A census – as any social scientist knows – is absolutely essential to modern government. We cannot plan social policy if we don’t know how many people there are, where they are, what they do, how long they live, etc. A non-judgmental collation of information – which is what a census is – is the bedrock of civilised society. Democracy and accountable government depend completely this kind of knowledge. If we lose it, government will be run by gossip, innuendo and Daily Mail after-dinner ‘common sense’ (as if it isn’t already, but hey)
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I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good. – Nick Clegg, interviewed by Henry Porter It is quite remarkable for a serving British minister to say this on the record. Public protestation of belief in the benignity and good intentions of the state is the normal standard. February 14th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If we ever get to the day when the best we can do in the way of eccentrics is men who wear silly hats, then heaven help us. – Simon Heffer, on the late David Hart January 9th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. – State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, announcing at UNESCO that the US intends to commemorate World Press Freedom Day next May. The theme will be “21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers.” December 8th, 2010 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Royal College of Nursing has just won a case against a bureaucratic body in England that many may not have heard of, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The victory is a fairly minimal one: it has been ruled that the ISA must confirm to some elements of fair procedure, and may not ban people from their professions automatically without hearing. None of the professional bodies or establishment human rights organisations such as Liberty appears to be challenging the principle of state vetting in employment. They are fussing about the procedure. But to me this is an epitome of the degree of state intrusion into our lives that is now accepted in Britain as completely normal. Here, from the Nursing Times report, are summaries of the cases on the basis of which the most recent ruling was made:
For those who are unfamiliar with English criminal law, “accepted a caution” is a sort of plea bargain in the hands of the police. If one accepts a caution, one is admitting an offence in return for no further action being taken by police (except keeping a record on you, fingerprints and DNA, till you reach the age of 100). One might believe one was avoiding punishment. That would almost certainly be suggested by police (whose figures are improved and paperwork decreased by disposing of offences by caution). Nevertheless the routine admission of a minor offence can be used by distant bureaucrats (whether they give you a hearing or not) to deprive you of your career (and in the case of British nurses wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money in training). And not only that but such a decisions makes it a criminal offence for anyone to employ you in any capacity in medicine, education or social care. Mr O and Mrs W would have been barred not just from professional nursing, but scrubbing the lavatories in a school after hours, or driving a bus for the elderly. (Or even, by a bureaucratic version of magical contagion, a bus for carers for the elderly. see pdf Q.35) And cautioned for what? In the one case leaving a near teenager alone for a short while. In the other for allowing (allowing!?) one’s wife to leave the children for less than a working day. Who knew these were criminal offences? I want children to grow up to be independent. That means them learning to manage themselves as early as they can. Leaving your children on their own for short periods, perhaps overnight or for a weekend, with proper provision and knowledge of who to call in case of problems, is not criminal. It is fine. It is laudable. But we live in a state that demands you not use your judgement, that cannot bear the possibility of error and learning. It fears mistakes enough that there are now rules about how you may bring up your family, requiring all minors to be treated as needy infants. All adults, on the other hand, whether at home or in their working lives, are deemed to be cruel monsters unless restrained by the threat of excommunication from the benevolent database. The state knows what is right. The ISA was originally to use a checklist to assess lifestyles for ‘risk‘, though that has been deferred for the moment. You are either among the elect, or you are damned – and the ISA has a list saying which is which. November 14th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
A disenfranchised population becomes an untrustworthy population, since it loses the habit of making its own decisions. The majority become childish in hundreds of ways, looking to the State as parent, complaining without displaying a willingness to any form of self-determination. The more liberty one has, the more indvidual responsibility is required of one to make rational, well-considered decisions in the context of one’s social and personal life. Most of us are educated to think we are not capable of this when, in fact, most of us are thoroughly capable but simply lack either the circumstances or the determination to test ourselves. An authoritarian, paternalistic State encourages us in this belief, by its actions as well as by its rhetoric. By its very nature it creates a morally enfeebled, child-like population. This population in turn ‘proves’ its inability to control its own fate and consequently ‘proves’ the need for the paternalism which created it in the first place. There is no fundamental difference between Tory and Socialist paternalism. – Michael Moorcock, The Retreat From Liberty, 1983 November 10th, 2010 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ministers should not spend more time consulting business about the general question of what should we deregulate. Exisiting businesses can handle existing regulations and often see them as allies to keep others out of a market. November 5th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an idea with logical force, many practical attractions and great philosophical appeal. It is courageous. It is clever. It stands, in short, no chance of success. – Matthew Parris, underlining that practical politics runs on interest, not intellect. September 19th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese. September 11th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Ministry of Defence employs 29,000 people in its procurement branch. Its equivalent in a country under actual military threat, Israel, employs a reported 400. Few would say that Britain’s Armed Forces were better equipped than Israel’s. July 18th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am fairly seriously prosopagnosic. That may be why I am so skeptical about identification in general, but the research into the condition is beginning to militate quite strongly against the presuppositions many people in the law-and-order business make about the utility of photo-ID. The BBC has an interesting radio programme on how bad people are at facial-recognition, here: The points in this that I suggest are important for policy are: 1. Most people are not in fact very good at matching strangers to their photographs. People tend to be much better at recognising people they know than people they do not know, and mistakenly generalise what you could call ‘Easy Matching’ from their experience with their familiars. This is not a mistake you would make if, like me, you find recognising people you know hard. Looking at someone’s ‘photo-ID’ on a one-off occasion will ordinarily be hit-and-miss, unless you are one of the rare people the radio programme calls “super-recognisers”. 