Johann Hari

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti-quake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakable grief that could last for years. In the middle of Haiti’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions of people like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of The Free Market has rolled out across the world because The People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatize the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tents more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The Gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece ‘The Shock Doctrine’, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle. One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF – an institution set up by European and American governments after the Second World War – would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertilizer for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion”, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine began to scythe through the population. Nobody knows how many tens of thousands starved to death; nobody bothered to count. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. Whenever I report from the developing world, the IMF tracks of anti-development lie like wounds across the land. They systematically disregard the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of their commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country.” So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there’s a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries… to spend a fortune subsidising the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn’t dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It’s not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: they have just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. They are forbidden from embarking on a fiscal stimulus. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter.

Here’s where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist – after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatisation of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through. The drowned-out people couldn’t fight back any more.

After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled onto an earlier loan – which requires Haiti to steeply raise the price for electricity, and freeze wages for the public sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them. It was classic IMF: we’ll give you a hand, provided your people feel the back of your hand.

There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti’s rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port au Prince, where they built mud huts – and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as “the Plan of Death.” It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly.

But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country – by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called ‘No Shock Doctrine For Haiti’ had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein’s mega-selling expose, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be cancelled out by the IMF.

And it worked. The IMF backed down. They publicly renounced their conditions – and even said they will work to cancel Haiti’s entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF’s agenda works. Klein says it is “unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics.” Of course, they need to be watched vigilantly for any signs of backtracking. Already they seem to be rolling back some of their panicked initial rhetoric and saying that “beyond the emergency phase” they may go back to business-as-usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune.

But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF’s poverty-promoting machine steam-rollering across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 – for the causes of democracy and justice.

...discussing the fascinating new biography of Arthur Koestler with its author, Michael Scammell. To buy tickets, click here

The great mystery of British politics is striding into the room, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. In the flesh David Cameron looks thinner and younger and smaller than on television. The caricaturists are wrong: his cheeks don’t appear full and ruddy at all. He looks sleek, and wired, with an intense gaze. He knows he could be a few months from Downing Street and the history books – so he is here to woo a crucial electoral block that is wary of falling into his arms, by giving an interview to Attitude, Britain’s best-selling gay magazine. He calls for coffee and dispenses with the photographer briskly: he poses for two minutes before saying, “Right, that’s enough,” and walking out of the shot. He places himself on his settee, in the shadow of Big Ben, and says: “Right. Let’s start.”

Until 2005, David Cameron was a conventional anti-gay Tory. He attacked Tony Blair for “moving Heaven and Earth to allow the promotion of homosexuality in our schools”. He mocked Labour for supporting the “fringe agenda” of equality for gay people. He supported the homophobic law Section 28 until its dying breath. But since he became Conservative leader, he has dramatically changed his position. He apologised for Section 28, got a Tory conference to applaud the principle of gay marriage, and has moved a flotilla of gay candidates into winnable seats. It seems at first glance like an amazing starburst of progress – making it possible at last for gay people to pick political parties from anywhere on the spectrum. The party of Norman Tebbit is now led by a man who poses for photographers outside a screening of Brokeback Mountain.

But a fat question mark hangs over Cameron’s Yellow Brick Road to Damascus. It is the same question mark that pervades so many of Cameron’s policies – and British politics itself. The Conservative leader has had conversion after conversion, on everything from the environment to SureStart to bank regulation. Is it for real? How can a man’s political views really change so far and so fast? Is his party behind him? Of his shadow cabinet team, 85 percent of those eligible voted for Section 28, and 90 percent voted against equalising the age of consent. By testing how honest he is about gay equality, can we tease out how authentic his claims to a softer, gentler Conservatism are?

I Shedding dead skin

He immediately starts with an apology. “I know there are gay people who have conservative values – like wanting us to be supportive of business and enterprise, wanting to have strong defence, believing in the strong defence of liberty and these kind of things – but in the past have felt held back because the Conservative party was sending them a signal that we didn't support them or their lifestyle,” he says in one long gulp of prose. “That has changed. I think we can look gay people in the eye and say you can now back us… because we now support gay equality.”

