'A time to help': Indonesians ran to aid of fleeing fans in stadium stampede

AFP - Yesterday 

As one of the deadliest disasters in the history of football unfolded before his eyes at an Indonesian stadium, photographer Adi Bowo Sucipto put his camera down and rushed to help.


People pay their respects to the victims at Kanjuruhan stadium in Malang after a stampede that killed at least 131 people in one of the deadliest disasters in football history© JUNI KRISWANTO


People light candles as they gather on Wednesday to pray in memory of the victims of a stampede© Juni Kriswanto

After police fired tear gas into packed terraces triggering the crush that killed 131 people, fleeing spectators sought refuge in the stadium's media centre.

A man was convulsing and gasping for air as Sucipto helped him into the centre. Like so many others who were trampled or suffocated in the crush Saturday, the man died, he said.

"I was shocked. It was traumatic and I eventually stepped aside," said the 43-year-old, who has worked as a photographer for more than a decade and was covering the match for a local news agency.



Photographer Ari Bowo Sucipto recounts his experiences helping victims during the Kanjuruhan football stadium disaster in Malang© JUNI KRISWANTO

In the aftermath of witnessing the horrors at Kanjuruhan stadium, Sucipto now beats himself up, guilty that he didn't run to the aid of others suffering that night.

"Why couldn't I help more?" he asked, saying he now becomes emotional when he sees the Arema FC fans donning the home team's jersey.



A group of people carry a man off the field at Kanjuruhan stadium on the night of the disaster© STR

Around the stadium in the city of Malang, there were others who witnessed the tragedy unfold and rushed to the aid of those caught in the stampede.



Food kiosk vendor Edy Tanto said he rushed to provide water from his shop to victims whose eyes were stung with the tear gas© JUNI KRISWANTO

Edy Tanto's kiosk on the outer ring of Arema FC's stadium was packed with fans without tickets watching the derby against fierce rivals Persebaya Surabaya before the final whistle.

Related video: Indonesia presses for answers after football stadium stampede that killed 125

As fans rushed to express their displeasure at the first home defeat in more than two decades to their adversaries from the biggest city in East Java, the tide turned.

Tanto said he saw people begin to pour out of the stadium when chaos erupted.

He rushed to provide water from his shop to victims whose eyes were stung with the tear gas, which witnesses said police had fired into the stands.

"I couldn't think straight," Tanto told AFP as he sat cross-legged on the floor of his shop.

"I just thought of helping them."

- 'A time to help' -

Some grabbed water from his fridges in a panicked search for anything that could ease their stinging eyes.

"I didn't think about the money. We also took pity on them as they walked in (to the shop) staggering and with short breath," Tanto told AFP.

A similar scene played out on the other side of the stadium.

Another food stall vendor said she rushed to help the tear-gassed supporters who ran to her shop to find cover, while police officers did nothing.

A woman died on the floor of her kiosk, she said, and officers who were standing inside started to fan her with cardboard.

"I was emotional and I scolded the police -- I don't care about their ranks," said the woman, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from the authorities.

She said she told them, "You know the supporter was dead, why did you keep fanning her?"

When the surreal scene of officers fanning a lifeless body was unfolding, the kiosk owner told AFP she was massaging another woman who had fled the hail of tear gas to soothe her.

Accounts show these are just a few of the many stories of selflessness that took place in Malang Saturday evening.

Men carried unconscious strangers to ambulances and supporters dragged their friends from the crush refusing to let go, saving their lives on a night when they were only supposed to be enjoying the match.

Like Sucipto, other photographers and video journalists working that night in the stadium stopped shooting to wrest fleeing football fans who were trapped in the human crush near an exit.

"It was a time to help as there were so many victims," Sucipto said.

mrc/jfx/mtp/dhc

China sends criminal experts to halt kidnappings in mineral-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo

06/10/2022


As its alarm grows over the safety of Chinese citizens working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s high-stakes mining industry, Beijing is deploying criminal investigators to help halt kidnappings in the African nation.

Eager to better protect Chinese businesses and citizens in the mineral-rich country, Beijing recently sent a delegation led by Liu Jingjie, head of the criminal investigation bureau at China’s Ministry of Public Security, to meet with Congolese security officials.

The high-level bilateral discussions included the DRC’s deputy prime minister and interior minister, Gilbert Kankonde Malamba, as well as members of its national police, immigration department and intelligence bureau.

Later the Chinese embassy in the DRC spoke of “police cooperation between China and the DRC, strengthening the security protection of Chinese nationals” in the country. The discussions also addressed rescuing kidnapped Chinese citizens and the difficulties Chinese nationals encounter in obtaining documents in the DRC.

“The Congolese side is willing to further strengthen communication and coordination with the Chinese side to better understand China’s demands, to deepen bilateral cooperation in the security field,” the embassy said in a statement.

China has massive interests in the DRC, principally in mining. China sources 60 per cent of its cobalt needs from the DRC. Cobalt is an essential component of batteries for electric vehicles, smartphones, tablets and laptops.

As the world’s largest lithium-ion battery maker, China’s relationship with the DRC is arguably indispensable. The DRC produces more than 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt.

But a volatile security situation plagues the DRC, especially in the eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu. The Congolese army is fighting a rebel movement in the two provinces called the March 23 Movement (M23). The DRC accuses neighbouring Rwanda of supporting the M23 militia in North Kivu, a claim Kigali denies.

