The UK should withdraw from Durban II

Canada has become the first country to withdraw from Durban II, from the Canadian Press:

"The so-called Durban II conference "has gone completely off the rails" and Canada wants no part of it, said Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity.

"Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it," Kenney told The Canadian Press.

"We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance.

"Our considered judgment, having participated in the preparatory meetings, was that we were set for a replay of Durban I. And Canada has no intention of lending its good name and resources to such a systematic promotion of hatred and bigotry."

There were a series of problems with Durban I that look likely to be repeated with Durban II.

Attacks on free speech

Durban I was marked by repeated attacks on the United States for its defence of the free speech guarantee in the US Constitution. The new conference is likely to, in a very similar way, be used as a platform to attack free speech.

UN Watch exposed, in an editorial for the Boston Globe, how the conference is to be used to attack the West for "religious defamation". This is an attempt to use the imprimatur of the UN to push for the banning of future Danish Cartoons, Satanic Verses and other free expression that we are right to defend. A speaker for Egypt described the Danish Cartoons as a "new and dangerous incitement against religion."

Anti-semitic abuse

At the last conference there was not just an obsessive focus on Israel - rather odd in itself for a conference supposedly focussed on racism. There were deeply unpleasant displays of extremist anti-semitic literature. This poster is one, particularly awful, example:

The Canadian government notes, in the Canadian Press, that:

"Furthermore, all of the non-governmental organizations invited to the first conference have been invited back to the second, including those that were at the "forefront of the hatred," some of which posted pro-Hitler posters at the 2001 gathering."

At best (worst?) this disgusting material will be displayed more subtly. More likely, things will be exactly the same.

Some of the world's worst regimes given prominent positions

Again, from UN Watch:

"Libya was elected as chair, and Iran and Cuba among the 19 vice-chairs."

With that kind of leadership...

Conclusion

At the earlier conference Canadian government policy had been that - through their presence at Durban - they could try to fight the numerous abuses. They have clearly realised that this will not work:

"Concluded Kenney: "If we felt there was any realistic chance that Canada could help to positively influence the process, we would stay involved. . . . By making this bold decision, Canada may send a wake-up call to the Durban organizers and other countries."

Britain should follow Canada's fine example.

An employment Huqabust?

Chris Dillow writes some really clever posts. He is one of the best UK bloggers of any type or ideological persuasion. Unfortunately, he has something of a penchant for pursuing arguments that he must know are decidedly silly. Elaborate houses of cards (like these).

Yesterday he gave us Konnie Huq's contribution to unemployment. As her pleasant appearance makes unemployment more enjoyable - "Why bother going out to work when you can stay home and look at her?" - she must have contributed to the social and economic costs attached to unemployment. This is the obviously silly bit in Chris's post. Despite her obvious charms no one is remaining unemployed in order to stay home and watch Konnie Huq.

So far, all good fun and I might sound like a bit of pedant to be writing about this at all. However, Chris argues there is a serious lesson to be learned from all this silliness:

"The point: does this seem absurd? It shouldn't. It's merely the logical consequence of the assumption that people on benefits could work if they want to. Perhaps it's this premise that's wonky."

That point doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The reason why it seems absurd that Konnie Huq created unemployment is that it is not plausible that she made a concrete difference to the utility attached to remaining unemployed. Images of beautiful women, on a screen, are easy to come by. The absurdity of a Konnie Huq effect on the unemployment figures says nothing about the likely effects of a more credible alteration to the conditions attached to unemployment - a change in unemployment benefit rates, for example.

I don't think it is a wonky premise that some people on benefits could work if they wanted to. Particularly given the number of immigrants, even to poor areas of the country, demonstrating that it is possible to find work here. A lot of those immigrants are low skilled so are not taking jobs beyond the locals.

In the end, the premise Chris attacks as possibly wonky is just saying that the unemployed are responding to incentives like anyone else. If the benefits to entering work aren't sufficiently high relative to the benefits of staying in unemployment (and those benefits include leisure time) for some people then there is a good chance they won't try and get work. Others might not look as hard or accept less than ideal jobs. It's a very simple intuition that is also behind iniatives that I know Chris supports, like the Citizen's Basic Income.

N.B. I apologise for the title of this post. It is a reference to the term "Huckaboom" used to describe Mike Huckabee's meteoric rise in the American opinion polls a little while back.

