Anomaly UK

I’m sitting at home today – it’s very impressive that they’ve got the trains running as well as they have, but my journey is a 3-hour round trip at the best of times, and it’s really not worth dealing with the extra delays.

My main reaction today, as I hinted yesterday, is that this was a weak blow. We assumed it was coming, and I expected it to be much worse. The final scale of the event was similar to the Kings Cross fire of ’86, or the Ladbroke Grove crash. The level of disruption is much lower than the Hatfield crash.

More on the implications of this below.

The second reaction is how well the authorities and the transport companies dealt with it. A major city is like a huge old engine, with massive and dangerous forces (the movements and supplies of millions of people) barely controlled. Throw a spanner into it and the secondary effects can be much worse than the impact. The engine took this almost in its stride – pretty much all of us got home last night, there was no chaos, the essential services were available to the victims and to the rest of us. There has been a lot of planning an rehearsals for this kind of situation, but that’s no guarantee the response will come off right. It did, and thanks and congratulations are due to everyone involved.

The third response is amazement at the claim by the group that said it did it, of “fear, terror and panic” around Britain. Get a clue!

I suppose every nation has a central “modern myth” of how it sees itself at its best. We’ve just been celebrating Nelson and Trafalgar and all that, but there can be no doubt that the defining myth of modern Britan is the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The story of that myth is that an apparently invincible enemy went all out to destroy us, failed, and allowed itself to be worn out in the process, picked to pieces by a few of our best.

That’s one reason why our response is neither the “fear and panic” imagined by our enemies, or the vengeful rage of the Americans with their myths of rattlesnakes and so on. That we could allow ourselves to lose our cool, in the sight of our parents and grandparents who lived through the 1940s, would be the most shameful thing I can think of, even if the situation today were a hundred times worse than it is. We will stand and take it, as they did, and we will grind out a victory, as they did.

That is the emotional response. The history, as always, is more complicated, but I am talking mythology not history, and the mythical ideal in front of us is clear.

So what to make of the feebleness of the long-anticipated blow? While not wanting to praise a bunch of murderers too highly, the attacks on New York in 2001 showed imagination, sophistication, skill and patience. By Madrid in 2004, the imagination had gone, the scale of planning was reduced, but it was still a very competently executed and effective attack. Here in 2005, the level of compentence was way down. How can you set off four bombs in the London rush-hour and only kill 40 people? There’s either a severe shortage of backup (supplies, explosives, whatever), or a severe shortage of brains, or both.

Indeed, the most striking fact of the last five years is that there has been no follow-up attack on the United States. As the months went by we believed they were preparing for another major spectacular, and then as the years went by and attacks came elsewhere – Bali, Madrid, it sunk in that they just weren’t capable of continuing their campaign.

As I suggested yesterday, I believe that leaving aside labels and slogans, the organisation behind September 2001 was essentially destroyed in Afghanistan. There are volunteers and sympathisers aplenty, there is money and possibly brains available, but there’s no core of skilled organisers with the right contacts to put it all together in secret.

Another possibility is that September 2001 was a one-off fluke, and there never was an enemy capable of seriously threatening western society. The scale of the threat has been overestimated, either honestly or intentionally by politicians looking to further particular foreign or domestic agendas.

I don’t really buy that. The World Trade Centre was perhaps a fluke in that the towers collapsed, putting the death toll into thousands rather than hundreds, and of course they had a greater advantage of surprise then, but there was clearly a significant organisation there, with supply lines, contacts, knowledge and skills to repeat the process. It seems likely that if they had been left alone, they would have done so. To strike first at the heart of the enemy, powerfully, then less strongly in Bali, then the same in Madrid, and now less strongly still in London, really shows decline in a way that any coherent leadership would be desperate to avoid if it could.

I don’t really have time for blogging these days, but here’s a few updates:

I’m OK – The Northern line was out by the time I got to it, so I switched to the Victoria.

No idea if or how I’m getting home tonight. The underground will be out for days or weeks, I think.

I’m mainly relieved. I always knew this was coming – it’s happened and it missed me.
The choice is between a Manhattan-style major event or a Madrid-style set of co-ordinated strikes. Here in Canary Wharf would one of the top targets for the Manhattan-style attack.

So far, it seems the impact has been smaller than Madrid. Possibly there’s a trainload of bodies in a tunnel somewhere, if not then we’ve got off very light.

Still, a very heavy double blow for London these two days. This might cause even more damage to the life and economy of London than the Olympics.

