Anti-capitalism and conspiracy theories - 1 comment

That I was surprised to read this:

That is why on this issue of Civil Liberties I will be voting and campaigning for David Icke in the by Election.

from a Labour blogger, is one way to sum up my reaction. This is a bit worrying, too:

There are plenty of us in the Party who have some similar views to David Icke [...]

And, here, we get to the root of it:

What interests me about Icke is his commentary on how Democracy is used as a cover for Global Capitalism's control of the media and politics, we are kept in the dark over so many things, from the environment, medical progress through to basic Human Rights and the surveillance of the Orwellian 1984 society.

Surely anyone who puts capitalism on a par with the (reptilian!) Illuminati is more to be pitied than condemned, but I wonder how far people who habitually talk about "corporate interests", and who employ the "You're only saying that because..." argument, have travelled down the same road. It's a complex world, but belief in conspiracies and all-encompassing forces that are beyond our ability to rationally assess them, even with all our political, economic, philosophical, sociological, and scientific tools, is not a rational decision: it marks a deliberate opting-out of the rational inquiry that created the world we know, and a deliberate step into the arbitrary, untestable world of cranks.

Perhaps it's a sign of the widespread ignorance of economics, philosophy, etc., that the only bits that register when people learn about capitalism concern size, scale, ubiquity, and so on, rather than how the economy works; the interaction of governments, firms, workers, consumers; alternative economic systems, etc.; let alone any material between Marx and The Economist. Lumping all economic issues under 'capitalism', and discrediting the discipline, not only limits our ability to (sensibly!) criticise capitalism, it also makes it more likely that future systems of distribution will be based around normative political principles, like 'need', 'desert', and 'right'; rather than liberal principles like 'desire', 'preference', and 'motivation'.

Moreover, to ascribe God-like powers to 'Global Capitalism' is the kind of thing we'd expect from someone on an island who has been introduced to other human beings for the first time, who might easily associate the unknown with the magical and superhuman. Perhaps it's a sign of the degree to which workers are alienated from the economic system: if they can't see that their boss is the slightly fatter one with the top hat in the office upstairs, he might as well be a Reptilian Zionist who does his work at the North Pole.

Whatever the reasons for its existence, the capitalism-as-conspiracy-theory argument needs to be stamped out, because it encourages people to support cranks; to read drivel, rather than the many fine works that make up the left-wing canon; to elevate motives above actions and ideas; and it also makes it impossible for them to conduct an argument with sensible people from the political right. As Orwell says in "Through a glass, rosily", while apparently taking a break from predicting surveillance-based societies:

[...] genuine progress can only happen through increased enlightenment, which means the continuous destruction of myths.

*

Dermot's piece continues:

[...] belief in God has as much evidence behind it as David's thoughts about the so called Illuminatae being descended from giant lizards when you bring it down to basics.

What these basics are is unclear, but logic is not involved. No, there is no direct evidence for the literal existence of God, but that doesn't allow belief in the Illuminati to grab a piece of the support moral authority that organised religion has built up. Moreover, if evidence is irrelevant, there's now no reason not to believe in any competing viewpoint: every belief is now of equal value.

Here's another myth with a life of its own:

Yes, he [Icke] has some pretty bizarre beliefs, but then again Dubya and Mr. Tony invaded Iraq because God told them to [...]

Norm has dealt with this little misrepresentation already. I think it shows that, for some people, the fact that there might be genuine reasons (in this case, a desire to topple one of the worst dictators of the last century) for others to make a particular decision is no match for a far-fetched explanation that is more politically convenient for the observer.

If one's instinct is to give oneself credit for disinterested actions ('I did it for England'), but deny it to one's political opponents ('they did it out of greed'), that demonstrates to me a combination of: moral dishonesty, alienation from others, and political calculation.

Of course it tells us nothing about which version of events is actually, or likely to be, true. Cynics are probably right more often than optimists, but the person who prefers to be right seeks a debate on honest terms, and doesn't poison the well for others.

Impossible Targets II: Closing the Pay Gap - no comments

Via Action Without Theory, I read that Michelle Stanistreet (who works at the Daily Express, of all papers), is standing for Deputy General Secretary of the NUJ, and has this to say:

Despite the fact that the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men. [...] The government says firms should do equal pay audits - but they don't have too. The law should be changed to make it compulsory.

