Is The Aidan Burley Sacking Going Too Far ?

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Dec 182011
 

Now as you may have guessed by now, I’m hardly the Tories biggest fan; on hearing the news this morning of a Tory getting caught doing something embarrassing, I couldn’t help but give a nasty smirk. It is always a bright start to the day when the Tory party is caught out demonstrating beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are the party of the über-rich which only gives lip-service to the middle-classes and has nothing but contempt for the working-class.

And running around dressed up as a member of the Nazi party is no joke – which is why certain foolish young people do it of course. Running around offending the sensibilities of their parent’s and grandparent’s generations is one of the all but irresistible pleasures of youth. These things go too far sometimes – it’s all very well running through the centre of a town naked, but dressing up as a member of the Nazi party is a step too far.

But Aidan was merely at a party where the offensive actions took place – he didn’t himself dress up as a Nazi, and it is not claimed that he did anything offensive himself. If you lined up all of the people who have ever been at a party where someone has done something incredibly foolish and offensive, then not many of us would not be lined up – and one suspects that most MPs would be in the queue trying to look inconspicuous.

 

Parent’s Rights to Their “Pets”; Sorry, “Children”!

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Dec 112011
 

From time to time, I dip into another blog whose principle author is even more opinionated than I am (and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing). And recently I encountered this article on the the “rights” of parents to be informed of their offspring’s sexual activities – arising from the requirement for underage girls to get what we in the UK term the “morning after” pill on prescription. Now it took a while for me to get that last point, but of course in the US, you don’t get anything on prescription without insurance; and an underage girl is going to get that on her parent’s insurance.

Or in other words, an underage girl has to ask her parent’s permission to take the morning after pill … and admit to the people she’s probably least inclined to, that she’s been fucking.

It seems that the politician’s excuse for this, is that there might be some health risks associated with underage girls taking the morning after pill despite there being no evidence to indicate so. But the suspicion is that this is pandering to the right-whingers who want to punish those teenagers who break the rules and have sex below the age of consent.

The article I mentioned of course (as it is a feminist blog) points out that this is an attack on women’s rights. I don’t disagree, but there is also something else lurking behind the support of parent’s rights over their children’s sex lives. Many of the parents who support the parent’s rights over their children’s lives would be horrified to think that they are being accused of eroding women’s rights because that is not their intention.

They believe that their right to control their children’s lives overrides any rights their children might have.

Most of us believe that there are certain rights that all people have certain human rights. Not adult human rights but human rights – so that includes both children and teenagers (who are not really children as we are talking about people with the physical maturity to impregnate, or become pregnant).

Now it is true that it may be necessary to restrict the rights of children, and to a lesser degree teenagers. But that should be a step we always take with extreme reluctance. And parental rights should not override human rights – children don’t belong to their parents, but to themselves.

The Two-Speed Europe

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Dec 112011
 

David Cameron has officially put the UK into the slow-lane of Europe with the other 26 countries all in the fast lane – including not just the 17 members of the Eurozone, but also those other countries that do not use the Euro. The excuse for doing so is to protect the banking industry – specifically the City of London from a transaction tax.

There are of course the Euro-sceptics whose mindset is stuck in the 19th century who are celebrating and suggesting that we should go further and have a referendum on leaving the EU and ‘going it alone’. Fortunately even the majority of Tories (whose instincts lie in that direction) realise this is a step too far and realise that whatever minor annoyances there are, the membership of Europe is a good thing for us.

To exaggerate the scale of things somewhat, Britain is a country playing in the playground of 900-kilo behemoths – China, the USA, and right next door to us (and we’re effectively part of it … sometimes) the giant of Europe. And it is a giant, although people often underestimate the power of Europe – all those funny Europeans, surely they can’t add up to much can they ? Actually they do – the GDP of the European Union as a whole is larger than any country in the world including the USA and China; admittedly only marginally larger than the GDP of the USA (a trifling 2 trillion dollars larger). This is because we usually rank countries in order of GDP, but miss larger blocks.

It is essentially an “accident” of history that Europe has remained a grouping of 26 independent countries whereas China became a huge land empire, and the USA became a federal union of “nation states”. The accident is of course a complex series of events throughout European history that is beyond the scope of this blog entry!

This could all be an example of short-term thinking – whilst staying out may protect the financial industry (although it is interesting to note that the Financial Times wasn’t entirely positive about this), it may well harm Britain’s prospects in the longer term. And increased regulation and taxation of the banking industry may be what the leaders of banking oppose, but it could well be that people in the UK actually would quite agree with it.

By staying out, we will have less influence over the core of Europe with less say on how Europe progresses. Whilst some people may welcome this, it does seem unwise to risk losing any amount of influence over what is our largest trading partner. And losing any influence with an organisation to which we belong seems unwise.

For some strange reason – perhaps because we seem to like bad news better than good news – the news about the European Union always seems to be bad rather than good. Some of this is merely down to how it is presented – we always hear about draconian regulation of business from Europe, but rarely stop to think that perhaps the regulation was called for by consumers because of abuses by businesses (such as international roaming charges by mobile phone operators), or that the European regulation merely harmonises regulation across Europe – would that business rather have 26 sets of regulations to work with, or 1 ?

