The Government We Deserve

Fighting fire with fire tends not to work

Most people - certainly myself - can find themselves completely unable to understand why the public gets angry about something, if that something is a person or cause for which we have personal sympathy. So when Iain Dale defends Julie Kirkbright and worries about the effect on women going into politics in criticising her childcare arrangements, I have some sympathy. As he says, who wouldn't want a family member to help with child care? 

Unfortunately that goes into dangerous territory - pushing back against the public's emotional reaction with a personal emotional reaction. As someone in politics, I feel he should instinctively know that in the face of an emotional reaction, you've got to step back and think rationally. Only by taking the heat out of the discussion can you really contribute to it. The first step is to understand what is actually making people angry. Too many defenders of the MPs are not investing the effort into doing this (Daniel Finkelstein goes down a similarly unproductive fight-fire-with-fire route).

Consequently, the whole "who would want to be an MP under this kind of scrutiny" meme is rather tiresome, frankly. There's a simple answer in the context of Julie Kirkbright's story: anyone who wouldn't abuse taxpayer's trust to pay for their personal lives. That way, people won't get angry with you when the truth comes out. Not a particularly tough standard, is it?

(I know I'm simplifying things here by ignoring the fact that all MPs, irrespective of their innocence or guilt regarding expenses, are taking a lot of heat. But the dangers of keeping things secret until they eventually leak all over everyone is a separate topic)

The importance of integrity to efficiency

Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editors, indulges in the kind of sophistry that ultimately only gives legitimacy to expensing MP's private lives in her piece "Count it, don't follow it". To summarise her point, just because you give an MP, say £400 to pay for an office chair for which a receipt is duly produced, you cannot be sure that in fact you didn't just pay for nice piece of artwork on the wall. The reason for this is that, absent expenses for the chair, the MP may have bought the chair out of necessity anyway. Therefore the practical of that £400 has been to put the art on the wall, not the chair behind the desk.

She also draws a parallel with overseas aid, where the £1b given for primary healthcare may end up somewhere altogether different once the foreign president gets his hands on it.

The realistic interpretation of this analogy, which I hope isn't her intention, is that because the healthcare never happens, the chair turns out to be a borrowed prop and the receipt a forgery, and the MP is indulging in outright fraud.

Parliament should sort out expenses ASAP

A passionate post by Iain Dale on the need to sort out the issue of MP's expenses. Very much agree with him - the government (and shadow government, and politicians in general) know full well the low esteem with which politics is held. The issue of expenses is a big part of that, primarily because the system allows too much self-enrichment, as compared to compensation for genuine expenses. Let people standing in the next general election know the circumstances of the job before sticking them with it.

Personally, it's not about the amount of money. I'm happy for MPs to get business class travel, decent digs in London, and employ staff. Let their working lives be comfortable. In return, let's have transparency in expenses. Even if it costs more, I'd rather pay rent on a decent flat near Parliament than put a few thousand quid towards buying washing machines and bath plugs for MPs. 

Micro-managing costs has no appeal to me whatsoever ever, but having politicians with principles doesn't sound like such a bad idea at all. The amount of money involved in renting even a few hundred London flats is negligible in context; the basic principle of employees of the state not using their expense account like a personal bank account is priceless. 

Fighting hysteria with hysteria

Depending on my mood, it either frustrates me or amuses me when columnists respond to protests by taking the worst cliches of the ideologues in attendance, and then run down their own ideological route of choice. Janet Daley does just this in her column in the Telegraph today. Her conflating capitalism with democracy and freedom is a ideology that particularly I dislike. It is both simple-minded, and a basis for some of the more cruel and / or selfish arguments of the right-wing. There is more to freedom than freedom from government intervention. Besides, freedom is quite possibly the most over-used word in political discourse. To drag it out like that is the sign of someone reaching for the emotional sound bites rather than trying to make a case.

Frankly, it is not indicative of a subtle mind to so blatantly equate capitalism with democracy and freedom, and systems and regulations with socialism and tyrannical control. She ignores basic facts of life. For instance, without regulation you suffer the consequences of other people's stupidity and not just your own, while those in positions of power can in fact be shielded from said consequences. 

Maybe she's not been reading the news lately.

I think we can all be fairly sure that if we were discussing polling results hugely in favour of increased regulation of market economics, she would not be quite so keen to include the concept of democracy in her deliberately emotive choice of words. But I guess when you're reacting to hysteria with more hysteria a rational argument is not the objective.

Obama's message to Iran

I was surprised and impressed with this.

Not in a naive, suddenly-everything's-going-to-be-wonderful sense, just a pleasant surprise that the US has made such an open, positive gesture to Iran at the highest level. It should inject some good energy into Middle East diplomacy.

