The AVs and the AV-nots

Why?

There’s a very good chance you couldn’t give much of a toss about the referendum on the 5th May.  The one thing that both sides in the AV debate have in common is that they are both failing to grab the imagination or even the attention of the electorate.

A miserable little party

For once – and I don’t imagine it ever happening again – ‘I agree with Nick’.  As in Nick Clegg, the Artist Formerly Known As the Face of the New Politics, and now most commonly known as ‘that cunt’ (to those on the left) or The Gimp (to those on the right).

When he described the Alternative Vote as a ‘miserable little compromise’, he was absolutely on the money and breathtakingly honest.  (This was an aberration.  Perhaps the consequence of simply speaking so much.  The politician’s equivalent of a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day.)

But, when the only other option on offer is the execrable status quo, a ‘miserable little compromise’ is also ‘a very small step in the right direction’.

Of course, the Lib Dems are a miserable little party, and perhaps it smarts to be supporting a reform that they have (unfairly) managed to ‘own’ ideologically.  But more of that later.

Ideally

Colours to the mast: I’d like a wholly elected – via proportionate representation – upper chamber, an AV-elected lower house, and a directly elected president.  That’s a lot of elections from someone who is unconvinced by democracy, but if we are going to try it as a system, we might as well do it properly.  (I’d also like the royal family and the landed aristocracy forced to perform sex acts for ‘benefit scroungers’ and the severely disabled on the Fantasy X Channel, but that – according to recent polling – will prove a hard sell in Middle England.)

Dishonesty

Why is AV better than first past the post (FPTP)?  (You can see some of the main arguments here.)

Constituency MPs will be returned to the House of Commons only with a mandate of support from more than 50% of their constituents.  AV is one of only two ways to ensure that constituency MPs enjoy a simple majority of support from those they represent.  The other way is to have a two-party state.  (One party too many in my opinion, but a potential step in the right direction.)

Posit a constituency with 12 voters.  (It is probably a Tory safe seat.)  Five voters vote for Party A.  Four for Party B and three for Party C.  Party A wins the seat and sends its woman to Westminster.  However, although the four voters for Party B and the three for Party C disagree on a couple of things, they broadly converge on some major points of policy and ideology, and all seven of them disagree with every last thing that Party A stands for.

In our hypothetical constituency, the majority of the electorate oppose their elected representative.

Under AV, when the votes come in and there is no clear majority, the Party C candidate is discarded and its three voters’ second preferences are counted instead.  All three vote for Party B.

Party B sends its woman to Westminster, with the support of a clear majority of the electorate.

The No to AV campaign makes several points against AV.

Many are profoundly dishonest.  You can see what they have to say here.

One point I would like to address directly is this.  AV has many shortcomings, but it most certainly does not break the idea of one voter, one vote, as the No campaign implies.

Essentially, it runs a series of run-off elections, and does it rather efficiently.  Instead of demanding that voters return each Thursday to vote on a gradually diminishing number of candidates until one has a clear majority, it counts voters’ subsequent preferences as candidates are eliminated from the contest.

At no point is anyone’s vote counted more than once.  Think of it instead as a series of separate contests.  But just with less hassle.

Conversely, under FPTP, the link between voters and votes is profoundly undermined.  In our hypothetical example, the majority opposition to a candidate cannot be captured.  In the mockery of democracy that is ‘tactical voting’, support for candidates and parties is utterly distorted, and the perceived bias of the particular constituency becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Votes are wasted.  MPs are sent to Westminster without the majority support of those they represent.  The system runs on inertia.  No wonder people don’t bother to vote when they face the choice of casting a vote that can achieve nothing or one that doesn’t accurate reflect their political beliefs.

The difference between right and wrong

However, that is my personal take on value of AV over FPTP.  There are, though, arguments to the contrary.  I don’t particularly buy them, but they exist.

But there is one argument I can’t accept.

Not to vote for AV because losing this referendum will fatally wound the Lib Dems and the Conservative-led Government.

If the Yes campaign is successful, Nick Clegg will probably survive as Lib Dem leader, and the current Government will rattle painfully through a full term.  And, yes, I believe that will be damaging and not just a little bit horrible for the country.

