Ourselves Alone: How the Leave Campaigns repudiated rule of international law

Posted on July 2, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Also published in Left Foot Forward http://leftfootforward.org/2016/07/ourselves-alone-how-brexiters-shrugged-off-international-law/

The late Tom Bingham, perhaps the most distinguished English jurist of his generation, noted that legal scholars trace the concept of rule of law back to Aristotle. However the concept is apparent, at least in nascent form, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King written a century earlier. In this the king realises as his own investigation finds himself responsible for the plague on Thebes that he must be subject to his own earlier ruling on how the culprit should be held accountable.

Tom Bingham

Bingham built on prior formulations of rule of law to argue that the idea had eight principles that were fundamental to it. These included that the law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights, and that the state must comply with its obligations in international law as in national law.

For hard Right ideologues, such as Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, such ideals of rule of law sit at odds with their own conception of the supremacy of Parliament as a fundamental of the unwritten British Constitution.

But generations of parliamentarians have never seen any conflict between rule of law and rule of parliament. So they have, over the past 40 years, set constraints on the unfettered power of parliament, notably in the form of the Human Rights Act, which is administered by the UK’s Supreme Court with appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, and the treaties that the UK freely entered into to obtain its membership of the European Union, which are overseen by the European Court of Justice.

So, when Gove, Johnson and Farage talked about taking back control during their poisonous and bloodstained campaign to take the UK out of the EU, what they were talking about was removing the constraints that derive from the treaty obligations which have provided the manifold benefits that arise from EU membership. Doubtless they were also thinking about national law, specifically the protections from government excesses afforded to citizens by the Human Rights Act.

It is axiomatic that a partnership like the European Union, indeed any international treaty with other nations, must introduce mutual responsibilities and ideally should have some independent body to oversee that the parties to the treaty comply. Otherwise the already fragile concepts of international rule of law become meaningless.

British experience of international rule of law during its colonial period was rather different to such contemporary expectations. It had little consideration of mutual benefits but rather had an altogether more lopsided aspect, with no recourse to independent arbitration or appeals to human rights for the colonial subjects whose exploitation enriched the UK to such an extraordinary extent.

This colonial perspective contributed greatly to the ludicrous myth of Britain standing alone during the Second World War. This myth insultingly overlooks the vital contributions made by Africans, Australians, Canadians, Indians, and Kiwis to the struggles against Nazism and Japanese militarism. This myth also gravely overlooks the horrendous cost that this entailed, most infamously in the Bengal famine of 1943.

But a theme running through the depressing debates relating to the UK’s EU membership in the run up to the referendum of 23 June 2016 was that the UK can still “stand alone”. This was underpinned by that weird continuing sense of colonial entitlement: that the UK should be allowed to cherry-pick what its relationship with the EU should be without any appreciation that UK membership should bring responsibilities not just privileges.

This attitude was copper-fastened by a careful cultivation of xenophobia by the Leave campaigns, and by a startling disregard for mere facts, from the true cost of EU membership to the actual provisions of EU treaties and the rights and obligations of member states under those treaties.

This wilful ignorance and misinformation to the UK electorate continues past the result of the referendum. On the morning of 27 June Boris Johnson declared, “The only change – and it will not come in any great rush – is that the UK will extricate itself from the EU’s extraordinary and opaque system of legislation: the vast and growing corpus of law enacted by a European Court of Justice from which there can be no appeal”.

Perhaps Johnson rarely lets facts get in the way of an opportunity to stoke the prejudices of his listeners. Perhaps he is merely supremely uninterested in facts. The European Court of Justice enacts nothing. It administers the body of law agreed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, of which, to date, the UK has been an equal party.

It is too early to see what will be all the consequences of the UK’s repudiation of the EU. Perhaps this will sate the appetite of the ideologues of the Right for unfettered power if what comes to pass is a recession-hit Little England as Scotland prepares to steer its own course as a full and independent member of the EU.

A blind Oedipus led by his daughter Antigone

But it is unlikely. And the Human Rights Act remains for a while longer, another affront to the Tea Party-ist fantasies of a resurgent and exclusivist English nationalism. Gove or Johnson may like to eruditely comment, after Milton, that they prefer to rule in hell than serve in heaven as they seek to translate their peculiar Cromwellian version of Ourselves Alone into a new English polity.

