“Utrinque paratus” says the Paras motto. But but can the Army really be ready for anything in 2020?
Public sentimentality over historic cap badges has, apparently, stayed the Government’s hand over plans to axe big-name regiments like the Black Watch in the forthcoming reorganisation of the British Army. But battalions within those regiments will go in what will be the Army’s biggest structural overhaul in half a century. It will leave us with fewer regular soldiers than at any time since the Boer War.
Public spending cuts are a driving force, of course. But military chiefs are also addressing the question of what kind of army Britain needs in the 21st century? The old certainties on that have gone. Technology, it had been thought, meant that it was possible to defeat an enemy from the air, with the minimum loss of life of our own troops, and without the need to look into the eyes of those we were killing. Peacekeeping would be an increased proportion of our infantry’s job. They would need training in a lighter more agile style of combat. Soldiers behind computers would need to experts in cyber war.
Two decades of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan have given the lie to the notion that the old expeditionary style of war is over, though those years have also reduced the appetite for similar adventures – something William Hague would do well to remember that before making unrealistic noises about “no options being ruled out” in Syria.
The threats of the future look many and varied. North Korea is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons. That, along with the rise of China to superpower status, could prompt the re-armament of Japan. Russia appears to be reverting to confrontation with the West. Then there is the global politicisation of Islam from South-West Asia to North Africa – running through a Middle East primed with the explosive combination of oil, religious extremism and deep-seated anti-Western resentment.
In between is a world of belligerent nationalism, disgruntled ethnicities, failed states, disenfranchisement with the global order and growing “asymmetric threats” from organized crime, warlords and international terrorism. Conflict is possible over everything from water and mass migration to interventions over gross violations of human rights.
Our Army therefore needs to be nimbler and more versatile. Certainly it will need the expertise to help build security in troubled nations. But it will also need skills more commonly found in civilian life, in science, IT and logistics. But, the military reformers have concluded, it will not be cost-effective for the Army to maintain, full-time, the entire range of niche cyber, medical, intelligence or other specialist capabilities it might need in emergencies. So the plan is to cut the number of regulars and increase the number of reservists.
FollowShareholders now have the power to withhold the cream from fat cats.
The new rules to force companies to get authorisation from shareholders for the amounts they pay their top executives should be welcomed unambiguously. So should the move by the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, to insist that firms provide a clear single figure for the total pay that directors received for the year – including pay, pension contributions, bonuses and long-term incentive payments. So-called “golden handshake” pay-outs when an executive exits a firm must now also be spelled out in advance.
Excessive pay for fat cat business leaders has been one of the scandals of the crisis in modern capitalism. The chief executives of the top 100 FTSE companies last year each earned an average of £4.2 million in basic pay, bonuses, share incentives and pension contributions. That is a rise of more than 400 per cent in just over a decade. The ordinary board members of those companies netted a whopping 49 per cent rise last year alone. All this is happening as average wages stagnate and ordinary people lose their jobs.
Nor can businesses claim that these mega-rises increases simply reflect improved performance. The average pay of FTSE 100 bosses rose 13 times more than the value of the companies they ran in the decade to 2010.
Shareholders have finally decided to act on this. There have been a series of investor rebellions in recent months at companies including Barclays, AstraZeneca, Aviva, Trinity Mirror, Xstrata and most the advertising giant WPP where a 30 per cent pay increase for the boss Sir Martin Sorrell was voted down. But their votes currently only have the status of “advice” to their boards.
The need for such votes to be binding was illustrated by the fact that the WPP board recommended the £6.8m pay deal for Sir Martin despite the fact that 42 per cent of its shareholders voted against WPP’s remuneration report the year before. Some have accused Mr Cable of diluting the measures by requiring a vote every three years rather than annually. But that was a sensible change. Annual votes might have destabilised management teams and encouraged short-term thinking. In any case the previous annual executives pay round clearly led to an unwarranted ratcheting up of remuneration.
