Why we need the welfare state more than ever

The long read London Guardian

Why we need the welfare state more than ever

Shocked by the ‘poverty cycle’, British reformers created a safety net for casual workers. Now precarious working conditions are back, and the welfare state is under attack. By Chris Renwick

Tucked away behind York Minster – the grand cathedral adorned with medieval stained-glass windows that dominates the North Yorkshire city’s skyline – is a cobbled street that has become an informal labour exchange. Each day, just before lunch, couriers dressed in the distinctive mint green and black uniform of Deliveroo, the online food delivery company, arrive at the end of this street, park their bikes and scooters next to a bench, and talk among themselves. Clutching their smartphones, they wait for someone, somewhere in the city, to place an order with one of the nearby restaurants and cafes. When an order comes through, one of the couriers will pick it up and deliver it in exchange for a small fee. They will then return to the bench to wait.

Plenty of people in early 21st-century Britain can identify with the experience of working for a company like Deliveroo. Drivers for the taxi firm Uber, for example, know only too well what it’s like for work to arrive in fits and starts via an app. But even more people are employed on zero-hour contracts in a wide variety of jobs, from stacking shelves to waiting tables to caring for the elderly. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 900,000 workers rely on a job with a zero-hour contract. These people start every week not knowing how much work they will get or how much money they will earn.

Informal or casual employment of this kind helps explain why Britain’s unemployment rate has not sky-rocketed since the financial crash of 2008. By contrast, almost a century ago, during the struggles of the 1920's and the Great Depression of the 30's, unemployment regularly climbed above 10%; at the most difficult moments, it went above 20%, with the true level – including those who were out of work but not officially registered as unemployed – even higher. Unemployment was also a serious problem – and one that suffered from the same difficulties of measurement – during the 1980's, when it climbed steadily to more than 12% during the early Thatcher years and, despite a steady decline, ended the decade at almost 7%. Despite the past decade seeing one of the slowest economic recoveries in history, unemployment has not got out of hand for long periods. After peaking at 8.5% in 2011, the rate has recently dropped below 4.5%.

The Conservative-led governments of the past seven years argued that declining unemployment rates are a sign that austerity is working. In the wake of the financial crash, in which banks collapsed and ATM's were hours away from refusing to dispense cash, David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues argued that there were too many skivers, sleeping off a life on benefits, while everyone else – the strivers, as they were labelled – trudged to work to support them. Cutting benefits would solve all manner of problems: it would get the skivers back to work, bring public spending down, and be good for the general health of the economy.

Like the unemployment statistics, these claims are deceptive. Millions of people are “just about managing”, to use a phrase the prime minister, Theresa May, was once fond of, and many are faring much worse. In the 12 months before March 2017, the Trussell Trust, Britain’s largest food bank charity, gave out more than 1 m three-day emergency food parcels to people in desperate need. At the same time, as the Guardian has reported this week, debt has ballooned in the UK, returning to pre-financial crash levels, with household debt at 150% of income in 2015. This debt has been fuelled by low-to-no wage growth, inflated house prices and, thanks to historically low interest rates, credit made available for items such as cars. But the main issue for the estimated 8.3 million people living with unmanageable debt is needing to borrow money to survive.

According to some commentators, much of this economic insecurity – a major contributor to the discontent that made Vote Leave’s slogan “take back control” so powerful in the EU referendum last year – is rooted in a profound set of changes taking place across western economies. Traditional ways of working and archaic vested interests are being challenged by new and powerful forces. The gig economy epitomised by the likes of Deliveroo and Uber, for example, is often talked about as “disruption”, with digital technology a new and irresistible means of transforming business practices and satisfying their customers. Tremendous entrepreneurial individualism and flexibility is being unleashed, the world just needs to catch up.

The difficulty with these arguments is that we’ve been here before. The sight of workers standing in large groups waiting for work would have been familiar to the residents of British cities such as York more than a century ago. Those workers were painfully aware that irregular and low-paid employment offered few guarantees. While they might be able to obtain enough work each day, week or month, they could be stopped in their tracks at any moment by injury or illness. For all their willingness to work, those casual labourers, like their successors now, might not be able to make ends meet – and while not troubling the unemployment figures, were at constant risk of falling into debt and destitution. Those earlier generations’ answer to their problems, however, was the welfare state – the very thing that successive governments have blamed for the country’s current situation.

Many of the issues at the heart of the current malaise in British politics can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when what we now call the welfare state was slowly being assembled. From a legislative perspective, the welfare state was initially focused on a specific problem that had grown since the early 1800s: that many workers struggled to earn regular and reliable wages throughout the entire year. But these labour market problems were believed to be bound up with other issues: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease – the “five giant evils” William Beveridge identified in his famous report, published in 1942. Schools, hospitals, council houses and benefits for those out of work were just some of the threads woven together to create the tapestry of the modern welfare state. The unraveling of that settlement has seen a resurgence of the original problem governments tried to tackle more than a century ago.

The country had grown wealthy during the industrial revolution, via the financial might of the City of London, the manufacturing power of the north of England, and an enthusiastic embrace of free trade. The poor, however, had not disappeared. The poor law, established in 1601, at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, made Britain’s guarantee of help for the destitute unique among European nations. In the 1830's, an influential group of reformers, who later would be known as “modernizers”, changed the terms on which that help was offered. Assistance should amount to less than what the lowest-paid labourers could obtain with their wages, reformers insisted. Furthermore, help should only be available to people who were prepared to live in a workhouse – a dark, dank and miserable place where they were given an ill-fitting uniform and forced to carry out menial tasks in exchange for shelter and meagre rations of the most basic food.

