Fans of the Hotelling/Downs Median Voter Model will be truly gratified by the latest two policy initiatives to be chucked in the general direction of the National Health Service. From the Conservatives (NB to non-UK readers: they are our right-wing capitalist party, which means that they are in favour of socialised medicine and abolishing university tuition fees).
” We will bring back matrons to take charge and deliver clean and infection-free wards”
And from the Labour Party (NB to non-UK readers: they are our left-wing socialist party, which means that they are in favour of privatisation of local government services and identity cards)
” Matrons will take the lead in setting standards for hospital cleanliness”
Three reasons why I find this particular piece of policy-by-Daily-Mail-editorial-page rubbish particularly disspiriting.
1. Some nurses are men; if I was one, then I think I would be pretty cross at the idea that a senior position was being created whose name came from the Latin for “mother”.
2. A “matron” in the NHS today is a ward sister with extra managerial responsibilities; ie a quite senior medical professional. If I was one, I think I would be quite cross that in the view of my political masters, my real role in life was to be a comedy battleaxe running a finger over the dusting.
3. This whole business is a response to a stream of tabloid hysteria about MRSA. MRSA is a bug which colonises the noses and skin of lots of human beings, and becomes a problem when transferred to burns or wounds patients through poor quarantine or lack of handwashing. It’s a problem completely unrelated to “dirty wards”, as anyone who ends up spending an hour or two reading the free leaflets in hospital waiting rooms can confirm. If you put every hospital in the UK into a big pot and boiled them, there would still be an MRSA problem as colonies of it are endemic in the population and it is spread by people, not wards. Apparently, the manifesto-writers for our two leading political parties either don’t know this, or do know it and have decided that what the Mail thinks (plus the opportunity to pander to the turn-back-the-clock tendency in British public life) is more important than the facts.
Like I say, democracy isn’t working.
The 15-year-long “McLibel” case came to an end yesterday. Two anti-McDonald’s protesters won their fight in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that they did not recieve a fair trial in the UK. They were not provided with legal aid to assist them in their defense against libel charges brought by McDonald’s (thus the ruling was against the UK government rather than McDonald’s itself; Mickey D’s won the original libel suit in 1995). I think the Independent is right in calling the original suit, over a leaflet accusing McDonald’s of bad labor practices and worse food “one of the biggest own goals in the annals of corporate public relations.” Seriously, they should have just let that slide.
Slightly OT: damn, y’all have really got some supra-national organizations over there in Yurp, dontcha? It’s like faceless bureaucrats in Strasbourg are telling everybody what to do, or something. Voting for some incompetent Tories would probably straighten that right out; you might want to look into it.
Useful site of the year, and it’s only January. Chris Lightfoot has (I think with a couple of his mates) put together this extremely useful site which will allow you to send a communication to your MP, free gratis and for nothing (Americans, spammers, and loonies1, you are out of luck I’m afraid and will need to wait for someone to invent a different service for you). It’s very useful for sending letters to MPs who don’t have readily available email addresses but (for example) helped sort out a parking ticket for you a couple of years ago and you want to say thank you. Or for that matter, if you want to ask them not to start any more wars, introduce ID card schemes. Or to suggest to them that the government is unlikely to do any better picking winners among immigrants than it did among nationalised industries. If your local MP (or MEP, MSP, etc) is a Tory or a LibDem, you can have a go at him or her too.
Personally, I think that democracy is basically doomed in the UK, but Chris still thinks it’s worth saving, so well done him for trying.
Footnote:
1Other than loonies who happen to live in the constituency of the MP they are trying to write to, I suppose.
Nick Barlow has the details on the new political party “Veritas”, launched by former TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk (Yanks; kind of like Jerry Springer meets Tucker Carlson, uptown!). I hope he will form some sort of bloc with the Ulster Unionists, simply because I’ve been saving up an “Orangeman” joke for that eventuality for the last three years.
Below the fold I reproduce (with minor editing) an old D-squared Digest post, explaining why these parties are doomed, and why it’s a big mistake for Kilroy et al to extrapolate from their strong showings in European and local council elections to any hope of not getting carted out at a General Election. This analysis generalises, by the way, and that is why (full disclosure time) I have a chunky bet on Oona King to keep her seat in a two-way fight against George Galloway. As and when a spread betting market opens up, I will be a seller of Kilroy-Silk’s chances, in reasonable size.
This post was dated May 02, 2003. It appeared the day after UK local government elections
Oh dear. As a political junkie, I think I’ve hit rock bottom. Last night, Mrs Digest1 came up the stairs late at night wondering why I wasn’t in bed and found me watching coverage of the (UK) local elections. I honestly think I’d have been less ashamed if I’d been caught watching a porn channel. I have never remotely been tempted to vote in these elections (or indeed to find out whether I could have voted; I’m not sure whether they had them in London), but I’m just addicted to the coverage. I love the fancy logos (the BBC had a particularly good “Vote ‘03” one which frankly deserved a better election), the silly computer graphics of debating chambers, the “results coming in” from places I couldn’t point to on a map, the sheer self-importance of it all. And, of course, the sadist in me loves to see how badly most politicians cope with staying up late at night. (Thinking about it, I seem to remember posting a while ago about how the appeal of boring sports like snooker was that they basically turned on the psychological destruction of one of the contestants. I was also watching the snooker from the Crucible last night, and it sort of segued into the elections. Same appeal).
But although I’m an addict, I’m not so far gone as to believe that these elections matter. In fact, I would support the view that local council elections matter a negative amount; the better a political party does in them, the worse a state it is in. To explain this view, let us consider the makeup of the electorate for these elections. We know (or at least, credibly guesstimate) that of the voting population of the UK:
a) 2% are fascists
b) about 4% are Welsh or Scottish nationalists.
c) 10% are civic-minded souls who will vote purely on local issues
d) A thick 10% are single-issue nutters of one kind or another
e) about 1% are more or less fictional characters because they are the result of ballot fraud.
