July 31, 2009
Disapointment
Gary McKinnon lost his appeal hearing today. It is now very likely he will be extradited to the USA. There’s a re-worded version of my earlier article posted on Liberal Conpiracy, highlighting this.
That not even the trolls are objecting to my article is indicative. Nobody can understand why the Government wants to put a mentally ill disabled UK citizen into the harsh American penal system, where he will probably die.
It’s a sad day for British justice.
July 30, 2009
Probably Away
I’m probably not going to be able to blog for a while.
That’s OK, because possibly the most important blog post in the UK of the last month has already been written by Richard Murphy, so you don’t need anything from me.
Everyone needs to read this. Because numbers don’t lie.
Dishonest Evangelism?
I’ve been having thoughts about evangelical Christianity. Don’t worry, I’m not about to convert. My thoughts are about whether evangelicals are fundamentally dishonest about the focus of their faith.
First, a disclaimer. One of my good friends has been an evangelical Christian for as long as I’ve known him. We’ve talked about evangelism a number of times over the years, and he’s no fool. After studying at Oxford University he took a course in evangelism to “understand why he believes what he believes”. He’s clued-up on this stuff. But as well as him, I’ve met other evangelicals over the years (indeed, a regular visitor to this blog is an evangelical Christian, and I’m sure she’ll be commenting). I’ve also had the dubious pleasure of sitting through evangelical sermons; a couple of times as a teenager, and then more recently when a friend of a friend revealed to the world that he and his partner had become evangelical Christians…at their wedding ceremony. So what follows is based on personal experiences and assessments. I think this brings both limitations and advantages.
So what do I take evangelical Christianity to be? I suspect it’s impossible to define precisely, but here’s my two cents. It’s a very radical form of Christianity that emphasises two fundamental aspects of belief, and manifests them by very enthusiastic (some might say, aggressive) preaching in efforts to convert new followers. Those two aspects are: an enormous preoccupation with sin and the hell-bound fate of all sinners, coupled with a belief that the only way to truly free one’s self from sin is to love Jesus; to open one’s heart to Christ and love him so that he can redeem one’s sin and save one from hell-fire.
Thus evangelism is distinct from many (most?) other more modest forms of Christianity. My long-time friend and regular visitor to this site, Peter, is a Christian. He’s a very wet sort of Christian, mind. He believes that everyone gets to go to heaven, because “hell” is actually this life. Yes, even Hitler gets to go to heaven, according to Peter. Personally, I’m not sure if that’s even Christianity. When you take out the metaphysical consequences for not living a Christian life in this world, I’m not sure what you’re left with is Christianity at all, but instead some sort of very wet – and rather pukey-nicey – take on spirituality more generally. But that’s by-the-by. [Peter may no longer think this, actually. But he used to, so that’s good enough for me to slander him].
Evangelism is not like that. A key tenet of Christian evangelism is that we are all sinners. By our very nature. It’s just what we are. And sinners go to hell. Forever. Which is a problem.
The only solution, say evangelicals, is to love Jesus and let him take away your sin by opening your heart to him. Now, evangelicals in my experience tend not to be snotty about this. Their attitude isn’t “well I love Jesus and you don’t, ha ha ha I’m going to paradise whilst you’re going to burn”. Generally they’re pretty self-deprecating despite having “found” Christ; they’re constantly on guard against their own continued sins and the need to correct for them. Their attitude to non-believers is usually one of concern (and it’s not pity, mind, but genuine concern): they really don’t want us heathens to go to hell. They want to save us. My evangelical friend did once get quite upset when he had to tell me to my face (after I asked him to) that I was going to be tortured for all eternity by demons for not loving Jesus.
It’s a pretty grim world view that states most of the people you come into contact with are going to burn for eternity. But – evangelicals will reply – it’s counterbalanced by the power of Jesus’ love. This, they say, is the light in the dark. It brings them hope and happiness. It makes this life of sin and temptation tolerable and worth living.
But I’m not so sure. Here’s why.
Every evangelical Christian I’ve met thinks that homosexuality is most certainly a sin. Gays go to hell, and on the express elevator. The reasons why evangelicals believe this (something to do with the insane book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, usually) doesn’t really interest me. I’m more interested by the logic of what follows when you talk to reasonable evangelicals wishing to consider their views.
By reasonable evangelicals, I do not include those who state that homosexuality is a choice. Anybody who says that gays simple choose to be gay – and hence are sinners by choice – doesn’t really interest me. Their world-view is so divorced from empirical observations of how human beings are that I don’t have anything to say to them. I’m more interested in the ones – like my evangelical friend – who are willing to admit that to gay people, being gay is just what they are. They can’t “help” it, it’s just what floats their boat.
But from that flows a problem. For if people don’t choose to be gay, and if being gay is a sin which lands you straight in hell, I want to know why God made the playing field so fantastically uneven. I want to know why my gay friends are on a highway to hell because of a sexual orientation that just is who they are…if God made them who they are. Why, by contrast, have I been dealt a manifestly better hand? To become an evangelical Christian would be much easier for me than for one of my gay friends: I just need to open my heart to Jesus, get baptised to wash away my sins, and stop having sex with my girlfriend until we’re married (oh, she’s going to laugh when she reads that. Married, indeed). My gay friends, by contrast, would have to repress a core aspect of their entire being if they are to avoid hellfire. Why has God made it so much harder for them? Why has he done this, when the penalty is eternal damnation?