(The BBC has since posted this since I wrote the bulk of this post.) Anyway, three different points, there. Starting with the last point, I think there's an indisputable case for the Government or an independent body to audit pay across all firms, as it's in the spirit of the existing anti-discrimination legislation, and is the best way to cut off discrimination at source. We know that some companies offer different wages for employees who differ only in their gender: for example, to cover their losses if they have to support a female employee in maternity. Companies naturally try to find 'alternative' ways around these commitments, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable extension of the rights of parents not to be discriminated against by employers, and for the Government to enforce the law as it stands. I suspect few on the left would disagree on this ideological and practical point, nor not be happy to defend the costs of the scheme to the public.

Besides which, forcing employers to account for all their workers, however poor their conditions, must be a good thing.

*

Logically, "the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years" is unrelated to "the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men". The aim of that legislation was not to equalise pay rates across the economy between men and women, or any other selected groups, but to ensure equal treatment of individual employees within particular workplaces. Since those workplaces neither individually nor even in aggregate reflect the entire population in all its diversity of employment, we can't jump from "we pay Alice the same rate as Bob" to "average female wages/income must equal that of men".

Before we look at the evidence, what about the principle? To be honest, I don't think I care whether men and women - across the entire economy - earn either the same average wage or income. Though the kind of people who audit companies don't have to be so crude, us lot use average income as a statistic to guide us to instances of exploitation, injustice, and thwarted ambitions. Those are the things we care about, not the average itself, surely?

Why should anyone care whether I earn more or less than a (putative) twin brother? You would expect us to make different decisions over a lifetime, have different luck, different preferences, and so on, so the comparison would be irrelevant. You'd expect my sister to have career- and life-preferences that were even further from mine. By all means interject with cries of 'gender socialisation' and 'false consciousness', but bear in mind that the male-female-equal-pay crowd is not the preserve of Marxists.

Perhaps you believe that my sister simply ought to earn the same as me. Firstly, this is far from a mainstream view. Secondly, what if one of us marries someone who earns twice what the other does - should the family income of one sibling be equalised with the other's instead? We're talking about wages/incomes here, not the benefits system. I doubt Michelle would want to commit to something of this nature.

Can we agree that if Z is the difference between male and female average pay, then Z = E + D, where E is the exploitation factor to be targeted, and D is a factor that reflects difference in attitudes and preferences between the sexes (I'm assuming luck, etc. is evenly spread)?

Some appear to believe that Z = E, and that clamping down on discrimination will eradicate the pay gap. Makes sense: men and women are the same, aren't they?

My claim is that clamping down on discrimination - as we should - will still leave a substantial D, and thus a substantial Z. It depends partly upon the type of job: the lowest skilled jobs, those with the lowest attractions and levels of commitment, should have very low difference between the sexes.

However, because men and women select different types of job for themselves, we cease to be able to compare. Perhaps a City trader should earn no more than a teacher. But until the day the traders are hanged from lampposts from one end of London Wall to the other, and the public service ethos is rewarded, the differential is there, and simply selecting your job increases the overall gender pay imbalance, irrespective of any discrimination. The evidence does indeed show that men are far more likely to become traders - and less likely to become teachers - than women, and there's nothing that equal pay legislation can do about that.

*

What of the facts? Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies sits before me. His rebuttal of the "discrimination is the reason for pay differentials" argument is comprehensive rather than elegant, and he hammers away at it for 31 pages, but this is a pretty clear conclusion:

[In the USA] Comparing never-married women and men who are past the child-bearing years and who both work full-time in the twenty-first century shows women of this description earning more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than men who had never married, while married academic women without children earned less, and married academic women with children still less. For women in general - that is, not just academic women - those single women who had worked continuously since high school were in 1971 earning slightly more than men of the same description

This being before the era of affirmative action. The reason, of course, for comparing never-married individuals is to strip out the effect of pregnancy, home-making, and so on, until only gender is left. That's not to devalue pregnancy or home-making, but to emphasis that these are voluntary things, and to identify how important gender itself is. If the above is true, women who put their career first cannot then be lumped together with women who don't.

Now, I don't have equivalent statistics from the UK, but I suspect that those who cling to the 82% figure don't have much more in their locker, either.

*

So is eliminating the gender pay gap really impossible, then? Of course not: as we've seen, once you compare like with like, a different picture already starts to appear. Forcing employers not to conceal pay rates, separately, is also a good thing. However, as long as we stick to the existing statistics, then unless gender employment preferences and/or the country's employment structure changes dramatically, only increasing compulsion - or breaking the spirit of existing equality legislation by favouring perceived losers - will eliminate the apparent gap:

Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender.

The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job.

But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce.