The theory was deterrence: make the poor law frightening and only the most desperate – those truly in need – would trouble the authorities and public purse. Yet theory had a difficult relationship with reality. By the closing decades of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of people – a total close to the population of Liverpool – were still using the poor law every year. The number was so large that many local authorities could not accommodate them in workhouses and had to continue offering cash handouts or food, as had been the case before the 1830's. Who were these people and why were they still asking for help?

Shipping magnate Charles Booth organised a survey of London in 1886, which collected information about what went on behind closed doors in the capital’s slums. Booth then divided London’s population into categories based on their economic means and – somewhat questionably to modern eyes – their habits and behaviour. The result was a shock for his middle-class readers: 30% of London’s population seemed unable or only just about able to meet the basic costs of living.

Booth’s research threw light on dark corners of Britain and implied that the poor were a much bigger group than even the government’s statistics on the number of poor law claimants suggested. Many people wondered if he was right. One was Seebohm Rowntree – a member of a York-based Quaker family that manufactured confectionery and prided themselves on being responsible employers. They tried to know all their workers’ names and introduced welfare schemes, including an eight-hour day. But this approach became more difficult as business boomed and their company grew during the late 19th century. When Booth’s report came out, they worried they were not close enough to their employees to know if Booth’s conclusions applied to them too.

Rowntree and his assistants went out on to the streets of York in 1897 to investigate. Armed with notebooks, they criss-crossed the city, frequently passing the place where Deliveroo couriers would congregate more than a century later. They visited more than 45,000 people in the following two years, asking how much they earned, what they paid in rent, what food they bought, and all manner of other questions about their lives. Rowntree made sure to compile information on wages from local employers and to consult the latest medical research on the number of calories men, women and children needed to consume every day. He used this information to draw a “poverty line” – a calculation of the goods and services an individual needed to survive in modern society and how much money they needed to acquire them – and figured out how many people fell below it.

To Rowntree’s surprise, Booth’s findings applied to York as well as London. But Rowntree did not agree with his static description of the poor. Booth’s classification included numerous sub-divisions and distinctions: those he considered criminal, morally weak and semi-savage were separated from the poor who had not displayed an obvious – and unacceptable – flaw, such as a weakness for drink. Rowntree, however, believed there was much movement between these categories. The poor seemed always to be with us, he explained, but the poor were not always the same people.

Rowntree identified what he called the “poverty cycle”. Many people earned enough money to support themselves, he argued. From time to time, though, their circumstances changed – they got married, had a child or a relative died. These quite ordinary events stretched resources, sometimes for just a few weeks, but often much longer. But when they were over, the pressure on household finances was lifted, meaning people rose above the poverty line. Nevertheless, there was always something around the corner, waiting to drag people back down again; most obviously old age, when all those years of being stretched to the limit and unable to save would take their final toll.

Social reformers and charity workers across the country observed similar patterns of interruptions to, and pressures on, people’s earnings throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the most important vantage points was Toynbee Hall, a university settlement located between White chapel and Spitalfields in the East End of London, where a small group of Oxford graduates lived among the poor, doing voluntary work and social research, before taking up employment – often of a much more lucrative and prestigious kind – elsewhere.

Among Toynbee Hall’s residents between 1903 and 1905 was William Beveridge. Beveridge spent time in the East End working with the unemployed, observing their daily routines, assisting with schemes that aimed to get them back into work, and following caseworkers from charities. In the process, Beveridge had come to a number of important conclusions. One was that unemployment was “at the root of most other social problems” because society “lays upon its members responsibilities which in the vast majority of cases can be met only from the reward of labour”. The other was that conventional wisdom about the causes of unemployment was wrong. For some commentators, unemployment was a question of character and motivation. An increasingly large part of mainstream opinion certainly accepted that a reality of modern industrial capitalism was periods when there would be no work available for some people – because trades were seasonal, or markets fluctuated. But Beveridge believed even this was a superficial understanding of the issue.

The biggest contribution to unemployment outside the downward slopes of the trade cycle, Beveridge argued, was the inefficiency of industry when it came to hiring workers. He asked readers of his book Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1909) to imagine a scene he had encountered on many occasions: 10 wharves that each employed between 50 and 100 men per day, half of whom were regular staff and half of whom were reserves. While each wharf would experience similar high and low points in trade throughout the year, they were also likely to have their own individual fluctuations within those patterns. Anyone looking at the 10 wharves as a whole would not see these smaller deviations. The problem was that those smaller deviations were all that mattered to the reserve labourers walking from wharf to wharf asking for work each morning, because they meant the difference between them and their families eating, or going hungry.

If there was better communication and planning, Beveridge argued, almost all of those men would be able to find work each day. The problem was that business and industries were quite happy with the situation: they often had many more workers than vacancies, and did not need to pick up the costs of supporting those who couldn’t find work. Beveridge believed the state was the only institution with both the power to solve this problem and the interest in doing so. The political will to act on this conviction would have far-reaching implications for the millions of people who have found themselves out of work since. But we have slid backwards into a situation where precarious work paid by the hour is considered a sign of progress.

The Liberal party administrations that governed Britain before the first world war changed Britain for ever. They modernised the tax system, differentiating between earned and unearned incomes, and introduced graduated rates for the roughly 3% of the population who qualified to pay income tax. David Lloyd George, the Liberals’ charismatic chancellor of the exchequer, announced a “People’s Budget” in 1909 – one for “raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness”.

The principal aim of the budget was to tackle interruptions to earnings among the working-age population. Following the example of similar schemes in Germany, national insurance involved weekly contributions from three groups: workers, their employers and the state. All wage earners aged 16 to 70 and earning less than £160 a year who paid weekly contributions of four pence a week (three in the case of women) could claim sick pay for up to 26 weeks a year, and treatment from a government-approved doctor. But another aspect of the Liberals’ plans had not been tried anywhere else before: 2.25 million men in a number of trades and industries, such as construction and shipbuilding, where work could be brought to a halt by something as unpredictable as the weather, were to be enrolled in a scheme of compulsory unemployment insurance, which offered benefits of seven shillings a week for up to 15 weeks a year in exchange for contributions of two and a half pence a week.

