… being both British and Australian. It only took seven and a half years of living in Ol’ Blighty to do it. The ceremony took place in the chambers of the Camden Council Hall — all dark timber and green leather. There were about 30 of us in the ceremony. Roughly half chose to swear their allegence by God, and half to affirm it without any religious reference. Now I get to wait six weeks before getting my British passport.
Tag Archive for 'UK'
I’ll never try to pretend that a Scottish tennis player or a bunch of South African cricket players are English, but today I sent off my application for naturalisation as a British citizen. My grandmother would be proud.
I don’t understand the (failed) attempt by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon to inspire a leadership challenge in the Labour Party here in the UK. Any serious contender for the job (i.e. Milliband) would surely recognise that the chance of a Labour victory in this year’s general election is miniscule, no matter who leads the party, and to lose an election three or four months into your leadership would hardly make for a sterling start.
If one takes a Tory victory as given, it would be far better to let Brown take the full hit for the loss. Keep him on as a figurehead to take all the bile, spit, rage and blame for the state of the country as a whole and the state of the government’s finances and the electoral loss in particular. Let the voting public gorge themselves in a cathartic spasm of kicking the Blair/Brown pairing and then shuffle Brown off, declare that there will be no return to Old Labour and start observing loudly at every opportunity that now it’s the Tories that are all about spin.
Brown’s job at this point is not so much to put out the fire — that can no longer be done — but to save the furniture. So why did Hewitt and Hoon do this? It was never going to work and it only serves to further lessen the probability of Labour retaining some of their seats.
The obvious answer is that they don’t consider a Tory victory to be a foregone conclusion and somehow think that simply getting rid of Brown will help the broader party separate itself from the Blair/Brown brand. The first part of that sentence may indeed be true (afterall, the Tories need an average swing of 7% to win), but the second is utterly false. Labour will not escape the Blair/Brown brand until they’ve spent some time in opposition for the simple reason that the public needs to kill it before they will forget about it.
Here is a NY Times article doing what the NY Times does well, this time looking at the use of food stamps across America. Here are the basic details (emphasis is all mine):
With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.
It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese
[...]
the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day. There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps
[...]
Nationwide, food stamps reach about two-thirds of those eligible, with rates ranging from an estimated 50 percent in California to 98 percent in Missouri. Mr. Concannon urged lagging states to do more to enroll the needy, citing a recent government report that found a sharp rise in Americans with inconsistent access to adequate food.
[...]
Unemployment insurance, despite rapid growth, reaches about only half the jobless (and replaces about half their income), making food stamps the only aid many people can get — the safety net’s safety net.Support for the food stamp program reached a nadir in the mid-1990s when critics, likening the benefit to cash welfare, won significant restrictions and sought even more. But after use plunged for several years, President Bill Clinton began promoting the program, in part as a way to help the working poor. President George W. Bush expanded that effort, a strategy Mr. Obama has embraced.
The revival was crowned last year with an upbeat change of name. What most people still call food stamps is technically the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
[...]
Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.
[...]
Use among children is especially high. A third of the children in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee receive food aid. In the Bronx, the rate is 46 percent. In East Carroll Parish, La., three-quarters of the children receive food stamps.A recent study by Mark R. Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, startled some policy makers in finding that half of Americans receive food stamps, at least briefly, by the time they turn 20. Among black children, the figure was 90 percent.
I’m not sure how I feel about food stamps. The classically-trained economist in me wants to point out that money is fungible, so that:
- for people that, if they were given the equivalent amount of cash, would have bought the same amount of food, the program largely serves to impose unnecessary administrative costs over a simple cash transfer and places a stigma on the recipients; and
- for people that, if they were given the equivalent amount of cash, would have bought less food, the program (arguably) willfully deprives them of welfare in addition to the administrative costs and stigma.
On the other hand, we have that:
- for the (presumed) minority of recipients that have problems with drug or alcohol abuse or have a family member that has problems, receiving aid in the form of food stamps helps ensure that there’s still food on the table (although I do assume that there is a secondary market in food stamps, not to mention in food itself);
- for the recipients living in high-crime areas, the incentive to steal food stamps is lower than that to steal cash (even if there is a secondary market, it’ll be annoying to deal with and won’t give 100 cents on the dollar), so receiving food stamps is safer;
- by giving people food stamps instead of cash, you reduce the possibility of a sense of entitlement emerging (one of the major problems in countries, like Britain, with comprehensive welfare systems is that recipients can come to consider the aid they receive as their right and not just (hopefully temporary) assistance); and
- America, for some reason that is mostly beyond me, has always had trouble facing up to the moral imperative to assist those in genuine need and presenting that assistance as food stamps seems to have granted it some political cover.
