Mini – Anomaly UK

Conversation about Civil Service

This is a conversation I had on Twitter on 3rd January 2017. I’ve referenced it a few times since, because it was so interesting and important.

The other party “SL” currently describes herself as “Retired lawyer… Enlightenment values and the rule of law. Pro-Europe.” I’ve scratched her handle here because I’m sure she wouldn’t want to be dragged back into all this after 8 years, and it’s not about her, rather I assume she represents the “Enlightenment values and the rule of law” people well. The discussion even at the time was notable for being reasonably polite and rational.

The initial trigger was a tweet by slightly nutty Labour MP Kate (now Baroness) Hoey. I don’t care about her.

I’ve pasted the tweets below. Note that this all took place over a couple of hours, and we replied past each other quite often, so it isn’t in X today as a single thread, rather there are a lot of branches. Therefore some lines below are replies to things further up the page, not to the immediately preceding.

@SL Civil servants are independent. In trying to politicise them you are a disgrace to Parliamentary democracy.
@someone-else She’s not on that again, is she? She didn’t even know MEPs were elected. Twerp.
@SL And she doesn’t know that civil servants are politically neutral.
@someoneelse This Post is from a suspended account
@SL False. The independence of civil servants is a vital underpinning of our democracy.
@anomalyuk who told you that?
@SL Who’s asking?
@anomalyuk someone who has read the Fulton Report
‘the Civil Service works under the obligation of political accountability’
@SL Who told you that?
@anomalyuk That’s the official report into how the Civil Service is supposed to work
@SL There have been many such reports, not one. “[T]he official report”? Comical.
@anomalyuk [link to the text of the Fulton report. The link no longer works, and I cannot now find a text, though there are pdf scans: https://www.civilservant.org.uk/csr-fulton_report-findings.html]
@SL No, it doesn’t say what you claim.
@anomalyuk Chapter 1, Paragraph 13. ¹
@SL which was in 1968. Read the current sources of law and practice.
@anomalyuk an employee COP isn’t talking about ‘underpinnings of democracy’
The goal of impartiality since Northcote-Trevelyan² has been for efficiency
per-term political appointees are likely to be less able than permanents
This is a (good) argument of sacrificing some democracy for efficiency
@SL I don’t know what you’re on about. The impartiality of civil servants is provided
for by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. See ss 5-9.
@anomalyuk I’m still genuinely curious where your bizarre theory came from, BTW.
@SL Here are some actual sources.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-service-conduct-and-guidance
http://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Code-of-Practice-for-Staff.pdf
A handy extract

@anomalyuk So (1) you retract your claim Fulton doesn’t say what it in fact says?
and (2) an ‘underpinning of democracy’ is new since 1968?
@SL No idea what you’re on about now, sorry. If you’ve a point, feel free to make it.
@anomalyuk I was not arguing that aiming for impartiality is without merit: I was disputing the ‘underpinning of democracy’ claim.
@SL “Aiming for” impartiality? It’s a statutory requirement. Under the rule of law.
@anomalyuk The (very hard) job of running a civil service is balancing professionalism with political accountability.
@SL A separation of powers underpins democracy.
And this discussion is about being an impartial civil servant. Subject to rigorous statutory obligations.It’s up to minsters
to set political goals. Civil servants implement them.
@anomalyuk there are a few threads now to this discussion. This [“A separation of powers underpins democracy”] is the one I care about (your legal claims are no doubt correct).
The ‘separation of powers’ historically never meant between politicians and civil servants.
Executive, Legislature and Judiciary were the traditional three branches. Crown/Prime Minister & Civil Service not separate
@anomalyuk The idea of a Civil Service with independent power gradually arose in the late 20th Century.
@SL Because our executive and legislature are one. It’s to give effect to a modified separation of powers.
@anomalyuk It arose around the same time in the USA, where legislature and executive are separate.
I tend to assume it’s part of the general managerial revolution, along with the ‘post-war consensus’ in politics.
but I’m interested in alternative theories. The idea that it is more democratic to do things this way is new to me.
@SL Independent power? I was talking about impartiality.
@anomalyuk How is ‘separation of powers’ not about power?
@SL Impartiality is a duty, not a power.
@anomalyuk How does the separation of powers, which you brought up, not me, come into it then?
I get impartiality. If a CS is too tied to a party, then when that party leaves, he leaves, replacement lacks experience…
..and possibly ability, government becomes amateurish and incompetent. As was the case before 1850s
My impression from you is that an impartial civil service should be a ‘check’ on executive power. That’s what I don’t get.
@SL Impartiality obliges a civil servant to tell the minister what is true, not what they want to be told. That’s very important.
@anomalyuk I would still class that as an ‘efficiency’ rather than a ‘democracy’ consideration. But I think we’ve got to the end.
Thanks very much for persevering, it’s been educational.

