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What an unbelieveable pile of crap. How has this story dominated the news for so long? It’s so insignificant as to be a total non-event in my opinion. They had an expense allowance. They had rules. They had an overseight body. They claimed and were told they were within the rules and given the money. Now they’ve got to pay it back because … well, I can only come back to jealousy and envy. They followed the rules, they shouldn’t have to pay it back. If you disagree with the rules, then they should be changed, but people who complied with them should not be forced to pay back what they claimed. It’s a fundamental fule of justice, that changes to the rules should not be retroactive! Not breaking the rules is not grounds for punishment.
Take the case of the guy who’s having to repay £41,000. Now, even if every MP had to repay a similar sum that’s only about £2.7 million. Yes, I say only. The budget of the NHS alone was £90 billion in 2007 and was set to reach £110 billion in two years time. That’s one service the government provides which is over 33 thousand times higher than what would take to give every MP £41,000. And, of course, the £41,000 repay was accumulated over 4 years. So it’s even less siginificant. It would work out to £675,000 a year, or 133 thousand times smaller than the budget of the NHS. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the NHSs £900 million deficit last year.
Lets say the figure for MPs over claiming is actually massive and averages to £15,000 per MP, per year (not the case considering the largest ‘over claim’ is £41,000 over four years, or £10,250 per year). Lets also say we can get every penny of that back at zero cost (impossible) and lets round it up to a nice even £4 million reclaimed. Lets say we then give all of the money reclaimed from the past four years to the education department. The education department gets around £80 billion a year. If we translate that to numbers which can be more easily comprehended, it’s like giving a minimum income worker, pulling in £12,000 a year an extra 60 pence. It’s not going to change anything for that person. They can now afford an extra bar of chocolate. They’ll be thrilled.
Okay, lets say we were even more specific and gave that £4 million to primary schools, which have a budget of £700 million. Now we’re talking! That’s the equivalent to giving our £12,000 a year worker an injection of almost £70! Not life changing, sure, but they’ll be able to buy… well, maybe they’ll be able to replace a broken part on their car which didn’t seem worth it before. Or they might be able to take a loved one out for a nice meal.
Of course, the assumptions made are crazy. There’s no way that reclaiming the money would come without cost. There’s no way that the over claim by MPs is that high. The whole thing is a total non-event. Complete storm in a tea-cup.
Interestingly (or actually not if you’re even slightly clued up on how the media operates) it was actually quite hard to find a web news page that said the £41,000 repay figure even in the same paragraph as the fact it’s spread over four years.
I think the story should have been told as: “Look how many MPs don’t claim nearly any of their allowed expenses! What a bunch of freaks/saints!” (depends on how you want to spin it) Seriously, how many people can honestly say that, if their company was to offer to pay for something that they would say no? How many people, when offered either money for, or money towards their work-related costs say no to that money? I would venture to say very few, and further to venture that the ones who do say no say that because of the difficulty of claiming, not because it’s morally wrong to claim. These MPs claimed when everyone of us would have claimed and we hang them out to dry for it!
Of course, there are those who are arguing that it’s not the money, it’s the principle. These people followed the rules and got money. They were open about what it was being spent on. It’s a fucking disgrace! They should all be strung up and shot! No, wait. Hang on. That actually sounds like reasonable behaviour to me. There’s the guy who had his daughter stay with him. He’s a total fiend of course. We want our MPs to be good family people, but not in a house part paid for by us, goddamnit! We want our MPs to represent us and be normal people and we want them present at Parliament and able to vote on the issues of the day, yet we want to make it so that only the disgustingly wealthy can actually hope to be an MP because we want them to finance their own central London houses!
I’ve heard it suggested that MPs should share bed sits… which is a really wonderful idea. Yes, lets have the leaders of the country hunkering down like crack addicts, four to a room!
I hate the coverage of this story because it is so petty. The premises at work are envy and jealousy. The ones demanding these MPs act like super humans are themselves acting like brats who’ve just been told the kid next door has got a new bike.
It strikes me that this story is being used to try and distract us from the worsening economic situation. For fear that we might notice that the system is seriously broken and we might get it into our precious little heads that maybe it needs changing. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have a system built on growth! Maybe it’s not a good idea to have power and wealth pooled in a very small number of hands. Maybe we should think about doing things differently… no, wait! That guy there claimed expenses he was entitled to, in a way he was supposed to, for things he was allowed! Burn him! Get the mob together and tell them to put down the “We demand change” banners and grab up the pitch forks and flaming torches! It’s witch hunt time!
