Category: Politics

Qualified majorities

The new Conservative government has announced plans to make strikes by public-sector unions more difficult, including

A strike affecting essential public services will need the backing of 40% of eligible union members under government plans.

Currently, a strike is valid if backed by a majority of those balloted.

There will also need to be a minimum 50% turnout in strike ballots.

The new Business Secretary Sajid Javid said “What people are fed up of is strike action that hasn’t been properly supported by the members of the relevant union.” It is notable that this complaint comes from a government that received less than 37% of the votes in the last election, accounting for less than 25% of eligible voters.

Keeping focus

Angela Merkel is caught in a political struggle over the German government’s relationship to the NSA. One element of the struggle is the government’s attempt to suggest, without explicitly saying so, that the US was open to negotiating a “No-Spy” treaty, whereas they knew that the Americans had made absolutely clear that no such treaty would be entered into. What I find fascinating in this affair is how blatant the US is willing to be about its contempt for the sovereignty of other nations:

Doch bereits im Juli 2013 hatte die Europa-Strategin im Weißen Haus, Karen Donfried, in E-Mails an Merkels Berater Christoph Heusgen trotz dessen nachdrücklichem Bitten vermieden zuzusichern, dass sich US-Geheimdienste in Deutschland an deutsches Recht halten würden. Die “SZ” zitiert etwa aus einer E-Mail vom 19. Juli 2013:

“Bei uns liegt der Fokus natürlich darauf, ob wir das US-Recht einhalten. Unsere Experten fühlen sich nicht dafür gerüstet, die Einhaltung des deutschen Rechts zu beurteilen.”

[Already in July 2013 the White House European-strategy expert Karen Donfried had refused to give assurances to Merkel’s advisor Christoph Heusgen, despite his explicit request, that US espionage agencies in Germany would follow German laws. Süddeutscher Zeitung quotes from a July 19, 2013 email:

Our focus is naturally on whether we obey US laws. Our experts do not feel qualified [literally, “adequately armed”] to evaluate our conformity with German laws.]

What admirable modesty! It’s only natural that their number one concern is whether they are obeying US law, and given their very limited success in achieving that goal, they have no excess capacity for anything as complicated as trying to simultaneously obey both sets of laws. The expertise budget is really not unlimited. Not to mention that the German laws aren’t even written in English!

I know I find it more than I can manage to decide, on any given day, whether I’m going to obey US or UK law. I imagine finding myself some day in court, having to say, “I’m sorry Judge, but my focus is on whether I obey US laws. I do not feel qualified to evaluate my conformity with UK laws.”

Of course, someone might say that representatives of the US government who feel themselves incapable of keeping within the confines of German law do have the option of staying out of Germany…

Just browsing

Among the first orders of business for the Conservatives, now that they have a majority, is to increase their ability to spy on the general public — for only the most noble of reasons bien sûr:

That law, labelled a snooper’s charter, would have required internet and mobile phone companies to keep records of customers’ browsing activity, social media use, emails, voice calls, online gaming and text messages for a year. 

It occurred to me that a reasonably effective defense against government snooping on your browsing history (and, indeed, Google snooping on your browsing history) might be to have a browser that is constantly active, and searches for random search terms whenever it is not being actively used.

Some ideas:

  1. The random browsing should not be completely arbitrary. It should include sufficient numbers of securityphilic keywords to make it difficult to search through.
  2. You don’t want the real searches to stand out as topically coherent. You’d want the choice of search terms to crawl through topic space.
  3. You might want to embed the real searches in the crawl. Suppose I type “David Cameron smashed restaurant” into my search window, when the browser, on its own initiative, has just searched for “spurious GCHQ bomb plots”. Instead of carrying out my search immediately, it interpolates thematically. Maybe a dozen searches like “spurious David Cameron bomb plots” and “spurious David cameron bomb restaurant”.

Motion of confidence trick

Expecting to lose (or rather, not win) the election, Cameron is setting all his chips on pre-emptively delegitimising a Labour government. The headline on the front page of the Times (dispensing with the pose of objectivity) is

Miliband trying to con way into No. 10, says PM.

(It’s an objective fact, because it’s a quote.) The former cabinet secretary who oversaw the 2010 coalition negotiations has dismissed this suggestion:

We live in a parliamentary democracy. The rules are very clear and they are laid out in the Cabinet Manual, and it says the ability of government to command the confidence of the elected House of Commons is central to its authority to govern.

