Paul Evans

I like 38Degrees most of the time. They campaign on issues that I agree on. I know one of the people there slightly, and I know that they take on some of the criticisms I've made about the democratic problems around petitions and write-in campaigns. I also think that there are some issues where the Westminster Village needs to be jogged out if it's own obsessions - especially on important issues that slip below the radar at election time.

I also like the way they're diversifying into other constructive forms of crowd-sourcing.

But where I worry most is the way that campaigns can be built up because they have a superficial appeal to a particular activist demographic. On complex questions this can be the case. 38 Degrees and AVAZZ have both made their presence felt on issues around copyright. There is a general, slightly muddy contention that the open internet is always a good thing and that the benefits of letting it rip in all ways outweigh any benefits related to curbing the way it's used. So, no porn-blocking, no piracy-enforcement, and so on.

It's not an argument I've ever seen made much beyond being an idealised contention, though for the most part, I'm in complete agreement with this view (except where it comes to the 'piracy enforcement' which I'll come to in a sec). It's a fashionable view. And, if you hold it, I suspect you may be receptive to claims that support it.

Here's 38 Degrees from a couple of years ago:

The Digital Economy Bill .... gives the government the ability to disconnect millions. Schools, libraries and businesses could see their connection cut if their pupils, readers of customers infringe any copyright. But one group likes it, the music industry. 

"The oppressively strict regulations could mean people everywhere are punished for simple acts such as sharing a newspaper article or uploading a video of a party where copyrighted music is played. Sold as a trade agreement to protect copyrights."

I'm not religious. Really, I'm not. But I've mentioned here (and here) before that I think sacred music is fascinating. And the biggest, fleeting doubt I've had about my choice of agnosticism has been in learning about the direct relationship between proportion and beauty - the Fibonacci Sequence in structure and design or the mathematical basis of musical harmony, as examples.

I think most agnostics with a limited grasp of natural sciences prefer 'cosmic accident' as an explanation for most natural phenomena, don't we?

I'm not alone in seeing some profundity in these things. All sorts of esoteric cults have grown up around this evidence. Picking at these subjects, I keep stumbling over various artefacts and concepts - the Harmonograph, the 'music of the spheres' or many and varied artworks that I think are worth thinking about.

I suspect my interest will be more similar to curious fascination that drives most readers of The Fortean Times than it will be to the kind of interst expressed by any 18th Century sub-Freemasonary sect.

Rather than boring you about them all here, I've just started using Tumblr to keep track of them here if you're interested.  I've not really got my head around how Tumblr works, but I think you can post things on to it yourself if you feel like it.

The Statute of Anne came into force on the 10th April 1709 (303 years ago today). I mention this as it’s seen as the cornerstone of the anglo-saxon model of copyright (often contrasted with the more continental approach to intellectual property) and it’s a subject that I’m having to think about quite a lot in the course of my work.

I mentioned this to my mother recently. It’s very rare that I discuss anything with her without her finding some Irish connection – usually a connection with Mayo, or – if possible – a connection with the small north-western portion of that county.

I figured the idea of copyright couldn’t have been conceived by some fella from Tallaghan Bawn or anything like that. And, in this case it wasn't. But she was, obviously, happy to correct me any 'copyright wasn't an Irish idea in the first place' misconceptions I may have had:

“The first historic mention of Copyright, which set the universal precedent, can be traced to 6th Century Celtic Ireland. It is contained in a judgement of Diarmaid, High King of Ireland – the legal equivalent of today’s Supreme Court – in his finding against the Christian missionary Columba, founder of monastic rule, later canonised as Saint Columcille, who had become and incorrigible plagiarist......

....The High King took that well-founded legal precedent and extended it in his famous judgement against Columcille thus:

“As to every Cow its Calf, so to every Book its Copy.””

In today's Observer, Julie Burchill - perceptive and pithy as ever - brings the consequences of the media's failure to adapt to a changing world into sharp focus;

"Fewer than one in 10 British children attends fee-paying schools, yet more than 60% of chart acts have been privately educated, according to Word magazine, compared with 1% 20 years ago. Similarly, other jobs that previously provided bright, working-class kids with escape routes – from modelling to journalism – have been colonised by the middle and upper classes and by the spawn of those who already hold sway in those professions. The spectacle of some smug, mediocre columnista who would definitely not have their job if their mummy or daddy hadn't been in the newspaper racket advising working-class kids to study hard at school, get a "proper" job and not place their faith in TV talent shows is one of the more repulsive minor crimes of our time."

The demand for content is burgeoning. The amount of money going into the digital economy is multiplying at a rate of knots. So why are 'content creators' scuffling for cash? Why can't newspapers pay for journalism? Why are theatres and TV producers so reliant upon interns?

All attacks rebound in some way. Sometimes, they blow up in your face and other times, your shoes just get splashed a bit.

