Johann Hari

Percey Shelley famously imagined a statue standing alone in the distant desert of an ancient land. Its inscription reads: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Shelley added wryly, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Our planet is littered with the ruins of Ozymandian civilisations: glorious, towering cultures that unwittingly committed suicide and decayed to dust. The citizens of each imagined they were somehow different, immune to the rules of scarcity and history. So, of course, do we. The Canadian novelist and historian Ronald Wright believes we are not doomed to dance the Ozymandias Tango into the historical desert – but he warns we seem to be doing our best to learn the steps.

“Our present behaviour,” he writes, “is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance.” Like every pre-collapse civilisation, we are trashing our own habitat at a staggering rate. We are even risking destabilising the fragile climate that has sustained us for 10,000 years – and “we have already caused so many extinctions that our definition over the earth will appear in the fossil record like then impact of an asteroid.”

But disaster is not inevitable. The remains of past societies are like “fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong” – and help us choose a different route. This is especially important now, when there is only one global civilisation left. Failure now means failure not just for the region but for the species.

And so begins Wright’s audacious polemical guide to 3 million years of human history, scouring it for survival tips. What went wrong for the Neanderthals, the Sumerians, the Romans, the Mayans, the Easter Islanders? What can we learn from their road to extinction? Every civilisation that has failed, Wright argues, sauntered into a “progress trap”. He explains this useful concept with a simple example: “Paleolithic hunters who learnt to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learned to kill 200 – by driving a whole herd over a cliff – had made too much. They lived for a while, then starved.”

Progress traps have felled societies time after time. The Upper Palaeolithic period ended when humans beings became so good at hunting they were finally able to launch “an all-you-can-kill wildlife barbecue”, eating so much that they killed off the species they depended on for food. “The perfection of hunting,” Wright says, “spelled the end of hunting as a way of life.” The first great urban civilisation, in Ur, “squandered its natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory”, denuding their land of all its forests and triggering a series of flash floods that made their soil sour and sterile. The Mayans also “cashed in all their natural capital. The forest was cut, the fields worn out, the population too high.” Faced with disaster, the Mayan elite clung to their notion of progress, building ever-higher pyramids and launching ever-more wars – “squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.”

In this short, superb essay, Wright is very good at impressing on his readers how fragile the rolling, rollicking experiment we call civilisation really is. We are only 70 lifetimes of 70 years away from its beginning. The project of settling down and creating agriculture is only possible because we have been blessed with an unusually stable climate for 10,000 years. We could not have developed agriculture before even if we had tried, because the planet was veering wildly between sweats and chills that made dependable crops inconceivable. Everything we associate with civilisation flows from this plodding climate and the agriculture that nestles inside it: indeed, Wright defines civilisation as “leisure born of a food surplus.”

We are now risking provoking the end of this ten millennia period through man-made global warming. It is, of course, a classic progress trap, except this time on a planetary scale. If we destabilise the climate too drastically, “crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilisation will come to a catastrophic end.” Of course this seems ludicrously dystopian to us, just as every civilisation has imagined its own fall to be impossible.

But we are not trapped on the road to extinction. We have progressed far enough to understand climate science, and to be able to avoid risking climactic meltdown if we can only find the political will. Wright is not a Luddite railing against human improvement – indeed, he is refreshingly clear that pre-modern civilisations were filled with people who died at 30 after a life of back-breaking work and mind-melting ignorance. He stresses, “The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking.”

There is still time to learn the lesson of the black boxes: that “the health of land and water (and of woods, which are the keepers of water) can be the only lasting basis for any civilisation’s survival and success.” But Ozymadias probably had time to claw back from disaster too – are we smart enough to learn from his and other civilisations’ mistakes?

On Saturday afternoon I was loitering in Trafalgar
Square, trying desperately to avoid the winged vermin
as I waited for an American friend who insisted on
meeting against a photogenic backdrop. It was the
first chance I have had to dreamily admire the
pedestrianisation of the end facing the National
Gallery. The clean, clear pavements and lolling
Londonders there have changed the square from being a
glorified traffic island to a classy European city
centre.

