Johann Hari

In this city, there are 15,000 little girls who, some day soon, will be pinned down, their legs pulled apart and – no matter how much they scream and weep and beg – will be forced to watch as their genitals are sliced off with a razor-blade. Enough with the euphemisms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a survivor of this butchery, explains, “The genital mutilation of girls is sometimes referred to as ‘circumcision’. Implicitly, this likens it to male circumcision. If male circumcision meant removing the glans and the testicles, and adhering the remains of the penis to the empty sac, I suppose the comparison would be valid.”

These girls cannot escape the details, so why should we? Another survivor, Amina, remembers the experience in halting horror: “I do not have words to describe the pain and torture I suffered. It was like a fire. I was held down by seven or eight women and an old woman came in. She had an old rusty razor blade. She just cut me up. It was so awful.” Amina endured the worst form of mutilation, know as ‘infibulation’. All her genitalia were hacked off, and then she was sewn up, left with only a tiny hole through which to urinate and menstruate. This was designed to guarantee her “purity”. She wouldn’t have pre-marital sex if she had to be physically cut open on her wedding night, and after being robbed of her sexual organs she wouldn’t think about adultery afterwards. Really, her family told her, they had done her a favour. Never mind that she would never enjoy sex. Never mind that she would take forty minutes on average to urinate. Never mind that she would be dangerously ripped and torn during child birth because the scar tissue replacing her genitals has no elasticity at all. She was pure now.

This is happening to girls between the age of seven and nine, today, here. Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, the tough, bluff Ghanan woman who runs the anti-mutilation charity FORWARD, says there is “no doubt” that this practice is continuing in London. The British Medical Journal has warned there “seems to be a conspiracy of silence in medical circles.” Some London girls are butchered in the back-streets, more are sent “home” (usually to a country they have never seen) to be mutilated. Yet some people bizarrely believe it would be racist to harry and hound the people perpetrating this abuse. Even the often-great feminist Germaine Greer has said “one man’s mutilation is another man’s beautification” and argued it would be cultural imperialism to oppose it. But isn’t the real racism to write off these young girls as aliens who do not grieve and suffer and weep just as much as white girls when they are tortured by their families? Is leaking urine ever “beautification”? Is fistula ever “beautification”?

“Some people get caught up in thinking of this in terms of imperialism or relativism or multiculturalism,” says Adwoa. “They forget that behind these isms there is a little girl being attacked with a razor-blade.” Why aren’t we siding with African women like Adwoa and Muslim women like Ayaan who are desperate to stop another generation of girls being crippled? Why is the Metropolitan Police spending its time chasing down casual drug-users, and not the men inflicting the ultimate misogyny – hacking apart a women’s genitals – on little girls?

If you know somebody at risk of female genital mutilation, or you would like to help prevent it, contact FORWARD on 0208 960 4000 or at www.forwarduk.org.uk.

This is the story of two great political experiments. The first has been conducted in the United States over the past twenty-five years, and it tested a simple question: what happens if you toss all the regulations and safeguards surrounding corporations onto a bonfire? What happens if you give the right what they want – if you make their every wet-dream into a dry reality – and set corporations entirely free?

The second experiment has been conducted in Argentina over the past five years, and lies at the opposite end of the political spectrum. It asks: what if you took hundreds of businesses from their owners and handed them over to their work-forces to be run themselves in assemblies based on one-worker, one-vote? What if you tried democracy not just at the level of the nation-state, but also at the level of the workplace?

These experiments are captured in a twin-set of superb documentaries gliding with a glint out of America’s current Golden Age of popular non-fiction film-making. (Michael Moore, we have something to thank you for). ‘Enron – The Smartest Guys In The Room’ is released this Friday, while Naomi Klein’s film about Argentina, ‘The Take’, is released later this year. At a time when we are encouraged to think that there is only One True Way to make a market economy work (a small state, low taxes and low spending, you know the drill) these films and the huge, nation-wide experiments they document reveal a bigger truth. Markets are essential – every country that has suppressed them has quickly regressed to universal poverty and famine – but they come in a thousand different forms. The gaps between Bush’s Enron-economy, Sweden’s social democracy and Argentina’s co-operatives show how foolish it is to speak about ‘capitalism’ as one big homogenous block. There are a thousand capitalisms, some humane, some horrendous.

