Murdoch most foul, but AC John Yates sees no evil

Murdoch's News of the World phone hacking story is playing all around the world (except on Murdoch owned outlets). That's what happens if you run an international news corporation.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates would like to close the file on illegal phone-tapping by Rupert Murdoch's lackeys. At the same time three inquiries are underway, and the tappees are consulting their lawyers. What is the betting that the files held by the Met will accidentally get shredded by a careless secretary?

Clearly, Rupert Murdoch (whose News Group has paid out £1million to three persons unknown on condition that they keep schtum) has a friendly relationship with John Yates, or will have, after this decision.

Maybe Murdoch's News International is too big to jail, in Yates' view.

Bankers, politicians, now newspapers and possibly the Met: all masters, all found indulging in dodgy activity of one kind or another. The bigger they come, the harder they fall, one and all. Like the Iranian regime, they are all engaged in a desperate pretence that the world can continue with Business as Usual. It cannot. We will see radical reform of our power structures in coming months and years.

Dumbed down

Maybe the pen
was mightier than the sword, but guns

and bombs have made
all voices weak.

Without a word
we gave away our power

to oily characters
who commandeered the shop

rather than queue in line
until the last few acid drops are handed out.

© Richard Lawson
2006

Afghanistan War: Is it worth it? What is the way out?

Seven British soldiers killed in seven days.
Seven families plunged into the agonised tunnel of grief. 176 families over the last 8 years. Thousands of Britons affected. Thousands of Afghan lives lost, many innocent civilians. Hundreds of Afghans plunged into grief and despair. Mutilation, pain, disability, anger, resentment, madness.

Millions of minds in Britain that entertain a wispy subconscious thought:

"What is it all for? Is it ever worth it?"

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth is ready with his answer : "...the conflict in Afghanistan would be hard and dangerous...Let us be under no illusion. The situation in Afghanistan is serious, and not yet decided. The way forward is hard and dangerous. More lives will be lost and our resolve will be tested...No single or simple solution will work. [is he thinking of the proposal to medicalise the poppy crop here??]...Success will be achieved incrementally. Step by step and over time, the Afghans themselves will take full responsibility for their own security and their own governance... If we are to succeed, we will need both the courage and the patience to see it through. There is no defined end date – only an end state....if Nato forces left now, the Taliban will take control and al-Qaida will return...We must stay and finish the job. There is a long way to go, but we are getting there".

The old BST in other words. Blood, Sweat and Tears.

But Bob Ainsworth ain't no Churchill, and Afghanistan ain't the white cliffs of Dover exactly either. Bob has to build a cognitive bridge to remind the Man on the Clapham Omnibus that Al-Quaeda lives in Afghanistan (and Pakistan too of course) and would Come and Get Us if our troops weren't there not looking for him.

Man on the Clapham Omnibus: "Afghanistan was where what's his name used to live, Goldfinger, no not him, the name will come to me in a minute, hang about, in those Tora Bora caves. Did it have to do with Pearl Harbour, no, that was before, it was 9/11 wasn't it, that's why we are there. When the Towers got hit. Bin Laden, that's the one. Our lads are out there to catch Bin...no, he lives at the other end of the country. No, our lads are out there to stop the Taleban because they hate our Parliamentary Democracy, and might come over here and and abuse our lovely MPs. They're out there to defend our banks from a takeover by Islamic banks because Islamic banks are intrinsically more stable. Oh I give up. Why are they there?"

Bob Ainsworth: (paraphrasing here - RL) They are there, dear voter, in order to set up a stable, non-corrupt, efficient and democratic Afghan state, one that will keep terrorists fully in check. Which means defeating the Taliban, because they would give refuge to Al-Qaeda. Defeating the Taleban is difficult, because they make a lot of money by selling opium that ends up in the arms of our young people like that pale and thin young man nodding off in the seat behind you. The poppy farmers depend on the Taleban to buy their crop so they do not co-operate with our troops. We cannot just rip up the crop because that would infuriate the people who depend on it for a livelihood.

Man on the Clapham Omnibus: (Who has suddenly begun to take an interest) So why do you not buy the poppy off the farmers? Then the Taleban have no support from the people. The farmers would be eager to help you when you are their customer. The financial and social carpet is pulled out from under the Taleban. The beauty of it is, you could turn the opium into medicine for people in the Third World, you know.

Bob Ainsworth: No single or simple solution will work.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: C'mon Bob, you can do better than that.
Bob Ainsworth: Some of the stuff we buy might end up on the black market.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: It's all going there now. Eejit.
Bob Ainsworth: The Afghan Government has no control over the area.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: It would have if it was running a marketing operation.
Bob Ainsworth: No single or simple solution will work.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: Are you that one who put in for a Duck House?