Conversely, if the referendum is lost, Nick Clegg will almost certainly be ousted, the Lib Dems and perhaps the Government will implode.  The Tories will, bolstered by some Lib Dem defections such as Clegg, probably limp on for a while as a minority Government (as they should always have been according to the rules or at least the traditions of our parliamentary system).  A minority Tory Government will be able to do far less damage to our country than the current chimeric Coalition; this, then, would be a good thing.

But I have a strict deontological moral philosophy.  My friends consider this cutting off my own nose to spite my face, making life hard for myself or being, simply, a contrarian.

My problem: if I believe that AV is a better (though still flawed) system than FPTP, then I have to vote yes, even if I would prefer the consequences of the no campaign being successful.

I don’t believe in the means justifying the ends.  Not least because the means are intrinsic to you; they are that which you can control.  The ends are always, even in a pretty predictable outcome, contingent and external.  Our responsibility for the means we employ through life is – to me – existential; our responsibility for the ends we achieve is accidental, arguable, uncertain.

If I believe that AV represents an improvement, then I must vote yes on 5th May.  So must you.

Disaster! Catastrophe! Credit cards!

“The chief Politician of the Bench was a great Asserter of  Paradoxes.  He told us, with a seeming Concern, That by some News he had lately read from Muscovy, it appeared to him that there was a Storm gathering in the Black Sea, which might in Time do Hurt to the Naval Forces of this Nation.  To his he added, That for his Part, he could not wish to see the Turk driven out of Europe, which he believed could not but be prejudicial to our Woollen Manufacture.”

The Greatest Newsmonger in our Quarter, The Tatler, No.155, April 1710

Addison’s comic swipe at shopkeepers worrying themselves into penury over the news of the day often comes to my mind.  Not least when I find myself dodging a looming deadline, feverishly hunched over my DAB Radio hungry for news, as though the Luftwaffe were overhead, the seas rising, the heavens falling.

Not that, for one moment, I am advocating ever dismissing ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people about whom we know nothing’.  To Chamberlain, the best response might have been: perhaps we ought to learn more about them, then?

But the news coverage of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on Friday 11th March bothers me.  This botherment was brought to a head by a foreign journalist friend of mine turning down the opportunity to witness a bloody political skirmish between a Middle Eastern government and its people yesterday because there was no point risking life and limb for a story not connected with Japan.

There is a matrix of factors calculating the newsworthiness of international events.  These include:

• Proximity – consider the prominence given to French elections over even Spanish ones
• Association – interest often follows  former imperial links; I wonder how UK news coverage of South America compares with Spain and Portugal’s
• Equivalence – a shooting in the US gains greater coverage than one in Finland, because of the common language and our greater familiarity with the culture of the country
• Wealth – fatalities x GDP per capita = quantity of column inches; an economically rational way of judging the newsworthiness of an event
• Aesthetics – news is increasingly visual, and the availability of images affects the way the story is told; the 7 July 2005 London bombings were represented by the image of a damaged bus, despite most deaths and injuries occurring on Tube trains
• Drama – the acute is prioritised over the chronic

This last element of drama worries me today.  It worries me in this way, and my analysis is very indebted to Brecht’s critique of what he called dramatic theatre.

The most dramatic event is that which is wholly contained in an instant or an act, in this case an earthquake and subsequent tsunami.  It is both unique and complete; there is nothing to do apart from document and consume that documentation.

Higher-conscious animals, such as humans, are evolutionarily disposed to gawp at dramatic events.  The well-known example is cars slowing when passing a road traffic accident, to get a good eyeful.  On some level, the brain is saying: look at this, remember this, avoid this.

Of course, watching footage of tsunamis smashing coastal towns or beady-eying car crashes doesn’t actually equip us with any useful information or tools for avoiding either deaths, unless in extremis we decide never to go near roads or within a few miles of the sea.

The mechanism is outdated, suited to a situation when the majority of threats to life were acute, unique and complete.  Historically, that’s millennia ago for humanity; evolutionarily, it’s but a blink ago.

