This the (former) United States Republican presidential front-runner discussing Libya. Let’s hope the Libyans don’t see it or they may change their minds about democracy.
Posts Tagged ‘democracy
is this any way to manage your pension money?
In 1983, at the age of 24, I started working for an investment bank in The City of London. In those days I thought I disagreed with capitalism. Even as the banking industry swirled around me I thought that for every winner there was a loser. I now have more time for capitalism. I no longer believe that investment of spare funds by people trying to save for retirement is wrong or likely to deprive someone else of value. Indeed I can see now how capitalism is merely the free allocation of funds in a free society and that it is a more efficient way of allocating funds than some bureaucrat in Whitehall.
If I have a few thousand pounds saved which I want to invest for retirement it is acceptable to lend that money to an entrepreneur who has a plan to form a company to provide goods or a service which will make a profit. If, after a few years, I consider that my investment has grown sufficiently and I can’t see the guy making much more money or if I see that another guy has a better chance of making money then it is legitimate for me to sell my stake in the first company and buy into the second.
These are fairly standard arguments and, if one believes in freedom of the individual and of individuals to act together as groups, then they are difficult to disagree with. A whole industry has grown up to facilitate these transactions along with information services to allow me to analyse various economic and financial information.
Yes, much of the money washing around the system does belong to pension funds holding capital on behalf of rich and poor alike. From rich bankers to grieving widows.
But not all who take part in the market are equal. The people who run the companies providing the financial transactions and related services realised that they were making a lot of money and that they could make even more money by ploughing their profits back into the system and trading on their own account.
Further, an article in the Financial Times on June 7th reported that big institutional traders “are winning preferential access to deals because computers used by exchanges are programmed to accept bigger orders first when matching prices”.
So we have a market where the small invester in my initial example is at a considerable disdavantage to large pension funds and banks and as the large organisations may jump in and out of a stock several times within a day we have to ask: Is this investment or gambling?
Another fault that I see in the system is the frenzied nature of professional dealers. In 1986 a wave of deregulation swept through The City in a process known as “Big Bang”. Prior to this trading took place using a process known as open-outcry where traders use hand signals to transfer information. There was a lot of shouting and yelling and things were pretty frenetic. The process is still used by the London Metal Exchange but, after Big Bang, the London Stock Exchange replaced open-outcry by rows of traders sitting at computer screens. Technology went berserk and computers now regularly buy and sell automatically. Volumes have increased and the pace is now extraordinary. A trader will have numerous computer screens displaying graphs and figures and they will need to assimilate this information quickly and then make decisions involving huge amounts of money.
Walking around The City one has to be impressed by the fantastic granite and glass buildings with vast marble entrance halls. One has to be impressed by the frenetic pace of trading activity and by the vigour and determination of the traders but one also has to ask:
Is this any way to invest the funds you are saving for retirement?
Should the various banks be spending your pension money on the most expensive real estate in England? Should they be using your money to build luxurious head offices? Should they be rigging the pay scales of their traders to encourage them to engage in undue risk? Should they be trading in an atmosphere of hysteria?
So what’s to be done? Ban something? Many would argue that you cannot restrict such activity without restricting our fundamental freedoms. They argue that, yes, there are outrageous abuses and failings of the system but that, overall, the system functions better than any other system yet devised. As with the saying about democracy, that it is “the least worst” of all the systems of government.
I read an article recently on the risk assessment process undertaken for nuclear power stations and I recall discussing risk management with an ex-colleague who now works in the oil industry managing the movement of supertankers around the world. In both nuclear power and oil transportation the impact of a failure can be catastrophic and risk management is tasked with analysing and controlling these risks.
It seems to me that the risk management strategies in use by banks and financial institutions are mere fig leaves when compared with the very real risk management which takes place in other industries.
The British government are now making plans to require banks to ring fence their retail banking divisions keeping them at arms length from more risky investment banking. The United States had a similar law known as Glass Steagall requiring separation of high street banking and investment banking. The law was enacted to control speculation following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. However, as the American economy recovered various parts of the law were repealed until the whole thing was dismantled in 1999.
Let’s hope that the British have leaned from the American experience and that the ring fencing legislation currently being discussed will remain in force in bad times and in good.
A better way to choose our rabble
On May the 5th the British people have a chance to fundamentally change part of our democracy yet for some reason the media has been practically silent about this. There has not been nearly enough coverage and it’s likely that many people will not think that voting is worthwhile.
