One week which explains what's wrong with the world

THE next week is going to be remarkable. The events which unfold will be a snapshot of what has gone wrong with the world and why. But it will also offer a glimmer of hope, and show us what we can do to change things for the better.

Few of us would disagree that our world is in a sorry state, and our predicament is down to a web of tragedy and change: terror, war, the rise of the alt-right, Brexit, the gulf between rich and poor, the corrosion of democracy and human rights, the worst excess of social media, the instability of work, the power of big finance, climate change, and the turbo-charged nature of new technology from artificial intelligence to robotics.

All of these problems are connected in a chain made of terrible decisions by our leaders, aided and abetted by our own apathy and ignorance.

Our world moves so fast that few have time to reflect on why we live as we do, why the events that fill us with fear are happening – or to ponder what the future will make of this time of ours Might historians call this era “The Great Disruption”? Not since the industrial revolution has the world been in such a state of flux.

Everything is suffering change. It is impossible to think of any industry that isn’t being transformed by technology – taxis, travel agents, newspapers, secretaries, telephone operators, just about every shop on the high street, stockbrokers, the postal service, delivery drivers, book stores, libraries ... the list is endless.

Change is not just altering industry. Warfare, the way we socialise, entertainment, religion, manners – even how we date has changed. Some changes are good, some are bad, but one thing is for sure, this is the era of the “Great Disruption”.

The irony is it was meant to be so different. At the end of the 20th century, we were told we were at “the end of history” – the Cold War was over, incomes were rising, and bitter divisions between left and right seemed to have been healed.

All it took, however, were the actions of 19 men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, a few years later to start a chain of events that would ripple through the world, influencing in turn the invasion of Iraq, terror in Europe, the rise of the alt-right, the path to Brexit, and the corroding of democracy that we see around us in the west today.

Each of these seismic events have echoes in the coming week which show us the web that connects them: how without one the other would never have occurred. But let us start with the first stage of this chain reaction.

THE TERROR TRAIL

Tuesday will be the 17th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attack on America. Like another great act of terrorism – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian gunman in June 1914 – the shockwaves from 9/11 rang around the world, and still ring today. Without the 9/11 attacks, there would have been no invasion of Iraq. They created a new military doctrine in America – pre-emptive military action: hit the enemy first before they hit you.

Intelligence was cooked up to justify the attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime. Lies were told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These falsehoods were amplified by much of the right-wing media in the UK and USA. Millions marched calling for no war, but they were not listened too.

As many military and intelligence chiefs warned both before and after the invasion, the attack on Iraq unleashed a wave of terror and violence across the middle east and Europe. An organisation as ghastly as Islamic State would simply have been a psychopath’s dream before 9/11 and Iraq made it a possibility.

Indeed, without the invasion of Iraq, there would unlikely have been civil war in Syria, as the toppling of Saddam was the started a domino effect across the Middle Dast in the shape of the Arab Spring. War in Syria led to a mass exodus of civilians fleeing murder and bombing, many heading to Europe as refugees.

So the ripples of 9/11 were these: a growing distrust in the west for mainstream political parties, a loss of faith in the press, the rise of terror in Europe, and an increase in immigration.

Call it grim serendipity, but this week will also see pre-trial proceedings under way against the alleged brains behind 9/11, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed within the walls of Guantanamo Bay.

THE CRASH

This Saturday will mark another anniversary – 10 years since the collapse of the global finance firm Lehman Brothers which triggered the crash of 2008. Like 9/11, we live with the effects of the crash to this day. The Iraq War also exacerbated the pain of the crash, with governments in the UK and USA too overstretched and overspent militarily to deal with the financial turmoil. The crash itself was down to old-fashioned greed and malfeasance. A mix of voodoo financing, snake-oil CEOs, and consequence-free risk-taking with other people’s money led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crash triggered the Great Recession across the Western world as the contagion spread.

In the UK, the government had to step in with a huge bank rescue package that came to total £500 billion in taxpayers’ money, with funds pumped into teetering giants like the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Lloyds TSB and HBOS. On Wednesday and Thursday respectively this week, the chair of RBS Group Sir Howard Davies and former chancellor Alistair Darling will both give public lectures on the legacy of the financial crisis.

What was the legacy? Austerity for one – which saw a squeeze on public services that hurt the worst-off in society the most – but also a sense of public outrage that bankers got off scot-free, bailed out when many felt they should have gone to jail.

So in the public mind the crash represents one thing: the little guy getting screwed while the corporate elite makes hay at their expense.