This misplaced predisposition of interest is coupled with another quality: unique, acute, complete, dramatic events are far easier to commoditise and disseminate.  They have a coherence, unity and simplicity that makes for easy production (lines of inquiry and argument are clear and implicit in the event) and easy consumption (causal relations are simple, only slight contextualising required, absence of subtlety or ambiguity of interpretation).

The product tidily fits into the shop window, and why not take out a personal loan at the same time?

Brecht interpreted dramatic theatre as anti-revolutionary.  In a sentimental, fatalistic world of acute tragic events, there is nothing humanity can do, but suffer in the role of ‘flies to wanton boys’.  By contrast, epic theatre delivered socio-economic tragedies, and demonstrated a world where humanity has agency, with all the moral obligations that implies.

Our news favours the sentimentally dramatic, as do capitalist political systems.  Today, Angela Merkal says that Japan can never be the same again.  Nonsense.  There will be an appropriate amount of public and private grieving and respect paid.  There might be considerable investment in tsunami defences, although what could be the economic rationale of insuring against a rare event that has already happened?  Stupidly, we respond to the future as though it will be a repetition of the unique events of the past.  To such dramatic, unique events – that an earlier age would have phlegmatically shrugged off as ‘an act of God’ – we cry: what must be done!

Where is the epic dramatic narrative?  The one that is socially, economically determined, and therefore within our ability to control and prevent?  It is a tragedy that is chronic, rather than acute, and commonplace rather than unique; precisely, invisible because it is everywhere, and so often seen.

So far, 10,000 deaths have been recorded in Japan.  Let’s assume safely that this will triple to 30,000 by the end of today.  Similarly, between the time of the earthquake on Friday and my moment of writing this on Sunday, about 30,000 children have died worldwide as a result of poverty.

(http://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html for figures)

Not unforeseeable, cataclysmic geographical symptoms, but rather the inevitable product of a socio-economic system that murders with a clockwork monotony.

There’s the news.  Yesterday’s, today’s, and – until we change, as we can and must – tomorrow’s.

‘A great number of things come to me in the bath, mainly sort of mosquitoes and adders, but in this case a rather stupendous idea.’

So said Peter Cook in the Frog and Peach sketch.

Although my bath today was mosquito- and adder-free, I did have time to reflect upon the recent report by the Economist into food.

Well worth reading but, in keeping with that paper’s personally alienating amorality, harmed by its editorial refusal to explicitly draw the conclusions to which the report so strongly and logically lead.

Simply, the crisis of food can be averted by three steps, none of which require any new technology or advances in agriculture.

1. Invest in transport infrastructure and food storage in developing nations
2. Reduce food waste
3. Re-orientate our diet

Wonderfully, all of these steps have several socio-economic benefits aside from the rather large one of preventing us from starving in 40 years’ time.

(However, first a quick disclaimer.  I am a socialist, an environmentalist and a (partial) vegetarian.  Partial, as I eat nothing with legs.  There is a moral dimension to all of these, naturally, but I don’t think morality helps in a rational, political argument.  It muddies the waters.  That I believe it to be an affront to human dignity to medicate, incarcerate and murder fellow highly conscious beings, and therefore we shouldn’t eat meat, is a normative statement.  One I feel I could defend with passion and some reasoning, but normative nonetheless.  Similarly, with socialism or what, for want of a better word, I might call environmentalism.)

Investing in developing countries – This is the easiest part of the solution.  Poor road and rail links, combined with an absence of decent storage and refrigeration facilities, means that between one-third and a half of all food produced in developing economies is spoiled before reaching the market.  There are few problems that can be entirely solved by throwing money at it, but this is one.

If western aid came with obligations to invest in infrastructure and food storage, rather than to buy our exports and to open their markets, this situation could be fundamentally changed within a matter of years, not decades, and well before the population crisis predicted for 2050.  That it would have the helpful side effects of economically strengthening developing nations, with the concurrent social and political stability that brings, and vastly improve health outcomes and quality of life for the poorest of the world is all to the good.