I think we should get out in large numbers and vote AV and I’ll tell you why.
The current voting system is known as First Past The Post (FPTP). It’s supporters claim that it is simple and straightforward. We all get a single vote to cast for a candidate to represent our constituency in Parliament. After voting closes all the votes are counted and the candidate who has the most votes wins.
This system has the advantage that each constituency gets a representative who has been voted for by local people. It has the disadvantage that, when there is no clear overall favourite, a candidate will be elected who has the support of only a minority of the electorate.
The Liberals have long advocated Proportional Representation (PR). This is a system where all the votes for all the parties in the UK are added up and a number of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) allocated proportional the the number of votes cast for their party. This overcomes the shortcomings of FPTP as smaller parties or parties with support widely scattered through the country are allocated MPs which they would not otherwise have got. It has the disadvantage of breaking the MPs link with his constituency.
But the system which is being put to the British people on May the 6th is not PR. The system which is being proposed is known as the Alternative Vote (AV).
With AV the voters get to rank the candidates in order of their preference. So the voter puts a ’1′ by their first-preference candidate, a ’2′ by their second-preference and so on. They can rank as many or as few as they wish.
When all the votes are counted, if a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes then they are elected. If no candidate gains a majority on first preferences, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who finished last on the first count are redistributed. This process is repeated until someone gets over 50 per cent.
Initially I was skeptical about this and I may have been swayed by the Tories pushing their propaganda that this is a “complicated” and odd system. However, after mulling it over for some time I have decided that, if one is trying to elect a representative, then this is not only a superior system to FPTP or PR but that FPTP can be absolutely undemocratic.
My reasoning is as follows. Suppose you and 59 other people survived a ship sinking and you were marooned on an island. 60 people in all. You decided that someone should be the leader (I leave aside why we think we need leaders for the moment). You decide to elect the leader. You decide that you will all vote and the person who gets the most votes wins.
Suppose 3 people are candidates and one guy gets 50 votes. You’d be fairly satisfied that most people wanted this guy as leader. Both FPTP and AV would deliver this result.
However, now suppose that one candidate received 8 votes, one candidate received 25 votes and one candidate received 27 votes. FPTP would dictate that the candidate with 27 votes would be the leader even though the majority of people would not want him as their leader. In fact the majority of people might think the guy was completely unsuitable but they would be overruled by the minority.
I believe that in this situation everyone would start yelling and people would decide, that, OK, it was obvious that the guy with only 8 votes was not a contender and he should not be a candidate. A second round of voting would be held with only the two main candidates.
Now the people who had voted for the least popular candidate would cast their votes for one or other of the two mains candidates. The outcome of this would be a majority.
In a national election with numerous candidates it is not practical to keep rerunning elections but whoever invented AV has obviously thought of this. AV gives us a chance to rank our first preference and then asks us: if your first preference were to come last then who would you vote for. This is a much fairer system because, as in the shipwreck scenario, it ends up with everyone voting on two candidates and one necessarily end up receiving a majority vote.
The Tories argue that AV is too complicated and strange and that FPTP is more like a sprint race. The Tories are TALKING BOLLOCKS!
FPTP does not always produce a clear winner. If it were a sprint race then, in many situations, all the runners would collapse, never finish the race and be carted off on stretchers. The winner would be declared the guy who got closest to the finish line. It is an absurd system as there are situations where nobody wins yet one guy gets to become an MP.
To continue the analogy, AV is more like a series of heats where the loser of each race is knocked out and the races rerun until, in the semi final, only two runners remain and first across the line is the winner.
I believe that AV is fair and logical because it produces a clear winner voted for by a majority.
So get out and vote on May 5th.
good times
Hypocrisy seems to be high on everyone’s list since the rebellions started in the middle east. The media have been reporting that the great and the good have been fraternising with defunct Arab establishments.
First Sir Howard Davies resigned as director of the London School of Economics because of a connection with the, now out of favour, Gaddafi regime and now we discover that Prince Andrew has “entertained” a leading member of the deposed Tunisian dictatorship at Buckingham Palace
Yes, from what I can gather Muammar Gaddafi is a shit. Yes, he has been ruthless and abominable in his dealings with the Libyan people. But hold on, don’t we know some other people like that. Didn’t Tony Blair invite Chinese president Jiang Zemin on his first satte visit to a Western country? Didn’t the New Labour government arrange for three white transit vans to shield Jiang Zemin’s eyes from people in the UK protesting against the despicable treatment of the Tibetan people by the Chinese regime?
