Trying to run a public service like a business will never work
A public service is an inherently different beast from a business and asking one to behave as the other is like asking a fish to ride a bicycle
So says Kerry-anne Mendoza in short, but spot-on, analysis in yesterday’s Guardian.
This is why our public services — NHS, railways, utilities etc. — are in a mess. They need to be run a services not as profit generation for shareholders.
Politicians, please note and action!
Category Archives: current affairs
Surveillance Powers
Yesterday’s Guardian carried an interesting and coherent dismantling of why the authorities need more surveillance powers in the wake of the Paris attacks. The writer, Henry Porter, argues that more surveillance powers undermine our liberty and openness in just the same way that the terrorists are trying to.
2015 Predictions
I thought I’d give my crystal ball a dust off and see if I could come up with a few ideas as to what might happen over the course of this brand new 2015.
What follows is the best I can interpret from the misty images I saw in the aforesaid crystal ball. They are just my ideas of what might happen based solely on hunches and gut feel; I have no inside knowledge and I haven’t been studying the form — so if you base any decision on any of this I will take no responsibility for your idiocy.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on what might transpire this year:
UK
- Labour win the General Election — although probably not with an overall majority; they form a government in coalition with the LibDems
- As a result of the new government the unions start demanding, and getting, inflation busting wage rises
- Theresa May beats off a challenge from Boris Johnson to become leader of the Conservative Party
- There is no change in UK interest rates
- A major household name (possibly a high street store) calls in the receivers
- At least one UK holiday tour operator goes under stranding several hundred holiday-makers abroad
- Against expectations UK inflation will be around 4% driven by higher wage settlements and spending by the new government
- On 31 December FTSE will close down 10% compared with 1 January
- UK will see at least one major plane crash and one major train crash
- Duke of Edinburgh dies and is given a state funeral
- Queen Elizabeth II becomes Britain’s longest reigning monarch
- The UK has a warm winter and a cold wet summer
Overseas
- Violence in South Africa between black tribes threatens to turn into civil war and causes a white exodus
- Death of President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is followed by further civil war
- Major epidemic will affect the developed world — could be Ebola or flu or MERS or something entirely new
- Australia will experience an earthquake of at least magnitude 7
- The Pope will issue a revolutionary encyclical, possibly on birth control, divorce or the celibate priesthood
- A number of international sporting bodies are proven to be driven by massive bribery and fraud
- The Islamic world continues to descend into total meltdown with more factional fighting, civil war and coups d’état; the exceptions are Saudi Arabia and UAE which remain relatively stable due to their oil wealth
- Russia continues to be belligerent over Ukraine and only their economic woes will prevent World War 3
- Brussels finally gets fed up with the UK’s posturing and formally asks us to leave the EU
- A major airline goes into liquidation
Personal
- I finally have to be put on insulin to control my diabetes
- We lose the venerable Harry the Cat (well he is over 17) but he is replaced by two kittens
It will certainly be interesting to see what really does occur. I’d be tempted to put money on none of this happening.
Do you have any good predictions for the year ahead?
Criminalising Behaviour
A couple of weeks back, on 6 November, Simon Jenkins launched a stinging attack in the Guardian on the government’s propensity to criminalise various behaviours. His full article “Our addiction to criminalising human behaviour makes a mockery of private responsibility” is worth reading, but here are a few key extracts.
If poisoning your foetus with alcohol is a crime, why is it not a crime to abort it? If alcoholism in pregnancy is “attempted manslaughter”, as a QC told the court of appeal … surely abortion is murder.
We need a philosopher — as Raymond Chandler would say — and we need one fast.
The advance of criminal law into these recesses of private morality is ominous.
Now we have the proposed crime of “emotional violence” – including “reducing self-esteem” by calling someone fat – showing there is no limit to the law’s ambition. To be against jailing people for such offences is not to condone what they do, merely to apply some sense of proportion.
Oxford’s Jonathan Glover sought to apply moral precepts to everyday life in his excellent book, Causing Death and Saving Lives. He quoted from Karamazov the brother’s euphoric cry that “everyone is responsible for everyone else and in every way”. It was, he said, heavy with “nightmare implication”.
[…]
Such paternalism – or perhaps control freakery – led the last Labour government to create 4,300 new offences through 50 criminal justice acts. It led Tony Blair to justify war against one state after another, for its own good.