One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.
I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.
I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.
When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?
How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?
The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.
Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.
Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.
In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.
Tag surfing yesterday I came across a blog entry made by Strategerie, saying nobody is above the law. They had some good points, and made them well.
“Just following orders” was supposedly thrown out as an excuse after the second world war when we deemed it insufficient to justify the actions of the rank and file Nazis. If they couldn’t use it then, we can’t use it now because, as Strategerie says, we’ve all got our own brains and we should realise that certain actions are just wrong, no matter who told you to do them.
Personally I think that anyone who wishes to engage in ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ should be forced to first endure them. If you consider them to be legitimate to use on innocent people (and you have to remember that the people they use them on are only suspects, not convicted of any crime, and are by the definition of our society innocent until we can prove them guilty) then you should consider them appropriate to use on yourself.
I’ve read about half a dozen instances of people who were rabidly pro-waterboarding, pro all kinds of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, who agreed to undergo the process because ‘it wasn’t that bad’, only to come out of it totally against waterboarding. Like the Mythbusters who experimented with Chinese water torture who thought it would be just a bit of a laugh because having a drip land on your head couldn’t possibly be that bad, these people found out that torture isn’t funny.
Torture is not okay. I’ve said this for a long time, in a lot of places. People will formulate all kinds of non-existent scenarios in order to justify torture. One of my most loathed is this one: “You have a suspect. You caught him red handed planting the bomb. The bomb will explode killing everyone in London (10+ million). Is torture okay to get the deactivation code?” Those who fight so hard to justify torture will say: “Yes, because it will (not the certainty) save the lives of the citizens of London.”
Flaw 1: Just because he planted the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean he has the code to turn the bomb off.
Flaw 2: If you have time to get a reliable answer from the suspect then you have time to evacuate the city, or at least start to and save as many lives as possible.
Flaw 3: There is every chance that the code he knows is one which will instantly activate the bomb, rather than deactivate it. It’s what I’d do if I were masterminding attacks (and for one that has a scale of 10 million victims, there is a mastermind) of this magnitude. I’d tell the guy a deactivation code to give him the illusion of control, knowing him likely to get an attack of jitters right after he plants the bomb and possibly trying to ruin my plans. If he then tries to ruin my plan, boom.
Flaw 4: If torture is okay to save the lives of 10 million, is it okay to save the lives of 1 million? 1 thousand? 1? At what point do we stop and say that torture is not okay, once we allow it? 10 million is used because it’s emotive. London is used because of its financial importance. The question is formulated to make ‘no’ as hard an answer as possible, but the lengths needed to make you feel like saying ‘yes’ are so extreme as to make the question almost meaningless. The scenario is designed to chip away at the certainty of conviction that comes with the statement “torture is never okay”. What about Rabidly Extreme Case A? Chip. What about Rabidly Extreme Case B? Chip. What about Extreme Case C? Chip. What about Extreme Case D? Chip. What about Case E? Then enhanced interrogation techniques are okay…
Flaw 5: These criteria of certainty are never, ever, ever going to be met. Even if you catch someone with the bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are the terrorist. Even if their hands are on the bomb there is no certainty, they could have been trying to stop it and the police could have misunderstood in the confusion. The certainty in the example is necessary for the argument to work as we balk at the prospect of torturing innocent people. They need to provide us with a concrete example of a terrorist caught in action, certainly guilty of being a terrorist.
The example is fiction and so to is the idea that torture is okay.
Of course, the terminally clueless will not understand this. People like That’s Right Nate, who believe that television shows such as 24 provide genuine, accurate examples of how torture works. Anyone looking to macho fiction for exemplary material and drawing analogies between waterboarding and having their hair washed probably shouldn’t be someone I point out, since it might only get them more attention and spread their diseased mentality still further. However, I chose that blog post because it seemed to represent the mentality that thinks waterboarding is okay, the 24 mindset that thinks shooting, or threatening to shoot, someone will make them squeal like freshly spanked pigs. But torture is unimaginably repulsive, as Hunter says.
