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.

as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipad

China's neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K.

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.

know your spies

A field guide to sinister Middle Eastern spy chiefs.

I am troll, hear me roar!

Is tragic diva SNLI cracking up, ask friends? "Creepy obsession" with blogger raises old rumours about starlet; Max Clifford is holding on line one.

"He's very good with colours", says Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security. "Everyone around here relies on him for style tips before their TV appearances. I'd never have thought of giving my shemagh a light spritz of Crazed Wingnut before going on Rachel Maddow, but it made my performance..."

(In the future, trolls will be considered a strategic resource like oil.)

a genuinely sinister drug

I liked this (via):

Although technically speaking releasing testosterone precursors on the world’s trading floors to try to rally valuations wasn’t criminal as such, the affected traders lobbied to declare it illegal. But governments liked the idea too much, and oxygen masks were forbidden.

(Electronic traders were of course immune, but they knew floor traders would be bullish and that was enough for them to become so, too. Soon there was no need to spend on the chemicals anymore.)

I think it was at last 3GSM I suddenly thought of the possibility of someone inventing a sales drug - a pill that would fill you with energy and induce repetitive behaviour (always be closing, right?), whilst at the same time making you hypersensitive to others' emotions...but completely indifferent to them, and also completely incurious about what you were doing. The street, or the Street, would probably call it Animal Spirit.

And then I jumped under a tram. No. In fact I thought someone should write the book before someone actually invented it, with whatever nightmarish meat-hook consequences that would have. Then I forgot all about it at wheels-up, until now, when the approach of the next 3GSM brought it slithering to mind.

predictions are difficult, except about Martin Kettle

The Grauniad asked 21 of its opinion writers to make predictions for 2009. As a service, and to force Daniel Davies' hand into starting his planned Predictions-L mailing list, I've shorterised each one and reflected briefly on it. The full texts are here.

1) Jackie Ashley thinks the Lib Dems may be powerbrokers in a hung parliament.

Comment: not so much a prediction as a statement that the polls currently look like that. But at least it's based on data.

2) Michael Tomasky thinks e-books will be a major hit, but nobody wants to read 80,000 words cos of wikipedia and google an stuff.

Comment: This is one of those issues that kills forecasters. The dawn of e-books has been repeatedly predicted and repredicted without happening. Tomasky makes the good point that the Amazon Kindle is selling well...but then his New Yorker/smartass kulturpessimismus conwis kicks in and he ends up predicting that e-books will sell hugely but nobody will buy them. Quack, quack, oops.

3) Gary Younge thinks industrial relations in the US will be troubled as the recession takes hold.

Comment: Fair enough.

4) Oh Jesus, here we go. Madeleine Bunting thinks the recession will teach us all a lesson about the Virtues of Thrift.

Comment: Mr Keynes, call your office. More specifically, this is so woolly that it's impossible to think of criteria that would let us determine the success or failure of the prediction. In fact, she explictly backs out of it by suggesting there will be a "confusion of values". Yellow.

5) Peter Preston thinks we will see better satire on TV, and a UK network will recruit John Oliver from the Daily Show.

Comment: Is/Ought confusion - not clear whether Preston thinks this *will* happen or whether he's hoping to encourage it. Hard to define "better", but if better satire on TV does happen there will probably be a degree of consensus that it has happened.

6) George Monbiot thinks some mate of his will have a big success with this fillum they made.

Comment: Well, it'll be either a hit or a turkey. Nobody knows anything (and the kid stays in the picture). It's a prediction, even if the film about climate change is characterised by "a Nigerian fisherwoman who has to wash her catch with Omo"; climate change does not cause oil spills, nor vice versa. Not in Nigeria, at least. I know about that pipeline in Alaska.

7) Polly Toynbee thinks environmental issues will lose salience unless there's a major disaster.

Comment: There's a bit of hedge in how you define "the agenda" here, but it's fair enough. And she's based it on data. Tim Worstall probably already has accused her of hoping for the flooding of New York City, and is now probably guiltily masturbating over her byline photo. And that's a prediction!

8) Jonathan Freedland thinks there could be a hung parliament, and a Lib-Lab coalition, or maybe a Lib-Con coalition. Or it might not happen.

Comment: Coward - three mutually exclusive predictions in one.

9) Simon Jenkins thinks genetic and embryological research will conquer disease. Seriously.

Comment: I am not joking. Perhaps a drop too much of the Old Tory's Arse 76-year old malt this Christmas. But we could treat this as a forecast that there will be at least one major medical achievement in this line in 2009, and that way it is fair enough.

10) John Harris thinks there will or should be a national debate that's something to do with sub-post offices.

Comment: Jesus wept, what a bunch of wank. I remember when he was good; he was especially good mocking the Big Conversation, strange to relate. This sounds like his balls just dropped off. Absolutely no testable claims. FAIL.

11) Jonathan Steele thinks Russian influence will increase in Georgia and the Ukraine. And there will probably be a change of government in Thailand, but it won't matter.

