Tag: UK politics

“Networks of choice”

I’ve commented before on the brilliant satirical sketch from the 2008 US election campaign, in which John McCain’s campaign staff discussed an ad accusing Barack Obama of proposing tax breaks for child molesters. “Did he really do that?” asks the candidate. “He proposed tax breaks for all Americans, and some Americans are child molesters” was the answer.

Last year, Home Secretary Theresa May applied this joke structure to the abuse of anti-terror laws to attack press freedom. Now the Guardian reports that the new director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan is keeping up this satiric tradition. He

has used his first public intervention since taking over at the helm of Britain’s surveillance agency to accuse US technology companies of becoming “the command and control networks of choice” for terrorists.

Fortunately, since it’s just the terrorists who prefer using Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter they’ll be easy for the security services to target. The honest people are presumably all using the upstanding high-quality British online services. Because they have nothing to hide.

What does it mean, by the way, that the Guardian calls this a “public intervention” (rather than a speech, as other political figures are described as delivering)? It sounds ominous.

Billions schmillions

It’s no wonder the British think they’re getting a raw deal from the EU. The front page of today’s Times reports on a revision of the membership contributions of various member states. The fact that they’re asking for an extra £1.7 billion from a government that is already straining to afford even the barest crumb of tax reduction for its neediest millionaires, while simultaneously fighting to protect its citizens from the temptation of voting for a further-right anti-immigrant anti-EU party is bold, to say the least, and provides an opportunity for Cameron to pose as a red-faced half-crazed deadbeat, defending his country from being billed for services already rendered.

But then you read on a bit and find that

Last year Britain contributed £8.6 billion to the EU budget – equivalent to almost 2p on the basic rate of income tax. The recalculating of the EU budget means that Germany is about to receive a rebate of £614 million, with France getting £788 billion and Poland £249 million.

There must be champagne corks popping at the Elysée today! £788 billion would be more than half of the total 2013 government expenditure.

Political talk therapy

Two apparently unrelated items from Nick Clegg’s speech at the Liberal Democrats’ party congress: First the BBC quoted his exhortation to the party soldiers, that they should

go to the next election with their “heads held high”.

Then came his announcement of

the first national waiting time targets for people with mental health problems.

People with depression should begin “talking therapy” treatments within 18 weeks, from April.

Let’s see: If the depressed Liberal Democrats can get their talk therapy started in April, maybe they’ll hold their heads a bit higher by the 7 May election.

Define “senseless”

David Cameron has described the defection of Tory MP Mark Reckless to the anti-immigrant anti-Europe party UKIP not as “reckless” (too obvious), but as “senseless”. As in, absolutely nothing could be accomplished by this move to advance the anti-immigrant anti-Europe political agenda by this move.

In completely unrelated news, which BBC journalists unaccountably included in the same article, the prime minister announced that he would not argue in favour of staying in the EU in his planned 2017 referendum if he does not obtain concessions from the EU:

“If I don’t achieve that it will be for the British public to decide whether to stay in or get out,” he said.

But he added: “I have said this all my political life: if I thought that it wasn’t in Britain’s interest to be in the European Union, I wouldn’t argue for us to be in it.”

And Conservative Culture Secretary Sajid Javid told the Daily Mail the UK could still prosper if it chose to exit the EU. “I think it would open up opportunities. I am not afraid of that at all,” he added.

Innumeracy: UK prison service edition

The BBC reports on a study by the Prisoners Education Trust, of the impact of the recent decision of the prison service to limit prisoners’ access to books. The Ministry of Justice has dismissed the study, saying

the PET survey of 343 inmates represented just 0.01% of the total prison population in England and Wales.

This is a twofer, with a pair of errors packed into impressively small space. Even a government minister should be able to calculate that if 343 inmates represent 0.01% of the prison population, then more than 6% of the population (53.5 million) must be imprisoned, which I don’t need to check the figures to know must be wrong. But I did check it, and find that the Ministry of Justice made a wee error of not quite 2 orders of magnitude. According to this publication (coincidentally, also from the Ministry of Justice) there were about 84,000 prisoners in June 2013. Assuming there haven’t been any huge changes since then, those 343 inmates in fact represent 0.4% of the prison population. Where is Michael Gove when you need him?

More generally, the comment conveyed the impression that if the sample were a small fraction of the population then it couldn’t be statistically valid. Of course, that’s not true. If you were doing an election poll of the whole population of England, a random sample of 0.01% of the population would be about 5000 people, which is much larger than most surveys, and enough to get a result that’s accurate to within about ± 1.5%. The real problem with this survey is that it’s not a random sample, and not representative, being self-selected among readers of a certain magazine; but there is no pretence about that, and if the Ministry of Justice were interested in addressing the issue rather than issuing talking points, they could address the question of whether the concerns raised by the more literate of the prisoner population most concerned with literacy are worth taking seriously.

 

Fishiness in Scotland

So now Alex Salmond has resigned. Not entirely unexpected, despite the fact that he managed to stampede the British establishment into promising effective autonomy for Scotland, which was exactly what Cameron opposed when the referendum was first mooted.

But surely I am not the only person who thought that a situation where the First Minister was named Salmond and the Deputy First Minister named Sturgeon was too fishy to be allowed to continue. In the interest of expanding the phylogenetic variety at the top of Scottish government, perhaps Liam Fox could be persuaded to abandon the Conservatives?

When to call it quits

Today is the day of the Scottish referendum. As I’ve commented before, I don’t really have a personal opinion about the question, though I think Scottish independence would probably make my life marginally worse. (To the extent that I have a coherent political view of the situation, it is mostly concurrent with that expressed with some eloquence by Charles Stross. I’d much prefer to see a federal UK. I guess that’s what happens when you let aliens with their strange ideas infiltrate the nation.)

