Tag: politics

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Thinking out loud about Wikileaks

I’ve been feeling a bit ambivalent about the latest Wikileaks kerfuffle — not an unusual reaction, I suspect.

Because I don’t think there’s anything inherently sinister or unreasonable about the fact that diplomats want to be able to say things in private that they wouldn’t say in public. And quite apart from the Swedish sexual assault allegations, Julian Assange comes across as a bit of a dick: arrogant and egomaniacal.

And I’m a bit creeped out by the self-righteous certainty of internet evangelists for the idea that information wants to be free: whether it’s the anti-copyright campaigners, or Mark Zuckerberg with his high-handed attitude to other people’s privacy, or Julian Assange. Although of the two, a wish to abolish government secrecy is easier to defend than a wish to abolish personal privacy.

So for those reasons I’m a bit sceptical. And yet…

Someone once jokingly defended fox hunting to me on the basis that ‘it keeps the foxes on their toes’. And I feel that way about governments. Sure, there are good reasons why they want secrecy… but I don’t want them to get too complacent about it. I don’t want them to assume they can do things that no-one will ever know about.

Some of my feelings about it were crystallised by this excellent blog post — essay, really —  by Aaron Bady, which concentrates on the role of diplomacy in East Timor, and how the State Department’s eventual backing for UN peacekeepers in East Timor only came after spending decades providing military support to the murderous and oppressive Indonesian regime.

Because despite politicians’ high-minded rhetoric, when it comes to foreign policy human rights is always the bottom priority. Our governments will prop up almost any regime, however brutally oppressive and violent, for almost any reason. They — we — do it to ensure access to resources, whether it’s oil or something else; or because the enemy of our enemy is our friend; or because they may be a bastard, but at least they’re OUR bastard; or because we want to stay on the right side of the Americans; or for reasons of ‘stability’; or because they are valuable trade partners; or because we want somewhere to put our air bases.

And the thing is, none of those are stupid reasons. Take oil. If we — the West, the wider global economy — lost access to Middle Eastern oil, we would be completely fucked. Our countries would grind to a halt extremely quickly. We have a direct strategic interest in the politics of the region. Is that sufficient to justify the propping up of the corrupt, hypocritical Saudi royal family, even as they bankroll Islamist terrorism and torture their own people? I think that’s a genuinely difficult question to answer.

But politicians don’t even want to have the discussion. They would rather treat us like idiot children, not worldly enough to deal with these kind of grown-up problems. They can’t keep the really big stuff secret, but they certainly do their best to avoid drawing attention to it, and to avoid talking about it. And you can bet your life that they do keep things secret when they can get away with it.

So let’s keep our politicians and civil servants on their toes. Let’s make them stand up and actually justify their actions.

The other aspect which has been surprising and thought-provoking is the government reaction to the leaks. It’s worth pointing out at this point that, despite a lot of bluster, no-one at Wikileaks has been charged with any crimes; no-one has come up with any convincing argument that a crime has been committed. Certainly not under US law, since they have that admirable constitutional protection of free speech. And yet one by one, Amazon, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard have rolled over under government pressure and denied service to a legal journalistic enterprise exercising free speech. Are the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel next?

I don’t think I am, generally, someone who wants to shake up the global political establishment just for the sake of it. I don’t have that anarchist temperament. But when I see politicians reacting with such panic and hysteria to the threat of a little daylight, and when I look around the world and consider how they’ve been doing when left to their own devices, I tend to think, yeah, let’s have it. Who knows, let’s look on the bright side; maybe this is the birth of a new golden age of journalism and of newfound accountability in government and commerce. And maybe it’s just a storm in a teacup. But I doubt it’s the end of the world. So let’s try it. See what happens.

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The chill wind of austerity

Gosh, it’s been a depressing week in British politics. Austerity is such a grey, foggy, Victorian sort of word. They’ll be talking about retrenchment next.

And you don’t have to be an expert in the fine details of the budget to realise that there’s no way the government can cut total spending by 20% without making the country a harder, nastier place in a whole lot of ways, some obvious and some subtle.

I was at a party the other day where parents were swapping tips about places to take young children, and they were commenting that London’s parks all seem rather nice these days. They’re well-maintained, and clean, they have nice facilities, and they’re making an effort to be better for wildlife. Well, with a 30% cut in local government funding, I think it’s a safe bet that those parks are going to become grottier, grimmer, a little bit less of an escape from the city around them. Which seems like a good symbol for what’s going to happen to the whole country.

And since 85% of the debt was run up bailing out the banks, most of this pain is being inflicted in the name of saving the bankers from the consequences of their own incompetence.