These schemes had obvious limitations. Pensions were meagre; unemployment insurance was mainly for skilled men; health insurance excluded hospital care, and spouses and children. Almost everyone found something to be unhappy about. The British Medical Association complained about the prospect of doctors being forced to become government employees, while friendly societies, trade unions and private insurance companies thought the state was trying to force them out of business. Middle-class households resented being made to pay out to insure their domestic help. Moreover, Labour MPs complained about the contributory system. What about those who couldn’t pay in or who found themselves out of work for longer than 15 weeks? Why not follow the example of pensions and pay benefits to all out of general taxation?

The Liberal government recognized that national insurance on its own would not tackle interruptions to earnings; interventions into the economy would be required, too. Beveridge was drafted in by Winston Churchill, president of the board of trade, to help roll out a system of labour exchanges – another idea borrowed from Germany. A forerunner of the modern jobcentre, labour exchanges were an important part of the government’s plans for administering national insurance, with employers offered incentives to advertise vacancies in the exchanges and the unemployed asked to visit them to demonstrate they had looked for a job. For Beveridge, this had the potential to create an “organised fluidity of labour” that eliminated the kinds of problems he had observed in east London.

Labour exchanges certainly helped some people find jobs, but they were never the dynamic sites of free-flowing information and recruitment that Beveridge imagined. Pensions and national insurance proved much more successful and durable, though. After the first world war, a succession of governments extended and reformed the schemes in significant ways. The result, building on the centuries-old guarantee of help for the destitute, was an imperfect yet impressive system that offered assistance to many, though far from all, people in times of need.

During the Great Depression of the 1930's, however, when the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald was expelled from his own party after he pushed through a 10% cut to unemployment benefits, there was widespread concern that these schemes were unsustainable. Interruptions to earnings looked like a minor problem when many people feared the complete collapse of the global economic system. What Britain seemed to have, Beveridge later suggested, was a series of “patches” – things that could be sewn on to country’s tearing fabric, rather than solutions to its underlying problems. Perhaps capitalism – a system that treated unskilled workers without the fallback of insurance as dispensable – was the real problem. There had to be a way to manage the economy that would transform life for people in Britain and enable national insurance to offer genuine security to all.

The economist John Maynard Keynes was always clear about whose side he was on. “I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense,” he explained, “but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.” Although many of his contemporaries threw their lot in with Labour during the interwar years, believing they were the only realistic hope for progressive reform in an era of universal suffrage, Keynes stood firm. He was a Liberal and he intended to do everything he could to help the party – going so far as to help formulate its economic policy under Lloyd George’s leadership during the late 1920's and early 30's. Keynes was not alone. Beveridge might have kept his allegiance quiet in a bid to appear neutral, but in 1944 he won a by election for the Liberals, and ran the party’s 1945 general election campaign.

Keynes cemented his status as the most important economist of the 20th century during the mid-1930's, when he published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money – the book that would serve as the set text for one side of the argument about how governments should respond to downturns and recessions. The world has revisited this argument regularly since the interwar years, including after the financial crash of 2008, when Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman urged governments not to forget the lessons that Keynes had once taught them.

Thrashed out over five years of debate and discussion with his research students and colleagues at Cambridge, The General Theory is now widely known for a relatively small number of ideas and a simple message. Governments should resist the temptation to cut back during recessions, Keynes argued, because their root cause was a contraction in aggregate demand – the total amount of goods and services that are purchased in an economy – which collapsed when people and organisations, uncertain about the future, simultaneously chose to hold on to their money. Keynes explained how spending money had effects that rippled outwards in the economy, including the creation of employment, as the demand for goods and services increased. Governments should stop worrying about deficits and sound finance when times were bad – they could take care of them once everything was moving again.

Unlike Keynes, Beveridge was not invited to help run the economy during the second world war, and was disappointed not to be fully involved. By the summer of 1941, the government had tired of his sniping from the sidelines, and gave him a job they thought would keep him out of sight and mind for some time to come: a review of national insurance. In November the following year, he delivered the result: his ground-breaking report, Social Insurance and Allied Services.

The Beveridge Report on Social Services & Allied Services from 1942. Photograph: The National Archives.

The Beveridge report was not quite what people were expecting, or what people now think it is. The British people did not want a “Santa Claus state” that handed out gifts to everyone, he argued; they wanted a form of economic and social security that reflected a history of paying into the system. Benefits should cover a much wider range of risks, Beveridge explained, but they should be simple to understand: everyone – workers, employers and the state – should pay flat-rate contributions and get flat-rate benefits paid out in return.

On the face of it, there was no reason for the government to be worried. Beveridge’s benefits scheme involved significant extensions and new responsibilities, but it also required people to pay hefty weekly contributions. However, Beveridge had made a number of recommendations, which he modestly called “assumptions”. The first two were an allowance for each child born (after the first) and a National Health Service, free for all people, both of which would be paid for out of general taxation. The other was that the government commit to a new way of running the economy: one in which they made sure that unemployment never went above 8.5%.

Beveridge had called these recommendations assumptions because he believed a reformed system of national insurance could not work without them. Unemployment had to be kept below 8.5% so that people could build up a history of contributions and the system did not collapse under the weight of demand when they needed help. Indeed, the easiest system to administer was one in which authorities could safely assume there were jobs for the vast majority of people.