Oedipus could not bear to look upon the devastation that he had wrought on his family and city so he tore out his own eyes. Today Gove, Farage, and Johnson look upon the wasteland that they have created of young people’s hopes for modest opportunities to study, work and fall in love amongst their fellow European neighbours, and they judge that it is good.

Barbarians at the Gate: reflections on the UK and European Union at the abyss

Posted on June 21, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Many years ago I watched a documentary about the life and work of the campaigning American journalist I F Stone. Stone was for his whole life a fighter for justice and a fierce critic of the excesses of his own government, such as its encroachment on civil liberties, its systemic racism, and its illegal invasion of Vietnam.

And yet, when asked towards the end of the film what his overall judgement of his country was, Stone said something I found striking: he said, in effect, that he regarded the American Republic as one of the great flowerings of civilisation, comparable to Athens in the Golden Age.

I F Stone

It was a carefully chosen analogy: Stone was also a classical scholar and author of The Death of Socrates. The Athens he contemplated would have been a warts-and-all one, constructed on the injustice of slavery and the subjugation of women, and party, on much too frequent occasion, to war crimes and mob-rule.

And yet in the midst of all this there were new ideas emerging in philosophy, science and the arts, and new politics, in one of the first human stirrings of democracy.

The United States’s bears similar scars to ancient Athens, it’s history marked by slavery and appalling racial prejudice, and by illegal war from Mexico and Nicaragua, to Vietnam and Iraq. But it is also the nation of Abraham Lincoln and Bobby Kennedy, of Harriet Tubman, Martin King and Dorothy Day. It was the country which in the 19th Century showed that democracy was a robust and viable system even in the face of dreadful civil war, and which has produced, like Athens, some of the greatest achievements of the age in science and art.

If it has a rival in the 21st century then I would argue it is the much younger European Union. Like the United States and Athens before it, and every human institution or undertaking before or since, Europe is a flawed, human project. In recent years we have seen one of its most abject failings in its fragmented and often craven efforts to establish a coherent and effective humanitarian policy in response to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

And yet: the European Union represents as vital a political project as the United States. It too represents one of the great flowerings of human civilisation. It has brought enduring peace to a continent that has hitherto been scarred over the centuries by fratricidal war. It is an effort by democratic nations to work together on matters of common interest underpinned by the the principles of human rights, democracy and rule of law. That is a project that is rare in human history and rare in the contemporary world. It is also something that is essential to face the political, environmental, humanitarian and human rights challenges of this fragile and interconnected world. So, for all its flaws, this is a project that is worth fighting for, not running away from in search of some mythic past.

Jo Cox

As Jo Cox noted in her maiden speech to Parliament, migration, including the free movement of EU citizens amongst our member states, has immeasurably enhanced the communities and societies that have benefited from it, through a vibrant diversity in food, music and arts as well as business and commerce.

But this cosmopolitan vision of Europe is anathema to some who instead cling to the same nasty rhetoric that was once used to justify colonialism, but which now is put in the service of a poisonous xenophobic populism. This seeks to convince the electorate that the EU and migrants are to blame for social ills that have been the result of domestic policies and failures in government, sometimes perpetrated by the very people scapegoating others

History shows us that such rhetoric can open an abyss, which the UK descended into on the streets of Birstall on 16th June 2016. The assertions which followed rapidly from those pedalling intolerance, that the brutal assassination of Jo Cox had nothing to do with them, still ring hollow.

Jo Cox understood that the European Union, with all its human flaws and imperfections as well as its enormous potential and aspiration, was worth fighting for. And in the months and years following the awful, bloody UK referendum campaign the fate of the UK and the EU itself still seems to hang in the balance as incompetents and charlatans such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are treated like perspicacious philosopher-princes by the BBC and other pusillanimous media.

The decency that Jo Cox embodied has not been crushed by the narrow victory in the Brexit referendum of a coalition of racists, delusional imperial nostalgists, disaster capitalists, useful idiots of the Left, and a misled section of the populace. It continues to reassert itself, notably on the streets of London and Belfast on 20th Oct 2018.

Both the UK government, and their tame opposition under Jeremy Corbyn, seem intent on ignoring this demonstration of disgust for their policies by so many people. Instead they seem committed to their process that will eliminate the human and citizens’ rights of tens of millions of people and reek economic devastation in the name of their delusional dreams of Brexit. But they should be careful.

