Interview with Johann Hari

This is 98% of the full transcript of my interview with one of the guys who makes The Independent worth reading. I'm currently putting this together as a prose piece for Platform, because this version is way too long, but still interesting.

Do you think Britain is going down the swanny?

No. It’s weird how people say Britain is ‘broken’ now, like David Cameron, and I want to say to them, ‘Well when was Britain fixed, then?’ Is it the 1950s when gay people were in prison, and women’s lives were wasted by not being able to get jobs? Was it in 1890, when half the population had rickets? I’d say Britain is a better place now than it’s ever been.

Every society has things that they want to make better, and there are a huge number of things that I want to be improved. I want to lower our carbon emissions, I want to redistribute wealth. But the thing is, these people who talk about Broken Britain; there’s a really good book called The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson, and it looks at the fact that societies with the highest levels of crime have the highest levels of inequality. And countries like Sweden, where there is less inequality, have less crime. This is a product of extreme inequality, all this crime. David Cameron’s not going to fucking sort that out! These people who talk about Broken Britain are the same people who caused it by celebrating this extreme inequality in the first place.

What do you do personally to tackle inequality?

There are certainly lots of things you can do. You can give money to charity, you can argue for higher taxes, you can treat people decently, you can live in a place where you see reality. But ultimately, these things have to be tackled by governments. You can say, well I donate money to charity or I have cut back on my carbon emissions. That is certainly admirable, but it’s not the solution. The solution has got to be everyone doing it. So the most important thing you can do is politically organise and demand it.

Do you think you could do a better job of running London than Boris Johnson?

I think a trained chimp could do a better job of running London than Boris Johnson.

Are you saying that Boris Johnson is worse than a trained chimp?

Considerably worse. Would an untrained chimp do a better job? Yes, it definitely would! A chimp that did nothing more than scratch its testicles and shit on the floor would do a better job than Boris Johnson. Thing with Boris is, as a person I quite like him. He’s quite funny, he’s quite likeable, but all this comedy bluster is a distraction from all the things he believes, which are really very extreme. Bear in mind, six months after the crash, Boris was still writing articles defending sub-prime mortgages. The decisions Boris has made have been systematically favouring very rich people at the expense of others. For example, he cancelled the West London congestion charge, which is for places like Kensington and Chelsea which are wealthy, and cancelled the charge of £25 for people who drive SUVs in central London. And to pay for it he put up bus fares, which are paid by cleaners and nurses and everyone else. So his decisions are systematically in the interests of very rich people, and shafting everyone else. And the untrained chimp wouldn’t do that, it would just spend money on bananas.

Who should we vote for at the next election?

Voting is not the most important political act that any of us do. If you look at really amazing long-term changes that mean that you and me have better lives than our grandparents, mostly these have not been brought about by political parties in Westminster, but through ordinary people organising through civil society and demanding them. Whether it’s feminism, trade unionism or gay rights, those were not things done by politicians at the top. They were done by ordinary people who demanded that politicians took on board their agenda and then changed the law. So when people talk about politics, the first thing they talk about is voting, which is very important, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is to be consistently engaged in a low level way, like volunteering for Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace or Stonewall, or whatever particular thing you want to concentrate on. The thing with choosing politicians is, you have to pick people who will be most susceptible to pressure from democratic organisations. Unfortunately we have a shitty voting system which means that you have very limited practical choices. What I would say is, in every seat, maximise the anti-Conservative vote.

Don’t you think that smacks of playground politics?

Not at all. What you’ve got to do, is you have to make a mature judgement about what will produce the least harm to ordinary people. It’s not like saying oppose the Conservatives because you don’t like their haircut or you think they’re fat, it’s the opposite. Although Labour has been bitterly disappointing and done some monstrous things, they would be considerably worse under the Conservatives. An area like this [Whitechapel, London] where loads of people live on tax credits, and they really need their Educational Maintenance Allowances and all those things, David Cameron says they will be taken away. So you try to make the most change you can within the system on election day, and the next day you start organising to change the system to make it better. [Goes into detail about how to vote tactically to keep the Tories out.]

Do you not agree that an informed apathy would be better? To not endorse any of the candidates and give them a mandate?