With eastern DRC supplying vast amounts of minerals, including gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum, Chinese nationals working there have been caught up in the worsening security situation.

In November last year, five Chinese nationals were kidnapped by gunmen at a gold mine in South Kivu. Congolese officials said in June that the five had been released, but did not disclose whether a ransom had been paid.

Observers say kidnappings are common in that part of the DRC, targeting local residents and expatriates alike.

Chinese who work in the mining industry are “likely to carry a lot of cash with them”, according to Christian-Geraud Neema, a Congolese mining analyst. “Money is the main reason for these kidnappings.”

During its meetings with Liu, the DRC pledged “to take measures to protect the lives and legitimate rights and interests of foreign nationals in the DRC, including Chinese citizens”, according to the Chinese embassy’s statement.

The embassy in Kinshasa described the security situation in the DRC as “severe and complicated”. It said the eastern provinces of Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, and Haut-Uele faced extremely high risks of armed attacks and kidnappings. The embassy urged companies to speed up their evacuations of Chinese nationals in the four provinces.

Beijing’s concerns in the DRC extend further. In the mineral-rich Katanga region in the southeast where a considerable number of Chinese work, the embassy warned of a high likelihood of serious security challenges. It cited armed robberies involving Chinese companies and citizens in Kolwezi, Lubumbashi, Likasi and elsewhere in the region.

On Sunday, Dai Bing, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, called on armed groups operating in eastern DRC to immediately lay down their arms.

“China expresses its support for the Congolese government and urges armed groups in eastern DRC to … respect calls for peace and participate in political dialogue and disarmament and demobilisation processes,” Dai said in a statement. He advised that the situation in eastern DRC had become unstable.

“Violent conflicts have escalated, resulting in many casualties,” Dai added. “Armed groups such as the M23 have caused large numbers of casualties and millions of displaced people.”

The envoy urged the UN Security Council to respond favourably to a DRC government request to lift the arms embargo imposed on the country in 2003 when it faced armed tensions, especially in its eastern provinces.

Beijing’s worries over its nationals’ safety in Africa date at least as far back as 2011, when China had to evacuate almost 36,000 citizens from Libya, according to David Shinn, a China-Africa expert at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a former US ambassador to Ethiopia.

“The single biggest threat to the Chinese community in Africa is ordinary crime,” Shinn said.

China has tried a variety of precautions on the continent ranging from enlisting private security companies to providing special training for African police and security personnel.

The situation in the DRC resembles the experience of Nigeria, which has also drawn upon the expertise of security officials from China’s Ministry of Public Security. The West African nation has for years witnessed a rise in kidnappings targeting foreign nationals, including Chinese.

Gunmen in June attacked a local mining site in central Nigeria. Security personnel were killed, and four Chinese nationals were kidnapped.

Concerned about the security situation in Nigeria, Cui Jianchun, the Chinese ambassador to the country, announced Beijing would send criminal investigation experts to help tackle the country’s security challenges.

Beijing’s aversion to deploying soldiers en masse and outside multilateral mandates such as peacekeeping despite its expanding interests has led it to employ a “hybrid” approach, according to Paul Nantulya of the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies at the National Defence University in Washington.

The China model “leans heavily on developing intricate police, law enforcement, and intelligence cooperation with African countries, building the capacity of host countries to surveil, and if need be, thwart threats to Chinese interests”, Nantulya said.

Increasingly, that means permitting Chinese special police units to undertake joint special operations with local parties, as was the case in Uganda recently, he added. Security contractors figure into “this security mix”.

A study in July by the Washington-based National Bureau of Asian Research found that Beijing had established community and police cooperation centres in some countries like Ghana and South Africa specifically for Chinese nationals.

Nantulya said China was quickly emerging as the destination of choice for African countries to send their police officers for training. He said at least 2,000 African law-enforcement personnel were trained in China between 2018 and 2021.

And between 2003 and 2017, China loaned African borrowers US$3.5 billion for security purposes to purchase communications systems, patrol ships, closed-circuit television systems, and police vehicles, the study noted.

By 2020, China had also built at least 186 sensitive government facilities, including 32 police and military posts through loans and grants, Nantulya added.

However, cooperation with African countries would probably be limited to cases where Chinese citizens were involved and only when Beijing sought government participation in an investigation, said Andreas Velthuizen, a professor specialising in peace, conflict and security studies at the University of South Africa.

“China is usually quite open about these kinds of agreements, especially in countries where it will be difficult to hide because of open democratic societies,” Velthuizen added. “It will be difficult to hide Chinese involvement in Nigeria and the DRC, impossible in South Africa and probable in securitised countries.”

I HAVE READ THESE, FOUND IN REMAINDER BIN

A FASCINATING CHINESE DETECTIVE NOVEL


Posted by Mal Warwick | Historical mysteries, Mysteries & Thrillers | 

Robert van Gulik’s series of 16 Judge Dee mysteries are set in China sometime during the era of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). They’re grounded in his intensive scholarly study of ancient Chinese detective stories, some of which he has translated into English. The Chinese Maze Murders was the first novel in the series.

THE BOOK’S HISTORICAL BASIS

In a postscript to the book, Van Gulik explains that the character of Judge Dee is loosely based on a Chinese magistrate who achieved fame as a detective some hundreds of years before the Ming Dynasty. Judge Dee was a favorite protagonist in detective novels written for hundreds of years thereafter. He also explains that “In most Chinese detective novels the magistrate is engaged in solving three or more totally different cases at the same time.”