The ongoing political saga of the three little pigs

Apparently the story of three little pigs is no longer acceptable. Having been slowly toned down over the years - the characters no longer eat each other - it has now fallen foul of some politically correct imperative to avoid any mention of pigs for fear of offending Muslims. A cartoon that attacks cowboy builders - The Three Little Cowboy Builders - was seen to "raise cultural issues", thanks to its portrayal of pigs, by Becta (the government's "educational technology agency" - whatever that is).

Bizarrely enough the story of the three little pigs has run into trouble with the PC-police before. The three little pigs were going to be recast as puppies for a school play in West Yorkshire before a councillor stepped in and restored sanity.

I'm pretty certain this is all utterly absurd. Muslims can't eat pork but there is no prohibition on pigs in the media. There is no suggestion that any Muslim has actually complained. Beyond that, Becta are clearly utter imbeciles as they assume the cartoon will offend builders - it won't. An attack on cowboy builders will be welcomed by the honest builders who lose business to the unscrupulous.

Despite the obvious silliness in this case it does illustrate a more serious issue. Attacks on free speech through the legal system, threats of violence (overt or implied) and hypersensitive protests at minor, perceived insults have a broad range of social effects. While we do need to be concerned that even the bravest - with something important to say - won't be able to speak their mind we should also be mindful of small concessions, some of them entirely irrational. Topics ruled out of bounds, self-censorship to be on the safe side. This isn't as dramatic and obviously important as the grand struggles over Salman Rushdie's book or the Danish Cartoons but it does matter.

We don't want a society where people are too cautious about what they say. A vibrant culture is built upon expression that is free in spirit. Where spontaneous creativity is not subjected to a political filter.

That kind of freedom of expression is worth defending. It makes the world a brighter, more interesting place.

Aaronovitch on Craig Murray and Internet abuse

This article is pretty good. Aaronovitch has hit upon a far more sensible response to blogosphere taunts than getting in a tantrum and calling the lawyers:

"A few weeks ago someone sent me a link to the website belonging to Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Last year I found myself debating against him at Trinity College, Dublin, on the Middle East. Though I didn't agree with him on much and wondered why he was wearing a kilt, I found him pleasant enough, especially when, afterwards, he rather disarmingly admitted that he didn't know a lot about Israel, about which he'd just been pontificating.

So to his site, where Mr Murray was highly critical of me being allowed by the BBC to interview Tony Blair last year on the basis that I was “a leading neocon, pro-war, pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim propagandist”. But if I was slightly saddened to see Mr Murray seduced by the adjectival Pavlovianism of the anti-war movement, I was staggered by what he said about me personally, describing me as “that sleazy fat neo-con slob Aaronovitch - someone should buy that man a picture for his attic”. Of course, I am too fat; “neocon” is the new all-purpose political accusation; though scrupulously clean, I occasionally underdress - and if Mr Murray feels so obviously superior in physical aesthetics, then I am sure The Times can provide the reader with photographs of us both to enable a comparison.

[...]

Now suppose, that I were to write an article for this paper in which I began by telling readers that Craig Murray was not just wrong and oddly ill-informed, but that he was also - let's say - a chinless, adulterous, anti-Semitic clown whose vanity and incontinence had led to him damaging those very causes that he claimed to care for so much. My editors wouldn't have stood for it, and the readers would have thought less of me for it. Yet in several of the more lionised and supposedly political websites that influence some of our journalists, this is exactly the level of debate. "

Update: What Gracchi said. Murray is clearly a complete fool making the kind of argument a complete fool should be expected to make.

Judicial Aristocracy

There are a great many topics I think about a lot that don't make it onto this blog. Judicial activism is one of those issues.

This article, an interview with Antonin Scalia, contains a brief version of a profound argument that continues ad nauseum in the United States:

"I am not happy about the intrusion of politics into the judicial appointment process in my country. But frankly, I prefer it to the alternative, which is government by judicial aristocracy."

This isn't a problem confined to the United States, though, and we need to take it more seriously. Douglas Carswell, in a chapter (PDF) from Direct Democracy, via Centre Right, sets out how judicial aristocracy in the UK has broken most of its reasonable limits in recent years.

I think that the basic cause of the problem is the cognitive bias created by a lawyer's career. They deal with individual cases and that encourages them to disregard broader social effects. When so focussed on an individual case it can seem brutal to think of the bigger picture. While many lawyers will accept that deterrence can be effective they will generally be more sceptical of its efficacy than the general population.