Shareholders will soon have the tools they need to curb excessive executive pay. They should use them.
Instead of waving a big stick over Syria we need to be dangling carrots for Putin
Dead babies are not enough. Nor are primary school children who have had their throats cut in front of their fathers in hideous reprisal for dissent against the government. Nor is chopping off the hands, legs and genitalia of those who happen to be the wrong religious denomination or ethnic group. All these things are sufficient to provoke international outrage. But it is an impotent outrage.
The violence in Syria has escalated significantly in the past 10 days. The evidence against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, from 23 separate massacres, has mounted steadily to the point where Amnesty International has accused Syria of committing “crimes against humanity” to punish communities it thinks support anti-government rebels.
None of this hand-wringing seems to have made one iota of difference. The conflict, which has taken more than 10,000 lives in just 15 months, is now described by the UN peacekeeping chief in Syria as civil war. Indeed the condemnation of the international community appears only to have stiffened the resolve of Assad to stamp out his opponents as quickly as he can. There are reports the regime has begun to use chemical weapons.
Victims repeatedly ask foreign reporters why the world is standing idly by as innocents are slaughtered. We all know the answer. The Russians have vetoed any meaningful action by the UN Security Council. In response Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing the rebels with weapons which only escalate the violence. In America neocons are urging Washington to do the same.
Meanwhile we in the European Union have responded with the bizarre gesture of banning luxury imports to the Syrian regime accused of killing thousands of its own people. No more caviar, truffles, pearls, flash cars or big cigars. That’ll show them.
So what is the way forward? To answer that it is important to understand that Syria has become an apocalyptic tapestry woven from some of the most problematic threads of our time. The dominant thread is the desire of the United States for stability in the Middle East to protect the supplies of oil on which its economy, shale-oil not withstanding, still depends. The warp to that weft is formed by Russia, China and Iran – the only effective axis of global resistance to the world’s sole surviving superpower. Woven into that is the unpredictability of Israel, which every US president must treat with gloved respect given the power of the Jewish vote in elections like the one President Obama faces in five months.
It is easy to mock the proposal by the Education Secretary Michael Gove that children as young as five should memorise and recite poetry as part of his overhaul of English schools’ primary curriculum. He is harking back, critics suggest, to some Victorian idyll which saw rote-learning as a disciplinary and character-building exercise in the mental gymnasium of Empire. Since then, the utilitarian argument goes, British children have slipped behind the rest of the world. We need to get back to the old ways.
These, one parodist suggested, had produced a nation whose elderly mental attics are littered with poetical lumber along the lines: I wandered lonely as a cloud, that tum-ti-tum o’er vale and hill, when all at once I saw a crowd, a something something daffodils. Education, they counter, should not be about parroted memory but learning skills to analyse literature and life. The uniformity of rhythmic chanting, by contrast, breeds dull conformity rather than encouragement to think. Others offered limericks beginning There was a young Tory called Gove…
It is a pretty rum idea that poetry can become utilitarian. Poetry, with its heightened language and its artifice of rhythm and rhyme, is the antithesis of utility. It has its uses, of course, as poets since the time of Homer understood. It was bards who transmuted the business of transmitting history from mere record-keeping into an oral tradition of art. It was poetry that turned time immemorial into time memorial by discovering that heightened language, driven by rhyme and rhythm, made things easier to remember. Times tables are a low-grade mathematical equivalent.
But poetry, enfolded in the heart, does much more. Learning by heart is not the same as learning by rote. A former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes explains the difference in the introduction to his recently re-issued 1997 anthology By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Our memories work at many levels – linguistic, cinematic and musical. Mechanical repetition is just one way of retaining material. Hughes shows how it is but the springboard for more creative modes.
