New Statesman Contents

What do we remember when we remember 9/11?

Emily Tamkin — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 17:03:13 +0000

Our remembrance of the 2001 attacks is about the greatness of America; in the process, it fails Americans.

Our remembrance of 9/11 is about the greatness of America; in the process, it fails Americans.

Those who are old enough will recall where they were on September 11 2001. I was on a school trip to a beach, and confused about what was happening. If, like me, you grew up in or near New York, the days following the attacks on the World Trade towers were ones in which we learned whose family members returned home safely, and whose were never coming home.

Then came the flag-waving. I wrote a poem about the seeming lack of American patriotism before the attacks happened. I was 11, and afraid, and was caught up in nationalist fervour. My teacher praised my efforts, probably because she was caught up in it, too.

The chest-thumping nationalism and frat-boy-like chants of “USA! USA!” may have offered collective release from all the shock and anger. But it also meant that some of those most directly impacted – the loved ones of the people who died that day – were silenced and forgotten. Even now, the 9/11 museum in New York City is about the breathtaking spectacle of the tragedy. It’s about President George W Bush and his team. It is about the horror of what happened. It is about the power of the US to exact vengeance. It is not really about those mourning the lost, and how they felt, and how their government treated them after the attack. Our remembrance of 9/11 is about the greatness of America; in the process, it fails Americans.

Terry McGovern is professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and the director of the Program on Global Health Justice and Governance at Columbia University. She is also a friend of my mother’s from high school. McGovern lost her mother, who was in her sixties, in the attacks. Six years after 9/11, McGovern produced a play called 9/11: Voices Unheard.

McGovern’s mother had worked in the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb exploded in the car park below. The State Department marks this as the moment when the Diplomatic Security Service recognised terrorism as a transnational phenomenon, as opposed to a regional one. It was something else for those who worked there. “She was aware that the World Trade Center was a target,” McGovern said of her mother. It transpired after 9/11 that the CIA and FBI had warned the Bush administration that attacks on prominent domestic sites might happen. “Had they even shared that information,” McGovern said, “my mother would have run out of the building when they were told to stay.”

After the attack, victims’ families pressured the Bush administration, which initially resisted forming a commission to investigate the attacks, sought to limit the scope of what could be investigated, and reportedly did not want open hearings on the investigation. So much of what the victims’ families were finally able to learn about what happened, McGovern said, they discovered in a “horrible, public way” while sitting in the families’ section of the 9/11 commission hearings.

McGovern and others who lost loved ones felt a disconnect between the public show of avenging the attacks and the way in which they the administration behaved towards them: in terms of how hard it was to get information about what happened, and in the way their loved ones’ remains were treated. “In contrast to what I would call the 9/11 show, I didn’t think that the families were treated well at all,” she said.

McGovern, spurred on by her frustration with what the country did and didn’t talk about with respect to 9/11, interviewed family members and wrote her play. “I was just trying to express some complexity,” she said: about what 9/11 was, and who the victims were, and who the families were, and how they felt then and feel now.

“All of us felt like: stop showing the planes hitting the tower. Stop the flag-waving. You’re not doing that for us,” she said.

Since 9/11, the US has worn a Janus-face. On the one side was the war on terror: the invasions and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the killing of civilians abroad, and the surveillance and curtailing of civil liberties at home. On the other side, there are the family members, friends and loved ones of the 2,977 people who died, who were left to try to piece together what happened and to carry their grief and memories of those they had lost.

I asked McGovern what she hoped people, 20 years on, would consider about how 9/11 changed the country, and how we remember the attacks and what came after. “The politicisation and exploitation of this event hasn’t served anybody well,” she said.

She added, “It would be really nice if there was truly some focus on how the families have managed. We were presented with a lifelong challenge.” There is also the burden of wondering when, and how often, and to whom, to disclose this part of their lives. And for some, there was the added insult of the way in which financial compensation was awarded: the Victim Compensation Fund calculated what to give in terms of lost earnings and benefits, which meant that relatives of lower earners and older people received less than others.