THE ALT-RIGHT

The alt-right would have had poorly fertilised soil to grow upon without the Iraq War and the financial crash. Not only did the war influence the worst effects of the crash, limiting over-spent governments from tackling the financial crisis more fairly, but both the war and the crash stoked the flames of racism. In alt-right eyes, immigrants and refugees are either terrorists or they are stealing white jobs.

This week, alt-right messiah Steve Bannon, Trump’s intellectual guru, will be popping up all over the place. He’s meant to be releasing a film called Trump @ War, and after getting dumped from the New Yorker festival after an outcry by liberal movie stars like Jim Carrey, Bannon will still be making an appearance at a festival organised by The Economist.

Put bluntly – because the alt-right sees the world in blunt terms – the chain of events goes something like this:

9/11 triggers war in Iraq, Iraq leads to Syria, and disruption in the middle east causes a rise in immigration into the west.

Simultaneously, the role of the West in the Middle East gives Islamist terrorists the ideological background to launch terror attacks on Western targets – Paris, London, Madrid.

The terror attacks fuel racism and calls for tighter immigration.

Meanwhile, the economic crash plays into the hands of the alt-right, allowing them to attack traditional politics, make claims of elites versus the people, and fuel a growing sense that nationalism and isolationism are the answers to our fears.

It’s a recipe made in hell.

SOCIAL MEDIA

These crises play out against the chatter of social media – a tool that fits snuggly into the hand of the alt-right. In a world in which many get their news not from a paper or TV, but from an echo-chamber on Twitter or Facebook, the lies and hysteria of extremists – from the alt-right to arch-Brexiters, and from hardline Corbynistas to the twin fringes of ultra-nationalism and ultra-unionism in Scotland – become harder and harder to tackle. Academics, think tanks, journalists and economists may be revealing facts which undermine extremist claims, but if few are listening – if most are having their own world view confirmed on social media and shutting out any fact that counters their opinion – then truth crumbles, and we find ourselves living in a post-truth world where anything goes.

The fight for truth goes on, of course. As Bannon takes to the world stage, a man who stands for a very different set of values will also have all eyes upon him. On Tuesday, Bob Woodward, perhaps the world’s greatest living journalist and the man who exposed Watergate with forensic newspaper reporting, officially launches his latest book Trump: Fear in the White House. The already heavily-trailed book portrays a president elected upon the backs of myriad fears we have discussed while barely capable of tying his own shoelaces.

Little wonder then that this week the Royal Society for Public Health, concerned by the impact of social media on modern life, is urging people to give up Twitter and Facebook for September.

BIG TECH

The men (and they are all men) who are the new masters of the universe – stepping into shoes once worn by corporate bankers – are the CEOs of big tech. On Wednesday, Forbes magazine releases its 100 Richest People of Tech list. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is pretty much guaranteed the top spot. He is, after all, the richest man in the world with an estimated wealth of £87 billion (that’s about the same as the GDP of Slovakia). In the same week, Nobel Laureate in economics, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, will address the Royal Society about the issues of “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work”. Over at MIT – the acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology – scientists will spend this week debating the impact of emerging tech on the global economy.

So this week points to where the real elites lie: they aren’t “experts” in universities, or economists, or journalists – they are the super-rich who make the rail and steel tycoons of the Victorian era look poor in comparison.

The week also flashes us a warning that tech is changing how we work and live. Will robotics and AI create mass unemployment and stagnate wages? If so, what will that mean for the millions still trying to recover from the effects of the crash? And who might exploit that? The alt-right?

Coincidentally, Apple is set to launch its latest iPhone in San Francisco on Wednesday – giving us more access to social media bubbles and taking more and more of our time away from what matters: our families, our friends and the facts that we need to look the world square in the eye and understand it.

BREXIT AND DEMOCRACY

Inevitably, all these woes of ours synthesise down to the causes of Brexit: distrust of mainstream politics, a socially and financially wounded working class, the rise of the far right, fear of terrorism morphing into hatred of immigrants, and social media bubbles which leave us free of fact but full of opinion, and vulnerable to manipulation, propaganda and lies.

It is fitting, then, that come tomorrow we are just 200 days from Brexit. Few now would argue Brexit wasn’t about immigration – an issue melded with and distorted by 9/11, Iraq, Syria, and the crash. The events of the world since 9/11 have taken democracy to the brink as Brexit shows in the UK and Trump shows in America.

