The question isn't so much "did Eric Pickles eat all the pies?", it's "who paid for the pies, and how many did he declare in the register of members' interests?". TBIJ is on an absolute tear on Tory lobbying stories at the moment, and the combination of photo and caption for the Eric Pickles one is masterly.
But this story reveals more than it says. So, four cabinet ministers accepted donations to their private offices since May, 2010. Those would be William Hague, George Osborne, Liam Fox, and Michael Gove, or to put it another way, most of Atlantic Bridge and the core of the neo-conservative group within the Conservative Party. I do not think this is a coincidence.
Curiously, it seems that if you get donations to your private office you don't also get them to your constituency party branch and vice versa, with the exceptions of George Osborne and Michael Gove, who would have more jam on it, wouldn't they?
Pickles, for his part, received zero, which makes perfect sense. You can't eat money, and as for spending it on unofficial advisers, that only makes sense if you ever take advice from other people and the Bradford food-mountain has always known he's right.
Meanwhile, Lord Astor of Hever turns up as a trustee of the Bridge and an pal of the Werritty-funding SAS walt, Iraq contract hunter, and intimate of mercenaries Tim Spicer and Anthony Buckingham.
I think I've said before that Astor of Hever came out of the Lobster Project proof of concept script as being a surprisingly important gatekeeper - although in himself, he isn't a major node, people who meet him also tend to get one-to-one meetings with the most important ministers. His weighted network degree, a measurement of how many links in the lobbying network involve him adjusted for how many people took part in the meetings, is 0.125, pretty low (78th in the league), but his gatekeepership metric is 2.533, the third highest overall and the very highest score for a minister with UK-wide responsibility. (I discount the gatekeepership numbers for Scottish and Welsh ministers, as their role is partly to represent Scottish and Welsh interests and they are structurally heavily lobbied.)
The gatekeepership metric in Lobster is the ratio of the average weighted network degree of those who lobbied a given minister to the average of all lobbies, to the ratio of that minister's network degree to that of an average minister, thus capturing the degree to which meeting that minister was associated with meeting more or less important ones while taking into account the fact that some ministerial jobs are more important than others. If it is greater than 1, you're likely to get a boost, if less, you're being heard out.
A limitation is that obviously, the Prime Minister can't help you meet a more important minister, so it doesn't yet deal with the situation where you meet the PM to get your word across and are then referred to a junior minister for action. I accept that this is a problem, although you would expect that it is easier to lobby the small fry, so the metric is nevertheless useful. However, at a network degree of 0.125, Lord Astor is not affected by this phenomenon.
OK, so we have a prediction - other ministers involved with the Werritty/Fox/Atlantic Bridge case will demonstrate unusually high gatekeepership. Step forward Gerald Howarth MP, Minister for International Security Strategy, who achieves a gatekeepership of 2.36, the fourth highest overall and the second highest UK-wide, on a network degree of 1.2. That's some pull, when you note that he's a significant node in terms of quantity.
Lobster detected a sinister network of influence! How awesome is that?
Blogging a noisy and socialistic view on politics, security, and whatever may take my fancy. "All the world now is in the Ranting humour" - Samuel Sheppard, 1647
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Why not foundation courts?
Thinking about the political castration of Ken Clarke and the fact that not even the Treasury in its most R.G. Hawtrey-esque mood seems to be able to stop the expansion of the prison industry, it struck me that the political class's attitude towards the public service known as justice is fundamentally different to its attitude to all the others, including defence and policing.
Since the mid-1980s and the rise of the New Public Management - possibly an even more pernicious intellectual phenomenon than New Classical economics - it's been a universal establishment consensus, shared by all parties, that any public service can be improved by giving bits of it a pseudo-budget to spend in a pseudo-market. Playing at shops is the defining pattern language of post-80s public administration. (This chap wrote at the time that the whole thing was remarkably like the 1960s Kosygin reforms in the Soviet Union, and perhaps we can induce him to post it up on his blog!)
For example, the 1990s Tory government wanted "fundholder" GPs to buy hospital services in an NHS internal market. Now they want to do something similar again, but more, faster, and worse. All sorts of local government services were put through a similar process. Central government agencies were ordered to bill each other for services vital to their operations. The Ministry of Defence was ordered to pay the Treasury 6% a year of the value of all its capital assets, such as the Army's tank park, reserve stocks of ammunition, uniforms, etc. As a result, the MOD sold as many vehicles as possible and had to buy them back expensively through Urgent Operational Requirements when they had to fight a war. Supposedly, some vehicles were sold off after Kosovo, re-bought for Afghanistan in 2001, sold again, re-bought for Iraq in 2003, sold again, and UORd in a panic in 2006.
(Off topic, if you're either a reporter hunting a story or a dealer in secondhand military vehicles, watch closely what happens to the fleet acquired under UORs for Afghanistan in the next few months.)
But there is one public service where the internal market is unknown. I refer, of course, to criminal justice. For some reason, it is considered to be normal to let magistrates and judges dispense incarceration, one of the most expensive products of the state, as if it were as free as air. The Ministry of Justice is simply asked to predict-and-provide sufficient prisons, like the Department for Transport used to do with motorways. Like motorways, somehow, however hard the bulldozers and cranes are driven, it never seems to be enough, and the prison system operates in a state of permanent overcrowding. Interestingly, the overcrowding seems to prevent the rehabilitative services from working, thus contributing to the re-offending rate, and ensuring both the expansion of the prison industry and the maintenance of permanent overcrowding.
The new public managers bitch endlessly about "producer interests" - they mean minimum-wage hospital cleaners, but somehow never GPs - but you never hear a peep about our bloated and wasteful criminal justice system. In fact, now that we have private jails, this producer interest is vastly more powerful as it has access to the corporate lobbying system and a profit motive.
Clearly, the problem here is that the gatekeepers to the system - the courts - have no incentive to use taxpayers' money wisely, as they face neither a budget constraint nor competition. There is a rhyme with the fact that a British Army company commander in Afghanistan has a budget for reconstruction of $4,000 a month, which he must account for meticulously to the Civil Secretariat to the Helmand Task Force, but in each section of ten riflemen under his command, at least one of them can spend $100,000 on destruction at any moment, by firing off a Javelin anti-tank missile, every time he goes outside the wire. As once the thing is fired, he no longer needs to tote the fucker any further, you can see that a lot more is spent on Javelin rounds than reconstruction, and indeed the task force was getting through 254 of them a month at one point.
But it's not a precise match. The military do, indeed, have to worry about their resources, as do the police. Only the courts can dispense public money without limit.
What if we were to give every magistrates' court a Single Offender Management Budget, out of which it could buy imprisonment, probation, community service, electronic tagging, etc in an internal market? This would make it obvious to the magistrate how much cheaper non-custodial interventions are than jail. It would force them to resist the temptation to jail everybody out of risk-aversion or political pressure. If a court was to start off the year handing down 16-month sentences for stealing a packet of fags, and end up in queer street by Christmas, well, that will teach them to waste taxpayers' money.
In fact, we could go further. Foundation courts would be able to borrow, if necessary, to tide themselves over to the end of the year, although of course they would have to make efficiency gains next year to repay it. It would be possible for a foundation court to go bankrupt and close. This, of course, will drive up standards. Perhaps we could even introduce an element of choice, letting defendants choose which jurisdiction they are prosecuted in.
I am, of course, joking. But not entirely.
Since the mid-1980s and the rise of the New Public Management - possibly an even more pernicious intellectual phenomenon than New Classical economics - it's been a universal establishment consensus, shared by all parties, that any public service can be improved by giving bits of it a pseudo-budget to spend in a pseudo-market. Playing at shops is the defining pattern language of post-80s public administration. (This chap wrote at the time that the whole thing was remarkably like the 1960s Kosygin reforms in the Soviet Union, and perhaps we can induce him to post it up on his blog!)
For example, the 1990s Tory government wanted "fundholder" GPs to buy hospital services in an NHS internal market. Now they want to do something similar again, but more, faster, and worse. All sorts of local government services were put through a similar process. Central government agencies were ordered to bill each other for services vital to their operations. The Ministry of Defence was ordered to pay the Treasury 6% a year of the value of all its capital assets, such as the Army's tank park, reserve stocks of ammunition, uniforms, etc. As a result, the MOD sold as many vehicles as possible and had to buy them back expensively through Urgent Operational Requirements when they had to fight a war. Supposedly, some vehicles were sold off after Kosovo, re-bought for Afghanistan in 2001, sold again, re-bought for Iraq in 2003, sold again, and UORd in a panic in 2006.
(Off topic, if you're either a reporter hunting a story or a dealer in secondhand military vehicles, watch closely what happens to the fleet acquired under UORs for Afghanistan in the next few months.)
But there is one public service where the internal market is unknown. I refer, of course, to criminal justice. For some reason, it is considered to be normal to let magistrates and judges dispense incarceration, one of the most expensive products of the state, as if it were as free as air. The Ministry of Justice is simply asked to predict-and-provide sufficient prisons, like the Department for Transport used to do with motorways. Like motorways, somehow, however hard the bulldozers and cranes are driven, it never seems to be enough, and the prison system operates in a state of permanent overcrowding. Interestingly, the overcrowding seems to prevent the rehabilitative services from working, thus contributing to the re-offending rate, and ensuring both the expansion of the prison industry and the maintenance of permanent overcrowding.
The new public managers bitch endlessly about "producer interests" - they mean minimum-wage hospital cleaners, but somehow never GPs - but you never hear a peep about our bloated and wasteful criminal justice system. In fact, now that we have private jails, this producer interest is vastly more powerful as it has access to the corporate lobbying system and a profit motive.
Clearly, the problem here is that the gatekeepers to the system - the courts - have no incentive to use taxpayers' money wisely, as they face neither a budget constraint nor competition. There is a rhyme with the fact that a British Army company commander in Afghanistan has a budget for reconstruction of $4,000 a month, which he must account for meticulously to the Civil Secretariat to the Helmand Task Force, but in each section of ten riflemen under his command, at least one of them can spend $100,000 on destruction at any moment, by firing off a Javelin anti-tank missile, every time he goes outside the wire. As once the thing is fired, he no longer needs to tote the fucker any further, you can see that a lot more is spent on Javelin rounds than reconstruction, and indeed the task force was getting through 254 of them a month at one point.
But it's not a precise match. The military do, indeed, have to worry about their resources, as do the police. Only the courts can dispense public money without limit.
What if we were to give every magistrates' court a Single Offender Management Budget, out of which it could buy imprisonment, probation, community service, electronic tagging, etc in an internal market? This would make it obvious to the magistrate how much cheaper non-custodial interventions are than jail. It would force them to resist the temptation to jail everybody out of risk-aversion or political pressure. If a court was to start off the year handing down 16-month sentences for stealing a packet of fags, and end up in queer street by Christmas, well, that will teach them to waste taxpayers' money.
In fact, we could go further. Foundation courts would be able to borrow, if necessary, to tide themselves over to the end of the year, although of course they would have to make efficiency gains next year to repay it. It would be possible for a foundation court to go bankrupt and close. This, of course, will drive up standards. Perhaps we could even introduce an element of choice, letting defendants choose which jurisdiction they are prosecuted in.
I am, of course, joking. But not entirely.
Labels:
Afghanistan,
banter,
Blair,
British Army,
civil service,
economics,
funny ha ha,
Home Office,
managerialism
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Don't faze me, sorry, tase me, bro!
OK, so the report by Gus O'Donnell into Liam Fox and Adam "I can't believe he's not Mike Ledeen" Werritty specified some companies as donors to the various odd parallel structures that supported Fox and Werritty. One of these is given in the report as G3 Ltd. This has been described in the papers as being an "international investigations and security company founded by former MI6 officers". Sounds kewl, no? In fact, I suspected it might be an international logistics and security company of similar name from this post - didn't the blog used to be good back then? - but it's not.
Of course, there's no mystery about the directors of a British company. You just look'em up on Companies House's Webcheck service. OpenCorporates and Companies in the UK are also very handy. But if you want the directors of a company, you've got to put up with Companies House's dreadful website and pay them £3 a time. Hey - it's less than a pint.
So I looked up G3 Ltd. It's based on a featurelessly dull business park in Daventry. It has one director, Glenn Mark Cameron, born on the 25th of March 1977. He is, as far as I know, no relation. He also had another company, G3i Ltd., based in the same business park. But that isn't the name we're looking for. However, G3i Ltd. did describe its business as involving "investigations and security". Mr. Cameron lives in Daventry - the address is available to anyone who can find £3 and use the website. It seems to be completely unremarkable.
G3 Ltd, though, has a couple of interesting features. One of them is that it was incorporated as recently as the 30th of August. G3i is much older, but was shut down in March. So it was set up in August and immediately started sending money to political causes? Further, it doesn't seem to have any visible business. (It doesn't need to file accounts for a long while yet.)
Glenn Cameron has a LinkedIn profile, which mentions G3i but not G3. (He's also on Twitter.) G3i is no James Bond venture, but apparently a perfectly sensible small-town IT shop, which later diversified. This is where things get interesting. One of the advantages of CompaniesintheUK is that although you can't query companies for their directors, you can query by director. Glenn Mark Cameron is also a director of a small plastics firm, a pet shop, and two near-identical firms called Pro-Tect Systems and Pro-Tec Security Systems. All of them are located close together in Daventry.
Forget the pet shop. Pro-Tect was around for a while, but Pro-Tect Security Systems was incorporated as recently as April 2011. Which leads us to this December 2010 blog post. Now, let's hop back to the LinkedIn profile. Cameron claims to be in charge of Tactical Safety Responses Ltd, which owns taser.co.uk and sells tasers to the British military and police forces. Blogger Richard Taylor pointed out that Glenn Cameron is one of its directors, as well as being company secretary of the first Pro-Tect.
Well, why care? The old Pro-Tect was stripped of its authorisation to own tasers, which are legally considered to be weapons for the purposes of the Firearms Act 1968 and need a licence from the Home Office. Instead, TSR Ltd. sprang up and was given the authorisation, despite the same people being behind it. Why did the Home Office take the T-bird away from Pro-Tect? Because they let the Northumbria Police have a new and untried version of the Taser, without the Home Office giving its approval, and they pointed it at one Raoul Moat while he was pointing a gun at his head, and the police pulled the trigger, and the gun went off!
So, Pro-Tect/Pro-Tect Security/Tactical Security Responses seem to be one and the same, and to have hastily swapped company in order to evade the consequences of this regrettable, sticky, and pinkish mess. Right. And their business model is that they have the exclusive right to sell Tasers to the police and the MoD. I wonder what possible interest they might have had in exerting influence on the MoD, and who knows, the Home Office too?
Put like that, it's a story of fairly petty influence-peddling. However, Gus O'Donnell didn't get to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, the Pope of Bureaucracy, by making mistakes over detail. It wasn't G3i or G3(UK) Ltd or Pro-Tect or TSR that appears in the report. It's G3 Ltd. (Even if the last revision time on the PDF is 1719, or about 26 minutes before the thing was finally handed out.)
Which leaves us with the strong impression that donations were being collected through this channel very recently, since the 30th of August, via a firm that has not apparently traded in any way. You might suspect that it exists just for this purpose. Further, people involved had financial interests in lobbying the government. And somebody in government felt it necessary to push out the message to the press that this story involved mystery spies and people with funny South African names. Why?
