A world-wide recession can be dismissed as bad luck. Electoral disasters? Everyone has them sooner or later, especially when times are bad. But presiding over one of the most embarrassing disasters in the history of English cricket? Unforgivable. Time to go, Gordon.
Current Affairs
Kids Will Vote Tory, Then
Today’s UK news brings the story that a major plank of Gordon Brown’s manifesto for the next election will be that all young people will be required to undertake at least 50 hours of voluntary work by the age of 19. Alex Massie has already pointed out the bizarreness of the concept of compulsory voluntary work so that I don’t have to. It falls to me, therefore, to ask exactly what this means.
I’m pretty sure that by the time I was 19 I had put in well over 50 hours of voluntary work helping out at the local cricket club, and at the stamp club where my Dad was a leading member. My mum commented that at 19 she was spending a lot of her time looking after her young brother and sister, and helping out at her father’s business. Somehow I doubt that any of these things will count towards Mr. Brown’s targets.
What I think this is actually about is social services. The government is facing a huge shortfall in areas like the health service, care for the elderly and disabled, and so on. One way to plug that gap, and play to the general hysterical fear of “young people” that the media is so fond of encouraging, is to draft kids into unpaid service in these areas. Which of course leaves one very important question: who is going to train and manage these press-ganged kids?
In sensitive and difficult areas such as this, I have a sneaking suspicion that we may often be better off without help than with unwilling help.
Saving American Books
Remember that daft “lead in books” legislation that I blogged about a while back? Well it is still on the books, and libraries are starting to think about which books they will have to destroy in order to comply with the regulations. Thankfully the American Library Association is not giving up without a fight, and they now have an ally in Congress. Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) has introduced legislation to exempt books from the legislation. Of course he needs votes in order to get is passed. And so, America, it is writing to your Congresscritter time.
Further details on the ALA web site.
Hat tip to Neil Gaiman who has been keeping on top of this one so that I didn’t have to.
Best Reason Yet to Leave Facebook?
Because the British government wants to keep an eye on everything you do there and store it in a database. For you own safety and security, of course. Just in case you might happen to be a terrorist.
There’s lots being said about this today. Here are The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC and Nick Harkaway.
Probably the thing that worries me most about this is that the authorities generally don’t have a clue about how social networks are used. Many of us routinely accept “friend” requests from anyone who comes along, because we are public figures and it would be considered rude not to do so. But what happens if someone who friends you later turns out to actually be a terrorist, or a sex offender, or an illegal immigrant? Are you suddenly going to find yourself under investigation as an associate of this person? Unfortunately I suspect you are.
The other thing that worries me is that this renders any privacy systems that Facebook and the like might have in place useless, because all of the information will be available via the government databases which will almost certainly not be properly secured.
By the way, before anyone starts, I know the title was unfair to Facebook. The government wants to go after all social networks. They also want to keep track of every email you send, and every web site you visit. They are an equal opportunity snoop.
And finally, while we are on the subject, Joe Gordon reminds us that our ever-vigilant MPs have once again been passing laws that are so vague that any crank who happens to have a position of authority to use them to save children from the evils of comic books. Petition here. UK citizens go sign please.
George Orwell wants to be your friend. Do you know Mr. Orwell? Or his friend, Winston Smith?
So Much for Privacy
There’s an interesting article about government databases in today’s Guardian. According to a report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, a political reform charity, out of 46 major government databases studied, 11 are in direct contravention of existing privacy and human rights legislation, and a further 29 need remedial work to bring them up to standard. You can find the complete report here.
Amongst the databases identified as currently illegally operated are the National DNA Database, the National Identity Register (intended to become the basis for an ID card system) and a system that allows data to be shared with law enforcement agencies in other EU countries without proper checks. Also on the list is the NHS Detailed Care Record, which apparently allows NHS staff to annotate patient records without any control or accountability. And perhaps most worrying of all, ContactPoint, a national index of all children in Britain which appears to be being used to highlight “problem” citizens from a very young age. From the Guardian article:
The report says children in particular are placed at risk. Three of the largest databases set up to support the young are failing to achieve their aims, it says.
