcerned about the consequences.

The last such consultation began on the afternoon of 22 March and lasted until 2.30 the next morning. Its only significant result was the declaration of additional public holidays on the Thursday and Saturday before Easter, thereby creating a five-day “rest period” during which schools and businesses would be closed and the pandemic, it was hoped, slowed down. Only a day later, though, Merkel had to concede that the plan wasn’t feasible. She then apologised — uncharacteristically — for announcing and then cancelling the measure. But she had no plan B. Each state has continued to prescribe its own measures, and it’s become impossible to keep abreast of the myriad different rules and sanctions.

The patchwork approach is partly explained by electoral pressures. Armin Laschet, the Christian Democrat in charge of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Markus Söder, the premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, are both vying to lead the conservatives in September’s federal election campaign and then succeed Merkel as chancellor. They have used the pandemic to sharpen their public profiles: Laschet by arguing against lockdowns and other restrictions, Söder by endorsing Merkel’s hard line. With five state elections this year, other premiers have also sought to impress voters first and deal with the pandemic second.

States with comparatively low infection rates refuse to agree to measures designed to flatten the curve in high-incidence states. And then there are the usual differences of opinion between states led by Social Democrats and those led by Christian Democrats, and between East German and West German state governments. That some premiers seem to find it difficult to understand how the virus spreads hasn’t helped.

To say that Merkel isn’t to blame for any of this would not be entirely correct. For one, her decision to relinquish the leadership of her party a few months before the end of her last term in office has undermined the authority she needs to make the state premiers act in unison. And when it became clear that individual states weren’t doing enough to contain the disease, the federal government should have stepped in.

It will try to do so, belatedly, this week. Merkel cancelled the heads-of-government meeting that had been scheduled for Monday. Parliament will debate a bill that would give the federal government the power to impose lockdowns and curfews. But such an initiative should have come much earlier.

A fortnight ago, Merkel took the unusual step of participating in a live one-hour interview with Anne Will, whose eponymous program on Sunday evenings, immediately after the latest episode of the popular crime drama Tatort, is the most-watched talk show on German television. In the interview, she reprimanded the premiers (singling out two who belong to her own party) and threatened a federal move to take control of Germany’s response to the pandemic. At last, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. But then she waited for almost two weeks. Perhaps she was hoping that such a move would prove unnecessary, or perhaps she was just dithering.

And then there was the federal health authorities’ decision to remove Spain’s Balearic Islands from the list of risk areas just in time for the Easter holidays. Maybe they thought nobody would book a trip — and it’s true that the airlines were offering hardly any flights to Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, which is Germans’ favourite holiday destination (sometimes called Germany’s seventeenth state). But around 45,000 holiday-makers descended on Mallorca over Easter, proving that the laws of supply and demand also work during a pandemic. Because of the time lag between infections and symptoms, it remains to be seen what impact this mass gathering will have.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the ruling Christian Democrats has suffered a further blow after several of its members of parliament were accused of corruption. In some cases, the politicians concerned had received large amounts of money — €660,000 in one instance — for putting the suppliers of medical masks in touch with the federal health ministry when it was desperately seeking large quantities of masks last year.

Looming above all of this is the question of why on earth the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party have been unable to nominate a successor for Merkel. It’s been more than fourteen months since her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, fell on her sword after she failed to prevent collusion between her party and the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) in the East German state of Thuringia. Since then the speculation has been endless: first about who would succeed her, and then about whether her successor Armin Laschet would be the conservatives’ candidate for chancellor. The conflict between Laschet and the Bavarian premier Markus Söder entered an extra round on Monday, with both receiving a ringing endorsement by their respective parties.

Germans, regardless of their political persuasion, age or class, are exasperated. A majority is in favour of tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. A vocal minority, represented in parliament by the AfD, refuses to believe that the virus is dangerous and wants no restrictions at all. I suspect the only reason why few outside the AfD are calling for Merkel’s resignation is that there is no one in her party who would be able to replace her.

On Saturday, the front page of Hamburg tabloid Morgenpost featured just one word in lieu of the usual article: Nichts* (nothing*). The asterisk explained: “This is what the chancellor and the state premiers have implemented to alleviate the state of emergency in the hospitals.”

The bungled response to Covid-19 didn’t come as a total surprise. Germans know that the country’s bureaucracy is slow to swing into action at the best of times. The fact that crucial technological developments seem to have bypassed the public service didn’t help. It’s no secret, for example, that federal, state and local governments have only slowly come to terms with the digital revolution. German health departments still report the number of infections by fax, rather than digitally. When schools were told that students needed to be taught remotely, some teachers took that to mean that they would simply post photocopied worksheets to their students once a week. And don’t even mention German Rail and the coverage of the mobile phone network.

But now, as Covid-19’s global reach prompts comparisons not just of infection numbers, vaccination rates and fatalities but also of government responses, German inefficiency is no longer a well-kept secret. Germans can’t keep complaining that their trains are always late but then find solace in the idea that others believe Germans are naturally more efficient. It’s the realisation that German stuff-ups are now regularly reported in the New York Times that has come as a shock.

Similarly, the millions of Germans who are convinced they would do a better job than Jogi Löw have long known about the weaknesses of Germany’s national side. Löw and his team just haven’t been that good since their triumph in Brazil seven years ago. But nobody else seemed to take much notice of the slide. That’s changed: now that Germany has succumbed to North Macedonia it is no longer possible to pretend that this was the same side that beat Brazil by six goals in the 2014 semifinal and went on to win the cup.

Germans feel that they not only need to get on top of the pandemic, they also need to restore their reputation as world champions of efficiency and innovation. They need not just to win their next qualifier — given that their opponent will be Liechtenstein, that’s perhaps not such a big challenge — but also to convince others that they are still one of the heavyweights of world football.

When it comes to football, there’s a short-term remedy. Germany just ought to field its best side — which means that Jogi Löw must admit it was a terrible mistake to tell Thomas Müller, the star performer of Champions League winner Bayern Munich, that his services were no longer required. Having Müller in the side might at least prevent the embarrassment of exiting Euro 2020 at the group stage.

Then there is the pressing question of who will be Germany’s new coach. Four of the eight clubs currently competing for this year’s title in the Champions League are coached by Germans, and their names naturally came up when Löw announced his resignation. But that’s not how the German Football Association works. It won’t appoint a Thomas Tuchel (the head coach of Chelsea) or Jürgen Klopp (who’s in charge of Liverpool); they are too independent or too flamboyant. (Not that either of them would want to give up their current gig in Britain.)

Löw’s job is more likely to go to an understudy, in the same way that Sepp Herberger’s assistant Helmut Schön became head coach in 1964, Jupp Derwall followed Schön in 1978, and Löw got the job when his immediate boss, Jürgen Klinsmann, resigned. Perhaps Germans should simply transfer their attachment from the men’s to the women’s side, which has won thirteen of its last fourteen games, including, most recently, a friendly against Australia.

Unlike Jogi Löw, Angela Merkel can’t draft somebody for her cabinet whom she had previously sent packing (although there would be no shortage of potential candidates). And, to stay with the analogy, while the Christian Democratic Union might be as conservative as the German Football Association and pick an uninspiring understudy as Merkel’s designated successor, it won’t be up to the party to appoint the next chancellor.

Germany could well do with a Jürgen Klopp of politics: somebody to motivate and inspire them as they face their next big task, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. They also need somebody to remind them that their glasses are half full rather than half empty; after all, despite the chaos surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic, so far proportionately fewer people have died of the virus than in eight of Germany’s nine neighbouring countries. (Only Denmark has done better.)

On 19 April, the Greens will announce who will run as their candidate for the chancellorship in September. As the Christian Democrats are only five percentage points ahead of the Greens in the latest polls, Merkel’s successor might be either of the two Green contenders, Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck. While neither has the charisma of a Jürgen Klopp, both would be keenly aware of the need for Germany to arrive at last in the twenty-first century. Both would lead a government intent on changing the country rather than administering the status quo. Both would know that the challenge of climate change will eventually dwarf that of Covid-19.

Germans’ concern with how their country is perceived has led them to believe that their government’s lack of action is a very recent phenomenon. But when was the last time the Merkel government did what was necessary without backtracking afterwards? Some would say that this was in 2015, during the so-called refugee crisis, but it should be remembered that the image of Merkel as an activist relies on a simple narrative: she decided that Germany should open its borders. Germany didn’t do that; it just didn’t close them. When the Merkel government swung into action, it helped negotiate a deal with Turkey to halt the flow of refugees while simultaneously tightening the asylum laws. In fact, Merkel last acted decisively in 2011, following the Fukushima accident in Japan, when her government decided to phase out Germany’s nuclear reactors.

Preoccupied as Germans are with appearances and perceptions, they tend to believe that the decline of Germany’s fortunes on the football field began after the 2014 World Cup. But the team that won the cup that year was arguably not as good — and certainly not as exciting — as the team that competed in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Germany won in 2014 because the competition was not as strong as four years earlier. In other words, the defeat at the hands of North Macedonia and the government’s ponderous response to the pandemic came after a long period of wasted opportunities. The summer of welcome in 2015 and the World Cup in 2014 just felt like moments when Germans were champions of the world. •

The post Champions no more appeared first on Inside Story.

As recently as two years ago, the rise of right-wing populism seemed unstoppable. From India to Brazil, from Hungary to the United States, populist leaders had won political office by railing against the “elites” and purporting to speak for “the people.” In democracies across Asia, Europe and the Americas, right-wing populist parties and movements had gained political influence using ultranationalist rhetoric and vilifying minorities. We became used to the idea that the Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros were here to stay.

At least in Western countries, the trend seems to have reversed. Donald Trump has been voted out of office; the right-wing populist parties that had been in government in Western Europe — Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria — have been sidelined. And isn’t it only a matter of time until Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ousts Bolsonaro? It is now possible to imagine that the era of right-wing populism is drawing to a close.

Often mentioned as evidence of the inexorable rise of right-wing populism was the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD. Less than 200 days after it was formed at a meeting of eighteen men in a church hall in Oberursel, just outside of Frankfurt, the AfD won more than two million votes in Germany’s 2013 federal elections.

At that election, the AfD fell just short of the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. Four years later, in 2017, it exceeded that figure, and for the past four years it has been the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. AfD is also represented in all sixteen state parliaments, and is now the second-largest party in the five East German states of Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

But just as the AfD’s rise fits the pattern of a surge of right-wing populism in the 2010s, its recent fortunes could be evidence of the waning of this political phenomenon. In elections in the southwest states of Rhineland-Palatine and Baden-Württemberg, the AfD shed more votes than any other party. In Baden-Württemberg, its stronghold outside the former communist east of the country, its support slumped from 15.1 to 9.7 per cent. Has the AfD’s time already passed?

The matter is more complicated than the figures might suggest. What has definitely passed is the party born in Oberursel on 6 February 2013. Of the eighteen men present that day, most have long left. One of them, the economist Bernd Lucke, led the party until 2015, when he was deposed in favour of Frauke Petry and subsequently quit the party. Petry herself resigned from the AfD in 2017 immediately after winning a seat in the Bundestag.

The old AfD was largely made up of three sets of people: conservatives who thought Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats had veered too far left, advocates of neoliberal economics who wanted Germany to leave the eurozone, and elderly men afraid of cultural diversity and appalled by the official rebranding of Germany as a country of immigration. Since then, aggressive nativism and opposition to refugees and other migrants have become the party’s trademarks.

Not all the leaders who emerged in 2013 have resigned from the AfD. Notable among them is Björn Höcke, a high school teacher of history and physical education born in West Germany in 1972, who has led the AfD in Thuringia for the past eight years. Rather than championing economic liberalism, as the majority of the AfD’s founders did, he has identified neoliberalism and globalisation as twin evils. He is socially conservative but wants a complete overhaul of Germany’s politics and culture.

In 2015, Höcke founded the Flügel, a network that brought together the far right of the AfD. Attempts by moderate forces within the AfD leadership to expel Höcke failed in 2015 and again in 2017. In 2019, the domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, published a report arguing that the Flügel, as well as the party’s youth organisation, was advocating attitudes and policies irreconcilable with the German constitution. Of the report’s 436 pages, fifty were devoted to Höcke’s views, reflecting the fact that he is rightly seen as the AfD’s most influential proponent of extremist positions.

The Flügel’s leadership eventually dissolved the organisation last year after pressure from Jörg Meuthen, the AfD’s relatively moderate co-leader, and his allies, who argued it was tarnishing the AfD’s brand and attracting unwelcome attention from Germany’s intelligence agency.

Another survivor of the class of 2013 is Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s deputy leader from 2013 until 2017, its co-leader from 2017 until 2019, and co-leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag since the last election. Born in 1941 in East Germany, he emigrated to West Germany as an eighteen-year-old, gained a doctorate in law, and also studied history. From 1977 until 1991, he worked as chief of staff of the Christian Democrat Walter Wallmann, who was in turn mayor of Frankfurt, federal environment minister and premier of Hesse.

After Wallmann’s defeat in the 1991 state elections, Gauland moved to the East German state of Brandenburg, where he became editor of a local newspaper. He joined the Berliner Kreis, a loose network of conservative Christian Democrats critical of Angela Merkel, but meetings with like-minded conservatives only exacerbated his alienation from the party that had been his political home since the 1970s. Although he is not usually considered to belong to the far right of the AfD, he has consistently taken Höcke’s side in factional struggles and signed the Erfurt Declaration, the Flügel’s foundational document.

More than anybody else, Höcke and Gauland have shaped today’s AfD: the former by attracting a sufficient number of followers, particularly in East Germany, to shift the AfD towards the far right, the latter by personifying the party’s radicalisation over the past eight years and providing cover for Höcke whenever necessary. More than anybody else, these two men can tell us where the AfD is heading.

Höcke and Gauland have each attracted more controversy than any other AfD politician. That’s partly because they habitually refer in offensive terms to people belonging to ethnic or religious minorities. In 2016, for instance, Gauland criticised the successful Berlin-born footballer Jérôme Boateng, son of a Ghanaian father and a German mother: “The people like him as a player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as a neighbour.” A year later, he suggested it would be desirable to “dispose of [“entsorgen”] in Anatolia” the prominent Hamburg-born Social Democrat Aydan Özoğuz, whose parents had migrated from Turkey.

Even more controversial have been Höcke’s and Gauland’s demands for a reappraisal of Germany’s Nazi past. In a 2017 speech in Dresden, Höcke said that German president Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous address to the Bundestag on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the second world war, in which he acknowledged Germany’s responsibility for that catastrophe, was a speech “against his own people.” Referring to the national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Höcke said that “we Germans are the only people in the world who have built a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” adding that “a 180-degree turnaround of German memorial politics” was needed. In a speech in 2018, Gauland infamously remarked that “Hitler and the Nazis are only a Vogelschiss [a piece of bird shit] in more than a thousand years of successful German history.”

Gauland and Höcke have consequently been branded Nazis and fascists. But however reprehensible their views, the labels are misleading. Neither of them would like to see a return to the Third Reich, and neither has endorsed the Nazis’ policies. Ostensibly, AfD figures violate taboos to defy political correctness, but their real aim is to attract the media’s attention, to unsettle their opponents, to shift the boundaries of political discourse and to demonstrate to their supporters that the “ruling elites” are vulnerable.

“It requires a provocation to be noticed,” Gauland said in defence of his suggestion that Özoğuz ought to be “disposed of.” “Again and again, the limits of what is sayable have to be extended by means of small advances,” Höcke explained to the Dresden writer Sebastian Hennig in a book-length conversation. Too often, commentators have fallen into the trap of denouncing individual AfD leaders as Nazis or fascists without recognising the intention behind their violations of taboos.

Unlike other parties on the far right that have had an impact in postwar Germany — including the German Right Party, which was represented in the 1949 Bundestag, and the National Democratic Party, the German People’s Union and the Republicans, all of which have at some stage been represented in state parliaments — the AfD is not a party in the tradition of the (historical) Nazi party. Rather, Höcke and other Flügel stalwarts have been influenced by the New Right.

In fact, the Flügel’s Erfurt Declaration is said to have been drafted by the Höcke confidant Götz Kubitschek, a publisher and author who is one of the leading proponents of the German New Right. Kubitschek and others think of their movement as a response to the New Left, and adopt some of the latter’s strategies. They aim not just for political power but also for cultural hegemony.

The German New Right draws on ideas developed by writers associated with the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s and early 1930s, including the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Ludwig Klages, the writer Ernst Jünger and the philosopher Oswald Spengler. Martin Heidegger, while arguably not himself part of the Conservative Revolution, is another whose ideas have had an impact on the thinking of the German New Right.

Gauland and Höcke frequently cite writers associated with the Conservative Revolution. In doing so, they ignore the fact that Schmitt, Spengler and others provided intellectual ammunition for the Nazis and sympathised with them, at least during the first half of the 1930s. But then, the Third Reich, which AfD politicians often refer to only as “those twelve years,” was supposedly but a Vogelschiss in a glorious past spanning a thousand years.

Another key difference between outfits such as the German Right Party and the National Democratic Party, on the one hand, and the AfD, on the other, is that the latter is populist. It has embraced a populism that pits “das Volk” against an “elite” that supposedly dominates government and the media. The AfD’s 2016 manifesto also favours some form of direct democracy: Swiss-style referendums to approve legislation passed by parliament and opportunities for extra-parliamentary groups to put bills to a popular vote.