There is also a bizarre myth that the European Union is less democratic than the national governments. That all EU power is controlled by unelected European Commissioners. That is a myth put about by politicians who are in danger of losing their cushy jobs if the people eventually device that with the EU parliament in place, there is no more need for expensive national parliaments. In fact, it is entirely possible that the EU is more democratic than national governments.

We often take the earlier accomplishments of the EU for granted – the ability to travel across Europe without visas at every turn. Who has not sailed through the fast lane at airports pitying those from outside the EU who are stuck in the slow lane ? And what about peace across Europe ?

Income Equality

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Nov 302011
 

First of all, take a look at the following graph …

Of course it will all mean a great deal more if I tell you about it. It’s a graph from the Wikipedia article on the GINI coefficient of income equality. For some reason, the scales are missing on the graph (at least on the browser I’m using) but as I often find myself saying, the numbers themselves don’t matter as much as the trends over time. The GINI coefficient is a measure of how equally income is distributed – how much higher the income of the wealthiest is over that of the poorest. It is a a simple measure of inequality that ranges between 0 (perfectly equal where everyone earns the same) to 1 (perfectly unequal where one person earns everything and everyone else earns nothing), but it only measures income inequality – there are many other aspects to income that can be interesting. However it is a very good  metric for income inequality.

If you look at the lines, there looks to be around 5 countries that have made a dramatic change to income distribution since World War II – France, and Mexico have become much more equal; the US, UK, and China have decided to become much less equal. China is perhaps a special case, but interestingly both the US and the UK have made this change since around about 1980 when the disciples of that poisonous messiah Ayn Rand, Reagan and Thatcher took power.

Not only that but it does not appear to be a one off adjustment but a continuing process – both the UK and the US are getting less and less equal as time goes by. Of course the US is a lot less equal than the UK … and most other places too except for banana republics and the like; it may well be that if we were to look back in time to the period between the two world wars, we would see that the US is a more equal place than the UK.

But I doubt it – the American Dream has always been a bit of a myth (I’ve cheated by linking to an article which claims that the American Dream is now a myth) in the same way that the idea that the old class-based society in the UK prevented upward mobility was a fallacy; whilst class barriers existed, there was still the possibility of upwards mobility with the acquisition of wealth and the willingness to compromise on your roots (i.e. aping the behaviour of the class you aspired to).

The American Dream is such a well-sold myth that a large segment of the American population will defend lower taxes for the wealthy because they feel they might one day with hard work become one of the wealthy. Despite evidence that the overwhelming majority of them will never be rich.

The question is, how did this increase in inequality come about ? Was it a deliberate decision by governments ? Or a natural tendency on the part of a capitalist society to concentrate income and wealth in the hands of the few ? Or more likely a bit of both ?

In the UK it has certainly been the case over the last 30 years that taxation has been moved away from income tax towards direct taxation (such as VAT) – politicians compete on who will bring in the lowest income tax whilst keeping silent about increasing direct taxation. The public laps this up – who likes paying tax – without being aware of the long-term consequences.

Whilst we like paying less income tax, it is also true that the rich benefit most from income tax cuts – they may only pay the basic rate of tax on the first part of their income, but they still gain the most when that basic rate is cut because they pay the most possible at the basic rate.

Of course there is also the issue of different parts of the population being awarded different pay rises. We have all heard of the company directors getting 49% pay rises during the middle of the recession, but that is just one year. If that sort of thing is repeated year after year over a period of 30 years, is it any wonder the rich are getting richer whilst the poor don’t ?

This might all sound like sour grapes – always a problem when you start criticising the excesses of the wealthy, but actually I’m relatively well off in comparison to many. Any big change in income equality is unlikely to make that big a difference to me, and if I end up paying a little more in income tax (and less in direct taxation), then it’s no big deal – indeed making a bigger financial contribution to society is something to be proud of and not shirked!

Syria: Why Isn’t The West Making A Stand ?

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Nov 192011
 

The interesting thing about what has been happening in Syria over the last few months is that people are just about beginning to ask why the West (as in the UK, France, USA, Germany, etc) are not taking the lead in doing something about Syria. There seems to be an assumption that we only did something about Libya, because it was easy and somehow in our interests to do so (i.e. “oil”).

Well perhaps, although Libyan oil reserves are hardly big enough to risk that much over.

But there are plenty of other reasons why the West isn’t taking the initiative over the Syrian situation.

First, on several occasions those opposing the current Syrian regime have made it clear that they do not want foreign intervention. So intervention could risk making the situation worse.

Secondly if you accept that there would be no Libyan-style intervention, you are pretty much limited to applying for and imposing sanctions of some kind. And the West has been doing that for some time – the EU has been imposing increasingly draconian sanctions since at least May this year, and the US has been imposing sanctions for far longer although in their case this has little to do with support for democratisation and more to do with punishing Syrians for having a government that supports Hezbollah. Yet despite all the talk, the Arab League has yet to impose sanctions. So who is taking the lead here ?

Lastly, it is all very well expecting the West to take the lead in opposition to noxious regimes, but where else in life do you find a situation where nothing happens, because the one who usually takes the lead in a community of equals has nodded off? If the Arab League feels the West isn’t making a strong enough stand, there is no reason why they cannot take the lead here. The West is distracted at the moment with economic problems – in particular the Eurozone crisis; maybe it should be pushing harder for something to happen in Syria, but when it isn’t doing enough (and some people might argue that it is), the Arab League could push itself.

 

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