Business OPINION | 07

Battle of Britain
The

Tuesday, July 30 2019

A
JOHN FEFFER
ll eyes are focused these days on
Boris Johnson, the new prime min-
ister of the United Kingdom. But
that’s not the most important news this
month out of Britain.
The Labor Party has finally come around
to opposing the country’s exit from the Eu-
ropean Union, though it’s possibly a case of
“too little, too late.” The party failed to get
its act together before the European Parlia-
ment elections in May and was thus unable
to offer a clear alternative to Nigel Farage’s
Brexit Party, which ultimately received the
most British votes.
Nevertheless, the battle lines are now
clearly drawn. Just last month, the country
was led by Theresa May, who initially sup-
ported Remain but who dutifully pushed
through her party’s commitment to Leave.
At the helm of the main opposition Labour
Party, meanwhile, is Jeremy Corbyn, whose
dislike of the European Union’s neoliberal
elements ensured that Labour was incapable
of taking a clear position. With such half-
hearted leadership, no wonder the country
has been making a mess of things after the
Brexit referendum.
Boris Johnson will take Britain’s helm. And
Labour has moved more firmly into the Re-
main camp. Let the battle begin. Britain’s
Labour Party is in difficult straits. It’s not
just the party’s incoherent position on
Brexit. Charges of anti-Semitism within the
party have led to a number of MPs leaving
the party and an investigation by the inde-
pendent Equality and Human Rights Com-
mission. Fully one-third of British voters
think that Labour is anti-Semitic. In this
year’s European Parliament election, Labour
lost half its seats. The party has seen its pop-
ularity drop from 42 percent in July 2017 to
27 percent two years later. But given how
unpopular the Conservative Party has been,
even 27 percent puts Labour close to the top
of the polls. There is, however, competition
from another quarter. The Liberal Democ-
rats have just chosen a new party leader, Jo
Swinson, who offers a full-throated rejection
of Brexit and an equally unequivocal con-
demnation of Boris Johnson: “He has shown
time and time again that he isn’t fit to be
prime minister. Boris Johnson has only ever
cared about Boris Johnson.”
An insurgent movement within Labour
has attempted to right the ship and stave off
the challenge from the Liberal Democrats. A
MPs called “Love Socialism, Rebuild
Britain, Transform Europe” recognizes the
problems of the European Union and ac-
knowledges the pain suffered by so many of
Brexit’s supporters. But it argues that
Britain should remain in order to join the
fight to transform the EU. Last week, the
group held a meeting in parliament that in-
cluded a number of shadow cabinet minis-
ters who endorsed the anti-Brexit agenda
and pushed for another referendum on the
issue.
Corbyn, meanwhile, has officially shifted
to supporting a second referendum, but only
after Labour-affiliated trade unions pushed
him that direction. I asked Mary Kaldor, a
professor of global governance at the Lon-
don School of Economics and a long-time
campaigner at the European level, if
Labour’s shift has come in time to affect the
Brexit discussion. Boris Johnson, for in-
stance, has threatened to implement Brexit
by the EU’s deadline of October 31 even if
he can’t renegotiate a deal to cushion the im-
pact of withdrawal. This “no deal” option
terrifies Britons across the political spec-
trum.
“We’re on a knife edge,” she told me.
“The victory of the Brexit Party [in the Eu-
group of society toward this mad ‘no deal’
position. My fear is that a lot of Labour MPs
will support the withdrawal agreement be-
cause the alternative is no deal. As [Labour
MP] Clive Lewis said at the meeting on
Monday, ‘We’re in for the fight of our
lives.’” The next official British election is
set for 2022. But snap elections could take
place if Boris Johnson believes that he can
take advantage of Labour’s divisions and Je-
remy Corbyn’s declining popularity. It
would be an enormously risky move to do so
before the Conservatives have delivered on
Brexit. But Boris Johnson, like Donald
Trump, is notoriously unpredictable and in-
cautious. It’s often said that anything – a
speech, a threat, a jingle – delivered in an
upper-class British accent sounds more so-
phisticated (to American ears at least). Boris
Johnson, however, challenges that assertion.
He has a long history of sounding absolutely
asinine, posh accent notwithstanding.
A one-time journalist, Johnson is a walk-
ing, talking embodiment of the Peter Princi-
ple: the tendency of a person to rise in a
bureaucracy to their level of maximum in-
competence. Except that Johnson has been
failing forward his entire life. Johnson was
fired from his first job at the Times of Lon-
would have scrupulously observed the rules
of the game thereafter or found a different
career. Instead, Johnson doubled down. He
found a new employer, the Telegraph, that
ate up all the Euroskeptic nonsense he was
making up from his new base in Brussels. As
one of his former colleagues put it, Johnson
wrote “outrageous stories with only the slen-
derest connection of truth in them.”
As mayor of London, Johnson was en-
tirely out of his depth, wasting huge sums of
money on unrealistic projects such as an air-
port on an artificial island in the Thames.
Another time, he bought old German water
cannons for riot control that ended up in the
scrap heap at a loss of 300,000 pounds. The
only reason London continued to function is
that Johnson delegated all the actual work to
competent underlings. Later, as foreign sec-
retary, Johnson compiled an even more ig-
nominious record of gaffes and diplomatic
blunders. He insulted foreign leaders. He
told inappropriate jokes. In fact, the only
thing that Boris Johnson has ever succeeded
at is Brexit, the campaign he supported from
the very beginning. But that’s like identify-
ing the Iraq War as George W Bush’s signal
accomplishment or suggesting that the con-
viction of the Central Park Five was one of