The people of India under Gandhi and Nehru, the African American community of the United States under Martin King, the nationalists of the North of Ireland under Hume and Mallon, showed that ultimately a determined people will, through non-violence, shape the political agenda. And when pan-European progressives achieve that in the UK, as they will, May, Corbyn, their acolytes and their clowns, will all be consigned to the dustbin of history.

People’s Vote March, London, 20th Oct 2018

Muhammed Ali

Posted on June 4, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

When We Were Kings, by Leon Gast
The Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, by Mark Kram
The Tao of Muhammed Ali, by Davis Miller
My first proper memory of Muhammed Ali was waking up to the news of his victory over George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974. I watched the BBC Sports film of the fight the next evening. It was awe-inspiring.

This fight is the principle subject of Leon Gast’s electrifying documentary When We Were Kings. The bloody, thieving, murderous dictator of Zaire, Mobuto, had decided that the world heavyweight title fight would help put Zaire on the world stage. Gast’s movie is an account of the extraordinary circus that resulted. It intercuts documentary and news footage from the time with illuminating interviews with, among others, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer, on the bizarre circumstances surrounding the fight, and on the phenomenal fight itself.

When We Were Kings is a great introduction to Ali, both as a cultural and political figure and as a boxer. His victory is beautifully explained as one not just of his technical fighting skills, but of his strategic thinking skills.

Rope-a-dope

Years later George Foreman described the devastation of having been beaten by someone so “braggadocio”. This is but a hint of the darkness that is frequently ignored in discussions of Ali. This comes much more to the fore in the Ghosts of Manila, an account of the rivalry between Ali and the great Joe Frazier. Frazier had been a supporter of Ali in the wilderness years when Ali had been stripped of his licence to box because of his courageous refusal to fight in Vietnam: “I ain’t got not quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me nigger!” he said by way of explanation.

However this was no protection to Frazier from Ali’s often cruel and lacerating invective. Frazier came to detest Ali and their brutal fight in Manila in 1975 has become a thing of legend.

Manila

Both fighters inflicted incredible damage on each other in dreadful heat, displaying incredible levels of endurance and courage just to keep up with each other. However by Kram’s account Frazier had effectively won the fight by rendering Ali unable to take the ring for the 15th and final round. All Frazier needed to do was to stand up. Then his manager, without consulting Frazier, threw in the towel, appalled at the damage that Frazier himself had already sustained in the fight. Frazier never forgave his manager and this extraordinary stroke of luck for Ali became a fundamental element in his legend.

But brutal fights such as Manila and the necessity to fight on almost to middle age that resulted from the loss of his license in his peak years, took their toll on Ali’s body and resulted in the Parkinson’s Disease that afflicted his final years. Davis Miller had met Ali at the peak of his career but became friends with him in these years. The Tao of Mohammed Ali is about a number of things including this friendship, writing, boxing, and perhaps most poignantly about Miller’s relationship with his own father. It is a fine and moving book that describes beautifully what Ali meant to ordinary fans, millions of who are today bereft at the news of his death.

The world is a duller, smaller place with Ali gone. But in many ways it is a better one in part because of what he did and what he stood up for. We will never see his like again.

Ali delivers the coup de grace on Foreman (Plimpton and Mailer look on – bottom right)

To Realise Modest Dreams: Law, policy and decent work

Posted on May 30, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Remarks to Committee on Decent Work in Global Supply Chains, International Labour Conference, Geneva, 30 May 2016

Many thanks for the opportunity of speaking here today.

This is a timely discussion. It occurs, of course, in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goal 8 to, “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. This includes a clear target for an end to slavery and child labour.

The deliberations of this Committee are therefore the first substantive international consideration of what practical measures may be put in place to help achieve the ideals of that particular goal.

I believe that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, give us the clearest guidance on how these deliberations should proceed. They state that businesses have the responsibility to respect workers’ human rights while governments have the responsibility to protect those rights. Of course it is desperately difficult for businesses to uphold their responsibilities when states are failing so abjectly in theirs.

That is a reality of the contemporary global political economy. Certain countries have sought to establish competitive advantage by scrapping the most basic of human rights protections for those who quite legitimately seek work in those countries.

This cannot go on. And this Committee now has an opportunity to lead on how it should end.