Today, Labour had a good time looking terribly 'in touch' in front of their supporters, and a bit smarmy in front of everyone else. The Tories look slightly off their game at the moment, but they still didn't need to work too hard in partly unpicking Ed's 'prolier than thou' credentials.

Still, it was bad day for the Tories and a not bad one for Labour, when all things are taken into account. It could have been a lot better though.

A union could have orchestrated a better stunt. A non-Labour affiliated one could have really gone to town on this one. Or any union's money could have hired the right celeb to take the piss out of Cameron all day long.

This has been in the Tory playbook for as long as anyone can remember. Deniable outriders make the attack before the front benchers turn up with a subtle and statesmanlike coup de grâce. A lot of the attacks Labour would like to make are out of bounds for two reasons: that they can rebound on the people who make them, and because they compromise future policy positions. Not a problem that the Tories have ever had with Taxpayer's Alliance attacks on Labour.

This is why party funding matters less than it seems. Labour and the big unions can help each other more if they start doing it informally.

This is an argument that's unlikely to find favour with Labour and senior trades unionists for all of the wrong reasons.

I hate the concept of 'elected mayors', or at least, I hate elected mayors in way they're intended to fit in with the wider settlement in the UK. I suspect a growing band of Londoners will come to share this view over the next few weeks.

Already, everyone is in pointscoring mode, and anyone beyond Planet Politics who doesn't conclude that 'all politicos are utter wankers' is probably in the sizeable quartile of the population who have previously tuned politics out all together.

Anyway. Back to the shrillness of it all. Personally, I'm really no fan of Ken Livingstone. He's my party's candidate, and he's the kind of devisive figure that smokes out dissenters from within the party's ranks.

For instance, anti-Ken Labour people are happy to give a following wind to this Tory attack-blog idea that he's some kind of tax-dodger or hypocrite.

It's not a fair line of attack. He's not fiddling his taxes or living high on the hog. He's a political obsessive - if he wasn't paying HMRC, he'd be spending the money in other ways to get himself elected in a climate where political funding is hard to get.

As a Labour supporter, if I were to find that a candidate - any candidate - wasn't managing their finances efficiently and couldn't finance their campaign properly as a result, I'd be very unhappy about it.

In addition, given Ken's circumstances as a self-employed individual who pays staff and who almost certainly drags is wife's elbow-grease into his campaign whenever he can, there isn't a single accountant anywhere in the country who would even let him arrange his finances any other way. Anything else would result in him over-paying taxes for the sake of appearances.

If Ken were salting the money away in some tax haven or buying himself a mansion, this would be a fair line of attack - but if not, it looks to me like opportunism.

I don't suppose we've heard even a fraction of the shrill opportunist attacks that we're going to hear on Ken over the next few weeks.

But Boris isn't going unscathed either. Today, a range of Labour people have got their knickers in a twist about how Boris has 'hijacked' ... er .... his own Twitter account. Sorry - that should read "his own TAXPAYER FUNDED account!!?!??!?!!!"

Boris was @mayoroflondon and he is now @borisjohnson. The former has been converted to the latter now he is in 'election purdah' period.

Here's a likely example of the dialogue that took place a few years ago between Boris and a civil servant a few years ago now:

CC: "Mr Mayor, it's in our job description to encourage you to interact with the public a bit more. Now I know that this is a bit of the job description that most civil servants ignore, at the very least, but I've got a time-and-motion person from Capita standing behind me to make sure that I tick everything on my list off. So why don't you .... er .... set up a Twitter account?"

BJ: "Gosh, I say! What a jolly good idea. What is a 'Twitter' by the way?"

CC: "It's a social networking tool (Boris looks blank) ... on the Internet (Boris looks blank) .... on your computer (Boris looks blank) .... the tellybox on your desk that you watched that Thai lady .... you know ... with the ping-pong balls?"

BJ: "Ah! I remember that. Have her sent to my room! What were we talking about again?"

(This goes on for some time). We return an hour later and the conversation is still progressing.

BJ: "This Twitter thing is a jolly good idea of mine. So shall I call it @borisjohnson or @mayoroflondon?"

CC: "Well there are all sorts of silly rules about what you can and can't say. Best if you let us have the passwords so we can step in when ... er ... IF you ever say anything a bit problematic.... about the Chinese Ambassador's wife and ping-pong balls, for instance. So let's stick with @mayoroflondon - and we'll set up a few feeds so that some tweets are automated...."

BJ: "What's a tweet again?" (this goes on for some time). We return an hour later and the conversation is still progressing.

BJ: "OK. I fully understand this now. Ping-pong .... computer .... internet .... Twitter .... can do it from my phone .... shouldn't do it from my phone .... can't pass comment on Frau Bundeskanzlerin's appearance... so how much will this cost the jolly old taxpayer then?"

