Six articles about Brexit

This work of John Harris gives a sense of 2017 as one of the most complicated, strange moments in modern UK history.

Whatever happened to the left-behind? 

It seems more unlikely than ever that deprived Brexit-voting areas will see any economic revival

It was not much more than a year ago. The result of the EU referendum was still being pored over, and the political moment seemed to be all about two things: a view of much of the leave vote as a cry of pain and resentment from parts of the country beyond London, and the urgent need to do something. Journalists were still being dispatched to the supposed Brexit heartlands; among politicians, the idea was that now that such places as south Wales, the east of England, the Midlands and the non-urban north had spoken so loudly that their deep problems were finally going to be addressed.

If you want a taste of what was briefly afoot, have a look at the text of Theresa May’s Conservative conference speech from October 2016 , delivered in the days when she was still in the business of strong and stable leadership and her backdrops did not collapse , both literally and metaphorically. She used the word “revolution” four times. “In June people voted for change,” she said. “And a change is going to come … this is a turning point for our country.”

She did not mean this only in terms of our exit from the EU: the referendum, she said, was nothing less than a “call for a change in the way our country works – and the people for whom it works – forever ”. Among other things, there was to be “an economic and cultural revival of all of our great regional cities”, while the power of government would be placed “squarely at the service of ordinary working-class people”, and the gap between “the wealth of London and the rest of the country” would be narrowed.

Now, as her government decays, most of her words read like the founding statement of a project that never was. Clearly, even if most of the people who voted for Brexit still seem convinced that it was the right thing to do, there are few signs of any changes to the places where they live. Quite the reverse, in fact. Though the creation of the capital’s beloved £15bn Crossrail continues apace, plans to modernise railway lines in Wales, Yorkshire, the Midlands and Cumbria have all been shelved. Philip Hammond has promised train services in the north a derisory extra £300m (by way of comparison, the cost of HS2 is put at £400m per mile ).

Meanwhile, the austerity imposed on city and local government carries on, and the loudest sound coming from the most neglected parts of the country is the great howl of pain arising from the government’s cruel changes to the benefi ts system. The Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfi l became something of a byword for Brexit , and it seems just as symbolic of what has happened since: universal credit will arrive there next March, and the council is facing at least another two years of cuts. Not far away in Newport, Gwent, where 56% of people voted to leave the EU, the council leader also happens to be the head of the Welsh Local Government Association.

“Services are wearing down to the point of collapse, and the public are rightly growing frustrated in terms of paying council tax and yet seeing key community functions cut or closed,” Debbie Wilcox says. “The whole position is unsustainable.”

At the heart of all this is the political irony that defi nes our times: that the very thing so many places voted for makes any attempt at their area’s revival even less likely. The only economic rebalancing that looks set to arise from Brexit will be London becoming a bit less rich thanks to the downsizing of the City. The Herculean effort needed to even begin meaningful negotiations is so consuming to the machinery of government that it clearly has no capacity for anything else.

And just look at this week’s Brexit headlines: news that £500m has already been spent on preparing to leave the EU , that next year’s outlays will be about £1m a day, and that the number of extra civil servants who will be needed to deal with our departure is now put at 8,000. Imagine if all that money and effort were devoted to a policy aimed at reversing the country’s long decline and thinking creatively about the future.

That mess of contradictions might look like good news for the people who think Brexit has to be overturned. But in the context of the places that ensured that leave had a majority, they have their own set of problems.

Whenever I spend time in Brexitsupporting areas, a few questions usually rattle through my mind. In the 17 months since the vote, has the coalition of forces – Labour and Tory remainers, Liberal Democrats, Greens – that now demands it is nullified given any serious thought to why so much of the country failed to heed its warnings, and continues to ignore them, even as promises go unmet, and Brexit grows dangerous and ever more complex? Do they have any kind of offer to leave voters in neglected places, beyond a second referendum and a return to the pre- 2016 status quo?

Even if the prime minister has failed to make good on her promises of a rebalanced country, the Brexit moment embodies one aspect of her vision: the fact that, for the fi rst time in decades, people and places that were long overlooked – sneered at, even – now sit at the core of our national politics. Though the Labour party’s acceptance of Brexit and its failure to come up with much of an alternative might seem maddening, its position on the EU is not just down to the Eurosceptic instincts of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Clearly, it is also locked into its position by the fact that most of the constituencies it holds – seven out of 10, according to credible estimates – voted to leave Europe, and the assumption that a critical number of the people who live in them are still of the opinion that Brexit has to happen, no matter what.

If you want to be patronising about it, you could take the view that all this is down to the lies of the leave campaign and a mess of nastiness surrounding immigration. But from a more enlightened perspective, it might be more instructive to understand a lot of support for leave as the climax of years of decline, neglect and condescension – and something that is hardly going to be abandoned in a hurry.

Forget, for a moment, all that noise about the fine details of the negotiations or whatever trade secretary Liam Fox has said about chicken, and think about how the politics of Brexit will actually play out. If the government’s weak grip on power offers the chance of renewed questioning of where the country is headed, some of the answer will arise from those remain-supporting MPs who now reluctantly back leaving the EU out of fear of their leave-voting constituents.

Will those voters change their minds? If there is a contrast between the promises of national revival made only a year ago and the lack of action since, a lot will hang on whether that discrepancy has any traction, or collides with people’s ingrained fatalism and fades away. Just as much will depend on the trade-off between economic damage and a deep belief in national sovereignty that runs much deeper among workingclass leave supporters than some people would like to think. The future suddenly pivots on Merthyr and Mansfield, Walsall and Blackburn: symbolic of these unexpected, upturned times.

05/11/2017 

Brexit won’t punish bankers. But it will harm voters

With a balanced economy we could relax when financiers shut up shop. As it is, we need their taxes

The reasons why 17.4 million British people put their crosses in the leave box last summer have been endlessly analysed, and often crudely carved in half – as if some Brexit supporters were angry about immigration and others fixated on questions of sovereignty, and that was pretty much that.

But 10 years after the French bank BNP Paribas heralded the coming financial crisis by suspend ing two hedge funds that had effectively proved worthless, it’s worth reprising a pretty basic point: among the furies that exploded on 23 June last year were lingering grievances about the crash of 2007-8. The years since the cashpoints almost ran out had seen simmering anger about the endless billions pumped into the big banks and the lack of any obvious reckoning – not to mention exasperation with politicians chained to the demands of high finance, and not nearly interested enough in the millions of people whose only acquaintance with the City lay in the mess it had made.

Clearly, the vote for Brexit represented a kind of misdirected, flailing revenge. As big banks lined up with the UK’s largest corporations to warn the public that Brexit would be disastrous , the sense of an instantaneous backlash was obvious. Former City insider Nigel Farage well knew Brexit’s basic populist plotlines, and when he made his victory speech in the small hours of 24 June , he said that the leave campaign had knocked down three adversaries in particular: “multinationals”, “big politics”, and “merchant banks”.

Having got up off the floor, some of the City of London’s biggest players are now taking big decisions. They have contracts that extend way beyond 2019, but what Brexit negotiations might mean for them remains chronically unclear. Plans for their future European operations need to be made now. So plenty are starting to shift parts of their business outside London, to a surprisingly muted response. Philip Hammond, the chancellor, seems to know roughly what is at stake, but swaths of the Conservative party – that historic redoubt of traders, brokers and high-rollers – seem surprisingly unconcerned. After all, what have bankers – bankers – ever done for us? Part of the answer lies in the £70 bn-ish of tax revenue paid by financial services in 2015/16 – about twothirds of our annual spend on the NHS .

What is pushing banks away from London is obvious enough. In the wake of the referendum, there was a lot of talk about the City somehow retaining its “passporting” rights, which allow banks and fund managers to do business freely across Europe. Those hopes now look forlorn: indeed, the City ’s biggest lobby group, TheCityUK, served notice that it was giving up the fi ght for such privileges back in January.

