Category Archives: Rants&Rambles

Political, Rants&Rambles

Control

One of the big claims from the “leave” campaign for brexit i.e. leaving the EU, was that it would lead to control over immigration. Obviously it ignored the obvious truth that most immigration into the UK was from outside of the EU, and the fact that there were any number of ways the UK could have chosen to control EU immigration (like many other EU countries) whilst staying within the EU.

It also was vulnerable to the accusation of racism.

The latter was always answered by the claim that what “people” wanted was to control the type of immigration so that skilled people would always have a place here.

Turns out post-referendum that’s not working very well for us because actually telling immigrants that you don’t want them, generally makes them stay away. We may reach a stage when we don’t allow people who want to come and work here through the border, but it’s much more likely that people will just choose not to come because they don’t think we’re a very welcoming place, or very nice people.

In the aftermath of Brexit, LinkedIn data quickly showed that fewer people from the EU were showing an interest in taking up jobs in the UK.

Their hiring data shows that the UK has gone from being a country that gains talent from the EU to one that loses talent to it.

The change is significant.

  • Over the last year alone, migration to the UK from the EU has fallen 26%, while more people are leaving the UK for the EU than were previously. The UK remains a net importer of talent from non-EU countries, because the number of professionals leaving for these countries is still lower than the number arriving from them. However, it is importing talent at a significantly lower rate.
  • Net migration to the UK from the rest of the world is also dropping. It’s down 20% over the last year, almost as significant a reduction as migration from the EU.
  • The UK is no longer seen as a good place to advance your career and there is no better example of this critical perception shift than Ireland. The UK has been seen as a place for Irish professionals to gain experience for decades. However, data now shows migration from Ireland dropping 37% over the last year, the biggest decline of all EU nations.

Does reduced migration from overseas mean more opportunities for British professionals?  Looking in detail at London, traditionally the UK’s largest net importer of talent from abroad: London has not been immune to the switch in migration flows, and is also now losing talent to other countries rather than gaining it. However, domestic migration into London is unchanged. It is not increasing to fill the gap ie. there is an acute shortage of skilled people developing.

 

It turns out that if you tell people to f*ck off, they don’t like you, don’t want to work for or with you, and you end up all alone.

They think the UK is racist – who could not have seen that coming?

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Tired

I am so very very tired of brexit. I am most tired of people talking nonsense and pretending they’re talking facts, pretending that they’re providing useful information, when in reality they’re just propagandists for a movement that they cannot possibly believe in anymore. Why are they still so invested that they’re willing to tell outright public lies, with no shame. because after one or two times of having the lie identified and corrected, then it cannot be called a mistake. It is deliberate.

I am tired of the MEP who keeps retweeting that we can’t possibly belong to a customs union with the EU to solve the Irish border problem because Turkey has a customs union and also still has a hard border with the EU.

And he writes this knowing that the UK is nothing like Turkey, would not have the same type of arrangement with the EU and that one customs union could be very different to another. He writes this without providing any alternative answer to the border in Ireland.

You have no idea how wearing it is reading people who say that a hard border would be Ireland or the EU’s “fault” and Ireland’s responsibility,  totally ignoring the fact that we have chosen to leave and create the problem in the first place. It also totally ignores the realty that WTO rules would require a hard border between the UK and EU if we leave the EU, the single market and the customs union without a comprehensive free trade agreement. Under WTO we are simply not allowed to offer other countries preferential treatment i.e. a soft border.

I have gone beyond weariness when it comes to people suggesting we should just bomb out onto WTO like all the other countries.

Other countries, Mauritania excepted, do not trade on WTO rules. Not even N Korea trades on just WTO rules. Countries like China, the US, India etc all have decades of treaties built up so that they can trade on better than WTO terms. There is an excellent EU database that lists nearly 1,000 treaties with third parties that we are walking away from as part of brexit (http://ec.europa.eu/world/agreements/searchByType.do?id=1)

And some of these will be about trade and some will be on other topics like security, health and safety, aviation, shipping etc.

None of them are trivial. And the UK has made no progress to resolving any of these issues. Our joint application (with the EU) to the WTO to split our trade schedule has been rejected by key countries such as NZ and Australia. Third party countries are refusing to simply grandfather our treaties via the EU e.g. the US suggesting it want better access to our airspace now we’re leaving the EU and vulnerable to a bit of shoving around.

I am tired of the MP who writes that we can have a perfect trade arrangement just like Switzerland, without being a member of the single market or the customs union, who is just choosing to ignore the fact that Switzerland is a part of EU schengen, that it has freedom of movement without control of immigration numbers above and beyond that within the EU.  And then this person goes beyond ignoring uncomfortable truths and just lies when they describe it as trouble free, ignoring the vast amount of customs declarations and inspections required to avoid VAT fraud.

Can I tell you how tired I am about those people who claim that outside of the EU we will enter some tariff free existence and food prices will fall because the EU insists on high tariffs. And clearly no one has actually looked at a breakdown of what tariffs are paid in reality, the kind of data to be found on the ITC site https://www.trademap.org/Country_SelProductCountry.aspx?nvpm=1|826||||0702|||4|1|1|1|1|1|2|1|1

Obviously most of our imported food comes from our nearest (EU) neighbours so is entirely tariff free, or from one of the many countries with a trade agreement with the EU (Kenya etc) so pays no tariffs, And even when tariffs may be a technical possibility (importing tomatoes from Morocco) there are quotas that mean in practical terms tariffs are rarely applicable. Plus there are Entry Price Requirements that allow individual countries such as the UK within the EU to set their own criteria for tariffs.

Because let’s be clear: removing all tariffs on agriculture would seriously fuck with our farming sector.

And can I just point out to the newspaper that the MP suggesting that our trading future is golden, just like that of Australia and NZ, is not a bright young star with novel ideas but a shocking fuckwit who seems not to recognise that NZ and Australia have an exceptionally comprehensive free trade agreement in place, that includes freedom of  movement for people. In other words they have something approaching the system that we’ve just voted to leave. Could she also please acknowledge that Canada and the US have a hard border, something we’re committed to avoiding in Ireland, despite belonging to a free trade agreement called  NAFTA.

