Information Landmine

Countervailing point of view

2011-07-12T13:18:00.003+01:00

Not content with scrapping the impartiality of the media, the Murdoch empire is taking on the English langauge:

Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, also on the seminar panel, said he should be able to host a debate about immigration or Britain pulling out of Europe without having to present a countervailing point of view.

If Kelvin wants to have a debate with just one point of view, isn't it unfair for those petty bureaucrats at the OED to tell him that he can't?

via

Worth Remembering

2011-05-31T00:09:00.004+01:00

As Memorial Day weekend comes to a close in the States, here's someone whose words are both timely and truly worthy of consideration.

Is This Man The World's Jolliest Bond Villain...

2011-02-05T21:23:00.003Z

... or is he just happy to be speaking to the blondie reporter from CNBC? Whichever it is, his forecasts for things to come seem to belie his cheerful manner:

Dreams For Sale

2011-01-11T21:40:00.003Z

A good, if grim, documentary on the impact of the economic crisis and real estate bubble on one US community:

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Quick! Somebody call Alex Cox!

2010-11-23T06:18:00.003Z

There's a great cult film in this somewhere. Or possibly a horrible global tragedy. Take your pick.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

2010-11-23T00:46:00.003Z

Tom Ricks has come up with that rare thing: a proposal that has something for everyone across the US political spectrum.

A Concise Analysis If Ever There Was One

2010-11-22T08:10:00.001Z

Bipartisanship Is Just Another Word For The Rich Ganging Up Against The Rest of Us

2010-11-20T03:00:00.002Z

Joseph Palermo in the Huffington Post tells it like it is.

Hedge Fund Republic

2010-11-19T04:12:00.005Z

The wealth disparities to be found between rich and poor in Latin America's banana republics no longer have anything on the extreme inequality to be found in the United States, according to this disturbing article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Wake up, America!

Anyone Want to Bet Against This Guy Winning In 2012?

2010-11-18T23:08:00.002Z

The Onion was, if anything, ahead of its time with this astonishing piece back in 2008.

Bush/Cheney III?

2010-11-17T04:14:00.000Z

Pretty much.

Fed/Goldman Swindle Explained

2010-11-16T16:49:00.002Z

An Alternative Remembrance Day/Veterans' Day Message

2010-11-11T02:18:00.003Z

... because the arms industry and the military establishment absolutely do not have our best interests at heart.

How International Capitalism Really Works

2010-11-10T17:12:00.001Z

A concise summary from John Perkins, the author of Confessions Of An Economic Hitman.

The Last 300 Years of Human Civilization In 05:39

2010-11-09T19:26:00.004Z

Some nice work from our friends at the Post Carbon Institute.

Real concerns

2010-11-05T12:20:00.008Z

Obviously the first reaction of any right-thinking person to this should be: Wa-hey.

Two caveats. First, there's a lot of concern that this is going to be some terrible dampner on free speech and political debate. I'm not saying there's no concern there, but I think this has been by people who see this thing as a judgement on the place of racism in politics. But as Mike Smithson argues, this case is really about where you draw the line between personal and political. If you look at the law:

(1) A person who, or any director of any body or association corporate which—

(a) before or during an election,

(b) for the purpose of affecting the return of any candidate at the election, makes or publishes any false statement of fact in relation to the candidate’s personal character or conduct shall be guilty of an illegal practice, unless he can show that he had reasonable grounds for believing, and did believe, that statement to be true.

The restriction that political lies have to be about "personal character or conduct" is quite important. Candidates still have scope to besmirch each others political records without having to check their facts, or even think about whether what they're saying is even feasible. It's only when they start on the personal attacks that they need to have reasonable grounds for believing what they're saying. So if Phil had been telling porkies about Lib Dem policies, he would have been OK. And if the function of politicians worrying about the Representation of the People Act S.106 is that politicians shy away from unfounded ad hominem attacks on each other, and have to focus on policies... I struggle to think of a world in which that is a bad thing.

The more substantive concern is that Labour's nasty streak hardly stops with Phil Woolas:

Woolas was never anything more than a patsy. The fall guy. Ritual sacrifice to our conscience.

...
This case was not about clumsy photo shopping mixed with a few equally crude allegations. It was about the politics of immigration, religion and race. Or more accurately, about the Labour Party’s shameful failure to adopt a coherent, let alone moral, stance on any of these issues.
...
When Phil Woolas’ campaign took the decision to “get the white vote angry” it wasn’t an aberration. They were deploying a localised variation of a national strategy. When we, as a party, call for British jobs for British workers, or a ‘debate’ on immigration, we are speaking in code. And when the code is deciphered it says, “we think you’re racist, but we don’t care. We want you to vote for us anyway”.

That seems about right to me. There seem to be a lot of people in the party who think that Labour gets a lot of votes from angry Sun readers who like their politicians to beat up on the brown folks. And these folks worry that, if the Sun readers aren't getting their hate fix from Labour, they'll go elsewhere. Woolas saw that there was a position going in the Labour party for someone who was prepared to be that little bit nastier on immigration, and duly applied for the post. I'm not sure that makes him a patsy, exactly, but it's pretty clear that he's just the tip of the nasty iceberg.

The trick for the Labour party is to do this whilst not upsetting the more liberal types by obviously engaging in race-baiting, which upsets us latte-drinkers to such an extent that we may think of voting Lib Dem. This is usually accomplished by talking about how Labour must "address the very real concerns of the white working class."[1]

Which brings me to Ed Milliband, and his decision to give Woolas the Shadow Cabinet immigration post. Because the whole point of dog-whistles is plausible deniability. You need to be able to court the racist vote, whilst still being able to turn round to liberal-latte types like me and deny that you're being a racist. You're just addressing the VRCOTWWC in a responsible manner.

Having a guy who's "prepared to speak uncomfortable truths about immigration" might make some sort of sense for keeping hold of a few voters who might otherwise defect to the onside. I can just about understand the strategy, even if I think it's pretty disgusting. But giving the immigration brief to a guy who's now mainly famous for acting on his belief that the white working class weren't concerned enough, and then telling lies in order to get them to a suitable level of concern, though... that's not exactly walking the electoral tightrope, is it Eddie?

If you're sticking to your chief racist when most political strategists would tell you to cut him loose, then that sort of suggests that you don't have any problem with racism.[2] In fact, it's a pretty clear signal that you've opted to go with the race-baiting strategy, and all us liberal latte types can go fuck ourselves (or at least vote Lib Dem without feeling too guilty about it).

[1] There's a better argument that the "very real concerns of the white working class" are largely mythical, and that people who like racism are already voting for the BNP.

[2] Note that this would be the case however the verdict had gone. Everyone agrees that Woolas was trying to scare the whites by making up stories about the Islamic menace. The question was whether these stories were sufficiently personal to be illegal.

Update:

Phil Woolas, 2009:

Immigration minister Phil Woolas has also threatened legal action over "disgusting" allegations he claimed for women's clothing, nappies and comics.

Phil Woolas, 2010:

It is vital to our democracy that those who make statements about the political character and conduct of election candidates are not deterred from speaking freely for fear that they may be found to have breached electoral laws.

Presumably The Telegraph's big mistake was not being a politician at election time.

Indeed

2010-10-29T18:18:00.000+01:00

"No one likes the idea of hearing what you're thinking."

2010-10-11T13:44:00.006+01:00

I've whined about this before, and it wasn't very interesting then. Still, worth a quick look, if only because I've discovered that there's a name[1] for the error Andrew Marr's making here:

"Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people," he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. "OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk".

"But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

"It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism."

Andrew, meet Theodore. And Charlie:

[1] Other than pot, meet kettle, of course.

Blair: The Vegas years

2010-10-08T17:33:00.004+01:00

I'm going to have to disagree with this:

Anyway, let's end with the now traditional, pro-forma Blair-bashing as I observe for the thousandth time that the problem with the former PM isn't that he's a liar. The problem is that he believes his own bullshit, which has made him considerably more dangerous to ourselves and to those he intends to help, not to say infinitely useful to people who don't believe a word of it.

Sorry but this is not the speech of a man who believes his own bullshit:

The former prime minister said that there had been a failure to challenge the ''narrative'' that Islam was oppressed by the West which was fuelling extremism around the world.

He said too many people accepted the extremists' analysis that the military actions taken by the West following the 9/11 attacks were directed at countries because they were Muslim and that it supported Israel because Israelis were Jews while Palestinians were Muslims
''We should wake up to the absurdity of our surprise at the prevalence of this extremism,'' Mr Blair said

''Look at the funds it receives. Examine the education systems that succour it. And then measure, over the years, the paucity of our counter-attack in the name of peaceful co-existence. We have been outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised.''

"Out-strategised"? Extreme views that many people hold? I'm sorry, but even by Blair's appallingly insincere standards, that one looks like a phoned-in performance. But the real sign that Blair's illustrious career of bullshit-peddling is in its twilight. The War on Terror crowd have always been big on pulling waffley, abstract ideas out of their arses just so that they've got something very general to declare war on, and Blair rode that wave with the best of them. But when you're down to talking about "narrative"[1] you're basically admitting that that part of the game's up.

[1] Which the Telegraph, no less, sees fit to put in inverted commas.

The Sticky Wages of Fear

2010-10-01T15:36:00.005+01:00

Good to see the Security/Industrial Complex meme getting a bit of an airing from Simon Jenkins.

For those who immediately start looking for the tin-foil hat when they hear the phrase "Security/Industrial Complex", here's Plato saying the same thing.

Maybe someone should look into that

2010-09-04T12:41:00.003+01:00

If you haven't read that New York Times piece on the News of the World phone hacking case, do. It's all good, muck-raking stuff. Of particular interest is the role of Scotland Yard. What makes the thing really fun, though, is the way that the News of the World has responded:

The paper has accused The New York Times of being motivated by rivalry with The Wall Street Journal, owned, like News of the World, by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Now I don't doubt that there's some truth to that, but does the Murdoch Media Empire really want to go down this road? Because, yeah, now you mention it, it does seem like only the papers which aren't owned by Rupert Murdoch are covering this thing, doesn't it? It's almost like media ownership determines the editorial line.

It's guess the missing words round

2010-09-03T17:33:00.003+01:00

“In my view, we should have taken a --- ------ way out of the economic crisis: kept direct tax rates competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit, and used the crisis to push further and faster on reform.”

Can you guess the missing words and whom the quote is from? No? Failed? Well, the missing words are New Labour and it’s a quote from “his highness” Tony Blair, arguing for lower taxes, increases in indirect taxes such as VAT (that hit the poor the hardest) and less government. That my friends from the most successful leader the Labour party has ever had.

Attention U.S. Voters...

2010-08-23T08:18:00.003+01:00

Does anyone anywhere still think this is "Change you can believe in"?

Flirting as political activism

2010-08-14T12:51:00.003+01:00

A cautionary note from Jamie K:

While I appreciate that a lot of good lefties have been backing off from the Lib Dems in a righteous huff for perfectly valid reasons, I think they’ve been a little too quick to return to Labour. After all, this is still the party of Phil Woolas.

Why is it that people are so keen to be affiliated with political parties? For people with political ambitions, I guess it makes sense. In fact, now's probably the perfect time to get in on the ground floor with Labour. I can't imagine that many of the people going back to Labour from the Lib Dems are in that category though.

Surely the ideal here would be to look obviously politically interested, but remain a floating voter until one of the parties provides a decent incentive to join?

Going sensible

2010-07-28T15:29:00.002+01:00

Right, I've had it. I mean, what is this?

The coalition government is going sensible on crime.

First they start going on about reducing prison sentences, which is sensible, seeing as:

(a) Prison is extremely expensive;

(b) Prisons are hugely overcrowded, yet building more prisons would be massively expensive;

(c) Overcrowded prisons are even more expensive, because inmates serving indeterminate sentences cannot get places on risk-reducing courses and so their risk cannot be reduced, meaning they do not get released on parole and are kept in prison for longer; and

(d) Prison generally does not, contrary to what Mr Howard suggested, work. Unless by "work", you mean "serve to squander public money at the expense of any real benefit to society".

Next, the coalition government announced plans to use restorative justice more widely. Which is sensible because:

(a) it is popular with victims of crime, as they feel more involved in the process;

(b) it aims to reintegrate offenders into the community, meaning they are less likely to reoffend in the future;

(c) when used as an alternative to the traditional criminal justice process, it can avoid criminalising people, which is especially important for young offenders.

And today, Theresa May has been talking about abolishing the affront to logic which is the ASBO. Bloody well sensible again!

If things carry on like this, I'm going to be left with nothing to rant about.

I never thought I'd miss Alan Johnson.

E-participation

2010-07-10T16:07:00.002+01:00

One of the most interesting developments in administration of government in the last few years (if, indeed any public administration can be considered 'interesting') has been the move towards doing more and more things online.

First local authorities started doing clever things like letting you pay your council tax online (wow). Now it's all about participatory democracy - internet style-e.

You have two choices at the moment. The rather corporately branded 'Spending Challenge' and 'Your Freedom' offer the public the opportunity to submit their own suggestions and rate others for their ability to save public money and enhance public freedom respectively.

A quick search for the idea on 'Your Freedom' with the most votes, reveals that it's to do with scrapping the Digital Economy Act and has attracted the amazing high tally of 24 votes (25 now, I thought I might as well stick my oar in). Not exactly a lot?

Whether either of these projects will elicit anything like enough traffic to mean that any of the suggestions are taken in any way seriously, I'm not sure. I wouldn't take much notice of 24 votes myself, and the absolutely dreadful slowness of the site (which evidently has more traffic than it can handle?) will no doubt put most people off.

What it's worth mentioning though, from a quick look, is that there are some pretty bad ideas I've ever heard of on there (although perhaps it is the reasoning behind the ideas that is bad)... abolishing human rights, leaving the EU, banning the national speed limit, scrapping foreign aid.
Interestingly, the lowest vote I can give anything is 1 of 5 - which is still positive in my view - there's very little way of expressing what a dreadful idea it is - or just voting zero.

Is it worth engaging with? Probably only if it reaches a certain tipping point and that will only happen if we engage with it... hmmm.... perhaps a facebook campaign would have been a better idea...

Re: Big Society

2010-07-01T02:21:00.004+01:00

Dear Mr Cameron,

I have been thinking a lot about your big society idea. It keeps me awake at night, whilst I consider how I am going to get me and the several thousand residents of Tyne and Wear for whom I have some (small, unelected and fairly anonymous) responsibility, through the next four or five years of your government (also unelected, but slightly less anonymous).

So, I had an idea.

Why don't you give me the same amount of money as you get paid. And we'll have a competition. We'll take the population of Tyne and Wear and we'll see who can do the most for the most number of people. You can have your emergency budget, and I'll have the £140K or so that you get paid. I'm sure if you do a whip round you can afford it.

We can each have a team. You can have that Osborne guy and Mr Clegg and I'll have Uncle Petie, Maisie and Rob. I'll let you have Danny Alexander too, as it's only fair we're even on the ginger stakes.

If you win, then I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and give you and your progressive politics a go. If we win, then no problem. It is big society after all.