Returning Narrative

I avoided all of this over Christmas.

I found the H1-B debate tedious and depressing. On the one hand, while it is possible to argue that the smartest people in the world immigrating into America to do business is a bad thing and should be stopped, it is hardly reasonable to expect, say, Elon Musk, to agree, since that is what he and many of his peers and friends did.

On the other hand, to jump straight from that to saying it is good that whole companies or sectors of the economy become colonial outposts of another country, with that country’s culture and language and expectations, because they can be hired 15 or 20% cheaper, is rather a stretch.

In between these two extremes are questions of balance and numbers. Nobody I was seeing arguing on either side seemed willing to admit that, which I found annoying. As to where the balance should be, well, that’s a question for Americans, not for me.

I’m intimately familiar with the equivalent situation in Britain, but, while I think it looks pretty similar on the ground, Britain’s commercial culture and relationship with the foreign countries in question are sufficiently different from America’s that my observations would confuse rather than illuminate the question.

I’ll just make one only tangentially related argument. The concept of the “refugee” when it originated, related exclusively to people in highly developed countries displaced by religious or political conflict. The related historical observation that countries have often been significantly enriched (without scare quotes) by inflows of such refugees goes with this — whether we are talking about Hugenots in Britain, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or indeed white South Africans. Mass migrations from undeveloped countries are simply a different kind of thing. Extending the legal conventions and organisations that emerged around Europeans expelled in World War II and its aftermath to those suffering the normal run of civil wars and famines in semi-civilised regions is a clear mistake.

The migrations of people from subject colonies is a third thing again. One would expect that to occur to the extent that colonial power sees it as beneficial, and to be reversible if desired. One would expect it to end when the colonial relationship ends.

Mini: Voter ID

This is the first general election with a requirement for ID documentation to vote. I’m opposed to elections, so this is not a concern of mine either way. However, I used to argue against voter ID. There are other arguments though, and it’s quite an interesting subject.

My old argument was that the government does not and should not run elections, and relying on government issued documents gives them too much control. Of course, postal voting makes this argument irrelevant, but I opposed that too for the same reasons.

The safeguard on elections was always transparency. Polling stations are public, you identify yourself in public and are given a paper in public, ballot boxes are visible and collected and counted locally in public. To commit electoral fraud you have to do it in public.

I recently discussed some of this in Holland with an assortment of Europeans. Their attitude was different —they have always had official government ID used routinely for many purposes. I always sneered a bit at that; our government does not need to track us all individually.

Today though I recognise that that model is just not appropriate in an era of mass income taxation, welfare state, and mass immigration. The British govt has never tracked and identified every person. But it is unfortunately past time it did.

So on voter ID, I still don’t care, but the government’s half-arsed attempts to cobble national identity management out of birth registration, national insurance registration, driver licensing and passports do actually need to be rationalised into true national ID. I hate it.

(Originally a tweet thread, 4 July 2024)

Boring Russell Brand Take

The man is a scumbag. He’s always been a scumbag, and it was never a secret that he was a scumbag.

The reports over the years from women who claim to have been mistreated by him are what you expect to hear about a scumbag. Some of them are reports of criminal behaviour, and probably few if any of them are practically prosecutable.

