Vox Polis

The Leader of the New Zealand’s National party, Don Brash, resigned yesterday after only 3 years as leader. He may have done well for the party in the last election, but he was boring, monotonous and had little to offer the Right in the way of new ideas. He also looked a bit like Michael Howard.

As an ex-head of the central bank he often seemed to think like an economist rather than a politician and his views were based on basic Right Wing libertarian ideas. He promised to introduce the voucher system in New Zealand. He will not be missed.

Looks like Blair’s “rights with responsibilities” agenda is going to take physical form with a real social contract. We saw some of these ideas floated back in September in Miliband’s doomed wiki experiment, where Dave showed us his environmental contract. But this social contract will extend the idea to health, policing and education. One example given by the Guardian is that you will only have a hip operation if you lose weight.

This idea is different from what a social contract, in the philosophical sense, is meant to achieve. Nosemonkey’s got a good article on this so I won’t repeat it here. Although I do think that Nosemonkey’s wrong in seeing this as a Hobbesian contract. I think it is closer to the Rousseauian idea that Nosemonkey seems to support. Don’t forget that Blair is a big supporter of positive liberty (in the Berlin sense; he even wrote a letter to Berlin explaining his ideas). This social contract seems to be based on self-government, but is the application of the Government’s will instead of the general will. We need to realise what is good for us. Only then can we be free. We will be “forced to be free”.

Although the uses of the social contract to explain how we developed out of the state of nature is interesting (although only as a thought experiment), what worries me about these proposals is that it forces the citizen to do the things that the government believes are good for the citizen to be doing. This is paternalism at its worst. Although you can argue that there is a choice - a person who needs a hip operation can refuse to lose weight and live in pain. This is not a choice that a rational person would choose. Questions arise such as do we have a moral responsibility to treat that person? Or in education, do we have a moral responsibility to teach all children at school? What about policing - shouldn’t we have a right to protection?

I’m sure it won’t be too long before the contract is extended to everything from security to voting. You serve in Iraq and we’ll protect you from terrorists. You vote for Labour and we’ll give you a peerage. - Brown might need the last one to win the next election with policy plans such as these.

It may be legal Cuban cigars all round in Washington soon. The Democrats may use their control of Congress to end the Cuban embargo, a policy that has contributed to Cuban poverty and helped Castro consolidate his position. Embargoes never work - it’s only through greater engagement and trade that democracy can be achieved.

I always believed that it was American policy towards Cuba that forced it to join the Russians back in the 50s. In effect the US created the problem themselves. This is at last a move in the right direction to begin to correct this mistake.

Speculation continues as to what John Reid is plotting. Why go to such lengths for self-promotion if you’re not after something?

Reid’s not in a position to challenge Brown and he knows it. The Labour party voting rules means that Brown’s got it pretty much sown up. If it’s the Deputy position he wants, I’m not convinced that the Labour party will allow Scots to dominate both top jobs - it clearly wouldn’t be a vote winner.

Could he be after a seat at the table under a Brown government? Clearly he would like one, but would Gordon really be that accommodating to the Blairites? I’m not convinced.

Then what is it? Perhaps he’s preparing for a future leadership contest. If Gordon loses the next election, which is quite possible, then perhaps he wants to be there to take the reins. He may be a few years older than Brown, but that won’t necessarily stop him.

The government’s latest venture into citizen interaction and the crazy world of teh Interwebs has just been bought to my attention.  With the assistance of mySociety.org (the folks responsible for PledgeBank and many other worthy projects) Downing Street have launched an online petitioning system.  The site’s currently in beta but seems to be working well (although at the time of writing it’s down for maintenance) and is attracting a lot of interest.  There are several worthwhile petitions already active; I’ve signed up to scrapping ID cards and fair-use copying rights so far.  As you might expect, the Internet’s lunatic fringe have also been busy - if you’re so inclined you can back the castration of paedophiles and ask the government to intervene to keep the manufacture of HP Sauce in the UK.  Whether all this interacting with the proles will actually have any effect on government policy is, of course, highly debatable but at least it’s an opportunity to bask in the warm glow of not being complete apathetic.