But most of all I am tired of people who pretend that this is what they voted for and what they want. You did not vote for the UK to become poorer.

You did not vote for us to become a free trading nation, wheeling and dealing our way around the planet at the cost of a hard border in Ireland and screwing up the Good Friday Agreement. And to those few sad bastards who did vote for that fairy tale: take a look at how our government’s negotiations have played out and tell me that you still think it was a good idea.

You voted to limit immigration, mostly living in places where very few immigrants live and fundamentally out of fear that, one day, they might decide your neighbourhood was somewhere they wanted to live and that you might have to cope with someone who was “different”.

And the reality is that most immigrants have always come from outside of the EU, but you told yourself that you weren’t being racist, that you didn’t mean immigrants like the ones you know, the ones that you’re friends with. Still friends now? Seriously? That’s not friendship. You told yourself that no one you knew would be affected and if they were, you just wouldn’t tell them. You wouldn’t tell the doctor or the nurse or the health visitor, not because of shame but… Well, okay maybe out of embarrassment.

You voted to turn back the clock, without regard to the impact that might have on the younger generation because, let’s be honest the 1960s and 1970s were actually pretty shit to live through.

And even though 10,000 people die each week in the UK, around 9,000 pensioners 80% of whom voted leave ie. 700,000 leave voters dead since the referendum and even though 500,000 predominately remain voting teenagers have arrived on the electoral roll since the referendum, you still bleed on about the “will of the people”

As if electoral fraud in the form of criminal funding of the on-line campaign hadn’t happened. As if 32m people could not have been persuaded by entirely legitimate arguments or racism to vote in either direction, yet if only 800,000 were persuaded by criminality then the entire referendum would have gone the other way, because the vote was narrow and probably a cheat.

I am so tired of this shit show.

 

Home, Rants&Rambles

Home Security

After around 2 weeks, the home finally feels safe from the invader, SaggyPuss. I have no idea what his real name might be but he’s definitely a tom cat, an unfettered entirely un-snipped stinky tom-cat.

There is no bloody excuse in today’s world to have an un-neutered moggy running around causing smelly mayhem. Unfettered cats wander looking for mates. They pee all over everywhere to mark out their territory. They get into fights, catch STDs and generally die young. All set against free snips (local anaesthetics for the boys) from the RSPCA.

About two weeks ago I came downstairs opened the door to the living room and was met by the reek of tom cat spray. The bugger had come in through the cat flap and peed as high as possible into every corner and all along the curtains to the french doors.

My three dafties, presumably watched terrified perched on top of the piano, because that’s where I found them in the morning.

Having had two very elderly cats, we had a supply of cat urine “detergent” because the stuff requires specialist biological weapons to remove.

Cats have a high protein diet which makes their pee very concentrated. If they haven’t been snipped, then tom cats feel a need to mark out territory to assert themselves, and to re-visit and re-spray their highly concentrated pee on a regular basis. Not only the cats were traumatised at the thought.

Cat pee is a nightmare to get rid of. As it dries it forms crystals of urea acid which don’t smell, but every time it rains or gets a bit damp (this is London, so quite a lot) the crystals turn back to stinky urea. So you end up buying expensive biological detergent that effectively eats the pheromone markers in the cat pee and tries to dissolve the urea. It takes repeated soakings and it isn’t cheap.

Meanwhile you search every corner with a blue light looking for the tell-tale white-yellow glow of urine, in order to douse the walls with the cat detergent. The curtains had to be sent for dry-cleaning, after a good soak for the entire bottom quarter.

But then we were left with the conundrum of how to stop a repeat offence. Although the detergent suggests it actually repels the cat from coming back, our first post-event night made it clear that was more ambition than statement of fact. Cue blue light and more detergent into every corner.

The only answer was a new cat flap, one that would “read” our cats microchips to only allow them in or out. To be clear, a determined cat can break any cat flap by sheer scratching and heft. A microchip cat flap, like a burglar alarm, just encourages unwanted visitors to head next door.

Amazon next day delivery was required.

Cue one more day of blue light and cat pee detergent because of course stinky SaggyPuss was determined to break into the living room and my three cats were totally unable to repel the intruder.

After a while of wandering around with a blu flight and anxious sniffing of floorboards, curtains etc. you start to forget what smell you’re looking for and everything, absolutely everything including the cat detergent starts to remind you of cat pee. It’s when you’ve been out and come back in, take an anxious sniff and realise that the smell hasn’t disappeared after all that you realise you have reached cat rock bottom.

The new cat flap arrived and was unwrapped. Thanks to the useful comments on the website, I knew that the best way to introduce my chipped cats to the flap was pre-installation. The cat flap had to “learn” their microchip numbers, always assuming that they’re a compatible number. We’d lost their records (I know incompetent cat parent – sue me) so had to risk outright rejection from the start at a cost of around £80 per cat flap.

Clued in by the helpful hints, we put cat treats onto the horizontal cat flap door and let the cats eat from it like a bowl to get it to register their numbers. They were a bit freaked by the noise of the catch clicking open, but at least we were confident (sort of) that it would open for each of them.

Then came the usual DIY trauma in our house of fitting anything to something. It was supposed to be the same size as the original cat flap but it turned out not to be the same depth. Cue lots of huffing and puffing before the door was in the panel and ready for use.

Lots of cat sniffing but not much usage.

Turns out that cats have very different techniques for getting through a cat flap. The boy is a head-butter and very keen to get outside once it gets dark. We’ve never been sure why he’s so keen because he has to be the most feeble hunter ever. It is of course possible that there’s some kind of complicated double-bluff going on and the reason he rarely brings anything home is because he eats it on the way. But he’s really not that bright and certainly not very dextrous. The cat toys have to be waved about at a significantly slower pace for him to stand a chance of catching them.

So he had no problem getting in or out, once he’d got over the initial hesitation at the loud click of the catch releasing the flap.

Th youngest girl is more of a scrabbler. So her attempts to scratch open the door are not immediately successful but eventually, if inelegantly, she will shove her head close enough to trigger the catch and her paws are mostly pushing the flap at the time so she can get through.