Decent work in international supply chains requires a number of quite basic protections in law and policy. It requires freedom of association. It requires an end to discrimination. It requires an end to tied visas and recruitment fees. It requires honest and sufficient systems of labour inspections to ensure that unscrupulous employers are not exploiting or enslaving vulnerable workers. It requires honest and sufficient systems of health and safety inspections so that poor people do not have to live with the threat that their working days may end by being burned to death, or crushed by collapsing concrete, as they toil to satisfy Northern hemisphere demands for cheap goods.

As a board member of the Ethical Trading Initiative in the UK I know that many business leaders, like all people of conscience, crave governments to put in place measures such as these to level the playing field by compelling unscrupulous employers to act with a modicum of decency.

So I respectfully but strongly suggest that this Committee must act to advance Sustainable Development Goal 8 by entering into a standard setting process on decent work in global supply chains to establish an international framework within which systemic risks and abuses can be addressed.

If it fails to do so then we will have failed at the first on the promise of a better world that these Development Goals make. And vulnerable workers will, for years to come, pay for that failure with the destruction of their hopes and loss of their lives.

Aspiration and Reality: How caste-blindness undermines UK anti-slavery efforts

Posted on May 25, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Speech to All-Party Group for Dalits, and Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Westminster, 24 May 2016

As director of Anti-Slavery International it is, from time to time, heartening to hear from senior members of the U.K. Government their intent that the UK should be a world leader against slavery.

Unfortunately these fine sentiments are hampered, possibly fatally, from the outset by some fundamental failures in domestic and international policy, most notably the failure to recognise the issue of caste as fundamental to both poverty and slavery for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia.

There is a lazy trope that is sometimes wheeled out in discussions of slavery, that anybody can be enslaved. Technically this is true, particularly if people are caught up in the cataclysm of war. But this disguises a much more fundamental truth: that generally those who are enslaved are from discriminated against groups: indigenous people in South America; migrants and refugees in Western Europe; Dalits and Adavasi in South Asia.

We have already heard in this meeting of the failure in British Government to confront the issue of caste in the UK itself. This is also a failure in UK’s development policy as exemplified by the Department for International Development’s withdrawal of aid from India on the presumption that the evolution of the Indian economy will lead to a it lifting all out of poverty.

Dr B R Ambedkar

This is a forlorn expectation in a society that Dr Ambedkar recognised was one where “Caste restricts opportunities. Restricted opportunity constricts ability. Constricted ability further restricts opportunity. Where caste prevails, opportunity and ability are restricted to ever narrowing circles of people”. In other words caste is not a recipe for economic justice let alone an end to slavery, in a region where the largest number of enslaved people reside.

The American historian, David Blight noted how in the pre-Civil War South of the United States even poor whites opposed the abolition of slavery because of the aristocratic privilege that it gave them. Dr Ambedkar identified that same aristocratic privilege in India when he recognised that the “caste system is not merely as division of labour, but a division of labourers”. And the sense of “aristocratic privilege” which emerges from this division of labourers facilitates the denial of rights to millions of Dalits.

In general slavery, poverty and injustice are systemic, not individual issues. This is never more true than when they are underpinned by caste. And this goes to the heart of the matter of slavery: Its elimination is a profoundly political issue. It is about power and exclusion from power. Those who are enslaved are excluded from power in part so they can be enslaved.

The attainment of civil rights and social justice that lead to an end to slavery are not inevitable achievements of economic development. They are often not even economically rational issues, particularly when those excluded from justice are from marginalised and discriminated-against groups.

Hatred and prejudice are irrational and visceral but they are not unconquerable. Proper law and policy can counteract them over time if properly implemented. But of course caste prejudice limits the implementation and the impact of decent law and policy.

We see this in India, for example, where there is much decent anti-poverty and anti-slavery law. Yet, corrupt police forces and overburdened court systems mean that such law is meaningless for those, such as Dalits and Adavasi, most vulnerable to slavery.

Child slaves in an Indian brick kiln, 2014

Prime Minister Modi’s stated intent to encourage inward investment by reducing factory inspections and permitting child labour, amongst other so-called labour market reforms, will of course reinforce the caste system and increase the risks of forced and child labour across India. This will, in turn, increase the likelihood that any goods or commodities produced there are tainted by slavery-like practices.