Terri Dowty, of Action on Rights for Children, said young people had never been so measured, graded, monitored and discussed; the level of intrusion could not be “justified on the basis of good intentions”.
So basically what Britain is doing here is creating a sophisticated surveillance society by stealth under the excuse that it is “protecting” children. As kids people have few rights, and by the time they grow up it will be too late – the government will already have extensive data about them, much of which is liable to be wrong, and which they probably won’t be able to challenge.
Cory, where are you?
Thought Control
From today’s Guardian:
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, is seeking a new legal power to dictate the basic content of every public exam in England, in a move that would give him or any future secretary of state the right to decide which books children must study at GCSE or A-level.
Um, what was it we used to say about Russia and China when I was a kid?
Change Happens: US Backs Gay Rights
Since he took office, Mr. Obama has been quietly undoing many of the more unpleasant policies of his predecessor. There’s still doubtless a long way to go, but here’s one change that has made me happy. According to Associated Press (reported here on Yahoo) the US will now sign a UN resolution calling for an end to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The resolution was put before the UN in December last year, and the USA was the only Western nation to refuse to sign it.
70 UN member countries still outlaw homosexuality, and in several it is punishable by death.
Insititutional Failure
Over the last few days the British media has been obsessed with the case of a London taxi driver who has been convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting female passengers. The number of victims is quite large, and the offenses have happened over a period of many months. So the question being asked is, how did he get away with it for so long?
In investigating the issue, journalists have discovered that claims of sexual assault are rarely logged as crime reports. Offenses such as car theft get a much higher priority. Why? Well partly it is because some poor guy losing his car is much more important than some hysterical woman complaining just because someone fancied her, right? But it actually goes deeper than that.
The UK government has very aggressive targets for monitoring the effectiveness of the police. They want to make sure that crimes are solved, and offenders brought to justice. So every crime that gets logged needs to be followed up, action taken, results produced. Now put yourself in the position of a police officer. Someone comes to you claiming that she has been raped. You know very well that when it comes to court it will almost certainly be just a case of her word against his. He’ll be quietly confident, she’ll be an emotional mess; his lawyer will subtly suggest that perhaps she imagined it, perhaps she asked for it, perhaps she’s making the whole thing up to get back at him for some slight. The jury will not convict. To get a rape conviction in the UK these days you pretty much have to get a conviction for violent assault as well. So, knowing that you are pretty much bound to fail to “solve” the case to the government’s satisfaction, would you log it as a crime?
Of course women know this. They also know that if a rape case comes to court the newspapers will be all over it, and it is the woman’s reputation that will be dragged through the mud. Given police indifference, the likelihood of failure in court, and media hostility, many women don’t even bother to report being attacked.
And you know, I suspect that men know all of this too.
Saving Books from Burning
The lead in books nonsense in the USA continues to rumble on. Neil Gaiman tweeted about it again today, and that prompted Nick Harkaway to start thinking of ways to rescue endangered books. Given what Nick’s wife does for a living, he probably knows a bit about campaigning. Here’s hoping we manage to save some books.
Good News for UK Trans Kids
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about homophobic and transphobic bullying in UK schools. Pink News reports that the government is to add protection for trans kids to the forthcoming Equality Bill. However, as with all these things, it will take time for the change to have effect. According to the Pink News report, gay and lesbian kids are supposed to have been legally protected in schools since 2007. The report I blogged about yesterday makes it clear that many schools are currently failing to comply with those regulations.
Sport and Colonialism
Today’s Guardian has an interesting article (which from the byline appears to have been written by Pakistanis) on the different attitudes towards cricket in Pakistan. Imran Kahn explains how success at cricket helped the country feel proud of itself in the past:
“The colonial hangover was removed by the cricket team,” he said. “When I started we were the generation that couldn’t possibly think of beating England. Then we began beating England. Much more important than beating other teams was to beat England because they were considered the master, the ex-colonialists. It was a country regaining its honour and pride through cricket, getting that self-esteem that colonialism destroys.”