However, one need only look a little further afield to see democracy under attack elsewhere in the week to come. On Friday, an increasingly populist government in Poland has to answer to the European Commission over the independence of the judiciary being undermined. Race hatred in Germany will continue to boil over. Italian democracy hangs by a thread.

Meanwhile, our paralysed Western governments look at a world in torment and find themselves without answers. This week, the 39th session of the UN Human Rights Council will look at a world in tatters with allegations of genocide in Myanmar, and the wars in Yemen and Syria just the main course in a banquet of global horrors. Simultaneously, Russia and China, two great disruptor nations, will engage in huge joint military exercises in Siberia – a show of force to a wounded west that their old enemies are fit and able.

The death of the old order has its own symbolic moment as well, when on Thursday, Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general and a man who represented the best of our post-war humanitarian values, is laid to rest in Accra, Ghana.

It should comes as no surprise then, that just a few days later on Saturday, the UN is launching its International Day of Democracy, aimed at bolstering belief in liberty, freedom, equality, the rule of law and free speech.

That’s how bad it’s become – democracy needs its own special day.

GLIMMER OF HOPE

Just 24 hours after the International Day of Democracy, the UN is launching the International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone layer – like democracy, the UN is concerned that the Earth’s climate is on its last legs and we have to act soon before it is too late. But it may in fact be climate change – the greatest threat to humanity – that points the way to salvation.

On Friday and Saturday, some 35 million people will take part in the Clean Up The World Weekend. It involves nearly 50,000 different projects in 130 countries. The aim is simple: improve your local environment. Also on Saturday, hundreds of thousands, if not one million or more, people around the world will take part in the International Coastal Clean-up, aimed at getting the filth of plastic off our shores. In Florida alone there are 252 individual mass clean-ups; 12 in Ghana; more than 100 around the Caribbean; the main one in Scotland is the beaches around Cramond near Edinburgh.

Millions of people coming together, without the need for political leadership, for the future of the planet and the future of their children – and using social media to coordinate it all – is surely a sign that ordinary folk are not so weak that we can change nothing, and that new technology can be harnessed for good.

People have listened and read and understood the facts about climate change – they armed themselves with the truth and now they are mobilising. They are taking that knowledge and applying it in real life from Cancun and Miami to the west African coast and the Firth of Forth.

Hope lies in ordinary people, in education, in facts, truth and action – these are the only tools we have to break the chain of events which has led us to the sorry state we find ourselves in at the beginning of this one very significant week in September.

THE NEW HERALD ON SUNDAY – BORN AMID HISTORY IN THE MAKING

AS this report shows, this first edition of the Herald on Sunday could not be more timely. All the events that dominate our lives coalesce in the coming week. It is a week which allows us to reflect on how we got here, and try to work out what we can do to get out of the mess we find ourselves in.

So for a new paper, we come to the news stands with fertile ground to explore. Good Sunday journalism is meant to not just report, but to analyse and explain events. Good journalism is meant to seek out the truth and try to find some answers. That is what we are doing in this report. We are asking: how did we get to this one week in September 2018, what has shaped our lives to this stage, and what can we do to move on and prosper.

The analysis and reporting of the new Herald on Sunday will seek out the truth without fear or favour, and try to provide honest answers impartially. Often the truth is uncomfortable and answers unpalatable, but good journalism has always been about taking the hard road, not the easy one.

THE MAIN EVENTS THIS WEEK

Sunday

Steve Bannon expected to release new film ‘Trump @ War’

Monday

Brexit: 200 days to go

UN begins 39th session of the Human Rights Council

Tuesday

17th anniversary of Sept 11 attacks

Bob Woodward releases new book ‘Trump: Fear in the White House’

You and AI: the future of work - lecture at Royal Society by Joseph Stiglitz

MIT conference begins on emerging tech and its affect on the global economy

Russia and China begin mass war games in Siberia

Wednesday

Forbes releases 100 Richest People List

Apple set to release new iPhone

Chair of RBS Sir Howard Davies gives speech on the financial crash 10 years on

Thursday

Former chancellor Alistair Darling gives speech on the financial crash 10 years on

Kofi Annan, state funeral in Ghana

Friday

Poland must respond to European Commission over concerns about judicial independence

Clean Up the World Weekend begins

Saturday

10th anniversary of collapse of Lehman Brother’s

Steve Bannon appears at event hosted by The Economist

International Coastal Clean-up Day

International Day of Democracy

Sunday

International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer

Running throughout the week

Royal Society for Public Health’s ‘Scroll Free’ social media campaign

Pre-trial proceedings for alleged 9-11 conspirators