Cameron starts to list a range of ways he says the Tories have shed their homophobia like dead skin. “I would particularly point to that speech [at Conservative party conference] where as a Conservative leader I stood up and said I support commitment and marriage – whether it is between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Find me another Conservative leader not just in Britain but somewhere in the Western world who has done that – and been applauded for doing it. I didn’t have to stand up in front of my own party and say that. Politics is about taking some risks. That was a proper good old-fashioned, heart-in-the-throat moment. This is my chance. If you lead the party it’s your chance to put your own stamp on things and do things your own way. And sorting out this issue has been a complete pleasure in terms of that, and badly needed doing. Am I the first person to spot it? No. But I think we’ve done some big steps on that.”

He stresses that any benefits his government gives to marriage will also go to civil partnered couples, and there are now two people in his front-bench team who have had civil partnerships themselves. He is speaking fast and rhythmically, holding my gaze, like a debater sealing his case.

How did he get from backing homophobic laws to this public homophilia in just four years? “I think now looking back you can see the mistake of Section 28,” he says, talking about the Thatcher-era law that made it a crime to “promote homosexuality” to children, which he supported so strongly he put it in his election literature several times. “There’s only one thing worse than making a mistake and that’s not putting your hands up and admitting it.”

But what exactly is he apologising for? He insists he never believed that it was possible to ‘promote homosexuality’ or make children gay. So what did he think the law was about? “You know, we can go over history, but what it came out of was this concern that local authorities were getting too involved in messaging in schools.” Yes – about gay sex. “But look, you can have your arguments about what local authorities should and shouldn't be getting involved in,” he says, waving his hand. He says his mind was changed by a gay friend who told him: “You can argue forever about this but in the end it’s something that a lot of people in this country find very offensive, and on that basis it can't be a sensible thing to do.”

The more I ask about Section 28, the more he repeats this point – it was offensive, it was “finger-pointing,” so it had to go. Yes, but it wasn’t purely a symbol. It was a law that did real harm to gay people. It prevented teachers from stopping homophobic bullying; it prevented proper sex education for gay kids at the height of the AIDS crisis. He repeats it again: it was an insult. He isn’t going to venture deeper than that.

He says he didn’t know any openly gay people as a child, or even at university. The first openly gay people he met were at the Conservative Research Department, after he had graduated. Perhaps this explains how he formed the attitudes that kept him opposed to gay equality for so long. I start to go over his record beyond Section 28 – and slap into a brick wall. In 2002 he voted against allowing gay couples to adopt. Yet when I ask him why, he flatly denies it. He says: “No… we were three line whipped on that vote and I abstained on it.” I point him to Hansard, which records his vote against gay marriage in cold black ink. He says “my memory” is that he abstained, and that he now thinks “the ideal adoption is finding a mum and a dad, but there will be occasions when gay couples make very good adoptive parents. So I support gay adoption.”

Even since his apparent conversion, he has voted to block a piece of progress. In 2008, he wanted lesbians who receive IVF treatment to be required to name a father figure – a requirement that gay equality groups say would obviously makes it harder for them to receive treatment. “No, I think that's a classic way to try to misinterpret what the vote was about,” he says. He insists he only wanted fertility clinics to have to “ask the question” about “the need for a father.” But why ask the question, if you don’t have an answer in mind? “I think those are important questions to be considered,” says, and looks away.

II A whistle-stop tour

On an hour-long tour of the policies he will make as Prime Minister that specifically pertain to gay people, Cameron is by turns impressive, mediocre, and worrying. He is at his best and at his clearest – to my surprise – when it comes to refugees who are fleeing homophobic persecution. He says: “If you are fleeing persecution and that fear is well-founded, then you should be able to stay. As I understand it, the 1951 Convention [on the rights of refugees] doesn’t mention sexuality but because it mentions membership of a social group, that phrase is being use by the courts, rightly, to say that if someone has a realistic fear of persecution they should be allowed to stay.”

At the moment, gay refugees are often told – under a Labour government – to go back home and hide their sexuality from police forces who would imprison, torture or kill them for it. I ask him if that is wrong – and he says unequivocally: “I think it is. If you have a legitimate fear of persecution, that it seems to me that is a perfectly legitimate reason to stay.”

Similarly, he is admirably disdainful of the ban on gay men giving blood. He says there is an independent investigation into this and he has to wait for its results, but “it sounds perfectly logical and sensible to make the change... Logic would dictate that it’s time to change.” He even tells the Church of England to follow his lead, saying: “I don’t want to get into a huge row with the Archbishop here… but the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through – sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line full essential.”