Volk is a central category in Höcke’s and Gauland’s universe. It is both demos, the political citizenry, and ethnos, an exclusive group defined by common ancestors, language and cultural practices. Höcke has described Volk as a “community whose members are linked by fate and across generations.” Not everybody with a German passport is a German, Gauland once told the journalist Jana Simon; they would need to have a German mother, be fluent in the German language and share “German values” (which he did not specify). According to Höcke, whether someone belongs to a particular Volk is determined not only by kinship ties but also by association (“Verbandschaft”) — that is, by a willingness to belong. Those formally belonging to a particular Volk by descent could therefore be excluded if they don’t identify with it or extend their loyalty to it.

As a historical category, Höcke’s and Gauland’s German Volk is ill-defined. For them, it becomes concrete only in the present, when it is defined in opposition to what they variously term a “globalised class,” “new elites” (Gauland), a “caste” of politicians and media professionals (Höcke), or “a transatlantic political elite” of “cosmopolitan universalists” (Höcke). They contrast this new “class,” “caste” or “elite” not only with the Volk but also with the “genuine” elites of yesteryear.

They want the Volk to have more direct political influence. But Höcke worries that, “As a Volk, we are already very fragmented, and we no longer produce a homogeneous people’s will, but rather dissonant cacophony.” Referring to the summer of 2015, when most Germans were in favour of welcoming refugees, he told Hennig that the people’s will must be tempered by “responsible politicians” who, if need be, make decisions “against current public sentiment and in favour of the Volk.” He then compared the “statesman” favourably with the populist, because in his view the latter is prone to pave the way for ochlocracy, or the rule of the mob.

Yet Höcke is also fascinated by the mob’s raw energy: “At some point the pent-up pressure will be released, clenched fists will be raised in the air, and the people, that big lout, will shake the fortified gates of power.” He regularly professes his love for the Volk, but I believe he does so from the position of somebody imagining himself in the role of the “statesman” who would be able to harness the energies of “that big lout.”

While baiting journalists and other public commentators with statements that are racist or smack of historical revisionism, and while mimicking the rhetoric of Hitler and Goebbels, Gauland and Höcke have been careful to draw a line between themselves and the Nazis. Thus they have rejected the adjective “völkisch,” which former AfD leader Frauke Petry had wanted to reanimate in 2016. Höcke said that it is associated with a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics whose demands he does not share. More importantly, however, unlike Volk, the connotations of the term völkisch place it firmly in the context of “those twelve years.”

The other term the pair avoid is Führer, because that is now associated only with Hitler — according to Gauland the sole “progenitor” of National Socialism and the Holocaust. That is not to say that Höcke, in particular, is unsympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian leader who knows best what the Volk needs. For him, the term “statesman” might be but a placeholder.

Following the recent state elections, Meuthen blamed two factors — the pandemic and the party’s supposed victimisation at the hands of the domestic intelligence agency — for its losses. He also tried to talk down the poor showing. Gauland and Höcke took a different approach, referring to the result as a “wake-up call” (Gauland) and a “rout” (Höcke). Höcke blamed the rout on what he perceived to be timid and lame election campaigns designed to increase the party’s appeal among moderate middle-class voters. When lambasting the desire to appease mainstream voters, he clearly had in mind Meuthen’s keynote address at the most recent party congress in November 2020, in which Meuthen famously said, with a wink to Höcke, “We won’t become more successful by presenting as increasingly uncouth, aggressive and uninhibited.”

In Höcke’s view, the AfD ought to have targeted traditional non-voters, who “are fundamentally opposed to the ruling politics” but can’t be mobilised to vote by means of policy positions that come across as half-hearted and tame. He was also concerned that the party had done poorly in working-class areas; like Gauland, he believes the AfD needs to champion the interests of the “kleine Leute” (literally: the little people). Höcke’s rather than Meuthen’s strategy seems likely to be adopted during the next campaign, ahead of state elections in June in Saxony-Anhalt, one of the Flügel’s strongholds.

Although Höcke was quick to blame the Meuthen camp for the losses in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, he has otherwise not been too concerned about losing or gaining a few percentage points in elections. For him, the AfD is not only a party but also a movement. It needs to pressure ruling “elites” both in parliament and by organising demonstrations outside parliament. This is a lesson the AfD might have learned from the Nazi party of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but also from Germany’s Greens of the 1980s and 1990s. In other respects too, the Greens provided a model: like them, the AfD has two leaders, one representing the moderate camp that wants to be in government and one representing the Flügel.

With the Greens having developed a taste for participating in governing coalitions, their more radical faction, the so-called Fundis, have been sidelined. It’s unlikely that something similar will happen anytime soon in the AfD. While the Greens have become a sought-after ally (they are in power in eleven out of sixteen states, and a sure bet to be part of the federal government after the national elections in September), the other established parties consider a close association with the AfD poisonous. (Inside Story reported on the turmoil that ensued last year after a Free Democrat was elected premier of Thuringia with the help of Christian Democrats and the AfD.)

The fates of Trump and Salvini are no necessary guide to what will become of the AfD. Its isolation makes its case unique among right-wing populist parties and movements. Elsewhere, the rise of right-wing populism increased the chances of populists taking power; in Germany, that is not an option. In some European countries, right-wing populists came to power indirectly because other political leaders adopted their key policies in an attempt to deprive them of oxygen. Danish Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen and Austrian People’s Party leader Sebastian Kurz, for example, embraced far-right positions on immigration. A similar thing happened way back in the late 1990s in Australia, when prime minister John Howard attempted to neutralise Pauline Hanson’s appeal. Thus far, the German Christian Democrats have not given in to the temptation to copy key planks of the AfD’s platform. It is unlikely they will do so any time soon.

Björn Höcke was right in his analysis of the recent election results: it doesn’t matter to the AfD who forms the next government in Rhineland-Palatinate or in Baden-Württemberg. Nor, in order to predict the party’s fortunes and future role, is it necessary to know who will win the upcoming elections in September. The AfD won’t be invited to help form a government, and it hardly matters to its leaders whether Angela Merkel’s successor will be the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet or his Bavarian colleague Markus Söder — or Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck from the Greens.

For the AfD, this year’s crucial elections will happen in December, when the party selects its leadership team. It may well be that its transformation will be complete by then, and there will no longer be the need for two leaders covering the party’s range of positions. The epithet “populist” may then be less relevant than that of “far right.”

Another reason the outcome of the September elections won’t matter much for the AfD is that whoever forms government will introduce policies to meet the Paris climate agreement’s targets. That will offer an opportunity to the AfD to mobilise climate change sceptics and those who believe they are personally bearing the costs of the government’s policies. Björn Höcke will be hoping that the people, “that big lout,” will then rise up. •

The post Waiting for “that big lout” to rise up appeared first on Inside Story.

I woke to the cries of my one-year-old son, but my eyes were immediately drawn to my phone, which was glowing with notifications in the early-morning darkness.

The previous week had been one of high tension between Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy government. Staring at the phone, I knew immediately that our world had just been upended.

At around 3am, just hours before Myanmar’s new parliament was due to meet following the November election, the Tatmadaw had begun rounding up senior officials from the NLD government in the capital, Naypyitaw, as well as Yangon and provincial cities. By the time I read the messages from my colleagues at Frontier Myanmar, a Yangon-based independent media organisation, the Tatmadaw was in full control.

I immediately opened Facebook — by far the most popular social media platform in the country — and watched a livestream of a regional minister being detained, a small group of gun-wielding soldiers just visible in front of her house. More photos, videos and testimonies were coming in from around the country by the minute. The coup was playing out on social media.

Then, at exactly 7.38 that morning, we got a taste of what this new era would be like: the internet suddenly went down. With the news channels also taken off the air, and the military-run station playing a Buddhist sermon, we were abruptly in an information vacuum. We would learn later that the newly installed acting president — a military appointee — was in the process of handing over power to the Tatmadaw commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, under a one-year state of emergency. After a decade, the military was back in charge.

This coup wasn’t supposed to happen. Like most observers, I’d assumed that the constitution the Tatmadaw carefully drafted over the course of fifteen years was enough security against any electoral outcome. The ability to nominate one of the three presidential candidates and another three seats in cabinet, complete autonomy over military affairs, 25 per cent of seats in parliament, an effective veto over constitutional change — surely it was enough. Discontent had been rumbling since the November election, which the NLD won in a landslide over the military’s proxy party, and the military had launched a campaign to discredit the outcome. But it was only in the week before the coup that we began to take these threats more seriously, after a military spokesman refused to rule out the possibility of the Tatmadaw seizing power.

The coup still didn’t make sense for the military as an institution, and right until 1 February there was optimism it wouldn’t happen. What we misjudged was how Min Aung Hlaing’s ambitions, with his retirement looming in mid year, and the personal enmity between the senior general and Aung San Suu Kyi could push the country into new and dangerous territory.

For all its flaws, the constitution had delivered a stable if uneasy power-sharing arrangement between the military and the NLD. It had enabled Myanmar to continue an imperfect transition that combined new political freedoms and rapid economic growth with a faltering peace process and, of course, the expulsion of the Rohingya to Bangladesh. With the civilian government now toppled, the future seemed deeply uncertain. That first day passed in a haze of confusion; the people I spoke to still seemed to be in shock.

The Tatmadaw portrayed its power grab as simply a temporary hiatus on the path to democracy. On previous occasions when it has seized power, in 1962 and 1988, the military abolished the constitution and introduced sweeping political and economic changes. This time, it was at pains to point out not only that the constitution would remain in force but also that Min Aung Hlaing’s temporary government would continue many of the NLD government’s initiatives. It appointed former ministers from the Thein Sein government, which preceded the NLD and won international plaudits for its reform agenda, and began negotiating with minority political leaders disgruntled at perceived NLD arrogance. It promised to hold elections and hand power to the winning party.

The military seemed confident that post-coup Myanmar would be business-as-usual. But it wasn’t long before everything began to fall apart.

Yet again, the Tatmadaw had badly overestimated its support in the community and underestimated the rage that its removal of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD would unleash. This proved a potent cocktail for an uprising.

The resistance began with a bang — literally. The nightly banging of pots and pans, an old ritual to drive out evil spirits, started at 8pm on 2 February, and has continued every night since. The next day, thousands of medical workers joined the “civil disobedience movement” and walked off the job, insisting they wouldn’t return until the civilian government was reinstated.

By that first weekend, thousands were on the streets of Yangon, and when the police made little attempt to stop them the protests quickly began to grow and spread, first across the central plains of Myanmar and then to its minority-dominated uplands. On 22 February — dubbed the “22222 uprising” — millions marched across the country, calling for an end to military rule. Tens of thousands of public and private sector employees joined medical workers in their boycott, crippling the health, logistics and banking sectors and bringing much of the machinery of government to a grinding halt.

As editor-in-chief of Frontier, I’ve spent most of the past month behind a computer screen — coordinating assignments with our reporting team, downloading photos, videos and news updates, writing liveblog and social media posts, and editing and writing features — rather than on the streets. But during one of the first days of mass protests, I walked along a main road through Yangon’s suburbs with thousands of students heading to downtown Yangon to meet up with other groups. Residents lined both sides of the street, holding placards and giving the three-finger salute that has become a symbol of the resistance. A lot of the protesters were clearly NLD supporters — some people held “Free Aung San Suu Kyi” posters — but they seemed to be united by a bigger cause: removing the military from power.

“We’re here to show the military that we will never accept them back in charge,” a woman in her thirties, Ma Shwe, told me through her black face mask. Standing beside the road, a twenty-three-year-old man explained that he could only vaguely remember what military rule was like, but he knew what it represented. “If we’re under the military, we have no future,” he said. “We have no choice but to fight.”

Medical staff protesting in Yangon last Saturday as security forces intensified their response. Nyein Chan Naing/EPA

For all that determination and anger, the protests in Yangon initially felt more like a carnival. Police were few, except at a handful of strategic locations, and not particularly threatening; people called out pyithu ye, or people’s police, in an effort to entice them to join the demonstrations. When I visited the barricaded area in front of Yangon’s city hall in mid February, there seemed as many people taking selfies in front of the police as were protesting. It was colourful, joyous, creative.

Gradually, though, the atmosphere has become more menacing. The military has shown no signs of yielding; rather, its position hardens by the day, as seen in the detention of politicians and activists, enactment of harsh new laws and use of ever-greater violence against protesters. On 28 February, when particularly large demonstrations erupted across the country, security forces killed at least eighteen people across six cities, the United Nations said, and as of 4 March fifty-four protesters had lost their lives in total, the United Nations said. Many are young and have died from gunshot wounds to the head or back, which indicates the security forces have adopted a “shoot to kill” policy to suppress the protests. As a result, the protesters are increasingly young and male, and are arming themselves with home-made shields and even bullet-proof vests.

Prisons are also swelling with political detainees. Since the coup, the slow trickle of arrests has grown to a flood, with detained protesters — who initially were being released without charge — now being sent directly to prison. Close to 1300 had been arrested up to 2 March, local rights groups say.

This is all intended to intimidate. So far, though, it has had the opposite effect — for many, the violence against peaceful protesters has only reinforced why the military must be removed from power.

The security forces are waging what must seem like a never-ending war against thousands of young, determined opponents of the regime. The confrontations in Yangon all more or less follow a similar pattern. The police fire tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets and charge towards the demonstrators’ makeshift barricades; the protesters take shelter in nearby apartments and re-emerge after the police have left. My colleagues, brave Myanmar journalists and photographers, have spent the past week being gassed and shot at, and hiding in strangers’ homes to evade arrest, in order to document this struggle for the world.

Time moves differently in a crisis; more has changed in our lives over the past month than in the average year. What was once strange becomes normal.

We’ve had to quickly adjust to a strange new reality — a reality in which banks are shut because rank-and-file staff are on strike, laws can and will be changed overnight without any consultation, and we consider it a duty to spend fifteen minutes each night filling neighbourhoods with the clang of metal on metal.

We’ve learned new acronyms, like CDM (civil disobedience movement) and CRPH (Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, the NLD’s rival government), and worked out the difference between tear gas canisters and stun grenades. We use VPNs and the messaging app Signal as a matter of course. Facebook feeds that were once full of photos of family and friends and inane thoughts are now dedicated solely to political struggle. We’ve chafed at 8pm curfews and nightly internet shutdowns, and burned with anger at livestreams of activists and politicians being arrested, and videos of police brutality.

As a foreigner, I’m an outsider — this is not my fight. But I am not totally detached from the struggle, either. Having lived in Myanmar for more than thirteen years and made a life here — a career, a family and a home — I can certainly empathise with the loss, anger and hopelessness propelling the protest movement.

But as a journalist, the coup has also brought a renewed sense of purpose. Many other journalists in Myanmar feel the same, I suspect, even as the risks continue to mount.

The media had been an important stakeholder in the early years of Myanmar’s unexpected liberalisation, but the NLD’s ascension to power — widely celebrated by journalists — had unexpected consequences for our industry. The party essentially ignored independent media, preferring its own state-run outlets, and had no compunction about locking journalists up under ill-defined laws if they challenged its political interests. Many journalists felt disappointed, even betrayed, by the NLD.

The Rohingya crisis took this to a new level. The tsunami of negative coverage that it unleashed prompted a huge public backlash against the media. Disinformation campaigns on social media, fuelled partly by government statements, painted journalists as foreign-funded stooges. After the government prosecuted two Reuters reporters for exposing a massacre of Rohingya by the Tatmadaw, journalists came to be seen as untrustworthy at best and potential traitors at worst. It felt as though we were slowly being ground down by a hostile public and government.

Now, inadvertently, we find ourselves back on the side of the people. It has been energising, revitalising.

Slowly, gradually, though, the military has turned the screws. It began with a letter demanding we refer to it as the State Administration Council, and stop calling it a “regime,” “military government” or “coup government.” In an unprecedented show of unity, almost sixty media organisations, including Frontier,  signed a joint statement pushing back against these demands, and insisting that we will continue to report freely and in line with media ethics. Our refusal to comply has resulted in further warnings; the latest included a threat to revoke our licences if we do not submit.

Meanwhile, amendments to the colonial-era Penal Code and the Electronic Transactions Law have heightened the legal risks for journalists and media organisations. In addition to the myriad laws already used to lock up journalists, it’s now an offence to “cause fear, spread false news, agitate directly or indirectly against a government employee” or distribute “fake or inaccurate news online that could create panic, loss of trust or social division.” Both carry a three-year prison term.

In recent days, close to twenty journalists have been arrested while covering the demonstrations, of whom at least six have been hit with these charges.

We all know what may be coming. The military is determined to hold on to power at any cost, and anyone or anything that gets in its way is unlikely to be tolerated for long. Until then, though, we’ll just keep doing our jobs. It’s the only thing we can do. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The resistance that began with a bang appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not hard to see why Germany’s leaders opted for a new hard lockdown. The “lockdown light” that has been in place since 2 November has failed to reduce the number of daily infections. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute, the agency that tracks infectious diseases, reported 29,875 new infections and 598 new fatalities, the highest daily figures since the pandemic began. According to the DIVI register, which monitors hospital capacity, more than 4500 Covid-19 patients are in intensive care and some hospitals can no longer accept new patients. Most alarmingly, perhaps, the number of clusters of cases in aged care homes is rising rapidly.

