Tag: UK politics

It’s all fine

Regulations are commonly enforced by fines. Economic logic says that the level of fines should be set high enough to discourage most of the violations, and if the laws are being violated frequently that means that the penalties are set too low. But that’s not how British politicians and businesspeople think. I commented before about how the Conservatives seem to think that high levels of speeding and parking violations are prima facie evidence that the laws need to be changed, rather than that there needs to be more effective enforcement.

Now we have this comment in the Oxford Times about the “bus gate” (ban on private vehicles) in one part of High Street. It should be prefaced by saying this is hardly an arbitrary restriction. Because of river geography and the huge space taken up by colleges, Oxford is inevitably a challenge for transport. High Street is sufficiently congested at most times of the day, with just buses, taxis and bicycles, as well as the vast numbers of tourists on foot, as to be difficult and dangerous to pass through.

A top businessman said Oxford’s bus gate in High Street should be reviewed after it emerged council bosses have raked in fines totalling more than £6m over 10 years.

The bus gate uses camera enforcement to restrict normal traffic from using the High Street between 7.30am and 6.30pm.

After the £6.2m fines total emerged following a Freedom of Information request by the Oxford Mail, Jeremy Mogford, owner of The Old Bank Hotel in High Street, called for the restriction to be reviewed.

Weirdly, he also seems to believe that it’s a problem that many of the scofflaws paying the fines are tourists. Given that Oxford has to pay a huge burden for maintaining transport infrastructure for millions of annual visitors who don’t pay local taxes, what could be more appropriate than that those who abuse the system and endanger our lives to get an advantage would pay the costs.

Two other points that Mr Mogford makes:

“I do think the bus gate should be better signposted in High Street because some drivers are clearly missing the signs or ignoring them.

“It’s quite likely some delivery drivers will go through the bus gate and pay the fine instead of spending half an hour going all the way round.

I agree with the first point, though the current signs don’t seem obviously deficient. As for the latter, I don’t really object. Fines can serve as a kind of stochastic congestion charge, allowing those with an urgent need to use a certain resource to pay the cost. I think that a formal congestion charge is better, though, since it is less ambiguous, more predictable, and removes the taint of illegality.

It takes a thief

Speaking to her fellow Conservatives this week, a “contrite” Theresa May said

I got us into this mess, and I’m going to get us out.

Ummm… Is this a common hiring policy? Is there any circumstance under which you’re looking for someone to lead a project and you say, “How about Theresa? She fucked everything up last time. That makes her just the person to make it go well this time.” Because she has the best inside view of the faulty decision procedures that caused all the trouble, or something.

It’s a bromide that is usually applied to a situation where the “mess” demands some unpleasant and unglamourous labour or expense to clean up — e.g., you misplaced the envelope with the club’s collected membership dues, so you need to go find it, or work out a new fundraising scheme, or replace the money from your own pocket. No one wants to do it, but it’s your job because it’s your fault. Applying it to remaining prime minister is just bizarre.

But this is all part of the way British politics is less about the effective deployment of power than the effective deployment of clichés. Of which Theresa “Brexit means Brexit” May is an unchallenged master.

Extreme left

Vox is explaining Jeremy Corbyn to Americans:

He is far to the left of Bernie Sanders: Corbyn has proposed renationalizing Britain’s rail system, abolishing tuition for British universities, massively hiking taxes, capping CEO salaries, and imposing rent controls to deal with Britain’s affordable housing problem. He’s even suggested reopening the coal mines that used to be a big part of Britain’s economy.

Hmmm. The rail system is already nationalised in US, as in most developed countries. Sanders himself did propose abolishing tuition at public universities in the US and raising taxes. He formerly advocated a maximum wage, though he retreated from that in the most recent election campaign. Rent control is, for obvious reasons, seldom an issue in US presidential campaigns, but it is certainly an issue that Sanders advocated as mayor of Burlington. As for reopening the coal mines, that’s kind of crazy, but it’s a Trump policy.

I think this shows, above all, how far Britain has drifted to the right (NHS notwithstanding) and the US has drifted to the left (despite the persistence of gerrymandered Republican control).

Destroy the monsters!

I think often of a lecture I heard many years ago by the late Richard Marius at Harvard, on Shakespeare’s Richard II. He made the point, novel to me, that the inviolability of kingly rule demanded that critics of the monarch direct their wrath ostensibly at the king’s advisers: The king is not unfit to rule, he is only being misled or corrupted. Compare:

Several politicians told the Guardian that Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, who act as the prime minister’s joint chiefs of staff in Downing Street, must take responsibility for the poor result, which saw the Tories lose their majority. The pair were at the centre of recriminations flying back and forth between MPs on WhatsApp groups and even resulted in one cabinet minister branding the pair as “monsters who propped her up and sunk our party”.

Yes, those monsters! May should be furious at how badly they performed in the election campaign. I suspect that they are also the people — wasn’t one of them Home Secretary or something? — who were responsible for the “tolerance of extremism” and failed anti-terror policies of the past seven years that May rightly excoriated when she laid out her detailed new “Things need to change” policy.

It’s a good thing that she’s now formed an alliance with a party famous for lacking all tolerance (for terrorism).

Where are the simple joys of Maidenhead?

Theresa May’s gamble has gone badly wrong. There’s a danger of chaos overwhelming all of us now, but I want to take this moment, with the result  still fresh, to exult.