Yet on perhaps the two biggest issues affecting gay people in Britain – violence in the playground, and violence on the streets – he doesn’t have much to say. Ofsted has found that homophobic bullying is “endemic” in our schools, and a Stonewall study found that 42 percent of gay kids get beaten up and 17 percent get told they are going to be killed. Cameron says: “I think there’s a broader question of bullying and how we deal with it. A part of it is about trusting teachers and head teachers more to instil a sense of discipline in their schools, which they find very difficult at the moment – partly because of all the bureaucratic rules and regulations about what they are and aren’t allowed to do.”

But how will he specifically tackle homophobic bullying? “The most important instrument of the state is to allow head teachers to keep order in their schools. To search for things, without having to have evidence that there’s weapons involved. To set proper punishments in schools, to exclude pupils who are bullies, or take part in bullying, without being overruled by an appeals panel.” He nods, as if agreeing with himself, and continues: “ I think you need a framework of what is taught from above, but the discipline and order and actually making sure that bullying is stamped out has got to be done by the head teacher and teachers.”

But I point out this is, again, talk about general bullying, rather than the hugely disproportionate amount directed at gay kids. Does he agree with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that schools should be required to teach that homosexuality is “normal and harmless,” just as they respond to racist bullying by saying all ethnicities are equal? He pauses and looks a little sceptical. “I think the point is, there’s now proper guidance from the [Department of Education] about this and I think that’s right,” he says.

There is, however, some evidence Cameron’s policies will unwittingly make homophobic bullying worse. The keystone of his education policy is to allow any group of parents who want to set up a school, and can attract pupils, to receive state funding. But the National Secular Society warns that wherever this has been tried, there is a huge rise in religious fundamentalist schools. We know they are far worse for gay kids: the Stonewall study, for example, found that anti-gay bullying is ten percent worse in faith schools.

At first Cameron’s response to this is to sound bemused. He says he doesn’t understand why homophobia would be worse in faith schools. But I ask: is it so odd? Some of these religious groups – not all – believe homosexuality is a sin. For the only time in the interview, Cameron looks irritated. “That’s so wrong,” he snaps, his brow furrowed. “My daughter goes to a church school and it’s not like that.” He angrily says “a lot of what you’ve read in the newspapers is actually a lot of tosh.” With a firm glare, he says he will put in place “ground rules” to make sure new religious schools “teach equality,” and that’s that. He gets up to turns the radiator next to him down.

When it comes to how to tackle the sudden spike in homophobic violence – 40 percent in a year – Cameron’s answer seems strangely scrawny. He says: “Culture is important. Some of the things that rappers and others sing are completely unacceptable. I was sort of laughed at when I first made this point four years ago, but I do believe that it’s important.” He says he won’t ban the songs, but he will argue against them. “Don’t underestimate the power of the bully pulpit, it is important. The idea of social and cultural leadership in these things does make a difference.”

I assume that’s the first step in his answer, and he is going to list many more ways to reduce homophobic violence – but then I realise he is staring at me, expecting the next question. That’s it? What else will you do? “Well, I think we can stop some of these people [meaning rappers] coming in to the country.” When I tell him a Home Office study has found homophobia is “endemic” within the police, he looks surprised. He says the police force “is making some progress”, and “what is required now is leadership.” In the middle of hugely disproportionate violence against gay people, he’s offering a weak cocktail: more Prime Ministerial criticism of rappers, more power for headmasters, and a vague call for “leadership” in a police force where homophobia is rife.

III “He is not homophobic.”

Yet Cameron has most shocked gay people who want to support him when it comes to Europe, where he has allied with men who accuse gays of paedophilia and destroying Western civilisation. After he became leader, he pulled out of the European People’s Party (EPP), an alliance in the European Parliament with the moderate centre-right parties of Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, in favour of a new coalition of Eurosceptics, largely from Eastern Europe. His new grouping is led by Michal Kaminski, a Polish politician who has been filmed calling gay people “faggots”. When the interviewer expressed surprise he had used such an offensive term, he replied: “What can I say? They are faggots.” Tory MEPs now sit under his leadership in Brussels; he was invited to address the Conservative Party conference. Cameron said on Sky News: “He is not homophobic.”

