Crooked Timber

Among the depressing pieces of news from London this week (depressing except for opponents of organised sport, who have, more or less, been guaranteed that the 2012 Olympics will be a lot of fun)—a BNP candidate, Mr Richard Barnbrook, was elected to the Greater London Assembly. So, how should he be treated?

One option is what you might call the Vidal Sassoon treatment. This involves gathering together large numbers of trained killers and street-fighters, physically busting up meetings, and brutalising fascists whenever one bumps into them. In this documentary (still online, and well worth a listen), one member of the 43 Group recalls encountering one of the ideologues of the British Fascists on a bus, holding onto the bars, and kicking him off with the full force of his body. (A TV documentary is on youtube here, here, and here).

Continue reading “The Vidal Sassoon Treatment.”

It’s beginning to look as if the voters of London have taken it upon themselves to abolish the post of Mayor land themselves with Boris Johnson. A remarkable move: reject a manifestly competent (if not especially likeable) incumbent, and a manifestly decent challenger (who, in addition to being gay, is related to Hugh Paddick!), for… well, Boris Johnson. (See Martin O’ Neill for invective—I’m too bemused and detached myself). If this comes to pass, I would say that it should be the one positive note of the day for Gordon Brown. Ken Livingstone’s mayoralty was too independent from Labour for them to get any credit for anything he did well; whereas David Cameron has tied his flag to Boris’s mast. The post of Mayor has far too little power really to do London a lot of good, but it has enough to do it a lot of harm, and there’s every chance that a Johnson mayoralty will oblige, and the Tories will suffer. If this comes to pass, Cameron, not Brown, should be disappointed.

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”

MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”

He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.’” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”¹
Continue reading ““Let it rip.””

Andy Gelman links to a new paper on money and UK politics. The abstract speaks for itself.

While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. We find that serving in Parliament roughly doubled the wealth at death of Conservative MPs but had no discernible effect on the wealth of Labour MPs. We argue that Conservative MPs profited from office in a lax regulatory environment by using their political positions to obtain outside work as directors, consultants, and lobbyists, both while in office and after retirement. Our results are consistent with anecdotal evidence on MPs’ outside financial dealings but suggest that the magnitude of Conservatives’ financial gains from office was larger than has been appreciated.

Andy isn’t sure about the substantive impact that this has for political science, given the disparities between the amounts of money that flows through politicians’ hands in functioning democracies and the amounts of money that they may personally derive from office. I’m not so sure about that, as the monies sticking to politicians’ hands do likely help shape their incentives (e.g. one can plausibly speculate that Tories who rock the boat too much aren’t going to have much luck cashing in on those directorships), but, in any event, the fact that Andy doesn’t spot any obvious methodological problems makes me at least think that the observed effect is likely real.

There’s been a marked increase in the harassment of photographers by the police, quasi-police, security guards and suchlike since 9/11, and the UK is no exception. Photographers have been (illegally) forced to delete pictures by officious police and have been told plain untruths about what the law says on the matter. A recent anti-terrorism campaign even has posters with the legend “Thousands of People Take Photos Every Day. What if One of Them Seems Odd?”, and invites the public to involve the constabulary. Since photography is a hobby that disproportionately attracts slightly nerdy loners, lots of photographers “seem odd”, but they ought to be spared this sort of attention!

Now Austin Mitchell MP, himself a keen photographer (and a past victim of such behaviour), is taking a stand, and has introduced an early day motion in the House of Commons

That this House is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which the police, police community support officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious ground such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.

Readers in the UK could email their MPs and express their support for Mitchell’s stand, they could also email Mitchell himself. Since it seems to be the trendy thing to do, I’ve also set up a Facebook group in support .

Some commenters thought that I should have waited before attacking the BBC’s “White” season. After, all, they argued … legitimate topic of inquiry …. watch first, judge later, … blah blah. Martin O’Neill has been watching, and he doesn’t like what he’s seen. Specifically, he has an article in the New Statesman deploring Denys Blakeway’s film about Enoch Powell, which attempts both a partial rehabilitation of the man and manages to suggest (without saying directly) that Powell’s “rivers of blood” claim was vindicated on 7/7 (a product of multiculturalism). Anyway, I’m summarizing Martin, so surf over to his excellent piece.

Martin Wolf, whom I frequently disagree with, but always find worth reading, had an excellent piece in last Thursday’s Financial Times. It was about the quasi-hysteria in the UK press over the prospect that ‘non-doms’ – wealthy foreigners resident in the UK - would be obliged either to become taxpayers or fork over 30,000UKP per year after they had lived there for 7 years.
Continue reading “Taxes and the little people”

Well here’s an interesting, and worrying, development. BBC2 is about to screen a series of programmes under the general title “White”, which purport to document the fact that the white working class in Britain (or just England?) feels embattled, with its “culture” under threat, and so on. The series includes a film re-examining Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, and it looks pretty clear that other documentaries will feature not a few blokes beginning sentences “I’m not racist, but ….”