Comment: I was tempted to say Jonathan Steele thinks...whatever the Russians tell him to. Note that back in 2004 he thought the Ukrainian revolution was an evil fascist plot because Yulia Timoshenko made a pile in the gas business. Now she's "a figure to watch in 2009, a controversial and vastly rich entrepreneur who takes a more respectful line towards Moscow". Prediction: Steele will continue to follow the Party line and will continue to be invited on all-expenses trips to Moscow (indispensable pdf). And he's hedging about Thailand like Capability Brown with a Black & Decker and a liberal dose of amphetamine sulphate. However, at least he made a testable prediction.

12) Jenni Russell thinks there may be something wrong with race relations in South Africa.

Comment: No shit, Sherlock.

13) Hugh Muir thinks various European politicians will do something or maybe not, and some UKIP MEPs may be re-elected. Or then again they may not. Who knows?

Comment: Hugh Muir may make a testable prediction he could be held responsible for. Or perhaps he won't.

14) Tim Garton Ash thinks there will be a youth protest wave, driven by graduate unemployment.

Comment: A testable, nonobvious prediction based on a quantitative model. Score one for Agent Romeo.

15) Julian Glover thinks "the age of depoliticised power will come to an end".

Comment: I think he means things like independent central banks. It's not at all clear though. Still, chalk it up; if the ECB gives up monetarism by December, he's right.

16) Libby Brooks thinks "the gardener who knows how to grow their own carrots" will be valued more than a hedge fund manager, and the success of Mamma Mia! is an example of a profound change in our views of status.

Comment: I think there is more than a little contradiction here, and not just because nobody ever liked hedgies anyway. Again, vague puffology about abstract nouns.

17) Seamus Milne thinks the "the neoliberal model is collapsing around our ears, but what is going to replace it is still up for grabs".

Comment: Not a prediction, and unfalsifiable. If you read on, it turns out the old tankie really means "maybe this crisis is the one! world revolution is here!" but he's wily enough to realise everyone will laugh if he says that.

18) Mark Lawson thinks William Golding's books will come back into fashion.

Comment: God, I hope not. But at least it's a prediction.

19) Scraping the barrel. Zoe Williams thinks that the idea of prime-time TV is obsolete, and that TV will be dominated by crowd-pleasing repeats.

Comment: Slightly contradictory. And whingeing about repeats? Radical.

20) Martin Kettle, for it is he, thinks the extreme Right in Europe will win more seats at the European Parliamentary elections. He doesn't think this means a third world war is imminent, but he does not have "high confidence" of this.

Comment: Kettle, Kettle. The boy's so prone, Ron. Trust him to make a fool of himself. I would think anything less than very high confidence that the radical right will not start a world war from Europe would be front-page news, but he actually buries this behind the shattering suggestion that the BNP might pick up an MEP or two.

Of course, that's actually quite unlikely because the method of election favours parties with a small but widespread support base like the Greens, rather than ones with sporadic, concentrated support like the BNP.

21) Marina Hyde thinks the Russian state will continue to take control over more of the Russian economy, but will re-privatise in the future, only to re-expropriate a new set of temporary oligarchs when the next crisis arrives. And the Government will fail to get newly state-owned bank branches to open on Saturday mornings.

Comment: That's actually a very good point. Two very good points, in fact. We have a winner!

why don't you just get a blog?

Ajay takes the cake again. Back in 2007, discussing the Piccadilly bomb plot, he made the important point that the difficult bit in arranging a fuel-air explosion is getting your timing right. You don't want to let the fuel disperse too much, but if you fire it too early there will be too much fuel and not enough air for combustion. So, here we are, from this week's trial.

But the would-be bombers had made a crucial error. The detonators consisted of two mobile phones wired to a light bulb surrounded by match heads. A phone call was supposed to trigger the homemade device igniting the vapours swirling inside the cars. But the mixture of petrol and gas was too thick - police sources say that if the car windows had been opened the bombs could have gone off - but as it was there was not enough oxygen to trigger the devices.

Get a blog, already.

Gilligan's "Ibogaine Frenzy"; Assaults Wrong Man, Screaming Nonsense

It seems that Andrew Gilligan has been stung by the phrase "Bendy Jihad". So much so that he has devoted a whole column to moaning about it, or rather to moaning about anyone having the cheek to disagree with him. It's a pity, then, that he couldn't see his way to attributing his attack correctly, quoting accurately, or refraining from beauties like these:

There's a certain mad nobility in the way Boris's opponents seem determined to strap themselves to the most unpopular causes going. You wonder what's next a support group for double-glazing salesmen? A bid to rehabilitate that misunderstood feminist icon, demonised by the Right-wing media, Rose West?

Do stay classy, Andrew. Anyway, to get to the point: Tom Barry is not responsible for the phrase "Bendy Jihad"; it was me. I invented the phrase to express the bizarrely gratuitous nature of the campaign against these peaceable giants of the urban savannahs; is it really a top priority, after all, to replace some brand-new buses with other brand-new buses which have had some glassfibre curlicues added?