One thing she learned, she told me, is that “people are incredible” and capable of complexity. She watched victims’ families, she told me, full of grief and pain, but nevertheless capable of questioning the government response, and of thinking more deeply about foreign conflicts.

Those voices – their voices – don’t need to stay unheard. They are speaking. Twenty years later, we can listen.

[See also: How the war on terror changed America]

HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AFP via Getty Images)

The World Trade towers in New York burn after being hit by hijacked planes, September 11 2001

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Tories fear voters won’t forgive Boris Johnson for his broken promises

Tim Ross — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 16:41:31 +0000

The scenario alarming Conservative MPs is that the social care plan will fail and that yet more tax rises will be needed.

An impatient Boris Johnson was pestering Downing Street officials relentlessly to show him the draft Conservative election manifesto. It was 2017 – he was foreign secretary at the time – but Theresa May’s campaign team refused. They didn’t trust him not to leak it to the press.

Two-and-a-half years later, Johnson presented his own manifesto to voters and won his party’s largest majority since 1987 on the strength of it. But it seems he couldn’t be trusted with his own election promises either.

The Prime Minister openly admitted breaking his contract with the British people this week, raising taxes and abandoning the “triple lock” on the state pension in a mini-Budget that pumped money into the creaking NHS and a social care sector that has been in crisis for a decade.

If you’re going to dump your central manifesto pledges, then protecting the state healthcare system from collapse during a pandemic while fixing the ugliest problem in social policy are worthy reasons for doing so.

According to some who worked with Johnson on the care package, he was personally “determined” to get the policy through and had been pushing for it since winning the general election in 2019. Previous attempts to solve the care conundrum have become stuck in the trenches of Whitehall warfare with the Treasury, or in political rows over “death” or “dementia” taxes.

But while Rishi Sunak – and many Conservative MPs – opposed the 1.25 percentage point rise in National Insurance, Johnson would simply not back down. “This only happened because of him,” one person involved said.

Despite voting for the policy in the Commons, Tory MPs still fear that jettisoning the manifesto is a huge risk for Johnson – and for them.

Retaining the public’s trust is vital for any prime minister and a record of keeping promises is a politician’s best chance of retaining the faith of voters. Having broken one major set of pledges, Johnson’s job now is to make sure voters see and feel that he is delivering on the plans he set out this week.

It won’t be hard to persuade people they are paying higher taxes. For one thing, from April 2023 the new health and social care levy will appear as its own item on every pay slip in the country, a new entry alongside National Insurance. The right-wing press is also up in arms about the tax rise, which is guaranteed to keep the issue high up the political agenda.

In their daily lives, too, voters will be painfully aware that they are paying more to the Treasury, especially if they live in former Red Wall battlegrounds in the north-east or the Midlands which backed Johnson’s Tories in 2019 and Brexit in 2016. It is in these areas, where disposable incomes are the lowest in England, that the impact of the extra levy will be felt most acutely – an obvious electoral peril for the Tories.

The crucial question is whether, amid all this financial pain, voters will also see the benefits of the extra money in their personal experiences of the NHS and social care by the time Johnson next asks for their support.

Some Conservatives expect an election as soon as next year, while others predict 2023 is more likely than the latest possible date of 2024. In three years, the NHS and care systems will have received £36bn but the backlog of 5.5 million postponed operations, scans and procedures is far from certain to have disappeared.

As for improving the social care system, elderly and disabled people won’t benefit from the cap on lifetime care costs by the next election, for the simple reason that they will not yet have spent enough on residential home fees to reach the £86,000 level at which the cap takes effect. The new system only comes into force from October 2023.

Johnson’s strategy assumes that the money for social care is indeed transferred from the NHS pot in the years ahead, instead of being swallowed up by an insatiable health service constantly and increasingly in demand. (Health and social care will soon account for 40 per cent of the government’s day-to-day spending, up from 30 per cent a decade ago.)

