Harry Potter and the prisoner of Jersey

The most interesting historical parallel of my week came from the barrister Harry Potter,* who presents the BBC documentary series, The Strange Case of the Law. He was talking about the fallout from Oliver Cromwell's unsuccessful attempt to try the Leveller, John Lilburne, for sedition in 1649.

Lilburne had mounted his own defence with great skill and had managed to get himself acquitted, much to Cromwell's annoyance. To spare itself the embarrassment of further legal defeats, Cromwell's government had Lilburne seized and whisked away to the extra-territorial stronghold of Mount Orgueil Castle in Jersey, where legal niceties like habeas corpus didn't apply, leading Potter to call Jersey 'Oliver Cromwell's Guantánamo Bay.'

It's an interesting parallel, given the current disclosures about the CIA's use of extraordinary rendition  to circumvent legal protections (along with the absence of disclosure about alleged British complicity).

Then and now, the rule of law matters and sneakily moving the goalposts to get the result you want is an abuse of that important principle, whether the state is offshoring torture or re-defining criminal suspects, or prisoners of war as "unlawful combatants" in order to do things like holding them  incommunicado, indefinitely and denying them access to counsel.

I'm left wondering whether this sort of authoritarianism by stealth is the sort of gambit which particularly appeals to would-be tyrants working in relatively open societies with rhetorical, or theoretical committments to liberty, who are made uncomfortable by the scrutiny that such openness brings. The Land of the Free has its First Amendment and the English Commonwealth styled itself a champion of liberty and was born in the wake of a national upheaval which had seen the collapse of censorship and an explosion of cheap pamphlets voicing all sorts of heterodox opinions.

Maybe some form of out-of-sight-out-of-mind external rendition is the way to go for authoritarians governing relatively open societies, who can't just clamp down directly, unlike autocrats with no pretentions to liberty, who could be sure that people who knew what was good for them wouldn't make too much fuss about other people being locked up the Lubyanka, the Špilberk or Carabanchel and had no need of a Guantánamo, or Devil's Island, with internal exile to Siberia just a few days away by unheated cattle truck.

Extra-territorial rendition from from a society  that claims to be free and open is a form of hypocrisy, which you might see as a sort of back-handed compliment to the freedoms that The War Against Terror is ostensibly being fought to uphold (although I'm guessing that this thought didn't come as much of a comfort to Liburne in his damp prison cell on Jersey, or to the recipients of enhanced interrogation techniques in their far-off legal black holes). As one cheese-eating surrender monkey steadfast ally in The War Against Terror once more or less wrote, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.



*I almost feel as if I should apologise for the title of this blog post - I couldn't resist, but the poor guy must be sick to the back teeth with all the lame wizardry gags he must have had to put up with to ever since J K Rowling linked his perfectly ordinary name with young adult fiction's biggest ever mega-brand.

Christ on a bike

The last thing I’ll say for the people that don’t believe in cycling – the cynics and the skeptics. I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry you can’t dream big. And I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event, and you should believe. 

From Lance Armstrong's more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sermon to those poor benighted haters who disbelieved in the cycling miracles he wrought by faith alone (110% positively, definitely, absolutely without any form of pharmacological assistance whatsoever). Lifted from a great post at Salty Current, which perfectly nails the corrosive effect of militant faitheism on public discourse:

The most aggravating aspect of Armstrong’s project was his promotion of faith in faith and celebration of the faithful identity. He and the cycling big wigs consistently worked to create a community of the faithful that would exclude and shun doubters. He flattered his more credulous fans with the notion that they were better people for promoting Hope and Belief. While the believers were in reality the overwhelming majority, they were sold an image of themselves as members of a small elite whose gift of spirit set them apart from the cynical, faithless masses...
...More generally, skeptics were castigated in the traditional way: contrasted with the virtuous faithful, they were portrayed as mean, callous, lesser people who lacked the life-affirming spark of faith. 

The take-out from Demagoguery for Dummies seems to be that you gotta have faith (or, rather, your followers gotta have it). Get that bit right and dealing with impertinent critics is a breeze - here are some bullet points for aspiring Machiavellians:

• Make your evidence-lite assertions loudly, confidently and often. 
• If anybody questions those assertions or, heaven forbid, tries to engage with the evidence, point out that the critic must be some sort of small-minded, out-of-touch nitpicker. 
• Always remember to keep on repeating how flawed your faithless critics are, in order to avoid getting bogged down in the (lack of) evidence behind your own assertions (attack is the best form of defence).