Let’s look first at all at America’s grand experiment in regulation-trashing. It is hard to think of two men who epitomise the Reagan-Bush vision of deregulation better than Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay. They were among the very first campaigners in Washington DC for deregulation of energy markets, and as heads of Enron they bankrolled Bush’s road to the White House with the biggest donations in town. When one of their colleagues retired from the Enron board, Daddy Bush sent him a video Valentine saying, “You have been fantastic to the Bush family. I don’t think anybody did more than you to support George.”

Lubricated by Enron’s cash, the Republicans proceeded to dismantle all the laws and regulations that had been built up during the twentieth century to protect citizens from the effects of a raw and uninhibited profit motive. Skilling declared, “Money is the only thing that motivates people.” Enron had started as a natural gas company, but as the politicians they paid progressively deregulated the energy industry that the firm came into its own. They “financialized” the industry, moving from dealing with the dull old gas that came down the pipeline to trading all energy as if it consisted of stock options. If it sounds convoluted, that’s because it was – Enron was effectively a giant pyramid scheme, using a hundred accounting tricks to create the appearance of industry where in reality there was next-to-nothing. But all the security guards employed by the state to ensure this would not happen had been sacked; all the guard dogs had been put down. Enron continued unchecked until the lights started to go out all over California.

After deregulation, Enron moved into the California electricity market and discovered their greatest scam yet. They found a great way to push up the electricity stock-price: plunge the state into blackout. If electricity was scarce, the price would soar - so Enron execs phoned paid lackeys at power plants across the state telling them to “get creative” and find an excuse to turn out the lights. The result was that whole cities were plunged into darkness, thousands were trapped in elevators, hospital operations were disrupted, and old people died in the baking summer heat. As Ken Lay counted the profit, he joked, “You know the difference between the Titanic and the state of California? At least when the Titanic went down the lights were on.”

Of course, there have always been corporate criminals, but Enron was a virus that could only thrive and breed and succeed beyond imagining in the insanitary conditions of deregulation. Enron was hardly incidental to the vision of the US corporate elite - their Bible, Fortune Magazine, voted them “the best corporation in America.” The American right’s grand experiment revealed – as the great economist Karl Polanyi warned in the 1940s – that markets are not “self-regulating”; they need government regulation, and lots of it, or they spiral out of control.

The Argentinean experiment emerged, in a strange way, from the failures of this earlier experiment. Throughout the 1990s, the International Monetary Fund undemocratically imposed Enron-capitalism on Argentina. They demanded that the government dismantle all democratic controls and regulations on businesses, promising this would lead to greater economic growth. In reality, it led to the biggest economic collapse in the country’s history. In 2001, Argentina’s economy – previously the most successful in Latin America – collapsed virtually overnight. Forty billion dollars was wrenched from the country in 24 hours, and there were no regulations left to stop it. A middle class country was suddenly pauperised. Children who once ate American fast food were reduced to rummaging through trashcans.

But in the rubble, an experiment began. Many of the factories and hospitals in Argentina were abandoned by their foreign owners, so the workers, rather than succumb to starvation, decided to take them over and run them as democratic co-operatives. Naomi Klein’s film studies the Zanon ceramics factory, where hungry workers went into their abandoned workplace and started to make the machines work again. They declared it a Fabricia Sin patrones (factory without bosses), and – like new co-operatives across the country – management was now run by an elected core accountable to monthly meetings of the workforce.

Of course, workers’ control of workplaces had long been a dream of the left and derided by the right, who claim that given freedom to run their own businesses, workers would vote for shorter hours and higher wages, swiftly bankrupting the joint. But the Zanon factory shows a different reality. The factory has become more successful than it had ever been, increasing output by 20 percent and taking on reams of new staff. This pattern has been repeated in the hundreds of impromptu co-ops across the country.

I recently met up with Jose Julian Penunuri, a 36 year-old worker at the factory, who explained how much more “human” the workplace was now: “We still have to discipline people or even dismiss them if they don’t do their work properly, but the terrible insecurity I had before, going from one six-month contract to another, is gone. It is a much better place to work.” Naomi Klein has visited a lot of the sweatshops that have spread like sores across the developing world, and she believes she has found in the Argentine co-operatives a real-world alternative, a way for poor people to benefit from markets and trade while retaining real democratic control over their lives. The corporation – run as a private top-down tyranny – turns out to be only one way of engaging with markets. It is probably not the most efficient, and it is certainly not the most humane. From the wreckage of market fundamentalism, one more democratic form of market economics has precariously emerged as an example to the world, alongside Swedish social democracy – but it remains a tiny minority.

