I commented before about the weird obsession of journalists with photographing Labour leader Ed Miliband eating bacon sandwiches. Here’s another one. It’s genuinely unclear to me whether this is about demonstrating some kind of general average-Brit bona fides — like when American politicians eat deep-fried corn dogs — or whether it’s more specifically about demonstrating that he’s not too Jewish.
Category: Politics
How Harold Wilson kept it together
One could spend the whole day and half the night recording the weird infelicities of expression that automatic spell-checking has wrought upon once-proud journalistic enterprises. But some are truly exceptional.
According tq The New Republic, his close associate Joseph Kagan (who was rumoured to be his KGB handler, by those who thought he was a Soviet mole) was a “clothing magnet”.
It sounds like the kind of excuse a teenager caught shoplifting might use. “I don’t know how it got into my bag, your Honour. I seem to be a clothing magnet.”
Cutting the Snowdian knot
All Five Eyes — really, all eyes in the democratic world — are on Australia, watching its ingenious solution to what seemed an insoluble problem: How to conform the needs of modern network surveillance for combatting crime and terrorism, with the demands of democratic governance. In their remarkably forthright way, they have recognised that there are two basic problems:
- Espionage agencies have an alarming tendency to involve themselves in illegal activity;
- Their activities tend to cause scandals, as citizens grow alarmed by hearing of what they consider to be threats to their privacy.
Their solutions are equally forthright. Rather than trying stopgaps of limiting the information collected, time periods for which it can be stored, purposes to which the information may be applied, and blah blah blah, which are completely arbitrary, and only end up forcing hard-working spies to spend their time thinking up ingenious subterfuges to evade the rules, they have attacked the problem at its roots. According to a recent news report, the Australian government plans to propose legislation under which
- ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) will have the power to declare their activities to be “special intelligence operations”, in which intelligence officers receive immunity from liability for actions that would be “otherwise illegal”. Since requiring even the head of their own agency to sign off on unlimited warrants for lawbreaking would be too onerous, approval of ASIO’s deputy director general will suffice.
- To avoid scandals, all reporting on special intelligence operations will be banned, punishable by up to five years in prison. (And that’s only if the leaks are inconsequential; disclosing information that would “endanger the health or safety of any person or prejudice the effective conduct of a special intelligence operation” could get you 10 years.) The beauty of the system is that, since no one outside the organisation actually knows which operations are special, journalists — and academics, and pretty much everyone else — will have to stop talking about the security services altogether. And since the security services will have access to all of their electronic records in real time, there’s little risk of people deciding to hold these discussions in private.
Problem solved!
Once Australians have stopped troubling their pretty little heads about espionage, all that redirected intellectual energy will help the Australian economy to better compete with China.
The government’s glass cliff
Numerous commentators recently have used the term “glass cliff” to describe the phenomenon whereby women finally get promoted to the top of an organisation after the all-male leadership has driven it into a crisis, so that the men get to benefit from the trust generated by such a conspicuous change, and also have a good scapegoat for the nearly inevitable failure.
I naturally thought of this when I read today’s reports on David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle:
As shellshocked former ministers walked the corridors of Westminster on Monday night, there were the first signs of a backlash as the scale of the cull of middle-aged men became clear. “It’s the night of the long knives and that went really well last time,” one Tory said sarcastically, referring to Harold Macmillan’s* desperate attempt to shore up his government in 1962, when he sacked a third of his cabinet.
[…]
Tory sources have made clear that Cameron wants the “old lags” to move on to make way for women and younger men who will be promoted on the second day of the reshuffle on Tuesday. Esther McVey, the employment minister and former breakfast television presenter Truss, Nicky Morgan, the women’s minister, Amber Rudd, the whip, Anna Soubry, the defence minister, Priti Patel and Margot James, members of the No 10 policy board, are all expected to be promoted. This should take Cameron close to his target of ensuring that a third of his ministers are women.
You’d think Cameron had been trying and trying and trying to get women into his cabinet, and now, finally, with less than a year remaining in the parliament, has nearly accomplished the herculean task.
* It’s pretty funny that they explain the origin of this expression without referencing the Nazis. Though, apparently, the deeper origin of the expression is British after all, describing a massacre committed around the year 450 by Saxons against Roman Britons (described here, in German).
