January 31, 2011
Sabbatical
I need to take a blogging sabbatical. I have an awful lot on my plate for the next couple of months, and most of it demands fairly sustained levels of attention. (Having now stated this, it is almost inevitable that I will blog more than ever over the next couple of months.)
So I’m anticipating that I won’t be writing much here, at least in the short term. But never fear; this blog is not dead – only sleeping.
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January 28, 2011
Gray and Keys vs. the New Social Legitimacy
Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been removed from their positions at Sky Sports. This follows their sexist remarks about (assistant) referee Sian Massey, the emergence of derogatory off-camera “banter”, and a frankly bizarre rant by Keys on TalkSport radio.
The first thing to note is that nobody forced Sky Sports to get rid of these two. Neither did anybody threaten to coerce Sky physically, economically, or via the power of the state. Rather, we now live in a society which (finally) deems it unacceptable for public figures to speak in such outrageously derogatory terms about women. Public figures caught doing so are exposed to extreme normative disdain, and this can in turn lead to purposeful abandonment by their backing-organisations or institutions.
This shows the power of values and legitimacy in collective human life and interaction. Sufficient collective moral disapproval can alone be enough to stimulate decisive action. Keys and Gray went beyond the bounds of contemporary “normative legitimacy”, and have paid the price.
This affair is likely to sit very ill with the right-wing commentariat, especially hysterical “opinion” spouters like Mad Mel and Richard Littlejohn, but also the less manically deranged. The angry (and nuttier) right typically reacts to such events by bemoaning the power of “sinister” interest “lobbies” that are “taking over” our society. More specifically, such “lobbies” are controlling even our very language and public morality. We can no longer say what we want – some words themselves are off-limits.
Now as it happens in some measure I agree with these rightwing commentators. Because it is true that our very language and public morality has undergone profound change with regards to the status of women in particular. As a result, certain people can no longer say whatever the hell they like without expecting serious repercussion. Some words themselves are, indeed, now off-limits (in public).
Where I differ from the right – aside from disdaining the naively simplistic view that profound social change is orchestrated by “sinister lobbies” – is in thinking that with regards to women’s equality, this is actually a jolly good thing. For the alternative is one that we know well from recent – and indeed, long-standing – historical precedent.
Certainly, there’s still a long way to go before genuine female equality is achieved in this country. But I would much rather live in a world where it is at least the publicly stated goal and norm. A world where ignorant bigoted male patriarchs cannot throw their weight around as part of a process that keeps half the population in the position of chastised, marginalised, denigrated second-class citizens.
Equally, I would much rather live in a world where offensive, degrading, intimidating, dismissive, undermining nastiness cannot be shrugged off as “just banter”. Because as anybody who has ever met a bully knows, the excuse that verbal intimidation is “just a joke” is one of the most effective means to marginalize and undermine a victim. Whether Gray and Keys realise it or not, when they claim that “it’s only banter”, they choke-off the voice of protest and close-down the means of escape for those objecting to what they are being subjected to, in turn manipulating them into accepting what they rightfully wish to resist.
So I welcome the new (and it is very new – well within my short lifetime) social norm of something like gender equality. A social norm that draws the bounds of legitimacy far narrower than what fat old Jurassic boors can cope with. And I make no qualms about that: because if the bounds of legitimacy weren’t being redrawn this way, the winners would be people like Keys and Gray. And frankly, I see no reason to prefer that world than the one we’re moving towards.
January 27, 2011
BMJ Slams Coalition NHS Reforms
I am disgustingly busy at the moment, and for the next two months. So apologies for simply copying and pasting – but this deserves attention.
The British Medical Journal is currently running an editorial about NHS reform, called “Dr Lansley’s Monster”. It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory. Here are some passsages:
What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.
The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”) Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.
Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.
On GP commissioning:
Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.
With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?
It ends:
Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely. All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.
When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration. Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
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(Hat-tip to Stuart White, on Facebook).
January 25, 2011
Drugs, Religion and the Usefulness of History
There’s currently a rather silly series airing on BBC3. How Drugs Work ostensibly “combines real life stories and computer graphics to explore inside the brain and the body” to find out, er, how drugs work.