Initially, the government was not as enthusiastic about committing to his recommendations as the public, who bought an astonishing 100,000 copies of Social Insurance and Allied Services during the month after it was published. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, refused to comment on the report for three months, and offered a vague endorsement when he eventually did. By the end of 1944, however, when victory over Germany looked certain, a series of white papers committed the British state not only to Beveridge’s plan, but also to a number of other new policies, such as a new secondary school system with a leaving age of 15. The road map for social reconstruction had been drawn.

The welfare state that came into being during the late 1940's underpinned a whole way of life that politicians only started to pull apart from the early 1980's onward. The intention during the third quarter of the 20th century was to bring capitalism under control, specifically its tendency to interrupt and put downwards pressure on people’s earnings, rather than dispense with the system entirely. The Labour party, which won a historic landslide in the election of July 1945, put its mark on the whole project, in particular by nationalising whole swaths of industry. Yet, after half a century of debate and legislation, each political party had left fingerprints on the final product.

These points matter for a number of reasons. One is that we often assume the welfare state was a collectivist venture. But even strident individualists found reasons to support it. Indeed, the era of social democracy helped create successive generations of individualists, including the working-class people who suddenly found themselves socially mobile during the 1950s, 60's and 70's. Looking back, and quite understandably, those generations can often give in to the temptation to imagine this progress was all down to their own hard work. Yet, as sociologists such as John Goldthorpe have shown, these generations rode the economic and social wave created by the policies adopted after 1945. Economic growth expanded the middle class by creating new management-level jobs into which working-class people could move, in both the public and private sectors, meaning there was “more room at the top”. Moreover, in an era of full employment, home ownership started to rise, not only because new houses were built, but also because it was perfectly reasonable for banks to assume that people would hold down a job for 25 continuous years and therefore pay back any money they borrowed.

Could that strategy be repeated today? The answer that has been given repeatedly for the past decade – and in some cases longer – is no. We have come to see the welfare state simply as a cost to be kept down rather than part of an economic and social strategy that aims to deliver security for all and opportunities to obtain more for those who want to. The idea that these goals are no longer obtainable is clearly false. A good start would be to reconnect with the liberal idea, now more than a century old, that everyone sees returns when they pool risks, whether it’s the individuals who can stop worrying about what is around the corner, governments that might otherwise cut their headline costs but succeed only in shifting it somewhere else, or the companies that benefit from healthy and educated workers operating in a safe environment. A successful economy requires all these actors to understand that they need to give, not just take, in order to build an environment in which they and those that follow them are able to succeed.

Are more radical measures required? In the long term, yes. The world has changed since the early 20th century: businesses and individuals behave differently and the “assumptions”, as Beveridge would have called them, that go with national insurance have evolved. The trend has been to pay for things by pushing the costs on to individuals, as has been done with university tuition fees. But there seems only so much mileage in this approach when debt is reaching dangerous levels, wages are stagnant and, as the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, income generated by wealth has increased rapidly for those lucky enough to have it.

One appropriate response would be to breathe new life into the radical strand of liberalism that differentiated between earned and unearned incomes back at the start of the 20th century. Piketty has argued for a global tax on wealth. But there are domestic policies that would go some way to achieving similar ends. We could consider applying capital gains tax to property – recouping some of the considerable profits that those generations who benefited from the welfare state have acquired from the houses they were able to buy, in part because of it.

A world without retirement

Some commentators suggest what seem like even more radical ideas, such as universal basic income (UBI): a guaranteed regular payment for every citizen that would keep them above the poverty line, even if they chose not to work. UBI would deliver security, but faces numerous technical challenges, not least the significant differences in living costs across the country, which make a “universal” sum impossible to settle on, even before tackling the political problems of accusations that it would simply make everyone a benefit claimant. Yet versions of the idea have found support across the political spectrum, from neoliberals such as Milton Friedman to the left wing economist and one-time Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. For the left, a basic income would give people security and dignity. For the right, however, that basic security would be valuable because it would mean people would be free to take the kind of irregular work offered by the gig economy or zero-hours contracts. The lesson of these differences and convergences of opinion is that tackling economic insecurity need not be done at the expense of efficiency, competitiveness or innovation.

What Would War with North Korea Look Like?

By Robin Wright The New Yorker

Military experts warn that, while war with North Korea would likely topple Kim Jong Un’s regime, the U.S. could be pulled into an open-ended quagmire.

Over the past half century, the United States has fought only one big war—in Kuwait, in 1991—that was a conventional conflict. Operation Desert Storm launched a U.S.-led coalition against the Iraqi Army after it occupied oil-rich Kuwait. The combat was quick (six weeks) and successful in its limited goal: expelling Saddam Hussein’s forces from the small Gulf sheikdom. Fewer than a hundred and fifty Americans died in battle.

America’s other big wars over the same period—in Vietnam, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies; Afghanistan, after 9/11; and Iraq, on and off since 2003—have been unconventional. They pitted a well-trained army with the world’s deadliest weapons against insurgents, militias, terrorists, or a poorly trained army, all with far less firepower and no air power. In each, asymmetric conflicts stymied the United States. Wars dragged on for years. Death tolls were in the thousands—in Vietnam, tens of thousands. The aftermath—and unintended consequences—were far messier and bloodier. The price tags were in the trillions of dollars.

A war with North Korea would probably be a combination of both types of conflict, played out in phases, according to former generals who served in Korea and military specialists. The first phase, they say, would be a conventional war pitting North Korea against American and South Korean forces. It could start several ways, but two scenarios, both preemptive actions, reflect how a full-fledged conflict might start—even if unwanted by both sides. Asked on Wednesday if he was considering military action, President Trump told reporters, “Frankly, that’s not a first choice, but we will see what happens.”