[…]
Glover asked only that we “work out what things are most important and then try to see where we ourselves have a contribution to make” … There must be some room left for private responsibility.
Indeed there must be some room — I would say a lot of room — for personal responsibility. We are too good at insisting that someone — anyone — is to blame except us. It is never our fault or our responsibility.
This has to stop. We have to start taking responsibility for our own actions. Just as we cannot be responsible for other people’s emotional reactions, we cannot expect them to be responsible for things which are down to us to attend to.
Guys & gals … We have to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves, and tell our politicians to get out the way.
Long Arm of the Law
The long arm of the law is getting longer and needs to be amputated!
It has been widely reported in the last couple of days (see, inter alia, here and here) that the Government wants to abolish Police cautions and instead allow the Police to fine people directly for most minor offences.
Like many others I see this summary justice as an erosion of our liberties and another move towards a police state.
Just because, according to the Police Inspectorate, around a third of cautions are issued incorrectly doesn’t mean they should be replaced with a more draconian measure. If anything it suggests the scheme doesn’t work and should be abolished. Yes, I dislike the notion of Police cautions as a piece of instant justice as much as I do summary fines.
A Police caution still gives the offender a criminal record. However the person concerned has had no opportunity to have their side of the case properly heard, in court, as the Police are acting as prosecutor and either magistrate or judge and jury. This to me is an infringement of the justice system which is based on the principle that everyone has the right to be heard in court by their peers (either in the persons of magistrates or a jury).
And allowing the Police even greater powers to fine offenders makes that far far worse.
We know why the government want to do it. They see Police cautions as a “soft option”, which it isn’t as it gives the offender a criminal record. Moreover it will probably save money which would otherwise have to be spent on the magistrates’ courts (already severely cut back) and will likely bring in extra revenue — in the way speed cameras and parking wardens have done.
But it means that many people will accept the caution or fine — often when they shouldn’t — because they don’t want to have to go to court for whatever reason; possibly because the Police have used scare tactics on them.
Out of court disposals (by which I understand cautions and the proposed fines) are incredibly problematic in terms of giving someone a criminal record without any form of legal procedure or check and balance. Both summary fines and cautions should, in my mind, be abolished: either the offence is serious enough to put the suspect before a magistrate or it isn’t.
Instant justice like this cannot be a good thing in a democratic, supposedly free, country. It all smacks too much of the Police state!
"Cleansing the stock" and Other Euphemisms
While we’re on about politicians, George Monbiot had another side-swipe on Tuesday 21 October in his Guardian column: ‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings.
Basically he’s on about the euphemisms that politicians, governments, and indeed companies, use to disguise — from themselves and (they think) us — the horrors of what they get up to. For example:
The [Dept of Work & Pensions can talk of] using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”
Hills, forests and rivers are described … as “green infrastructure”
Wildlife and habitats are “asset classes” in an “ecosystems market”.
Israeli military commanders described the massacre of 2,100 Palestinians … in Gaza this summer as “mowing the lawn”.
People, aka. human beings, can be referred to as “personnel targets”. And then there are the old favourites: “neutralising”, collateral damage” and “extraordinary rendition”.
Dictatorships, and those wishing to conceal what they’re up to have always spoken thus: for example look at Communist Russia and Communist China.
Gawdelpus!
Ebola Panic
This article from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian on 17 October takes a swipe at politicians’ panic over Ebola — a classic case of the politics of fear.
But in amongst it all he has another couple of telling comments.
… air travel which, in the digital age, is almost all non-essential …
Ah, someone else has woken up to this! It’s time business and politicians did too and realised they can operate just as efficiently and more productively using electronic communication, teleconferences etc. and not flying people around the world. Hey look! Even Joe Public uses Skype!
Oh and no, holidays in the Maldives, Morocco or Thailand are NOT essential either!
The political scientist Louise Richardson wrote in “What Terrorists Want” that it is precisely what western politicians seem happiest to give them: they want to make us fear them. “By declaring war on terror,” she says, “far from denying al-Qaida its objectives we are conceding its objectives. That is why a war on terror can never be won.” It is a terminological admission of defeat.
Yes! Something else I keep saying. Stop giving the “terrorists” the oxygen of publicity. Stop splashing every threat, murder, bombing all over the front pages f every newspaper and news bulletin. All you’re doing is giving them publicity, which is precisely what they need.
No, I’m not saying shut our eyes to what they’re doing and/or don’t report it. Just make it low key, as in “In other news …”.