Yet the cannabis episode is interesting, if only for one minor reason: the show’s repeated attempts to inject a sense of justification for marijuana’s prohibition. Despite being mostly an hour-long demonstration that illegality is largely pointless and unnecessary, deference to the norm of social prohibition has to be maintained. So we’re breathlessly told that after smoking a joint your chances of a heart attack increase by 50% - without it being noted that because most people are not at risk of having imminent heart attacks, this is largely irrelevant.* And so forth.
Those – like me – who favour moves to drug decriminalisation, and eventually controlled legalisation, often despair at the apparent impossibility of change. After all, the long-haired hippies of the swinging sixties grew up with drugs all around them…and proceeded to cut their hair, before become MPs, journalists and voters who largely favour continued criminalisation.
Yet social attitudes do change, and far bigger things than drug prohibition bear testament to this. Consider the case of Thomas Aikenhead, who on January 8th 1697 was executed for blasphemy in Edinburgh, after allegedly railing against the Holy Trinity. His was the last execution in Britain for this “crime”, and he was indicted as follows:
“That … the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra’s fables, in profane allusion to Esop’s Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ.”
By merely reproducing this text and stating that I heartily approve of Aikenhead’s antics, I thereby demonstrate that British society has changed profoundly. Yet before the 18th century, not only was blasphemy a capital crime, but the proposition that a society of atheists was even possible was treated by many as plainly ridiculous.
During the 18th century, the spectre of atheism and non-conformity gradually dwindled, as coerced adherence to approved religious dogma faded from the forefront of social anxiety. (If you want to understand some of this fascinating story from an intellectual history perspective, read this excellent book.)
Indeed, my hero David Hume is a case in point here. Born in 1711, he notoriously “cut off the nobler parts” of his 1739 magnum opus A Treatise of Human Nature, partly for fear that his irreligious positions might earn him Aikenhead’s fate. Yet by 1748, Hume instigated a devastating attack on natural religion in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And although it was ultimately published only posthumously, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion put the nail in the coffin of a host of religious arguments, without its publisher being indicted.
In less than a hundred years, British official public attitudes to the necessity of some level of religious conformity altered dramatically. Sadly, the reasons for this are far too complicated to expound here. Though it has something to do with the end of feudalism, the development of what we would now call capitalism, and the emergence of the modern coercive state apparatus. Plus the sheer variety of forms of religion and dissent growing ever exponentially after the protestant reformation, and the continued need in Britain to discover a via media between competing faiths (not least Catholicism) so as to avoid social breakdown.
If you think that attitudes towards the need for drug criminalisation today are deeply entrenched, they are as nothing compared to the importance of basic tenets of shared religion in early modern societies. After all, questions of religion reach into questions about the very nature, being and purpose of human existence, as well as the more pressing question of the ability of human beings to live together in peace.
What this nicely goes to show, therefore, is how history can help us gain some perspective. What may look to us, here and now, as necessary and fixed, may in fact prove to be contingent and transitory. A knowledge of the past thus has unexpected and indirect uses in the present, even if only to improve self-awareness.
Of course, philistine dunderheads fail to see this, usually whilst maintaining that only market-recognised “practical skills” have true value. On which point I note that the study of history is coming under the Coalition axe, as 80% cuts to University arts and humanities teaching budgets take effect. A well-known aphorism goes: those who don’t learn history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. More generally, I would say: those who don’t value the past are quite likely to fuck up the future.
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* My favourite example of silly TV science about drugs was broadcast a few years ago. “Scientists” got some mice high on marijuana, and compared how long it took them to get out of a bowl of water vis-à-vis more sober mice. The glaring flaw in this “experiment”, however, is surely that it had no way of controlling for whether stoned mice just really love swimming.
January 23, 2011
Thatcher or Kafka? A Question of Influence
Ignore – if you can – the intellectual incoherence of this Government’s economic policy. On the one hand it endorses free cross-border capital flows, relatively free-trade in goods and services, minimal financial regulation, and floating exchange rates. But it simultaneously seeks enormous restrictions on the supply of labour. When it comes to immigration, market mechanisms are deemed unacceptable.