Isn’t it time to extend the pedestrianisation even
further? The howling, polluting car lobby said the
changes in Trafalgar Square would cause logjams
throughout central London – but nothing of the sort
has happened. My fantasy is to see the
pedestrianisation of the central square mile of the
West End, reclaiming everything from Piccadilly Circus
down to Parliament Square for the sixty percent of
Londonders like me who don’t own cars. How about it,
Ken?

If you love having a health service free at the point of use, you almost certainly feel nervous at the sight of Nurse Tony padding towards our hospitals with a syringe and an enema tube. When he told the Labour conference this week, "Extra money alone won't work. Only money and reform will," I felt a small sliver of fear. This is a man whose idea of "reform" all too often means handing concessions on a glistening platter to the right. Is this a way of dismantling the NHS, yet another arena in which Blair's beliefs are converging with those of Bush?

The evidence suggests not. If you study it, you find that grafting the concept of choice on to a taxpayer-funded NHS is not a way of dismantling Nye Bevan's creation. No: it is Britain's last chance to make it work.

When Labour came to power promising to save the NHS, the system faced two huge problems. The first - and the most obvious - was the Tories' chronic underfunding of public services in order to pay for tax cuts. By 1997, they had whittled health spending down to just 5.7 per cent of our GDP, the lowest in the developed world. By comparison, France spent 9.3 per cent and Germans coughed up 10.3 per cent: is anybody surprised Brits were sicker and died younger?

This sickness has been slowly drugged away with cash over the past seven years. After two wasted years when Labour stuck to Tory spending plans, NHS spending has risen by 7.4 per cent a year, and by next year we will hit French levels of funding. But as extra cash finally began to cascade into the NHS in the late 1990s, the Government noticed a second problem, hidden for years by the Tory drought. The extra money was not buying anything like as much improvement as it should. Waiting lists were barely budging. It became clear that running the NHS like an old nationalised industry - with politicians at the top setting targets and screaming for results - wasn't working.

Why? Partly, it's because the system was riddled with perverse incentives. For example, there was little relationship between the number of patients a hospital treated and the budget it was given. Often it ran the wrong way: if a ward was inefficient, treated patients slowly, cancelled more operations and built up big waiting lists, it was more likely to be given funds by the Department of Health because it could argue that it had a greater need. With the best intentions, the NHS was too often structured to reward poor performance - and it got it. Without any way to read signals from the people using the service - is this good? did you hate that? - the NHS was structurally incapable of consistently improving in the way (say) Tesco or Safeway do every week.

If this model had continued - a flailing little command economy in the midst of a 21st-century consumer society - the case for an NHS free at the point of use would have slowly died. The writing was on the hospital wall: a populist Tory would one day come along, appeal to growing middle-class discontent and argue - as Michael Howard tried to at the last election - for subsidies to help the middle class to flee into the arms of Bupa. The NHS would be left as a rump, treating only the poor - and services for the poor very quickly become poor services.

The Government gambled that another NHS is possible. Simon Stevens, Blair's health policy advisor from 2001-4, explains the logic when he talks about "an increasing appreciation of the fact that health care improvement requires a source of tension to overcome the inertia inherent in all human systems. The past five years have seen England searching for the optimal policy mix to generate that constructive discomfort."

The Tory way of creating that "constructive discomfort", that hunger to improve the service, is to introduce the raw price mechanism: if you've got the money, come this way - and if you haven't, the queue starts there. But the Labour way has been to create choice within the NHS and make the tax money follow the patient. You need a hip operation? From the end of 2005, you will be given a choice of five hospitals, some in the NHS, some private. Your GP will help you pick one, talking you through the evidence about their waiting times, their cancellation rates, which one can provide the most convenient date for you, and so on. The taxpayer still picks up the full tab. The good parts of the health system will slowly be rewarded, and the bad parts will wither.