And it is gratuitous. We know now that they do not kill cyclists. Not one authenticated case of a Bendy attacking cyclists has been provided. No evidence for any of the other horrors they supposedly inflict on the public has been adduced whatsoever. But rather as so many Conservatives are indiscriminately in favour of killing small animals, the Bendy Jihad rolls on, despite the fact that the contracts between Transport for London and the bus operators mean that come what way, 50 bendies will still be in operation at the next mayoral election, despite the fact that some of the routes involved are impassable to double-deckers because they go through the Strand underpass, despite the fact Boris Johnson forgot all about paying for the extra drivers and conductors required for 24-hour operation...clearly, the role of the Bendy Jihad is not instrumental, but symbolic. Rather than fighting for a secular triumph in which the Caliphate of a better transport system is actually achieved, the Bendy Jihadis hope to prove themselves worthy of their place in paradise (also known as the House of Commons) by their sacrifice.

However, their religion is actually considerably less advanced than Islam in anthropological terms. Rather than propitiating god by good works or asceticism, they are still at the stage of making sacrificial offerings of dead animals; in this case, these savages intend to stage a mass cull of defenceless bendies. Perhaps they will build a giant pyre and dance round it, or burn Peter Hendy in a wicker man atop City Hall. It's potlatch politics; they're doing it purely because they can. Politically, it's an appeal to the primitive instincts; watch us smash their big, long, red totem!

I suspect the authors of the Bendy Jihad are well aware of this; it's hard to remember this now, but it wasn't that long ago that the main strategic problem facing the Conservative Party was how to win an election in a climate of prosperous housing-boom contentment, without risking any of their core ideological substance. The answer, of course, is to pick an aesthetic and push it as far as you can.

Now, Gilligan claims that "one tireless Johnson-basher, Tom Barry, explains how the Mayor's opposition to bendy buses is actually part of a sinister, global neo-conservative conspiracy". Unfortunately, he's got this the wrong way round. The opposition to bendy buses is actually a conspiracy which consists of sinister global neo-conservatives.

For example, we have Policy Exchange's founder Michael Gove, shadow Schools Secretary. Mr. Gove is on record as recommending the pseudonymous "Bat Ye'or"'s book Eurabia, in which you can learn that the European Union is secretly controlled by Arabs. (There are pills you can take for that, I think.) We have its recent director Anthony Browne, the toast of US extreme-rightist group VDARE, who apparently thinks we are "on the edge of anarchy" because of the not-ricin not-plot, now Boris Johnson's policy chief. We have the truly odd figure of Policy Exchange research director Dean Godson - advocate of "political warfare", former special assistant to John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy (that's the US Navy, and he's now the head of John McCain's transition team), and shaky-on-facts thinktanker. Why am I bothering with this obscure thinktank?

Because, of course, not only did Boris Johnson staff up from it, but it published a paper back in 2005 which specifically proposed the Bendy Jihad in the following terms:

One of the remarkable things about the debate over the Routemaster – London’s much loved hop-on, hop-off double deckers complete with conductor – is that it is about much more than just a bus. It is highly revealing about so many aspects of public policy in Britain today. The first is the rising tide of the group rights agenda (or at least a particularly extreme interpretation of it) which has overwhelmed key public utilities and those who do business with them.

That's Godson. "The group rights agenda", no less. Here's some more:

The Routemaster’s crime, in short, is not that it is ineffective; it is that it is unfashionable. It does not fit with the modern, sleek, concrete-and-glass Euro-city that Mr Livingstone wants to create; never mind that this city exists only inside the Mayor’s head.

It's always the EU in the end with these people, isn't it? You'd think that Andrew Gilligan might have been aware of this document's essentially partisan and political nature; after all, he wrote that last bit and Godson edited it.

What a bunch, and how bizarre that they all share a deep interest in buses despite having never been at all interested in transport policy before. I suppose their nonsense is explicable by the Dunning-Kruger effect - the principle, experimentally demonstrated, that incompetent people are not only unaware of their incompetence but convinced that others are even more incompetent than they.

Anyway, this is all very interesting, but it's just a pity that Tom Barry didn't actually say it, just like he didn't invent the Bendy Jihad. The two halves of the quote, each side of the oh-so-convenient ellipsis, come from two distinct pieces of writing, welded together like the halves of a dodgy secondhand car and with much the same purpose. Tom Barry says in the first one that there is a curious overlap between the Bendy Jihad and a neo-conservative worldview, quoting me. I think we've amply demonstrated that. He says in the second that the Boris Johnson campaign was motivated by Tory hatred of Ken Livingstone for cosying-up to the "new economic superpowers". That's an opinion, on a whole range of stuff that has bugger-all to do with bendies.

Comment is free, facts are sacred. Remember? Much more of this and I might conclude Alistair Campbell was right. Which would be a considerable stretch for me. But then, they say you should never meet your heroes. Especially not when they get caught sockpuppeting.

the crucial cannibal vote

I grinned at this comment at the Stiftung:

“Joan Walsh, are you telling me, really telling me here, now, on TV, that because Charlie Black worked with this Savimbi guy, this so-called Reagan ‘freedom fighter’ in Africa who is alleged to have been a cannibal, are you really telling me that this means Team McCain eats people???? Are you making that allegation here tonite ?! I am asking you directly. That Team McCain are cannibals. Is this guilt by association? Yes or no !!”