The Enron slogan was “Ask Why.” After studying the results of these long experiments – and their damning findings about the Enron-capitalism still forced on so much of the world by the IMF and World Bank – it’s a question that hangs poignantly in the air.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments on this article can be sent for publication to letters@independent.co.uk or just for me to johann@johannhari.com

One day soon, there will be a fateful knock on the door of Ten Downing Street. It will be the police, investigating the alleged sale of peerages – but it might as well be the ghost of Maundy Gregory. He is a mouldy footnote in the history books now, but Gregory once carried with him the electric zing of power in his role as David Lloyd George’s peerage salesman. He was tasked by the Prime Minister with selling off coveted places in the House of Lords to the super-rich in return for hefty financial donations, and he is still the only man ever to be jailed for it. As Scotland Yard’s investigation slowly works its way up to the Prime Minister himself, armed with the knowledge that every single person who has given more than a million quid to the Labour party has received a knighthood, he seems likely to lose this dark distinction soon.

The stink caused by the dependence of all our political parties on billionaires is going to make the British people recoil and retch for some time to come. (Remember: tonight the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne is hosting a dinner for his party’s biggest donors to ask their ‘advice’ on the Tories’ economic policies, and even the Lib Dems’ biggest donor is caked in sleaze allegations). But so far, our rage is being misdirected. Our politicians are refusing to do the one thing that is capable of soaking up this sleaze – reclaiming the funding of our political parties from the super-rich and handing it to us, the tax-payer. It is only by giving politicians a safe, clean supply of state funds to run their campaigns that we wean the Blairs, Camerons and Campbells off their addiction to the electoral crack doled out by billionaires for their own obvious purposes.

But this option is barely being discussed. Instead, the political fall-out from this scandal is falling on the red leather wasteland of the House of Lords. The solution rushed out is to democratise the Lords. The whispers in Westminster are that Blair is poised to agree to an all-party compromise: some 70 percent of the Lords will be elected, and the remainder will be appointed. It is clearly wrong, wrong, wrong for a person to make laws you and I have to obey, if we had no say in choosing them and have no way of kicking them out, so at first glance, an elected House of Lords seems unquestionably right. My knee jerks in its favour.

But there is a major drawback to an elected Second Chamber that we should seriously consider before we sleepwalk into endorsing it. When a country has two democratically elected chambers (think the US, Germany, Italy) it is virtually guaranteed long periods of political paralysis when the second chamber blocks the first, and very little happens. Gridlock shuts down all political traffic for years on end. One of the reasons the US has an incredible 40 million people limping along with no healthcare insurance is because even when a government is elected with a clear mandate to introduce it, the programme gets lost in the logjam of competing houses. That’s why what looks at first glance like a more democratic system actually turns out to be less responsive to the people. After all, how democratic is it to ensure that our democratically elected government can do virtually nothing?

Of course, if you believe – like Thatcher and Reagan – that big government is a curse and the best government is a shrunken and frozen one that rarely acts except to cut taxes and guarantee external security, then this is great. Go for a second chamber and rub your hands with glee while the democratic government looks on helpless as other forces run the country. But if you are even vaguely leftish – if you believe that government action is often essential to deal with the problems thrown up by markets – then an elected Second Chamber begins to cause frownlines. Yes, some terrible chunks of government policy over the past eight years would have been delayed or blocked by a more legitimate second chamber: the internment of suspected jihadis, identity cards, the restrictions on free speech. But so would many of the good things: the (too mild) redistribution of wealth, SureStart, baby bonds, wind power, gay marriage. All but the most bland bits of legislation will be held up for years on end, or lost forever. Is that really what we want?

True, the proposal Blair is poised to green-light would still leave the new House of Lords slightly less legitimate than the House of Commons. In theory, the Commons would still be able to overrule the polyunsaturated-only-70-percent-elected Lords. But does anybody doubt that a chamber stuffed with people who have fought gruelling, duelling elections will be far more assertive and far more inclined to say ‘no, no, no’ than the meek, elderly Quango of the Dead that currently sits in the Upper House?

If we continue on this particular slow slide away from cash-for-peerages, we will end up with the worst of both worlds – a deadlocked legislature and political parties still owned by the super-rich. Despite the British people believing in Sweden-style higher taxes and higher spending, we will become even more like the 51st state of Bush’s America.

But what is the alternative? The status quo is clearly intolerable. An appointed chamber of the corrupt and the crony, with the odd ex-statesman or genuine expert thrown in as cover, cannot survive. So we have to ask – what is the function of the Second Chamber? It is to provide checks and balances, to ensure the Commons does not rush into bad or foolish legislation, and to prevent democracy from descending into a tyranny of the majority. Can these functions be carried out better elsewhere? I think they can – within a smashed and remade House of Commons itself.