I shouldn't complain, working as I do in an office which is 95% male, but even if you can prove the existence of sexism or racism, introducing new sexism and racism to tackle the existing problems just exacerbates illegitimacy rather than confronts it, and it stokes up resentment for the future. Let's treat people as individuals and kill off 'Identity Politics' once and for all.

Impossible Targets: Poverty - 2 comments

Harpymarx has reminded me about the campaign against poverty, which was popular a couple of weeks back, before the David Davis business took off. My criticism of the use of 'relative poverty' is simple enough, and has been stated enough times, but I don't think it's pedantic to repeat it when bloggers and politicians uncritically use a measure that is effectively impossible to target, giving and receiving praise for accidental successes, and condemning worthy failures.

We continue to use 'relative' statistics, but the language of absolutes, confusing ourselves and forcing Governments into the ludicrous position where policies deliberately aimed at improving the life-chances of the poorest are unlikely to have any impact on the standard 'poverty' measure, which is determined - not so much by (a) national income/GDP-per-head, which Governments at least have a chance of influencing - but median income, something which combines the difficulty of (a), with the added complexity that comes with the continually varying distribution of incomes and (possibly also) housing costs.

This is a recipe for confusion and disappointment, that means that no advance in the fight against poverty is ever permanent: one bad year can cancel out five good ones if the statistics turn that way. There are plenty of other reasons for criticising the use of the '60%-of-mean-net-disposable-income' measure', not least the fact the State provides up-front services for free, that the poorest can use without drawing from their limited funds. It might only be a safety-net, but this reduces the moral weight of purely income-based poverty measures.

Yet the Government clings - so it may take credit in good years - to a measure of poverty that makes its child-poverty-elimination target impossible without the kind of radical restructuring of society that would bring incomes closer to the median. But the Government clearly doesn't believe in such a restructuring, and the various charities and pressure groups are hardly going to antagonise donors and activists by associating with radical redistributive politics. In that woolly world, the aim is always to 'persuade' the Government to 'do more', perpetuating the idea that there is a magic lever to be pulled. Thus it's unfair for Harpymarx - undoubtedly a backer of such redistribution - to condemn the Government for missing its own poverty targets, when they must know that (a) a deterioration cannot in itself be a sign of bad faith, and (b) that the impact of worthy measures like Sure Start can only be assessed by a closer look at the statistics than the mainstream media and casual bloggers will normally provide.

As Tom Freeman pointed out last year, there are many alternative measures of 'well-being' that are absolute, comparable, and also moving in the right direction. It must be impossible for Labour to abandon the official poverty measure now, and assuming the Tories are in power within two years, the dropping of poverty targets will make it irrelevant, but if the pressure groups have any sense they will propose a new 'quality of life' index that it is feasible for a future Government to target, that combines an absolute 'fundamentals' element, a relative element that reflects equality of opportunity, and a 'social well-being' element.

Of course one cannot write about Government targets for the poor without a little disgust that such things are necessary at all.

Extremist politics - no comments

Muslim convert 'recruits' inmates:

A former British National Party activist who converted to Islam in prison is trying to radicalise young prisoners, the BBC can reveal.

I'm deliberately avoiding use of the term 'fascist', but doesn't this tell you all you need to know about those whose currency is political hate, whether on the 'left' or 'right'? Once the contempt for the mass of the population is there, trivial political and religious differences like these can easily be rationalised away.

Steve Gough, vice-chairman of the Prison Officers Association (POA), said the organisation had been worried about the situation for a number of years.

"This shows what we've been saying. If you can get someone that's so right wing converted then a normal prisoner is going to have absolutely no chance," he said.

Which is probably about the same amount of faith in the human race I'd expect from a Prison Officer.

David Davis' resignation - 11 comments

Call me wet behind the ears, but I've been surprised by the amount of hostility directed at David Davis, who (for the benefit of future readers) resigned today as Shadow Home Secretary - even from those who ought to agree with him in their opposition to the 42-day detention plan.

He's an MP, elected to support his party, and to express his own views, and the concerns of his constituents. Clearly he's already addressing points (1) and (2), and it's apparent that he's prompting a by-election to address point (3). Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Besides, elections are a Good Thing, and democracy has no price, so to talk of 'frivolity' and 'wastes of taxpayer's money' shows a grotesque attitude to democracy. It isn't a risk-free strategy either: seats only appear to be 'safe' until a remarkable independent candidate comes along and turns the election on its head; and as I keep saying, vote tallies start at zero and increment, they don't decrement - party majorities are no more that statistics.

If these initial reactions are anything to go by, Labour's big guns are going to take a depressingly contemptuous line. Take this, from David Blunkett:

David Davis's behaviour is a pure piece of political theatre [...] This is childish and immature and it is not worthy of a major political party to engage in such theatre.