I think they're wrong. The evidence appears to be that deterrence is very effective. However, I don't want to predicate this post on that. It is quite possible that economists have a cognitive bias in the other direction. We see everything through the prism of data and tend to lose a lot of important detail in the aggregate. Beyond that, our subject works with incentives so we are predisposed to believe in their effectiveness. Given how hard it is to increase the probability of getting caught high sentences are the often most sensible public policy if you want to control crime.

This is one of those issues that we'll struggle to resolve rationally. The difference in views is rooted in the way in which economists and lawyers understand the world. Each group will sound unconvincing to the other. The lawyers will hear unrealistic generalisation and the economists will hear mushy anecdote when listening to their opposite numbers.

Now, both lawyers and economists have a host of rational and emotional arguments to support their case. The proper way, in a democracy, to resolve the question is to put it to the public. The problem is that the legal community maintains an entirely unnaccountable power through the judiciary.

The right can win the debate over law and order but it will be frustrated by the judiciary. The judicial aristocracy's distortion of the democratic decision is then exacerbated as their resistance often has the added effect of making deterrence-boosting legislation itself appear ineffective.

I don't have any policy solutions in mind. Ending the independence of the judiciary is a big step. That's why I don't write on the subject very often. However, the problem of the judicial aristocracy is a serious one that the right should be thinking very seriously about.

McCain's TV style

If there is one thing I'd expect an American politician to be good at it is coming across well on TV. It is a pretty basic competence and their politics is supposed to be more professional. However, I can't imagine any British politician being this bad:



There are two options on TV:

1) Stare down the camera. This is generally done when you're being interviewed remotely - "from our Westminster studio" - and you must on no account ever look away. If you look away even for an instant then you look shifty.

It's difficult. The questions will often be coming to you from a speaker to the side and the temptation to look at your questioner is a powerful natural reflex you've got to completely kill.

2) Look at whoever you're speaking to. Let the camera be a fly on the wall watching you give a speech to ordinary people. Don't look down the camera or you'll break the illusion of reality.

Either option works, neither is 'right', but you can't fudge the issue. The half way house McCain occupies in this speech makes him look shifty, nervous and amateurish.

Facebook can take their Bear Balloon and shove it!

I wouldn't normally write a blog about Facebook. Having seen a book about Facebook in WH Smiths while on my way back to Letchworth for the weekend I've become convinced the whole affair is a horrible cliché. Writing about it or otherwise making it out to be somehow important or profound is silly. The Facebook industry exploits poor, deluded and normally middle-aged people who buy into the idea their social life can be improved with better IT skills. The opposite is true.

However, my Facebook-blog embargo has to be broken thanks to the social milestone that is the $1 Bear Balloon. You see, a Bear Balloon is clearly just a regular balloon with ears attached. Balloons are cheap. I'm convinced you could buy one for less than a dollar. Particularly if you were willing to bulk buy.

That means that the imitation has become more valuable than the actual product. Not only are people willing to pay for an entirely imaginary product - they're willing to pay more!

The kind of virtualised life that William Gibson imagined a few years ago has existed at the fringes for a while - Second Life and online games - now it is reaching the mainstream. Soon we'll all be buying virtual tickets to virtual plays with virtual props bought from virtual designers. It's weird. I think the Bear Balloon is a vital step on the path to such a weird future.

While I'm breaking my Facebook-blog embargo, I think you can divide the Facebook community into the old guard and Facebook-proles. Facebook-proles can be identified by their "(no network)" tag, the old guard have a university network. The Facebook-proles brought with them all of the paraphenalia that they loved on MySpace.com - weird little games, the ability to bite people as a zombie and a host of other distractions from real life. Ironically, many of the Facebook-proles are middle-aged, middle class people. They're so obviously jumping on the bandwagon. They're not cool. If you're a Facebook-prole then feel ashamed!

Some rather weak responses to the TPA report on NHS performance

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog

Here at the TaxPayers' Alliance we're used to rather unconvincing government responses to our reports. Tessa Jowell produced the memorably meaningless argument that it "is a mistake to view 2012 as a cost, rather than an investment" - as if investments don't have costs. The DFID managed to completely contradict their own press release in a response to our study on hate education in the Palestinian Territories.

Today we've had some equally lackluster responses to our study Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981.