Joan Walsh: “Chris, no one wants to do that. Not at all. We are just saying that this relationship between Savimbi and the McCain campaign needs to be investigated. We need all the facts. What exactly was the relationship with this notorious Savimbi character. There is a lot there that should concern the American people. We need to know it all so the American people can decide.”

Well, ha ha. But then it happened. Via Making Light, this brainblitzing turdspurt:

Bree Keyton told the tribal "Christians" you are NOT Christian if you practice "tribalism" where they do voodoo to conjure up a goddess spirit or a "genie" and then come to church on Sunday to worship Jesus! What she discovered there is apparent in most churches around the world; namely, mixture in the church. Some renounced their devilish practices of blood covenant by killing sheep, goats, humans to be inducted into the tribe or to get a wife or to get revenge.

She said the current president of Kenya is a Christian. However, Obama's cousin Odinga ran aganist him and said he rigged the election and stirred up the masses to rape woman and boys, kill and burn and torture Christians, etc. until Obama contacted Condeleeza Rice and she granted Obama the right to contact Odinga and other ruling elders and he "convinced" them to stop terrorizing the Christians. Bree Keyton said the current Christian President was forced by our government (!) to "create" an office for Odinga (to make "peace") so he was made the Prime Minister (!) to make peace between the Christians and Odinga's Muslim religion!

Long pig; it's this year's Ibogaine. Relatedly, I was just reading back over some of the Pierre Falcone posts, and it struck me that McCain's public image has come a long way since I blithely remarked that Falcone had been a fool to offer him money. True, I was thinking of relative rather than absolute integrity - I said Falcone should have offered Tom DeLay the cash, and got a far better deal in terms of value for his bribe dollar.

Perhaps McCain should try a different West African warlord; Charles Taylor knew a good campaign slogan when he saw one. He could help him mend fences with the crucial evangelical vote, thanks to his links to Pat Robertson. And eating UN personnel would probably go down well with the base.

From the pony to the spherical cow

Whilst we're at it; watch Tim Worstall claim that the banks don't have any mortgage-backed securities on their books. Indeed, Tim, if you were right there would be no reason to nationalise them; but then, we wouldn't be in this mess. As Molotov said to Ribbentrop, so if the British are finished, why are we in this bunker and whose are those planes?

It's always a laugh waiting for the talking points caches to sync with the authoritative nonsense server.

HOWTO: remove giant statue of Sir Fred Goodwin

think I've said before that I find public sector accounts incredibly weird. Here's a great example; it's a very good FT story on the bank nationalisation plan and how it affects the national finances. Bizarrely, the £25-50bn of government bond issuance required to raise the money probably won't count towards the public sector net cash requirement (what used to be the PSBR in John Major's days of sound finance...not!); it's a "financial transaction" and these are excluded.

Well, that makes a weird sort of sense; the liability on one side is matched by an asset (the stake in the banks) on the other, the net change in the government's cash position is zero (at first, but even later, any dividend paid on the preferred stock would at least balance the interest payments). The next bit, however, gets really strange; although it's not counted as new public borrowing, it is counted in the figure for the national debt. It's debt, right? Yes, but if the government was anything else but the government, the increased debt would be matched on its balance sheet by the stash of bank shares. It being the government, however, it's not.

Now, it gets really counterintuitive when it comes to the really big money - the £250bn guarantee for wholesale bank lending. Apparently, if the Government (as suggested) charges the banks a significant fee for the guarantee, this will force it to take the full wad on its books as a liability of the public sector. (Even though most of any transactions among the eight participating banks will add up to zero; if Lloyds lends Barclays £1bn and Barclays lends HBOS £1bn, and Barclays then goes bust, the state guarantee would only come into it if Lloyds and HBOS couldn't agree to settle the transaction between themselves.) If the Government offers the guarantee free of charge, however, the rules on public sector contingent liabilities mean they can keep it off the books. Yes, you heard that correctly; it's in some sense financially better for the state not to receive quite a lot of money.

Anyway, in these weird times, let me propose a weird solution. The Government has promised to put manners on the banks in return for the £50bn, pressing for executive pay restraint and measures to help small businesses. Some people are concerned that they won't be able to make this stick because preference shares don't come with a vote. I disagree; whatever the formal terms, anyone who fronts up as much as half of RBS's capital base is going to have several billion votes, and indeed it looks like the CEO is going to be sacked as a condition of the deal. It's a question of political will.

EDINBURGH, October 12th: Crowds cheered as the giant statue of Sir Fred Goodwin was torn from its perch by a Royal Engineers' armoured tractor. As the news spread this morning, a mob gathered around the base of the monument, unavailingly beating it with sledgehammers and dragging at it with ropes. Eventually, Sergeant Mick Kelly's Chieftain AVRE arrived. After a few minutes, its engine roaring, the huge vehicle succeeded where they had failed and the dictator's figure crashed into the dust. In a sinister orgasm of rage and contempt, the mob beat it with their shoes, spitting and jeering as the ruin was towed through the streets....