The negatives for us in the developed economies of the world would mainly be suffered in our own agricultural industries.  Keeping Africa poor and hungry has proven very useful to the GDPs of the EU and the US.  Perhaps we might want to revisit that approach anyway …

Reducing food waste – In the UK, a third of all food bought heads, untouched, into the bin.  The Economist simply dismisses this as a consequence of food being too cheap.  Taking a sideways step, I would suggest that it is actually too plentiful.  The difference between the US and UK – where this problem of waste is especially acute – and other developed nations enjoying relative cheap food, is our over-reliance on supermarkets, and our bulk-buying of food.

I’m not going to demonise the big supermarkets here, nor rant about the ways in which they bully farmers, steer our national diet towards the less healthy foods or distort competition with their complex monopoly.  Relevant to my argument here is the following.  Often – though increasingly less so – large and situated away from people’s homes, supermarkets require a specific shopping trip.  The layouts of the stores and the composition of their offers are designed to maximise profit against footfall.  That’s not some lefty conspiracy theory of mine.  If you – like me – have had the mixed pleasure of attending a Tescos agm, you will have heard these various strategies articulated.  They are reasonably easy to infer from a visit to a supermarket.

For good or ill, a nation reliant predominantly on supermarkets for food shopping finds itself returning with over-full baskets.  The first, obvious, step towards wasting food is buying food you don’t need.  We have a weakness for the ‘bogof’ and the loss leader.

Some – including the Economist – might argue that it is ‘human nature’ for us to shop in this way, whilst supermarkets exist and prices are low, and that attempts to persuade people to behave differently are deterministically doomed to failure.

Most statements about ‘human nature’ are contradictory gibberish.  This is no exception.  If behaviour is contingent upon socio-economic factors, then its status as either constant or inherent seems immediately very dubious.  Simple economics almost certainly offers no solution here.  I would be amazed if food waste correlates positively with wealth.  (Indeed, if I had to bet, I’d bet on the opposite.)  Unless prices rose exponentially, to drive the poorer amongst us to the brink of starvation, I don’t think waste can be reduced without rational arguments for behaviour change being played out in public.

This nicely segues into the bit that we can all do …

Re-orientate our diet - The other year, I was fortunate to be involved in a book by geographer and water scientist Tony Allen about Virtual Water.  It is due to be in bookshops at the end of this month.  Buy it. (I should point out that I get precisely no commission.)

Central to the book’s argument are the following:

• There is sufficient water for peak population of 9 billion.  It is just being used wrongly.
• Meat is a wildly inefficient way of using water in feeding people.  It is approximately eight times as ‘thirsty’ in production as vegetables and cereals.  The average meat eater costs about twice as much in water as the average vegetarian.
• National wealth and meat consumption positively correlate.  Meat eating is already on the increase in China; should India ditch its mainly vegetarian diet, we could be in trouble.  There are a lot of bellies in India and China.

My vegetarianism is a consequence of working on the book.

From macro t0 micro

Unless you are a member of the Coalition cabinet (and if so, fuck you), you aren’t in much of a position to effect any of these changes on a macro level.

But as an individual, there is plenty you can do.  So easy that it seems glib.

1. Eat less or no meat – the UN suggests even two meat-free days a week will do wonders for the world’s water supplies
2. Shop wisely – buying food from local shops on the basis of need is environmentally more sound (and that’s a fact), and also far pleasanter (that’s just an opinion).  Every time you bin food, you are binning money.  That’s a big sensible, self-interested reason for not wasting.
3. Bank and invest ethically.  You’re unlikely to be heading out to developing nations to help in transport infrastructure (though kudos to you if you do).  But your money can easily do that.  And you don’t need to stick your dosh with kooky, hippy folk for it to do good.  The Cooperative Bank offer a range of services and fees that are competitive with any other high-street bank.  Just less cunty with it.

Three little steps as a contribution towards ensuring that future generations will be able to enjoy thoughtful baths on a Sunday morning.  Followed by a worry-free (nut) roast.

