Tag: UK politics

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…

Heckler’s veto in Southampton

A couple of weeks ago I signed a petition in support of a conference planned for 17-19 April at the University of Southampton, on “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” that had been threatened with cancellation because of pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the UK Zionist Federation; ubiquitous-parking enthusiast and Communities minister Eric Pickles also contributed his opinion. It seemed to me an obviously legitimate academic conference, on a subject of both academic and public interest. If the choice of speakers does not cover all possible opinions on the matter — my impression is that my own view would not really coincide with any of those represented, and the framing of the topic is too politically tendentious for my taste — well, that’s unfortunate, though I’d wait until after they’d spoken to comment on what they have to say, and then opponents are free to organise their own conference.

Now the university has decided to cancel the conference because of specious “health and safety” concerns: because protestors threatened violence, or because the university authorities consider them the protestors — or the conference organisers — inherently deranged. I recognised long ago that “health and safety” is the leading weasel word in the British bureaucratic vocabulary. Pretty much anything can be justified with it, and it sounds so much more decisive and incontrovertible than saying “I am worried that someone could get hurt” (or “someone could catch Ebola”).

This is a dangerous decision. As someone whose grandparents’ generation was forced out and/or murdered by brownshirt thugs who came to power in Germany and then most of Europe after applying the strategy of directed violence against opposing political and intellectual viewpoints, I am dismayed to see that Jewish organisations in the US (see, e.g., the Salaita affair) and UK have come to the conclusion that the main problem with the Third Reich was too much free speech. Never again!

This is a dangerous step. Either Southampton will make itself a pariah by this move, or it will make itself an example to other universities, who increasingly find that all that academic exchange-of-ideas mumbledy-goop just gets in the way of the free exchange of money and services with well-connected donors.

An impressive display of openness and freedom

… in a secret trial. What’s that about?

The Guardian reports on the conclusion of the terrorism trial of Erol Incedal, who was convicted last year of possessing a bomb-making manual, but now acquitted at a second trial on the more serious charge of plotting a terrorist attack.

On each occasion, the evidence was carefully presented in one of three sessions. Parts of the case were in open court, with the press and the public free to come and go; other parts were held behind locked doors, before a jury whose members were warned that they could go to jail if they ever divulged what they had heard; and parts were held in intermediate sessions, in the presence of the jury and a small group of journalists who are prohibited – at least for the time being – from reporting what they learned.

This is definitely not an ideal situation — nobody claims that it is — but I am hugely impressed by the fact that so much care was put into finding a solution to difficult problems of secrecy and criminal justice, making an effort to provide information to the public wherever possible. Including a jury. Not to mention the fact that the state was willing to accept an acquittal, something that is unthinkable these days for a terrorism trial in the US. The trial judge “had originally acceded to a demand from the prosecution that the entire trial be heard in secret, and that Incedal, and the man arrested with him, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadjar, be identified only as AB and CD.” This was overturned by an appeals court, after criticism by MPs and civil-rights groups.

It’s ironic, but news like this revives my belief that the spirit of liberty survives in the UK. It’s not that I necessarily think that the courts made the right decisions, but the fact that they are treating civil rights as important counterweights to the demands of the security services, worthy of substantial effort and special procedures.

Which ageing monster?

The New Statesman has a review of a new book, Blair, Inc., about the money grubbing post-Downing-Street career of a certain former Prime Minister. Among Blair’s unsavoury activities, he received £8m a year for providing PR advice and speechwriting services to “an ageing monster whose regime is mired in allegations of torture and murder.” But before you wonder where Gordon Brown came up with that kind of money it’s explained that this is Kazakhstan’s President Nursaltan Nazarbayev, “We learn that a number of people from Blair’s Downing Street team, including Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, also provide services for Kazakhstan.”

Competitive immigrant-bashing: The Tories strike back

Yesterday I commented on the ferocious competition among the leading UK political parties to prove their anti-immigrant bona fides, with UKIP trying to stake out an unassailable position by arguing that they need to stop children of immigrants from going to school. Today the Conservatives are fighting back, arguing that that’s not enough, they need to stop immigrants from having children at all. With this we’re back to 2008, when I first came to Britain (as an economic migrant), and the BBC was fulminating against the “foreign-born mothers” who were costing the NHS £350 million a year in maternity services. The fact that the NHS would grind to a halt if some of those foreign-born mothers were not working as nurses, in the intervals between popping out their expensive babies, was not mentioned.

How to stop immigrants from competing for our jobs…

… don’t let them go to school.

When the UK political establishment goes through one of its periods when everyone is competing to prove that they hate immigrants the most, it must be hard to be the putative anti-immigrant party trying to hold on to your market share. You need to do something outrageous to prove that you really really hate the immigrants more than anyone else. That’s the only way I can explain this proposal by the head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage to ban immigrant children from state schools for five years. Not illegal immigrants, mind you. Legal immigrants. His idea seems to be that the hedge-fund managers will pay to send their child to Eton, and people like me will either stay away or move here without my family. We can provide the British people with services that they’re not willing to do themselves, or not willing to pay to train their own people to do, and pay taxes, but not receive any government services in return.

I’m not sure whether the core UKIP voters are going to be thrilled about them shifting the immigrant population to mainly unattached young men.

Powerless

The Oxford Mail moans in a recent headline that the Oxford city council is “powerless to prevent the spread of graffiti”.