We'll get someone fairly independent to judge it... someone who doesn't like either of us. A former Labour immigration minister might be a good one on that score. But I'm sure there would be a few good candidates.

What do you reckon?

Can we stop this government now? I want to get off!

2010-06-28T00:00:00.002+01:00

Lib Dem voters aren't too keen on the VAT rise it would seem and are regretting the way they voted as a result.

How is this possibly news? Or even sensible research? Who is keen on the VAT rise? (Apart from Alexander/Cameron/Clegg/Osborne?)

Bloody hell Lib Dem members, it's not the rise in VAT you should be getting your knickers in a twist over... it's the way your mate Clegg is changing the whole political underpinnings of your party that are the problem.

Him and his new buddies have just given us a budget that hits the poor six times more than the rest. It's knocked some of the most sensible and useful initiatives on the head, like the frankly wonderful Future Jobs Fund, cut University places, oh and if you have more than one baby and you're not married then there will be some nice little tax related penalties for you... (assuming you have a job and are paying tax).

That is what you should be getting upset about. It should be making you so angry that you cry, giving you sleepless nights and forcing you to drink (not affected by tax increases - they missed a trick there).

Because you see, when you're told that the Lib Dems have injected some fairness into the budget, they're not lying to you. It's just they use the Tory definition of fairness now (it's not the kind of fairness that is concerned with inequality and injustice, it's the kind of fairness that keeps the rich OK and barely affected and screws the undeserving poor [1]). This isn't a coalition government, it's a Tory government with a few trophy try hard ministers to keep the intellectual liberals up in their ivory towers.

The solution? I waver on this every day. In the absence of being able to run away, today's plan is

(a) Join the Labour Party
(b) Vote in Ed Miliband [2]
(c) Get on with sorting this fucking mess out (probably via Big Society - i.e. do for free what Cameron can't be arsed to pay for anymore)
(d) Have another drink and wait for the results of the comprehensive spending review which will no doubt screw us over even more.

[1] The more I look at the budget, the more I conclude that they could have saved a whole load of trouble for themselves by just rounding up all the 'poor' people and shooting them.

[2] Yes, Ed is my candidate of choice, it's the beer belly. It makes him seem some how more real... although I did like this of David's.

More World Cup...

2010-06-27T15:05:00.008+01:00

5:49 Watching with the Australian family. So the only people in the country who know less about this than me.

6:00 Granny: "He kicked it out on the full. Is he allowed to do that?"

11:45 Did you know that Schweinsteiger translates as "pig mounter"?

19:45 Because the country doesn't hate John Terry enough...

31:50 At this rate we're never going to be able to lose on penalties.

37:00 Or maybe we will.

38:30 Mum: "Even I can get upset about that."

Half time: It does strike me that we have been on the right side of the odd dodgy line call in World Cup games against Germany.

57:00 Does Steven Gerard think he gets three points for scoring outside the box or something?

66:00 Well that's that.

69:40 Or that is.

76:34 Grandpa does the sensible thing and falls asleep.

79:28 On the plus side, my sister's getting married next weekend, and now won't have to compete with this bunch of prima donnas for everyone's attention.

90:00 Maybe if Rob's got the time he could put together some sort of international football return on investment index. It'd be a very telling measure of the failure here.

Waiting for Israel

2010-06-25T15:58:00.004+01:00

Melanie Philips on what the McChrystal/Rolling Stone thing tells us:

For my money, the most alarming thing about the Rolling Stone piece is the perception of the troops on the ground that they are being forced to hold back in order 'not to upset Afghan civilians’ – and as a result are losing not just their comrades but the war itself...

For what the article has confirmed is that the American prosecution of the Afghanistan war is flawed, chaotic, and incompetent and will hit the buffers unless someone gets a grip. And that means fighting this war as if it really is a war and not a ‘nation-building’ exercise; and saying unequivocally that America is there for as long as it takes because, however awful and bloody this conflict is, the alternative – a jihadi-boosting defeat for the west and the Talebanisation of Pakistan – is infinitely worse.

Not on the face of it the sharpest bit of reasoning.

But let's not be too hasty. There could be more to this that meets the eye. Like the soliloquy of a syphilitic grotesque fool in some sort of ostentatiously avant garde Shakespeare production, Mel's rambling little diatribe may conceal profound truths behind a veil of simple-mindedness.

"But Petie," you say, "she doesn't make any bloody sense! 'We need to get a bit more blasé about civilian casualties in Afghanistan so as to make sure the Taliban don't take over Pakistan?' There's not even the most cursory gesture towards cause and effect going on there."

Well maybe. But can you blame that on Melanie? Because make no mistake folks, this is a mad war. From that article:

For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people," says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense."

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested.

See. No-one actually believes that America can win the thing. In fact, no-one even really knows what winning would mean. I went to a talk about why we should be in Afghanistan by Ivan Lewis, then minister-for-bullshit-rationales-for-the-Government's-Middle-Eastern-adventures, who told me with a straight face that we were in Afghanistan because 70% of terrorist attacks in the West had substantial links to Afghanistan or Pakistan,[1] then pretty much conceded that even if you turned Afghanistan into the most dreamy Westernised-democratic-freedom-loving-drug-free-libertopia known to man, the terrorists would just move somewhere else, before asking me - I shit you not - "But what would you do?" So no-one knows what we're doing there. They'd just be embarassed to admit that it was all for nothing after everyone got so pumped about it and that many people killed. Someone could lose their job, y'know.

There's a sort of crazy logic going to it, but it has nothing to do with stopping terrorism. Now you could meticulously trace how all the perverse incentives and fragile egos have joined together to get us into this mess. But Mel does something else; I might say, if I was that sort of wanker, something braver: like a caged animal protesting against the bars of insanity that hold it captive, she smears the pages of the right-wing tabloids with her writings in an unceasing dirty protest against the madness of modern war.

Far-fetched? Maybe, but at least the whole Mel-postmodern-performance-artist explanation does at least make more sense of explaining Mel's rightward tack than this sort of sorry drivel.

Or she could just be throwing more fodder to the folks who want to fuck up all the Muslims in lieu of getting a library card and a satisfying sex life.

[1] I will always regret not demanding that he declare war on France, because wasn't it true that 70% of terrorist attacks were planned in Pakistan or Afghanistan or France?

Clarke's Court Closure Consultation

2010-06-23T21:03:00.006+01:00

The Ministry of Justice has announced that it is considering closing 103 magistrates' courts in England and Wales. Magistrates Courts deal with around 95% of all criminal cases in England and Wales, i.e. most criminal cases. There are a huge number of cases coming through these courts. Here are some ideas as to how to reduce the number of cases coming through the courts:
(a) reduce the eye-watering number of acts deemed crimes in England and Wales;
(b) raise the age of criminal responsibility to, say, 14;
(c) roll out some progressive alternatives to the court process, such as Restorative Justice and maybe aim this particularly at youths;
(d) impose measures aimed at closing the gap between the rich and poor (it's an oldie but a goodie).
I could go on, but I won't, because the fact is these ideas are hardly new, but no one with any power to do anything seems to listen. Whatever measure you go for, what is obvious is that there will continue to be large numbers of criminal cases coming through the courts until something along the lines of the above is done.

So, what to do first? Reduce the number of cases coming through the courts or reduce the number of courts? Clearly, Ken likes to put the cart before the horse.

It is true that some courts are smaller than others and some get more cases coming through them than others. However, I suspect that this is largely to do with poor direction of traffic. After all, many Magistrates Courts are, on the contrary, regularly over-listed. It is fair to say that a reasonable number of trials unfortunately do not go ahead as planned due to last minute problems such as witnesses not turning up, prosecution papers not being ready, important documents mysteriously materialising out of nowhere which should have been served months earlier, defendants going awol, or indeed guilty pleas being entered on the day of trial due to last minute negotiations. Not all of these are avoidable. However, they are all unpredictable and do not necessarily warrant rabid over-listing.

For example, I recently witnessed one court which had 5 trials listed to go ahead on the same day at the same time. There was only time to hear one. One case therefore proceeded as planned. All of the witnesses in the other 4 cases, as well as the respective defendants had to be told that their cases would have to be heard on another day. Whilst the CPS prosecutor was still utilised for the case which proceeded, the 4 respective defence solicitors for the cases which did not go ahead were obviously not required. They were being paid out of the legal aid pot, so there were 4 wasted fees paid out. The remaining 4 cases will be heard on a different date, so no money has been saved and, on the contrary, a great deal has been squandered.

Ultimately, the closure of 103 Magistrates' Courts is a crap idea at the moment because: (1) it comes before the necessary substantial reduction in cases coming through the courts [Footnote 1]; and (2) it could over-centralise justice and provide for a move away from local justice.

[1] These sorts of "cart before the horse" government initiatives abound in the world of Criminal Justice. For example, Labour's wild increase in sentences of imprisonment (number and length) before doing anything about the overcrowded prisons.

World Cup Liveblog

2010-06-23T15:00:00.020+01:00

3:00 - Presumably everyone does this. The twist in my case, of course, is that I know fuck all about it. In fact the main reason I'm blogging this is that BBC News 24 are making it impossible to avoid. In a weird Big Brother "watch twats watching telly on your telly" moment they're showing me people watching the game all over the country. Kellogg's head office in Manchester looks like its full of wacky characters.

3:05 Strikes me that I must be the only person in the country who doesn't know who more than half these people are. I recognise James, Rooney, Terry etc. but who the fuck is James Milner?

3:07 Apparently the ref's famous for not giving England players cards.

3:09 Even I can see that Wayne Rooney is pretty bloody good at this.

3:13 Am I the only one who thinks that Frank Lampard looks like famous Jesus impersonator Jim Caviezel?

3:14 Google says I'm not.

3:22 Defoe scores, right after the commentator gives a load of statistics about how Defoe never scores when he starts with Rooney.

3:24 The replay shows him pulling a Garth Brooks-style "I'm pumped!" jump in as he does it. Clever.

27.30 - My more football savvy fiancée points out that I should probably do it in terms of minutes and seconds, thus introducing a huge dilemma about whether I take that from when I start typing, or when I finish.

29.35 News just in. God actually doesn't love a trier.

30.40 The f says that this is just Slovenia playing badly. I think I'm meant to explain the off-side rule now, but might fuck it up.

33.02 "You can't do anything useful unless you've got a player or the ball in front of you."

34.00 The goalie does not count as a player for this definition.

37.00 Commentator: "It is England, don't forget." I'm unclear about the significance of this.

38.00 George Osborne's nefarious "Take your jobs while you're busy watching the World Cup" plan may yet work.

42:00 Those vuvuzela's are getting pretty annoying. In all the creative excuses being made for England's shit first two games, did anyone try claiming that Wayne Rooney had mellisophobia?

Half time: Everyone's sounding very triumphalist all of a sudden. What's the betting that England still find a way to screw the pooch?

The US-Algeria game should be set to Benny Hill music.

Ah, apparently Milner was the guy who did the cross. So now I know.

46.02: Was quite worried there until I realised they'd changed halves.

47: Glen Johnson fucked some guy up in the first half and got away with it, then got elbowed in the face and got a yellow card for his troubles. So I think this ref just likes violence, more than England players.

58.00 This is all pretty exciting. I can see why people watch it.

67.15 No Benny Hill for David James. He seems to be hearing the Matrix soundtrack.

78.12 My lady friend informs me that "They're just dicking around now." I'm inclined to agree.

93.00 Well, that's that.

A little bit of pre budget sentimentality...

2010-06-21T22:03:00.002+01:00

Last week was refugee week and went largely undocumented by IL authors. So, in retrospect, I would like to share two stories that will mark this one for me.

I commented in an earlier post about the difficulties facing Refugee Migrant Justice. I'm afraid eating my hat will not be required, as predicted, the LSC didn't budge at all and last week, refugee week, RMJ went into administration.
This is a tragedy.
I may disagree with some of the approaches that RMJ have taken. However, their presence will be a huge miss. Hundreds of asylum seekers will have their cases negatively affected as a result. Many people have not given up and continue campaigning (including an Early Day Motion from Caroline Lucas MP). The sad reality may be that MoJ will let this organisation die. This won't be the last player, big or small to end up like this. The next 24 months will be the worst the UK voluntary sector has ever seen. And the UK as a country and the people within it will be worse off as a result.

Which makes it all the more important when we are inspired. Which is exactly what I am by a gentleman by the name of Alan Brice. Alan is probably the hardest working person I have ever come across. He makes me look lazy. Over the years, I have known him dedicate amazing amounts of time and energy to the benefit of a huge number of people. In addition to his work, as Centre Manager for the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture in the North East, Alan is undertaking a bike ride across the UK to raise funds for the same organisation. His capacity to care about the welfare of his clients and others like them is something which I have the greatest respect for.

We don't know what life will be like tomorrow, after the budget is unveiled. It is perhaps not so melodramatic to suggest that there are dark days ahead. As the RMJs of the world begin to disappear, I am sure that the Alan's of this world are going to be needed all the more.

"I guess we're not leaving, right?"

2010-06-14T11:18:00.007+01:00

The New York Times reports on Afghanistan's newly discovered hoards of rare metals:

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Obviously this is going to put a rather different light on the occupation.

The interesting question, as Charlie Stross points out, is how newly discovered all this mineral wealth actually is:

Or were they, perchance, identified as possibilities by earth resources satellite overflights at some point in the 1990s, but written off as unexploitable due to lack of access?

I'm not sure we even have to suppose that far. According to the article, quite a few people new about this beforehand:

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

So it could be earth resources satellites, or it could be good old-fashioned treasure maps. Anyway, it'd be interesting to know:

1) What happened to all those Soviet mining experts and Afghan geologists? Because if I had maps that could lead people to fantastic wealth, and was living in either Russia or Afghanistn during the 90s, I would find my thoughts turning inexorably towards mining industry executives, midnight meetings, and big suitcases full of cash.

2) Who commissioned the geological survey part of the "broader reconstruction effort"?

3) Is there a link between 1 and 2?

Having said all that, I'm sceptical about whether this would have actually been a serious reason for going in. My guess is that the Lithium probably started out as a nice bonus: then Bolivia elected Morales in 2006, US investment in Bolivia started looking less secure, and we started hearing more talk about "staying the course" in Afghanistan.

What can we learn from the BP oil spill?

2010-06-12T13:39:00.005+01:00

Thanks to Blood and Treasure, Americans have learned that British right wing media pundits aren't to far behind their American cousins in terms of the prized ability to hold two contradictory views at the same time:

Insane Britons believe that it is outrageous for Obama to identify a company as British when it chooses to dissociate itself from this country. They therefore think that the Prime Minister should stand up for this entirely multinational entity because it is “Britain’s flagship company”, to quote our most reliably insane newspaper.

You can see his point. Surely if you're worried about the Yanks turning this into an anti-British thing, Cameron's line should be: "Nothing to do with us, guv. Try Tony Hayward for war crimes for all I care."

