Julian Assange and Pussy Riot

 Politics  2 Responses »
Aug 182012
 

Last night I caught someone droning on about the similarities between the case of Pussy Riot and Julian Assange, and that with the right of freedom of speech comes the responsibility for responsible use of that right. I very quickly turned off as any comparison is ridiculous.

Pussy Riot are in prison today as a direct consequence of their attempted use of their right of free speech; whereas Julian Assange at most is facing legal trouble as an indirect consequence of his use of the right of free speech. Certainly on the face of it, Julian Assange’s legal troubles have nothing to do with the Wikileaks website.

It is certainly true that Pussy Riot’s actions inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was to some extent ill-advised. They could well be guilty of some sort of aggravated trespass crime, but it would seem to me that they are being punished for something else – their imprisonment for 2 years is by far out of proportion to what they have done. And it appears that even the victim (the church) also believes this is excessive as they have asked for leniency.

It is true that insulting someone’s religion in their place of worship is perhaps going too far for a protest, and perhaps should be punishable by a couple of days in prison. But sending them to prison for two years looks to everyone like an excuse to put them away to stop them protesting against Putin‘s autocratic rule. The funny thing is that Putin’s minions could not have done something more effective at demonstrating that his regime is a repressive one.

Julian Assange on the other hand is effectively charged (the UK courts have made it plain that he can be regarded as being charged with the crime even though a peculiarity of the Swedish justice system means he hasn’t as yet been charged) with some sort of sexual misconduct. Which on the face of it has absolutely nothing to do with his Wikileaks activities. Whilst there may be some oddities about the case, the only possible action for an honourable man would be to go to Sweden to answer the charges.

The conspiracy theorists would argue that this is all just a way of the US getting their hands on Julian Assange to rush through their own court system to punish him for “treason”, espionage, or some other crime. It is highly unlikely that Julian could be legally extradited for treason (which is likely to cause a considerable amount of laughter considering that Julian is no a US citizen) or espionage (which is after all at an international level purely a political crime). But it is just about possible that there is some US involvement in the charges he faces in Sweden – perhaps simply as a way of harassing someone whom the US government has a certain amount of anger with.

It is really rather extraordinary that Julian is claiming political asylum with Ecuador in preference to relying on the justice systems in the UK and Sweden; frankly he has better protection in either Sweden or the UK from any US actions than he would do in Ecuador which although has granted him asylum for publicity reasons is far more likely to let the US quietly grab him in exchange for a few billion in foreign aid.

The Alternative Olympics Medal Table

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 042012
 

This is being written during the games, so the table is at a certain point in time; I will update once the Olympics have finished … and make it more complete, but the point stands.

Whilst the Olympics is not really about statistics, those of us with that perversion do tend to want to see the numbers. And every time the Olympics comes around, I get slightly irritated by the medal tables that appear. The headline medal tables simply rank countries in order of the number of medals their athletes have won, which is a spectacularly dumb way of ranking countries – with most other metrics there is the option of looking at deaths per thousand people, etc.

At present the standard medal table is led by China and the US. Both are enormous countries, so of course they get a lot of medals. And indeed the people in the US are probably saying that the US is outperforming China by the simple fact that it has pretty much the same number of medals despite being ¼ of the size! And that is quite right – so why do we not have a table of countries ranked by the population per medal – i.e. if a country has 50 gold medals, and 5,000,000 people then there is one gold medal per 100,000 people. If we do a table for that, we get some very different results :-

Rank Country Gold medals Population Population per medal
1 Great Britain 10 62m 6.2m
2 USA 21 314m 15m
3 China 20 1339m 67m

These results are very different and there very well may be other surprises if the full medal table is calculated. There are those who might claim this is a simple trick to get the UK on the top of the medal table, but it is not as simple as that … indeed this alternative medal table may well be helpful to larger countries. After all it shows that despite their total medal haul, they are not doing nearly as well as they should do!

Mitt Romney’s Olympic-Sized Blunder

 Politics  No Responses »
Jul 272012
 

No, not that one. His gaffe at criticising the ability of the British people to competently host the Olympic games may be foolish in the extreme. After all the time for such criticisms is not on the eve of the games, but well in advance when things could be done – all his comments have done is demonstrate that he has very little ability in the realm of international diplomacy. And makes it less likely that any British officials will take his more serious comments seriously in the future.

Given the imminent start of the London 2012 Olympic games, it is hardly surprising that everyone has concentrated on this aspect of Romney’s comments. And it certainly points him out as being totally unsuited to any kind of international diplomacy. But another comment also points the way to Romney being unsuited to being a US president; and in some ways is very much more serious.

He also commented on the fact that he had met with the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (commonly and incorrectly known as MI6), which is a far more serious lapse in judgement that may indicate unsuitability for “domestic” matters as opposed to international matters. His meeting with the head of SiS was hardly top-secret, and the fact that it has been leaked hardly a matter for panic. The common practice of keeping such meetings private is probably more a legacy of SiS very secret existence – up until it was established on a statutory basis in 1994, the British government would refused to comment on any aspect of SiS; even whether it existed or not.

In security terms, you only comment on things that are secret if the benefit of doing so significantly outweighs the advantages of secrecy. Romney’s comments about this meeting indicate that he does not take security seriously; whilst this comment would on the surface would seem to compromise only British security and there in a very small way, his comments are likely to ring alarm bells with any US official involved in security. He would of course deny that his comments reflect a negligent attitude to US national security, and would quite rightly point out that there was no negative impact on US national security.

But it is not what he has revealed, but the fact that he revealed anything at all that indicates his attitude is wrong.

