How not to have another recession?

Paul Graham makes a reasonable case (if only in his usual style of repeating the same point as if that alone will convince), that now is a good time for startups to start.

What does seem to be true is that when recessions begin the number of MBAs that are begun also increases. Given the cyclical nature of expansion and recession that we go through perhaps we would be well advised to find these incipient management mavens something else to do with their recessionary period. Like raise pigs or something.

The Economics of Risk assessment

It was extremely interesting listening and from time to time watching to reactions to the Stern report on the radio and TV. It was like this long exhalation of breath from all these pundits and politicians. At last, they seemed to breathe, we can talk about it.

Not that the Vox Pop was all that welcoming, the general reaction being that its just government being government as it was only expressed to them in the form of taxes. The Stern report is more than just about taxes, indeed it barely mentions them and doesn't identify particular taxes. What it does do is cost the environment, or rather the risk assessment of cost if nothing or very little is done.

And for that Stern needs more than commending, since if for no other greater reason, governments around the world, the US government in particular will take it seriously, far more seriously than they take the science that underlies it. Because now it is a tangible risk with a tangible price tag.

1% Mr Pisspot or 40-60% for you in the future, choose now, yes I thought so.

There are other recommendations in the Stern report which are also heartening especially as I proposed them (in very small voice), more than ten years ago.

If poor countries with rich resources use up those resources then the likelyhood is that green house gas emission will increase and if those resources are largely rain forest the cost of renewal will be even greater as it takes 25 years to replace trees to clean the air.

More than ten years ago I suggested that we pay those countries with the scarce and important resources the exact value of those resources in rent for them to manage and not utliise them in any way. I called it marketingtheworld.com and it had a (very tatty) web site.

This is exactly the argument that Stern uses and he uses economic magic formulae to prove it works.

But I'll take no credit, other than the credit for being able to reason.

I must remember to take the recycling box to the pavement tomorrow morning...

Police and State inextricably adjacent.

With the new Drugs Act one has to give written consent before a physical search of the person (and presumably inside the person), can take place. This sounds a step forward. In the same breath though the legislation adds, unless it is considered that consent is being withheld unreasonably in which case consent can be implied.

Implied.

So Mr Pisspot you are refusing to grant us written permission whilst lying prostrate on the floor with three beefy police officers pinning you down and my gloved finger about to invade your rectum, I have no alternative but to imply that you have given consent by unreasonably refusing to give that consent.

Under English Law the basis of being policed is that of consent from the public now even the implied consent of refusing it is no longer required. The principle of arrest was very clear in policing. A policeman has no more rights than anyone else in arresting someone, they are citizens whose job it is to protect life and property but do so under the same restrictions and controls as any other citizen.

Or rather they were. Under the new regulations that came into force in the New Year a policeman can now arrest someone for any offence whatsoever even if it be ever so minor. A citizen can now only arrest an individual for an indictable offence.

Since being arrested is sufficient cause for search and sufficient cause for search of premises and home there are now no controls on any fishing expedition mounted by the police on any individual. You truly can be arrested for stealing a sandwich from Pret a Manger and then have your gaff turned over for possession of drugs, arms, fertiliser and insecticide or whatever else it is that's high on the Chief Constable's list of undesirable products this day.

The Government has handed over the keys to the Police and now we must trust to their benificence in how they use those keys. Blair will undoubtedly wrinkle his eyes in disgust and simper simultaneously (a very peculiar performance and singularly performed by him) at the notion that we live in a Police State but the position is clear.

Police States are eminently safe and secure for those that the Police happen not to be interested in, we must individually pray now that we do not attract their interest.

Paypal, how to get cash to the Man

When governments have been in power for some time they either become insane or lazily self congratulatory. The Tories went insane over Europe in the 90's and slumbered whilst Wilson picked their pockets at the beginning of the 60's and the Labour Party went collectively insane after ie1979.

Blair's New Labour government is proving the exception to the rule in that it isn't the entire government that is going insane. Just the Prime Minister.

He has always had a kind of simplistic idea of Law and Order, when he shadowed the Home Office brief he coined the phrase, 'Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime', but it was only soundbite there was no substance to it. In the euphoria of the second election win he came up with the idea of frog marching drunken youths to the cash point to pay up on the spot for fines thought up by the police. This disappeared in a general tumult of derision.

Now he wants to stop cash as an monetary instrument except for buying the papers or tipping the bin man. He doesn't say that's what he wants, but that would be the result. What he wants, he says, is to reduce to a £1,000 the limit where you have to declare exactly where the cash came from to, if required, the satisfaction of the police (and their agents, solicitors, banks, car dealers and your Auntie Mary).