Like I said, it's a matter of political will.

However, it will be much easier to hold the Government's feet to the fire about this if they do have formal rights to intervene, as well as safer, as unwinding the stakes in a hurry in order to punish a recalcitrant bank wouldn't be easy. One option is to buy ordinary shares as well as the new preference ones, and have the Treasury Shareholder Executive manage them; the numbers involved would put the Government in a position to insist on a seat on the board and extensive influence over management. However, this would be riskier, as ordinary shares don't have the charge over cashflow the preferred kind do, and it would also spook the market even more, as issuing the new shares would dilute the existing shareholders.

It would also be affected by weird public accounting, as this would make the banks into public-sector entities and therefore bring them on the Treasury's books; in which case, only their liquid assets would be counted against their debts and the national debt would therefore reach unheard-of proportions.

But there's another option. For many years after privatisation, the Government held so-called "golden shares" in a range of ex-nationalised industries considered to be strategically important. For example, that in Rolls-Royce gave the Government a veto over changes of ownership and the right to reserve the top management positions to British citizens. Some of them were abandoned in the early 2000s at the request of the European Commission; notably those in BAA plc. Now, these shares were legally structured as "special preference shares", and the Office for National Statistics didn't consider them to be sufficient state control to put BAE, RR, National Grid plc, BAA and the rest on the books - but they certainly granted the Government special rights over these companies. In fact, they still do at BAE Systems and Rolls.

Update: Oh well, here comes the shock and awe. Sod golden shares, preference shares, whatever - it looks like we're in for the whole hog, 75% of RBS's market cap, voting stock, Government directors, sack the board, don't open the London Stock Exchange...fuck, did they just say that? Looks like the opening of the books must have been quite a dramatic event.

tomorrow's public inquiry today

Is anyone else disturbed by the fact Ed Balls appears to have been replaced by Chris Dillow?

Ed Balls, the schools secretary and only member of the Co-operative party in the cabinet, will today propose that 100 schools over the next two years become co-operative trust schools owned and controlled by the local community. He will tell the annual conference of Labour's sister party that he is putting up an extra £500,000 so trust schools have extra financial help to become co-operatives. The move comes as Michael Stephenson, the new general secretary of the Co-operative party and a former political officer at Downing Street, claims co-ops could be on the brink of a revival in Britain. "Co-ops are an idea whose time has come back."

He is looking at how to persuade Labour to bring the co-operative model into railways, schools, housing and other public services, arguing that Labour, searching for new ideas, can find intellectual renewal in those behind co-operatives. The Co-operative party has already succeeded in persuading Network Rail to review its governance structures to see how it can make rail users part of its board.

The actual policy is fairly milksopful, but still; it can hardly blow up too badly. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown announced an insulation push, but for some reason, not an air-source heat pump in sight. It's been badly received; there could be more, although that's hardly an insight, but I'm not impressed by Tony Woodley trying to make "lag the loft" a smear analogous to McCain's tyre gauges.

If this is officially policy amateur hour, I'd point out that my own pet scheme on this issue deals with the problem of what if this winter's really bad and WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN CODGERS? rather well. To recap, I propose to fund it out of the existing bill for fuel subsidies capitalised over several years, and make it subject to individual choice, and voluntary-but-automatic. Those who don't want to or can't take advantage of it can just continue to receive cash. Full implementation of it would eventually reach one-third of UK households, and the bill is £1.98bn, all of which is existing spending. So we could chuck in the £910m from the gas pushers to fund an extra payment for the opters out.

Oh yes, and there's this. I'm beginning to picture some sort of awful inquiry commission wanting to know just what I was thinking, and how I can claim I didn't know cooperatively-owned prefabricated guerrilla hospitals linked to some sort of leftwing cross of Facebook and CVSTrac were going to grow to enormous size and attack our cities.

Towards an Empirical Determination of Sampling Error in Iain Dale's Survey

At number 7 in Total Politics' Top 100 Left-Wing Blogs: "Alternate Seat of YTR". That's apparently me.

At number 100 in Total Politics' Top 100 Left-Wing Blogs: "The Yorkshire Ranter". That's also me. I thought personality went a long way, but it looks like looks have quite an impact. Or maybe it's Don Blaney who puts these things together?

Yes, I'll get around to moving the whole thing over into the new look'n'feel, in my own facilities...as soon as I get round to it, program something to map all the individual permalinks on the two systems together, etc. It's as much fun as Virgin Media's billing department in here. But did nobody over at MessageSpace/YouGov/WebCameron/Teh E-Conservative Movement notice that I'm not just a member of the Liberal Democrats, but a candidate for election several times over?

The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)

I'm about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it's a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I've made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy is not sensible, except perhaps as temporary relief of the symptoms. Instead, I suggested, why don't we pay them to insulate, or to install £1,895 air-source heat pumps, and get rid of the problem; after all, we subsidise the rich to do these things to their property. And I suggested that, if we're too stingy or the government is short of cash, we could use the money now paid out as winter fuel payments.