All of these groups will be voting in the local elections for sure; the fascists and nationalists have to turn out because it’s their only chance of getting anyone elected at all, and the other three groups have to vote by definition. Already, with these groups, all five of which are by any reasonable standard weirdos, we’re up to 27% of the electorate. A further 5% of the population belong to political parties, and about four-fifths of these can be expected to get out and vote. We have now reached 31% of the electorate and turnout was only 36% in the local elections.
The weirdoes have usually made up their mind how they’re going to vote on issues of no relevance to a general election campaign (I include the “civics” in this category, because their assessment of who might be best for parking permits in Kensall Green is a completely random predictor of their actual political allegiance). The party hacks vote the party line. Therefore, when we’re “taking a barometer reading of the nation” in these elections, we are looking at a sample which is made up of fourteen percent regular Joes who just happened to be walking past the polling station, plus eighty six percent cranks, ideologues and hacks. If you’re doing well with that crowd, you’re in trouble.
The problem is that the cranks are the swing voters in local elections. If something’s on the cover of (say) the Daily Mail every day, then you can guess that about eighty per cent of the readership don’t give a fuck, and just turn to the features about Catherine Zeta Jones getting a bit fat and the Fred Basset cartoon. But the more gullible fifth will be foaming at the mouth with rage as directed, and if it’s the Mail, that’s four hundred thousand voters out of a turnout less than 15 million. One party ends up being the beneficiary of this 2.5% swing, and believes that there’s been a massive endorsement of their entire platform. Since one tabloid or another (in fact, usually more than one) is always in the self-righteous rage game, this swing is completely random, and since usually the tabloids are catering to a niche audience (people who need to be told they are right all the time because at some level they realise their views are bizarre), there is a come-uppance at the general election when the population as a whole make up their minds. There are real consequences to this, unfortunately; hundreds of people have quite likely been tortured and killed because the political class of the UK got it into their head that being “soft on asylum-seekers” was an important political issue on the basis of local election results.
Bottom line: “Really popular with nutters” isn’t an election winning strategy, but it can get you a good showing in UK local elections. All of which makes me even more determined to vote Tory next time3. I really want to punish Blair for lying to me, and I now know that I can do so without taking any material risk that the buggers will get in. And the frightening thing for Duncan Smith2 is that my kind of support is probably quite a material proportion of his entire franchise.
Footnotes:
1She has asked me to point out that her name is not Mrs. Digest and will not be until I get a chunk of gold on her finger.
2I think that Duncan Smith was a politician of the time, but I really can’t remember anything about him, or why I mentioned him in this context3.
3Ahhhh of course, John B in comments jogged my memory. “Duncan Smith” was actually Ian Duncan Smith, who led the Conservative Party at the time, and at the time I was so incensed at being lied to by Labour that I was going to vote Tory. Don’t worry etc, since that post I have found out that my local MP is Frank Dobson, who voted against the war (and also has sound opinions on the real issues that affect real people, like the proposed redevelopment of my local boozer and a parking ticket on my Triumph Spitfire that he sorted out in 1999), so I will be voting Labour, with heavy heart.
Longtime readers will remember that there was quite an active debate a few months ago on the subject of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist imam, and his visit to London. There have been a few developments since then. Ken Livingstone (mayor of London, for our non-UK readers) has produced a dossier justifying his decision to share a platform with Qaradawi, out of the apparent belief that this is in some way a substitute for meeting the crowds of outraged Londonders who thought he shouldn’t have. Harry’s Place has a lot of material on whether or not this dossier cuts the mustard; they think it doesn’t.
On a number of issues; apologism for suicide bombers, advocacy of killing gays, wife-beating, etc, it seems pretty clear that Qaradawi is possessed of some fairly horrible reactionary views. This isn’t much of a surprise; to be honest, it was free information which could simply be read off the fact that he is a fundamentalist imam. But Ken’s dossier does contain one important point.
That is, that the particular offence which caused us at CT to come off the fence and condemn him - a statement that it was OK or even required for jihadis to kidnap Western civilians in Iraq - is a statement which Qaradawi denies ever having made. In general, while I can’t emphasise enough that he is not someone who I would ever like to see gaining influence in the UK, Qaradawi appears to have repeatedly, consistently, and at some personal cost, maintained the view that fundamentalist Islam does not impose any duty of violent jihad against the West, and that killing infidel civilians is wrong. This raises a quite important issue as to what kind of fundamentalist Muslim we need to be talking to (I’m trying to talk in general terms here to avoid issues specifically related to Qaradawi; I am not yet sure whether his view on suicide bombers is just the general apologism common throughout the Arab Middle East or something more virulent).
There’s a lot of debate in the Harry’s Place comment threads that I’m not going to try to summarise here, but below the fold is the text of an email I sent to the editors (I was having a bit of technical trouble so I decided to summarise my views in an email. I think it makes sense as a standalone, but you’ll probably need to read this to see what I mean by “David makes a good case”).
I think that David makes a good case, but retain my own view. There seem to be two issues:
1. Whether the Mayor of London ought to be making friends with people with views that are repugnant to Londoners. Verdict: No he shouldn’t. I think I’ve been pretty consistent on this one. But there is also:
2. Whether, all things considered, it makes all that much sense to demonise Qaradawi and say that he is a) as bad as the rest of them and b) persona non grata everywhere in the UK. I think that (contingent on getting a particular answer on the two questions of exactly how much of an apologist for suicide bombers he is, and whether he did actually say those things about civilians in Iraq, both of which questions I regard as still open) the verdict on this one might be that we shouldn’t.