The keys to getting there lie jangling within pockets of the recent Power Inquiry into rejuvenating Britain’s democracy led by Helena Kennedy. Its core proposal is to bring us into line with every other democratic country in Europe and introduce proportional representation for the first chamber. Because no political party has won a majority of the popular vote – more than 51 percent – in this country since the 1930s, it is safe to assume this will require the Prime Minister to form a coalition with smaller parties. (Under PR, a whole smorgasbord of parties is offered up to the electorate – just look at Israel, where militantly secularist parties, a Legalise Cannabis coalition and the Pensioner’s Party have flared up from nowhere to get very close to the balance of power in recent years. It’s odd that the current government is so insistent on choice in public services but so wary of it at the ballot box). The requirement for a coalition places a huge check on governmental power, especially since coalitions can crumble at any moment. PR would probably have prevented Tony Blair from participating in the invasion of Iraq, for example, unless – political suicide – he had been prepared to form a National Government with Iain Duncan Smith’s Tories.

In case this is not check and balance enough, the Power Inquiry recommends another big block on governmental authority – giving real, substantial powers to the Select Committees. Set up in the late 1970s, these committees of backbench MPs study the issues for years and invariably say the most intelligent and bold sentences uttered by any parliamentarian. Kennedy’s group wants to give them far greater resources, the legal power to subpoena witnesses, and the right to scrutinise and veto government appointments. Once we had PR and weighty select committees hanging over ministers’ heads, there would be far better checks and balances in place than the current fusty House of Appointees.

The solution is not to democratise the House of Lords into a national gridlock – it is to shut the place down, and leave those old red leather benches to the tourists and the history students.

London is a city soothed and stirred by illegal drugs, from the junior doctor keeping himself awake on a 48-hour shift (how did you think they manage it?) to the teachers relaxing with a spliff after a rough day to the City boys snorting charlie in a £20-a-drink club. Cannabis and cocaine are as densely interwoven into this city’s tapestry as alcohol. Trying to drive drugs from London is as futile as the attempt to drive the Demon Rum from Chicago in the 1920s – yet still the Metropolitan Police, goaded by our politicians, chase after this drug-free dragon.

At a time when there is a rape in this city every six seconds, last Saturday night the Met thought it was a smart use of 200 officers and months of pre-planning to crack down on a group of people who were dancing. This army of officers lowered the temperature of the Fridge, one of Brixton’s best clubs, by surrounding it, sealing the exits, and seizing a dozen people who now face long prison sentences. For most of the bewildered people locked down, their worst crime was excessive gurning.

John Roberts, the Met's lead member for Lambeth, claimed that the operation was “part of a much bigger picture” which involved targeting “the anti-social criminality that drug dealing breeds and the misery that is causes”. But there is an irony in his statement. It is not drug use that creates anti social criminal gangs – it is drug prohibition. Criminalizing drugs does not stop people using them, as anybody who has ever been clubbing knows. It simply hands the multi-billion dollar industry to armed criminal gangs who flood London with guns to protect their patches.

Don’t take my leftie-legalizer’s word for it. Listen to Michael Levine, who had a thirty year career as one of America’s most distinguished federal narcotics agents. In his time, he led a thousand raids like last Saturday’s, as well as infiltrating some of the biggest drugs cartels in the world – and he now explains, in sad tones, that he wasted his time. In the early 1990s, he was assigned to eradicate drug-dealing from one New York street corner – an easy enough task, surely? But he quickly learned that even this was physically impossible, given the huge demand for drugs in cities like London and New York. He calculated that he would need one thousand officers to be working on that corner for six months to make an impact – and there were only 250 drugs agents in the whole city. One of the residents asked him, “If all these cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what’s the point of this whole damned drug war?” You could ask the same about the midnight Fridge raid - the first midnight Fridge raid in history that I (and my swollen gut) have disapproved of.

When Levine rose undercover to the top of la Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world, he learned, as he puts it, “that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it… On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business’.” He was right – prohibition is the dealer’s friend. Legalization is his greatest enemy. Shocked, Levine recounted this to his bosses, who explained yeah, we know, but we have to keep pointlessly going through the motions of a drugs war because the alternative is “politically unacceptable.”

But what is that alternative? It is to seize control of the drug supply back from the criminals and hand it to off-licenses, pharmacists and doctors. We do not have a choice about whether Londoners use drugs – but we do have a choice about whether those drugs are controlled by gun-toting gangsters. In the real world – as opposed to the Met’s fantasia – the only way to clean out the Fridge is to legalize, legalize, legalize.

