Category: Main

Anomaly UK blog posts

Why is the EU so corrupt?

For the benefit of those surprised by the software patent scandal, it is worth asking, why is this style of behaviour so characteristic of the EU institutions? A caricature of a Eurosceptic might say that it is to be expected of “foreigners”, but in fact the EU is more corrupt than any of its member countries.

Like asking why some countries are poor, this is in a sense a reversal of the real question. It is normal for people to be poor, and it is normal for governments to be corrupt, and it is the exceptions that need explanations, not the normal case. Nonetheless, there is still a discrepancy to be explained, as the EU is unusually corrupt when compared to governemnts in the developed world.

I see two major reasons. First, necessity puts a lower limit on national governments’ corruption and incompentence. Even in the modern era of bloated state sectors, there is a lot which a national government does which is considered essential to the lives of its citizens. If the Italian government could not keep order in the cities, if it could not keep the state-run transport system and basic nationalised services running, it would collapse. It would be overthrown as its failure became obvious to everyone.

In contrast, absolutely nothing that the EU does is essential. Every member government is capable of running its own country, and some have done so for centuries. There is no minimum level of competence or effectiveness below which the EU cannot fall, no degree of corruption which is unsupportable.

Secondly, the EU has a huge weight of idealism supporting it. While other state enterprises are judged on their achievements and their merits, the EU project can count on a large body of support on the basis of its ideals, independently of its actual structure or behaviour. It can upset one group or another with individual acts of defiance of law and democracy, but there are always more people who assume, in ignorance, that it is a force for good. When it comes to a vote, the diffuse good feeling outweighs the outrage of those that have experienced the Eurocrats directly.

The weakness of these two arguments is that they apply equally to the USA. It also is a federal layer over states capable of running their own affairs, and it also commands a unionist idealism. While by no means free of corruption, it is not so mired as the EU.

It is important to recognise that the USA is unique in this. There have been a number of other superstates, but none of them have been democratically controlled except for the USA. They have all been effectively ruled, as the EU is, by nominal civil servants with control of the bureaucracy. Though an opponent of Communism, I think the problems of the USSR were as much the result of federalism as they were of Marxism.

So why has the USA succeeded? I think its exceptional status comes from a number of different elements, but here are a few:

  • It was founded on a principle of strictly limited government. The founders had a clearer idea of what they were against than of what they were for.
  • In particular, federal powers are much more sharply circumscribed by the Bill of Rights than by any vague doctrine of “subsidiarity” in the EU lexicon.
  • Its population does not consist of distinct nations (ignoring Native Americans, which they did). Citizens see the federal institutions as being part of their own country.
  • Americans have a more “legalistic” attitude than Europeans, who have a more “pragmatic” attitude to law. This pragmatism tends to dissolve separations of powers.

Related links:
Software Patent article

FFII
UKIP
Larry Siedentop – the argument about legalistic / pragmatic law is from him. I highly recommend his book as an insightful and non-partisan study of its subject.

Software Patents

The EU Council has adopted the Software Patents directive unanimously, despite the fact four of its members opposed it.

To many Europeans with an interest in software freedom, this issue has been their first encounter with the mechanisms of the EU. They might easily assume such anti-democratic manoevering is exceptional. It isn’t. It’s business as usual. What the politicians at the heart of the EU want, they get, and the rules don’t matter.

Consider:

The EU’s annual accounts have not been audited — for ten years running

Denmark voted against the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum in 1992. A small change was made and they were asked to vote again. If it was the same treaty, they had already rejected it. If it was different, all the other signatories needed to ratify the new one. Never mind.

The stability and growth pact was agreed before the single currency was introduced, limiting members’ fiscal deficits. Several member states have exceeded the deficits, and the pact has not been enforced.

Whenever a new Treaty is introduced, we are always told that if we reject it we will lose all the (alleged) benefits of EU membership, despite the fact that everyone has committed to the previous treaties, which logically would remain in force. The implication is that prior agreements are worthless. (example: see the very end of this piece from “Britain in Europe”).

That’s just off the top of my head. (now updated with references: I don’t demand anyone take my word for this stuff).

More

The Northern Bank Robbery and the Peace Process

Fascinating article on the Northern Bank robbery, from the Observer

When I originally wrote my article “The Structure of Terrorist Movements”, my plan was to follow it up with two sequels; First, a recent history of the IRA, and second, a piece on international terrorism. My overall intent was to challenge Eric Raymond’s “Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto” on what I saw as its one flaw: the lumping together of terrorists and their supporters as one undifferentiated enemy.