My reasoning is that first, there are an awful lot of things that we find repugnant about Islam; treatment of women, treatment of gays, hatred of non-Muslims, repression of Muslims, endorsement of terrorist violence against non-Muslims. However, of these three, at present, the endorsement of terrorist violence against non-Muslims ought to be considered far and away the most important for purposes of making UK public policy.
Given this, my instinct is to adopt the usually sound principle of “divide and conquer”. I reject the analysis that “dealing with Qaradawi gives encouragement to extremists and marginalises liberals”. I think that divide and rule tells us that, given that there is a material population of Muslims potentially susceptible to becoming terrorists, we will do best by emphasising the differences between them rather than the similarites. This would be in the second edition of my One-Minute MBA course. Demonisation of Qaradawi makes it much harder to use divide-and-conquer tactics, because it allows the violent imams the point that even people who denounce violence get beasted by the West, and gives the impression that our objection is to Islam rather than to violence (in fact we dislike them both, but I take it as given that violence is the current priority).
Another generally sound principle of negotiation is that you direct your message to people who have influence over the course of events rather than to other interested parties. This is why I reject the attempt to link the issues of our treatment of Qaradawi with the development of liberalism in the Arab world. If the liberal Arabs held any influence at all over the terrorist-susceptible population, things would be different (note that we are talking about the terrorist-susceptible population here, which is a small subset of the total British Muslim population and which is, indeed, concentrated on the two big London mosques). They don’t, but Qaradawi does. So, he is a very important player here; he is someone who has credibility with the people who we want to turn away from violence, and he is (caveats above) against the use of terrorist violence. It is unfortunate, but hardly coincidental, that he has a lot of repugnant views.
Which brings me on to the third generally sound negotiating principle; that progress is made through incremental concessions. For a Wahhabi, to demand that they don’t hate gays and oppress women is not an incremental concession; you’re effectively asking them to give up their religion. Again, there are several tens of millions of Muslims out there who would be considered fundamentalists by any reasonable standard. The whole thesis of the war on terror (and certainly of any more general thesis of “Islamism”) is that these people think that their religion obliges them to kill us. This means we have a choice of either a) talk to them and convince them it doesn’t or b) kill them. I’m up for making a real effort at a), not only because b) is what they call “genocide”, but also because under b) they are quite likely to have a go at killing us back, which carries the risk that I get caught in the crossfire.
There is always of course (I covered this in previous MBA post) option c), of “do neither and wait for more information or a better alternative”. In this particular case, I think that the cost of waiting is unacceptably high. While we’re refusing to talk to the umma, the other side is pumping them up with three sermons a day and a bunch of satellite television channels. If there is a version of Wahhabism under which it is possible to be a good Muslim without killing infidels, then we really need to ensure that this message gets the widest possible publicity in the Wahhabi-susceptible community.
If only Muslims lived in the “Red states”! Then everybody would be falling over themselves to remind us that the only hope of making progress in bringing them toward sane politics is to talk to them in their own terms and not to spend disproportionate amounts of time and effort telling ourselves how horrible they are.
That was perhaps longer than I intended, but I suppose reading it here saves you from having to bother reading it again when it goes on CT.
best,
dd
I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.
So what was wrong with the SBC?
(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.
What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).
But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not a priori ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.
Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.
(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.
SBCers have asked why religion should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. If is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a prima facie justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.
Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as The Satanic Verses has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.
Gosh, my pet issues are piling up today! George Galloway won his libel case against the Telegraph.
The week before last I suggested that “Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much.” Well, he won, but he didn’t win small - £150k is a lot of money given that UK libel awards are de facto capped at £200K these days. Basically, I suggested at the time that “much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase ‘there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason’” and it did. The judge decided that the Telegraph had crossed the line between neutral reporting of (after all, pretty damning) facts, and putting the boot into Galloway. This more or less amounted to malice, and the word “qualified” in “qualified privilege” is there to indicate that you can’t use this defence to make statements motivated by malice.
If the Telegraph had won this case, we would have the public interest defence for newspapers established, and the British press would have been that much freer from our ludicrous libel laws. So it’s a bit of a bummer all round.
Galloway’s name is not cleared by this (nor could it be; the truth of the allegations was not an issue in the trial because of the Telegraph’s use of the privilege defence). There are still big questions outstanding over the funding of Galloway’s charities, which are being investigated by Parliament. The really irritating thing here is that the Telegraph threw away a potentially very strong story simply because they could not resist the temptation to throw a load of nasty abuse at a prominent lefty and anti-war figure. This is a lesson which I hope that the pro-war side will pick up (and one I’ve commented on in the past ; it’s simply not on to claim that people who disagreed with you about the specific rush to war in March 2003, did so because they were supporters of Saddam Hussein. That’s not an honest way to carry on the debate, it’s unpleasant and it is, apparently, in the strictest sense, malicious.
Lots of fun and games coming out of the Telegraph / George Galloway libel trial, so I thought I might as well dig up the second ever post I did on CT, handicapping the race a bit. I’m not sure that I’ve got much to add to that post, to be honest; even the links seem to still be alive. The Telegraph is going for a defence of qualified privilege, and Galloway isn’t trying to suggest that the documents were fakes, so it is likely to all turn on the question of whether the Telegraph’s journalism at the time was “responsible”. In which case, my guess is that much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase “there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason”. Charles Moore’s trash-talking of Galloway during the period when he thought GG wasn’t going to sue might also come into the equation. My guess is that Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much. A bit disappointing for free speech fans, because it maintains the irritating state of affairs arising from Times vs Reynolds; while the House of Lords has hung out the tantalising prospect of a generalised public interest defence, nobody has actually won a case on one yet.