Yet the scenario now alarming Tory MPs at Westminster is that the plan will simply fail and billions more will need to be raised in taxes for care in two years’ time. “If socialist policies worked, I’d be a member of the Labour Party,” said one rebel Tory who refused to vote for Johnson’s plan.

By the time of the next election, Conservatives fear, voters will be feeling the pain in their wallets and still seeing the problems on the wards. A new narrative will then take hold of a broken NHS that not even a Tory tax bombshell could fix. The risk is that voters then turn up to the polling station remembering Johnson as the man who broke his promises – twice – and wonder whether he is worth trusting again.

There is hope for Johnson. But only if his government can meet the enormous task of cutting the NHS backlog against its own incredibly tight timetable. Johnson’s gamble means his fate is now no longer in his own hands.

It is the work of his new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, and the service he oversees that will determine whether the extra cash goes to the front line in a way that offers value for taxpayers’ money. For Tory hopes of retaining voters’ trust, it is Javid, rather than Johnson, who is now the most important minister in the government.

Toby Melville-WPA Pool/Getty Images

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, and Britain's Health Secretary Sajid Javid arrive for a news conference in Downing Street on September 7, 2021

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Sitting out 9/11 with Blink-182

Ben Myers — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 16:02:57 +0000

On 12 September 2001, I sought refuge at the California home of the manager of the band Blink-182. The third world war was inevitable and its soundtrack was lightweight pop-punk.

Flags and warships – that’s what I remember most clearly. Flags flapping from every street corner and planted in every trimmed lawn, and slate-grey warships stacked in a holding pattern in the offing, that smudged state where the Pacific meets the skyline.

They were guarding the golden shorelines of California as I glided down the Interstate 5, a warm road that passes through the heart of inner-city Los Angeles before touching the coast somewhere south of those Orange County beach towns – Huntington, Newport, Laguna – that I knew only through their association with the hardcore punk bands I had grown up on.

It was 12 September 2001 and I was heading towards Encinitas, just north of San Diego, to seek refuge at the coastal home of the manager of Blink-182, and the tone on every media broadcast and in every petrol station was already turning from shocked to vengeful. As the US Navy mobilised its 50,000 military personnel into action from its nearby base, a third world war was not beyond the realm of responsibility. Imminent violent retribution was inevitable, and the soundtrack to the beginning of the end of the American empire was lightweight pop-punk.

This was never the plan. I should have been reclining in West Hollywood after a frothy pool-side chat with the three self-styled douchebags of Blink-182 as part of a week-long jaunt following the band and their younger support acts New Found Glory and Sum 41, writing two cover stories for a music magazine. Instead, I was incessantly smoking duty-free Camel Lights on the freeway in an attempt to stave off the panic that had been rising over the previous 24 hours.

But then again, perhaps Blink-182 were perfect. Perhaps their juvenile music represented everything that the country’s enemies perceived as wrong with Western imperialism. As the sun flickered silver on the ocean, I kept thinking about a quote I’d underlined in my copy of the 1959 novel The Slide Area by English writer Gavin Lambert: “In America, illusion and reality are still very often the same thing. The dream is the achievement, the achievement is the dream.” And now the US was waking to a nightmare.

Forty-eight hours before al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes and crashed them into the towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring thousands more, I’d flown in to see Blink-182 play a show to 20,000 teenagers at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in San Francisco, then described as the happiest city to work in the US.

It was also one of the strangest gigs I’d been to, which I put down to a combination of severe jet lag, Google being right next door, and the crowd of MTV-reared spawn of dot-com workers that was the whitest and wealthiest I had witnessed. “All of them here to see a stupid punk band,” the band’s drummer Travis Barker had remarked in the lounge of his tour bus.