What I found when I tried to write my summary of Northern Irelands terrorist war was, first, that people had spent years doing serious research on this, and I didn’t have time even to read what they’d written, never mind improve on it, and second, that on many important issues, the real facts simply aren’t known.

There is at least a good reason why the facts are so unclear: It was necessary during the peace negotiations for both sides to present the settlement to their followers as a victory. Each side recognised the other’s need to do this, and were therefore prepared to disguise the cold facts in places.

So, of necessity, what follows is not the factual summary I originally envisaged. It is much more an opinion piece, describing what I believe has happened in Northern Ireland since 1992. Almost every statement I will make can be challenged.

First claim: the war is over, and has been since 1998, though it was not clear at the time. Violent incidents have occurred since then, notably the Omagh bomb which killed 29 in August of 1998. They will continue, but they are no longer the acts of a coherent political movement. They should tail off over the years. The individuals involved may have links to mainstream republicanism, but that mainstream, including Sinn Fein, no longer depends on them. Sinn Fein has almost completed the movement to being a purely political, rather than terrorist, organisation.

full article…

More on Denbigh High School

I have found the actual Appeal Court judgement on the Denbigh School case:

http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j3114/sb-v-headteacher_denbighighschool.htm

Update: URL moved

It bears out, so far as I can see, my interpretation in my previous post:

75. The decision-making structure should therefore go along the following lines:
1)Has the claimant established that she has a relevant Convention right which qualifies for protection under Article 9(1)?
2)Subject to any justification that is established under Article 9(2), has that Convention right been violated?
3)Was the interference with her Convention right prescribed by law in the Convention sense of that expression?
4)Did the interference have a legitimate arm?
5)What are the considerations that need to be balanced against each other when determining whether the interference was necessary in a democratic society for the purpose of achieving that aim?
6)Was the interference justified under Article 9(2)?
[…]
81. Nothing in this judgment should be taken as meaning that it would be impossible for the School to justify its stance if it were to reconsider its uniform policy in the light of this judgment and were to determine not to alter it in any significant respect. Matters which it (and other schools facing a similar question) would no doubt need to consider include these:
Whether the members of any further religious groups (other than very strict Muslims) might wish to be free to manifest their religion or beliefs by wearing clothing not currently permitted by the school’s uniform policy, and the effect that a larger variety of different clothes being worn by students for religious reasons would have on the School’s policy of inclusiveness;
Whether it is appropriate to override the beliefs of very strict Muslims given that liberal Muslims have been permitted the dress code of their choice and the School’s uniform policy is not entirely secular;
Whether it is appropriate to take into account any, and if so which, of the concerns expressed by the School’s three witnesses as good reasons for depriving a student like the claimant of her right to manifest her beliefs by the clothing she wears at school, and the weight which should be accorded to each of these concerns;
Whether there is any way in which the School can do more to reconcile its wish to retain something resembling its current uniform policy with the beliefs of those like
the claimant who consider that it exposes more of their bodies than they are permitted by their beliefs to show.

In other words, the school didn’t write the correct arse-covering memos before deciding to apply its school uniform policy.

School Uniforms and Thought Crimes

Update: Denbigh win appeal to House of Lords

As the blogosphere’s man in Luton, I suppose I should comment on the Shabina Begum case. The only “local colour” I can contribute is to confirm that one doesn’t see many jibabs around the streets of Luton.

The other point that was made when the case was originally decided in favour of the school, but not made in the press now that the appeal has gone the other way, is that Denbigh School is 80% Muslim. Various arguments I have seen do not take this into account.

That is by the way. I’m less interested in whether religious traditions should override school uniform policies, than in the bizareness of the legal argument that the Appeal Court used.

Their finding seems to be that the School erred by not considering whether their uniform policy breached the pupils’ human rights. If they had considered it, they could have decided, as the lower court did, that the uniform policy was fine, and they would have been OK. They lost because they didn’t have a piece of paper on file saying that they had taken human rights into account.

(I’m open to correction on my understanding here, as I’m working very much from secondary reports, including the Council’s own statement on the judgement.) UPDATE: I found the primary source; more details here.

This trend of legal and regulatory requirement is intensely stupid and irritating. It replaces restrictions on actions and policies with thought crimes. I mean that precisely; the fault of Denbigh School was not in its actions but in the way it decided its actions.

The result of this legal attitude is to drown all activity, in both the public and the private sectors, in a snowstorm of pointless arse-covering paperwork. Hypocrisy is made paramount, and the key managerial skill is, as Dogbert has it, “pretending to care”.