I don’t agree with that, because if you opt out the system, the system carries on without you. They aren’t going to register that you haven’t turned up. All that will happen is the Tories will be more likely to win and people will be shafted. For example, think about Educational Maintenance Allowances. If you’re 16 or 17 and you want to stay on and do your A-Levels or a B-Tech, the government gives you up to £30 a week to stay on if you’re from a family that earns less than £30,000 per year. That’s a real difference to a lot of people, and the rate of people staying on in the sixth form has gone up considerably. That will go if David Cameron wins. If that was the only issue at stake, and it’s not, I would find it very difficult to go up to someone who is going to lose their EMA and say, “Well I didn’t do anything to stop that, because I wanted to have an informed apathy,” I think they would see that as frivolous. Be informed, but don’t be apathetic. By all means be angry at the system, because there’s a hell of a lot to be angry about, but use that anger to change it as best you can to minimise the harm the system will do. I think if you say, “Well I’m not going to take any part in it,” then the system will carry on without you.

Did you support the G20 riots?

I’m in favour of civil disobedience if it’s got targeted goals, like making everyone realise that we’ve urgently got to cut our carbon emissions or we’re going to face an absolute disaster with global warming. I think it depends on who the rioters are and what their goals are. I don’t think it does any good to just go and smash up a shop for the sake of it, but if you are targeting your rage at very specific places that are doing real harm, definitely. I thought at the summit here in London, by far the most sensible arguments you heard were from the people protesting outside. They were a hell of a lot more sensible than the people inside.

Did you go on the protests?

Yes I did, well I was writing about them, I don’t know if that counts as being on them. Before I was a journalist I used to go on those things.

What made you decide to become a journalist?

It was the only thing I was ever good at. I’m shit at all the other things. So it’s the only thing I was good at and someone was willing to pay me to do.

You’ve written a book and you write for numerous publications, so where do you want your career to go? Editing?

No, I wouldn’t be any good at that. I don’t have any of the skills that it takes to be an editor.

Are you freelance?

No, I’m on staff at The Independent.

Who is the biggest cunt in journalism?

Richard Littlejohn. He’s mentally ill. Actually, I don’t know if he’s a cunt, he’s so unhinged. I don’t hate him, but I feel desperately sorry for him. In a way that there are journalists who I hate, I’m not sure if I would include him. It’s interesting how much of the British right is actually clinically insane. People like Littlejohn and Melanie Philips are just mad. They live in this bizarre, unhinged fantasy world. They never go out into the real world and see anything. I’d probably say Littlejohn. Like I was saying to you before [Johann was keen to rant about the Daily Mail columnist even before I turned the tape recorder on], Littlejohn thinks about gay sex more than I do, and I’m gay. This is a man so obsessed with homosexuality in a bizarre way, so he needs help.

You’ve been insulted by quite a few famous people, so which is your favourite? I hear Chomsky insulted you...

Yeah, with Chomsky, erm... When you’re insulted by someone you hate, like Richard Littlejohn, you feel great. When you’re insulted by someone you respect and admire like Noam Chomsky, you don’t feel good. And I didn’t feel good about that, but I’ve had a rapprochement with him since. The weirdest one was the Dalai Lama, who called me fat, the bastard.

But he lives on rice, what’s he expect?!

Well exactly, if he had a carb heavy diet he’d be a right bunter. That was slightly odd. I went to interview him, and everyone who interviews him just says, “Your holiness, you’re the best person I’ve ever met in my life, you’re amazing.” Obviously I think the Chinese occupation in Tibet is horrific, but equally when he ran Tibet, it was a fucking slave owning theocracy and he personally owned 17,000 serfs. So I asked him about that, and obviously he’s just never used to being asked anything critical, because he started off for ten minutes pretending he didn’t speak English. But I said “I’ve heard you give lectures in English,” so after another ten minutes, I thought I’d bring it back to something where we agree. So I said Your Holiness, you’ve always been vary critical of income inequality in the West, so I don’t see why we have so much money, because we each only have one stomach,” and he said, “But not you. You clearly have at least three.” I thought Oh my God, I’ve just been called fat by a spiritual god.

Who else have you been insulted by?

God knows, shit loads of people. I try not to keep track of them too much. Busted called me a cunt, which I was quite pleased about.

Why do you get involved with spats with people like Richard Littlejohn instead of choosing to rise above it? My friend says that you shouldn’t have gone on his show to give it credibility, because all sensible people know that he’s ignorant. You should have just ignored him.

I don’t agree that all people know that he’s ignorant. They may not know that he doesn’t know any facts, and the facts that he does use are wrong. So one of the things I wanted to establish on the programme is that the so-called facts he uses in his column are simply incorrect. So for example, he says that asylum seekers are weighed down with benefits, so I said to him, “Do you know how much a single asylum seeker is given in Britain every week?” and he said, “I’ve got no idea.” I said “Well, you should know this because you claim every week that you know.” Actually, it’s about £42 per week, and it’s been cut since then. I think that’s useful, to point out that when he makes a factual claim it’s a lie. And when you do point out a fact it’s the opposite of what he claimed. I think there’s a value in that.