And yet earlier this week the unthinkable happened. Pakistani terrorists attacked a a visiting cricket team, clearly intending to kill them all. Why? Because the terrorists regard cricket as a colonial import:
Among militant groups, though, cricket is considered an imperial throwback. The banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected of involvement in the recent Mumbai and Lahore attacks, called upon Pakistanis to give up the sport. “The British gave Muslims the bat, snatched the sword and said to them: ‘You take this bat and play cricket. Give us your sword. With its help we will kill you and rape your women,'” the LeT said in its magazine.
The situation is similar in the rest of the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. Some of the greatest cricketers the world has ever known have come from India, the West Indies, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. What is more, the most high profile domestic cricket tournament in the world – the one with the most money involved, the one that players from all over the world want to be part of – is the Indian Premier League. Australia’s players might still be on top of the world, but when money and politics are taken into account it is India that runs the game. This infuriates stuck-up Englishmen.
Clearly I’m not a Pakistani, or indeed from anywhere in the former British Empire. I have no voice in their internal debate. Some of my ancestors, however, are from a part of Britain that was conquered by the English around a thousand years ago and was treated as a colonial possession for hundreds of years. Rugby is a game that was invented in an English public school, and is very much a creation of the upper classes (lower class English people are supposed to play soccer instead). And yet rugby is a game that the Welsh took to their hearts – particularly in the coal mining valleys of the south – and is now as much a part of our national psyche as cricket is of India’s. Nothing gives us greater pleasure than beating the English. And if a bunch of religious extremists were to tell us that we had to stop playing rugby because it is a colonial import I like to think we’d give them pretty short shrift.
So Much for Data Protection
Whenever a government wants to set up a new, far-reaching database they always reassure the public that proper safeguards will be put in place to make sure that the data is not mis-used. In Europe we even have Data Protection legislation, making it a crime to share personal data without permission. Does that stop people doing it? Of course not.
Today British newspapers are reporting the case of a private investigator whose business specialized in selling personal data about people to companies in the building industry. The primary purpose of his activities was to allow construction companies to illegally vet potential employees for union connections before employing them. Some 40 UK companies who used his services, including big names such as Balfour Beatty, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O’Rourke and Costain, are currently being investigated for illegally purchasing this data.
This sort of thing would happen anyway in some form or another, but it will be made much easier by the existence of government databases. As and when a massive health service database goes live, you can bet that members of right wing and religious extremist groups will be scouring it for LGBT people so that they can target them. The fact that this will be illegal will not stop them.
Cricket Under Attack
I woke up this morning to the terrible news that a bus taking the Sri Lankan cricket team to the ground for their game against Pakistan had been attacked by well-armed terrorists. Thankfully none of the team is seriously injured, though Thilan Samaraweera and Tharanga Paravitarana have been taken to hospital with shrapnel wounds to the thigh and chest respectively (see CricInfo). However, five Pakistani policemen who were part of the security team for the cricketers died protecting their charges. The Sri Lankan team was only in Pakistan because both Australia and India had declined offers to tour, claiming the country was “too dangerous”.
For the benefit of those of you in non-cricket-playing countries who may not be familiar with the politics, this appears to have been nothing to do with the Sri Lankans per se. Indeed, as Sanath Jayasuriya has been quoted in The Guardian, in all the years of conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, cricketers have never been attacked. Nor is this an Islam v Secular issue. The Pakistani team and government include many devout Muslims all of whom are cricket lovers as well. The Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK, speaking on Sky News this morning, talked about extremists who believe that cricket is un-Islamic: that is, he was talking about fundamentalists.
If you are looking for an analogy, the best one I can think of is to imagine what would happen if a bunch of well-armed Christian fundamentalists attacked a bus taking the Washington Redskins to a game against the Dallas Cowboys, complaining that playing football on a Sunday was sinful.