Given that Britain has said that it wants to leave the single market, the EU was hardly likely to allow the UK to retain one of that market’s lucrative elements, and the search for a possible substitute has now focused on so-called “equivalence” : arrangements for certain kinds of fi nancial trading to continue, if the EU agrees that Britain’s regulations are in line with its own.

This may be all that the City has to cling to, but there are no end of drawbacks, not least the fact that such arrangements are unilaterally granted by Brussels, and can be revoked at a month’s notice . Small wonder, perhaps, that there is all that talk about possible transition periods. But even if we actually get to postpone the worst of Brexit, what happens in 2022, or 2025, or whenever we fi nally leave? And what of the big City interests who are already reshaping their operations?

To the audible delight of Irish estate agents, tailors and wine merchants, the authorities there say they have finalised deals with more than a dozen banks and finance houses for some of their business to be shifted from London to Dublin. JP Morgan – which warned during the referendum campaign that Brexit might mean losing a quarter of its 16,000 UK staff – has started building a 22-storey tower on the banks of the Liff ey. Morgan Stanley is likely to shed jobs in London by expanding operations in Frankfurt; CitiGroup, Standard Chartered and Nomura Holdings are reportedly opening new offices Brexit won’t punish bankers. But it will harm voters John Harris in the same city . That much-loved public favourite the Royal Bank of Scotland apparently has its sights set on Amsterdam, which is nice.

“To the joy of Irish estate agents, tailors and wine merchants, more than a dozen banks will shift business to Dublin”

When I called round a few City insiders this week and asked them how much of London’s financial business Brexit might cost, one put the figure at 25%. An LSE study reckons the potential loss of business revenue is around 15%; one Brussels-based thinktank says the value of assets about to be transferred to mainland Europe may total € 1.8tn , equivalent to 17% of the UK’s banking assets. To state the blindingly obvious, in an economy as financialised as ours, that’s a lot.

Meanwhile, even bigger anxieties swirl around. Some relate to the disastrous possibilities of a cliff -edge Brexit, glimpsed this week in the letter written to the House of Commons Treasury select committee by the deputy governor of the Bank of England in charge of the Prudential Regulation Authority, which essentially exists to prevent financial crises.

He warned of threats to both the financial sector and the UK economy as a whole, as well as holding out a particularly chilling prospect: that just as personal debt reaches a critical point and warnings of financial fragility are once again heard, British regulators might be prevented from doing their usual work by the new responsibility of regulating the British operations of European companies hitherto overseen by other EU governments. He calls this a “material extra burden”; the rest of us might think of it in terms of accidents waiting to happen.

This may be the first column I have ever written in defence of banks. If we had any kind of solid, dependable, balanced economy, we all might be much more relaxed . But there are no signs of that; indeed, leaving the EU looks likely to make the gaping inequalities the City symboli ses even worse. The next time you are in a hospital or school, you might want to consider two things: that bankers foot a siz able share of the costs; and , in the midst of Brexit’s mix of anger, delusion and indiff erence, they may soon be paying their taxes somewhere else.

11/08/2017

Fear there’ll be food rotting in the fi elds after Brexit? It’s already starting

Our farms rely on EU fruit and veg pickers. But they are staying away, and it’ll hit this summer’s harvest

In the wake of an ocean of writing linking Brexit to the zeitgeisty Dunkirk spirit , here’s one more martial metaphor. Self-evidently, this is the phoney war stage of the process. Negotiations have barely started; the prime minister is on holiday. Meanwhile, ministers – and Labour politicians – talk about the fundamentals of leaving the European Union as if we can push Brussels in any direction we fancy and freely choose no end of measures to ease our passage out.

The recent noise about freedom of movement is a case in point. If the government has a coherent position, it seems to be that migration from the EU under current rules will end in 2019 , but also carry on, with – according to the home secretary, anyway – the proviso that during an “implementation phase” of up to four years, people from the EU will simply have to add their names to a national register. Thus, a great human army which keeps so much of Britain’s economy ticking over will still be available, just as long as the right arrangements are put in place.

This is, of course, somewhat less than credible, as evidenced by a mounting crisis that has yet to turn critical but is bubbling away across the country. At the least, we are fundamentally changing the basis on which people can live and work in the UK, swapping residence as a right for a much more uncertain system dependent on political caprice.

If you wanted to be more dramatic, you might say that the 2016 European referendum in effect put a huge neon sign over Britain, saying, “ Foreigners not welcome ”. And to make matters worse, the value of sterling is making coming here even less attractive. “

The perception from overseas is we are xenophobic, we’re racist, and the pound has plummeted too. We’ve gone with Brexit and that makes us look unfriendly.” Those are the words of John Hardman, director of Hops Labour Solutions, which supplies about 12,000 workers a year to food-grow ers. He reckons that when it comes to “foodpicking jobs in agriculture – which means everything from strawberries to brussels sprouts” , there is currently a Brexit-related shortfall of about 20% , which chimes with recent surveys by the National Farmers Union.

What of the much-discussed prospect of food rotting in the fields? “We’re not far off . I suspect that’ll definitely happen next year,” he says. Hardman reckons that growers are beginning to question their investment plans for 2018, fearing crops going unpicked, and says that large-scale growers might soon consider moving into central and eastern Europe, at which point those much-fetishised union jacks will start to disappear from strawberry punnets.

According to a study by the GMB union sourced from official figures , nearly half the workers employed in the UK’s fruit and vegetable “processing and preserving sector” are from countries within the EU. In meat processing, the figure is 44%. But among seasonal businesses that use fruit and veg pickers, the number usually rockets to more than 90%. Such figures denote thousands of people who are often poorly paid and prepared to do monotonous, frequently back-breaking work, thereby keeping a large swath of Britain’s food economy ticking over.

But not for much longer, perhaps. In the latest survey by the Association of Labour Providers , 30% of agencies who supply workers to British food and agriculture businesses say they don’t expect to be able to source sufficient workers for the remainder of this summer’s peak picking period, and almost half say they will have problems in the busiest period before Christmas.

Whenever the subject of free movement and the UK’s food industry comes up, many people envisage a Brexit in which wages will leap up, British workers will return to the fields , and all will be well. Superficially, the fact that 40% of labour providers in agriculture and food say the businesses they service have recently had to increase wages makes it look like things might be pointing in that direction. But the food sector is just as complex and fragile as the rest of the economy, and it may not take much to tip it into chaos.

“The jobs are poorly paid, boring and backbreaking. Most UK-born people wouldn’t be interested”

Supermarkets can sell cheap food to people who haven’t had a pay rise in years thanks to an industry partly built around growing and packing businesses that tend to run on unbelievably tight margins (half of British fruit farms are reckoned to turn profi ts of less than 2% of turnover). But in the main food-growing areas of England – the East Anglian fens, for instance – unemployment rates tend to be low. And even leave-voting locals acknowledge that, whatever the wage rates (if you’re up for the work, you can turn £10 to £15 an hour picking strawberries), most UK-born people wouldn’t be interested in the kind of jobs that might soon be available.

Besides, seeing Brexit as any kind of cure for low-wage work is surely a political category error. The project that Britain is embroiled in is not a great progressive drive to right social wrongs: it is an emotion-driven revolution led by people on the political right who have no idea what they are doing . And sooner or later, thanks to a combination of reduced domestic production and insuffi cient workers, Brexit may well explode into further increases in food prices – a prospect which takes us back into the fragilities of Britain’s teetering economic model: limited household budgets, rising debt, and the fact that what separates millions on limited incomes from borderline starvation is the availability of cut-price food.

Meanwhile, the most zealous Brexiteers look forward to a supremely unlikely future in which we spurn the huge amount of food we import from Europe and somehow either produce our own, or fly in stuff from around the globe. Beyond the prospect of stupidly increased food miles and basic fruit and veg suddenly refrigerated to within an inch of its life , such half-baked visions may well bump up against one big problem: the effects of Brexit (including the loss of farming subsidies , which is a whole other mess) meaning we may not have much of a British food industry left – a strange thing to be embraced by selfstyled patriots, but there we are.

Who knows? We could turn the suddenly vacated fields into nostalgic theme parks, where people could watch re-enactments of the second world war while eating imported strawberries: it would be the perfect Brexit day out, should anyone be able to afford it.