2. A significant number of people (the programme suggests 3%) are sufficiently bad that it handicaps them in everyday life, but generally they do not realise it. I was 30 before I understood I had a problem, though I can recall incidents back to 6 or 7 years old that are examples. Yet officialdom assumes that anyone can recognise others from pictures, to the degree suggested by the false Easy Matching supposition. There is no testing of passport control staff, police, security guards, bar-staff… anyone, who is expected to do the matching. Yet 3% or thereabouts not only are ordinarily useless at it but are being put to an impossible task. They may well compensate intuitively by responding to other behavioural or bodily clues that have nothing to do with facial features—the Clever Hans syndrome. I know I do. But I was not always aware that is what I was doing, or that I was different in that respect from other people. Some Hypotheses: Photo-ID for age-checking is rather like voice-stress or polygraph “fraud detection”. There is no real evidence for its accuracy, yet the story that it ‘obviously’ works is so plausible to so many, that few even question it. There is a massive confirmation bias, and it is probably not acting as more than an intimidatory deterrent. Software facial-recognition is thought of as pretty bad for the purpose that it is put to (fact) – but it may well be better than 90%+ of people under the same circumstances of matching strangers in large numbers, and infinitely better than the small fraction of checkers who, unknown to themselves and their employers, are getting it wrong almost all the time. Criticisms of the technology are often as based in the mistaken Easy Matching idea as support for it. Both sides of that argument assume people are better than machines. But in practice ID-ing travellers and drinkers doesn’t do a lot. It is an imposition and a cost on everyone, but the attitudes struck in security theatre do not stop competent imposture. Flash and dash is close to useless, but there’s a huge industry of ID badges built on it. The false assumption is that replacing a doorkeeper who knows everyone (and in most cases will therefore recognise them quite well), with picture-passes that ‘anyone can check’, is more efficient and more secure. Quite the reverse. But look at the reception area in any large firm and what to you see? Picture passes with RFID tracking of the pass and bored temps concerned that you display a badge properly, operating on the assumption that your badge is you. (Technology keeps ever more track of those tokens, however. So, as long as you are compliant, regardless of the fact that linking ID with people does not work, ID does work as surveillance.) There is now in the system a prejudice and an interest in not facing (ha!) these ideas. Everything in fact tends towards dismissing them. The authoritarian mindset is particularly prone to confirmation bias (Cf. the catastrophic DNA database arguments), and Clever Hans will sucker them every time. The most modern fashions in government are close to superstition. May 4th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Assiduous readers will have noted from my (sparse, of late) posts that I do not agree with some other Samizdatistas about UK elections. I do not think political disaster will save us or that small government might arise from the wreck of huge government. Mine is a mitigation strategy. Just as we have to eat, even when the choices are unappetising, we have no choice but to be governed. Therefore I vote, and am active within the existing political system, in order to to try get the least worst result I can. Sometimes the least worst is not very good. Politicans in a democracy have an amazing ability to back themselves into impossible corners, even when they don’t have to. The Conservative party’s promises to “protect” the budgets for the National Health Service and overseas aid may be mad as government, but they do have an electoral logic. They are explicable as strategic decisions to change the image of the party, and appear to have worked as such. Overseas aid is largely symbolic, peanuts compared with the welfare bills. (And few will really care if that promise ends up broken.) Whereas keeping up spending plans on a bloated NHS which absorbs approaching a fifth of the budget and a tenth of the nation’s wealth, supports huge lobby groups and unions, and has been force-fed taxpayers’ money like a Strasbourg goose by the incumbent regime, is a serious commitment it will be hard to row back from. Still, maybe they had to do this to themselves, as the price of power: middle Britain worships the NHS; it is more important than IHS, more established than the Church of England. The Tories were not trusted to keep that faith, and had as a result no more chance of governing than a secular party in Iran. Now they are accepted as orthodox. But why would you make a promise no-one expects, but that similarly constrains your scope for radical action? No party has promised not to raise VAT rates, despite pressure. No party has directly promised not to make cuts to state wagerolls. And Cameron did just promise a pay cut in the public sector. Sounds good? Oh dear, no. He did so in a way that disastrously locks him in and creates a political bar to the cuts that are really needed. A 5% cut in ministerial pay, and freezing it for the life of a parliament, is easy populism. “Slashing” the BBC calls it. However, in practice it is trivial; and, much worse, it puts a ceiling on what can be done to tackle the deficit. Ireland has already cut all public sector salaries—by an average of 13.5%. Had he said ministers will be paid a third less, and hinted at serious cuts in other public sector salaries over £60,000 (representing impossible wealth to most voters), then he could have been populist with room for manoeuvre. But now Cameron will be very hard put to do as much as freeze the wage bills of the bureaucracy. Even though ministers are arguably underpaid, getting much less in real terms than their Victorian forebears, it will be impossible now to cut the salary of any signficant public sector interest group by more than 5%. Protecting the NHS forces greater cuts from every other department just to stand still. A promise to cut just made cutting nearly impossible. That is a terrible mistake. May 1st, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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