“After a temporary stabilisation of case numbers at a higher level in late August and early September, a steep increase in case numbers ensued in October in all federal states,” the Koch Institute reported last Friday. Measures introduced at the beginning of November had failed to cut new cases significantly, with numbers “sharply increasing” over the previous week.

Until recently, Germany had managed the pandemic reasonably well — not as well as East Asian countries but certainly better than its European neighbours. Even as late as the end of September, after infections started to climb again, Germany’s numbers were not particularly alarming compared with those elsewhere in Europe.

On 30 September, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany’s cumulative number of cases per 100,000 people over fourteen days was just over thirty, better than each of Germany’s eight neighbouring fellow EU members. Apart from Poland, all had recorded figures in excess of 120.

A month later, Germany’s figure had risen to 195.6 — but even then the country was still doing better than all of its neighbours except Denmark, with the rates in three of them (the Czech Republic, Belgium and Luxembourg) exceeding 1000, and France and the Netherlands both recording a fourteen-day cumulative total of about 750 per 100,000.

By Sunday, though, Germany’s figure had climbed to 334.9, significantly worse than the equivalent figures for France and Belgium. Immunologists agree about the success of the far-reaching restrictions introduced by France and Belgium, like those of other European countries that experienced exponential rises of infections in September and October. By contrast, Germany’s restrictions during November were too weak: while bars and restaurants, and cinemas and theatres were closed, shops remained open, as did schools and childcare centres.

Angela Merkel can’t be blamed for those half-hearted measures. She has long argued that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously and reportedly wanted stricter restrictions as soon as it became clear that the “lockdown light” hadn’t had the desired effect. She was uncharacteristically emotional last Wednesday when she warned in parliament that too many contacts over the following fortnight might make the coming festive season “the last Christmas with the grandparents.”

Part of the explanation for the slow response to the latest surge lies in the country’s federal system of government. Although Merkel wanted tougher measures, she had failed to convince all of the state premiers. It is their governments that are responsible for imposing and, with local councils, implementing such measures, and they preside over different infection rates and intensive care capacities. The fact that the premiers of the most populous states, Markus Söder of Bavaria and Armin Laschet of North-Rhine Westphalia, have championed diverging approaches throughout the pandemic — not least because they are both vying to succeed Merkel as chancellor — hasn’t helped.

But state–state and federal–state rivalries don’t entirely explain the dithering. The state governments’ fear has been that stricter measures would be met with popular anger.

At first sight, such an explanation seems counterintuitive. Most Germans have long supported a decisive response to the pandemic and have endorsed the government’s handling of the crisis, including the imposition of a strict lockdown earlier in the year. An opinion poll conducted last Thursday, three days before the announcement of tougher measures, showed that 49 per cent of those surveyed wanted more restrictions while only 13 per cent considered existing restrictions excessive. And Merkel’s popularity, and the approval rate for her Christian Democrats, has been exceptionally high since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the same time, polls suggest that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, which has opposed all measures to contain the virus, would fall short of its performance in the 2017 federal election (when it scored 12.6 per cent of the national vote), never mind attract the kind of support it enjoyed a year ago, when one in five surveyed Germans said they would vote for it.

To understand why federal and state governments didn’t heed the almost unanimous advice of the medical experts and impose more drastic measures earlier, we need to go back to the Merkel government’s response to the influx of refugees from Syria in 2015. Or rather, we need to look at how that crisis is remembered, particularly within Merkel’s party, but also among other German politicians outside the AfD.

A powerful narrative says that it was a mistake to open the country’s borders that year, thereby alienating a sizeable minority of Germans opposed to an ethnically and culturally diverse Germany while irritating a majority who didn’t think that the loosening of border controls was justified. For those who have embraced this narrative, polarisation and the rise of the AfD — which in 2017 became the first party of the far right since 1953 to be represented in the Bundestag — have been more traumatic than any other event in reunified Germany’s short history.

This account tends to overlook three facts. First, the government didn’t open Germany’s borders in 2015; rather, it decided not to close them (and not to defend them in any way that echoed the pre-1989 German Democratic Republic’s defence of its border with West Germany by shooting people trying to cross it). Second, polls at the time revealed that a majority of Germans approved of the Merkel government’s response to the refugees. Many may later have changed their minds, but a clear majority still agrees that Germany has an obligation to provide sanctuary for people fleeing war or persecution. Finally, those who voted for the AfD in 2017 hadn’t suddenly become opposed to migration, or to living in a multicultural society, and hadn’t suddenly developed a longing for an authoritarian political leader. Rather, in 2017, it made sense to them to vote for a party that seemed to represent their views.

But whether the facts get in the way of the story is irrelevant. The key thing is that it is held to be true. For many of those who believe the narrative, a repeat or prolongation of the trauma associated with the rise of the AfD must be avoided.

You might imagine that Christian Democrats would want to solve this dilemma by adopting the policy positions of the AfD to try to make it disappear. But Germany’s post-Auschwitz identity works against a rapprochement between centre-right conservatives and the AfD because large sections of the latter are considered ideologically close to the Nazis. This contrasts with countries like Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, where centre-right or centre-left politicians have espoused positions on refugees and migration that were previously owned by the far right.

Also working against any rapprochement is the fact that past attempts by the Christian Democrats to neutralise a far-right party by adopting its vocabulary or policies have backfired. Ahead of the 1992 state election in Baden-Württemberg, for example, the Christian Democrats moved to the right to attract potential voters from the extremist Republikaner, a precursor of the AfD. The strategy failed miserably: the Republikaner won 10.9 per cent of the vote and the Christian Democrats shed 9.4 percentage points of support compared with the previous state election.

More recently, ahead of the Bavarian state elections in 2018, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, the Markus Söder–led Christian Social Union, or CSU, attempted to mimic the AfD’s rhetoric, particularly in relation to asylum seekers. But Söder soon realised that he risked losing more votes to the Greens (because many Christian conservatives were appalled by that kind of rhetoric) than could be gained from potential AfD voters. He changed tack, won the election, and is now a good bet to be the next chancellor, leading a coalition of Christian Democrats and Greens.

This leaves Christian Democrats, in particular, in a quandary. They would like to keep the AfD small (or ideally make it disappear altogether) by wooing potential AfD voters, but without appearing to embrace AfD positions. So they have made do with telling AfD supporters that their concerns are legitimate and are being taken seriously, hoping to thereby avoid provoking the anger of the people who responded so strongly to the refugees.

For the AfD, the pandemic has been disastrous in the sense that it has pushed asylum seekers, who were no longer front-page news anyway, further into the background. But the current crisis has also provided an opportunity for the party. Having initially criticised the government for doing too little, too late, the AfD proceeded to lambast the government for doing too much.

The change of heart had much to do with the emergence during spring of a motley bunch of groups — New Agers, anti-vaxxers and others — that considered the government’s measures an overreaction and didn’t accept the science that informed them. The AfD and other groups on the far right tried, often very successfully, to harness this growing movement. AfD politicians ridiculed face masks, argued against closing schools and businesses, suggested Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, alleged that the government would force the entire population to vaccinate, claimed that restrictions to halt the disease amounted to a suspension of civil liberties and a breach of privacy, and organised demonstrations to channel fear and anger.

The government was taken by surprise when thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — protested. Because the anger was reminiscent of the anger of people decrying the accommodation of asylum seekers in their neighbourhoods, federal and state governments generally handled the protesters with kid gloves, bending over backwards to convince them that their concerns — which often turned out to be based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — were being taken seriously.

Although a largely silent majority of Germans would have supported earlier and tougher measures to keep infections low, it was this loud, even shrill, minority whose views informed decision-making. That was particularly the case in the East German states, where the far right is comparatively strong — and perhaps nowhere more so than in Saxony, where the AfD won 27 per cent of the vote in the 2017 Bundestag elections and a shade more in the state elections two years later. Saxony’s premier, Michael Kretschmer, repeatedly met with protesters and listened to their concerns, no matter how absurd they were. He also criticised harsher measures adopted in other states, saying that Saxonians could be trusted to behave responsibly without threats of sanctions.

In rural and regional Saxony, in particular, discontent about the federal government’s handling of Covid-19 was widespread and conspiracy theories gathered followers. People often refused to wear masks, even on public transport. But the East German states generally did well during the pandemic’s first wave, with the number of reported infections lower than in West Germany.

During the second wave, though, East Germany has been particularly hard-hit, and Saxony worst of all. Although the state was hardly touched in spring, it now has the highest number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants nationally. On Sunday, its infection rate was twice as high as the national average and more than four times higher than in the West German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

But the state government’s hesitant approach and the influence of the AfD can’t be blamed entirely for Saxony’s catastrophic numbers. The state shares borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which were hit hard, and early, by the pandemic’s second wave. Unlike in spring, the borders remained open, and Poles and Czechs continued to commute to Saxony for work, shopping and leisure. (But they were able to do so also because Saxony’s government was reluctant to resort to border controls, lest its own people grow even more restless.)

The influence of the popular movement against coronavirus restrictions, fostered if not orchestrated by AfD politicians, can’t be discounted either. Rural Saxony has been for Germany what the Dakotas have been for the United States. It’s no accident that the districts where the AfD enjoys particularly strong support have been hardest-hit by the virus, while the city of Leipzig, where the AfD does comparatively badly, has an infection rate of about a third of the state average.

One other recent example of the impact of the 2015 refugee narrative is worth mentioning.

Germany’s public broadcasters are funded by a monthly fee payable by households. Last set in 2015, it amounts to €17.50 (A$28) per month for households with a television set. Earlier this year, the sixteen state premiers agreed to a moderate fee rise, to €18.36, effective from January 2021.

The plan attracted some opposition. The AfD in particular has long claimed that journalists with the public broadcasters tend to be left-wingers who use publicly funded programs to promote their views, and the fee is thus misspent. Much like Donald Trump has done in the United States, Germany’s far-right politicians have targeted journalists as “enemies of the people.” At rallies organised by far-right organisations, including protests against coronavirus restrictions, journalists are frequently abused and sometimes assaulted. But the protesters represent but a very small minority; most Germans trust the public broadcasters and value their programs.

The fee rise must be ratified by all sixteen state parliaments. Ordinarily, this would be a formality when the premiers have already reached unanimous agreement. But in the small East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, which is governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, Christian Democrat parliamentarians defied their own party’s state premier and declared they would vote against the rise. With the AfD, which also opposes the rise, the Christian Democrats command a majority of seats; the government’s motion would therefore have been lost.

That vote would have been the end of the governing coalition. Neither Greens nor Social Democrats would continue to work with a party that makes common cause with the far right. In the end, the state premier, himself a Christian Democrat, averted the fall of his government by sacking his interior minister, the ringleader of the revolt, and then electing not to put the fee rise to a vote, which means that it won’t go ahead as planned, either in Saxony-Anhalt or in the rest of Germany.

When it comes to the funding of Germany’s public broadcasters, the Christian Democrats’ fears about provoking extremists in Saxony-Anhalt will probably be inconsequential in the long run. The public broadcasters will take their case for a funding increase to the High Court, and they are confident of winning the case. The rise will come, albeit with a slight delay.

The dithering about new measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus is a far more serious matter. I concluded an earlier Inside Story article, in May this year, by declaring that “it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent.” The government might not have made concessions as such, but its approach has been unduly influenced by the protests and the exponential rise in infections is one of the results.

Premier Michael Kretschmer seems to have realised that his earlier decision to trust all Saxonians to act responsibly was wrong. Even before Sunday’s emergency meeting his government opted for a full lockdown starting on 14 December. Blaming a minority of Saxonians for the catastrophically high incidence of Covid-19 infections, he opted for an uncompromising stance. People have had long discussions about this issue, he told Spiegel, but now “we’re done with that… Anyone who wants to can still have a different opinion and question our measures, that’s the way it is in a free country. But that’s no longer crucial, these people now have to step aside… After all, opinions aren’t facts.” Elsewhere, he said that what was now required were “authoritarian measures by the state.”

Not only do these statements smack of a spurned lover’s revenge, the vocabulary is also grist to the mill for the AfD, which claims that the state is hell-bent on eroding personal freedoms. But it’s good to hear even Kretschmer now telling conspiracy theorists to get lost.

By resisting both the €0.86 fee rise and measures to curb the coronavirus, a small minority has exercised undue influence by being loud and, even more importantly, because the noise is reminiscent of the anti-refugee protests of the recent past. Members of the German majority have received less consideration because they have behaved meekly and their support is taken for granted.

It would be disastrous if the government paid too much attention to loudmouths orchestrated by the far right when it formulates its polices in other key areas — climate change, a challenge that dwarfs Covid-19, chief among them. When Germans are again able to focus their attention on that issue, the majority needs to make itself heard, and “these people” might then again be asked “to step aside.” •

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Born Salama bint Said in 1844 in Zanzibar, she was the daughter of Said bin Sultan Al-Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, and Jilfidan, a Circassian woman who had been abducted by slave traders as a child and bought by the sultan to join his harem. Although her mother was not the sultan’s principal wife, Salama benefited from being part of the island’s ruling family. As one of her father’s thirty-six children, she inherited a plantation and residence upon his death, and a further three plantations when her mother died.

In her early twenties, Sayyida Salme (Princess Salama), as she was later known, was living in the Zanzibar capital, Stone Town. A love affair with her neighbour, the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, resulted in her falling pregnant. Conscious that her relatives wouldn’t countenance marriage to an infidel, she fled to Aden aboard HMS Highflyer with the help of the wife of a British consular official. There she converted, took the name Emily and married Ruete, who had followed her under less dramatic circumstances. The couple moved to Rudolf Heinrich’s native Hamburg, where they had three more children (her first child had died in Aden). The marriage was short-lived, however; in 1870, aged thirty-one, Rudolph Heinrich was killed in a tram accident.

Although Hamburg law prevented Emily Ruete from claiming her late husband’s estate, she and her children initially remained in Germany — not least because her return to Zanzibar was vetoed by her half-brother, the then sultan. Occasionally she taught Arabic to make ends meet. In 1886 she published a part memoir, part ethnography of Zanzibar, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin, that would be reprinted numerous times and translated into English (under the title Memoirs of an Arabian Princess), French, Arabic and other languages. In 1889 she left Germany and settled in Beirut. When the first world war broke out, she returned to Germany to live with one of her daughters in Jena, where she died in 1924.

“Model immigrant”: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme), Princess of Zanzibar. Undated photo by unknown photographer/Alamy

Emily Ruete was buried in her husband’s family plot in Ohlsdorf, Hamburg’s main cemetery. The grave is considered historically significant and has been preserved. In 2007, during the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All, her life was commemorated with a memorial in the cemetery’s Garden of Women. Two years later, her story featured in an exhibition at Hamburg’s town hall. Over the past twelve years, her life has also been the subject of three works of fiction: the rather conventional biographical novels Sterne über Sansibar (2011) by Nicole Vosseler and Abschied von Sansibar (2013) by Lukas Hartmann, and Sansibar Blues (2008), a piece of postcolonial metafiction by acclaimed writer Hans Christoph Buch.

Given this background, it’s not surprising that a local resident suggested naming a park in Hamburg-Nord, one of Hamburg’s seven districts, after Emily Ruete. In a submission to the district assembly five years ago, he argued that the park, adjacent to a waterway and not far from a mosque and the Ruetes’ former residence, was reminiscent of Zanzibar. The idea was again on the assembly’s agenda in 2017, this time supported by the argument that present-day refugee movements made it appropriate to honour “Emily Ruete aka Princess Salme” as a “model immigrant of her time.” On neither occasion did the idea attract sufficient backing.

Events started to move more quickly in February last year. A newly created square needed a name, and this time the Social Democrats and the Greens, who together hold the majority of seats in the assembly, proposed memorialising Ruete, with the Greens arguing that she was a “strong and intriguing” historical figure. Local residents attending the meeting at which the plan was considered commented that the name didn’t matter to them; they were more concerned that street furniture be installed to make the square more inviting. When the motion was put to a vote, the Christian Democrats opposed it — not because they objected to memorialising Ruete, but because they believed the process of naming the square lacked transparency.

Later last year, Hamburg-Nord Council advised the district assembly that the square’s name had been gazetted and street signs delivered. The council suggested that an information panel about Ruete’s life be erected and her descendants invited to attend its unveiling, and in February 2020 €4400 (A$7200) was allocated to commissioning a local history workshop to create the panel.

Here, the story took its controversial turn. The workshop’s research found that Ruete had not only defended slavery during her lifetime but also made racist remarks in her 1886 memoir. The workshop’s findings drew on an intervention by a member of Hamburg Postkolonial, a network of individuals interested in Hamburg’s colonial legacy, who may well have been the first person to take an interest in the naming of the square and read Ruete’s 1886 book closely.

In September this year the Greens and the Social Democrats moved successfully to reverse the assembly’s earlier decision. “In 2020, to name a square after Emily Ruete is not an option,” the minutes of the meeting record a Greens representative saying. “It would be inconsistent with the [two parties’] stance against exclusion and inhumanity.” Rather than naming the square after someone else, the district assembly decided to leave it nameless for the time being, presumably to avoid having Ruete’s name remain in place during the search for a substitute. Immediately after the assembly’s decision, council workers removed the offending street signs.