05/08/2017

They came to live a British dream. Is it all over?

Europeans moved to the UK to get ahead. But tough talk on immigration makes them fear for the future

On the southern edge of Peterborough is a new residential development called Cardea – a huge expanse of housing served by a solitary Morrison s supermarket and a self-styled “clean, modern pub” called the Apple Cart – which has become a byword for the more affl uent elements of the city’s Polish population.

On roads called Jupiter Avenue, Hercules Way and Neptune Close, newly built homes extend into the distance. A three-bedroom detached will give you change out of £250,000, and put you in close proximity to the expanse of warehouses, distribution centres and retail outlets which power a big part of the local economy. The openings such places offer tend to fall one of two ways: management positions and tech roles for people who have either worked their way up or arrived with the right qualifications; or, at what the modern vernacular calls entry level, more uncertain roles for people who are prepared to put in the graft, and who often shoulder the burden of mindbending shift patterns and low wages.

From a leftie perspective, all this might suggest some awful neoliberal dystopia. But to many people from EU countries, Peterborough has off ered the prospect of self-improvement and hardwon comfort. Individual career histories often defy not only the more doomy critiques of the modern job market, but the idea that human beings can be neatly divided into “low-skilled” and “highskilled” . They instead present a picture of people who have determinedly moved from one category to another.

One of my most reliable contacts is a fortysomething man who arrived in 2005, began stacking shelves for Marks & Spencer, and now runs his own photography business. In the recent past, I have met people who started packing crates for Ikea and became middlemanagers, or initially found low-grade work in supermarkets, only to eventually open their own shops.

Such stories are built around a set of aspirations: property ownership, relative affluence, and as much stability and security as the modern economy can deliver. Hearing them first-hand, I have felt at least some of my ingrained scepticism melt away: it might be easy to scoff at such an idea, but at least some people in this part of England have lived out a kind of British dream.

But no more, perhaps. Since 24 June last year, the signals emanating from Whitehall and Westminster have been clear. If the United Kingdom once offered an open door and an array of opportunities, such things are now almost completely obscured by mistrust, bad faith, and the sense that a majority of people in England and Wales (including the 61% of voters in Peterborough who supported Brexit) have had enough.

Such is the upshot of those leaked proposals from the Home Office, reportedly reflective of the views of Theresa May herself, and loudly endorsed by the right wing press. In symbolic terms, this is just one more burst of nastiness and delusion to add to an ever-expanding pile. But in the sense of practical policy, what has been proposed represents something quite remarkable: confirmation that post-Brexit Britain will put the demands of economics – or, put another way, national prosperity – well below the emotional stuff of belonging and nationhood, with no end of consequences.

Certainly, if it all comes to pass, there will be no more Cardeas. For any wouldbe migrant from mainland Europe, the kind of career ladder scaled by people in Peterborough will be snapped in two.

Supposedly low-skilled workers will only be able to stay for up to two years; even the high-skilled will have their stays capped at five. In that sense, the British dream will be over: migration from the EU will be subject to the kind of guest worker system that institutionalises prejudice and mistrust, and puts up huge barriers to some of the most basic elements of human existence.

Britain will be no place to start a family, or buy a home; as with people from outside the EU, anyone wanting to come and work here will be subject to an almost incomprehensible regime of income requirements, residency permits and immigration checks.

As far as I can tell, the mood among many people from EU countries remains stoical and hard-headed, perhaps reflective of a sensibility ingrained under communism, when the people in power regularly lost their minds but life had somehow to continue. “You are leaving the EU, so I guess some sort of restriction is inevitable,” said one of my Polish acquaintances this week.

But at the same time, there is a sense of a collective anxiety that has been slowly growing since last summer. On that score, I think of a woman I met in a Peterborough delicatessen back in February, who told me that her Facebook feed had recently filled with rumours that after the triggering of article 50, people from EU countries would be barred from re-entering Britain. “There are fears that they might chase us out of here, fears of deportations,” she said. Then she shrugged. “But life goes on.”

What all this says about the state of British Conservatism is very revealing. Post-Thatcher, the Tories have never resolved the tensions between the politics of nationalism and base prejudice, and the most basic principles of freemarket economics . But if May has her way, the fi rst will decisively trump (a good word, that) the second.

In that sense, the fate of a lot of people from mainland Europe will be hugely symbolic. Most of the EU citizens I have spoken to in Peterborough do not have a left wing thought in their heads; they believe in a credo of self-reliance, hard work and home ownership. In a British context, these ideas are as Tory as they come. So how come so many Conservatives now want to slam the door on their most devout adherents?

And what of the economy? Peterborough is one of the largest urban centres of a region of England in which unemployment is below the national average ; and in a city of nearly 300,000, a mere 1,770 people are currently claiming outof-work benefi ts. Its successive waves of migration from the EU – first Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians, then Bulgarians and Romanians – have fed a job market in which most British people are barely interested. Nonetheless, all of us have come to expect the benefi ts: cutprice food ; consumerism-on-tap ; the confidence of knowing that an online click today means a delivery tomorrow ; the idea that if the worst comes to the worst, some or other army of care workers will be there to look after us.

No more, perhaps: if a good deal of the explanation for Brexit is about a denial of the future and some misplaced vision of the past, we may be about to fi nd out what all that means in practice.

Terrified of the more irate elements of its core vote, the Labour party currently seems little interested in loudly raising the alarm. Whether Tory unease will boil over is uncertain, at best. But what we could be about to lose is obvious. Frozen into the brickwork of those newly built houses in Peterborough is a whole host of stuff – hard work, persistence, ambition, stoicism – that has played a huge role in keeping an increasingly fragile country in business. To throw all that away would be madness. But amid the general lunacy of Brexit, will that be enough to stop it?

07/09/2017

Revolutions are for zealots and fools – as the Tory Bolsheviks will find out

Leaving the EU was meant to be Thatcherism’s fi nale, but could turn out to be its death instead

The centenary year of the Russian revolutions of 2017 highlights an accidentally topical question: what do revolutionaries do when they actually get their revolution? The immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, wrote Leon Trotsky, often boiled down to “legislative improvisation”. In his auto biography, My Life , he explained the general idea as follows: “Everything had to proceed from the beginning. There were no ‘precedents’, since history had none to offer … As a rule, matters were brought up for consideration without previous preparation, and almost always as urgent business.”

Does this remind you of anything? Swap St Petersburg for a Brussels conference room a century later, and you perhaps get a comparable sense of slightly unhinged ideals colliding with reality (albeit without the rattle of gunfire and the looming prospect of civil war). “The Bolsheviks came to power without a detailed template for the new state order,” wrote the anti-communist historian Robert Service in his 2007 book Comrades. “They did their inventing almost as an afterthought.”

Reading those words again this week, my mind settled on three things: Theresa May’s claim last year that Brexit was nothing less than a “revolution” , that image of David Davis facing the EU’s negotiating teams sans notes , and an essential difference between Bolsheviks and Tory Brexiteers – the fact that whereas the former’s revolutionary project survived its most besieged and confused period, the latter’s seems to be crumpling before it has even got started.

Which brings us to the dire state of the Conservative party. Most political commentary frames mounting Tory chaos in terms of May’s spectacularly illadvised decision to call a general election, runners and riders for the leadership, and the implicit idea that a change at the top might make a signifi cant diff erence. But there is a much deeper story at play, about 2017 as the denouement of a Conservative story that dates back 40 years, and what might turn out to be the most piquant of ironies: that if Brexit marks the Tory right’s apogee of influence, it could also prove to be their moment of eclipse, in which they take even the more enlightened elements of their party down with them.

We all know where leaving the EU sits in the romantic imaginations of such Tories as Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox . They have their differences, but 40 years after the first of the great changes authored by Margaret Thatcher they tend to see Brexit as the ultimate stride into the free-market utopia her followers have always dreamed about, with the added bonus of huge patriotic symbolism. In this vision – of, as Fox puts it , “a low regulation and low taxation environment which is only likely to improve outside the EU” – Brussels is not the liberalising, pro-business force that reality suggests, but an eternal brake on enterprise and initiative that has to be comprehensively left behind.