But I found most interesting Cameron’s response, explaining why any government that depends on support from the barbarians in the north would be presumptively illegitimate:

Why is that a problem, why does that raise huge questions of credibility? Well for the obvious reason that the SNP don’t want Britain to be a success, indeed they don’t want Britain to exist. [SNP voters] have every right to vote, of course they do. But I’ve also got every right to warn of the dangers of a government propped up by a bunch of nationalists who don’t want our country to succeed.

I find this startlingly apocalyptic. “Britain” used to include all of Ireland, but didn’t cease to exist when part of that island gained independence. The fact that the SNP is expected to gain a broad majority across one of the constituent nations of the UK suggests that “they don’t want our country to succeed” is too facile. After all, it’s their country too, isn’t it?

 

Feeling good

According to the Guardian,

British taxpayers should expect to feel worse off under whichever party wins the general election next week, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

What a weird circumlocution! We’re not saying that people will be worse off, only that they will feel that way. We’re not even really saying that that they will feel worse off, only that they should expect to feel worse off. And what will be the basis for that feeling? They will be paying higher taxes which, as taxpayers, is all those people care about. It may be that British residents will be feeling better if Labour is elected — their children will have more and better school places, they won’t have to queue at the hospital A&E, they’ll have access to better social services in times of need — but British taxpayers will be down in the dumps. Maybe there’s some way we could get them to meet up, even for the residents to share some of their good fortune with taxpayers.

The funny thing is, the report does not use the expression “worse off” (except in reference to a particular proposed tax change with a cliff-edge effect, leaving some people in a particular income band worse off than if they had lower incomes). It doesn’t include broad statements about people’s general subjective well being, or even their financial well-being. It simply suggests that all the parties are going to raise taxes somewhat, make minor changes to benefits, and overall make the system slightly more complicated and less coherent.

Brussels on the Leith

It seems that the coming election is all about clawing back to Westminster those sovereign powers that have been allowed to slip away to unaccountable foreigners. In Brussels, and in Edinburgh. After fighting to convince the Scots that they really were, and by rights ought to remain, an integral part of the UK, the Conservatives have now made the danger of pernicious Scottish influence the centrepiece of their campaign. It’s no coincidence, really, since the informal alliance between Scotland and the EU was an important issue in the independence campaign, and will certainly revive calls for independence if the Conservatives are able to follow through on their threat to withdraw Britain from the EU.

As a non-native, I have no emotional attachment to the union or to the particular nationalisms, but I do wish they would make up their minds. “English votes for English laws” is the latest Tory slogan. That would be easily accomplished by creating a devolved parliament for England, which would turn the UK into a logically structured federal state. For whatever reason, that seems to be unthinkable, or at least unspeakable. Instead, they want to keep the Scottish MPs in a combined national and English parliament, but only allow them to vote on certain bills, creating a dangerous (but perhaps convenient for some) ambiguity about which MPs can form a majority, and hence a government.

I wonder if any of the people who helped defeat the referendum a few years back on a partial move toward proportional representation has any regrets now. It used to be that the first-past-the-post system was praised for providing clear parliamentary majorities and a stable balance of two major parties, as opposed to the silly continentals with their every-shifting coalitions of splinter parties. In fact, the system rewards, up to limits, geographic concentration of support. According to the most recent polls, Labour and Conservatives are each expected to get about 33% of the votes, and about 42% of the seats. So far so good for the “stable-large-party” doctrine. But the small parties receive very unequal treatment among themselves. The Liberal Democrats are projected to garner 8% of the votes and 4% of the seats. UKIP, a new party with broad but geographically diffuse support, is projected to snag 14% of the votes, but only 3 seats, or 0.5%. The SNP, with 4% of the votes, are expected to get 8% of the seats, essentially all of the MPs representing the 8% of the population who live in Scotland. The Greens, also with 4% of the votes, will be lucky to hold on to their single MP (out of 650 total).

So I wonder if, amid all this fragmentation, people are wondering if people are reconsidering the wisdom of Britain’s indirect approach to promoting large, broad-based parties, that is no longer really accomplishing its goal, but is unintentionally promoting regional-parties.