God is starting to look like a bit of an unfair, malicious bastard at this point. If he loves his flock equally, why has he made it so much harder for some sheep to make it into heaven? Note that what does not follow from this question is any sort of metaphysical conclusion about whether God exists. There is no reason a priori to assume that God has to be nice. What does follow are important thoughts about the kind of “love” it is possible to feel towards such a God (assuming here that Jesus and God are taken as different manifestations of the same thing, as I think evangelicals maintain).
What kind of love can be felt to an entity that stacks the deck horribly unequally; who sends all sinners to hell but makes some more disposed to sin than others? Well, not a very nice sort of love, if it’s love at all. For this “love” is backed up with a coercive threat: love me – for I am the only path to salvation (a key evangelical tenet) – or burn forever. Oh, and by the way, loving me is going to be distinctly harder for some of you than others, just because I move in mysterious ways.
This isn’t a love that grows out of trust, respect, gratitude, empathy, spontaneous attraction or all the other things it seems empirically and emotionally proper to associate with love. Rather, it looks like something else entirely: the forced adoration of a hostage for a tyrant who demands gratification and obedience upon pain of eternal torture.
Again, I draw no metaphysical conclusions. As a good Humean in matters metaphysical, I’m a philosophical agnostic about the existence of God (though I am dubious as to why I should believe the evangelical interpretation of Him over, say, the Baptist, Catholic, Islamic, Judaic or whatever). The evangelicals could be completely correct about the metaphysical set-up, the primacy of sin, the need to “love” Jesus and the rest. Except, however, that they should stop calling what they feel towards Jesus “love”. It’s not love: it’s a subservience induced by fear of damnation, dressed up in pretty language (and usually accompanied by annoying songs and acoustic guitars).
Which is fine if that’s what you want from faith. Just don’t try and tell me it’s love.
July 29, 2009
Letting the Tories Win
According to The Guardian, Gordon Brown was using the Norwich North by-election to road-test the strategy of emphasising Tory spending cuts to voters. That strategy failed. Disastrously.
The irony, however, is that emphasising Tory plans to slash spending could and should be a vote-winner – provided it’s done in the right way. And the right way is certainly not Brown’s way.
So far, Labour strategy has been – at least, if Brown himself is anything to go by – to drone out the words “10% Tory cuts, 10% Tory cuts” like some ear-achingly painful stuck record. The idea (one presumes) is to scare the electorate into not voting Conservative, on the grounds that public services will suffer too much if they get elected.
If Norwich North is anything to go by, the voters aren’t scared. Whether this is because whatever comes out of Labour mouths is now automatically deemed utterly unbelievable by a sceptical electorate, or because of a clever Conservative strategy of turning the issue on its head by emphasising national debt (and hence, the alleged need for cuts), I’ll leave others to decide.
For what it’s worth, I suspect it’s a doomed-to-fail strategy simply because most voters cannot actually visualise what 10% cuts to public spending entails, in terms of effects on public spending and quality of life alone. After all, it’s a long time since the last recession (at least 15 years). People under 33 have no adult experience of constrained government spending during a recession. People over that age have had 15 years for the memory of the pain such constraints bring to fade.
“10% cuts” is therefore a pretty abstract notion to the average voter (I include myself). Sure, it sounds kind of scary. But without recent, fresh or direct experience of the impact of government spending cuts during a recession, the gap between something sounding scary and it actually being sufficiently fear-inducing to provoke a person to action remains wide. Hence, droning on about “10% cuts” won’t scare people into not voting Tory, because it’s simply too abstract a threat.
Yet all this shows is that attempting to induce fear is the wrong way to attack the Tories on cuts. (I will leave aside justified qualms about the rightness of attempting to win an election through fear-mongering). It does not show that attacking the Tories on cuts is necessarily a flawed electoral strategy.
A better strategy would be to argue that Tory cuts will make the recession worse. This, as it happens, is stock Keynesian thinking and is (finally) starting to get an airing (and here, and here) against the Conservative mantra that huge cuts are needed because of national debt (whilst making statements that “you don’t spend what you ain’t got”, despite the outright macroeconomic stupidity of such sound-bites).
Yet to explain why big Tory cuts will make the recession worse requires something which is apparently alien to Gordon Brown and the New Labour project: treating the electorate like thinking, intelligent adults.
Rather than trying to scare the electorate into not voting Tory, why doesn’t Brown try to argue them into rejecting policies which would prolong recession, increase unemployment and delay recovery? Why doesn’t he present a set of explanations about how national economies work, and why, in turn, cutting spending during a recession is a terrible idea? This would expose the Tories as economically illiterate as well as dangerous, without pursuing the low-politics of fear which isn’t working anyway.
The explanation isn’t hard to find. New Labour has consistently treated voters as contemptible idiots, to be manipulated through the pages of the tabloid press; to be lied to and ignored when they disagree with the dictates of the leadership. No wonder Brown’s response to Tory popularity has simply been to try and terrify the electorate. No wonder that engaging with voters as intelligent beings able to assess arguments on their actual merits has not even been tried.
Such is the irony of New Labour’s last year in power. An electoral strategy that could save it requires the one thing it is singularly incapable of: treating voters as beings able to think and choose, rather than as a herd to be frightened and manipulated.
H/T to Giroscope for the post that got me thinking.
July 28, 2009
Exploring the relationship between a free press and democracy
This is a first attempt to articulate some thoughts that have been kicking around in my head for quite some time. Unfortunately this is a very long post, however I’m very keen for comments to help me move and refine my thinking. Thanks.