For the record, even if it was G3(UK) Ltd. and GOD had made a cock of the job, Andries Pienaar is not a director of that company. And if G3 Ltd is a company in some foreign jurisdiction, well, it's got no legal business donating money to politicians.
Of course, there's no mystery about the directors of a British company. You just look'em up on Companies House's Webcheck service. OpenCorporates and Companies in the UK are also very handy. But if you want the directors of a company, you've got to put up with Companies House's dreadful website and pay them £3 a time. Hey - it's less than a pint.
So I looked up G3 Ltd. It's based on a featurelessly dull business park in Daventry. It has one director, Glenn Mark Cameron, born on the 25th of March 1977. He is, as far as I know, no relation. He also had another company, G3i Ltd., based in the same business park. But that isn't the name we're looking for. However, G3i Ltd. did describe its business as involving "investigations and security". Mr. Cameron lives in Daventry - the address is available to anyone who can find £3 and use the website. It seems to be completely unremarkable.
G3 Ltd, though, has a couple of interesting features. One of them is that it was incorporated as recently as the 30th of August. G3i is much older, but was shut down in March. So it was set up in August and immediately started sending money to political causes? Further, it doesn't seem to have any visible business. (It doesn't need to file accounts for a long while yet.)
Glenn Cameron has a LinkedIn profile, which mentions G3i but not G3. (He's also on Twitter.) G3i is no James Bond venture, but apparently a perfectly sensible small-town IT shop, which later diversified. This is where things get interesting. One of the advantages of CompaniesintheUK is that although you can't query companies for their directors, you can query by director. Glenn Mark Cameron is also a director of a small plastics firm, a pet shop, and two near-identical firms called Pro-Tect Systems and Pro-Tec Security Systems. All of them are located close together in Daventry.
Forget the pet shop. Pro-Tect was around for a while, but Pro-Tect Security Systems was incorporated as recently as April 2011. Which leads us to this December 2010 blog post. Now, let's hop back to the LinkedIn profile. Cameron claims to be in charge of Tactical Safety Responses Ltd, which owns taser.co.uk and sells tasers to the British military and police forces. Blogger Richard Taylor pointed out that Glenn Cameron is one of its directors, as well as being company secretary of the first Pro-Tect.
Well, why care? The old Pro-Tect was stripped of its authorisation to own tasers, which are legally considered to be weapons for the purposes of the Firearms Act 1968 and need a licence from the Home Office. Instead, TSR Ltd. sprang up and was given the authorisation, despite the same people being behind it. Why did the Home Office take the T-bird away from Pro-Tect? Because they let the Northumbria Police have a new and untried version of the Taser, without the Home Office giving its approval, and they pointed it at one Raoul Moat while he was pointing a gun at his head, and the police pulled the trigger, and the gun went off!
So, Pro-Tect/Pro-Tect Security/Tactical Security Responses seem to be one and the same, and to have hastily swapped company in order to evade the consequences of this regrettable, sticky, and pinkish mess. Right. And their business model is that they have the exclusive right to sell Tasers to the police and the MoD. I wonder what possible interest they might have had in exerting influence on the MoD, and who knows, the Home Office too?
Put like that, it's a story of fairly petty influence-peddling. However, Gus O'Donnell didn't get to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, the Pope of Bureaucracy, by making mistakes over detail. It wasn't G3i or G3(UK) Ltd or Pro-Tect or TSR that appears in the report. It's G3 Ltd. (Even if the last revision time on the PDF is 1719, or about 26 minutes before the thing was finally handed out.)
Which leaves us with the strong impression that donations were being collected through this channel very recently, since the 30th of August, via a firm that has not apparently traded in any way. You might suspect that it exists just for this purpose. Further, people involved had financial interests in lobbying the government. And somebody in government felt it necessary to push out the message to the press that this story involved mystery spies and people with funny South African names. Why?
For the record, even if it was G3(UK) Ltd. and GOD had made a cock of the job, Andries Pienaar is not a director of that company. And if G3 Ltd is a company in some foreign jurisdiction, well, it's got no legal business donating money to politicians.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
non-Thursday music link
I think you'd have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny's twitter feed).
Well, a big dance hall implies big sound. That implies either electronic amplification, or before that was invented, a fuck-off big horn section. And either of those will help the dancing while cramping your conversation. (I SAID, HOW ABOUT ANOTHER DRINK!) In fact, the electric guitar was invented in the 1930s as a substitute for quite so many wind players providing the wash.
It's true, as William Baumol said, that you need as many people to play a concerto as you did in 1900 and the same isn't true of producing steel, farming, or running a phone exchange or a bank. Interestingly, the electric guitar was originally an attempt to substitute capital for labour in the music industry, with enormous unforeseen consequences.
Don't believe me? Compare the horns-as-power-chord here and the the rhythm guitar-as-horns here, although those are ahistorical. Anyway, it's not Thursday, so how about a music link?
But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner lightly on her elbow, and they would move silently on to the floor. It was quite normal for partners to dance for hours without speaking to each other, before going their separate ways.
Well, a big dance hall implies big sound. That implies either electronic amplification, or before that was invented, a fuck-off big horn section. And either of those will help the dancing while cramping your conversation. (I SAID, HOW ABOUT ANOTHER DRINK!) In fact, the electric guitar was invented in the 1930s as a substitute for quite so many wind players providing the wash.
It's true, as William Baumol said, that you need as many people to play a concerto as you did in 1900 and the same isn't true of producing steel, farming, or running a phone exchange or a bank. Interestingly, the electric guitar was originally an attempt to substitute capital for labour in the music industry, with enormous unforeseen consequences.
Don't believe me? Compare the horns-as-power-chord here and the the rhythm guitar-as-horns here, although those are ahistorical. Anyway, it's not Thursday, so how about a music link?
Moving swiftly on
So yer Djanogly and his legal aid bill and his insurance companies. Something I'd love to know more about is his rather odd statement that his kids had "non-interest bearing non-voting shares" in these companies and that they were "of no value". This is of course another case of the principle that lawyering a statement is much like doctoring it.
So, I presume that Djanogly (whose name is remarkably hard to type if you're a pythonista and therefore have the word "django" wired into touchtyping muscle memory) didn't really intend to leave his kids something of "no value". Had he wanted to do that, he could just leave them nothing, and save the lawyers' fees.
Now, the financially interesting thing here is that the securities involved are shares. Most shares are ordinary shares - they convey a share of ownership of the company, which is expressed by the fact they carry votes in the annual general meeting, and they carry the potential right to a share of profits if the directors (who the shareholders elected) so decide. However, they come dead last in terms of the company's credit and they pay no interest. All your capital is at risk if the company can't pay its bills, as everyone else gets paid out first. This is the nature of ownership - you have control over whatever it is you own, you can draw on its profits if you want to, but if it goes bust, it's your funeral.
Non-voting shares are usually preference shares. The difference is that you give up the vote, in exchange for a regular, guaranteed payout of income rather than just a chance of a dividend. Further, the preferred shareholders have to be paid their money before any dividends or anything else are paid to the ordinary shareholders, so there is an additional measure of security. This is why they are "preferred".
But Djanogly's statement excludes both preferred and ordinary shares. Note that there is neither a vote, nor any interest. Who would want such a security?
There are reasons. If a company is wound up, its creditors get paid first, with the government at the front of the queue. At the back of the queue are the shareholders, of all kinds. But this is only of interest if the company has creditors - i.e. if it is in debt. If there were no creditors, then its assets would be divvied up by the shareholders in return of their capital. Even if the company, like most companies, has some debt, such a residual claim would be worth having if the company's assets are worth much more than the debts.
Or the company might buy out the funny shares, or swap them for ordinary or preference shares. Also, you'll note that the shares are not "interest bearing", but then shares usually aren't and this is very important. If the shares aren't preference shares - i.e. they are not "interest bearing" - it's entirely up to the directors to decide what to pay out to them and when. They could hold a board meeting tomorrow and pay a huge special dividend in cash, on the special class of shares alone. Or they could wind up the company and divvy-up the pool. In a public company with thousands of shareholders, they might struggle to get away with this, but the Djanogly family controls 100% of the company.
So. The shares are worthless now, but the directors of Djanogly's firm are in a position to make them very valuable at a time of their choosing. Why would you want this set-up? The short answer is "inheritance tax".
As is fairly well known, inheritance tax has a time component. If you give away your money, and then die, it counts as an inheritance for tax purposes if you died seven years or less after giving away the money. If you give it all to the kids, you then have to live seven years without your money, and with the risk that you might survive much longer. And even if you commit suicide, you've to stick the seven years first. Of course, it is extremely annoying to tax-evaders that you can only control the moment of your death in a negative and unpleasantly dramatic fashion.
So the value of a device that permits you to bequeath something that is worthless until activated by a third party ought to be obvious. Ideally, you'd want something that permitted activation from beyond the grave, like the Soviet nuclear missile command system in Charlie Stross's The Jennifer Morgue. But that is impossible, and I think that a contract that required your executor to convene the board and pay out the money the day afterwards would break the rules on related-party transactions, although who knows?
Thanks are extended to Jones the tax.
So, I presume that Djanogly (whose name is remarkably hard to type if you're a pythonista and therefore have the word "django" wired into touchtyping muscle memory) didn't really intend to leave his kids something of "no value". Had he wanted to do that, he could just leave them nothing, and save the lawyers' fees.
Now, the financially interesting thing here is that the securities involved are shares. Most shares are ordinary shares - they convey a share of ownership of the company, which is expressed by the fact they carry votes in the annual general meeting, and they carry the potential right to a share of profits if the directors (who the shareholders elected) so decide. However, they come dead last in terms of the company's credit and they pay no interest. All your capital is at risk if the company can't pay its bills, as everyone else gets paid out first. This is the nature of ownership - you have control over whatever it is you own, you can draw on its profits if you want to, but if it goes bust, it's your funeral.
Non-voting shares are usually preference shares. The difference is that you give up the vote, in exchange for a regular, guaranteed payout of income rather than just a chance of a dividend. Further, the preferred shareholders have to be paid their money before any dividends or anything else are paid to the ordinary shareholders, so there is an additional measure of security. This is why they are "preferred".
But Djanogly's statement excludes both preferred and ordinary shares. Note that there is neither a vote, nor any interest. Who would want such a security?
There are reasons. If a company is wound up, its creditors get paid first, with the government at the front of the queue. At the back of the queue are the shareholders, of all kinds. But this is only of interest if the company has creditors - i.e. if it is in debt. If there were no creditors, then its assets would be divvied up by the shareholders in return of their capital. Even if the company, like most companies, has some debt, such a residual claim would be worth having if the company's assets are worth much more than the debts.
Or the company might buy out the funny shares, or swap them for ordinary or preference shares. Also, you'll note that the shares are not "interest bearing", but then shares usually aren't and this is very important. If the shares aren't preference shares - i.e. they are not "interest bearing" - it's entirely up to the directors to decide what to pay out to them and when. They could hold a board meeting tomorrow and pay a huge special dividend in cash, on the special class of shares alone. Or they could wind up the company and divvy-up the pool. In a public company with thousands of shareholders, they might struggle to get away with this, but the Djanogly family controls 100% of the company.
So. The shares are worthless now, but the directors of Djanogly's firm are in a position to make them very valuable at a time of their choosing. Why would you want this set-up? The short answer is "inheritance tax".
As is fairly well known, inheritance tax has a time component. If you give away your money, and then die, it counts as an inheritance for tax purposes if you died seven years or less after giving away the money. If you give it all to the kids, you then have to live seven years without your money, and with the risk that you might survive much longer. And even if you commit suicide, you've to stick the seven years first. Of course, it is extremely annoying to tax-evaders that you can only control the moment of your death in a negative and unpleasantly dramatic fashion.
So the value of a device that permits you to bequeath something that is worthless until activated by a third party ought to be obvious. Ideally, you'd want something that permitted activation from beyond the grave, like the Soviet nuclear missile command system in Charlie Stross's The Jennifer Morgue. But that is impossible, and I think that a contract that required your executor to convene the board and pay out the money the day afterwards would break the rules on related-party transactions, although who knows?
Thanks are extended to Jones the tax.
Adventures in radial graph visualisation - Sindy edition
The Independent on Sunday has another really excellent piece on Liam Fox including a very good network visualisation. See the power of the radial graph paradigm, and understand why I want Lobster to look like that! kc claffy wasn't wrong.
to be filed for reference
It's a truth universally recognised that if you find one security exploit you'll find another. Something called CivilServiceLive has published a really excellent rundown of Tory and Lib Dem special advisers and - what is the word? - non-adviser advisers, here. I note that super-neocon journo William Shawcross's kid has been placed with George Osborne, as one of two non-adviser advisers. Hilariously, one of his official special advisers glories in the name Poppy, a monicker she shares with my neighbour's charming cat. Of course, you can't be held responsible for choosing your parents, even if Tories often seem to believe you should.
The Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, though, sounds like a wanktank of the first water but turns out actually to be a thing.
The Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, though, sounds like a wanktank of the first water but turns out actually to be a thing.
Now that's what I call lobbying
In the recent case of Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, there was an issue that the news media spent an enormous amount of time and effort dancing around with innuendo, newspaper code, and carefully lawyered prose. It is a fact that the word "lawyered" is to the word "lawyer" as the word "doctored" is to the word "doctor". Without understanding this hidden and sordid side of the issue, you would have been seriously misinformed. The matter was very sensitive, and there was an excellent chance of getting sued and probably also demonised as being deranged by shameful prejudices.
I refer, of course, to whether or not the Defence Secretary's private office was having unprotected sex with other defence secretaries' private offices.
It took a while to surface this at all - the Guardian let a wee squeak out on Thursday, and eventually it was the Sindy that took the plunge and surfaced it in the same way you surface a submarine, with an enormous roar of compressed air thundering into the ballast tanks under pressure while the nuclear reactor cranks up to full power. It's a must read.
The fact that Werritty's freebies included trips to the Herzliya Security Conference paid for by pro-Israeli lobbying groups should have been a screaming giveaway, but then, that's what a good cover story is for. I presume that was what the Sindy eventually followed up.
I mentioned this element of the story to Daniel Davies earlier in the week. I can offer no special insight except for the enduring value of pattern recognition. This has, after all, happened before in recent memory, with really bad consequences.
Consider Mr. Michael Ledeen and the affair of the weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ledeen, a professional neoconservative, claimed to have intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium and various other things, which came from his contacts in Iran, some of whom were recommended to him by his contacts in Israel, one of whom, Larry Franklin, was convicted of spying for Israel in the US State Department. Ledeen believed these contacts to be renegade members of the Iranian secret service. (He had never visited Iran, and I think to this day never has, and he doesn't to the best of my knowledge speak Persian, so how he would have known is beyond me.) The CIA, for its part, believed that this was partly true. They just disagreed with the "renegade" bit. But Donald Rumsfeld had deliberately decided to ignore the CIA, so Ledeen's intelligence was accepted. However, that wasn't the end of the story. At some point, the Department of Defense became suspicious and called in its own Counter-Intelligence Field Activity to investigate.