Very often this is the reasoning behind the “no deal is better than a bad deal” position, and the most out-there Conservative vision of post-Brexit Britain, in which the only way to survive will be as a kind of northern European Singapore, fully in keeping with the ideals of the blessed Margaret.

Prior to the election, even if May’s brand of Toryism was turning out to be a lot less laissez-faire and anti-state than these people would have liked, there may have been some mileage in the idea that enough of the electorate would approve of these visions or meekly put up with them to make such turboThatcherism a goer. After all, after seven years of austerity and state-shrinking, the Conservatives were apparently heading for a landslide. But now? Austerity goes on, but its rationale is in retreat. Signal events, from the Grenfell Tower disaster to this week’s figures showing stalling rises in life expectancy and a big surge in crime , only underline the sense of a governing philosophy hitting the skids. The idea of Britain as some indulged, state-dependent place in dire need of further liberation now looks more like the stuff of political suicide than the basis of any renewal.

“The idea of Britain as in dire need of further liberation now looks like the stuff of political suicide”

And then there are the economic factors . In the wake of the 2008 crash  we have seen the slowest recovery in modern history. Wages continue to lag behind prices; poor pay feeds into the weak demand that seems to rule out any hint of strong growth. Household debt, not surprisingly, is forecast to exceed even the catastrophic levels to which it soared before the crash of 2008. Such, self-evidently, is where the kind of capitalism long embraced and encouraged by British Conservatism has taken us. Rather than what May is like on television, this is the most fundamental reason for the Tories’ poor showing at national elections. And clearly, the economic convulsions of Brexit will make things much, much worse.

What can the Tories do? Well away from the Brexit Bolsheviks, there is a strand of Conservatism that is at least aware of the depth and breadth of these problems. That applies to May herself, though beyond fuzzy talk of a new social contract and the imperative of “government stepping up”, very little flesh has been put on the rhetorical bones. Many of the people who have advocated some kind of Tory reformation are still full-throated Brexiteers, still seemingly oblivious to the basic fact that the society they want and the historic disaster they support are mutually incompatible. But even more problematic is the rising sense that for as long as Conservatism is defined by abstract economic beliefs that increasingly fi nd no reflection in reality (question: which “markets” do Google and Facebook operate in?), and attached to the idea that people have to mostly help themselves, it will founder.

There is – or rather was – another Conservatism, always hostile to grand schemes, accepting of the idea that people can look to the state for help, and well aware that one person’s buccaneering capitalism is often many people’s misery. Sixty years after its post war peak, it may now be so far-fl ung as to be beyond the Tories’ reach – though if they lose power to a Jeremy Corbyn-led government, or the current administration quickly fi nds itself surrounded by the rubble of Brexit, it may once again find its voice. If that happens, the reconstructed Tory view of the party’s recent history will surely centre on one key understanding: that revolutions are largely for zealots and fools, and if Conservatism is the author of uncontrollable chaos, the game is usually up.

20/07/2017

It is clearly a terrible idea, but Brexit has to happen

Those who still hope to stop us leaving the EU need to think harder about the likely repercussions

Social media is awash with it. In a certain kind of company, conversation inevitably turns to it. Now, even senior broadcast journalists hint that it might be possible, triggering great surges of online excitement. Barely a year after the EU referendum and only three months since the Daily Mail’s triumphal “Crush the saboteurs” front page, you can almost smell it: a rising expectation that the nightmare of leaving the EU might somehow be averted, allowing the country to return to some kind of normal.

“ Brexit may never happen ,” says Vince Cable.
“ I know in my heart that Brexit can be stopped,” offers Alastair Campbell.
“ We’ll stop Brexit,” insists the venerable AC Grayling .

On Tuesday Manuel Cortes , the general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staff s Association and an enthusiastic supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, wrote an eloquent article for the LabourList website encouraging the party to bow to the supposedly inevitable. “The folly of the Brexit vote is becoming clearer and its economic consequences look dire,” he said. “Staying put won’t even cost us a penny.”

Fair play to these people: with ministers evidently making it up as they go along, dire economic forecasts, and big EU figures warning that negotiations might quickly break down, there is clearly a prima facie case for what they suggest. And calling time on Brexit fits the guarded optimism embraced by thousands of people since the start of June. A combination of Labour’s election surge, Theresa May’s crumpling, and the joys of a half-decent summer seem to have embedded one belief above all others: that if enough of us make sufficient noise, we can somehow pretend 23 June 2016 never happened.

The problem is that it did. More over, as far as I can tell from the many conversations I had with leave voters during the election campaign, the vast majority of people who voted to leave the EU are still convinced that it is the right thing to do. In whole swath s of the country, the bitterly anti-establishment mood that boiled over last summer is still there. In places long since laid waste by the malign eff ects of globali sation, predictions of economic doom do not cut much ice. And as well as holding fast to their beliefs about free movement and the necessity of Britain taking power back from Brussels, some now express an opinion that irate remainers might not even understand: that if leaving the EU is turning out to be so diffi cult, this only underlines how much of an off ence to sovereignty and democracy it probably is.

For pro-EU people who support Labour, all this highlights some very uncomfortable tensions. Though it is hardly his fault, it is part of Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation into the Princess Diana de nos jours that he has in some way become the sentimentalised focus of many remainers’ hopes while actually tilting in precisely the opposite direction: reverting to his lifelong Euroscepticism and embracing Brexit (albeit with the strong caveats highlighted by Labour’s stance on the “great repeal bill”), and thereby ensuring that leave supporters are an equally important part of Labour’s delicate electoral coalition. This was the key reason why Labour held on to many pro-Brexit seats they were predicted to lose – something plenty of non-Corbynite, instinctively proEuropean Labour MPs well understand.

Yet still the predictions of Brexit interrupted pile up. Thanks to the kind of long transition arrangement proposed by the Confederation of British Industry, some think the process might fi zzle out. Perhaps a second referendum will kill it. This week, a talented Tweeter wrote an imagined speech for May, conceding “the Brexit process would inflict much unsalvageable damage on our country”, and announcing the U-turn to end all U-turns.

But there is always something missing : any sense of the backlash that would be sparked, the myth of betrayal that would sit at the heart of our politics, and the great gift likely to be handed to ugly and opportunistic forces that are still out there, waiting for their chance. Ukip is in abeyance partly because its current leadership could not run a bath, but also because the process of Brexit is under way. Immigration did not much figure in the general election because the prospect of ending free movement was in sight. Nix those things – which, in the latter case, applies as much to staying in the single market – and the grim politics of the pre-referendum period could well come roaring back.

“By the time everything is resolved a lot of us will be very old or dead. But that may be the price we have to pay”

At which point, a few simple facts. To understand why people support Brexit is not to agree with them. Clearly, leaving the EU remains a terrible idea. It will almost certainly be economically calamitous, and it sends out a terrible signal about the kind of country Britain has become.

The big question, though, centres on where Brexit came from, and what sustains it. A large part of the answer is about an ingrained English exceptionalism, partly traceable to geography but equally bound up with a puff edup interpretation of our national past, which has bubbled away in our politics and culture for decades. The likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have used it for their own ideological ends; in the kind of post-industrial places long ignored by Westminster politicians it turned out to be the one bit of pride and identity many people had left. It runs deep: even if the economy takes a vertiginous plunge, it will take a lot longer than two years to shift it.

The only way such delusions will fade is if they are finally tested in the real world and found wanting, whereupon this country may at last be ready to humbly engage with modernity. And in that sense, to paraphrase a faded politician, Brexit probably has to mean Brexit. That may result in a long spell of relative penury, and an atmosphere of recrimination and resentment. By the time everything is resolved a lot of us will either be very old or dead. But that may be the price we have to pay to belatedly put all our imperial baggage in the glass case where it belongs, and to edge our way back into the European family, if they will have us.