I’ve had a niggling worry about the limitations of our presently constituted democracy for a while now. It relates to the media, and the extent to which it may be a decidedly undemocratic force in modern British mass democracy.
It seems correct to say that democratic society requires a free press. After all, how can we have free and fair elections and choose wisely between candidates unless those candidates can be reported on by independent sources? [That’s an empirical claim, by the way, rather than one about a priori necessities, just to head-off the philosophical pedants] Similarly, unless the failings of elected politicians can be freely reported, then how can those politicians be properly held to account and removed, surely one of the chief merits of representative democracy which has helped it avoid the worst catastrophes endured by other systems of government?
Yet it seems fairly clear that merely having a free press is no guarantee of a thriving democracy. I’ll get to reasons for why I think that in a moment, but first let’s consider what might be meant by “thriving” democracy, and why it might be desirable.
A thriving democracy would, I think it’s fair to say, be one in which many people are actively interested by, and engaged in, politics. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they will all be members of political parties or take part in campaigning activities (though one would assume that these are the sorts of things that politically engaged and active people would get involved in). But it would seem to go hand in hand with high levels of awareness about political issues, and high levels of turnout at elections.
Yet we must go further. Part of what would make this democracy “thriving” is not just that people would be aware and interested and likely to vote. Rather those features would in turn – it seems safe to assume – result in things like high levels of accountability, and responsiveness to the needs and desires of the electorate. The high level of accountability would flow from the fact that many people pay attention to the doings of politicians, and vote to have them removed when they are perceived to have failed. The responsiveness to the needs and desires of the electorate would follow from the same two factors: high levels of interest and engagement in the political process.
It would seem to me that a thriving democracy is better than one that is not thriving, insofar as one believes that higher levels of accountability and responsiveness to public need are good things. Indeed, one might even have further ‘republican’ thoughts that human life only goes well when human beings are engaged in civic/political activity, and thus consider such a “thriving” democracy as valuable for the further reason that it has more human beings living the good (political) life. [For non-philosophers: ‘republican’ in this sense doesn’t simply mean ‘somebody who thinks there should be no monarchy’, it’s a tradition in western political thought].
But to return to the above point, it seems clear that a free press does not necessarily guarantee a thriving democracy. For example, imagine a wholly free press which produced nothing but lies. If the general population had only access to this free press of lies, it seems clear that a “thriving” democracy might struggle to come about. To see this, we must introduce a further thought: that a democracy can only thrive when the engaged, active and interested citizenry have access to true facts. For how can the engaged and interested citizenry secure proper accountability and responsiveness to their needs and desires unless they know the truth about what is happening in their world/nation/society? It seems impossible.
You may see where I’m going with this. Is there not a danger that a free press could actually do harm to a democracy? That is, if the majority of what ordinary voters read is lies, distortion, or scare mongering, could it not be the case that the quality of democracy is worsened? For if people believe lies and distortions, and their perceptions of society are warped by fear-mongering, how can they ensure that politicians are responsive to their needs, or held to account? Indeed, wouldn’t this situation become considerably worse if the lies, distortion and fear-mongering put people off becoming politically engaged or even voting, say because they concluded that “politicians are all the same anyway”?
And yes, you’ve spotted the next move as well: to ask whether the above is in fact a fairly good description of what the British free press actually achieves.
A few things to clarify first. I’m going to maintain that the British press is indeed free. That’s despite worrying considerations that having rich press barons like Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere, Richard Desmond and the Barclay Brothers owning between them huge chunks of the UK mainstream media ensures that the press is only “free” insofar as it adheres to the interests of their rich proprietors.
And I’m also going to put aside valid concerns from the likes of Noam Chomsky that the press isn’t truly free because it appears to have evolved a sort of self-censorship due to the underlying market mechanisms of media as an industry. Rather, I’m going to maintain that the press in Britain is free because the State does not control it. Governments do not decide what goes into newspapers or TV news in the UK…as the recent expenses furore aptly demonstrated.
Secondly, I don’t think the British free press consists only of lies (as might be thought to follow from the above). There are many good journalists telling the truth, doing high-quality, honest reporting with great integrity. My worry is just that there aren’t enough of them to counterbalance the actions of those who do engage in lies, distortion and scare-mongering.
Some examples of the British media engaging in lies, distortion and scaremongering are therefore called for. There is only space and feasibility (before you all get bored and stop reading) to include a few of examples of this sort of thing. But then, you probably know about loads already. To keep this piece of barely reasonable length I will mostly link to other blogs who say it better than me.
First up my new pet hate figure, Caroline Malone, who wrote the News of the World article I poked fun at in the previous post to this. Malone’s piece is basically indistinguishable from BNP propaganda, but that’s not really my problem here (though I do find it very worrying).
My problem for the purposes of this post is that the News of the World has a readership of something just shy of 3 million. It’s the most-read Sunday newspaper in Britain. Yet as the blog Tabloid Watch has ably and admirably showed, Caroline Malone’s comment piece in this most-read Sunday newspaper is full of untruths and distortions.
Read their whole entry here, but this gives a flavour:
“This is clearly referring to asylum seekers. In which case, of course, they can’t work (unless she wants to join the Refugee Council Let Them Work campaign?).
I’m not sure I have heard of the ‘free car’ thing before. Where is her evidence for this? Who is giving out these ‘free cars’? Fact: asylum seekers don’t get ‘free cars’.
As for getting ‘free houses’ this is very often very basic Home Office-paid-for accommodation. Asylum seekers do not get council houses or housing benefit.”