I am not saying that we should not do business with the Chinese. It’s too late for that now.
What the West needs is less grand standing on human rights and more disciplined rules on engagement with undemocratic regimes. Democracy should be understood as a great prize. Experience in democratic countries has shown that it is something which is difficult to achieve and requires constant vigilance to maintain. It is not something that we can order a nation to introduce overnight. It needs time to grow and mature.
So we should not go around the world condemning every regime which does not measure up to Western standards of democracy. We should, however, encourage democracy and prefer democratic regimes over authoritarian regimes.
A good start would be for democracies to agree to refuse to grant Most Favoured Nation trading status to undemocratic regimes.
In the words of Elvis: A little less conversation and a little more action.
Where was the informed debate on this?
I saw this at a petrol station recently. OK, I can see that it is in the interest of the petrol station owner to log the registration plates of cars in case they drive off without paying. But I can recall no informed debate about whether this data should be automatically made available to the police!
Democracy my arse! Gradually, using fear of crime and terrorism, the state increases the control that it has over the individual. “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” whine the naive and trusting. This is bollocks. History shows that if authorities are given powers they will abuse them.
It’s also a bit rich to advertise it as “neighbourhood policing”. You’d have to have truly Orwellian mind to consider a nationwide network of CCTV cameras to be neighbourly.
She wont vote for militant Islam
This evening BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze is discussing the unrest in Egypt. I usually find this program to irritating to listen to. The panelist seem to consider that it is their soul objective to be obnoxious and insulting to the “witnesses”.
In describing tonight’s program the BBC web site asks: “Is it morally justifiable to tolerate or support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse for the citizens of Egypt.”
My answer is simple: NO! No because it is wrong to support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes. NO because we cannot know what the alternative will be. And NO because we have experience of what happens when revolution finally breaks out in countries where the West has connived to suppress democracy. i.e. the people despise the West along with the dictator which they have just thrown off.
The classic example of this is Iran. In 1953 the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d’état instigated by the United States and the United Kingdom. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed as Shāh and propped up by the United States until the revolution in 1977.
From what I have read the revolution was initially backed by a secular movement but militant Islamists used the chance to grab power. Secular Iranians tried to resist but were crushed by the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. They could have received help from the West but having been responsible for 20 years of their repression we were not trusted and there followed a caustic division between Iran and the West that lasts ’till this day. That is an example of what happens when we support unpleasant, authoritarian, undemocratic regimes because we feel the likely alternatives might prove worse.
We should support the people of Egypt in ejecting their dictator. If they then elect an authoritarian Islamist government then more fool them. At least the responsibility will not be ours and when they are finally in a position to reject authoritarianism we will be in a position to help.
More optimistically I believe that Egyptians will have learned from the experiences of Iran and Afghanistan and will reject outright Islamist rule though Islamists may have some role in a coalition. It is possible that Egypt could finally break the curse that has afflicted the Arab world for decades and start to modernise.
Imagine a middle east of modern democratic countries right on the border of the largest trading block in the world. I am talking of the European Union. While the world obsesses over whether China will supplant America as the largest economy in the world they overlook the fact that the EU has an economy larger than both. With the Arab world modernising trade would take off and this would be great news for Arabs and Europeans.
The financial crisis has caused market uncertainty and companies have been nervous about initiating capital projects. Investors are also unenthusiastic as many assets appear overpriced; there is even talk of a Chinese asset bubble. Consequently some sectors, such as insurance, are awash with capital.
If democracy were to blossom then this capital could find it’s way to infrastructure projects in the Arab world. There was speculation in The Economist in 2009 of solar powered electricity generation in the Sahara with the electricity transported to Europe across the Mediterranean. That is not going to happen while the region is ruled by unstable dictators.
Lastly consider the effect on the Arab / Israeli conflict. Today the subtext of much of Israel’s argument is that the Palestinians are just Arabs who are used to being oppressed and the Palestinians are no worse off than citizens of other Arab countries.
Imagine if Israel were surrounded by thriving democracies. Israel would be forced to confront it’s oppressive and racist policies toward the Palestinians. Could The United States continue to support the siege of Gaza or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? Shame on them if they did.
Hypocrisy Rules
Confusion reigns regarding legitimacy of Wikileaks but they may have done the world a favour by opening a Pandora’s box of hypocrisy over secrecy, privacy and information security.