The guy posting that 24 is a good example of torture in action, also seemed to think torture was good because it allowed the war in Iraq. Seriously, what? We went to war in a country with no connection to al-Qaeda because people under torture provided information that there was, and you think that’s an advert for torture? I’d have to agree with Daniel, Bush and Cheney should be tried as war criminals, along with Tony Blair and all other ‘leaders’ who participated in this world-wide disgrace.
Torture is not okay. It does not provide accurate information. There are claims circulating that the torture of Sheikh Mohammed stopped an attack on LA which could have destroyed the Library Tower (more commonly and accurately called the US Bank Tower) in LA. This is strange, since the plot was broken up in 2002, and he wasn’t even caught until 2003. Now, changing history is nothing new, Bush and the neocons were doing it the entire time they were in office. They got very good at it in fact. One of my favourite memories was watching a UK television programme where two Americans were arguing, one a Democrat, one a Republican. The Republican starts to spout off a whole ream of total falsehoods about the second world war and his Democrat counterpart turned to him and said “You do remember we’re in the UK right? These guys actually know their history!” The audience laughed and the Republican was very red-faced. He didn’t try it again after that.
It seems to me that if an American is a Christian or believes in their Constitution then they must demand to see the people who ordered these actions brought to justice along with those who did the most torturing. Not only to ensure accountability, but to ensure their Christian/Constitutional values are upheld.
I’ve just read David Waddell’s very wise words over on his blog about whether debt is good, bad or ugly. He makes a lot of very sensible points about micro scale economics. In his example of Bob and his new sofas, for example, he’s entirely right that if Bob saved, rather than got his sofa on credit every time, he’d be able to buy more sofas in the long run. Bob doesn’t do this and the economy doesn’t encourage him to because of the very nature of our entire society. The short term is more important than the long term. Governments look no further than the next election. Businesses look no further than the next profit report. Individuals look no further than the next pay slip. There are exceptions to those rules, but generally people live pay slip to pay slip, saving and then spending their savings, putting a tiny amount into a pension and then regretting it in the long run. Businesses may have what they call a ‘long term plan’, but they’re usually only very sketchy beyond 5 years, and 5 years isn’t the long term. Governments are seen as over-stepping their legitimacy if they make too many policy decisions which run for more than their term in office. Etc, etc, etc.
Also, Waddell seems to ignore the fact that our currency is now debt. It’s not linked to anything more tangible than the debt we owe to the banks. If we stop borrowing or they stop lending then we’re in serious problems (hey… spooky). Because we can no longer be paid on demand the sum of £5 in gold, and instead are paid the sum of £5 in £s, we now need banks to keep providing easy to obtain debt and consumers to keep taking out more debt than they can easily finance. Bob may be better off if he figures out that saving will enable him to get more, or more expensive, sofas in the future, but for that to work as Bob intends it to work there needs to be enough other people who don’t realise it so the system keeps working and Bob’s money is still worth enough to buy him a sofa by the time he wants one.
He also overlooks the fact that the interest paid on loans made by the banks becomes available for re-lending. So a sea of consumers taking out loans is a good thing for lending as it generates interest which the banks can then lend out to more customers. Since the banks are able to lend many times what they actually have in reserves, and since the interest is theirs to keep, they can get a lot of money for lending from lending money.
It’s a brilliantly subtle system while it’s working. People believe the money they trade for goods and services is a unit of value. They believe it is worth something, because of that belief it is. If that belief disappears then the money they trade actually has no value at all. They can’t trade in the money at a bank for a thing which has value as a tradeable item such as gold, they can only trade in the money for different money. If they don’t accept the value of that money, where does that leave them? It’s in their best interests that they accept that the 1s and 0s in the bank’s computer which represents their wealth has value as they have no other recourse if they don’t. Belief is what holds the entire economic system together. That and the legal system deems it to be acceptable if someone will only offer to repay a debt they owe to you in the legal currency of the country you’re in, whether or not you believe in that currency’s value any more.
Waddell has a good point when it comes to the three phenomena of self-certification, 6 x mortgages and over 100% mortgages. However, once one accepts that money is debt (rather than value) and that the banks hoover up the money supply through interest payments, it becomes obvious why such things started to happen. The system needs larger and larger debts to finance the interest payments on the debt already in circulation.