At this point, a thick curtain of secrecy was drawn down on the story, even if we did eventually get the Phase IIA report. Whatever CIFA found out, Ledeen was able to introduce the famous forged documents on uranium from Niger, which seem to have come from the Italian secret service, as being Iranian information with Israeli approval, and this was used in the even more famous dossier.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if old blogging chum from way back in the day, 2004, Laura Rozen hasn't also had this thought, as she was instrumental in digging into the whole Ledeen affair and she's too smart to miss it. Also, hilariously, she and Spencer Ackerman had the honour of being targeted by Ledeen's mates in Silvio Berlusconi's intelligence service with a scurrilous smear-campaign. I should probably hat-tip the lady's Twitter feed.
Note the elements of the story. Ledeen is a semi-official adviser with special, privileged access to policymakers. He is outside the formal requirements of government service, but has access inside it. He is seen to have special access to an important ally, and therefore to be trustworthy. A third party observed this, and took advantage of it to introduce information (or rather, disinformation) into the policymaking system. Does anybody see a pattern here? Similarly, Werritty was offered privileged access from outside the government firewall because he was ideologically congenial. It seems that this was considered acceptable because the influence exerted came from a country considered friendly. But then, there were the rogue Iranian intelligence agents, or were they just ordinary Iranian intelligence agents?
Well, at least Werritty actually went to Iran. Unfortunately this is the worst of the story, as it seems he was going round encouraging Iranian dissidents, or people he thought were Iranian dissidents, and promising them British support. This is really incredibly, shamefully irresponsible - he could have got people killed, and it cannot be ruled out that he did, although it's also quite possible that the whole affair was just a massive exercise in bullshitting and wanktankery.
Probably he really believes that he was in contact with the opposition. I'm fairly sure Ledeen doesn't think he's an Iranian agent either. This is where this classic Onion article comes into play. As I said at the time, why *do* all these Iranian agents keep sucking Michael Ledeen's cock?
It is all reminiscent of Bruce Schneier's thoughts on what happens if you create a backdoor into some computer system, so people like us can get in and out without anyone noticing. The problem is that once you do that, it immediately becomes the biggest security threat to the system as anyone else can use it too. Once this new interface to the MoD was created, with Werritty accepting connections from the wider Internet and forwarding them to Fox, of course it attracted dubious actors. Hence the parade of various people trying to sell aircraft spares and dodgy encryption software to the military or to get someone's knighthood expedited.
For my next trick, what parallels do you see between Werritty's role with Liam Fox and those of Andy Coulson and Neil Wallis with No.10 Downing Street and the Metropolitan Police (and of course the Conservative Central Office) respectively? Remember that both of them were at various times funded by third parties. Further, is it not interesting that the same key Conservatives who defended Coulson to the bitter end - George Osborne and Michael Gove - also tried to save Liam Fox? (Jonathan Freedland seems to have sensed something here - check out the reference to "Cheneyite Tories".) And is it not even more interesting that George Osborne actually recommended Andy Coulson for the job? And is it not completely fucking outrageous that William Hague, Atlantic Bridge board member and Foreign Secretary (I think this is the right order of precedence), dares to claim that proper Cabinet government is back in the midst of this berserk threat-chaos?
I refer, of course, to whether or not the Defence Secretary's private office was having unprotected sex with other defence secretaries' private offices.
It took a while to surface this at all - the Guardian let a wee squeak out on Thursday, and eventually it was the Sindy that took the plunge and surfaced it in the same way you surface a submarine, with an enormous roar of compressed air thundering into the ballast tanks under pressure while the nuclear reactor cranks up to full power. It's a must read.
The fact that Werritty's freebies included trips to the Herzliya Security Conference paid for by pro-Israeli lobbying groups should have been a screaming giveaway, but then, that's what a good cover story is for. I presume that was what the Sindy eventually followed up.
I mentioned this element of the story to Daniel Davies earlier in the week. I can offer no special insight except for the enduring value of pattern recognition. This has, after all, happened before in recent memory, with really bad consequences.
Consider Mr. Michael Ledeen and the affair of the weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ledeen, a professional neoconservative, claimed to have intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium and various other things, which came from his contacts in Iran, some of whom were recommended to him by his contacts in Israel, one of whom, Larry Franklin, was convicted of spying for Israel in the US State Department. Ledeen believed these contacts to be renegade members of the Iranian secret service. (He had never visited Iran, and I think to this day never has, and he doesn't to the best of my knowledge speak Persian, so how he would have known is beyond me.) The CIA, for its part, believed that this was partly true. They just disagreed with the "renegade" bit. But Donald Rumsfeld had deliberately decided to ignore the CIA, so Ledeen's intelligence was accepted. However, that wasn't the end of the story. At some point, the Department of Defense became suspicious and called in its own Counter-Intelligence Field Activity to investigate.
At this point, a thick curtain of secrecy was drawn down on the story, even if we did eventually get the Phase IIA report. Whatever CIFA found out, Ledeen was able to introduce the famous forged documents on uranium from Niger, which seem to have come from the Italian secret service, as being Iranian information with Israeli approval, and this was used in the even more famous dossier.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if old blogging chum from way back in the day, 2004, Laura Rozen hasn't also had this thought, as she was instrumental in digging into the whole Ledeen affair and she's too smart to miss it. Also, hilariously, she and Spencer Ackerman had the honour of being targeted by Ledeen's mates in Silvio Berlusconi's intelligence service with a scurrilous smear-campaign. I should probably hat-tip the lady's Twitter feed.
Note the elements of the story. Ledeen is a semi-official adviser with special, privileged access to policymakers. He is outside the formal requirements of government service, but has access inside it. He is seen to have special access to an important ally, and therefore to be trustworthy. A third party observed this, and took advantage of it to introduce information (or rather, disinformation) into the policymaking system. Does anybody see a pattern here? Similarly, Werritty was offered privileged access from outside the government firewall because he was ideologically congenial. It seems that this was considered acceptable because the influence exerted came from a country considered friendly. But then, there were the rogue Iranian intelligence agents, or were they just ordinary Iranian intelligence agents?
In May 2009, Mr Werritty arranged a meeting in Portcullis House between Mr Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with close links to President Ahmadinejad's regime. In February this year, Mr Werritty arranged a dinner with Mr Fox, Britain's ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, and senior political figures – understood to include Israeli intelligence agents – during an Israeli security conference in Herzliya, during which sanctions against Iran were discussed. Despite Mr Werritty having no official MoD capacity, an Israeli source said there was "no question" that Mr Werritty was regarded as anyone other than Mr Fox's chief of staff who was able to fix meetings at the highest levels, and was seen as an "expert on Iran".
Well, at least Werritty actually went to Iran. Unfortunately this is the worst of the story, as it seems he was going round encouraging Iranian dissidents, or people he thought were Iranian dissidents, and promising them British support. This is really incredibly, shamefully irresponsible - he could have got people killed, and it cannot be ruled out that he did, although it's also quite possible that the whole affair was just a massive exercise in bullshitting and wanktankery.
Probably he really believes that he was in contact with the opposition. I'm fairly sure Ledeen doesn't think he's an Iranian agent either. This is where this classic Onion article comes into play. As I said at the time, why *do* all these Iranian agents keep sucking Michael Ledeen's cock?
It is all reminiscent of Bruce Schneier's thoughts on what happens if you create a backdoor into some computer system, so people like us can get in and out without anyone noticing. The problem is that once you do that, it immediately becomes the biggest security threat to the system as anyone else can use it too. Once this new interface to the MoD was created, with Werritty accepting connections from the wider Internet and forwarding them to Fox, of course it attracted dubious actors. Hence the parade of various people trying to sell aircraft spares and dodgy encryption software to the military or to get someone's knighthood expedited.
For my next trick, what parallels do you see between Werritty's role with Liam Fox and those of Andy Coulson and Neil Wallis with No.10 Downing Street and the Metropolitan Police (and of course the Conservative Central Office) respectively? Remember that both of them were at various times funded by third parties. Further, is it not interesting that the same key Conservatives who defended Coulson to the bitter end - George Osborne and Michael Gove - also tried to save Liam Fox? (Jonathan Freedland seems to have sensed something here - check out the reference to "Cheneyite Tories".) And is it not even more interesting that George Osborne actually recommended Andy Coulson for the job? And is it not completely fucking outrageous that William Hague, Atlantic Bridge board member and Foreign Secretary (I think this is the right order of precedence), dares to claim that proper Cabinet government is back in the midst of this berserk threat-chaos?
Labels:
intelligence and stupidity,
Iran,
Israel,
Ledeen,
lobbying,
MOD,
politics,
press,
special relationships,
spy,
Tories,
Wanktanks
Monday, October 10, 2011
Leeds. LEEDS. Leeds. (Look, you're the richest club in the northern union. Get a better song)
So, I managed to get to watch the Grand Final on Saturday night! The first pub we tried had a private function where the TV is, although it also had Timothy Taylor's Landlord Ale, and the other bar contained a group of Irish union fans who'd been drinking steadily since 6am. We moved on, and actually found rugby league on the Holloway Road.
John Kear apparently thought it was the best of the Grand Finals he'd seen, and he ought to know. He also thought Danny McGuire was Leeds's defence leader, a clearly inspired judgement.
Saints were all about width, the classic pattern of trying to extend the line faster than the sliding defence and creating the overlap. Leeds were all about depth and tempo, trying to force defenders to turn and beat them for short sprint pace. It was a classic clash of styles.
A few years ago, people used to talk about the "midfield triangle" in league, being the half-backs and the loose forward. This doesn't quite make sense, as the hooker in league is a specialist acting halfback and one of the most important distributors in the team, and organising a league team around the scrum is beside the point. Instead you've got a square, or a quartet, or something with four in it. A box with four pies in it, if you will. A four-pack of beers.
Leeds re-organised theirs quite radically - in the playoffs, they'd been using Kevin Sinfield as the scrum half and saving Rob Burrow to run at tired legs. In the final, they played Burrow from the first 20 minutes with his regular partner McGuire and put the Sinner back in 13. But that doesn't tell you much. Burrow didn't do much distribution or tactical kicking and McGuire's role in the game was almost totally defensive. Instead, Sinfield and Danny Buderus did the distribution, Burrow had a free role to dash and buzz and harass Saints, and McGuire had a parallel defensive mission to hunt the Saints first receiver, coordinate the defence, and generally get stuck in whereever the attack came from. And he did a hell of a job on this.
Saints didn't really come up with an answer to this, once it got going. Kicking penalties flattered the score a bit. McGuire broke up their moves regularly, Burrow kept catching defenders on the turn and eventually won the Harry Sunderland trophy, and Buderus and Sinfield kept control of the pace of the game.
This may bring back the old "is a stand-off really a loose forward" thing from the 1990s. Back then, there were quite a few good players who operated in either slot - Daryl Powell, Tony Kemp, Phil Clarke, Ellery Hanley, and earlier, Wally Lewis come to mind. The 1994 Lions, coached by Hanley, used first Clarke and then Powell in this role to mark the great Laurie Daley (who was the absolute opposite). It worked at Wembley, but the plan rather broke down after both of them got injured, and it also made the team pretty negative. On the other hand, once Powell was off the pitch and Garry Schofield back on, Daley ran rings round Great Britain for the rest of the series.
But Leeds's game plan didn't really reduce to that. Anyway, it was a hell of a game and Rob Burrow's first try was a bit of brilliance beyond tactics, exploiting a gap in depth rather than width - one side of the defence hadn't come up quite as smartly as the other - and ducking under the big men to make the initial break.
Oh yes, and that makes it a Yorkshire clean sweep of the three divisions with Leeds, Featherstone Rovers, and Keighley. Keighley! They told me it was Warrington's year, and Wigan were back...
John Kear apparently thought it was the best of the Grand Finals he'd seen, and he ought to know. He also thought Danny McGuire was Leeds's defence leader, a clearly inspired judgement.
Saints were all about width, the classic pattern of trying to extend the line faster than the sliding defence and creating the overlap. Leeds were all about depth and tempo, trying to force defenders to turn and beat them for short sprint pace. It was a classic clash of styles.
A few years ago, people used to talk about the "midfield triangle" in league, being the half-backs and the loose forward. This doesn't quite make sense, as the hooker in league is a specialist acting halfback and one of the most important distributors in the team, and organising a league team around the scrum is beside the point. Instead you've got a square, or a quartet, or something with four in it. A box with four pies in it, if you will. A four-pack of beers.
Leeds re-organised theirs quite radically - in the playoffs, they'd been using Kevin Sinfield as the scrum half and saving Rob Burrow to run at tired legs. In the final, they played Burrow from the first 20 minutes with his regular partner McGuire and put the Sinner back in 13. But that doesn't tell you much. Burrow didn't do much distribution or tactical kicking and McGuire's role in the game was almost totally defensive. Instead, Sinfield and Danny Buderus did the distribution, Burrow had a free role to dash and buzz and harass Saints, and McGuire had a parallel defensive mission to hunt the Saints first receiver, coordinate the defence, and generally get stuck in whereever the attack came from. And he did a hell of a job on this.
Saints didn't really come up with an answer to this, once it got going. Kicking penalties flattered the score a bit. McGuire broke up their moves regularly, Burrow kept catching defenders on the turn and eventually won the Harry Sunderland trophy, and Buderus and Sinfield kept control of the pace of the game.
This may bring back the old "is a stand-off really a loose forward" thing from the 1990s. Back then, there were quite a few good players who operated in either slot - Daryl Powell, Tony Kemp, Phil Clarke, Ellery Hanley, and earlier, Wally Lewis come to mind. The 1994 Lions, coached by Hanley, used first Clarke and then Powell in this role to mark the great Laurie Daley (who was the absolute opposite). It worked at Wembley, but the plan rather broke down after both of them got injured, and it also made the team pretty negative. On the other hand, once Powell was off the pitch and Garry Schofield back on, Daley ran rings round Great Britain for the rest of the series.
But Leeds's game plan didn't really reduce to that. Anyway, it was a hell of a game and Rob Burrow's first try was a bit of brilliance beyond tactics, exploiting a gap in depth rather than width - one side of the defence hadn't come up quite as smartly as the other - and ducking under the big men to make the initial break.
Oh yes, and that makes it a Yorkshire clean sweep of the three divisions with Leeds, Featherstone Rovers, and Keighley. Keighley! They told me it was Warrington's year, and Wigan were back...
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Liam Fox: Not Fit For Purpose
OK, so "Not All That" Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble.
Ah, one of them. Anyway. Part of the problem is this famous meeting where his bestie Adam Werritty just happened to turn up. What was on offer? Well, a product called Cellcrypt, whose makers were trying to sell it to the MoD to stop evilly-disposed persons from eavesdropping on British soldiers' phone calls back to the UK. (Note: this is going to be long. Technical summary: voice encryption apps for GSM-style mobile networks can guarantee that your call will not be overheard, but not that your presence cannot be monitored, and not necessarily that the parties to your calls cannot be identified.)
Back in the early days of Iraq, the CPA permitted one mobile phone operator in each of its three zones to set up. The British zone, CPA-South/Multinational Division South-East, let the Kuwaiti national telco, MTC (now Zain and busy running Mo Ibrahim's old Celtel business into the ground) set up there with a partner some of us may have heard of. It's from Newbury and it's not a pub or an estate agency and its logo is a big red comma...funny how Vodafone never talked that particular investment up, innit? Anyway. Later the Iraqi government did a major tender for permanent licences and Orascom got most of it, but that's another story.
