British Politics

The Liam Fox/Adam Werritty scandal largely happened when I was away in the US, so I’m only now catching up on the details. These are, in brief, that Werritty, a close friend of Fox (the British Secretary-of-State for Defence, now resigned), paid by various shadowy backers and lobby-groups, accompanied him to a very large number of meetings, including ones involving foreign governments. Some of the details of the financial backing for Werrity and the background in the pro-American think-tank Atlantic Bridge are covered by the Guardian “here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/15/liam-fox-atlantic-bridge?newsfeed=true . Now there’s talk of “prosecuting Werrity for fraud”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/8829803/Liam-Fox-affair-Adam-Werritty-facing-fraud-investigation-by-police.html for allegedly misrepresenting his status with Fox to lobbyists in order to get their cash. What I don’t understand is why nobody is pursuing the question of whether there’s been a breach of the Bribery Act. It looks to me _prima facie_ like there’s a case to answer.

Looking at the “statute”:http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/23/section/1 :

It is clear that Werritty’s backers promised or gave “a financial or other advantage to another person [Werritty]” , intending “to induce a person [Fox] to perform improperly a relevant function or activity”. In which connection note (1.4) that “… it does not matter whether the person to whom the advantage is offered, promised or given is the same person as the person who is to perform, or has performed, the function or activity concerned.” So an offence can be committed where Werrity is paid to influence Fox. The case also seems to meet the “function or activity”:http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/23/section/3 provisions, since Fox is “performing a function of a public nature” and “is expected to perform it in good faith”, is “is expected to perform it impartially” and “is in a position of trust by virtue of performing it” (though meeting any of those last three clauses would do).

So why aren’t Labour MPs demanding an investigation into whether there has been a breach of the Act?

Joris Luyendijk’s new project up at the Guardian is aiming to apply the methods of social anthropology to the financial sector in the City of London. He’s carrying out interviews in pubs and coffee bars with people at all levels and in different roles in financial services industry, to get a proper picture of how the social roles all fit together. So far, he has made at least one major discovery:

• People in the Guardian comments section really, really hate bankers

I know, I was just as surprised. I’ve been doing my own amateur social anthropology exercise too. By which I mean that I’ve got a Twitter account and some spare time, and as a result, have been collecting[1] prime specimens of banker abuse. So far, I’ve gathered that I, personally, have stolen from every single benefits claimant in England, and that Sir Fred Goodwin (crime: got a big pension, managed a bank poorly) is clearly a bigger criminal than Sir Anthony Blunt (crime: betrayed dozens of serving agents to Stalinist Russia). And, of course, during the recent London riots, dozens of variations on “who is the real criminal – the man who smashes a shop window and steals an iPod, or the man who gets paid a bonus?”

Because, at the end of the day, Dr Harold Shipman murdered 52 infirm old women in order to steal money from their wills, but bankers, get bonuses. Who is the real criminal, eh??

It is without any anticipation of popularity or agreement (or even any real hope of not being called an asshole on my own blog, although I must say that would be jolly nice if you were in the mood) that I tell you that I think this is all rather a pack of bollocks.

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Just when British Labour Ed Miliband leader is on a roll, along comes Maurice Glasman to spoil things. I’ve been willing to give Glasman the benefit of the doubt up to now, despite feeling somewhat uncomfortable at some of the things he’s had to say on immigration. After all, Labour lost the last election and we do need some proper discussions about how to connect with a somewhat alienated working-class base. Glasman, with his talk of community and his Polanyi-inspired scepticism about the capacity of the market to ensure genuine well-being seemed a voice worth hearing. Well the mask hasn’t just slipped, it has fallen off, and I think the “blue Labour” project has come to a halt with his latest pronouncements. Intra-left polemics have been marked by too much moralizing denunciation in the past, at the expense of genuine dialogue and understanding. But there is a time for denunciation, and it is now.

Today’s Daily Express “front page”:http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/259756 (Headline “Britain Must Ban Migrants”):

bq. Lord Glasman, Ed Miliband’s chief policy guru, wants a temporary halt to immigration to ensure British people are first in the queue for jobs. The Labour peer also urged the Government to renegotiate EU rules allowing the free movement of migrant workers in a decisive break with the open door policy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them. They’re in the right place – it’s us who are not,” he said.