In the meantime, this messiest of national dramas grinds on, and not for the fi rst time the story suggests the priceless words of the American writer and satirist HL Mencken : “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

14/07/2017

Monsanto Papers

In order to save glyphosate, the Monsanto corporation has undertaken an effort to destroy the
United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible. Le Monde started the Monsanto papers, resulting in a dozen investigative articles exploring the many strategies used by Monsanto to interfere with science, influence the regulatory process and orchestrate PR campaigns to defend their products.

These two articles uncover how Monsanto actively tried to undermine the credibility of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

The Monsanto Papers, Part 1
— Operation: Intoxication.

02/06/2017

“We have been attacked in the past, we have faced smear campaigns, but this time we are the target of an orchestrated campaign of an unseen scale and duration.”

Christopher Wild’s smile quickly faded. Through the window of the high rise where the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is headquartered, the rooftops of Lyon, France, spread out behind his tall figure. 

Christopher Wild is the director of the agency so he weighed every word—speaking with a seriousness appropriate for the situation. For the past two years, a blazing onslaught has targeted the institution he is running: the credibility and integrity of IARC’s work are being challenged, its experts are being denigrated and harassed by lawyers, and its finances weakened.

For nearly half a century IARC has been charged, under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), to draw up an inventory of carcinogens. But now the venerable agency is beginning to waver under the assault. The hostilities were launched on a specific date: March 20, 2015. On that day, IARC announced the conclusions of its “Monograph 112“. The findings left the whole world stunned. Unlike the majority of regulatory agencies, IARC declared the most widely used pesticide on the planet to be genotoxic (it causes DNA damage), carcinogenic to animals, and a “probable carcinogen” for humans.

The pesticide is glyphosate, the main component of Roundup, the flagship product of one of the world’s most well-known companies: Monsanto. Glyphosate is also the Leviathan of the agrochemical industry. Used for more than 40 years, it is present in no less than 750 products marketed by about 100 companies in more than 130 countries.

Glyphosate, the bedrock of Monsanto

Between 1974, when it was placed on the market, and 2014, the use of glyphosate increased from 3,200 tons to 825,000 tons per year. A dramatic increase that is due to the massive adoption of seeds that are genetically modified to tolerate it – “Roundup Ready” seeds.

Of all the agrochemical companies that could be affected by measures to restrict or ban the product, there is one whose very survival is at stake. Monsanto, which developed glyphosate, has made the chemical the bedrock of its economic model. The company has built its fortune selling Roundup and the seeds that go with it.

So when IARC announced that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic,” the American firm reacted with unprecedented brutality. In a company statement, it vilified IARC’s work as “junk science”— a selective “cherry-picking” of data, based on an “agenda driven bias,” all leading to a decision made after only “hours of discussion at a one-week meeting”

Never before had a corporation so crudely challenged the integrity of an agency under the aegis of the United Nations. The battle was launched—the one taking place in the open at least.

A year’s work to evaluate the pesticide

Because in its own offices Monsanto was dancing to a completely different tune. The company knew full well that IARC’s evaluation of glyphosate was carried out after a year of work by a group of experts, who then met for several days in Lyon to deliberate. IARC procedures require that the industries affected by the product under review have the right to attend this final meeting.

For the evaluation of glyphosate, Monsanto had sent an “observer,” the epidemiologist Tom Sorahan, a professor at the University of Birmingham (UK), whom the company sometimes employs as a consultant. The report he sent to his bosses on March 14, 2015, assured them that everything was done according to the rules.

“I found the Chair, sub-chairs and invited experts to be very friendly and prepared to respond to all comments I made,” wrote Mr Sorahan in an email sent to a Monsanto executive. The email appears in the “Monsanto Papers” —a collection of the company’s internal documents that a U.S. court started to make public in early 2017 as part of ongoing lawsuits.

“The meeting followed the IARC guidelines,” the observer added. “Dr Kurt Straif, Head of the IARC Monographs Programme, has an intimate knowledge of the IARC rules and insists these are followed.”

Counter-attack

The academic scientist, who has not responded to requests from Le Monde, seemed to be very embarrassed by the idea that his name might be associated with Monsanto’s response to the IARC decision: “I do not wish to be referenced in any document from your PA/PR people,” he wrote, though at the same time proposing that he would be “happy to assist in formulating statements that you may wish to make” in the inevitable counter-attack that the company was putting in place.

A few months later, the non-American scientists who had been members of the IARC panel on glyphosate all received the same letter. Sent by Monsanto’s law firm, Hollingsworth, the letter told them to hand over all the files related to their work on “Monograph 112.”

Drafts, comments, data tables … everything that had gone through the IARC computer system. “If you decline to provide the files,” the lawyers warned, “we request and instruct you to immediately take all reasonable steps in your power to preserve all such files intact pending formal discovery requests issued via a US Court.”

“I found your letter intimidating and noxious,” said one of the scientists in his reply dated November 4, 2016. “I find your approach reprehensive and lacking in common courtesy even by today’s standards.”

Pathologist Consolato Maria Sergi, a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada continued: “I consider your letter pernicious because it maliciously seeks to instill some anxiety and apprehension in an independent group of experts.”

Lettre de Hollingsworth à Consolato Maria Sergi by LeMonde.fr on Scribd 

Intimidating maneuvers

U.S. members of the IARC working group are being subjected to even more “intimidating” measures. In the U.S., the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, allows every citizen—under certain conditions—to request access to documents produced by public bodies and their officials: memos, emails, internal reports, etc.

According to our information, since November 2015 the law firms Hollingsworth and Sidley Austin have filed five applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone where two of the group experts are employed.

Applications on other scientists have also been made to the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA), Texas A&M University and Mississippi State University. Some of these institutions have even been subpoenaed by Monsanto lawyers as part of ongoing glyphosate litigations – and therefore obliged to hand over some of their internal documents.

Is the aim of these intimidating maneuvers to silence criticism? World-renowned scientists who are usually open to media requests did not respond to Le Monde’s requests—even for interviews off the record. Some did agree to speak but only from a private line outside office hours.

Members of the U.S. Congress do not need to use FOIA to be able to hold federal scientific institutions accountable. Republican Jason Chaffetz, former member of the House of Representatives and former chair of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, wrote to Francis Collins, the director of NIH, on September 26,
2016. IARC’s decisions have “generated much controversy and alarm,” he wrote. And despite its “record of controversy, retractions, and inconsistencies,” IARC receives “substantial taxpayer funding” from the NIH.

In fact, 1.2 million euros out of IARC’s 40 million euros annual budget comes from a NIH grant. For this reason Jason Chaffetz asked the NIH director for details and justifications of all NIH expenditure related to IARC.

Characters that are almost out of a John Le Carré novel

The same day, the Chaffetz letter was applauded by the American Chemistry Council (ACC). As the U.S. chemical industry’s powerful lobbying organization, of which Monsanto is a member, they “hope that it will shed light on the close and somewhat opaque relationship” between the IARC and American scientific institutions. The chemical lobby had found a valuable ally in Mr. Chaffetz. In March, the former congressman wrote to the head of another federal research organization – the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) – to ask her to account for the research that the institution has funded on the harmful effects of bisphenol A, a compound widely used in some plastics.

What better way to neutralize an institution than to cut off its funding? In the months following the publication of “Monograph 112,” CropLife International, the organization that defends the interests of pesticide and seed companies around the world, approached some representatives of the 25 member states of IARC’s governing council to complain about the quality of the agency’s work.

Known as “Participating States,” they contribute about 70 percent of IARC’s total budget. According to IARC, at least three of them—Canada, the Netherlands and Australia—were approached. None of them replied to Le Monde’s requests. Throughout 2016, characters who seemed to be almost out of a John Le Carré novel made their appearances in the glyphosate saga. In June, someone who presented himself as a journalist but did not announce or register himself as such attended the conference organized by IARC in Lyon for its fiftieth anniversary.

