Category: Politics

Fascist alarm in Germany

There’s a lot of breast-beating, inside and outside of Germany, about the right-wing nationalist AfD getting more than 12% of the vote and taking seats in the Bundestag. I find much of this commentary overwrought. It’s not just the rhetoric that tries to make the AfD into the second coming of the Nazis, such as this from the Telegraph:

The far-Right could return as a force to be reckoned with in Berlin politics for the first time since the Second World War.

Almost identical lazy rhetoric appears all over the place, such as this from NPR:

It’s the first time since the Second World War that a party professing such xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic views has been voted into the Bundestag.

I dare say that the previous time they are alluding to, the problem was not that the far-right was “a force to be reckoned with” in Germany. It’s a bit like if you were writing an article about the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster and called it “the most significant nuclear incident in Japan since the Second World War.” (I suppose they could have made it worse by calling this instead “the second time since the First World War” that the far-Right was a force to be reckoned with.) Continue reading “Fascist alarm in Germany”

The World’s Greatest University(TM) has a bad PR day

Pity the poor flack in Harvard’s press office that needs to deal with two remarkable instances of cravenness in a single day: Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government bowed to criticism from the CIA to revoke its invitation to military whistleblower and transgender activist Chelsea Manning to come for a short stay as a “visiting fellow”. And Michelle Jones who rehabilitated herself in prison after a gruesome childhood that culminated in the neglect, abuse, and possibly murder of her own child, to emerge 20 years later as a noted historian of the local prison system, to be admitted to multiple graduate programmes in history, but had her acceptance at Harvard overruled by the university administration. Continue reading “The World’s Greatest University(TM) has a bad PR day”

The self-modifying enabling law

The UK government seems to be so pressed for time to get their Brexit legal framework going, that they’ve taken to translating old German laws to fill in the gap — with certain pernicious modern features. I thought this stuff about “Henry VIII” powers was just hysteria, but the proposed European Union Withdrawal bill is nothing short of a dictatorial power grab.

The text may be found here. Section 7 deals with “regulations” for implementing the law:

A Minister of the Crown may by regulations make such provision as the Minister considers appropriate to prevent, remedy or mitigate— (a) any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively, or (b) any other deficiency in retained EU law, arising from the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU.

and in paragraph 4 we read:

Regulations under this section may make any provision that could be made by an Act of Parliament.

Compare to the German original:

Reichsgesetze können außer in dem in der Reichsverfassung vorgesehenen Verfahren auch durch die Reichsregierung beschlossen werden.

[In addition to the methods described in the Reich constitution, laws may also be determined by the government.]

Continue reading “The self-modifying enabling law”

Poor “negotiating tactic” tactic

From the Guardian:

The Brexit secretary is determined not to table a figure for the price the government is willing to pay to settle Britain’s obligations as it leaves the EU – believing that putting a figure on it would be a poor negotiating tactic.

Might I suggest that presenting as sole justification for your uncooperative negotiating tactics their quality as “negotiating tactics” is itself a poor negotiating tactic?

Not everyone shares the British view that everything in life is a sporting competition.

Racism in context

Oriel College, Rhodes BuildingThis story happened to a friend of a friend — FOF in urban legend technical parlance — when I was a student at Yale. Said FOF had applied for a Rhodes scholarship, and was invited for an interview. Reading the FOF’s application letter stating that he sought to “further the legacy of Cecil Rhodes”, one interviewer asked, “When you refer to the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, do you mean in particular his legacy as a white supremacist or as a pedophile?”

I’m not sure if it’s credible that a representative of the Rhodes Trust could speak so disparagingly of its founder — this may be an example of British establishment values refracted through the prism of 1980s American student sentiment — but the principle is solid: Many who advocate leaving monuments to dubious figures of the past in situ — whether Cecil Rhodes or Robert E. Lee — complain  suggest, instead of “rewriting history” that this statuary needs to be seen “in context”. But they rarely concern themselves with providing the full context.

Now that Charlottesville has deposed its racist monument and Oriel College has kept its own, I wondered if the Oxford City Council might propose a solution amenable to all. Accepting the right of Oriel and its not-at-all-racist historically-minded alumni who refused to donate to a Rhodes-free institution, there is still plenty of space in front of the facade for more context. As it stands, the college places Rhodes in the context of two 20th-century kings and four 15th-16th-century college provosts and bishops. The city (or enterprising protestors) could contribute more context by placing an exhibition out front of famous British racists — for example, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Enoch Powell — with the Rhodes statue in the centre.

The migration surge

Last year, a few weeks after the EU referendum, David Davis — remember him? — suggested that the UK might impose a cut-off date  before actual consummation of Brexit, for EU migrants to obtain residency rights.