CC: "Not much. Well, technically, not anything. Of course we signed some PFI deal with Accenture that means that we've got to send a couple of staff on a Social Media Risk Awareness Course at £800 per head. And we've got to then commission some written guidance from them (£6,000). And we've got a similar arrangement with BT that means we've got to  make the account match our corporate house style (don't ask - an arrangement with Wolff Olins). So it'll probably look like about £25k if we get the wrong sort of FOI requests in. But it doesn't really cost anything."

BJ: "Ticketty boo!. And just to prove I've been listening, I'll need some 'followers', right? Do we have an obligation to pay Serco to drum them up for me?"

CC: "Er.... no Mr Mayor. If you can't get a couple of hundred thousand followers on twitter for nothing, then I doubt if anyone can."

BJ: "And I can say anything I jolly well please?"

CC: "Er.... no Mr Mayor. Accenture will draw up a lengthy list of things you can't say" 


BJ: "What? Can't I even have a pop at old Ken once the election starts?"

CC: "Er.... yes Mr Mayor. But at that point, you're on your own. And you'd probably better set up a new account as @borisjohnson"

BJ: "But Ken will be doing this as well between now and then. His lot will have thousands of followers by the time the election has been announced - he's got nothing better to do, and I'll be at a standing start. That isn't fair."

CC: "Well maybe the sensible thing is to re-name your account as @borisjohnson when the purdah period starts. Technically the rules say that you can't use publically funded assets for political advantage, but the account won't be paid for by the public sector. 

And anyway, I suspect that giving you a twitter account without any restrictions on what you can say is technically the opposite of giving you a political advantage.... and it's not really an electioneering tool in itself. Tories don't really use Twitter much anyway...."

BJ: "What's a hashtag again? I say, I appear to being 'followed' by a charming Russian lady who has no followers herself. This looks promising...."

And so on. Get the picture? Ken's not a tax dodger. Boris hasn't hi-jacked anything. And this is going to be a very long month or so.

Here's an odd one. Someone is offering me $25 to put a link to a commercial service in an old post. The way they're asking me to do it is not even really an endorsement of the thing I'm linking to and I doubt that the post concerned will get many visits, apart from search-engine crawlers.

Has anyone else had a request like this? It looks like free money to me. WDYT?

On the subject of 'methodological agnosticism' (my current religion), I saw this a while ago:

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." - Charles Bukowski

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"

"Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin?"

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” 

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them." Laurence J. Peter

"..you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” (source unknown). …

 “…when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (J.M. Keynes)

There's a good post over on LabourList by Owen ('Chavs') Jones about the need for a new, two-pronged, class politics in Britain - one in which the yawning material gap in incomes isn't disentangled from the crisis of representation.

I say that it's a good post because it raises essentially the right questions, and that these fundamental concerns don't seem to be on the table almost anywhere on the left with as much clarity.

Where I substantially disagree with him is that I think he underestimates the capacity, suitability or willingness of trades unions to act as the agents for the change he's calling for. I think the following points are worth making:

1. The problem of managerialism is roundly ignored by the left
I'd characterise a lot of the problems that Jones identifies very differently. In the 19th Century, Bagehot painted an 'English Constitution' in which the dignified elements of the state enabled the efficient bits to do their work. It's slightly worrying, reading Bagehot, that his view appears to be somewhat rosy today after a century-and-a-half of democratic reform. At least most of the executive power was actually in the hands of the people who were supposed to exercise it when Bagehot was writing.

Today, even our governing Oxbridge caste of career-politicians appear to be more dignified than efficient. The real business is being done by managers, mostly in the private sector. It used to be the case that managers were the servants of private shareholders or ministers, depending upon which sector you were looking at. That fact that there aren't working class voices in Parliament isn't actually the biggest problem.

Today, society is largely ordered to facilitate government by - and for - managers. Public policy is entirely shaped by the consultariat who have replaced the semi-accountable Whitehall mandarins. PLCs are, similarly, no longer shoveling value at shareholders but at their managers.

It is managers who gauge the value of talent, who aim to replace what professions did with their systems, and who set the wages at all levels of society. The need to replace politicians and professionals with managers drove the privatisation-lite of the New Labour years and has continued uninterrupted into the direction of The Coalition.

I've rarely met anyone on the left who isn't persuaded by this explanation for what Chris Dillow calls The End of Politics, once it is put to them. But I've also very rarely met anyone on the left who is even aware of this diagnosis.

2. We need to be clearer on why the link between wealth inequality and unequal representation exists
Crosslandite social democrats were always 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich - as long as they pay their taxes.' Peter Mandelson was only putting provocative parentheses around Crossland's view that managed capitalist growth would reduce inequality. And - as far as it goes - this could be a respectable argument if the people making it were not also intensely relaxed about the way that some individuals exercise a great deal more power than others at the ballot box.

If you can buy your way into the political process in order to exempt yourself from the process of redistribution, then all of this intense relaxation becomes toxic. If you can do so to change the direction of redistribution - corporate welfare - then it is even more poisonous. And this is often what happened with new Labour in power, culminating in the banker's bailouts - an unparalleled act of larceny.