The latest front in the war on immigrants is actually another attack on overseas students. In this case, eliminating the Tier 1 Post Study Work Visa that allows international students to live and work in the UK for up to 2 years after obtaining their UK degree or qualification.
As well as being particularly unfair on those who pursue professional degrees (Law, MBAs, Accounting) as it deprives them of the opportunity to receive qualifications through their training contracts, this is likely to disincentivise foreign students from coming to the UK.
The official Coalition position is that it only wants to deter students from staying after they’ve completed their degrees, thus reducing net worker migration. But this is very odd. After all, newly qualified graduates are likely to be the most economically productive and highly-skilled immigrants in Britain. Why, exactly, do we want to turn those people out? Especially as very few are likely to be eligible to claim state support if they can’t get work, hence will likely leave of their own accord.
Admitedly, I don’t know the foreign-student elasticity of demand for UK degrees. But unless the government can show that it is highly inelastic, we have to assume that this measure will have a deterrent effect upon foreign nationals planning to study in the UK in the first place.
So as well as losing potentially highly-skilled workers, we may also loose highly skilled students. Students who pay far more in fees than their domestic peers, at a time when sections of UK higher education funding are being cut by up to 80%. Students who – if they are graduates – make significant contributions to the output and performance of their academic departments, boosting UK institutions vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
It seems likely, therefore, that Coalition policy has little to do with economics, and lots to do with politics. Namely, that anti-immigration sentiment runs high (in no small part thanks to the propagandising efforts of both Labour and Conservatives) and this Tory-led government wants to be the anti-immigration party par excellence.
An apparent problem with this “strategy”, however, is that restricting immigration numbers will only assuage angry voters if they come to believe the immigration “problem” is being dealt with. But they will only come to think that if the dominant social and political narrative deems that immigration is no longer a “problem”.
Except, on this front, the national media has a significant ability to set the general tone and mood. But tabloid newspapers – or more precisely, their owners – have no interest in whether immigration is really “out of control”, or whether Britain is really “full”. What they care about is maintaining the perception that Immageddon looms, and pandering to it. Because that mantra shifts a lot of units.
The media has no incentive to change the anti-immigration narrative, regardless of whether or not the Government really does reduce immigration level. It’s worth remembering, after all, that New Labour’s own highly restrictive anti-immigration laws made absolutely no difference on this front.
Thus: the Tory-led government instigates anti-immigration policies which will not appease anti-immigration sentiment, but which may well exacerbate the UK’s dire economic conditions, in turn further fuelling anti-immigration sentiment. A sentiment which the Tories may (but equally, may not) be able to harness in future elections.
You are now forgiven for thinking: “The inspiration for the Coalition isn’t Thatcher at all. It’s Kafka”.
January 21, 2011
Blair’s Heirs
The other day I noted the sheer scale and audacity of Coalition lies and u-turns. My intended point was that the volume of dishonesty is staggering, and has potentially corrosive impacts upon our politics in the long term.
My piece was cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Sadly, LibCon is no longer a place for reasoned exchange. The fate of any highly successful blog is (almost) inevitably an exponential increase in morons until sensible debate is suffocated.
Still, amidst the whataboutery and “Labour also lied; two wrongs make a right!” lines of “argument”, something vaguely sensible was being articulated. Namely, that even if I’m right that the scale of Coalition dishonesty is astonishing, this isn’t wholly new. So it’s worth asking: where did it come from?
By sheer co-incidence, Tony Blair has again been up before the pointless farce of the Chilcot Inquiry. Aside from giving him the opportunity to intone about the threat of Iran – whilst straight-facedly denying that invading their immediate neighbours to the west and east has made that worse! – we also know that:
Summing up the contents of the statements, [Blair] said he had told Mr Bush: “You can count on us, we are going to be with you in tackling this, but here are the difficulties.”
The message he wanted to get across, he added, was “whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you, I am not going to back out if the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and the UN route is the right way to go”.
One reason Chilcot is a farce is, precisely, that any remotely impartial spectator already knows Blair lied about Iraq. And whatever Chilcot determines, there will be no consequences for Tony.