The strange Mr. Watts

Prowling among scientists and international civil servants, the man was seeking details about the functioning of IARC, its funding, its monograph program, and so on. A few months later, at the end of October 2016, the man reappeared—this time at the annual conference of the Ramazzini Institute, a renowned and respected cancer research organization based near Bologna, Italy. Why on Earth the Ramazzini? Perhaps because the Italian institute had announced a few months earlier that it was going to conduct its own carcinogenicity study on glyphosate. 

Related: Of mice, Monsanto and a mysterious tumor

Christopher Watts – that’s the man’s name – asked questions about the independence of the institute and its funding sources. Because he used an e-mail address that ended “@economist.com,” those he approached did not question his affiliation to the prestigious British weekly, The Economist. To the scientists who did ask for details, he said he worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a consultancy which is a subsidiary of the British press group.

The EIU confirmed that Mr. Watts had indeed produced several reports for them but was “unable to confirm in what capacity he attended” the two conferences. “During that time, he was working on a story for The Economist, which ultimately was not published.” Oddly enough, the weekly’s newsroom replied “there’s no one of that name on our staff.”

The only thing that seems clear is the name of a company that Mr. Watts created at the end of 2014: Corporate Intelligence Advisory Company. According to the administrative documents, the personal address of Mr. Watts is located in Albania. He did not wish to answer questions from Le Monde.

Intrusive and bureaucratic guerrilla warfare

Within the space of a few months, at least five individuals presented themselves as a journalist, independent researcher or assistant in law firms to approach IARC scientists and researchers involved in IARC’s work. All were seeking very specific information about the agency’s procedures and funding.

One of them, Miguel Santos-Neves, works for a New York-based economic intelligence company called Ergo.According to a report in the New York Times in July 2016, he was collared during a U.S. judicial investigation for misrepresenting his identity. On behalf of Uber, Mr. Santos-Neves had investigated a plaintiff who had filed a classaction suit against the company and questioned his professional entourage under false pretenses. Ergo did not respond to Le Monde’s enquiries.

Just like Christopher Watts, two sister organizations with nefarious reputations are interested not only in IARC but also in the Ramazzini Institute. The Energy and Environmental Legal Institute (E&E Legal) introduces itself as a non-profit organization, the missions of which include to “hold accountable those who seek excessive and destructive government regulation that’s based on agenda-driven policy making, junk science, and hysteria.”

The Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, for its part, says “it seeks to provide a counter-weight to the litigious environmental movement that fosters an economically destructive regulatory regime in the United States.”

According to Le Monde, they have initiated no fewer than 17 FOIA requests to the NIH and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Engaged in legal, bureaucratic and intrusive guerrilla warfare, they have demanded the correspondence of several American officials “containing the terms ‘IARC’, ‘glyphosate’, ‘Guyton'” (Kathryn Guyton is the IARC scientist responsible for the “Monograph 112”).

They seek the smallest of details on scholarships, grants and other financial and nonfinancial relationships between these American agencies, IARC, some scientists, and the Ramazzini Institute.

“Let nothing go”

The two organizations are headed by David Schnare, a confirmed climate sceptic who is known for harassing climate scientists. In November 2016, Mr. Schnare temporarily left E&E Legal to join Donald Trump’s transition team. As for Steve Milloy, who is also among the leaders of the organization, he is a wellknown figure in the small world of tobacco industry funded propaganda. When asked about their motivations and sources of funding, the president of E&E Legal replied by email: “Hi, we’re not interested in participating.” The attention on these FOIA requests is amplified by op-eds published in some media outlets.

One of them, The Hill, is mandatory reading for every political player in Washington DC. Their authors are a squadron of propagandists that the association US Right to Know (USRTK) has documented as having longstanding ties to agrochemical companies and conservative think tanks, such as the Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute, both known for their major role in the manufacture of climate skepticism. Their writings expose exactly the same arguments. And sometimes even the same phrases: the “shoddy science” of an IARC ravaged by conflicts of interest and “widely criticized”—yet without ever saying by whom.

The lawyers involved in U.S. lawsuits revealed that Monsanto also used more discreet means. Responding under oath to questions from lawyers representing people who attribute their cancer to Roundup, the firm’s executives revealed a confidential program aimed at countering all criticisms and called “Let Nothing Go.”

The transcripts of these hearings remain confidential. But memos from the law firms involved allow a little more to be known. They show that Monsanto uses third-party companies that “employ individuals who appear to have no connection to the industry but who in turn post positive comments on news articles and Facebook posts, defending Monsanto, its chemicals, and GMOs.”

The machine seems to be racing ahead with the advent of Mr. Trump

In recent months, the coalition against IARC has grown. At the end of January 2017, a few days after the inauguration of Donald Trump at the White House, the American Chemistry Council joined its ranks. The U.S. chemical lobby has opened a new front on social networks in the form of a “Campaign for Accuracy in Public Health Research,” with a dedicated website and a Twitter account.

Its stated purpose is to obtain a “reform” of the IARC monograph program. The powerful lobbying organization has put aside the kid gloves: “A side of bacon or a side of plutonium? It’s all the same according to IARC.” The tweet goes with a photomontage showing two fluorescent green bars dipping into bacon and eggs on a plate.

In October 2015, IARC indeed classified processed meats as “carcinogenic” and red meat as a “probable carcinogen” like glyphosate. Perhaps having privileged access to President Trump’s closest circle provides a feeling of omnipotence to these chemical and agrochemical industries? The chief American lobbyist of the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck, taken over as Deputy Assistant Administrator at the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention of the U.S. EPA, the very agency that oversees the re-examination of the glyphosate file.

And was not Andrew Liveris, the boss of Dow Chemical, a member of the American Chemistry Council, entrusted by Donald Trump in person to lead the president’s “Manufacturing Jobs Initiative”?

The machine seems to be racing ahead with the advent of the Trump era. At the end of March, the Republican Texan Lamar Smith, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, addressed the now former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price. Smith focused his demands on the financial links between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Ramazzini Institute in order, he wrote, to “ensure that grant recipients adhere to the highest standards of scientific integrity”.

Ignorance and lies

That is all it took for this congressman’s request to become, in the writings of two propagandists called Julie Kelly and Jeff Stier, a “Congress’s investigation” into the “obscure organisation” that is the Ramazzini Institute. Published shortly afterwards in the National Review, their article attacked personally both the director of NIEHS Linda Birnbaum, accused of promoting a “chemophobic agenda,” and her former Associate Director, Christopher Portier, who accompanied IARC’s work as an “invited specialist,” described as a “well-known anti-glyphosate activist.” Both were described as “Ramazzini fellows”.

According to Kelly and Stier, this is another example of “how science has been politicized.” The story was also taken up by others, including Breitbart News, the farright website co-founded by Steve Bannon, the former White House Chief Strategist. To describe the Institute or Collegium Ramazzini (the two are confused in the articles) as an “obscure organization” here, or as a “kind of Rotary Club for activist scientists” elsewhere, is at best ignorance and at worst a lie. Founded in 1982 by Irving Selikoff and Cesare Maltoni, two leading figures in public health, the Collegium Ramazzini is an academy of 180 scientists specializing in environmental and occupational health.

Linda Birnbaum and Christopher Portier are “Fellows” of the Collegium. And so are the Head of the IARC Monographs Program Kurt Straif, and four other experts from the Monograph 112 working group, all top-flight scientists in their respective fields.

“We are not afraid”

The launch of a long-term toxicology study on glyphosate by the Ramazzini Institute in May 2016 has made a target of an organization renowned for its expertise in cancer. The Head of the Research Department of the institute, Fiorella Belpoggi, is one of the few scientists who agreed to speak to Le Monde: “We are few, we have no money, we are just good scientists and we are not afraid.”

The attacks on the Ramazzini and the IARC are very unlikely to stop. After glyphosate, other strategic chemicals are on IARC’s list of “priorities” for the period 2014–2019. These include more pesticides and also bisphenol A (BPA) and aspartame. The NIEHS happens to be one of the world’s leading funders of research on the toxicity of BPA. As for aspartame, the study that alerted the world to the carcinogenic properties of this sweetener was carried out several years ago… by the Ramazzini Institute.