When memorization gives way to performance, something organic starts to happen. It becomes a part of us, in the way that a sonata does when a pianist can set the music aside and play from the memory of fingers and mind combined; then the musician somehow channels the composer’s emotions and adds to them his own. It is what in prayer the rosary, at its best, can achieve.
That is not appropriate, I found myself saying to my 12-year-old the other day. I pulled myself up mentally. Inappropriate? Surely I meant wrong? But there’s more to this than euphemism. To say something is wrong opens us to the challenge of “by whose standards?” But to indicate that it is not appropriate merely seems to bring the weight of society to bear to support our judgement.
There is a parallel device in economics. We let the market decide, which seems to be a neutral non-judgemental method. The market, you see, imposes no belief system. It just maximises individual freedom, wealth and choice.
This is, of course, bunkum. If you elevate what the jargon calls “utility maximization” to become your primary belief you have made an ideological choice. Because in truth there are some big issues on which neutrality is not possible. If efficiency and incentives are the “cornerstone of modern life”, as the supposedly rogue thinkers who wrote Freakonomics suggest, we are left with a pretty diminished view of what it is to be human.
The Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel catalogues what has gone wrong in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs? Is it right to pay drug addicts to be sterilised? Can we sell citizenship to immigrants or auction places at the best universities to those who will pay most? Is it OK to buy your best man’s speech off the internet, to privatise prisons, outsource torture or hire mercenaries to fight our wars?
In the past three decades market values have crowded out non-market values in more and more areas of life – medicine, education, law, sport, art, sports, even personal relations. We have slept-walked, Sandel argues, from having a market economy to being a market society. And the process frequently involves “bribery” in the sense of bypassing persuasion and “corruption” in the sense of corroding old established values.
Why is the Church of England like Chicken Licken?
The bishops of the Church of England have resorted to some extraordinary hyperbole in their formal objection yesterday to the Government’s proposal to permit gay marriages. They have been privately briefing that equality in civil marriage raises the prospect of the biggest rupture between the church and state since the CofE became the established church 500 years ago. What, bigger than the dissolution of the monasteries? Or Queen Mary burning Protestant bishops at the stake? Or Cromwell chopping off the head of the church’s Supreme Governor, Charles I? The extravagance of the bishops’ language only reveals the paucity of their argument.
What the Government is proposing is that all couples, regardless of their gender, should be permitted to have a civil marriage ceremony. No religious organisation would be compelled to conduct a gay wedding ceremony and yet the church is objecting on the grounds that this would, in some unspecified way, undermine the very nature of the institution of marriage. It offers no grounds to justify this notion, beyond the writings of its scriptures – or rather a traditional interpretation of them forged in more bigoted times. How allowing two gay people to pledge their love and fidelity devalues the principle of the lifelong commitment escapes most people. It, rather, broadens society’s commitment to it.
Definitions of marriage have shifted subtly in different societies and times. Those changed emphases – as when married women were given the right to own property or when laws were passed to protect them from domestic violence and rape – also provoked protests that the amendments undermined marriage. The Church of England accommodated those. It even permits vicars, where they wish, to remarry divorced people – a change which, an outsider might argue, represents a clearer prima facie erosion of the principle of lifelong commitment.
Spain – too big to fail, not too big to bail
The members of Spain’s national football team have been told that they are not to use Twitter for the next few weeks. The general assumption is that this is to do with the Euro 2012 competition. But it could, of course, be another desperate attempt by the Spanish authorities to take no risks with anything that might inflame the financial markets. Alvaro Arbeloa on austerity might prove just too provocative.
Spain is in its worst financial crisis for a century. The gallows-humour gagsters who brought you Grexit or Grout – to describe the possibility of a disorderly exit by Greece from the euro – have two more bits of japery on offer. Spanic is meant to encompass the markets’ alarm over Spain’s twin financial and economic crises. More portentously, Squit vulgarly raises the prospect of Spain quitting the euro too.