‘Managing’ the Internet

But now, the chest-thumping Brexiteer new group of radical and socialist Labour ropean Parliament elections] pushed a whole don for making up a quote. A normal person Donald Trump’s great victories.

UMAIR JAVED siderable consensus by the previous,
PML-N-led government. In the long
list of things the party should be regret-
ting, now that it’s on the other side of
the quash, this should be pretty high up
on the list.
As highlighted by Ramsha Jahangir
in an excellent online piece for this
publication, PECA 2016 arms the reg-
ulator to assert its control by bypassing
more thorough and consultative proce-
dures for banning internet content. As a
piece of legislation, PECA echoes the
larger, danda-driven ethos of the Pak-
istani state on issues of political con-
decisions. Norms often emanate from
state-to-state power relations, with the
more powerful ones providing blue-
prints for the less powerful ones. In
Pakistan’s case, with increasing prox-
imity to China and the Gulf, born out
of our economic and geostrategic im-
peratives (or should one call them
handicaps?), some of what defines
those states is going to appear attractive
to our decision-makers as well.
This was something that people have
highlighted at various points in the re-
cent past as well. Authoritarianism is
not something extraneous to the Pak-

L
ast week, several news outlets
reported comments made by
the chairperson of Pakistan
Telecommunication Authority on the
organisation’s troubles in ‘managing’
content over the internet. The initial
story that came out suggested that the
PTA chief, a retired major general, had
suggested exploring options utilised by
flict, which has become all the more
apparent in the last 12 months. What is
this approach? Essentially, if you don’t
like something, ban it, incarcerate it,
and don’t let it see the light of day.
None of this is to suggest that the
issue of how a state (any state) interacts
with internet content is straightforward.
In countries like Pakistan, where phys-
ical violence against minorities of sev-
eral types is common, provocations on
istani state. The country has a long and
illustrious (sic) history of centralising
authority and utiliding coercion to
achieve political objectives. What
makes the current moment more pro-
nounced is the perception of severity of
the ‘national situation’. In other words,
decision-makers now act on the senti-
ment that the country had become too
soft, corrupt, and hollow in dealing
with certain economic and political is-

Feeding 7.7 billion

countries like the UAE and China,
where major social media platforms are
either banned or heavily regulated.
Later on, a flurry of inchoate clarifica-
tions issued by the organisation