Follow these rules and, with any luck, you'll never need to do anything as embarrassing or uncomfortable as having a fact-based discussion.

That's not to say that most people of (usually confused) faith aren't perfectly honest, harmless, guileless and even benign. It's when it gets out into the public sphere and people with power, or people with something to hide, use it to shut down evidence-based argument that faith goes really toxic.

Faith might be the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions and the opium of the people, but it's also the weapon of choice for cheats, con-artists, demagogues and the peddlers of quack remedies. Militant faitheist obfuscation makes the strong stronger and the crooked more comfortable.

Evidence is the democratic weapon you can fight back with, if only you can get your hands on it.

British establishment destroys satire

When members of the Chinese establishment get upset at being mocked, they task the State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television with delivering some stupidly impossible target like stopping everybody in China from making puns.

Here in Britain, it looks as if our own Very Important People have a subtler, more cunning, plan for disarming critics by adopting what I've just decided to call the Tom Lehrer Gambit, named for the great man's famous observation that 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.'

How else to explain this weekend's headlines? 'House of Lords refused budget cut as it would mean cheaper Champagne' or 'Nigel Farage blames late arrival at his own Ukip event on immigrants?' These headlines belong in The Daily Mash, not "straight" media outlets.

This can only be part of a deliberate media strategy - instead of ordering somebody else to ban puns, members of the British establishment* are clearly trying to break satire itself by putting themselves beyond parody.

At this rate, I give the satirists of The Daily Mash, Have I Got News for You and The News Quiz six months before competition from the real home lives of the rich and famous puts them out of business.


* Of which Farage is a comfortably-off member, no matter how often he tries to deny it

Could do better

When I was poor and I complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now I’m rich and complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m starting to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.

Russell Brand made that point clearly, concisely and quite well. He can also use more words to make half of approximately the same point, then go on to win himself the Plain English Campaign's "Foot in Mouth" award for outstanding gobbledygook:

A Halloween-haired, Sachsgate-enacting, estuary-whining, glitter-lacquered, priapic berk… How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras’d my Essex arse with undue praise and money.

Fortunately, the relevant advice is out there and has been for some time:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

All the fun of the fair

There may trouble ahead (specifically an 'utterly terrifying' 'hulking great mountain of pain') but, according to my newsreader, there will also be a 2.2% increase in fun and frolics in the shape of railway-based fairs. It doesn't say whether the rides, candy floss and hot dogs will  be confined to station concourses, or whether there will be actual in-train entertainment. I suspect it's the former, on the grounds that it's hard enough finding space for a normal-sized piece of luggage on a Virgin Pendolino, let alone a coconut shy.

Did civilization splutter to a halt in the '70s?

Now, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. A report by Credit Suisse this October found that the richest 1 per cent of humans own half the world’s assets ... When wealth accumulates so spectacularly by doing nothing, there is less impetus to invest in genuine innovation.

Michael Hanlon thinks that innovation 'spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago' and pins at least some of the blame on the direction the political economy has taken since the end of the post-war boom. We've sort of been here before with David Graeber's Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit. Like Gaeber, Hanlon also blames the de-funding of public research:

During the Golden Quarter, we saw a boom in public spending on research and innovation. The taxpayers of Europe, the US and elsewhere replaced the great 19th‑century venture capitalists. And so we find that nearly all the advances of this period came either from tax-funded universities or from popular movements. The first electronic computers came not from the labs of IBM but from the universities of Manchester and Pennsylvania. 

Graeber qualified this by noting that:

 ...the United States never did abandon gigantic, government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research.

If  Hanlon's right and Graeber's qualification also stands, maybe the question is how come no people longer seem to be getting obvious trickle-down benefits from the military-industrial complex (jets, radar, ARPANET), that we got in the boom years?

Graeber and Hanlon also agree that dreaming big is off the agenda, due to the lack of space for blue-skies thinking, intellectual timidity and risk aversion:

Those thinkers most likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications. [Graeber]

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes.[Hanlon]

And they both conclude that things could have been / could be so much better:

For earlier generations, many science fiction fantasies had been brought into being. Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, then why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?[Graeber]

If the pace of change had continued, we could be living in a world where Alzheimer’s was treatable, where clean nuclear power had ended the threat of climate change, where the brilliance of genetics was used to bring the benefits of cheap and healthy food to the bottom billion, and where cancer really was on the back foot.[Hanlon] 

There's obviously a huge counter-factual going on here and there's only so far you can go in speculating about discoveries and innovations that don't actually exist in our timeline. Maybe some of the progress Hanlon and Graeber think we  missed out on is down to purely technical limitations and nothing to do with priorities and political economy.

