4 JULY 2014
AFTER GOD
ROWAN WILLIAMS, LUCY WINKETT AND MELVYN BRAGG ON HOW TO FILL THE FAITH-SHAPED HOLE IN MODERN LIFE
THE END OF EMERGING MARKETS
IAN BREMMER: INDIA AND CHINA ROSE TOGETHER, BUT THAT ERA IS OVER
Plus
LEADING ARTICLE: LABOUR SHOULD BECOME THE PARTY OF TAX CUTS AND BOLD TAX REFORM
THE POLITICS COLUMN: GEORGE EATON ON ED MILIBAND’S INTERNAL STRUGGLE
MEHDI HASAN: ISIS IS DELUDED TO CLAIM A NEW MUSLIM CALIPHATE
BEL TREW REPORTS FROM BENGHAZI, WHERE VIOLENCE HAS MARRED ELECTIONS FOR THE NEW PARLIAMENT
EDWARD PLATT IN ISRAEL: WHY HEBRON IS SYMBOLIC OF THE FAILURE TO MAKE A LASTING PEACE
THE SURREAL MADE SWEET: MARK LAWSON ON THE RETURN OF MONTY PYTHON
ANTHONY LOYD: HOW AN AL-QAEDA TERRORIST ENDED UP WORKING FOR MI5 AND THE CIA
TWO GREAT WRITERS OF ONE MIND: JONATHAN BATE ON MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
IAN BREMMER: FROM EMERGING MARKETS TO DIVERGING MARKETS
The geopolitics expert Ian Bremmer argues in the NS Essay that we can no longer think of countries such as China, Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico and Turkey as a single group, because of the huge divergence in their interests, priorities and pace of development. The catch-all term “emerging markets” has become profoundly misleading, he argues:
As Leo Tolstoy said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That’s a good rule of thumb for the shift in emerging markets’ fortunes between the 2000s and today. China will soon boast the world’s largest economy. When it does, it will still be poor, and thus potentially unstable. It will be far from ready to take on global responsibilities appropriate to a country of its size and influence. Beyond China, virtually all these countries rose on a fortuitous tide of historically unusual circumstances. Now they are going their separate ways – and just at the moment when they have begun to matter.
LEADING ARTICLE: LABOUR SHOULD BECOME THE PARTY OF TAX CUTS AND BOLD TAX REFORM
In this week’s leader, we argue that Labour should become the party of tax cuts and bold tax reform. We suggest that “if the Labour Party was radical rather than obsessed with process and presentation, and if it wanted to win a popular mandate rather than merely limp over the line” in 2015, it would be taking steps now to overhaul Britain’s unfair and inefficient tax system, which places a disproportionate burden on lower earners.
. . . we would support the merging of [National Insurance] and income tax in the interests of greater transparency but also because we believe low- and middle-income earners in Britain already pay too much tax, especially when fuel duty, VAT, council tax and stagnant real wages are taken into account. Ed Miliband complains about a “cost-of-living crisis”. Perhaps, in response, he should consider cutting the average earner’s tax burden.
If the Labour Party was radical rather than obsessed with process and presentation, and if it wanted to win a popular mandate rather than merely limp over the line in coalition with whatever might be left of the Liberal Democrats at Westminster after the general election in 2015, it would be setting out proposals to overhaul our tax system.
Indeed, it would aspire to become a party of tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners and seek to switch some of the burden of taxation from income and consumption to static assets such as property and land, as well as environmental bads. It would reform inheritance tax so that the rich become less able to avoid it. It would introduce land value taxes, at least for business and agricultural land but also potentially for property. The rebanding of council tax, which is based on valuations more than 20 years old, would also be an essential part of any wide-ranging programme of reform.
*Read the leader in full below*
THE POLITICS COLUMN: RED ED v MODERATE MILIBAND
In the Politics Column this week, the NS political editor, George Eaton, argues that Labour’s internal ructions and the confusion among voters about what the party stands for are symptomatic of a struggle within Ed Miliband himself:
If the public is unsure what Miliband stands for, it is partly because he has often appeared unsure himself. There is Ed the insurgent, who is “bringing back socialism” and talks of sweeping away three decades of neoliberalism through a Thatcherite revolution in reverse. Then there is Ed the incrementalist, who learned his politics at the feet of Gordon Brown and who talks gently of building a “fairer capitalism” and reveres consensual “one-nation politics”.
*Read the Politics Column in full below*
MEHDI HASAN: THERE IS NOTHING ISLAMIC ABOUT THE ISIS “CALIPHATE”
Mehdi Hasan is bemused by the recent claim of the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that he is the caliph and “leader for Muslims everywhere”. There is nothing Islamic about a state, Hasan argues in Lines of Dissent, and Islam does not require an Islamic state. To him, “the hand-choppers and throat-slitters of Isis, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and the rest have no political programme, no blueprint for government”. Hasan sees only “a hate-filled ideology, built on a cult of victimhood and sustained by horrific violence”:
Let me make a prediction. The so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria will be totalitarian, won’t be Islamic and, in the words of the former US state department spokesman Philip Crowley, “has as much chance of survival as an ice cream cone in the desert”. By declaring statehood, Isis may have sown the seeds of its own destruction.