Thought crimes produce hypocrisy, because it is impossible to tell what someone is really thinking. You can act for one reason and claim to be acting for another reason, and if your reasons rather than your actions are regulated, you can get away with anything.

Time after time: employment law, money-laundering law, accounting law, human rights law, we are being required to take various principles into account, and document that we have done so, rather than being judged on results which can be objectively assessed.

This even links with yesterday’s post. I am a fanatical believer in honesty and openness. I like to tell the truth about what I’m doing and why, and prefer other people to do the same. Thought crimes mean that I am still free to act as I choose, provided that I’m prepared to lie about it. It leaves a culture of disinformation which harms everyone’s decision making.

Openness

Via Hit and Run, an overwhelming case for openness in counter-terrorism.

The bullet points: If law enforcement had kept fewer secrets from the public, the Sept. 11 attacks would not have happened. If they had kept more secrets, the attacks would have been more successful.

Our key advantage over the terrorists in our midst is that there are more of us than there are of them — by a factor of tens of thousands. Secrecy is a necessity for them: it evens the odds by taking nearly all of us out of the fight. If they know our secrets, there’s actually not enough of them to exploit it. If we know any of their secrets, then someone, somewhere, can use that to learn more or to act against the terrorists.

In Britain, the government believes there are people against whom no legal case can be made, but who pose a huge danger if released into society. Its solution is to put them under house arrest, without legal proceedings, and a law is now before parliament to permit this. My solution would be to publish their names, addresses and photographs in the Mail on Sunday, and suggest that people might want to keep an eye on them.

There is, of course, a danger that “mob rule” might get out of hand, but I trust the people more than I trust the government. Apart from anything else, private individuals are more accountable than officials, as they do not have the Official Secrets Act to protect them from the consequences of their actions.

Crowded Island?

I’ve been busy with work and other things for a couple of months, and now, catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions, I’ve come across a couple of pieces by Tim Worstall which need comment.

Tim says here, and repeats later, that [Britain] has “both a small crowded island and a constipated planning system”. I wouldn’t have thought he would have fallen for that one. Britain is not at all crowded, but the British crowd together through choice and because of a planning system which is not merely constipated but perverse and disastrous.

What proportion of Britain is “built up”? The CIA reckons we have a land area of 241000 sq km, and 372000 km of roads. If to be built up you need to be within 20m of a road, that puts an upper limit on built-up Britain of 15000 sq km, or 6% of the total land area. Defra describes 33000sq km as “Urban or other”, though without revealing what “other” is that’s not tremendously useful. Even if it includes stuff like Richmond Park, it still seems high to me.

If we had ten times the current population in Britain, then it would be crowded.

Why is it then such a common piece of received wisdom that Britain is crowded?

I hinted at the answer before: although Britain isn’t crowded, the British are very much a crowd. An eighth of us live in 1500 sq km of Greater London. That’s really crowded. If the whole island were populated at that density, we would have the same population as India.

Most of the population lives, if not in London, in similar conditions. The vast majority of the country which is empty, nobody sees, because, um, nobody lives there. Even people in rural towns and villages live near other towns and villages, and don’t realise how much of the country isn’t near any towns and villages. They see the towns growing and the open spaces disappearing, and fear that there will be none left, but it is the space near them that is being filled, because it is near people, and they do not realise that most of the country is not near anyone.

We live crowded, in part, because we are city-dwellers, or, in other words, civilised. Our style of living requires living close to lots of other people to do lots of different specialised jobs. Most of those who complain about the crowded conditions of Britain will explain that they can’t possibly move to much cheaper remote areas, because they won’t get work, or they won’t be able to do a lot of what they like to do.

But there is the second factor. The best places to live are on the edge between the city, with its civilised amenities, and the countryside, with its space and pretty landscapes and fresh air. It is expensive to live in such places, so the people living there are the rich and the powerful. If you build on the countryside next to them, you’re having negligible effect on the balance of the country as a whole, but you have a severe effect on those rich and powerful people who no longer have the best of both worlds, but are now part of the urban sprawl. They would have to “trade up” again to move to the new “ideal homes” on the new edge of the urban area.

If one were very cynical about politics, he might expect that a policy would come about that would specifically protect from development the countryside around major cities, thereby defending the privileged position of the currently most-valuable living area, at the cost of everybody else being crammed into the cities or isolated in remote areas.

But then, who would be that cynical?

(Update: Tim follows up)

Human Nature

Tweetable link: https://t.co/KVbnM2ZDw8?amp=1

Via Belmont Club, the sad story of large scale sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and aid workers.