Anyway, the NY Times piece comes with some more fantastic graphics. Here are two snapshots (click-through on either of them to get to the good stuff on the NY Times website):
About an hour ago I wrote about an article in The Guardian about how they had been prevented from writing about parliamentary proceedings via a court injunction. In particular, they weren’t allowed to write about this question put before parliament:
(292409)
Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.
The story became a Twitter sensation. Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have been the hottest trending topics on Twitter for the last few hours, the Liberal Democrats sought an urgent debate on press freedom and now, as their journalists write furiously in the background with their editors looking over their shoulders to save time, The Guardian is reporting on their front page:
Breaking news: * LATEST: Guardian can reveal that parliamentary question from Paul Farrelly MP subjected to reporting ban was related to Trafigura toxic waste scandal. More details soon ..
Which is to say that the gag has been lifted in under (?) 24 hours.
This has all been a tremendous example of the Streisand effect, named for Barbara Streisand’s catastrophically backfiring attempt to prevent a picture of her house being made available on the internet. While attempting to surpress attention, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have only managed attract a huge amount of attention to themselves.
It’s a PR nightmare for them and a happy day for The Guardian.
Update 1: Here is confirmation from the Guardian.
Update 2: Here is the BBC on the matter. By way of explaining why they did not cover the story despite not being expressly mentioned in the injunction, they say:
No injunction was served on the BBC, but ever since the Spycatcher case in the 1980s news organisations which knowingly breach an injunction served on others are in contempt of court, so the corporation too felt bound by the Guardian injunction.
Which is the equivalent of “once bitten, (forever) twice shy.” The Beeb finishes by quoting Steven Fry’s tweet from when he discovered the good news:
Can it be true? Carter-Ruck caves in! Hurrah! Trafigura will deny it had anything to do with Twitter, but we know don’t we? We know! Yay!!!
Update 3: BBC Newsnight will have a special on Trafigura and their chemical disposals tonight.
When ordering a latte from a British caff, remember that their unit of measure for barista-applied sugar is much larger than the little packets you get at specialist coffee shops.
The Murdoch Empire ™ has decided to pull the plug on their free newspaper for the going-home-on-the-tube market, The London Paper, after making a pre-tax loss of £12.9 million in the year to June 2008.
That they’re hemorrhaging cash right now is no surprise since advertising expenditure is strongly pro-cyclical — it plummets in a recession and explodes in a boom. To some extent, they’ve been unfortunate that the credit crisis and it’s associated advertising caution has been around for two of their three years and obviously the competition with Associated Newspapers’ London Lite won’t have helped. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that it was ever a viable business model and frankly, even if it were, I’m glad that they’ve folded. Ian Burrell puts it mildly when he says:
For the past three years, the sight of purple-and-mauve jacketed vendors thrusting free newspapers into the hands of office workers as they headed home from work has been a familiar feature in the capital.
“Thrusting” is the correct word to use, but I would prefix it with a few choice adverbs, “obnoxiously” being the most polite. The vendors are seriously rude. They make a deliberate point of blocking traffic and getting in your face. It is genuinely infuriating — I find myself wanting to scream at them — but I know that they’re just doing what they’re told to do.
On their way home from work, nobody cares which of the free papers they read. Since the papers themselves are desperate to get your eyeballs, the ideal economic situation would therefore be for them to pay you to choose them. But that’s impossible on a practical level, so instead they end up forcing a non-monetary cost on everybody by slowing everyone down and annoying the hell out of people.
Since Associated Newspapers still have a 24% stake in the Evening Standard, this will probably mean the end of the afternoon freesheet (I imagine that the Metro in the morning will stick around), but even if it doesn’t, it will almost certainly mean the end of the obnoxious vendors forcing themselves on people. They’ll just stick the London Lite in the same bins that they use for the Metro instead. Presumably those vendors are being paid (minimum wage, I would guess) and so getting rid of them might make it narrowly profitable if there is just one afternoon freesheet.