More self-deconstructing clichés: Bill of Rights edition
The UK government is now all hot on pushing through a “British Bill of Rights”, which bears the same relation to what one ordinarily thinks of as a “Bill of Rights” as “Soviet realism” bears to realism, or “French letters” to letters: The emphasis is definitely on the “British”, rather than on the “Rights”. The goal is to limit rights (by preventing appeals to any authority above the UK parliament), rather than to expand or guarantee them. Anyway, Dominic Grieve, the now suddenly former Attorney General, who was fired along with all other opponents of this approach within the government, referred to it as
legal car crash with a built-in time delay.
If there is a time delay, then is it really a “car crash”? I’m having trouble picturing how this works, purely automotively. Perhaps this particular colourful expression would be better reserved for something that has more of a sudden and unexpected quality. And perhaps there is some other tired expression that a politician could trot out for a dangerous — perhaps even explosive — situation with a built-in time-delay fuse… Oh, I’m sure it will come to me…
For German self-deconstructing political clichés see here.
Security theatre review
The newspapers are full of the new rules, requiring that electronic devices be powered up at the security checkpoint before entering flights to the US. Apparently, this is in response to information that terrorists may be hiding explosives in smart phones.
Now, I am fully aware of the limitations of the usual common-sense criticisms of anti-terror and anti-crime measures. Most criminals are not masterminds, and the same is true of suicide bombers. But here we’re not talking about a bunch of crackpots with big ideas and a truck full of fertiliser. The whole premise is that a master bomb designer is packaging a bomb powerful enough to bring down a plane into a Samsung smartphone. Surely, with modern miniaturisation, he can also design it to include a reasonable simulacrum of an Android home screen. Maybe he just won’t think of it, but unless the intelligence agencies have some very specific design specs for this device, it seems like they’re targeting a very narrow gap of stupidity: Smart enough to design an ingeniously concealed bomb, not smart enough to make it behave, at least superficially, like a smart phone. (“Why has the email app been removed and replaced by the “Blow Up the Plane” app?”)
(And one more thought: If the phone is designed to explode immediately upon being powered up, then the effect of this measure will just be to kill a few dozen people at the security check, which is probably an improvement, but hardly counts as a solid win for our side.)
I am reminded of my favourite bit of security theatre, from about 2006. Passing through security in Montreal, the man ahead of me had a bag filled with small cans and jars of what looked like Jamaican delicacies. Solid food is permitted on the plane, but liquids are forbidden. But these were in sealed tins, and obviously you couldn’t open them all. So the security agent did what any reasonable person would do: He read the labels to determine the contents and quantity. All the cans and jars were cleared to be taken on the flight.
Confessions
Reading Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, I was struck by her formulation of a question that I had wondered about myself, and never seen explicitly stated:
Why the Soviet secret police were so obsessed with confession remains a matter for debate…
What is the motivation to force a prisoner to “confess”? Even if the interrogator believes the charge to be true, why is it important for the prisoner to say it? Surely a confession under duress is not going to convince anyone else. Of course, you may want to use a confession extracted under torture to deceive someone else into thinking this was a confession freely offered, but it is hard to see how that can be relevant to system where torture is standard.
Furthermore, in the pre-video era, it’s hard to see why anyone would go to the trouble of manufacturing a deception by torturing the prisoner to put his own signature on the confession, rather than simply forging the signature. And yet it was important enough for interrogators to spend months attempting to extract the “genuine” confession, and for prisoners to submit themselves to agonies to resist.
The officer investigating Vladimir Tchernavin, a scientist accused of “wrecking” and sabotage, threatened him with death if he refused to confess. At another point, he told him he would get a more “lenient” camp sentence if he confessed. Eventually, he actually begged Tchernavin to give a false confession. “We, the examining officers, are also often forced to lie, we also say things which cannot be entered into the record, and to which we would never sign our names,” his interrogator told him, pleadingly.