3. The democratic problem is more straightforward than most people say it is
There's a touch of the Emperor's New Clothes around discussions of democracy. It's a point so obvious to make that no-one does so for fear of being rude. Let's put this crudely. My vote should be no weaker or greater than anyone else's.

If you fund political parties in a way that doesn't involve safeguards, this ceases to be the case. If you use your media ownership to bully regulators and politicians in a way that serves your material interests, again, this isn't the case.

If the private sector is at all of the top-table seats (and the public interest is largely unrepresented) in a parliamentary process about something as central to our politics as healthcare, then you have an unprecedented crisis in British democracy. (Update: Here's the background to the 'Reform' think-tank - it's funding and it's role in health service policymaking)

If, in a more participative and direct democracy (and we're definitely heading in that direction), you have convening power or the capacity to shape the marketplace of ideas, then our votes are going to become even less equal.

4. Unions should help - but probably won't
Jones is right; Trades Unionism should be the key to addressing the diversity of representation in the way that it did in helping to found the Labour Representation Committee back in the day. Remember, this was really the only uniting principle that brought Labour into being. We weren't socialists, mutualists, syndicalists, feminists, fabianists, rationalists or communists. We were primarily concerned with addressing the crisis of representation - where universal male suffrage had failed to result in working class MPs.


Labour was really just a jump-together club of all of those '-isms' - they all thought that their cause would be strengthened by more working men being in parliament.

I'd suggest that Jones massively underestimates the degree to which Unions need to change to facilitate this though. The smaller unions still promote a lot of the civil society ethos that writers like John Dewey saw as being essential to democracy (the 'holding elections does not a democracy make' argument), but the larger unions only seem to grow by acquisition and have very little by way of democratic legitimacy in the way that they conduct their business any more.

The arguments about managerialism that I outlined earlier in this post are ones that should have a massive appeal to a Trades Union movement that is still thinking. It's an argument that I've never heard raised when the brothers meet.


Owen Jones is right: This crisis of representation should be a much greater cause for alarm than it is. I'd suggest that it also needs to be understood more - and that the obvious agents for change (the Unions) need to travel a good deal further than I think they are prepared to go.

5. Let's not underestimate how important The Labour Party is either
I won't bore on about this last point too much - It's such a regular staple here. But in summary, lefties need to drop the idea that they first need to capture the Labour Party, then win an election and then implement Project Utopia. Right wingers have never made this mistake about the Conservative Party.

Alex Hilton has an understandable whine about Ed Miliband's Labour Party (though I can't see why his complaints didn't equally apply to pervious iterations of the party). Hopi Sen answers him and it looks like two bald men fighting over a comb.

Labour should be a boring party that chases votes around the centre ground. The job of the left is to drag that centre-ground leftwards. The big unions that finance Labour waste so much money paying for office space when they could be running campaigns that no politician can ignore.

I've spent a lot of the weekend going through Nick Cohen's 'You Can't Read This Book' - I'd get a copy if I were you.

I'm even more of a spectator than a participant on the Scottish independence debate than I am on most things. All I have is questons.

Firstly, as a social democrat, I'm very keen on a one-club approach to all political questions. I'd generally not ask "what do I think should happen?", but instead, "what would a good democracy do?"

I'm concious that this is an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, but I'm more interested in working out what the best way of making decisions is than in what decisions we should make. I'm always looking for this formula;

• Decision-making in the interests of everyone, not just sectional interests (with protection of minorities provided by a 'constitution' of some kind)
• Where sectional interests happen at the expense of others, there is compensation
• Decision-making that is optimised to maximise the quality of those decisions
• As many people as possible involved in those decisions - as long as we can avoid self-interested outcomes at the expense of those who don't have the capacity to participate
• Geographic closeness to the seat of decision-making

"[Beveridge] wanted a responsible government taking determined action to create work, but a responsible workforce too. He would have wanted reform that was tough-minded, and asked everyone to work hard to find a job. He would have worried about the ways that his system had skewed social behaviour because he intended benefits to help people who had their earning power interrupted because of illness, industrial injury or the capriciousness of the trade cycle. He never foresaw unearned support as desirable. 

.... But beyond this, "something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society."

"They [the voters] want to hear a clear voice of condemnation when people terrorise our streets and not hear it suffixed with ‘understanding’ and ‘complexity’. They can’t understand why those on out-of-work benefits – excluding the disabled and the retired – get a pay rise more than the average worker. When they turn to Labour, they want to hear a credible and clear line. Too often they experience a haze."

Two recent posts from Chris Dillow - one on the irrelevance of politicians and another on the reluctance of politicians to make the robust moral decisions deserve another look, and not just because they're mostly right.

In both cases, they seem to be based upon the settled view of what politicians should be, rather than the principled description of what they could - and should - be.