The women in question should have known better and probably should have been better advised. That doesn’t begin to justify any of his behaviour, whether criminal or merely scummy.

Not actively celebrating his scumminess would be helpful to women in the position that they were in. Scumbags like him should not be paid to advertise products or participate in elite media. It is disgraceful that he was widely promoted in the past, and a further disgrace that promotion is being withdrawn directly he becomes inconvenient to the establishment through whatever it is he’s been pissing them off with lately. I’m not even sure if it’s stuff I agree with or disagree with — why would I care what an idiot scumbag like him thinks?

On a generally open forum like X or YouTube, people shouldn’t be excluded from participation, including payments, just because someone thinks (correctly) that they’re a scumbag. But choosing to promote scumbags is scummy behaviour.

Housekeeping

It is three years since I first discovered that Twitter was hiding tweets with links to my blog.

I’m pretty sure the root cause is the “.party” domain I used (because when I migrated from Blogger it was really cheap and I thought it kind of made sense for something political, though really I’m explicitly not party-political). Twitter seems to treat links to these little-used top level domains as probable spam.

There was an interesting incident at around the same time: links to the World Health Organisation on its “.int” domain got the same treatment. This was early in the pandemic.

Anyway, I had a workaround which was to tweet the link, copy the “t.co” shortened form, and then delete the first tweet and tweet it again with the shortened form. I think that worked at first, but not after a while.

Then I used a free subdomain, pointed it here and wrote a little static web page that could pull the path out of the URL, and generate a link to the right one. That was clunky as hell and fiddly to use.

So I have finally given in, spent a few more quid on a boring .co.uk domain, so https://www.anomalyblog.co.uk/ is the official address of this blog now.

All the old anomalyuk.party addresses still work, and I hope will do for a long time, unless it gets pointlessly expensive to keep renewing it. Most of the links on old posts here don’t work; it’s a great shame how history disappears. I was very impressed, looking at one 2011 post, that links to Robin Hanson’s “overcomingbias” still work, although he has migrated to Substack since then.

Inspired by that, I’ve done some coding to fix up the redirection from blogger, so that even the old anomalyuk.blogspot.com links now work properly, as they did when I first migrated but which I had let rot since then.

To complete the housekeeping, I’ve switched themes: as far as I can see the default themes that come with wordpress are better for a simple plain text-centric blog than most alternatives, including the one I picked back in 2017. I’ve taken one of the old ones.

Chokepoints

Quick placeholder here to identify a concept that comes up repeatedly.

Governing (in the very broadest sense) is partly about principle, and partly about practicalities. You can decide you want something to happen, but it might be easy to act effectively, or difficult. You can pass a law, but it might be easy to enforce, or difficult.

Those practicalities are affected by what the normal behaviour of people is.

One example: if most people are employed by one company or another, government can have a lot of influence by attaching rules to that employment relationship — it can collect income taxes, ensure minimum welfare, regulate safety, etc. The employers can be conveniently be made agents for the govermnent — information-gatherers, or providers or enforcers.

There are many other examples. If goods come into the country through a few ports, government can exert a great deal of control easily by closely regulating those ports. If people all go to the same church, the government can monitor and influence their views by acting through that church.

However, behaviours like this change. In the case of the employment relationship, as one example, it has in the last decade become much easier to work short-term. The canonical example is Uber: Uber can provide a lot of the function of an employer — giving a worker a fairly steady stream of work for different end consumers, doing marketing, payment handling, paperwork — without actually being an employer. Youtube makes TV programmes without employing producers and presenters. The influence that government used to have at that “employment” choke point is gone in those cases.

The most topical example of this wider phenomenon is of course media. If news and entertainment came from a small number of newspapers and broadcasters, those were choke points that allowed government to amplify its control.