Why should we care? For two reasons. A Spanish exit would send ripples round the global economy which might build to a tsunami by the time they crashed upon our shores. And the process Madrid is currently undergoing – slashing fiercely to reduce a budget deficit amid a gathering recession – has lessons for Britain at a time when George Osborne, for all his Budget voltes-face, continues to insist there is no alternative to his Plan A.
Almost €100 billion has been pulled out of Spanish banks in the first three months of this year. That is around a tenth of the country’s GDP. Two-thirds of it went in March alone as Spanish citizens and foreigners rushed to find safer places for their money. This capital flight can only have accelerated since, as Spain has resisted pressure to seek international assistance for its parlously debt-stricken banks.
It is those banks which have provoked the latest crisis in the eurozone’s fourth biggest economy. The Spanish government has just had to find €19 billion to bail-out Bankia, the nation’s third biggest lender. Its story is all too familiar. Banks which the IMF pronounced “highly competitive, well-capitalised and profitable” before the 2008 crash – and which “would be able to absorb losses from large adverse shocks without systemic distress” – are now on the brink of collapse.
Echoing the US sub-prime mortgages debacle, Bankia made risky loans to low-income immigrants, and built the biggest portfolio of property loans in Spain. It was the same old combination of over-leveraged debt, poor regulatory supervision and a property bubble that burst. Reckless property developers took any loan on offer and arrogant bankers obliged. The man at the top, the infelicitously-named Rodrigo Rato, left the sinking Bankia ship last month just before it was nationalised.
Will the slaughter at Houla prove a pivotal moment in the oppression of Syria?
Photographs of dead children are particularly shocking. When John Mullin, editor of the Independent on Sunday, saw the pictures of the 32 children murdered in cold blood in Syria he decided that the usual newspaper rule – that images of the dead should not be reproduced – must be broken. He printed one small photograph on page 3 of his paper with front page headline which was both a warning and a challenge. It said: “Syria. The world looks the other way. Will you?”
Justifying his decision next day on Radio 4 he used an interesting word. The photographs were “a game changer,” he said. “As soon as I saw them I knew.”
Game changer was also the phrase diplomats were using to describe the massacre at Houla. The Syrian regime had crossed a new line of brutality. Multiple witnesses reported that, after the rebel village had been pounded by artillery, members of a government militia, the Shabiha – which means ‘the ghosts’ in Arabic – had gone in and cut the throats of small children. One report said they had done it in front of the children’s fathers as an added punishment for rebellion.
Tipping points in wars can be psychological rather than military. Sometimes, as in Rwanda, they come too late. But sometimes, as in Kosovo, they are in time for intervention to prevent more murder. Will the slaughter at Houla prove a pivot in the year-long violence in Syria in which over 10,000 people have died?
It seemed so on Sunday when Russia broke from its unswerving defence of Syria and backed a UN Security Council condemnation of the killings. Diplomats began briefing that that Moscow was privately now discussing the idea that President Bashir Assad should be forced to step down. But when William Hague went to Moscow to press the notion it seemed the Kremlin was rowing back on that, blaming both sides for the killings. Outsiders should stop inciting the Syrian opposition, he was brusquely told.
Russia’s association with the ruling Assad family go back four decades. Moscow’s total investment in the Syrian economy is almost $20bn. Last year 10 per cent of Russia’s global arm sales were to Damascus. In return it is allowed to use the Syrian port of Tartus as its only Mediterranean naval base. A Russian freighter docked there on Saturday, bringing the Assads more weapons.
Why a Pakistan that “looks both ways” on tackling terrorism is better than the alternative
“There’s a common outrage, a common response wherever you look,” said Carl Levin, chairman of the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee. Wherever you look. He clearly wasn’t looking far enough.
The good Senator was responding to the news that Pakistan has jailed the doctor who ran a fake vaccination campaign to provide information for US intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Dr Shakil Afridi had pretended he was carrying out hepatitis B prevention and took blood samples from children living in a compound in Abbottabad which, when tested by the CIA, matched the DNA of the world’s most wanted man. US special forces swooped on the hide-out and executed the al-Qa’ida leader.