Currently Tradesports has Bush at about a 56% chance to win the Presidency. But the Iowa Electronic Markets shows a slight lean towards a Kerry victory.
To be sure, the IEM tracks overall votes and Tradesports electoral votes, so these leanings could be consistent. And if Kerry wins the popular vote and loses outright they will be. But that looks rather unlikely. Kerry’s national vote has trailed his battleground states vote in just about every poll that’s looked at this split. This is not particularly surprising since the Bush campaign and its surrogates have massively overspent the Kerry campaign (and its surrogates) on national advertising with Kerry focusing almost exclusively on battleground state advertising.
The IEM numbers are fairly close, but if they hold I suspect one or other (or quite likely both) markets will end up on the wrong side of this election. On the other hand, if Kerry does repeat Al Gore’s efforts and win the popular vote without taking over the White House, I might have to revise my faith in the success of these markets. (Of course if that happens I’ll have much more to worry about than being wrong on a technical question like this one.)
Mark Steyn promises to resign if Kerry is elected.
Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.
I doubt he’s quite up to it, but at least his heart’s in the right place.
James, in comments to my Condorcet post, writes
It will only anger the American voter to suggest that foreign nationals should be involved in electing the US President.
Of course (some) foreign nationals are allowed to vote in British general elections (Henry, Kieran and Maria would be if they were resident). I’m guessing that there are other countries that also allow (some) foreign nationals to vote in national elections. [1] Information?
1 EU citizens can vote in countries other than their own in European elections and in the UK I think they can vote in local elections too.
Compass is a new organisation that has emerged out of what could perhaps best be termed the thoughtful ex-Blairite left. It’s closely connected with the magazine Renewal. Its first national conference is coming up, with speakers like Polly Toynbee, Ruth Lister, Stuart White, Michael Meacher and Gordon Brown. Looks well worth going to, for those of you who don’t live thousands of miles from London.
Via the Virtual Stoa I have learned that you have to sign up to MPs’ email lists. I suggest that Tim Collins find out who is faking his site and email list, and close them down. I know it’s a fake, because if it were true Gyles Brandreth would be listed.
The Hansard Society have produced a report on political blogging
Political Blogs – Craze or Convention? [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.
[via Harry’s Place ]
Last night’s Newsnight had a nice what-he-said-then/what-he-says-now juxtaposition, and the same quotes appear in today’s Independent:
We are asked to accept that, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. (Tony Blair, 18 March 2003)
I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. (Tony Blair 6 July 2004)
On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?
Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.
On this sacred day of democracy, two old posts of mine putting forward the case for not taking part in this complete farrago. I would add two points in the context of the current UK elections:
1) Given the large-scale use of postal ballots, the “electoral bezzle” (the proportion of the turnout which consists of fictional characters who are the result of electoral fraud) is probably much larger this time than in previous elections.
2) As the FT points out today, the list system used in the European elections means that there are substantial numbers of political hacks and placemen who will get elected no matter what, making it even more pointless to bother voting.
Don’t encourage them.
Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.
Chris’s post on higher education in the UK has reminded me of an idea I devised when I was experiencing the regime of UK Higher Ed. Numerous UK academics are dissatisfied with their working conditions in exactly the way that Chris’s correspondent is, though not all of them would feel comfortable decamping. If I were a member of the Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament I would be very tempted to capitalize on this. I’d try to get a long-term commitment for funding a small new academic institution in whichever country I was in, which would provide an elite undergraduate and graduate education to a small number of students (at first), and would, by providing much happier working conditions and slightly better incomes, provide a magnet for high-quality academics in English institutions (whom I would pursue aggressively).
Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Glasgow all have excellent communications and transport infrastructures. Anecdotally I know that a good number of Welsh (and, I presume, Scottish) students already spurn Oxbridge to remain in their own country for college (is there actual research on this?): the mark of success would be increasing these numbers, and, perhaps, competing for international students too (since international students would pay higher fees — and given the low cost of living in Wales, at least, and 3, rather than 4, year courses, these institutions could compete with good private liberal-arts colleges in the US). It should be relatively easy to succeed in getting high-quality faculties in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, with slightly better incomes and much better working conditions, especially if the institutions were proximate to the parliament and assembly; and even in the sciences central government could not make the scientists ineligible for EU or private funding.
Why bother? Elite institutions might have economic benefits in the private sector, by attracting high-tech industries etc. Perhaps more importantly, they might attract talented students some of whom would then stay in the area for at least some of their careers. Perhaps most importantly, though I hesitate to attribute such base motives to people as fine as the AMs and MSPs, if it worked it would be a sock in the eye to the English.
A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.
The entire report can be downloaded from HM Treasury’s website hereA BREAKDOWN OF TRUST
7.29 A side effect of a modern university’s far-reaching role and breadth of activities is the increased number of stakeholders who hold the institution to account. The result is an uncoordinated and often unnecessarily burdensome system of accountability and regulation. Two independent reports have highlighted the need to reduce the accountability burden on universities. While a number of the recommendations from the Better Regulation Task Force report have been implemented, progress has been slow.
7.30 At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the Government’s use of hypothecated funding to achieve its strategic objectives, creating more regulatory pressures and accusations from the sector of micro-management. HEFCE, for example, is currently running between 40 and 50 separate funding initiatives on behalf of government departments.