The middle girl is just not that bothered. She’s more of a paw pusher than a head butter, and quite a cautious hunter. So she would look into the cat flap, trigger the catch and immediately pull back at the noise. Time and time again. The youngest daughter decided to “help” by judicious use of cat treats placed in the cat flap but it turns out that the cat is quite adept at reaching for cat treats paw first so that didn’t really work. After a couple of days she would just walk up to the cat flap and stretch out a paw for the treats – not quite with the programme.

Reading the instruction manual (better late than never) it instructs us to turn off the microchip recognition and just let all three use the cat flap as an open door.

But what about smelly Saggy Puss?

I would rather clear little trays each and every morning than deal with the gallons of cat pee that bugger introduced to my house in just one evening’s work. How bad can it be to just open the door and let her out each morning and evening?

So another coulee of days went by and she got used to being in at night and out most of the afternoon until eventually she made her own way in through the cat flap. And a couple of days later, she snuck out on her own as well.

It had taken quite a few days of cautious watching of her brother and sister before she could bring herself to trust in the machine, but we seem to have got there in the end.

We are safe from cat intruders, at last.

 

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Bias?

The BBC is planning a Brexit Special looking at all aspects of the BBC’s coverage of this extraordinarily divisive issue – specifically whether the corporation has kept to its charter commitment to impartiality, not just in its journalism, but also in its programming.

Do let them know what you think of the BBC’s Brexit coverage across the board – has it shown due impartiality not just in its news journalism, but also in its general programming its dramas and even its comedy shows ” announced on Radio 4 Feedback Friday 23rd March.

And having received the notification I really need to work out what it is that I think of their coverage.

I think that, as regards Brexit, the BBC has in some crucial respects got its approach to these issues wrong. I have not undertaken any kind of systematic study of their coverage – like most people I dip in and out of it, and then only parts of it (R4 Today,  BBC2 Daily and Sunday Politics, BBC1 The Andrew Marr Show, BBC1 News BBC1 Question Time, BBC1 Newsnight and BBC News Channel).

I also dip in and out of other broadcasters, mostly Channel 4 News, ITV Peston on Sunday and ITV News. None of those three seems to me to have the same problems as the BBC in their Brexit coverage and I think that comparison is important as it is suggests that other, equally serious, news organizations, which will also have asked the same questions of themselves as the BBC, have come to different answers.

I’m obviously very well aware of the possibility that my estimation of the BBC’s approach is no more than a reflection of my own views and biases about (and against) Brexit. But if I only saw through that prism then presumably I would be one of those who sees the coverage of Sky, ITV and Channel 4 as pro-Brexit, which I’m not.

I’m equally well aware that there are very many people who regard the BBC as being systematically biased against Brexit. But it seems unreasonable to accept the argument that since both Brexit sides accuse the BBC of bias this suggests that the position is about right. Precisely because of the polarisation of views over Brexit, the BBC would attract criticism from both sides almost whatever it did, so that criticism cannot in itself be taken to prove their approach.

A standard way to think about balance is the amount of air time given to each side and whether each side is allowed to reply to the other. This seems to be how the BBC have dealt with Brexit, effectively using the approach adopted to party politics, especially in General Elections, with the two main parties getting equal air time. So, for every ‘remain’ statement there is a ‘leave’ response and vice versa and this supposedly ensures impartiality.

The trouble is, this doesn’t really work very well for Brexit.

Many of the technical issues of law, public policy, political theory and economics around Brexit don’t sit well with normal electoral senses of balance.

Taking economics, whilst it is not a precise science – if indeed it is a science at all – the overwhelming balance of opinion amongst economists, including those employed by the Government, is very clear: Brexit will be economically damaging and the main debate is the extent of the damage. Yet ‘balance’ suggests that the pro-Brexit minority of economists be given equal billing with the anti-Brexit majority.

So the BBC policy of “balance” creates a false equivalence – placing verifiable facts from one side of the Brexit debate against airy assertions from the other to create an illusion of balance. So economists who quote the government’s own predictions of a Brexit penalty of between 2-8% of GDP must be “balanced” with the wildly optimistic predictions of Brexit economist Patrick Minford.

Giving equal time in these circumstances suggests equal weight can be found in each argument which is clearly not the case.

And in any number of brexit panels or discussion shows before the referendum and even now in the panel shows with just one year to go, audience members believed and still believe that the economic evidence is equally split.

Audience members believed there was as much to be said on one side as the other and so voters might as well toss a coin on the economic issues. This seemed to be true regardless of whether the people were for, against or undecided about Brexit and I believe was a direct result of the ‘balanced’ approach to reporting by the BBC on issues or topics which are fundamentally unbalanced.

As a minimum, the BBC reporter should challenge the outlying view to make clear it is exceptional and by no means mainstream. people are allowed to believe in fairies and fairy tales, but they need to have it clearly explained that this is what they’re choosing to believe. Fairy tales are not documentaries.

There is another and perhaps more subtle point: the boundaries around what was and wasn’t part of the ‘campaigns’ were not clear. This was shown by, for example, coverage of Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ intervention, treated in many BBC bulletins as if it was statement by the ‘remain’ campaign with a response given from a ‘leaver’. Actually,it was an important new fact – the fact being not that Obama was necessarily right in what he said, but this was the view of the US president – to which both sides should have been asked to respond. Not doing so was subtly to endorse a key Leave campaign claim that the opposition was not simply the Remain campaign but the massed ranks of the global ‘establishment’.

Also, beneath this is a deeper and probably much more controversial point: almost all of the factual arguments made by the Leave campaign were untrue (£350M a week for NHS, Turkey is joining the EU etc.) but ‘balance’ required the BBC to treat them as being as valid as the opposing arguments.

Typically in an electoral campaign the division is between competing claims of ‘what we should do’, and those can reasonably be treated equally. They may often draw upon disputed facts, of course, but that’s almost always because the facts are susceptible to reasonable differences in interpretation. It could be argued that maybe the Leave campaign’s ‘take back control’ slogan was of that sort.

What was meant by “taking back control” could be regarded as a matter of opinion and could be treated in that way. Are people talking about border control, about control of immigration numbers?