Still, the fact that Melanie Philips has trouble finishing a thought is hardly news here in Britain. My own bit of take-home wisdom is just that being a pension fund manager looks like a pretty cushy job. Until a few weks ago, I thought it was this stressful, professional finance thing where you had to do loads of corporate analysis and political risk assessment and hedging and shit like that. But apparently you can just buy a whole load of stock in a company that regularly causes environmental catastrophes, hope that no-one ever sues it into the ground, then head off to the pub. When can I start?

The end of child detention...

2010-06-08T09:08:00.002+01:00

... in the UK at least.

One of the biggest worries when the Coalition government announced they would end the detention of children, was how policies would be developed to provide alternatives.

So, Damien Green must be trying to rival Liam Byrne and Phil Woolas, neither of whom were known for their respect of any kind of human rights during their tenures of the post, with this latest piece of crowd pleasing policy: send the children back to Afghanistan instead. AKA the worst idea I have heard in ages.

Children, that us. Unaccompanied minors are those that travel ALONE, without their parents. And now they'll be sent home. To a place where they are alone. Oh, and Daily Mail readers (not that any of you will be found here, but you never know) it's costing £4milllion.

I doubt we'll be hearing the cry of "Kabul prisons for British children..."

Legal aid shenanigans (1)

2010-06-01T13:03:00.002+01:00

Charity Refugee and Migrant Justice are making a big fuss today about how the structure of legal aid means that they might close [1].

I'm a bit perplexed about what they are doing here for three reasons.

[A] Legal aid contracts have not yet been announced, so at the moment, they don't know what level of service they are contracted to provide from October... seems a strange time to go public on this...

[B] This structure has been in place for years. RMJ actually had it slighter better than most NFPs by being allowed a longer period of transition.

[C] Every other NFP legal aid provider I know is in the same situation! Why have they gone it alone on this one? Why not get some of the other big (and small) providers on board to add some weight to this, rather than coming across like it's only them who have the problem here.

Competition in the NFP legal sector is a concerning thing. These big organisations are more than happy to expand into cities and bid as rivals to take contracts from local providers who have been delivering well for years. Yet they lack the professionalism and the foresight to recognise that working together might have achieved more for the sector and for the people they all want to work to help than this kind of individual approach. I do not understand why they are going it alone on this one.

And, if the LSC budge on this, I'll eat my hat [2].

[1] For those not in the know, legal aid funding changed a few years back, so that rather than being paid on a monthly basis as work is done, they now pay providers only at the end of a case. For cases that might span months and years, this presented a significant challenge for the Not for Profit legal sector.

[2] The odds of (a) more blog posts appearing on here re Legal Aid and (b) me making this kind of daft statement again in the next few weeks are really not worth betting against.

"A home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls"

2010-05-28T11:53:00.008+01:00

Superb SATC2 annihilation.

What is a Philosopher?

2010-05-21T11:44:00.017+01:00

According to Simon Critchley, it's a silly person who doesn't have to punch a clock, and has ideas that are of no practical relevance but that are seditious and dangerous because... Socrates, hemlock and stuff. Which I suppose is accurate in at least the case of Simon Critchley.

In case you think I'm lying, lets take this point-by-point:

He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

So philosophers are people with their minds on higher things which the hoi poloi don't understand. But get this:

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

Best I can tell, that makes no sense. Falling into a well has, as far as I can see, zero relevance to the claim that the world is composed of water. I suppose you could charitably say that a man who believes that water is the essence of all things should spend more time looking at water and less time looking at the sky, but even that's pretty damn tenuous. And he didn't actually say it.

It doesn't get any better:

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like to peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger"...

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity...

Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

I'm not sure that tells us something about the nature of philosophical inquiry, so much as lends weight to a lot of people's prejudices about academics who don't do science being pretentious wankers with too much time on their hand who could do with a funding cut or two. As an academic who doesn't do science, I'd like to request that Simon Critchley be first in line for that sort of treatment.

And finally this:

Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect for social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks...

Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

I'm prepared to be wrong about this, but I'm not actually sure it's true that anyone does "think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death" which would explain why Critchley, who usually can't stop himself from dropping names, confines himself to the weasel words "many sensible people." He is using Socrates as a sort of philosophical everyman here, so maybe he's trying to make the point that he, Simon Critchley, is a philosopher who frequently annoys people and is therefore also "politically suspicious, even dangerous." In which case someone should really disabuse him of that notion fast.

So, on behalf of sensible people everywhere: Don't worry Simon, no-one thinks you're remotely dangerous, and you aren't going to be killed. We just don't really want to listen to you.

All this by way of introduction to The Stone, which is the New York Times's new philosophy forum. So far there's only Critchley's introduction up, but the plan, apparently, is "to discuss issues both timely and timeless." Which of these labels best describes Critchley's contribution is left for readers to decide, but I'm going for "timeless" - masturbation is as old as humanity itself, and and while it may sometimes be philosophically timely to do it in public, I don't think Critchley's really there yet.

There's no "i" in public

2010-05-21T11:44:00.008+01:00

Slightly delayed reaction, but this is the first chance I've had to vent...

Some of the most infuriating post-election analysis has involved repeated reference to what “the public” have decided [1]. This would suggest that the voting population is mentally conjoined by way of some vast pulsating shared consciousness [2]. Now I'm all for monism in small doses, but I'm not entirely convinced about this whole giant mind conception of the UK's voting population.

Commentators have, for example, bleated about “the public” deciding to punish MPs by denying any one party a clear majority – which would suggest that people voted for a particular party not because they agreed with that party's policies and wanted them to be in power, but rather, because they somehow foresaw how every other member of the public would vote and then voted accordingly to ensure no single party got too many votes. Perhaps there was a mass UK Voters conference where “the public” voted on how they would vote so as to stick it to those dastardly MPs. Oh god, there was and I wasn't invited! Still, there's no “i” in public. Oh, hang on...[3]

[1] The same infuriation is incited by financial reporting such as: "the markets don't like uncertainty". It makes the markets sound like a wuss that needs to man up.

[2] members of a facebook group

[3] Try typing in "the public decided" into google and have a look at their track record on decision-making. It will soon become apparent that the public is a moron.

And what next for development policy?

2010-05-15T15:17:00.001+01:00

Sometime last year on this blog, we reviewed the Labour and Conservative green papers on international development. Jayne reviewed Labour's 'Building a Common Future' and I gibbered on about ‘One World Conservatism’. No one looked at the Lib Democrats consultation paper on international development. I don’t think even they did.

Despite not waxing lyrical about One World Conservatism, Jayne and I both agreed the conservative green paper was the fresher document and had more ideas in it – at least I think we did.

Andrew Mitchell, the conservative MP, is the new Secretary of State for International Development meaning we're likely to see a lot of those ideas I looked at in One World Conservatism turned into policy.

As proposed in the Conservative green paper, we'll get some of the standard policies such as increasing aid transparency and commitment to raising the aid budget to 0.7% of GNI - although there's no time frame for achieving this and some new ones.

There'll be a root and branch review of the 108 countries that receive aid from DFID designed to focus aid and make it more effective. Aid flows to countries like China that are deemed to have sufficient resources to cater for their own development needs will be cut back. I'm not sure how many countries this will affect given China is almost unique in this respect.

There'll be anti fraud officers introduced to tackle corruption on 'UKaid' projects with a direct telephone lines set up for people to report graft.

As part of handing power back to the people - I find this idea amusing, we vote for a government only for it to give us back some of the power we voted to give it - the 'My Aid Fund' which should be £40 million in its first year, will give us all the chance to vote on where and how aid is spent. Yes. It warms the heart a little.

Overall, there’ll be a lot of continuity within DFID, some new policies will be introduced but mostly to stamp conservative colours on international development rather than to make any radical changes to DFID which was one of the most successful government departments under Labour.

Fantasy Cabinet, anyone?

2010-05-09T01:07:00.001+01:00

My heart has sunk so many times over the last few days that I'm not sure it's worth picking it up again... first the exit poll, then the real result that looked frighteningly like the exit poll that none of us believed could be true. And then Nick Clegg said it was the Tories right to have the first bash...

Smart move there. The noble thing, the morally right thing. The wrong thing for Britain, but the right thing to do. Damn him for being a better person than I would be. Doesn't solve the problem of leadership though.

Labour didn't win the election because we don't believe Gordon Brown deserves to be prime minister.
Conservative didn't win because David Cameron simply should not be prime minister.
Lib Dem didn't win because we don't believe Nick Clegg can be prime minister.

And now, we're stuck with having to find one who's not even going to have authority on his side of the room. The government is fucked.

Given that, maybe we should live in an idealistic world, just for a second... the next months, possibly years are going to be a nightmare. The job is an impossible one. So why not just throw caution to the wind and do something a little bit crazy...

I suggest, make Caroline Lucas PM.

Now come on, bear with me... she can't be any worse than the rest of them. Think about it. We need someone to arbitrate, bring people together, find a common ground and a way through. Why not her? She has so little to lose. Yes she lacks experience, but don't they all? Stick a good cabinet behind her and it could be alright.

Make Vince Cable Chancellor (obviously), leave David Miliband as Foreign Secretary, and stick a couple of decent Tories in around Education and Health and Transport and Rural affairs and things like that where they can't do too much harm. Cameron might have to have the dep's position, Clegg could go in as home sec, and Brown, should bow out gracefully and take Mandelson with him and Hague too whilst he's at it. The rest would fall into shape with a good balance of skills and experience and political allegiance.

Have a bash, see what happens, let them all have a really good go and sneak in a bit of electoral reform. Call another general election early in the new year and I bet we'll have a decent majority then.

It could work you know, and at this point, what have they got to lose?

In which the author opines on electoral reform from a position of ignorance...

2010-05-07T14:40:00.006+01:00

So the Tory plan for electoral reform consists of re-jigging the boundaries to make sure they're all more equal sizes? Because, you know, the old ones were unfair.

I can't be the only one who sees a flaw with that plan: if you're worry is that districts are unequal, you're either going to have to stop people moving out of their electoral districts, or keep changing voting boundaries in order to keep up with their movements. So assuming they don't want to institute Chinese-style population controls, the Tory plan for voting reform is essentially to have the Parliament redraw the boundaries every five years or so. To think that was a good idea, you'd not only have to be the sort of tit who pretends to believe that the Tory sense of British fair play will stop them from gerrymandering the fuck out of the boundaries this time, you'd also have to believe that every party ever elected from now until the end of the British Parliamentary system is going to be cut from the same cloth.

Any takers on that one?

FAO: Andrew Neil and the Tory party

2010-05-07T01:24:00.002+01:00

If there's no overall majority, then obviously we're going to have a Prime Minister who hasn't won an election. So its stupid to rule people out of the position on that basis.

The inevitable consequence of blogging for the Spectator

2010-04-21T11:15:00.003+01:00

I'm intrigued by the implications of Melanie Philips's latest post about Cameron's woes. She's pretty sure what voters want. They want less immigration, less Europe, more stirring up shit in the middle east, and some fast cuts to the deficit. Cameron's not giving them enough of it, and so they're flocking to the Lib Dems out of protest. In other words, they want it nasty, and Dave just sits there pretending to be all nice. The fool.

Now obviously it's a confused sort of protest, because it's not like the Lib Dems are nasty. They're really rather nice. In fact they're even nicer than Cameron pretends to be. So what gives? Mel knows:

The fact that Clegg is just the same is for the moment irrelevant: he is by definition not the leader of the two pain parties which have brought the country to its knees.

Ah. So they don't actually know anything about Nick Clegg, and in fact didn't even listen to him sounding all nice in the debate. They're just going for someone else, apparently blissfully unaware that there are a whole load of parties like UKIP that could fully satisfy all their nasty cravings.

What's interesting here is the implied theory of the public as Mel sees it: they're incredibly reactionary, but incapable of properly communicating this, not so much because they're embarrassed about it, as because they're also spectacularly stupid and ill-informed. I'm not sure Cameron will be asking her to replace Andy Coulson any time soon, but at least the woman seems to be in touch with her audience.

More liblogging

2010-04-20T23:33:00.004+01:00

Very exciting past week for those of us who lean a bit Lib Dem.[1] As absolutely everyone knows, Nick Clegg is now more popular than Jesus, the Beatles and Barack Obama combined (and what a show that would be!) and is going to take over the nation with his warm fuzzy feel-goodiness. Or something like that. At least this is the story the press are going with. So I was quite pleased to find this on Political Betting, which suggests that the Lib Dem bounce started a bit before the leaders debates, the implication that there might be something more solid going on than just Clegg's boyish charm. Incidentally, if you're puerile enough to be interested in horse race politics (and I really am) Political Betting is, for reasons that should be obvious from the title, about as pure and objective a take on that angle as you could ever hope to find.

More substantially, Emmanuel at IPEzone (yes, that bugger's till running) lays out some proper reasons for why he'd back the Lib Dems if he was the sort of stout British yeoman who was allowed to do such things. Jamie Kenny provides some reasoning for the more jaded amongst you. And for those who just can't get enough of Clegg, he provides some amusing (if rather oblique) speculations about life in the liberal corner of the European Parliament.

[1] Information Landmine, insofar as its possible to speak of such an entity, does not toe any particular political party line.[2] Me, I'm a confused liberal,[3] and so a natural member of the Lib Dem ranks.

[2] Although I think it's safe to say that we all want to see George Osborne beaten with sticks.

[3] Much of this confusion is temporal. Am I a 19th century liberal? A New Dealer? A modern bleeding heart type? Obviously I'd like to think of myself as a "classic" but, Deadwood[4] fantasies aside, I'd really rather not go bck to the 19th century.

[4] On the subject, why do libertarians get so hung up about Deadwood as a libertarian ideal? There was no government, you goddamn morons. That's not libertarianism, that's anarchism. Libertarianism was what was happening outside in the rest of the United States, with George Hirst and all that bad shit. And his speeches about the wonders of capitalism to a man he goes on to have killed are meant to show that, you know, he's kind of a hypocrite. One of these days I'm going to sit down and write a big blog post about that.[5]

[5] I'm sure none of you can wait.

Too much applause...

2010-03-31T13:55:00.003+01:00

From the Times today, via way of Liberal Conspiracy:

The Conservatives complained to the programme makers three times during Monday night’s television debate between the candidates for Chancellor, accusing them of skewing coverage in favour of Vince Cable.

At one point during the Channel 4 Ask the Chancellors programme senior Tories phoned the hotline to the production staff claiming that the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman was receiving too much applause.

Yesterday the Conservatives warned broadcasters not to give the Liberal Democrats an easy ride in the leaders’ TV debates.

Although many were happy with the performance of George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, senior Conservatives, including David Cameron, were irritated by the way Mr Cable was able to present himself as a referee between two opponents rather than facing pressure over his own policy positions.

This is pretty disingenuous. Most of the "serious pressure about policy positions" in that debate came from Osborne attacking Darling or vice-versa. The reason Cable didn't come under much pressure was because they were desperately trying to ignore him. This is perfectly in keeping with the Tory battle plan for dealing with the Lib Dems - pretend they don't exist and that the election comes down to a straight choice between Labour and Tory - which they were putting into full force on Monday night. Cable was clearly gunning for a show-down with Osborne, but George kept on batting the ball back to Darling. This was probably the sensible move (is there a political pundit in the country who thinks that Osborne would have come out better from that one?) but you can't really blame Channel 4 for the Tory election strategy. Or for the fact that Cable knows his shit and Osborne doesn't.