7.31 Universities in the UK are operating on the margin — of 131 institutions in England, for example, 47 ran operating deficits in 2002, with the remaining 84 averaging only a 2.2 per cent surplus on revenue. This puts pressure on universities to chase every available pound of funding. With each new funding stream comes new regulatory burdens. In 2003, HEFCE is budgeting to channel 14 per cent of its funds through hypothecated schemes. About half of these funding initiatives were “top-sliced”: that is, the cash to fund them originally came from a reduction in core funding, rather than from additional government funds. In such cases, universities are often required to apply and account for money that had previously been delivered to them through the core grant. The unintended consequence of central government initiatives is that the sector is in a defensive mood and feels micro-managed.
7.32 In Scotland, the Scottish Executive, through the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, makes less use of hypothecated funding, and this is one factor contributing to a much closer, more respectful relationship between the funders and Scotland’s universities. The other perhaps more important factor is that with only a relatively small number of institutions, it is easier to build close and trusting relationships. Similar considerations apply in Wales and Northern Ireland.
7.33 Public funding needs to be carefully supervised and institutions held to account. But the level of burden is often disproportionate to the money involved, and policies can be untargeted. In many cases, initiatives are designed around the lowest common denominator and all universities, however well-managed, are treated in the same way. The constant layering of new initiatives on top of old, often uncoordinated across government departments and agencies, creates an overly complicated regime.
7.34 The overarching problem, however, comes down to a matter of trust. The Government does not seem to have enough confidence in the way that universities run themselves to give them extra funding without strings attached. Some of this is justified – the sector has in the past suffered from poor management and a lack of strategic thinking. Yet if universities are to become more creative and play their full part in regional and national economies, then ways must be found to give them more room to develop a strategic vision and take entrepreneurial risks.
Recommendation 7.4
The Review recommends that the Government and all funders should minimise the use of hypothecated funding streams.
Funders should continue to consolidate individual funding into larger streams, more proportionate to the necessary level of bureaucracy and regulation.
Smaller hypothecated funding streams should, where possible, be allocated on a metrics or formulaic basis, rather than by bidding.
Funders should minimise audit requirements on hypothecated funding streams.
“Top-sliced” funding streams should have a limited life of no more than three years, after which they should be rolled back into core funding, unless policy is explicitly renewed.
I recently bought the DVDs of the first three series of The West Wing, which make for far too compulsive viewing. Watching it, the same thought occured to me as has occured to many others: namely, how much better President Josiah Bartlet is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s President David Palmer would also get my vote (if I had one) over most post-war Presidents. Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office. Not so fictional British Prime Ministers, who seem to be either Machiavellian (Francis Urquhart ) or ineffectual (Jim Hacker ). Perhaps only Harry Perkins comes close to matching an ideal in the way that Bartlet and Palmer do. I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures and I’m sure there are more examples of fictional leaders to play with. Suggestions?
Great news for British people who occasionally worry that they might be stranded away from the comforting gaze of a CCTV camera, or who think that the police force has too many restraints placed on it in the name of civil liberties.
As of a speech yesterday, our blessed Prime Minister has decided that telephone tapping (an investigation methodology more usually associated with terrorists and international drug gangs) should be permitted for investigations into criminals suspected of offences which would carry a sentence of less than three years if convicted. I know the civil liberties crowd will whine, but as far as I’m concerned, the prospect of not knowing who might be listening in to my phone calls is a small price to pay in the fight against dangerous driving, carrying a knife in public, graffiti and similar massive threats to our lives and liberty.
Even better news, though, is the introduction of “individually targeted CCTV”. It’s horrendously wasteful to just put CCTV cameras up in public places and hope that someone happens along to commit an offence in front of them. Similarly, to wait until an offence is reported and then find out who did it is a waste of scarce resources that could be spent on the NHS. What you need to do is select people who the police think are criminals, put a CCTV camera in their house, then watch them like a hawk until they do something illegal. Then you can swoop down and whizz them off to jail without bothering with a costly and time-consuming jury trial. Since the British State has recently become perfect and never makes mistakes, it’s flawless. Hurray for Tony!
You’ve got to admit it’s a good April Fool’s joke. It took me ages to mock up that page and persuade the Guardian to host it on their website.
Oliver Kamm has a fun post (and ensuing discussion) giving his nominations for the worst UK ministers since the WWII. Some of his nominations are obvious — Michael Foot for worst leader of the opposition (not, of course, a ministerial post, but you get the idea), Anthony Eden as worst prime Minister (though Churchill is overrated, and why have Major rather than Callaghan as runner up?). Others seem to get the nod simply because bad things happened on their watch, which it is not really reasonable to blame them for — like Nick Brown for Agriculture, and Byers for Transport. They handled their crises badly, to be sure, but is it fair to condemn them rather than the numerous lightweights who never had a crisis to handle? Other still mystify me perhaps because of my ignorance — why is Douglas Hurd the worst FS? One of the commentators rightly takes Kamm to task for leaving George Brown off the list — maybe he just deserves a special award of his own. Finally there are nominees who are simply political: Shirley Williams, I presume, is blamed for comprehensivisation despite the fact that it was set in process by her predecessors Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher (yes, that’s right, that Margaret Thatcher). I believe (though somebody could correct me) that more LEAs went comprensive under the preceeding Heath government than during Williams’s time at the DES, and the evidence against comprehensive schooling is mostly hype. Why not John Patten, a truly awful education secretary, and surely at least more deserving of runner up than Kenneth Baker? (not that I have any agenda against him…).
If I were less tired, I would write a post exploring the applicability, in our post-WMD world, of The Five Standard Excuses for any Failed Government Project described by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. I conjecture that some varietal of each of them will be found in talk about Iraq as prior certainties about Saddam’s monstrous armaments evaporate. The excuses are as follows:
1. There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything but security prevents its disclosure. (The Anthony Blunt excuse.)
2. It has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limit.
3. It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before it provided much valuable data and considerable employment. (The Concorde excuse.)