One thing that did happen was that soldiers took their mobiles with them to Iraq, and some of them pretty soon realised that buying a local SIM card in the bazaar was much cheaper than making roaming calls back to the UK. Either way, lots of +44 numbers started showing up in their VLR, the big database that keeps track of where phones are in a GSM network so it can route incoming calls.
Pretty soon someone who - presumably - worked for the MTC-Voda affiliate and whose purposes were not entirely aligned with Iraq The Model realised that you could use the VLR to follow the Brits (and the Yanks and the Danes and the Dutchmen and Kiwis and all sorts of contractors) around. Not only that, you could ring up their families in the UK and make threats with the benefit of apparently supernatural knowledge.
This obviously wasn't ideal. Efforts were made to mitigate the problem; soldiers were discouraged from using local GSM networks, more computers and public phones were made available. The eventual solution, though, was to get some nice new ruggedised small-cell systems from companies like Private Mobile Networks Ltd., which basically pack a small base station and a base station controller and a satellite backhaul terminal into a tough plastic box of a suitably military colour. You open it up, unfold the antenna, turn on the power, and complete some configuration options. It logs into the mobile operator who's providing service to you via the satellite link.
Now, because radio signals like all radiation lose intensity with the inverse square of the distance, you'll be vastly louder than everyone else. So any mobile phone nearby will roam onto your private mobile network and will be in the UK for mobile phone purposes, a bit like the shipping container that's technically in Egypt at the end of Four Lions. And none of this will touch any other mobile network that might be operating in your area. Obviously you can also use these powers for evil, by snarfing up everyone else's traffic, and don't for a moment think this isn't also done by so-called IMSI catchers.
You're not meant to do this, normally, because you probably don't have a licence to use the GSM, GSM/PCS, or UMTS frequencies. But, as the founder of PMN Ltd. told a colleague of mine, the answer to that is "we've got bigger tanks".
So, where were we? Well, the problem with trying to do...something...with Cellcrypt is that it doesn't actually solve this problem, because the problem wasn't originally that the other side could listen to the content of voice calls. Like all telecoms interception stories, it was about the traffic analysis, not the content. Actually, they probably could listen in as well because some of the Iraqi and Afghan operators may not have been using up-to-date or even *any* air interface encryption.
But if you're going to fix this with an encryption app like Cellcrypt, you've got to make sure that every soldier (and sailor and diplomat and journo and MoD civilian) installs it, it works on all the phones, and you absolutely can't make calls without it. Also, you've got to make sure all the people they talk to install it.
And the enemy can still follow you because the phones are still registering in the VLRs!
So, there's not much point relying on OTA voice encryption to solve a problem that's got nothing to do with the voice bearer channel. However, bringing your own small cell network certainly does solve the problem, elegantly, and without needing to worry about what kind of phones people bring along or buy locally.
And the military surely understand this, as by the time of the famous meeting, they'd already started deploying them. Also, back when this was a big problem, 19 year-old riflemen usually didn't have the sort of phones that would run a big hefty application like Cellcrypt, which also uses the mobile data link and therefore would give them four figure phone bills.
To sum up, Werritty was helping someone market gear that the MoD didn't need, that was hopelessly unfit for purpose, wouldn't actually do what the MoD wanted, and would cost individual soldiers a fortune, by providing privileged access to the Secretary of State for Defence.
"He is an odd bloke," said one fellow minister. "He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line."
Another Tory MP said Fox's tendency to name-drop and brag about his close friendships with Republicans in the US, media magnates such as David and Frederick Barclay (owners of the Daily Telegraph), and his endless globe-trotting, even before he entered the cabinet, has made many bristle and help explain why he has plenty of enemies in the Tory party and in Whitehall. "I think you either roll with the bluster or find it repellent," said a Tory MP.
Ah, one of them. Anyway. Part of the problem is this famous meeting where his bestie Adam Werritty just happened to turn up. What was on offer? Well, a product called Cellcrypt, whose makers were trying to sell it to the MoD to stop evilly-disposed persons from eavesdropping on British soldiers' phone calls back to the UK. (Note: this is going to be long. Technical summary: voice encryption apps for GSM-style mobile networks can guarantee that your call will not be overheard, but not that your presence cannot be monitored, and not necessarily that the parties to your calls cannot be identified.)
Back in the early days of Iraq, the CPA permitted one mobile phone operator in each of its three zones to set up. The British zone, CPA-South/Multinational Division South-East, let the Kuwaiti national telco, MTC (now Zain and busy running Mo Ibrahim's old Celtel business into the ground) set up there with a partner some of us may have heard of. It's from Newbury and it's not a pub or an estate agency and its logo is a big red comma...funny how Vodafone never talked that particular investment up, innit? Anyway. Later the Iraqi government did a major tender for permanent licences and Orascom got most of it, but that's another story.
One thing that did happen was that soldiers took their mobiles with them to Iraq, and some of them pretty soon realised that buying a local SIM card in the bazaar was much cheaper than making roaming calls back to the UK. Either way, lots of +44 numbers started showing up in their VLR, the big database that keeps track of where phones are in a GSM network so it can route incoming calls.
Pretty soon someone who - presumably - worked for the MTC-Voda affiliate and whose purposes were not entirely aligned with Iraq The Model realised that you could use the VLR to follow the Brits (and the Yanks and the Danes and the Dutchmen and Kiwis and all sorts of contractors) around. Not only that, you could ring up their families in the UK and make threats with the benefit of apparently supernatural knowledge.
This obviously wasn't ideal. Efforts were made to mitigate the problem; soldiers were discouraged from using local GSM networks, more computers and public phones were made available. The eventual solution, though, was to get some nice new ruggedised small-cell systems from companies like Private Mobile Networks Ltd., which basically pack a small base station and a base station controller and a satellite backhaul terminal into a tough plastic box of a suitably military colour. You open it up, unfold the antenna, turn on the power, and complete some configuration options. It logs into the mobile operator who's providing service to you via the satellite link.
Now, because radio signals like all radiation lose intensity with the inverse square of the distance, you'll be vastly louder than everyone else. So any mobile phone nearby will roam onto your private mobile network and will be in the UK for mobile phone purposes, a bit like the shipping container that's technically in Egypt at the end of Four Lions. And none of this will touch any other mobile network that might be operating in your area. Obviously you can also use these powers for evil, by snarfing up everyone else's traffic, and don't for a moment think this isn't also done by so-called IMSI catchers.
You're not meant to do this, normally, because you probably don't have a licence to use the GSM, GSM/PCS, or UMTS frequencies. But, as the founder of PMN Ltd. told a colleague of mine, the answer to that is "we've got bigger tanks".
So, where were we? Well, the problem with trying to do...something...with Cellcrypt is that it doesn't actually solve this problem, because the problem wasn't originally that the other side could listen to the content of voice calls. Like all telecoms interception stories, it was about the traffic analysis, not the content. Actually, they probably could listen in as well because some of the Iraqi and Afghan operators may not have been using up-to-date or even *any* air interface encryption.
But if you're going to fix this with an encryption app like Cellcrypt, you've got to make sure that every soldier (and sailor and diplomat and journo and MoD civilian) installs it, it works on all the phones, and you absolutely can't make calls without it. Also, you've got to make sure all the people they talk to install it.
And the enemy can still follow you because the phones are still registering in the VLRs!
So, there's not much point relying on OTA voice encryption to solve a problem that's got nothing to do with the voice bearer channel. However, bringing your own small cell network certainly does solve the problem, elegantly, and without needing to worry about what kind of phones people bring along or buy locally.
And the military surely understand this, as by the time of the famous meeting, they'd already started deploying them. Also, back when this was a big problem, 19 year-old riflemen usually didn't have the sort of phones that would run a big hefty application like Cellcrypt, which also uses the mobile data link and therefore would give them four figure phone bills.
To sum up, Werritty was helping someone market gear that the MoD didn't need, that was hopelessly unfit for purpose, wouldn't actually do what the MoD wanted, and would cost individual soldiers a fortune, by providing privileged access to the Secretary of State for Defence.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
keighley keighley boing boing
Championes...
Keighley 32, Workington 12. Yeah.
Keighley 32, Workington 12. Yeah.
Not the kittens!
I have just finished reading The Stones of London: A History in 12 Buildings. Not a gem by any means - far too much broadbrush Tory-ish and not much of an edge - but I did think he had a couple of good points. One was in the chapter on Keeling House and Denys Lasdun, in which Leo Hollis makes the very good point that the Brutalists specifically didn't want to impose international style modernism on everyone but the reverse - they wanted to adapt modernism to the peculiarities of sites, communities, materials, and projects. It's quite possible that trying to be enormously localist and consult everyone is a great way to get things drastically wrong, eh, Pickles? There's no such thing as a Wharfedale shipping container.
In fact, some of Lasdun's remarks he quotes would probably please Prince Charles if only he didn't know who said them, and you might even think that part of the problem was the silly name. Although, I guess they said that about Operation KITTENS.
As a result, I guess I'll have to denounce comrade Hatherley as a right-deviationist.
Another one was about the fate of Victorian houses in London, and specifically the way that people buy them and immediately set about ripping out the interior walls, dragging the kitchen forwards from its kennel in the back garden, and building - essentially - an open plan, white-walled modernist interior inside the brick skin.
In fact, some of Lasdun's remarks he quotes would probably please Prince Charles if only he didn't know who said them, and you might even think that part of the problem was the silly name. Although, I guess they said that about Operation KITTENS.
As a result, I guess I'll have to denounce comrade Hatherley as a right-deviationist.
Another one was about the fate of Victorian houses in London, and specifically the way that people buy them and immediately set about ripping out the interior walls, dragging the kitchen forwards from its kennel in the back garden, and building - essentially - an open plan, white-walled modernist interior inside the brick skin.
Throwing out the bums
What if the entire political response to the Great Financial Crisis could be summed up as "Punch the incumbent"?
Americans threw out George Bush. Obviously this was overdetermined, but still, they did it in the winter of 2008. If you look around the democratic world, what seems to make the most difference is timing - how much distance was left to run in the political cycle. Nicolas Sarkozy got hugely lucky by running for election a couple of months before the crash, thus getting a full term. But then he married Carla and got away with paying all that cash into the Balladur campaign's account at the Boulevard Haussmann Credit du Nord, so falling in the shit and coming up smelling of roses is hardly unusual in his life. Had the election somehow held off until the winter, though, after the whistle blew for the crisis, who would have bet against the electorate lashing out at the incumbent?
In Spain, Zapatero was in charge when the storm broke and took the punishment, although one does begin to wonder if he might eventually pull it round, having survived this far. I'll come back to that. In Germany, the incumbent-bashing reflex hit both the coalition partners, but the biggest winner was the FDP. Wasn't that simply because they hadn't been in charge for many years, unlike the Greens? As a result, Angela Merkel was able to stay on and form a coalition with them. In Austria, the crisis hit with a rightwing government in power and the Social Democrats got back in. In Greece, we had the same pattern, unfortunately for the Socialists who got stuck with the bill. Poles threw out the Kaczynski brothers and brought back the Social Democrats. Swedes threw out the Social Democrats, who were in charge, and brought in the conservatives. Ireland sacked the Right and brought in Labour and Fine Gael. Australia finally binned the rightwing coalition that had been in charge since 1996 and pulled in Labour. Danes threw out the Right, who were in charge, and brought back the Socialists. The pattern was the same everywhere - whoever was in charge, was replaced at the first opportunity. Rather than anything like a coordinated move right or left, there was a rush to throw out the bums.
In the UK, therefore, what would you expect a priori? Labour were in charge when the crisis blew up and therefore they got a beating. However, it's worth unpacking this a little. As things got progressively worse, so the Tories did better and Labour did worse, until the winter of 2009. From then on, the Tory lead began to fade through the spring, and eventually they collapsed just short of the line and were carried over by the Lib Dems. This fits perfectly with a burst of rage at incumbents that just looked like a move to the Right because of the electoral calendar.
It's also worth considering Germany carefully. In many ways, German politics since the crisis has been a preview of British politics a few months ahead. They had an anti-incumbent backlash and a bout of Cleggmania. The conservatives held onto their core vote, with the broad Left fracturing, and the Liberals getting an unusually good score by virtue of not having been in government recently and smiling a lot. (This is quite like the British election of 2010.) As a result, a Tory-Liberal coalition was formed, started yelling for austerity, and began to decay almost as soon as it was launched. It made a lot of rather silly pronouncements, adopted a cuts budget and a succession of gimmes to clientele groups...and now the Liberal element of it is down to 2% in national polls as the economy turns for the worse.
Interestingly enough, they're now seeing (as well as the crushing of the FDP) a broad revival across all the Left parties - the SPD, the Left Party, and the Greens, whose halfleader Jürgen Trittin was making a lot of sense about the Euro last week.
But it would be foolish to think May 2010 was a judgment on the Left or the Labour Party as such. Given the hugely favourable circumstances, it was also such a judgment on the Tories.
Americans threw out George Bush. Obviously this was overdetermined, but still, they did it in the winter of 2008. If you look around the democratic world, what seems to make the most difference is timing - how much distance was left to run in the political cycle. Nicolas Sarkozy got hugely lucky by running for election a couple of months before the crash, thus getting a full term. But then he married Carla and got away with paying all that cash into the Balladur campaign's account at the Boulevard Haussmann Credit du Nord, so falling in the shit and coming up smelling of roses is hardly unusual in his life. Had the election somehow held off until the winter, though, after the whistle blew for the crisis, who would have bet against the electorate lashing out at the incumbent?
In Spain, Zapatero was in charge when the storm broke and took the punishment, although one does begin to wonder if he might eventually pull it round, having survived this far. I'll come back to that. In Germany, the incumbent-bashing reflex hit both the coalition partners, but the biggest winner was the FDP. Wasn't that simply because they hadn't been in charge for many years, unlike the Greens? As a result, Angela Merkel was able to stay on and form a coalition with them. In Austria, the crisis hit with a rightwing government in power and the Social Democrats got back in. In Greece, we had the same pattern, unfortunately for the Socialists who got stuck with the bill. Poles threw out the Kaczynski brothers and brought back the Social Democrats. Swedes threw out the Social Democrats, who were in charge, and brought in the conservatives. Ireland sacked the Right and brought in Labour and Fine Gael. Australia finally binned the rightwing coalition that had been in charge since 1996 and pulled in Labour. Danes threw out the Right, who were in charge, and brought back the Socialists. The pattern was the same everywhere - whoever was in charge, was replaced at the first opportunity. Rather than anything like a coordinated move right or left, there was a rush to throw out the bums.
In the UK, therefore, what would you expect a priori? Labour were in charge when the crisis blew up and therefore they got a beating. However, it's worth unpacking this a little. As things got progressively worse, so the Tories did better and Labour did worse, until the winter of 2009. From then on, the Tory lead began to fade through the spring, and eventually they collapsed just short of the line and were carried over by the Lib Dems. This fits perfectly with a burst of rage at incumbents that just looked like a move to the Right because of the electoral calendar.
It's also worth considering Germany carefully. In many ways, German politics since the crisis has been a preview of British politics a few months ahead. They had an anti-incumbent backlash and a bout of Cleggmania. The conservatives held onto their core vote, with the broad Left fracturing, and the Liberals getting an unusually good score by virtue of not having been in government recently and smiling a lot. (This is quite like the British election of 2010.) As a result, a Tory-Liberal coalition was formed, started yelling for austerity, and began to decay almost as soon as it was launched. It made a lot of rather silly pronouncements, adopted a cuts budget and a succession of gimmes to clientele groups...and now the Liberal element of it is down to 2% in national polls as the economy turns for the worse.