There is a finite limit on what credit-worthy people can finance and are willing to finance. So they introduce self-certification to allow those who aren’t credit worthy to get into debt. Since this debt is secured against their house, which is going up in value, it doesn’t matter if they finance the debt or default, the bank makes money, the interest gets paid and the loan has created the money it needed to create for the system to work.
The banks lend money to everyone, even those who on paper can’t pay it back, and that fuels further increases in property prices, which helps the banks out because the defaulters’ homes are worth repossessing. Now, the increase in price starts to mean that people who should be able to finance a house can’t. So the bank increases the amount they will lend, because more people buying houses is good for them, both in interest payments and in house price inflation for future repossessions.
When you’re moving house there is almost always something you want to change about the house you’re moving to. Some small or not so small detail which is wrong. Now, if you’re having to give the vast majority of your pay to the bank so they’ll give you a 70 or 80% mortgage then you can’t make that change right away and may never get around to it. Many such changes will increase the value of the home, such as an extension. The bank wants your house to be worth as much as possible and so starts giving out 100% mortgages, so you can spend that 20% you’d saved on your extensions and remodelling. Lovely. However, word gets around that the banks are now giving 100% mortgages, so people stop saving that 20% and just want their house. The banks still want the house to increase in value by the addition of extentions and remodelling, so they up the percent they will loan to the borrower in the hopes that the excess will be used to increase the value of their home or buy some other retrieveable goods. If the mortgage is financed the bank gets its share. If not then its gets its share by repossession. This works so long as the price of houses is going up.
The reality is so stupid that it seems almost impossible that it would be allowed to continue. A bank shouldn’t be allowed to loan out almost $100,000 on a starting capital of only $1111.12 (part two of Money As Debt), but in effect they can. They can have $1111.12 and collect interest on almost $100,000.
The current credit crunch (God I hate that it got called that) was obviously going to happen. The system makes it inevitable. If we have the fossil fuel energy reserves left to claw our way out of the huge hole we’re in then it will happen again, unless we change the way banks and loans operate. We wont change a thing though because we like the illusion of prosperity that the system creates. We like to buy things today that we can’t afford until next year/decade. We like to have businesses able to operate despite losing £75 million in one financial year. We like these things and these things are what the system provides. There is so little real incentive to change the system that it wont be changed. I can even imagine post-crash societies which still operate this type of credit system. We’re short term animals. We like the benefits today and don’t care if it hurts tomorrow. We like it even more when the benefits are today and the pain might not be felt until after we die (see the way we treat the environment, the problems looming with peak oil and the lack of action, etc).
In my youth I was very anti-guns. Guns kill people. The argument that people kill people is stupid. Although it acknowledges that people will kill other people with or without guns, it ignores the numerous instances of people shooting each other by accident (something decidedly harder without a gun). This is especially relevant for children, who are able to get hold of keys, are very inquisitive and boastful, and who are not renowned for their ability to listen to basic instructions or their finesse and subtlety of grip.
It seemed to me that it was obvious that a nation with easy access to guns would necessarily be a nation with very high levels of gun crime and homicide. I looked at America and it was instantly obvious that this was the case. Things like the number of Americans, per day, dying from gun crime compared to the number of people in the UK made the case seem water tight. I was unshakable in that conviction for many years and got into many debates with people about the need for weapons.
Most of the people I argued against believed that hunting was the best and most sure-fire way to win the gun control argument. As a native of the UK, this argument was lost on me. We have no big game. We have no hunting traditions. We wouldn’t have anything worth buying 9mm ammo for, which we would be allowed to hunt.
Then I found out about the gun ownership laws of Switzerland. They have fewer deaths per year than America has per day. For this to be comparable on a per capita basis the population of Switzerland would have to be little more than 825 thousand. It’s 7.5 million. The rate of gun crime in America is around nine times higher. There must be a reason, other than the availability of guns, to explain this difference.
If you look at figures for homicide, America outstrips most ‘civilised’, democratic nations in the world. Compared to Finland, the US has around seven times the gun related homicide rates and twice the overall homicide rates.
Gun ownership is clearly not causing the murder rates, see Lithuania as a country with stong gun controls yet very high murder rate, so the question must become “What is?” And I think it’s clearly cultural. The US is in love with violence. The South Park movie might have its tongue firmly in its cheek when it has a parent saying that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, so long as people don’t say naughty words” (or something to that effect), but it is clearly exemplified in the shows you can find coming out of the US. Very little swearing of any kind, yet lots and lots of violence.