Wikileaks have been dispersing information “leaked” by government or corporate employees for years now. However, what really put the cat amongst the pigeons when they released details from thousands of “cables” between United States Embassies around the world. The Americans responded by getting Paypal and Mastercard to stop processing payment transactions for Wikileaks though apparently these companies agreed without any legal intervention.
Meanwhile, the Swedish government is trying to extradite Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange from the United Kingdom under charges of rape. In accordance with Swedish law, the names of the alleged rape victims are confidential but Naomi Wolf in The Guardian is calling for the names to be published.
The U.S. authorities then issued a court order to get details of private Twitter messages for seven people whom they believe to be involved with Wikileaks. The original order stipulated that the court order must be kept secret so that even the people whose messages were being accessed would not be told. Wikileaks challenged this in the courts and we now know that the court order exists and that one of the people being investigated is an Icelandic Member of Parliament named Birgitta Jonsdottir.
A blogger who appeared on Channel 4 News on the 7th January complained that the U.S. authorities were spying on everyone and that nothing was really “private”. A lawyer interviewed worried that journalists were being prevented from defending the anonymity of their sources.
Then we have The Daily Telegraph sting where Business Secretary Vince Cable was prodded into a conversation where he discussed threatening to bring down the coalition. The Telegraph initially omitted to mention that Mr. Cable also claimed to have “declared war on Mr Murdoch”. This last tidbit was later leaked to the BBC.
We must not forget that the debate over information security takes place amidst a climate of fear of terrorism. Under New Labour the United Kingdom suffered more and more intrusive security measures justified by the need to confront the threat of terrorism. Police encourage this hysteria by preventing members of the public from taking photographs in public places.
The rational conclusion from this rumpus is that the concepts of privacy and freedom of information are under strain, that none of our data is secure and that all parties are behaving hypocritically.
However, Wikileaks may have done us all a favour by bringing the arguments to a head and this could be good for democracy if governments acknowledge and address the underlying issues.
The driving force behind the rise of Wikileaks and the challenges to privacy and freedom of information is modern information technology. In the past information has been stored on paper and was therefore difficult to copy and disperse. Though this may have been comparatively inefficient it meant that keeping information secure was relatively easy. Today’s technology allows vast amounts of data to be stored in devices no bigger than a postage stamp. It provides that data can be easily analysed and it facilitates easy dispersal via The Internet.
There are two aspects to the current chaos over information security. Firstly the data is obviously not adequately secured and secondly there is no agreement on what data should be freely available.
While securing information is technically possible, human factors make the process extremely difficult. Further, as data has become so concentrated, once a system is compromised the quantity of information dispersed can me enormous. All this has been known to information security professional for years yet we have not faced up to the fact that our efforts to secure information are not working.
All bureaucracies, such as governments, have a tendency toward secrecy. Rather than selecting information to be kept secret they prefer blanket regulations which keeps everything secret. Following pressure to release information the British Government responded with the Freedom Of Information Act 2000 which allows that some information can be released dependant on a public interest test. This is the wrong way around.
Rather than keeping everything secret and then allowing exceptions we should make everything freely available and only keep secret selected information.
Two things need to happen.
Firstly democratic countries need to define more clearly the information which can legitimately be categorised as secret or confidential and what information individuals can expect to keep private. All other information should then be freely available.
Secondly government and corporations should wake up to the responsibilities that is theirs because they hold vast amounts of other people’s information. This realisation should feed into some high level thinking about how to carry out effective information security and this should put a greater emphasis on professionalism together with standardisation of systems and processes. This will probably accelerate the current trend toward cloud computing.
Greater clarity over the rules on information security together with greater realisation of the challenges in securing that data can only be a good thing.
Photography
Ich bin ein Osbaldwicker (NIMBIs are good)
Tags: BBC, Big Yellow Taxi, democracy, developers, Hands Off Our Land, Heathrow Airport, houses, housing, Joni Mitchell, Joseph Rountree Foundation, National Planning Policy Framework, natural beauty, Nigel Ingram, NIMBI, Not In My Back Yard, Osbaldwick, Osbaldwick Parish Council, overcrowding, planning permission, Radio 4, Sanchia Berg, Today program, Wendy. Madocks
Just one more tree
This morning on the BBC Radio 4 Today program Sanchia Berg reported on a building project that took nine years to “work it’s way through the process” and I thought of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi:
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone,
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
It seems that the government are about to publish a revised National Planning Policy Framework which will replace 44 existing planning statements numbering over 1,200 pages with a 49-page document.