I was asked to go on the programme and argue against a BNP person. I’m not in favour of No Platform, I’m in favour of arguing against the BNP, but I just thought I can’t really be bothered, what’s the point? But then I thought hang on, I can make it about Littlejohn. He is Nick Griffin’s favourite journalist. I’ll make it about him. So that’s what I tried to do, and I think there’s a value in that.

When Nick Griffin was on Question Time, I don’t know why Rebecca Wade wasn’t on the panel, because The Sun and the other right wing papers fan the flames every day, and this is really what turns people to the BNP. What do you think?

I agree with you. One of the things that’s very frustrating is when you get right wing journalists showing all this outrage at the BNP, and you want to say well, you pump out this sewage, and now you’re acting all shocked that there are rats coming around. What did you think would happen? If you go around lying, and saying that asylum seekers are given houses and SUVs, what did you think was happen if you’re going to say a load of bullshit?

Do you think the media too often appeals to the lowest common denominator?

I think the media is way too dumbed down. But there’s a danger in implying that there was a golden age when it wasn’t like that. If you look at newspapers from thirty years ago, they weren’t any better. It’s definitely true that there’s a massive bias towards the right, for a very simple reason. Newspapers are owned by billionaires, and therefore the newspaper serves the interests of the billionaire and the advertisers.

Who owns The Independent?

A billionaire. We’re relatively lucky in that we got a relatively benign billionaire who lets us say what we want, but most places don’t have billionaires who do that. Obviously a newspaper will serve the interests of the person who owns it. Occasionally you luck out, like we have, but that’s really pretty rare.

What do you think of Twitter, which is a medium which purposely limits the amount of words which can be written? Since you use Twitter, does that run counter to your argument?

I think you can have both. That’s like saying that short stories destroy novels. I don’t think Twitter is that dangerous.

What do you think about the demise of newspapers with everyone getting their news for free online?

I don’t know, I’m not a good judge on this.

What would you like to see happen?

As a writer, my bias is to get as many people reading my stuff as possible. So I’d be very upset if pay walls went up. I want the information to be as free as possible. But at the same time, it costs a lot of money to do good journalism, where people have time to think about things and go to various places and find out what the hell’s going on there. We can’t pay for that at the moment. For every reader you have in print, you need ten times the amount online to make the same advertising revenue. So the sums don’t add up. One of the weird things is, in terms of actual readership, newspapers are doing incredibly well. If you add together the online readers and the print readers, far more people read The Independent now than ever before in its history. People do want this product, it’s just a matter of getting the bastards to pay for it.

What’s the most important piece of journalism you’ve ever done?

I think the war in Congo. That is the most amazing story. I didn’t do it justice, but six million people died fighting a war which was basically fought for us. I don’t know if you know the story. It’s the deadliest war since Hitler marched across Europe, and there are two stories about how it happened. There’s the official story which is a load of bullshit, and the real story. The official story is that at the end of the Rwandan genocide, the people who committed the genocide fled across the border into Congo, and the Rwandans chased after them and everyone invaded. It’s not true. What happened is, the Congo has unbelievably huge amounts of gold, coltan and various minerals. So when the Rwandans invaded, they didn’t go to where everyone who committed the genocide were, they went to where the coltan, the gold and the diamonds were. And then everyone else invaded to get them. And the UN study of this shows that they were only doing this so that they could sell it on to Western countries. There’s no indigenous market for something like coltan in Africa. Coltan is a metal that conducts heat very well, so it’s in all mobile phones, and also laptops, remote controls. This is one of the only places in the world that has coltan. And it’s this amazing fact that in 1999, the fighting in Congo massively increased, and nobody could figure out why. But the price of coltan massively increased at the same time, so there was more fighting for it because it was worth more. Why was that? Sony Playstations came out in 1999, and they’re made of coltan. So you’ve got this bizarre thing, where the kids in New York and London and everywhere else can play imaginary war games, and the kids in Congo are being sent to fucking die in this actual war!

Were you sent there as a foreign correspondent?

Well I was sent there to cover the story, I tried to persuade my editor to let me go and he did. I went there for a month, travelled around and saw what I could see. That’s one of the amazing things about The Independent. There are very few newspapers where they say to their reporters, “go for a month and just find out what you can find out about this obscure war,” and that wouldn’t happen at most papers.

Were you trained as a journalist?