But that’s not the really depressing part. It might be possible to take a deep breath and face the cuts as stoically as possible, if I was actually sure that they were going to have the desired effect. If I believed that they were the only thing keeping Britain from becoming the next Greece, if I was sure that the cuts were going to lay the foundation for a more stable and more prosperous economy in the longer term… but meanwhile there are Nobel prize winning economists like Krugman and Stigliz saying that, on the contrary, this is the worst thing the government could possibly be doing. The killer quote from the most recent Stigliz article:

Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions.

Now I don’t know whether they’re right. I suppose I have to hope not. But it really would be the vomit garnish on a shit sandwich if the effect of all these cuts was to take a weak economy and give it a good kicking.

Meanwhile Cameron, Clegg and Osborne seem to be rather enjoying themselves. Partially perhaps because of a pre-existing ideological commitment to the idea of small government, but I think mainly because they’re rather enjoying the vision of themselves as dynamic men of action, men with the leadership qualities to make the hard decisions.  Of course the British economy is where it is because a group of decisive, dynamic go-getters in very expensive suits decisively and dynamically cocked up on a catastrophic scale. The politicians have obviously been watching and learning.

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Culture

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano

Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia is a journalistic account of organised crime in Naples; the title is a pun on Camorra, the name of the Neapolitan mafia. It’s an eye-opening, depressing book. The prose is occasionally a little purple for my taste, which I suspect is partly the translation. And I feel a bit petty criticising the prose style since Saviano risked his life to write it; he now lives under 24 hour police protection. I can only hope his bravery does some good, although the book makes the problem seem intractable.

I realised it would feature unpleasant people doing unpleasant things — I’m not a complete idiot, I saw Goodfellas — but I thought that the movies might tend to exaggerate it, since violence is so cinematic. But actually the brutality is genuinely shocking: there are page after page of murders and beatings.

As a young doctor in the 1980s my father had worked on an ambulance crew. Four hundred deaths a year. In areas with up to five murders a day. They’d pull up in the ambulance, the wounded on the ground, but if the police hadn’t arrived, they couldn’t load him onto the stretcher. Because if word got around, the killers would come back and track down the ambulance, stop it, climb in, and finish off the job. It had happened lots of times, so the doctors and nurses knew to stand by, to wait till the killers came back to complete the operation.

Also shocking is the sheer scale of their involvement not just in clearly illegal activities like drugs, people trafficking and gun running, but in superficially legitimate businesses: fashion, construction, waste disposal. I guess it makes sense; a willingness to ignore the law can be a great competitive advantage. It’s easier to make money from imported consumer goods if you don’t pay any import duties or taxes; from clothing if it’s made in an illegal sweatshop; from waste disposal if you don’t even try to dispose of toxic waste safely.

The Casalesi have distributed their good throughout the region. Just the real estate assets seized by the Naples DDA in the last few years amount to 750 million euros. The lists are frightening. In the Spartacus trial alone, 199 buildings, 52 pieces of property, 14 companies, 12 automobiles, and 3 boats were confiscated. Over the years, according to a 1996 trial, Schiavone and his trusted men have seen the seizure of assets worth 230 million euros: companies, villas, lands, buildings, and powerful automobiles, including the Jaguar in which Sandokan was found at the time of his first arrest. Confiscations that would have destroyed any company, losses that would have ruined any businessman, economic blows that would have capsized any firm. Anyone but the Casalesi cartel. Every time I read about the seizure of property, every time I see the lists of assets the DDA has confiscated from the bosses, I feel depressed and exhausted; everywhere I turn, everything sems to be theirs. Everything. Land, buffalos, farms, quarries, garages, dairies, hotels, and restaurants. A sort of Camorra omnipotence. I can’t see anything that doesn’t belong to them.

The details of life at street level, and the mechanics of things like the waste disposal trade, are the most interesting parts of it; some of the stuff where he is detailing the feuds between different groups is less gripping, just because it’s difficult trying to keep track of all the different names and the list of murders gets depressingly repetitive. But overall it is fascinating stuff and I certainly recommend it.

» Naples – Roberto Saviano, GOMORRA is © Chiara Marra.

The image is of Saviano’s face on a wall in Naples. According to Google Translate, ‘Ascolta il Richiamo’ means something like ‘heed the call’.

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Horsetrading and backroom deals?

We’ve heard a lot in the last fortnight about horsetrading and haggling among our politicians, and some commentators profess to be deeply offended by it all. But surely negotiation and compromise is how policy is always arrived at: it’s just not usually so obvious.

Even within a normal single-party majority government, there must be disagreements about policy; and even when they broadly agree, different ministers must have their own priorities and pet projects. And since most policies cost money, the Treasury has to be involved; and civil servants and advisors will have their own input. In public, all ministers and civil servants are required to stick to the government line, which may give the impression of a Borg-like unity of purpose; but presumably the government line is arrived at in the first place by a process of negotiation, of horsetrading, of deals that take place in back rooms.

