Yes Minister, Pre-Distribution and the Big Society

A Yale political scientist, one Jacob Hacker, has come up with an idea he calls "pre-distribution", focusing work done by John Rawls and others on how to make society fairer.  At the moment the state tries to do this ex post facto via taxation and welfare.  Hacker wants to do it much earlier on.

I heard Hacker interviewed on the radio the other day because his ideas have been taken up by Ed Miliband  (the Tories have been quick to link the hapless author with Yes Minister's Jim Hacker; David Cameron delightedly pointed out at PMQs that the academic has written a book called The Road To Nowhere).  Jacob Hacker seemed a thoroughly amiable chap, partly bemused and partly flattered by the attention he is getting.

Basically, he wants employees to be given more money.  This is all very laudable (and if it could be achieved by making sure their Chief Executives got less, it might even work); but if you pay employees more, you immediately raise the company's cost base and make its products and services less competitive.  More money for the employed means fewer jobs for others.  If we did what Hacker - and now apparently Ed Miliband - want, the Germans and Chinese would be laughing their heads off.  Because they are the people who would benefit.

Hacker's view is shared by by Dave Prentis, head of public sector union UNISON.  Prentis has bitterly criticised the Government's public sector pay freeze.  He may be justified in trying to get better pay and conditions for his members, because this is after all what unions are there to do, but he is wrong to suggest, implicitly if not explicitly, that higher wages for public sector workers are somehow good for society at large.  They aren't.  Every pound spent on higher public sector wages is one less that can be spent somewhere else in the economy.  That's why Ed Miliband has endorsed the Tory pay freeze.  Prentis needs to explain which service (or whose jobs) he would cut to pay for his members' wage increases.

For the disaffected, alternative employment and better pensions may be available in the private sector.  Or not.

If the pre-distributionists really wanted wages at the bottom end to rise, they would be calling for an end to unskilled immigration.  Its effect has been much studied (not the least by Prof David Blanchflower) and is well understood.  The pool of available labour increases.  Employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages.  Wages at the bottom end stagnate while those at the top rise.

During the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK, leaving many British people (some of them, incidentally, with brown skins) languishing on their sofas.  Ironically, those most in favour of unrestricted immigration are those most likely to complain about the inequality which results when you have it.

Like other big ideas, Pre-Distribution will come and go.  Blue Labour.  Red Tory.  Ed Miliband mentioned Disraeli's One Nation during his party conference speech - that one, more than a century old, flickers briefly into life now and again.  Will the Third Way still have legs in 2112?  Perhaps.  But I don't think we'll be hearing much about the Big Society.

Mario Draghi as Jan Tomaszewski - keeping the Euro in the game.

Eurozone watchers like me underestimated at first the willingness of the apparatchiks to keep the single currency going.  Whilst good leadership might have been in short supply, a story has emerged in the last year of striking resourcefulness in taking steps to defer the final Euro crunch.  In retrospect this should have been obvious - a generation of European leaders has grown up believing in the The Project, and they are not going to see their dreams chucked on the scrap-heap just because of a yawning currency imbalance between north and south.

No leader has emerged with greater credit (admittedly in a below-average field) than Mario Draghi, ECB chief.  First of all his Long Term Financing Operation, allowing banks access to cheap three-year money, kept the banking system afloat at a time when it might well have foundered.  Now, when it looks as if Spain could get sucked into the abyss of unaffordable bond yields, up pops Draghi with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to keep yields down, a promise which has taken the concrete form of Outright Monetary Transaction, a scheme by which the ECB will buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market in exchange for fiscal reforms by the sovereign in question.

Draghi reminds me of Jan Tomaczewski, the legendary Polish goalkeeper, who flung himself in the way of the missiles bombarding his goal during World Cup qualifier against England in 1973.  Like Tomaczewski, Draghi seems equal to everything that is thrown at him.

But his interventions are short-term only.  Draghi is a good shot-stopper, but he cannot stop the relentless attacks on his goal.  The country most likely to need OMT now seems to be Spain.  But Spain doesn't want to ask for the money yet, because it would be politically humiliating and in October there will be regional elections.  Meanwhile the country has youth unemployment at 50%, and yesterday Madrid cut 40 billion Euros from its budget (perhaps to forestall the demands the ECB will make for triggering OMT), which will only push its economy further into recession.  And this at a time when Catalonia is pressing for a secession referendum which Madrid says would be illegal.  Old Spanish generals are warning about military action if Catalonia goes ahead.