But the same isn’t true of the £350M claim for well-attested reasons, and indeed the BBC’s Reality Check said so. But what it didn’t do was report as headline news that it was not true in the same way as it would (if necessary) report that the claims the earth was flat are untrue.

Yet, for all the indeterminacy around economics and politics, the £350M claim – which, don’t forget, was one of its headline slogans, is still periodically defended by Boris Johnson and is being recycled as the ‘Brexit dividend’ by the government – was as untrue as saying the earth is flat. It was just a matter of arithmetic, but couldn’t be treated as such by the BBC because it was regarded as a matter of opinion, to be treated in a balanced way.

The consequence was that the ‘let’s take back control’ and the ‘let’s spend £350M a week on the NHS’ slogans were treated in the same way, when they were entirely different kinds of claim even though they appeared to be versions of the same thing (i.e. if we take back control then we can spend £350M a week more on the NHS).

Due impartiality would have led to them being treated differently (one as debatable, the other as untrue); balance meant that they were both treated as being legitimately debatable.

Even if ‘General Election’ approach to balance could be justified during the Referendum, it’s less defensible in ‘normal’ news reporting rather than campaign reporting. Here what matters is what gets reported and what doesn’t and/or with what prominence. Such judgments are invariably difficult and contestable, but my overall sense is, again, that the BBC have erred towards a subtly pro-Brexit stance.

A recent example of under-reporting was the heavily criticised lack of coverage of large anti-Brexit marches in various cities. It’s difficult to be sure, but I think that had comparably sized pro-Brexit marches occurred they would have been more prominently reported. With more certainty, it can be said that other broadcasters gave the marches more prominence, and did so earlier, and that exactly the same criticism was made of the lack of BBC coverage of an anti-Brexit march in March 2017.

There was also a striking lack of coverage and follow up reporting by the BBC of Christopher Wylie’s appearance in front of the Commons culture committee with folders of evidence alleging Vote Leave’s overspend during the referendum.

As Wylie made a convincing case that Vote Leave had distorted our democracy with data and cash, news sites across the world, from Canada to Denmark, began to run the story prominently. But not the BBC, which initially tucked his evidence into a report about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to appear in front of the same committee. The corporation did just enough to cover itself but in reality it was pressing the mute button and that, too, has implications for our democracy.

To take a converse case, last August the BBC gave prominent coverage to the Patrick Minford and Economists for Free Trade (formerly, Economists for Brexit) report claiming huge benefits from hard Brexit. The question arises as to why their work was selected for coverage? It was not new work but based on work that had been reported before the referendum,  re-published in new form. Secondly, the underlying work had been heavily and extensively criticised by several leading economists from the LSE and Sussex University amongst others.

Thus, however it was covered, it is questionable whether it should have been covered at all. That is not, as Nick Robinson suggested at the time, a ‘censorship’ argument – every day all kinds of research are put into the public domain but it’s not censorship that very few are selected for reporting by the BBC. I am not certain, but my memory is that no other broadcaster gave any prominence to this story. As a minimum, any coverage of the re-formatted report should have been presented with clear caveats about it’s nature as an economic outlier, closer to fairy tale than fact.

This feeds into a wider issue of the prominent platform given by the BBC to certain pro-Brexit figures. The most egregious example is the joint highest tally of 32 appearances on Question Time by Nigel Farage, which continued even after he ceased to be UKIP’s leader. UKIP being a political party whose membership could probably all fit into a very tiny garden shed.

It has also emerged that the only MEPs who have appeared on Question Time since 2012 are from UKIP, with the sole exception of the equally pro-Brexit Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. UKIP’s voter numbers (at least until recently) may have justified representation on the programme and that since they have had no MPs (except, for a short period, Douglas Carswell who defected from the Tories), it would be to their MEPs that the BBC would have to turn. But that doesn’t explain the absence of the MEPs of other parties.

UKIP has been represented on Question Time in a staggering 24% of the programmes since 2010, compared with just 7% for the Green Party.

And obviously since being nearly wiped out in the last General Election, UKIP’s voter numbers couldn’t justify any appearances on mainstream news programmes.

UKIP aside, the BBC seems to give an extraordinarily regular platform to Jacob Rees-Mogg, and this goes back to well before he was the chair of the ERG which is sometimes given as the justification for the attention given him. He is hardly the only pro-Brexit Tory backbencher, let alone the only Tory backbencher, and yet his presence is ubiquitous on the BBC. Of course, he features on other news outlets as well but – again, it’s only my impression, but something that the BBC could easily verify – to nothing like the same extent. Maybe this isn’t so much pro-Brexit bias as some idea that he is an ‘entertaining character’ perhaps along with Nigel Farage.

If so, that is to miss the serious political intent his persona conceals. At all events, there is no one individual on the remain side to whom the BBC gives the same exposure and this means that even if each Rees-Mogg appearance is balanced with a remainer, the public are not presented with a readily identifiable speaker – another subtle but significant skew towards the Brexiters.

There is another issue about the BBC’s extensive use of Rees-Mogg, especially since the Referendum. He, like other regularly featured Brexiters such as Iain Duncan Smith and Bernard Jenkin, is not a member of the government. The LBC journalist and presenter James O’Brien recently made the point that the government are unwilling to put up ministers to defend Brexit policy.

In their absence, Brexiters outside the government get used instead.

But that is a major failure of political accountability and, as O’Brien says, it would be better to empty chair the government rather than to use proxy spokespeople. For that matter, if such proxies are to be used, why almost invariably look only to the Ultra Brexiters of the ERG? There are, after all, many who support Brexit but in its soft rather than hard variant and by ignoring them the BBC, again subtly, skews not just towards Brexiters but to the most extreme amongst them.

Beyond who is on programmes, there is also a problem in the way that they are interviewed. The first is that of interviewer bias, but again I think this is a far more subtle matter than is sometimes acknowledged. I don’t think it is a problem in itself that journalists in the BBC or elsewhere have discernible political views. We expect them to be serious, thoughtful people and serious, thoughtful people have opinions of their own. I certainly don’t pretend to know for sure, but I have the impression that, for example, Sky’s Faisal Islam and Jon Snow of C4 News are remain-inclined, whereas I have the impression that John Humphrys and Andrew Neil of the BBC are leave-inclined.