Terrifyingly, there's a chance someone might pick up on the idea - because it turns out they've got one like it in exciting America. Surely it's got to be good. The Californian municipality in question is offering loans to carry out energy-saving improvements, to be paid back through property tax. I'm not quite sure how it works, although here are more details; but it seems to be restricted to homeowners, and I'm far from sure if the repayments are additional to the property tax you'd already pay or not.

My brilliant scheme has the distinction that, rather than the user repaying it, it's repaid from the benefits they would otherwise claim. In a sense, it capitalises the stream of WFP cheques over ten years. Government gets to save on the benefit payments over and above the amortisation period of the heat pumps or insulation; the recipient gets to save hugely on heating; and society saves three to four units of energy from gas for every unit of electricity the heat pump uses. (The technology is wonderful.) And it hits the cheapest way of saving bulk CO2.

Here are some numbers. The two main groups of WFP recipients get £200 and £300 respectively; this is currently planned to go up quite sharply. (Another reason for my brilliant scheme is that tying bits of the government budget to prices that might rise without apparent bounds is stupid.) To be conservative, and also because I could have tried harder, here are some data from 2006. £1.98bn was spent. Elsewhere, it looks like 11,407,000 individuals received money, but the relevant number is a number of buildings not people. It seems 8 million households received WFP, which is a fair enough proxy. That gives us an annual payout per premises of £247.50; with a full-heating ASHP at £1,895, that's a bit over seven and a half years to pay it off.

We've already got a list of recipients, and we write to them every autumn. Obviously there are people who don't want to be bothered, and probably they are right, so we'll give them the choice of fuel payments or [whatever silly name our friendly local special advisor comes up with]. Given the usual take-up rate for optional benefits, I'd reckon the pressure every year should be manageable enough; but if we felt militant enough we could make it voluntary-but-automatic.

One question I'd raise against myself is why this pensioner obsession. Don't a lot of them own their homes? What about children? Well, for some reason they are the only group in our society we find it necessary to give special help with their energy requirements. Minister, I am a mere technocrat. I don't bother my head with these things...but you might want to look at the numbers for some of the in-work benefit schemes.

People say to me just be yourself, it makes no sense to follow fashion. How could I be anybody else?

Ackerman reckons we should be impressed that he suggested a Turkish-Kurdish rapprochement two years ago. The evidence for the rapprochement is pretty good - there are meetings going on between the KRG and the Turks, under the chairmanship of (Kurdish) Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, about issues connected with all the business Turkish companies are doing in Kurdistan. But who cares about that, when there's blogger one-upmanship at stake?

It's the 24th of July, 2005, and this is on the front of TYR: The Turks Are Coming! Maybe

If I was a Turkish spook, I wouldn't be planning to attack the Kurds. I'd arm them, trade with them, finance them, and sleep soundly knowing I had one of the most bitter bunches of mountain killers in the world between me and the chaos in Iraq. And I'd still have the menace of invading them available. Just one thing: do not declare a sovereign state - yes, be one, but don't say it. I wouldn't want to be shot by my own side.

Hey, that's two whole days after Jean Charles de Menezes was offed by Ian "Therapy Cat is Concerned" Blair. Well, the Turks eventually blew their stack and invaded, achieving nothing and wasting their deterrent credibility. Now they are getting serious. You read about it here first. And remember, one day Kurdistan will apply to join the EU.

Speaking of predictions - look at this. Via Brian Ulrich, Turkey is playing a key role in negotiations between Syria and Israel, by offering the Israelis a side-payment....in water. Yes, just like this old school January 2004 post on TYR. There's a huge opportunity for an EU-like technocratic settlement there, y'know.

Where did I get the title?

Chance

Where else but Northern Ireland would the government form a Consultative Group on the Past?

In other news, the Kevin Myers review has achieved the rare distinction of links from ahem, reactionary ballbag hack Tim Worstall and Ken MacLeod, who reckons Al Gore would so have staffed-up from AEI and Patrick Henry College in order to fight for the Unitary Executive, going by his last book. (Worstall, meanwhile, having spent years arguing that climate change isn't happening cos of the 1940s pause, is now arguing that its nonexistence means climate change doesn't exist either. I am not joking.)

I'm not sure if this is universal acclaim or just a case of the fundamental unity of extremism. In other housekeeping, someone on a Verizon FIOS link in Syracuse, New York wants to know what hhappens when kerosene is spilt on a kitten.

Update: Shorter Worstall - I'm a lady! libertarian...

The Only Way To Defeat This Is To Surrender

This should be the biggest story in the UK; you know the Government just explicitly took powers to give the congestion charge ANPR camera data to the Americans, or actually any other state outside the European Economic Area? And what does Boris Johnson plan to do about that?