Public Sector and Private Sector

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 272012
 

For what seems like most of my life, the conventional political wisdom has been in favour of the private sector and against the public sector. The private sector is seen as somehow inherently more efficient than the bureaucratic and inefficient public sector. Somehow the idea that the profit motive means that the private sector can provide services for cheaper than the public sector.

Of course the private sector can provide services cheaper when it slashes the wages of workers to the bone, and minimises the amount of work that gets carried out. At the place where I work, cleaning services were contracted out a long time ago so that cleaning is now carried out by workers aiming to meet the terms of a contact rather than being there to clean. The difference? Workers employed to clean, will often perform acts of cleaning that may or may not be spelt out in a cleaning contract – the types of cleaning that only need to get done once a year such as perhaps quickly wiping off the tops of doors, or scrubbing the marks off door handles.

There has been a bit of a change over the last few years – more and more stories about the failures of the private sector, and in the latest case where G4S failed abysmally to provide security for the Olympic games, the public sector had to pick up the pieces. As someone from the police pointed out: “We don’t have the option of giving up and going home.”

There are other failures too ranging from the widespread failure in the world banking sector, to failures that occur at such small scale that they only really impact at the local level – such as the financial mismanagement at my local football club. In such situations, there are three choices – either let the failed business collapse and live without the services that it provided, wait for the private sector to rescue the remains, or to rescue it by public sector intervention.

In the worst cases of failure where society believes it cannot live without the services (such as banking), it is always the public sector that rescues the business.

Or to put it another way, the private sector may only be more efficient than the public sector if the costs of the final bailout are not accounted for. In many cases, public sector inefficiency may be taking into account that the public sector does not have the opportunity to give up and walk away. And this is all assuming that the private sector actually is more efficient.

We have been told again and again by the economic conservatives that the private sector is more efficient, but with examples such as the NHS, is it really so ? We have faith that the private sector is more efficient, and I suppose there may well be some evidence too. But in all cases? Perhaps not.

There is nothing wrong with the private sector; there is nothing wrong with the public sector. We need to stop demonising the public sector and assuming that the private sector is our saviour in all circumstances.

Banks: RBS IT Fails, Barclays Involved In Shenanigans

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 282012
 

This week has been a fun one for those of us who like kicking bankers when they’re down with two stories about banks tripping over their own shoelaces. Firstly there has been the ongoing saga of the IT woes within RBS which caused last week’s inability to process payments, and secondly the story of Barclays helping to “fix” the interbank interest rates – which made all of our loans more expensive.

We are used to these kinds of stories about the banking sector, and many of believe that there is something fundamentally broken about the banking sector. Banking is important to the world economy – our current recessions are due in part to banking incompetence and greed (which definitely triggered it but is perhaps not completely to blame).

If you look deeply at the IT woes of RBS, you begin to see that underneath the story of complicated IT “stuff” falling over there is a hidden story of banking greed. Whilst IT is never infallible, the problems at the RBS data centres may well have been caused, or at least made worse by their recent practices. RBS have been engaged in a programme of making experienced (and expensive) UK-based workers redundant, and replacing them with cheaper (and inexperienced) foreign workers by outsourcing or offshoring (the difference is not relevant here).

It is worth noting that if RBS had made expensive UK-based workers redundant and replaced them with inexperienced (and cheaper) UK-based workers, they would be breaking the law. You do have to wonder why using foreign workers makes it legal!

The article I linked to above does say that in some ways the Indian workers have been doing good work, but they lack experience when working with mainframe-based systems. This is hardly surprising when mainframe-based systems are seen as so old-fashioned, with more weight given to Windows and UNIX-based systems, but experience matters.

Most people with more than half a clue in the IT world know that experienced staff can be particularly valuable – they can oversee the work of others and point out potential issues. And when issues do arise (and they always do), they are more likely to be able to be confident about remedial actions. Perhaps best summarised as they know when to take their hands off the keyboard!

That is not to say that inexperienced staff cannot be made use of – there is no other way of someone becoming experienced after all. But you need a sensible ratio.

If RBS had taken the sensible action of using India-based staff to supplement the existing UK-based staff so that experienced staff were retained until they chose to leave, then we may have seen a different result last week. But of course that would have cost more money.

Now onto the “Barclays” situation. Staff at Barclays (in collusion with staff at other as yet unnamed banks) attempted to influence the interest rates that banks charge each other. These funds available to banks are the source of the loans that most of us make use of – including mortgages, so any effect on the interest rates would have caused the interest rates we pay to go up (or down). It is as yet uncertain whether Barclays staff were successful in influencing the rates or how much the rates were influenced.

But given the size of this market (one figure is quoted as being £225 trillion), even the tiniest influence on the interest rate could make enormous sums of money. If they had artificially inflated the interest rate by just 0.1%, they would have taken their share of in the region of £225 million. And who is to say it was as small an influence as that?

With both stories together, we can see that at least two major banks had management teams in place that encouraged profits over other priorities to an unsafe degree. Whilst the management at Barclays may not have been directly involved in the scams to defraud the public, they were responsible for the culture that allowed staff to pursue profits at the expense of banking ethics, morality, or the law. And RBS management are responsible in a similar way – by extreme cost cutting they put the day to day operations of their bank at risk.

It is perhaps unreasonable to expect bank staff to act ethically. Whilst there are hopefully people who could resist the temptation to help themselves to their share of ill gotten gains, such people are probably pretty unlikely to choose banking as a career. Especially given what we now know about how bankers behave.

There is not an easy answer to this; not even nationalisation would change the embedded culture (after all, RBS is mostly owned by the UK taxpayers), but it would be a good start. And we need to do something about how profits are shared – to make it less likely to tempt someone to make excessive profits at the expense of perfectly reasonable restraints. How about paying bankers bonuses on an equitable share? So that nobody within a bank gets a bonus bigger than his or her colleague?

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