But I'm still left wondering how much better the world might be, if the trillions captured by vested interests for socially useless speculation and rent-seeking were available for real-world innovation and whether, if the innovation motor really has stalled, anybody has any jump leads.

The first rule of Immigration Club

You don't have to be the sharpest tool in the box to realise that the oppressed Ukip martyr's whine of "we're not allowed to talk about immigration, because political correctness," is bullshit, now that any fool with ears can hear the non-stop cacophony of high-profile politicians competing to out-brag each other about how tough they'd be on migrants. If you think the subject's being ignored, you just haven't been paying attention. A small club of noisy, professional immigration bores now dominates the discussion monologue.

The first rule of Immigration Club is: You do not stop talking about Immigration Club.

Since we're now not allowed not to talk about immigration, is there anything new or interesting to be said? Well, things did recently get quite interesting with the hint of a possible, partial solution to the seeming paradox of Schrödinger’s Immigrant. Just as Schrödinger’s Cat exists in a state of being both alive and dead at the same time, Schrödinger’s immigrant exists in a state of both lazing around on benefits whilst simultaneously being out there stealing British jobs.

There's still no convincing solution to the paradox in terms of a general theory of immigration. Theoretically, foreign migrants might be differentially better at blagging their way onto benefits to which they're not entitled than their British-born peers, or more skillful at optimising their work shift patterns to accommodate regular signing on, or getting their mates to sign on in their place, or some other fiddle.

But I'm not aware of any actual evidence to back up this hypothesis, (the Department of Work and Pensions' own figures don't seem to back it up), nor does it seem likely that newcomers for whom English is a second language would be any better at outwitting the UK's institutionally sceptical benefits bureaucracy than native English speakers who've had a lifetime's experience of UK institutions. And, given that fraud accounts for about one per cent of the total annual benefits and tax credits spend (probably less than a fifth of the cost of benefits which people are entitled to, but which go unclaimed), it seems that neither Brits nor migrants are much good at gaming the system, anyway.

But, in terms of the special theory of immigration (that's EU immigration to you), there's a possible solution to the paradox. You can be both in work and claiming benefits if they're the sort of  in-work benefits some politicians are now keen to stop EU migrants getting. An EU migrant worker or self-employed person who's here legally and has passed the EU's "habitual residence test" and the controversial, additional "right to reside" test imposed by the UK government, could be entitled to some in-work benefits, thus becoming that oxymoronic demon of the Ukip imagination, the benefit-scrounger-cum-job-stealer.

Of course, a cohort of low-paid people who are working here legally and have passed the appropriate residency tests getting their wages topped up, just like low-paid Brits, hardly adds up to the shocking blank cheques for illegal foreign scroungers conjured up by Daily Mail migrant scare headlines, but maybe in-work benefits might be a problem, with some element of unfairness in terms of people who haven't contributed gaining a benefit, or with people being incentivised to take low-paid jobs that might otherwise go to British nationals.

For contributory benefits, like Contributory Job Seekers' Allowance and Incapacity Benefit, the problem is self-limiting - if you haven't contributed, you can't claim. No problem. But there are quite a few non-contributory benefits  which might be acting as a draw.

If it is a problem, how big is it? Anoosh Chakelian in the Staggers gives some perspective:

The latest DWP figures from 2014 show that there are 1.73m EU nationals working in the UK, equal to 5.7 per cent of all people in work... ...Less than 5 per cent of EU migrants are claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance, while less than 10 per cent are claiming other DWP working-age benefits.

So we're talking about approximately 173,000 Schrödinger’s immigrants. Or less than half a per cent of the UK's working-age population of something like 38 million. Even if the draw of in-work benefits is a problem (and if it is, does it outweigh the economic benefit of those people coming here, working, spending and paying taxes?), it's clearly not a very big one.

But maybe , even if it's not a big problem, it's a a matter of fundamental unfairness - a few of them can come here and claim in-work benefits, but we can't go there and do the same. Well, it seems to be a bit more complicated than that:

Is the UK benefits system more generous than those in other EU countries?

The systems are very diverse, so comparisons are difficult.

In terms of total spending on social security per inhabitant, the UK does not rank highest...