“I hadn’t realized we were so important before this,” whispered Fiorella Belpoggi, “but if you get rid of IARC, NIEHS and the Ramazzini Institute, you get rid of three symbols of independence in science.” A type of science that has become a threat to economic interests worth hundreds of billions of euros.

In order to save glyphosate, the Monsanto corporation has undertaken an effort to destroy the
United Nations’ cancer agency by any means possible.

Here is part two of an investigation from Le Monde.

They had promised it was “safer than table salt” – but that was in the advertisements. It is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It is the main ingredient in their flagship product, Roundup, the bedrock on which their firm has built its economic model, its wealth and its reputation. A product which has been on the market for more than 40 years and became a best-seller with the development of genetically-modified seeds called “Roundup Ready.” It is this product, glyphosate, that could in fact be carcinogenic. On March 20, 2015, Monsanto took a major hit. On that day, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared glyphosate to be genotoxic (it causes DNA damage), carcinogenic for animals, and a “probable carcinogen” for humans. The jury was a group of 17 seasoned experts representing 11 different nationalities who were brought together by this official UN agency, which is responsible for establishing an inventory of carcinogenic substances and whose scientific opinions on the matter have been authoritative for half a century. There was therefore no doubt that this would also be the destiny of their conclusions on glyphosate, published in the form of a report called “Monograph 112.”

A declaration of war

Safe from prying eyes, the fury of the U.S. corporation crossed the Atlantic via optical fibre. On the very same day, a message that carried the whiff of a declaration of war was sent to Geneva (Switzerland) to the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is IARC’s parent organization.

The letterhead sported the famous little green branch framed by an orange rectangle: the Monsanto logo. “It is our understanding that IARC participants purposefully chose to disregard dozens of studies and publicly available regulatory assessments that support the conclusion that glyphosate does not pose a human health risk,” wrote an accusatory Philip Miller, Monsanto’s Vice President of Global Regulatory and Governmental Affairs. Among the points that he wanted to be discussed in an “urgent meeting” were what “steps can be immediately taken to rectify this highly questionable review and conclusion,” the selection criteria for the experts, and even “an accounting of all funding for the classification of glyphosate by IARC, including donors.” The roles had switched: it was now the international organization that had to be accountable to the company.

Throughout the summer of 2015, CropLife International—the lobby organization of the agrochemical sector in which Monsanto is a member—took over the intimidation by letter. Intrusive demands jostled with veiled threats.

IARC, a stronghold of independence and integrity

IARC has seen it all before. Not for the first time is it the target of criticisms and attacks —those are commensurate with the agency’s reputation. Although IARC’s evaluations do not have any regulatory value, they can sometimes threaten huge commercial interests.

The most documented attack concerns passive smoking, which was evaluated by IARC at the end of the 1990s. But even in the heyday of confrontations with Big Tobacco, the weapons used were relatively tame. “I have been working for IARC for 15 years and I have never seen anything like what has been happening in the past two years,” confided Kurt Straif, Head of the agency’s Monographs Program.

It would be difficult to make IARC look like a controversial agency, contested within the scientific community itself and driven by an “anti-industry” bias. For the overwhelming majority of scientists in the academic world—cancer specialists or public health researchers—the agency represents a stronghold of independence and integrity. “I honestly have trouble imagining a more rigorous and objective way to proceed towards collective scientific reviews,” said epidemiologist Marcel Goldberg, a researcher at the French National Institute for Health and Medical research (INSERM), which has participated in the work of several monographs. For each of them, IARC brings together around 20 researchers from different countries, selected not only for their experience and scientific competence but for the absence of any conflicts of interest.

Moreover, IARC bases its opinions on studies published in scientific journals and excludes confidential industry-sponsored studies. This is not the case for most regulatory agencies, which—on the contrary—may give decisive weight to studies performed and supplied by the companies whose products are being assessed. Among them is the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the official EU agency in charge of assessing risks related to pesticides.

In fall 2015, the European Union was to decide whether or not it would renew its authorization for glyphosate for at least another decade. As the basis for that decision, EFSA’s opinion on glyphosate was much-awaited. By November, Monsanto could take a breath. EFSA’s conclusions contradicted IARC: EFSA concluded that glyphosate was neither genotoxic nor carcinogenic. Shortly afterwards, Monsanto’s breath was taken way again.

Attack against a scientist

A few weeks later, around a hundred scientists severely criticized EFSA’s conclusions in a respected journal, considering them flawed by numerous shortcomings. Behind the initiative was a U.S. scientist who had helped the scientists working on IARC’s monograph as an “invited specialist.”

It was on him that the attacks concentrated.

In environmental health circles, Christopher Portier is certainly not a nobody. “I have read here and there that Chris Portier has no competence and it’s probably one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard,” said Dana Loomis, the Vice Director of the IARC monographs. “He developed many of the analytic tools that are used everywhere to interpret toxicological studies!” Mr Portier is one of those scientists whose CV does not fit in less than 30 pages.

Author of more than 200 scientific publications, he has been Director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), director of the U.S. Agency on Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, associate director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and of the National Toxicology Program. “That’s undoubtedly a unique career,” said Robert Barouki, director of a toxicology research unit at INSERM.

Newly retired, Christopher Portier now offers his competence as an expert and adviser to several international organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a U.S. environmental protection NGO.

And it is this man who was to become the target of an attack … On April 18, 2016, the news agency Reuters published a long article on IARC in which the agency was described as a “semi-autonomous” WHO agency guilty of “confus[ing] consumers.”

The article referred to “concerns about potential conflicts of interest at IARC: It involves an adviser to the agency who is closely linked to the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S. campaign group opposed to pesticides”.

Rants and recriminations

“Critics,” wrote Reuters, “argue that IARC shouldn’t have allowed him to be involved in the assessment of glyphosate.” Remarkable detail: the news agency—which declined to respond to Le Monde— meanwhile quoted three scientists who castigate the institution, without ever mentioning that all three are widely known to be industry consultants. But who are these nameless “critics”? In reality, the criticism of IARC can be traced back to the blog of David Zaruk, a former lobbyist for the chemical industry, who has worked at some point for the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

In Brusssels, where he is based, Zaruk is infamous for his penchant for insults (the authors of this article have been his targets several times). He was the first to protest against Portier’s conflicts of interest, which he considers undermine IARC’s opinion. And he has persistently flayed the American scientist in the course of no less than twenty long posts around the topic of glyphosate – not to mention his tweets.

Related: The Monsanto Papers, Part 1—Operation: Intoxication

Professor Portier is described successively as an “activist”, a “rat”, a “demon”, a “weed”, a “mercenary”, and even a “little shit”, who “wormed his way” into the fruit that is IARC. To him, the agency is like a “scab”, and “the more” he “pick[s] at it”, “the more pus [he sees] coming out” because IARC is “infected by its hubris,” and “infected by politicised activist science” and “infected by anti-industry bias.”

Zaruk says he has had “three contacts” with Monsanto but denies he has been remunerated for his writing. “I did not receive a penny for my blogs on glyphosate,” he stated in an email to Le Monde. In April 2017, he published again a diatribe against NGOs, Christopher Portier and several journalists, which he illustrated with a photograph of Nazis burning books on the Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933.

Zaruk’s ramblings could have been easily checked and invalidated. But the prestigious guarantee of a Reuters’ article gave the go-ahead to their wide dissemination. Within a few weeks, the accusations of conflicts of interest were transmitted and quoted in The Times of London, the daily The Australian, and in the U.S. in National Review and The Hill under the signature of Bruce Chassy, an emeritus professor of the University of Illinois funded by Monsanto—as confidential documents obtained by the association US Right to Know (USRTK) in September 2015 have shown.

Conflicts of interests

Zaruk’s “work” was also cited in Forbes magazine in an op-ed signed by a biologist affiliated with the Hoover Institution, a think tank close to the Republican party. His name appears in declassified archives of the tobacco industry. At that time, this man would offer to write columns or land media appearances to “communicat[e on] risks and science”. Rates between $5,000 and $15,000.

