Bumper Banker’s Bonuses Are Back

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 072009
 

… goes the headline, but did they ever really go away ?

All that really happened was that last year the bankers did not get much of a bonus because their banks were losing money, and now that things are looking better the bonuses are back. This should not surprise anyone; plenty of people get bonuses. What is really happening here is that people are questioning the size of the bonuses.

In fact when you look around, you will realise that there are plenty of people who get ridiculously large amounts of money for doing their jobs. When someone questions whether someone is earning too much, the first thing that occurs to everyone is “Is this jealousy?”.

Well perhaps a bit. I would not mind earning a bit more money, but I am reasonably comfortably off. And to earn more money at my current type of work, I would have to resort to working to make rich people even richer. Which I would much rather not do.

I have no great solutions to solve the problem of income inequality, but it is something that is worth trying for. And screw those who whinge about how taking money away from people with high incomes will drive talent overseas.

The most obvious thing to start with is to start making tax avoidance an activity that brings contempt from the public so that someone at a social gathering who admits it is likely to be shunned. There is a tendency to believe that money that one has earned is solely one’s own, and that tax is somehow “theft”. Whilst the anarchist within me would agree that governments taking money off individuals by force is theft, those who usually complain about this theft are merely being selfish.

No man is an island, and the cleverest banker who earns millions in bonuses, would not be able to do that in any sensible way without public services – police to protect their property, firefighters to try and save their property (and life), and health service workers to try and fix them up when their health fails. The more tax you pay the more proud you should be.

Perhaps we should encourage people to pay more tax than they are required to.

Whatever we do, we should remember that a society that pays some arsehole more money in a week than a nurse earns in a year just for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field has something wrong with it.

Reforming the British Parliament ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Jul 252009
 

They have decided that reforming the British parliament is the only way of distracting us from the expenses scandal. Pretty good scheme as parliamentary reform is well overdue, but what makes them think that we would trust politicians (said in the same tone of disgust as you would say child molesters or investment bankers) to do an honest job? We are supposed to passively sit back whilst they thrash out the ideas and eventually vote yes or no on a reform referendum. It is our parliament and we should be telling them how it will be.

Fewer MPs?

The Conservatives have come up with the idea of reducing the number of MPs in parliament, and the idea of fewer politicians involved in government sounds pretty good. At least at first.

After all, fewer MPs means that parliament costs less. But are we really bothered by the costs ? Assuming that each MP costs £200,000, and as we currently have 646 MPs, then the total cost is £130 million. That sounds quite a lot, but in terms of the total cost of government it is not so much. The suggestion is to reduce the number of MPs to around 400, which would cost £80 million.

But why do we have MPs? It is to represent us the public. And reducing the number of MPs is effectively telling us that our voices are less important. Each MP represents a parliamentary constituency containing a number of us; given the total population of 61 million and averaging out the number of people per MP, each MP represents 94,000 people. So they do not get much time to talk to us!

In 1801, we had a population of 10.5 million with 658 MPs meaning each MP represented just under 16,000 people. It would (in theory) have been a great deal easier to bend the ear of your local MP! If we were to have the same ratio of MPs to people, we would have nearly 3900 MPs! Perhaps that is too many especially as the cost would work out at £763 million! But I believe more MPs would be better …

Why do the politicians want fewer MPs ? What fringe benefits are in it for them? Given our current crop of politicians, we should always look beneath the surface to see what advantages their proposals have for them rather than us. Sure fewer MPs will cost less, but is that the real reason behind the proposal?

Perhaps it is instead that fewer MPs makes a parliament more easily controllable by the party whips. Fewer rebelious backbench MPs to upset what the government wants to do. Do we really want that ?

I want my MP to feel rebelious and to ignore the party whips on occasion because they represent me and not their political party.

End Of First Past The Post?

There has even been a hint that some politicians without a yellow hue have expressed an interest in ending the first past the post electoral system. The current system where the person with the most votes in a constituency wins is undoubtedly the simplest possible voting mechanism.

The big problem with our archaic voting system are the millions of people whose voice is effectively ignored. If you are a fan of a smaller party, or live in a constituency whose MP is someone you did not vote for, then your views are effectively unrepresented. If you look at the last election in 2005, Labour held onto power retaining 55% of the MPs, with only 35% of the popular vote – a majority of those who voted did not vote for a Labour government.

And the raw statistics do not necessarily tell the full story. Many people (myself included) will not vote for an MP they really want because they know that their preferred MP has no chance of being elected. Instead we vote for an MP who has a chance of getting in whose views we dislike the least. This tends to favour the large parties.

I could ramble on for ages about the weaknesses of the current system and highlight possible alternatives. But without the time to model the behaviour of alternate voting systems I don’t have the right to go into too much detail. Remember that – anyone who advocates a particular voting system needs to have spent time modelling their voting system so they can have some form of evidence for the expected behaviour.

I can tell you what features a new voting system should have :-

  • It should end the travesty of “safe seats” where a particular party can almost expect their candidate to win. And let’s see an end to situations where political parties choose not to put up candidates to allow one particular candidate (like the speaker) a “free run”.
  • It should break the close association with the geographic area to allow minority views to be “grouped” in a larger area.
  • Constituents should have the right to recall their MP and fire him or her. This would have to be constrained in some way – perhaps a 3 month cooling off period after a motion to fire has been started.