The Today program reported that in 1999 plans were published to build 540 modern houses near the village of Osbaldwick east of York. Local people objected and, with the help of a local MP and the parish council, were able to delay the project until work finally started in 2011.
An interesting story but what struck me was that the whole stance of the BBC piece was that the objections of the local people were merely an inconvenient obstacle which had delayed a legitimate project. This was epitomised by Nigel Ingram, of the Joseph Rountree Foundation, who was reported as saying that “the planning system was primarily to blame” and the foundation thought that the battle cost it £5 million. Even Osbaldwick Parish Councilor, Wendy. Madocks, confessed that she found it “incredible” that the local people had managed to hold off the developers for ten years.
From this BBC report it seemed that the battle had beeb merely a waste of time and money and an encumbrance to the developers who were considered in the right by default.
It may have been fairer to portray this as a failure of democracy under pressure from a large well funded organisation.
One reason that we we assume that local people’s objections are an obstacle is that we brand them as NIMBIs (Not In My Back Yard). We consider that these people want all the conveniences of modern living such as housing, electricity and sewage without taking their share of the irritations which, in this instance, was to have an area of natural beauty demolished to make way for new houses.
I believe that condemning NIMBIs is short sighted and that, on the contrary, we should cheer NIMBIs in their battles to protect their corner of the natural environment.
Yes, it’s true that we need more housing, power stations and whatnot. However it will always be possible to make the argument that a handful of local people must sacrifice their little bit corner of planet Earth to pay for the necessities of modern life. And if we continually override the objections of NIMBIs then we shall eventually have all areas of natural beauty demolished.
It works like this:
Suppose that the stubborn people of Osbaldwick had won their battle. Suppose that whatever bureaucracy which rules on these things had come down 100% in their favour and the Rountree Foundation had been told, in no uncertain terms, that they could forget the idea of getting approval for the planning application near Osbaldwick. What then?
The pressure for housing would still exist and so the Foundation would have found another site and let us say, for the sake of argument, that the other site they had found was near Middlethorpe. Let us say that the foundation won approval there and the houses were built.
That would not have been the end of it.
The next time that it was necessary to build more houses or a power station or a sewage works then the planners would search around and the excellent site near Middlethorpe would have gone but they would be thinking, “…well, there is always that site up near Osbaldwick”. And this time when the planners came back they would claim the moral high ground. “Consider the honest people of Middlethorpe”, they would argue, “You cannot seriously expect them to put up with more houses when they allowed the development last time. The people of Osbaldwick must take there share of development”.
And even if Osbaldwick fought off this second assault there would be a third and a fourth until the area of natural beauty was eventually demolished.
That is how things work.
England used to be covered in forest but the great and the good always insisted that just a few more trees should be chopped down. Just a few more because the great and good always have enough money to live in the few remaining areas where there are trees.
Yesterday I was looking at my old secondary school from the air on Google Earth and it struck me how, when the school was built in the 1950s or 60s, there had been a great deal of space around the building. Some space for sports but also some just for kids to run around in. The school has changed over the years as the town has expanded and more buildings have sprung up on the green spaces where I used to run around. We all have grown used to living more densely packed.
Last year I went walking in The Peak District. I thought it would be good to get away from the city and walk around in the wilderness. Hah! Walking around in the hills I occasionally stopped to peer around and I observed scores of other bastards also standing on their fucking hind legs like bloody meerkats also looking around and trying to enjoy the wilderness. The English “wilderness” is crawling with tourists and it will nto be long before they install sandwich dispensing machines.
England is too crowded and there is pressure for more housing and I guess it must be built but if we continue like this we will all be living in shoe boxes. Already I can see that my parents lived in a smaller home than my grand parents and I live in a smaller home than my parents.
Just a few more houses, just a few more. Just one more terminal at Heathrow Airport. Then, once it is built, just on more runway at Heathrow Airport. The argument for the Heathrow Airport is that England must maintain it’s position as a global hub but for who’s benefit? If our environment is gradually eroded by development then in who’s benefit is this development? Just when are we going to stop hankering after more and more stuff and start valuing the stuff we have?
Thus far an no further! Ich bin ein Osbaldwicker and all that.
Star House