---

THE CHINESE MAZE MURDERS (JUDGE DEE #1) BY ROBERT VAN GULIK @@@@ (4 OUT OF 5)

---

MANY MYSTERIES IN A CHINESE DETECTIVE NOVEL

In The Chinese Maze Murders, there are six interwoven mysteries that Judge (magistrate) Dee must solve with the help of his four trusted lieutenants. However, the judge himself recognizes only “three real cases. First, General Ding’s murder [in a locked room]. Second, the case Yoo versus Yoo [over an inheritance]. Third, the disappearance of [blacksmith] Fang’s daughter. [The other three] must be viewed as local background. They are separate issues and have nothing to do with the substance of our three cases.” Nonetheless, every one of the six cases posed a puzzling mystery.

Oh, and by the way, there are two additional problems confronting Judge Dee and his colleagues: a criminal has seized power in the border town where Judge Dee has been assigned and is terrorizing the populace, and a conspiracy is afoot to enable the hostile “barbarian” tribes to invade and plunder the town. In other words, The Chinese Maze Murders is unlike any present-day detective novel. No contemporary writer of detective fiction would attempt to maneuver through so many plots and subplots in a single volume. But Van Gulik pulls it off.

ASSESSING THE BOOK AS LITERATURE

Van Gulik’s depiction of the customs and the criminal justice system of ancient China is fascinating. As a mystery story, it’s less successful, if only because Judge Dee proves to be impossibly discerning, combining the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes with the combat skills of a Special Forces officer. The author’s writing is also annoying at times. The book is laced with typos and hard-to-explain grammatical errors, and Van Gulik has the exasperating habit of placing an exclamation mark after almost every sentence uttered by Judge Dee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) was a Dutch novelist, diplomat, and musician who authored 16 Judge Dee novels after translating an 18th century Chinese detective novel on which he based the series.

FOR ADDITIONAL READING

For a taste of a contemporary Chinese detective novel, you might take a look at Death Notice by Zhou Haohui—A detective novel by one of “China’s top three suspense authors”. Please note, however, that I don’t recommend the book.

For an abundance of great mystery stories, go to Top 20 suspenseful detective novels (plus 200 more). And if you’re looking for exciting historical novels, check out Top 10 historical mysteries and thrillers reviewed here (plus 100 others).

And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, plus a guide to this whole site, on the Home Page.

Magnitude 5.4 earthquake in Iran injures over 1,100 people: Official

Iran is located in a seismically active zone and has seen major earthquakes in recent years

Haydar Sahin |06.10.2022


TEHRAN, Iran

Over 1,100 people have been injured from a 5.4 magnitude earthquake that struck Iran's northwestern province of West Azerbaijan in the early hours of Wednesday, according to a health official.

Speaking to Iranian state television, Health Ministry spokesman Mojtaba Khaledi said 1,127 people were injured in the earthquake.

The powerful quake shook the city of Khoy, located 807 kilometers (501 miles) northwest of the capital Tehran.

According to the Iranian Seismological Center at the University of Tehran, the quake occurred at 3.51 a.m. local time (0021GMT) at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles) followed by more than 30 aftershocks with a magnitude of less than 4.

Many of those injured have been admitted to local hospitals in the province, said Khaledi.

Iran is located in a seismically active zone and has seen many catastrophic earthquakes in the past years.

The most devastating quake to hit the country in recent history came in 2013, when at least 34,000 people died in the city of Bam in southeastern Kerman province. The quake measured 6.7 on the Richter scale.

It came a week after an earthquake of magnitude 5.6 struck the same province, although no casualties or major damage was reported at the time.

Historical review shows megadroughts could become permanent in some places due to climate change

Projected megadrought risk.Credit: Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2022).

 DOI: 10.1038/s43017-022-00329-1

A large international team of researchers has found, via historical review, that parts of the planet that now experience occasional megadroughts may be changing to become permanently dry. In their paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the group describes the factors guiding their predictions regarding megadrought areas as the planet grows warmer.

As atmospheric carbon increases, scientists around the world are scrambling to predict the environmental changes that are likely to be wrought. In this new effort, the researchers looked at areas that are known to have experienced droughts and sometimes megadroughts in recent history in an effort to predict how they might be impacted by a warming planet.

To gain some perspective on how droughts arise, the researchers looked at descriptions of them over the past 2,000 years around the world. They also looked at other evidence, such as tree rings, stalagmites and other naturally occurring records to learn more about events that led droughts to arise and their duration.

They found that droughts or megadroughts (those that last longer than would be expected) have occurred sporadically over the years on every continent except Antarctica. They also found that most megadroughts came about due to unusual variations in sea surface temperatures. The researchers then made predictions about the likelihood of megadroughts occurring in the future based on both natural and man-made conditions.

The predictions show that the parts of the planet that have been historically prone to droughts or megadroughts are likely to become even more prone to them if conditions in those places grow hotter. This, they note, is because warmer air holds more water. It could also be due to factors such as snowmelt. Warmer temperatures lead to earlier snowmelt and drier soil, which in turn leads to less moisture in the air and therefore less rainfall.

The researchers also note that rising temperatures will likely have an impact on La Niña events, too, leading to decreased rainfall. The end result, they suggest, is some areas likely evolving from drought conditions to permanently dry regions.