Thus even the most competent Eurozone leader's measures are made at the expense of ordinary people in countries of the southern periphery.  They are anti-democratic in several senses.  Draghi and his like have no democratic mandate in Spain.  They aren't even Spanish.  Their decisions profoundly affect the Spanish electorate, but Spanish voters have no say in them.  Their effect on Spain as the country struggles to do what is required of it is so grindingly awful that it jeopardises not just Spanish democracy, barely half a century old, but the existence of the country in its current form.

That all this should be happening in pursuit of a monetary union that was meant to ensure a united and peaceful Europe is a bitter irony.

A prediction then - if a country leaves the Euro it won't be because EU leaders have run out of imaginative road.  On the contrary, they will keep thinking of ways to kick the can on a bit further till hell freezes over.  Instead it will happen because somewhere people decide that they have had enough.  At this stage Spain looks the most likely candidate.

Legalising drugs and two dead policewomen

I am willing to be persuaded that legalisation of drugs is a good idea, but as long as they are illegal it's wrong to take them.

There are two reasons for this, one contentious and one incontestable.  The first one - because laws in a democratic society should be obeyed - is open to the observation that it leaves no room for conscientious objection.  The second however bears all before it.

It is that to take drugs illegally is to facilitate a worldwide criminal monster which causes chaos and misery wherever it reaches.  It wrecks whole countries (think Colombia and Mexico) and blights the lives of millions.  By all means campaign to get drugs legalised, but while they're illegal it's despicable to take them.  Even just a bit of spliff now and again helps to keep the monster going.

Amidst the universally outraged reaction in the media and in society at large to the killing of the Hattersley policewomen, no-one mentions drugs.  But drugs are the gangs' principal business.  The demand element in their business, without which it wouldn't exist, comes from society at large.
Including, and probably disproportionately, the media.

Andrew Mitchell and the police

So Andrew Mitchell, the Chief Whip, has a run-in with the Downing St police officers.  Cue earnest correspondents on TV and in the press pointing out how bad this looks in the light of the killing in Manchester of two policewomen.  The Police make sacrifices for us, they intone, and it ill behoves a Tory minister to treat them with disrespect.

I have no particular taste for Mitchell, who looks typical of his kind, but it's funny how the press has chosen the murdered WPCs as a context for his conduct.  They could instead have chosen the Met officer who pushed the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson to the ground.  Or the South Yorkshire police who perjured themselves after the Hillsborough disaster.

But that would make Andrew Mitchell, pleb or no pleb, look pretty decent, wouldn't it?

Parade's End, liberalism and the Duchess of Cambridge

My wife and I have been watching Parade's End (known in the family, in deference to E M Forster, as Howard's Parade).  The BBC's adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, with a script by Tom Stoppard and a stellar cast including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Roger Allam amongst many others, ought to have been compulsive viewing.  But we've been disappointed, finding a lot of it stodgy and garbled.  Some scenes that should have been electrifying (the dinner with the mad vicar) looked like a hasty run-through, and much though I love Cumberbatch, he hasn't made the decent but stubborn Tory MP Christopher Tietjens really likeable enough for us to care what happens to him.  Cumberbatch sticks his jaw out and looks stoic, trying out a new accent every week, but the script doesn't allow us to get inside the character.  Rupert Everett, doing a fine unobtrusive job as Tietjens' brother, is wasted.  Watching the first episode of the new Downton Abbey series on Sunday night reminded me what an effective screen-writer Julian Fellowes is: Downton is less ambitious, but Fellowes delivers in a way that Stoppard doesn't.

The Parade referred to is, presumably, the facade of Edwardian life, where the rich pretended all was well in front of the servants, women couldn't vote, and authoritarian generals looked blithely on while their men were butchered by the hundred thousand.  I haven't read Madox Ford's book (though I will), but the TV series invites us to look forward by comparison to our own time of emancipation, honesty in sexual relations and a more enlightened foreign policy.  This is much the same appeal Mad Men makes - we feel superior watching Don Draper and his cronies drink their sexist, racist and Republican way across New York in the same way as we pity Tietjens his loveless marriage and deplore the treatment of Suffragettes.