"We know we have to use the state to re-make society."

2010-03-31T13:22:00.002+01:00

David Cameron is now actually using this as a tag-line. What's the actual point of the Tories now. I mean, I'm pretty sure there was a time when social engineering was the sort of thing the Tories disapproved of. Now not so much.

The Bill

2010-03-30T10:15:00.004+01:00

Could everyone please make their way on over to here and give them some money? Quickly. Thanks terribly.

Now why was that necessary? Glad you asked. You, my friend, have just contributed to the 38 Degrees campaign to stop the Digital Economy Bill being shuffled through parliament before the election. They're planning to buy any number of adverts in the paper to try and let MPs know that ramming through this sort of legislation without proper scrutiny is the sort of thing people end up losing seats over.

And why should MPs lose seats over this? Once again, a very good question. Well the Bill's pretty broad ranging, but mostly people are worked up about copyright protection. In particular, people are upset by plans to disconnect users who are accused of online copyright infringement, and to try blocking foreign sites that allow it.

While this might sound like a good thing (copyright infringement being bad), it's a little more complicated than this. There are lots of good places to read about this, but for those of you who can't be bothered, the key thing to remember is that there's a lot of information on the internet, and only a very small part of it is infringing material. There are also a lot of people on the internet, and only a pretty small number of them are engaged in large scale copyright infringment. Processes designed to work out what material is infringing, and stop the people doing it, necessarily effect more than just that material and those people. If you fast-track the process for dealing with infringers, but you'll also get more people who just use the internet to pay their bills and read the news. Want to cut off Youtube-like services that people are using to share copyrighted material? Good for you, but you're also cutting them off for a whole load of people who wanted to use them for legitimate purposes.

This isn't to say that there should be no new measures for stopping copyright infringement. It's just that someone's ox is always going to get gored when you introduce new laws. As backers of the bill have pointed out, there are ways round that. Paul Carr had posted on Tech Crunch the other day that the bill wasn't as fundamentally flawed as everyone seemed to think, and that with a bit of proper democratic scrutiny it could provide good protection for copyright holders without too much collateral damage.

That's a point of view, but the key point here is could. At the moment, the bill is a pretty much a wish-list for big copyright holders. If it's going to make it into law, it needs to be a compromise between them and all the other affected parties (users, ISPs, new technology companies, free and open source software developers, civil liberties groups). Which can only happen if there's an actual debate about it. So go on.

"I'm not a pacifist"

2010-02-21T23:10:00.004Z

Is there something about particular religions that incites people to violence or is it particular people who go looking for support of their crackpot tendencies? Finally, the question is settled once and for all in this evening's episode of the Channel 4 documentary, The Bible: A Brief History, in which Gerry Adams gives us his version of Jesus' teachings on peace and forgiveness. Yes, Gerry Adams.

You can just picture Channel 4's producers salivating at the idea of the rumpus such a shocking choice for their programme on Jesus and forgiveness might cause. Unfortunately for them it's ultimately more comedy than controversy.

During the programme, Adams does his best to portray himself as affable, thoughtful and kindly (which he may well be, I can't really comment as the closest I've ever come to meeting him was when I went shopping in Manchester on 15th June 1996).

He affably, thoughtfully and kindly points out to viewers less conversant with Northern Irish politics: “I'm not a pacifist”. Well, cheers Gerry, that whole IRA thing has been puzzling me for years. Adams goes on to seek out grains of support in the (what I had hitherto always regarded as gentle, peaceful) teachings of Jesus for his own personal support of violence. A particularly snigger-worthy moment was during a discussion about Barabbas, when Adams pointed out that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter:

Posh history prof: “Barabbas was what we would call a terrorist these days”
Adams: “From someone else's viewpoint he might have been a freedom fighter”

By now even the slowest of Channel 4's viewers[1] have grasped the brazen fact which has been flaunting itself throughout: that Adams has nothing meaningful to say on the subject matter that the programme professes to be about.

Finally, Adams' conclusion about the teachings of Jesus? they're more sort of guidelines really.

Channel 4 did accidentally allow some valid insights to slip in, such as the widow of Pat Finucane (who was killed by Loyalist paramilitaries) talking about forgiveness, and Alan McBride (whose wife and father-in-law were killed in the Shankill road IRA bombing), who suggested that we should “be more like Jesus and not so religious”. Pretty spot on. Odd to think there are people out there who, on the one hand are willing to kill in the name of their professed religion, but on the other hand, are not willing to live according to the true teachings of that religion.

[1] And we're talking a Channel which routinely broadcasts impenetrably intellectual programmes such as Wife Swap and Supersize vs Superskinny.

Is the BBC making up titles to court controversy in some sort of pathetic attempt to drive up ratings...

2010-02-08T21:36:00.002Z

... or is Generation Jihad an actual marketing demographic, like Generation X?

Haiti

2010-02-08T15:31:00.002Z

Anyone who is interested in hearing what's going on in Haiti, should check this out:

http://gfuller.tumblr.com/

Grant is a good friend of mine, and I had the pleasure of working with him in Sierra Leone. He's a fantastic journalist and has worked in Sierra Leone, Liberia, various parts of South America and now Haiti, not only reporting on human rights stories but also helping local journalists to improve their skills.

His journey in Haiti is well worth following.

Still human...

2010-02-03T09:55:00.002Z

It doesn’t surprise me one bit to hear that UK Border Agency staff have been accused of humiliating people who have claimed asylum in the UK. Surely and sadly, it is obvious in a system that is designed to humiliate and de-humanise, staff members should work within a “culture of disbelief and discrimination.”

What the UK government has missed, in it’s policy making for asylum seekers in the UK – is that these people are human.

A recent change in policy has been around those asylum seekers who have been refused refugee status, but unable to return or be returned to their countries. They are not allowed to work. They are provided with basic accommodation. Until recently, a single person on section 4 was provided with £35 per week of subsistence – in the form of supermarket vouchers.
The cash free existence is one that has been campaigned against by many as being unnecessarily restrictive. It is a system, however, that had been successfully overcome outside the system – church, community groups and individuals purchased the vouchers at face value, using them themselves and providing the asylum seeker with cash that can be used for buying food etc at cheaper, more accessible shops.

The clever old UKBA weren’t too impressed by this. So, instead, they have now introduced the Azure card [1]. This card is loaded with £35 per week. It has to be taken to the supermarket and spent there. If you don’t use the credit, only £5 will roll over. Doesn’t sound so bad, but... not all the supermarkets are online for it yet. In Newcastle, only Tesco and Asda accept the cards. And what if you want to save up some money for a warm coat? Or take the bus to see your solicitor? Or visit the doctors?

Some of the people I work with have been on Section 4 for years. One man I know, we’ll call him Alpha, he lives in Walker, like many asylum seekers. There is no Asda, no Tesco in Walker. So he has to travel to Kingston Park Tesco. But he has a cash free existence. That means he can’t get the bus, the metro. So he walks. 8 miles. 8 miles there and 8 miles back to Kingston Park to shop. And he can’t buy halal food there.

Now, I agree, that perhaps this is better than being dead somewhere in East Africa, killed by a government official. And I concede that according to the ‘system’ this man has been refused asylum. But I believe that he, like many, has been wrongly refused. And even if he hasn’t, even if he is lying. What kind of life is this? It’s certainly not cheaper than providing that £35 through the benefits system – the Azure card system must have cost a fortune to implement [2]. Or even allowing people to work for a living so they don’t need state handouts. It is designed to be de-humanising, degrading, humiliating, restricting.

Alpha, he escaped persecution by the government of his country. He escaped death there. And he came here, and now, he is persecuted by our government. And he sat in front of me, and he said.

“In my country, the government, they don’t like you, and they kill you. But at least they kill you. But in this country, the government, they kill you slowly.”

[1] So called because it is blue.
[2] I might stick in an FOI request to find out how much...

The logical conclusion of "pre-emption."

2010-01-29T16:59:00.003Z

Is this what it's actually come to? I'm pretty sure I just saw Tony Blair offer up the argument that if we hadn't gone into Iraq in 2003, Saddam might have got weapons of mass destruction by 2010.

He's actually laughing at us.

Media's childish portrayal of children who commit crimes

2010-01-23T12:52:00.002Z

Yesterday, two children were sentenced for horrific offences that they had committed on other children. The media coverage concerning this case has been infuriatingly juvenile.

The acts perpetrated by the two child defendants were horrific and the impact on the victims involved will probably be lasting and enormously damaging to them and their families. This has all been covered by the media and is of course worth reporting. What has been conspicuously lacking is serious, humane, grown-up commentary concerning the two children who committed these crimes.

These boys have been branded by the media as “evil brothers”, “hell boys”, “devil brothers”, “little savages” and that isn't just the tabloids. The labeling of these children with such terms supports an infantile worldview where people fit neatly into the categories of either “baddies” who are evil, or “goodies” who are virtuous. This diverts attention away from where we should be looking.

And where we should be looking is at the circumstances in which the boys grew up. A small insight into the two brothers' background – where journalists have bothered to report it – indicates a severely disturbed, violent and abusive upbringing. I do not mention this to try and elicit sympathy for the boys; it is, however, important information if we want to get to the bottom of why this happened and how we can stop things like this from happening again.

The apportioning of blame is not as simple as dumping it all at the feet of these children and trawling the horror section in Blockbusters to come up with catchy headlines. These boys are not evil, they are not possessed by malevolent spirits and they are not acting on satan's orders. These children have been brought up in enormously damaging circumstances and it is extremely difficult to decide where to assign the blame: social services? the boys' parents? society as a whole? Perhaps all of these to an extent and elsewhere as well.

So why does it matter whether we label the children “evil” or, alternatively, say they are a product of their upbringing? The debate over the age of criminal responsibility shows us why. The age of criminal responsibility is currently 10 [1] and therefore children aged 10, 11, 12, etc. are deemed to be culpable for their actions [2].

There are many who think that the age of criminal responsibility is too low and should be raised to at least 14. The media's labeling of children as “evil” tends to be seized upon by those who disagree and think that our age of criminal responsibility is justified. They argue that cases such as that of the Edlington boys (who were 10 and 11 respectively when the offences were committed) illustrate that the age of responsibility should not be lowered, otherwise these boys could not have been prosecuted. This argument is circular – “These children are morally responsible at the age of 10, therefore these children are morally responsible at the age of 10”. There is nothing but the media's childish reporting of “evil” children to back up this argument.

More generally, it matters that we do not descend into childish ideas of good and evil people, as once the puerile assumption is made that such children are “evil”, then no further analysis needs to take place, because the reason why the bad thing happened is that they are bad kids. Hence an important opportunity is lost to investigate failures endemic in human systems which have led to this horrendous situation. That's deeply concerning, as there is a serious need to examine the real causes behind what has happened and actively do something to rectify the problems which are found, if we want to reduce the chances of this sort of thing happening again. We need to ditch the childish approach, and have a mature, grown-up discussion.

[1] The age of criminal responsibility in most European countries is 15 and in Belgium it is 18.

[2] Some allowances are admittedly made at the sentencing stage – unless the crime is so terrible that the child magically becomes fully responsible for their actions and so bears pretty much the full brunt of the punishment, i.e. the degree to which a child is morally responsible for his or her actions is directly correlative to the seriousness of the offence – the logic of which I have never understood.

Sadly Prescient

2009-12-20T02:08:00.009Z

Remember how some commentators and a huge number of ordinary people thought that the last US presidential election signalled the start of a shiny new enlightened era in US and world politics? With Obama's poll numbers plummeting and his abject failures to do much of anything substantial on the economy, the wars or the environment, it turns out that Jello Biafra's words from back in the 2008 primary season are looking as sage as ever:

“I figure every available tool should be used relentlessly to fight the powers that be. It’s not as though a President ‘Barack-star’ is going to wave his magic wand and suddenly Iraq is all better. My biggest worry about him is that if he wins, he’s just going to turn around, pull off the mask, and be the creature of the corporate establishment that his voting record indicates. And a whole generation inspired to get off their asses and participate will become so disillusioned that they don’t vote again.”

Indeed, Mr. Biafra, indeed.

Murdoch to vanish in cloud of hyperlinks

2009-11-13T16:23:00.005Z

So Rupert Murdoch's planning to block all his stuff from Google, because he reckons they're stealing his content. There are a number of views on this strategy, but they fall into two broad categories:

Rupert Murdoch is a Global Media Tyrant who can pick governments and start international wars if he so chooses. Turning the internet into a walled garden shouldn't be too much of a problem for him.

Rupert Murdoch is a daft old pensioner who doesn't understand new technology, and has just pushed the self-destruct button. The whole thing is like an infinitely more pleasurable and globally significant version of watching your granddad try to make his mobile phone work.[1]

Which is true? Well obviously, being a decent human being, I believe that what's bad for News International is good for the rest of the world, and would like to believe scenario 2. But I'm not really sure. So I'm going to spew out a few random points, which I'm going to add to as I think of them:

1) This poll in the Guardian is asking the wrong question. It's not a competition between News Corp and Google. It's a competition between Murdoch and other news providers. If enough serious news providers on the web go bust then, as Nick Carr points out, charging people for content becomes a much more attractive proposition. The Murdoch family say as much when they're doing their BBC bashing.

2) What happens to blogs under this scenario? Will it open up more of a space for the magical digital commons utopia future and innovative new business models that folks like Clay Shirky and Tim Lee think is going to happen?

3) Unless we're prepared to assume unlikely things about the direction of copyright law, he's never going to get actual facts behind a paywall. So people are gong to be paying for the wonderful expression and nuanced analysis that are taking place behind the Murdoch paywall. If that's true, you wouldn't expect him to have too much luck.

Most of the Sun's online content, for example, strikes me as eminently replaceable. Tabloid opinions are like arseholes - they're shitty, everyone's got one, and most of us don't get paid for it. So whilst Rupe can already charge for the Wall Street Journal, he might have some more problems with some of the others.

Then again, I've never really understood the argument that he'll always be able to charge for the WSJ. Specialised topics like finance may be the ones that are most valuable to people, but they're also the ones that attract the largest number of clued-up folk who will offer news and insights for free, either because they're shamless self-promoters or they're just very interested in the topic. There are enough great finance and technology blogs out there already that you'd think the WSJ was eminently replaceable too.

Update: There's at least a rumor that the plan is an exclusive deal with Microsoft, so that you can only find Rupe's content on Bing. Siva Vaidhyanathan has some smart thoughts on it.

[1] Actually, MY granddad is far more competent with technology than an octogenarian has any right to be. He's also, for what it's worth, an Australian. Just saying...

In defence of "issues"

2009-11-11T12:52:00.004Z

So Tony Benn says he finds himself closer to the Tories than New Labour on issues of personal liberties:

There are issues I find myself in agreement with some of the Tories on, particularly on civil liberties. All this security state stuff is very, very worrying. Libertarians like David Davis, a right-wing Conservative, resigned over the government’s 42-day detention law. and I went to speak for him.