A short while ago Sir Simon McDonald, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, said that human rights is no longer a priority in the Foreign Office, and instead was supplanted by the”prosperity” agenda.

We see that reflected in the warm embrace the British government has given to Prime Minister Modi and the prospect of trade deals with an India whose supply chains are rife with forced and child labour.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended child labour in the United States by banning it in interstate commerce. To introduce comparable measures into international trade, as President Obama has just done in the United States, would give pause to those who currently profit across South Asia from the exploitation and enslavement of others that is enabled by the caste system.

If the UK truly wanted to be a world leader against slavery could begin by following President Obama’s suit and leading the European Union to similarly empower public officials to exclude the products of slavery from our markets.

Today there are many politicians and a few philanthropists who crave the title “the new Wilberforce”. But few demonstrate the most fundamental qualifications for that title: That is the moral courage and clarity of thought to challenge the vested interests and the national and international political-economic structures, such as caste, that enable so much contemporary injustice.

Until that happens the struggle to end slavery will remain unfinished, and that to end poverty will be a piecemeal affair, scarred by inequality and discrimination.

Not Peace but the Sword: Remarks to the Global Sustainability Network Forum

Posted on March 18, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Vatican City, 18 Mar 2016

The first thing we must recognise is that slavery is a profoundly political issue: it is about power and exclusion from power. Consequently anti-slavery work must, by its very nature, be contentious.

Slavery is sometimes a result of the cataclysm of war. We see that in the tragic histories of Sudan, Syria and Nigeria. But slavery also exists because of the way we have chosen to establish national and international laws, policies and customs relating to development, employment, trade and business. It is in the opportunities provided by these systems that slavery flourishes.

For example child labour and child slavery, including early marriage, are a global affliction because we have failed as a human society to establish a decent system of education. There are too few schools, and where there are schools, amongst other failings, the curriculum is often poor, ignoring girls needs, and with no provision for decent vocational and entrepreneurial education.

Alternatively in South Asia there is such limited rule of law that factory owners can with impunity enslave girls and young women to produce the very garments that many of us are wearing this morning.

Migrant construction workers in Qatar

The Qatar 2022 World Cup is being prepared by forced labour. Across the entire Arabian peninsula domestic workers are routinely enslaved. At the root of these systems of slavery is the Kafala system. This provides a legal prohibition on workers escaping even the most abusive of employment relationships.

It is a cynical system to legally facilitate medieval levels of exploitation and enslavement.

Britain Migrant Workers It is also essentially the same system that the UK government has in place for overseas domestic workers. The reforms that that government is currently proposing are cosmetic. They will do little to alter this de facto legalisation of trafficking for domestic servitude of many who are mothers sacrificing their lives and freedom in the hope of a better life for their children.

Jesus said, “I bring not peace but the sword”, because no system of injustice has ever been ended without conflict, and perhaps the greatest sin in the face of injustice is silence. Thus will it be with slavery. It will entail confrontation with those who selfishly guard the rules and resources that underpin it.

Dalit woman enslaved as a “manual scavenger”

Towards this end we must renew the struggle to obtain decent education for all, particularly girls, particularly Dalits and Adavasi, and the children of refugees and migrants.

We must loudly and publicly repudiate the sin of caste based apartheid which scars not only Hinduism, but also Islam and Christianity and underpins slavery in South Asia.

Business must stand with civil society to repudiate law and policy that eliminates the most basic protections for vulnerable workers and increases their risks of enslavement.

President Obama’s recent move to empower public officials to exclude slavery tainted goods from the US market is a significant one. It represents an extension of the rule of human rights law into the realm of international trade. As a result it threatens consequences to those that have tolerated, or worse, facilitated, slavery as a foundational element in their economic policies.

Europe should follow suit and put in place similar powers. Again this is something which ethical business leaders should demand if they truly want to prove themselves against slavery.

It is important for government, business and civil society to work together against slavery. But, paradoxically, if that work is not painful and thankless it will probably be worthless. We must seek empowerment for those enslaved, not mere superficial changes to unjust systems. But, if we have the courage to grasp that challenge, we may also transform a moment of history for vulnerable people across the world.

Splendid Isolation? North Korean slavery – not as distant as you might think

Posted on February 22, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

There is much international human rights law in the world, and in its midst there is a significant body of law on slavery.