A couple of episodes in there was a scene in which Tietjens accidentally wandered into the bathroom while his wife was naked.  There must have been a dozen ways in which this information could have been communicated without actually showing Rebecca Hall's upper half, but the director nevertheless opted for the full frontal.  Now I have been a fan of Ms Hall since her fragrant turn in Woody Allen's Vicky, Christina, Barcelona, but I personally found her nakedness disconcerting to the extent that it rather overshadowed the point of the encounter (which was to underline the extent to which the couple were alienated from each other).

No matter: that is where the liberalism the series argues for has got us - whereas at the time Parade's End was written the only chance of seeing naked breasts was pretty much get married or go to Paris, by the 70s the adolescent male could enjoy a nano-second of Jenny Agutter jumping naked into a billabong (Walkabout, since you ask) and now the casual viewer can see Ms Hall's perky embonpoint adorning his living room at will.

And that is not to mention the inexhaustible reams of pornography available at the click of a mouse, now arriving chez nous without so much as a discussion in Parliament, let alone a vote by MPs.

Is this liberalism an advance?  I'm not sure.  For every piece of art that is improved by the explicit, I suspect there are many, many others made worse.  More generally, is it a freedom worth the price of its misuse?  As with all such things, those who argue for emancipation assume that people will use it wisely; I think that's a mistake.

Meanwhile, in an ironic meeting between the old world and the new, a French magazine prints topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge.  I have some sympathy for her, but I don't think she will be sunbathing topless again any time soon.

Hillsborough and Islam

So some American fruitcakes make a stupid and offensive film about Islam.  Across the world Muslims march.  In Libya the US embassy is set on fire and people are killed.  Meanwhile in the UK a new report into the Hillsborough tragedy reveals that police lied and altered witness statements.

There is a modest connection between these two events.

First, Islamic outrage.  Clearly a lot of people don't understand that in the West people have considerable freedom of action, and if some idiot makes an offensive film that is not the US government's fault.  "Ah", say the protestors, "but they let it happen.  They didn't stop it".  They don't understand that the freedom to practice a religion - Islam, say - is pretty much the same thing as the freedom to make art, however bad and tawdry.  Religion is merely one way of looking at the world; other views are available.  "Ah", say the protestors, "but Islam is not just a religion.  It is the religion, and if you say anything against it you are insulting it".  At which point the Western mind slightly loses patience, and thanks the Lord, Allah, whoever, that such folly does not take place here.

Actually, about a thousand people protested outside the American Embassy in London over the weekend.

As for Hillsborough, the subject came up at a party on Friday night.  Amidst the universal condemnation of the police, my friend Ewan came up with the following.

"Of course, the thing they never mention is how the people actually died.  They weren't crushed by falling masonry or anything.  They were crushed by people pushing from the back.  Yes, the police shouldn't have opened the exit gate, but they only did that because loads of Liverpool fans were late, and when they opened it they pushed to get in.  OK, it wouldn't have happened if the gate hadn't been opened, sure, but the actually deaths were directly caused by fans pushing".

I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but Ewan was articulating a sentiment that I have heard hinted at many times, almost furtively, out of the corner of my ear in conversations about Hillsborough over the years.  Ewan's contention was that so widespread was the sympathy for the victims, and so successful the Hillsborough lobby in focusing blame on the police, the stadium designers and the FA (all partly responsible for more remote causes), that the truth about the proximate cause could no longer be mentioned.  Anyone who was remotely critical about the Liverpool fans on that day risked the self-righteous ire of an entire city, unable to accept that some of the blame lay with its own.  It nearly did for Boris Johnson, and only last week another Chief Superintendent had to backtrack hastily over some comments that, goodness gracious, the conduct of fans at the time didn't make the police's job any easier.  Ewan had himself, he said, been putting these points on the Guardian's Commentisfree website, only to find himself banned.  Comment is only free within certain Guardian-approved limits, it appears.

In case you're wondering, Ewan is not me; and Ewan is not his real name either.  He is a professional person with something to lose and I wouldn't identify him here.

I have no idea whether he is right about Hillsborough (although in the absence of a meteorite having fallen unnoticed on the Leppings Lane End there is certain plausibility about the explanation). Certainly football grounds were unruly places in the 70s and 80s, and attending them was to experience a visceral thrill of physical danger, and not just from the jostling hostility of rival fans: I went to an FA Quarter Final at Oakwell where supporters at the home end were so jam-packed in that getting your arm up to scratch an ear was a major undertaking.  It's a miracle there weren't more disasters.