When I raise the subject, he nods, sits up, and drinks from his coffee in a big gulp. “I think you should form European alliances on whether you agree with these people’s views on the broad direction of the future of Europe, that’s what its about,” he says. “Now, does that make it a more difficult message to explain to gay people who want to votes Conservative? Yes it does, I accept that. One of the reasons for doing this interview is hopefully to try and get across a sense that I have not joined with these people because of their views on social issues. I have not.” He stresses that he has joined with these groups because “there should be a centre right group in Europe that wants [the European Union to be] an open flexible trading Europe, rather than the endless progress towards a more federalised Europe.”

This is obviously true, and perfectly defensible. But Cameron has gone further than that. He has repeatedly said that Kaminski and his party are “not homophobic,” and he wouldn’t ally with them if they were. The evidence shows this is wrong – and shockingly so. A few days before we met, the MPs of this “not homophobic” Law and Justice Party demanded a crackdown on what they called “positive paedophilia by some homosexual circles.” Their senior MP Stanislaw Pieta said: “I’m not saying every gay is a paedophile, but in Britain 43% of paedophiles are gay and they only make up 1% of the population.” Their leader Lech Kaczynski says “the human race would disappear if homosexuality was freely promoted.” There are hundreds of such statements from the party, all on video.

“Obviously, I don’t agree with that [statement],” Cameron says when I read it to him. So does he now admit they are homophobes? “I’m not allied with parties that have views on homophobia or racism that I think are unacceptable.” But these are the leaders of the party. They are not marginal. I read him more and more shocking statements. Poker-faced, Cameron refuses to address the contradiction in his position: he says he wouldn’t ally with anti-gay politicians, yet here they are, making blatantly anti-gay statements.

Whenever I raise it, he tries to change the subject. All the parties in Poland are equally bad on gay rights, he says. I tell him that’s not what the Polish gay equality groups say. The veteran gay activist Waldemar Zboralski says: “The Law and Justice Party is by far the most homophobic party in Poland and Mr Kaminski is the leading symbol of homophobia in this country. It’s very strange for Mr Cameron to deny this, it is indisputable.” So he throws into the air a confetti of different distractions. These aren’t “minor parties,” he says, “they were parties of government” recently. The Liberal Democrats have anti-gay allies too: “Where are the questions for Nick Clegg?” Finally, he says: “Funnily enough, who’s now in the EPP? Italian fascists. Would you be happier if we went and joined a bunch of Italian fascists? No.”

But Mr Cameron, why can’t you simply condemn people who call us “faggots” and “paedophiles” as homophobic? If that isn’t homophobia, what is? How can we believe you are not the old Section 28 Tories underneath if you invest so much energy defending these bigots? His brow is furrowed. He says finally, in a quick, snappy tone: “The fact is, in some Eastern European countries they need to make progress towards equality and rights… Conservative parties have had to go through a real change over this issue. I think we’ve done it faster in the UK than some others. Will other European conservative parties be on a similar journey? Yes. Have they finished? No.” Finally, after a huge amount of wrangling and jangling, he argues these parties “are changing”, and will change more if he engages with them. But change from what? He won’t say.

IV The mystery

Is Cameron’s reinvention convincing, in the flesh, and in the end? He is a former corporate PR man, so you would expect him to be able to deliver a convincing sales pitch – and he does. He does have some real progress to sell: he talks about getting the Tory conference to applaud gay marriage, and the selection of gay candidates, with passion. His defence of gay refugees and opposition to the blood ban went further than he has to politically. Yet there was enough evasion and dissembling in his answers to sow doubts. He didn’t tell the truth about his own voting record, and he made ludicrously false statements about his anti-gay European allies. On the biggest obstacles facing gay people – the real, on-going violence – he had little to offer beyond words of condemnation.

David Cameron is a hazy cloud of charm and platitudes: no matter how hard you peer into him, you cannot find anything solid to focus on for long. There are flickers of apparently real pro-gay feeling, but they are soon followed by excuse-making for some of the most anti-gay politicians in Europe. Which is the real Cameron? On this issue, I suspect even he doesn’t know. But over the next four years, we are all going to find out: the beaming lights of power will part this mysterious and contradictory fog.

To read Johann’s full 6500-word interview with David Cameron, buy the latest issue of Attitude, Britain’s best-selling and most award-winning gay magazine.

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...from the Progressive London conference this weekend online. Just click here.