No, I don’t have any journalism training. When I left university I suddenly realised that, as I was being told by everyone, that I would have to work for a year unpaid doing work experience, and there was no way my family could afford that. So I was a bit panicked. I’d written loads of articles when I was at university, and I sent them to loads of places asking, “will you give me a job, you don’t have to pay me very much,” and by my amazement, Peter Wilby, who was then the editor of the New Statesman, gave me a job and that was where I started. I learnt a huge amount from him and from the staff at the New Statesman, so I got a really lucky break. It’s an absolute scandal how entry into journalism works. We are expecting people to work unpaid in central London for absolutely ages. Who the fuck can afford to do that? It automatically screens out anyone who hasn’t got really rich parents. That’s not just shocking in terms of social justice, it’s also very bad for journalism because it means we end up with a bunch of rich freaks who’ve never lived in the real world working for our newspapers.

Are you still taking Ritalin?

I never took Ritalin, but for two weeks I took Modafinil. I ordered it online, and I think it’s borderline legal. It’s not a Class A drug or anything. I did it for an article. And it’s not an amphetamine, it’s a drug that was developed for narcoleptics, to help you stay awake. But it turned out that if you take them and you’re not narcoleptic, you just stay awake and you’re alert. I wouldn’t want to take it for too long, which is why I stopped after a fortnight, because I’d done enough to write the article. Partly because we don’t know the long term effects of it, and the other thing is it made me more alert, but I wasn’t being very imaginative. Someone explained to me that what it does. Supposedly part of your brain is 50 per cent working on what you’re doing now, and 50% on all the stuff you’re processing covertly. But what Modafinil does is, it concentrates all of your concentration on to the thing you’re doing at that moment., which is good, but over time your imagination is working less well.

Would you recommend it?

I’d recommend it for short periods, like if I was ever going to take exams again, I would definitely take it during exams because your memory is much better. I wouldn’t recommend it in the long run to anyone because we don’t know what the effect is. It could be fine it could not be., but I don’t think it’s very smart to take something where you don’t know what the long-term effects are. But definitely for people doing exams, and this is going to be an issue in the future. It’s going to be the equivalent of athletes taking steroids.

Do you think they will be drugs testing students?

I would have thought so. Definitely, you get an unfair advantage, or the people who are not taking it would be at a disadvantage.

Do you think all drugs should be legalised?

Yes, for a number of reasons. When you criminalise a drug, it doesn’t go away. The use doesn’t actually fall, what happens is that the industry, instead of being controlled by doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses, becomes controlled by armed criminal gangs. And that has a huge cost. They go around killing each other, a lot of people get caught in the cross-fire, they terrorise whole estates and so-on. So there’s that problem.

Secondly, the way people take drugs changes, so under prohibition people take more hardcore drugs. It’s called The Iron Law of Prohibition. Under alcohol prohibition the drinking of beer and wine massively fell, and people started drinking moonshine instead. That’s because when something has been smuggled, there’s a premium on getting the maximum kick into the smallest amount of space.

Thirdly, what everyone should know is in 2001 Portugal decriminalised all drugs. Heroin, cocaine, everything. So it’s still illegal to sell them, but you can have them for your own possession but if they catch you with them, they won’t do anything. And when this happened, people said oh my god, everyone will be lying in the gutter with needles in their arms. But now the results are in, drug use has actually fallen. Not a huge amount, I think about 4 percent. But heroin use has fallen by about 50 per cent which is exactly what you’d expect from the Iron Law of Prohibition. So I think the solution is to accept that human beings have always been trying to get high and stoned since we lived in caves, always will, so the best thing you can do is minimise the harm instead of wasting money on the police chasing after people who are basically addicts and putting them in prison. Instead, spend all that money on treating people who are addicts, helping them come off them if they can, and if they can’t giving it to them safely through prescription.

Would you still say that if smack addicts lived downstairs from you?

There are smack addicts living downstairs from me! I literally live next to a heroin clinic. And that’s something to bear in mind. When you legalise, you don’t have smack addicts living down the street. In Zurich, they provided a regulatory legal framework where you can go and get heroin in clinics. Street homelessness literally ended. There is no street homelessness in Zurich now. The number of addicts massively fell, prostitution massively fell, burglary fell by 60 per cent. So it’s precisely because I care about people who have smack addicts living in the next room that I want drugs to be legalise, because you will be at a lot less risk from them then. The people who suffer most from the drug wars are people who live in poor areas. Criminal gangs aren’t going and shooting anyone in Hampstead, they’re shooting people in Aldgate and Brixton. That’s where the drug war really has a terrible effect. You’re not going to get accidentally shot by a dealer in Dulwich.