Dr Afridi’s role in finding bin Laden – which his nation’s secret services had so conspicuously failed to do – constituted “treason”, the Pakistan authorities have decided. A tribal court convicted him of conspiring “to wage war against Pakistan has decided and jailed him for 33 years. Washington reacted with fury to the “Alice in Wonderland” sentence. It was “beyond ludicrous”. Pakistan was “a schizophrenic ally”. If this is co-operation, said another senior Senator, “I’d hate like hell to see opposition.” Another Senate committee slashed $33m from US aid to Pakistan– $1m for each year of Afridi’s sentence.
But go to Pakistan and you will find outrage of a different kind. Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, called Shakil Afridi a “traitor”. The president’s son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, opined that “it is against the law in any country to cooperate with foreign intelligence”. Some in Pakistan’s newspapers want to see Afridi hanged; others suggest hanging as too good for him.
What do we learn from these diametrically opposed views?
It is two years since David Cameron sparked a diplomatic row by truthfully, but tactlessly, accusing Pakistan of “looking both ways” on terrorism. Everyone knew he was right but Pakistan’s main funder, the United States, had deliberately refrained from such plain speaking because Pakistan’s ambivalence towards tackling terrorism was seen as preferable to outright hostility. And the reality on the ground is that Pakistan has lost more civilians than any other nation to Islamist terror attacks – some 30,000 Pakistani civilians and 3,000 soldiers have died at the hands of the Pakistani Taliban – while at the same time the country also has growing levels of support for extremists in its population, religious leaders and intelligence services, the ISI.
The Bible is the second book, says Gustavo Gutiérrez. Life is the first book. The liberation theologian is not making some Catholic point here about the Church predating scripture. He is not talking about those who wrote the Bible, but those who read it. Our life experience is the lens through which we engage with even divinely inspired words, says the Dominican who spent much of his life working among the poor in his native Peru.
For Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker art was the first book. Their volume Saving Paradise grew out of a trip round Italy and Turkey which the two American academics made in search of the earliest Christian art. As they wandered through ancient churches and catacombs they discovered that, for a thousand years, believers filled their holy places with pictures of Christ as a resurrected figure. Variously an infant, youth or bearded elder, depicted as shepherd, teacher, healer or enthroned god. It was only at the turn of the first millennium, with the rise of Latin Christianity, that the crucified Christ became the dominant image. It coincided, they concluded, with the Crusades and the embrace of violence as a legitimate expression of Christian obedience. The tortured Jesus became the iconic focus.
What this meant, as wars were blessed as holy, was that Paradise – which had been seen as something which Resurrection created in the here and now – became transferred to some future life which the Crusaders were promised as a reward for jihadist martyrdom. Obviously this has profound implications for the notion of Atonement which many people today find hard to square with notions of natural justice.
But it also acts as an obverse of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus’ inquiry when he asks Mephistopheles how he has been allowed out of hell to visit him. The devil replies: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it”. Yet if Paradise is now, rather than in some hereafter, we clearly have our work cut out to get it into shape.
‘Saving Paradise’ is to be the theme of the Greenbelt this summer. Last weekend the festival ran a taster session with 10 speakers invited to reflect on Paradise Lost and Found in the world around us.
Four of the speakers tackled the state we’re in. The climate activist Tamsin Omond was blisteringly honest on how we have transformed the garden of Eden into a city. Ann Pettifor, formerly of Jubilee 2000, looked at the current debt crisis in Greece and the Eurozone. I considered the strengths and weaknesses of the global development industry (see paulvallely.com for the text). And Symon Hill of Occupy lambasted contemporary capitalism.
Can global development deliver us a new paradise?
Paradise Lost and Found
Greenbelt
83 London Wall, London EC2M 5ND
Sunday 20th May 2012
Can global development deliver us a new paradise?