Blink-182 were the world’s biggest band that summer. Their fourth album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket – a title with a clear disregard for critical credibility or lasting creative value – had recently debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 and sold 14 million copies. Any edge the trio of 20-somethings may have possessed during their 1990s punk dive beginnings had long been polished away to pop perfection. They were taking on the Backstreet Boys and Britney now – and winning.

Which is why the video for the album’s lead track “The Rock Show” had seen Blink-182 blow their $500,000 budget on trashing cars and televisions, throwing notes out of windows and giving a homeless black man a pimp-style makeover. Even back then it was a vulgar display of wasteful excess that spoke to something insidious and dead at the centre of America.

“People will say, ‘The Beatles? Yeah they were rad but Blink, oh my God, those guys spoke to a generation and really lead the youth,’” singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge told me backstage, not entirely seriously, yet perhaps more presciently than he realised.

“Or maybe we’ll be remembered as the band who sung about fucking dogs,” singer/bassist Mark Hoppus added.

The following day I joined the band on a video shoot for their new single about the divorce of DeLonge’s parents. The director had shot Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and was filming the band playing in a suburban house as it was demolished around them. It was, they explained, meant to represent the crumbling of a family. Concrete columns collapsed, dust billowed and the next morning in New York, at 8.46am, the video took on a whole meaning. It was never broadcast, but the metaphors were coming at me thick and fast.

[See also: How the war on terror changed America]

Ground Zero was 3,000 miles away, yet the consensus in LA suggested that if al-Qaeda were going to strike again, then Hollywood would be next. This strange sprawling city built on artifice was placed on red alert and, having been told all flights out might be cancelled for six weeks, the streets appeared eerily empty as I, like thousands of others, fled.

9/11 – even the instant numerical branding of the tragedy seemed utterly corporate – was the JFK moment for those born post-1963. We all have our memories. Twenty years on, mine create a pungent collage of competing recollections: steaks sizzling on an Encinitas barbecue; Donald Rumsfeld’s clenched jaw and murderous eye; the late afternoon Californian light; the amped-up rhetoric that soured all media impartiality; the nasal harmonies of overgrown men sporting long shorts; another quote, from DH Lawrence this time, on California: “A queer place – in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific”; the scent of jasmine and citrus; another stubbed-out Camel cigarette; newlyweds Chris Evans and Billie Piper sipping cocktails at the hotel; a solitary Sikh man being swamped by armed FBI at the airport; George Bush’s childlike smirk; rising panic; the flags and the warships.

Blink-182 finished their run of live dates, though after briefly holing up at their manager’s beachside house where I felt even more benumbed and anxious than usual in LA, I returned to West Hollywood to attempt to write up my features. Events took an even odder turn when I found myself passing many a woefully (for me) sober hour in the hotel bar alongside stranded blues rockers the Black Crowes, until Evans and Piper gallantly pulled a few strings to get several of us stranded Brits on to flights back home. In those surreal first days of destruction and death and terror and pop music, I sensed that the American dream, if it even existed, was over in ways we could not yet comprehend. The 21st century had begun.

“Male Tears” by Benjamin Myers is out now on Bloomsbury.

PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy

Press shot of Blink-182 in 2001.

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How the freak economics of the Thatcher years warped boomers’ views on tax and house prices

Jonn Elledge — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 15:51:06 +0000

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Those who lived through the oil boom have a distorted sense of today’s economic trends. But they’re the ones driving the social care debate.

“To understand the man,” Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said, “you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20.” Boney turned 20 just as the French Revolution was kicking off, which makes sense, but I’m not sure this rule is flawless: when I was 20 Labour were unbeatable, the economy was booming and the world was at peace – all of which feels about as relevant to the current world and my opinion of it as The Chronicles of Narnia.

There is, nonetheless, the grain of a point here: we are all shaped by the times through which we live. Consider the baby boomer generation, born in the late 1940s or 1950s, who still dominate British politics today.