When a valuable control point, such as TV broadcasting or long-term employment, dissolves away, government has a serious problem. It has four choices:

Expend more resources to achieve the same amount of control
Give up control
Find new choke points
Try to force people back into the old choke points

There’s no value judgement here. I’m not an anarchist, government needs to govern, and the optimal mechanisms for governing, at any point in time, are affected by the affordances provided to the government by common patterns of behaviour.

Whenever you see controversy around technology — because technology changes the way people interact and moves choke points — it usually comes down to this question.

Update July 2023: This is a two-way process. Chokepoints can disappear, as described above, and also new chokepoints can emerge.

For better or worse, cash is on the way out. More of everyday life is being mediated by banks and other money transfer institutions, which are accessible to government regulation like the media companies.

For better or worse, this enables government to have more policy control over commerce. You can campaign for a government to abjure that new power, but in the long run it is unlikely that any will do so.

Media bifurcation

Quick summary of some tweets in response to this article about how hard news is moving behind paywalls

https://www.axios.com/media-startups-subscriptions-elite-401b9309-404e-482b-9e23-718f9daea3a6.html

The tone of the articles is that journalism is moving to paywalls so the poor underprivileged folks will be denied all this valuable journalism, and suffer as a result.

If the mass population were to be denied access to journalism, that would be about the best thing that could possibly happen, but of course it is not conceivable. They will continue to get what they want to consume; the stuff that is moving behind paywalls is the niche stuff that the profitable mass media no long sees a reason to subsidise.

Nevertheless, that is significant and could have large effects in the long run. I wrote about some of the issues a decade ago, when I reviewed “Flat Earth News”.

Mass-market news is primarily entertainment. Most people watch news to engage their minds and have something to talk about, not because they actually benefit from the information. (see also: Politics as Entertainment).

There is a long tradition, though never dominant and much reduced in recent decades, of including true information in news media. This was a product of paternalism, idealism, and the fact that actual news was kicking around anyway and was easy to throw in.

There has always been a minority of news consumers who actually need true information from the news for practical reasons. They used to be served by the same media industry as the mass market. (Not necessarily the same publications, but the same organisations and meta-organisations of media).

When the same industry produced facts for the minority and entertainment for the majority, that made it cheap to include facts in entertainment. If it bifurcates, the infotainment side will no longer have access to or focus on true information.

It is not clear that “premium news” of the type described in the axios piece is the factual news I am discussing, as opposed to just being a market segment of infotainment. It might be, but “business intelligence” services are more obvious candidates.

The “factual news consumers” I am thinking of are primarily business and government. If you want to know what is really going on in the world today, in order to make business decisions, do you read a daily newspaper or watch TV news? I don’t think so — you read specialised industry analyses.

In Your Fridge

(This is a minor stream-of-consciousness snapshot)

I watched Moldbug’s recent interview with Michael Malice on YouTube, and noticed a couple of previous ones and watched those too.

In one of them, Moldbug is asked who he would like as King, and he suggests Gordon Ramsay. He does a funny bit about Ramsay looking to see what is in the State Department’s fridge, or something.

That made me think of the funny Japanese woman who was all the rage a few years ago, who got people to throw stuff out of their cupboards.

Why do Gordon Ramsay and Marie Kondo (looked up her name) do the same thing? (I have only seen a few clips of each, but this piece is not about facts).

By looking at what stuff you are keeping, both of them can get objective evidence towards the same question: are you in control of what is happening here? If you are in charge, then what is in your fridge and in your cupboard is what you think should be there. If stuff just somehow ends up in your fridge or your cupboard and you let it happen, then you are not in control. Whether you are in control is a much bigger and more important question than what you believe. Gordon Ramsay and Marie Kondo are both telling you that the first thing you have to do is take control.

Moldbug’s whole point is that in our system of government, nobody is in control. The fridges are full of expired ingredients and rubbish.

Crime and CCTV

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Aleph asked a really good question on Twitter:

What are examples of highly influential things that are not thought of that way? My go to example is birth control pills, which are one of the most influential inventions of the last century.
https://twitter.com/woke8yearold/status/1416028831098474498

His example is a little bit off — it was generally understood in the 70s and 80s that we were living in a world that The Pill had created. That that understanding has been lost to the younger generations is notable, but it’s natural that the impacts of major changes in the past get gradually forgotten.