Hallelujah.
On Saturday night, just before midnight, Daniela and I were roped into playing a game of cricket on Sunday for a team of ex-pats. Well … “roped” is the wrong word and much too unfair: we signed up with enthusiasm. No, that’s not quite right, either. Dani gets incredibly excited by this sort of random adventure and she signed up with genuine enthusiasm. It was inevitable at that point that I sign up as well (with Australia levelling the Ashes up in Leeds, I did have a patriotic duty to join the fray), but my enthusiasm was buoyed somewhat by the wine and had a slightly greasy patina of apprehension. I hadn’t played a proper game since October 1992 when I was in my high school team and Dani had only played a couple of games of backyard cricket with the dog chasing the ball. Still, we were assured that experience and ability were by no means necessary, so we agreed con gusto.
We only got to bed at 3am on Sunday (it was a big night – a friend was leaving London), but managed to wake in time to gather with the rest of the team in central London at 11:30am, coffee in hand. To the casual eye, my whites may have looked a bit like an old pair of khakis supplemented with a borrowed white polo shirt. Dani, of course, was resplendent in white from top to bottom. The team we played for represents a charity and, it turns out, there are charities that offer transportation services to other charities, so we all piled into the mini-bus more usually used for carrying disabled children to be driven for an hour and a half to the interminable maze otherwise known as the Oxfordshire countryside.
We must have spent 40 minutes twisting and turning and silently swearing at the perpetually manic directions of the lady in the SatNav (“Recalculating. After point four miles, turn left, then turn left.”). I was sitting next to our captain – an Indian chap with an easy grin who was about to submit his Ph.D. He alternated between trying to figure out where we were, pouring scorn on the English badminton team for pulling out of the world championships in India and declaring confidently that, as an Australian, I must be a fantastic fielder who would happily throw himself horizontal to stop a boundary. I mumbled something about a bit of practice in the nets before the match and stared anxiously at the six-foot hedges.
We eventually found the Ipsden Cricket Club [Google Maps]. It’s a beautiful ground that backs onto a (recently harvested) wheat field and has a gigantic ash (?) tree down on the long boundary at the western end. The pavilion even has a piece of the original floorboards of the Long Room at Lord’s. The weather was superb, with barely a cloud and a fair breeze coming from the north west. I guess that the temperature would have been in the mid-twenties (Celsius). There were some Red Kites in the sky and quite a few gliders were out for the day.
A couple of the guys padded up and we took turns bowling in the nets. I somehow managed to keep mine in the general direction of the stumps, managed a few yorkers and even clean bowled one of our batsman once. The captain told me that I would bowl in the match and our friend that had invited us expressed some joy that he wouldn’t have to be bowler number five all on his own. I started to pick up some confidence. It was fun. It was relaxed. I didn’t suck.
The game was to be 35 overs each; we fielded first. The Canadian on our team used to play as a catcher in baseball and became the wicket keeper. Dani alternated between Third man and Long on, while I swapped between Point and Mid-wicket. We had two good bowlers, two pretty-good bowlers, and me and my mate who’d invited us. We did pretty well in the first 10 or 11 overs. We got a couple of wickets and they weren’t scoring too quickly (maybe four per over?). I didn’t fumble my first couple of touches of the ball and Dani was enjoying herself.
Then I missed a ball badly. I froze, didn’t get down to it and had to run swearing after the thing only to watch it dribble over the boundary. Not to worry, it was only one mistake and other people were occasionally missing some too. After a couple more overs I was called up to bowl. I was okay in my first over: clearly nervous and not very good, but not obscenely bad either. My second over, however, was a shambles that in hindsight I’m almost oddly proud of. It was chaotic, occasionally dangerous to the batsman and very, very expensive. I was “rested” after that.
My second over also roughly marked the start of our mini collapse. Without a fifth bowler, our two decent guys had to bowl 11 or 12 overs each (the Ipsden team very kindly waived the rule requiring no more than seven overs per bowler) and they started to get tired. I was fading mentally pretty quickly and I missed four or five balls in what turned into a pretty farcical fielding display. I even managed to have my feet slip out from under me on one occasion. Drinks came out after 21 overs and our captain took the time to observe that we were fielding atrociously.