“We all suffer crime, the poorest and vulnerable most of all, it is the duty of government to protect them. But we can make choices in spending too. And instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards…let that money provide thousands of extra police officers on the beat in our local communities. But the truth is that the best two crime prevention policies are a job and a stable family.”

Who said this?  Who else but Tony Blair in 1995.  Thanks to Peter Black for the insight.

It seems that the new EU wine label logo is not as uniting as people hoped.

The French have complained because the logo doesn’t look the same when you translate it into different languages, and supposedly it’s in English on some EU sites (not French). Here are the French changes:

…and the original one:

Some also believe it looks like Google and the ‘r’ at the end is like the copyright symbol - symbolising capitalism. Clearly these aren’t things the EU should be celebrating. That’s also no problem if we keep the French version.

According to the Times, the Germans are also unhappy - and plan to produce their own logo.

I can’t wait for the celebrations next year.

After the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last week the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) are the latest organisation to jump on what’s fast becoming a bandwagon of support for fair use copying rights. Taking a slightly different tack the BPI have suggested that fair use could be allowed via an authorization granted by rights holders rather than through a change in the law. The BPI have already announced that they won’t prosecute anyone for copying music from e.g. a CD to an MP3 player.

Whilst authorization would in a practical sense get rid of the problem there are a number of issues that it doesn’t solve. The first issue is constitutional, as Kay Withers of the IPPR put it “It’s good that the BPI have said they’re not going to prosecute but it should be the government deciding what the consumers and citizens rights are, rather than citizens.” The second issue is the question of whether and how this authorization can be granted retrospectively, I don’t see how changes to the licensing of CDs that have already been sold can be enacted without contacting all rights holders involved which would clearly be a mammoth task. The third issue is ‘future-proofing’, the BPI only speak on issues concerning music but the legality of personal copies of DVDs (and who knows what else in the long term) is also in question. All these problems can be solved by the government enshrining in law the right of UK citizens to make reasonable use of works protected by copyright.

As a bleak side-note - whilst I was writing this post it occurred to me that after the changes brought about by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which made all offences arrestable you could, presumably, be arrested, DNA sampled etc. for carrying an iPod that had music stored on that you’d ripped from your own CDs. Just something to think about.

Via Out-Law.com.

The Lib Dems have come up with proposals for a Great Repeal Act and are asking people to suggest more - here. There are only 10 laws on the list at the moment, I’m sure we can at least double that.

David Rennie is arguing on his blog that the attempt to introduce transparency in EU proceedings is a failure. This is because letting the cameras into meetings prevents deals and compromises from being made, resulting in all the “productive” discussions being taken during the unfilmed lunch.

Rennie goes on to explain that journalists know what goes on in these lunches anyway so there are no secrets. He compares the filming of meetings to the attendance of the CEO to a regular meeting, and asks “just how much really useful work would you get done?”

But the failure is not transparency. As Rennie rightly alludes to, the failure is the leaders themselves - they are unwilling to discuss things openly for political reasons. Because of this, transparency will not help to improve relations with citizens nor change the public’s view towards the EU.

So does this mean that we should get rid of the cameras?

Although the journalists might know what goes on, they often fail (I admit it’s often the fault of the editor/owner of the paper rather than the journalist) to pass this on to the rest of us. If it was passed on then clearly there would be no point in discussing things off camera because we would know what those discussions consisted of.

Also let us not forget that this is a “big” step for EU leaders who are used to late night back room deals. It takes time to adjust. If the CEO turned up to one meeting, that would clearly put you off. If the CEO was a regular attendee, then you would get used to their presence, interact with them and frankly the company would probably benefit.

But for transparency to succeed our leaders must stop assuming that people are not able to comprehend EU proceedings or understand that compromise is necessary and not a sign of weakness. They must accept that the EU should not continue as an elite and secretive project. So let’s give transparency a chance.