Having their own personal views isn’t an issue, but what is an issue is how it affects their conduct. Taking that BBC duo, I have never heard Andrew Neil conduct an interview on Brexit which is not tough and well-briefed, regardless of what side of the debate the interviewee is on. To my mind (and I’m not alone) he’s an exemplar of effective political interviewing, and if I suspect he has opinions I disagree with that’s neither here nor there. John Humphrys, by contrast, inserts his own implicit views about Brexit rather obviously, and that does affect the way he conducts interviews – recent examples include his widely complained about interview with Tony Blair and, most bizarrely, his asking the Swedish Ambassador if Sweden will end up speaking German after Brexit. Humphrys has a particular importance, because he is perhaps the Corporation’s most senior journalist, and Today is an agenda-setting programme, so in a way he is the flagship political interviewer and his conduct has a significant reputational consequence for the BBC.

The second issue about interviews is more structural than personal. Whereas the BBC has some truly excellent journalists specialising in the EU and Brexit – Katya Adler, Adam Fleming and Damian Grammaticus all come to mind– the headline interviews are almost invariably undertaken by generalists. Understandably, they don’t always have enough knowledge to hold interviewees to account on technical issues. To take a basic example, politicians talking – as very many do – about ‘access to the single market’ should always be, but rarely are, taken to task. Everyone has access to the single market, the issue is on what terms. The largely unchallenged use of the term has seriously damaged public understanding, since access is compatible with any and every version of Brexit.

Much the same could be said about persistent confusions on basic issues such as goods vs services, tariffs vs non-tariffs or border control vs freedom of movement. No doubt this is not just a problem for the BBC but it’s notable that, for example, Faisal Islam, Sky’s Political Editor, was able to extract significant new information in an interview with Theresa May last April, precisely because whilst being a generalist (in the sense of covering the full spectrum of politics) he is also very well-versed in the technicalities of Brexit.

It might be said that the issue of specialist knowledge is as relevant for interviewing remainers as it is for Brexiters, and so this doesn’t signify anything for impartiality. But, again, it’s more subtle than that. The Brexiter case is very often that it will be simple, quick and technically easy (e.g. to secure a trade deal) whilst the remainer case is often that it will be difficult, slow and technically complicated. It’s very difficult without specialist knowledge to probe assertions that things will be simple because the interviewer needs to know the complexities to put the counter-case; by contrast, it is fairly easy to probe assertions that things will be complicated since it can be done by putting forward the simplicities as the counter-case. So, in this very subtle way, the high profile set piece interviews are almost invariably easier on Brexiters than remainers.

My overall sense is that what has happened at the BBC, going back over at least the last ten years or so, is that it has been stung (or perhaps worn down) by the very vocal criticism of the anti-EU movement and of the political right more generally. I think that reports alleging liberal-left bias, such as that by the Centre for Policy Studies, relentless accusations of the same charge from the right wing and Eurosceptic press, as well as from insiders such as Andrew Marr, Peter Sissons and, yes, John Humphrys, led it to a kind of ‘liberal guilt’ which has even been described as self-hatred (this as far back as 2006). That sense of a kind of cultural bias

This was the backdrop to the BBC Trust’s impartiality review of 2013, with the UK’s relationship with the EU identified as one key strand for review (the others being religion and ethics, and immigration), and I think that at least since then the BBC has bent over itself backwards to avoid accusations of pro-EU and, in the current landscape, anti-Brexit bias. About time too, its Brexiter critics will say. But there are two problems.

First, the research undertaken for the 2013 review actually showed that the evidence pointed in the other direction, both as regards EU coverage and the other issues, something reflected in the report.

Even so it has led to a need always to compensate for a crime even if it hadn’t actually been committed. So by pushing even a little further away from anything that could be accused of being a pro-EU stance the BBC has actually become more imbalanced.

And the second problem is that, despite doing this, the BBC is still accused of having an anti-Brexit bias reflecting, I think, the fact that for a very vociferous group of people in politics and the media anything other than uncritical cheerleading for Brexit  will be regarded as bias against Brexit.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made against the BBC. I suspect that when historians come to tell the story of Brexit they will conclude that the BBC’s coverage played a part in the outcome of the Referendum and of the subsequent process. I think they will conclude that a combination of liberal guilt that grew out of the climate in the years before the Referendum, and of the misapplication of a certain conception of balance during and after the Referendum, led to a subtle skewing of the news agenda in favour of Brexit and/or against remain.

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Rants&Rambles

Paranoid?

Have you checked the data Facebook is holding about you? As a not very diligent user of social media, I finally got around to taking a look. Obviously it has a record of all of your posts, photos and videos &  obviously it keeps all of the self-declared interests in music etc.

I was not surprised by the lack of contact information from my mobile phone or email because I can remember thinking “Not in a month of Sundays” when asked setting up the account. Some people have their entire address book stored plus a record of every phone call including the data saying where, when etc.

That’s a bit too spooky big brother for me!

I was freaked out enough by finding unexpected advertisers and installed applications.

All in all, I’ve managed to contain the data held on me to a reasonable level mainly by being paranoid at set-up and not much of a user thereafter.

But I would certainly advise anyone to take a look at the data held on them (via settings). If you’re not happy then delete (not disable) the account to remove the data and then set it up again with a bit more care about the settings.

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Enough with the lies

Is there anyone alive today in the UK who is not absolutely sick to the teeth of brexit, and with no sign of an end, or even the beginning of the end in sight. And yet there is no escape from recurrent lies.

Yet again, Boris Johnson brings out of the cupboard the idea that we can save ourselves £350m a week or £18bn a year once we’re out of the EU and spend that money on the NHS instead.

Yet again, responsible people point out that this is a lie, that there is no truth to the £18bn figure and once again a group of plonkers in on-line forums says, “Yes, but…” and happily repeats the figure as if it were true.

Repeating it doesn’t make it true. Pointing out that people are just telling lies, surely they must know by now that there is no truth to the figure, just seems to make them double down.