stressed that these were used as exam-
ples and that the PTA has no intention
of banning internet platforms in Pak-
istan.
The entire exchange, which hap-
pened in front of a Senate special com-
mittee, makes several references to
blasphemous content hosted outside of
Pakistan as the main source of frustra-
tion for the telecom regulator. While
considered a serious matter, it is worth
remembering that a similar debate led
to a multi-year ban on YouTube under
the PPP government, placing a signifi-
cant freeze on content production and
creation in Pakistan.
Even if we take the most benign in-
terpretation of the PTA’s statement, it
doesn’t take much to see through the
bugbear as a mere foothold in the larger
conversation around regulating Pak-
istan’s internet sphere. And it doesn’t
take much to see why the internet is
proving to be a source of considerable
consternation to the Pakistani state at
this point.
Regulating the internet under the
pretext of hurt Muslim sentiment is
something the state has been pushing
for some time.
It received extra credence in the
highly securitised atmosphere of the
last decade, when anti-state jihadi con-
tent appeared as another cause for reg-
ulatory concern. The outcome, one that
many are now familiar with, was the ill-
thought-out Pakistan Electronic Crimes
and through the internet are a public
policy issue that need to be resolved.
But the pathway to resolution needs
to be based on principles that are, at the
very least, enshrined in the Constitu-
tion. To put it as briefly as possible, one
unelected bureaucrat, appointed by an
opaque process that was likely influ-
enced by his former rank and institu-
tional affiliation, cannot be making
decisions that impact millions of inter-
net users in the country. At the very
least, it needs to be consultative and
subject to transparent guidelines that
can be debated and amended as and
when the situation demands.
On the other hand, this entire episode
(and what’s gone on for the last three
years with cyberspace in Pakistan as a
whole), and in particular the examples
that were cited in front of the Senate
panel, provides us with a window into
what the Pakistani state aspires to be-
come.
IR scholars have pointed out that
norm diffusion is a powerful explana-
tory mechanism to understand how mil-
sues, and, therefore, needs a firmer grip
on the handle to navigate through to
eternal salvation. The PTA hearing
made the analogies explicit, but it does-
n’t take much to see that the China or
Bangladesh or Burma model,
whichever one is in vogue at this point,
occupies many important minds. On
paper, Pakistan is a parliamentary
democracy, but such a remarkable one
that every important decision is being
taken by unelected technocrats, bu-
reaucrats, and military officers of vari-
ous shades. To address and resolve this
dissonance, I submit a fairly straight-
forward request: let those who wish to
control this model, and those who wish
to play along with it, come out with an
institutional plan that suggests a new
legal architecture for the state.
The dissonance as it stands now just
produces confusion and increases trans-
action costs. If the desire is to have a
unitary state for however long, at least
be open about it. That would allow cit-
izens and politicians alike to engage
with the actual truth, rather than switch-
W
JAMES A HAUGHT
hen I was born in 1932,
the world had 2 billion
people. Today, the
global population has swelled to 7.7
billion – soon to quadruple in a sin-
gle lifetime.
How can the planet feed the mush-
rooming manswarm? Here are some
thoughts: I grew up in a meager
farming region of West Virginia. We
had no electricity. Small-town fami-
lies had gaslights, and everyone else
used kerosene lamps.
Our valley was mostly a string of
dirt farms, horse-operated like in
medieval times. My boyhood was
during World War II, when most
men had gone to combat. My aging
uncle ran his farm with two mis-
matched horses and a crew of grand-
daughters, plus a scrawny pubescent
nephew, me.
We milked cows by hand, plowed
and mowed by team, found Indian
arrowheads in corn rows, cut creek-
bank weeds to feed pigs, killed cop-
perhead snakes, straightened bent
nails to save money – long days of
manual work. It seemed like slavery.
Other family farms along the valley
were little different.
tle country high school (13 in my
senior class), I fled to urban life and
a newspaper job. In decades after the
war, when I returned home, I found
most of those old farms abandoned,
overgrown in thickets. I guess par-
ents died and children went to city
jobs, as I did. (When back-to-the-
land urbanites came to rural West
Virginia farms in the 1960s, I told
them they were rushing toward the
life I had spurned. Many of them
didn’t last long at hoeing and shov-
eling.)
Most food production shifted
away from skimpy family farms to
big commercial plantations capable
of much greater output. But even
those huge farms couldn’t keep pace
with the soaring human population.
In the 1960s, alarm spread that the
manswarm was exceeding the food
supply, and famines were likely.
Stanford professor Paul Erlich wrote
a 1968 book, ‘The Population
Bomb’, warning that mass starvation
seemed certain in the 1970s. Church
groups held public discussions of the
impending crisis. Erlich wrote:
“The battle to feed all of humanity
is over…. In the 1970s and 1980s,
hundreds of millions of people will
starve to death in spite of any crash
But, out of the spotlight, Norman
Bourlag had unleashed the Green
Revolution in Mexico, Pakistan and
India, using high-yield crops and
heavy fertilization. Massive food in-
creases resulted. His technique
spread around the world. Bourlag
got the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. He
was credited with saving a billion
lives. Yet the population upsurge
didn’t stop. Before he died in 2009,
Bourlag said his Green Revolution
had peaked and couldn’t keep up
with the worsening need.
So, what’s the future regarding
hunger? I’m an ardent believer in
science. I hope that genetic engi-
neering will make breakthrough after
breakthrough, producing ever-better
plants and animals to feed humans.
A technique called CRISPR (clus-
tered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats) snips a plant’s
own DNA as needed – rather than in-
serting bits of foreign DNA as in
past gene-splicing. The revised
genome duplicates itself endlessly as
new generations of improved crops
ensue. National Geographic says it
has potential to “help feed the
world.”
Here’s hoping that gene science
spawns a second Green Revolution

Letters to the Editor

Act 2016, which was passed with con- itary and civilian leaders) make certain ing back and forth between what is real As soon as I graduated from a lit- programs embarked upon now.” and keeps humanity thriving.