Matthias Iken and others who criticised the change of heart bemoaned the fact that a nineteenth-century woman was being judged against the standards of the twenty-first century. A representative of the Free Democratic Party, who voted against the unnaming of the square, argued that Ruete’s book was “an authentic non-European source” about the history of East Africa, which had otherwise been told from a “colonial point of view.” Ruete had commented on the Germany of the time from a non-European perspective, he pointed out, and had exposed the hypocrisy of her European contemporaries in Zanzibar, who decried the institution of slavery but were themselves slave owners.

By the time Ruete’s book was published, slavery had long been formally abolished in Europe and North America: in Britain, for instance, in 1834; in France in 1848; and in the United States in 1865. But Emily Ruete, herself the daughter of a former slave, had known Zanzibar only as a place where slavery was largely uncontested. In the mid nineteenth century, the island had been a hub of the Arab slave trade, with possibly as many as 50,000 slaves passing through its port annually. The political clout of Emily Ruete’s father, the sultan, was based not least on his prominent involvement in that trade. Slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in the 1870s but continued until the early twentieth century, despite the island’s becoming a British protectorate in 1890.

The September 2020 backflip was not the first time Hamburg politicians have had second thoughts about streets named after people whose views or deeds are now considered repugnant. In recent years, Hamburg’s state government has become particularly concerned by the possibility that some streets and public buildings might be named after people who were Nazis, supported the Nazis or advocated anti-Semitic or racist ideas.

In several instances, streets have been renamed; on two occasions their names were retained but the reference changed. Weygandt Street, for example, was originally named after the Hamburg psychiatrist Wilhelm Weygandt (1870–1939), who was interested in eugenics and sympathised with the Nazis. Now it is named after somebody with no connection to Hamburg: Friedrich Weygandt, a public official in Mainz who was executed because he had been a vocal critic of the local archbishop during the peasants’ war of 1525. New proposals for street names are now routinely vetted by the Hamburg State Archives.

In 2017, the archives commissioned historian David Templin to investigate fifty-eight historical figures whose names featured on street signs, or were likely to do so sometime soon, and develop criteria for deciding whether to rename particular streets. One person on the list was Gustav Gründgens, a famous actor and director whose life is explored in Klaus Mann’s controversial novel Mephisto and the acclaimed István Szabó film of the same name, winner of the 1981 Oscar for the best foreign-language film. So far Gründgens, who was the protégé of Nazi strongman Hermann Göring and played a prominent role in Nazi Germany’s cultural life, has not been deemed sufficiently compromised to warrant a renaming of the street carrying his name.

Compromised? Gustav Gründgens as Hamlet in January 1936. Wikimedia

While until very recently the archives’ vetting process focused on links to the Nazi regime or ideology, Nazism is but one of at least two dark chapters in Germany’s past whose legacies endure. Another is colonialism. Because Hamburg has long been Germany’s most important port, many of the city’s businesses and individuals played a significant role in colonial endeavours, including during the short period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Germany had colonies in Africa and the Pacific.

Demands to engage critically with Hamburg’s colonial past go back a long way. In 1967, and again in 1968, student protesters toppled a bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, a former commander of German colonial troops and governor of German East Africa, resulting in that memorial’s permanent removal. But it was only in 2014, after sustained pressure from civil society groups, that the state government agreed to tackle the city’s colonial legacy.

Compared with efforts to draw attention to the Nazi past and remove references to Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices from public view, official moves to expose Hamburg’s colonial links have been slow. (This was partly because, as Thomas Laqueur noted when recently comparing German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and American attempts to come to terms with slavery, the Nazi past was “brief and circumscribed.”) In fact, when the state archives looked into the naming of Emily Ruete Square last year in the course of its routine vetting procedure, the proposal didn’t raise any concerns. Yes, a memorial for prominent merchant — and notorious slave trader — Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–82) was removed in 2008, but demands to rename three Hamburg streets that carry his name — Schimmelmannstraße, Schimmelmannallee and Schimmelmannstieg — have so far been unsuccessful.

Besides, the government’s decision in 2014 focused on how the city’s colonial past was being represented publicly, and how Hamburg could distance itself symbolically from that past. The decision made no reference to demands for reparations to tackle historic injustices. In the past twenty years, such demands have focused on Germany’s genocidal 1904–08 war against the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa (today’s Namibia); most recently, Namibia rejected Germany’s offer of a one-off €10 million compensation payment and an unreserved apology as inadequate. But the issue of symbolic and material reparations is not limited to Namibia, and given the extent to which Hamburg has been a beneficiary of colonialism, this issue should not only be a matter for the federal government.

Also absent from the state government’s decision were references to present-day injustices. German colonialism did not end when Germany lost its colonies after the first world war, nor when German attempts to colonise Eastern Europe came to a crushing halt in the course of the second world war. Hamburg businesses and Hamburg consumers continue to be implicated in colonial practices — something that is easily forgotten when the focus is on a past that is seemingly over and done with.

Hamburg-Nord’s decision to rescind the honouring of Emily Ruete didn’t, however, reflect a gradually growing awareness of wider historical injustices. It came about suddenly — in fact, it’s possible to pinpoint a specific day on which the wheels were set in motion: 25 May 2020, the day a white police officer killed George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis.

The death, and the consequent surge in the Black Lives Matter movement, provoked a rethink of the memorialisation of individuals implicated in slavery, or in colonialism more generally. In the United States, numerous monuments commemorating the Confederacy, for example, were toppled or, having been targeted by protesters, removed by the authorities. In the British city of Bristol, protesters toppled the bronze statue of English slave trader and Tory member of parliament Edward Colston (1636–1721) and dumped it into the harbour. Having recovered the statue, the authorities took it to a “secure location.”

In this context, the dispute over Emily Ruete Square was a small skirmish. Public interest died down quickly. Ruete was, after all, a minor historical figure — and there have been more obvious and prominent targets in Hamburg.

None has been more prominent than Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the preeminent political leader of nineteenth-century Germany. As prime minister of the militarily and politically dominant German state of Prussia, he engineered the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as its first chancellor. An ardent defender of the monarchy, he had the support of Prussia’s landed gentry; in turn he ensured that their privileges remained untouched.

Bismarck’s time as chancellor was marked by two momentous conflicts. They pitted Bismarck first against the Catholic Church and then against the socialist labour movement, both of which he believed posed threats to the status quo. Having largely lost the Kulturkampf (culture war) against the Catholic Church, he formed an alliance with the party representing Catholics in parliament to take on the socialists. He had more success on that front, not least by introducing compulsory sickness, disability, accident and retirement insurance schemes, making imperial Germany something of a pioneer of welfare capitalism and at the same time reminding the socialists’ prospective supporters that their interests were well served by the government.

Unlike Ruete, Bismarck was no slave owner. Nor did he defend the institution of slavery. That he nevertheless became a target was because, as German chancellor, he hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that eventually led to the divvying up of most of Africa among the European colonial powers. He also oversaw Germany’s acquisition of colonies in west, southwest and east Africa and in the Pacific, including New Guinea, Samoa and Micronesia. Although he initially opposed Germany’s becoming a colonial power, he later took a hands-on approach to furthering its interests in Africa and the Pacific. He even enlisted Emily Ruete in diplomatic manoeuvres to secure Germany’s influence over Zanzibar (which Germany later traded with Britain for Helgoland, a small island off the German coast).

Making the case for German colonial rule in Africa, Bismarck’s government drew on arguments provided by Christian abolitionists. Germany’s late nineteenth-century colonial ventures thus became precursors of the Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq in 1991, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and other modern-day humanitarian interventions. But although Bismarck’s government tried to justify German colonialism on humanitarian grounds, it condoned slavery and forced labour in its African colonies.

After his resignation in 1890, Bismarck was venerated as unified Germany’s founding father, not only during the remaining twenty-eight years of the monarchy but also, albeit less emphatically, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi Germany and in the Federal Republic. Throughout Germany, numerous Bismarck statues are testament to the admiration. Hamburg has three. His memorialisation even went beyond Germany; the capital of the US state of North Dakota, for example, is named after him.

Contested: another of Hamburg’s Bismarck memorials, after cleaning. Klaus Neumann

By far the largest of Hamburg’s Bismarck statues, and the best known nationally, sits on the edge of the red light district of St Pauli and overlooks the river Elbe. Made of one hundred blocks of granite, it is more than thirty-four metres high and weighs more than 600 tonnes. Unveiled in 1906 after three years’ construction, it depicts Bismarck as a medieval knight holding a sword. It was listed on the cultural heritage register in 1960.

The monument has long been the focus of protests. It attracted controversy even during the planning phase. Sculptor Hugo Lederer and architect Johann Emil Schaudt’s design was criticised for portraying a seemingly unapproachable leader, prompting art historian Aby Warburg to deride its critics as anti-modernists. In the latter years of the Weimar Republic, German nationalists who celebrated Bismarck’s birthday at the memorial regularly clashed with left-wing demonstrators. In 1990, on the day of German reunification, unknown climbers covered Bismarck’s head with a Helmut Kohl mask, which inspired Stephanie Bart’s 2009 novel Goodbye Bismarck. In 2015, the monument was repurposed for another ephemeral work of art, “Capricorn Two,” when an ibex was mounted on Bismarck’s head.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in Germany, Bismarck memorials were among its first targets. On 14 June, a week after Colston’s statue was dumped in Bristol Harbour, activists daubed one of the smaller Bismarck statues in Hamburg with red paint. The larger statue was spared the same fate only because it was concealed behind fences and scaffolding. In 2014, the federal government budgeted €6.5 million to restore the crumbling memorial, with the proviso that the state government match that amount to rebuild the surrounding park. Later, the overall amount budgeted for memorial and park was increased to €15.4 million. It was ironic that work on the monument began shortly before the repercussions of George Floyd’s killing reached Germany.

The decision to spend so much on restoring the Bismarck monument attracted criticism well before May 2020. Since January, a group that calls itself Intervention Bismarck-Denkmal has demanded via Twitter that the renovation work stop immediately. But the criticism was amplified following Floyd’s death, with new groups, such as Bismarck’s Critical Neighbours, adding their voice. When demonstrators demanded a halt to the project on 28 June, the Social Democrats and Greens, who have been in power in Hamburg since 2015, found themselves in a quandary. They were committed to restoring the monument but didn’t want to be seen defending what it was increasingly associated with: colonialism and racism. The state government therefore proposed to hold consultations to determine how the site could be repurposed without removing the monument. (They will kick off this Thursday, 19 November, with an online panel discussion, “Recontextualising Bismarck.”)

Proposals advanced thus far include a memorial museum inside the base of the monument to document Hamburg’s colonial past, and a counter-memorial adjacent to the statue. A Hamburg precedent exists for the latter: in 1982, rather than removing a controversial war memorial in the centre of the city, the state government commissioned the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka to create a counter-memorial right next to it. Ideas less likely to be adopted include turning Bismarck on his head or replacing his granite sword with an illuminated Star Wars–type lightsabre.

Are the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square and demands for the removal of Bismarck statues evidence that Germany is heading towards an Orwellian dystopia where anything not deemed politically correct will be suppressed? No — if only because the “cancel culture” has been accompanied by loud protests (such as Iken’s) and authorities haven’t rushed to get rid of street names honouring the slave trader Schimmelmann or the opportunist Gründgens.

Prominent in the debate about what to do with the hundreds of Bismarck memorials in Germany is opposition to any form of Black Lives Matter–inspired iconoclasm. More often than not, the defenders of the monuments have spoken out against iconoclasm as such, rather than in defence of Bismarck as a historical figure. But that is likely to reflect strategic choices rather than any kind of censorship.

Iken and others nevertheless have a point. During the district assembly committee’s debate, Free Democrat Lars Jessen said he was “astonished” by the proposal to unname Emily Ruete Square because it was “incomprehensible” that Ruete’s views had only now become known. But the issue is not so much that the Greens and Social Democrats belatedly discovered Ruete’s racism; it’s that they didn’t care to engage with her life before suggesting a square be named after her.

Ruete’s 1886 memoir was reissued in 1989, accompanied by an editorial essay that contextualises her text, and republished by different publishers in 1998, 2007 and 2013. It is still in print and is available in several Hamburg libraries. I suspect the fact that Ruete was a woman of colour in nineteenth-century Germany was considered sufficient grounds for honouring her — in the same way that, a year later, her comments about slavery were sufficient grounds to withdraw the honour.

The complexity that makes Ruete such an intriguing historical figure has been in plain view, but was recognised only briefly during the discussions about the square. This complexity has not yet received the attention it warrants. Once the history workshop had produced evidence of her views about slavery and Black Africans, other aspects of her persona no longer mattered. Yes, she was an apologist for slavery. But she was also an astute observer of the hypocritical stance of European humanitarians in Zanzibar. She had only contempt for the British anti-slavery campaigners who took no interest in the welfare of people who had been freed: at best, she commented sarcastically in her memoir, European humanitarians were knitting woollen socks for the former slaves.

Complications: the Monument to Slaves in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Wikimedia

That it is possible to engage with Ruete while criticising her views on slavery and her role as a slave owner was demonstrated in 2009, when the Hamburg-based artist HM Jokinen created the performance “An Maria Ernestina,” an artistic intervention designed to disrupt the exhibition about Ruete at the Hamburg town hall. “I welcome the exhibition about Sayyida Salme, daughter of a slave,” the artist wrote at the time. “But I reject the honouring of a princess who accepted as normal the services of slaves and who profited from them.”

Ruete was also a perceptive observer of racism in Germany and the colonial gaze to which she herself was subjected: “At social events, in the theatre and at concerts, I had the feeling that I was constantly being looked at — something that I found most annoying,” she recalled in her second book, Briefe nach der Heimat. “One day, as my husband and I were out for a stroll, a couple of ladies in an equipage went by. Not only did they stare at us when they went past; but, when I accidentally turned around, I noticed the two ladies kneeling on the back seat in order to be able to observe us more closely.”

It is telling that the first German edition of Briefe nach der Heimat, in which Ruete writes about the first years of her life in Germany, was published only in 1999, six years after its English translation, and has never been reissued. Doesn’t the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square also perpetuate the silencing of Ruete’s critical views about Hamburg society?

I too have misgivings about the readiness with which Emily Ruete Square was unnamed, but mine are different from those articulated by Matthias Iken and aren’t specific to memorials tainted by Hamburg’s colonial past. Germany is still a country of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders and their direct descendants. Memorialising the lives of the victims of Nazi Germany (or of German colonialism, for that matter) while removing from public view any references to the lives of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders risks obscuring that fact.

Over the past twenty-eight years, the artist Gunter Demnig has laid more than 75,000 Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”): concrete cubes with brass plates inscribed with the name of a victim of Nazi persecution. The overwhelming majority of Stolpersteine are in Germany. This is undoubtedly an effective means of helping Germans to remember the Holocaust and honour the many ordinary people who became its victims, but shouldn’t Germans also be compelled to stumble across the names of perpetrators and accomplices, lest the complicity of ordinary Germans is forgotten?

Or, as I proposed some twenty years ago, might it not be appropriate for Hamburg residents to perform a public reading not only of the names of the thousands of Hamburg Jews who were killed in the Holocaust but also of the names in the 1943 Adressbuch, the last directory of all the heads of all households registered in Hamburg, which was published during the second world war?

Bismarck is in good company. Other historical figures — Immanuel Kant among them — have been exposed as apologists for colonialism or as racists. Postcolonial and anti-racist iconoclasts would be very busy indeed if we decided to no longer commemorate the lives of individuals who used the “n” word, denigrated people of colour or were implicated in German colonial ventures. Which is not to say that Kant’s writings about “races,” for example, don’t deserve more critical attention than they have received thus far.

Nor are the demands to raze controversial memorials unprecedented. After 1989, East Germans were often only too ready to expunge all traces of the German Democratic Republic by renaming streets and schools and removing memorials. Sometimes the desire to draw a line under the past even led to the targeting of people like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who happened to be communists but who could not be held responsible for Stalinist repression. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that attempts to expunge all references to East Germany’s communist regime have been counterproductive and ill-conceived.

But when it comes to German debates about memorials today, I don’t see a cancel culture at work. Rather, I detect attempts to neutralise, if not sanitise, the past. Complementing a restored and cleaned-up Bismarck monument with an exhibition about Hamburg’s colonial past and with a counter-memorial, however worthy that may be in itself, could encourage Hamburg residents to wash their hands of the legacies of colonialism. Rather than letting the past intrude into the present, a counter-memorial on its own might put the past to rest. But the thirty-four-metre high Bismarck monument would stand in the way of such memorial hygiene.

Sure, it could be regarded as an eyesore. But because it is so monumental and ugly, it can’t be easily ignored. It could therefore serve as an awkward reminder of Germany’s dark pasts, and their legacies and continuation into the present. Something like that happened in 2004–05 when the Wissmann statue, which had been put into storage in 1968, was re-erected for fourteen months in the context of HM Jokinen’s afrika-hamburg.de art project.

Like the Hamburg war memorial, whose message was meant to be neutralised by Hrdlicka’s counter-memorial, the granite Bismarck should remain a beacon for protests and a canvas for graffiti and other ephemeral art, notwithstanding any adjacent counter-memorial. Let’s hope that the authorities don’t take the view that a counter-memorial is a substitute for anti-memorial graffiti and that the statue therefore needs to be kept spotlessly clean.