Next up there’s what the excellent Ben Goldacre correctly calls “The Media’s MMR Hoax”. This goes way beyond just one popular newspaper; it’s about the entire British media colluding in the systematic misrepresentation of science and medicine to scare the living daylights out of parents, in order to whip up a hysteria turn led to the resurgence of diseases which were previously almost eradicated in this country. Oh, and then pilloried the very man whose work the same media outlets had used to perpetrate the hoax in the first place.
The best thing you can read on this is Goldacre’s book “Bad Science”. The book culminates in the Media MMR Hoax expose, but along the way Goldacre does a first-rate job of explaining in simple, clear terms how to think about science properly, which helps you understand all sort of other things…including why homeopathy is very, very silly. Seriously, it’s my book of the month. Buy it.
If my marketing plug has failed, or if you need more encouragement, try Goldacres’s website, and start with this post.
Finally, there’s the recent wilful selective presentation of UK crime figures by virtually every media outlet in Britain. A good person to read on this is Polly Toynbee, who writes:
“Take this week’s remarkable crime figures: the murder rate fell by 17%, the lowest for 20 years. Overall, the crime rate was probably stable, though the less reliable recorded crime figures show a fall of 5%. The Home Office warned that recession would see property crime rise by 4% – but in fact it only rose marginally, by 1%.”
Toynbee was drawing attention to the fact that crime is not getting worse in Britain. Yet Britain’s free press did not joyfully proclaim this. Instead (as Toynbee writes) The Telegraph screamed “One in Four adults is a crime victim”. The Sun opted for “Crime crunch UK”. The FT news pages ignored the murder figure altogether with “Surge in shoplifting and fraud reveals effects of recession on crime”. The BBC’s 10 O’Clock News asked “Is the recession to blame for an increase in some types of crime?”
Even Toynbee’s own Guardian newspaper opted to use the headline “Deaths on rise as government anti-knife crime strategy fails”, a week later, despite the fact that the statistics actually showed the situation to be far more nuanced than that.
Despite crime not exploding in the UK, the free press proceeded to tell – or imply – that it had. Now it’s not often I’ll say this, but one has to feel sorry for the Government. Whether by luck or design, under their watch crime has, since the mid-90s, been falling. Yet they get no credit for it in the press, whilst those who rely on the press for their information become convinced (one must assume) that Britain is drowning in a veritable flood of crime…and so must presumably blame the Government for not sorting it out. How many Government ministers’ reaction to this was simply “why do we even bother?”
Anyway, enough examples. This post has been very long (I’m sorry), but I’m ready to draw a tentative conclusion, and it goes like this:
A free press is essential to democracy. If the press is not free, then democracy cannot function. That much I believe to be true. But a free press can also end up promoting a deeply flawed, shrivelled and unsatisfactory kind of democracy. For if lies and distortions are widely believed to be truth, and if hysteria and scare-mongering run rampant, then individual citizens cannot be well-informed participants in the political process, and thus democracy cannot thrive. That is bad, because it undermines the reasons why democracy is valuable in the first place.
This conclusion appears to be not just a theoretical possibility, but a description of the UK at present. (I’m here thinking not just of press lies, distortion and scare-mongering, but also of declining voter turn-outs and increasing levels of political apathy [both evinced anecdotally, and proxied by continuously falling levels of political party membership] which whilst possibly not caused by the press exclusively, may plausibly be supposed to have some important relationship to it).
We appear to have an antinomy at the heart of our politics. Modern, mass representative democracy – for all its flaws, the best form of government ever tried by a considerable distance – appears to require for its existence an institution which may simultaneously pollute and degrade the virtues that make democracy valuable.
Like I said, it’s a thought that’s been worrying me. What to do about it? I have no idea.
July 27, 2009
News of the Screws: No more immigrants…except the ones who pay to advertise on our website
Quick blog-post at the tail-end of the working day (i’m so sick of looking at Public Accounts Committee reports: anybody who tells you that Parliamentary recess is a holiday for MPs is full of shit).
Reading the Bickerstaffe Record, I followed a link to a News of the Screws comment piece by Carole Malone.
It’s quite special. Malone explains that apparently ”80% of voters want immigration curbed“, before launching into a diatribe of hate directed at the Screws’ old favourites, the dreaded job-stealing, culture-destroying, baby-eating immigrants.
The article is so far off to the whip-em-up right that Enoch Powell might well have read it and thought “steady on a bit there Carole, this is Blightey you know.”
But unfortunately somebody forgot to inform the Screws’ advertising department:
For it seems that the Screws is perfectly happy for immigrants “to turn up illegally with some sob story of how [their] own country is too dangerous or that [they're] a lesbian who’ll be shot if [they] stay there and Hey Presto, it’s like [they've] won the lottery!” so long as after they’ve done all that they appear on the Screws’ website advertising themselves as part of a dating service.
Still, every penny counts when it’s in the Dirty Digger’s back pocket…
July 26, 2009
Keynes, Cuts and Conservatives
Tory MP and shadow Treasury secretary Phillip Hammond yesterday declared that if the Tories win power, he will become a hate-figure. The reason? He plans to slash public spending.
Hammond, however, is claiming this as a virtue, not a vice. This is because he reckons public spending cuts will result in a short unpleasant period of belt-tightening, before leading to economic recovery. He’s thus presenting himself as a hard man for hard times, declaring that he doesn’t mind being unpopular because he’ll do what’s right.