Any amount over £1,000 can be seized by the police should they wish unless they receive what they think is sufficient explanation not only for you having such a sum but that the purpose is lawful.

Supposedly this is to attack low level drug dealers and (natch) terrorists.

The most likely use of cash at that level is to buy a used car, not a business which is all that enthusiastic about always being on the right side of the law anyway, and if you use cash you're more likely to get a better deal since cheques at that level aren't guaranteed and credit cards require checks. It's largely a cash business.

But then the Very Reverend probably hasn't ever considered buying a second hand car nor had much need for cash over the past 8 years. Even if he did fancy buying a 12 year old Lancia with a wad the odds on anyone asking where he got it or the police from ever bothering the likes of him is approaching zero. Just as the odds on the police asking some youth that happens to smoke where he got his dosh from approach certainty.

So, what's the odds that the next time you need to score some smoke (not me I stopped doing that not long after Thatcher got in), that you'll be exchanging email addresses with the Man and you'll pay with Paypal?

Is it really you?

From next year first time applicants for a UK passport will have to have a personal interview. This is supposed to be so that they can verify the person in the tiny photographs (already countersigned by some solicitor or similar as being a faithful likeness), is the person getting the passport. In future no doubt it will also involve the 7-9 different biometric tests and then everyone will have to go through it.

Hmmm, that will make it harder to forge them no doubt.

There was a man from the Passport Office on the radio yesterday defending the price rise up to £51 of the passport and saying it was very secure from being forged because it was digital.

Hmmm, see doubt above.

This is on the same day that the Head of MI6 opined that ID cards would be of no practical use as they'd be forged.

Don't bother pirating the Daily Show, just watch Newsnight

Last night's Newsnight included a piece by Salaam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, on the state of Iraq today and the constitution and his decision to vote for it.

He began outside his parent's house again, which was bright, sunny and in bloom with the roses that no doubt were the very same variety of roses brought back from Syria and Mesopotamia by the Crusaders, but which is now for sale because the area the house is in is now overrun with jihadists and unsafe.

His manner was more like the Salaam Pax before the war, still funny but very sad and fearful of the future. His father is a member of the assembly and had a hand in drafting the constitution and is one of the few Sunnis to do so. But, as with most of the Sunnis, his father's view is that of a secular Iraqi but the Constitution says that no law can contradict the laws of Islam. Which is a licence for those with the power to to interpret in whatever way they think.

So, for the Tony Blair argument that we may disagree with the war but we can't disagree that it would be better for Saddam to be in power we also have to accept that the status of women and citizens in general will be less under this new Constitution than it was under a dictator.

The latter paragraph is my interpretation, to make your own watch Salaam Pax at click this. You can watch Newsnight online for up to 24 hours after each original broadcast.

It's not Detention but we won't let you go home

So the Terrorism Bill is printed and they've largely kept the two most contentious measures; the possibility of keeping those arrested without charge for up to three months and making it illegal to glorify terrorism knowingly to an audience knowing that it would incite them to acts of terrorism.

The latter one is just silly and its danger is not in the word glorify since the prosecution will have to show intent but that the the charge can be brought retrospectively even before the crime ever existed to be performed.

The police are representing the 3 month detention not as detention but as a succession of 7 day arrests confirmed by some judicial sitting. Whatever. Everyone else sees it as detention and so detention is what it is.

The police also argue that its necessary because of the time it takes to get the evidence in order to charge them properly, because it takes time to crack encryption codes to read the data on their hard disks.

Two things occur to me.

• I'd have thought that in order to arrest someone in the first place that there would have to be a prima facie cause for that arrest and that there would be some charge upon which they could be held whilst any forensic evidence was extracted and identified. As David Davis says, the witholding of encryption keys when asked for them by the police is itself against the law and they can be charged for withholding evidence.


• If it takes more than 14 days to break the encryption on the hard disk then actually breaking that encryption is extremely unlikely and a limit of three months may be insufficient.

The purpose of School

I do wonder what the purpose of going to school is from time to time and I say that in the knowledge of being a school governor. Remembering school as it was is an inescapable thing as I try and remind teachers the only experience most parents have of school is when they were there as children themselves and most of them didn't have anything like a happy or pleasant time and my own experience was worse than most.

I do recall though that schools were in the midst of life as well as in the midst of passing some test or other and that events outside of school did impact us and sometimes those impacts were great.