But in spite of all this slavery is still widespread across the world. This is so for a number of reasons. First slavery is still in many places legal.

It is effectively legal in Saudi Arabia. In Qatar and United Arab Emirates the Kafalah system provides a legal underpinning for the enslavement by migrant workers by private individuals. In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan state-sponsored forced labour, particular in the cotton harvest, is used for the enrichment of the elites. In the United Kingdom trafficking of overseas domestic workers has de facto been legalised.

Slavery is also deeply institutionalised in North Korea, and as with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it is used to sustain the privilege and power of that country’s elite.
But, while the world often sees North Korea as an isolated place, consideration of the issue of North Korean slavery shows that it is not nearly so much an isolated thing.

The 2015 United States Trafficking in Persons report notes that, “Chinese authorities continued to forcibly repatriate some North Korean refugees by treating them as illegal economic migrants, despite reports some North Korean female refugees in China were trafficking victims. The government detained and deported such refugees to North Korea, where they may face severe punishment, even death, including in North Korean forced labor camps. The Chinese government did not provide North Korean trafficking victims with legal alternatives to repatriation. The government continued to bar [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] access to North Koreans in northeast China; the lack of access to UNHCR assistance and forced repatriation by Chinese authorities left North Koreans vulnerable to traffickers. Chinese authorities sometimes detained and prosecuted citizens who assisted North Korean refugees and trafficking victims, as well as those who facilitated illegal border crossings”.

All of this is contrary to China’s obligations to protect victims of trafficking under the Palermo Protocol of which they are a signatory. China’s failure provides means for Chinese traffickers to coerce their victims with the threat of denunciation to the Chinese authorities. It further sustains the institutional practices of slavery in which North Korea indulges, by effectively enforcing North Korea’s policies beyond its borders.

I would caution the rest of the world from getting too judgemental about this too quickly though. Here we see China indulging in something that the rest of the world also does: erasing an inconvenient slavery problem by the simple assertion, made with great conviction, that it is not actually a problem of slavery. Suggest to any Home Office minister or official that the UK’s overseas domestic worker visa is a license to traffick, and you will see this process in action here.

And of course the complicity with North Korean slavery is not restricted to China. In November 2014 the journalist Pete Pattisson exposed in the Guardian how North Korea trafficked construction workers to Qatar for work on the diverse building projects there.

As I noted at the outset Qatar has legal mechanisms in place to facilitate the enslavement of vulnerable workers by private individuals. One of the consequences of this is that the 2022 World Cup is likely to be the bloodiest sporting event since Julius Caesar’s funeral games. That fact has not caused the repudiation of Qatar in any international forums.

What Pete’s journalism exposed however is one of the sources of hard currency that props up the North Korean dictatorship is from North Korea’s sale of its people internationally. And that again has not caused any sort of repudiation of Qatar or those countries which also avail of the cheap labour of trafficked North Koreans. In October 2015 the UN Special Rapportuer on Human Rights in North Korea estimates that 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in foreign countries, mainly in the mining, logging, textile and construction industries and that the number is rising.

The UN Special Rapporteur estimated that the vast majority are working in China and Russia but others are reportedly employed in countries including Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Oman, Poland, United Arab Emirates and, of course, Qatar. If North Korea obtains only $10,000 per worker per annum this traffick in human beings would be worth half a billion annually to the dictatorship.

A fundamental issue that we see in many slavery cases, and exemplified in relation to North Korea, is that it is an international issue and needs therefore to be tackled internationally. The importance of international law, and international rule of law is exemplified in relation to North Korea. I suspect that like the UK China’s equivalent of the ministerial code has no mention of international law and so ministers considering their policy in relation to North Korean refugees and victims of trafficking are able to lightly dismiss their human rights obligations and those under the Palermo protocol.

The case of North Korea also shows that slavery must become a central issue of diplomacy. The easy acquiescence that the international community has in the slavery practices of other countries, aside from its moral bankruptcy, is also now a security risk. If the North Korean elite were not obtaining hard currency from the international trafficking of its citizens it would be that much more difficult for the dictatorship to cling to power.

I wonder do many consumers consider the risk of North Korean forced labour in garments that they purchase from China. Whether they do or not again the issue of the enslavement of North Korean exposes the need for new international law. Franklin Roosevelt effectively ended child labour in the United States by banning its use in inter-state commerce. President Obama has taken a leaf from Roosevelt’s book in introducing powers to exclude slavery tainted sea-food from the US.