Regardless of retrospective justifications offered by the Iraq conflict’s apologists, never forget that what clinched the Parliamentary vote for war was the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and was an immediate and dangerous threat. But that was complete baloney.
Blair lied about the evidence. He had already promised Bush that Britain was committed to an invasion, regardless. Blair was never going to pull out. Even when the Americans continued to make unilateral decisions with total disregard for British action or interest.
Blair misled Parliament to secure British backing for America. He has never shown an ounce of remorse. He still acts as though his declarations of unfailing moral vision are all the justification he ever needs. He shows us a putative sincerity, against a clear backdrop of dishonesty. He expects that to be enough – and in a lot of ways, it is. For blair and Labour were re-elected in 2005. He walks the streets a free – and very rich – man.
Now recall the ascensions of David Cameron and Nick Clegg to their respective party leaderships. Cameron – a moderniser despised by much of his own party – beat the favourite David Davis largely because many Tories thought they had finally found their answer to “Teflon Tony”. As for Clegg, he too was a Blair clone if also with a dash of Dave. (The Liberals picked the more rightwing contender, because the country’s mood was at that point moving towards the Conservatives.)
Tony Blair, along with Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, initiated an era in British politics where the truth was a worthless commodity. One easily traded for pious intonations, technical get-outs, and straight-faced declarations of hollow sincerity. Iraq was the apotheosis of this, not least because all those responsible got away with it.
By the sheer scale of their recent dishonesties, Cameron and Clegg may simply be confirming that they are, indeed, Blair’s heirs. But perhaps not in the ways their parties originally hoped.
January 19, 2011
Book Review: Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature – An Introduction
Book Review – Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature An Introduction by John P. Wright, pp. 316, Cambridge, £16.99
This is a noteworthy book from a noteworthy author, to mutually reinforcing effect. John P. Wright is that rare thing: a scholar with a sophisticated grasp of the complexity of philosophical argument who is also a serious historian of philosophy (with an emphasis on “historian”). These two things have here combined to produce a beginner’s guide which doubles as a valuable scholarly contribution for more advanced readers.
Wright has succeeded in capturing the complexity of Hume’s arguments in the Treatise whilst maintaining a prose style which makes the material accessible, without disguising that readers must work hard to keep up. Particularly pleasing is the seriousness with which Wright treats Hume’s positions. Whereas many “introductions” give-in to the temptation to pass (usually dismissive) judgement on Hume’s arguments, Wright instead notes common objections before providing the more sophisticated Humean response, leaving readers to decide where to go from there. He is also scrupulously honest in making clear when he is taking sides in any interpretative debate (and in Hume scholarship, this is no infrequent thing). This is best exemplified in his meticulous discussion of Hume’s account of causation in the Treatise.
Wright correctly notes that the bulk of the “problem” of causation for Hume is epistemological – the issue of how we can come to “know” of causal connections in the external world. Providing an admirably thorough and accurate exposition, Wright follows Hume’s argument to the letter. Illustrating the powerful nature of the sophisticated epistemological scepticism in play, Wright explains the sheer intellectual force of the reasoning which leads Hume to suppose that our only basis for a belief in causal necessity resides in our own minds. Yet Wright notes that there is also an outstanding corollary debate in this area: that whilst Hume was intractably sceptical as to our ability to “know” of mind-independent causal connections, there remains the issue of whether he nonetheless thought causal connections obtained “out there” in an underlying reality, to which we do not actually have access.
On this “ontological” question Wright’s commitments are “realist”. That Hume believed there are necessary causal connections built into the fabric of existence, even if we can’t have direct access to them. Personally, this is far too quasi-Kantian a conclusion to deduce for my liking. My preferred reading is that Hume is thoroughly sceptical here, too: that whilst there might be causal necessity built into the fabric of existence, equally there might not. As we don’t know (and will never have any way of knowing), the correct position is not ontological “realism”, but simple, healthy, sceptical agnosticism. Wright, however, is quite open about his own commitments and the alternatives available, and his footnotes provide ready ammunition for opponents.