At S's age, or the year before, there was the Aberfan disaster when a coal tip (and there were hundreds of coal tips in England and Wales then), saturated with water slipped down and engulfed a Primary School killing virtually all the children and Staff. Our teacher talked to us quietly after the news was heard during his break and explained to us what had happened.

Around the same time Gus Grissom and his partners were killed in the launchpad flame up testing Apollo and the Saturn V. Again it was brought up in school.

Yet in this year of such enormous natural events killing and making homeless so many little if anything has been mentioned in S's school yet just like Aberfan, there are entire schools of children her age and younger wiped out in the earthquake curiously called the South Asian Earthquake. And they do know about these things, they do watch Newsround they do absorb it. Schools should help to explain and put into context great events whether they happened three hundred years ago or three years ago. It is a great failing if they do not.

Dialogues

The technique of using a dialogue between two or more people, at least one of them famous, has been used to put forward political and philosophical argument since the time of Plato and even scientific discourse was promoted in the same way, famously by Galileo. Last night's Panorama on BBC 1 took it to a different stage, taking the individual statements by Tony Blair and his wife, the barrister, Cherie Booth and strongarming them into a set of conversations between them about the need for Terrorism legislation versus the threat to liberty that such legislation provides.

The problem being that Blair's speech technique is to throw 'y'know and long pauses' into everything and his wife's speeches are extremely technical when they are on her own subject.

So the conversations were stilted and simply gave the impression that they talked past one another, neither actually involving themselves in the other position but simply restating the same position over and over, Blair stating they have to have it, they have to make the law fit their intentions and Cherie's that its up to the courts to decide who should and who should not be incarcerated.

This might well be how the household of Number 10 operates but it did nothing to promote the evident overall case of the Panorama programme which was that the legal establishment, even significant elements of the intelligence establishment, view these proposed laws with more than suspicion to the extent that they were compared with internment in Northern Ireland.

The interviews with judges, intelligence community folk and policemen were far more enlightening than the Punch and Judy Show of The Very Reverend and Her Indoors.

Coincidentally, tonight Channel 4 unveils its new More 4 digital channel (an adult channel where the word adult means between the ears and not between the legs), with a play on Blunkett and the Mistress from the Spectator in which Blair is ennobled as Toblerone by Carol Kaplan, that arbiter of style and fashion. From what I've heard and seen it will be a far more incisive portrayal of what New Labour has become than the staged dialectic of Panorama.

Cooling Reality

Global warming has struggled to the news after the General Election and it being broached in the joint News Conference yesterday with the Very Reverend and Shrub. This morning the Today programme had an interview with an American scientist still claiming that there's no consensus in the scientific community that warming is actually taking place and that its made worse by us humans, let alone that doing something about it just in case would be a good thing.

And this was followed by the President of the Royal Society simply stating that all of the Societies for Science in all of the G8 countries, including the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, agreed that warming was taking place and agreed that measures had to be taken now.

I don't know the credentials of the first scientist from the USA but it would be good to know if there are any independant scientists, that is any not funded by industry, in the USA and in the field that have the view that global warming is not taking place.

Every story in the USA press up to now has been about finding more data, there is shedloads of data and in the end it doesn't matter an iota whether it was originally caused by industrialisation or whether its a normal change in the climate cycle. None of that matters.

What is beginning to matter is that it is now evident (where before it was only suspected), that the current US administration takes active steps to edit published data on global warming. From the New York Times, re-reported in the Minnesota Star Tribune:

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, 

Philip Cooney removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists

and their supervisors already had approved. 

In most cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

Post Enron no one will be guilty

After the decision by the Supreme Court that overturns the decision on Anderson Consulting's conviction and as Anderson's is pretty much defunct it seems there are few guilty parties. Sarbanes-Oxley, and the EU's draconian money laundering regulations, notwithstanding businesses might be able to tread less gingerly and have less of a fear that they'll have their collar felt.

But the added administrative costs will be there.

Microsoft serial patent abuser

This past Tuesday Microsoft was granted a patent on serialising data to XML. Other than the idiocy of the granting the obvious, is this defensive patenting really beneficial to all developers as its tacitly assumed that Microsoft aren't going to go after every individual ISV and developer that happens to have converted data to XML using their own or non-Microsoft tools.

I understand the rationale about defensive patenting, even if I don't agree that software patents should exist at all, but if they are going to exist perhaps there should be an organisation, funded by ISVs large and small, that goes out and gets these obvious patents and that current patent holders assign existing obvious patents to for the benefit of all ISVs and developers.