Interestingly enough, they're now seeing (as well as the crushing of the FDP) a broad revival across all the Left parties - the SPD, the Left Party, and the Greens, whose halfleader Jürgen Trittin was making a lot of sense about the Euro last week.
But it would be foolish to think May 2010 was a judgment on the Left or the Labour Party as such. Given the hugely favourable circumstances, it was also such a judgment on the Tories.
Monday, September 26, 2011
my love affair with GSM hardware
Even more trivial than the last one! Some mobiles I loved.
Samsung ???
This was the first of them all in 2000-2001. A weird reverse-clamshell design that very rapidly developed dodgy contacts in the joint. But eh, I had a real, lasting relationship and I could send her texts from the union!
Siemens c55i
Neat and sort of German. With a big square INTERNET key to remind you that you could look at a small subset of the Web on it, if you wanted to spend an absurd amount of money. I took this one away to Vienna and ran up horrible roaming bills (see above) and went without for six months.
Nokia 3210
First Nokia. Smaller, thinner, more future-y. Lit up like a squid from within.
Nokia 6210
Ah, an enduring design classic. Really great, clicky but soft, good sized keys with lighted markers. Less Star Trek than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Real European design. Series 40 OS. Sound hardware. And when we moved into the new flat, I remembered that Royal Holloway computer centre still had a dialup pool, so we aligned the IR port and dialled in over the circuit voice channel, and we could load the blog. 2003 was a bit late for dialup though.
Nokia 6210i
Same as the 6210 but with a 1.3 megapixel cam. Operators had finally repented of trying to make everyone use MMS and therefore squeeze photos into the size mandated by the 3GPP standards group. Sadly, they also made the keys silvery and destroyed its austerity of design. This was the only one I ever lost, from a boozy working lunch at MCI.
Qtek 8100/HTC Amadeus
Working at MCI made that a nonproblem. Very soon we got one of these as a gimme. Technically this was the first smartphone I had, with MS Windows CE and an SD card slot. The back was designed fairly obviously to look a bit like some Apple products, and the whole thing was meant to be a "music phone". That didn't mean it came with any real storage capacity, and I added a 2GB SD card - at the time those cost real money. Having worked out how to configure the data access point, it meant I could read NANOG on the train of a morning until I got banned for three months for swearing. I also managed to permanently reduce the default camera resolution, so a whole holiday's worth of snaps were thumbnails. It was this phone that I took to Singapore and Cape Town in one month and set my personal record mobile bill of £132.
BlackBerry ?
Vodafone sent us one of the BlackBerrys before they were designed to not be hideous, as a review of their hosted BlackBerry service. This was quite impressive, even if it was hard to stop it getting my colleague Sean Jackson's e-mail. My partner was horrified by the blinking, commanding red light, I was delighted by the clickwheel. I took it to 3GSM in Barcelona. VF asked us for it back soon afterwards. I wonder why?
HTC ?
I had this one in early 2006. I can find similar ones, but only from at least a year later - or perhaps we got an early prototype? Anyway, it was similar to this one but with even fewer hardware controls, so only the horribly crap touchscreen. The first one I had with a touchscreen, or WiFi. Didn't really work. It also destroyed the SD card full of songs. Bastards.
HP iPaq 6915w
This one was actually quite impressive in a slightly grim enterprisey way. It provided a touchscreen, a QWERTY keypad, WiFi, and GPS, and it worked when it wasn't crashing. It also had a hard plastic cover that flipped over the screen. I remember deliberately taking a photo on board a plane from London to Dubai to get a GPS fix, and finding that the camera app would look up photos on Multimap (Multimap!) if it could. Also, looking up questions on the Buddha Bar's WiFi from IMDB to settle an argument.
HP wanted it back.
BlackBerry Pearl
Around then, RIM discovered product design and suddenly BlackBerry devices didn't need a tea cosy over them. The first of the new breed was this one, and RIM sent me one, which I took to Cape Town. It worked well and looked good, although it was made of glue and phone calls sounded really odd.
Nokia N73
3 UK announced a new product - the X-Series tariff, which offered Skype! on a mobile. They sent us one. I was impressed and paid for one myself. It was a damn good photo phone and a good all rounder, even if it wasn't pretty. The Skype implementation was disappointing. But the camera was great.
HTC TyTN
I went to an Orange UK product launch. They said there were Nokia E61s going, but I got there late and they were all gone. I got one of these instead - a preview of the future, really. Windows again, with a large but not good touchscreen, and a slide-out QWERTY, and basically top specifications in everything, and a handy click-wheel. The first 3G device I had. My sister then needed a phone and the N73 turned up, so I offered her the gadget. She renamed it the Beast of Telecom but used it for ages.
Nokia E65
I changed operator to 3UK for the X series and stayed for the cheap Internet service. The E65 was part of Nokia's attempt to outcompete RIM on looks - a shiny slide-out device. But the bit that got me was the fact it could read RSS feeds. I could check key blogs on the train!
Nokia E71
Ah, a genuine design classic this one. So much so I've still got it. Mine came in a mix of chrome, white plastic and white leather keys on the QWERTY. The late version of Symbian S60 it ran worked very well unless you wanted to write code for it, in which case you were basically in for a world of tiresome. It felt and looked great and everything built in worked great. And you could just USB it to any computer and wvdial it to get online.
Bizarrely, Nokia shipped it with a 200MB(!) SD card with some apps on it, rather like they sent out crappy tinny headphones with "music phones". Also, the phones socket was at 90 degrees to the phone, so it wouldn't drop into a pocket and never worked well.
Eventually I dropped it and the screen crazed, and I thought it was time for Android.
Samsung GT-i7500
A hacky mess. No QWERTY, which annoys me. Seriously buggy in every way. Made of tickytacky, ugly. Atrocious battery life and radio performance. Crashy, although that's the Google's fault. At least the headphone cockup was avoided. Perhaps some of the 'droid issues are fixed in updates, but the updates never come. (On the other hand, Nokia announced in about 2008 that you could update your phone's software to the latest version...but it would overwrite all the data on it. Thanks!)
And if it runs out of internal storage, it silently drops SMS messages. Fail.
Samsung ???
This was the first of them all in 2000-2001. A weird reverse-clamshell design that very rapidly developed dodgy contacts in the joint. But eh, I had a real, lasting relationship and I could send her texts from the union!
Siemens c55i
Neat and sort of German. With a big square INTERNET key to remind you that you could look at a small subset of the Web on it, if you wanted to spend an absurd amount of money. I took this one away to Vienna and ran up horrible roaming bills (see above) and went without for six months.
Nokia 3210
First Nokia. Smaller, thinner, more future-y. Lit up like a squid from within.
Nokia 6210
Ah, an enduring design classic. Really great, clicky but soft, good sized keys with lighted markers. Less Star Trek than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Real European design. Series 40 OS. Sound hardware. And when we moved into the new flat, I remembered that Royal Holloway computer centre still had a dialup pool, so we aligned the IR port and dialled in over the circuit voice channel, and we could load the blog. 2003 was a bit late for dialup though.
Nokia 6210i
Same as the 6210 but with a 1.3 megapixel cam. Operators had finally repented of trying to make everyone use MMS and therefore squeeze photos into the size mandated by the 3GPP standards group. Sadly, they also made the keys silvery and destroyed its austerity of design. This was the only one I ever lost, from a boozy working lunch at MCI.
Qtek 8100/HTC Amadeus
Working at MCI made that a nonproblem. Very soon we got one of these as a gimme. Technically this was the first smartphone I had, with MS Windows CE and an SD card slot. The back was designed fairly obviously to look a bit like some Apple products, and the whole thing was meant to be a "music phone". That didn't mean it came with any real storage capacity, and I added a 2GB SD card - at the time those cost real money. Having worked out how to configure the data access point, it meant I could read NANOG on the train of a morning until I got banned for three months for swearing. I also managed to permanently reduce the default camera resolution, so a whole holiday's worth of snaps were thumbnails. It was this phone that I took to Singapore and Cape Town in one month and set my personal record mobile bill of £132.
BlackBerry ?
Vodafone sent us one of the BlackBerrys before they were designed to not be hideous, as a review of their hosted BlackBerry service. This was quite impressive, even if it was hard to stop it getting my colleague Sean Jackson's e-mail. My partner was horrified by the blinking, commanding red light, I was delighted by the clickwheel. I took it to 3GSM in Barcelona. VF asked us for it back soon afterwards. I wonder why?
HTC ?
I had this one in early 2006. I can find similar ones, but only from at least a year later - or perhaps we got an early prototype? Anyway, it was similar to this one but with even fewer hardware controls, so only the horribly crap touchscreen. The first one I had with a touchscreen, or WiFi. Didn't really work. It also destroyed the SD card full of songs. Bastards.
HP iPaq 6915w
This one was actually quite impressive in a slightly grim enterprisey way. It provided a touchscreen, a QWERTY keypad, WiFi, and GPS, and it worked when it wasn't crashing. It also had a hard plastic cover that flipped over the screen. I remember deliberately taking a photo on board a plane from London to Dubai to get a GPS fix, and finding that the camera app would look up photos on Multimap (Multimap!) if it could. Also, looking up questions on the Buddha Bar's WiFi from IMDB to settle an argument.
HP wanted it back.
BlackBerry Pearl
Around then, RIM discovered product design and suddenly BlackBerry devices didn't need a tea cosy over them. The first of the new breed was this one, and RIM sent me one, which I took to Cape Town. It worked well and looked good, although it was made of glue and phone calls sounded really odd.
Nokia N73
3 UK announced a new product - the X-Series tariff, which offered Skype! on a mobile. They sent us one. I was impressed and paid for one myself. It was a damn good photo phone and a good all rounder, even if it wasn't pretty. The Skype implementation was disappointing. But the camera was great.
HTC TyTN
I went to an Orange UK product launch. They said there were Nokia E61s going, but I got there late and they were all gone. I got one of these instead - a preview of the future, really. Windows again, with a large but not good touchscreen, and a slide-out QWERTY, and basically top specifications in everything, and a handy click-wheel. The first 3G device I had. My sister then needed a phone and the N73 turned up, so I offered her the gadget. She renamed it the Beast of Telecom but used it for ages.
Nokia E65
I changed operator to 3UK for the X series and stayed for the cheap Internet service. The E65 was part of Nokia's attempt to outcompete RIM on looks - a shiny slide-out device. But the bit that got me was the fact it could read RSS feeds. I could check key blogs on the train!
Nokia E71
Ah, a genuine design classic this one. So much so I've still got it. Mine came in a mix of chrome, white plastic and white leather keys on the QWERTY. The late version of Symbian S60 it ran worked very well unless you wanted to write code for it, in which case you were basically in for a world of tiresome. It felt and looked great and everything built in worked great. And you could just USB it to any computer and wvdial it to get online.
Bizarrely, Nokia shipped it with a 200MB(!) SD card with some apps on it, rather like they sent out crappy tinny headphones with "music phones". Also, the phones socket was at 90 degrees to the phone, so it wouldn't drop into a pocket and never worked well.
Eventually I dropped it and the screen crazed, and I thought it was time for Android.
Samsung GT-i7500
A hacky mess. No QWERTY, which annoys me. Seriously buggy in every way. Made of tickytacky, ugly. Atrocious battery life and radio performance. Crashy, although that's the Google's fault. At least the headphone cockup was avoided. Perhaps some of the 'droid issues are fixed in updates, but the updates never come. (On the other hand, Nokia announced in about 2008 that you could update your phone's software to the latest version...but it would overwrite all the data on it. Thanks!)
And if it runs out of internal storage, it silently drops SMS messages. Fail.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
it wasn't Thursday, and still isn't, so...
So there was this thread with music. It went like this, and then like this, and this, then this, this, this, and finally this. Also a fair amount of stuff about shwi-vet Erik Lund and the most popular man in Britain. But mostly music.
Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for "oh yeah this is funky".
Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for "oh yeah this is funky".
...like it's 2008!
Having fixed the Viktorfeed, I notice with some pleasure that the activity levels continue to decline. It looks like the last gang in town is "Reliable Unique Services", ICAO:RLB, an alias for Rus Aviation, operating five Il-76, a couple of which served with various version of Click Airways.
Sometimes history is written by the losers
A good post on the notion of "hard Keynesianism" raises some important questions about the recent past of the Labour Party. Hard Keynesianism is the doctrine that, if the government should run a deficit when there's a negative output-gap and therefore unemployment, it should run a surplus when there's a positive output-gap and therefore inflation.
It's trivially true that the government can't increase its indebtedness as a share of the economy forever, so obviously if you do any fiscal stimulus at all you need to think about a budget consolidation some time in the future. But the hardness in the hard Keynesianism comes from the idea that the average balance of the government budget ought to be zero. That is to say, between recessions the government should always be running a surplus, and it should just unwind that to deliver stimulus.
There are several problems with this idea. First of all, getting to the point of running a semi-permanent budget surplus is an enormous job and we ought to be very sure it's a good thing before undertaking it, especially as it involves offering everyone whacking tax rises.
Secondly, big private companies or nationalised industries don't usually target zero net debt just for the sake of it. After all, if you can get a return on investment higher than the cost of capital, i.e. the interest rate you pay, you ought to raise the capital and invest it. In so far as this doesn't happen, running the public sector as a structural saver might cost us all in terms of economic growth. It's not obvious that major infrastructure projects should wait until a recession comes along and gives us an excuse to build.
Thirdly, a permanently reducing supply of government bonds might have unforeseeable consequences in the financial sector. Pension funds are big buyers of government debt because it's considered relatively safe and it's available in different maturities, so they can match the flow of income from it to the expected flow of pensions. If it was in short supply, they'd have to pay much more for it, and as a result, pension rates would be worse. Banks park their spare cash in government securities. The Bank of England trades them in order to manage the interest rate. We don't really know what would happen here.
But finance could react to a shortage of AAA-rated bonds in a couple of ways. One would be to push money into riskier investments. That might in fact help the economy, by getting more money into industry, but you try telling that to people whose savings vanished. Another would be to do what they're doing now, which is just to sit on their cash and do nothing, so we have a demand-deficient recession. A third would be to do what they did a couple of years ago, and invent new AAA assets. And look how that turned out!
And fourthly, we'd have to think hard about what to do with the surplus money. We couldn't risk it, and it would have to be liquid so as to be available in a crisis. Obviously, foreign government bonds...you see where I'm going here.
Now, as far as I can see, the main attraction of hard Keynesianism in Britain is either that it sounds easy to sell because it uses the rhetoric of tough-osity, or else that it's something to throw at Gordon Brown. After all, there is little point complaining about surging public spending in the mid-2000s - because public spending didn't actually surge in the mid-2000s - or that we can't plan on expanding the public sector as a percentage of GDP - because it wasn't historically big or fast-growing in the mid-2000s.
So if your aim is to support the Blairite king-over-the-water, and you're not willing to simply pretend that there was a public spending blowout in 2005-2006, you need an alternative and hard Keynesianism is it. Oddly, if you take into account some of my objections, you end up with something rather like Gordon Brown's fiscal rules.