In the first scenario, the United States could engage in what is known as a left-of-launch strike just before a North Korean missile liftoff, or in the first seconds of its flight. This could be done kinetically or by cyber attack, although it’s unclear whether the United States has that full cyber capability yet. The regime of Kim Jong Un has already launched eighteen missile tests this year. South Korea reported this week that Pyongyang may test another intercontinental ballistic missile within days. If the Trump Administration chose to thwart a missile test now or in the future, former generals and military analysts told me, North Korea is likely to retaliate, possibly escalating tensions into open warfare and unleashing weaponry Pyongyang feared it might otherwise lose in U.S. air strikes.

The second possible scenario would be North Korea initiating military action because of fears or signals that the United States is close to an attack. The signals could range from small steps, such as Washington pulling out diplomatic dependents from South Korea, to major actions, such as deploying more military aircraft, equipment, personnel, or even nuclear weapons in the South. Pyongyang could preemptively attack to fend off what it feared was going to be a full-scale invasion.

Fiery rhetoric from both sides has escalated tensions over the past month. In August, President Trump vowed, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” A few hours later, the Strategic Force of the North Korean People’s Army countered, “It is a daydream for the U.S. to think that its mainland is an invulnerable Heavenly kingdom.” The incendiary rhetoric is sucking the air out of diplomacy, a track still heavily favored by South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and Europe. As a result, brokering any compromise on Pyongyang’s nuclear reality seems more distant, especially given its rapid pace of weapons and delivery-system development, exceeding all intelligence estimates. The only deal Kim might now consider is a freeze—and at a heavy price from the West, which the White House seems unwilling to negotiate, or even talk about what else would be acceptable.

If war erupted, the first phase would likely play out for at least a month, and possibly many weeks more. “North Korea is in a position now where its conventional warfare has atrophied over the years and not been modernized much,” the retired General Gary E. Luck, the former commander of both U.S. and U.N. forces in Korea, told me. “But it still has the numbers in its military—because of the type of regime it is—that it could execute a conventional war not far afield from the last time around.” It also now has a nuclear bomb.

North Korea has almost 1.2 million troops in its various military branches, plus another six hundred thousand in its reserves and almost six million in its paramilitary reserves, according to “Military Balance 2017,” published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a global think tank. South Korea’s armed forces are about half the size of the North’s, but it has 4.5 million troops in its reserves and another three million in its paramilitary reserves. Partly because there is still no formal end to the last Korean War, only an armistice, the United States has about twenty-eight thousand troops deployed in South Korea, with tens of thousands more in the U.S. Pacific Command.

In the end, North Korea would lose a war, the generals and military analysts say. The regime of Kim Jong Un would probably collapse.

But the Second Korean War could be deadly—producing tens of thousands of deaths just in Seoul, and possibly a million casualties in the South alone. It would almost certainly be devastating physically in both the North and South, military experts say.

“The devastation to the peninsula would be disastrous, just disastrous,” the retired Major General James (Spider) Marks, who served in both Korea and Iraq, told me. (During the first Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, the United States lost more than thirty thousand troops in battle. South Korea lost almost a quarter million troops and a million civilians. In North Korea, just over a million troops and civilians are estimated to have died.)

Luck, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam and the first war against Iraq, told me “it would be a very tough fight.” He said, “in the end, we would win, but the price we’d pay to get there would be pretty dadgum high. There would be horrendous loss of life. There are twenty-five million people in South Korea within artillery range of North Korea.” North Korea has thousands of artillery pieces embedded deep in the northern slopes above the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula.

Lost in tensions over North Korea’s nuclear programs are its chemical and biological weapons, Luck added. “They are something to be worried about.”

As bad as the scenario for the first phase seems, the second phase could then get worse. “A war would not end quickly after the defeat of North Korean forces,” Mark Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Washington, told me. “North Korea would not be immediately pacified.”

A conventional conflict could then devolve into the now familiar kind of insurgency that U.S. forces face in the Middle East and South Asia. Loyalists to the Kim regime might fight on in covert cells and costly guerrilla attacks.

“North Korea would not go down as fast as Saddam’s regime (in less than a month of the U.S. invasion) or the Taliban (in two months), but the aftermath would be similar and probably of greater intensity,” Fitzpatrick said. “North Koreans are brainwashed into believing that the Kim dynasty is deity-like and Americans are the source of all evil.”

Numerous war games have analyzed what it would take to eliminate the regime and its weaponry, he noted, but little has been done to study what might happen afterward. The same problem plagued military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan: they achieved their initial goals, only to get sucked into open-ended quagmire.

Marks, the retired general, compared U.S. vulnerabilities in Phase II to problems with NATO's planning for possible war with the former Soviet Union. “No plans extended into the phase of conflict following war and the likely use of nuclear weapons to stop the advancing Soviet ground forces,” he told me. “Unconventional war fits no pattern, defies the military planner's imagination—and might obviate the use of force in the first place.”

One of the big unknowns is what China would do if war were to break out in the neighboring Korean Peninsula. Beijing does not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons. The latest U.N. resolution imposing new sanctions on Kim’s regime produced rare unanimity among the fifteen members of the Security Council. But China is also North Korea’s closest economic partner; its southern provinces are heavily involved in trade with Pyongyang. Beijing views North Korea as a buffer to prevent Western influence along its border. It does not want reunification of the peninsula. And it would shudder at the prospect of North Korea’s collapse and future instability on its border, the military analysts told me.

U.S. air strikes of some North Korean targets might require flying not far from the border with China, Marks warned. And China would be just as concerned as the United States would be if another country came that close to U.S. borders. “North Korea is a subset of our relations with China,” Marks told me. “What impact would a war have? Devastation of Seoul, the unraveling of world order, and China on the other side with ‘enemy’ status. And if the United States and China are belligerents, everything is up for grabs.”

The dire predictions about what a possible war with North Korea would look like are among the many reasons that current and former military officials strongly favor more diplomatic outreach—whatever President Trump says publicly. Last week, Trump tweeted, “The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years. Talking is not the answer!” Hours later, James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense and a former marine, publicly broke with the President. “We’re never out of diplomatic solutions,” Mattis told reporters while standing next to South Korea’s Defense Minister, Song Young-moo, at the Pentagon.