 

 

Slam Duncan

This is a double first. My first attempt at a sub-tabloid punning headline. And my first attempt at blogging from my shiney happy iPhone. Gosh, it is fiddly. And there is some kind of predictive text thing going on, which changes fiddly to diddly and tabloid to haemarroid. (That last one is a bare-cheeked lie.)

So. Alan Duncan is belatedly dispatched for being ‘out of touch with the electorate’ (newspeak for ‘being a Tory’).

I might say good. I might say that venal, self-serving, pompous, disingenuous little twerps with an almost pathological disdain for ordinary people, an absolute lack of ideology, vision or sense of civic duty have no place in British politics.

Except Alan Duncan did indeed have a place. And his place was to remind us (truthfully) that this is who the Tories are. Like the drunken uncle at the family gathering with the propensity to garrulously spill out the dark secrets of the past, Duncan has been ushered into the cupboard under the stairs labelled ‘Eccentrics’ to keep Norman Tebbit and Dan Hannan company.

But we should not allow this too-blatant window dressing. Cameron might like to pretend these people are eccentrics, odd balls, exceptions. They are not. They are simply Tories. Tories are the party of telling the unemployed to get on their bike. They are the party of believing free healthcare to be a 60-year mistake. They are the party who, at the height of a recession and an expenses scandal, consider their MP salaries to be rations.

That is how they are. Cameron is not condemning these people. He is not throwing them out of the party. He is simply shuffling them aside and asking them to keep schtum until after the election. Then, the Eccentrics will be let out of the cupboard. God forbid, they might even be allowed to run stuff. Until then, we have a Jane Eyre party, where the shameful loonies scurry around in the attic, casting their dark influence over all that takes place below in the light.

We need to remember that these people are the Tories proper. Unreconstructed, unrepentant and as progressive as a Luddite with a taste for witchburning. We need to hold that in our minds when we see their sparkly election manifesto, adorned with friendly green trees and smiley young faces. Like Dorian Grey, the true face of the Tory party can be seen in Duncan’s ugly sneer.

Long live the Queen!

As a committed Republican, I often get quite normal people suddenly turning very aggressive. Interestingly, they often put the burden on my side of the argument, to ‘prove’ that we should do away with the monarchy, rather than offer anything like a justification for this outdated, unfair and anti-democratic institution. So tradition stifles thought.

Two particularly strange justifications I have heard for the monarchy are: it drives tourism and it prevents fascists and totalitarians coming to power. The former argument is bizarre. The US and France are the two most popular tourist destinations in the western world. I’m not suggesting we bulldoze Buckingham Palace and replace it with a NCP dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. The Louvre and the Hermitage draw more visitors now that people can actually enter them.

The latter argument deserves more attention. Many otherwise normal people believe that the monarchy acts as some useful constitutional check. Often, supporters of this will cite Hitler’s democratic rise to power and the ineffectiveness of the German President Hindenburg as a bulwark against fascism. Nonsense. Hindenburg wanted to dismantle German democracy. A president (or a monarch) may be a constitutional check on any unpleasant (or pleasant) political movement, in accordance with their inclinations. The difference being that a president is answerable to the electorate through the ballot box; the monarch is answerable only to God (apparently). The Spanish monarchy was the figurehead for Franco’s fascism. My point: a monarchy is no more or less likely to prove effective against a drift to totalitarianism than a president.

The monarchy is an expensive, exclusive insult to our collective intelligence. In a secular society, how can we believe in divine rule? In a pluralist society, how can we concentrate prestige and power in the hands of a few well-established families. In a democracy, how can we have an unelected head of state (and, as G Smith rightly points out, a not directly elected proxy executive body within the legislative body)?

What system would I have in place? A directly elected executive and two fully elected Houses of Parliament. Not a perfect system, but a progressive improvement. Greater transparency and accountability. Imagine if we could have delivered a mandate on the Iraq war direct to a President at the ballot box in 2005, instead of having to make our (often blameless) constituency MPs suffer. Labour MPs against the war lost their seats because our poorly structured democracy allows no more direct form of protest vote.

The monarchy is indeed popular. So were bear-baiting, public executions and the Black and White singing minstrels. Progress is led from the front. Here’s to a bloodless, low-cost constitutional revolution in the UK.