Warrant? We don't need no steenking Warrant!

The current political story from I Just Heard is about the FBI requesting something called administrative subpoenas.

Which means that the FBI is asking Congress to grant them the overall permission to seize data from any individual or corporation without first seeking a warrant from the Court.

This makes data sound as if it can give evidence about more than its existence and content. Quite apart from the civil and commercial liberties that could be lost and traduced this also means that fishing expeditions would be administratively sanctioned.

Let us hope that PC Plod (Charles Clarke) hasn't noticed.

The original news item.

Peace Green, the new colour from Land Rover

Yesterday Green Peace invaded the Land Rover plant and shackled themselves to one of the large models, declaring it a 'Climate Crime Scene'. Production was disrupted they made the news, mostly just the local midlands news, and then were arrested. They sounded a little inarticulate on the TV but I think that was mostly because they were setting themselves up at the time and perhaps they just were inarticulate at the time.

Land Rover's local PR person, who happens to be someone that was a journalist working for the local BBC, was not in the least inarticulate of course and made the point that most of the large models run on diesel.

There was no challenging of this, local news tends to support local industry.

Gorgeous George and the Briar Patch

Although Gorgeous George doesn't impress me with his self serving self advertising promotion of the right things for the wrong reasons he doesn't strike me as someone who has something like $600 million.

If the allegations from the Senate Permanent sub-committee on Investigations are to be believed Galloway had the benefit of vouchers issued to allow Irag to sell oil in return for food and humanitarian aid. They also allege that he profited from these vouchers.

This is substantively the same allegation that The Daily Telegraph made after it published a list it had fortuitously recovered from the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, whilst chaos was raging in the city. Galloway succeeded in a libel action against the paper and now he's going to go before the committee probably in the knowledge that there is no paper trail to hang any profits upon him.

You need more than a name on a list to have the truth.

Pay no attention

to the advert on the right. But it does show that Wee Willie Winkie's party is a little more switched onto the Webbysphere than their rivals.

It's a pity then that their online manifesto is some javascript page display engine (Mobular seems to be the name, but I'm not giving them a link it's so crap), which is buttock wearyingly slow.

Just stick a pdf up with some mirror servers people.

Finally a vote to make

I learned this morning from the Today Programme after they'd had the three headed interview with the candidates for the Wyre Forest (though uniquely one of our three heads is independant), that although we don't have a Lib-Dem candidate standing we do have a Monster Raving Loony, Bert Priest, standing. Now we really do have an alternative vote.

Dr. Taylor seems to have learned the art of political interviews, changing the focus of the question from 'You' to 'We', shifting the subject to his own advantage (in his case concentrating on improving Health Service strategic decision making for everyone else in the country whilst we suffer with the old decisions' wake). The Labour and Tory candidates (I can't tell the difference between them, they're both called Mark though, I think), wibbled in the background. I notice they didn't get one of the ubiquitous Oborski's on the air in the interview, if they had no more light might have been cast but a deal of heat generated.

Blairown

There's a mumble in the media jungle about the first election advert by Labour, featuring the Very Reverend and The Munudger as to when they're going to set up home and get married and what their first child would look like.

It didn't quite look like that to me, not quite the 'we have been through so much, we have differences but at heart we love one another', so much as a parody of Alias Smith & Jones. There was an iconic sketch setup in the program where the two faces were very close together and one would say something fairly reasonable, that the other would say something outlandish to and then the return would be even further out on the edge; Smith sweating heavily and Jones beadily sardonic.

Politics as satire on 80's comedy, how post modernist and deconstructivist of the Labour Party. Or how cruel of the director Anthony Minghella, not to indicate The English Patient but perhaps The Talented Mr Ripley.

ID poor, poor ID

Wendy Grossman has a piece about a research group at the London School of Economics finding numerous flaws (75) in the Government's proposals for biometric ID cards. Some of them are political and about the rights of EU citizens to free movement and so on and some are basic technical flaws.

But the one which I've always known is that the reason behind which the Government hides as for why we need this pointless and useless biometric ID card is completely spurious. We do not need to change the passport to have biometric information we just need digital photos taken for new passports then the digital image can be watermarked (digitally) and checksummed so that it cannot be forged on that passport (as there is a code to the checksum on the passport).

None of that requires an ID card or biometric measuring of the population all of which is entirely untried and untested in any real size of population.