There’s an oddity about the addition of the modifier “white” to “working class”, in the British context. Historically, Britain has been a country where class has trumped ethnicity as the key dimension of social stratification for politics. Class solidarity, and Labour politics, appealed across ethnic and national divisions. Of course ethnicity mattered, but, in the end it was class that structured the institutions in an through which political compromise and conflict happened. Perhaps the prominence given to “white working-class culture” by these film-makers merely reflects the fact that class has been or is being replaced by ethnic balkanization on American lines.

The other thing worth noticing is how various people who position themselves as vaguely transgressive leftists (who spend all their time criticizing “the left”) are anticipating this series. (I’m thinking, of course, of people on the fringes of the Euston Manifesto crowd.) So, for example, John Lloyd (I’m assuming it is the same John Lloyd) has a piece in the FT making sympathetic noises, and Andrew Anthony (a kind of Nick Cohen-lite) had an article in last Sunday’s Observer. Given their leftist background, most “decents” have promoted either a class-based solidarity or an abstract universalism of citizenship in opposition to multiculturalism (which their blogs incessantly attack). But these pieces suggest something new. One possibility is that they are being drawn to the promotion of “my culture too!”, a resentment-driven demand for recognition within a multicultural system; another is that they are pushing the ethnos in the demos. Maybe they haven’t worked it out themselves yet. Either way, it gives me the creeps.

Rowan Williams doesn’t need me to defend him, having, preumably, better placed and more powerful friends (one in partiuclar). But here goes anyway. One of my several Anglophile (and this one a rare Episcopalian) in-laws just sent me (approvingly) this piece from the Sunday Times, and added the following, rather lovely if a little unlikely, quote, recommending a different version of multiculturalism from that to which he takes the Archbishop to be committed (which, I gather from googling, comes from Mark Steyn):

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

‘’You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Continue reading “Will no-one rid me….”

The UK is all agog at the moment over the bugging of an MP’s conversations with one of his constituents, while the constituent was being held by police on (apparently credible) suspicion of terrorist offences. There seems to be quite a debate going back and forth about whether the “Wilson Doctrine” (basically forbidding the tapping of MPs’ telephones and commonly thought to also rule out bugging them in more modern ways) has any place in the new world order. I think this is a very easy question to answer, along game-theoretic lines not a million miles from those suggested by John in a post on the general subject of bugging and spying a couple of years ago. All one has to do is to remember the following fairly basic general principle, which would hardly make it onto the syllabus at most decent business schools because it’s so obvious:

If you create the presumption that the cops can hear anything that you tell an MP, then people will only tell their MP things that they would be happy to tell a cop

I would guess that there are plenty of people in the Muslim community in Tooting who would tell Sadiq Khan MP things that they would not tell the police. I would further surmise that the general security of the British public (ie me) is benefited to some small extent from the fact that there are people in the Muslim community in Tooting who would tell Sadiq Khan MP things that they would not tell the police. I rather suspect that the bod who decided to bug Sadiq Khan’s conversation with Babar Ahmad was concentrating purely on his own case and did not consider the more general ramifications of undermining the general principle that MPs conversations are not directly accessible to the police.

A kind reader alerted me to an article in last Sunday’s Guardian, on the proposal by the Conservative Party to introduce the Dutch system of Kraamzorg in the UK. As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, under this system a qualified maternity nurse cares for mother and the newborn child at home in the first week after the birth.

The article gives a fair account of what these nurses do, and of the advantages of this system. Yet I’m surprised by the claim that the system would be too expensive to be introduced. Of course the question is ‘expensive in comparison with what’. In the Netherlands, one reason why mothers who give birth leave the hospital so quickly after the delivery (if they go to the hospital at all, that is), is the cost; a maternity nurse at home is much cheaper than the cost of keeping mother and child in hospital (as is the case in Belgium, for example). I don’t know what the kind of care is that is currently provided to newborns and their mothers in the UK - yet it is self-evident that if the comparison is made with no care for the newborn and mother at all, then the system is relatively expensive. But how under a system of no care at all the mothers can take the rest that they need is a mystery to me. The days that this could be provided by family members are, for most of us, long gone. Hence not a bad plan from the Tories, if you ask me.

My long post from a couple of months ago on James Scott’s Seeing Like a State and Brad DeLong’s review of it enjoyed a temporary revival when Brad republished it in his ‘DeLong Smackdown’ series. But I got a bit of grief from one reader, who thought that I had given Scott far too easy a ride. Which is probably true – while I admire the book, I do have many disagreements with it, which I would have gotten into if I had been reviewing the book proper, rather than arguing against Brad’s interpretation. One such disagreement popped up when I was reading it again for class a couple of weeks ago, together with John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power.¹
Continue reading “Seeing Like “Seeing Like a State””