They seem to just not understand the numbers, any numbers:

The £5bn rebate is never paid to Brussels ie. of the £18bn gross figure you are mis-quoting, £5bn stays in the UK and is spent (or not) entirely at the discretion of the UK government.

Of the actual payment to the EU, the £13bn net figure paid to Europe, an additional £4.4bn is paid back to the UK in the form of agricultural payments etc.

& also in addition £1.4bn more is paid back to the UK in terms of payments to universities etc in the form of scientific research

& on top of that, the EU pays £1bn in lieu of us paying our foreign aid commitments directly.

The net payment to the EU is around £7-8bn. which fades into insignificance compared to our trade with the EU.

& if people want to talk about trade with the EU versus opening up of supposed trade outside of the EU, then in addition to direct UK-EU trade, people really should take into account the loss of around 70 free trade agreements negotiated by the EU that we disappear when we leave with the likes of Canada, S Korea etc plus the free trade agreements in the pipeline with Japan etc.

None of this is rocket science or even remotely contested.

Why can’t people just cope with the facts as they are rather than telling lies? It is the stupidity that grates most in the end. There is no economic argument for leaving the EU; there just isn’t one to be made.

You could make other (I believe fatuous) arguments around sovereignty and the obviously xenophobic, most likely racist argument against immigration made primarily by people living in areas of low to no immigration.

But there is no economic argument that stands any scrutiny whatsoever. You won – get over it.

 

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Borders

I am increasingly pessimistic about the brexit options for Ireland.

In December the UK government conceded that there were no technological solutions currently available to allow for a soft border within Ireland and under pressure from the DUP it agreed with the EU to “regulatory alignment”. It was a fudge of course because the meaning was never clearly defined but it allowed both parties to move forwards towards trade talks.

However. the UK cannot get a legally watertight transition deal until it resolves the status of the Irish border as part of a wider divorce settlement with the EU, sources have said, as  brexit talks move into an intense phase.

Senior UK and EU officials are due to meet this weekend in Brussels, ahead of an EU27 Brexit summit on Friday, when Theresa May hopes to bag the transition deal that UK business requires.

But firms will be denied certainty on the transition deal, as EU sources stress the best the UK can get in March is a political text, not a legally binding treaty giving cast-iron security for companies across Europe.

The EU have published a position paper that suggests as a fall back option setting a hard border between N Ireland and the rest of the UK, allowing N Ireland ‘special status” within the EU. Whilst certainly a practical alternative, the proposal is toxic to the Irish DUP as they see it as a stepping stone towards a re-unification of Ireland. Since the UK government is a minority government reliant upon the votes of the DUP to pass any legislation, this makes the “fall-back” option impossible to contemplate.

But no alternative has been proposed by the UK.

Let’s be clear, this is a problem that the UK have created and therefore it is the responsibility of the UK to come up with a workable solution.

The UK has voted to leave the EU in the referendum. The UK government has taken that a step or two further and decided to leave both the single market and customs union. The UK government has chosen to become a third party country. WTO rules require all third party countries to be treated on the same terms, without preference so when the UK leaves, it becomes a WTO requirement to have a hard border in Ireland unless we achieve the “holy grail” of a comprehensive free trade agreement.

Given a choice between a hard border within Ireland and one between N Ireland and the rest of the UK, it is likely that the DUP would opt for the latter despite the disastrous economic consequences for their electorate. One in three adults in N Ireland are already unemployed. A 10-20% hit to their economy resulting from a closed border would lead to a further loss of jobs. Add economic deprivation to a sectarian divide with such a recent history of violence, then the situation looks anything but good.

The alternatives, which would include Labour policy of keeping the entire UK within a customs union with the EU, effectively remove any chance of independent trade deals outside of the EU, seem equally unlikely unless the government falls and the UK electorate can be persuaded to vote Labour.

“The whole agreement on the withdrawal will be contingent on a solution on Ireland,” the EU source said to the Guardian newspaper. “And it is politically unthinkable that we would wrap up everything and that you wouldn’t have a solution on the Irish border. The Irish would never accept it, but also the rest of the union will not accept it, because it would be toying with the integrity of the single market.”

The EU has outlined three options for avoiding a hard border: a deep free-trade agreement with the UK; “specific solutions” that depend heavily on technology; or, failing both of those, Northern Ireland remaining in “full regulatory alignment” with the EU.

In Parliamentary Committee this week, David Davis the brexit Secretary acknowledged that there are no technological solutions currently available. There are no specific solutions to the border problem. In a border where a substantial number of crossings are agricultural, there will always be a need for physical inspection of livestock and other agricultural products such as milk – health and safety requirements for both countries will require a hard border.

Ireland, backed by some of the EU’s most senior leaders, is insisting the UK spells out its commitment to the fall-back insurance plan sooner rather than later, while stressing the first two options remain on the table as part of a future trade deal.

The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, said last week that London could not assume negotiations would move on to other issues without solving the issue. If that happened, “my response would be Ireland first”.

Other sources stress there is still a long way to go, with the Irish parts of the text still coloured red on an EU internal traffic light grid, rather than amber, which may allow talks to progress.

The content of the transition is less fraught for negotiators. EU diplomats expect the UK to accept the transition on the EU’s terms, meaning Britain would obey all EU rules with little or minimal say in the institutions.

Separately, a committee of MPs has warned in a report today that Britain is so unprepared for Brexit that it should consider postponing the UK’s leaving date.The Commons Brexit select committee is set to recommend that May should request an extension to the EU’s article 50 process beyond next March, the HuffPost reported.

Any extension of Brexit talks would have to be agreed unanimously by all 27 EU countries. It would be deeply unpopular with brexit campaigners within the Uk government.

Diplomats have indicated they would be open to rolling over negotiations for a few weeks, but a longer extension could run into problems. Several member states, especially France, and the European parliament, which will approve the final withdrawal agreement, have stressed that the UK should be out of the EU before the next European elections, due in May 2019.

Rants&Rambles

Japan

We are told that the world of work is heading towards another revolution, where many jobs will be automated out of existence. It seems peculiar that one of the countries that is so very busy building the technology to bring about this end, is one that in some respects, resists automation so fiercely.