It's trivially true that the government can't increase its indebtedness as a share of the economy forever, so obviously if you do any fiscal stimulus at all you need to think about a budget consolidation some time in the future. But the hardness in the hard Keynesianism comes from the idea that the average balance of the government budget ought to be zero. That is to say, between recessions the government should always be running a surplus, and it should just unwind that to deliver stimulus.
There are several problems with this idea. First of all, getting to the point of running a semi-permanent budget surplus is an enormous job and we ought to be very sure it's a good thing before undertaking it, especially as it involves offering everyone whacking tax rises.
Secondly, big private companies or nationalised industries don't usually target zero net debt just for the sake of it. After all, if you can get a return on investment higher than the cost of capital, i.e. the interest rate you pay, you ought to raise the capital and invest it. In so far as this doesn't happen, running the public sector as a structural saver might cost us all in terms of economic growth. It's not obvious that major infrastructure projects should wait until a recession comes along and gives us an excuse to build.
Thirdly, a permanently reducing supply of government bonds might have unforeseeable consequences in the financial sector. Pension funds are big buyers of government debt because it's considered relatively safe and it's available in different maturities, so they can match the flow of income from it to the expected flow of pensions. If it was in short supply, they'd have to pay much more for it, and as a result, pension rates would be worse. Banks park their spare cash in government securities. The Bank of England trades them in order to manage the interest rate. We don't really know what would happen here.
But finance could react to a shortage of AAA-rated bonds in a couple of ways. One would be to push money into riskier investments. That might in fact help the economy, by getting more money into industry, but you try telling that to people whose savings vanished. Another would be to do what they're doing now, which is just to sit on their cash and do nothing, so we have a demand-deficient recession. A third would be to do what they did a couple of years ago, and invent new AAA assets. And look how that turned out!
And fourthly, we'd have to think hard about what to do with the surplus money. We couldn't risk it, and it would have to be liquid so as to be available in a crisis. Obviously, foreign government bonds...you see where I'm going here.
Now, as far as I can see, the main attraction of hard Keynesianism in Britain is either that it sounds easy to sell because it uses the rhetoric of tough-osity, or else that it's something to throw at Gordon Brown. After all, there is little point complaining about surging public spending in the mid-2000s - because public spending didn't actually surge in the mid-2000s - or that we can't plan on expanding the public sector as a percentage of GDP - because it wasn't historically big or fast-growing in the mid-2000s.
So if your aim is to support the Blairite king-over-the-water, and you're not willing to simply pretend that there was a public spending blowout in 2005-2006, you need an alternative and hard Keynesianism is it. Oddly, if you take into account some of my objections, you end up with something rather like Gordon Brown's fiscal rules.
is there a Corby trouser press, miniature kettle, and teabags in Room 101?
A couple of News of the World things. Just before the Met dropped their effort to bully the Grauniad with the Official Secrets Act, they ran this story about the disastrous attempt to use a supergrass in the Daniel Morgan case. Is this a coincidence? And this quote reads like a Ballardised version of Le Carré:
That's none other than Dave Cook, the policeman who was being followed around London by the Murdochs' private investigators in an effort to protect Alex Marunchak, on the instructions of Greg Miskiw. I wonder who else read the text message?
Also, if the police story that a junior officer on the Operation Weeting case launched the OSA effort all on his lonesome while the handover to the new chief was going on is at all true, I think we probably know who one of the moles is.
One of the most "concerning" events for the judge came on 5 September 2006, a month after Eaton was recruited as a supergrass and while officers were still taking his witness statements. Eaton was taken by DCI Cook to a "covert location" near Reading, and left alone in the bedroom of a hotel. He became very distressed and broke down.
Half an hour later Cook – who had been trying to get Eaton to implicate two brothers, Glenn and Garry Vian, in the Morgan murder – sent him a text message that the officer then deleted from his mobile phone, according to the judge's ruling.
An hour after Eaton had been put into the hotel room he changed his story and prepared a statement implicating the Vian brothers in the murder for the first time.
That's none other than Dave Cook, the policeman who was being followed around London by the Murdochs' private investigators in an effort to protect Alex Marunchak, on the instructions of Greg Miskiw. I wonder who else read the text message?
Also, if the police story that a junior officer on the Operation Weeting case launched the OSA effort all on his lonesome while the handover to the new chief was going on is at all true, I think we probably know who one of the moles is.
he's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy
Did anyone else read this and this and get the horrible feeling that Maurice Glasman is over-promoted, and likely to crash in some really embarrassing way, even more than he has done already? It reminds me a bit of Tony Blair at his elevenarife worst or one of those people who are caught pretending to be commanding the SAS from a Kwik Save in Eccleshill.
Not only was he advising Ed Miliband, but David as well! And it seems he was giving them diametrically opposite advice, as if to find out what would happen! Not only was he an obscure lecturer, but he was literally starving! But when he became a member of the House of Lords, he was able to build a new storey on his house in Hackney!
(Hint: probably best not boast about using your parliamentary attendance-money to build an extension. Just because it's not a duckhouse...)
Also, this: Rather than giving a single mother housing benefit, Blue Labour is more likely to give her a stake in a community land trust.
Where is all this land in, say, Islington, the borough with two grass football pitches and one of them is Arsenal, coming from? Further, where will she live and how will she avoid eviction during the years the CLT will need to round up financing and fight its way through the planning process before the project even breaks ground? Wouldn't it be easier if she could just, eh, stay in her home rather than move to some vague new construction project God-knows-where?
Also, I'm sure some of us can relate to this:
Just dance, you'll be OK, right? No, actually, nothing that fun, he was at somebody or other's wedding and staring at his phone for news.
Not only was he advising Ed Miliband, but David as well! And it seems he was giving them diametrically opposite advice, as if to find out what would happen! Not only was he an obscure lecturer, but he was literally starving! But when he became a member of the House of Lords, he was able to build a new storey on his house in Hackney!
(Hint: probably best not boast about using your parliamentary attendance-money to build an extension. Just because it's not a duckhouse...)
Also, this: Rather than giving a single mother housing benefit, Blue Labour is more likely to give her a stake in a community land trust.
Where is all this land in, say, Islington, the borough with two grass football pitches and one of them is Arsenal, coming from? Further, where will she live and how will she avoid eviction during the years the CLT will need to round up financing and fight its way through the planning process before the project even breaks ground? Wouldn't it be easier if she could just, eh, stay in her home rather than move to some vague new construction project God-knows-where?
Also, I'm sure some of us can relate to this:
Then I suddenly thought of David, and the grief, and James [Purnell], and the party, and the bitterness, and I thought, I'm glad I'm in Shoreditch today.
Just dance, you'll be OK, right? No, actually, nothing that fun, he was at somebody or other's wedding and staring at his phone for news.
is this normal?
It seems that the Islington Gazette's usually very funny problem page isn't coming back from their recent re-design. Perhaps I should write and tell them I have a problem.
a restraining influence on the rate of retrogression
So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions' press offices are handing out "tokens" to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings with lobbyists and monitoring the counts to see if they appear to be giving one company or other preferential access. And the reason is that lobbying information is being analysed by journalists and other malcontents with their stinkin' computer diaries.
Of course, they can always go and meet secretly at White's or the meeting room of some dreadful wanktank, but they could do that before and they seem to find official lobbying worth their while or else they wouldn't do it. I suspect that corporate lobbyists are the sort of people whose behaviour is accurately modelled by the toolkit of neoliberal economics, like psychopaths and economists themselves.
In tangentially related news, did you know that there was a serious proposal to rebuild the Houses of Parliament as a Benthamite panopticon in the 1840s? MP Joseph Hume thought Millbank Prison had been such a success that a parliamentary panopticon might be a good idea, or at least he did a piece for Bentham's Westminster Review arguing for it. Whether he was in earnest or taking the piss I have no idea.
I suppose you could have a single citizen, chosen by lot, at the top of the tower...
Of course, they can always go and meet secretly at White's or the meeting room of some dreadful wanktank, but they could do that before and they seem to find official lobbying worth their while or else they wouldn't do it. I suspect that corporate lobbyists are the sort of people whose behaviour is accurately modelled by the toolkit of neoliberal economics, like psychopaths and economists themselves.
In tangentially related news, did you know that there was a serious proposal to rebuild the Houses of Parliament as a Benthamite panopticon in the 1840s? MP Joseph Hume thought Millbank Prison had been such a success that a parliamentary panopticon might be a good idea, or at least he did a piece for Bentham's Westminster Review arguing for it. Whether he was in earnest or taking the piss I have no idea.
I suppose you could have a single citizen, chosen by lot, at the top of the tower...
Sunday, September 18, 2011
the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty bad
This is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What's so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs.
Specifically, even if consultation doesn't help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of people. That's worth something. Economists, especially, ought to remember this as the whole idea of Pareto efficiency comes with Pareto's further point that a step towards optimal efficiency in any given market is not necessarily a step towards perfection overall.
Further, in practice, people who refuse to consult in the hope of making an optimal decision are quite likely to be rationalising the avoidance of information they don't like or just their own arrogance. In that case, they're very likely to make a really bad decision. It's better to miss the cost-index speed by a couple of knots than stall the plane into the sea. Programmers are taught to remember that premature optimisation is the root of all evil.
A couple of points in the upshot. Do we lose more from not attaining perfection than we do from horrible bungling? For a practical example, are all those superbly conceptualised deadweight losses and x-inefficiencies that are meant to be in the economy in the event of any state intervention whatsoever anywhere near enough to match the lasting losses of financial crisis? Enormous efforts are made to squeeze the long-term unemployed back into the job market. But the numbers are clear - people lose work in recessions and then don't find it again.
Wouldn't it be better to hold the line, putting up with one parmesan shaving less on my martini in the good times, rather than waste time and money and bother a lot of poor bastards trying to fix it later? Kurzarbeit beats the piss out of A4E.
More generally, loss-aversion is often considered to be a cognitive bias. One of the things the recurring drama of the rogue trader tells us is that someone who tells you it's only a little loss and it's worth it for the potential upside is very often lying or deluded. Isn't loss aversion actually quite a sensible heuristic for most purposes? After all, many of the things it would warn you against are actually sure losers, like gambling, smoking, and voting Conservative.
That gets me to the final point. How dare anyone have the intellectual dishonesty to argue against social democracy on the grounds that stuff happens and we need safety first and to respect individual variety and old institutions and no plan survives contact with the enemy? Avoiding disasters and silly experiments is our thing, and if that's conservatism, well, vote Labour.
Of course, my own experiment with voting Lib Dem is exhibit A.
Specifically, even if consultation doesn't help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of people. That's worth something. Economists, especially, ought to remember this as the whole idea of Pareto efficiency comes with Pareto's further point that a step towards optimal efficiency in any given market is not necessarily a step towards perfection overall.
Further, in practice, people who refuse to consult in the hope of making an optimal decision are quite likely to be rationalising the avoidance of information they don't like or just their own arrogance. In that case, they're very likely to make a really bad decision. It's better to miss the cost-index speed by a couple of knots than stall the plane into the sea. Programmers are taught to remember that premature optimisation is the root of all evil.
A couple of points in the upshot. Do we lose more from not attaining perfection than we do from horrible bungling? For a practical example, are all those superbly conceptualised deadweight losses and x-inefficiencies that are meant to be in the economy in the event of any state intervention whatsoever anywhere near enough to match the lasting losses of financial crisis? Enormous efforts are made to squeeze the long-term unemployed back into the job market. But the numbers are clear - people lose work in recessions and then don't find it again.
Wouldn't it be better to hold the line, putting up with one parmesan shaving less on my martini in the good times, rather than waste time and money and bother a lot of poor bastards trying to fix it later? Kurzarbeit beats the piss out of A4E.
More generally, loss-aversion is often considered to be a cognitive bias. One of the things the recurring drama of the rogue trader tells us is that someone who tells you it's only a little loss and it's worth it for the potential upside is very often lying or deluded. Isn't loss aversion actually quite a sensible heuristic for most purposes? After all, many of the things it would warn you against are actually sure losers, like gambling, smoking, and voting Conservative.
That gets me to the final point. How dare anyone have the intellectual dishonesty to argue against social democracy on the grounds that stuff happens and we need safety first and to respect individual variety and old institutions and no plan survives contact with the enemy? Avoiding disasters and silly experiments is our thing, and if that's conservatism, well, vote Labour.
Of course, my own experiment with voting Lib Dem is exhibit A.
oh fuck hell, it's that extensive future-of-the-Labour-party post at last.
OK, I've been thinking about this for a while. My problem with the whole "Blue Labour" concept, and further, the love-affair between people like James Purnell and American "community organisers" is this: If you're so smart, why haven't you got health insurance?"
Seriously. Isn't trying to learn from the American Left a bit like trying to design a football team by studying Plymouth Argyle and the career of Peter Ridsdale? Obviously, there is much to be said for the analysis of failure as a road to knowledge. The aviation industry made a whole trade and a near religion out of crash investigation, anonymous reporting through CHIRP, etc, with excellent results. But it's far from obvious that Glassman and friends have spent much time on the failures of US progressive politics.
Part of this is the unvarying, universal force of time. We all idealise the causes and methods that marked our lives. For Maurice Glassman, it's the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He looks at himself and remembers the marchers of Birmingham, Alabama. Other people recall the rainbow coalitions of the 80s, the 1992 Clinton campaign, the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment running up to the Seattle G8. History defines us before we define it, in opposition to Winston Churchill's remark about shaping the things we build that thereafter shape us. That's why he's so keen on churches.
But what made civil rights work? It wasn't just grassroots organising. Neither was it the intervention of the Feds or the Democratic control of Congress and the White House. Both things had happened before.
Many of the institutions of black self-organisation had existed for years without achieving anything like it. Similarly, even Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration hadn't even tried particularly hard. Part of the problem was that not all of them even agreed that society could be changed - the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's career before his break with the Nation are cases in point - or that it could be changed short of the final world revolution, like the communists thought.
British workers had plenty of miners' welfare clubs and brass bands in the Great Depression, too, and indeed the First Depression of the 1870s. But nobody seems to have found that satisfactory.
What I'm driving at is that neither Labour, nor the civil rights movement, achieved anything much until they lined up the movement at the grass roots, their own institutions, their influence in other institutions, and a central government that was basically sympathetic. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were willing to send the army and the FBI to enforce the law on the unofficial powers - the flip side of the big society - of the South. Democratic appointees to the courts, the National Labor Relations Board, and a million other committees were available to hear their arguments. The grassroots institutions of Labour were there to hold Attlee and Wilson's feet to the fire, just as the Tory thinktank/lobby/academic world was there to hold Thatcher's feet to the fire.
There is no contradiction between the broader movement and the electoral party. This is a false dichotomy.
But what are those institutions today? Of course, the biggest are the unions. At the other end of the scale, perhaps the blogosphere might even count, eh.
One thing they are probably not is religious. Glassman seems to imagine that we can all win by making friends with the churches. Unfortunately, the biggest religious group in the UK is unbelief and the next biggest is Anglicanism, and there are at least as many church Tories and worse (pseudo-American rightist evangelicals) as there are fans of Faith in the City, which is a bit of a while ago now.