It’s a clever political move, and likely to pay-off given how evasive, dishonest and useless Gordon Brown is now perceived to be by the electorate. But it’s a worrying one, because Hammond advocates a macro-economic model that may well make the dire economic situation worse. To see why this is so, some careful thought will be required. Hence today’s blog – answering a call from The Other Taxpayer’s Alliance – is not for those unwilling to spend 15 minutes having a good careful think.
Here we go.
The model Hammond advocates can be dubbed the “grocer’s shop” approach. It treats the national economy as though it were a corner shop, with the government being the grocer. It goes roughly like this:
Books should be balanced, and spending should be tightly related to incomings. If the shop’s income falls, then its outgoings should fall too. This is because it is only prudent to spend what one has, or else one over-reaches the business, leaves it exposed and reaps economic ruin. Expenditure should be cut as income falls, and should remain cut until better times increase demand, and in turn, income.
Thus the grocer’s model is very simple: it advocates familiar and safe-sounding ideas like “only spending what you’ve got” and “balancing the books”. But it’s also a very passive approach: the shopkeeper simply sits back and waits for the bad times to pass.
Now, critics of the grocer’s model may raise the following worries. Firstly, they might point out that the grocer, in making cuts, is likely to impact heavily upon people’s lives. After all, one way to make cuts at the grocery store is to sack the employees. To simply sack the employees and say “toodle-pip, we’ll see you again when the good times return (whenever that may be)” may seem more than a little callous…especially if the employees elected the grocer to run the shop in their interests, say, rather than just to make personal profit.
Furthermore, the grocer’s attitude to increasing income – i.e. getting people to spend in her shop – may leave something to be desired. For the “grocer’s model” only really has room for the grocer to do things like offer discounts on what’s being sold [you might like to think of this as analogous to a tax cut] or increase advertising of what’s on sale, hoping this will boost demand and increase income, speeding-up recovery. Yet because the grocer is fundamentally separate from her customers, there’s not much she can do. For surely it would be madness for the Grocer to kick-start her shop’s recovery by, say, generating increased income for the customers. Wouldn’t it? Right?
Well perhaps not. Indeed this is where we might start to question whether a national economy really is like a grocer’s shop, and whether the government is helpfully thought of as a grocer.
To understand this alternative to the grocer’s shop approach, it’s useful to consider an idea from John Maynard Keynes which sounds complicated but really isn’t. The very important idea is called “the paradox of thrift”, and it goes like this:
In a recession, people are worried about job security, interest payments on their debts, inflation and all the other nasty things that people worry about in recessions. These worries cause people to lose confidence. When people lose confidence, they decide not to spend but to save. This is because saving feels safe: it’s money in the bank for a rainy day, which everyone expects to be tomorrow.
The problem is that this creates “multiplier effects” in the economy as a whole. Instead of consuming goods and services and stimulating demand, which would in turn lead to job-creation and economic growth, when people save it suppresses economic growth because their money sits in a bank (or under a mattress) instead of creating the demand necessary for growth by being spent.
Thus we have a paradox: in a recession people save because they feel insecure and lack confidence, and so saving seems like a very sensible idea…but the aggregate effect of many people saving at high levels is actually to prolong the recession, because it dampens the stimuli to growth.
So why does this paradox matter?
Well, it illustrates that the government’s job in a recession is to be far more than just a grocer. In a recession, people are saving because they lack confidence, but paradoxically this is causing economic stagnation. What is required is for an external agent to come along and kick-start the whole shebang: to encourage the savers to save less and to spend more. This will create demand in the economy, and lead to job creation and further growth.
The only external agent capable of doing this at the concerted national level required to be effective is a government. There are multiple ways it can be achieved, but for example in 1930s America it was often done by spending money on huge civic projects like the Hoover damn. By undertaking large infrastructure projects, the Government demanded resources and services from companies that could help build the projects. This stimulated demand from those companies, who in turn bought goods and services from other companies, all of whom increased their output and in turn employed more workers. Alongside this, the Government also employed people to work on its infrastructure projects. These workers, having jobs, went out and spent more money, thus creating more demand, and so on. Economic growth was kick-started. (Of course, governments will have problems here if the workers simply save all their wages instead of spending, say because they still lack confidence and hence would rather save. This factor helps explain why recessions can be long-lasting, though of course there are many other factors in play).
The point is, to beat the paradox of thrift created by spending, Governments must do something. Simply cutting spending is likely to be counter-productive because it will reduce demand in the economy (remember that the Government is a big consumer of non-Governmental goods and services, so if it stops spending this has big knock-on effects). Here we actually have another paradox: if a Government cuts spending and says “we’re just waiting for the storm to pass”, they may actually be prolonging the storm.
Indeed my colleague Richard Murphy has explored such thoughts already and in great depth. He’s a trained accountant, so you can read the well-explained maths here. But to simplify his thinking very quickly, consider it as follows.
If the Government cuts spending, this decreases demand in the economy as a whole. This leads firms to cut back their production and to shed workers. Unemployment as a whole rises. This is a real problem, not just because unemployment is an evil that ruins families and lives, but because it makes recessions worse. For consider, if people are unemployed they have significantly lower incomes, thus they have less money to spend, thus demand is lower…which means lower output, lower investment and lower growth in the economy. Furthermore, unemployment has further adverse affects on Government: when unemployment rises the Government sees its tax receipts fall, and must pay-out more in social security payments. This in turn means the Government has less money to spend in ways which could stimulate demand in the economy, and which would help to reduce unemployment.
So cutting spending in a recession is a very risky thing to do. It threatens to make the recession worse. This is because the Government is not a mere grocer whose job is simply to make cuts, sit back and wait for recovery. Such behaviour is likely to make recovery a more distant prospect. The Government is the agent that can kick-start recovery itself by spending.