There is a special joy at seeing a tactically shrewd and wholly cynical and unprincipled scheme fail. The Tories made a principled case back in 2010 for fixed-term parliaments, which they enshrined in law. May made a principled case for not calling a new election last year when she took over the leadership last year. And then she abandoned all those principles as soon as she saw a political advantage in the sky-high poll numbers for herself and her party. There was no other justification than that she thought she was sure to win, because all the press barons loved her, and Jeremy Corbyn dresses badly, and she couldn’t conceive of having to compromise. Just to make it particularly destructive, she lit the 2-year fuse on Brexit before calling the new election, so that time is running out even while they sort out their mess in Westminster.

A reasonable conclusion would be that it was a mistake to try to run the country off the hard Brexit cliff on the basis of a paper-thin referendum majority, and that she should instead seek a broad consensus, at least on the EU negotiations, with all the major parties. That wouldn’t be Theresa May’s conclusion, though. She may not have been in favour of Brexit, but she’s not going to lose the opportunity to knife the perfidious foreigners, even if the price is collaborating with the DUP to undermine abortion rights, climate policy, and peace in Northern Ireland.

By the way, if you don’t recognise the reference in the post title…

Wake-up call

Microsoft responds to the worldwide ransomware attack on Windows XP:

The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call.

A wake-up call where they kill sick people in need of medical treatment. I’m not staying in that hotel again.

Fortunately, it turns out that no one was responsible: not Microsoft, not the NSA. Here in Britain, the government that skimped on funding vital infrastructure for the National Health Service so that their computers didn’t get urgent security patches looks likely to be re-elected in a landslide, because the important thing is not what a government does in office, but whether its plans for what it would do get leaked to the press several days early.

Strong and stubborn stable leadership.

Fly me to the moon

In a democracy, what should be the relationship between leaders and the people? Last year Michael Gove famously offered a populist defense of Brexit against the dire warnings of economic experts: “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Donald Trump has obviously had great success with his idiosyncratic mix of doomsaying (“American carnage”) and pollyannaism (e.g. “You’re going to have such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost—and it’s going to be so easy”).* The vaguely conspiratorial premise — the spirit of “How to do it!” — is that our problems are all very simple, but elites are attempting to buttress their favoured position by making them seem complicated. Continue reading “Fly me to the moon”

Is there really a general election happening?

We’re now barely six weeks away from a general election. Supposedly.  The excitement in the press and in the public is… imperceptible? I guess you don’t see anything happening locally until the parties have chosen their candidates and geared up for the vote, which means it’s going to be an incredibly short campaign. The Prime Minister is too busy to bother defending her policies.

The general response is like, ha, well played Theresa. Calling the election was the whole game. And the fact that she was still mocking suggestions for a new election just a week before is treated is just proof of her cleverness. Rather than unscrupulousness. Continue reading “Is there really a general election happening?”

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your colonies.

 

So, after Labour made it a point of triple-underlined principle to vote unanimously in favour of Brexit, and to deprive Parliament of any vote on the final deal, and that it wasn’t worth tying the government’s hands about possibly depriving 3 million Europeans in the UK of the rights they had been promised, it turns out the party of social democracy and the working class has found a principle that they feel strongly enough about to want to constrain the government’s freebooting negotiations. This tweet came today from the Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union:

The language is appalling: “bargaining chip” is the language of defenders of EU citizen rights. Labour abandoned them, but believes that protecting Britain’s 18th century colonies is a noble cause worth fighting for. Much more important, too, than the right of young Britons to develop their talents and careers across the continent.

Londoners pat themselves on the stiff upper lip

The story to date: A petty criminal from Kent committed a murder suicide in the centre of London, killing 4 and injuring 40. The attacker was Muslim, which seems to be enough for this to be classified as a terror attack*, and so the English praise themselves for their fortitude in continuing to carry on with their lives, rather than, I don’t know, hunkering down in air-raid shelters until the sirens announce all-clear. #WeAreNotAfraid, they tweet. Amazing that a city of nearly 9 million people is uncowed by the threat of a scary Muslim (acting on his own, apparently) now deceased, who killed as many pedestrians as non-terroristic London drivers killed with their cars in the whole second half of February. It’s a terrible thing that people were killed and injured, but people in cities all over the world live their lives surrounded by the suffering of others, without hiding in their cellars. The specialness of Londoners in this regard is as delusional as the British deal-making acumen.

Besides which, it’s not even true. While the PM was announcing in Parliament

An act of terrorism tried to silence our democracy, but today we meet as normal, as generations have done before us and as future generations will continue to do, to deliver a simple message – we are not afraid and our resolve will never waver in the face of terrorism,

the London police were trying to pressure pro-EU protestors to cancel their planned march on Saturday, because the unafraid Metropolitan Police with its approximately 30,000 officers couldn’t be expected to simultaneously manage both a criminal investigation AND 20,000 peaceful demonstrators.

Because nothing says WE ARE NOT AFRAID like using a minor terror attack as an excuse to prevent the exercise of core democratic rights.

* Whereas a genuinely politically inspired random murder in New York, intended to “send a message”, is not called “terrorism” and doesn’t inspire any praise for New Yorkers continuing for to live, because the perpetrator was not Muslim.