UPDATE: Sir Andrew Green, who heads-up the rabidly anti-immigration group MigrationWatch, “describes”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2015979/Freeze-UK-immigration-British-people-says-Ed-Milibands-policy-guru.html Glasman’s latest pronouncements as “over the top. It is simply not practicable”. That’s pretty extraordinary.

[Colleagues in the United States are used to the phenomenon where academic lectures and reading lists get pored over by Republican politicians and “operatives” keen to undermine academic freedom and redbait intellectuals. But it is sad and shocking that in the UK, Denis MacShane MP, who was elected to Parliament as a Labour Party candidate, has recently indulged in the same kind of thing. The Association of Political Thought has now issued a statement about MacShane’s behaviour and it is to be hoped that he now does the right thing, and issues a full apology to the scholar concerned, Anne Phillips. I was very pleased to be able to add my name to the list of signatories. CB ]

Denis MacShane and the LSE reading list: a statement from the Association of Political Thought

During the debate on Human Trafficking on 18 May 2011 (Hansard Col 94WH) Denis MacShane MP, quoting from the list of essay titles for an academic political theory course at the London School of Economics, accused a distinguished professor, Anne Phillips FBA, of being unable to tell the difference between waged work and prostitution, and of filling the minds of students ‘with poisonous drivel’. Fiona McTaggart MP agreed, accusing Phillips of holding ‘frankly nauseating views on that issue’. 

The ineptitude of this exchange – which is now forever on the official record – is extraordinary. Students are asked why we should distinguish between the sale of one’s labour and the sale or letting of one’s body. That condones neither the latter nor the former. It encourages students to reflect on how to draw an important line between things appropriate and things inappropriate for market exchange.  Asking such questions, far from being ‘nauseating’, is central to public debate about policy and legislation.  If Members of Parliament cannot tell the difference between an essay problem and an assertion of belief how can we trust them to legislate effectively?

Parliamentary debate is a cornerstone of our constitution and political culture. However, using the privilege of a Parliamentary platform ignorantly to traduce the reputation of a teacher of political theory is a dereliction of office.

[signatories below the fold.]
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The recent British royal wedding left me wondering what it was all about. One million people were said to have gathered on the streets of London for the occasion, and media coverage is estimated to have reached some two billion worldwide. Normally I’d be happy with a bemused shrug: ‘has the whole world gone mad?’ (Especially when I realized the staff in my local optician’s in Dublin had come to work dressed as if going to a wedding, to watch the proceedings live online). But massive state-sponsored pageantry can’t be brushed aside so easily, and the impending state visit by Queen Elizabeth to Ireland prompts me to pay it some attention.

It seems to me that we might take four possible views, not all of which are entirely independent of one another. The monarchy and all it entails could be seen as a matter of abstract constitutionalism; as an offshoot of modern celebrity culture; as a focus of political legitimation within Britain; as an immediately recognizable global brand.

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Bristol had a riot last Thursday night. I wasn’t there, although I’ve spoken to a number of people who were or who observed events from windows overlooking the action. The facts are still not entirely clear, but becoming clearer. As far as I can establish them they are:

Beyond this the facts are murky.

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I wish I had time to write more about this, but a few links will have to do. On Sunday the Observer ran a story that the AHRC, the main state-funding body for arts and humanities research in the UK, had caved into pressure from the British government to include “the Big Society” (the Cameron Tories name for their attempt to hijack mutualism while cutting public services) as one of the things they’d support research into. Subsequently, the AHRC issued a vigorous denial, “refuting” [sic] the allegations. Well it looks like the Observer story was wrong, that a journalist misunderstood his informant (the actual government pressure was on the British Academy – see here) and that the AHRC had not bowed to ministers. So why, then, does the AHRC promote “the Big Society” on its website? It turns out that, rather the like the British journalist of the poem, they don’t need to be bribed or twisted but are happy to guess what their political paymasters want and publicize a party-political agenda on their own initiative. British academics are upset. See Iain Pears here and here, and my colleague James Ladyman at the New Statesman. And there’s a petition: do sign it.