In the context of the Inquisition, at least, it is possible to believe in a certain sort of twisted altruism: Being convinced of the truth of the accusation, the inquisitor believes the unrepentant sinner’s soul to be forfeit to Hell. His life is of no account, but the soul can be rescued, if only said sinner can be moved to whole-hearted penitence. In this context, the confession has its own value, and it is clear why it must come from the heretic’s own lips.
“Continent cut off…”
The news this weekend is dominated by reports of how the entire EU failed last week to reach agreement with David Cameron on the next president of the EU Commission, and had to settle on a compromise candidate, Jean-Claude Juncker, supported only by the non-British faction of the EU. Only Hungary — despite its borderline fascist government — was able to garner Cameron’s support, while the remaining 26 EU members had to make do with the bare consolation of having their preferred candidate take office.
(This was right after soccer teams from many nations were brusquely snubbed by the England side, who could not be persuaded that the quality of the other team’s playing was such as to keep them from attending to other pressing engagements back home.)
Senior Conservatives were not magnanimous toward the defeated EU, accusing other national leaders of “cowardice” for refusing to publicly defame the EU leader whom they had agreed to, and would consequently be working with in the coming years, despite the fact that some of them had not at first considered him their favourite candidate.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said Britons “will be proud that at last they have a Prime Minister who has demonstrated that he puts the interests of Britain first — regardless of who or what is pitted against him.” Perhaps the leader most determined to assert British interests against Europe since King Harold II, who was also famous for keeping his eye fixed (on real reform). They were similarly disdainful of reports that Pope Francis has not completed a conversion to the Anglican Church, and are seeking further investigation of reports that a large ursine has been seen defecating in a forested tract. Continue reading ““Continent cut off…””
A very special relationship
Anyone interested in the technical details of US and British internal signals espionage, as practiced by NSA and GCHQ in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, should read James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Some of the details are fascinating, many are disturbing, and some are just unimaginably bizarre. Like the fawning letter sent by Sir Leonard Hooper, director of GCHQ in the late 1960s, to his NSA counterpart Marshall “Pat” Carter, in which he suggested (perhaps tongue in cheek) he might like to name GCHQ’s two giant radio dishes after Carter and his deputy. After effusive thanks for the NSA’s support, and Carter’s personally, he goes on:
Between us, we have ensured that the blankets and sheets are more tightly tucked around the bed in which our two sets of people lie and, like you, I like it that way.
I’ve read this over multiple times, and I don’t think I can decipher it. Are the blankets and sheets wrapped around the two sets of people separately, or are they bound in a transatlantic conjugal embrace? Are the intelligence agencies the Mommy and Daddy, tucking us in for the night while they protect us from the bogeys (from whom they derive much of their power, while themselves knowing that they are mere figments). This talk of wrapping sheets “tightly” around two sets of people who passively “lie” makes me think of winding sheets wrapped around corpses.
And then, there’s the closing: “like you, I like it that way”. Is he still speaking metaphorically here? Was he ever? Or is he proposing or recalling a secret tryst? Is that the sort of pillow talk that deeply closeted military types engaged in half a century ago?
“Not infinite”
From The Guardian:
British nurses are planning to debate whether GPs should start charging patients for appointments.
The Royal College of Nursing’s (RCN) annual conference in Liverpool will discuss whether the union backs the idea of charging people a fee to see their family doctors.
Traditionally the RCN has stood behind the belief that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery. But nurses have put forward the motion, saying that NHS finances are “not infinite”.
“Not infinite” sounds like a sensible observation. Neither are the funds available to the police infinite, which is why we charge people a fee to report a burglary, with extra hourly charges for the investigation. And schools. And that’s why when the smoke alarm klaxons you out of bed, the first thing you need to do is grab enough cash to pay the firefighters who show up. Because their finances are not infinite.
Obviously, the RCN is just trying to make the point that healthcare workers are having their salaries squeezed up against the free-at-the-point-of-delivery. But this argument is made often, and it’s ridiculous. If you want to advocate patient fees, as opposed to all the other ways that the nation could increase funding of the NHS, it can only be because you think that the service that is now free is being overused, and you want to encourage ill people to do something else, besides visiting their GPs. In any case, the cost of administering the £10 fee would probably be more than the fee would bring in.
Here’s what charging for fire and rescue services looks like.
Common Infirmities 