4. It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again. (The Munich Agreement excuse.)
5. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual now being dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures. (The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse.)
Some of these excuses have been employed by the U.S. government for some time, notably (1). A version of (2) is also becoming more popular with them. These excuses also do double-duty as rationales that critics impute to the Bush administration. Many, for instance, will favor some version of (4) or (5) in an attempt to resist alternative theories involving vulgar phrases like “blithely imperialist” or “neoconservative maniacs,” simply because of the appalling vista suggested by the latter views. I personally find it worrying that the administration’s choices in domestic and foreign policy are starting to puzzle clever economists. These, after all, are people who by temperament and training will bend over backwards till their spines snap before saying the words, “Yeah, I guess you’d have to say that was pretty irrational.” If those guys give up on you, you’re really doing badly.
Alastair Campbell was on the box last night to discuss being cleared of all charges by the Hutton inquiry. Fair do’s to the guy; he got cleared and we have to respect that. Doesn’t change the fact that every single word we were fed about WMD, including “the” and “and”, was bollocks, but it seems churlish to deny even the Blairites their day in the sun. But I have to take issue with one claim he made. Mr Campbell said, pressing his advantage home:
“If the Government faced the level of criticism which today Lord Hutton has directed to the BBC, there would clearly have been resignations by now. Several resignations at several levels.”
Well, let’s go to the tape. See, the dossier which Dr Kelly did or didn’t denounce, was actually one of two such dossiers put before the UK government and public. There was, subsequent to September 2002’s authoritative (but wrong) “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction”, a rather lower-budget affair entitled “Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation”
The second dossier was, frankly, an embarrassment. It was this one which had the plagiarised PhD thesis in it. It also had exactly the kind of aggressive phrasing which was at issue in the Gilligan story: “assisting opposition groups” (in places like Syria) turned into “supporting terrorist organisations” (where? tell us! help!). And the rest. It really was very bad (note in passing that this docuent was outside the remit of the Hutton Report).
Quite appropriately, this document came in for quite some level of criticism. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee made the folowing points:
The sources used should have been credited (note that this would have involved admitting that the PhD thesis was 12 years old)
The document should have been reviewed by ministers, rather than being chucked out into the public domain by civil servants
The publication was “almost wholly counter-productive” and undermined the credibility of the government’s case.
The general tenor of the criticism is perhaps best summed up by the fact that the relevant chapter of the FASC’s report is entitled “A glorious, spectacular own goal”. I’d note in passing that Blair attributed this dossier to the security services in a speech to the House, which is misleading as they had not in fact checked it.
The thing is, that this dossier was the idea of … Alastair Campbell. He admitted as much to the FASC (the words used were “it was my idea”). Jack Straw was the minister in whose name it went out, and Tony Blair spoke about it in front of the House. All three have admitted since that it was an embarrsing mistake.
Alastair Campbell resigned from his job for unrelated reasons a few months later. Nobody, at any level, has lost their job as a result of the “Dodgy Dossier” fiasco. It’s understandable that the BBC didn’t feel it appropriate to cry “balls” to Campbell’s statement in the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.
The results are in from the “Listeners’ Law” feature on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, where the show’s audience chose between five bills, with Labour MP Stephen Pound agreeing to propose the winner in Parliament. More than 25,000 people voted. The winner was a “proposal to authorise homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders.” It won with 37% of the vote.
Pound clearly had been bargaining for something a bit more enlightened. Press commentators have been smirking at his subsequent discomfort, but his immediate response assures him a place in future anthologies of political quotations. “The People have spoken,” he said, “the bastards.”
The runner-up proposal was of interest to me professionally. It was a “presumed consent” law for organ procurement, i.e., “A Bill to allow the use of all organs for transplant after death unless the individual has ‘opted out’ and recorded that opt out on an organ transplant register.” The synergistic benefits of combining this proposal and the winning candidate into an omnibus package don’t seem to have been discussed. Nevertheless, the presumed consent idea beat out three proposals, namely, “A Bill to ban smoking in all workplaces, to include bars and restaurants,” Prime-Ministerial term limits and compulsory voting, and “Ban all Christmas advertising and the erection of municipal street decorations before 1st December.”
I’m suprised that none of the blogs that deal with British left sectariana have linked to George Monbiot’s column yesterday . I know George says daft things from time to time (and there’s a factual error about the Royal Society in this very column) but pointing out the genealogy of Spiked!, the Institute of Ideas, LM Magazine etc etc and the links between the various swivel-eyed neolibertarian technoenthusiasts who are the former Revolutionary Communist Party seems like a public service that should be performed every so often. (Especially now they all have “proper jobs” writing columns for the Times and fronting think tanks.)
The widespread hostilty to Bush and Blair over the war and the run-up to it is well reflected in the numbers attending the demonstrations in London and elsewhere yesterday. Many people here are still very angry that they were lied to (as they see it) about WMDs and the “threat” from Iraq. At the same time, liberal hawks are asking rhetorically why there were no demonstrations against Saddam Hussein, or against other tyrannies.
(I think that last question is pretty easy to answer: people usually demonstrate because they are angry at their own government (or its associates) rather than at someone else’s. Even anger at yesterday’s bombings in Turkey wouldn’t translate into demonstrations because there would be no point in marching against Al Quaida.)
But even walking a few streets around my home and looking at the posters urging people to demonstrate, I’m quickly reminded why I would not. “Bush” is represented on many of them with a swastika in places of the “S” — an absurd implied equivalence anyway, and a grotesque one a few days after the synagogue bombings in Istanbul. The stunt with the statue also suggest the triumph of theatre over political and moral judgement. And then there’s the fact that the Stop the War Coalition calls for an immediate end to the occupation of Iraq and that some of its components even support what they call the “resistance”. Since the imperative now is to stop Britain and the US from “cutting and running” and to insist that they ensure a transition to stable and constitutional Iraqi self-goverment (and put the infrastructure back together again) what the demostrators largely want is the opposite of what ought to be done.