Another thing they are not is anything other than "urban and metropolitan". This is something both "Blue" and "Purple" like to moan about. The great majority of the British live in cities or their suburbs and quite a few of those in London. Further, they have stopped moving out of them and reversed course. If the MLK porn element of Blue Labour is an American import, this is a much less desirable one - it's the usual crap from David Brooks about Real Americans, who by definition have pickup trucks, etc, etc. We don't need this crap.
By definition, an electoral strategy that is founded on winning the hearts and minds of a shrinking minority of a minority - religious people, susceptible of conversion to Labour, who live in the countryside! - can only fail. It is a question of arithmetic. There aren't enough of 'em! Even in London, this all risks shedding Labour people like the unionised bus drivers who live around here at at least the rate god-botherers are signed up.
Come to think of it, the only solution to the equation is if the electoral turn-out keeps falling, faster. If you assume that the religious will keep voting (an assumption borrowed from the Americans), perhaps there's something to be said for clinging to the last voter. But that would work as well for the activist Left and the unions. Anyway, I somehow doubt the final extinction of the swing voter is actually what anyone wants. Even if the whole political class does sometimes seem to be trying to foster extreme cynicism as a strategy.
Anyway, to take this to the bridge. Not so long ago it looked like the Obama campaign would be the model we would take with us, what with its RESTful interfaces and ward teams and whatnot. Now that looks like a busted flush, a depressing miss, a lucky shot in an off year for the other side. The saddest bit being the vanishing of the movement.
A question: the last time the British Labour movement launched a new, independent, task specific organising effort was the Anti-Nazi League. What is the equivalent for economic aims, and would anyone dare?
Seriously. Isn't trying to learn from the American Left a bit like trying to design a football team by studying Plymouth Argyle and the career of Peter Ridsdale? Obviously, there is much to be said for the analysis of failure as a road to knowledge. The aviation industry made a whole trade and a near religion out of crash investigation, anonymous reporting through CHIRP, etc, with excellent results. But it's far from obvious that Glassman and friends have spent much time on the failures of US progressive politics.
Part of this is the unvarying, universal force of time. We all idealise the causes and methods that marked our lives. For Maurice Glassman, it's the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He looks at himself and remembers the marchers of Birmingham, Alabama. Other people recall the rainbow coalitions of the 80s, the 1992 Clinton campaign, the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment running up to the Seattle G8. History defines us before we define it, in opposition to Winston Churchill's remark about shaping the things we build that thereafter shape us. That's why he's so keen on churches.
But what made civil rights work? It wasn't just grassroots organising. Neither was it the intervention of the Feds or the Democratic control of Congress and the White House. Both things had happened before.
Many of the institutions of black self-organisation had existed for years without achieving anything like it. Similarly, even Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration hadn't even tried particularly hard. Part of the problem was that not all of them even agreed that society could be changed - the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's career before his break with the Nation are cases in point - or that it could be changed short of the final world revolution, like the communists thought.
British workers had plenty of miners' welfare clubs and brass bands in the Great Depression, too, and indeed the First Depression of the 1870s. But nobody seems to have found that satisfactory.
What I'm driving at is that neither Labour, nor the civil rights movement, achieved anything much until they lined up the movement at the grass roots, their own institutions, their influence in other institutions, and a central government that was basically sympathetic. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were willing to send the army and the FBI to enforce the law on the unofficial powers - the flip side of the big society - of the South. Democratic appointees to the courts, the National Labor Relations Board, and a million other committees were available to hear their arguments. The grassroots institutions of Labour were there to hold Attlee and Wilson's feet to the fire, just as the Tory thinktank/lobby/academic world was there to hold Thatcher's feet to the fire.
There is no contradiction between the broader movement and the electoral party. This is a false dichotomy.
But what are those institutions today? Of course, the biggest are the unions. At the other end of the scale, perhaps the blogosphere might even count, eh.
One thing they are probably not is religious. Glassman seems to imagine that we can all win by making friends with the churches. Unfortunately, the biggest religious group in the UK is unbelief and the next biggest is Anglicanism, and there are at least as many church Tories and worse (pseudo-American rightist evangelicals) as there are fans of Faith in the City, which is a bit of a while ago now.
Another thing they are not is anything other than "urban and metropolitan". This is something both "Blue" and "Purple" like to moan about. The great majority of the British live in cities or their suburbs and quite a few of those in London. Further, they have stopped moving out of them and reversed course. If the MLK porn element of Blue Labour is an American import, this is a much less desirable one - it's the usual crap from David Brooks about Real Americans, who by definition have pickup trucks, etc, etc. We don't need this crap.
By definition, an electoral strategy that is founded on winning the hearts and minds of a shrinking minority of a minority - religious people, susceptible of conversion to Labour, who live in the countryside! - can only fail. It is a question of arithmetic. There aren't enough of 'em! Even in London, this all risks shedding Labour people like the unionised bus drivers who live around here at at least the rate god-botherers are signed up.
Come to think of it, the only solution to the equation is if the electoral turn-out keeps falling, faster. If you assume that the religious will keep voting (an assumption borrowed from the Americans), perhaps there's something to be said for clinging to the last voter. But that would work as well for the activist Left and the unions. Anyway, I somehow doubt the final extinction of the swing voter is actually what anyone wants. Even if the whole political class does sometimes seem to be trying to foster extreme cynicism as a strategy.
Anyway, to take this to the bridge. Not so long ago it looked like the Obama campaign would be the model we would take with us, what with its RESTful interfaces and ward teams and whatnot. Now that looks like a busted flush, a depressing miss, a lucky shot in an off year for the other side. The saddest bit being the vanishing of the movement.
A question: the last time the British Labour movement launched a new, independent, task specific organising effort was the Anti-Nazi League. What is the equivalent for economic aims, and would anyone dare?
tagged!
Term-extraction algorithms have the disturbing property of making things sound more interesting than they really are. These are WordPress's suggested tags for the last blog post:
Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent in the methodology. You're trying to identify statistically significant variance in the corpus used, so the weirdness pops out from the background. Like teal and orange.
community organisers, multilateral agreement on investment, plymouth argyle, james purnell, crash investigation
Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent in the methodology. You're trying to identify statistically significant variance in the corpus used, so the weirdness pops out from the background. Like teal and orange.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
again with the central bank thing
London Banker:
If this is so, then they must needs take a view on the value of all sorts of assets and therefore of all sorts of capital investment. This brings us back to a point I was making earlier on - whether the independent central bank is a valid institutional model any more.
Because they now have the role of market maker of last resort, central banks should become much more active in ensuring that any asset permitted to be classed as capital by a bank can be liquidated on demand in a public market.
If this is so, then they must needs take a view on the value of all sorts of assets and therefore of all sorts of capital investment. This brings us back to a point I was making earlier on - whether the independent central bank is a valid institutional model any more.
the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank...
OK, I've added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We're up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds.
Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped somewhat. We retain our Strong Buy rating on him and also on Oliver Letwin. Second, there's been a shakeup of the lobbies - Facebook has dropped out of the top 20 but the lobbying star is BAE Systems, which has surged into the top 5, scrabbling above Barclays Bank to become the UK's biggest single private lobby. That's right, banking has fallen behind armaments.
Is the government considering ordering the Type 26 frigates? Or backing out of the F-35? Or switching to the Sea Gripen fighter, which the Bungling Baron of British Waste O'Space has a 30-odd% finger in? Who knows...
Actually, this is probably just an artefact of the MOD being unusually conscientious about disclosing lobbying information and that theirs comes in a sensible format rather than in a locked filing cabinet, behind a door marked Beware of the Leopard...sorry, in a mangled PDF file.
Lobster Project tip of the day is probably Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, Tim Loughton, Education PUSS. With a gatekeepership of 1.228 (i.e. a 23% uplift in influence from lobbying him) he's significantly underlobbied at a network degree of 0.075. Somebody, buy him an intern.
Although Nick Clegg is in third place overall, I note that his gatekeepership is down to 0.34 and that therefore, there's little hope of getting access to the prime minister through him.
Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped somewhat. We retain our Strong Buy rating on him and also on Oliver Letwin. Second, there's been a shakeup of the lobbies - Facebook has dropped out of the top 20 but the lobbying star is BAE Systems, which has surged into the top 5, scrabbling above Barclays Bank to become the UK's biggest single private lobby. That's right, banking has fallen behind armaments.
Is the government considering ordering the Type 26 frigates? Or backing out of the F-35? Or switching to the Sea Gripen fighter, which the Bungling Baron of British Waste O'Space has a 30-odd% finger in? Who knows...
Actually, this is probably just an artefact of the MOD being unusually conscientious about disclosing lobbying information and that theirs comes in a sensible format rather than in a locked filing cabinet, behind a door marked Beware of the Leopard...sorry, in a mangled PDF file.
Lobster Project tip of the day is probably Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, Tim Loughton, Education PUSS. With a gatekeepership of 1.228 (i.e. a 23% uplift in influence from lobbying him) he's significantly underlobbied at a network degree of 0.075. Somebody, buy him an intern.
Although Nick Clegg is in third place overall, I note that his gatekeepership is down to 0.34 and that therefore, there's little hope of getting access to the prime minister through him.
...wi nowt taken out
What is it with Tories and loan-sharking? We all know about Francis Maude, the toxic pusher and secret ruler of the world, or at least we all should - he was a director of a company offering dodgy "debt consolidation" deals, and also Spanish sub-prime mortgages that were marketed as an inheritance tax avoidance scheme.
And then there's this purely commercial transaction:
Nice mates you've got there, as they say. Eeeuww. For me it's the Christian stuff that really makes me want to throw up. Yer man had some things to say about the ethical aspects of credit, I think. And there's the surprisingly picayune, penny-ante nature of the whole deal. Did you know you could get control of the Coalition whipping operation for a mere £105k? The Yorkshire Building Society has actually offered to lend me - me! - twice as much. I'm sure I could find an issue worth enough to make the deal wash its face.
But of course some people's money is worth more than others'. The Tories bitch endlessly about the trade unions giving to the Labour Party. But the real point is that UNITE's members can fork over millions collectively and Labour will do bugger all in return. At least the Tories are honestly venal - perhaps they could adopt the motto "Good Honest Corruption". As for the other lot, well... I suspect, though, if I were to put together a syndicate of bloggers to outbid Edmiston they would find some excuse.
Circling back to the beginning, though, they say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. When it was fashionable to whine about local authorities advertising jobs in the Guardian, I pointed out that the Sun and the News of the World were permanently full of adverts for loans and specifically for debt-consolidation. A question: how much, do you reckon, the Edmiston companies, Prestbury Holdings, and its subsidiaries spent on advertising with News International? Also, what's the betting one of these guys turns out to own Eric Pickles?
And then there's this purely commercial transaction:
Records lodged with the Electoral Commission reveal that the Funding Corporation Group Ltd (FCGL), based in Warwickshire, donated £105,000 to the Tories on 24 June. The company also gave £25,000 last December.
FCGL owns 99.9% of the Funding Corporation Ltd which sells cars on hire purchase plans to drivers with poor credit ratings through a subsidiary, ACF Car Finance. The Funding Corporation Ltd also owns a debt recovery business, Red2Black Collections.
The companies are ultimately owned by Lord Edmiston, a staunch Tory party supporter and Christian philanthropist, who gave the Conservatives almost £300,000 between 2004 and 2009 under his own name....
One man described in an online forum how he nearly bought a £7,000 car from ACF that would have ended up costing him £325 a month over 60 months, a total cost of £19,500, equivalent to an interest rate of almost 200%. Another bought a car valued at £5,995. But the true cost when interest and PPI was factored in came to £16,445...
Measures that would have forced the lenders to curb some of their practices, were voted down by Lib Dem and Tory MPs on 28 June.
Nice mates you've got there, as they say. Eeeuww. For me it's the Christian stuff that really makes me want to throw up. Yer man had some things to say about the ethical aspects of credit, I think. And there's the surprisingly picayune, penny-ante nature of the whole deal. Did you know you could get control of the Coalition whipping operation for a mere £105k? The Yorkshire Building Society has actually offered to lend me - me! - twice as much. I'm sure I could find an issue worth enough to make the deal wash its face.
But of course some people's money is worth more than others'. The Tories bitch endlessly about the trade unions giving to the Labour Party. But the real point is that UNITE's members can fork over millions collectively and Labour will do bugger all in return. At least the Tories are honestly venal - perhaps they could adopt the motto "Good Honest Corruption". As for the other lot, well... I suspect, though, if I were to put together a syndicate of bloggers to outbid Edmiston they would find some excuse.
Circling back to the beginning, though, they say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. When it was fashionable to whine about local authorities advertising jobs in the Guardian, I pointed out that the Sun and the News of the World were permanently full of adverts for loans and specifically for debt-consolidation. A question: how much, do you reckon, the Edmiston companies, Prestbury Holdings, and its subsidiaries spent on advertising with News International? Also, what's the betting one of these guys turns out to own Eric Pickles?
it's not Thursday, so...
Time for a non-Thursday music post.
And again:
In other "things that are good" news, I want one of these.
And again:
In other "things that are good" news, I want one of these.
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities.
Chaos as a deliberate strategy
Yadda yadda China cyberwar. I make the point that the Chinese infosec environment is characterised by chaos, there isn't a well-defined centre of activity probably enjoying offical tolerance or more like the old Russian Business Network*, and that the great firewall is about censorship and also a sort of trade-barrier protecting the locals from competition. It's an interesting point why the Chinese Internet got so awful. Structure is a big part of it; rapid economic growth, lots of software piracy, and therefore a hell of a lot of old Windows machines that don't get patches. But I do wonder, as with all sorts of other Chinese issues, to what extent internal chaos with selectively porous borders is a strategy.
Meanwhile, Four Lions is still a documentary.
*You might say we've just not found it yet. But the distinction is that the Russians wanted you to know it was out there.
Meanwhile, Four Lions is still a documentary.
*You might say we've just not found it yet. But the distinction is that the Russians wanted you to know it was out there.
Irrational policy design
David "I was right" Blanchflower's Right Blog is right. On this occasion he's right about polling results. The public apparently thinks that Osborne's fiscal policy is bad for the economy, unfair, too fast, excessive, and is affecting their lives directly. They're also worried about unemployment and public service cuts. Which they also think are "necessary" by a surprisingly strong majority (57-33) although they disapprove of them by almost as strong a majority(55-30, the don't knows making up the difference).
Well, funny old public. Consistent much? Obviously part of this is Waring's pony. The public would quite like deficit reduction as long as they didn't have to have any of the consequences. Similarly, a majority would quite like a pony. Also, hardly anyone would argue for keeping the public sector net cash requirement at recession levels forever so the question is not entirely logical.
But I think this does have some interesting political consequences. If you want a policy to get implemented, I think you need some element that opinion will stick to even if all the other indicators are flashing red. It may, actually, be the irrational element. In this case it's "necessity" and it draws on the complex of ideas around economics-as-morality. You might even come over romantic and say it would be the poetic element of policy.
Well, funny old public. Consistent much? Obviously part of this is Waring's pony. The public would quite like deficit reduction as long as they didn't have to have any of the consequences. Similarly, a majority would quite like a pony. Also, hardly anyone would argue for keeping the public sector net cash requirement at recession levels forever so the question is not entirely logical.