In both cases, Chris doesn't start from the most important observation here: Politicians have rivals. Nominally, parliaments are sovereign (with lots of global caveats - here's ours). Nominally, they derive that sovereignty from us - 'nothing about us without us.'

Yet, I doubt if anyone would try to push the fiction that we all have equal influence over our Parliaments. I don't mean the simple aggregate of direct democracy either. As that line from The Putney Debates put it, "the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live" should expect his arguments to weigh as heavily with his MP as "the greatest hee".

Try it yourself. Knock up a few hundred words on Utilitarianism, the oppression of minorities, how parliaments should make policy and the question of who elected politicians should represent.

It's a surprisingly uncomplicated essay to write. Yet no-one would look at most democracies and say that this good balance isn't increasingly disfigured by burgeoning populism or distorted beyond recognition by pressure groups, bureaucratic interests or media owners.

There are clear parallels here with my last post here on the erosion of justice.

We knock politicians for their failure to regulate the finance sector, but I'd like to read the counterfactual history of Western democracies in which parliaments would have got away with calling time on that particular party. For all of my lack of understanding of the climate change debate, I suspect we'd be able to say the same about that one too.

If someone were to come before a court and was demonstrably incapable of making good decisions in their own interests because they had fallen under the influence of a bully, the court would appoint a someone with the independence to make those decisions. New Labour made an early admission of this kind when it make the Bank of England independent and Osborne has created his own ersatz version with the Office for Budget Responsibility.

There is nothing anti-democratic about a Parliament doing the same thing in other spheres - quite the opposite. The only point at which Parliament deserts its duties when it replaces a legitimacy-lite Prime Minster with a technocrat (and in our centralised modern states, that is all that has been happening) and then only gives them one task - to solve the problem that the bully has helped to create.

I'd go further. The most democratic thing a Parliament can do is to appoint someone who can make the decisions that they would make if they weren't under unbearable coercion.

This is not a defence of the current rise of technocrats though. Their mandate appears to be to solve the current crisis and then to restore the power relations that created it in the first place. If technocrats fail to create a long-term challenge to the forces that rival Parliaments, then they're no better than our increasingly centralised and presidential political leaders. But I don't suppose they're any worse than them either.

Many of the anti-racists who have demanded an uncompromising response to the allegations of racism against John Terry and Luis Suarez will come to regret getting what they've asked for. This controversy also has implications for people with little interest in football.



I'm not sure we'll ever see all of the evidence related to these incidents, but I'm fairly certain that neither were simply one-way racial slurs. In both cases, we've seen clumsy claims in mitigation against a backdrop of an opaque process. The reputation of professional football, it seems, requires the hearings to be conducted in private while the sentences get handed down in public.

With the facts that we have, it's hard to understand why Liverpool FC are going to such lengths to demonstrate solidarity with Suarez. This may partly be because we don't have all the facts and Liverpool players have some that we don't.

I'm not going to make the case that the sentences that have/will be handed out are harsh or disproportionate. I can't know that. But I'm fairly sure that, in another workplace, this would be done differently. The result may have been more lenient or more harsh, but it's fairly clear that it'd be different.

The contrast with the (admittedly botched) justice that the alleged killers of Stephen Lawrence will receive is a useful comparison here, on the day that the judge started summing up with a stout defence of the fair trail.

Here's my problem with this: High-profile people now appear to have been given a semi-constitutional status. Transactions that they're involved in have to combine an institution-saving opaqueness with the requirement to set an example.

It's more important that justice is seen to be done than that it's actually done. There's a parallel here in the way that it seems to be the settled view of almost everyone - even at the Leveson Enquiry - that someone who puts themselves in the public eye then loses certain privacy privileges.

It seems that justice - in the cases of people in the public eye - seems to be based upon what sentence the public will understand as being appropriate once they've seen a simplified version of events. This applies to footballers and general celebrities. It also applies to politicians, civil servants and other political players. It applies to anyone that newspaper proprietors and editors want it to apply to.

It reflects an increased willingness to pander to the demagogic demands of The Hive Mind. It gives a more mundane expression to some of the observations in Charlie Brooker's very good 'Black Mirror' series (especially the 'National Anthem' episode).

Decisions that affect us all are being made in the same way. Sharon Shoesmith's treatment at the hands of Ed Balls is a notable example. The court of public opinion is expanding its remit and no-one seems to be doing much to counteract this.

With Suarez, Terry and Shoesmith, we got the Dopamine-rush you get from swift justice. Children aren't safer as a result. Allegations of racism are now another disruptive tool that can be gamed wherever a celebrity is involved. 

It's another reason for Chris to conclude that politicians are irrelevant now. Why bother standing for office when unelected people with convening power can decide what decisions you are going to make in advance and then harass you until you make them?

The notion of 'the public interest' seems to have taken on a life of its own. Reversing this won't be easy. But it's possible.

