So, Iceland’s president has thrown a controversial international financial deal to a referendum. Looking at this alongside the Lisbon Treaty kerfuffle in the UK, can we now approach a definition of “referendum” as:
a political device used by politicians of one party to unpick international agreements made by politicians of another party, in circumstances where they believe the popular mood of the moment is on their side.
A group of cross party Parliamentarians (including a former Archbishop of Canterbury) have released a statement (extracted and linked at ConservativeHome), saying that immigration is too high and that the population of the country should be capped at 70 million.
It is not surprising that a bunch of backward-looking, right-leaning MPs should want to stop immigration. It is not surprising that they should garland their views with endless protests that some of their best friends are Polish, and they just love what Indian women do with those henna patterns.
What is surprising is that they think their idea of a 70m cap is even slightly credible.
First problem: Why 70m? The UK population doubled in the eighteenth century and more than doubled in the nineteenth – presumably former MPs would have set 10m as the target, or 20m. What makes a less-than-10% rise unacceptable now? Is there some magic number of schools or hospitals, beyond which more can never be built? Are there no empty homes in northern England, no brownfield land where these new arrivals can be accommodated?
Second problem: Which 70m? If an economist were to choose 70m people to live in the UK, there would be far more hard-working, young, tax-paying immigrants and far fewer old, workless, unhealthy, pension-drawing British people. Is it really a good idea to shut out the people who will be paying for my pension?
Third problem: How 70m? Given that the population of the EU is about 500m (and will be more soon), and that they can all live wherever they like, how do we keep them out? Do we start culling when we get to 70m+1? Leave the EU? Smear excrement around the arrivals lounge at Heathrow to discourage people?
Fourth problem: Why bother? The statement appears to believe that the growth in the BNP vote is linked to some sort of rational concern about immigration, and that if the government only adopted an explicitly xenophobic immigration policy, everyone would be happy and the issue would drop off the agenda. Well, nice idea, but the right-wing papers are driving this agenda, and will continue to do so right up to the moment when their man gets into office. As soon as that happens, the tone will change and the Government will be become the good guys who are doing their best (except for occasional beatings to serve as a warning). Then we’ll see what happens to the salience of immigration, and the BNP vote.
Update: Some excellent critiquing of the “balanced migration” report at Left Foot Forward.
Happy New Election Year everybody.
Today’s big news story is the (fourth or fifth) first day of campaigning for the general election, likely to be held in May.
I was particularly impressed by how the Conservatives are giving at least a veneer of crowdsourcing to their manifesto by inviting questions (this week on the NHS) and allowing people to vote on the ones which are put to David Cameron in a live webcast on Friday.
It’s not much, but it’s a start.
Lots of comment around Simon Cowell’s threat to launch a political X Factor. Not that people necessarily remember it, but the idea’s been done, and spectacularly didn’t work.
Also revealed are the voting patterns in the phone poll, which show that the only actual intervention by the judges was to dump out Jedward. For which relief, as they say, much thanks.
James Crabtree writes a long article, which is worth reading, following up on his idea of compulsory civic service in the light of recent work by DEMOS.
I have a few philosophical problems with the idea of compulsory civic service, not least the idea that it is the State’s responsibility actively to define what its citizens should do, rather than to prohibit what they ought not to do.
That said, James’s piece makes me a little better-disposed to the proposal, not least because it sites it within the liberal republican tradition (the idea, not to be too wonkish) that this service is part of a range of obligations the citizen has to the political community to which he belongs, as in Switzerland, the Italian city-state republics, and so on.
There is still a problem for me, though, in the idea of compulsion. Are we really going to force people to undertake this service and send them to prison if they don’t? After all, a fine would just be used by the well-off to ‘buy out’ of six months when they could be working in the City or bumming round Europe on Daddy’s millions.
Perhaps an alternative approach might be – in the civic republican tradition – to prevent people from taking up their civic rights of voting, participating in juries, etc., until they had completed the service. Given the level of political disengagement, though, how many people would just not bother?
I have been a bit surprised by the number of comments coming in on an old post of mine on the Kercher trial, which has just concluded in Perugia.
I commented on British coverage of the trial when it kicked off in February, noting the tendency of the British press to assume that trials in other countries (even their beloved USA) are inherently unfair, and doomed to condemn an innocent Brit to a rat-infested prison, perhaps with an unshaven man in a sombrero drinking tequila in an outer office.
The foreigns, you see, don’t understand justice and good old British fair play. Their funny little legal systems are all right for them, of course, but couldn’t possibly be used on a British person. This attitude is everywhere, and feels like one of the last mental tendencies of Empire – if one of your chaps is in jail, send off a gunboat (or a snippy comment on the Telegraph website, in the modern variation).
Anyway, this is all by way of a long introduction to saying I was highly amused to see my post from February being the top Google result for “Italian justice” (hence all the traffic), and that the other three of the top four search results were Brits and Americans saying that the trial was a joke, and how could a pretty white woman possibly be judged by some greasy fascist winking at the girls as he drives round the Piazza Navona on a tiny little scooter? Screen shot below.
Screen shot 9.42 on December 5 2009
Today is a day to remember – I’m serious. Here’s Dan Hannan, MEP, on his blog this morning:
Britain is no longer a sovereign nation. At midnight last night, we ceased to be an independent state, bound by international treaties to other independent states, and became instead a subordinate unit within a European state.
Hannan’s article is a classic of the genre, combining apocalyptic melodrama with a pedantic legalism that bears no resemblance to the reality of the world as it is lived.
For instance, the reason we are apparently no longer a sovereign state is that the EU now fulfils, in Hannan’s opinion, the four-part definition of a state in Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Treaty. Disaster! Stop all the clocks! Write a thriller about it and call it the Montevideo Protocol (starring a devilishly handsome shaven-headed hero who can’t stand socialised medicine).