The only sense in which I think I have relevant expertise is with regard to the way people are talking about risk. The whole thrust of the No campaign has been to conjure up dangers, known and unforeseeable, of Scottish independence. I think they’re probably right — in particular, I think the economists are right that Scots are being misled by those who claim that they can successfully keep the British pound as their currency. On the other hand, there are also risks of staying part of the UK. In particular, the risk of being taken out of the EU by an English public that is increasingly insular in its outlook (inlook?) Since everyone’s fond of divorce metaphors, we might see Scotland as a woman whose jealous husband is trying to force her to move with him away from her friends and family. There is a long tradition of Scotland using relations with the Continent as a balance against England. It’s not so much a question of whether Scotland wants to be part of a bigger nation or go it alone; it’s a question of whether Scotland wishes to confederate with England or with Europe. And despite a reasonably successful 307 year run with England the choice for the future is not so obvious.

And that raises what I think is the most irksome twist of the No campaign’s logic: The question of timing. If you protest early against a new arrangement, you can be told, “You haven’t given it enough of a chance”. But if you wait too long, you can be told it’s really been settled by custom and tradition. (To be fair, “you haven’t given it enough of a chance” wasn’t really the argument against the 18th century Scottish rebels, who tended to find English muskets doing the persuading.) Surely it’s reasonable to reconsider these sorts of arrangements after 300 years or so. England offered Scotland the opportunity to be a co-coloniser rather than a colony, and it accepted. Now that the imperial dream is not just dead but despised, isn’t it reasonable to ask a new generation whether the union is still meeting their needs?

Recruiting the dead

Former chief of the UK General Staff General Sir Richard Dannatt  has spoken up on the Scottish referendum, and what he has to say is deeply disgraceful:

Scottish soldiers have fought over several centuries and in so many campaigns to preserve the territorial integrity of their country from external threat, but in the Northern Ireland campaign more recently, they fought against internal threat, but what about today? Do the families of Scottish soldiers who lost their lives between 1969 and 2007 to preserve the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom now just say, “Well, it no longer matters”?

Now, interestingly, while he does go on to say “I cannot speak for them”, his essay includes not a single quote from a single one of these Scottish soldiers, living or dead. Putting aside the fact that some of them were probably just looking for steady pay or a certain kind of military camaraderie, I think it is extraordinarily condescending — and disrespectful — to enlist the dead to march in ones political campaign. And it is disgraceful to use the term “internal threat” to cover both the Northern Ireland campaign — where British soldiers battled against a terror campaign that sought to change the constitutional order by force — and the referendum campaign

There were many nationalists in Northern Ireland who themselves wished to dissolve the “territorial integrity” of the United Kingdom, but who also opposed the attempts to do so by force. The fact that General Dannatt cannot perceive a gap between seeking to accomplish political goals by referendum and seeking to accomplish it by force says all you need to know about the military mind at its most brutal.

In fact, as a matter of historical record, even their political masters at the time of the greatest turmoil in Northern Ireland, the government of Edward Heath, doesn’t seem to have been fighting to “preserve the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom”, so much as to prevent Northern Ireland from sinking into full-blown civil war. At least, the cabinet seems to have been willing to entertain the notion of British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, but ruled it out when it seemed certain only to exacerbate the chaos and violence.

Scotland’s European future

I commented before on the interesting way an independent, increasingly cosmopolitan Scotland, and an increasingly suspicious and insular rump-UK might pass each other on the way through the EU door. I was interested to find out who is permitted to vote in next week’s independence referendum in Scotland. You might have supposed that an attempt was being made to appeal to the inbred Bannockburn nostalgia voters, perhaps even extending the franchise to self-identified Scots by birth. Instead, the voting eligibility criteria seem sedulously post-nationalist and forward-looking. Birth plays no role, only residence and citizenship. In addition to admitting 16- and 17-year-olds to the franchise, they are permitting — in a move that seems stunningly self-assured to anyone who remembers how the aftermath of the 1995 Quebec referendum descended into ugly recriminations against “money and the ethnic vote” — EU citizens ordinarily resident in Scotland to vote. There’s no clearer statement, I think, of how differently the Scots view their future from how the English view theirs.

And if the nationalists win the referendum on this basis, it will be hard to argue that they haven’t earned their independence honourably.

Scotland, England, and Europe

I have no clear opinion about the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence — on the one hand, as a citizen of another former English colony, I understand the emotional appeal of revolution. On the other hand, as a current resident of England I fear the ensuing chaos, and rationally I really don’t think the negative consequences will necessarily — or even primarily — be felt south of the border. Furthermore, a UK without Scotland will be more conservative (and Conservative) and more xenophobic and anti-Europe.

This last point does suggest, though, a convenient resolution to one of the sticking points of Scottish independence — membership of the EU. The current UK government claims that an independent Scotland would have to negotiate membership like any other new applicant, and so would certainly lose the opt-out from the Euro, and other benefits, if secession-fearing members like Spain don’t block Scottish membership altogether; the Scottish nationalists say they would be negotiating a change of terms from inside the EU. But the Conservatives — who would doubtless attain a majority in a Scotland-free Parliament — have promised a referendum on withdrawal from the EU in the near future. Perhaps these could be coupled, and Scotland could simply inherit the UK seat in the EU. It would save everyone a lot of strife.

But saying that, it makes me wonder about the outcome of the EU referendum. I’d always assumed that Scottish independence would guarantee the UK’s exit from the EU. But would politicians in London really be willing to see their counterparts in Edinburgh and Dublin making European policy, and themselves excluded? It seems hard to imagine.