So, we are to have a referendum in the UK on the alternative vote system. Tempting though it might be, I suppose I shouldn’t decide my view on the basis of my desire to stick it to the vile Nick Clegg. The fact that AV (like the French two-ballot runoff system) requires MPs to secure (eventually) a majority in each constituency certainly has _prima facie_ attractions, and it is troubling that most MPs are now elected on a minority vote. (In 1951 and 1955 only 39 and 37 seats in the Commons were held without a majority, so things have changed.) So on the plus side, there’d be more work work for candidates to do in more constituencies in order to secure election. On the other hand, AV can get you dramatically non-proportional outcomes (worse, in fact than FPTP). This will be familiar to Australians from (for example) the 1977 elections where the Liberals managed a majority of seats with considerably fewer first preferences than Labour and where the coalition of which the Liberals were part got two-thirds of the seats (a landslide) with only a minority of the vote.

I’m culling these facts from Vernon Bogdanor’s 1984 book _What is Proportional Representation?_ Bogdanor (David Cameron’s tutor at at about that time, incidentally) believed the system would hurt the Tories on the grounds of the their geographical distribution. John Curtice, on the other hand, “thinks”::http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-curtice-this-could-make-cameron-the-winner-from-electoral-reform-2124667.html that Labour would suffer. Any more reliable indications out there? Psephological guidance please.

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.
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Tomorrow sees a vote in the House of Commons on the principle of whether to triple the fees charged to undergraduate students at UK universities and to completely withdraw state funding from all subjects except science, medicine and engineering. That’s the headline proposal, the reality is somewhat more complex since the changes are accompanied by a government-sponsored student loan scheme under which those who fail to secure reasonably paid jobs will not be required to pay and will eventually be forgiven their debt (so some of the cost will end up falling to the taxpayer). The other uncertainty surrounds the level of the permitted fee: government has said that it will only allow a £9000 charge if universities do certain as-yet unspecified things to widen access, but £6000 will usually be inadequate to cover costs.

Whether the changes are distributively regressive or progressive (compared to the status quo) is a matter of some controversy, but the assumption that is is progressive depends on assumptions about future government behaviour (around the adjustment of thresholds for repayment) that are perhaps optimistic. Most of the early evidence suggests that prospective students from low-income figures will be deterred from higher education by the headline figure of the debt they will face (perhaps many many times their current family income) even though the reality is not as scary as that scary scary figure. I’ve been arguing with some other philosophers on “a comments thread at Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/yet-more-on-student-unrest-in-the-uk-over-the-attack-on-higher-education-funding.html , some of what is below recapitulates that, and some of it is a bit rantish. Apologies for that.
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Frank Field, the Joe Lieberman of British politics, “has been advising the ConDem government”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/frank-field-welfare-sacred-cows on welfare reform. Here’s a sentence to contemplate:

bq. This goal of changing the distribution of income will be achieved by ensuring that poorer children in the future have the range of abilities necessary to secure better paid, higher skilled jobs.

Of course, I can see a way in which that might work. The newly educated poorer children, frustrated at the stultifying low-wage jobs on offer to them, rise up and change the income distribution by expropriating the expropriators. I doubt that’s the mechanism that Field has in mind though.

Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) “is planning a reward scheme”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/31/council-plans-big-society-reward (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:

bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.

Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, “Sam Bowles”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5883/1605 ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.

Thanks to some FB comments by Marc Mulholland, I see that there’s an interesting bit of rhetorical back-and-forth going on in British politics today. Labour claims that ConDem plans to cap housing (and other) benefit payments will have the effect of forcing poor people out of London and therefore amount to “social cleansing”. Useful idiot Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg “pretends to be outraged”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9125000/9125499.stm :

bq. To refer to cleansing would be deeply offensive to people who have witnessed ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world.

Unfortunately, for him, in a flanking manoeuvre from the right, London mayor Boris Johnson (Tory) then “repeats the charge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/28/boris-johnson-kosovo-style-cleansing-housing-benefit , making it more explicit and destroying its metaphorical character:

bq. What we will not see, and will not accept, is any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.

None of this, including the faux-outrage from Clegg, would surprise anyone who has hung around the blogosphere since 2001, since charges of “moral relativism”, “moral equivalence” and “you are implicitly comparing X to Y how dare you!” are the common currency of wingnuts and “decents” alike. This one is mildly interesting, though, because it is a complaint about the adaptation of what was originally a piece of “unspeak”: a euphemism. The complaint depends for its force entirely on the euphemism being understood non-euphemistically, if you see what I mean. I see from some discussion at the Unspeak site, that Steven Pinker has a name for this: the “euphemism treadmill”.

bq. People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon the euphemism becomes tainted by association, and a new word must be found, which soon acquires its own connotations. ( _Blank Slate_ p.212).

Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”

Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :

bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.

bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.

bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.