As good an advertisement as I've heard not to enter party politics (if one were needed). Thanks, DB.

Equally tawdry, I feel, would be the decision not to field a Labour candidate at the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. That would be a decision bound to salt the earth for the local CLP and the PPC, who might well pay the price at a local level for years to come. Whatever our individual views, Labour, nationally, has made its decision, and so it must stick up for its policy, whether that allows it to hold its vote, or costs it a deposit. The Lib Dems are entitled not to stand if they fully support the Conservatives, but Labour can't withdraw too, leaving one side of the argument/electorate with no (mainstream) representative.

Returning to the democratic point: needless to say, the 42-day plan doesn't cease to be illiberal or (probably) unnecessary even in the event that the electorate does back it (the interventions of the loathsome Kelvin McKenzie and Rupert Murdoch are surely proof enough - via Phil), but if some good is to come out of this affair, it would come from Davis and the Lib Dems eroding that apparent public support, and changing public attitudes for the better.

Don't, by any means, take that as an endorsement, but the task for Labour activists during this by-election is the same as it ever was: to battle illiberal and conservative ideas and values, with liberal, cooperative, and socialist ones. It would be a shame if, in doing so, we couldn't hope for a Labour MP to be elected.

Still no to 42 - 1 comment

Sadly the Government has still not managed to make a reasonable case for the extension of the detention-without-trial limit. If they cannot satisfy our concerns about the human rights of suspects; cannot provide any evidence that the extension from 28 days to 42 has ever, or is likely either to prevent terrorist incidents or to substantially increase the chances of information being extracted; and cannot provide any assurance that 42 would be a binding upper limit; then the proposal ought to be thrown out with as little fuss as possible.

Offering 'concessions' seems to completely miss the point. Whether you prefer to oppose 42 on principle, or over its likelihood of success, the whole idea of concessions seems irrelevant to the issue at hand, and, if anything, adds insult to injury.

The fact that the Prime Minister has staked his authority upon the vote is a problem he has made entirely for himself. The fact that the Conservatives and minor parties might profit - in the very short term, as Frank Dobson argues - is an unfortunate but necessary evil.

According to YouGov, 69% of the public supports raising the detention limit to 42 days "in exceptional circumstances". Firstly, the 700-odd people who stated this opinion are foolish to do so, but they can hardly be blamed for telling a pollster that they might agree to limit their own rights when the issue is not close to home, when alternatives have not been proposed, and when the issues have not seriously debated with them. What's more: they're no more foolish than those who cannot see that "exceptional circumstances" means different things to different people. Such circumstances appear to be the case right now for some; while for others, only some distant war might fit the bill. One doesn't need to be in denial of the terrorist threat to dismiss this argument; those who cite "exceptional circumstances" are responsible for clarifying what these circumstances are.

As it stands, the poll resolves nothing, thus honest commentators will take it with an appropriate shovel of salt.

The Telegraph continues:

The Government's case was boosted when Baroness Park, a Tory peer and former senior MI6 officer, came out in support of stronger detention powers. She told The Telegraph that the "frightening" scale and complexity of the global Islamic terrorist threat made the new laws a necessity.

"Everyone who knows the difficulties of investigating it is convinced," she said, adding that David Cameron and the Conservative leadership were wrong to be opposing the measures.

Needless to say, what 'frightens' a campaigner for a cause might not frighten a neutral party. The death cult that is Islamist terrorism is a pressing threat to any country, and to any individual (especially Muslims) that favours freedom, tolerance, and what makes human beings human. But Baroness Park's job is not merely to convince the Government, or the Conservatives, of the danger, but other Western politicians, plenty of whom are equally forthright in their opposition to terror, but who have not so far found the need to extend detention without trial. Let us take a cautious approach, then: once Baroness Park and the Government have begun to win over other politicians to their case, we can revisit the extension proposal. Until then, we treat her opinion as one among many.

Luke Akehurst makes the point, in supporting the Government's move, that the need to prevent atrocities is more pressing than concern for the liberty of suspects. Now, I am prepared to believe that the security services wouldn't abuse these powers in general. Sadly, this faith is not binding upon the security services, who are beyond my control, and your control too. The reason we have codified liberties is because all of us have a right to a private space, free of encroachment, and to protect us from good people as well as bad, because even 'well-meaning' States, authorities, and individuals cannot be relied upon to respect us. No need to invoke Shami Chakrabarti, or even George Orwell, here.

The Government's on much safer ground with its deradicalisation plan, via Norm.