Marks told me that Mattis’s statements reflected the views of top American commanders. “There is certainly a hawkish option on North Korea,” he said, “but there is no hawkish faction at the Pentagon. Nobody wants another war in Korea.”

Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’

• The Golden House is published by Jonathan Cape.

Beginning with the inauguration of Obama and ending with the election of Trump, Rushdie’s latest novel is an intimate portrait of New York. The author talks about the journey from hope to despair and always feeling an outsider

Emma Brockes London Guardian

The image that came to Salman Rushdie, around which he would build his new novel, was an enclosed garden in downtown Manhattan. It is a space that exists in real life (although, as one of the characters in The Golden House observes, real life is a category from which it is increasingly hard to distinguish less reliable entities) and with which Rushdie is familiar; old friends inhabit one of the houses backing on to the garden. “The idea of there being a secret space inside this noisy public space,” he says. “I had this light bulb moment that it was like a theatre – with a Greek tragedy, amphitheatre quality – where the characters could enact their stories. It also had a Rear Window quality, of being able to spy on everybody else’s lives. At that point, the Golden family decided they wanted to move in.”

We are in the offices of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent of 30 years – “my longest relationship!” he says gleefully – a mile north of Rushdie’s apartment in lower Manhattan. He is looking particularly Rushdie-esque today: part rumpled intellectual, part something less sober. At 70, Rushdie has had more public incarnations than most writers of literary fiction – brilliant novelist, man on the run, subject of tabloid scorn and government dismay, social butterfly, and, in that singularly British designation, man lambasted for being altogether too Up Himself – but it is often overlooked what good company he is. His humor this morning is not caustic, nor ironised, nor filtered through any of the more protected modes of engagement, but is a kind of jolliness – a giggly delight – that simply makes him a good laugh to hang out with.

The Golden family are transplants to New York from Mumbai (or “Bombay” as the author continues to call it in conversation, with what feels like particularly Rushdian obstinacy), an outlandishly wealthy father and his three dysfunctional sons in flight from a personal tragedy; the loss of their mother during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. We never discover their “real” names; on arriving in the US, the patriarch renames himself Nero Golden – Rushdie, anticipating a collective eye-roll perhaps, points out in the novel this is no more ridiculous a name than Huckleberry Finn or Ichabod Crane – and tests the principle that the US is a place where one can leave one’s past at the door. It is an issue with which Rushdie is intimately familiar; the split in identity, the ability to shed one’s skin after a trauma and potentially skip off scot-free, and he explores both the impossibility and, ultimately, the undesirability of this. That the novel opens with the inauguration of Barack Obama and closes with the election of President Trump, “the Joker” as Rushdie brands him, is the novelist’s reminder there is no progress in history that can’t be undone.

The biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day.

The week of our meeting last month, reverberations from the fascist march in Charlottesville are still being felt, along with myriad other stories from Trump’s White House. “I remember when there wasn’t that much news,” says Rushdie, “when the biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day.” It would seem to be a bad time to be a novelist and if Rushdie’s new novel seeks to compete with real life, it is by retreating from the polemicism of so much news and social media to get inside a non-partisan reality.

There are a lot of topical references in The Golden House – from “no-platforming” and illiberal campus activism to the transgender debate and other iterations of identity politics, which Rushdie approaches as symptoms of a broader cultural change. “In America when you talk about identity issues, at the moment a lot of that is gender identity. If you’re in England, there’s this other argument about national identity, which was behind the Brexit catastrophe; and in India, when people talk about identity, they’re really talking about religious sectarianism. In all three places, the identity subject is colossal but it is understood completely differently. I was thinking about that, too.”

Although Rushdie is of a vintage inclined to get grumpy about aspects of the gender identity debate – the suggested replacement of he/she with a spectrum of alternative gender markers – he tried to remain open-minded. “I wanted to approach the subject completely not judgmentally, just get into it. What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this. The point was to enter into it as seriously as I could and present it without patchiness. And I think in real life that’s what’s happening; people are wrestling with it. And they don’t always resolve it properly for themselves.”

One of the novel’s protagonists works at the “Museum of Identity”, a mildly satirical invention that “I was very happy to have come up with”, says Rushdie, “and that I’m sure will exist in the next five years”. Meanwhile, Nero Golden’s youngest son, D, struggles to suppress his transgender leanings. “This modern obsession with identity revolts me,” says D. “It is a way of narrowing us until we are like aliens to one another. Have you read Arthur Schlesinger? He opposes perpetuating marginalization through affirmations of difference.” This sounds less like the talk of the 20-something fictional character and more like the novelist addressing the reader.

Rushdie isn’t persuaded that solipsism on the left contributed to the rise of Trump, nor that economic disparity was the only cause. “I had a lecture gig in a city called Vero Beach in Florida: big audience, older people, quite affluent, very well educated, and almost all Trump voters,” he says. “Not at all the cliche of the ignorant blue-collar Trump voter. These were people with college degrees who’d had highly paid jobs, many retired, readers.” When the author mentioned climate change, he says, “this gentleman – they were all very courteous – disagreed with me and he said: ‘When you say that all the scientists agree on this, that’s not true.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, it is true actually.’ And he said: ‘No it’s not.’ And I said: ‘Sir, we can’t go on like this, it’s silly. But let me put it to you this way: if you say the world is flat, it doesn’t make the world flat. The world doesn’t need you to agree that it’s round in order to be round, because there’s this thing called evidence.’”

Did he get the impression these positions were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? “Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.”

I once sat next to the Trumps at a Crosby, Stills & Nash gig. Donald Trump knows all the words to ‘Woodstock’!