Of course there is more to it than that. There is a whole pile of politics involved, including the war in Afghanistan. Tariq Ali takes a look at the issues in The Guardian. But the core issue here is that this is a terrorist attack that will outrage ordinary Pakistanis in a way that attacks on Western tourists in India, or support for the Taleban, will not. As Alex Massie says in The Spectator, “the real intended victim is Pakistan itself.” And because of that I hope that we will discover that this time the terrorists have shot themselves in the foot.
Convention on Modern Liberty
Today a bunch of people in the UK have been busy talking about the erosion of civil liberties in our country. The event was called the Convention on Modern Liberty and it took place in London, Glasgow, Belfast, Bristol, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge and on Twitter. Speakers included Philip Pullman, Brian Eno, Feargal Sharkey, Billy Bragg and Cory Doctorow. You can find Pullman’s keynote speech online here. And a Guardian report on the event here. Cory has been busily tweeting away, as have many other people. If you search Twitter for #coml you should find lots of coverage.
I don’t really need to add anything except give you a brief extract from Pullman’s speech:
The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia of furtive hatred and low-level panic, every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour.
And suggest that you read the whole thing.
How Others See Us
Heads Up, Bay Area, the UK is talking about you. It may come as something of a surprise to the Liberal and Progressive population of the Bay Area, but apparently David Cameron and his pals think that they are an ideal template to follow for returning the Conservative Party to power. Doubtless it is a bit of a surprise to the Huntin’, Shootin’ ‘n’ Fishin’ wing of the Conservatives as well.
But there is more. Alex Massie weighs in and points out that the Bay Area might be too elitist to be safely copied by Conservatives:
Equally, if you were to pick a place to reinforce the notion that the party leadership is so wealthy and comfortably off that it struggles to appreciate the concerns of the Average Joe then, yup, San Francisco and the Bay Area might be the place you’d choose.
I’ve quoted a little selectively there, but the general impression that Alex gives is that Bay Area folks are wildly out of touch with the views of average Americans. Of course that may be one of the reasons I like the Bay Area so much. But, as Alex sagely gets around to pointing out, the real reason for not copying California is the total mess that its government has fallen into. Really, Britain has enough economic problems without being unable to pass a budget.
The Faithful Are Not All The Same
There’s an interesting new Just Plain Sense podcast gone up today. In it Christine Burns talks to a Catholic priest with an apparent passion for post-modernism. It is nice to find a priest with a belief in the need for deconstructing texts. There’s also a fair amount of “what was he thinking???” comment on the subject of Pope Ratty and his recent pronouncements about saving the world from teh trannies. I realize now, however, that I should have suggested that Christine ask a question or two about paganism.
Oh, and if anyone who knows Peter Murphy is reading this, please do let him know that there is an actual Catholic priest in Liverpool called John Devine.
UK to Get Tough on Polygamy?
Now there’s a headline you don’t see every day, and yet I have take it from today’s Guardian. Lady Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion and a leading Muslim peer, is concerned and told the BBC:
“There has to be a culture change and that has to brought about by policymakers taking a very clear stance on this issue, saying that, in this country, one married man is allowed to marry one woman.
“And that must be the way for everyone who lives in this country.”
So this is not about Mormons, this is about Muslims, some of whom happen to believe that a man should be allowed multiple wives. But the first thing that came into my mind when I read the Guardian article was that Lady Warsi wanted to replace one sort of religious stricture with another one.
To start with, one man and one woman is not the way it has to be for everyone in this country. One man can marry one other man if he wants to. (There’s the old issue of civil unions and “marriage”, but let’s leave that aside for now.) And it goes further than that, because one of the main reasons that gay and lesbian couples want legal recognition of their relationship is because of the legal status and rights it affords them.
People in the UK sometimes to engage in polyamorous relationships, but because bigamy is illegal those relationships cannot have any legal standing and one or more parties (generally mistresses) are disadvantaged. As I understand it, under Islamic law a polygamous relationship can obtain legal recognition and all parties are covered. Indeed, again as I understand it (and I’m being cautious here because I know very little about Islam), the Qur’an exhorts Muslims only to take only additional wives if they are confident that they manage more than one fairly and justly.