World star
The International Cricket Council announced
the third Women’s Global Development Squad
and Pakistan’s star batter Javeria Khan was se-
lected to lead the multi-nation WGDS in six
Twenty20 matches on a tour of England. This
tournament includes two matches each against
ECB Super League teams Southern Vipers and
Surrey Stars. I really appreciate their praise-
worthy efforts for improving the standard of
women’s cricket around the world and allowing
such exposure to real matches as sources of op-
portunity for the players to better their playing.
I congratulate Javeria for the wonderful position
she received in the WGDS and we hope that she
will improve her own game and inspire others as
well. We are rooting for you!
Bakhtiyar Phullan
KECH
out and the television won’t work and your
laptop battery dies you find yourself bored
and with nothing to do. This is because this
addictive technology becomes your life and
you slowly lose interest in all other hobbies
or interesting activities that you used to spend
your life engrossed in. Can people even imag-
ine a world without technology anymore? I
can’t even recall the last time I went a day
without looking at my cell phone at all. Tech-
nology has made life so convenient for us that
it’s almost scary to think of what would hap-
pen if we had to go without our favourite
gadget for an extended period of time. We
have become dependent on gadgets and giz-
mos to keep us going. A coin has two sides
and so does technology where the good and
the bad go hand in hand. The World Wars re-
vealed a side of technology which can be used
for mass destruction. It made us realise that
technology can harm more than it helps.
where. No matter how old or young you are,
it helps us in every aspect of our lives, and it
is a thing that cannot be lived without. Pro-
grammes like Facebook that are designed to
reunite you with a childhood friend or keep in
touch with your loved ones are extremely
easy to navigate and user friendly. Though we
say that with technology we are becoming
more socialised, we are not. Somewhere
down the lane we are losing that personal
touch. We have become so monotonous about
technology that we cannot spend a day out-
side without using a single gadget. We must
try to remember that you cannot achieve all
your wants and desires by spending your life
staring at a computer screen. In fact I think
I’m going to go outside and sit under the sun
for a while. It will be a welcome change.
Muhammad Haider
KARACHI
Accusations
legedly transferred by them abroad. It is not
clear if his words convey an offer for a plea
bargain or that he wishes for them to face
hardships. How is this kind of plea bargain-
ing different from the NRO requested by op-
position leaders which the PM has been
claiming repeatedly despite their denial? This
issue should not be allowed to fester for too
long as the present state of the economy can-
not afford the uncertainty of political insta-
bility.
Dr Najeeb A Khan
BOSTON
Space race
According to a press report released on July
26, the Minister of Science and Technology has
announced that Pakistan will send its first as-
tronaut into space by 2022. It is wonderful news
that during the current economic crisis our lead-
RAWALPINDI
Hep C awareness
As reported by World Health Organization
(WHO) Pakistan has the world’s second
highest prevalence of Hepatitis C after Egypt.
World Hepatitis Day on July 28 is an oppor-
tunity to step up national and international ef-
forts on gathering funds and awareness for
hepatitis, encourage treatment plans, and
highlight the need for a greater global re-
sponse. The date of July 28 was chosen be-
cause it is the birthday of Nobel-prize
winning scientist Dr Baruch Blumberg, who
discovered the Hepatitis B virus and suc-
ceeded in developing a diagnostic test and
vaccination program for it. For the preven-
tion of Hepatitis B a very effective vaccine is
available globally of which three doses give
lifelong immunity unlike Hepatitis C. To en-
sure the well-being of its employees, organi-

Friend or foe?
We must face the fact that the people who
invent technology put their hard work into it
but the person who uses it becomes lazy and
shuns responsibility. When the power goes
Today, technology has become an indispen-
sable part of our lives. The internet has be-
come the biggest source of information in the
21st century. Any and all the information is
available to us at the touch of a button.
Google is your best friend. Technology is a
good thing for people anywhere and every-
In his speech at the Washington Capitol
building, our Prime Minister Imran Khan
vowed to take back the facilities of AC and
TV from previous leaders Nawaz and Zardari
to force them to return the public money al-
ers are spending our tax money on things like
this. They could feed thousands of poor citizens
with all that rocket fuel. However, that is not
something to worry about. I am sure that this
will help our nation much more than anything
else the funds could have been used for.
M Akram Niazi
zations like the PFA conducted Anti-HCV,
Anti-HIV, Malaria and HbsAg tests in col-
laboration with Pakistan Red Crescent Pun-
jab. I think everyone should work on some
preventive health practices in order to stay in
good health because health is wealth!