By that point the batsmen had settled in nicely, though and our fielding was rarely the problem. Boundaries, boundaries, everywhere became the order of the day. Poor Dani had to scramble down the embankment past the boundary to hunt for the ball in the bracken on more than one occasion. I was out at Deep cover point and Deep forward leg by then and under instruction to stay on the boundary (not walk in with the bowler). I may not have had the reflexes for the infield, but dammit, I could run around like a mad hare as sweeper. For the last five overs or so, I switched over to the northern side of the field and played Square leg and Deep cover. I managed to stop the three or four balls that came to me, saving a couple of singles and a boundary, so my fielding ended, if not a high note, then at least having recovered a smidgen of self-confidence. Ipsden managed 3 for 236 after 35 overs, with one chap on 101 not out. It had taken three and a half hours.
Our hosts put on quite a spread for the break. Half a dozen types of sandwiches, some chips (“crisps” to the English) and a bunch of delicious sweet tarts and teacakes filled us up mightily with endless cups of tea. The black labrador of the club president happily wandered between us, soaking up the attention. I reminded Dani how to hold the bat (it’s not a natural position for someone new to the game) and we both earnestly hoped that we wouldn’t need to pad up.
Dani’s and my friend opened the batting along with the captain and it shortly became clear that the race was on. I was surprised. Apparantly last year the Ipsden team had gotten our lot all out for only 60. Dani and I ended up sitting and watching a fine batting display as our batters clipped along to seal the win with two balls and six wickets to spare. One of our lads managed a fantastic century and another 74. The sun had started to set by the end and the wind, still fresh, began to chill a little. Jumpers, cups of tea and the dog to the rescue, we were toasty warm through to the end.
It was the last game for our captain, who on top of the win to remember was presented with a bottle of champagne and a first-edition copy of C.L.R. James’s classic, “Beyond a boundary“, by the regular members of the team. We got back to London about 9:30pm and were home by 10. It was an absolutely cracking day. We really enjoyed ourselves and the team was a great bunch of guys. It was, in many ways, the very best sort of day in England.
Now if only I weren’t so stiff the day after that I can barely walk …
One of my friends disagrees with my thoughts on the MP expenses scandal in Britain. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that part of our difference of opinion starts at a disagreement over what it really means to be a politician.
So here is my question to the world at large (yes, I recognise that it might be a false dichotomy): Is “politician” a job title just like any other, or is being a politician to have some sort of sacred, noble trust? Is there is something more to the role than simply maximising the returns to your constituents or the country as a whole?
Let me propose a thought experiment (for any American’s in the audience, parliament = congress and MP = representative).
Suppose we change the law so that a) voting for your representative to parliament is mandatory; b) each member of parliament represents exactly the same number of people; and c) in addition to electing a representative to parliament, everybody is permitted to vote directly on any matter brought before that parliament. If you choose to vote directly on an issue, then the weight of your representative’s vote is decreased proportionately. In this way, we would have the possibility of anything between 100% pure direct democracy and standard representative democracy, depending on what people choose.
How many people would choose to vote directly on some issues? How many on every issue? Clearly the answer is that we’d have a distribution. Some people would vote directly on everything, some would do so occasionally and some never at all.
So what do we make of that distribution? I’ll grant that I’m thinking like an economist here, but I think it’s a perfectly normal, mundane choice between trade-offs. Should I pay attention to the debate on fishing regulation or should I do something else? Everybody faces a different combination of available options, preferences over those options, incomes and relative prices between those options, so any range of attention to parliament might emerge.
In that situation, choosing to not vote directly is entirely equivalent to taking your shirts to the dry cleaner or hiring a maid to clean your house once a week. It’s an economic decision like any other, which in turn makes “politician” just another service industry job title like “financial adviser” or “maid”.
[Side note: This scenario is currently my ideal. If I could, I'd have MPs paid per parliamentary vote per person represented, with a negative hit to anybody that introduced a bill to parliament so as to discourage frivolous votes.]
Update (1 June ‘09): Put another way, why should a backbench opposition MP, who has only an abstract and indirect power over my life, be subject to more stringent ethical standards than the person performing heart surgery on me, who has direct and absolute power over my life?
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