David Osler thinks this is a sign of Tony's having finally jumped the shark. I cannot for the life of me work out what the actual argument is, though.

Steady on, mate. Socialists shouldn’t find themselves in agreement with the Tories on anything. Ever. We might share the Tories’ opposition to given aspects of New Labour authoritarianism, but that is a different thing entirely from being in agreement with them. The difference is one of nuance, perhaps, but nevertheless vital to grasp.

This insistence on the momentous significance of the difference - between "agreeing" with someone about something, and "sharing their opposition" to it with them - is the kind of thing that gets left-wing politics a bad name.

Having strayed over the border into "People's Front of Judea" territory, Dave stamps on the accelerator and heads for the middle, telling us that Tony reaping the harvest of his "issues over ideology" pragmatism. The trouble is that he never really explains what's wrong with that, other than the fact that it might make you side with the Tories if you happen to agree with them on more of the issues:

Now we have reached the point where ‘the issues’ align Benn not with striking miners or the women of Greenham Common, but with David Davis and his ilk. When your methodology brings you this far off track, you know that somewhere you have gone wrong.

What's the argument here? That the Labour party's right and everyone else is wrong? That political issues should take a back seat to party politics? Seriously, I really don't get it...

Some links I liked

2009-11-11T00:54:00.001Z

(1) Focusing health aid on AIDS is leading to a shortage of funding for the less glamorous but more fatal diseases in developing countries;

(2) Crabs or may be lobsters and Jean Paul Sartre; and

(3) economist, Tyler Cowen tells a story about why he’s suspicious of stories.

Poaching nurses from developing countries might just be good for them!

2009-11-06T15:20:00.004Z

Is recruiting skilled labour from developing countries detrimental to the economic growth of developing countries? Not according to Michael Clemens of the Centre of Global Development and David McKenzie in ‘Think Again’ published in the Foreign Policy Magazine.

They make a convincing economic argument that looks at the national gains arising from skilled labour emigration i.e. higher incomes for skilled labour and remittances sent home, as well as the creation of an incentive system that fills any skills gap left – not to mention repatriation in the long term.

And the changing international landscape adds to Obama's lack of action

2009-09-25T13:00:00.004+01:00

And Philip Stephens, of the Financial Times, here, explains how the changing global landscape is leaving the US as an insufficient super power and the Obama administration asking for cooperation.

Barack Obama's Faltering Leadership

2009-09-24T17:06:00.004+01:00

Steven Hill of The Guardian nails it. However, this is hardly a surprise. Even if he wasn't just a centrist most strongly committed to restoring business as usual, Barack Obama would have had trouble changing anything in a declining superpower that's horribly ill-equiped for change (psychologically, ideologically and physically).

"To this one-time Trotskyite, ideology was the enemy of reason and it had to be fought."

2009-09-22T10:34:00.004+01:00

Melanie Phillips tells you everything you need to know about the now-deceased Irving Kristol in a single sentence.

This Speaks For Itself, Really

2009-09-17T15:25:00.002+01:00

Credit to Mr. John Estes for spotting this. Terrifying yet priceless!

The Beat Goes On

2009-09-16T16:30:00.001+01:00

Tiarks's 1st Law of the Institutional Economics of Sexual Depravity in action again.

Wonky Policies...

2009-09-15T22:15:00.002+01:00

A couple of months ago, Gordon Brown made the ridiculous claim of 'local homes for local people.' This bizarre policy, based on no facts at all, gave some great headline opportunities for ignorant tabloids and ooops, a small problem with the matter of legality.

You see the problem with this policy, was that it was addressing a non-existent issue. There is no magic housing queue for migrants.

Now I thought that was ridiculous, until I heard this... Now this piece glosses over the nitty gritty of this little government initiative nicely, so here's the simple version.

1. People aren't happy because there's a recession on. Quite rightly, a lot of them are pretty messed up by it. (Actually they were pretty messed up before it too...)
2. Some, particularly those in deprived communities, feel angry that they are not appropriately served by the public sector when they need it most.
3. Many are blaming the myth that the public sector treats migrants better than local people.
4. Community cohesion is under threat. (More so than before, apparently)

With me so far? OK. So here is the government response...

5. Because of the above, we need to target the most deprived communities and demonstrate how local authorities are committed to supporting their residents through the recession.
6. This will be done through a series of interventions aimed at the indigenous white population, to counterbalance the myth that the non-white non-indigenous population are favoured.

Are you confused by the logic here? Let me simplify this a bit

1. People still believe WRONGLY that the government favours migrants and/or anyone who isn't white over locals.
2. To bust this myth, the government are going to implement a series of programmes to treat white local people better.
3. The hoped for result is that the white people live happily ever after, the non-whites have to live with it and Labour win a few votes back from the BNP.

I've always thought that myth busting was a little bit twee. But perpetuating a myth that you know is a myth so you can look like you are addressing the issue?

Shameful.

Looking for meaning in all the wrong places

2009-09-09T12:13:00.009+01:00

Can someone please help me parse what the hell Melanie Phillips's point is in this post?

She's upset about a BBC report by Katya Adler that said armed Rabbis in the IDF were a sign that Israel was turning the fight with the Palestinians into more of a holy war, because, as she rightly points out, it's not really that unusual to have a bit of religion in the army:

[T]he British army has military chaplains who are also officers.

Does seem to smack of double standards. And the logic, as Mel points out, would seem to be faulty:

Adler made this leap because to her, all orthodox Jewish religious observance is extreme, right-wing and aggressive; all settlers are orthodox and therefore extreme, right-wing and aggressive; thus all orthodox Jewish soldiers are settlers and therefore they are all extreme, right-wing and aggressive.

But the army is for all Israelis, not just the religious ones, it's a secular state thing:

The settlers believe the land was given to them by God, she charged. Well, they may well do so; but as Israel’s soldiers they are fighting to defend not the settlements but the State of Israel of which they are citizens and to which land they are fully and indisputably entitled under international law. Indeed, contrary to what she stated they are also entitled under international law to settle the disputed territories which are still the site of aggressive war waged against them; but that’s not in fact what they are in the IDF or were in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead to do.

Yes I know. But leave aside Mel's grip on the finer points of international law and English grammar for a moment, and it gets better still. Because half of Israel seems to be saying the same thing Adler's saying:

True, she was not short of Israelis to say all this: to make the direct equation between religious orthodoxy in the IDF and ‘holy war’.

If half of Israel thinks there's taht there's a nutty "Holy War" element to the IDF's mission, then we should probably listen. I mean they'd know, right. Apparently not:

Israel is a society which is deeply, even violently polarised between secular and religious. Quite unlike Britain, America or Europe there is simply no middle ground in Israel where people can be moderately religious and straddle the two worlds. You either belong to one side or the other; and each views the other as utterly dangerous and threatening. With no acknowledgement whatever of that crucial context for these Israelis’ remarks, Adler was able to use Israeli Jews to make her repellent case for her, that the IDF rabbis are as bad as the jihadis and that Jewish religious belief is beyond the moral pale.

You see, in suggesting that some Israelis think that other Israelis are dangerous religious nutters, Adler ommited the crucial context, which is that some Israelis think other Israelis are dangerous religious nutters.

Because of the extreme hostility by secular Israelis towards religion, Israel's education system leaves many of them with scant idea – just like Katya Adler – that the people, the religion and the land are inseparable and bound together by the thousands of years of history of the Jewish people in the land. It is a history many of them only learn for the first time when they join the IDF, which has to make up the appalling deficiencies in their education by taking them to places like Masada to teach them precisely what it is they are defending.

So the IDF is in the business of teaching its recruits "that the people, the religion and the land are inseperable and bound together by the thousands of years of history of the Jewish people in the land", and that's why they should fight? Wasn't Mel meant to be defending the IDF against that sort of thing at the beginning of the post?

Seriously, what am I missing?

Spoiler Alert

2009-08-25T10:43:00.004+01:00

The Wire: a show in which slick politicians use urban crime as a platform to get elected, thus ensuring that nothing ever gets done about it.

So Chris Grayling's sort of right when he says that parts of Britain are becoming like the Wire. It's just that when Tommy Carcetti does it, he sounds kind of believable:

When Chris does it, he just looks like your embarrassingly racist old uncle:

"It's like a curse. I know what he's going to do next..."

2009-08-23T19:55:00.006+01:00

FBI director Robert Mueller is a by-the-book kind of guy, who likes to keep things professional. But after the Megrahi case, he feels compelled to offer Kenny MacAskill this pearl of wisdom:

Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed by one man's exercise of "compassion."

See. Potential bombers can now sleep soundly in their beds, safe in the knowledge that if they do launch an attack, survive it, get incarcerated and then get cancer, there's a chance they might get to see their families while they die a slow painful death. I wouldn't have made that conection myself, but I guess that's why I'm not one of America's top crime-fighters. It must be a troubling gift, this uncanny insight into the minds of madmen.

For a more sensible perspective...

More IP stupidity

2009-08-22T16:47:00.006+01:00

The BBC provides another textbook case of bad IP journalism as thinly-veiled advocacy for bad IP policy. France and Italy have decided to start fining or locking people up when they buy counterfeit goods. The article starts strong with a good misuse of the term "copyright" in the context of brands:

Holidaymakers could be fined thousands of pounds - or even jailed - for buying fake designer goods when abroad, copyright lawyers are warning.

It's pretty clear that they're talking about trademarks here. Which makes the whole business of fining consumers seem completely ridiculous, as the industry spokes-tard inadvertently illustrates:

Intellectual property lawyer Simon Tracey said anyone tempted to bring back items such as fake designer sunglasses, a football top or handbag from their holidays should beware.
He said lots of people have already been fined thousands of euros for owning a fake, and France seemed "a little bit harsher" than Italy.
But he said it was hard to persuade people that owning a fake was "a bad thing".
"The problem is, it is an intellectual theft, so therefore it's much harder to explain to people that it is wrong, but in reality - as a matter of social responsibility - it is just as bad as stealing.
"We all tend to debate the fake bag, we tend not to think about the products that can cause serious harm or kill like fake pharmaceuticals," he added.

Simon's too stupid know it, but he's actually on to something. Let's think about the fake pharmaceuticals because, as he rightly points out, that is the most worrying case. Some guy buys a fake drug that damn near kills him, and Simon wants to lock him up for a bit? We're clearly dealing with a razor-sharp legal mind.

There's a more general point here: the ostensible justification for trademarks is that they give you some indication of where the product came from, so that people can form a reliable opinion about the quality of what they're buying. As with our fake pharmaceuticals, the harm from counterfeiting comes when counterfeiters make consumers think they're buying something they're not.

If you think you're buying the genuine thing, then you're as much a victim as the brand owner. If you know you're buying a fake, then there's no deception and thus no harm done. There's no convincing justification for ever prosecuting the buyer, unless they're planning to sell the stuff on, in which case they should be targeted for the sale, rather than the purchase.

Of course, that's not necessarily what EU trademark law and customs law says. My point is that the law has strayed far beyond its original premises. The patter that you'll here whenever someone tries to explain why we have trademarks in the first place is that they function as a way of keeping consumers informed, allowing them to be more certain about their choices. By ensuring that certain marks get associated with certain products, you know when you buy something marked "Coke" that it comes from a particular big American conglomerate, rather than Fizzy Pop Poisoner's Co, in the same way that if you buy something marked "Fair Trade", you know that certain standards have been kept to.

Trademarks, at least, in the fairy-tale that brand-owners like to tell when they're asking for more restrictive laws, are a form of consumer protection. When you've got to the stage where you're using those laws to prosecute consumers, you're in a very strange place indeed.

Finally, bonus points for the inclusion of the expected "we should fight organised crime by making more stuff illegal" line:

These are not cheeky chappies making an honest living on a Sunday morning, these are hardened criminals.

You'd really think a lobbying campaign that's meant to be all about inventiveness and originality would have come up with some new standard lines by now, wouldn't you?

Spot-on

2009-08-16T20:18:00.003+01:00

For this US ex-pat, who feels more alienated from his former country with each news report from what is becoming literally the front lines of the healthcare "debate", this just absolutely nails it.

"What's wrong with profit?"

2009-08-12T14:18:00.008+01:00

The "What's wrong with profit?" placard has been a favourite of the trolls at the US healthcare forums. This has always struck me as far too general a question for anyone except a committed Marxist to give an answer to. I mean, unless those protesters would feel perfectly happy waving their banners at the next rally to legalise prostitution, I think they'd have to concede that it all depends on the context.

Anyway, I realise they're not really in it for the debate, so mostly this is just an excuse to point to Mike Konczal's rather excellent piece on health insurance at Atlantic Business. If you're not reading Mike's stuff, do.

The assumption behind Mike's piece is that there's nothing wrong with profit so long as it's the result of a mutually beneficial transaction. His point is that health-insurance doesn't look a lot like this, because of rescission: the word Health Insurers use for not paying out insurance claims when customers look like they'll be claiming more than they'll ever pay in. As he points out, this doesn't need to happen a lot to be a problem, because not many people get seriously ill in the first place:

So any random individual will not lose his health insurance through a rescission claim. But if you are of the group that actually needs to file a claim it could be anywhere from 5% to 50% likely.

Notice this makes the whole idea of health insurance pretty pointless. If you could be sure that you'd never run up serious health-care expenses in your life, you wouldn't bother with insurance, because it'd be cheaper to just pay as you go. And it gets worse:

So if I was a shareholder or executive of an insurance company, and saw that we had very few sick people on our insurance, I'd be very mad. Why? Because one great way to make money is to keep them on the roster, collect their large premiums, and then deny them the care they need when the time comes. Very sick people are probably the easiest to kick off; letting them go before collecting their insurance is leaving money on the table.

And that, in a nut-shell, is what's wrong with profit in this context. The way to get the really big profits in health-insurance is to sucker in sick people, and then not pay them, and that's a point that applies to the folks holding placards at town-hall meetings as much as it does to anyone else.

Update: More of Mike's stuff can be found at the ever excellent Rortybomb.

Also, Wikipedia informs me that medical expenses are the chief cause of bankruptcy in the United States. The CBS article tells us that this is "crushing families and businesses", so maybe the Democrats could send their own folks out waving "What's wrong with profit?" placards. Just a thought.

Chilling, But Unsurprising

2009-08-12T12:56:00.004+01:00

Maria Allwine writes a first-hand account for Buzzflash on the surge of hatred on the streets that signals a rising tide of fascism amongst right-wing anti-healthcare protesters in the US.

The Health of Our Media = The Health of Our Democracy

2009-08-11T11:26:00.002+01:00

Ex-CBS News anchor Dan Rather clearly gets it.

The Fix Is Indeed In

2009-08-09T17:13:00.004+01:00

Frank Rich of the New York Times gets what this author has been saying since before the election. A change of style has, undoubtedly, taken place with the new administration but there's been very little change in substance that this blogger can see or believe in so far.

More on the Wingnuts/Teabaggers Healthcare Reform Circus

2009-08-08T12:31:00.003+01:00

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post hits the nail squarely on the head. Bravo!

Sitting Here in My Safe European Home...