Now, as I’ve matured, I’ve come to see what the Second Amendment is FOR. It’s not so some stupid Yank can go shoot some animals with a high powered assault rifle. It’s so the government fears its people. As Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears its people, there is liberty.” Gun ownership should be about the prevention of tyranny, not hunting, nor defending oneself against ones fellow citizens. It’s about protecting your liberty against your government. You have a right to defend yourself against others within your society, but your gun is not the first or best means through which that should be done, the government is. Your gun’s primary purpose should be the protection of your liberty from tyranny, plain and simple.
Since I came to this realisation I have been in favour of fewer gun controls. The people should be able to buy armour piercing bullets, high explosives, high velocity rifles, assault weaponry, etc. They should because they need it against their government. You don’t need an AK47 to take down game, you need it to take out soldiers who are coming to take away your freedom, your property, or your/your families life. You don’t need high explosives to go fishing, you need it to make the government think twice about sliding into fascism. You don’t need a pistol in your bedside table in case of break-ins, you need it in case of late night Nazi-style round ups of your friends and family.
You need a weapon capable of protecting your liberty from the one thing most capable of taking it. Your own government.
The survivalist angle that you need guns for hunting come the collapse is also flawed. Ammunition has a limited shelf life, primers stop working, without the easy access to the means of maintenance guns stop being reliable, etc. If you want a gun so you can hunt you would be much better advised using the last few years of cheap, easily availability of everything to learn how to make an implement from natural materials and use it to hunt with. That will set you in a much better position to survive than having a static stockpile of ammo and guns.
Even the best, most prepared and most heavily provisioned person can be dropped by a stray/lucky shot. Making a strong point and defending it might be a very civilised way to go about self defence, but a nomadic, light and knowledgeable person, capable of simply walking away into the wilds and finding food and water has a much better chance of surviving the fall of civilisation. A house is a target for gangs looking for food. A shelter which is concealed, made by someone who can, if needs be, leave it at a moments notice and make another somewhere else, is much better.
Democracy, a wonderful thing. We are told this without end from the moment we’re really able to ask the questions. We are introduced to ‘our team’ by our parents. We’re told all the ways ‘our team’ is better than ‘the other team’ and therefore why we should support them. Our team. It’s like football. You support your home team because of whatever reason you choose and you back them to the hilt because that’s the only way you know how.
If your team does something you don’t agree with then, more often than not, you blame that thing on a portion of the team, the scape goats of the team, and life goes on. Your team is still your team, you just wish they’d get rid of all those goats. Then it’d be perfect.
Doesn’t matter which team you support either, this will probably be the way you vote. There are a very small number of swing voters. Voters who don’t treat politics like a giant and very long game of football. But are swing voters really any better than supporters? Swing voters tend between the two main parties, the home or away side. They don’t think, “Hang on a second, not four years ago I was actually for the other side and switched because of a, b and c. Maybe I should look for something else?” No, they go on flicking from Red to Blue Corporate Party, thinking that they’re making a difference.
I’m here to tell you that both left and right wing are attached to the same tired old bird.
Democracy doesn’t work. It relies on uninformed, illeducated, selfish, bitter people to be right most of the time. Taxes are essential for the multitude of things we expect from the government, yet if you put it to the vote, most people would vote down taxes. It would be ‘right’ within the democratic system. The government would then scramble to provide the things that people were still shouting for without the money to provide those things. If, after a few years of this, you were to ask people if they want more or less taxation, they’d again vote for less. They’d ignore the fact that they’d been moaning just a week before about the absense of services from the government and vote with their selfishness.
Civilisation is the bird. It has restricted the choices we have to its left or right wings. Civilisation believes itself capable of flying, but it’s falling.
I’m waiting for the people to start saying that the current financial disaster was unforeseeable. Like they did with the New Orleans levy. Like they did with the Iraqi civil war. It will be on every news network and the good little journos wont point to all of the voices who were crying out against the way we were doing business, just as they didn’t point out the numerous studies into the levy system, just like they didn’t point out the opinions that were bang on the money about the way the Iraq situation would develop.
Vote no one. No one is worth your vote.
Legal aid cases have never actually been the plum cases. A barrister has, for a very long time, been able to get substantially more money from doing jobs other than legal aid jobs, because of restrictions placed on the pay awards by the government. However, a lot of them saw the benefit of doing legal aid work and so did it alongside their ordinary practice since it is essential in our legal system that people should have adequate representation in court in order to defend themselves.