Paul Vallely
This is not a parable, but a true story (though, of course, it is could be both). It was told to me by Charles Elliott from his time as director of Christian Aid.
An aid worker went to an African village and asked what the community needed. The elders were asked whether they would like a well, or a school, or a clinic, or latrines.
After conferring they said: “We would like a new graveyard”.
The aid worker was perplexed. “We don’t do cemeteries,” he replied, “it’s not part of our development brief. Would you like something else?”
The elders deliberated again and then replied: “No, if we can’t have a graveyard, we don’t need anything else thanks”.
Can global development deliver us a new paradise? That depends on what your idea of development – and paradise – is.
The received wisdom about development is that it is the same thing as raising economic productivity. Development is about maximising our personal wealth, freedom and choice. That’s the modern idea of what it means to live a good life. It has its roots in the Enlightenment notion that progress is linear – and that moral and material progress go hand in hand. It assumes that all traditional societies are alike and that progress is only possible if they can be purged of their “primitive” attitudes.
Now, we don’t want to be puritan about this. The decade leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis saw extraordinary economic growth which has lifted millions of people out of poverty in countries like China and India. But this growth, which was generally arrested by that international financial crisis, has been accompanied by: greater environmental damage, greater inequality and increased fuel and food instability.
Worse still, the vision it embodies is fundamentally individualist rather than a communal vision. It is thoroughly materialistic and acquisitive. Yet in acquiring more and more stuff we in the West have also acquired overwork, stress, addictive activity, depression, anti-social behaviour and family dislocation. The incessant quest for more – higher incomes, faster growth – is robbing us of the good life rather than helping us attain it. Poverty can be spiritual as well as material.
Did David Cameron take Greek lessons at Eton? He certainly needs them now…
At the time it seemed quite a good gag. Greece had stopped exporting hummus and taramasalata: it was a double-dip recession. After all, Greece was a far-off part of Europe, just 2 per cent of its economy and still redolent of those mildly comic Ruritanian generals. A year on it doesn’t seem that funny. Some 70 per cent of Greek voters have just voted for parties which reject the €174bn international bailout offered to Athens. The country is on the brink of chaos. The consequences for the Euro and for non-eurozone neighbours, like us, alarmingly unpredictable.
Things are bad. Unemployment has trebled. More than half of all young people under 25 are jobless. Public servants have had 30 per cent pay-cuts. Even the middle classes are struggling to survive. Infants are being abandoned on doorsteps. Suicides are soaring. Its economy will be uncompetitive and depressed for years, or even decades. If it pulls out of the Euro after its elections on June 17 there will be runs on the banks, collapsing public services, unpaid policemen, looting and rioting and perhaps grave civil unrest.
But it is not just the Greeks. Voters across Europe are rejecting the new austerity policies as ordinary people object to paying the price for a financial disaster caused by greedy bankers, incompetent regulators and a complacent political elite. The French have just elected a new president, François Hollande, who ran on a platform of shifting focus from austerity to growth. In Germany the party of the high-priestess of austerity, Angela Merkel, has just been battered by its worst electoral results in local elections since 1945. In the UK the two parties of the cuts-obsessed Coalition took a thrashing in the recent council elections. Likewise in Italy. Opinion polls suggest the same thing is about to happen in Holland.
“Austerity is over,” said Takis Pavlopoulos, a senior figure in the successful anti-cuts leftist party in Greece . “You have to be a neo-liberal fanatic not to see that it has failed.”
President Barack Obama has been pushing a softer version of the same line to Europe’s leaders this weekend. The United States has taken a very different approach in the wake of the 2008 global financial fiasco. Early that year President George Bush reacted quickly bringing in a $158bn financial stimulus to foster growth. Then Obama, within days of his inauguration, introduced an enormous $787bn stimulus package as the US was teetering into a depression.