• A European federalist settlement would be a great deal more democratic than the current settlement enjoyed by most - if not all - Europeans
• Monetary union is an accelerant to political union, and therefore, European federalism (although political union and federalism aren't necessarily the same thing)
• There's a cart-horse problem with monetary union - that it can only work in the presence of political union, but political union is unlikely unless it's created by the experience of the Euro. This appears to be what we're seeing, albeit in a hasty and risky form.
• The Euro was implemented very badly. Allowing countries with large black economies to be part of it was potty in the first place (in my defence, I've spent the last decade telling everyone that I know that the Euro is ultimately doomed as long as it includes an unreformed Italy)
• The presence of unreliable, anti-democratic governments like the Italian one within the Euro meant that it was only ever going to be a fiscally conservative union (and I'd add that, from what I can see, the case with Greece is slightly more complicated, but the conclusion is the same). A lack of cohesion makes this inevitable. 
• Britain is a politically conservative place that won't vote for the democratic improvements that a federal Europe would bring. This can be partly explained by it's democratic shortcomings - ones that could be removed by a good federalist settlement. Cart and horse again.
• Britain is, however, one of the most atlanticist forces within the EU and had a strong strategic interest in bringing Eastern European nations into the European sphere of influence. Bringing unequal economies into the EU may be a good move from the viewpoint of national governments seeing strategic alliances, but not good from the Federalist viewpoint. 

I don't normally use this site for anything work-related, but I reckon the readers (if there are any left - it's very quiet these days) are the most likely to know the answer to this:

Here's a quick overview of prominent Labour & Trade Union social media initiatives for a talk I'm giving to TU organisers. I know I've not included 'False Economy' here yet, but are there any others that I've missed? (They are in no particular order btw):

I went to Westminster Skeptics last night to hear Dr Graeme Archer's very entertaining talk about evidence-based policy and the problems that there are with using statistical evidence to inform policymaking decisions.

Through necessity, Graeme skipped though quite a lot of it and I didn't fully follow everything, but broadly speaking, his talk appeared to give a concrete underpinning to a lot of views that I hold already.

Obviously, this is a very good thing. I appeared to have reached the same position by a bayesian process that he says that he has reached as a practicing statistician in the pharmaceuticals industry.

This may have come up after I left (I couldn't stick around for the questions after) but there was one thing that jarred. He seemed to think that an ability to treat statistical evidence to tweak bayesian priors rather than use it as a device by which we wipe previous assumptions out (and replace them with a beleif in whatever the 'evidence' tells us to beleive in) is a trait that is widely found in the political left but not the right (Graeme is a Tory).

A few quibbles:

Firstly, the pre-Thatcher Conservative Party was a good deal more Burkean than they have been since. Paraphrasing Burke very swiftly, he was clearly of the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' view, and that tradition (the Bayesianism of the most powerful sections of society?) needs an overwhelming case to be made before reform is acceptable. This appears to be the political manifestation of small-c conservatism.

Secondly, I think that he would have had a point if he'd argued that New Labour were particularly guilty of gathering evidence that appeared to support some radical-ish managerial approach, and using it to force through Year-Zero type policies, but there's a political context behind that which I will come to shortly.

Thirdly, if you're a big fan of market processes as a way of making decisions, then Graeme's (and my) views are comforting ones. I'm quite happy to sign up to this statement by way of a general creed:

The distributed wisdom of lots of small decisions will usually be a great deal better than less frequent big decisions made as a result of a formalised process. The main brake upon this means of making decisions should be a counterweight from elected bodies that apply distributed moral wisdom 

Has Populism peaked? Probably not. But it may have reached the end of it's beginning.

It's hard to be comfortable about any form of collective punishment, but the Italian people are about to go through a spot of it at the hands of Super Mario. It will take effect as a punishment for picking the wrong government. For allowing the shallow appeal of Berlusconi to trump other considerations, the Italian people have enjoyed a level of economic growth that was only worsted by Zimbabwe and Haiti. And that's only the beginning of a story that may take decades to play out.

It's the demagogic politics of bread and circuses. When a polity is dominated by the politics of purely emotional appeal - and almost nowhere has been immune to it -these democratic shortcomings lead to sub-optimal government. Vote stupid? Pay later!

Berlusconi himself was the protege and beneficiary of previous corrupt Italian governments, and the world is now conspiring to replace him with a technocrat. In Russia, the debased democracy that followed the collapse of communism resulted in a return to the dictatorship-lite of the Putin years.

But in the past week, US Republicans have learned that support from The Tea Party is a two way street that may cost them the Presidency. Let's hope so.

Super Mario's appointment is far from being a cause for celebration. His alleged deal to pull back from breaking up Berlusconi's media holdings is particularly worrying.

This is a crisis that is less rooted in bad economics than the bad democracy that results in bad economics. The EU and the IMF are wrong to allow Italy to duck this bullet and it does not bode well that, everywhere, the symptoms and not the illnesses are being treated.