The Hrdlicka memorial is not enough to counter Hamburg’s most obnoxious war memorial: traces of red paint, and of countless attempts to remove that paint, have done at least as much to call the war memorial’s raison d’être into question. The head of the district of Hamburg-Altona, which is responsible for one of the smaller Bismarck statues, had a good point when she announced after it was defaced that council workers were not expected to clean it up immediately.

Bismarck has been a controversial historical figure not only because of his role in German colonialism but also because he was an anti-democrat, because he tried to repress the organised labour movement and because of his anti-Semitism. He was also the founder of Germany as a political entity. Critically engaging with his memory could prompt a reassessment not just of the kind of aggressive nineteenth-century nationalism that informed the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war, which led to the unification of Germany, but also of the idea of the nation that suffuses today’s understanding of what it means to be German.

I hope the Bismarck colossus overlooking the river Elbe will stick around to catalyse discussions that go beyond a distancing from recognisably dark pasts and instead engage with seemingly unproblematic presents. I also hope that closer attention to the experiences of Emily Ruete will facilitate a public conversation about everyday racism and the lives of people of colour in Hamburg, be it in the late nineteenth or in the early twenty-first century.

Some weeks ago, the state archives created a new position to investigate the colonial dimensions of street names in Hamburg. Obviously the authorities are hoping to avoid in future the kind of embarrassment that was caused by the naming of Emily Ruete Square. But what might actually be needed to get people in Hamburg to engage with the complexity that made Ruete such an intriguing historical figure is a (non-official) effort to rename that square in Hamburg-Nord. •

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Across town, the other America was taking its stand at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a lawn centre alongside Fantasy Island Book Store, a purveyor of sex toys and erotica, and opposite the Delaware Valley Cremation Center. The industrial park served as the backdrop for a press conference held by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who had brought along a stack of specious claims about voter fraud. In the middle of the event someone interrupted to tell him that the election had been called for Biden. Giuliani waved the news away. “Don’t be ridiculous. Networks don’t get to decide elections. Courts do.”

It was an alarming claim — courts don’t decide elections in the United States, with one notable exception — but by the end of the weekend it had become an article of faith on the right. The president has refused to concede, and conservative media outlets and Republican politicians have, with few exceptions, lined up behind him. On talk radio, hosts like Rush Limbaugh insist that Trump won the election and Democrats have stolen it. His callers agree.

And here’s where the two Americas stop being a cliché and start to become an existential crisis. With loyalty to Trump superseding loyalty to democracy, the right is turning the country’s last scrap of common ground into a fatal fault line.

Few Americans are surprised that Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge he lost the election. After all, back in the 2016 campaign he said Americans would have to wait and see whether he would concede, a waiting game delayed four years by his unexpected victory. It’s easy to dismiss this as Trumpian bluster, a spray of lies and conspiracies to conceal that he has no recourse for a lost election.

It’s also easy to dismiss the calls for lawsuits and recounts as just another grift. The Trump campaign flooded supporters’ inboxes with fundraising calls for the “Official Election Defense Fund,” ostensibly created to raise money for whatever legal battles ensue. But squint at the fine print and you’ll see that 60 per cent of the money goes not to a legal fund but to paying off the Trump campaign’s debt. One more con as he walks out the door.

But don’t write this off as an ego trip or a shell game. This is a coup attempt. As Ezra Klein wrote in Vox, while Trump’s efforts seem laughably ineffective, they have serious consequences. “What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.”

That is precisely the argument that you’ll hear in the prime-time hours on Fox News and in the wall-to-wall right-wing radio broadcasts that blanket the United States. “We all believe that Donald Trump won this election. We all believe that he won it handily,” Rush Limbaugh told his audience on Monday. “In Democrat cities, they purposely were holding back counting the early voting and mail-in votes in order to know how many they would need to find in order to win. There’s no other explanation for this.” (There is an alternative explanation, one rooted in evidence: Republicans blocked the counting of early votes in certain states like Pennsylvania, resulting in the delayed counting that followed.)

But this conspiracy is not being contained to just right-wing media and the Trump team. As they have throughout the Trump presidency, Republican leaders have, by and large, fallen in line. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News on Thursday and declared, “President Trump has won this election.” Senator Lindsey Graham, who habitually follows wherever Trump leads, told Fox News, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again” — a dark intimation of fraud and conspiracy.

The myth of a stolen election is already beginning to crystallise into a new article of faith for the American right. And it is already being teed up to justify all sorts of anti-democratic behaviour, including a new round of voter suppression aimed at preventing methods like mail-in voting that allowed a record number of Americans to participate in this year’s election despite the pandemic. Even as he was warning of a permanent Democratic hold on the presidency, Graham also pointed to a solution: “From a Republican point of view, mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us.” End mail-in voting to suppress the Democratic vote and the Republicans — who have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — may be able to eke out a few more wins in the electoral college.

That’s the path the right is headed down — indeed, the path they’ve been on for at least a decade now. The arrival of Donald Trump accelerated and metastasised the anti-democratic trends in the Republican Party, but they’ll continue long after he’s gone.

In some ways, the United States had a lucky near miss. Trump turned out to be a lazy autocrat. The next few months will likely follow a predictable script. “No one seriously thinks the results will change,” a Republican official told the Washington Post, downplaying Trump’s refusal to concede. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.” Yet even a lazy autocrat can inflict serious damage on democratic systems — especially when he has one of the two Americas solidly behind him. •

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After eight months of scrambling to campaign during an uncontrolled pandemic and to fight off an onslaught of voter-suppression tactics, the Biden campaign found the votes it needed.

Now comes the hard part.

The lesson of these early results is twofold: proponents of democracy have reason to celebrate, and they also face a difficult road ahead. Nowhere were these twin lessons more fully on display than in Trump’s speech at 2am on election night. Over the course of a falsehood-filled ten minutes, the president declared the ongoing ballot count a “fraud on the American public,” despite no evidence of voter fraud. He announced he would go to the Supreme Court to freeze the ballot count and falsely declared himself the winner of the election.

It was precisely what he had said he would do, confirming once more that he will use any combination of threats and power to maintain his hold on the American presidency. This has been the core of Trumpian politics since his first campaign, when he frequently encouraged violence at his rallies — even offering to bail out any supporter who got arrested for assaulting a protester — and repeatedly refused to say he would accept the results of the election.

It has also been the case throughout his presidency. He has transformed the Department of Justice, especially the attorney-general, into his personal fixer. He also sought to leverage US support to Ukraine for help creating a scandal about Joe Biden’s family (that’s why he was impeached).

But it’s the escalation over the past several months that has been the most alarming. In June the president sent federal forces to gas peaceful protesters outside the White House. The White House erected a new fence that pushed back the perimeter around the building, which was pushed back even further earlier this week. And now he has made good on his promise to try to have lawfully cast ballots rejected so he can retain his hold on the presidency.

It’s good for supporters of democracy that, in three months, Donald Trump will no longer have access to the power of the presidential office. But to move away from the minoritarian structures that gave rise to the Trump administration, the United States needs fixes that go far beyond a single election held under extraordinary circumstances. It needs significant institutional reforms: for voting rights, for courts, for districting.

Should the Senate remain in Republican hands, those reforms will remain out of reach, as will almost all of the Biden agenda for pandemic relief, immigration, climate change and healthcare. Americans remain smitten with the idea of bipartisan governance, but seem to forget that it requires two willing parties. As Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly demonstrated, the Republicans have little interest in working with Democrats. In fact, a Biden administration will almost certainly struggle to fill Senate-confirmed cabinet positions and open judgeships.

That is the bleak reality a Biden administration will likely face come January. But it matters that Barack Obama’s vice-president is the one preparing to assume the presidency. Even before the end of his first term, Obama’s team had begun working on a plan to carry out its agenda without legislation. And what they found is that they could make people’s lives significantly better even as Republicans in Congress blockaded Democratic bills.

So what can a Biden administration do? First, it can reopen the country to refugees and asylum seekers while repealing the entry ban targeting majority-Muslim nations. It can work to reunite the families shattered by child separation. It can restore recognition and protection for trans people. It can reinstitute consent decrees with police departments across the country — a critical tool for criminal justice reform — and continue the Obama administration’s project of extending clemency to nonviolent drug offenders. It can rebuild the independence of the Justice Department and return to the strict ethical standards of the Obama administration, key moves that can begin restoring the rule of law.

Is it enough? No. But it’s a start — a beginning to a generational effort not just to renew Americans’ faith in democracy but to create, perhaps for the first time, a fully inclusive democracy in the United States. •

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Her government’s first three-year term was more a repair shop than an innovative enterprise of deep reform. Now Labour has a majority in its own right — sixty-four seats of 120, according to Saturday’s election-night count, from an extraordinary 49.1 per cent support under New Zealand’s two-vote mixed-member proportional system.

So will we see real action on climate change? Ardern called that “my generation’s nuclear-free moment” in 2017, evoking the famed nuclear-free legislation of David Lange’s 1984–90 Labour government, which reduced the ANZUS treaty to only Australia and the United States.

And will she make good on finance minister Grant Robertson’s “wellbeing budgets,” which he has today signalled he plans to continue? “Wellbeing budgets” are intended to bring measures of environmental, social and human capital into calculating how well the government and the country are doing. Put fully into effect, this change could be transformative, but whether Labour will do that is the big second-term question.

In her first term Ardern was constrained by New Zealand First, led by old-time populist Winston Peters. Peters campaigned on having been a “brake” on Labour and the Greens, and promised a repeat. He has gone: New Zealand First crashed to 2.7 per cent, far below the 5 per cent threshold needed to get seats.

Ardern’s other support party in the first term, the Greens, won ten seats from 7.6 per cent of the party vote. Ardern has been coy since election night about whether she will bring them into a governing arrangement.

The opposition National Party crashed to thirty-five seats, from 26.8 per cent of the party vote, bleeding votes to the libertarian right-wing ACT party, which multiplied its single 2017 seat to ten (from 8.0 per cent). National lost fifteen electorate seats to Labour and one to the Greens.

Seventy-two electorate seats are awarded to the party that gets the most votes in the electorate (the electorate vote). The other forty-eight seats are “list” seats, apportioned to parties in proportion to their share of the total party vote.

The immediate challenge the government faces is navigating the social and economic challenges thrown up by Covid-19. On current Treasury projections, measures to keep the economy afloat after the loss of tourists and students to the border closure mean that net government debt will climb from just under 20 per cent to over 55 per cent of GDP.

Ardern declared on election night that she had a mandate to push on with the response to and recovery from Covid-19. Her focus is on generating jobs (unemployment is now forecast to peak at between 7 and 9 per cent), upskilling people for those jobs, maintaining primary product exports and eventually reopening the border to higher-value tourism.

This is in the context of a fraying global order and an overdependence on China for exports and tourism. On the plus side for New Zealand are Ardern’s personal contacts from her time as president of the International Union of Socialist Youth in 2008, and her international acclaim for her handling of the March 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre and her competent leadership of the Covid response (though senior officials say she has not made as much use of her contacts as she could have).

Other longer-term challenges include climate change, housing, social services and “wellbeing.”

In her first term Ardern persuaded the farmer-and-business-sensitive National Party to agree to a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, together with a climate commission to draw up five-yearly “budgets” of emissions reductions and a new monitoring regime.

Changes to New Zealand’s emissions-trading system have pushed the price per tonne of carbon from as low as NZ$2 in 2008–17 to NZ$35 recently. Whether agricultural emissions, mainly of methane, are to be brought into the system is to be decided by 2023; though that seems likely, the mechanics have yet to be finalised with farmers’ representatives.

Otherwise, there has been very little real action on emissions. Few of the government’s light vehicle fleet have been replaced with electric vehicles, for example. Building code changes still don’t require offices and industrial buildings to use low-carbon, energy-efficient systems. The problem? Greens leader and climate change minister James Shaw uses three words: New Zealand First.

The government did increase spending and investment in health and education services, hospitals and schools, public housing and social welfare, and ramped up plans for physical infrastructure, principally for roads but also for rail. But a shortage of houses, coupled with ultra-low interest rates (the Reserve Bank’s cash rate is 0.25 per cent and it has a NZ$100 billion bond-buying program), has continued to drive up house prices — by 11.1 per cent in the twelve months to September.

Despite this, Robertson has stuck to his orthodox support for the Reserve Bank’s independence. And he and Ardern have qualified their plans for increased health, education and welfare spending with a determination not to let government debt get out of hand.

Ardern characterises that fiscal conservatism as furnishing what she has called a “licence to govern” — a licence, that is, from sceptics and businesses. In fact, even if net government debt does go over 50 per cent of GDP, that will be below where most advanced-economy countries were before the pandemic took hold.

Ardern and Robertson have been restrained on the revenue side, too. In the election campaign Labour promised to lift the top tax rate from 33 per cent to 39 per cent, but only on incomes above NZ$180,000. Last year Ardern abandoned plans for a tax on income from capital gains, saying there was no mandate for it. But by ruling out one while she is Labour leader she effectively ruled out trying to build a mandate. She categorically opposed a Greens campaign proposal for a wealth tax.

On both tax and welfare, Ardern has fallen far short of changes proposed by expert working groups she set up. Nevertheless, she declared during the campaign that she would push increased social investment in a second term. She, Robertson and Shaw insisted to me in August that they were still committed to the “wellbeing” approach, even while the word was scarcely to be heard.

In July the government inserted the three additional measures — environmental, social and human capital — into the Public Finance Act, requiring Treasury to report on them. In effect, this will put some focus on a wider notion of prosperity than GDP. But getting rigorous statistics to underpin the measures will take time — in some cases years — assuming they can be developed.

If Ardern and Robertson can pull that off, they might build this different way of thinking about the economy into the language of politics. That would be transformative.

Certainly, Ardern has tons of political capital to invest in the wellbeing project — if she chooses to. That will be one big test of her second term. •

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Worried that a record turnout of voters is trending Democratic, Republicans across the country have been running a series of shadow campaigns: while candidates lobby for people’s votes, lawyers and activists lobby for those votes not to be counted.

The pandemic has forced these campaigns into the open, with the desperate scramble to limit the franchise clashing with voters’ demands for more ways to cast their ballots in the midst of a public health emergency. But the Republican campaign to shrink the electorate stretches back decades as part of a growing anti-democratic strain that now defines the party.

To understand how this anti-democratic politics emerged, it’s first necessary to understand how Americans came to embrace broad democracy. That story can be told as a slow expansion of the vote — first, to unpropertied white men in the 1830s, then to Black men in 1870, women in 1920, and Indigenous Americans in the 1950s. But formal enfranchisement didn’t mean people could actually cast a ballot. For most Black Americans, for instance, a series of laws backed by violence made voting next to impossible until the 1960s.

In that decade, two things happened: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the federal government to protect voters who had been discriminated against, and the Supreme Court developed its “one-person-one-vote” doctrine that said, generally speaking, one person’s vote shouldn’t be more powerful than another’s. These changes marked a democratic revolution, and Americans increasingly came to expect universal and equal franchise: the notion that every citizen has an equal right to vote.

For a Republican Party increasingly reliant on white voters in a rapidly diversifying country, this was a problem. In the early 1980s, they began pushing back against expanded voting rights by complaining about “voter fraud,” arguing that new measures had to be put in place to make voting more secure. If fewer people voted as a result, well, that was the price Americans must pay to have confidence in their elections.

How that played out on the ground was not so neutral. In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent a “National Ballot Security Task Force” to Black and Latino neighbourhoods in New Jersey. This group of armed off-duty police officers plastered the neighbourhoods with warnings that they were hunting fraudulent voters, and then appeared at polling sites and challenged Black and Latino voters to show their voter registration cards. This voter-intimidation scheme was so blatant that the Republican Party was forced by the courts to enter a consent decree, in which it agreed not to intimidate voters at the polls. (That decree expired a few years ago.)

The Republican voter-disenfranchisement project gained new energy in 2010, when huge victories put Republicans in charge of state houses across the country. Conservative legislatures introduced hundreds of laws to restrict ballot access, including strict voter ID laws that required voters to pay significant fees for required documents. Republican secretaries of state also purged voting rolls and closed polling sites in minority neighbourhoods, leading to the hours-long lines that have become a standard part of American elections in the past decade.

The courts, too, have played an increasingly pivotal role in voting restrictions. Most important, in 2013 a conservative Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ending most protections for voters in states that have historically discriminated against minority voters. Legislators in those states rushed to pass new restrictions following that ruling. And now in 2020, appeals courts packed with Trump appointees have stayed most efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic. (This year has already seen more than 350 court cases over ballot access and deadlines, meaning the courts are playing an outsized role in this election.)

This may all seem like rough-and-tumble politics, political parties fighting for whatever advantage they can get on election day. But even setting aside the ethical component of that argument — disenfranchising voters is more than a political tactic, it’s a violation of a fundamental right — a broader political development is worth mentioning. Republicans have increasingly adopted policies and positions attractive to a shrinking minority of voters in the United States. Along with voting restrictions, they have begun to explore ways to limit democratic representation more broadly.