P.S. This post delayed, due to Blogger, once again, refusing to play ball.

Microgeneration: the spin - 3 comments

The Register has a new article that cuts through a lot of the misleading claims about microgeneration, which many have seen as a cheap and efficient way to cut emissions, and as an alternative to developing new nuclear facilities.

The Guardian, amongst others, has put a very favourable spin upon the Department for Business, Energy and Regulatory Reform's recent report. The Conservatives back microgeneration (warning: PDF file), naturally, it being seen as the warm, fluffy option. See also this. On our side, John McDonnell MP is banging the drum too (my emphasis):

When Labour backbenchers were pressing to include in this legislation early action to introduce feed-in tariffs for altenative energy produced by homes and community organisations the Government refused to co-operate and instead offered yet another consultation over the coming year, delaying the whole process by at least another year and possibly longer. In Germany and other European countries the introduction of feed in tariffs has resulted in a dramatic increase in alternative energy production.

The Register, though, is scathing:

[...] This subsidy plan would continue to cost the taxpayer £5.5bn each year forever, according to the report - that's as much as we currently spend on defence procurement, or enough money to buy 55 terawatt-hours of electricity every year at consumer prices, well over 15 per cent of the national leccy bill. And of course, we'd all still be paying our normal energy bills as well, and we'd still have done nothing to clean up the other 99 per cent of our energy usage.

By comparison, a nuclear power station half again as big as Sizewell B is said by French makers EDF to cost about £2bn and by most other people to cost about £3bn. Four billion quid's worth of nuke stations would produce as much low-to-zero-carbon electricity as the headline microgen plan, which would cost conservatively five times as much just in subsidies - forget about the costs to the users. Even given swingeing regulatory, maintenance, staffing, decommissioning and waste-management costs (plus some pocket change for fuel) it's not surprising that the nuclear energy industry - unlike the microgeneration one - does not consider that it needs any subsidy at all in the UK. [...]

And it gets worse. If grid electricity can be decarbonised even partially - by building wind farms or nuclear stations, say - the eco benefits of microgeneration disappear. We would find ourselves subsidising people to spew carbon unnecessarily, in fact. The report shows quite clearly that if the carbon burden of grid power can be halved, then burning gas in the home becomes a very eco-unfriendly thing to do, no matter how cunning the machinery used. Subsidies for CHP et al would then be highly un-green, as they would actually drive up carbon emissions rather than reduce them. Only heat-pumps, and perhaps some biomass kit, would be eco-worthwhile if grid electricity were less dirty.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

I don't have any ideological preference in favour of nuclear power, but it's beholden upon those who have an ideological, or opportunistic, opposition to it, to do some research before jumping on any bandwagon that seems to be travelling in the other direction.

No to 42 - 1 comment

So many issues seem to have gone by without my comment, recently, but I'd rather not add the issue of the detention of terrorist suspects to the list. That said, Bob Piper has perfectly summed up for me the bloody-mindedness of the entire plan to go out on an international limb (so to speak), and increase the limit from 28 days to 42:

One of the most futile aspects of what is termed 'The Great War' was the trench warfare that claimed so many lives.

Armies dug into trenches fought for months on end over the control of a series of fields. Tens of thousands of men lost their lives and when you look back on it you have to think, why? What was that all about?

So it seems with 42 day detention orders. Of course, not in the degree of severity as the shocking conflict in the Somme and elsewhere, but in terms of the futility of the whole exercise.

Before Gordon Brown and his Home Secretary decide to order their troops to go over the top, the Generals should be asking the Chief of Staff.... why are we doing this? The cannon fodder should refuse to leave the treenches unless they get answers a bloody sight better than we have had so far [...]

The Government is busy making concessions to the anticipated Labour rebels, still without explaining why the UK needs a measure at all that goes far, far further than those taken by those liberal democracies who, by their very nature, are terrorist targets. It's thoroughly mystifying; justifiably concerning to the many political liberals who expect to be at home within the Labour Party; and if a defeat does prompt a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister or Government, it would represent a staggeringly unnecessary own-goal, over an issue that means little to voters, and doesn't encapsulate any ideological principle of ours. The whole business is a vote-loser from start to finish.

As a matter of principle I have to hope the Labour rebels stand firm. Even if the immediate consequences for the Prime Minister are bad, the sooner the Government ends its obsession with unnecessary, grandiose, and illiberal criminal justice legislation, and focusses its entire attention on addressing the UK's social ills, and empowering the population - things that are achievable (if hard) and which can improve the lives (and win the votes) of millions.