It's a simulacrum of market processes, keeping the best things about them (innovation and responsiveness) and ditching the downside: the fact they only serve those with enough cash.

Some people have mislabelled this as "part privatisation", because the Government has sometimes used tax money to send Granny Bloggs to a spare bed in a private hospital if she has been waiting in agony for a space in an NHS hospital for months. But as long as the system is free at the point of use, as long as my gran gets the same treatment as a duchess, who cares? How is it privatisation if the Government pays?

It's important to separate out what matters in this debate from what doesn't. The absolutely sacrosanct principle is that we all collectively pay for each other's healthcare through tax, and you get treated according to your need, not your ability to pay. Any hint of co-payment, any question of up-front charges, would be a violation of that principle, and would be a scandal. But once the service is free, the question of where you actually get treated should simply be a matter of technocratic problem-solving: what works best?

And the evidence is in: introducing competition and choice into the free-at-the-point-of-use NHS makes the service much better for the poor and middle-class people who depend on it. Since devolution, the English have been injecting choice and competition into their NHS, while Scotland and Wales have been squeezing them out of theirs. The BBC commissioned the University of Nottingham to study the results. They were devastating for the anti-choice campaigners. Even though the Scots and Welsh spend 25 per cent more on their health services, their systems are "much worse", the study found.

While waiting lists have plummeted in choice-and-competition England, waiting lists have risen "exponentially" in anti-choice Wales. The English think their NHS is slowly getting better; the Scots think theirs is getting "much worse". So competition drives down waiting lists and drives up support for a free NHS. Remind me again why we were frightened?

It isn't Nurse Tony and his choice-flavoured medicine that would kill the NHS. The only thing that can kill it is a dogmatic refusal to help this limping fiftysomething health service into the operating theatre. Without reconstructive surgery, it will be in no position to fight the Tories when - one day - they return to power.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

La inundación de Nueva Orleáns está convirtiéndose en la conciencia pública estadunidense, en el equivalente para George W. Bush de la crisis de los rehenes en Irán, en 1979: un repentino y desastroso hecho que pone al descubierto la incompetencia del presidente.

Una imagen lo resume todo: mientras el presidente tocaba una guitarra ante una audiencia de megarricos que aportaron fondos para una causa republicana, a unos cientos de kilómetros de ahí, decenas de miles de personas -incluidos algunos de los más pobres de Estados Unidos- estaban atrapados en un desastre de película, debido a la falta de recursos para poder abandonar su lugar de residencia, antes del huracán.

Es difícil describir a Bush como alguien que sigue una filosofía política. Es duro imaginarlo en un momento de lectura sobre las tesis de Milton Friedman y Freidrich Hayek. Vamos, no es fácil pensar que sea capaz de decir sus nombres. Pero en años recientes y en días posteriores al desastre, el presidente ha permanecido pegado a su guión ideológico tan estricto, que ha causado mayores desastres.

La guía política de Bush fue puesta por escrito por un ideólogo de la derecha llamado Marvin Olasky, un hombre a quien el gobernante admira tanto, que hasta le escribió un elogioso prefacio a su libro Conservadurismo Compasivo.

La filosofía de Olasky es simple: el gobierno debería hacer lo menos posible. El sector público es invariablemente ineficiente y, peor, moralmente corrupto. El gasto gubernamental sencillamente alienta a la gente a ser dependiente de los recursos oficiales, generando una especie de morfina para adictos a los subsidios, incapaces de confiar en sí mismos. Por eso el gasto en proyectos públicos debería ser llevado al mínimo.

Una vez que eso suceda, la caridad privada y las empresas proveerán todos los servicios que el gobierno suele financiar, pero con "mayor eficiencia" y sin "problemas morales". Las únicas tareas del gobierno deben ser la seguridad en el exterior y los derechos de propiedad interna.

Difícilmente Bush sigue esa filosofía cuando afecta a los ricos estadunidenses que cobran cuantiosas cantidades del presupuesto. Para mencionar sólo una: hay que recordar a la supercorporación Wal-Mart, que ha recibido mil millones de dólares en subsidios federales y estatales.