Update 13:45 : Thameslink are running trains outbound from King’s Cross, so it looks like I should be able to get home (probably have to walk across London). Wikipedia has rumours of something up at Luton, but no confirmation anywhere, so I think we can ignore that. A commenter on europhobia had a story about Marines shooting a suicide bomber at Canary Wharf, which I think is rubbish. As of 12:32, company security was reporting “no specific threats have been made in relation to Canary Wharf”.

No more attacks as yet. This seems to be more on the scale (though not in the style) of the IRA than the sort of attack I was afraid of. If this is their best shot, we can definitely take it.

Update 16:00 : Getting ready to call it a day. DLR is resuming service, which will get me half way to King’s Cross. They’re saying the Underground will resume tomorrow morning, so I might even be able to come in tomorrow.

Transport and Emergency services appear to have done a superb job. If the network is running anywhere near normal tomorrow that will be an amazing feat.

There is of course the possiblity of follow-up attacks, but frankly I don’t think the bad guys are up to it. I looks to me like the brains in that outfit have all been rounded up or blown up, and we’re dealing with wannabees and idiots. Still dangerous, of course, in an unsubtle way — almost any idiot can blow up 20 people on a packed tube train — but not capable of anything really spectacular.

According to the BBC, Charles Kennedy said:

The Tories were relegated to south east England, while the Lib Dems were a national party of the future.

The figures say that the Tories outpolled the Lib Dems in every region of Great Britain except Scotland and Northeast England. How can this possibly make them less of a “national party” than the Lib Dems?

Tim Bray at ongoing writes that

[The Chinese are] walking away from those “cheap labour” manufacturing jobs that have served as one of the main economic drivers of the last couple of decades. At the end of the day, cheap labour doesn’t stay cheap. And while there are probably some more “cheap labour” places for businesses to move—India, Africa—the consequences for China have to be profound. And I can see the day coming, maybe not in my lifetime but not that much further out, when the whole notion of moving businesses around the world so you can pay people less has become, finally, self-defeating. What happens then?

Of course, the first thing that happens then is that we celebrate the end of global poverty of the kind that exists today. It would be a shame to let that go by without marking the achievement.

The way I always look at this question is to compare Japan and Indonesia. Two chains of islands in the Far East. Indonesia is more than double the population of Japan and much larger. Japan is a high-wage economy, the second largest in the world. Indonesia is a low-wage economy, visible to us as an exporter of textiles and cheap manufactured goods.

What would happen to Western economies if Indonesia were to sink beneath the waves tonight? What if Japan were to do the same?

The first would be a blow; the second a catastrophe. Japan is more valuable to us than Indonesia. If Indonesia (and China, and India, and Africa) were to become like Japan, we would be richer.

To descend to the “micro” scale, the competition for cheap labour (as a whole) comes from more-productive expensive labour in more capital-intensive industry. Goods currently produced in labour-intensive ways will be produced in capital-intensive ways with less, but costlier, labour. Workers currently producing low-value goods will be producing more value.

Cheap-labour manufacturing has a “sweet spot” of goods that are easy enough to make that you don’t need highly skilled labour, but difficult enough that you can’t do it with virtually no labour. This is a moving target: I have heard (anecdotally) that socks are not made in places like Thailand and Indonesia; they are made in the developed world because the process is so automated that unskilled labour isn’t needed. As cheap labour becomes less cheap, the sweet spot will disappear.

“David Copperfield” (a policeman) explains the purpose of Schools in our society.

I’ve been reading the Equal Opportunities Commission’s report on young people entering jobs.

One finding highlighted in the press release:

67% of women, didn’t know when they chose their career, about the often lower pay for work mostly done by women and of these two thirds of young women said they would have considered a wider range of career options had they known.

In the general spirit of making up “just so stories”, without evidence, to explain why men and women might behave differently (not being an academic, I can participate in this diverting pastime), I have a new one:

Children are generally presented with a mass of propaganda to the effect that making money is nasty, and nice people aren’t concerned about such things. (I still wince at the memory of Roger Hargreaves’ “Roundy and Squarey”). My prejudice leads me to suspect that girls might be slightly more susceptible to this rubbish than boys, and that therefore boys would be more keen to identify and head for well-paid occupations than girls.

Just a thought. It would be interesting if the EOC, or whoever, were to ask a question along these lines in their next survey. My prejudices are all very well, but data would be preferable.

For the record, while I see no need to aim for exact equality of numbers of men and women in every occupation, and am suspicious of quangos like the EOC, they are clearly looking at a real problem. I am sitting here in a room with twenty-six other software developers, twenty-five of which are male, and we’re struggling to fill open positions…

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