But The NHS Is … Socialism!!

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Sep 122016
 

The title of this post came from a tongue-in-cheek post on a forum I sometimes post on, and this post is not about the NHS nor it is even about socialism.

What it is really about is the over the top reaction you get when anything even tangentially related to socialism crops up anywhere someone from the US can see it. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this is a variant on Godwin’s law whereby if someone accuses something of being socialist, they instantly win and condemn the “thing”.

To which I want to respond: grow up and think for yourself.

First of all, socialism is not the same as communism and in turn, communism is not the same as the kind of communism as practised by the Soviets. It is possible that communism inevitably leads to the kind of totalitarianism that the Soviets were so keen on, although there are those who disagree. But this is not about what sort of government you have.

It’s about how to run certain things. How do we pay for, and run certain services we have decided are essential such as :-

  • Health care (of individuals)
  • Public health (of society as a whole – vaccinations, sewage, water supply, etc.)
  • Police and justice system.
  • Defence

There are plenty of things that we have historically decided that should be paid for by the community as a whole, and be run by our government (in a very loose sense the community itself), including many of the items listed above. Even the most rabid anti-socialist is unlikely to start bleating about how the government is interfering with the private sector when talking about defence.

Yet suggest something new should be paid for by the community as a whole – such as the health care system – and Americans will start shouting “Socialism” and condemn the notion without looking at the merits.

By all means condemn a new community-funded notion if there are obvious problems with it, but to condemn it because it might be something suggested by a socialist government is ideologically-driven stupidity of the first order.

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Why Don’t FOI Requests Apply To The Private Sector?

 General  No Responses »
Sep 082016
 

Freedom of information requests are a pretty cool feature of law that forces public bodies to disclose information on request if it is appropriate to do so. However it effectively only applies to public bodies which effectively excludes most charities and private companies.

Why?

The purpose of the FOI law is to catch out public bodies that are up to some sort of shenanigans – spending public money on first class junkets to Hawaii (or Italy if you’re on the American continent), diverting funds intended for hospital beds to some less worthy purpose, losing nuclear submarines, and all sorts of other nefarious activities that idiots with inadequate supervision can get up to.

This is all very well … indeed very useful, because the public should be able to obtain details from public bodies about what they get up to.

But what about other organisations?

In theory, private companies are supervised by the board, which in turn is supervised by the shareholders. In practice, shareholders are unlikely to be interested in the day to day operation of a company until that company starts losing money. So what happens when a company is up to something nasty, but is still making profits? Well there is always the hope that hard investigative journalism will expose the scandal.

Or you could change the law and make freedom of information requests apply to all organisations.

Because journalists can use FOI requests to delve into the secrets of public organisations to get an easy story, we are in danger of getting a skewed picture of the relative merits of public organisations versus private organisations. If scandals within the public sector are easy to expose, and scandals within the private sector are hard to expose, we will get more stories about scandals in the public sector.

Which may lead the naïve to believe that the public sector is more prone to nefarious behaviour than the private sector.

So in a way FOI requests applying to only the public sector is another way of demonising the public sector.

But ultimately the question is: do charities and private companies sometimes get up to activities that it is in the public interest to know? If the answer is yes, then of course FOI requests should apply to them.

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Scrapping The Human Rights Act

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 232016
 

There are moves afoot to scrap the UK’s Human Rights Act.

Think about that for a moment. There is a minister of justice who wants to take away your human rights.

Whether or not you like the ECHR, the fact that a British politician wants to scrap the Human Rights Act is somewhat worrying. They want to take away our human rights. It is all very well saying that the British authorities never behave in ways that would threaten our human rights, and we have both common law and traditions that protect our human rights. But scrapping the Human Rights Act sends a signal that we do not need human rights; a signal that may not be picked up and acted on for years or decades, but the signal is still there.

Now if they were merely going to modify the Human Rights Act, that would be fine. I am sure there are parts that go a bit too far and others that do not go far enough. The key thing is that changing the Human Rights Act; even improving it, sends a different signal no matter what those changes are. That signal is that we do believe in human rights.

And that is a good message to send.

The New Defence

The New Defence

“Not Guilty” Means “Innocent” ?

 General  No Responses »
Aug 192016
 

Of course it doesn’t. Anyone who claims so needs their brain rebooted.

This topic came up on an online discussion where there were many comments indicating a poorly conceived belief that a “not guilty” verdict from a court means “innocent”.

In a criminal case the court has to decide whether there is enough evidence to determine if the accused can be found guilty in the opinion of the court. The legal system very wisely knows that whilst it has the job of determining truth (as part of dispensing justice), it cannot do that so restricts itself to determining whether there is sufficient evidence to find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

That means those who get a “not guilty” verdict comprise two groups – those who are innocent, and those who are guilty, but there is sufficient doubt over their guilt that they cannot be found guilty. Any policeman (or woman) will tell you that those found “not guilty” include plenty of people who really are guilty, but the evidence isn’t sufficient.

We have a legal system where there is a presumption of innocence – the old saying is that it is better that 99 guilty criminals go free than 1 innocent person be convicted. The legal system assumes that mistakes will be made (quite rightly – the decisions are made by people), and weighs the system heavily in favour of ensuring that mistakes result in people going free when they are guilty.

It does this by asking the jury to decide if the accused is guilty; not whether they are innocent. And they must have no reasonable doubts over the guilt of the accused. In a perfect situation a simple question has a black or white answer – the accused is guilty or innocent; in the real world we all know there are grey areas – there is plenty of evidence showing that the accused killed the victim, but she has a good alibi.

Where a case becomes grey and there is sufficient doubt, the verdict should be “not guilty” even if the accused was probably guilty.

The Edge

USA: Racial Tensions Or Wealth Inequality?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 172016
 

As seen from afar, the USA seems to be having a problem with racial tensions – police shootings, protests, “Black Lives Matter“, etc., and racial inequality such as found at Facebook. Nobody with any sense doubts that there is racism in the USA – everywhere there are bone-headed bigots worrying about the colour of the dead stuff that keeps the squishy bits on the inside.

But we may be too quick to assume that it is simply racism; many of the symptoms could well be caused by wealth inequality and relative poverty.

The wealthy (and their children) are more like to succeed because of a number of factors :-

  1. They are more able to afford private education – either to supplement state education or to replace it with presumably higher quality private education.
  2. They are more able to afford higher education; even though it is possible for those who cannot afford it to get loans to pay for higher education in the USA, this will leave those in debt at a disadvantage.
  3. Social networks (the “old boy network”) that the wealthy have access to includes greater opportunities at internships at organisations that give their children greater opportunities.
  4. And internships themselves seem designed to favour the children of the wealthy – unpaid work in the hope of getting a better job at the end of it is something that is only a suitable option if you already have money to live on.

There are those who point at people from relatively poor backgrounds who have “made it”, and there’s certainly no doubt that exceptional people can succeed whatever their background. But most of us are not exceptional.

Relative poverty and lack of opportunity can easily lead to frustration with the system, and amongst the criminally inclined a tendency to resort to crime – those with more wealth or more opportunities will not resort to crime to the same extent.

So does the USA have a racism problem or a wealth inequality problem? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I would not be at all surprised if the answer is both.

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