(A quick note before we get into this: Yes, I’m about to generalise about the experiences of an entire generation. Yes, I know that not everyone in that generation today votes Tory. Yes, I’m sure there are complicating factors that you/your parents/your favourite uncle faced, which I’m leaving out, and which I’m being terribly unfair by not mentioning. It is, nonetheless, legitimate to make generalisations when talking about broad social trends, so there.)

The boomers came of age in the 1970s, at a time of high inflation, industrial unrest, and a widespread breakdown in the relationship between management and labour. In 1979, just as they were entering their peak earning years, Margaret Thatcher came to power. Over the next decade, personal and business taxes fell, yet the actual tax take continued to hover at around 40 per cent of GDP.

At the same time, wages rose – at least, for those lucky enough to have them – home ownership expanded thanks to the right to buy policy, and house prices boomed. In 1975, the average house cost around £10,000. By 1990, it was over six times that. OK, the market then crashed – but not by anything like the amount needed to render your outstanding mortgage anything more than trifling.

If this had been your life experience, what might you conclude? That getting on the housing ladder might have been difficult, but definitely paid off. That hard work would be rewarded. That taxes can fall, without too many negative consequences. That things would generally get better.

Much of this narrative is nonsense, of course. The instability of the 1970s wasn’t caused by greedy unions, but by an oil shock, which sent inflation soaring: tough pay bargaining was largely just an attempt to keep up.

The stability of the next decade was built on oil, too. In his new history of the British economy, economics journalist Duncan Weldon notes that it was the oil boom that allowed the Thatcher government to cut taxes. Norway invested its oil windfall in a sovereign wealth fund; the Thatcher government, in contrast, used its own to reshape the state, or (this is me, not Weldon) even to buy political support.

Other aspects of the Thatcher boom were equally unrepeatable. The proceeds of privatisation had the same economic logic as selling your stuff to pay for lunch. As to the housing boom, it was all very well while wages rose and inflation wiped out mortgage debt, but one of the Thatcher government’s big achievements was to then stamp on inflation: this century, house prices have continued soaring, but wages haven’t, and debt has not been inflated away. Not that the relationship between inflation and mortgage debt is especially relevant to the growing chunk of the population who feel they have as much chance of getting on the housing ladder as they do of flying to the moon.

We all know the Thatcher years weren’t a boom for everyone. But even those who benefited did so largely because of a series of unrepeatable windfalls. Yet we are all shaped by our experiences: if you were of the right age to suffer in the 1970s and benefit from the 1980s boom, little wonder if you think that inflation is a demon, hard work pays off, and there is no downside to tax cuts.

That generation – through size, geography, and propensity to vote – still dominates politics today, and provide much of the Conservative Party’s base. It is also driving the debate on how we fund social care. They’ve worked hard all their lives, and think they’ve earned some help with care costs too, because they’ve already paid into the system what they’ve taken out. In terms of the demands they’ve placed on the state so far, perhaps that’s true.

But as that generation reaches old age, the costs they incur are going to soar. That is something they have not paid for. So past attempts to solve the cost-of-care crisis, by the Brown and May governments, involved trying to claw back some of the unearned wealth many members of that generation keep locked up in their expensive homes.

To those who own those houses, though, that seems unfair: a house is a home, and they earned what they have through hard work. They think they’ve paid their share.

Now consider someone coming of age in the 2020s, leaving education with a large pile of debt, watching their living costs rise even if their wages don’t, and now, thanks to the social care levy, looking at a marginal tax rate of over 40 per cent. What will they conclude about the world, I wonder.

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Margaret Thatcher holding up her party's manifesto, November 1979.

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The Cumbria coal mine debacle shows the incoherence of UK climate policy

Philippa Nuttall Jones — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 14:52:05 +0000

At a time when the UK is aiming for net-zero emissions, coal from the proposed mine would emit 8.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.

“Coal, cars, cash and trees.” These are the four areas in which Boris Johnson has told the world the country will make “extremely bold” commitments at Cop26 – and will expect everyone else to follow suit. So far, so good.