Now, behind all of this is a lurking problem which threatens to throw a spanner into the works. At the outset of a recession a Government may be constrained in its ability to spend because it may have run up debts in the good times. As those debts require servicing (i.e. the interest on them needs paying), the Government must be committed to making sure it can meet its obligations. This is pretty important: if international lenders judge a Government unable to meet its financial commitments, then the nation in question could be blackballed by international lending markets and the consequences would be pretty dire (all modern macroeconomics depends upon a “rolling-ball” of controlled government debt, chunks of which are owed to international financiers as well as domestic citizens holding government gilts and bonds).
However, when a recession gets under way Government coffers suffer because tax receipts decrease and social security out-goings increase. The Government has less money to play with, so it must make servicing its debt a priority for the sake of the nation’s fiscal integrity. This is just a brute fact of life, and it explains why some cuts may be needed in a recession: if the Government must service its debt, and can only afford to do so by cutting some public spending, then it will have to face up to this and make the necessary cuts.
But it’s important to understand what’s going on here: the Government is under an unfortunate constraint, stuck between a rock and a hard place. It must service the debt for the sake of national financial integrity, but doing so through spending cuts is likely to make the recession worse. This may be the bullet which has to be bitten; the lesser of two evils. Yet it should be recognised as such. What it should not be seen as is an invitation to make any more cuts than are absolutely necessary. Making increased cuts will lead to further economic stagnation and delay recovery.
Yet Tories like Hammond have interpreted the unfortunate need for some spending cuts in a recession (a necessary evil arising due to national debt levels) as an opportunity to make more, counter-productive cuts than are called for (a decidedly unnecessary evil arising, often, from an ideological desire to slash state services).
Thus Hammond should well deserve to become a hate figure. He plans to implement economic policies that will prolong the recession, increase unemployment and make the pain of recession worse for millions. And all because he’s forgotten the paradox of thrift, and fallen into the trap of thinking the Government is a simple grocer when it should and must be so much more than that.
Gary McKinnon and the Government’s Broken Moral Compass
It’s not often I agree with anything to be found in the Daily Mail. But to disagree with Saturday’s front page would require one’s “moral compass” to have gone completely haywire. You know, like the present Government’s has.
The Mail ran the story that Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay is resigning out of disgust that his party last week voted for 43-year-old Gary McKinnon to be extradited to the United States on computer hacking charges. MacKinlay was one of just 10 MPs to vote against the Government. He resigned saying: “I was really frustrated by the vote last week. Many of my colleagues had expressed their sympathy for Gary McKinnon. But when the crunch came, they just went tribal and followed the diktats of the party.” The Mail is backing MacKinlay, and plugging its campaign to have McKinnon tried in the UK.
Now I’ve been following the McKinnon case for a while, mostly through the rear pages of Private Eye. Here’s a quick lo-down for those not in the know: in 2001 and 2002 McKinnon hacked into 97 United States military and NASA computers, which the US authorities claimed resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage, and left 300 computers unusable.
You’re probably not feeling very sorry for McKinnon right now, so here’s the rest. McKinnon hacked the US computers because he was looking for evidence of UFOs. As well as being a self-confessed “nerd”, McKinnon has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychology at Cambridge University has described McKinnon’s condition as making him incapable of understanding normal social behaviour, helping to explain why he committed his crime…though “crime” may be putting something of a gloss on it. McKinnon claims that when he “hacked” the US systems, he encountered no passwords and no firewalls; that it was more like logging-on than hacking in. Accordingly he actually left messages for the US authorities such as “your security is really crapt”[sic], to let them know he’d been visiting.
Yet rather than thank McKinnon for exposing how rubbish their security was – and allowing them to improve it before a truly malicious “cyber-terrorist” attacked – the US authorities have been continuously seeking McKinnon’s extradition. If extradited and found guilty, McKinnon could face 60 years in a high-security US prison, of which he’s said: “It is terrifying…a hardline prison where stun guns are used and male rape is common. The likelihood is that I would die in an American prison even if I was given a sentence of 35 years.” The alternative is that McKinnon is not extradited, and is instead tried in the UK where an autism charity can suppervise him in a community sentence.
Given such facts, that the Government voted to extradite McKinnon is in itself depressing. But it’s more than just depressing: the case illustrates fundamental problems with the present Government. To see this it’s helpful to ponder why on earth our esteemed leaders might be in favour of McKinnon’s extradition.
One obvious thought is that Labour is still desperate to be seen as “tough on crime”. But if this is about mere appearances and trying to grab ‘lock-em-up’ votes in middle England, then it’s an abject failure: the mouthpiece of middle-England small-minded nastiness is encouraging readers to sign a petition in support of McKinnon. Of course, if it’s not about appearances then that is even more worrying: it indicates that the present Government really thinks a man with mental disabilities who was searching for UFOs should be locked up in one of the most brutal and unforgiving penal systems in the world.
The other obvious thought is that the Government doesn’t want to upset the Americans. But this explanation can only lead to further negative conclusions.
Firstly, it’s not like the UK would be risking a favourable relationship with the US in getting people we want extradited: the abject imbalance in extradition arrangements between our two countries has been well documented. So is the Government simply motivated by a desire to let the Americans know how happy it is with the present unequal arrangements, a sort of desperate, fawning sycophancy at the expense of one of its own citizens?