Laws as so complicated, the interactions between laws especially, that trained legal assistance is necessary in almost all legal matters. Because they are necessary and their job difficult to get into, they are able to charge a premium. Add to that the Labour government’s ability to pass laws like they are going out of fashion and you have a situation where more laws are on the books so more offences are being committed and so more representation is needed. The legal aid pool doesn’t grow in a concurrent way and so less money is available each year for each case.
Barristers operate a ‘cab rank’ principle, the first barrister available takes the case. They can only turn down a case if the fee is not sufficient for the task they are being asked to perform (or if it contradics their moral or ethical code). In a recent case that was abandoned because no barrister would take it the reason was because, once they’d added up the number of hours they would have had to put into the case and divided it by the “generous” amount they were offered for the legal aid job, they were expected to do the work at a rate of around £4 an hour, less than minimum wage.
Legal aid is vital. Cutting it is like admitting we don’t actually give a damn about justice (I know we don’t, but lets not be so brazen about admitting it, please?) or the right to a fair trial. We have trial by media anyway. There’s no smoke without fire! We cry foul when people are found not guilty because we are so certain they were, the papers and news told us they were guilty, so they must have been.
I’m sure the CEOs of major corporations would be thrilled if you said to them, “Right, while you make this product, rather than being paid 400 times the average wage of your workers in the UK (3000 times the wages you pay in a lot of the poorest countries), how about you get paid the same?”
As an aside, is the job a CEO does really worth 400 times that of the people on the bottom of the ladder? Really? If the CEO took the day off, would that impact the state of the company the same way as 400 average workers taking the day off would? No, so he’s not adding the same level of value as 400 workers. If the CEO stopped doing his job, would it take 400 standard workers to replace him? No, so he’s not doing a job so big he would need to be replaced that much. If he decided to work an extra day’s worth of work, does the companies profits sky rocket? No, so he’s not actually adding much value at all. It strikes me that CEOs have managed to create this club where they get astonishing levels of pay for a level of work that isn’t concurrent with the value they add to the company. If CEOs have to fire a handful of people to cut costs they should be made to take a 5% pay cut as well. In many big companies that 5% pay cut would be the same as getting rid of 20 people. There is nothing a CEO, a footballer, an F1 driver, etc does that is worth that level of money.
Unsurprisingly I am opposed to ID cards. Shocking, I know.
ID cards as being pushed on three main fronts: They will help the fight against terrorism, they will help the fight against crime, they will help prevent and return illegal imigrants.
The terrorism point is my favourite. It uses the public’s ignorance against them something cronic. Almost all of the terrorists involved in the recent terrorist attacks on the UK, Spain, America, etc, have had perfectly valid ID which they left in places they hoped it would get found. They are not like ‘old skool’ terrorists who wanted to plant their bomb and scurry away before it blew up. They are martyrs, they know their bombs will explode with them attached to them. They want that to happen, so who they are either isn’t important, or is very important because they have composed messages to be found once they are done.
The fighting crime point is also quite high in my list of amusing points. They have said, on many occasions, that this will not turn into a case of ‘papers please’. The police will not be allowed to ask you for your ID card during their routine stop and searches, so what’s it going to do for the fight against crime? Oh, of course. The lines about it not becoming a case of ‘papers please’ is just a smoke screen so they can get the cards in place. Once they’ve spent billions rolling out the system, forced everyone to pay hundreds of pounds for the right to be stamped like cattle, they’ll then realse! Oh my god, you know what, these don’t work as tools to fight crime unless the police can ask to see them! Convienient, the opposition will want to cry, but they will quietly allow the amendment because billions have already been spent and the cards are already in place.
Illegal immigrants do not, on the whole, get jobs with reputable businesses. They get jobs at very low rates of pay for businesses which are happy to exploit them. These businesses don’t care now if the person is illegally in the country, what difference is an ID card going to make? There are already in place perfectly viable and useable methods of checking if a person can legally work in this country, the businesses which employ illegal workers are the ones which don’t care what the check returns or don’t even bother to do one at all. There is enough undercover footage of people making it clear that they can’t legally work in the UK and these people being totally unconcerned for this to be considered fact. If the police can’t stop you and ask to see your ID, so how are they going to be able to use the system to find and deport illegals?