Only it's not funny. People are dying over there, and they do not need to be dying. Not just dying from poor kit: dying because of piss-poor policy too. The British Army knows that to win over an insurgency, you have to win hearts and minds. Legalising the poppy crop is definitely the way to go. It is not just this blog saying this, it is the European Green Party, it has been agreed by the European Parliament, and several NGOs including the Red Cross agree it is the way to go.

There must be a few soldiers out there who would agree that we should buy the opium crop.

More on this

Drug Rehabilitation Service Blocks New Avenues of Cure

Consider the hypothetical case of a general practitioner who is also a psychiatrist with three decades of experience had been using a simple, brief psychotherapeutic tool that was safe and effective in removing the emotional charge from patients' memories of past abuse.

In his or her work as a locum GP s/he meets a person who is in a drug rehabilitation centre and finds that a large section of drug and alcohol abusers, the patient has a history of emotional physical or sexual abuse which would respond to the use of this specific approach. The GP teaches the patient a mental exercise to practice five minutes a day for two weeks, and needs to meet up in order to complete the process. The GP liaises with the rehab centre, offering to come in free of charge to do the work, in the hope that this case will demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, so that it can be added to the array of help offered to their clients.

You would think that drug rehabilitation services, faced with one of the most challenging problems caring services face, and given that success rates in drug rehabilitation, although not measured, are not amazingly high, would be open to looking at what is involved and how effective and safe it is? Wouldn't you?

You would be wrong. The offer would be turned down by a management decision by the "funders", although there were no funding implications.

You would also tend to imagine that if the GP wrote to the local mental health authority and the prisons, offering to make a presentation about this brief and effective approach, that they would answer the letters sent, wouldn't you?

Wrong again.

The management of health services will have "naught but that which is hammered out on their own anvil", as it says in the intro to the King James Bible*

Doctors are continually criticised for offering only a drug based approach to mental problems, but when they try to use sychotherapeutic, talk based approaches, they are blocked.

Ah well. La lutte continua.

*this should not be taken to imply that the writer is in any way religious.

Should Public Services be cut?

Thanks to the frothing at the mouth madness of the bonus-crazed profit seekers in the private financial corporations we have a massive national debt standing at 47% of NDP. Great. So Govt needs to rein make means massive public spending cuts. Tories and Labour have been having a pseudo-debate about how much each is and isn't going to cut. Also great.

So public sector pay is to be frozen. Private sector jobs have been lost in the recession. Should public sector pay rises and jobs therefore go too? Is this fair? Or are public sector jobs underpaid anyway in comparison with the private sector? Polly Toynbee thinks they are.

So we go looking for some facts, and find some on the site of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). It was the nearest I could get, but dates back to 2005. Probably as good as it gets, because it takes a couple of years to process the data.

First, 1998-2005 the number of people employed in the public sector (PubSec) rose by 11% and those in the private sector (PrivSec) by 4%. Some of this is acounted for by a phase of the cycle - public jobs tend to lag behing private, then catch up. This was the catch up cycle.

Since the late 1990's earnings in PubSec rose by 4.5%, PrivSec by 4%. Not much of a difference.

PubSec wage bill took 37.2% of National Income in 1999, rising to 42% in 2006/7 - the product of more numbers and more wages.

In 2004 the average PubSec workers earned £27.6 per week less than PrivSec.
However, the median PubSec workers earned £12 per week more than PrivSec.

This difference is due to the fact that private sector pay is more divergent, with greater numbers at the extremes of high and low pay.

At the highest extreme, the top 25% of PrivSec (executives &c) earners are clearly better off than their PubSec equivalents, although the PubSec are doing their best to catch up and pay their top dogs fat cat salaries. IDS finds that a grade 5 civil servant gets 22% less than his PrivSec equivalent, and a Grade 2 gets 65% less.

So there we have it. It's all very complex, and I have simplified it as much as I could. There is much more data to be taken into account, but so far there is no real evidence that the public sector is significantly overpaid.

Classical Keynesianism argues that Government should borrow to keep them in public service. Culling the Civil Service (much as anyone who has had anything to do with them would like to do so) will just increase the unemployment total, the social security bill, crime and mental and physical ill-health.

It all depends on what they do and how efficiently they do it. There would be an enormous benefit to the country if the idiot high ranking Civil Servants who are blocking development of a decarbonised economy were to be removed from office. We can dream.

The main gain would be to improve efficiency. The way to do this is to reinstate the old Suggestion Box, where sharp end workers can continuously modify and improve the efficiency of what they to. There must be thousands of lowly Civil Servants who are plodding along every day doing stuff that they know full well is pointless and inefficient. Their suggestions could improve efficiency enormously. Successful suggestions would be rewarded. It would improve their health and well being, since it would empower them. Marmot has found that powerlessness in the Civil Service is a cause of ill-health.