The King's Fund, quoted in the Guardian, were good enough to acknowledge that our basic methodological approach is valid. Unfortunately, they then tried to diminish the conclusions of our study by placing them in a completely inappropriate context.

Even if the statistic that total mortality is between 750,000 and 1,000,000 is accurate that isn't the correct number to compare with our estimate of 17,000 deaths from poor NHS performance. Most deaths occur either from a condition, or at an age, that they should not be considered amenable to healthcare and therefore have a limited part to play in any discussion of the ability of the NHS to save lives.

The proper comparison is with total amenable mortality and that comparison is contained in our study. As the Times noted "mortality from [amenable] conditions is 26.9 per cent higher in the UK than the average in the four European countries, and 48.6 per cent higher than in France, the best-performing country." This is a very significant difference. We only cited the number of lives lost more prominently as we didn't want the human tragedy to be lost in a fog of more esoteric statistics.

If the King's Fund don't think that 17,000 deaths is a high number then why do we concern ourselves with deaths on the road or deaths related to alcohol? Neither are nearly as lethal as poor NHS performance.

Health Minister Ben Bradshaw responds for the Government with a quote in the Guardian. First, he said that the gap between EU peers and the UK has been narrowing. That was clearly acknowledged in our study. However, it has been narrowing at pretty much exactly the same slow pace since 1981 despite a huge cash injection since 1999. There are probably several trends underlying that pattern, technological change that erodes established advantages is probably particularly important. There is a lot of analysis of the trend in our report but, suffice it to say, Bradshaw has to explain how exactly his government has spent so much more, £34 billion, and got exactly the same results.

He follows that with a meaningless ad hominem. Hopefully Guardian readers will be open minded enough to know that calling someone "rightwing" is a poor substitute for being able to point out how they are wrong.

Finally he accuses us of admitting that our figures are "more than three years out of date". We did no such thing. The data used in our report is the very latest available mortality data. It describes deaths in 2004 for the simple reason that mortality statistics for more recent years just don't exist yet. 2004 isn't that long ago and is five years after the cash injection whose effects we wanted to study. Almost all statistical analyses have to look a certain distance into the past thanks to the time taken, by the relevant organisations, to produce the statistics that they analyse. If Ben Bradshaw isn't willing to accept any study that does so you have to wonder how he understands health policy at all.

A new TaxPayers' Alliance report - Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981

A report I have written, Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981, examining NHS performance and putting it in context with an examination of trends in Europe was released today. It has done rather well in the media and will hopefully provide a new clarity to the healthcare debate - illustrating both the huge stakes and the failure of recent strategy.

The empirical method used, mortality amenable to healthcare, was obviously inspired by Nolte & McKee's 2003 study of amenable mortality, which was cited in the Better Government position paper (PDF). However, the analysis was inspired by this graph, and others like it, from the Department of Health (PDF):



Look at the pattern for England compared to the EU-15. Premature mortality from circulatory diseases is definitely falling - and converging on the EU-15 average. But its been falling pretty steadily since the eighties. If you look at that graph its very hard to spot what has happened to massive additional spending since 1999.


Replacing this graph of one condition with no filtering for conditions amenable to healthcare with the aggregate mortality amenable to healthcare numbers in our study was an enormous empirical task. It required exporting the numbers for a given gender, in a given country, in a given year from the raw World Health Organisation database to a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet filtered for conditions amenable to healthcare and then turned those numbers into an age-standardised rate. This had to be done for each gender, each year and each country. It was a big process but it gave us an aggregate measure of healthcare progress in Britain and the European countries studied.

We could then look and find out two things. First, we could get an estimate of the human cost each year of the poor performance of the NHS. These are mortality rates and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that they represent a staggering number of lives lost. Innumerable tragedies, a significant number of which, over 17,000 by our estimate, could have been avoided if we matched the performance of European healthcare systems.

Second, we can see whether massive increases in funding post-1999 have had been effective. It appears they haven't. There is no discernable effect of the additional funding in the mortality numbers. If we want to get the kind of performance in healthcare that people in Europe expect and receive we need to learn lessons from how they organise healthcare: we need to decentralise, encourage competition and end political management.

Barry Sheerman's ironic accusations

Epolitix.com (via ConservativeHome) reports Barry Sheerman accusing David Cameron of turning the Commons into a brawling house:

"In an ePolitix.com podcast, the chairman of the education select committee said: "Can I just say, there was appalling behaviour by the leader of the Opposition today.