The European Union should follow suite and establish similar general powers that could be used against the import or any goods manufactured with the use of forced labour, including that for trafficked North Koreans. Such a measure would have repercussions through the entire global political economy by causing real economic threat to those countries that have come to routinely use forced labour of vulnerable workers.

We see much that is horrible and distressing when we look at the institutions of slavery in North Korea, including our own reflection: that of the rest of the world at best standing idly by, at worst benefiting.

That needs to come to an end, not merely with fine words, but with robust and clear sighted international action. I hope the UK, for as long as it is part of Europe, will begin to provide proper leadership on this and bring the authority of the world’s largest single market to bear on this vital human rights issue.

Less certain than death: corporation tax in the modern world

Posted on February 5, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Originally published in Business Fights Poverty:

http://community.businessfightspoverty.org/profiles/blogs/dr-aidan-mcquade-less-certain-than-death-corporation-tax-in-the-m

In the wake of the recent controversies that have been sparked since the announcement of Google’s US $ 130 million settlement with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, it is worth contemplating, of all things, a few interrelated issues of political and moral philosophy; I find they can often help cut through the bluster.

Milton Friedman once declared that the only moral responsibility of business executives was to maximise profits for shareholders within the law.

Friedman was many things, including a brilliant and accessible writer, although many, myself included, would argue, a deeply simplistic one. Even Ronald Reagan was able to grasp the central tenets of his political economics.

We still live in a world crafted by the economic beliefs of Reagan and, in particular, of Margaret Thatcher, which drew deeply on many of Friedman’s core ideas. One consequence was that his view of the ethical responsibilities of business executives has become the dominant moral code amongst business executives across the world.

A further consequence is that many corporate executives see it as a moral responsibility to minimise the tax that their company pays. It is important to understand this as politicians fulminate ineffectually about the “unethical” nature of legal company tax avoidance: that there is a counter-narrative amongst many business people, which asserts that they are doing the right thing, the moral thing, for their shareholders by minimising, or even avoiding, tax.

scrooge mcduc I don’t agree with this perspective but my opinion will make little difference when weighed against the vast piles of loot that wholly legal tax avoidance could deliver. In any event that shouldn’t matter. The potential for tension and conflicts between competing moral philosophies was something which Adam Smith already anticipated in The Wealth of Nations (1776) when he argued that it was the state’s responsibility to regulate businesses: how companies can be made to make fair tax contributions is among the most pressing issues of business regulation today.

Certainly this is now a far more complicated issue than it was in Smith’s day as trade is significantly more international. But it is a challenge that must be confronted through extraterritorial law and, perhaps, new tax collection mechanisms, such as those mooted by Nigel Lawson, and the long overdue Robin Hood tax. New approaches are vital if there is to be any significant progress towards tax justice, greater economic fairness amongst small, medium and large businesses and a balancing of public finances.

This is an issue where the European Union could demonstrate its worth by offering the prize of continued access to EU markets across the entire member states only to those corporations that agree to abide by more transparent and just rules of taxation.

Paradoxically, to get to a position where politicians would be prepared to move on such a project will probably require quite a few more businesses, particularly those who are arguably disadvantaged by not being able to take such a flexible view of where they should be taxed as their giant competitors, demanding such action. Today, very few politicians are prepared to contemplate any significant changes to the globalising political economy without the imprimatur of at least some parts of the business community.

The problem with inequality

Posted on February 2, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Previously published in Business Fights Poverty:

http://community.businessfightspoverty.org/profiles/blogs/dr-aidan-mcquade-inequality

top-1-percent This week, Oxfam reported that the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population own more than the rest of us combined. Or, put another way that “… runaway inequality has created a world where 62 people own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.”

In his book, How to Speak Money, John Lanchester argues that such inequality emerges from a general consensus amongst policy makers, borne out by significant progress in the real world, that permitting such inequality is the best way to reduce poverty due to the economic activity which it stimulates.

Which would be fine if inequality itself were not a considerable problem. A number of business theorists and economists have argued that to obtain sustainability, it is essential to seek growth “at the base of the pyramid”, ensuring that the most abjectly poor have a stake in the global economy. But there may be even more worrying threats emerging from inequality.