2009-08-07T10:49:00.007+01:00

Just when your correspondent was beginning to think that, well, maybe going back to live in the US wouldn't be such an unattractive proposition after all, and that the power and influence of the God, guns and guts crew who wrecked the place were finally on the wane, along comes a timely reminder of the sort of reason he decided to leave to begin with.

The values of a country where a significant percentage of the population is happy to profess the idea that maintaining and, indeed, increasing corporate profit is a more legitimate and noble undertaking than providing even the most basic standards of human decency and compassion are not values that this author will ever share or understand. Shame about the right-wing fundies because there's so much that is good about the US and some of its other professed values like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In the matter of Alan Johnson v Sense and Decency

2009-08-06T18:25:00.003+01:00

In what has been called a “smear campaign against a guy with Asperger’s” by Gary McKinnon’s impressively resolute mother, Alan Johnson wrote an article for the Times a couple of days ago about how impotent he was concerning his ability to intervene in the case of Gary McKinnon.

I have only just climbed down from the walls after getting myself worked up into something of a fury over Johnson’s “firm, but unfair” approach to the matter.

Johnson begins his article by talking about how the Judgment of the Court of Appeal “emphasises the fact that it would be unlawful for the home secretary to intervene to prevent his extradition”. That is misleading in the extreme. What the Court of Appeal actually said was that they found no fault with the decision to extradite. During the course of the proceedings, the Secretary of State clearly accepted that he had the power, indeed the obligation, to decline to extradite McKinnon (if Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights would be infringed). It is not, as Alan Johnson erroneously suggests in his article, unlawful for him to intervene. He in fact has a duty to do so, if he considers that Article 3 would be infringed.

Here is the Court of Appeal on the likely effect of extradition on McKinnon (at para 89 of the Judgment):

“89. Ultimately, I have to weigh the impressive medical evidence adduced by the Claimant against the severity involved in Article 3. I have no doubt that he will find extradition to, and trial and sentence and detention in the USA, very difficult indeed. His mental health will suffer. There are risks of worse, including suicide.” [1]

What Johnson clearly wishes to avoid facing is the fact that his decision – and the Judgment of the Court of Appeal – basically amount to an assumption as follows: “Well, I know the expert evidence suggests that extradition might lead to Gary’s mental health suffering and might cause him to commit suicide, but despite what those experts say, I think he’ll probably be alright”.

Additionally, nowhere does Johnson mention the fact that he has declined thus far to seek any undertakings from the US that McKinnon be granted bail until sentenced and that he would be repatriated to serve his sentence in the UK. He has the power to do this. Why is he not exercising it?

Aside from getting the Law wrong (and neatly side-stepping the possibility that the Law is itself wrong), the remainder of Johnson’s article seems largely dedicated to a series of wretched attempts at assuaging his conscience. Johnson states toward the beginning of his article: “I can make no pronouncement of McKinnon’s guilt or innocence” and then proceeds to expound a shoddily put-together argument aimed at proving McKinnon’s guilt. He goes on and on about how terrible a crime he thinks it is, and points out that McKinnon’s actions “affected critical government security systems in America.” Well, if those systems were so critical, maybe the IT geniuses at Nasa should have changed the password from “password” to something a bit harder to crack.

Johnson tries his best to justify McKinnon’s extradition to the US. However, he has one moment of clarity, when he seems to suggest that he actually thinks trial in the UK would be better, to quote Johnson: “he should be tried fairly … in a court of law” (my emphasis). Probably best he stays here then.

There are questions over whether the extradition laws should have been employed in the way they were and questions over the validity of those laws. However, perhaps more important than the question of where McKinnon should be tried is whether he should be tried at all? We are, after all, talking about a lone autistic man, who was looking for aliens. He is not part of some highly organised criminal faction intent on bringing down America’s intelligence systems. There has been absolutely no sense of proportionality in any of the decision-making concerning this case.

Praise must be expressed for Peter Hain taking a stand for McKinnon and of course, the voice of sense and reason in British politics, Chris Huhne, who rightly said that “Ministers should hang their heads in shame over the Gary McKinnon case”. Even the Daily Mail understands this one.

[1] The quoted passages of medical evidence contained in the Judgment make for sombre reading and go into a lot more detail as to McKinnon’s condition and how the whole extradition process would cause him to suffer, would cause his mental health to deteriorate and possibly result in suicide. Worth having a look at if you feel able to cope with the subsequent hours of banging your head against a wall, trying to understand how the Secretary of State and then the Court of Appeal came to the decisions they did.

One World Conservatism

2009-08-04T14:24:00.001+01:00

Around the same period as DFID publishing its new white paper on development, the Conservative Party launched its international development Policy Green Paper “One World Conservatism A Conservative Agenda for International Development” outlining the Tory vision for international development. Its main focus is to fight against poverty by increasing aid effectiveness and promoting wealth creation through the development of the private sector.

The Conservatives plan to increase aid effectiveness by directly linking aid to results (independently audited by an aid watchdog) on the ground. Central to this strategy is the ‘Cash On Delivery’ policy that will give more aid to countries considered to have met specific measures of progress and less to those where the progress is slow. The same approach will be extended to aid channelled through multilateral organisations with DFID expected “to cut funding to multilateral organisations that fail to demonstrate real results on the ground”.

Corruption as discussed in the BBC news report in Jayne’s earlier post, will be tackled by designating an ‘anti-fraud officer’ on all DFID country programmes. Although in the BBC report this is not the issue, as Dominic O’Neil, the DFID country representative, and Ernest Bai Koroma, the Sierra Leone President are aware of corruption implying the policy focus should be on ways to stop graft rather than gimmick hotlines.

Other conservative policies to increase aid effectiveness include, making three-year rolling aid commitments and giving indicative ten-year projections for aid, carrying out a root and branch review of the 108 countries that receive aid from DFID (more aid will be targeted toward Commonwealth countries), and increasing aid transparency and taxpayer involvement in how and where aid is spent.

Overall many of the policies outlined in the document are light and suffer from some deficiencies. For example, while much is made about linking aid to results on the ground, not much of a policy is forwarded for achieving development that is non-measurable in scientific terms.

With the ‘Cash On Delivery’ policy, countries that most need aid (i.e. those countries that are unable to achieve the set measures of progress) will get less aid, while those that demonstrate signs of being able to support their own development will be given more aid.

The emphasis on quantity (which in development may only be an indicator of short-term success or failure) rather than quality (which if achieved has more long-term development effects) is myopic.

The ‘My Aid Fund’ (£40 million in its first year) that gives taxpayers a chance to vote on where and how aid is spent is a gimmick and trivialises development.

On more long- term sustainable development, the green paper advocates wealth creation through the private sector, but is sketchy on how the private sector can be developed in recipient countries and its limits as an instrument of national development.

Becoming a five star citizen

2009-08-04T11:54:00.003+01:00

I was going to try and write something about my mate Phil Woolas' [1] latest nonsense but then I read Shazia Mirza's comment here and decided she says it beautifully.

Of course even if you don't really care about how new British Citizens get passports, it's worth thinking about what it might mean for anyone who is British born. If the kind of behaviour that is expected of someone undergoing naturalisation is going to be assessed, then how long before we all get assessed about how good we are as citizens. Maybe, in 10 years time, we'll have our identity cards with star ratings, a bit like McDonalds used to do for their staff. Citizen of the month?

Hmmm. How many stars do you think I'd lose for writing this?

[1] If I bothered to use tags on my posts it would be easy for you to chart the course of the friendship. Seeing as I don't, have a look here and here.

UKaid: building more empty classrooms...

2009-08-02T14:21:00.002+01:00

DFID recently published it's new white paper on development "Building a Common Future". Apparently development helps us all. Especially if we can put a UK label on the bits that we do. I wonder how much money was spent on making the nice new "UKaid" logo and for that matter on sending little leaflets out to DFID stakeholders? Anyway...

The plan is, amongst other things, to get millions more kids into school and millions more bed nets. What it's kind of light on is quite how it's going to do that.
I don't doubt DFIDs ability to create school places and ship bed nets to foreign lands. What I doubt is its ability to keep those kids in school for more than 5 minutes and to ensure that those bed nets get, free of charge, into the homes that need them.

The same week that the strategy was published, this was put out by the BBC: seems they may be questioning the same thing.
Pa Koroma makes a poor case for himself by appearing to say that yes, funds do go astray, but perhaps if you gave us more, then a few might get to the right place.
And the DFID representative suggests that there is a point in time where the young people of Salone will reach crisis point, but when pressed, he doesn't really know how long and then suggests 5-10 years. I'd be inclined to suggest this might have happened 19 years ago and they're not out of it yet.

The sad problem is, that DFID don't really know enough about the countries that they work in to be able to deliver money effectively. Receiving governments can't confidently take money from them because they know that it isn't going to go where they say it will. And BBC journalists make reports about places and can't even pronounce the name of the place correctly, or in fact give the president his proper name - just how much do they really learn about the place when they can't get this right!

We need some new solutions. Because DFID may well be funding thousands of new classrooms and new teachers but it clearly has no idea how that is impacting on how many children end up in long term schooling. Which surely is the point?

Nurse to ward 6, please...

2009-07-28T17:20:00.009+01:00

I know this is going to be a hard sell for some of you, but consider taking a moment out of your day to feel sorry for Melanie Phillips.

"Begging your pardon there Petie, but would you mean the Melanie Phillips we see on question time? The one who just recently talked about 'America’s neuralgic conscience over its historic racism [and] the monstrously unjust over-reaction to that racism.' Because we were leaning more towards the idea that anyone who thinks that Affirmative Action is an over-reaction to slavery and segregation should be lynched, then offered a place at university on favourable terms and told to have another think about it."

Well, you're all entitled to your own opinions. But I think you should really look at the thing in its proper context. That context is the much-covered arrest of Henry Louis Gates. For those who sensibly avoid most news about Americans that doesn't involve them either trying to conquer the world or crash its economy, this is the story of a black literature professor at Harvard who was arrested for assaulting a police officer after he lost his key and tried to break into his own house. Apparently he had a few choice and rather loud words with the officers who responded to the call, so they asked him to come outside, then arrested him for assault. Then they dropped the charges.

Now there's a range of different spins you can put on this, running the gamut from "it was all the fault of the viciously racist police force" to "it was all the fault of that black man with his hysterical liberal rhetoric." I wasn't there, and so have no idea which way it actually happened.[1] Mel, however, was and does. Or something.

Anyway, she read the officer's report, and after a quick update to clarify that yes, she does know what Gates was actually charged with, thankyou very much, she wants it to be understood that she's very upset with Barack Obama for going off half-cocked on the whole thing. You know, because he wasn't really there and so should shut the hell up about it. He has, apparently, revealed once again that he is "steeped in anti-white grievance politics of the most bitter and corrosive kind."

She was pretty sketchy about waht he'd actually said. He'd called the police "stupid" but that didn't seem to fit the "anti-white grievance politics" bill. All issues of race aside, they arrested a Harvard professor for yelling at them, right? I mean, let's say for a minute I completely buy Mel's take on the story here, that Gates had no reason to feel aggrieved for being treated like a criminal in his own home, that he shamelessly played the victim card and started yelling at the police, and they then arrested him for assault on a charge they subsequently dropped.

That would still make them "stupid", no? I mean, even in Mel's version of events, all they've done is give a very angry man a big political stick to hit them with.

So after a quick visit to youtube, I had a look at Obama's announcement to find out that, no, he did just say that they acted stupidly.

And The Phillips reckons that this is the thin end of the wedge for Barack's race war.

Which, brings me on to my main topic. I'm pretty sure the woman is about two headlines away from a collapse into speechless, paranoid psychosis. Mel's world used to be such a simple place, with authority figures we could love on one side, and the combined forces of Islamofascojihadisocialatheism - lefties, investigative journalists, terrorist networks and that sort of thing - on the other. This made for a pretty simple strategy of centralising as much authority as possible so that the authority figures will have all the resources they need to squash the MetromuslimPCviromentalists. Now that the lefties are the authority figures, it's all got terribly confusing and rather scary.

If you want to try and imagine what it must be like for her, think of being a Labour supporter just after Blair's invaded Iraq. In order to adjust for Mel's frankly shaky grip on reality, imagine that this time you're experiencing it with a head full of bad acid. The whole political project you thought you were working for has just turned into a werewolf, pinned you to the ground and fastened its jaws around your neck. Mel's world right now is like a horror film written by Hunter S. Thompson and directed by David Cronenberg: fun for the rest of us to watch, but deeply unsettling for her to live through.

[1] Although my knee-jerk reaction is summed up pretty well by this, from James Grimmelman.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

2009-07-24T12:18:00.008+01:00

Flying Rodent's all down on blogs again:

Some readers might point to intelligent, well-written blogs run by reasonable individuals, but frankly, pish and tush. British blogs run at roughly 5% sober budget analysis to 95% face-raping crackheads.

Never mind blogs as a primary news source, I'm struggling to think of a handful of bloggers who would merit even the fabled fifteen minutes of fame. That's particularly ironic, since the vast majority of them certainly deserve chemical castration, and that's being charitable.

Iain Dale's running his annual Blog Awards wankathon as we speak - I defy any reader to deny that the world would be a richer, more rewarding and more just place if each of the top ten writers on his final list had been ripped to pieces by enraged mako sharks three seconds after they logged in to their first Blogger accounts.

You can see his point. I immediately went over to Iain Dale's blog to see what the fuss was about, but before I could find anything on the blog awards I came across this, and so had to spend the next half hour picking little flecks of vomit out of my keyboard:

I don't mind admitting that I am a complete prude where drugs are concerned. I have never taken an illegal drug and will never do so. It's never wise for someone with a vaguely addictive personality to put themselves into that situation!

Well aren't you a bloody card? This is blogging as the outlet for all those cutesy "No, but I would have inhaled" answers that Iain would like to be giving if only anyone were interested.

Where FR slightly loses me is the idea that this is anything peculiar to the internet. He's worried about what happens when we stop reading newspapers and start reading blogs:

This is why stories along the lines of Newspapers in terminal decline tend to fill me with horror. The idea that blogs might become one of the world's primary news sources was popular when I started my own, and the prospect fills me with the same mind-numbing, gibbering dread now as it did then.

Make no mistake - the day that blogs become the primary news source for a plurality of the populace will be a cataclysm at the species level, like Spanish Flu or the Black Death.

I'm sorry, but if newspapers are our last and best defense against the forces of chaos, we're fucked already. Click through on that link, and the top story is that DMGT is losing ad revenue. How is that a bad thing? If the Mail and the Standard went tits-up tomorrow, it wouldn't really matter if their readers started buying the Telegraph, following Iain Dale or just muddled on as usual and formed a cult devoted to hastening the arrival of the Child of Littlejohn and Phillips who will purge the country of all but the chosen elect of white suburban, home-owners.

Blogs are not a forewarning of the apocalypse. 95% of blogs are shit for the simple reason that 95% of everything is shit.

How backward do you have to be to think that Boris Johnson's too contemporary?

2009-06-24T16:42:00.005+01:00

Seriously...

