The Government’s “Anti-Business” Bias …

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Feb 062012
 

If you read certain articles, you might believe that the current UK government is anti-business. The Tories ? Anti-business ? That is simply preposterous – the Tories would never let the government be anti-business. They are after all in politics to help their business buddies.

What certain bankers don’t understand is that there is a certain level of anti-banking here – which is not anti-business. Banks are merely a subset of business, and given that many banks are “too large to fail” comprise a rather special category of business that is not very business-like.

And the government is not really anti-bank at all, but anti-preposterous banking bonuses. Banking bonuses seem to have risen out of proportion to the value that people add to a bank. As mentioned before, no person is wholly responsible for the success or failure of a bank – a CEO may come up with a great plan, but his or her underlings have to carry out that plan. And the success of the CEO is dependent on how effectively his or her plan is carried out.

Personally I do not have a problem with bankers earning millions in bonuses (and I’m very unlikely to ever get such a bonus), providing that :-

  1. They are properly taxed.
  2. They are proportional to the bonuses given to every other employee in the firm.

It is interesting to see that the bosses of National Rail have voluntarily given up their bonuses into a fund for improving the safety of railway crossings. Whilst there was some pressure about the potential size of their bonuses, it was nowhere near as much as that received by the banking bosses, and they gave up their bonuses a lot quicker – nice to see that some business leaders see that their bonuses may be a little excessive after all, rather than whinging about how the government is “anti-business”.

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 ?

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.

 

Why Executing Criminals Is Wrong

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Sep 032011
 

I have blogged before about the death sentence (and possibly other entries too) but people are still being executed, so there is no reason why I should stop ranting about this. Hopefully this entry will be a little more fact-orientated than previous attempts.

Execution is one of those contentious issues, and in a country that has long banned the death sentence the whole debate starts up again when we discover people such as Harold Shipman and Fred West. It is difficult to argue against the death sentence when such creatures are in the news, but it has to be done.

If You Execute Criminals, You Also Kill The Innocent

Criminal justice systems are run by fallible people; no matter how hard we try, people will always make mistakes and some of those mistakes can cause disastrous consequences – and in the case where criminals are sentenced to death, it is not just possible, but really has happened that innocent people are killed by the government. Detailed statistics on this are practically impossible to locate – partially because we don’t know who has been executed for a crime they have not committed.

All we know is that some people have been executed because they were innocent, and some people were executed because they did not receive a fair trial. For instance, take the case of Sacco and Vanzetti where two men were executed in 1927, but in 1977 the governor of Massachusetts admitted that they had received an unfair trial and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”. This coming despite the possibility that Sacco was in fact guilty of the crime – ballistic tests on his gun in 1961 indicated it was used in the killings although it had been interfered with enough that any prosecution based on those ballistic tests would be unfair.

So here we have a case where two men were executed – one who was innocent and received an unfair trial, and another at worst received an unfair trial. And of course these two anarchists were involved in a particularly well publicised case – how many others executed have received no help in establishing their innocence ?

Of course other people have tried coming up with useful statistics, and I will myself …

Out of a list of 33 “notable” executions in the UK since 1910, 6 were of people had their convictions quashed posthumously. This gives a rate of 18% of executions being of innocent people! An alternative figure of 632 executions in the UK between 1900 and 1949, would reduce the false execution rate to 1%. Neither of these figures is satisfactory, although the second is probably closer to the mark – although it misses out the number of executions between 1950 onwards, the figure for the number of innocent people executed is probably also not complete.

But it does illustrate that of all executions, some include innocent victims – perhaps 1%. Or in other words, out of every 100 people executed, at least 1 person is innocent of the crime he or she is executed for.

Perhaps you might think that 1 out of every 100 people executed is a small price to pay, but consider how you would feel if that innocent person was someone you loved more than your own life ? Your husband, your wife, your son, or your daughter. How would you feel then ?

Every innocent victim of the hangman’s noose is someone’s loved one.

But We’ll Only Do It For The Really Bad

If you restrict executions to the really heinous crimes where you are really sure that the criminal is guilty, what happens ?

Well firstly, it does not stop innocent people from being executed. Take the example of Timothy Evans, a man who was initially found guilty of murdering his own daughter (and he was suspected of killing his wife too); yet three years later it was discovered that his neighbour John Christie was a serial killer and eventually shown to have killed the daughter and wife. Timothy Evans was eventually pardoned in 1966. Of course it was a bit late for him as he had already been executed.

No matter how certain you are that someone is guilty of a crime, there is always the chance that they are not in fact guilty.

Secondly, it is a slippery slope – if you execute someone for committing a really nasty murder, it becomes easier to allow executions for “less serious” murders, and then so-called lesser crimes. As an example of this in action, see the Bloody Code article where the UK in little more than 100 years went from 50 crimes punishable by death, to 220 crimes punishable by death.

Life Imprisonment Is Cheaper

This is actually an argument in favour of abolishing the death sentence, but a despicable one.

It is true that in the US today, it is probably cheaper to imprison someone for life rather than sentence someone to death. This is because most death sentences go through an excruciating process involving many appeals to all parts of the criminal justice system. If us woolly liberals would just shut up about the death sentence, it would be possible to execute people very cheaply.

But we’re not going to shut up about it.

And looking at the money involved is contemptible – this discussion is about justice, mercy, and all sorts of ideals. If society cannot afford a just criminal justice system, it can no longer be called a society.

Cruel And Unusual Punishment

No matter the method a country chooses to execute a criminal, it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment – prohibited by the UN (article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although I’ve used the traditional English phrase rather than the wording of the UN). The reasons why the death sentence is inhuman is varied, but includes :-

  1. Most people sentenced to death spend a long time on death row awaiting execution – an average of 14 years in 2009 (and the link contains other interesting information). The reasons for this are irrelevant. The effect on the prisoner amounts to psychological torture sufficient that many on death row have requested rapid execution to end their suffering – even prisoners who were eventually found innocent.
  2. We may have moved on from impaling, or other forms of execution that take the victim many days to die, but that does not mean the current methods are humane – even the “most humane” method of lethal injection has those who claim it causes unnecessary suffering in some cases.
  3. There is a degree of arbitrariness in how the death penalty is applied leading – a serial killer with 48 victims to his name can “get off” with life imprisonment whilst someone who has killed just one victim is executed. The more you dig into just how arbitrary the death sentence is, the more you should get concerned about it. Shouldn’t justice be even-handed ?

Final Word

This may not be the final version of this blog – as things occur to me, as I get the incentive to write, and as facts crop up I will be adding to it. But for now it is enough.

This probably won’t convince anyone in favour of the death sentence to give up and start opposing it, but it might encourage those who are undecided to look a bit deeper and come down in favour of abolishing it.

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