Of particular interest to more historically-minded readers will be both Wright’s lengthy and detailed introduction, and his constant endeavour to situate Hume’s arguments against a background of contemporary debate. Whereas many beginner’s guides simply regurgitate basic biographical platitudes, Wright has taken the trouble not only to provide a detailed over-view of Hume’s early life but also to stress the possible connections between the young man and the later philosophy (if only slight later: Hume finished the Treatise when he was just 27 years old).
Of particular interest here is Wright’s suggestion that Hume’s early psychological breakdown – before his new “scene of thought” which inspired the penning of his masterpiece – was induced by a rigorous attempt to conform his life to the stoic moral teachings of Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, two extremely prominent moral theorists of the early 18th century. Basing this claim not in idle speculation but in Hume’s correspondence, Wright thus makes an important historical contention about the possible motivations for – and our interpretations of – Hume’s repudiation of the stoic “moral sense” theories in favour of an epicureanism that placed pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance at the centre of human psychology. For those who wish to combine philosophy with history to good effect, Wright’s is no trivial suggestion.
Indeed historical sensitivity is one of the most pleasing things about this volume, where intellectual context of Hume’s arguments is always sketched. This is not only interesting in itself, but also helps both to illustrate Hume’s own rival commitments as well as guiding the reader towards interpretations that avoid retrospective conceptual anachronism. This is particularly important when Wright comes to discuss Hume’s moral and political commitments in the final sections of the book.
On one level, by locating Hume’s intervention as a complex response to (amongst others) Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, John Locke and Samuel Clarke, this book happily avoids the trap of becoming a narrow, tired discussion of Hume’s arguments against ethical rationalism to the exclusion of all else. Whilst handling Hume’s rejection of any moral realism derived from a faculty of reason with aplomb, Wright is also wholly alive to the fact that Hume’s real targets in the Treatise were the “moral sense” realisms of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, and the non-naturalistic sceptical moral irrealism of Bernard Mandeville. Accordingly, it is the responses to these authors which command the bulk of Wright’s treatment – which is exactly how it should be, for that is how it is in Hume.
In doing so, however, Wright also makes a subtle yet important scholarly intervention as to the extent of influence upon Hume. The great student of Hume’s thought, Norman Kemp Smith, famously claimed that Hume entered philosophy through the “gateway of morals” and that his moral and political thought were essentially an extension of Hutcheson’s. This interpretation has been followed in recent years by David Fate-Norton in particular, but Wright here aligns himself with scholars such as James Moore and Luigi Turco who emphasise the radical discontinuity between Hume and Hutcheson, with the Treatise constituting a thorough-going repudiation of the Glasgow professor. For what it’s worth, Wright further convinces me that the Kemp Smith interpretation must indeed be rejected.
Insofar as a beginner’s guide can be a tour de force, it is fair to describe Wright’s volume as such. It is, to my knowledge, the best introduction to Hume’s Treatise – and by extension, Hume’s thought – on the market. If you teach a course on Hume, or 18th century philosophy, or ethics, it should be on your reading list. For those just looking for a helpful place to start exploring one of the greatest works of genius ever produced, here it is. This is a book for all, and it deserves attention.
January 18, 2011
Coalition Lies and the Corrosion of Politics
The sheer scale and breadth of the present government’s pre-election lying and post-election u-turning is quite something to behold. Let’s trot through the big ones, that we actually know about.
First and foremost, the stupendous Lib Dem betrayal on tuition fees. From categorical pledges to oppose all fee rises, to backing a lifting of the cap to £9,000 a year. Quite spectacular, and utterly impossible to hide.
Further down the list and marginally less egregious: Cameron denouncing as “Labour lies” any suggestion that the Tories would restrict bus passes for the elderly, cut the Winter Fuel allowance, or get rid of the pension credit. After promising to protect all these things on national television, the Coalition has done the exact opposite.
There’s also the general category of systematic dishonesty about the NHS. The Tories explicitly promised not to touch “frontline services” and to protect the NHS before the election. They are now instigating massive back-door changes. Changes described by “seriously concerned” leading healthcare experts as “unnecessary risks” which are “damaging” and “potentially disastrous”.