Patent medicine

The Indian Upper House of Parliament this week is due to ratify the changes to the Patent laws which will allow the international pharmaceutical companies to enforce those medicines and procedures which have already been patented in the USA and Europe, regardless of the method of manufacture.

Previously if the method of manufacture was different to that described in any patent document then Indian law allowed that it was a different product and not covered by the original patent.

This is a blow not only to Indian health medicine and the local pharmaceutical industry (other than that owned by the multinationals), but also to those in Africa who have been using Indian manufactured generic drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Bilharzia and any number of other endemic diseases.

At the same time India is also adopting a mail in claiming patent system based on product and not upon process. Pfizer was the largest single initial applicant with 373 applications, Johnson & Johnson 262 and the largest Indian pharmaceutical Company taking advantage was Dr Reddy's Labs with 205.

I can understand a little better the argument for some pharmaceutical patents if a medicine or procedure has actually been designed and there is a need to be able to safeguard the capitalised costs of development (which is an asset remember). But if the medicine is little more than a tested, processed and formulated substance which exists in nature or it is purely a discovery then I can't see how a patent is justified.

Even when patenting is allowable if it is the only effective treatment for a disease then that monopoly alone should be sufficient reward for the manufacturing company and generic licences should be available for governments to purchase so that its citizens should not be burdened or prevented from getting the one treatment that does exist.

It is all the more ironic that it is the WTO, the body that is supposed to promote fair trade, that has enforced this change on the Indian Government. Not for the first time the word fair applies to trade only in one direction.

Waiting on the Maginot Line

Waiting, as we are, in the phony war before the election is called and the dogs enter the slips the question is not who will win but what Gordon Brown will decide afterwards. One can never be sure outside the village of Westminster how much fire there is in the smoke of the mutual dislike of the PM and Chancellor but just occasionally one catches it in the body language of one or the other of them.

Yesterday, when the journalist barracked Tony Blair with the charge that he was exaggerating the Tories' cuts, as Blair stuttered from word to word, his voice trying to coat the 'Yes but, No but' with the Reverend Blair touch of old, just behind him, just behind and to one side was Gordon Brown.

There was the briefest, the tiniest, the merest smidgen, of a smirk from him as his Leader manfully tried to pull it around and then in the gap as Blair half turned almost in tiredness, Gordon made half a step forward, scrap of paper in his hand, no doubt with the exact phrase the exact terminology to explain all away and put it to bed. Those gently smiling jaws.

Unfortunately, the clip ended at that point and I haven't seen the whole thing yet so I had to imagine the rest.

Poor Mr Howard has no one chafing for his job. It must be extremely dispiriting for him. One week he is the champion of our ancient and historical rights, the steely glint, the righteous light banishing the dark side and the next he has t to rise after Gordon Brown has stolen his clothes, renovated them and made them silk out of rough hemp. So its not surprising he hemmed a little just before bringing out the slogan that they must have crafted in the wee hours of the morning 'Vote Now, Pay Later'.

It's obvious that Gordon Brown is convinced of the fundamental strength of his economy and that any black hole will either just slide into the future, no smaller, but no larger either or that the VAT receipts and Corporation Tax he's been counting upon really will start to enter the coffers. We will no doubt be dreaming the same fantasy for the next four years.

In any event, the pensioners with their bus passes (oh you had one already?), and the £200 pounds off the Council Tax (oh, you're on benefit so you get the Council Tax paid, but you only have £99 a week anyway), and the Queen Mum's statue (what did she ever do for the miners in her father's pits), will push even those hesitating voters back towards New Labour.

As Gordon Brown attempts to set the real agenda for the election and make his own contribution the really important one, Tony Blair is stuck between wanting to consolidate his legacy and get something positive out of Iraq at least before he goes and his political nous which is no doubt saying to him, the political tide is turning beware the Ides of May. If Blair hadn't steam rollered himself into that extraordinary claim on the next term and then choosing to go himself he now wouldn't be in the position of the incredible loss of face if he goes now or in the first year of the election and from his body language I think he wants to go now.

But what of Charles Kennedy? I did a search recently for Liberal Party Leader UK on Google, (Google I find so helpful for when I can't remember someone's name), and instead of Charles Kennedy's of course David Steel's came up and came up on H2G2 that wikipedia forerunner.

The reason though I put in Liberal rather than Liberal Democrat is that living where I do, in the Wyre Forest, we don't get the choice of a Liberal Democrat but of a Liberal. This may well be some Lib-Dem/Hospital Alliance to protect the good Doctor's seat (not Who but Taylor). If the election had actually been called then I'd have to give the Liberal Candidate's name but it hasn't so I don't.