Japan is a unique culture. In a small Japanese tempura bar, you could easily see a lone chef, a man in late middle age, cooking behind a counter for no more than 11 customers. The set menu might have 15 items on it. That means that at any given moment, the chef will be keeping track of 165 pieces of food, each subject to slightly different timing and technique. You would not see him write anything down, expending no apparent effort. It is an everyday demonstration of total mastery. This doesn’t look so much like a job as a life.

In Japan, there is often a deep personal investment made by people  in their work. The word shokunin, which has no direct translation, sums it up: It means something like “master or mastery of one’s profession,” and it captures the way Japanese workers spend every day trying to be better at what they do.

Shokunin culture can have a side that, to those of us raised on a more brutally capitalistic worldview, verges on the ridiculous. It is not unusual to see men standing with a yellow glow stick, pointing pedestrians toward the pavement instead of to the parking lot nearby. Presumably, if a vehicle comes, they point towards the car park. The man is basically acting as a sign, a job that has already been automated away in most other developed societies.

Occasionally one can find a group of men drilling a hole in the road. Or possibly, just one of them digging; with the others four watching him. For the whole 30 minutes, that’s all that happens but it isn’t done reluctantly, or while checking their smartphones, or gossiping, or anything. It was purposeful.

This can be dismissed simply as people whose jobs involve literally doing nothing except that for the people involved it certainly looks and feels as if their work is meaningful. For these workers, the value they attached to work doesn’t seem to be simply its economic value.

A Japanese train conductor bows on entering and exiting a train compartment; a department-store worker does the same thing coming or going from a shop floor, whether observed or not, whether the store is heavingly busy or almost deserted. It’s clear that there are deep cultural differences at work here, not all of them benign; the reason Japanese has a word for “death from overwork” is because it needs one. You could even argue that work has too much meaning, is too freighted with consequences for individual identity, in Japan.

Among economists, Japan is a byword, a punch line, a horror story. The boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s — during which it became popular to imagine a Japan-dominated economic future, the subject of Michael Crichton’s thriller “Rising Sun,” for instance — was followed by a spectacular stock-market crash. The Nikkei share index hit a high of 38,957 on Dec. 29, 1989. Over the next two decades, it fell 82%. Twenty-seven years later, it is still only at less than half that 1989 value. Property values crashed along with share prices, which turned large parts of the financial system into zombie banks — meaning banks that hold so many bad assets that they are essentially broke, which means they can’t lend money and therefore cease to fulfill one of a bank’s central roles in the modern economy, which is to help keep the flow of credit moving.

The Japanese economy ground to a halt. Inflation slowed, stalled and turned to outright deflation. Add Japan’s aging and shrinking population, contracting G.D.P. and apparently unreformable politics, and you have a picture of perfect economic gloom.

It doesn’t feel like that when you visit, though. The anger apparent in so much of the developed world simply isn’t visible in Japan.

A student of the culture would tell you that public displays of anger are frowned on in Japan; a demographer would point to the difficult prospects faced by young Japanese, paying for an older generation’s lavish health care and benefits that they are unlikely ever to enjoy themselves. The growth numbers would seem to imply a story about stagnation. But unemployment is almost nonexistent — at 3%, it’s among the lowest in the developed world. The aging of the society is visible, but so is the distinctive liveliness of the various youth cultures. I’ve been to plenty of stagnant places, and lived in one or two as well, and contemporary Japan isn’t one of them.

 

Why? A big part of the answer, I think, lies in the distinctive Japanese attitude toward work — or more specific, toward meaning in work.

Work is good, but meaningful work is better.

Does our shiny new Western world of work — post-manufacturing, un-unionized, gig-based, insecure — offer as much sense of meaning as work once did, or as it still seems to in Japan? In Derek Walcott’s epic poem “Omeros,” a wide-ranging reimagining and mash-up of Homer’s Aegean and the contemporary Caribbean, he writes admiringly and respectfully of his protagonist, Achille, a St. Lucian fisherman. Achille is a man “who never ascended in an elevator,/who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,/never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter.”

Near the end of Walcott’s long, meditative, elusive poem, that line gave me a jolt. What’s so bad about waiting tables? Is there really something so lessening, something analogous to begging or borrowing, about being a waiter?

The answer to that question for lots of people is “yes”. This isn’t a general human truth about workers at all times and in all cultures, because there are places where waiting and where service in general are deeply respected jobs. But it’s apparent that the new service work has many people doing things that aren’t congruent with their sense of their identity.

For many people, their personal story or narrative has become one of decline and loss, of reduction in self-esteem. The tension in status between different types of work is one theme of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” — indeed, that is essentially what his struggle is, the gap between the narrator’s sense of what he should be doing, as a writer, and what he actually does all day, as a homemaker: “Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards.”

It’s sometimes said that the value of manufacturing work is exaggerated, and that we should just get used to the idea that most jobs are now in service industries — which is probably true. But unionized manufacturing work gave a sense of community and meaning that more atomized, more modern, more service-based work struggles to do. It doesn’t matter that many of those old jobs were boring, or brutally repetitive, or dangerous, or made workers sick — or, like coal mining, all of those things simultaneously.

In the 1937 speech where Franklin D. Roosevelt called for “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,” he stressed that “the overwhelming majority of our population earns its daily bread either in agriculture or in industry.” Hard manual work created tangible products, and that tangibility was part of what made the work seem meaningful. Miners and autoworkers, laborers in the clothing and electrical and transportation industries, had a social cohesion based on the fact that they worked and sweated and lived and suffered together, creating a tangible product that seemed to them imbued with national, even world-historical, significance.

The danger is that a class identity founded on collective labour is replaced by an identity founded on resentment, further destabilizing our politics. As Japan shows us, there are worse things for a society than calmly growing old together.

Rants&Rambles

White

Today is a day for staying home, lighting the fire and bumbling about.

Unusually, the snow has arrived in London, and is now spread across the entire country. In many places we are seeing red weather warnings ie. threat of life, across the south east and Scotland.

Schools are closed and the roads are snowed up. Even after salting, the snow is coming down so quickly that it’s becoming more and more difficult to get out and about so staying home seems the only sensible option.