Por el contrario, el presidente ha seguido devotamente esa filosofía cuando el gasto tiene que ver con la esfera pública.

Esto puede ser visto en el largo camino de Katrina. Bush ignoró advertencias sobre la seguridad pública en Nueva Orleáns para cuidar los pasos de su guión prestablecido: recortes a la esfera pública. Congresistas de Luisiana trataron de conseguir más dinero para fortificar los diques de Nueva Orleáns contra las inundaciones, con base en informes que señalaban que el azote de los huracanes sobre la ciudad era una de las principales amenazas a la seguridad del país.

El problema de esos congresistas fue que su argumento estaba en favor de un gobierno grande, sin beneficios inmediatos para las corporaciones, la antítesis de la filosofía que sigue Bush. Así es que, en vez de recibir más recursos, fue reducido 44 por ciento el presupuesto para financiar la construcción de los diques de Nueva Orleáns, a cargo del cuerpo de ingenieros del ejército.

Además hubo otra parte de la "burocracia" que Bush decidió cortar para que el presidente pudiera reducir los impuestos de los más ricos. Se trata de la Agencia Federal para la Administración de Desastres (FEMA, por las siglas en inglés), la entidad diseñada para responder a desastres en el territorio continenetal estadunidense.

El mandatario anunció que tareas centrales del FEMA debían ser canceladas para trasladarlas al sector privado. "Muchos están preocupados por la posibilidad de que la ayuda federal para desastres haya evolucionado hacia un programa sobredimensionado", afirmó alguna vez un vocero de Bush, en el más puro estilo de Olasky.

Cuando el huracán estaba a 24 horas de impactar la costa del Golfo de México, Bush no abandonó sus dogmas. El procedimiento de evacuación fue privatizado. A la gente de la ciudad se le pidió sencillamente -por emisiones de radio- que saliera de la región, sin asistencia de la autoridad. Nada hizo el gobierno por ayudar a 150 mil personas tan quebradas económicamente que no podían agarrar sus cosas y abandonar Nueva Orleáns. Esto, presumiblemente, hubiera sido "moralmente corrupto".

Cuando las aguas inundaron la ciudad del jazz y el blues, Bush no dio un paso atrás. Los derechos de propiedad fueron lo primero que protegió. Los saqueos fueron vistos como un peligro mayor que el aumento en el nivel del agua, las enfermedades y el hambre en el Superdome. La mirada de las tropas se desvió de las misiones de búsqueda y rescate de personas a impedir que gente hambrienta y sedienta irrumpiera en supermercados y tiendas de abarrotes. Esta imagen podrá pasar a la historia como un símbolo del conservadurismo gubernamental que pone a la propiedad por encima de las personas.

La segunda respuesta fue de tipo ideológico: demandar la caridad del sector privado. En el momento en que la gente miró hacia la administración pública en espera de asistencia urgente, el presidente sugirió dar dinero a las entidades regionales caritativas. Pero no se trató de cualquier organización de ese tipo. El sitio en Internet de FEMA fue vinculado a la Cruz Roja y a la Operación Bendición del evangelista de ultraderecha Pat Robertson.

Un gobierno pasivo que sirve sólo a los intereses de las corporaciones no puede resolver problemas. Esto es algo visto. En 1927 el Mississippi se desbordó y un millar de personas, sobre todo negros pobres, se ahogaron. El presidente Calvin Coolidge mostró una indiferencia casi total por Nueva Orleáns. El pueblo estadunidense se sorprendió de que el rescate quedara en manos de la Cruz Roja y que el gobierno no financiara el alivio de refugiados y la reconstrucción de viviendas.

En 2001, un amigo y consejero de Bush, Grover Norquist, dijo que la fuerza del movimiento en favor del conservadurismo recortaría al gobierno hasta tal punto que la administración federal pudiera ser lanzada por el desagüe de una tina. Pero lo que sucedió fue que la bañera en Nueva Orleáns estaba llena de gente. Y puede ser que Bush y su filosofía también acaben ahogados.