Incidentally although you would imagine, reading the Hillsborough coverage, that football crowds behaved with the same hushed decorum found at a Swiss finishing school on prize-giving day, I distinctly remember fans chanting the N-word when a black player got the ball, bananas being thrown onto the pitch in their direction, and the Barnsley fans singing "You'll never catch the Ripper" at the police. Civilised it wasn't. I don't remember anyone saying, "No, after you old chap".

But whether my friend is right or not about the proximate cause of the tragedy, it's indisputable that suggesting Liverpool supporters might have been partly to blame has become something whereof, to borrow from Wittgenstein, one cannot speak.

In the same way that in some countries you can't say, for example, that Islam is a load of tosh.

The test of ideas is their availability for public scrutiny.  Freedom is only possible if individuals are willing to put up with the expression of ideas they don't like.  This is worth doing because in exchange you get the opportunity to express your own.  The 96 deaths at Hillsborough were a tragedy for the individuals and their families.  The death of free speech is a disaster for all.

The Dawkins Delusion #2

Here's the second part of an article I wrote in 2006 about Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.

In the first, posted a few weeks ago, I set out the problems Dawkins faced when writing it. To summarise, firstly, he didn't know enough about theology to do a decent demolition job.  Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own reasoning was often slipshod.  Thirdly, Dawkins made assumptions about the value of scientific truth which didn't seem to me to be warranted, and which he doesn't question.

In particular I tried to show how Dawkins failed to grasp the implications for religious people of the physical nature of the universe - broadly, it's a mistake to invoke the laws of physics to cast doubt on an entity that many religious people believe doesn't take physical form.

In this second part I want to look at Dawkins' treatment of the curious fact of the universe and of our presence within it.

This has been seized on by Theists keen to support the idea of a God.   Isn’t it funny, the argument runs, that conditions in the universe are just right for us?  How amazing that if the laws of physics were just slightly different then we wouldn't be here! This is an argument which is not perhaps as shaken as it should be by the thought that “we could only be discussing this question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us" (The God Delusion, p.144), but nevertheless Dawkins seems uneasy here, and if there is only one universe then he evidently feels he has some refuting to do.

Dawkins suggests that the “Goldilocks” (ie just right for us) universe theory could be undermined by the suggestion that there are many universes “co-existing like bubbles of foam”, as he puts it.  This is not his field of expertise, and he can do little (p.145) except outline the theories of Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind and others about these multi or mega-verses.

Obviously if there were more than one universe, Theists would no longer be able to claim that the existence of one which included us must be part of God’s master plan, to design intelligent beings capable of appreciating Him (or other pronoun of choice).

It’s worth pausing here to consider how Dawkins’s intellectual stance sits alongside his rhetorical means.  Religion, The God Delusion tells us, is a lingering superstition, whereas Dawkins is a scientific rationalist, using only the tools of pure reason to demolish quasi-mediaeval faith.

But what tools is he relying on here?  The “suggestion” that there are many universes.  The multiverse "theory".  Our universe "may" this, "may" that, "may reverse itself".  "It is conceivable that" followed by "if" the other.  This on p.145, whilst over on p.146 someone else “has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory”; but don’t worry, it’s not a religious nut, it’s a respectable theoretical physicist, one Lee Smolin.

So let’s get this straight.  When Theists rely on unproven theories, they’re taking us back to the Dark Ages.  But when theoretical physicists do, they’re wheeled out to provide support for Prof Dawkins’ attempt to demolish the “Goldilocks” universe argument.

There’s more of the same double standards, incidentally, elsewhere in the book - look at p.155/6.

“May” and “if”, “theory” and “suggestion”, are deluded fantasies when they are part of the belief systems of the religious, but put them in the hands of Professor Dawkins and they become glinting forensic tools.

There is a powerful whiff of hypocrisy here.  The application of rigorous and fair premise-and-conclusion logic is the cornerstone of science, and something with which Dawkins explicitly associates himself.  He is a scientist after all.  But instead of examining the subject in a dispassionate and even-handed way, Dawkins buttresses his arguments with the same rhetorical bluster and flabby ratiocination he derides in his opponents.

The temptation to chuck the book in the bin was pretty strong, but my wife had paid fifteen quid for it, so I carried on reading.

However things got worse.

I'll post the gory details in a couple of weeks.