Less enormous (but by no means less important) lies that may have escaped your attention include: pledges from Cameron and Clegg to end child detention for those seeking asylum in Britain which have been totally reneged on, and the recent joke of the departure of Control Orders by the front door and their immediate return via the side window.
Oh, and the emergence of a video showing Cameron claiming he wouldn’t cut EMAs. And pledges to protect school funding from cuts, but instead playing jiggery-pokery with the accounts to disguise reduced funding beneath the veneer of a hollowed-out pupil premium. And Tory promises to protect child benefit. And the building of a massive snooping database both Liberals and Conservatives promised they wouldn’t pursue.
Well, you get the picture. Those are really just the ones that came most quickly to hand. I’m sure there’s plenty more.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with some sop that it Pains Me Dearly to see such dishonesty and untruth in our political class. The magical optimism fairy didn’t pay me a visit last night; I’m still as cynical as ever. Politicians lie (often by unavoidable necessity), and being a Tory/Tory-lite Coalition, this bunch lied even more than usual in order to get their paws on power.
What concerns me, however, is the sheer scale and audacity of the Coalition’s reneging on earlier promises. I know the standard line is that none of this is done joyfully, but is the necessary price to pay for “Labour’s deficit”. (Or even more ludicrously, that this is all the outcome of “coalition policy” produced by party compromise, thus wholly divorced from any pre-election pledges.) But fewer and fewer ordinary voters will believe this (if any still do), and such justification will increasingly have traction only with the already-converted.
The real problem is that systematic large-scale dishonesty in politics is corrosive. The present government’s flagrant disregard for its own promises threatens to undermine even the minimal levels of trust Britons place in their political system. If this goes too far, there’s the very real risk that lying and dishonesty will become normalised. And that spells trouble.
Because if voters conclude that all politicians are lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other, then it eventually becomes acceptable for politicians to be lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other. As voters become disillusioned and resigned, all political sides play the same dirty game because only suckers remain honest. It’s a downward trajectory from there. And where do you end up? Well, basically, you end up in Italy. Which is not a good place to be.
So whilst I’m not surprised that Nick and Dave are presiding over a pack of lies dealt by a pack of liars, I do wish they would lie a little less – or at least, a little less obviously.
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Thanks to Guy and Paul for helping to assemble and source the compilation of lies in under 30 minutes.
January 17, 2011
Wikileaks, Switzerland and Nazis
Wikileaks has been handed confidential information by banker Rudolf Elmer, which threatens to reveal Swiss banking complicity in tax evasion and other criminal activity. Accordingly, Elmer is to go on criminal trial for breaking Swiss bank secrecy laws.
One thing you can expect to hear around the build-up to this case is that Swiss banking secrecy was enacted to protect Jewish assets from the Nazis during the 1930s. This was the line repeatedly deployed in 2008, when US authorities unveiled systematic complicity from Swiss bank UBS in assisting American tax avoidance.
It would be nice for the Swiss if it were true; providing some sort of vague moral justification for the systematic undermining of the laws and revenue authorities of other states. But it’s not true.
From Treasure Islands, the new book by Nick Shaxson you should all read:
“A pervasive story now exists that Switzerland put bank secrecy into place to protect German Jewish money from the Nazis. This myth dates back to a bulletin in 1966 from the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (today’s Credit Suisse), and Swiss bankers have wielded it to great effect ever since. American officials negotiating a new tax treaty with Switzerland at that time lodged an official complaint after being frequently lectured about the supposed origins of bank secrecy as protection for Jewish money. A Swiss Federal Council report in March 1970 officially endorsed the story, and this was backed up in 1977 by a lurid book by a former Geneva newspaper editor outlining the fabulous story of Gestapo agents infiltrating Switzerland to worm out Jewish bank details. The problem with the story is that it’s not true
Amid the Great Depression, Swiss farmers’ and workers’ movements began in 1931 to clamour for more control over the banks. Bankers feared state inspection of their hitherto closely controlled financial domain would risk secrets leaking out, and they pressed fiercely for a new law, to make it a crime to violate Swiss bank secrecy. By August 1931, the highly-influential right-wing daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung was attacking government oversight of the banks, and in February 1932 a top banker sent the government draft legislation with a clause making it a crime to violate bank secrecy. It was the French scandal [revelations that up to 4 billion francs were being lost to Swiss-facilitated tax evasion schemes] that October, however, which really spurred government into action. A new banking law was prepared and an official draft was ready by February 1933, just eighteen days after Hitler came to power and long before he had consolidated his grip on the German state or even gained control of all of Germany’s intelligence services. The Swiss law finally adopted in 1934 for the first time made it a criminal offence punishable by fines and prison to violate bank secrecy, and was almost unchanged from the original draft. In Germany the death penalty for having foreign accounts undeclared to the Third Reich only appeared in 1936. Even the Swiss Bankers’ Association has no records of the supposed activities of Gestapo agents coming to Switzerland to squirrel out information about Jewish money.”