I wonder if we’ll hear again from that friend of Eugene Volokh and Kathryn Lopez that, well, maybe a few protestors turned out after all. Perhaps he or she will follow the lead of Iain Murray’s friend who has sensibly stayed some distance away from the protests so that he can truthfully say “it’s quiet around here again.” Meanwhile Iain’s wife suggests the protestors are inconsistent: “Were there protests like this during the height of the IRA terrorist attacks in London against the British government’s military intervention in Northern Ireland? … [I]f you’re going to protest a nation or group of nation’s ‘aggressive behavior’ towards a country or region that appears to support terrorism, shouldn’t you protest all such ‘aggressive behavior’?” I don’t know whether she’s aware of what originally provoked British military intervention in the North (it wasn’t because the IRA had bombed London). But I’ll have to leave it to others to explain the difference between (a) Efforts to capture or control terrorists living in your own country who bomb your citizens, and phone you up to say so, and (b) Invading a country which, though run by a universally reviled evil dictator, does not pose any credible threat to your nation or have any known links to the terrorists who attacked you.
Like Tim Dunlop I am a little disgusted but not at all surprised to hear that President Bush will not be addressing Parliament on his visit to Britain. According to ABC News, “such a speech could invite the kind of heckling the president received when he spoke to the Australian Parliament last month.” One might have thought that a leader with thicker skin might have told the begrudgers to “Bring it on.” Bush’s aversion to explaining himself to people who might talk back is well known, of course, but it seems insulting to treat the representative body of your staunchest ally in this way. Some Tories appear to think so, too, though most of the anglospheroids seem content to bash Red Ken instead.
Needless to say, the spin on the visit — see the same ABC news story — is that Bush is in London to “address” and “confront” those who doubt his policy in Iraq. He’ll just be doing this without, you know, addressing or confronting anyone.
A nice piece in today’s Independent on Sunday (UK) by Adam Swift, defending Dianne Abbott from herself.
For those not following the story, Abbott, a frequent critic of other Labour politicians’ decisions not to send their children to local schools, has sent her son to the very expensive and exclusive (though, according to my sources, not very good) City of London School. She has said herself that her decision is ‘indefensible’. Swift, author of How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed explains that, although she appears to be a hypocrite for doing what she has told others not to, she may well be justified in refusing to send her son to the local school. He points out that this is different from saying that she’s justified in sending him to an exclusive expensive school, but if my sources are right she is probably just wasting some of her money.
For non-Brits, Dianne Abbott is one of the few remaining firebrands of the Labour left. (My maternal grandmother used to refer to her, rather eccentrically, as ‘that lovely coloured girl’, by which I assumed she meant to be praising her politics rather than her looks).
I just learned (rather late) that this week’s Times Educational Supplement is carrying this Platform piece by me. Since I don’t have a subscription I can’t read it, but assume it is a nicely edited version of the following.
The meritocratic ideal has a powerful grip on contemporary politicians. It seems deeply unfair that some people have worse chances of getting at the unequally distributed rewards of our society, just because they are born into households that, themselves, have done worse in that distribution. The meritocratic ideal commands that one’s social class of origin should have no impact on one’s chances for success.
But in fact very few societies have come anywhere close to approximating the ideal. In Britain, for example, although the proportion of working class children attending university has steadily increased over the past 50 years, this has only been in line with the increase in the proportion of 18 year olds attending university. Relatively, it is as great an advantage to be born well in 2003 as it was in 1953.
Former secretary of state for education, Estelle Morris, frequently stated her ambition to eliminate the connection between social class origin and educational success (and, by extension, success in later life). But any efforts to achieve this through education policy face two serious problems. First, it is incredibly hard to compensate for disadvantage through education — it is easier and more effective simply to eliminate disadvantage at its source. Second, any such efforts involve targeting resources at the least advantaged. But targeting the least advantaged in the state schools runs the risk that wealthy parents will feel they are getting a bad deal — and defect to the private sector. This would be undesirable because the involvement of more advantaged parents and children in the state system is generally thought to benefit the least advantaged. Three examples: i) if the most stimulating students are creamed off into the private sector, that sector becomes correspondingly more attractive to the best teachers; ii) lower achieving children benefit from being taught (well) alongside higher achieving children; iii) as schools come increasingly to rely on fund raising to top up their own resources, they benefit from having parents who are more capable of raising (and donating) funds.
The trick, then, for the policymaker concerned with social mobility, is to design policies which simultaneously target the least advantaged and lower achieving children, while reassuring the middle class parent. What policies do this will depend on the motives of the middle class parents: obviously those who simply want to maximize their own children’s prospects cannot be reassured by anything that helps out the least advantaged.
But one recent study and two new books suggest it might be easier than some fear to reassure middle class parents. A new study conducted by the IPPR finds that in London, despite increasing prosperity especially among the wealthy, the percentage of children attending private schools has barely changed in the last two decades. This hardly indicates a predisposition to flight by parents in the state system.
Then there is Adam Swift’s How Not to Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent. After providing a brilliant argument for the prohibition of private schools, Swift explains why it might nevertheless be morally permitted – even required – to send one’s child to one if they do exist. The reason is that one might have an obligation to send one’s child to an adequately good school, and the state may not provide that option (in fact, if private schooling is widespread, it is likely not to provide that option for everyone). This is not, he understands, everyone’s motivation for using private schools. But it is an acceptable motivation.