Climate model shows drought in North and South America at the same time during La Niña events

More information: Benjamin I. Cook et al, Megadroughts in the Common Era and the Anthropocene, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43017-022-00329-1

© 2022 Science X Network

Study finds expanding voting rights can reduce violence

by Oxford University Press

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A new paper in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that the extension of voting rights can reduce political violence. The researcher finds this by looking at the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Political scientists have long debated the effect of enfranchisement on violence and political outcomes. In theory, the extension of voting rights to a historically disenfranchised group has great power to reduce the potential for violence, since voting offers a channel for those dissatisfied with the status quo to express disapproval and pick new officeholders. "Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens," said Martin Luther King in his historic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1957. Malcolm X expressed a related sentiment in a speech he gave in Cleveland in 1964.

But the extension of voting rights also shifts political equilibria. Such changes may increase elites' incentives to compensate for their loss of power with political violence. People with new voting power may also turn to violence if they do not see the benefits they expected from enfranchisement.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. This changed the political alignment of the United States dramatically, but its impact on political violence is debatable. Certainly, political violence in the country appeared quite salient throughout the 1960s, as Americans witnessed several assassinations and riots erupted throughout the decade, in cities including Birmingham, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Atlanta. Riots occurred in more than 100 U.S. cities alone on the night King was assassinated.

The Voting Rights Act prohibited discrimination in voting, but all jurisdictions were not covered equally by changes due to the law. The act required covered jurisdictions to suspend any practices limiting registration and obtain federal pre-clearance before any change in voting practices, and in many cases, federal officials came to register new voters in their county.

But counties altered due to the changes imposed by the Voting Rights Act were often located adjacent to (otherwise similar) counties that could continue on as before. The researcher here compared data on political violence between covered counties and non-covered counties on either side of the border in the years following 1965.

The researcher found that the Voting Rights Act halved both the number of instances of actual political violence and the likelihood that new waves of political violence would break out. Additional results show that in counties covered by the Act, citizens voted to voice their political views, whereas in other counties citizens continued to use violence. This effect mainly appeared to result from a change in political strategies rather than changes in policies and in the economic situation of citizens.

"In the current context of increasing discontent with democracy, understanding the voting-violence nexus is of extreme relevance," said the paper's author, Jean Lacroix. "Multiple countries still discriminate access to voting. Ending such policies could incentivize all citizens to engage more with voting and to rely less on violence as political action."New research reveals impact of rioting at the ballot box

More information: Ballots instead of bullets? The effect of the Voting Rights Act on political violence, Journal of the European Economic Association (2022). DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvac048

Provided by Oxford University Press 

Party feuding leaves Truss and Britain battling for survival

The prime minister looks for a chance to govern one month into role


British Prime Minister Liz Truss with husband Hugh O'Leary following her keynote speech on the final day of the Conservative Party conference. Getty Images

Thomas Harding
Birmingham
Oct 05, 2022

One Conservative donor said it was the “worst” party conference he had been to in 50 years, a veteran journalist said it was the “most chaotic” in 50 that he had covered, “and that’s including Labour and the Lib Dems”.

At times it felt like the Tories had lapsed into the blood sports much loved by some, scenting prey and like hounds following it, regardless of the consequences.

That mindless chase towards impenetrable thickets was averted — temporarily at least — by Liz Truss’ conference speech, where she was emboldened by environmentalist protestors who attempted to steal her limelight.

In the end, she delivered a speech that grew in confidence, selling her vision of low tax and a booming British economy that appears to have bought her time.

Canada wipe-out

But that will not provide much solace for Conservative MPs terrified of losing their seats whenever the next general election occurs.

Some point to the wipe-out experienced by Canada’s Progressive Conservative party, whose popularity plummeted from 43 per cent to 16 per cent, losing all but two of their 156 seats previously held before the 1993 election.

Recent electoral surveys suggest MPs have good reason to be fearful, with steady polling showing the opposition Labour consistently at between 25 and 33 per cent ahead.

In the short term, at least, that favours Ms Truss, lending her the ability to exert party discipline with the threat of calling a general election in which most MPs would lose their jobs.

The risk of extinction might prove motivational and will probably tie MPs to Ms Truss’ vision for growth, no matter the consequences.


Cockpit addicts

The cause of the Conservative descent from being the self-styled “natural party of government” can be traced to the decision to call a referendum on exiting the European Union in 2016.

On the first day of Brexit they lost a sensible, centrist prime minister in David Cameron. Three prime ministers on and the party is plummeting earthwards in a spin.

“Since Brexit it’s been like a load of drug addicts are in the cockpit flying like crazy and we’re the passengers but it’s only the people in the cockpit who have ejector seats,” a respected Conservative figure told The National.

For now, it appears that Ms Truss has managed to land the plane but not exited the cockpit, surrounded by those who seem intent on self-immolation.


Snake and traitor

While the fledgling British prime minister ended the conference confident and, to a point, in command, that had not seemed possible when the man no Tory wants as an enemy, Michael Gove, fomented the first uprising of the Truss era on Sunday.

Well-intentioned headlines of fixing Britain’s economy were trounced when the former Cabinet minister, who was sacked by Boris Johnson as a final act of revenge the night before he resigned, lobbed a stun grenade

.
British Conservative MP Michael Gove arrives at the conference in Birmingham. Reuters

“I don’t think it’s right,” he said, responding to whether he would vote for the five per cent cut to the 45 per cent tax rate for highest earners announced in chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s contentious mini-budget.

Mr Gove, who has variously been called a “snake” and a “traitor” by his own, is clearly exercising influence now he’s back among backbenchers.