Of course, even if it were true that Swiss banking secrecy was originally adopted to protect Jewish assets (which it wasn’t), that wouldn’t justify the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion today. Instead, using of the legacy of the holocaust to provide cover for illicit financial skullduggery simply compounds the distasteful nature of what the Swiss tax haven operation involves.
Incidentally, Treasure Islands continues to pick up excellent reviews. Having started it over the weekend, I can confirm that it’s a cracking read. You should buy it.
January 14, 2011
Cold World
18 years old is a strange age. Legally, you’re an adult. But in many ways you’re still a child. Looking back on my own late teenage years, I’m astonished at how immature I really was.
Which brings me to Edward Woolard. There’s no doubt Woolard was an idiot at the precise moment he threw that fire extinguisher off the top of Milbank. Yet whether he is an idiot through-and-through is a different matter. Certainly the national media branded him a thug in its instant witch hunt. But in truth, none of us know whether he was simply seized by a one-off moment of immature madness.
Either way Woolard is paying dearly. 32 months in jail, at the age of 18. His life prospects in tatters, and a family no doubt heartbroken.
You may think he deserves it. And certainly, it seems clear he had to receive some sort of serious sentence. Not simply to act as a deterrent to other acts of idiocy, but also to reflect that he could have killed somebody. The state can’t, after all, have private citizens behaving in ways which recklessly endanger the lives of others.
And the authorities also had to send a clear message for their own purposes. That even though they lost control at numerous points towards the end of 2010, captured perpetrators can expect to pay dearly for their actions.
It is worth remembering, however, that Woolard didn’t actually kill anybody. And surely that matters (even if the reasons why are philosophically complicated). Two and a half years in jail is a long time. Especially for not killing anybody, in an unpremeditated single act of stupidity. I can’t help but find it excessive.
And that’s partly because I keep thinking: “that could have been me”. Not because I’d ever throw a fire extinguisher off a roof (‘tis not my style). But because when I was 18 I did something very, very stupid too.
Angry and frustrated at the world generally – and heartbroken because the girl I was head-over-heels about decided she preferred her boyfriend after all – I got into a drunken fight one Friday night. Except I’d also been doing some amateur Thai boxing. And I hit the guy in the sort of way that you don’t hit people, even in organised amateur fights. Because you can kill them.
Needless to say I didn’t kill anyone. But if the angles had been a little different, the impact a little more, his alcohol-levels a little higher, it’s very possible I might have. A moment of madness, and I could have killed a man. And gone to prison for 20 years.
But I’m lucky. My moment of madness didn’t go that way. I’m free to pursue a successful and comfortable life. As I sincerely hope the guy I struck 6 years ago currently does.
Incidentally, PC Simon Harwood is lucky too. As we all know, when Ian Tomlinson was walking home from work PC Harwood struck him without warning and pushed him to the ground. Not long later, Tomlinson was dead. Yet Harwood never saw the inside of a dock, and the Crown Prosecution Service decided this particular bobby wouldn’t even stand trial for assault.
No such luck for Edward Woolard. I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Of course I’d like to say that the hypocrisy of a judicial apparatus which allows the police to kill whilst giving children lengthy prison terms will lead the The People to rise up for reform. But that’s spectacularly unlikely, I’m afraid.
So all I really have to note today is that it’s a cold world out there. If you’re lucky enough to be sitting by the fire, think on that a little while.
