EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

            

 

Globalisation: Spinning into reverse

Putting the brakes on international integration is no longer as far-fetched as propelling away from the planet

The self-proclaimed grown-ups of New Labour parodied anyone airing anxiety about globalisation as making a childish demand: "Stop the world, I want to get off!" Putting the brakes on international integration is no longer as far-fetched as propelling away from the planet. For better or – quite possibly – for worse, it is happening. A few days before Russia responded to the E coli scare with a heavy-handed bar on all sorts of European vegetable imports, the cheeriest thing America's top trade official could find to say about the Doha round was that he was not ready to read the last rites over its corpse. Meanwhile, the collapsing global carbon market is a reminder that – outside Europe, at least – no multilateral solution has been found to the most multilateral problem of the lot.

The European Union remains the single outstanding example of integration across borders, and yet here too the centrifugal force of national sovereignty is pulling afresh. Across its north the establishment is being battered at the ballot box by populists who resent bailing out the south. Meanwhile, those southerners imagined to be benefiting from northern largesse take to the streets of Athens and Lisbon to rage against the strangulatory strings attached to the money. The victors of Versailles once ordered Germany to starve itself into surplus, but today it is Germany that safeguards repayment of every last euro of bank debt by pushing pain on to Mediterranean taxpayers. Within the single currency, a cash-strapped periphery cannot devalue to boost exports and rebalance the accounts. Serious commentators line up to explain that swallowing this noxious medicine will not work, and yet the continent's fractured politics determine that swallowed it must be. Further fracturing is the foreseeable result.

If the paper notes in their pockets are the most regular reminder of the fact of the union to most of its citizens, the freedom to cross borders at will is their most tangible right. This is not so for Britons, who live outside not just the eurozone but also the Schengen agreement, which axed the checkpoints between 22 EU states. But recently the agreement has been creaking as never before. While the French and the Italians have bickered over the free flow of Libyan refugees between them, the Danes have moved to reinstall controls and met only minimal resistance from their partners. Perhaps others are planning to go the same way. A continental comeback for passports, the defining documentary expression of national separateness, could reduce Jean Monnet's vision – of a Europe that would not merely "coalesce states" but also "unite men" – into a passing dream.

Even before the slump, growing discomfort with diversity – both across an expanding union and between its communities – was making Europeans newly prone to hunker down into their nations. A sweeping new assessment of the continent's drift, David Marquand's The End of the West, concludes that after federalists sought to take the politics out of their project, politics is now having its revenge. Without truly cross-border parties, there is no connection between the discourse of the election campaigns that voters experience and what happens in Brussels. Whatever their misgivings about their own politicians, publics prefer to trust leaders whom they know how to sack if they have to. Marquand proposes a shot of democracy for the centre, through the direct election of the European council's president.

Like federalism in general, that suggestion is unfashionable. But officials and capitalists who had hoped to create a new international order by stealth are discovering that they can't. The only way to continue the mission is to secure legitimacy from the people, messy as that may be. Otherwise, the present age of globalisation could go the way of the previous one, which ended in 1914. Pro-trade technocrats would then find themselves pleading: "Stop the world, I want to get back on."
 

Sale of the Tote: High stakes

For all its familiarity, this year's Derby day marks the end of a long, beneficial partnership

Upwards of a hundred thousand people will gather on Epsom Downs today for the Investec Derby, one of the world's great horse races. Even for those who cannot make it, the 232nd Derby remains a splendid national excursion, a day of picnics and punters and the Queen cheering on her horse in (another) attempt to become the first reigning monarch since 1909 to own the winner.

But for all its familiarity, this year's Derby day marks the end of a long, beneficial partnership. The Tote was founded in 1928 by chancellor (and ex-cavalry officer) Winston Churchill to generate money for the racing industry, a move justified in a world where traditionalists still thought the horse had a role in warfare. Although its contribution to racing was overshadowed later by the levy introduced on all betting, the Tote still invests millions each year in racecourses and what has become the multimillion-pound racing industry. Now it is to be sold, in an operation that – while it might matter less – looks as ill-thought-through as many of the coalition's other essays in privatisation.

The government could have learned from Labour's decade of frustrated attempts to shed this accidental anomaly. The Tote has always existed in its own corporate limbo, so in order to sell it off, first it had to be nationalised. By the time that had been achieved, the financial crisis had erupted and the idea of raising money from a sale was abandoned, only to be eagerly seized upon last year by incoming ministers in their search for cuts. But they have found it no easier to handle than Labour did. It has had to promise that racing will receive half the estimated £200m proceeds of the sale, and last month it was still working on a model that would generate as much cash for the industry while retaining an appeal to commercial investors. Yesterday, after a series of missed deadlines, it finally emerged that its preferred bidder is to be Fred Done's Betfred, a fast-growing betting-shop chain that had pledged £120m of income to racecourses. But the racing industry, which preferred the rival Sporting Investment Partnership chaired by Sir Martin Broughton, the former boss of the British Horseracing Board, will look askance at a company whose motive, they believe, is the Tote's chain of 500-plus betting shops rather than the industry itself, while workers at the Tote's Wigan HQ will wonder what it means for their jobs.

Most of the Epsom racegoers will be unaware of the long, muddled saga of Tote privatisation. But it has been another example of the Whitehall tendency to decide on an end without considering the means. And, as so often, it will only be after the gamble fails to pay off that voters will ask what has been done in their names.

Unthinkable? Horrible heroes

Most people's villains can be unconditional heroes to others: Gaddafi, for instance, and Mladic

Controversy lurks where you least expect it: in, for instance, 11 across in Tuesday's Guardian quick crossword. The clue was: "Hero of Wuthering Wuthering Heights"; the solution, "Heathcliff". "Since when," our reader Marilyn Chorley Clegg of Carshalton objected, "is a wife-beater, kidnapper and property thief a 'hero'?" The answer to that, perhaps regrettably, is: since the beginning of time. In some contexts, certainly, a hero or heroine is a person of moral character whom we should all wish to emulate. But in others the hero is more an epic protagonist, a prime mover in great events. Thomas Carlyle, in his lectures on heroes and hero-worship, assembled a team whose members might also have set off dismay in Carshalton. First up was Odin, an addict of war, able to start them simply by throwing his spear, and a scandalously promiscuous progenitor – quite apart from the fact that (like Heathcliff) he never existed. Nor are Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte, Carlyle's choices in the category "hero as king", figures on whom most parents would want their children to model themselves. One of England's most lauded heroes is Robin Hood; yet he too was a blatant property thief. Most people's villains can be unconditional heroes to others: Gaddafi, for instance, and Mladic. Even Florence Nightingale had her detractors, while Joan of Arc was possibly mad. If the wild, the wilful and even the downright wicked were barred from admission, the pantheon of heroes would be a poor, shrivelled place.