But there is a large chink in the Prime Minister's armour. This week, less than two months before Glasgow hosts the most important climate summit since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the UK opened a public inquiry into whether it should approve a new coal mine in Cumbria.

The project looks increasingly unlikely to go ahead, but its very existence is proof of a lack of coherence and clear strategy from Westminster on climate action. The inquiry is also a hugely unwelcome distraction for the UK’s Cop26 team as it tries to drum up support for an urgent global coal phase-out and ambitious emissions cuts.

“Consigning coal to history is one of the biggest steps to reaching the 1.5°C target,” says Dave Jones, global programme lead at clean energy think tank Ember. Johnson would seem to agree. “We want the developed world to kick the coal habit entirely by 2030 and the developing world by 2040,” he said in August. Yet, if approved, the UK’s first deep coal mine to be opened in 30 years could remain open until the end of 2049.

The mine would be used to dig up coking coal from beneath the Irish Sea for steel production. Supporters argue this could boost UK industry and create local jobs. Industrial decline has left parts of West Cumbria suffering from severe deprivation. The coal mine, say backers, would create 500 much-needed jobs.

Climate author and academic Mike Berners-Lee, who lives close to the site, argues that creating “a small number of jobs in yesterday’s economy” would do more harm than good. Offering people “vulnerable” jobs that would quickly become obsolete would simply “set West Cumbria up for a fall”, he says. Instead, as the world moves away from fossil fuels, the region needs “thousands of high-quality, clean jobs”. Research suggests that with the right policies, Cumbria could benefit from 9,000 new jobs in industries related to the clean energy transition, ranging from renewables to construction and transport.

“Historically, coal offered people a job with dignity; people died young, but they were working in an industry that powered the economy,” says Berners-Lee. But in 2021, “there is no dignity in working for a new coal mine”. And there is no guarantee either about the number of jobs or that they would be given to people in Cumbria, he adds.

Moreover, in a country aiming for net zero emissions by 2050, the extracted coal would emit an estimated 8.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year when burned. “If you assume the average employee’s wage were £36,000 a year, even though it wouldn’t be that much, that would mean producing about half a tonne of carbon dioxide to put every pound in an employee’s pocket,” says Berners-Lee. “That’s an incredibly carbon-intensive way of earning enough money for a Gregg’s sausage roll,” he quips. But as he makes clear, this is no laughing matter.

Political support for the project is decreasing. Neil Hudson, MP for Penrith and the Border, a neighbouring constituency, this week became the latest former enthusiast to announce a U-turn. Despite “previously signalling my support for the project”, he now believes it should not go ahead, citing the summer’s extreme weather events and the latest UN IPCC report as confirmation that the days of coal are numbered. “With our leadership of Cop26 we have a real opportunity to set an example to the world,” he said in a written statement.

However, it is difficult to set an example when your own house isn’t in order. “We seem to be struggling to get UK government strategy to where it needs to be,” says Eliot Whittington, director of CLG UK, which works with companies advocating action on climate change. “We have climate policies in the UK, but there is a lack of strategic thinking.” To lead Cop26, the government needs “clearer and more coherent policies”.

The Cumbrian coal mine, like Westminster’s decision to grant new permit for oil drilling in the North Sea, “muddies the waters,” says Whittington. “It doesn’t feel like the government is on the front foot. Especially in the context of Brexit, the government needs to set out exactly what a green, competitive UK industry looks like.”

As with so many of Johnson’s plans, the rhetoric of “coal, cars cash and trees” is catchy, but the details and full commitment are missing. The coal mine debacle can be dismissed as “slightly embarrassing”, but it is symptomatic of a much wider problem that, if not resolved fast, will have global repercussions.

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A general view of the former Woodhouse Colliery site where West Cumbria Mining (WCM) are seeking approval to once again extract coal Whitehaven, England.

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