Now, Charles Kennedy, oh dear, I've run out...

Minimus Carta

So there we have it. On the say so of a politician with the unseen evidence of unknown people and from possibly other countries we can now restrain, tag, imprison and otherwise reduce the liberties of anyone within the borders of the United Kingdom, so long as it is an emergency.

Because, even though the Commons and Lords did almost their utmost to make this vile legislation palatable they gave Big Ears a hole large enough to climb through. The evidential test even if it comes before a judge is less than 40% likelyhood, in other words it is less likely than a reasonable person would surmise that this individual would commit or enable an act of terrorism.

The supposed win that it had to come before a judge before such a Control Order could be implemented is a paper covering over the immense hole of an emergency, since when in such cases is it ever notgoing to be an emergency?

The vague promise of some kind of Independant inspection, though not necessarily Privy Councillors and if not then truly secret issues will never be discussed, and the holding out of a time to amend the current legislation is claimed as being tantamount to a sunset clause by the Tories. But it is not. Amending legislation is not the same as having it lapse, whatever amendments are allowed the principle will remain, the government can incarcerate anyone they choose on untested evidence in an emergency.

If anyone doubts this then see that Clarke signed the emergency orders last night as soon as the Bill became Law, yet the people involved were already bailed under the same conditions as the Control Orders and there was plenty of time to bring it before a judge. After all the exiting Prevention of Terrorism Act enables the police to hold a suspect for up to 14 days without charge.

This government treats with contempt Parliament, the Law and the rights of its citizens.

No matter how many times you hit it

if its a can of worms its still a can of worms however changed the shape of the can. So, sunset clauses or not, the Security legislation should not be passed because it is bad law, it categorises those that the Government can restrict, control and contain on the basis (at best), of a balance of probabilities on evidence which is secret and untested.

On the 28th January I posted the open letter to MPs about the problems surrounding house arrest. These arguments are still current. No matter whether a judge agrees or not house arrest is divisive and a cause for creating unrest, civil disorder and terrorist acts.

Blair said today in the House that reason for passing this legislation is that the security services need it and asked for it. I think perhaps he has forgotten, it is not the purpose of Government, nor yet of Parliament to simply give security services what they want just because they ask for it. If whatever the security services is accepted as gospel and just followed upon there will be no free society for them to protect.

Blog for Today

The BBC Radio 4 Today Programme is looking for three bloggers to blog the forthcoming General Election and as is my wont given my excess of ego and inflated sense of my own writing and wit I have applied.

Though as they're looking for three and probably roughly equivalent to the three main parties I may just be disqualified on the basis of my political weirdness, even if it is shared with people like Tony Benn and John Mortimer.

Open Letter to British Members of Parliament

I wanted to rehearse for you some of the arguments for not extending the Secretary of State for Home Affairs' powers to tag, restrict the movement of and or place under house arrest either UK and EU citizens or foreign nationals without placing sufficient evidence in front of a Judge and Jury.

Apart from the obvious grounds of law and justice and of not giving absolute power to the Executive over the liberty of individuals there are a number of side effects that will arise which will make the maintenance of public order harder and, if anything, increase the radicalisation of those that otherwise would not contemplate acts of terrorism.

If an individual is to be under house arrest, in their own home, this is not going to be some detached home in some leafy suburb or a country house in a rural area it is going to be a flat in a multi-story block, the top floor of a terraced house in West London or a semi in Dudley Port, or wherever. The individual will be held within his own community, they will become the focus of dissent, peaceful dissent and possibly violent or destructive dissent, not solely from those that dissent from his imprisonment but dissent from his or her supposed crimes and their presence in their community.

In the wider community individuals that may not come from any kind of radical background, nor yet even be a Muslim, may, simply because of their reaction to the generally unlawful behaviour of the Government, become radicalised and radicalised to the extent of behaving alone or with others and creating their own terrorist cell.

Because in this much the Government is right, it is not the architects of terrorism that blow up suburban trains in their station, it is not the lecturing cleric that straps explosive to his body and blows up a restaurant of people it is the young man or woman, radicalised and convinced that something must be done and that their individual sacrifice will as a tiny but extreme action bring about justice for those they feel have none. So, it may well be that someone that was attracted in a madrasa in Pakistan to go to Afghanistan and train with a Liberation Army force will be convinced that they should make this sacrifice and so confining him may be, in his instance, be a good thing for society, in which case bring that as evidence before a Judge and Jury and make that decision public, even if the evidence is given in camera.