Mark referred to this article, written by his old pal Boris Johnson, mayor of London, when he asks why the Supreme Leader is railing against Britain. It's not that Boris is smoking what Helene Cooper is smoking; it's more that the mayor commits the traditional Western political sin of seeing everything through a contemporary frame-of-reference.

Incidentally, Boris's article is as good an example as I've seen of the fact that, underneath the laziness and the foppery, Boris is one of the craftiest political operators ever. In one column, he manages to say how much Tories love Barack Obama's, send out some signals to people who are pissed off about BBC top-slicing ("a vindication of the BBC, and the principle of taxpayer-funded broadcasting"), sound excited about some vaguely defined "new technology" and still keep the Torygraph regulars happy by harping on about the great British Empire that was and how that nasty Jonathon Ross gets paid too much.

It is not the stupid who voted for this

2009-06-06T10:34:00.002+01:00

The facebook status update of a friend of a friend of mine today reads "Congratulations to the people of Burnley for officially becoming the most ignorant in Britain." My sister talks of feeling sick at the news. Actually it's three seats now. Not that many? Well it's three seats more than they had before.
And so, the left wing idealists will begin their chatter about how the people are ignorant and how the strategies of Labour and Tory parties made the wins easy and they will be right. Yet they will be oh so wrong.

Our democracy is imperfect. Yet to the polls I went on Thursday without fear. I had a vote. I used my vote. There was nothing and nobody to stop me from voting. Perhaps most importantly, no one would even consider stopping me from voting. I know how lucky I am.

And with the results of our votes, the people of Britain speak. Because our democracy allows that. I can say what I like, and so can anyone. And so people chose to vote for the BNP. The BNP have a right to those seats. They won them fairly. We should be celebrating the freedom of democracy. For true freedom of speech is in embracing diversity and recognising the variety of opinion.

And maybe the current government have let us down. And maybe the only realistic alternative is led by a tosser that turns our stomach. And maybe there seems no hope for political leadership we actually like right now.

It is not the BNP voters who let down Britain. It is you who did not vote. It is you who let the BNP gain that bit more power. More than you think.

For protesting against the political gravy train through apathy is not protest. It is nothing. Because if you do not vote, those in power need not concern themselves with you.

What we perhaps should have learned from the MP expenses palava, is that if those in power want to gain from it (which is surely what popular opinion believes), then they will want to retain it. And so they need not concern themselves with the opinions of those who do not vote.

If the hearts and minds of the British people are moving right, then the politics of the mainstream will follow. AND THEN WHERE WILL WE BE?

And so I turn to those of you who do not vote. Those of you who see the injustice, the wrong, the hate and sit there and complain that none of your politicians meet your needs, and I see this country ruined because of you. Because our politicians do not set the political agenda, they merely follow it. It is us, each and everyone of us, who sets it.

And you, you have handed over responsibility for your life and your living and your community to these people through doing NOTHING. And then you complain when they don't represent it. BUT YOU TOLD THEM NOTHING. You sat back and gave them everything because you couldn't be bothered to do anything.

If the people of the UK vote over the next 10 or whatever years and the BNP gain more and more ground, then we have to understand it is what the people want. If it's not what you want, then it's time to start saying so now. Because maybe we can't all have exactly what we do want. Maybe we don't even know what it is that we want.
But if we agree that we don't want this, then now is the time to start moving against it.

From the people who brought you "Are you thinking what we're thinking?"...

2009-06-05T14:24:00.007+01:00

... comes the idea that the "Conservatives can beat the BNP."

Now, if you're thinking what I'm thinking, it's probably something like: "Well obviously. The Tories are a major political party and the BNP are, well, the BNP."

But Harry Phibbs means something far more subtle than this. He means... well it's not really clear. Mostly he just knows that he has a burning urge reheat the tired fact that the BNP is economically leftwing:

The Conservatives need to get stuck in and expose the BNP as a neo-Nazi outfit. This task can no longer be satisfactorily left to the Socialist Workers party. Voters will understandably dismiss anything coming from that quarter as hysterical abuse – even if in this case it happens to be true.
What Conservatives can add to this critique is something that the left can never admit: Nazism and communism are ideological twins.The BNP is in fact an extreme leftwing outfit. It wishes individual liberty to be sacrificed to state control. It seeks the overthrow of capitalism, and rages against profit and speculators. It wishes to institute a siege economy with protectionism and the nationalisation of foreign-owned companies. In this it is being consistent to its founding inspiration. Hitler nationalised the banks and insurance companies, the economy was rigidly centrally planned, there was an extensive programme of public works, independent schools were banned.

Now that's all true enough, but it seems to me to go against his argument: "The Tories don't like it because they think it's a bit lefty" isn't a devastating condemnation of anything, now, is it? And if BNP supporters are mostly lefties, then surely it's Labour (or indeed the SWP) who should be doing the beating. If you're trying to convince people that the defining feature of the BNP is that they nationalised banks and raged at speculators, you're pretty much doing Nick Griffin's job for him.

Of course, there's a perfectly sound argument the Tories can make against the BNP. It goes something like: "Look, we've written the damn book on nationalism and dog-whistle politics, and we've got a chance of winning an election. Vote for us instead." They've tried going heavy on that, and it didn't do much for them, so now they've dropped it. Which is all well and good, but then why not leave the BNP the hell out of it instead of writing columns in national newspapers talking about how the BNP hate bankers too?

Tags are so passé

2009-05-07T14:07:00.003+01:00

A recent addition to the ever-widening scope of Community Sentencing involves issuing those convicted of a crime with a hi-visibility jacket emblazoned with the slogan "Community Payback".

The idea behind this latest governmental brainwave is presumably that the person forced to wear the jacket will consequently feel humiliated and to some extent (despite this probably being the case already) ostracised from society.

One problem. Much like tags, these hi-vis jackets are not seen as something inherently embarrassing and to be avoided at all costs, but are in fact the latest must-have item for the youth offender of today.

Those lucky enough to be presented with one instantly become the envy of their ASBO-toting mates. Unsurprisingly, there are now reports of style-hungry youths dishonestly appropriating said property belonging to the Probation Service with the intention of permanently depriving it of these bold fashion statements.

Which leaves one wondering: other than the most rationally-challenged of the Daily Mail’s readership, who in their right mind thought that this scheme would actually work ? ?

Too nucleur to fail?

2009-05-07T13:07:00.004+01:00

Mathew Yglesias points up the idea of "strategic rents" as a key to understanding the US-Pakistan relationship. The essence of the idea is a variation on the classic conservative criticism of aid and welfare generally - that if you're giving people resources because they have a problem, you are in some sense paying them to have problems.

Pakistan is a country that for about the last 30 years has built itself round military aid, and the military is correspondingly powerful. The big solution was meant to be getting the military out of government, but that doesn't seem to be working so wel l. The suggestion is that the Pakistan military it knows that if things get bad enough, the US will have no choice but to re-install it, which might expalin why it's so happy to sit most of its forces on the Indian border, domestic chaos notwithstanding:

The army still insists that India remains the major threat, so 80% of its forces are still aligned on the Indian border instead of defending the country against Taleban expansion.

The army has also refused to respond to US and Nato demands to oust the Afghan Taleban leadership living on its soil.

So what do you do about this in the long term? Yglesias thinks the US needs to have a credible threat of just walking away, but that's a lot trickier than it sounds - can the US really claim that it'll walk away from a nuclear power on the brink of collapse with the Taleban hoping to fill the breach? The odds of that hapening are probably pretty small - the Pakistan military, after all, doesn't want the Taleban in any more than the rest of us. Then again, the US doesn't want to be seen to be throwing in th towell in the one place where their stated enemies identifiably are.

What are we going to do about Labour?

2009-05-02T08:52:00.003+01:00

It's not hard to think of reasons why Labour should be voted out. The whole Internet privacy thing (read the simple guide here and the issue over restricting Gurkha rights are just the tip of the iceberg really (Worth having a look here and here if you're interested in those two).

But in my eyes, it's like this. We have a government who wants to exploit difference and divide us in any way possible. Yet at the same time, they also want to know as much about us as possible. Hmmmm. This week I've heard that described by people as 'sinister', 'astounding'. I prefer terrifying.

In a slightly drunken debate last weekend, I proclaimed, rather wildly, (as I am sometimes known to), that the kind of world we see in fiction, like in V for Vendetta and 1984, where people are controlled to ridiculous levels and true freedom is barely an idea, really isn't that far off. If the kind of behaviour that we're seeing at the moment from our government continues, we're going to walk into it and get stuck before we even notice. I sound a bit conspiracy theorist when I say these things, but I actually think it's true.

The Labour government has to go. I've said in an earlier post that I might vote against Labour on the climate change issue alone. Add that to the multitude of other issues, and to be honest, it puts the idea of democracy to shame if we let them do all these things that we really don't like and then leave them in because we might save 25p a week in tax (or some other self interested reason).

But who the hell do we get in instead? I don't know. Maybe we should resign ourselves, like Jarvis, to the seeming inevitability of a Tory government?

But surely not? That the history of British democracy tells us we should bounce Tory / Labour / Tory / Labour doesn't mean it will continue that way forever. That can change.

If the Lib Dems or the Green Party were to take power, I doubt they would have the capacity to do any kind of decent job. Sorry, but it's just true. Organisations and responsibilities expanding at that rate is just a recipe for disaster.

I've always tried to support Gordon Brown. I believe a country, like an organisation, can only be well run if people are behind it's leader. Partly that's his responsibility to keep us on board, but also it's ours to give him the benefit of the doubt sometimes. But Labour have lost their legitimacy now. Gordon Brown should have called that election whilst he had the chance, it would have been a risk, but at least he would have known he was a supported PM. Just the same, key Labour Ministers need to stop kissing his ass and start stepping up for what they believe in. Instead of contradicting themselves and each other, they need to start taking a stand. Question when they see things being done that they disagree with. Resign if necessary.

But they're all too worried about power, and their own little empires. We talk about problems with African Leaders and their lack of concern for the country, but I don't think we're any different here. Same issue, just better concealed. We worry about developing countries having 'free and fair' elections where there is actually choice, but what choice do we really have here? How many of our politicians actually serve us and not themselves?

So what do we do? Get behind the smaller parties and build them so that in 20-30 years they might have a shot? Join the Labour Party and try and change them from within? Start a revolution? Opt out? Give up? Go and live in the woods?

I don't know. I really do not know. So for now, I'm walking the very thin line where I schmooze the great and the good by day, and bang my head against this wall by night. Which makes me quite self interested really, maybe I should become a politician after all...

A long way for a short break

2009-04-29T22:57:00.003+01:00

I can't decide what I find funnier. Tony Blair taking a two day trip to Sierra Leone to promote tourism in the country, or that the trip coincided with Independence Day.

Personally, I think his travel agent and his PR gave him bum advice.
Two days in Salone is barely enough to get to the airport and back.
And picking independence day to flaunt your power and 'heroic' status might not be the most appropriate moment.

For the record, I should add that without Tony Blair's encouragement of the intervention in Sierra Leone, I dread to think where that country would be. But I do wish he wouldn't dress up his little jaunts as something they're not.

Also, if anyone does fancy a trip, I would encourage it completely and I can recommend some great places to go. But I'd advise taking a little longer than two days, it really isn't worth the airfare (or the carbon footprint) just to get your feet dirty. And you probably won't get the Blair treatment.

Also, please don't misguidedly believe that this brief post is any indication of a future flurry of activity on this site. We're all being a bit rubbish at the moment. We'll get it sorted soon... hopefully...

Revisiting one of the key questions of our age...

2009-04-15T17:02:00.005+01:00

It's a little late to the party, but of all the crazy "politics of the Dark Knight" posts I've read, Martha Poon's is surely the greatest:

Chapter 5. After Wayne Enterprises and Lau Securities Investment meeting. Reese (accountant) to Lucius Fox: “Sir, I know that Mr. Wayne is curious about how his trust fund gets replenished. But frankly, this is embarrassing…”

Bruce Wayne is a trust fund orphan. He invests in capital growing activities through Wayne Enterprises, whose successful operation is so secure that he sleeps through business meetings. Wayne’s nighttime vigilante project as ‘Batman’ follows the classic model of 19^th C philanthropy which diverts funds from capitalist production to the betterment of society. He stands up the urban underbelly (organized crime, terrorism and corruption) and for the reinstatement of civic ideals (democratic politics and civil order). The twist is that he does not build social institutes or charitable societies. He channels funds into the development of a personal arsenal of crime fighting technologies.

Chapter 15. Reese to Fox: “Applied science, a whole division of Wayne Enterprises just disappeared. Overnight. […] Now you’ve got the entire R&D department burning through cash, claiming it’s related to cell phones for the army. What-er ya buldin’ for him now? Ahhh rocketship?”

Batman is a story about a man who deploys his fortune on disposable technologies, hand made Armani suits (see credits), and political campaigns, for the protection of a particular form of society. In Gotham City illegitimate wealth is acquired by larceny and drug trafficking. Legitimate ways of making money include the perpetual streams of investment revenue of the rich, whom Wayne is able to convene in an instant, to rally behind a politician of his choosing.

Chapter 12. Fund raising party for Harvey Dent. Rachel Dawes to Dent: “Harvey Dent, scourge of the underworld, scared stiff by the trust fund brigade!”

In a world where the lines between right and wrong as a clear as the black boxes in a comic strip, the civic virtue of the rich remains totally untested. The working middle class bridge & tunnel crowd, on the other hand, must prove its moral metal in the Joker’s highly simplified orchestration of a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Working people are shown to have weaknesses caused by economic pressures that can hinder the fight against evil by making a police officer in fear for his wife shoot a man in protective custody, or betray the Assistant District Attorney.

Chapter 33. Ramirez confronted by Two-Face (Dent) about the betrayal leading to Rachel’s death: “They got me early on. My mother’s hospital bills and I just…”

As Batman takes responsibility for the death of five men to save Dent’s spotless reputation, the moral of the story is that sometimes people deserve not to know the truth so that they can maintain hope: hope, that a system whose fundamental wealth production / distribution mechanisms never go unchallenged, will one day bring them a better future…

‘The Dark Knight’ is a Warner Brothers Picture.

Surely she means "that a system whose fundamental wealth production / distribution mechanisms remain unchallenged", though.

Calling bullshit libertarianism

2009-04-13T12:50:00.002+01:00

Will Wilkinson points out that libertarianism can quickly become an excuse for defending the status quo. Bashing your foes is easy, but I'm always impressed with folks who're prepared to shine a light on the ideological blind spots within their own movements.

Everyone's a super-hero...

2009-04-10T12:19:00.003+01:00

One of the interesting things about the financial crisis is that it functions as a sort of economic Rorschach blot: everyone thinks that this proves that they were right all along, that everyone should now listen to them, and that we will all then be delivered to their particular version of the promised land.

So for example, democratic socialists think that this is an example of what happens if you have too much deregulation, and that now we'll regulate properly and get capitalism back on the leash, serving the public where it belongs. Libertarians take exactly the opposite view, and think that banks got too big and too risky because of too much government involvement, and if everyone would only listen to them, we'd have a free world of small-business-owning Rand-bots.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb has an opinion piece in the FT about how this proves everyone should have been reading his books, and that we should get rid of all those so-called experts:

The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

[By which I assume he means him.]