Nothing is more emblematic of the GOP’s anti-democratic strain than calls to repeal the 17th Amendment. That amendment allowed for the direct election of senators, who, for the first century of US history, were selected by state representatives. The Senate had been constructed that way so it could serve as a firewall against popular democracy.

By the early twentieth century, though, Americans had come to see the Senate as a corrupt body of self-dealing politicians with no accountability. So they amended the constitution to enable the people to directly elect their senators. In recent years, a growing number of writers and politicians on the right have begun to complain about this amendment. Just last month, Republican senator Ben Sasse penned an op-ed calling for it to be repealed. There had been, he decided, just too much democracy, which was a bad thing for the American people.

In the midst of all this, a countervailing force has emerged: a new voting rights movement. This movement began receiving national attention in 2013, when the “Moral Mondays” movement emerged in North Carolina in response to a radically conservative Republican legislature’s stripping of voting rights and democratic representation from Democrats across the state.

The voting rights movement has had an impact. Not only are Americans far more aware of the efforts to limit voting rights — and the reality that voter fraud is vanishingly rare — but Democrats winning control of state houses in recent years have instituted reforms that make it easier to vote: automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and even felon enfranchisement.

That last move has had a massive impact. A number of states strip people convicted of felonies of their right to vote, even after they have served their sentences. Given the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, this had disenfranchised enormous numbers of Black men in many states. In Tennessee, for instance, more than 20 per cent of Black people had been stripped of their right to vote. Thanks to reforms by Democratic legislatures and voter initiatives, people with felony convictions are in the process of having their voting rights restored in several states.

The fight over which ballots count in 2020 is likely to continue past election day, as Republicans attempt to win in courts and counting rooms what they could not win at the polls. But this is not just a 2020 problem. The major parties disagree about a very basic democratic principle: that all citizens should have the right and ability to vote, and that their votes should be equally counted. That fight, over the desirability of democracy itself, will go on for years to come, and Americans who believe in democracy will have to grapple with what it means that theirs is not a broadly shared faith. •

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Margaret Thatcher’s epic fall had the lot. The vertiginous week that followed Diana’s death came close. Since that 1990s peak, the pictures have got small. Brexit, Scotland, wars, elections: all have dipped well below the decade’s high bar (though the first two are having another go in extra time). Between the craving for release and the means to satisfy it there now lies an abyss, whose hallmark is the political–media spasm, or PMS. Facilitated by classical politics’ and canonical media’s submission to social media, the PMS is defined here as an unhinged, self-cannibalising public furore that debases whatever is ostensibly at issue. Not just the rotten fruit of this millennial declension, the PMS is its very avatar — as is exhibited, with fitting bathos, by Tony Abbott’s starring role in a recent production.

More dirt bucket than welcome mat, the instant local reaction to a Sun report on 25 August trumpeting the pick of “our wizard of Oz” for an undefined role promoting London’s post-Brexit trade was also impressively viperous. The ousted member for Warringah was described as a “failed Australian prime minister” (passim), “right-wing Australian anglophile” and “antipodean mercenary”; a “man of primitive opinions” and “one of the most notorious attack dingoes of Aussie politics”; “a has-been from the other side of the world of whom we know little and care less” yet also a “travelling player on the right-wing thinktank circuit” and one of a “clown parade of other fruit loops”; an “unreconstructed example of Australian chauvinist manhood”; a “walking dinosaur… defective, morally bankrupt, intellectually inadequate”; and a “strange” and “unnecessary” choice because of his antediluvian views on climate change, same-sex marriage and labour rights, and his “political gunslinging,” “inability to command loyalty” and “directionless leadership.”

Haughtiest of all, naturally from a Guardian star columnist, was Abbott’s depiction as an oddball “from the remaindered bin in Australia” who “might see his role pushing British exports as an escalating scale of rugby club dares,” and the move itself “like learning that Theresa May had accepted a part on Neighbours, possibly as some kind of Mrs Mangel reboot.” Abbott, congeniality itself in a Zoom chat with the House of Commons foreign affairs committee three days later, told a bumptious Labour MP, “I do not normally read the Guardian; I am sure it is a wonderful newspaper, but it is not my staple reading.” This didn’t get into the paper.

The prize for invective-solely-designed-to-go-viral (from a strong field) went to Labour’s shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry, carrying the unfair advantage of five years in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet: “[A] man addicted to picking fights — confrontational, aggressive, thin-skinned and nasty,” “sexist,” “sleazy,” “Islamophobic,” an “offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change–denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist.” Her 800-word volley began with responses from among the “host of Australian political contacts” she had texted with the news (variations on “that must be a joke,” their “uniform theme”), and ended: “[If] Tony Abbott is the best answer Boris Johnson can come up with [to Britain’s trade deal void], we’re in even more trouble than we think.”

“During his brief, two-year premiership,” those contacts had told her, “his trade minister — Andrew Robb — succeeded in translating the previous Labor government’s legwork into agreements with China, Japan and South Korea, as well as progressing Australia’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All Abbott did was come along at the end of the process and sign the treaties. He has no hands-on experience of trade negotiations whatsoever.”

The one–two punch — he’s a cad, and clueless on trade — was something everyone could pitch in with, from arts, environmental, LBGT+ and sporting celebrities to MPs and diplomatic veterans of the Uruguay round. London mayor Sadiq Khan (“misogynistic and homophobic views”) and Scotland’s premier Nicola Sturgeon (“He’s a misogynist, a sexist, a climate-change denier who shouldn’t be any kind of envoy”), neither of them ever slow to hitch a ride on a passing bandwagon, drew from the now ubiquitous litany, though Labour leader Keir Starmer once more proved to be a canny operator: “I have real concerns about Tony Abbott and I don’t think he’s the right person for the job. And if I was prime minister I wouldn’t appoint him.”

Abbott’s exact status was still unknown, as the man himself confirmed on 1 September at that Commons hearing: “I think I would call it a role rather than a job… there is nothing official as yet.” Responding with good humour to grandstanding darts from Labour and Scots nationalist MPs (“a bit of lively banter and partisan sparring… brings back happy memories [of] the parliamentary chamber floor”), his message, consistent with many op-eds and speeches since the 2016 Brexit vote, was that London should follow up a bilateral trade deal with Canberra by joining the interim Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

More spicy were comments on end-of-life care and lockdown’s “psychic damage” at a lecture that morning to the Policy Exchange think tank — whose chair is Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s high commissioner in London — which showed the Guardian’s diplomatic editor “how Abbott’s courting of controversy made his possible appointment by Johnson a high political risk.”

On the other side, the cheerleading of the Sun (or “Murdoch’s Sun,” to use the correct vernacular) lacked the paper’s usual fizz, given its exclusive that the “forthright Aussie” is “to be unveiled as Britain’s new trade deal supremo” or, more formally, “joint President of Britain’s relaunched Board of Trade.” Johnson himself, as so often in these months, was absent from the front line, leaving ministers to defend the still-hazy appointment.

A mannequin could plausibly have done better. Health secretary Matt Hancock, a gung-ho crusader amid every Covid-19 setback, quailed at a Sky News presenter’s checklist of Abbott quotes. Liz Truss, the Panglossian trade secretary who doubles as minister for women and equalities, when asked “why is it right that someone who is widely viewed as sexist, homophobic and a climate-change denier should be representing Britain around the world?” replied, “What I’d say about Tony Abbott is that he’s a former prime minister of Australia. Australia is a key ally of the United Kingdom and he has done a very good job in areas like trade.”

Through this wan defence, Australian ex-diplomats had already bowled some scornful zingers. Abbott would be “a sporadic distraction, as is his wont” in any Australian–UK process, not “window dresser” but “window breaker,” former trade negotiator Tim Ward opined in the right-wing Telegraph, adding that “[given] how destabilising his very presence seems to be, it could even be viewed as a cunning ploy by Australia to rattle the other side.” Mike Rann, who preceded Downer as high commissioner, said Abbott was known for “picking a scrap with anyone,” then nailed press coverage with a sly mention of Johnson’s most hapless cabinet placeman.

A trio of ex–Australian PMs who had jousted with Abbott, now regulars in London’s media firmament and treated with the deference that status entails, also joined the fray, thickening the flavour of an Australian proxy war fought on British shores, a kind of contrived semblance — once more, the second time as bathos — of ABC’s spellbinding The Killing Season.

Beyond doubting that Abbott could actually negotiate on behalf of the UK (“awkward to say the least”), Malcolm Turnbull added little to the caustic portrait of “wrecker” Abbott in his hefty autobiography, while Kevin Rudd (“Is the UK joking?”) took another chance to assail “Bozo the Clown’s” climate and health record. “If the UK goes through with this, he will be an albatross around their neck.” Julia Gillard’s own Sky News gig was a model of message discipline, first in promoting a book, then in holding to a tight script over her viral 2012 speech, fixedly not naming its targets. (“I stand by every word but I don’t think I need to add to it. It’s not for me to work out who should be the UK trade envoy or specialist.”)

For their part, some of Abbott’s ideological confrères were initially stunned by the way that the Sun’s 250-word pebble had, Withnail & I–like, set off an avalanche by mistake. A more downbeat tone might have served them better. (“Oz reject is Brit pick,” or “Aussie ex-PM bats for Blighty” — more originals on request.) Talking to themselves, they had omitted to game-plan his character and record becoming headline news in the old country. But as the vitriol fed on itself, as per the modern PMS, a retaliatory barrage, notably male-heavy, was let loose, its gist that Abbott was being traduced and merits the post.

Lamenting “personal abuse” and “cheap caricature,” the monthly Critic’s political editor Graham Stewart saw Abbott in eminent terms: an “Anglophile former prime minister of one of Britain’s friendliest allies” and a former Rhodes scholar and monarchist on whom the Queen bestowed the Order of Australia “for his life of public service” (accolades become a mite rickety) with an effective record of “bilateral diplomacy.” Daniel Hannan, prolific evangelist for Brexit and the Anglosphere, echoed the claim (“He knows how to get ambitious trade deals done. We are lucky to have him”), as did Downer (“Tony has huge experience of navigating through the thorny bushes of trade agreements”), while the Adam Smith Institute’s Matthew Lesh said he can “provide the advice and advocacy to get deals over the final, contentious hurdles that inevitably develop at a political level.”

Lesh’s vigorous polemic conceded “some questionable comments” by Abbott “in the past,” but defended him by referring to the supportive testimony of Abbott’s sister Christine Forster and late gay friend Christopher Pearson, the “deranged hatred” of a left now “rushing for the pitchforks,” how British views of Abbott have been “twisted” by Gillard’s “out-of-context speech,” and even Peter Hartcher’s morning-after column in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Being a conservative, with traditional social views, should not disqualify someone from all positions in public life,” Lesh argued.

That same day, 4 September, former Abbott adviser Terry Barnes published an eerily similar piece (a “flawed” man who “has said unwise, even stupid, things in the past — who hasn’t?”… whose image is “framed by his political enemies”… “vicious caricature”… “a skilled negotiator who can reconcile competing interests”… “nobody remembers the context of that fiery speech”…).

The PMS, imperious offspring of the pre-internet era’s “media circus,” is happiest in a vacuum. Information tends to get in its way. By now this one had lasted for nine days without a single new fact. Equally familiar was this PMS’s pattern: an ogre, affixed with twittified bio and shaming quotes, becomes the pretext for cartoonish, self-inflatable sloganeering that not only elicits an imitative defence but also shapes even the less reductive outpouring. The only thing in doubt was how it would exhaust itself.

Whispers of another backflip, a motif of Johnson’s premiership, began to spread. But on 4 September, with Julia’s Sky interview also doing the rounds and another weekend’s torrid headlines in sight, a hard-hatted Boris, asked where Tony stood in light of the row, delivered a typically writhing answer: “There’s going to be an announcement about the composition of the board of trade. I obviously don’t agree with those sentiments at all, but then I don’t agree with everyone who serves the government in an unpaid capacity on hundreds of boards across the country. And I can’t be expected to do so. What I would say about Tony Abbott is this is a guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal-democratic nation of Australia. It’s an amazing country, it’s a freedom-loving country, it’s a liberal country. There you go, I think that speaks for itself.”

By late afternoon, it was official: “the Honourable Tony Abbott” would be one of nine advisers to the board of trade, just as the Nine group’s Bevan Shields had intimated on day one, channelling an evidently impeccable source. (Abbott will serve in “some sort of advisory capacity,” he had posted.) The board, one of eleven committees tasked with refuelling UK strategy in key policy areas, includes Patricia Hewitt, the Canberra-born former trade secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Linda Yueh, economist and broadcaster, and investment banker William Russell, also mayor of London’s financial district as well as a member of the previous board suspended in July. That Russell functions as a friend of China’s establishment, with the ineluctable tangles the position now involves, raised zero interest amid the PMS.

That, for the present, was that. Now, between quarterly meetings with new colleagues, Abbott can get down to the work — unpaid, expenses aside, and scarcely glamorous — of “[engaging] extensively with industry, communities, farmers and consumer groups across the UK, to ensure a range of voices are heard as the UK develops its independent trade policy.” As he customises this bland spec, Zoom-networking an Australia–East Asia–UK triangle, progress will also depend on Brexit’s endgame with the European Union (in short: a trade deal or not?), and even on how Britain’s stew of economic and political uncertainties, not least the course of Boris Johnson’s government, plays out. Among these, a “growing Tory love for Australia,” albeit tendentious and needy, is cohesive for the party, with Abbott himself the emblem. It’s not you, it’s us, might well be the unspoken declaration.

More tasty are incipient signs of a roving commission for Abbott. The Financial Times reports this week that home secretary Priti Patel’s pondering the idea of sending far afield the migrants (Iranian, Afghan, Sudanese and more) who crossed the English Channel on small vessels “is further evidence of the influence of Tony Abbott’s ideas on Boris Johnson’s government.” Ascension Island in the south Atlantic was one candidate, Shetland in the North Sea another. (This chimera jolted recall of an observation by the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner in 1949, regarding the doomed Anglo-American venture to oust Albania’s communist regime, as recounted by the KGB spy Kim Philby: “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British own an island within easy reach.”)

Here is the second potential seed of the next Abbott spasm, the first being the fintech entrepreneur Anne Boden’s barbed declaration of pride when her own trade board membership became known: “[It] is important that we have challenging voices at such an important body. I support diversity and so did this woman,” linking to Julia Gillard’s famous speech.

The PMS was wilting from the moment of Johnson’s interview, though the Guardian’s autopump turned Friday’s front-page lead “Pressure on PM to drop ‘misogynist’ trade adviser” into Saturday’s “PM appoints ‘misogynist’ Abbott as trade adviser.” By then the next spasm was being given lift-off by Extinction Rebellion’s two-week protest carnival, as the eco-activists’ blockage of roads and newspaper deliveries, plus its mounting of a Titanic-themed posh tea party and a model lighthouse named Greta Thunberg, incited the gamut of reaction from fury to ridicule.

Abbott fever left no trace. That may have owed a little to the swift handover to Extinction Rebellion. But two factors are more fundamental (and also fit XR, Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip, and Black Lives Matter in its local variant). First, the PMS exists in an eternal present, absorbing into itself all other temporalities. In a flash, it dominates. Once popped, it vanishes. Thanks to a first in human history — the melding of instant amnesia and instant retrievability — it is also ever available for an encore. When that hits, and the manic carousel is unblushingly reprised, there is no sense of a previous iteration, since everything now belongs to the new eternal present.

Second, the PMS is always primarily about itself, reducing to effluent its notional subject and putative ethical concerns. Driven way beyond its natural life or level by value-spawning attention, clicks and noise, it operates to disallow any resolution or release. It can never offset the vast resources it devours and the coercive hyperbole of its language. Thus the PMS is a guarantor of disappointment.

From the consumer side, to accept the PMS on its own terms would be to overlook its many foreclosures. An oblivious British public was given no hint that Abbott himself, if unlikely ever to be stuck with the most plangent judgement in The Killing Season’s four hours — Jenny Macklin’s “people are complex” — might be viewed in other than Manichean terms. Neither his own capsule self-portrait in response to David Marr’s Political Animal — “a more nuanced and complex character than perhaps many of the standard left-leaning critics would concede” — nor the book itself, nor anything else from the Abbott oeuvre, got a look-in. The PMS can’t accommodate nuance, complexity — or curiosity.

Neither did themes pertinent to Abbott’s heralded job receive much attention during the PMS: the contours of an Australia–UK trade negotiation, the tenability of the Anglosphere, and the wider Tory infatuation with down under (Isaac Levido’s key strategic role in Number 10 as but one example) — or even the fate of its Labour counterpart. The British Foreign Policy Group’s Sophie Gaston, viewing “today’s antipodean dalliance” in equable terms (“something feels unique about the Australian influence in British politics in 2020”), was an exception.

The political–media spasm can well afford to ignore such laments. The now-unguarded public realm, beneficiary of and in thrall to social media’s flattening of silos, is its playpen. No wonder the great national drama — as music hall to film, or silents to talkies — could not survive. What the PMS can offer in place is less than clear. But when so many are happy to play Bozo the Clown, perhaps that hardly matters. •

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It’s tempting to leave it there, to note that the debate was a worthless exercise and a waste of time. But something happened that should be on front pages across the country: the president refused to denounce white supremacists — the nation’s top domestic terror threat — and then signalled his support for more violence and unrest in the run-up to the election.