If we fail in this, due to our Government's fear of terror, then we will only attract terrorism and all the ways of life that the Government is so striving to defend will disappear and all that will be left is paternalism and further totalitarian measures.

I would urge you to vote against any such measure.

I'm afraid the President escaped

and is in front of the press.

Well it sort of felt like that. I was reminded, whilst watching Shrub's first press conference since his inauguration, of the Presidential Debates; the body language, the breathing, the voice. I was reminded that my most direct reaction is that he is trying so hard to convince himself at the same time as railing against the skepticism of his audience. He does strike me as perhaps the one man in the White House who doesn't know what's going on.

He did as well as he could with the question about a Jordanian dissident arrested in Amman for making a pro-democracy speech but at the same time gave away that he'd been briefed about Jordan by his answer, so in the end he just looked evasive. It's the sickly smile that does it.

Two news events were coincident with the press conference, the helicopter crash with the death of 31 Marines and the rail crash of two commuter trains and a goods train in Glendale, I may have missed any reference to the second but the first was glossed over and passed on to the Department of Defense. When you become blasé about the casualties in a theatre regardless of whether it was weather or enemy action you know that the relative loss calculations are now out of date. Whereas previous calculations before the invasion were about how few Coalition troops would be lost, now its not even being forecast or seen as important.

The Freedom to be who we want to be

There are two separate but intertwined pressures on us that impel the introduction of ID cards. The continuing and increasing need to prove who we are in order to gain any benefit from being a member of society and so identify those who are illegitimate members of society, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and so on and the pumped up fear of the Other, who could be the terrorist. So in order to prove a negative we have to jump through hoops.

Just recently another example of this tide came up with this Employment Agency requiring copies of ID and at the time we thought it was just officiousness for the sake of it, but now it seems that it is law but a law that is served more in the breach than the observance.

To quote from the DTI's guidance on the Employment Agency Act (which hitherto I didn't even know existed):

Provides that an employment agency or employment business must not
introduce or supply a work-seeker to a hirer unless it has obtained
confirmation:
(a) of the identity of the work-seeker. This will mean seeing any
document which provides evidence of the work-seeker’s identity,
such as his/her passport, driving licence, birth certificate.By virtue
of regulation 32(6) this will extend to those persons provided
through limited company contractors, where the notice under
regulation 32(9) to opt out of the scope of the Regulations has not
been given;

(b) that the work-seeker has the experience, training, qualifications
and any authorisation which the hirer considers are necessary, or
which the worker needs to have by law or by the requirements of
any professional body, in order to carry out the work. This
obligation can be properly discharged by the agency or
employment business when registering a work-seeker. During the
registration process it should request sight of evidence of training
received, qualifications and authorisations such as certificates,
and registrations with professional bodies. Again by virtue of the
provisions of regulation 32(6), the requirements here must be
extended to those persons supplied through limited company
contractors, which have not given notice to opt out of the
Regulations;

Now the position of employment agencies in relation to those looking for work and those looking for workers has always been a little murky, just as Estate Agents responsibilities to buyers are a little indistinct. You can see that there are two targets for this legislation, making sure that Employment Agencies vet people correctly for their clients, the employers, and pruning at the earliest time those that shouldn't be here looking for work. similarly with requiring copies of qualifications. Yet the result of this is surely to slow down the entire process and at the same time encourage identity theft and (if there is such a thing) identity fraud.

It has been a feature of our inherited anglo-saxon system that anyone can take whatever identity they like so long as it is not for the purposes of committing a fraud or crime or escape the consequences of a criminal act. I can call my self Raspberry Ramsbottom if I so wish, quite legally and without having to change it by deed poll, entering it in a newspaper or anything else. Now this is becoming a de-facto illegal act, or at least an act which prevents you from engaging with the rest of society. If you have the experience required for a job and meet whatever other criteria an employer has what else is relevant?

You could argue that the employer has a duty not to employ illegal immigrants, but that is not so, no one (outside of the draconian money laundering regulations), has any duty to report a crime or possible crime. An employer does have to take a National Insurance number at the time of employment and inform the Inland Revenue that they've hired them, but that is all.

This isn't a New Labour thing or a Conservative thing, its a Government thing, this desire for eveything to be known for everyone to be responsible not only to uphold the law but to enforce the law. We are being made into our own Stasi, informers upon ourselves.