“Let’s deal with that issue when we come to it. One way of dealing with it could be saying: ‘OK, only people who arrived before a certain date get this protection’ – there are other ways too…”

Davis dismissed the idea that speaking even hypothetically about a cut-off date for residency rights could spark a movement of people to the UK. “No it won’t be like that,” he said. “If you set a date, that’s when you start the rush.”

The government abandoned that idea, as it would have been so offensive to other EU governments as to immediately scuttle the negotiations. How did that rush turn out?

No, I mean all those greedy Europeans swarming over this green and pleasant land… Here is a plot of total EU migration over the past 25 years (from Migration Watch UK). 2016 is right there at the end. Feel the surge!

Extra cash

The EU is once again infringing on the British yeoman's ancestral freedom:

Fees for paying with plastic – most commonly a credit card – are routinely levied on everything from low-cost flights and tax bills to cinema tickets and takeaway meals, but the Treasury announced that these would be consigned to history from January 2018.

The government said the move, which builds on an EU directive, would mean “shoppers across the country have that bit of extra cash to spend on the things that matter to them”.

I'm just wondering: If the effect of this regulation is to leave people with more cash to spend, isn't that defeating the purpose? Anyway, I'm sure we can return to credit-card fees (and mobile roaming charges) just as soon as we're out from under the Brussels yoke.

Don(ald) Corleone

I’m fascinated by how The Godfather has become the touchstone for all attempts to understand the Trump administration. And by a line of thinking that has hardened into conventional wisdom, clearly stated in today’s op-ed by the NY Times’s token theo-conservative Ross Douthat:

As the hapless Don Jr. — the Gob Bluth or Fredo Corleone of a family conspicuously short on Michaels — protested in his own defense, the Russian rendezvous we know about came before (though only slightly before) the WikiLeaks haul was announced.

We’ve given up on any pretense that the president of the United States isn’t a gangster. Conservative thought leaders are well into lamenting that he isn’t even a competent gangster.

The fast con

Donald Trump after his discussion with Theresa May at the G20 summit:

We have been working on a trade deal which will be a very, very big deal a very powerful deal, great for both countries and I think we will have that done very, very quickly.

According to the Daily Telegraph,

The President’s comments are a huge boost for Mrs May…

I think it’s hilarious — emblematic of the desperate brexified incompetence of the UK in international trade negotiation. Does anyone think Donald Trump knows what goes into making a trade deal? Don’t they notice that this is just one of the many things that Trump has declared would be “easy” and “fast”. Building a wall on the southern border. Healthcare reform:

“Together we’re going to deliver real change that once again puts Americans first,” Trump said at an October rally in Florida. “That begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare…You’re going to have such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost—and it’s going to be so easy.”

Did anyone bother to inform the PM that treaties need to be ratified by a 2/3 majority in the US Senate? That’s not a hurdle you surmount just by holding hands with DT and whispering sweet racial blandishments in his ear. (“Did anyone tell you you have the most Anglo-Saxon eyes?”) A £1 billion bribe isn’t going to cut it either.

It might be worth recalling who Trump said he was getting foreign policy advice from during the election campaign:

I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.

Parliamentary mortality

An article in the New Statesman raised the question of whether the Conservatives could lose their hold on power via by-elections over the next few years only to dismiss the possibility because by-elections simply don’t happen frequently enough. The reason? Reduced mortality rates. Quite sensible, but then this strange claim was made:

In 1992-7, the last time that the Conservatives had seven by-elections in a parliament, life expectancy was 15 years lower than it is today.

Ummm… If life expectancy had increased by 15 years over the last 20 years, we’d be getting close to achieving mortality escape velocity. In fact, the increase has been about 5 years for men and 4 years for women.

But that raised for me the somewhat morbid question: How many MPs would be expected to die in the next 5 years? Approximate age distribution of MPs is available here. It’s for the last parliament, but I’ll assume it remains pretty similar. It’s interesting that Labour had twice as large a proportion (25% vs 12%) in the over-60 category. In addition, I’ll make the following assumptions:

  1. Within coarse age categories the distribution is the same between parties. (This is required to deal with the fact that the numbers by party are only divided into three age categories.)
  2. Since I don’t have detailed mortality data by class or occupation, I’ll simply treat them as being 5 years younger than their calendar age, since that’s the difference in median age at death between men in managerial occupations and average occupations.
  3. I assume women to have the same age distribution as men.
  4. I’m using 2013 mortality rates from the Human Mortality Database.

My calculations say that the expected number of deaths over the next 5 years is about 6.4 Conservatives and 6.5 Labour. So we can estimate that the probability of at least 7 by-elections due to deceased Tory MPs is just a shade under 50%.