The police will eventually be given the power to stop you and ask for your ID card. The majority of people in this country don’t care about that though. They’ve no experience of being harrassed by the police because they’re white. ID card stop and searches will provide yet another reason to stop minority groups, to ask for them to prove their right to exist.
No computer system is perfect. Biometrics are not perfect. What happens if your details are lost or stolen? Can someone tell me how I can get a replacement retina and set of fingerprints please? Once your information is lost there are no ways of changing it. There already exists the technology to clone finger prints, if everyone in the country is on the database then there will be even more reasons for people to develop this cloning technology for all biometric data. Once you’ve lost control of your biometric identity, what then? When the technology is the sole arbitor of your right to exist freely, what happens when someone cracks the database and changes your bio-scans to their own? When your ID card says you’re not you, how do you get your details back? What happens when the more mundane happens and the biometric scanner returns a false when it should have returned a true? How long does that follow you for?
ID card supporters have ignored all of the questions and jumped on a knee-jerk billion pound bandwagon. It’d be sad if it wasn’t going to cost me a large amount of money.
Is a two party system really the way to achieve the best in terms of democracy? When those two parties represent totally different ideologies, and core beliefs I can see it working in a very binary way. Not that it’d be very democratic, just that it would be better than the situation we find ourselves in now, where the only wiggle room between the two parties, the only place to slide a piece of paper and say “verily, these are not the same party” is the colour of the backdrops. Do you like your representative to favour red backdrops or blue backdrops?
Sure, the Conservatives might vote against the government on some issues, but that’s politics. You can’t say “We agree with what this government is doing, it’s all great” because that’s exactly the same as saying “why vote for us, there’s no difference between what we want and what they want”. You have to provide the counter point, the argument, as to why the government is wrong in what they are doing. When pressed on why they were against the government’s plans more often than not the answer is because of minor details in the legislation. While I fully accept that minor details can create big problems and that the details need to be right, the answer which is given isn’t “we disagree with the need for X” it is “we’d do X different in minor ways”. That’s not a choice, especially for people who don’t care for X in the first place.
A two party state is a lack of democracy by virtue of the fact that it only has three choices. i) Pro-government, ii) Pro-opposition, iii) Protest vote. The system favours the government, since many people either believe that it’s better the devil you know or that things aren’t that bad under the current guy. This has given rise to the belief that oppositions don’t win an election, governments lose them.
A while back I heard about the “vote no one, no one would vote for you” campaign and thought it a terrible idea. The main reason I thought it was a bad idea was because abstaining doesn’t make a point. It’s counted as a lazy/apathetic person (recently you could also be accused of happithy, being too happy with the way things are to bother about the elections). This might be the reasoning behind some people not voting, but most people I speak to who don’t vote have reasons along the lines of “they’re all lying scum, why should I vote for any of them?” It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s not that they are apathetic (and it most certainly isn’t because they’re hapathetic), they just don’t see a choice they want to take from the limited stock on offer. They don’t want to vote for a minor party, since the minor party has no chance of securing power and they’re sick of the crap which the main parties are constantly engaged in.
Watching PMQs it’s easy to see why people don’t like politics. It’s all so scripted and fake. The PM has the questions before they’re asked, knows who’s going to make comments against his policy and who will support his policy. He arranges for some little lacky to stand up and ask him a positive question so he can look good and has had his script writers working on his answers to the opposition for as long as they could. Nothing is left to chance. It’s the same as the visits he makes to various places, where he turns up in a throng of people, all Labour activists, all asked to attend and look enthused. Fake.
The media has stopped calling politicians liars where ever they can avoid it. They opt for the word ’spin’ instead. The PM’s Spin Doctors. It’s lies. They’re liars. If you told someone a lie and when they called you on it you said “no, it wasn’t a lie, it was spin” they’d either clock you one or say it was a lie, since that is what spin is.