I’ve ordered an electric blanket for the eldest away in a cold rental home at university and had it delivered this morning. It might be silly but I really hate the idea of her being cold in the night. Her plans are to visit a neighbour who had a stroke a year back and whose dog she has been walking weekly. She’s worried that he doesn’t have the heating on much and maybe could use some help getting some basic groceries to stock up. Without pausing for breath she noted the chance that she might find him dead or struggling – it’s time to be a good neighbour.

The snow is predicted to continue right through to the weekend so I’ve warned her to stock up for the long term – the snow is only going to get deeper and colder.

Home, Rants&Rambles

Privilege

One of my daughters is at university whilst the other will probably leave for university this September. I don’t like to think about the latter. I’m busy pretending to myself that my babies still live at home, whilst also, and in an entirely contradictory manner, congratulating them on growing into such wonderful women. But probably, by the end of the year, we will have two semi-adult, semi-independent children living away from home, and that costs money.

There is a debate at the moment about student fees in the UK. Changes in the way the UK finances tertiary education mean that we now have the most expensive undergraduate courses in the world.

University coasts break down into two component parts: fees for tuition and maintenance.

In England annual university fees are now £9250 a year. The loans are “owned” by a private company and the interest rate charged, which accrues from the minute that you first take out the loan, is around 6% making for a cost of more than £555 a year for the start of your course.

However large the loan is that you build up, let’s say £27,750 capital over three years plus interest accrued £3,465 by the end of a three year course i.e. £31,215, you will only start repaying it when you earn more than £21,000. repayment is charged through the UK payroll system of taxes (PAYE) at a rate of 9% pa. on top of the standard UK income tax rates. This additional tax is paid until either the loan is paid off or 30 years have passed, in which case any outstanding amount is written off.

So it’s an expensive business having children at university. When I consider the rather measly 6 hours contact time my eldest enjoys at university, the cost is only bearable when viewed as compensating or supplementing the 35+hours that her sister will require.

It costs roughly the same amount again for maintenance i.e. accommodation etc so in reality many children will end up with debts of around £60,000.

And since the loans are only repaid over a certain income threshold, and since many women will take a career break to have kids and return to work only part-time, a substantial proportion of the loan balance will never be repaid (around 45% of the total loan portfolio). This unpaid balance is building up, but ultimately will be the responsibility of the government ie. all tax payers, graduates or otherwise to repay.

We decided to pay for our children’s maintenance ourselves, and are obviously lucky enough to afford to do so. But we decided to encourage our daughters to take out a student loan for the fees. A number of friends find this decision incomprehensible with one going so far as to ask how we could do such a thing, having happily paid for our children to attend private schools as if they were one and the same issue.

Hmm.

In the UK we have seen a vast expansion of university places such that the number of children attending university has risen from around 20%  to 50% of the population. And that expansion has been funded largely by the rise in student fees. Calls to reduce or remove fees entirely, seem to ignore the consequence of cutting places for students to study. The country could not afford to pay for 50% of kids to attend to university if it was all paid for by central government.

And so you see a rise in the number of people suggesting that it would okay to restrict university places, because university should not be the be-all and end-all. University, apparently, is not right for everyone and we have gone too far in suggesting that it is.

My problem with this argument, is that it seems to be made mostly by people who have no doubt that their children will attend university, come what may. University may not be for everyone else’s kids, but it most definitely is the right place for their kids. other people’s kids can grow up to be plumbers and electricians. Their kids will grow up to be middle-managers, lawyers, doctors etc.

Because when people of my generation went to university, there was an obvious restriction on the number of places at university. And that had consequences. Most of the people I know now, went to very safe, very middle-class schools, private or grammar. Almost everyone they knew as kids went to university, and the idea that they were part of only 20% of the population doesn’t really ring true for them. I went to a very poor working class comprehensive state school. Out of a school year with around 180 pupils, around around 4 of us went to university. So whilst almost 100% of my middle class friends’ classes went to university, just 2% of my peers managed to make it to university.

Any suggestion that we should cut back on university places, inevitably means cutbacks for the working class, for the poorest amongst us.

So my children will take out student loans that will be expensive and unwieldy to pay back, because in part this will fund kids’ education who could not afford to attend university without a loans system.

They will also take out student loans, because at some level, knowing that they personally are paying for their university course, will hopefully encourage them to try and get the best value out of their course. It will give them some skin in the educational game.

Maybe.

I’m told that all young kids want to do is chill out and get pissed, that the loan is somethings they will simply write-off or ignore. It seems to me that some kids will be like this and some won’t. I’m hopeful that my kids have been raised with a greater sense of responsibility but also believe that times have changed and this generation of young people is incredibly more hard-working and focused than our generation ever was.

Either way it has nothing to do with paying private school fees which are absolutely indefensible from a moral societal perspective. People pay for private schools because they believe it will advantage their kids in some way, much as any other selection process within education privileges children. We paid for private education because we wanted both girls to attend single-sex schools, to be within a highly motivated, focused and quite narrow academic stream and obviously because we likes the additional facilities that mad wit easier for the kids to study and study well.

We had the money and were willing to spend it. Other people without the money, make different choices where they can such as sitting for competitive grammar schools etc. There is no moral high ground in terms of selective education.

& it would be stupid to pretend otherwise, I have voted and will continue to vote for a government willing to abolish all types of selective education, whether academic or faith. But whilst it’s available, we made use of the advantage it could offer our daughters.

And the privilege we are willing to offer our kids continues unabated. If my girls want to study for masters or doctorates because they’re enjoying their academic studies that much, then they’ll be able to do so, financed by the bank of mum and dad. If they want to live and work in London, we will help them do so again, financed by the bank of mum and dad.

& at the back of my mind is the knowledge that other people’s children don’t have those choices. The world of work is narrowing; the middle classes are contracting.  I want my girls to be happy but, like most parents, I need them to be safe first and foremost.

Because ultimately money is just a tool, a way to afford a life you want to live and we want to live close to our children and for them to be happy (in the hop that th two are not incompatible). Happiness wasn’t a factor in our decision making when we were younger. We had to earn money to live. Now that we have the money, I’d like my daughters to have broader choices, to have a safety net to catch them if those choices don’t work out.