The possibility that Hannan might be wrong, or that the EU and the UK might be parallel sovereignties, or that they create a new form of joint sovereignty unimagined in 1933, isn’t considered – why spoil a good drama?
For all it is laughably inaccurate, hyperbole of this kind always goes unchallenged and is then forgotten. The sensationalism of the media and the collective amnesia of the public will ensure that in a few months’ time, the UK will lose its sovereignty all over again, on some other issue, like a constitutional groundhog day.
That’s why you should remember this day. Remember, when life goes on as normal, Parliament continues to pass laws, we continue to be grudging members of the EU, and the world, in general, keeps turning on its axis, this this was not a day when we lost our sovereignty, that it was just a day like any other, like October 22, 1844, for instance.
Then when the next great world-changing disaster comes around, you can remember that the Euro didn’t collapse within five years, sharia law isn’t ruling our streets, and we could all use a sense of perspective.
The news from Switzerland is bad, not just for the overwhelmingly moderate Swiss Muslim population, but also for democratic reformers in general. Anyone arguing against democratic reform can now say – “let the people have their say, and you’ll get racism and discrimination, like in Switzerland”.
What’s worse, a minority in British politics see such populist racism and discrimination as positive reasons for more participatory democracy. “Cut through the wiles of politicians and the PC brigade, and let the people say what I … sorry, they really think.”
What case can democrats make against those populists?
It has to start from questioning the democratic credentials of the Swiss vote. Sure, the vote was passed in the proper constitutional form, but there are undemocratic elements to every constitution, and I would argue that the use of referendums to deny minority rights is just such an undemocratic element.
One has to draw the distinction between the false view of democracy as “whatever the people think today”, and the larger view of democracy as a system that secures the right of people to control their government both now and in the future.
When I think about the basic principles of democracy, I’m always drawn back to its original Athenian conception, centred around three words – isonomia (equality before the law), isegoria (equal right to speak), and eleutheria (personal freedom).
Two and a half thousand years on, our conception of equality has moved on a little (no slaves, women voting), but the ancient fundamental that a good state secures permanent equality in laws, speech and freedom is written into the US Constitution, the Declaration of Human Rights, and a hundred other basic laws.
If we start with this conception, the Swiss vote starts to look very undemocratic. In the same way that it is not democracy to vote to abolish democracy, it is not democracy to legislate against the fundamentals of democracy.
This Swiss law would be democratic if it applied to all citizens of any religion – the French concept of laïcité works, in theory, like this. As it is, the Swiss referendum attacks isonomia as it applies to Muslim citizens alone. This is even more obvious when one looks at the form it took: a federal constitutional amendment on one religious building in a constitution that delegates every other religious matter to the cantons.
I don’t know what reach the ECHR has in Switzerland – I assume the country is a member of the Council of Europe. I hope that the ECHR has the power to overturn the referendum result. You can imagine the reaction from the rightwingers on the Net: screaming about a disgraceful denial of democracy. I don’t agree. To overturn this unjust and undemocratic referendum would be in itself a democratic decision – even if not taken by the people.
It’s the first birthday of the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance today, and they have an amusing “Which”-style comparison guide if you aren’t sure which one you ought to support.
The original TaxPayers’ Alliance were quoted in a blog post I was reading earlier, from Thomas Byrne, who said, by way of an argument for cutting top public sector salaries:
While there is no systematic data on executive pay in the public sector, there is strong evidence that it has increased rapidly in recent years. For example, the number of employees earning more than £50,000 across local government has increased eleven-fold since 1996, compared with a three-fold increase in the economy as a whole over the same period.
This is an excellent statistic in that it is both easy to grasp and completely misleading. I commented on Thomas’s article to set out why:
I think you need to be careful with the TPA’s figures on local government pay compared to private sector pay.
Consider a population of 110k people. 10k work in local government, 100k work in the private sector.
The local government people are generally low-paid because of years of spending cuts under a Prime Minister we shall call for the sake of argument Thaggie Matcher. Let’s say that they are distributed in bands so that 30% earn £10k, 40% earn £20k, 20% earn £30k, 8% earn £40k and 2% earn £50k
The private sector people are generally paid more. Only 15% earn £10k, 30% earn £20k, 35% earn £30k, 20% earn £40k and 10% earn £50k.
Now assume that inflation means that everyone who earned £40k and above now earns £50k and above. Without affecting the relative wealth of the population, the number of local government people paid over £50k has gone from 2% to 10% – a fivefold increase. Meanwhile the number of private sector people paid over £50k has gone from 10% to 30% – a threefold increase.
Are local government workers better paid now relative to private sector workers? No, the pay differentials within and between the two sectors are unchanged. In fact, 30% of private sector workers are paid more than £50k, and only 10% of local government workers are, so private sector workers are much better off on average.
But by using an arbitrary cut-off point that caught fewer LG workers than private sector workers at the starting point, any increase that affects all employees equally will show a larger percentage increase in the LG workers than in the private sector ones.
While researching the latest fraud woes of the UK Independence Party, I came across this article in the Times. Reporting on the alleged OLAF investigations being conducted on UKIP MEP Michael Nattrass, it has received just five comments in the nine days since it was put online.
This perhaps shows the public’s level of interest in the affairs of the European Parliament, but what’s more interesting is what those comments say. One of them is pro-UKIP – it roughly says that fraud is OK if it’s done by people you agree with, an attitude with which the Daily Mail would thoroughly agree. More surprisingly all the other comments are pro-BNP. 80% BNP support is roughly thirteen times more than the BNP got from actual real voters in the European elections, and more than a hundred times the BNP’s level of support at the 2005 General Election.
Why do newspapers have comment functionality again?