Of course, it doesn't touch on the actual issues but that is in the nature of giving a new year's message. Perhaps some will see the necessarily respectful tone as a sign of weakness. I'm sure that has been considered, and intelligent diplomacy found to more important than populist aggression.

It will be interesting to see the response to this in the Middle East. While again it may be in the nature of the message, I would imagine there will be some instinctive reactions that this is nothing but the hollow words of a politician. But in diplomatic terms, this was not a small thing. Let's hope the potential benefits are not dismissed on the Iranian side.

Freedom of speech should never lead to torture

Here's a telling example of the dangers of state surveillance. A perfect counterpoint to the fallacious, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Clearly being innocent is not enough.

The other point stories like this always reinforce for me is the recruitment effect of policies sold on the basis of keeping us safer. Not only do innocent people find themselves in terrible situations, it just provides fuel to the terrorist fire when it happens. I take a greater risk of serious injury or death any time I drive to work compared to being on the receiving end of a terrorist attack. Please let me live in a civilised society in the meantime i.e. one that respects civil liberties.

Blunkett offends my intellect

David Blunkett has written one of those opinion pieces that is truly offensive. Not because of bad language or raising some taboo subject, but because it is such an affront to simple logic. Read it here if you've got the stomach, or are naturally pre-disposed to agree with the points he makes no matter whether they make sense.

Blunkett kicks off with a wonderfully self-centred paragraph that ignores the possibility that people might have found him "unprincipled" rather than "tough" as he clearly likes to think of himself. But then the assault on the intellect begins:

On this, the 75th birthday of what became Liberty, we must reflect that by their nature, organisations like it define themselves by what they are against. Governments, by contrast, have to decide what they are for, and come up with answers rather than criticisms.

This is grotesque. Without any attempt to explain what he means by "their nature", he has moved swiftly from self-centred to an arrogant assumption that we should share his feelings regarding groups that thought they were dedicated to things such as civil liberties. Does he also feel that Amnesty International is not so much a positive organisation championing human rights, but a negative one that is just against things? And if so, would he explain why being against torture is such a bad thing?

How will we decide to go to war next time?

Martin Kettle raises an interesting defense of Jack Straw's decision to veto the requests for the cabinet minutes discussing the Iraq war. The principle involved boils down to that question of politics versus governance I've started to find so interesting. Martin essentially says that if the privacy of the cabinet were to seen to be lost, then ministers would start playing politics rather than concern themselves with good governance.

I think there's a lot of truth to that. This blog is tracking me through a learning process about the mechanics of the UK government, so the thing I learnt today is that the cabinet minutes do not track exactly who said what. Beyond noting which minister started a discussion, it remains anonymous. Even so, a minister might hesitate to raise a concern, or raise a false concern, simply to have a political ace up their sleeve. Discussions minutes could be exploited for political purposes. We can be sure something of the sort would happen, because even if they didn't wish to then media, activist and general public inquiry would put someone unexpectedly on the spot. No-one has managed to invent a way of writing that is so clear and unambiguous that a genuine need for clarification is always avoided, let alone the deliberate misinterpretations of those with particular agendas.

The point is also made that if one set of minutes is released, a precedent will be set. There is an argument that the Iraq war is sufficiently exceptional that it avoids setting a precedent. Clearly that argument falls flat, although I think a similar point can be made in a slightly different way.

Truly dreadful puns

So bad it's good:

Too soon to judge, but...

I once shared a flat with a mature (in most senses of the word) philosophy student in Glasgow, who was the first person who really made clear to me that the timescales for judging things on a historical basis are rather longer than recent electoral results. That caveat aside, it's difficult not to enjoy some schadenfreude at George W. Bush's expense on seeing the results of a recent Presidential Survey by C-SPAN over in the states.

Arguably the most important measures are Economic Management (i.e. managing the domestic agenda) and International Relations (managing the foreign agenda), and Dubya ranks extremely poorly on both (40 and 41 out of 42, respectively). Buchanan and Hoover, both have some responsibility for financial crises and in Buchanan's case their Civil War, rank lower on Economic Management.

With respect to International Relations, I was curious as to just how W. H. Harrison had managed to do an even worse job. Apparently he was only at the top there for 32 days, so I feel comfortable saying that in the opinion of American presidential historians, Dubya was indeed their worst President ever as far as the world outside the US border would be concerned.

Not that I'm saying anything particularly novel here. But at least the next time an American chooses to take offense at a comment about Dubya, or in other words the fact that people do indeed have opinions about countries that are not their own, I can point out that their own experts agree :)