The fear of closure …

For the better part of a week, I have been hovering on the brink of finishing a not-very-interesting-but-reasonably-lucrative writing assignment. The official deadline was last Friday and I am in a period of grace. But what am I doing? Procrastinating.

Why?

Granted the work is dull. So dull, that I am not sure I can be bothered to even describe it to you. That would be enough to explain why I procrastinate. And yet. And yet …

This procrastination is not restricted to only things that I find boring. It extends to the things I want to do also. Once this piece of work is out the way, I have a clear month or two (and, just about, the finances to support this) in which to write. Do proper writing. The writing of which I have always dreamed.

And so, I wonder. I wonder if my refusal to finish this piece of work is born (at least partially) of a fear of having to face up to my ambition. A fear of having to do what I have purported to want to do.

Of course, when this is finished, I could easily lose a month. I might be moving house, and there would be all the concomitant painting and carpet removing and box lugging and new-environs learning and furniture arranging. And I want to improve my blog. And twitter some attention. Maybe post more on LabourList and other political sites and … oh my goodness, it is summer already and there are still unopened letters, unfinished blogs, untaken trips with my son, unspent relaxing evenings with my wife, books to read, films to watch, new bands to (vainly) try and like. 

And then I need to earn some money. And so the cycle will be able to continue, uninterrupted by That Which I Want To Do, which I always place outside and out of reach.

Arse. Stop it Michael. Finish your work.

Wish me luck.

Why vote Tory?

I appreciate that I am very far from impartial on this question. But whilst I hear – and feel – people’s disappointment, anger and frustration at Labour, and Gordon Brown especially, I never hear a positive reason for voting Conservative next year. The best anyone musters is: the need for change.

But what change would a Tory government bring?

To focus on the past. The Conservatives are the party of light-touch regulation. Nor would any Tory dispute this. It is a fundamental part of their supply-side economics theology. They would never have proven a more effective bulwark against the excesses of the financial services sector that precipitated this downturn. Significantly, it was under Thatcher’s 1980s banking reforms that the seeds of the crisis were sown, when the ratio of required deposits to allowed lending were dramatically loosened. Thus, high-leveraging was born.

To focus on the present. There is no other course to pursue than that being followed by the current government, as well as the governments of all other western European nations. Financial bailouts for financial institutions and industries that cannot be allowed to fail. The unavoidable fiscal stimulus of increased government spending. Taking monetary policy to the hilt with slashed interest rates and talk of quantitative easing (effectively, putting more money into circulation). There is very little scope for debate or change here. The Tories have argued the toss on the nature of the fiscal stimulus, mainly attacking the VAT holiday. They might even have a point. If workable, I might have favoured targeted VAT cuts. Suspend VAT on fuel for pensioners, unemployed and those on working tax credits. Or an immediate income tax cut for the poor. Economic analysis suggests that a US-style rebate cheque to the low-incomed might have done considerably more to stimulate the economy. But these are details. In the present, a Tory government would follow broadly the same course.

So, to the future. Here is the difference. To be crass, Labour supports a comprehensive welfare state system. It is the party of infrastructure investment. Consider: the Olympics development, the Building Schools for the Future programme, Crossrail. They are the party of progressive taxation and social justice. Whatever you feel about these in and of themselves, they are both good in the long term for stimulating a domestic market for goods and services. Wealth distribution is good for the economy and, by extension, good for wealth generation. The Tory position remains as it ever was: tax cuts. Tax cuts means spending cuts. Quips about reducing public-sector inefficiency are simply smoke and mirrors to fog over this absolute, inarguable equation. Regardless of your opinion on Brown, he was ruthless at trimming public-sector inefficiency, from his bowdlerising of the civil service to the greater penetration of private companies into public service provision to the strict budgetary constraints and requirements for match-funding for future public spending. If Brown’s historic prudence is pure myth, his wastefulness is pure lies. 

There is the divergence. The future. For a future under Labour, expect investment in public services, wealth redistribution (albeit modest), the continuance of a welfare system to underpin one of the most flexible labour markets in the world. In other words, expect a plan. A plan led by government but with an ear to the needs of business and a heart turned to the needs of people. 