His reach was such that Mr Kwarteng missed the main course of his dinner with reporters from The Sun newspaper on Sunday night, as Ms Truss summoned him to commit a U-turn on the tax hike.

Cabinet freelancers

That came on Monday, the humiliation was complete for Mr Kwarteng as the reversal came hours before he made his keynote conference speech. Lacking any lustre, and indeed attracting only lukewarm support, its main effect was to trigger the starting gun for a Tuesday of high drama.

MPs felt emboldened to force further concessions with ministers — including Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt, calling for social benefits to rise in line with inflation, currently around 10 per cent.

Cabinet discipline went up in smoke mid-conference, with ministers openly floating their own policies against the government position.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng gives his keynote speech. EPA

Home Secretary Suella Braverman criticised the tax U-turn and accused Mr Gove and other critics of Ms Truss of staging a “coup” to force the climbdown.

Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch publicly told Ms Braverman not to use such “inflammatory” language.

At one point it appeared Mr Kwarteng was blaming Queen Elizabeth II’s death for all the chaos, claiming his mini-budget had to be seen in the context of the “high pressure” period following her demise and funeral.

Grant Shapps, a former Cabinet minister renowned for his reading of the Tory mood, said MPs would not “sit on their hands” in ousting Ms Truss without improvement.

Whipping in


All eyes will be on the prime minister when MPs return to Westminster next week. MPs who vote against her tweaked financial package will probably find themselves without the whip, suspended from the party, Downing Street officials have hinted.

For now, it appears that Ms Truss’ conference speech has saved the situation. “People just need to give her a chance to deliver something and run the country,” one Conservative member told The National. “Because this is not about the party, it’s about the country.”

Battle for Britain

That hard won breathing space will not last for long. Challenging events loom for the government.

Next Wednesday, Ms Truss will come up against the official opposition, with Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer likely to be unrelenting in his criticism during Prime Minister’s Questions.

The Bank of England’s purchase of government debt, needed to restore order after the tax cutting triggered financial chaos, will end on Friday, October 14.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss speaks on stage at Britain's Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham. Reuters

Before or shortly after then, the government will probably publish the Office of Budget Responsibility report, which will set out how the tax cuts will be paid. This will probably be via big cuts in public services, leading to further cries of dismay in Tory ranks.

The coming days will be a time of reflection for Ms Truss, who has undoubtedly had the most challenging apprenticeship in becoming prime minister since Winston Churchill took office in May 1940 as France fell and British forces were thrown out of Europe.

Two months later, the Battle of Britain began, when the country’s very existence was at stake.
British Prime Minister Liz Truss - in pictures

TORIES CANNOT MANAGE CAPITALI$M

Pound falls again as agency downgrades outlook for UK's credit rating to 'negative'

Fitch takes aim at the apparent conflict between government policy and Bank of England action to fight inflation, warning that it is concerned by the levels of borrowing the chancellor is likely to need to fund the growth plan.

James Sillars
Business reporter @SkyNewsBiz
Thursday 6 October 2022 

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is due to meet bank bosses on Thursday

A measure of confidence in the UK's creditworthiness has been slashed by another major ratings agency in the wake of the mini-budget, piling further pressure on the under-fire pound.

Fitch revealed on Wednesday night that it had cut the outlook for its credit rating on UK government debt to "negative" from "stable".

It maintained its overall rating - with AAA being the ideal verdict - at AA-.

The shift reflected, it said, mounting concern over the level of borrowing required to fund the chancellor's tax and spending pledges made in the Commons last month.

Financial markets delivered a stinging verdict on the package, dubbed a growth plan by Kwasi Kwarteng, with sterling eventually plunging to an all-time low against the dollar.

Investors also demanded higher rates of return for holding UK government debt, with the Bank of England later intervening to buy long-dated bonds to prevent a crisis for pension funds.

A series of U-turns have since helped the pound and bond yields recover some poise.



Truss: ‘No shame’ over tax U-turn

The UK currency was, however, trading back towards $1.13 on Thursday morning though that partly reflected a rekindling of dollar strength after further oil market turbulence.

Fitch revealed its decision days after a similar move by rival Standard & Poor's.

It said of the chancellor's mini-budget: "The large and unfunded fiscal package announced as part of the new government's growth plan could lead to a significant increase in fiscal deficits over the medium term."

The agency hit out at the lack of independent budget forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in the statement and the policy clash that sees the government trying to grow the economy at a time when the Bank of England is trying to shrink demand in its fight against inflation.

It added: "Although the government reversed the elimination of the 45p top rate tax... the government's weakened political capital could further undermine the credibility of and support for the government's fiscal strategy."

Sky News revealed on Wednesday that Mr Kwarteng was due to meet bank bosses on Thursday amid concerns about the impact of the recent market turmoil on home loan provision.

It has emerged that the average mortgage interest rate has risen to above 6%, meaning households are paying the greatest portion of their income on mortgage payments since 1989 - exacerbating the wider cost of living crisis.

The politics of Britain’s ‘mini-budget’ crisis

By Andrew Curry, 

originally published by thenextwave

October 5, 2022

Resilience
Building a world of resilient communities


To borrow Hemingway’s famous phrase, political and economic crises happen gradually, then suddenly. And when they do happen suddenly, there are lots of immediate reasons why. The current economic and political crisis in the UK is largely self-inflicted, which raises the question of ‘why?’, but can also be thought of as representing the endgame of a long political wave.