If anything, the negotiations between Clegg and Cameron provided a rather greater degree of transparency than normal. We can compare the coalition agreement to the two party manifestos and it becomes apparent exactly what compromises have been made, what deals have been struck. And we can judge for ourselves whether they were good compromises or bad ones. That seems to me like a Good Thing.

» The advert is from the Evanion collection of ephemera in the British Library.

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Election debrief

Going in to this election, it became clear that whoever was in government would have to raise taxes and cut spending, but no politician was willing to spell out the details. So the best we voters could hope for was a government which shared our priorities when making those decisions.

On that basis, the result could have been worse. I’m not thrilled to have David Cameron as the new PM, but the Conservative Party in coalition with the Lib Dems is hopefully a slightly different animal than the Conservative Party in the raw.

I do find it encouraging that Cameron seemed genuinely quite keen to form a coalition, rather than fighting on with a minority government. I guess it could be a simple political calculation — he wants the votes — but I still think it says something about his personality. I can’t imagine Margaret Thatcher doing the same.

It also suggests that, when trying to get legislation through the Commons, Cameron would rather be dependent on the Lib Dems than the right wing of his own party and the DUP. Which may go some way to answering the question of whether he really is a centrist and moderniser by instinct, or just the shiny new face of the Nasty Party.

At the very least, anything that reduces the power of sectarian fundamentalist Protestants in parliament has to be a good thing.

And while AV isn’t full blown proportional representation, it does at least eliminate the tactical voting which is my personal bugbear.

So that’s a relatively upbeat assessment of the situation. I’m equally capable of coming up with alternative scenarios where it all gets very messy indeed, but I guess we might as well try to hold on to optimism for as long as possible.

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Why I like STV

I’ve been mulling over the various flavours of voting reform available and I’m most tempted by Single Transferable Vote — which is, as it happens, also the system favoured by the Lib Dems at the moment, although that’s not particularly why I like it. No, what I like about it is that it allows you to express some nuance in your vote.

A quick explanation for those of you who haven’t been geeking out over voting reform over the past few weeks.

Rather than the current system with one MP per constituency, STV would have larger multi-member constituencies. So under one particular example that someone came up with, I would be in a constituency called ‘South Central London’, consisting of Southwark, Lambeth and Wandsworth, which would have 6 MPs. And so each party would have multiple candidates standing in each contistuency. And instead of marking a cross next to one candidate, the voter chooses candidates in order of preference – writing in 1 2 3 4 5 in the boxes.

Since there are 6 MPs, any candidate who is first choice for 1/6th of voters is elected. Let’s pretend here are 600,000 voters to make the maths easy; so 100,000 votes means you’re elected. If you got 120,000 votes, the 20,000 surplus votes would be redistributed to other candidates in the proportion that they were the second choice of all 120,000 votes. So if it was a Labour candidate, it’s quite likely that most of those 20,000 votes would be distributed to other Labour candidates. That process is repeated until all the seats are filled; but if at any time the votes are split such that no-one has 100,000 votes (which is quite likely with a lot of candidates) the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are redistributed in the same way.

Notice that the system doesn’t actually attempt to be proportional across the whole country, it is just locally proportional; but that’s good enough, really. Most constituencies would elect at least one representative from each of the major parties, so all the parties would be trying to win votes in all parts of the country; MPs would be tied to a local constituency, though a slightly larger one than we’re currently used to. It also effectively creates a certain minimum threshold for minor parties: for example, the BNP got about 2% of the national vote on Thursday, so strict proportionality would give them 12 MPs; but using STV, they wouldn’t have any MPs unless enough people voted for them in a particular constituency. So in my theoretical example, 100,000 people in South Central London would have to put the BNP as one of their choices for them to win any of the seats. Whether you think that kind of minimum threshold is a good thing or not is another question: it might be more democratic to let the fruitcake parties have a presence in parliament.

But the reason I like STV is that it actually allows you to vote with a bit more nuance. You have a choice of candidates from each party: if you’re an old fashioned socialist, you can try to find a Labour candidate who seems more left wing for your first choice. If you believe in small-government but you’re socially liberal, you might be able to choose Tory candidates who share those views and avoid voting for the ones who seem overly motivated by religion. Or you might want to vote across party lines: my small government socially liberal voter might vote for some combination of Conservative and Lib Dem candidates. If, like me, you don’t necessarily want the Green Party to be running the government but you do want a strongly pro-environment voting bloc in parliament, you could vote Green>Lib Dem>Lib Dem. Because although each voter nominally only has one vote, hence Single Transferable Vote, in practice you have a sort of mixed vote which you can share out among the candidates. You don’t know in advance quite how much of your vote is going to count for which candidates, because the maths is far too unpredictable, but it does at least make some allowance for the fact that most of us don’t completely agree with any of the parties.