I can't help but think, however, that this is a great opportunity for the creative utilisation of this - via Schneier, why not get a personalised registration incorporating an SQL injection attack? You probably can't do this in the UK, however crafty you are with where you put the bolts. (They don't make a bolt shaped like the bottom half of a semicolon, after all.)

But a T-shirt with the following message:;INSERT INTO watchlist (pnrs) VALUES 'ADDINGTON/DMR';COMMIT TRANSACTION That would be cool. One of the nice things about QR codes, of course, is you can do these things graphically. Look into my eyes...



More seriously, this is one of the many things that worry me; the reason why I'm so keen on a carbon tax is that it's an option that doesn't involve creating a vast mass-surveillance system as collateral damage.

Donal Blaney: Hypocrite, Political Whore, and Torture Fan

Blaney:

Donal Blaney said...

I do not bandy the term "nazi" or "racist" about in the same way the left do.
2:05 PM

Blaney:

This is how the Nazi traffic wardens of London behave when they see a nice car that they decide they want to tow.

Blaney:

First, a confession. I was appointed a house prefect at school and I handed out a record 400 punishments over 14 months for a variety of offences, most of them trivial. In doing so, I recognise that in many instances I abused my power.

Blaney:

Now we know where the thousands of extra police are being deployed - on low level "crime" rather than preventing and investigating violent crimes and burglaries that are what we're all most worried about.

Blaney:

Where do I accuse anyone of plotting to suppress an accusation of paedophilia? What drugs are you on to have written such nonsense?

Blaney:

Secondly, a Labour council candidate was arrested last week on suspicion of child porn offences. Needless to say, had he been a Tory it would have been the lead story on the BBC and in the national press.

Blaney:

Thatcher would use nuclear. She wouldn't want us dependent on foreign gas and oil in today's world. It is the one area, apart from cuisine and gun rights, where the French are better than us.

How many nuclear power stations did she build, Don?

Blaney:

Cut Petrol Tax, You Greedy Sods

Are you against the market, Don?

Blaney:

Amnesty International once again show their true political colours in a campaign ad against the practice of waterboarding. This sanctimonious clique of naive peaceniks and leftist fellow travellers want us to fight the evil psychopaths who indiscriminately kill innocent men, women and children of all colours, creeds and religions with one arm tied behind our backs.

Blaney:

Hectoring and abrasive, Humphrys has become a parody of himself. In the same way that Jeremy Paxman's sneer seems to have become more exaggerated as the years go by, so it is with Humphrys' aggressiveness.

Hectoring and aggressive, eh?

Blaney:

I obviously agree that torture is not the answer.

I think I draw the line at permanent physical harm to the prisoner. Humiliation or psychological interrogation techniques are, in my view, not a problem - but we're all entitled to a different view. Waterboarding doesn't do the prisoner any permanent physical harm although he may be reluctant to shower or use a flannel again in the future when/if he is freed.

I am aware that the CIA has in the past used a creative interview technique which involved blind-folding a suspect, placing him into a helicopter and for the helicopter to lift a foot or two off the ground. If the prisoner didn't answer questions, he was told he faced being pushed out of the helicopter from (as he was told) hundreds of feet up. This too concentrated the mind.

(Note that he therefore goes against the British Army's doctrine on human intelligence collection and sides with, ah, the Gestapo. Are you against the troops, Don?)

Feel free to add any more Dons you find interesting in the comments. Unfortunately Don's forgotten how to use the moderation function, or something.

You're fit, but don't you just know it...

Time for some rugby league blogging, right? I saw London knock Castleford out of the cup on Saturday, and I can report that I'm beginning to think London (sorry, sorry, Harlequins RL) are getting to be dangerous. Cas dominated the first half and went in 12-0 up, but ended up with a 42-14 thrashing. They were, as it happens, missing their star loose forward Jon Westerman, who I was looking forward to seeing, but I doubt he'd have changed anything. When a team just gets run over like that, individuals don't matter much.

What does matter is that London are ferociously fit this year; Brian McDermott has really prepared a side almost as tough as he is (hey, he's been a Royal Marine Commando, a prizefighter, a British Lion, and a Yorkshire Dales hill farmer; enough macho to kill a normal man). And they are making a strategy of it; every time I've seen them recently, they've soaked up the pressure in the first half and then unexpectedly cranked up the speed after the break, which is a killer if you haven't either got the stamina to match it or a 20 point lead. It's an old Wigan trick from the 90s; it's probably as old as the game.

However, I would like to say that whoever introduced those inflatable sticks you whack together to generate noise deserves everything they get. It's not just the volume, it's the odd piercing quality of the sound; I can happily put up with RL terrace fixtures like the old dear driven by a truly disturbing blood lust, but this is new. Perhaps that's what pushed the youth-team guy who picked a vicious brawl in the club bar after the match, incidentally hurling his target at my girlfriend, over the edge. (He also saw his way to trampling on a Cas shirt and assaulting someone who looked to be his father, so who knows.)

The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages On

This NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces' deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or other, because of the Human Rights Act. The details are opportunely left open; the usual formation of the story makes only two testable claims, one of which is that landing a captured pirate in Somalia would likely be illegal because the local authorities might cut their head off, and the other being that the pirate might claim political asylum aboard ship.