But I think this does have some interesting political consequences. If you want a policy to get implemented, I think you need some element that opinion will stick to even if all the other indicators are flashing red. It may, actually, be the irrational element. In this case it's "necessity" and it draws on the complex of ideas around economics-as-morality. You might even come over romantic and say it would be the poetic element of policy.
don't forget the power
Because Chris Dillow has spam-bucketed me again, like quite a few TypePad sites periodically do, this comment will go here instead. Chris discusses a paper claiming that fiscal stimulus will not work because the central bank will put up interest rates and the exchange rate will rise, and quite sensibly points out that it doesn't make sense to expect the exchange rate to rise in a punishing recession with a large budget deficit. (Unsurprisingly both Tim Worstall* and George Osborne believe this or at least make out like they do.)
Anyway, my comment is that if you look at this from a political economy perspective rather than a macroeconomics perspective it does make sense. Central bank independence, as an institution, is meant to reduce politicians' discretionary power over the economy. Therefore, it's not actually surprising that the central bank might be trying to counteract the decisions of the minister of finance. I mean, Jürgen Stark and friends designed the ECB specifically to implement deflationary policies in the event that the elected power wanted the opposite.
And why would politicians accept this? In a perspective of political economy, this might be because they felt the unelected power would serve their interests, because they felt it was stronger than they were and it would get its way, or because they were simply unaware of any contradiction. Of course, what we choose to be unaware of is a deeply political decision.
Further, a Kaleckian would say it does indeed make sense to look at central bank independence as an institution whose purpose is to prevent full employment.
*Bizarrely, Tim is or claims to be unaware that the European Central Bank is an independent central bank. Let's roll the tape:
Tim Worstall: the only man on earth who thinks the European Central Bank is elected.
Anyway, my comment is that if you look at this from a political economy perspective rather than a macroeconomics perspective it does make sense. Central bank independence, as an institution, is meant to reduce politicians' discretionary power over the economy. Therefore, it's not actually surprising that the central bank might be trying to counteract the decisions of the minister of finance. I mean, Jürgen Stark and friends designed the ECB specifically to implement deflationary policies in the event that the elected power wanted the opposite.
And why would politicians accept this? In a perspective of political economy, this might be because they felt the unelected power would serve their interests, because they felt it was stronger than they were and it would get its way, or because they were simply unaware of any contradiction. Of course, what we choose to be unaware of is a deeply political decision.
Further, a Kaleckian would say it does indeed make sense to look at central bank independence as an institution whose purpose is to prevent full employment.
*Bizarrely, Tim is or claims to be unaware that the European Central Bank is an independent central bank. Let's roll the tape:
“what on earth was the ECB doing raising interest rates this year?”
That’s the problem with government as a whole really isn’t it? Sometimes the idiots get in. Far better to have a system where the idiots can’t do any harm even if they do get in: you know, that minarchist state thing?
Tim Worstall: the only man on earth who thinks the European Central Bank is elected.
Boundaries. Now there's dull for you
Just as so much Blair era culture-page handwringing about why my kids came back from university, in hindsight, was a way of not talking about wages, student debt, and housing, people tend to lose sight of the central role of politics when they make arguments about "filter bubbles". The original post over at Flipchart Fairytales is actually pretty good, but I had to take issue with the argument about Americans increasingly living in counties that swing to one party or the other by large majorities.
The problem is that it's very easy to change the boundaries of an American city or county or congressional district and they do it all the time. There are even people who make a good living acting as consultants to local politicians on how best to re-district their political opponents out of their constituency or their political supporters back in.
Movements of population are slow, but boundaries can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Thereafter, of course, they are real facts about power and they have an impact on the real world. That is of course why American politicians do it, and why a system that sounds like Shirley Porter stamping on a human face forever is allowed to persist. Both parties benefit, although the Republicans enjoy the usual hostage-taker's bonus.
It doesn't do to miss out power if you're thinking politics.
So, we're about to have our own redistricting festival. Here's Lib Dem Voice whistling past the graveyard and moaning about this Democratic Audit piece. The proposals will be published on Tuesday and there will then be some 12 weeks of "public consultation", but not public inquiries. (LDV points out that public inquiries are scary and have politicians and lawyers, but then, democracy is scary and detailed and has lawyers and politicians, and they have to listen to the results of a public inquiry.)
There is a timetable for the hearings here.
I've said before that really, everything in this exercise should be opposed as being basically dishonest. We shouldn't be having a boundary review to make Tories feel nice about the AV referendum. Any ideas?
The problem is that it's very easy to change the boundaries of an American city or county or congressional district and they do it all the time. There are even people who make a good living acting as consultants to local politicians on how best to re-district their political opponents out of their constituency or their political supporters back in.
Movements of population are slow, but boundaries can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Thereafter, of course, they are real facts about power and they have an impact on the real world. That is of course why American politicians do it, and why a system that sounds like Shirley Porter stamping on a human face forever is allowed to persist. Both parties benefit, although the Republicans enjoy the usual hostage-taker's bonus.
It doesn't do to miss out power if you're thinking politics.
So, we're about to have our own redistricting festival. Here's Lib Dem Voice whistling past the graveyard and moaning about this Democratic Audit piece. The proposals will be published on Tuesday and there will then be some 12 weeks of "public consultation", but not public inquiries. (LDV points out that public inquiries are scary and have politicians and lawyers, but then, democracy is scary and detailed and has lawyers and politicians, and they have to listen to the results of a public inquiry.)
There is a timetable for the hearings here.
I've said before that really, everything in this exercise should be opposed as being basically dishonest. We shouldn't be having a boundary review to make Tories feel nice about the AV referendum. Any ideas?
the Conservatives really do hate you as much as you feared
In the light of this it's fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service's archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?)
Tory plans seem to require that eventually, with full implementation of free schools and any-qualified-provider, the entire health and education sectors be excluded from either the Freedom of Information Act or any requirement to gather standard statistics. At the same time, presumably, we are all expected to exercise "choice" among 'em.
It ought to be obvious that the purpose of this is that your local community school, or "school school" as I think of them, will still have to be listed in league tables and whatnot while your local twat-madrassa will be able to bullshit without limit about its results. It is worth remembering that, years later, Kenneth Baker admitted to the Grauniad's Nick Davies that he deliberately tried to make the state schools awful so people would go private.
Another thought: what happens to that funny "Dr Foster" thing that sort-of privately mined NHS data to provide doctors with best-practice recommendations if they're not going to bother with boring data an stuff and just hack away?
Tory plans seem to require that eventually, with full implementation of free schools and any-qualified-provider, the entire health and education sectors be excluded from either the Freedom of Information Act or any requirement to gather standard statistics. At the same time, presumably, we are all expected to exercise "choice" among 'em.
It ought to be obvious that the purpose of this is that your local community school, or "school school" as I think of them, will still have to be listed in league tables and whatnot while your local twat-madrassa will be able to bullshit without limit about its results. It is worth remembering that, years later, Kenneth Baker admitted to the Grauniad's Nick Davies that he deliberately tried to make the state schools awful so people would go private.
Another thought: what happens to that funny "Dr Foster" thing that sort-of privately mined NHS data to provide doctors with best-practice recommendations if they're not going to bother with boring data an stuff and just hack away?
discovering the axis of barking
The Grauniad Dabatlog has produced a rather fancy network visualisation of the sources cited in Anders Behring Breivik's personal manifesto/horse-shit compendium. This is great as I now don't need to worry that I perhaps should have made one. It's very pretty and you can click on stuff, and see that some of the sources are thinktanks and some of them are newspapers, and well, it's very pretty and you can click on stuff. It also comes with a piece by Andrew Brown reprising his "Don't be beastly to the creationists!" shtick but with Melanie Phillips, for some reason.
Unfortunately it's almost completely intransparent, and gives little indication of what data is being visualised or on what basis, and there is really no obvious conclusion to draw from it. But did I mention pretty and click? If forced to take a view, I would reckon that the underlying data is probably a matrix of which sources appear together with others and the layout algo is a force-directed graph (aka the default in pretty much any visualisation toolkit), probably weighted by appearance count. There's some sort of proprietary metric called "linkfluence" which appears to be given by(indegree/outdegree)*len(neighbourhood) or words to that effect.
As a result, the only information I got from it was that he linked to Wikipedia, the BBC, and big news sites a lot. Well yes; Wikipedia, bbc.co.uk, etc, generate a hell of a lot of web pages and people read them a lot. Obviously, to say the least, you need to normalise the data with regard to sheer bulk, or you'd end up concluding that Google (or Bing or Yahoo) was his inspiration because he did a lot of web searches, or that he was a normal man twisted by SMTP because he used e-mail.
In fact, I thought they actually did that until I realised that RSS.org is about the other RSS, the Indian extreme-right movement, not the popular Internet syndication standard. Harrowell fail. Anyway, it does show up rather nicely that the groups "European nationalists", "Counter-Jihad", and "American Right-Wing" overlap. However, I feel there's something missing in the characterisation of MEMRI and various other sites as just "Think Tanks" as if they were just like, say, IPPR.
Also, an emergent property of the data is that there is an Axis of Barking running vertically through it: the nearer you are to the top of the diagram, the more extreme and crazy. MEMRI, FrontPage, Gates of Vienna, Melanie Phillips are near the top; the Wikipedia article on the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 is at the bottom. And the MSM is somewhere in the middle. (Although I do wonder if they allocated the sources to groups before or after running the force-directed graph.)
It seems to be one of those command the exciting world of social media with just one click! things.
Anyway, upshot. I want to avoid Project Lobster producing a diagram like this one. It's too impressionistic and fluffy and reliant on basically aesthetic reasoning. (I think we've had this point before.) Of course, that's partly the difference between the underlying data sets; it was at least thinkable if unlikely that there would be no grouping in Breivik's sources, while presumably political lobbying is nonrandom and subject to intelligent design.
Elsewhere, a reader passed this along which I need to actually watch (isn't video time consuming?). There's a shindig in Warsaw in late October. And I want this on a T-shirt.
Unfortunately it's almost completely intransparent, and gives little indication of what data is being visualised or on what basis, and there is really no obvious conclusion to draw from it. But did I mention pretty and click? If forced to take a view, I would reckon that the underlying data is probably a matrix of which sources appear together with others and the layout algo is a force-directed graph (aka the default in pretty much any visualisation toolkit), probably weighted by appearance count. There's some sort of proprietary metric called "linkfluence" which appears to be given by(indegree/outdegree)*len(neighbourhood) or words to that effect.
As a result, the only information I got from it was that he linked to Wikipedia, the BBC, and big news sites a lot. Well yes; Wikipedia, bbc.co.uk, etc, generate a hell of a lot of web pages and people read them a lot. Obviously, to say the least, you need to normalise the data with regard to sheer bulk, or you'd end up concluding that Google (or Bing or Yahoo) was his inspiration because he did a lot of web searches, or that he was a normal man twisted by SMTP because he used e-mail.
In fact, I thought they actually did that until I realised that RSS.org is about the other RSS, the Indian extreme-right movement, not the popular Internet syndication standard. Harrowell fail. Anyway, it does show up rather nicely that the groups "European nationalists", "Counter-Jihad", and "American Right-Wing" overlap. However, I feel there's something missing in the characterisation of MEMRI and various other sites as just "Think Tanks" as if they were just like, say, IPPR.
Also, an emergent property of the data is that there is an Axis of Barking running vertically through it: the nearer you are to the top of the diagram, the more extreme and crazy. MEMRI, FrontPage, Gates of Vienna, Melanie Phillips are near the top; the Wikipedia article on the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 is at the bottom. And the MSM is somewhere in the middle. (Although I do wonder if they allocated the sources to groups before or after running the force-directed graph.)
It seems to be one of those command the exciting world of social media with just one click! things.
Anyway, upshot. I want to avoid Project Lobster producing a diagram like this one. It's too impressionistic and fluffy and reliant on basically aesthetic reasoning. (I think we've had this point before.) Of course, that's partly the difference between the underlying data sets; it was at least thinkable if unlikely that there would be no grouping in Breivik's sources, while presumably political lobbying is nonrandom and subject to intelligent design.
Elsewhere, a reader passed this along which I need to actually watch (isn't video time consuming?). There's a shindig in Warsaw in late October. And I want this on a T-shirt.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
all is right with the world
Did anyone notice that Liam Fox had an audience of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, or I suppose they of him although you know how these things work around here, some time this spring? It's in the latest MOD meetings disclosure, which runs up to March 2011. MOD is probably the most assiduous department for meetings disclosure - not only do they provide lists up to March, they have yet to randomly change the file format even once, insert random foreign characters, use multiple spellings of the minister's surname, suddenly start publishing PDF files, or indulge in any other quirks. (On the other hand, the Cabinet Office has suddenly developed an addiction to PDFs.)
However, I notice that this meeting doesn't have a date, nor a purpose. It's just there - Liam Fox, Rupert, and Becks. It's possible that this is a quirk, as immediately before it there is a meeting listed with John Witherow of the Sunday Times for a "Defence Briefing" in March 2011 and perhaps they interpolated the duplicate items. (The doctrine of just war, however, does require as well as just cause and reasonable chances of success that the decision be taken by legitimate authority.)
Meanwhile, WhosLobbying.com has a problem with the Home Office, in that if you try to look up the Home Office on their website, the site chokes and returns a 500 internal server error.
I suppose it's understandable. If you want any other shocking document release stories, the Daily Hell has plenty. I especially like the image of Blair in the den, plugging through the borrowed prose of Saif Gaddafi's PhD thesis. Haven't I seen this before somewhere?
However, I notice that this meeting doesn't have a date, nor a purpose. It's just there - Liam Fox, Rupert, and Becks. It's possible that this is a quirk, as immediately before it there is a meeting listed with John Witherow of the Sunday Times for a "Defence Briefing" in March 2011 and perhaps they interpolated the duplicate items. (The doctrine of just war, however, does require as well as just cause and reasonable chances of success that the decision be taken by legitimate authority.)
Meanwhile, WhosLobbying.com has a problem with the Home Office, in that if you try to look up the Home Office on their website, the site chokes and returns a 500 internal server error.
I suppose it's understandable. If you want any other shocking document release stories, the Daily Hell has plenty. I especially like the image of Blair in the den, plugging through the borrowed prose of Saif Gaddafi's PhD thesis. Haven't I seen this before somewhere?
as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipad
China's neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K.
A well-known music critic? Now that's special. You don't get detailed comment on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's seabasing capability from Martin Kettle when he's in one of his SUCK ON MY CULTURE, PROLE moods, or indeed when he's editorialising, do you? Does Brian Sewell take a view on whether the much delayed Maritime Afloat Replenishment Ship project should go down the Dutch/Canadian JSS route, perhaps building on licence from Schelde in the UK, or stick with specialised tanker and dry-replenishment hulls?
It's a pity that this doesn't mean their politics is any more pacific.
For instance, Gao Yi, a well-known music critic, tweeted: "Compared with a war, US$7 billion is much more worthwhile. Right now, we lack the off-shore staging capacity for a mid-intensity war.
A well-known music critic? Now that's special. You don't get detailed comment on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's seabasing capability from Martin Kettle when he's in one of his SUCK ON MY CULTURE, PROLE moods, or indeed when he's editorialising, do you? Does Brian Sewell take a view on whether the much delayed Maritime Afloat Replenishment Ship project should go down the Dutch/Canadian JSS route, perhaps building on licence from Schelde in the UK, or stick with specialised tanker and dry-replenishment hulls?
It's a pity that this doesn't mean their politics is any more pacific.
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