The situation is made more confusing given that it’s hard to see what the UK would really have to lose by refusing McKinnon’s extradition. Embroiled in taking action about the revelations of illegal CIA activity under Bush, the Obama administration is hardly likely to bear a lasting grudge against the UK for refusing to extradite a man who ultimately did the Americans a favour (albeit a costly one). But even if they did bear a grudge, why does the Government not think this is a price worth paying on behalf of a UK citizen? After all, the Israelis managed to deal with it when two Tel Aviv hackers were tried there instead of being extradited to America.
A final possibility is perhaps the most worrying of all: that the Government wants to extradite McKinnon for no other reason than extraditing him is the Government position. That is, rather than considering the facts, the changed international landscape and the long-standing public outcry, the Government has made up its mind and that’s the end of it. Ministers dictate the McKinnon is to be extradited, and MPs who claim to support the man duly fall into line and betray him at the crack of the party whip.
The emerging explanation of what the Government is playing at changes depending on which of the above one finds most persuasive. But that in turn reflects very poorly on the Government: they are committed to putting a mentally ill citizen who never harmed a soul into a harsh foreign penal system, and nobody really knows why. If there is a coherent Government reason for this policy, it’s not been articulated. The case is remarkable like that of the Ghurkhas: a Government guided by a “moral compass” which can’t tell north from south, whose leadership is unable to explain why the present course is even being sailed.
Now I really, really don’t want to see the Conservatives in Downing Street next year – but then, what right has a Government of such flaws to remain in power?
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P.S. More information – and ways of supporting Gary McKinnon – can be found at the Free Gary website.
A judicial review of his case will be handed down on Friday 31st July, which will help determine whether or not he is extradited.
July 24, 2009
China: Neither Fish nor Fowl
I recently took part in “UK-China 400”, a programme organised by the British Council and the All China Youth Federation, a wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Whilst in China, the UK contingent was the subject of an extremely slick propaganda operation: the Party spared no expense in showing us the China they wanted us to see. Perhaps the most striking example was an official visit to the city development centre in the Haidian district of Beijing.
With the Chinese capital sprawling ever outwards, the authorities are permanently engaged in urban planning. In Haidian, a vast development project of residential, commercial and industrial zones is being masterminded. To be completed in just 5 years’ time and covering an area of several hundred square miles, what is being planned as a mere annex for Beijing would count as a fully-fledged city anywhere else in the world.
Our party was enthusiastically shown a huge scale-model of what the completed new district will look like. Science and industry parks were illuminated, alongside residential districts and a network of roads, highways and canals. But what caught my eye was the “affordable social housing”, to be offered on a “voluntary” basis to displaced farmers and migrant workers. Looking closely, I couldn’t help noticing that this affordable social housing consisted exclusively of enormous, concrete, multi-storey tower blocks of the sort the UK constructed in the 1960s, with disastrous results.
I asked the Chinese officials what measures were being taken to avoid the problems of crime, social deprivation and entrenched poverty the UK experiences with high-density social housing. As far as I could tell the question was translated accurately, as was the answer: “the people in the social housing will be able to use the same schools and leisure facilities as the other people, so the problems you had in the UK won’t be repeated here”.
The inadequacy of the reply was only exacerbated by what came next. The Chinese drove us to a semi-completed residential zone to see model apartments of what would soon be on sale. Our contingent gasped as we wandered around 4-bedroom luxury apartments, complete with marble bath-tubs and enormous American-style fridge freezers. These were flats being built “for the elite”, as the Chinese put it.
And they weren’t joking. With a price tag of RMB 3.8 million (£380,000), such apartments will be out of the reach of even top civil servants, who we were earlier told can hope to make RMB 10,000 (£1,000) a month at the peak of their careers. The Chinese were proudly showing us accommodation that only the very wealthiest business and political elites could afford – within minutes of declaring their intention to house their poorest in the kinds of social housing which have created endemic problems elsewhere.
Provision of social housing is of course a controversial issue in all countries. But this episode was instructive regarding China specifically. For given that we were being shown what the Communist Party wanted us to see, there seemed one obvious conclusion to draw: if China is communist, it is now so only in name.
China remains a one-party dictatorship, controlling the media and crushing dissent in established communist manner. And it has retained the communist mind-set towards development: vast projects are to be completed virtually over-night, regardless of the human or environmental costs (for example, 1000 year old Yancheng has been demolished so that it can be re-built in 5 years as a Chicago-style metropolis). Yet this is combined with a happy acceptance of vast social inequality; of luxury apartments built for minority elites, by workers without rights or representation, offered zero welfare protection and housed in giant concrete monstrosities. The proud and public display of such inequalities – and the urban planning which builds them into the very fabric of society – is simply incompatible with even a superficial commitment to communism.
In drawing such conclusions one must, of course, be careful. The exclusively state-controlled media pumps out incessant rhetoric about “harmony”, alongside boring Pravda-style statistics of national manufacturing output. Pictures of Chairman Mao are common (albeit many of them appearing on t-shirts bought by westerners). Yet this is merely an appearance of communism, as our official visit to the homes of the elite indicated.
Yet China isn’t truly capitalist either. The State’s finger in so many business pies – its retention of the control of the means of production, if you like a Marxist analysis – rules that out. (The best illustration of this was being told that despite a 25% fall in exports in Jiangsu province, manufacturing production would not decrease and jobs would not be shed. Why? Because Chinese industry will continue the state-directed over-production tried and tested in the 90’s and 00’s – regardless of global recession).
Ultimately, what is emerging in China is something altogether new. It is neither fish nor fowl – but it may nonetheless be the worst of both.