What the story does not actually say is why this would stop anyone from detaining pirates, or for that matter why the same doesn't go for the French. After all, as a State party to the European Convention on Human Rights, France has the same legal obligations. Now, the first claim is obviously true in the sense that yes, Virginia, Somalia is a nasty failed state run by a mix of more-or-less Islamist warlords and Ethiopian army officers. Handing someone over to this lot for trial might well be illegal. But has nobody else noticed that it would also be intensely, profoundly stupid?

Who on earth would want to return captured pirates to the state, or rather un-state, that permitted them to operate openly from their territory? Even if the Somali authority they were returned to actually wanted to try them, you've got to assume there's a significant chance of them getting away. In fact, the French mission gives us all the information we need; the pirates collected the ransom, went ashore, and seem to have planned just to drive off with it, which doesn't inspire confidence in local law enforcement.

Further, there is no legal reason whatsoever to give pirates captured off Somalia to the Somali police. Pirates have a special status in international law they share with slavers, torturers and those responsible for genocide; they are hostes humanae generis, enemies of all humanity, which in practice means that any state that can catch them has effective jurisdiction in the case. Once the pirates are caught, there is absolutely no reason not to take them to a proper court back in London, or wherever. That given, why should we need to even think about handing them over to a jurisdiction where they might escape, be tortured, or be put to death?

The second testable claim is that a captured pirate might claim political asylum. This is true. A longstanding principle of the law of the sea is that of exclusive flag state jurisdiction, which means that a warship of state A is for all intents and purposes part of A's national territory. The principle holds in a weaker form for merchant vessels. Americans really ought to be conscious of this, because they fought a war against Britain in part over the principle.

Now, a story. When I took my MSc in 2003-2004, my International Law course was taught by Commander Steven Haines, who had just resigned from his post as a senior legal adviser to the Royal Navy, round about the same time Elizabeth Wilmshurst walked out of her similar post at the Foreign Office. In fact, I heard Wilmshurst's name for the first time from him. He didn't give his reasons, but do I need to draw you a fucking diagram? (He's also the only person I know who ever had control of a nuclear weapon. Cool, eh? Pity he took so bloody long to mark essays.)

Haines took part in the 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone, where he was involved in the decision as to what to do with limb-choppin' war criminal Foday Sankoh after his capture. The military were keen to fly him straight out to Illustrious, as he's not known for being a great swimmer and would be very unlikely to escape; Haines opposed the idea on the grounds that he might claim political asylum, which would have been politically more than problematic. Instead he was confined at the airport and then in the Freetown police station with a guard reinforced with British troops, but later cheated the courts by dying before he could be brought to trial.

So the problem is not new, but it's not like it helped Sankoh any. And there is no reason why some one can't spend their political asylum in prison; it doesn't confer immunity for one's crimes, and piracy is a crime. (That is both bathetically and pathetically obvious, but there is an important point here which we'll come back to.)

To recap: yes, it would be illegal to hand over a pirate to Somali warlords for trial. No, this does not constrain anyone in catching pirates, because anyone who can catch them can try them. And frankly, not handing prisoners to the Somali "government" is a feature, not a bug. Yes, you can claim asylum aboard a foreign warship; no, this is no deal-breaker.

So what did those thrillingly tough and macho Frenchmen do with their six captured buccaneers? They, after all, aren't letting themselves have their national essence sapped by do-gooding lawyers and bickering parliamentarians' quibbles, right? Up to the yard-arm? Walk the plank? Hand them to the fun-loving fellas from Ethiopian Military Intelligence? Er, no.

Six pirates sont transférés à bord de la frégate Jean Bart et ils seront remis à la justice pour être jugés en France.

So yes, the six pirates were brought aboard the Jean Bart and will be tried in France.

Far too many people who should know better have swallowed this transparent bollocks at face value, or indeed, at a considerable premium. For example: here's Information Dissemination getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muqawama getting it wrong. Here's Abu Muq getting it wrong again after initial treatment. I don't have the stomach to look into the fever swamp.

So why, do you think, is this story being pushed so hard? The ur-text is this Times article, which consists of pure assertion - there is no information in there implying the central claim, that the RN has been ordered not to detain pirates - and a quote from swivel-eyed Tory Julian Brazer MP apparently reacting to the Times reporter. Repeat it a few times, and voila; new facts.

But who, pray, is keen on demonising the very idea of law as a constraint on state action? Try this comment at AM:

Ultimately the very notion of law itself may be bought into disrepute. As it is already in the ranks of the American forces.

See? It's those bastard lawyers who MADE us torture them. Indeed it was; just not the same ones. This kind of embrace of raison d'etat has something of the power of all the ideas of a liberation from freedom about it.

By the way: as well as the Reuters report, Liberation has photos and commentary from the guy who runs Secret Defense.

Update: I'd forgotten that the original Captain Kidd was commissioned by the Navy to hunt down other pirates. He was a countergang that went wrong. Now there's a far better lesson for you.