Encouraging political violence has been a mainstay of Trump’s strategy since entering politics in 2015. During the 2016 race, he frequently encouraged rally-goers to assault protesters, even saying he would pay their legal bills if they were arrested. A year later, after the deadly white-power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists celebrated Trump’s famous equivocation about their actions.

The 2020 race has been no different. While the pandemic has mostly prevented huge rallies of the kind Trump held in 2016, he has still found ways to signal to his supporters that armed intimidation and violence are welcome parts of his campaign. The Republican National Convention featured Patricia and Mark McCloskey, a St Louis couple who greeted peaceful anti-racist protesters walking past their home by brandishing guns (they face felony charges for unlawful use of weapons). Trump has also recently said that Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old Illinois resident who shot and killed protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was acting in self-defence.

If those events were dog whistles, the president’s comments at the debate were trumpets. Asked by Wallace if he would denounce white supremacists, the president first waffled, asking for a specific group. Both Wallace and Biden suggested the Proud Boys, a violent far-right street gang. Rather than denounce them, Trump told them to “stand back and stand by” — which the Proud Boys immediately adopted as their slogan. He then added, “Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

The exchange was notable not only because Trump encouraged the violent group but also because he avoided denouncing white supremacists in general. His own Department of Homeland Security, in a draft report on terrorist threats to the United States leaked in early September, assessed that “white supremacist extremists — who increasingly are networking with like-minded persons abroad — will pose the most persistent and lethal threat.” Yet Trump continues to claim that antifa, a left-wing protest movement, is a domestic terror threat (the Homeland Security report made no mention of it) and refuses to denounce — or even talk about — the most serious domestic terror threat in the country.

Disturbing as that moment was, it was not the only alarming remark the president made. At the end of the debate, Wallace asked both Biden and Trump to urge their supporters “not to engage in any civil unrest” around the election. Trump instead responded, “I’m urging my supporters to go in to the polls and watch very carefully.” He then went on to argue at length that because of mail-in balloting, the United States was likely to have “a fraudulent election.”

The baseless claim that Democrats are stealing the election is not new. Trump has been saying it for months, attempting to cast doubts on the results at a time when polls show Biden with a commanding lead. But the call for his supporters to go watch the polls, mixed with his refusal to call for peace around the election, is especially troubling.

In the United States, people cannot simply show up as poll-watchers. It’s a job that requires specific training and regulation. What Trump is calling for is intimidation — and it’s already happening. In Virginia, which has already begun early in-person voting, Trump supporters swarmed a polling site, requiring election officials to provide escorts for voters waiting in line.

Now imagine that the group gathering is not just a bunch of boisterous Trump supporters but members of militias or violent gangs like the Proud Boys. It’s a scenario made much more likely by the president’s comments on Tuesday.

At the debate, Donald Trump did little to outline the sorts of policies he might pursue if given a second term. But he did give viewers a clear vision of what a second term might look like: one marked by ongoing political violence, cheered on by the president. •

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Sophie self-isolated in one section of the prime ministerial home while Justin assumed full responsibility for the household, including the couple’s three children, aged twelve, eleven and six. Meals were delivered, but otherwise the Trudeau family was on its own. Official photos of Trudeau working in his home office and holding conference calls with world leaders were taken by his daughter. He was late for at least one meeting because his son’s bathtime went past schedule.

Sophie Trudeau recovered full health, but it was another peak moment for Justin Trudeau’s progressive and enlightened image: this time, as a regular working dad and temporary single parent.

Initially, Trudeau’s government steered a similarly steady course. While specific public health measures were largely under provincial and local jurisdiction, the national government moved quickly to close the US border to non-essential travel while ensuring vital economic and supply links remained moving. A major economic aid package — including wage subsidies and the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, a direct government transfer of up to C$2000 a month to workers affected by the pandemic — was quickly assembled, and a flurry of other programs responded to the pandemic’s massive disruption.

Trudeau addressed the nation daily, emerging from his front door to give live televised addresses. His reassuring image of sincerity and compassion was well received amid a broad national consensus. Unlike the chaotic polarisation across the border, in Canada politicians of all stripes broadly agreed on responses to the pandemic. Cracks and problems emerged, of course, with reports of how successive governments had overlooked warnings to prepare for such a crisis, especially by stockpiling personal protective equipment. Overall, though, Canada and its prime minister could pat themselves on the back for handling the pandemic pretty well.

Then events took a different turn. On 25 June the government announced yet another new program, the Canada Student Service Grant, an initiative to encourage volunteer service through funded placements. Unlike other pandemic response programs, though, this would be run externally, by an organisation called the WE Charity.

Led by two charismatic brothers, Craig and Marc Kielburger, WE was among the highest-profile charities in the country. Working through schools and holding massive “WE Day” arena rallies, it had built partnerships with major corporations and news outlets, including the nation’s biggest bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, top telecom provider Telus, the Canadian arm of KPMG, and the national Globe and Mail newspaper. The Kielburger brothers were national celebrities, especially Craig Kielburger, who had founded the initial organisation in 1995 as a precocious twelve-year-old.

Yet the announcement drew immediate scepticism. Governance experts and public servants asked why an external partner was needed when the government had shown it was able to create and deliver massive new programs like the Emergency Response Benefit in weeks. What made WE best suited to the job?

For its part, the opposition pounced on Trudeau’s personal connections with the charity. He had appeared at WE rallies as prime minister, and so had several of his family members. Revelations soon emerged that his mother, the indomitable Margaret Trudeau, had spoken at quite a few WE events, receiving C$250,000 in expenses and honorariums. Brother Sacha Trudeau had also been engaged for C$32,000. Even Sophie Trudeau’s fateful trip to Britain, where she attended a WE event as part of its growing global portfolio, was expenses-paid by WE.

The backlash was swift. Just over a week later, on 3 July, the arrangement with WE was terminated. But that didn’t stop the scrutiny from intensifying.

WE and the Kielburger brothers didn’t fare well. Despite many years of high-profile operations and a sparkling reputation for upbeat goodwill, the organisation proved to be more complicated than most people imagined. While WE itself was a charity, other arms of the Kielburgers’ empire didn’t have charitable status, its accompanying “ME to WE” unit was expressly for-profit, and financial arrangements between the entities were complex.

Originally focused on international development, WE now spanned many activities, foreign and domestic. In the words of one analysis, “it defies easy description, from its high school clubs to international development projects to ethical chocolate sales to mental health advocacy.” Revelations about difficult workplace conditions, and the news that the chair of the WE board had resigned in March under pressure from Craig Kielburger were highly damaging.

The Kielburgers had also been a litigious duo. Notwithstanding WE’s partnerships with most newspapers in the country, it emerged that they frequently challenged negative coverage of their organisations and activities. Deep scrutiny had largely been left to the alternative press.

Parliamentary committees launched investigations into the affair, with the finance committee taking the lead in seeking answers to two questions. Had public servants been directed to favour WE in the design of the program? And to what extent had Trudeau and others recused themselves from decisions related to WE? The muddled answers, when they came, demonstrated just how far the WE empire had permeated the Canadian establishment.

Public servants testified, somewhat convincingly, that they had turned to WE without political interference or pressure because it was the only suitable entity to deliver the program. But a later-revealed email from one senior public servant describing WE executives and political staff of the finance minister as “besties” didn’t engender confidence in the arm’s-length nature of the process.

Finance minister Bill Morneau’s testimony dug the hole deeper. Although he had recused himself from the development of the WE scheme because his daughter worked for the organisation, he had participated in the cabinet discussions that approved it. Then he revealed that he and his family had taken trips to Kenya and Ecuador to visit WE projects, and that he had unintentionally failed to repay the charity the C$41,000 cost, an oversight he had corrected the day before his testimony. This, to put it mildly, was not well received.

The Kielburgers themselves testified for what is generally considered a disastrous four hours, during which they were highly defensive and failed to gain public sympathy.

The peak of the affair came on 30 July when Trudeau appeared before the finance committee, the first prime minister to be quizzed by a parliamentary committee on his own conduct since 1932. The opposition focused on the Trudeau family’s connections to WE, and Trudeau outlined his own recusal from the WE decision. He pointed out that his wife’s London trip had been approved by the ethics commissioner and said that he had excluded himself from development of the Student Service Grant. But he was less able to explain the rest of his family’s connections — or why, like Morneau, he participated in the final cabinet discussions of the arrangement.

The ethics commissioner announced an inquiry into the issue and the prime minister’s conduct. This is the commissioner’s third inquiry into Trudeau as prime minister, after earlier findings that Trudeau violated conflict-of-interest provisions in his use of the Aga Khan’s private aircraft and vacation island, and that he put improper pressure on government officials to cut a prosecution deal with a major Montreal employer, SNC-Lavalin, over foreign corruption issues.

Once again, the central issue was Trudeau’s judgement. Even if there was no evidence of egregious corruption, the prime minister didn’t appear to have thought through how his actions could be perceived. This falls into a longstanding pattern that includes his infamous appearances in blackface as a young adult. Trudeau has always stood for good intentions — but intentions not always well thought-out.

Like Trudeau, the Kielburger brothers had built high-profile careers on good intentions, personal charisma, a brand of pleasant but vague and unthreatening progressiveness, and well-groomed hair and good teeth. Yet Trudeau’s case was assisted by the fact that he wasn’t the only person drawn into their web. The implosion of WE was a sad indictment of the entire Canadian corporate and media establishment, which had happily backed a winning brand for years without looking too closely.

This general complicity masked the odour of Trudeau’s own connections to the rapidly collapsing entity. Its corporate partners fled, and on 10 September WE announced the cessation of its Canadian operations.

The political hit was bad but not catastrophic. Trudeau’s approval ratings, which had hit a modest high of 55 per cent in the northern spring, fell to 44 per cent at the height of the scandal in late July. The Liberals retained a slight polling lead over the Conservatives, who were concluding a laborious leadership election that had been extended to eight months by the pandemic. Nevertheless, Yves-François Blanchet, the leader of the third-party Bloc Québécois, pledged to seek a no-confidence vote when the hung parliament resumed in autumn.

In the meantime, Trudeau had set about cleaning up. Tensions between him and the finance minister over the pace of government spending in the pandemic — no doubt made worse by Morneau’s embarrassing part in the WE mess — appeared to culminate on 17 August when Morneau unexpectedly announced his retirement from politics. Trudeau immediately replaced him with the formidable deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, who had previously served as international trade, foreign, and intergovernmental affairs minister. Freeland is widely seen as the government’s fixer, assigned to tough jobs like negotiating a revised free-trade agreement with the Trump administration.

A day later, Trudeau announced that parliament would be prorogued for a month. This would allow a “reset” of the government’s agenda to deal with the realities of 2020, he said, playing down the fact that it also dissolved the parliamentary committees still digging into the WE affair. Sudden prorogation to escape inconvenient political situations (an option denied to Britain’s Boris Johnson last September by the UK Supreme Court) has become a familiar tactic in Canada, even though Trudeau’s 2015 party platform pledged not to use the mechanism “to avoid difficult political circumstances.”

Five days later, the Conservatives elected a new leader, Erin O’Toole. Having run for eight months as an upstart “true blue” Conservative against the slightly more moderate frontrunner, Peter Mackay, O’Toole changed his tone on leadership election night and pledged an inclusive party for all, posing a potentially much stronger threat than his lacklustre predecessor Andrew Scheer, and at least modestly infringing on the Trudeau brand.

And so, as August ended and the northern hemisphere autumn approached, there was optimism in Canadian politics, alongside serious talk of an election. Covid-19 conditions appeared stable and Canadians had enjoyed a socially distanced summer with no new lockdowns. Trudeau had declared that the governor-general’s 23 September speech to parliament (known in Canada as the throne speech) would be a “road map out of the pandemic” that would enable Canada to “build back better.” Grand policy designs were rumoured along with discussion of Trudeau’s election prospects against the novice O’Toole.

But September was a different story. The beginning of the Canadian school year was chaotic, especially in Ontario, where teachers and parents were bewildered and upset by unclear and shifting policies. While this was outside federal jurisdiction, it demonstrated that stability was still far away.

Then unmistakable evidence emerged that the dreaded second wave was arriving. Covid-19 cases began to rise again, and demands for tests far outstripped capacity. Again, much of this was under provincial jurisdiction, out of Trudeau’s direct responsibility, though provincial governments begged for more federal funding to bolster their healthcare systems. But news also emerged that Trudeau’s own government had in the previous years refocused a renowned unit responsible for monitoring global health risks, which might otherwise have given better early warning of the pandemic.

Finally, both Conservative leader O’Toole and Bloc Québécois leader Blanchet tested positive for Covid-19 and went into self-isolation (neither has developed symptoms). Amid this misery, expectations for the throne speech were curbed, as was talk of an election. The airwaves were instead dominated by renewed pleas from public health authorities for Canadians to stay vigilant, and by the continuing furore over schools and testing capacity.

Trudeau briefly ramped up expectations by asking for television time to address the nation on the evening of 23 September, following that afternoon’s throne speech. Each of his three predecessors had done this exactly once, to address pressing constitutional or parliamentary crises. But Trudeau’s address was anti-climactic, largely repeating the themes and promises in the speech read by the governor-general hours before.

Standing amid Canadian flags and looking very prime ministerial, Trudeau outlined a sprawling plan that promised new support for provincial testing; ongoing wage and income-support programs; a million new jobs; national child care and pharmacare programs (both already long promised); investments in electric vehicles; measures to tackle systemic racism; and much more. The overall themes were nevertheless clear: first, that the government was prepared to continue spending and intervening in the economy to deal with the pandemic; second, that it remained committed — at least in words — to a progressive agenda, taking a “feminist, intersectional response” to the pandemic (words used in the throne speech but not by Trudeau in his television address).

Six months after the pandemic was declared, Trudeau appears back where he started, as the well-meaning, progressive-sounding leader who ran the country and his household briefly as a single parent, and who, like the Kielburger brothers, exudes good intentions that aren’t always realised in practice. The resumption of parliament will likely mean renewed committee inquiries into the WE affair, and the ethics commissioner’s eventual report will be added to the shelf of inquiries into Trudeau misjudgements.

But WE is unlikely to do much further political damage, and overall Canada remains well-off. The second wave is now of top concern, but the country has so far escaped any major new lockdowns. Life and the economy remain greatly disrupted, but public consensus remains strong, with masks and social distancing widely accepted in principle, if not always in practice. And the Canada–US border stays closed, isolating Canadians somewhat from the chaos to the south, while the country and its prime minister keep afloat, luckily on more than just good intentions. •

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The McCloskeys entered the spotlight in late June when they stood outside their suburban mansion and brandished guns at anti-racist protesters passing by their house. Aside from the armed homeowners themselves, there was no conflict and no intimation of violence, just a protest weaving its way through the neighbourhood. But in their convention appearance, the McCloskeys told a quite different story.

Mark described himself and his wife as simply “defending our home,” while Patricia warned, “What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighbourhoods around our country.” And it wasn’t just protesters threatening suburban homes. Democrats, Patricia claimed, “want to abolish the suburbs altogether,” inviting “crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments” into suburban neighbourhoods.

“So make no mistake,” she said. “No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

The McCloskeys appeared at the convention as avatars of both white flight and “law and order” politics. They represented a decades-old argument: that the suburbs are under attack from the chaos of the cities, chaos allowed to thrive because Democrats coddle criminals and punish police. And all of those ideas — suburbs and cities, quiet and chaos, police and criminals — are deeply racialised, coded as white and black even when race is never mentioned.

In the days that followed, Republicans at the convention returned again and again to the idea that America was on the verge of collapse, rent by rioting and lawlessness, and that only Donald Trump could put things right again.

It’s an unusual argument for an incumbent, calling attention to the fact that, despite already being president, he has neither prevented nor stopped the perceived lawlessness happening on his watch. Yet this idea has now emerged as the central theme of the Republican campaign, the one everything from television ads to the president’s Twitter account will revolve around in the coming months.

So it’s important to understand what it is, and what it isn’t. The shorthand for this kind of campaign is “law and order,” but that’s just branding. After all, the rule of law has been an obstacle not an ally for the Trump administration. This is true for the McCloskeys as well: they have been charged with unlawful use of a gun for brandishing their weapons at peaceful protesters (though Missouri’s governor, in a very Trumpian move, has vowed to pardon them if they are convicted — laws for thee, not for me).

Nor is the Trump campaign particularly interested in instituting order. Trump has long pitched himself as the chaos candidate, the person who can shake things up and burn things down. In the past several months, as the pandemic, protests and police riots have upended life in the United States, he has continued to be a chaotic force, promoting miracle cures and misinformation about Covid-19 treatments, and unleashing federal law enforcement on peaceful protesters outside the White House.

In fact, his administration has made clear that they believe the chaos is good for them. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said during the convention that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is” for the president and his brand as the law-and-order candidate.

Whether that’s true is not entirely clear. After all, Trump used a very similar approach in the 2018 midterm elections, when he went all-in on the so-called “migrant caravans” that, he warned, would lead to an invasion of the United States. “The Democrats don’t care what their extremist immigration agenda will do to your neighbourhoods or your hospitals or your schools,” he said at a rally in Houston two weeks before the elections.