The right-wing press has spent a decade pumping out day-after-day propaganda that depicts asylum seekers as swan-baking, benefit-snatching criminals who surge into Britain in their hundreds of thousands to scrounge, steal and rape. Yet this week, those same journalists have been open-mouthed and astonished to discover that their campaign has had a real political effect. They have reported with hushed horror that one quarter of British people is now sufficiently soaked in this invented hate to consider voting in the local elections for the nakedly racist British National Party. Well, what did they expect?

The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, Anotnio Guterres, took the unprecedented step last year of warning the British press that they were stoking “dangerous” levels of hate against refugees – but they continued unabated. They invented more slanders against refugees than an entire issue of the Independent could list – imaginary Kurdish asylum seekers who turn out to be terrorists, fantasy figures of over a million “illegals” streaming in every year, and countless cookie-cutter rants claiming that bitterly poor people living on £38 a week in a damp council flat were being “hosed down with benefits”.

Yet rather than acknowledge their own culpability, the right-wing press has found a new group to blame. The rise of the BNP is not due to their own media-inflated racism, with its old, old history stretching back to the Daily Mail’s claims in 1938 that “the way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring into this country is an outrage”. No – it is due to the very presence of asylum seekers and immigrants, and the government’s “lavish treatment” of them.

Last month, I travelled to Yarl’s Wood – the detention centre for asylum seekers just outside London – to witness this “lavish treatment” first-hand. Jules was asleep the night they came for her children. The first she heard was four, five, six man standing at the foot of her bed telling her not to scream. She could hear her daughters – the eight year old and the seventeen year old – shriek and sob and shake in the next room down, but she was not allowed to hold them. She had to pack a tiny bag, and quick. All three of them were going to be taken and locked away together indefinitely.

Five months later, they are still festering in a jail cell, the end-point for this swift shift from a bang on the glass door to a life behind iron doors and barbed wire. The eight year-old has lost a stone in weight; her clothes are hanging off her like rags. The seventeen year old has retreated to a sullen silence, rarely speaking. Nobody has ever accused these women of committing a crime. All Jules and her children did was run for their lives, run for safety to London, a place they thought would offer them asylum.

As I sit with Jules in the stark visiting room of this not-a-prison-honest-guv, she explains that she might be held for another five months – or another ten. She has no idea. A curvy woman with a high blonde wig and defeated eyes, she tells me her story in a drained monotone. It begins in Jamaica, where she was a successful businesswoman manufacturing and selling her own clothes. She decided to throw out her husband – “he was no good”, she says – and the troubles began. He said he would “chop her” if she didn’t take him back. She ignored him – and took a knife in her chest and in her throat as a result. She lifts her wig, and it becomes clear it is not a fashion accessory. It is there to cover the angry scar runs along her throat.

“He burned down my mother’s house,” she says so quietly I have to lean close to hear. “He stabbed the little one. I knew if I didn’t leave Jamaica, I would be chopped to pieces.” A British judge granted Jules leave to remain in the country, but the Home Office appealed – and that’s why she was snatched from her London flat to this place, this collection of yellowing prison buildings in bleak Bedford scrubland. She has no idea what is going to happen to her. Her children are not being properly educated. The youngest girl cannot cope with the fact she was not even allowed to say goodbye to her class and to her teacher. The teenager is distraught – “she did well in her GCSEs, she wanted to go to University.” She feels like she is going insane.

So this is where is ends, I thought as I sat looking at her watery eyes. All the years of journalists demonising asylum seekers, all the years of politicians caving in to them – it ends here, with children locked behind bars for the ‘crime’ of seeking asylum. Jules and her daughters are not alone. Every year now, 2000 children of asylum seekers are locked up in this country for months on end. Doctors are warning we are inflicting irreparable trauma on these kids. One mother explains that even a year after she and her son were released from the detention centre, “He still has nightmares. He is afraid of knocks on the door. He his even afraid when letters arrive. One year later and he is afraid of letters. It is so scary.”

Are the asylum-haters happy now? No. We are still “cosseting” and “spoiling” refugees. The government policy of appeasing the far right by adopting ever-more-cruel measures has failed. Their lies have only grown. The BNP are a deserving target, but far too easy. It is the right-wing press that has pumped out racist sewage for years. They have no right to act surprised now that swarms of vermin are feeding on it.

To find out how you can help free children detained for seeking asylum, go to www.noplaceforachild.org.uk