If I owned a company and you worked for me, and you did something bad to an innocent third party, I'd have to take some responsibility whether I knew about it or not.

I'd deserve the appropriate sentence - a slap on the wrist, a modest fine, and in the worst cases, a short-ish spell inside. As Chris Bryant says of James Murdoch,

"No CEO of a construction firm could have passed the buck in the way you have tried to do. In the end it's your company, your employees, your profits and your responsibility."

So, entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control” (source). It's a nice line, and one that sums up a lot of very profitable new tech businesses very nicely.

Reading this post by Gerry Morrissey* we see in News Corp a company that exercises monopolistic muscle and makes £100s of Millions in the UK out of it's ability to beat regulators - not beating competitors.

With Murdoch, it's easy to form judgements like this. Christ, the guy wears his Lex Luthor credentials so proudly on his sleeve where every European liberal can see them. We've spent the last six months screaming at anyone who will listen: "How did you not see this already you thick gits?"

But where Murdoch has adopted Machiavelli's injunction that 'it's better to be feared than loved', the big tech media players have gone the other route. By giving us shiny things that we like, they've been able to escape the grasp of regulators, because to regulate would be to deprive us all of the free-shiny that Apple and Google let us access.

So mp3 players as fantastically designed as the iPod are worth every penny of the £160 that it costs to buy. Why? Partly, because it allows us to listen to music in breach of the licence by which it was originally distributed - and it adds value to it with a cool user interface.

OK, those licences were daft, iniquitous and inflexible. Probably the optimal licencing regime for music would be some pay-per-listen, often funded through collecting companies and cushioned at the pay-point by bundling it into a complementary service (music in pubs shift beer - and hey presto! PRS!).

But two wrongs don't make a right. If I were a musician and you told me you were listening to my latest album on a file-shared mp3, I'd probably want to bite your head off and shit down your neck. And Apple have made $billions from the process that would have culminated in you having a turd poking out of your decapitated corpse.

My lovely shiny Humax box lets me time-shift and ad-skip. I love it. I've not watched an advert on TV for a long time. Thanks Humax! I just hope I don't run into a Channel 4 TV producer, screenwriter or director next time I spill that story or the same experience (head off, defecation etc) would be my just reward.

Humax have made $millions facilitating this process, crucifying the commercial Public Service Broadcasting model. As have TiVO and Sky+. Regulators with backbones would insist upon hardware and ISP levies to ofset this. But - hey! Hands off! Free-shiny!!

Google give us free tools. They're great! Or in the case of the one social media tool that I genuinely loved (Google Reader) it was great - until last week. I won't bore you with this one again, but I think that this issue raises profound questions about corporations that are given regulatory passes on the grounds that they're facilitating innovation.

Google, Apple Facebook give us nice things. There are huge social positives from what Google gives us for no noticeable charge. Like piracy or open data (the downsides of open data are under-discussed IMHO), these are game-changing processes. But because the innovation often results in positive game-changing and helps support important social strides, we give the corporations that make huge profits from them free-passes without treating them like the utilities that they often are.

And we don't acknowledge that these 'free' (at the point of use) services aren't actually free. They're part of a value-chain. And we don't acknowledge that their users have a right to access the data that they give to these services in a useable way. Google have monetised my sharing of data. They may have a strategic reason to change how it works to make more money, but they shouldn't have the right to simply deprive me of my archive.

There are parallels of course. Facebook have occasionally abused our expectations on privacy (and I doubt if most users yet understand the 'if you're not paying for it, you're part of the service being sold' argument. Millions of people may be consenting to things they wouldn't consent to if they understood them fully.

This is an issue that I'd expect journalists and politicians to take more seriously than they do. OK - politicans are crap at acting on issues they don't really understand - they have an excuse here.

But I've really written all of this because I've got into a debate with one quite-good tech/media commentator who seems to think it's alright for 'free' services that occupy monopolistic and incumbency position to suddenly turn to their users and say 'no pay - no play!'. 

It isn't alright. They're not free services. Normally, a company that has monopolistic and incumbency privileges wouldn't be allowed to do this. But because of the free-shiny, Google can. Like Apple and Google do.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

I don't usually complain about changes to social networking platforms, but I'm incensed about the Google Reader changes - particularly the removal of the 'share' function, the shared items page and the 'note in reader' browser button. I have loads of stuff in there and I use it to feed all kinds of things (including the sidebar of this blog). All gone now. Sign the petition - (ironically, in Google Docs) and, inevitably, there's this:


 

I've seen a few things recently that underline the way that ideological warfare constantly struggles to avoid the kind of conclusions that good democracies reach.

Take Greece, for example. Unless Pete / Alex / Snowflake et al (below) haven't pulled these arguments out of their jacksies, then we have to conclude that Greece has been the butt of one of the most effective ideological assaults any of us have seen in a long time - world opinion being softened up to accept the long-term smashing of an economy to protect what the Occupy movement call the 1%.