 ...In the UK, a bigger portion of welfare is funded by the state than is the case in Poland, France, Germany or the Netherlands. In those countries, more is funded from individual and employer contributions. In other words, more benefits are linked to previous earnings.

On the other hand, in several countries, including the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and Denmark, the share of state funding is higher than in the UK.

In Germany, there is a two-tier welfare system - part based on contributions, part non-contributory. An EU migrant made jobless in Germany would get up to 70% of current salary in the first year of unemployment. After that, the unemployed go onto a non-contributory system called Hartz IV. Germany has objected to paying those benefits to EU migrants who have not made sufficient contributions through work. But that policy has been challenged in the courts.

 In Spain, welfare payments depend to a large extent on where you live as payments are handled regionally, rather than centrally. In Madrid there is a two-year residency test for RMI, which is paid to unemployed jobseekers. The benefits system in the Basque Country is rather less restrictive.

In Bulgaria, the EU's poorest country, you do not qualify for unemployment benefit unless you have been working for at least nine of the last 15 months.

BBC News Q & A

It's interestingly counter- intuitive that we Anglo-Saxon free marketeers have a more statist approach to welfare than those bastions of the European social model, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Which, in turn, raises another interesting question.

Conventional wisdom has it that, even stripping out the effects of the the catastrophically mismanaged Euro, we in Britain enjoy a lower unemployment rate than the European average because of our "free market" "flexible" approach to labour.  Or is part of our relatively low unemployment down to the unacknowledged effect of our decidedly un-free market decision to provide state subsidies for low-wage jobs that wouldn't be viable for either employers or employees in an actual free market? I don't know the answer and there are other factors in play (such as wages being supplemented via the unarguably free market mechanism of piling on household debt, which has quadrupled since 1990), but it's an interesting possibility that behind the curtain of all that free market rhetoric may sit a Central Planning Wizard.

Could Iain Duncan Smith be the hapless Wizard of Oz, frantically pulling the levers which maintain the illusion of a flexible labour market, built on free market principles? Could that rough beast, Universal Credit, currently slouching towards Manchester to be born, mark the nativity of a conservative project to keep the ailing free market alive with the life-support of a Citizens' Basic Income?

And talking of free markets paradoxes, what's with these these Thatcherite free-marketeers objecting to the free movement of labour? "We voted for a free trade area, not a political union, " they complain, but it's not much of a free trade area when people who want to move around it to work are being held back by barriers of red tape being thrown up by bureaucrats at the behest of "small-state, free market " politicians.

So the subject does throw up a few interesting surprises, complexities and paradoxes. These might not not get us very far, but they make a change from yet another iteration of the simple, stupid solutions to non-problems that are all members of the Immigration Club ever want to talk about.

My working hypothesis is that they're  deliberately bullshitting in order to crowd more important issues off the agenda - like, for example, the National Health Service (whether or not Nigel Farage secretly wants to privatise it, his health policy shows all the signs of having been made up on the back of one of his fag packets, during one those rare five minutes he spends not blaming foreigners for everything). Or the tax evaders and avoiders, who game around £32 billion out of the system, by the HMRC's own conservative estimate, an exclusive scroungers' club which Nigel was rather keen to join at one point. Sadly for Nige, he flunked his membership application because, despite having been tutored in the City of London, the world's tax avoidance capital, he was too dumb to set up his own offshore tax-avoidance scheme properly.

Immigration Club may generate a lot of noise, but they're basically all mouth and unfortunate trousers. Or, like Mr Shakespeare said:

...It is a tale.
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Anyway, that's more enough of taking Immigration Club seriously, so it's time to end by winding its members up with a bit of cognitive dissonance. Remember when the the pro-Ukip Nick Griffin's British National Party fell flat on its serially incompetent collective face by trying to evoke our pre-immigration Finest Hour with a picture of a Spitfire of 303 (Polish) Squadron on one of its anti-immigration posters, when as any fule kno, their fellow fascists flew Stukas and things (unsurprisingly, xenophobes and Polish aeroplanes don't mix very well)? I'm indebted to Czech Economist, Tomáš Prouza for adding a Hurricane to our Battle of Britain collection, by tweeting a topical reminder of how Czech migrants, whose papers may well not have been in order, along with a bunch of Poles, helped the the Brits to kick Reichsmarschall Göring's arse:

These Czechs "worked" in the #UK for less than four years. No benefits for them? #CameronOnMigration pic.twitter.com/hBAW4b0Xwd
— Tomas Prouza (@CZSecStateEU) November 28, 2014