So - keep the public services going through the recession, but make them more efficient through grass roots empowerment.

Wave Cloud Sundown

sunset with angel wing
tip pinions spread
strong sweep of wave cloud
carved by the wind
drawn on a burst of dying light


the ranging run of sunset blue gold sky
fading through lemon green
purple and brown down to our dusty trail
through grey green graveyard trees
fields lit by golden stacks
then fixed dark triangle of road
a line of sparks of which ourselves are one

and to the south
a fresh new crescent moon

(c) Richard Lawson
France 2001

Iran update

Useful BBC review of the current Iran situation. It is all down now to internal politicking in Iran's elite. By no means all Iranian politicos accept that AhmadiNajad's election was fair. We shall see what emerges.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has given Israel the nod in case they need to use Saudi airspace in an attack on Iran's nuclear facility. Apparently the Syrians also would not be displeased if the Iranian nuclear weapons effort met with an accident.

Nuclear is more trouble than it is worth. Always remember that if every Iranian were to be given 1 square meter of photovoltaic panel, it would create as much energy as their civil nuclear power effort.

Johnathon Porrit fingers Sir Humphrey

From today's Observer:

"Jonathon Porritt, one of Britain's leading environmentalists, has attacked the Treasury for being "startlingly arrogant" and for dragging its feet over sustainability...This month Porritt steps down as chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, an independent government watchdog, after occupying the role since it was founded nine years ago.

He said: "Looking back now, as I am in my last few days, I see a terrain of wasted opportunity. I am not saying the only reason is the intransigence of the Treasury, but I do think the Treasury has killed a lot of the energy around sustainable development."... "Too often they have been foot-dragging and obstructive... a startlingly arrogant part of government. There is almost no curiosity about sustainable wealth creation. There is no readiness to interrogate the macro-economic model. SDC produced a report, Prosperity without Growth, in an attempt to start a debate on redefining prosperity, but we were met with a weird mixture of hostility and indifference."...Since it was founded in 2000, the SDC lobbied the government consistently to use its multibillion-pound budget to promote sustainable development through its procurement of buildings, goods and services. But Porritt said his efforts fell on stony ground for years. "At meetings relatively senior civil servants from the Treasury were sitting there glowering and wondering what they could do to scupper things when they got back to base," he said".

Ah. The Civil Service. The physical bowler hat has gone, but a virtual bowler hat (tricorn hat in the case of the Treasury) is etched into the brain of most senior Government officials. They are the substrate of political power, a cadre of lifelong dictators who will have naught but what is beaten out on their own anvil. Like insincere hotel workers, they project an obsequious servility while pissing into the customers' soup. They obstruct the will of the people, as faintly represented by elected ministers, ("Yes, Minister, but that would be a courageous decision"). They project their own agenda through the "options" that they present.

I cling to a chosen, existential optimism, but when I look upon the Civil Service, my optimism fades. They must be brought to heel. The Green Party has a paragraph in its Government policy about holding them responsible for the mistakes they make, but this is only the beginning. How can the service be revitalised, brought forward a couple of hundred years into the twentieth century, or even (idealist that I am) into the twenty first century? (At least, Conference did pass such a motion, though I see that it has not found its way into the MfSS on the web)

The best I can offer is the Suggestion Box, where workers at the sharp end can put forward suggestions to improve efficiency, said workers to be incentivised by receiving a percentage of the money saved by their improvement. This would increase their health too, as Marmot finds that disempowerment is the cause of much illness in his long-term study of the health of the civil service.

Ban ki Moon in Burma

Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, is in Burma trying to persuade the generals to behave sensibly. Good for him, but he really needs to be working on a set of rules to make the process of becoming a dictatorship more difficult.

The international community treats each dictator in an ad hoc way, as if it is somehow a unique event. As consciousness rises of the dictators' brutality, political pressure slowly rises, discussion ensues, and appeals to his (it is usually a him) better nature give way to calls for some kind of sanction, which is then blocked in the United Nations Security Council because one or other of the members there has a trading relationship with the dictatorship.

It doesn't have to be like this. There are identifiable steps to dictatorship, such as closing down the free press, arrest of political opponents, and setting aside the results of elections. The UN needs to set up a tariff of sanctions targeted at the regime, applied when each step is taken, and lifted when the repressive step is repealed. The stick of action in the International Court of Justice can be balanced with a carrot, guaranteeing the dictator a comfortable life in exile if he leaves office voluntarily. More here - scroll down to Dealing Effectively with Dicatators.