Now of course there is a feminist angle here. To start with, if men are allowed multiple wives then women should be allowed multiple husbands. That should go without saying. And just in case Mr. Heinlein is looking down on me, group marriages should be OK too. But from a feminist viewpoint, complaining about polygamy is mostly to do with complaining about the idea than men can “own” women. While polygamy might encourage such views, monogamous men often view their wives as property too. What we really ought to be campaigning for is equal legal status, not for the enforcement a particular sort of social arrangement.
Also I’d like to see religion removed from the process entirely. Government should not sanction one religion’s views on social organization over another’s. The objective should be to allow citizens to undertake contracts to form family units for the purpose of mutual support, the rearing of children and so on. Religious ideas about what forms of sexual behavior are “moral” should have nothing to do with it.
Obviously there are potential practical problems with this. If, in practice, polygamy is being used as an excuse to force young girls into providing unpaid domestic and sexual services, that’s something we need to be concerned about. But from a theoretical point of view I find it hard to see why polygamy needs to be illegal.
UK Civil Liberties Erosion
Today’s Independent has a bunch of articles about the erosion of civil liberties under New Labour. The main article is here, with supporting comment from Brian Eno here.
It is an odd mess, because in many ways New Labour has done a lot for embattled minorities, albeit often only because it was dragooned into it by the European Court. What the Indy is talking about, however, is the War on Terror police state mentality that has taken over government thinking around the world. What our government, and others of a Left persuasion, are saying is that yes, they will stamp down hard on racists and homophobes and the like, but they have to have powers to deal with terrorism.
Which brings us to the other article. One of the things that has irritated me about my recent problems with getting into the US is the automatic assumption that many people had of, “oh, those Americans, they are awful people.” I was pretty much sure that immigration people are the same the world over, including in the UK, but I didn’t have any counter examples. Now I do.
A judge has insisted that an asylum seeker who was sent back to his home country where his life might be in danger be brought back to Britain, because the circumstances of his removal were unlawful:
In a written statement, Mr X said that, last September, he was deceived into thinking he was being taken from Tinsley House immigration removal centre, on the perimeter of Gatwick airport, for an interview with an immigration officer. Instead, without warning, he was taken in a van by four security men to a plane.
He said that, when he resisted leaving the van, he was handcuffed, and punched in his private parts to make him straighten his legs so they could be belted together. Crying, he was lifted on to the aeroplane and flown out of the country.
And:
Mr X’s mobile phone had been taken from him and he was given no chance to contact friends or lawyers, even though Home Office rules required that he should have 72 hours’ notice of removal to give him a chance to make calls.
Worst of all, the representative of the Refugee Legal Centre interviewed in the article said that the government is attempting to ban legal reviews of such procedures so that the government need not be held accountable for how it treats asylum seekers. After all, they have to have powers to deal with terrorists, right?
Except that Mister X is not a suspected terrorist. His problem is that he’s gay.
So I ask you, what is the point is passing a whole bunch of nice, friendly laws protecting gay people from harassment, if at the same time you pass laws allowing your “security” services to brutalize anyone that they take a dislike to?
The Economist on US Immigration Policy
It looks like Congress is having another bout of “keep them furriners out!” fever. Not that I would actually get an H-1B these days, I’m too old, but I do know a bit about regulation of derivatives.
Facebook Politics
The San Francisco Chronicle is trying to predict the result of the next Gubbernatorial race by looking at the Facebook popularity of leading candidates. The race currently look like this:
- Jerry Brown: 700
- Gavin Newsome: 25,000
- Steve Poizner: 80
Inspired by this they then went on to look at other major political figures:
- Barak Obama: 5.2 million
- Sarah Palin: 491,000
- Vladimir Putin: 29,500
- Gordon Brown: 3,399
Poor Gordon. Nobody loves him these days.
For comparison, here are a few other notable public figures who have fan pages:
- Neil Gaiman: 48,196
- Bruce Springsteen: 221,899
- The Flying Spaghetti Monster: 36,701
Rumors that David Cameron is to off the Flying Spaghetti Monster a place in his shadow cabinet are being hotly denied by Conservative Party headquarters.