No, you can’t know when the actual moment will be. But over a long period of time, the options keep narrowing until there are no good choices left, at least for the party and politicians that have benefited from that wave. Every political party hits a zugzwang moment.

Forty year cycles

I think it was the politics academic David Runciman who observed that if you looked back over a century of British politics, you could see cycles that ran from economic crisis to economic crisis every forty years or so, with a political settlement coming around a decade later. I can’t find the source for that, though.

This is a heuristic, not a law, and the timings are approximate. But, indicatively, the long depression of the late 19th century ran to 1896 (with Baring’s Bank bailed out in 1890); the 1929 crash led to the depression of the 1930s; the oil crisis happened in 1973-74; and, then of course, there was the 2008 crash.

The political effects of these: the ‘Liberal landslide’ of 1906, the Labour win in 1945 (complicated by the experience of war), Thatcher’s win in 1979 and subsequent victories in 1983 and 1987. And the 2008 crisis is still playing out in our politics today.
Systems patterns

It happens that you see this two-generation pattern in other bits of the literature. Strauss and Howe’s idea of the ‘Fourth Turning’ basically proposes a four-generation model from crisis to crisis. Their four generation pattern more or less goes ‘build’/‘enjoy’/‘exploit’/‘unravel’, although that’s not the language they use. It follows a classic long-run systems pattern, even if some of their post-hoc timings are spuriously exact.

All the same, the mechanism is visible. A crisis leads to a system reset, designed to solve the problems that caused the crisis. For a generation you get a reinforcing loop as the system benefits from this new set of ideas. But all systems decay over time, and a balancing loop kicks in as the problems caused by those new ideas come to the fore.

The advocates of the previous set of reforms retire or die off, and a set of ideas that had some coherence to them either become incoherent, or simply no longer fit the changing political and economic landscape. As David Muir noted, Thatcher said this explicitly of the Labour Party back then:



He added:
Now applies to the Conservative Party.

Conservative decline

So the current British political and economic crisis can be seen as the last twitch of Thatcherism, and by two of its last remaining zealots. I’ll be coming back to the-budget-that-wasn’t-a-budget later in this piece, but there’s another important element here. This is about the long-term decline and de-composition of the Conservative party.

I know this is a strong thing to say. We’re talking about a party that has a majority of 80 seats in the British House of Commons, and one of the givens of modern British politics is that you should never bet against the Conservative party. Over the last century it has been the most successful ruling party in Europe.

But it has been unravelling since the 1980s. In the 1950s, and the era of ‘One Nation’ Conservatism, the Conservative Party was also a social institution, with 2.5 million members across Britain. (In Barnet, in north London, which had 70,000 voters, there were 12,000 Conservative party members. By the 2000s, its membership was less than a tenth of this, and ageing fast. Social values had moved away from the party as well. Economics, which have punished the younger generation, means that the party’s vote is now heavily skewed towards the over-60s and the party’s policies have followed.
Triangulation

David Cameron’s attempted solution to this was to triangulate: a pretence at ‘one nation’ social values to voters (gay marriage and ‘hug a hoodie’), with the party funds coming from an increasingly narrow base within the finance sector, and the core vote shored up with a message that drifted between patriotism and racism.

The first part of that was sheered off by UKIP and the Brexit, while the finance base got narrower (Johnson’s “fuck business” moment in Brussels was emblematic) but Johnson propped it up for a moment with the idea of ‘levelling up’, which appealed to enough voters beyond the traditional Conservative base to win an election. If you’re interested in the political sociology of all of this, the most persistent analyst is the sociologist Phil Burton-Cartledge at his ‘All That Is Solid’ blog—for example in these 2018 pieces—and in his book on the post-war history of the Conservative Party.

Levelling up was an interesting idea, or would have been had the Conservatives treated it as a strategy and not a slogan. At the least it could have been a programme that dealt with Britain’s real problem, which is captured sharply in a chart from the Financial Times a few weeks ago.


(Britain’s wage and productivity problem. Source: Financial Times)

Flat wage growth

The problem is this: wage growth, and associated productivity, in the UK have been flat since the financial crisis. The causes of this are either complicated, which is the version you get from economists, or they are post-crisis austerity, which killed off the initial post-crisis recovery, followed by Brexit, which had a calamitous effect first on business investment and then on trade.

These together have created the low wage, low investment economy that has characterised Britain recently, with a toxic combination of flat wages and low investment. Paul Mason explained how this worked in practice in a Guardian article a few years ago by using hand-washed car businesses as an example.

And one of the sharper observations on Twitter when inflation started picking up (you can never find a Tweet when you need one) was by James Meadway, who suggested that this low wage, low investment economy also needed low inflation and low interest rates to survive.

Doing something

But for a moment, let’s take the so-called ‘mini-Budget’ at face value. If the rise in inflation and interest rates has wrecked the UK’s low-wage, low-interest rate economy, then the government had to do something.

So, if you want to be generous to the budget-that-wasn’t-a-budget, you can say that it was, as claimed, an attempt to do something about productivity. I’ll pretend for a moment that Truss and Kwarteng were being honest when they said it was a ‘budget’ about growth.

But even this hits an immediate problem. In the 1980s, the idea of trickle-down economics and the Laffer Curve was contested, to say the least, but hadn’t been disproved. Similarly, ‘freeports’ and all of the other mechanisms of supply side economics had not yet been discredited. They represented then part of a suite of theories about how to solve the problems of the previous economic model. But everyone knows that’s no longer true. 40 years on, these are burnt out ideas that don’t work in the way their advocates thought they would.

Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer spelt out some of the issues in an article in The Guardian:

As Truss put it last week: “Lower taxes lead to economic growth, there is no doubt in my mind about that.” There may be no doubt in the prime minister’s mind, but there’s a lot of doubt in the data. The US has had four decades experimenting with this kind of economics, and the evidence is clear: not only does it not work but it does enormous damage to the economy and society.
Understanding the government

So what’s going on with our new administration? I think there are four alternatives.

1. They are zealots who don’t realise that the ideas they have believed in for decades are no longer fit for purpose.

2. Or they are working a clever plan to create a crisis to force further cuts in the size of the state and of public spending.

3. Or they realise that they are only going to get one shot at this, and they have decided to help their friends and political supporters cash in before the house comes crashing down around their ears. (Corruption, in other words).

4. Or they aren’t very good at politics.

Measuring ‘zealotry’ is hard, even though you know it when you see it, and usually people just point to the libertarian economic manifesto, Britannia Unchained, that Truss, Kwarteng and others co-authored a decade ago. But while I was writing this piece, the Financial Times’ data journalist John Burn-Murdoch published a handy chart mapping economic policies by political party across a number of countries.1 The policies of the current Conservative administration are now right at the edge of the scale, having shifted from the centre-right mainstream to the right under Truss (‘jumped’ or ‘lurched are more accurate descriptions).


(Source: Financial Times)

Heady cocktail

Of course, some of the evidence fits several of these interpretations. Firing the head of the British Treasury department and then declaring that your Budget is a ‘mini-budget’, to avoid scrutiny, could be zealotry, or it could be cashing in, or it could be incompetence.

It’s probably doesn’t go with the ‘clever plan’ version, though, since the Treasury went along with years of Osborne’s austerity without kicking up a fuss despite the economic damage it was causing. (There are other views on the ‘clever plan’.)

My own view, briefly, is that it’s a heady cocktail of zealotry, corruption, and incompetence—that all three have interacted with each other to create the current crisis. You could even say that the current crisis is over-determined, because any two of these would have been enough.
Corruption

It is impossible to avoid the smell coming from the British government at the moment: the Chief of Staff who is of interest to the FBI, the Conservative billionaire hedge fund owner and Conservative donor Crispin Odey who used to employ the Chancellor who has made millions shorting the pound as a result of its collapse following the budget—with just a sniff of private information beforehand. Odey seems to have salvaged the fortunes of his hedge fund by doing this. Not to mention the Cabinet Minister and former (briefly) Chancellor of the Exchequer whose possible tax avoidance scheme continues to raise questions.

This list could go on, but it’s been a theme of the 2019 ‘Brexit’ government. The same corruption was seen throughout the pandemic procurement scandals.

As for competence, one of the signs of decline of a party is a shrinking pool of talent. The political talent pool has been shrunk more generally by the professionalisation of politics, but the Conservatives have accelerated this through expelling some MPs and by pushing through its pursuit of their ideological version of Brexit.
Running the country

In The Critic, Mike Jones brought these two ideas together when he noted a few months ago the shallowness of much of the Conservative leadership campaign:


For (leadership candidate Kemi) Badenoch, modern-day Conservatism is pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of policy…“What’s missing”, she wrote, “is an intellectual grasp of what is required to run the country.” While Labour is cementing its image as the party of productivity and investment, the Tories, though unintentionally, spend much of its efforts in making the party as unattractive as possible.

But the deeper problem is that the party’s underlying ideas—legacies of that 40-year wave I discussed on Saturday—are about a smaller state with less public capacity. Hence Jacob Rees-Mogg’s persistent desire to shrink the civil service. A decade of austerity has stretched the capability of the state, of public services, and of local authorities to close to collapse.

State capacity

And one of the things we have learned, from the pandemic, from the climate crisis, and from the energy crisis, is that states need capacity if they are going to offer any kind of security to their citizens. Markets alone can not deliver this, even if they are well regulated. And they can no longer deliver growth either: we know, from the work of Mariana Mazzucato and others, that this requires all kinds of investment in public capacity.

Beinhocker and Hanauer described this as “middling out” economics, and it requires public investment:

a robust economy of thriving middle-income families is not a consequence of economic growth, it is its cause. So the policy priority is then to invest in the broad population of working people: education, healthcare, childcare, elderly care, worker training, affordable housing and good public infrastructure, from transport to broadband. It is also critical to support people with a living minimum wage and enough economic security that they aren’t economically trapped and can take risks, from starting a new business, to taking time out to reskill.



Johnson’s maverick style allowed him to nod in the direction of all of this, at least rhetorically, even if he had little intention of doing it. The political effect of Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget for the rich, along with Truss’ belated conversion to energy support, and the rolling crises that followed it, was to make voters realise viscerally—almost in a single day—how much they need the state to be on their side, to look after their security, in the 2020s.

A version of this article was published in two parts on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

Liz Truss wants 'growth, growth and growth'. Here's how Brexit has damaged her goal 

By Alasdair Sandford • Updated: 05/10/2022

Britain's Prime Minister Liz Truss makes a speech at the Conservative Party conference at the ICC in Birmingham, England, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022. - Copyright AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

"I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth."