And from the Tories. Expect tax cuts. Expect service cuts. Expect an end to investment. The Tory party typifies the current Labour response to the downturn as borrowing from the future to sort out the present. That’s a fair assessment. It is necessary. The Tories point to the massive increase in government spending since 1997 without asking why it was necessary. It was necessary after 18 years when there was no planning for the future. When our rail network, our schools, our hospitals fell behind the standards of the western world. They passed the burden and the bill on to the next generation. A burden that we carry and a bill we still pay. When the current administration has the political courage to refuse to repeat their mistakes, and to only pass forward the bill and not the burden, they criticise.

Now. I’d love to hear where I am wrong on this. I’d love to hear a reason to be positive about the great likelihood that my children will be growing up under a Conservative government. Please. Post.

Bankers say sorry …

… and even go straight to their room without any dinner.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7880292.stm

That the apology is worthless, coming as it does from two individuals who have already resigned and are in no position to follow up an apology with any action or change in behaviour, seems to have been missed. Not that it isn’t fun to watch these people humbled. I’ve met one of the four bankers mentioned on a number of occasions, and would say that he was a very pleasant – if hubristic – chap. 

Make no mistake. These guys are sorry. But if you asked them whether they truly felt they were to blame, their unqualified, abstracted apologies would melt into a dribble of self-justification. Whilst the success of the financial services industry was the result of everyone’s good judgement and hard work, its decline is apparently an act of god. Such is the calm arrogance of the dispassionate intelligence; an arrogance that would be shamed to discover it was arrogant. If these people are villains, they are villains of the most insidious kind. Villains convinced of their own goodness.

Ultimately, an apology without acknowledgement of culpability, is no real apology. These apologies are couched in the language of the unfortunate, passive observer of events. Just as I am sorry that people have died in Australian bush fires in the last 48 hours, so are these people sorry that their banks went belly up. Bizarrely, these are apologies phrased as absolutions from – not admissions of – guilt.

Are we to feel sorry that the crash in their former employers’ share prices means that their remuneration is less, though still massive? Surely they are the only people who believe we might. In fact, they are probably slightly piqued that more people are not sorry for them. So, they recede into the night, retired unchanged. Learning nothing from the new environment developing, except that it is unfamiliar and inexplicable to them. And perhaps is no longer a world where the good-natured, true-hearted apology of the elites wipes away all sins perpetrated against the rest of us.

Return to blogging …

… after a very abortive attempt at blogging two years, I am going to try again. But not this evening. As this evening, I am desperately trying to find several thousand words to write about Romanian corporate law firms. Eeek.

Am just gently musing in the back of my mind about Michael Phelps and his dope smoking. Admiring the unforeseen affect that digital cameras (especially those on phones) are having on our collective morality, particularly when mixed with the amazing distributive communicative power of the web. Anyone and everyone can get caught out from Prince Harry to Amy Winehouse to Jesse Jackson, for all kinds of naughtiness and indiscretions. Naughtiness and indiscretions which have gone on quite happily for centuries before there existed the media for capturing and disseminating them. And then forcing all these mini-apologies; these micro-crucifixions. 

If only these had existed in the times of Cicero or Wolsey or Mozart. What amusing faux apologies for nights spent with whores, blasphemous drunken rants and political skulduggery have been lost to history.

Right. Back to the Romanian legal market.

More scarce … or more smart

Apparently, the hedgehog is now an endangered species in the UK. Numbers have plummeted in the past five years. Now this is all very sad.  But how do they calculate the size of the hedgehog population exactly? You don’t often see hedgehogs shuffling back to their hedge of birth around census time.

In fact, hedgehog population size is estimated from the volume of road kills. Now, whilst in my head I completely believe that building on greenland sites, the increased intensity of and reduced crop diversity in agriculture and the social trend for overly designed gardens have all destroyed natural habitats for hedgehogs, in my heart I am clinging to the idea that after 100 years of cars on the roads, the little buggers have just got a lot better at not getting hit.