Rushdie has been in the US for more than 15 years, but he is still on the outside, a survivor, or beneficiary depending on your view, of a double displacement, first as a child moving from India to England to attend boarding school and then as an adult, when he left London for New York in 2000. It is a gift, he says, “to feel really connected to three places”, and it has nourished his fiction. The 70th anniversary of partition this year reminded one of the startling effect of Midnight’s Children when it was published in 1981, Rushdie’s second novel that is still unmatched for exuberance and a sense of talent unleashed. His third novel, Shame, cemented his reputation, since when he has produced novels ranging wildly across the spectrum between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality. Fury, Rushdie’s 2001 novel, was a less intimate portrait of New York than The Golden House, his panoramic social novel of the city. While his two sons, Zafar, who is in his late 30's, and 20-year-old Milan, both live in London, Rushdie feels his roots in the US have deepened enough to get inside the city with something like the assurance with which he tackles London and Mumbai. (His youngest son, meanwhile, is threatening to move in with him in New York, as 20-year-olds will, reminding Rushdie that “children take up a lot of time and brain space”. He smiles. “But on the other hand, there are rewards.” )

And of course Trump came as a great shock. Rushdie recalls sitting next to him in Madison Square Garden many years ago, at a Crosby, Stills & Nash concert, accompanied by “the then much younger Ivanka and the disgusting boys. And the thing that surprised me was that he was on his feet and knew all the words to all the songs. Donald Trump knows the words to “Woodstock”?!”

Sitting the novel against the backdrop of the years preceding Trump’s election was not only a way of creating an elegy to the Obama era, but of suggesting that Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. “One of the reasons why I think it was possible to write the book is that a lot of what Trump represents and unleashed was there anyway, if you were looking properly, and would not have been destroyed by his defeat. Once you take the cork out of the bottle, things fly out.”

And while the rise and fall of Obama’s US – “the journey from that moment of optimism to its antithesis” – gave the novel a structural symmetry that has, says Rushdie, “horrible to say it, but a formally pleasing quality”, he is clear of the connection between then and now. “A big chunk of white America has been unable to stand the fact that for eight years there was a black man in the White House. Couldn’t stand it. And unfortunately Hillary was a bad candidate, and I think everybody underestimated, including me, the incredible hatred for her, including among left wing people, young people and women.”

All successful people are status aware, but it is a rather endearing quality in Rushdie, who is either disinclined or unable to disguise it. It was there in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir (the title is the pseudonym he assumed while living for 10 years under the fatwa) and in which his willingness to appear in less than flattering light – going on bitchily about his ex-wives, grumbling about protection officers calling him “Joe”, documenting the end of his marriage to Elizabeth West and the infatuation that led to his marriage to Padma Lakshmi – made it a more revealing memoir than most, although it was hard to know, at times, whether this was due to a surfeit of self-awareness or its opposite.

 ‘I have an itch to get outside the bubble’ … Salman Rushdie.

When he first joined Twitter, he says, “one and a quarter million people rushed in my direction. Which sounds like a lot until you look at people who really have a lot – Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and so on, and that’s before you get to the real aristocrats, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, the gods.” He giggles. “Even down here among writers a million people is a lot, so that was nice, to feel that you were having a conversation with a lot of people who were interested in you and your work, because it’s a self-selecting group.”

Twitter suited Rushdie, his belligerence and his sense of fun. He rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into fights and responded to people with puny numbers of followers. He was funny and generous and not at all like the popular view of him as pompous, plaintive, pain-in-the-arse Rushdie. Then, as has happened with many early fans of the platform, “I began to really dislike the tone of voice of Twitter. This kind of snarky, discourteous, increasingly aggressive tone of voice. I just thought I don’t like this. These people would not speak like this if they were sitting in a room with you. I had planned to stop earlier and then it was the election campaign and I got into it, and the last thing I tweeted was this pathetic tweet, having just voted: ‘Looking forward to President Hillary’.” He laughs. “After which total silence. And I thought, just stop, and I did and I haven’t missed it for one second.”

Too much exposure to strangers online can collapse one’s faith in humanity. In the novel, Rushdie refers to “synderesis”, the philosophical principle that people are born with an innate moral consciousness directing them towards good. Does he believe that? “I think there is an ethical sense,” he says. “I do believe that we’re born with a need to know what is right and wrong, which is why children accept the instruction of parents on the subject. We need to know what are the boundaries of good and bad behaviour in order to function in the world. I don’t think we automatically know what is right or wrong, but I think we have the desire to know.”

These are hard calls at the moment, when the very nature of reality and the meaning of “facts” are in dispute, long before one gets to the big existential questions. In the wake of Charlottesville, the issue for the left has been to what extent should one tolerate the intolerant and defend their right to freedom of speech. “I think the great boundary is to not tolerate people who would destroy the world that makes it able to tolerate people,” says Rushdie. “That’s the great mistake made in Germany during the rise of Nazism, which was to allow it to rise through the ballot box and then abolish the ballot box. Something similar happened in Algeria, where the old administration thought that they would defeat the insurgent FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] and GIA [Armed Islamic Group] by letting them run for election and defeating them. Instead they ran for election and won and then abolished elections. There is a limiting point. If the thing that is happening would destroy the system that allows it to happen, that’s a deal breaker. I’m a huge admirer of and supporter of the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended the marchers’ right to protest] and I give them money and so on, but I think they might have been wrong about Charlottesville. I think when people are running over other people with motor cars, that’s not legitimate free speech. And they went there for a fight. And got it.”