It’s still a great question. My suggestion for a more recent instance is CCTV. Obviously the spread of CCTV has been very much noticed and commented on, particularly here in Britain which has been in the forefront. However I think the impact has been greatly underestimated, because while it has been making the detection of crime much easier, police and the criminal justice system have simultaneously become much less effective and efficient in every other area, and criminality has been spreading and increasing. CCTV doesn’t show in crime statistics, because it has been cancelled out by everything that would otherwise have been causing crime to skyrocket. CCTV hasn’t eliminated crime, instead it has just masked how bad society has got.

If I’m right (this is a casual impression, not a researched thesis), then in Britain today we are actually totally dependent on CCTV for society to continue to function. Take it away, put us where we would have been with the last 30 years of social trends and policing changes, and our cities would become unliveable.

It’s got a lot further to go, too. IP-networked wired or wireless night-vision HD cameras are about £20 and falling. Tiny rechargable cameras recording to flash memory cost less than the Micro-SD cards you put in them. There’s no way these cameras don’t become ubiquitous.

Margin Call

The best movie I have ever seen about financial markets is Margin Call.

Unlike anything else set on Wall Street³, the characters feel right. They’re all believable. What they do, and the way they relate to each other, is very realistic. They’re not caricatures, and they are all very different from each other, in realistic ways.

(The one possible exception — and this is important for reasons I will come to — is Jeremy Irons’ CEO. And I’m not so much saying he’s not realistic, as that I have no experience of that level of management at work, so I can’t tell. My other comparisons are from experience).

Great as the movie is — I highly recommend you see it — there’s one huge misunderstanding that nearly everyone has: they think the movie depicts what happened in the 2008 crash.

It has many of the points, but it is not at all what happened. But you can make a good argument that it’s what should have happened.

In real life, nobody panic-sold mortgage derivatives and caused a sudden crash in their prices. Rather, there was a severe sustained decline in their prices over months and months, with occasional bumps and false bottoms.

From the first investment funds based on mortgages going bankrupt, to Bear Stearns failing, was nearly a year. From Bear Stearns to Lehman was another six months. The whole thing happened in slow motion. Margin Call takes place in about 36 hours.

Throughout the whole period, banks were still making the same mortgages, and broker-dealers were still securitizing them and selling them. If a major trading house had panic-sold the derivatives and crashed the market at the beginning of that period, causing the whole crisis to happen sooner, it would have been very much smaller, and the damage would have been very much less.

The drama of the movie is the conflict between Jeremy Irons as the ruthless, heartless CEO who orders the bank to dump everything immediately (“It sure is a hell of a lot easier just to be first”), and head trader Kevin Spacey as the more human, complete man, torn by his relationships with his customers, and the effect of a crash on everyone else. Again, the characters and the acting are first rate.

But from my point of view, having experienced the real history from very close up, Irons is unambiguously the hero, and Spacey is unambiguously the villain. If the Jeremy Irons character had been real, he would quite likely have saved the world. In real life, any time a similar argument came up, the Spacey side must have come out the winner, and so the insanity went on, people continuing to buy and sell what at some level they knew or suspected was worthless, because they couldn’t imagine or couldn’t face bringing it to an end.

The fantasy didn’t end until people at one more remove — the shareholders of the banks and broker-dealers — panicked and dumped the stock. Bear and Lehman didn’t fail because they lost money, they failed because because their stock became worthless and without the confidence that they could raise capital by selling equity, nobody would give them any credit. They couldn’t roll over short-term loans, and died.

Background: I’ve written all this before, on Twitter and elsewhere, in the past. I’m dropping it here now so I have an anchor I can refer to. Incidentally, I’m anonymous, but as I’ve mentioned before, I was there. Any responsibility I bear for what happened is, I would claim, tiny, but then again, who’s wasn’t? It was a collective and structural failure, and I was part of it.