Similarly, Simon Johnson of the IMF thinks the problem is that America's bankers won't let the IMF have their way, whilst Dani Rodrik thinks that this is a vindication for the idea of moving away from big institutions like the IMF and letting national governments have more say over their own finances.

What with all these folks getting stuck in, I was thinking I'd have a go myself. Until recently I was actually working on a way to blame this all on Jade Goody. I was hazy on the details - something to do with the credit crunch being a result of our sense of entitlement to stuff we've done nothing obvious to deserve. Guess it's back to the drawing board...

Nokia to the rescue

2009-04-09T12:17:00.004+01:00

Robert Reiner says that even though we're having a civil liberties meltdown and police are beating folks down in the street, at least we've got cameras to hold them accountable with. He even throws a bit of Foucault in so that we know he's dead brainy:

Against the main Orwellian narrative, however, there are two counter-trends, encapsulated in the Tomlinson case. The Independent Police Complaints Commission now has the power to investigate serious cases such as this one. Perhaps even more significantly, the spread of video and other recording equipment has created an informal means of opening police malpractice to public scrutiny. New surveillance technology has prompted fears of the realisation of the Benthamite dream/Foucauldian nightmare of the ever-seeing Panopticon policing the population. But the spread of video and digital cameras provides a small counter-trend, the recording of official wrongdoing by citizens, dubbed "Synopticon" by the Norwegian radical criminologist Thomas Mathiesen.
As we see the bitter fruits of the neo-liberal consensus signified by New Labour's acceptance of Thatcherite economics, and we face several likely summers and winters of discontent, the police will become increasingly embroiled in controversial political and social control tactics. Synopticon offers a fragile check on Panopticon.

Trouble is, he's a bit behind the times on the civil liberties meltdown - pointing cameras at police is illegal, Rob. At least it is if it's "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". Which I have no doubt the police will interpret really narrowly when deciding whether or not to rip cameras with incriminating evidence off people.

Update: Since Alan refuses to post anything here, I've taken to nicking stuff off his facebook page: the Department of Transport had CCTV shut down in the City of London over the G20 protests. Which was helpful, no?

We can't ignore this

2009-04-07T21:48:00.004+01:00

I am slightly lost for words as I write this, I find it difficult to believe that this footage is actually something that happened in the UK. In broad daylight.

It looks very much as though the Police may have been responsible for this man's death and then lied about it afterwards.

Ian Tomlinson was, as we understand, not a protester. He was just walking home from work. From this footage, it appears that he was just minding his own business. Today's story from the Guardian website is here and it looks like there will be more tomorrow.

Want your Right to Life? Best pay your taxes

2009-03-27T11:30:00.003Z

More posts by me which are not, in fact, posts by me. If only I could write my thesis like this.
This one is a guest post from the lovely and talented Lizzie McClory:

Jack Straw has drawn rather a lot of attention to himself recently with his announcement of a green paper entitled ‘Rights and Responsibilities’. The bill is aimed at protecting citizens’ rights (such as the right to free healthcare and victims’ rights) and also monitoring citizens’ responsibilities (such as the duty to serve on juries, obey the law and to pay taxes). The idea is that the proposals in the green paper will effectively extend the Human Rights Act to social and economic rights.

Tempting as it is simply to swat aside Straw’s proposed bill by dismissing it as toothless and futile, I am more concerned with a problem identified by Chris Huhne.

The frightening concept implicit in this Bill is the conflation of citizens’ rights and human rights. It should be recognised that there is an important difference between:

(a) fundamental protections that should be available to all human beings, whatever responsibilities they have shirked; and

(b) benefits that are available to a citizen who enters into a contract with society, thereby acknowledging certain responsibilities.

The concern is, that assuming Straw’s mission succeeds, these social and economic rights will be seen as a mere expansion of the Human Rights Act. In other words, Straw wants “to build on the Human Rights Act” (which brings to mind Joni Mitchell: “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot …”).

There are two immediately apparent dangers:

1. The debasing of human rights by virtue of their association with these ‘secondary’ social and economic rights.

2. The threat to the universality of human rights.

Currently, human rights operate as a guaranteed basic minimum standard of humanity afforded to all.[1] This may not remain the case, as if social and economic rights are contingent on responsibilities, then by virtue of conflation with these rights, human rights could also become contingent on responsibilities.

There is a disturbing possibility, therefore, of access to human rights being dependent on whether, say, one agrees to sit on a jury or not. Surely this is not something any right-thinking government should promote. (A right wing-thinking government intent on bringing down the Human Rights Act, now that’s a different matter.)

[1] Of course the rights of wrongdoers are a separate issue here. Convicted criminals’ rights are balanced against the rights of the public / the state and sometimes the wrongdoer in question must forfeit a human right in the name of punishment - for example, forfeiture of the Article 5 right to liberty by way of imprisonment.

The financial crisis, the London Summit and Developing Countries

2009-03-26T14:58:00.002Z

Another one that's actually from Rob, with me as proof-reader and editor.

On 2 April 2009, leaders from the G20 countries (19 of the world’s largest economies plus the European Union) and guest countries invited by the host Prime Minster Gordon Brown will meet in London to discuss the global economic slowdown.

Against the backdrop of worst economic crisis since the Second World War, central bank governors and Ministers of Finance will come together to discuss coordination of global economic policies needed to restore global economic health.

They will discuss what policies are required to stabilize the financial markets and actions needed to reform and strengthen the global financial and economic architecture to put the global economy back on track. So where should they start from?

Any reform of the prevailing economic and financial system should start with addressing the root causes of the current economic crisis.

As has been well-documented, and as I highlighted in an earlier post, the financial crisis started in America with excess liquidity in the money markets being invested in high risk financial instruments (Mortgage-backed securities) to earn higher returns in a low yield environment.

However, the crisis which began in America, has spread to the rest of the world and in doing so, it has exposed some deficiencies within the global economic and financial system that precipitated it.

Dr Yilmaz Akyuz (formely chief economist UNCTAD) in a presentation at the South Centre on 13 March 2009 identifies some of the key systemic defects in the current architecture that have created recurrent financial instability and crises in the monetary and financial systems.

According to the Dr Akyuz, there are three interdependent sources of international monetary and financial instability that any international reform should start by readdressing.

These are “(1) Policies in systemically important countries, including some of the larger emerging economies, (2) problems inherent to an international reserve system based on a national currency, and (3) unregulated financial and currency markets”.

The current economic crisis was partially created by unilateral macroeconomic, exchange rate and financial policies followed by strategically significant countries over the last decade or so.

Key macroeconomic policy pursued in the USA and within some parts of the European Union was markedly different to that pursued in the large emerging economies of Asia which focused on export oriented growth and reserve boosting policies after the Asian crisis in the late 1990s.

This created imbalances within the system that indirectly helped to trigger the crisis. The IMF which has the de jure obligation to carry out surveillance of macroeconomic policies and exchange rates had failed to impose any telling discipline over its non-borrowing member countries choosing instead to focus on lending to developing countries.

Paradoxically, policymakers within the advanced economies and emerging markets have been able to pursue diverging policies because the international reserve system is based on a single national currency (the dollar). Dr. Akyuz points out “this is a system which is inherently unstable because it depends on the reserve country running a current account deficit in order to fund world reserves”.

The system is negatively affected by the pro-cyclical behaviour of the financial markets and capital flows (which compels developing countries to hold large stocks of dollar reserves) and macroeconomic and exchange rate policy indiscipline in the systemically important countries.

Concerning the pro-cyclical behaviour of financial markets, Dr Akyuz suggests the establishment of an International Lender of Last Resort (ILOFLR).

However, as he points out “.. this is neither feasible nor desirable. It would not address the question of global financial instability and may even aggravate it further by encouraging imprudent lending and investment”.

He proposes more consideration be given to establishing a genuine international reserves system that is based on Special Drawing Rights. Such a system would have the advantage of costs being incurred only when used.

In the upcoming summits, one of the key topics of discussion will no doubt be the regulation and supervision of financial markets and capital flows. The current financial crisis is testament that financial markets cannot be left to self regulate.

It is evident from the current crisis that the adverse global spillovers arising from the financial sector in developed countries can be equally as damaging if not more damaging than those arising from trade policies, however, unlike trade, international financial activities are not subject to multilateral discipline.

In order to reform of the international financial and economic architecture governments will need to consider the introduction of new multilateral arrangements and mechanisms or strengthen existing ones to correct this deficiency.

To this end Dr Akyuz highlights three regulatory systems;

A fully fledged system World Financial Authority (WFA);
a selective approach in which international supervisory bodies for large trans-national banks and credit rating agencies would supervise and oversee that the agreed standards and rules were adhered to; and
an eclectic approach which would expand the mandate and improve on the governance of existing bodies such as Financial Stability Forum, Bank of International Settlements, the Basle Committee on banking.

He points out the WFA and the selective approach would be constrained by complex issues of national sovereignty and the power of international regulatory bodies` vis-à-vis national regulators and as such would be resisted by developing countries.

For Developing Countries (DCs) the WFA and the selective approach also carry the added problem of one size fits all policies with uniform rules and regulations that would most likely be shaped by developed countries to meet the needs of their economies.

To make sure that any restructuring of the economic and financial architecture takes into account their needs, DCs will need to collectively develop an agenda on the reform of international financial markets, one which includes new modalities in reaching and implementing agreements on regulations, with a view to minimizing their vulnerability to external financial shocks.

For the upcoming G20 summit and the UN high–level conference on the financial crisis, Dr. Akyuz suggests DCs push forward an agenda that contains at least some of the following, without forgetting the long term systemic issues identified above:

Eliminating pro-cyclical behaviour of international lenders to DCs;
Increasing transparency and reporting for highly leveraged institution investing in DCs;
Imposing regulation to eliminate pro-cyclical rating and bias against DCs borrowers/issuers and restrictions of their investment strategies to reduce the destabilising effects on exchange mechanisms;
Recognising the rights of DCs to impose control over both inflows and outflows;
Creating a statutory framework for temporary debtstandstills and capital flows in countries experiencing serious balance of payments problems; and
Introducing an arbitration system for orderly and equitable restructuring and workout of sovereign debt for developing countries to both private and official creditors.

How much of this can be achieved is an open question. But if any genuine impact or resolution is going to arise from these processes then the needs of developing countries must also be taken into account. For as long the current imbalances remain the incentive to pursue unilateral policies will remain, further weakening an already shaky and unstable financial architecture.

Annals of smug (continued)

2009-03-23T16:21:00.006Z

There's a pretty good formula for success in the study of International Political Economy which goes roughly like this:

1) Find an economist writing about ~~macro-economics~~ update: pretty much anything.
2) Read until you discover said economist neglecting some really obviously predictable political event that would affect their model
3) Proceed to slate them for not sufficiently considering ~~"the political"~~ update: one or more of "public choice theory", "interest groups", "politics" or "the political."[1]

Over at IPEZone, Emmanuel does a great job of this, using those folks who thought that US sovereign debt might lose it's AAA status as his punching bag:

As an IPE scholar, I am inclined to believe that no amount of red ink will make the major credit rating agencies--S&P, Moody's, and Fitch's--downgrade US debt. The reasons are political-economic. With the exception of Fitch's, these are all US-based firms. When push comes to shove, they will try to protect the national interest, provided not-too-subtle nudges from Sammy. For instance, American authorities have sole discretion for classifying these entities as nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs). If American authorities catch wind of an impending downgrade, it is child's play to kick them out of the US credit rating business entirely by removing this designation (despite these being American firms). Being disqualified to rate a significant portion of dollar-denominated debt would endanger credit rating agencies in a way that the Asian financial crisis and the credit crunch failed to do.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, for a politics/economics commentator, Robert Peston talks some shit sometimes.

[1] Connoisseurs of the process will undoubtedly be able to think of many more, and will also notice that the terminology here has been ranked in ascending order of the likelihood that the user doesn't think of themselves as an economist.

Updated to achieve an even more preposterous level of off-the-cuff generalizing than was previously the case.

Why I can't (won't) tell the Home Office what to do

2009-03-23T00:18:00.004Z

On Wednesday, the Refugee Council and partners will host a conference "Integration: Building a Life in the UK" with the idea of bringing together a bunch of people from within the VCS to talk about how the government can make policy on integration for refugees work.

To quote: "UKBA have agreed to respond to the key points which will emerge from the conference – and has asked that we include how we as practitioners can be involved in the solutions."

So, the general objective is for organisations working with refugees is to tell the Home Office what we want it to do, whilst also pointing out how we can help them do it.

Two problems here. For a start, these organisations are doing a chunk of their work on Home Office funds. Both the Refugee Council and TimeBank hold contracts that pay them to deliver Home Office prescribed services using Home Office money. Now I'm not saying these services are bad, or that they are delivered badly (although let me be clear, I'm not saying they are good either). But there has to be a question of independence. How keen are they really going to be to tell the Home Office what they're doing wrong? How concerned are they going to be about keeping their contracts in the future?

Second, with even the 'supported rate' for voluntary organisations at £133 plus VAT, not to mention the cost of the travel down to London, there aren't going to be all that many regional organisations present who are working with refugees. In Newcastle alone, we have, off the top of my head, 7 organisations that work exclusively with refugees and asylum seekers (with many more targeting them amongst other groups). Two of them are under significant risk of going under in the next few weeks, due to lack of funding. Two of them are supported massively by church congregations, one is a branch of a major national charity, another holds a bunch of Home Office contracts. I'm fairly certain that at this conference, there will be no significant representation from Newcastle's refugee serving VCS. I imagine this will be similar for other regions.

Why? Because on what little money I have to run my organisation, I can justify neither the time nor the money to go and tell the Home Office how to do their job, so that they in turn can use that to try and tell me how to do mine. And to be frank, why I should pay to do this is beyond me. (I should add, that even if I thought it the most important thing to go to that conference, I would still be unable to finance it from our ever dwindling budget. And also, that they would never fund my organisation even if I wanted them to. Probably this rather bumps me down the list of people that they'd want there anyway - I am, after all, not very important at all!)

We seem to have lost sight of the fact that our job is to address social inequalities, to stop them, to work ourselves out of a job. We can't do that if we are in the pockets of the system that is compounding those problems. I find it harder and harder to defend the claim that Phil Woolas made all those weeks back that enraged me, regarding NGOs 'playing the system'.

I know that these organisations like the Refugee Council and TimeBank and those working in them, actually care. I know that they want to support refugees and asylum seekers and to promote their interests. But are they willing and able to truly defend those interests? Sooner or later, we are going to have to look at them and ask, are they really in the best position to hold our government to account for the way they treat asylum seekers? And if not, then who is going to step up to the plate and do it instead?

Tipping Point

2009-03-19T20:29:00.005Z

This animation is well worth a watch for explaining some of the issues surrounding climate change.

As Rob point out below, climate change is an economic issue, not an environmental one, not one of justice, barely even a political one. But that can change. Surely it has to?

Have a look here at the website where this film is from.