Traducción: Guillermo García

Fuente: Diario La Jornada,

Johann Hari: The sudden death of Blair's green beliefs
Published: 27 September 2005
It seems like everything has been warming up this autumn with one exception: Tony Blair's enthusiasm for dealing with climate change. Global warming is now proceeding so quickly it's hard to process all the information at once. One day there's an announcement that the Arctic has - after 11,000 years of stability - reached a melting "tipping point". The next day there's the loss of 1 ,000 people and a major American city to Katrina - almost certainly the daughter of climate change - while her twin sister, Rita, was waiting in the wings. It all happened so fast you could easily miss the stuttering end of the hottest summer that Europe has seen in 500 years, or the other shards of evidence that global warming is causing the planet's natural processes to unravel faster than climatologists initially predicted.

In the lull between Katrina and Rita, Tony Blair sat next to the human oil-barrel Condoleezza Rice in New York and casually announced he has "changed his thinking in the past two or three years" on this issue, which just happens to be "the biggest threat we face", according to his yellowing speeches from last year.

We all know what the old Blair believed: that governments must negotiate a binding treaty to cap the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. That meant Kyoto for now, and - when it runs out in 2012 - a much tougher successor. Even people who despaired of Blair's domestic and foreign policies often clung to his environmentalism as the last shiny scrap of his decency, his one note of dissent from the Bush line.

But the New Blair sounds remarkably like Dubya. "The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in light of a long-term environmental problem," he said. It's time to be "brutally honest": there will probably never be a successor treaty to Kyoto, because the Americans, Chinese and Indians will never sign up. Besides, he said, you don't need a cap after all - you just need to develop some new technologies. In that New York conference room, eight years of Labour's environmental policies cracked into pieces like a melting iceberg.

Condoleezza beamed. The US right nearly combusted with glee. An ExxonMobil-funded propaganda site joyfully announced: "Blair has just effectively pulled the plug on Kyoto." The Bush-loving shock jock Rush Limbaugh declared that "even Blair" now believes "only pinheads support environmentalism". Yet at first Blair's logic might seem appealing. Isn't technology a far better way to deal with this problem than imposing restrictions for the sake of it? Who wants harsh restrictions on our appetites if there can be a smooth, pain-free transition to cleaner fuels?

The only problem with this charming sing-song is that it is based on a series of false oppositions borrowed from the US right, designed to obscure the real solutions. Blair acts as if there are two options: do you want treaties to limit greenhouse gases, or do you want technologies to do the same job? But his own Government's policies show that this is bogus. Treaties create the need for technology. They aren't opponents, they are Siamese twins. If you have to cut emissions, of course you will dedicate more energy to finding ways to do it. When Britain signed up to the Kyoto Treaty, it suddenly had a huge incentive to build wind farms and other renewable energy sources.

No environmental problem has ever been solved by the market alone, using its "hidden hand". From catalytic converters to the scrubbers on top of power stations, they have all required legislation and international treaties - exactly the things Blair is now renouncing as unnecessary.

And it gets weirder. Blair then set up another false choice: do you want a growing economy, or cuts in greenhouse gas emissions? But less than a year ago, he said, "We can have a strong, growing economy while addressing environmental issues. Between 1990 and 2002 the UK economy grew by 36 per cent, while greenhouse gas emissions fell by around 15 per cent... The very act of solving [global warming] can promote growth, creating a space for scientific discovery and hence investment."

How did Blair swing so far away from his own stated position? Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, offers an "educated guess": "Blair was determined at the start of 2005 to drag the Bush administration into the climate change process. He found, not surprisingly, that they won't agree, but he persisted, and instead of moving them, they've ended up moving him. He's given in and given up. Now you hear him and think, 'Where has this man's mind gone?' "

Blair has brought his global warming policies almost into sync with the Bush White House, who have been stressing that any "solution" must be voluntary and market-based - in other words, just hot hurricane-fuelling air. So your global warming strategy and mine are now just a few steps behind an administration who have thanked ExxonMobil - one of the world's great environment-destroyers - for their "active involvement" in writing their climate change strategy, and who have employed corporate lobbyists to water down their own scientists' reports. It's one thing to side with these people in toppling a fascist dictator, however flawed the war - but to side with them on trashing the planet?