The concept formed the centrepiece of Liz Truss' speech to the Conservative Party conference, and the new British prime minister mentioned the word more than two dozen times.

"For too long, our economy has not grown as strongly as it should have done," Truss said. She underlined the importance of growth to the UK economy by linking it to the need to cut taxes — "putting up a sign that Britain is open for business" — slash regulation, boost investment, and improve public services.



Castigating "those who try to stop growth", she vowed she would "not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back".

And she painted Brexit in entirely positive terms, saying the government was "seizing the new-found freedoms outside the European Union", and "making the most of the huge opportunities Brexit offers".

Yet several reports say one significant factor to have impacted negatively on Britain's growth and economy — also creating a barrier to future performance — is Brexit itself.Liz Truss speech: Five key takeaways including Greenpeace, Brexit and 'facing down separatists'
Post-2016 period: After the UK voted to leave the EU

Some surveys have said the vote for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum had a damaging effect on the British economy, even before the UK actually left the EU and its economic structures.

"Voting for Brexit had large negative effects on the UK economy between 2016 and 2019, leading to higher import and consumer prices, lower investment, and slower real wage and GDP growth", wrote two economists from the London School of Economics (LSE) in a paper for the think-tank UK in a Changing Europe, published this year.

This happened even though at this stage "there was little or no trade diversion away from the EU", the report said.

Another report by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) reached a similar conclusion. "Even before Brexit has actually taken place, the referendum shock of June 2016 has already had substantial economic costs," its study said in March 2020, updating its previous analysis from three years earlier.

"We estimate that the Brexit depreciation increased UK consumer prices by 2.9%. This represents an £870 per year increase in the cost of living for the average UK household," its four authors said.

An assessment by Investment Monitor in January 2022 found that UK growth trailed that of leading European counterparts in the years following the Brexit vote, even though it had been ahead at the start of 2015, and again at the time of the 2016 referendum.

"Based on figures from the OECD, UK GDP grew by 14.3% between Q2 2016 and Q3 2021. This is a smaller growth rate than four of the EU’s largest economies. During the same period, Germany had the highest indexed growth rate at 32.2%, followed by Spain (25.6%), France (23%) and Italy (16.3%)," it said.

"In the post-referendum and pre-TCA period, the economic effects of Brexit began to materialise. Products more exposed to the uncertainty of future trading relations with the EU experienced lower trade growth," said another report by LSE researchers for UK in a Changing Europe, published in April 2022.

It also concluded that increased UK-EU trade barriers had caused UK food prices to rise by six percent between the end of 2019 and September 2021 compared to the years before December 2019.

Brexit Timeline 2016–2020: key events in the UK’s path from referendum to EU exit
Post-2021: After Brexit took effect

This year has seen economists begin to separate the economic damage done by Brexit from that wrought by the COVID pandemic.

In June a report by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform (CER) estimated that in the final quarter of 2021, GDP (gross domestic product) was 5.2% smaller, investment 13.7% lower, and goods trade 13.6% lower than what they would have been had the UK remained in the EU.

He added that tax rises imposed by Boris Johnson's then government " would not have been needed if the UK had stayed in the EU (or in the single market and customs union)".

Two other reports cast a shadow over Liz Truss' desire to advertise Britain as "open for business".

The UK's Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reported in March that the UK had "missed out on much of the recovery in global trade," amid the recovery from the pandemic, noting that the UK "appears to have become a less trade intensive economy".

"The Big Brexit" published in June by the Resolution Foundation think-tank and the LSE found that a drop in British "trade openness" — measured as a share of GDP — showed a much higher fall than in countries with similar trade profiles, such as France.

In May a report by the Peterson Institute for Economics found that Brexit was "driving inflation in the UK higher than its European peers", despite suffering the same economic shocks from Russia's war on Ukraine and soaring energy prices. It blamed in particular labour shortages resulting from the end of the free movement of EU migrant workers to the UK, as well as new trade barriers.

In September City A.M. reported that the number of UK businesses exporting to the EU had fallen by a third in 2021 compared to 2020, due to the extra red tape they faced when trading with the bloc. It quoted figures from the UK's Revenue and Customs department HMRC.

An earlier study by the LSE, from April, found that Brexit caused "major disruption" to both EU-UK exports and imports, with many British firms stopping trade with the EU.

Eurostat data on EU trade with the UK published in March said goods imports from the UK to the EU in 2021 declined by nearly a quarter relative to 2019, while the value of services imports from the UK fell by nearly 7% over the same period.

The UK left the EU at the end of January 2020, and the new rules came into force when a transition period expired on December 31 that year. Its departure from the EU's single market and customs union, and the trade deal negotiated by then prime minister Boris Johnson, created significant barriers to trade with the bloc.Brexit damage: Is EU exit now hitting UK's economy harder than COVID?
Brexit agreement caused 'major disruption' to EU-UK trade, finds study
For both Conservatives and Labour, Brexit is done

Both the UK's ruling party and main opposition agree that there is no going back on Brexit.

"We are the party who got Brexit done," trumpted Liz Truss in her conference speech in Birmingham.

In a speech in July, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he "couldn't disagree more" with those who wanted Brexit reversed — instead offering a new slogan of "Make Brexit Work".

There are understandable political imperatives behind such stances, and they may explain why Brexit often features little in debates over the UK's current economic plight.

But many critics of the government and opposition alike say the failure to face up to the reality of the UK's EU exit — and the barriers created with its closest trading partner — mean the complexities of the situation are not being properly understood.