And finally …
A democracy must know what it should fear … [but] … Freedom from fear is a human right. We pay politicians to guard us from terror by not terrifying us.
Jenkins’s article is worth a read.
Human Rights Act II
Just a quick follow-up on my post of a couple of days ago on the Tories proposals to change the UK’s human rights landscape (see Legally Illiterate). As expected this has continued to attract vociferous attacks.
Also as promised the Law and Lawyers blog has posted two further, more in depth, articles:
Human Rights protection in Britain ~ 10 key points
Human Rights ~ the Conservative Party proposals.
Two other pieces worth reading are:
Head of Legal — Full of sound and fury on human rights
UK Human Rights blog — Incoherent, incomplete and disrespectful: The Conservative plans for human rights.
If we care at all about our rights then we all need to be concerned and keep working to halt these appalling proposals.
Legally Illiterate
So, the Conservatives, if they win the next election, propose repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and renegotiating, or failing that withdrawing from, the European Convention on Human Rights — as has been widely reported in the media over the last few days (see, inter alia, here).
Just about everyone except the Tories (and probably UKIP) is saying some variant of how crass a move this is. Many are openly hostile to the very idea. And many are pointing out the numerous flaws, stupidities, misunderstandings and sheer impracticality of such a move.
I’m not going to reprise the arguments here; others have done so far better than I can …
Needless to say Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan has come out against the proposals, as has the Liberal Democrat’s Simon Hughes.
Even Dominic Grieve, a former Conservative Attorney General, isn’t impressed; he describes the ideas as “unworkable” and “almost puerile”.
Jessica Elgot at Huffington Post picks 10 pretty large holes and howlers in the proposals, as well as pointing out that they have self-evidently not been drafted by a lawyer!
The Law and Lawyers blog opinion is “Don’t make me laugh”! He promises a more in depth look at the proposals at a later date.
If you do nothing else read this from barrister Isabella Sankey for Liberty. It is the most considered response I’ve seen so far. Sankey picks apart each strand of the proposals and points out the legal misunderstandings and legal impracticalities. I just love her overall comment on the proposals as “legally illiterate“. That’s really telling it how it is!
This one could run and run. Except that I doubt it will because I’ll be very surprised if the Tories get a large enough majority at the next election. Though that doesn’t mean there is any room for complacency. The time for rebellion approaches …
Reductio ad absurdum — but he has a point!
I’m not a natural Guardian reader. I view it as a bit of a rag, like almost all the media. But I can’t help reading George Monbiot’s column in the Guardian every Tuesday. He invariably lifts the lid on something our political masters would rather remained out of sight and mind. Monbiot’s articles are well argued and he always posts a fully referenced version on his weblog.
This week is no exception. In Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world? Monbiot totally destroys any pretence our masters have for their actions in the Middle East. I give you a few extracts:
Let’s bomb the Muslim world — all of it — to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course? Why stop at Islamic State (Isis), when the Syrian government has murdered and tortured so many? This, after all, was last year’s moral imperative. What’s changed?
…
The humanitarian arguments aired in parliament last week, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East and west Asia … Perhaps this is the plan: Barack Obama has now bombed seven largely Muslim countries, in each case citing a moral imperative.
…
Now we have a new target, and a new reason to dispense mercy from the sky, with similar prospects of success. Yes, the agenda and practices of Isis are disgusting. It murders and tortures, terrorises and threatens. As Obama says, it is a “network of death”. But it’s one of many networks of death. Worse still, a western crusade appears to be exactly what Isis wants.
…
More than 6,000 fighters have joined Isis since the bombardment began. They dangled the heads of their victims in front of the cameras as bait for war planes. And our governments were stupid enough to take it.
…
Never mind the question, the answer is bombs. In the name of peace and the preservation of life, our governments wage perpetual war.
…
There are no good solutions that military intervention by the UK or the US can engineer. There are political solutions in which our governments could play a minor role … Whenever our armed forces have bombed or invaded Muslim nations, they have made life worse for those who live there.
…
Yet our politicians affect to learn nothing. Insisting that more killing will magically resolve deep-rooted conflicts, they scatter bombs like fairy dust.
He is pointing the finger at David Cameron and Barak Ombama, but previous governments — specifically Tony Blair and George W Bush — are at least as culpable.
The argument may be reductio ad absurdum, but he does have a very good point.