Why is there the need for spin? Is it because politicians are lying little weasles who wanted power for themselves and never had any intention of using it in a positive way for the community? Is it because 24 hour news coverage means that decisions must be made quickly and decisively in the glare of media attention, then defended whether or not it was the right decision? I think we’re seeing quite a few examples of this in Brown. He takes a few days to make big decisions, which is a really good thing. Big decisions should be taken with care and care requires time. However, Brown gets crucified for it, characterised as indecisive and bumbling by a media who waned the answer to the situation on the day the situation broke. They hate having a story open and running, it needs to be packaged and complete so they can bring in their experts to analyse it and the talking heads to debate if it was right or not. They don’t want to keep reporting the same story day after day since it makes them look bad. They can’t have that so they victimise the PM for taking his time and trying to get it right. I’m not trying to say he does get it right, but taking his time and gathering data is a much better way to get the right answer than to make a snap headline and then try to find out how it will work later.
In a two party state both parties move to cover the centre ground. That doesn’t mean moving to the centre of the political spectrum, but the centre of the general opinion of the country, so the UK’s centre ground is slightly right wing, while the in the US the centre ground is even further right, making their ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’ politicians seem to be the same as our right wing politicians. Parties move to the centre so they have access to the greatest share of votes, because all a politician cares about is being re-elected. Every decision they make which will see the light of day is about securing them another term in office. Many (I’d say every, but how would I prove it?) decisions that wont make the light of day is about self interest.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill
In June of 2006, Conservative leader David (call me ‘Dave’) Cameron said the Conservative party, if they got power in the next election, would consider scrapping the Human Rights Act (1998) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. This Bill of Rights would protect the individual without protecting the terrorist or criminal, would protect our rights without protecting theirs.
I remember thinking at the time that it was stupid. The Bill of Rights proposed by Cameron couldn’t contain fewer rights than the Human Rights Act, since the Act already doesn’t include two of the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Act is already as skinny as it could be made. Since the UK is a signitory of the Convention and a member of the EU, we have to follow the ECHR or have the ECHR rights upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. So a Bill of Rights would have to look very similar to the current Human Rights Act. One might consider that Cameron wanted to give people more rights, but since his ’sell’ was about how the Bill of Rights would not protect criminals and terrorists that was highly unlikely.
Now it turns out that a Joint Committee on Human Rights has suggested that we scrap the Human Rights Act and bring in a British Bill of Rights. This time the suggestion is that we include economic rights as well as the rights of the ECHR. Which is interesting.
Of course, the UK Parliament has no method of creating a Bill of Rights. One of the fundamental rules of the UK Parliamentary sustem is the supremacy of Parliament. Parliament today can not bind Parliament tomorrow, else Parliament tomorrow is not supreme. As such, Parliament can revoke any act made by a previous Parliament, including but not limited to removing us from the EU, since our participation in it is contained in an act of Parliament. There is a lot of debate in the political circles as to whether Parliament is actually still supreme with the EU able to make binding legislation on us. It is. Someone who submits themself to the rule of another under their own freewill and retaining the power to remove themselves from that situation any time they wish is still in control. Parliament is still in control.
It has been suggested more than once that Parliament could hold a referrendum to implement the Bill of Rights. However, referrenda are not binding. They are opinion polls of the citizens of the country, not legislation. Parliament is sovereign, not the people. The people get to choose who goes to Parliament to represent them, but that is their only power. Unlike in America where the foundation of the society is the people[1], in the UK the people only serve to legitimise the Parliament.
The formation of other countries’ codified constitutions have almost always been born in revolution and large scale violence. The UK is quite special in the developed world, and in democracies in general, by having an unwritten constitution, Israel is the only other democratic country I can think of off the top of my head which has (or at least had, last time I looked) an unwritten constitution like the UK. Even China has a written constitution (though I’d hazard a guess that it doesn’t protect many human rights).
Amusingly, most constitutions of the world are based on the observations of the UK system, which is why we have never had a constitution historically and why it took until 1998 for the ECHR to be enshrined in UK law. The ECHR was written largly by British lawyers, with British consultants. It was based on the rights held as fundamental by Britain and as such Britain was never expected to do anything other than sign and endorse the document while other countries were expected to alter their laws to put the ECHR centre stage. We incorporated the ECHR in 1998 because of the embarrasment of being the second worst human rights violator in Europe (Italy was number one). We went from guiding principle to second worst offender in the space of fifty or so years.
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[1] The preamble of the US Constitution contains the ideological grounding for the whole document and, although not law in itself, is used by Supreme Court Judges to guide them in their decisions. It reads:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” – Preamble to the US Constitution.
The important part being “We the people…” indicating that the document is by and for them.