Disastrous coalitions

The polls show the UK general election campaign stuck in an uncomfortable pattern. The three biggest parties seem clear to be the Conservatives and Labour, each with about 41.5% of the seats, and the SNP (Scottish Nationalists) with about 8.5%. That means that unless the two main parties form a coalition — which might happen if the Earth is invaded by bug-eyed monsters from Beta Centauri or Europe or someplace like that, but is extremely unlikely under any less circumstances less conducive to national unity — there is no majority without the SNP. In terms of policy the SNP is a natural ally of Labour —  but they have this one particular ambition to dismantle the country that makes them hard to accept as a coalition partner. They’re like the Bloc Québécois, who blocked majorities in the Canadian parliament for a decade or so until the most recent election.

The natural consequence would be a minority government, with informal concessions to the regional party that fall short of secession. But that’s naturally a worrying prospect for those who don’t want the country to be taken apart, or are worried about special benefits streaming north. So Cameron is beating that drum: Continue reading “Disastrous coalitions”

Long-running non-dom com

UK residents who can claim that their real long-term home is somewhere else — perhaps in their family suite in Monaco, or they plan to be buried in the Cayman Islands — are termed “non-domiciled”, and spared the indignity of paying UK tax on their worldwide income. This includes people who were born and lived their whole lives in this country, if their father was foreign (or himself non-domiciled). This last is particularly galling to the ordinary taxpayer.

Now Labour has vowed to do away with the whole farce, leaving the Tories spluttering about the cost to the economy of driving away wealthy job-creators. What’s fascinating is to see Conservatives suddenly arguing that foreigners are making useful contributions to Britain, even if they are benefit cheats tax avoiders. Sure, some wealthy foreigners are probably making a positive contribution to the UK economy, while others are primarily competing with local people for scarce housing. In that they are a lot like non-wealthy foreigners, if we replace “housing” with “jobs”: some make a net positive economic contribution, some don’t.

But no one is suggesting that we really need to make sure that we retain any loopholes that allow impecunious immigrants to claim benefits in ways that seem contrary to any intended purpose or basic civic morality, because otherwise they might leave.

Dolchstosslegende à l’anglaise

Another Jew has stabbed us in the back, warns defence secretary Michael Fallon. This time, it’s Ed Miliband, who has shown himself an utter failure at trying to pass for a normal bacon-eating Brit, who is potentially going to leave us helpless, with barely a nuclear-armed submarine to protect us against the benefits scroungers. His choice of detail was fascinating: He wrote that Miliband

could not be trusted with the nation’s defences after he “stabbed his own brother in the back to become Labour leader”. In a Times article Fallon wrote: “Now he is willing to stab the United Kingdom in the back to become prime minister.”

Now, of course, we can’t be sure of the details until David Miliband’s body is found*, but so far as I am aware, they competed fairly for the leadership of Labour. Ed won. Doesn’t sound particularly nefarious to me. But then, I come from a religious tradition whose scripture celebrates younger brothers who stab the older ones in the back triumph over the disadvantages of their birth.

*Correction: It has already been found. It is in New York, directing the International Rescue Committee.

Losing sleep

One thing that surprised me when I moved to the UK was the lack of any significant paternity leave. It seemed peculiar, in this century, for the government to have a policy of making space for new parents to take care of their newborn children without losing their jobs, but to be insisting that the care must be provided by the mother. It seemed even more peculiar that otherwise progressive employers, that go beyond the statutory minimum in providing leave for new mothers, rarely seemed to extend any protection to fathers. (Oxford, in particular, provides on its own initiative leave for fathers who adopt a child, but not when a child is born.)

This has now changed. The government passed a shared parental leave law that now comes into effect. Not everyone is happy about it, though:

The Institute of Directors has previously warned the new law could create a “nightmare” for employers.

I’m not particularly prone to nightmares, but those I have had almost never involved men taking care of their infant children while the mothers returned to work. At least, not primarily. Perhaps a different cliché would have been more appropriate here.

As a sign of how much difficulty journalists have keeping the UK’s constitutional arrangements straight, the article concludes with

Parental leave is a devolved issue in Northern Ireland but the Northern Ireland Assembly passed a bill offering parents the same rights as in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Scotland didn’t even vote to secede, but it’s already forgotten…