It is well known that rape is a near universal feature of war. What this shows, I think is that it is not the experience of war that produces this effect in men, rather it is the opportunities offered by war.

The modern development of sociobiology has triggered many arguments: sociobiologists will suggest that some human behaviour has been selected by evolution. Opponents will pop up screaming that the sociobiologists are fascists and supporters of genocide. The sociobiologist will, while drying the jugfull of water off his head, attempt to explain that he’s not making statements of morality, and that what is natural is not the same as what is good.

The essential point that is often glossed over is that what is natural for one human to want to do, is often also natural for another human to want to prevent. As a simple example, it is natural for a man with an established sexual partner to want to mate with other females, but it is natural for his partner to want to stop him, and it is natural for the other females’ partners to want to stop them.

It is not controversial that one biological feature of humans is to live in large societies: larger at least than those of chimpanzees. The nature of these societies varies somewhat, but, as Stephen Pinker points out, there are more universals than might be expected.

If you take a man out of his society, give him a gun or a bodyguard, and put him in the middle of a lot of people not of his society, who are starving and helpless, what might happen could be described as biology taking over, but would be better described as one aspect of biology finding itself unbalanced by other aspects of biology which normally balance it.

The result of this reasoning is that the UNHCR/Save the Children report is not shocking. Personally, I am not shocked. The people implicated in this investigation are not monsters. That does not mean they should be let off: deterrence is a better reason for punishment than moral outrage, not a worse one.

Conversely, if you are putting people in positions of power over foreigners, either as invaders, peacekeepers, aid workers, missionaries, or local business managers, and you do not hear that they are abusing their power in this way, you should not believe that this is to be expected from the good people you are using. You should either congratulate yourself on the unusually effective systems you have put in place to prevent it, or you should assume it is going on and you just haven’t found out.

The UN, of course, is one of the least likely organisations to exert effective control and supervision of its agents.

There are two possible approaches to preventing the abuse. Either the agents should be genuinely part of the society they are helping, so that they are subject to the restraints of that society, or they must be maintained in the society that they came from, and be under the restraints of that society. The latter approach seems easier. Rotating staff in and out fairly quickly might help. The key point is that, just as with invading armies, it needs substantial active measures to prevent peacekeepers or aid workers taking advantage of their position.

Update: Another story that I think is related to my general point:
New Scientist — Everyone is a potential torturer

Update: Via a new news report, I gather that UN peacekeeping troops who commit crimes can only be tried back in their home country, which of course makes them that much less controlled.

New Party II

Follow up to “A New Party?”

“stoatman” commenting at Samizdata points to The New Party. I’ve never heard of them, but their web site hides their platform under a mass of something-for-everyone waffle. Digging down, the only policies that aren’t a total fudge are withdrawl from the EU, and tax cuts funded by social security cuts. Not bad policies, to be fair, but not practical in an electoral sense.

A large majority of the electorate has a firm positive commitment to the current welfare state. We’re stuck with it until there’s a major fiscal crisis making it obviously unsustainable, or until there’s a real revolution in attitude among the population, which I cannot see happening in the near future.

A fringe party cannot attack on that front. It can only gain influence by using an issue or group of issues where the majority are either opposed or indifferent to the positions of the major parties. UKIP has done that. Greens have done it in the past.

I don’t think there’s a large positive commitment by voters to the removal of the individual freedoms that were normal thirty or forty years ago. A party that made its main platform the reversing of all the pointless restrictions on individual freedom that have come in during the last decades might draw a large enough vote to encourage other parties to take on the agenda.

Of course, many of us would want to go a lot further, but once we get as far as, say repeal of drug prohibition, the influence of the party would wane. Every vote gained by a major party taking that policy would lose them one. The same goes for much of the economic liberalisation we would like to see. A policy of allowing people to smoke in pubs would not be a vote-loser with the electorate at large in the same way. Every political issue outside the core “freedom” policies would have to be fudged in the normal way: adopt the same positions as Labour and Conservative (they’re mainly the same).

To come from nowhere to challenging for worthwhile numbers of votes there has to be a very clear core platform, not a broad bit-of-everything manifesto. A few clear slogans pushing basic freedoms, and a name to match (“The Civil Liberties Party”?).

There are arguments against taking this approach. It would cannibalise the UKIP vote to some extent, and UKIP is doing a good job — in the long run EU membership is a bigger issue than foxhunting or email interception. The party could not become explicitly pro-withdrawl without alienating a large proportion of its potential support.

Another argument against is that if we as activists devote our effort towards this compromise platform of relatively popular freedoms, it could weaken the struggle at an intellectual level for a full and logically consistent level of freedom.