For weeks Trump had tweeted and talked about the caravans, hoping to provoke a sense of fear and anxiety that would draw white suburban women to the Republican Party. It didn’t work. The election was an overwhelming triumph for the Democrats.

So why is Trump going back to that well? In part, because he still believes it’s how you win suburban white women, who have been a key voting demographic since the days of the “soccer mom” back in the 1990s. Those women were the focus of the Republican convention, and the target of the party’s “defend your homes!” campaign.

But there’s reason to believe it might not work. Women, particularly college-educated women, have fled the Republican Party over the past four years, with 51 per cent opting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now 59 per cent supporting Joe Biden. The party has also started losing the suburbs, something 2018 crystallised for political observers. Before that year’s election, the GOP controlled sixty-nine suburban districts; after, it controlled only thirty-two.

Trump still has a June Cleaver view of suburbs, which is why he keeps tweeting about the “Suburban Housewives of America.” But not only has that idea of women’s place long since passed, the suburbs themselves have also changed, becoming more diverse in terms of race and class. Winning the suburbs means appealing to more than just middle-class white families.

The other reason Trump is rolling out a save-our-suburbs campaign is that it’s the only kind of campaign he knows. Race-baiting — and that’s what this is, not “law and order” or “family values” — has been a staple of Trump’s politics since the day he entered the race in 2015 railing against Mexicans as “rapists and murderers.” The backbone of his 2016 campaign was policies like the border wall and the Muslim ban; we shouldn’t be surprised that in 2020, barely coded racist appeals would be the core of his campaign.

Even if this appeal doesn’t work, it’s already having other consequences. The call to defend the suburbs has helped rally militia groups, who have been especially active this year. Last week, a seventeen-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, who appears to have travelled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in connection with militia groups, shot and killed two people involved in protests there. The president has refused to condemn his actions, and Rittenhouse is quickly becoming a hero of the right. Which means more chaos and violence are likely to follow.

The election, then, will be a referendum on all this unrest, around both policing and the pandemic. For Democrats, it’s a matter of reframing the president’s claims that people won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America — pointing out, for instance, that all the chaos happening now is happening under Trump’s watch. But fear is a powerful political force, and Trump will be leveraging it as much as he can in the coming months, hoping to convince white Americans that he is their best hope for the future. •

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Under Hong Kong’s unusual post-handover political and constitutional arrangements, democratic participation is severely constrained. The chief executive, who heads Hong Kong’s executive-led government, is elected by a 1200-person committee dominated by pro-Beijing business interests. Only half of the seats in the city’s legislature, the Legislative Council, are elected by universal suffrage, the remainder again going to small special-interest groups called “functional constituencies.” Yet extensive rights and freedoms are guaranteed by Hong Kong’s constitution, the Basic Law, including freedoms of expression and assembly.

It’s an unusual combination. Most countries that enjoy a similarly broad range of civil and political rights do so within the context of liberal democracy. When citizens disagree with their government, they are free to protest; but they may also, as the saying goes, vote the bastards out. Likewise, most countries that don’t have democratically elected governments also circumscribe rights and freedoms, making public protest impossible. Under those authoritarian regimes, you can’t vote the government out, and you also can’t criticise or protest against it.

Hong Kong’s unique dynamic explains why it became — to borrow the title of my first book — a city of protest. If the people of Hong Kong were unhappy with government policy, they couldn’t vote out their government, and nor could they participate meaningfully in the policymaking process. But they could exercise their freedoms of expression and assembly. So they protested.

In turn, political protest proved to be an effective means of forcing political change, from stopping the enactment of the Article 23 national security law in 2003 to forcing the government to abandon a compulsory patriotic education curriculum in 2012. This held true for the 2019 protests, which successfully stymied chief executive Carrie Lam’s proposed extradition bill.

But this unique arrangement left Hong Kong in a state of disequilibrium. Indeed, its very uniqueness attested to the fact that this precarious balancing of a high level of rights and freedoms against a low level of representative democracy was not a natural state. As I wrote in the conclusion to City of Protest, in the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement, “As long as the disequilibrium between rights and freedoms and representative democracy prevails in Hong Kong, the competing pressures to right that imbalance will also persist.”

Both the Umbrella Movement and the protest movement of 2019 aimed to tackle that disequilibrium by pushing for increased democracy. At the same time, though, as I also noted in 2016, “there is also another way to address the disequilibrium: reduce the rights and freedoms that Hong Kong enjoys.” I envisaged measures such as a continuation of the government’s “lawfare” campaign — the politicised use of Hong Kong’s legal system to target opposition politicians and dissidents — as well as efforts to undermine the electoral system, attacks on the free press, “rectification” of the education sector, and deeper penetration of society by united front groups.

Now, some four years later, we are seeing that strategy come to fruition, for the national security law seeks to do all of these things.

The new law is not simply about creating four criminal offences to close a “loophole” in Hong Kong’s law, or about dealing with risks — real or phantom — to China’s national security. The law is about systematically criminalising dissent and dismantling the legal structure that has enabled past protest movements, putting a permanent end to Hong Kong’s cycle of protest.

This is why so many of the law’s provisions appear to have been crafted precisely to target the strategies of past protest movements. Occupying roads and blockading government buildings, as they did in the Umbrella Movement or in 2019, would now constitute criminal subversion. Interfering with transport systems, whether by blocking the cross-harbour tunnel, vandalising MTR stations or cutting traffic lights, all of which they did in 2019, is now an act of terrorism.

The list goes on. Ordinary citizens supporting protesters by donating money or goods, offering to drive them home from protests or even providing them with information would now be committing the crime of assisting terrorists. Even simply chanting protest slogans and waving banners would invite arrest for secession or subversion, or a ban on running for public office. The law appears specifically targeted to end political protest, once and for all, in Hong Kong.

Yet the city’s ever-adaptable dissenters are finding new and creative means to protest. When authorities declared that certain protest slogans were “inciting secession” and thus illegal, protesters held up blank sheets of paper representing the banned characters. When pro-democracy cafes and restaurants were told their decorative Lennon Walls — collections of colourful Post-it notes bearing protest slogans — were “inciting subversion,” they replaced them with walls of the same colourful notes, devoid of slogans. The semiotics of protest is so strong in Hong Kong that the message is unambiguous, even without the slogans. Some stores cheekily turned to displaying posters and slogans from China’s Cultural Revolution, with one favourite being a quote from Mao Zedong: “Wherever there is repression, there will be resistance.”

This past week, when authorities arrested pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai and sent hundreds of police to search the newsroom of his paper, the Apple Daily, the community engaged in activism with their wallets, buying up copies of his newspaper in the hundreds of thousands and buying shares in his Next Media Group on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, sending the price soaring more than tenfold.

Hong Kong’s dissidents must hope that they can use these creative forms of activism to continue their push for increased democracy while navigating the minefield of the new national security law. If they don’t succeed, then Hong Kong’s unique, delicate disequilibrium of “liberty without democracy” may finally be resolved. And it won’t be in democracy’s favour. •

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Obama, the first Black presidential nominee in US history, was young and had just four years in the Senate under his belt. His international upbringing and unusual name marked him as cosmopolitan and worldly in a way that US presidents seldom were. Biden, on the other hand, came from the heart of white working-class Pennsylvania. He was known for his long career in public life and his affection for the Amtrak train that ferried him back and forth between D.C. and his adopted state of Delaware.

While Biden seemed hand-picked to provide balance to the presidential ticket, he and President Obama quickly became not just governing partners but close friends. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Biden laboured over his choice of running mate for so long, in the hope that he could replicate some of that relationship. And it’s perhaps even less surprising that he chose someone so similar to Obama to join him in the 2020 campaign.

Kamala Harris, like Barack Obama, is a groundbreaking candidate. If the Democrats win in November, she will be the first female vice-president, the first Black vice-president, and the first Asian-American vice-president. She has not been in the Senate long — less than four years — and people still need a little help pronouncing her name (it’s comma-la, with the accent on the first syllable, not the second).

The Biden–Harris ticket, like the Obama–Biden ticket before it, represents the changing face of the Democratic Party. Once home to white working-class union voters, the Democratic Party has more recently been identified with the “coalition of the ascendant”: young, urban, college-educated, increasingly female and racially diverse.

The idea of a coalition of the ascendant, while thrilling to those who were ascending, held less appeal to those being eclipsed. The backlash against Obama’s election was swift and fierce, and was part of the reason Donald Trump proved so successful in 2016. White voters, particularly white men without a university education, were not ready to concede that they no longer controlled American politics.

That story has been told many times in the past four years. But what it misses are people like Joe Biden who, rather than recoiling at being displaced, decided to work with the new generation of political leaders — not as the star, but as part of the supporting cast.

It’s one of the things that ultimately set Biden up for success in 2020. Black Americans saw Biden cheerfully support Barack Obama, never clawing for the spotlight, never insisting that he was entitled to more. The partnership, and friendship, between the two men meant a great deal to many Black voters, who ultimately saved Biden when it seemed his presidential bid was over. (The Biden nomination will someday be treated as inevitable rather than improbable, but after finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, his campaign looked dead in mid February, before he began sweeping primaries in states with a significant number of Black voters.)

Which is why, even though Biden seemed to be the conservative choice in a diverse field of candidates, he still offers a stark contrast to Donald Trump in the general election. Demographically, the two look a lot alike: both white men in their seventies from the northeast who’ve been eyeing the presidency for a long time. But that’s where the resemblance stops. Because while Trump has greeted the changing demographics of America with a fanciful promise to turn back the clock to a whiter decade, Biden has embraced the coalition of the ascendant — not always easily or smoothly, but with real commitment.

The Harris pick shows how that commitment has persisted in the post-Obama era. Biden announced early on that he would choose a woman as a running mate, and he could easily have stopped there, choosing any of a number of white women who serve in the Senate or as state governors. Certainly there were those in his inner circle urging him to pass on Harris, who they felt was “too ambitious” to be vice-president (insert eye roll here).

Biden, though, didn’t fall into that particular trap. Nor did he make the Sarah Palin mistake, choosing someone who seemed exciting but lacked the knowledge, experience and character to lead the country. He knew that his running mate had to be someone who reflected the changing nature of the Democratic Party but could also be a governing partner and, given the realities of his age, would be ready to lead the country from day one.

Judging from the first few hours since the announcement, Harris was also a smart choice for a campaign against Trump. So far the Trump campaign has struggled to define either person on the Democratic ticket. Trump has largely abandoned his “Sleepy Joe” attacks, now opting for darker accusations that Biden is barely cognisant of the world around him and being manipulated by far-left radicals. But those far-left radicals wouldn’t have chosen Harris as his running mate. Nor has the Trump team figured out how to attack her. The campaign’s first statement, which labelled her “Phony Kamala,” was a scrambled mess of vague warnings about the “radical mob” and “anti-police extremists,” an odd line of attack against a former prosecutor.

The choice of Harris largely shields Biden from attacks from the right while reaffirming his alliance with the coalition of the ascendant. If anything, it leaves him open to attacks from the left, which have already begun. Though Harris has adopted liberal policies both as a senator and as a candidate, her career as a prosecutor makes her an easy target for advocates of criminal justice reform. (Although Harris has pushed for reform, she is much more restrained in this area than many on the left.) And across the board, she is a more moderate choice than Elizabeth Warren, an equally popular choice for the #2 spot on the ticket.

So there will be criticisms, some quite sharp, coming from the left in the coming months. But the Biden campaign has likely judged that anti-Trump sentiment, along with a raft of liberal policy proposals, will be enough to shore up his left flank.

It would be easy to conclude, then, that Kamala Harris represents the safe choice, the one most likely to help Biden secure victory in November. But that misses something very important. Biden carries with him a sense of history, in which his Senate career was significant but his vice-presidency transformational. In choosing Kamala Harris, a Black woman whose parents immigrated to the United States from India and Jamaica just a few years before she was born, he is completing a process he began with Barack Obama in 2008: to build a new Democratic Party and raise up a new generation of leaders. In that way, his legacy will be not just as a cheerleader of the coalition of the ascendant, but one of its architects. •

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Amid the extensive criticism of the new law, though, one group of voices has been conspicuously quiet: that of the broad alliance of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy, anti-government politicians, referred to as the “pan-democrats.”

This alliance secured a landslide victory in local council elections in Hong Kong last November, winning majorities on seventeen of eighteen district councils. Coming after half a year of sometimes violent anti-government protests, those elections were seen as a referendum on the protest movement. With record turnout, the overall sentiment of the Hong Kong people was unambiguous.

This September will see much more significant elections for the Legislative Council. The pan-democrats had hopes of another strong showing, with some even hoping they might win a majority in the heavily gerrymandered legislature for the first time ever. This would put them in an unprecedented position to put pressure on the government’s agenda. Some had even suggested they might attempt to push their case for democracy by blocking supply to force a constitutional crisis.

But now they find themselves at a crossroads, with their future relevance called into question.

They have good reason to be cautious. The new law requires candidates for public office to swear to uphold Hong Kong’s constitution, the Basic Law. Given that the national security law is itself incorporated into the Basic Law, some pro-government figures have suggested that merely criticising the new law would break this oath, barring the critics from office.

Beyond this, though, the national security law rewrites the rules of the game for the pan-democrats, fundamentally challenging how they campaign and how they behave in office.

The pan-democrats have always fought elections on an explicitly anti-government, pro-democracy platform. Their key policies have traditionally included opposition to a national security law and the promotion of universal suffrage — the first overruled last week by Beijing, the second increasingly difficult to achieve as the mainland tightens its grip on this inappropriately named “autonomous” region.

The structure of Hong Kong’s political system places the pan-democrats in the position of permanent opposition. Only half of its legislature, the Legislative Council, is elected by universal suffrage. The other half is elected by a small circle of special interest groups called “functional constituencies,” which represent various industry, professional and business bodies, and are dominated by the pro-Beijing parties. As a result, the pan-democrats consistently win a majority of the popular vote but only ever occupy a minority of seats.

In their opposition role, the pan-democrats have traditionally organised and engaged in protest actions, both on the streets and inside the legislative chamber, including filibustering and other procedural tactics. The result has been some wild scenes in recent months, as pan-democrat legislators fought (sometimes physically) to prevent the pro-Beijing parties wresting control of a key house committee. After noisy protests and scuffles saw pan-democrat legislators forcibly ejected from the chamber, the pro-Beijing side prevailed and pushed through a controversial law outlawing insults to the Chinese national anthem.

Similar disruption would now place the pan-democrats at risk of prosecution under the new national security law. Among other offences, the broadly defined crime of subversion includes the use of “unlawful means” to “seriously interfere in, obstruct or harm” the functions of a Hong Kong government body. That’s a wide enough definition to catch many of the pan-democrats’ recent protest actions in the legislative chamber as well as the “occupation” strategies of the street-level protests led by their key figures.

Last June, a proposed extradition bill was effectively stopped when tens of thousands rallied to blockade the Legislative Council building, preventing legislators from convening their meeting. Pan-democrat lawmakers were on the frontlines of those protests, wielding megaphones to cheer on the crowds and mediating between protesters and police. That protest would now constitute criminal subversion.

To the extent that protesters damaged transport infrastructure, including traffic lights — again, a frequent occurrence during last year’s protests — they could be prosecuted for terrorism offences under the new law, with anyone inciting or supporting such activities also criminally liable. Pan-democrats will now be forced to reconsider their role in the street protests, especially when the protests risk becoming violent.

Pan-democrats had also been active in international outreach, travelling the globe to meet with foreign governments to solicit their support for Hong Kong democracy. It has been particularly galling to Beijing to see anti-government activists meeting with US congressional leaders, courting the US administration and cheerleading for sanctions.

Those activities will now constitute the crime of colluding with foreign governments to endanger national security, forcing pan-democrats to step back from this role. Indeed, prominent young activist Nathan Law last week announced that he would be going into voluntary exile in order to continue his international advocacy for Hong Kong out of reach of the law.

Beijing has also added one final wrinkle: anyone who is convicted of any offence under the new law, no matter how minor, will be disqualified from running for public office, apparently permanently. Any sitting member or public servant so convicted will be removed from office.

It is hard not to conclude that one of the aims of the national security law is fundamentally to redraw Hong Kong’s political landscape. This was suggested by an unnamed mainland political expert who told the state-owned Global Times that the new law would “change the psychological expectations of pan-democratic groups” in Hong Kong.

As Hong Kong heads towards September’s elections, pan-democrat candidates are likely to feel demoralised. Forced to second-guess the acceptability, or even legality, of their campaigning, they may find themselves having to speak in code to their supporters among Hong Kong’s residents.

Even if successfully elected, they will be deprived of their traditional tools and will need to rethink their role as opposition legislators. We may see them go the way of opposition parties in other Asian states, relegated to the position of an irrelevant and marginalised sideshow, ignored by the government as a minor irritation, their views deprived of oxygen in the mainstream conversation.

Despite its structural democratic deficit, Hong Kong has for decades been characterised as one of Asia’s most vigorous polities, with a strong civil society. The smothering of pan-democrat political parties would be a sad, retrograde step. If it is accompanied by a plunge into the self-policing mindset of an authoritarian state, then it suggests a dim future for the people of Hong Kong. It will take courage — and considerable personal risk — for Hong Kong democrats to stand their ground. •

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