So no WMD

not we shouldn't have gone at all. So Andrew Sullivan says no one was against the war because they said there were no WMDs. Well, wrong. Apart from fly weights like myself, Hans Blix also didn't say there were caches of available WMD, he said there were unanswered questions, Robin Cook, past Foreign Secretary, in his resignation speech in the Commons specifically said he did not accept that there was materiél available for use on the battlefield or in strategic weapons.

I know it's hard for some to accept that they were just wrong and there's no point in crowing about it just because those that saw through the sham happened to be right. Because it was a crap shoot, the politicians in the absence of good intelligence could have been right, but it was a very low grade chance of being right.

Whilst avoiding crowing, let us also say that many of us that doubted the original reason, and doubted the original need also foresaw the likely consequences. Other than the conflict not spreading to Turkey, personally, I think I've largely and probably luckily (which is an odd sort of verb in this sentence), been right.

I'm not about to form my own political party though, unlike Kilroy Silk, (observant and readers of extraordinary good memory my recollect my comparisons with Sir Oswald Mosley).

Recognise your situation

I'm not a US citizen, nor less a US resident, and I'm not going to presume to tell US citizens what they should or should not do if they want Guantanamo closed down.

But there are some fundamental fallacies floating about. These facilities, and the process by which people get arrested and taken there have very little to do with Bush. The entire setup and organisation is managed by the Pentagon, not the military but the Pentagon bureaucracy.

There's a pattern in human behaviour. Some crisis arises, the leader announces that the crisis must be dealt with and dealt with efficiently and he (or she) won't take failure to the people for all good reasons of state and not least because it would threaten their position as leader. The order is taken and passed on and the condition that failure is not acceptable becomes the only guiding motivation, nothing else matters, failure is not acceptable.

And so any means by which failure is avoided is acceptable and decisions are taken by bureaucrats, justified by bureaucrats and can never be questioned by bureaucrats because this is what the leader wants.

Whether the leader wanted it or not.

The Pentagon now cannot conceive of any other action except the incarceration of anyone identified as an enemy, regardless of how that is discovered or known. All the mistakes and errors are acceptable because the net has to be made so wide because so many are enemies.

Analysis as to why there are so many is not an acceptable process within the Government because it's a war and in war you don't look for ways to ameliorate or capitulate but to win.

And failure is not acceptable.

Why did the Pentagon seem to be taken by surprise by the results of the invasion of Iraq, why did they assume that after an initial period of martial law that the Iraqi citizens would welcome the chance to be democratic and be welcoming of their liberators? Because analysis is not acceptable and their friends that were Iraqi, the ones they paid so well, told them everything would be well.

And failure is not acceptable.

There are hysterical comparisons with other totalitarian regimes (and you may be well fed, able to vote, able to express yourself with more visible freedom than most on the planet but if, in the end, the Government decides who is right and who is wrong it is totalitarian), with atrocities such as the Holocaust or the Killing Fields. There is no moral equivalence with these horrible examples and Bush is a well meaning man as, perhaps Rumsfeld (ok, I may have doubts about that), is as well.

There is no moral equivalence but there is an equivalent pattern.

When failure is not acceptable and the Commander in Chief says so, then the sergeant is empowered to pile up naked prisoners, order them to fellate one another and photograph the consequences, he may even have been ordered to do so.

Because failure is not acceptable.

Whereat the Exit Strategy

The announcement that the search is over, isn't really news and nothing new has happened. A major reason for the search being called off (apart from its futility), is that the people conducting it just couldn't be protected.

Secondly, I can see the point of the argument that goes, 'this is all messed up but it would be worse if we just walked away'. That may be true, but is that engendered by a feeling of responsibility that having caused it it should be cleaned up or engendered by pride and wishing not to lose face or even calculating that if the US (the rest of the Coalition don't matter), left now it would claimed as a victory?

Any of that could well be true but it avoids the question, 'Is the US remaining actually improving matters or making them worse and postponing the inevitable'.

It was my original belief and prediction before this invasion happened that the only short term result would be (in the absence of a general conflagration from the Bosphorus to the Ganges), Civil War in Iraq between up to four separate combatants and continuing in much the same way as the Civil War proceeded in Lebanon. The difference being that instead of the patrons being Syria and Israel they would be the US and Iran.

Some things have shifted but on the whole I still see the same result with possibly worse conseqences for the US than when they ignominiously left Beirut in the 70's. It was that, if we remember, that helped spark Iran Contra and the funding of Saddam in the first place.