Finally, Stephen Ball’s Class Strategies and the Education Market contains extensive interviews with middle class parents deciding whether or not to ‘go private’. Strikingly, many of his interviewees are, indeed, motivated by the concern to ensure that their own child just gets an adequate school: some go private, and others do not. Even some who do go private bemoan the fact that they are doing so, and express regret that there is not a school with a representative socio-economic mix available to their child. They believe that the available state school is not just not good enough for their child, but not good enough for any child.
Why does this help? Consider the following targetting policies. First, alter the funding formula so that all children eligible for free school meals bring with them three times the normal amount of per pupil funding. This helps to counteract the tendency of schools to prefer middle class to less advantaged children, and ensures that, if low income children do still concentrate into particular schools, they are at least better resourced. Second, alter the structure of ‘new start’ schools so that they have, for the first 3 years, guaranteed class sizes of no more than 15, rising to 22 over the next 4 years, so that lower class sizes benefit the least advantaged, and are enough lower as to have some real impact.
Both these policies target the least advantaged. But what do they do for the middle class parents who are abandoning the schools for private sector, taking with them their political clout, personal resources, and the social capital of their children? Well, for some of those parents, those who are seeking unfair advantages for their children, or who cannot bear to have their precious children mix with the lower orders, it will do nothing. But for the large number of parents who simply want an adequately good school for their child it might do quite a lot. If ‘new start’ schools had those kinds of guarantees they might be quite attractive to parents whose other choices are very expensive private schools or under-resourced state schools. If low-income children brought a lot of resources with them the schools and classrooms they inhabit will be better able to provide a decent learning atmosphere for them and for anyone else who is there with them. More schools and classrooms would meet the required threshold of adequacy, and more middle class parents might choose them, to the benefit of the least advantaged.
So the policymaker’s dilemma might be less demanding than it seemed. Still, its worth remembering that we don’t know that much about how to use schooling to counteract disadvantage, and don’t have many examples of it doing so. Social mobility is easier to achieve through policies which simply eliminate social disadvantage — high employment and steeply progressive taxation. These policies simultaneously make social mobility less important, by equalizing people’s life chances and lowering the stakes in the lottery of whom you are born to.
Melanie Phillips has been at the Tory party conference and has some interesting things to say about it. Basically she distinguishes two conferences — a public conference with great ideas delivered in a voter-appealing way; and a lunatic asylum of Tory MPs conspiring semi-publicly against their leader. She says that
Duncan Smith, fights for his political life against malevolent libertines, intellectual snobs, resentful has-beens, insanely ambitious opportunists and other malcontents. The parliamentary Conservative party needs to be put in a straitjacket.
I can’t share her enthusiasm for the Tories newfound localism; but am all for straitjacketing the parliamentary party. But that leads me to wonder what would be left of the Tory party if we locked up the lunatics. A handful of shadow cabinet members (well, two, Letwin and Willetts) and some old age pensioners? Is Phillips a closet LibDem?
From the Guardian’s profile today of Tory Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin:
On his extensive office bookshelves there are enough volumes of Socrates … to suggest he is someone who thinks about politics using rare quantities of abstract nouns.
Shome mishtake surely? (Thanks to John Kozak in comments to an item below for the heads-up.)
A new Labour (but definitely not New Labour) ginger group has been launched, by the name of Compass. It looks interesting and some good people are involved.
I just got back from an interesting conference in Newcastle (UK) organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and presided over by Matthew Taylor as his last big act before going to direct policy at number 10. (Actually I got back a week ago, but pressures of work and technical set-backs have kept me silent till now). Basically it was a ‘looking for a new big idea’ kind of gathering for New Labourish types – IPPR had asked a bunch of academics to present their thoughts and findings about meritocracy, social mobility, and equality of opportunity, and a bunch of politicians, policy makers, and representatives of domestic NGOs to engage with them. I confess that I anticipated a kind of dialogue of the deaf, but it wasn’t like that at all. The academics (including John Goldthorpe, John Roemer, Stephen Machin, Adam Swift, Michael Hout) made brief, pertinent, and not-dumbed-down presentations; and the in-session and out-of session discussions were to the point and thoughtful. Gordon Brown gave a talk on the first afternoon with which I, very much not a New Labour person, was very impressed. He seemed not only to have a coherent, worked out view, and a straightforward comfortableness with the language and concerns of traditional social democracy, but also to have read and understood all of the preparatory readings. (Apparently he called up John Goldthorpe the previous Thursday to ask him about some of the technical points in Goldthorpe’s paper). My brief was to respond to the minister for school standards, David Miliband’s, speech on why the government is focussing its attention on teaching and learning more than on admissions and funding. Again, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness and reasonableness of his presentation, and the care with which he distinguished issues of what should ideally be done and what is feasible given political and constitutional constraints; though, fortunately, disagreed with enough to make it worth debating him. One large disagreement among the attendees was the extent to which a society should try to reward ‘merit’ financially. Again, though, whereas I’d assumed on going in that I’d be in a minority with Swift and Roemer against meritocracy, it was striking how soft the support for meritocracy was in all the discussions, and how well disposed Brown was, for example, to prioritizing the interests of the least advantaged.
Cynics will dismiss my impressions as the consequences of either being over-susceptible to politicians charm, or (more likely) jet lag, and in another couple of weeks I’m sure I shall relapse into my own negativity. But the fact remains (as Americans I’ve described the conference to keep saying) that such a conference, in which senior elected politicians discuss the work of serious left-wing academics on their own terms, in the presence of senior policy-makers, is utterly unimaginable in the US.
All the papers for the conference, by the way, are accessible here at Ippr.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
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