Blair rationalises this by saying he is pursuing the only course that it "politically possible". This is Blair's Get Out of Jail Free card for every bad thing he does: it's not my fault, the political reality made me do it. But there's a reasonable case to be made for this, at first. Why cling to a policy, he asks, which cannot succeed? Isn't it better to get something - however small - than nothing? But we are confronting a clash between the politically possible and the physically possible. As Jonathon Porritt, Blair's former environmental adviser, said yesterday, "It's no good our leaders lining up like a whole array of King Canutes in front of the rising sea, saying 'Go away, we haven't got time to deal with you right now.' "

And isolating Bush on global warming - something that has long been in Blair's grasp - would achieve a great deal. Already 74 per cent of Americans (according to a recent Zogby poll) think voluntary emissions won't work. Several of the contenders for the 2008 election are strongly in favour of caps on emissions.

But seeing that nice Mr Blair reinforcing Bush's myths on television - relax and wait for the technology, folks - whacks environmentalism with the force of a Grade Five hurricane. By embracing the climate-trashers, Blair doesn't soften them. He emboldens them - and, with his new treaty-trashing rhetoric, he is seriously at risk of becoming one of them.

London’s living rooms are vibrating once again to the high-pitched squeal, “Remember you’re a Mitchell!” Yes, Barbara Windsor wiggled her way back to Albert Square this week, and yet again the press is fawning over “everybody’s favourite Eastender” and “a working class hero.” But I don’t think a lover and defender of
a gang of torturing, slashing thugs is heroic, no matter how many times her bra pings off into Sid James’ face.

The Krays belong to a strange lost slice of London’s history. When we hear about warlords in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems impossibly foreign – armed gangs challenging the authority of the state? But the Krays brought warlordism to where I live – East London – only fifty years ago. Barbra Windsor teetered and tottered around their human rights-meltdown, offering nothing but her famous giggle, some sexual favours and a clutch of excuses.

She still describes the Krays mistily as “charming and polite”, and spews the lines used to defend fascistic tyrants everywhere: they seemed nice to me (they got her a rehearsal room for free once), they only killed Bad People, they kept crime down. Her mate and fellow Eastender Mike Reid says, “Had the Krays remained free, the London of today would be a safer place. During their reign there was no mugging.” Of course – what’s a bit of torture and butchery (not to mention abuse of underage children) if it keeps down the mugging rate?

I tested the real popularity of Babs and Reid’s theories here in the East End by heading round the corner to the Blind Beggar pub, the sweetly dingy hole where those “charming, polite” Krays tortured and shot a man in the head in what they called a “public execution.”

Most of the customers were Aussies or Asians with no memory of that time, but a few old cockneys were nestling in a corner. Jessie Glass, 62, said, “They were just gangsters, nothing more.” I offered him the standard list of excuses. Weren’t they generous with their money? “Yeah, other people’s money.” Didn’t they only hurt their own? “What about the jurors in their murder trial? The brothers threatened them, that’s why they got off. There were a lot of people terrified of the Krays who had nothing to do with crime.” Weren’t they nice to women? “What about the teenage wife Charlie Kray was so fucking horrible to she committed suicide?” And, he could have added, what about the wives and children of the men they doused in petrol and tossed matches at?

If you are hungry for real working class heroes, here’s one: the barmaid from the Blind Beggar – still living in hiding as Mrs X – who risked her life to testify against the Bruvvers. She was not prepared to wipe the memory of the Krays shooting a man in cold blood from her mind, and she risked her life for justice. Doesn’t she deserve our respect a little bit more than a screeching blamange still reminiscing happily about the days when the East End cowered infear? Here’s a new slogan for you Babs – remember you’re a Kray-lover.