It's a warning to us all. Ideological assaults happen. History is rewritten and reality is fabricated to protect and support the beneficiaries of the failures and shortcomings of democracy. Ideological assault seems to me to be something that the left rarely arms itself against, preferring to perfect it's own analysis. It's the equivalent of ignoring the opposition's team sheet and formation before a match.

I've got a few links below (bookmarks for myself as much as anything), but what's my conclusion? It's a lightly-held one, but it seems to me that Europe's problem isn't poor economic management. If the quality of democratic decisionmaking were better in the EU, we'd be able to share the pain of the little PIIGS fairly easily.

Europe's problem is the falling standards of liberal democracy that the EU is prepared to accept. This mess is the result of bad decisions that were forced by the unbridled demands of pressure groups.

Italy is the real problem - it should never have been allowed in the EU (never mind the Eurozone) and it's done plenty in the past decade alone to warrant expulsion (as I argued in one of my earliest posts here). If Italy were a functioning liberal democracy, we wouldn't be worried by the contagion from a Greek default. If Greece were one, it wouldn't be defaulting.

In the cases of Ireland, Greece and Italy to my certain knowledge, we've seen the consequences of a debased democracy - not a fundamentally malfunctioning economy. This is not restricted to those countries either. It's an explanation that fits the whole post-Lehmans crash, and right-wing populist movements such as the tea party have been given free rein to campaign for it's continued existance.

We've seen democracies and corporations distorted in their aims by the overwhelming demands from powerful interests groups and mangers respectively. This is the problem - and the EU's decision to sidestep it (not least with the individual culprits within Greece) while demanding unpayable penalties from the Greek people speaks volumes.

I don't know why the Occupy movement are thrashing around for a set of demands to unite behind. Surely 'a good democracy' and all that it entails is the answer?

"The first bail-out was designed to stabilise and buy time for the Eurozone. It was designed to avoid another Lehman-Bros-type market shock, at a time when financial institutions were too weak to withstand it. In the words of BBC economist Stephanie Flanders: “Put it another way: Greece looks less able to repay than it did a year ago – while the system as a whole looks in better shape to withstand a default… From their perspective, buying time has worked for the eurozone. It just hasn’t been working out so well for Greece.” If the bail-out were designed to help Greece get out of debt, then France and Germany would not have insisted on future multi-billion military contracts. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the MEP and leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, explained: “In the past three months we have forced Greece to confirm several billion dollars in arms contracts."

"The figure of 53 years old as an average retirement age is being bandied about. So much, in fact, that it is being seen as fact. The figure actually originates from a lazy comment on the NY Times website. It was then repeated by Fox News and printed on other publications....... Looking at Eurostat’s data from 2005 the average age of exit from the labour force in Greece (indicated in the graph below as EL for Ellas) was 61.7; higher than Germany, France or Italy and higher than the EU27 average. Since then Greece have had to raise the minimum age of retirement twice under bail-out conditions and so this figure is likely to rise further."

"Why the consternation in the rest of Europe? Because a bailout will still have to take place - of the banks, shorn of the "cover" and pretence that they were really bailing out the Greeks. In turn this will accelerate the need to re-regulate the banks and separate retail banking from investment banking - in other words reversing the trend set in course by Margaret Thatcher when she de-regulated in the 1980's, and then exported the idea to the world."

"I rather think that Hutton's enthusiasm gets the better of him, mistaking centralisation of power for federal integration. The view from much of Greece is of an economic dictat that will impose endless austerity. Maybe this is overstated and the debt write down certainly gives some breathing space. But what this deal does not seem to do is to reform the structural problems of monetary union and redistribute trade imbalances (as Yanis Varoufakis argues here). Instead it still suggests that the cause of the crisis lies in the moral failures of the peripheral states, requiring the constant supervision of the enlightened technocrats at the centre, whatever their previous record.

Even that would be acceptable if it were not for one thing. The theory - austerity and orthodoxy. Faced with the incontrovertible evidence of failure, they are insisting on implementing their plan with a renewed intensity, even as the social fabric of the indebted nations tears apart."

"There’s only one word that adequately describes the majority of Dutch media reports on Greece right now: a witch hunt."

"In a solidary (sic) Europe, the question shouldn’t be: how do I get my money back with maximum profit? It should be: how do I help a country get out of a recession for which I am partly responsible, and who will foot the bill for that? In the first place, part of the money should be taken from those responsible for causing this mess — from the elite. The Greeks who have committed fraud for years on end, who evaded their taxes, who obfuscated their money and who speculated irresponsibly, are going free, partly thanks to a recent law on parliamentary immunity. It’s an eyesore to he Greek people that Papandreou has failed to sue even a single corrupt politician, to punish even a single entrepreneur or ship owner, and to recover even a single penny from the billions of euros that have disappeared into various pockets. And in no way does Brussels seem to be pushing for such measures. In fact, on this subject, Brussels has remained silent as the grave."