In 2014, a study funded by NASA found that the competition for resources and the stratification of society into “elites” and “masses” were key factors in the collapse of civilisations. Essentially, by the time the existential threat to a civilisation began to encroach upon the day-to-day lives of the “elites” to such an extent that they were inclined to do something about it, it was already too late.

Such is the existential threat that today’s mind-boggling level of inequality poses to the world. And the challenge for ending this is not merely a rational political or economic one. The realities of contemporary slavery show us that those privileged by unequal power relationships in society become profoundly attached to them in ways that are often quite irrational. For example, a considerable constraint on obtaining growth at the “base of the pyramid” is that of prejudice; many Indian shop keepers would benefit if abjectly poor Dalits and Adavasi had more disposable income to spend. However, many of the same shop keepers would be aghast at such ritually “unclean” people coming into their premises, no matter how much money they possessed.

Similarly, the prejudice against South Asian migrants to the Gulf States makes it next to impossible for the prejudiced to contemplate how such migrants might contribute to society if they were given decent work instead of being part of the Kafala system which enables their enslavement with impunity.

There are solutions to such prejudices: extension of the rule of law, outlawing discrimination, and educating children for mutual understanding and respect. Such steps will require considerable moral courage by our political leaders. And given that many of the global elite are probably in thrall to such prejudices and utterly unaffected by their consequences, it is rather unlikely that too many proposals to tackle inequality and prejudice will emerge from Davos this week. We can only hope that the voices of citizens from civil society and business alike protesting the threats that inequality poses for us all, will eventually pressure the political and economic elites of the world to finally, perhaps at some future Davos, take concerted action to create a fairer world.

The Dark Side of the Force: Human agency and human belief

Posted on January 7, 2016 by aidanjmcquade

Much of the Star Wars universe is brilliantly executed fantasy. Some of it – think ewoks and bleeding Jar Jar fecking Binks – is execrable. But in the midst of all of this there is at least one important philosophical point: Obi Wan and Vader follow the same religion. The only difference is that Vader’s path is on the “Dark Side”.

Many belief systems have similar “Dark” and “Light” sides. An atheist, for example, can follow the “Light Side” by viewing life as something she had better do right because she will only get one shot at this. Or she can decide that she can do what she likes, given that there are no immortal consequences for even the worst of actions.

Similarly a Christian could follow the “Light” by seeing each of us a human beings in the image of God in spite of our flaws and differences. Or he could take to judging how poorly everyone else appears against his subjective standards and inflicting his notion of righteous vengeance at every opportunity.

Martha Nussbaum, in The Fragility of Goodness, argues that humans often do evil not because they transgress a moral system, but because they privilege one moral system, or perhaps a particular interpretation of a moral system, over another. Christopher Browning demonstrates the depth of depravity that can emerge from such thinking when one group of “Ordinary Men” in Eastern Poland during the Second World War decided to uphold their perceived duties to their Furher over their more fundamental human duties not to butcher unarmed children, women and men in cold blood.

But, in spite of the power of well demonstrated social pressures in such circumstances, human agency, the choices we make based on our beliefs and values, is still at the core of human action. A person can still choose to be a decent person in spite of the social pressures to the contrary. Or, indeed in spite of their underlying belief system: two of the great “rescuers” of the Second World War, Oskar Schindler and John Rabe, were both card-carrying Nazis. So decency, even heroism, does not depend simply on the belief system that we choose. It also depends on how we choose to interpret it.

I have known great and humane atheists. I have known great and humane Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Buddists. I have also known one person who used their noisy public commitment to vital human rights issues as a cloak to disguise the immense depth of their moral cowardice and venality. And then there are the murderous Crusaders of history, the Nazis, the Maoists and Stalinists, the Klan and their ideological cousins in Islamic State – those who use their beliefs as excuses to choose the darkest and bloodiest paths through life.

The “Light Side”

Richard Dawkins and his fellow travellers like to blame religion for so many of the world’s ills. But the sprawling silliness of Star Wars, and the mythical universe that it has created, has hit upon a much wiser understanding of human nature. As Shakespeare, the great chronicler of human folly and human evil, also understood: the faults are in ourselves.

Aidan McQuade

Musings, mostly on books: Essays and reviews exploring the choices that shape our world.

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