Why London?

I am sure those Londoners reading this (all two of you!) will be horrified at the thought of the mother of parliaments moving elsewhere, but why is it necessary for the parliament to be located in London?  Whilst it has good transport links, it is really only convenient to get to if you live in the South. Moving it to Birmingham would make it more equally inconvenient to get to, and Birmingham has pretty good transport links itself.

But why do we need a physical parliament at all? This is after all the 21st century, and there is nothing stopping MPs from taking part in debates and voting from their constituency offices. This would solve the problem of travelling and second homes, and give us greater access to our MPs.

Afghanistan War Aims

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 252009
 

Sometimes I really do not understand some comments that crop up from time to time in the media. Apparently there are many people who do not understand why we are fighting a war in Afghanistan.

Well I guess some people are so dumb they need reminding to keep breathing.

Or are so uninterested in what is going on that they never listen to media discussions on the war.

It is not as if the reasons have not been discussed many times. And it is not as if the aims are particularly difficult to understand – we’re there to establish a stable government that is not going to let Afghanistan be used as a solid base for terrorism. Sure, things start to get a little more detailed and confused when you dig down into more precisely how that will be done especially when combating the opium/heroin trade gets mixed in.

The terrorists in Afghanistan use the heroin trade to raise funds for their activities, so it is perfectly reasonable to try to stop the funds, but it needs to be done in such a way that it does not irritate the opium farmers whose livelihood depends on the trade. As I have suggested before, the simplest way of dealing with this, is to simply buy the opium for a fair price ourselves.

So the next time someone complains that they do not know why we are fighting in Afghanistan, remember that whilst it is perfectly reasonable to object to the war for all sorts of reasons, objecting because you do not understand the aims is just indefensible.

Rampant EU Phobia at the Sun/EU Legislation on Horse Meat

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 282009
 

Of course anyone who has ever kept up with the Sun (a UK newspaper famous for thinking that topless woman is news, and for being keen on the “frothing at the mouth” school of journalism) will not be surprised in the least that they are jumping up and down and screaming at the thought that the EU is daring to interfere with our right to chomp through Rebecca’s pony after it has eaten it’s last bit of grass.

The news article is here (at least for now … newspapers are notorious for moving things around). But I dare say it is more of a waste of your time than reading this blog entry.

What has gotten the Sun so excited is that the EU is proposing European-wide legislation requiring the owners of working horses (which includes “pets”, riding horses, and racing horses) to sign a declaration that they will not allow the deceased horse to enter the human food chain.

What has gotten everyone involved so excited about being asked to promise something they would not do anyway ?

Well … perhaps. It turns out the British are not quite as horrified by the idea of eating horse meat as might appear. Seems that we will quite happily tuck into Rebecca’s dead horse if there isn’t any other kind of meat available. During WWII, horse meat was regularly supplied and eaten, and quite a few people have fond memories of certain dishes.

Before judging this latest EU proposed legislation, it is worth looking into why it is proposed. The idea behind it, is to stop the carcasses of horses that have been treated during their lifetimes with drugs inappropriate for food animals from entering the food chain. In other words if we do not stop such animals entering the food chain, there are many medicines that cannot be used.

So the people protesting at this EU legislation being imposed are essentially saying that they’re happy for horses across Europe to receive less than ideal health care because they do not want to make a declaration that they won’t eat their favourite horse. Ridiculous isn’t it ?

Of course there are those who say that this is all an indication of how useless the EU is that a law that is required for mainland Europe (where horse meat is widely eaten) has to be applied in the UK where allegedly it isn’t needed. But are we sure that it isn’t needed in the UK now ? Or in the future ?

It is essentially a sensible law, and the EU is being condemned for applying it over here! Anyone would suspect that in fact all this fuss was brought about by a newspaper proprietor with an axe to grind. The thing to remember about newspapers like the Sun is that they lie … they have been caught lying many times in the past, and they are not above trying to slant news to suit their own agenda. In this case a hatred of the European Union.

Iranian Islamic Republic In Crisis

 Politics  No Responses »
Jun 232009
 

The BBC today is saying that that the Iranian Islamic republic is in crisis, although that probably has been the case for days now (or even years if you are interested in human rights as I am). The thing is that nobody seems to have picked up on what seems obvious to me – just how stupid the current leadership of Iran is.

If you are going to ignore the results of an election, don’t have one. Come up with some sort of fake crisis that makes one impossible. If people feel they have a say in their government and it is ignored they get a bit more annoyed than if they don’t feel they have a say.

If you are going to rig an election to come out the way you want, you should at least try to make it look honest. Doing such daft things as causing 150% (or whatever) of the electorate vote for you is not going to keep the electorate on your side. Give the electorate at least some choice in believing the results.

If people are rioting in the streets because of your rigged election, don’t say that you’ll review some suspicious bits but the result still stands. That will just make them riot harder.

At a certain level of violence in the streets, it is no longer sensible to send the thugs in. It is time to start thinking of a sensible solution.

If all this were to occur some place other than Iran, it might be more understandable – still stupid. But when the leadership of Iran acquired power in almost exactly the same circumstances ? You could almost believe that they want to destroy the Islamic republic – the protesters were not originally calling for the end of the republic, but the actions of the leadership have pushed them towards it.

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