MORE than 1,000 cases of graffiti scrawled on private property are blighting Oxford…

That sounds pretty bad. What sort of extraordinary, perhaps dictatorial, powers would the council need to be granted in this state of emergency, to enable them to rescue us from this blight? The article continues that the graffiti cannot be removed

 because firms are not paying to have them removed, the city council’s graffiti team has warned.

“But 99 per cent of them don’t pay because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to.

“There are more than 1,000 jobs on my database we can’t touch –and we have the equipment and the training to deal with them.”

The council charges £27 an hour on top of £15 per square metre for the removal of graffiti from privately-owned property.

It seems strange to formulate this in terms of “lacking powers”. My guess is that if they considered it to be a sufficient problem for the public welfare that they wanted to use tax money to fund the cleanup, very few property owners would wish to hinder them. They lack the power to force the property owners to pay because most of the public agrees that, having been victimised by the graffiti writers already, the property owners don’t deserve to be punished with the compulsory expense of cleaning it up.

This is the city council acting like a private company, advertising its graffiti-cleaning service. But a private company would never think to formulate its inability to attract customers willing to pay £27 an hour for its property-beautification schemes as “we are powerless to carry out our plans because 99 per cent of our potential customers don’t hire us because of the cost and they think they shouldn’t have to,” and whine about how unreasonable that is, because “we have the equipment and the training”.

“The important thing is to get the money in”

That’s what Lin Homer, head of HM Revenues and Customs (the UK tax authority) said in 2012 about agreements not to prosecute wealthy Britons who had been concealing their money in Swiss bank accounts, and so also protect them from having their identities publicly revealed, in exchange for them kindly consenting to pay the taxes that they were legally obliged to pay. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone! And then I recall this woman (a mother with two children) who was sentenced to prison for five months for receiving an item of clothing from a friend who had stolen it.* As Bob Dylan sang, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king.”

Shocked by the criminal activity at HSBC in Geneva, which was revealed to the French tax authorities by an enterprising tech support guy, the Swiss police have been unusually active in seeking to ensure that such lawlessness is stopped — by seeking to extradite and prosecute the guy who revealed the information. Informed of HSBC’s crimes in 2010, the UK government sought ingeniously to decapitate the bank, by appointing its CEO Stephen Green to the House of Lords and making him Minister of State for Trade.

In order to further ensure that appropriate standards of legal and ethical behaviour were put into effect at HSBC, the head of tax at HMRC, Dave Hartnett, started working for HSBC as a consultant two years later.

* This sentence was later overturned on appeal. But she certainly wasn’t allowed anonymity, and no one said “The important thing is to get the trousers back”.

The next war

The BBC reports that education secretary Nicky Morgan “wants England to be in the top five in the world for English and maths by 2020. It is currently 23rd.” They quote her:

Returning us to our rightful place will be a symbol of our success. To achieve this, we will launch a war on illiteracy and innumeracy.

So, I’m thinking about wars that Britain has prosecuted over the past half century or so, often with the goal of “returning us to our rightful place”. Suez. Falkland Islands. Bosnia. Iraq. Yemen. Cyprus. Kenya. Afghanistan. Northern Ireland. Not all disasters, but not an unbroken record of glory either. Not really a set of memories you want to activate if you want your audience to think “overwhelming success” rather than, say “useless drain on national resources”, “antiquated racist ideology”, or “undermining democracy and human rights”.

Putting aside the absurd-sounding ambition for England to be among the top 5 for English, (I’ll just guess this wording reflects the slightly vague British awareness that foreigners tend to speak Foreignish, and so might have literacy skills to be tested that aren’t literally “English”) the battle plan for maths all comes down to tables:
Continue reading “The next war”

Parking violations in a democracy

A throwaway comment by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, in an article about the fascist overtones of recent police challenges to civilian authority in New York, reminded me of one of the things that has long mystified me about the psychology of automobilism. He writes

We still don’t know where this confrontation between de Blasio and his cops will lead, or how it will be resolved. (So far, the city has been peaceful – and nobody on my block got a parking ticket all week! So it’s win-win.)

In most places I’ve lived, at most times, I tend to think that enforcement of parking regulations is distressingly lax. This surely reflects, in part, my own interests, as someone who doesn’t drive, but who frequently finds sidewalks and cycle lanes blocked by illegally-parked cars. And I particularly resent when the illegally parked endanger my children’s lives by forcing them out into the street. But in most places I’ve lived — including significant periods in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany — the general culture seems to view enforcement of parking regulations as an evil incursion upon human liberty.

It doesn’t seem at all strange that people resent their own fines — that’s core human nature — or even that people would develop a general perspective of ignoring the benefits of parking regulations and communing on the personal nuisance, particularly when the benefits accrue disproportionately to the weaker members of society — the young, the handicapped. What seems strange is that people seem, on the one hand, to consider enforcement of parking and traffic laws illegitimate, on the other hand not to want their elected representatives to do anything about it.

As with so much else, our current Tory government is different in this point. They genuinely seem to want to bring the Wild West to British roads. One of the first things the Tories did after coming to power was to stop funding speed-limit enforcement cameras. A few years ago the government said that widespread lawlessness on the roads proved that the current speed-limit regime lacked democratic legitimacy. Most recently, spheroid Tory caricature Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, was prevented by the Liberal Democrats from pushing through a 15-minute grace period for parking on double-yellow lines, essentially making all local parking restrictions unenforceable.

And now, Pickles has just announced that from this autumn local councils would be banned from using CCTV to enforce parking laws, including “Orwellian spy cars”, because if Winston Smith hadn’t been ticketed for parking too long outside the Ministry of Truth he never would have to go pay his fine in room 101.