July 22, 2009
Have Anti-incitement Laws Helped the BNP?
Could it be possible that anti-incitement laws have actually helped the BNP? In considering this I want to focus on two laws in particular: the Incitement to Racial Hatred provisions of the 1986 Public Order Act, and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006). The former of these was plausibly targeted at combating racism in wider society, but the latter was most definitely aimed in large measure at the British National party specifically.
This is because the BNP were getting around Incitement to Racial Hatred law by talking about “Islam” and “Judaism”, which they pointed out are religions not races. Indeed, just before the 2006 law came into effect BNP leader Nick Griffin and Mark Collett (then head of the Youth BNP) beat charges of inciting racial hatred by pleading that they had been criticising religions not races. Following this the Government moved on long-standing plans to close the apparent loophole and legislated against incitement to religious as well as racial hatred.
Now, I happen to have multiple-ranging problems with incitement to hatred laws. In particular there are two issues that make me feel very uncomfortable.
Firstly it is not – and should not be – illegal to hate. Hate may be an unpleasant and nasty emotion, but in a free democratic society individual citizens should be free to hate because they should be free to hold whatever emotions they may have.
Of course, what they should not be free to do is act upon that hate by way of violence, destruction or intimidation. If there are incitement laws, they should target not emotions like hate, but actions like violent attacks upon others (which may well flow from emotions like hatred). Legislating against an emotion itself is deeply illiberal, for it is the state saying that some kinds of emotion are simply not allowed. And that is surely wrong, and worrying.
Secondly, there is a lurking problem with anti-incitement laws. Under anti-incitement laws against (for example) violent acts, if Agent X incites Agent Y to commit a violent act against Agent Z, then Agent X is to be punished for something that Agent Y did. But that seems to go directly against the principle – enshrined in the rule of law – that a person is only tried and punished for crimes they themselves have committed.
The way out of this is to declare it a crime to tell other people what to do. Yet that puts us in very tricky territory about responsibility. For imagine that I tell you to go and jump off a building…and you do it. Have I murdered you, and should I be put on trial accordingly? It would seem absurd to say that I have. But this hints at the lurking problems associated with prosecuting somebody because they incited another person to commit a crime.
But putting those concerns to one side, I want to focus on something else: the possibility that UK anti-incitement laws may actually have helped the BNP.
For a long time my belief was simply that anti-incitement laws don’t work, assuming their aim is to reduce racial and religious hatred and the criminal acts that may flow from such hatreds. People who are susceptible to messages of hate, and who are likely to act on that hate by being violent, destructive or aggressive, don’t just appear out of nowhere. Most people who are receptive to messages of hate are this way because they are angry. Their anger causes them to look for targets of blame; messages of hate towards other groups provide such targets.
The sorts of people predominantly susceptible to hate and who likely to be persuaded by incitement to violence will be – surprise surprise – less well-off people, who feel their life is a struggle, and believe that it is a struggle because others are being unfairly favoured at their expense. Thus, the way to stop these people being incited by others to emotions of hatred or acts of violence is to address the reasons why they are angry and susceptible to hate. This means – surprise surprise – targeting poverty, addressing feelings of disenfranchisement, and eliminating perceptions of unfair disadvantage by markedly improving people’s lives.
What is less likely to work are attempts to gag those who spread hatred. This is because the hate-spreaders will always find ways to either get around the law, or not be noticed by it. For as long as there is a receptive audience to messages of hate, the preachers of hatred will emerge.
Incitement laws target symptoms not causes: a more effective strategy is to neutralise the reasons why people are drawn to messages of hate in the first place. Of course, the upshot of this more effective strategy (namely, poverty reduction, civic engagement, clear communication about issues like housing allocation and immigration) is that it is considerably more expensive – and considerably less headline-grabbing – than threatening to lock people up.
For a long time that’s all I thought there was to it. Now I’m not so sure.
Part of the BNP’s recent electoral success has been it’s shedding of the thug image. Skinheads and jackboots are out, suits and ties are in. Alongside this more cosmetic alteration, the BNP’s rhetoric has also changed. No longer is the BNP preparing for the (allegedly) inevitable race war; now it simply wants to “stand up for the rights of the white indigenous population”, as Nick Griffin repeatedly states.
It has become common place to assert that the BNP’s rhetorical shift came because it realised it would do better in elections if it toned down its message of hate. But does this explanation give too much credit to the strategic aptitude of the BNP leadership?
As noted above, Griffin and Collett beat racial hatred charges in 2006 by pleading they were discussing religion not race. Post 2006, this defence would no longer wash as the Government moved to make incitement to religious hatred illegal too. Now, we can safely assume that BNP members do not want to go to jail. The result? Their rhetoric had to shift and become more subtle, less likely to land them in the dock for inciting religious or racial hatred.
In becoming more subtle the BNP’s message of hate became more opaque. Rather than ranting about race or religion directly, the BNP focused on issues like housing shortages and immigration. These served as proxies for racism and Islamophobia, without falling foul of anti-incitement laws. Accordingly, BNP messages became less obviously odious to the average angry voter. Simultaneously, the BNP’s focus on issues like housing and immigration appears to have resonated with voters who felt these concerns were unaddressed by the other parties. These factors appear to have combined – along with a collapse in the Labour vote – to deliver two BNP successes in the Euro elections.
Could it be that by forcing the BNP to be more subtle, the very anti-incitement laws designed to restrain Britain’s fascists actually helped them gain the electoral traction they’d previously failed to achieve?