COVER STORY: AFTER GOD
For this week’s cover story, Rowan Williams and Lucy Winkett consider the importance of ritual in religion, while the non-believers Melvyn Bragg, Julian Baggini and Robin Ince suggest ways of filling the God-shaped hole in modern life.
Williams describes the ritual of prayer that marks the start of his day and how this enforces the same stillness and physical focus required in Buddhist meditation:
. . . the regular ritual to begin the day when I’m in the house is a matter of an early rise and a brief walking meditation or sometimes a few slow prostrations, before squatting for 30 or 40 minutes (a low stool to support the thighs and reduce the weight on the lower legs) with the “Jesus Prayer”: repeating (usually silently) the words as I breathe out, leaving a moment between repetitions to notice the beating of the heart, which will slow down steadily over the period.
Lucy Winkett, the rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, argues that ritual will always be a fundamental part of the human experience:
In theological terms, rituals are performed at the crossroads where time meets eternity; where chronos meets kairos. We live our lives earthbound and rushing: metaphorically looking at the second hand on a clock. It’s accurate, but not a good way of telling the time. Rituals are performed, as it were, by the hour hand; imperceptible movement, no less true but a lot less anxious. Rituals help us do nothing less than live a different kind of time.
Melvyn Bragg finds that though his “early faith has ebbed away”, something remains: “the mysteries, visited on a young mind with force, which now appear like falsities, seem to have struck a chord too deep to be forgotten”. For Bragg, the rituals of walking fill the gap left by religion:
The rituals . . . are few but often seem essential. The garb, the route, the recognition of old favourites – trees, prospects, rivers. Once you are in the rhythm of those rituals what happens, to me at any rate, is that a non-self takes over. A non-drug-induced drift.
The blogger Vicky Beeching finds the same sense of calm after losing her treasured iPhone on the tracks of the London underground: “Smartphone-free, I noticed throughout the afternoon and evening that I’d regained the natural pauses that happen between events.”
The philosopher Julian Baggini argues that it is a mistake to “replace religious rituals with secular ones”. He sets out instead to find ways to “cultivate the virtues that ritual promotes”. And for the comedian Robin Ince the solitary delight of browsing in second-hand bookshops has become a ritual of quasi-spiritual importance:
Once the books are bought, I retreat to a tea shop, preferably one with an elaborate Victoria sponge in the window, and pore over the new purchases. Inside each book is the hope of a new way of seeing the world; each one is a potential adventure.
EDWARD PLATT: DEATH COMES TO HEBRON
Edward Platt, author of The City of Abraham: History, Myth and Memory, explains why Hebron, “a city that ought to illuminate the ideal of fraternal co-operation”, has come to symbolise the region’s repeated failed attempts to make a lasting peace:
It was no surprise that the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers who went missing in the West Bank on 12 June should have been found near the town of Halhul. Nowhere in the West Bank is beyond the reach of the Israeli army, but it does not permanently control Halhul, which lies at the northern entrance to the city of Hebron.
[. . . ]
Hebron, which lies 25 miles south of Jerusalem, is the only place in the West Bank where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side . . . it is the birthplace of the Jewish people, and the geographical, mythical and emotional heart of the world’s most intractable conflict.
CRITICS INTERVIEW: THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS
Dorian Lynskey meets the Manic Street Preachers who, now all aged 45, are enjoying an “Indian summer of creativity” with two albums in quick succession. The once politically engaged band members, who grew up in Blackwood, a town in the South Wales Valleys ravaged by the 1984 miners’ strike, tell Lynskey why they now feel disenchanted with politics and the Labour Party:
They were raised as “classic Labour”; the title of the 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours came from Nye Bevan. They turned down a role in the Olympics closing ceremony because they couldn’t bring themselves to perform in front of the royal family. Their estrangement from Labour has come as a shock. “I’ll always hate Ukip,” spits Bradfield. “I’ll always hate the Tory party. The only problem now is that I hate Labour, too. The sea’s washed over the sand. There’s not one thing you can hang your hat on any more.”
“I actually feel bad about myself because I am disenchanted with politics,” Wire says. “I hate the idea that there’s no one left to vote for. I don’t feel anyone represents me. They certainly don’t represent the people I care about. When the left abdicates its duty to the people it should be representing, that vacuum is always filled by the right. I think the Labour Party is so distanced from its core vote. It’s just become a giant think tank. You can’t get any sicker ironies than Tony Blair being a peace envoy and the banks being nationalised – too sick to bear.” He continues, “It’s not how I want to feel. I’m not Russell Brand. I don’t feel a part of any of it, really – unless I actually stood myself.
If there was a presidential system in Wales, I’d probably stand.” The campaign would be quite something.
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MARK LAWSON ON THE RETURN OF MONTY PYTHON
The NS critic at large, Mark Lawson, hot-foots it to the O2 Arena in London to see the first of ten performances by Monty Python (“as long as their various post-surgical scars can withstand the effort”). Lawson finds that “the familiarity of the material starts to feel weird” and that sketches which were once surreal and anti-establishment have become merely sweet and touching:
The most graphic illustration of this process is that their “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” gag is so well loved that this Inquisition was not only expected but demanded by the audience, which, recognising the couple of lines of dialogue before the pope’s interrogators burst into a suburban living room, roared its relief in the manner of rock audiences hearing familiar opening notes.
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