The attacks of the Brussels blogger were also echoed by well-known propaganda websites, such as the American Council on Science and Health and the Genetic Literacy Project. Fed by PR people linked to the pesticides and biotechnology industries, the latter published an article about Christopher Portier and IARC signed by Andrew Porterfield, who describes himself quite simply as a “communications consultant for the biotechnology industry.”

And what about the suggestion that Portier faces conflicts of interest? Did the Environmental Defense Fund—through him—weigh in in favor of IARC’s decision to classify glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen”? “Because he had a link to this organization, Portier had the status of ‘invited specialist’,” explains Kathryn Guyton, IARC’s scientist in charge of Monograph 112. This means that he was consulted by the working group but didn’t contribute to the decision to classify the chemical in one category or the other. Real conflicts of interest however exist—but elsewhere.

In May 2016, while the press and the blogosphere were all out in relaying suspicions of malpractice at IARC, it was the turn of another group of UN experts to release their opinion. The Joint Meeting on Pesticides Residues (JMPR), a joint WHO and UN Food and Agriculture (FAO) organization group that rules on risks related to food (and not to exposure via inhalation, skin contact, etc) cleared glyphosate.

Almost one year earlier, a coalition of NGOs had warned WHO about conflicts of interest in the JMPR. Three of its members collaborate with the International Life Science Institute (ILSI), a scientific lobby organization financed by major agribusiness, biotechnologies and chemical industries—from Mars to Bayer and from Kellogg to Monsanto.

Serious allegations

Toxicologist Alan Boobis (Imperial College, United Kingdom) was serving as copresident of JMPR but also chair of ILSI’s board of trustees. Angelo Moretto (University of Milano, Italy) was rapporteur in the JMPR while acting as an industry consultant and member of the board of trustees of a structure created by ILSI. Vicky Dellarco, also a member of JMPR, was an industry consultant and a member of various ILSI working groups.

JMPR experts are supposedly subjected to the same independence rules—among the strictest in the world—as those applied at IARC, namely the WHO rules. Because it can alter the credibility of the institution and its decisions, an apparent conflict of interest is as serious as an actual conflict of interest. However, questioned by Le Monde, the WHO confirms that “no expert was deemed to have had a conflict of interest preventing their participation in the JMPR.”

This answer left Hilal Elver and Baskut Tuncak dissatisfied; they are respectively the Special UN Rapporteur on right to food and the Special UN Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes.

“We respectfully call upon WHO to explain how exactly it came to the conclusion that the experts’ ties to industry did not present an apparent or potential conflict of interest under its own rules” is how these two experts reacted when questioned by Le Monde. “Strong, clear and transparent processes for conflicts of interest are essential for the integrity of the system” they said before “encouraging” the organizations of the United Nations to “review” them.

These two experts wrote in their report on the right to food that some “serious claims” exist “of scientists being ‘bought’ to re-state industry talking points.” The report, which was handed over to the United Nations Human Rights Council in March 2017, also underlined that: “The pesticide industry’s efforts… have obstructed reforms and paralyzed global pesticide restrictions globally.” Throwing discredit on IARC, its working group experts and the quality of the scientific work accomplished—these “efforts” are of strategic importance, even vital necessity, to Monsanto.

Court cases underway in the United States

Close on Monsanto’s heels are several U.S. law firms representing victims or relatives of victims who have died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), a rare cancer that affects white blood cells which they attribute to exposure to glyphosate. For their lawyers, IARC’s Monograph 112 constitutes an essential piece of evidence. For Monsanto, Monograph 112 could weigh heavily on the final verdicts. According to legal documents, the amount of damages and other payments in the U.S. could well amount to billions of dollars for the 800 plaintiffs—a number that will “probably” rise to 2,000 by the end of the year, according to Timothy Litzenburg, a lawyer at The Miller
Firm. Confidential memos, spreadsheets and internal briefs: all in all, ten million pages taken from the boxes in Monsanto’s archives and from entrails of its PCs. This is the amount of documents that the company has been forced to hand over to the court to date. In the U.S., a procedure called “discovery” allows this kind of raid on the adversary’s paperwork.

From the mass of scanned documents, released drip by drip, that are the “Monsanto Papers”, the multinational’s response plan emerges. Take this “confidential” PowerPoint document dated March 11, 2015, with slides that develop a strategy of influence in the form of “Scientific Projects.” Among other ideas, a “comprehensive evaluation of carcinogenic potential” of glyphosate by “credible scientists,” and “possibly via Expert Panel Concept” is mentioned. That will be done.

In September 2016, a series of six articles appeared in the scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology. They exonerated glyphosate. But, as the publication was openly “sponsored and supported” by Monsanto, would anything other than this have been possible?

The authors were the sixteen members of the “glyphosate experts panel” to whom Monsanto confided the task to “review the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monograph on glyphosate.”

Their recruitment was delegated to Intertek, a consultancy specialized in the production of scientific material for companies facing regulatory or legal difficulties related to their products. Monsanto and its allies also called on the services of Exponent and Gradient, two other firms engaged in the business of “product defense.”

“Glyphosate task force”

The crisis management PowerPoint also envisaged the publication of an article about IARC itself: “How it was formed, how it functions, hasn’t evolved over time, they are archaic and not needed now.” The scientist who was suggested as a possible author has published nothing on the issue so far.

However, an article that perfectly matches the hostile specifications was published in a minor journal in October 2016. IARC’s system of classification has “become outmoded” and “serve[s] neither science nor society,” wrote the 10 authors. “This is how eating processed meat can fall into the same category as sulfur mustard gas.” IARC’s approach, they said, is at the origin of “health scares, unnecessary economic costs, loss of beneficial products, adoption of strategies with greater health costs, and the diversion of public funds into unnecessary research.”

It was a very unusual tone for a scientific journal. This is perhaps because Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology is a special kind of publication. Not only does its editorial board include numerous industry players and consultants but also its editor in chief, Gio Gori, is a well-known figure in the history of the tobacco industry.

Owned by the powerful scientific publishing group Elsevier, this is the official journal of a supposedly scholarly society, the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology & Pharmacology (ISRTP). No significant information about the society is available on its website and neither Gori nor ISRTP nor Elsevier responded to questions from Le Monde. It has therefore not even been possible to identify anyone in charge – let alone its sources of funding. However, last time ISRTP published its sponsors, in 2008, the list of six included Monsanto.

As to the 10 authors of the article, some of them have worked or are currently working for the Swiss group Syngenta, a member of the “glyphosate task force” of the industrial players selling glyphosate products. Some are private consultants. Others are academic scientists and take part in the activities of the scientific lobbying organization, ILSI. Among them are Samuel Cohen, professor of oncology at the university of Nebraska, Alan Boobis, co-president of JMPR, and Angelo Moretto, rapporteur of the same JMPR.

“Shock tactics”

These three scientists pursued the trail. A few months later, they published on the propaganda website called the Genetic Literacy Project, which had relayed the personal attacks against Christopher Portier, a text claiming that IARC “should be abolished.”

The agency was accused of fuelling “chemophobia” among the public. If it is not reformed, they wrote, IARC “should be relegated to the regulatory museum where it belongs, along with other historical artifacts, such as the Model T Ford, the biplane, and the rotary dial telephone.”

In scientific circles, convention holds that the author of the first draft of a text takes responsibility for any modifications up until the very last corrections. Which one of the authors wrote these two texts—published by the scientific journal and on the Genetic Literacy Project website? “I can’t remember,” replied Alan Boobis when asked by Le Monde, explaining “it was a whole process,” and that the writing had “undergone quite a lot of refinement over the year.”

This is “a bit of shock tactic,” acknowledged Boobis. Asked why the article was published on this website, Boobis admitted that the Genetic Literacy Project was not famous for its rigour, but explained that the text was refused by a scientific journal. Their arguments are identical to those of Monsanto and their allies. “This is a very odd position that we’ve reached that any association with industry whatsoever is regarded immediately as an indication of bias, corruption, confounding, distortion or whatever,” answered Boobis.

Is the “abolition” of IARC what Monsanto wants? The corporation did not wish to answer Le Monde’s questions.