This is, of course, the “provocation” argument which was directed at Rushdie during the years of the fatwa; “oh, well, he brought it on himself, he went looking for a fight and found it”. “Provocation” was also the word used by Francine Prose about the offence caused by some of the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine. Along with other high profile members of PEN, she withdrew from a PEN event at which the magazine was to be honored in 2015. “Provocation is simply not the same as heroism,” wrote Prose, a statement for which Rushdie attacked her on Twitter.

These weren’t just fellow writers, but old friends: Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Prose herself, who had been Rushdie’s vice-president when he was president of PEN. “Those people were wrong,” he says now. “In light of what’s happened in France subsequently, I hope they’re embarrassed. Because it’s quite clear that people can get killed for anything. Get killed for going out to a club on Friday night. The idea that that particular group of people in some way called down their own damnation is not even tenable. It was a terrible division inside PEN and it’s left some very bad wounds; Francine and I don’t talk any more – and we go back.”

Rushdie won’t hold with the argument that the cartoons were racist. “There was a problem of taking up positions before they really looked for information. For instance, Le Monde had done a survey of Charlie Hebdo covers over a 10‑year period: 520 covers. And the number of covers that dealt with Islam was six. The number of covers dealing with Catholicism, or Israel, was much higher. But then hundreds and hundreds attacking the Front National and Sarkozy. So here you have this anti-racist, anti-state little paper, which is being accused of being an organ of the establishment and racist. The exact opposite of what it is. And I said: ‘Just look at this. And think again.’ And nobody thought again. I’d met one or two of the people who were killed and they were just these … sweethearts. These old, soixante-huitard lefties. And nobody read the fucking magazine.” He laughs. “Another big French survey showed that a very substantial majority of French Muslims identifies as primarily secular, and only a small minority identifies as religious. I thought: ‘Look at this; they don’t care. They have real issues of employment and racism and this isn’t the thing that’s attacking them.’ Anyway it was a horrible fight and it has left damage. I did patch it up with Michael O. I’ve been friends with Michael since 1980.” But no other fences were mended.

I hate it when the liberal progressive left become stupid. We are supposed to be smarter, they are supposed to be stupid

There is an assumption that Rushdie has been pushed to a more extreme position on Islam because of the years of the fatwa, something he finds irritating and belittling. He does react very strongly against bullying, but along with everything else at the moment, who is the bully and who the victim is a question on which no one can agree. Trump, he says, “is someone who has successfully bullied the country”, and there is bullying elsewhere on the political spectrum. Did it, I wonder, give Rushdie any satisfaction to see Germaine Greer, who was unsupportive of him during the years of the fatwa, be “no-platformed” for her remarks about transgenderism? “No, I felt sad for her. I felt it’s so stupid. I hate it when the liberal progressive left becomes stupid. Because we’re supposed to be smarter and they’re supposed to be stupid. I’ve known Germaine since the dawn of time, and we’re not close, but I thought that was stupid.”

Brexit has been depressing him, too. “It made me think I’ve been wrong about this place all this time. And I know, anecdotally, that rudeness towards people with brown skin and eastern European accents has exploded. People going up to people on the bus and saying: ‘We’ve voted now so when are you leaving?’ In the same way as Trump here has enabled the far right.”

Rushdie thinks he might like to write about the Other Side next; the part of the US that is, to those living in downtown New York, completely alien. “I have an itch to get outside the bubble. There’s such a rift in this country. Maybe you have to go to the other side of the rift.”

The Golden House, viewed as representative of a social class and wealth category rather than characters moving around a fictional space, may attract the remark “check your privilege”, which Rushdie responds to by saying of course that’s what people said about The Great Gatsby; “who cares about these rich people?”

They’ll still say it, I suggest. “Well,” says Rushdie, momentarily eliding into his image as impossibly grand, “read another book.” And he bursts into laughter.

• The Golden House is published by Jonathan Cape.

There is no future

There is no future

David A Fairbanks

During the last week we have seen a wonderful outpouring of help and genuine concern in Houston, Port Arthur, and other communities in Texas and now help coming to Louisiana.

How long will it last?

President Trump says he will donate a million dollars, he won't. His administration will game the talk radio shows and play to the base and in a month will shove everything about Hurricane Harvey out of sight.

Irma might come and makes matters worse.

What is troublesome is that there is a cynical effort on the part of Republicans to diminish the federal government, to eventually drown it in a bathtub.

Speaker Ryan says Social Security has passed its time and congress needs to abolish federal pensions and let the banks take over. Thus old age becomes a profit based business with the managers paid well and the retirees living in squalid poverty. Ryan's belief is that "If you don't have a million dollars you are a bum, a failure!"

Only Hippie Losers collect Social Security!

Donald Trump's obsession with Barack Obama motivates Trump to attempt wholesale erasure of the former president and everything he did.

Trump is less of a racist than jealous of a glamorous and intelligent younger man.

We are in serious trouble as a nation.

1. More than 25 million alcohol or opioid addicts that are dysfunctional and dying at the rate of 500 a day.

2. 60 Million Baby Boomers heading for financial ruin and will end up either starving or become desperate wards of the state.

3. Almost 5 million Black Males, 16 Million White Males and 6 Million Hispanic males with no job skills or credible education and no future.

4. Nearly 5 million adults in the corrections and parole community lacking any serious education or financial support.

5. 20,000 bridges aging and in need of repair. 70,000 miles of highways in need of repair. 

6. Sewage and waste management 20 years behind schedule for upgrade and replacement.

7. 45 million women lacking serious job skills.

There is more.

The congress dithers because they get paid to do so.

North Korea and Iran see the US as a loud noise and a country that has no serious beliefs. The predators are circling us.

What can we do? What will we do?

The generosity and concern shown in Texas is encouraging, but the political forces seeking to destroy the American ideal of 'Community' or that we must move forward have not given up their quest to slam the country back to a time when everyone kept quiet and a small group of white men ran everything.

The predator reactionaries never go away, they will push and shove whenever possible.