"He has been around in Parliament long enough to understand the rules of Parliament.

"He used the word 'you' shouting across the despatch box six times. He wasn't reprimanded by the Speaker, which I think was unfortunate.

"If someone is going to turn this place into a sort of brawling house, I am going to do anything I can as a senior member of Parliament to stop him."

Asked whether he would be seeking action on Cameron's interventions, Sheerman said: "He's got the behaviour of a hooligan in the chamber.

"As someone who wanted to get away from 'Punch and Judy', he is dragging the House of Commons down into a pit that I don't want to see it in."

What's brilliantly ironic is that this is the same Barry Sheerman who got in a drunken fight with Bob Marshall-Andrews, from the Times:

"Barry Sheerman, the senior Labour MP and chairman of the Commons Education Committee, happened upon the scene and attacked Mr Marshall-Andrews for talking to his “friends” in the Tory party. Mr Marshall-Andrews shouted back at him and suggested that Mr Sheerman might have taken drink.

At that point Jim Dowd, the pugnacious Labour MP for Lewisham West, arrived to begin haranguing Mr Marshall-Andrews, who insulted him and again implied that he was the worse for wear. It was too much for Mr Dowd, who grabbed his foe by the lapels and began pushing him across the lobby, finally pinning him against a wall.

Fortunately, the Labour whips’ office is in the opposite corner of the lobby and they were quickly alerted. Tom Watson, the genial and rotund junior whip, raced to the fracas and pulled Mr Dowd away from his adversary.

Other whips — known as the Westminster “thought police” — appeared swiftly to surround the combatants and defuse the situation,fearful that the real police might have to be called in. Mr Dowd retired from the area and Mr Marshall- Andrews went back to his Conservative “friends”.

Later, with tongue slightly in cheek, Mr Mitchell described it as an “unprovoked and unpleasant attack on a distinguished senior parliamentarian. It was mercifully defused with speed and efficiency by the government whips."

What a hooligan!

The DFID respond to the TPA study on Hate Education

Yesterday we released a report on how British taxpayers' money supports hate education in the Palestinian territories. The response from the Government is a little confused.

As I wrote on the TPA blog:

"Today our study on Hate Education in the Palestinian territories was reported in the Express. The report included a response from the Department for International Development:

"A spokesman for the Department for International Development said: “We don’t fund the Palestinian Authority directly and therefore don’t fund textbooks."

How strange, on the 11th of July last year they put out a press release titled:

"UK leads the way in resuming direct aid for Palestinian Authority"

The release continued:

"The UK has underlined its support for the Palestinian Authority with a contribution of £3 million to allow it to begin paying off its private sector debts, Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, announced today.

A month after Hamas’ takeover of Gaza and the establishment of a new Government by President Mahmoud Abbas, today’s announcement makes the UK one of the first countries to resume direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority." [emphasis added]

Beyond that, the problem isn't just direct contributions, as the Express notes: "the TaxPayers’ Alliance said that, by funding worthwhile activities, Britain was freeing up funds which could be spent in more sinister areas."

Our report raises serious issues about how the UK contributes to the long-term prospects for an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes positive recommendations, modelled on longstanding practice in Northern Ireland, for how our aid money can encourage an end to radicalisation and hate education. The DFID should look at those recommendations instead of issuing nonsensical rebuttals."

"I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there."

There are some massive and flawed assumptions underlying Justin McKeating's angry post about those opposing opt-out organ donation. This section is a prime example:

"‘It strikes at our relationship with the state,’ they say. Well get this: You can’t have a relationship with the state when you’re dead. You can’t assert ownership over your own corpse. Why? Because. You. Are. Dead. What other freedoms would you like to exercise after you’ve shuffled off? I take it you’ll be putting your favourite songs on your iPod to take with you as well? It’ll be as much use to you as your liver."

You clearly can and do have a relationship with the state when you are dead. It doesn't take very long to think of some examples:

1. There is both a criminal penalty (I assume) and a massive social sanction to necrophilia.
2. People frequently refight criminal trials after the person convicted has died in order to establish their innocence.
3. A will has legal force.
4. Even under Brown's proposed reforms we will legally respect explicit opt-outs.

We clearly believe that people are entitled to maintain some kind of dignity after they have gone. This requires that we respect their wishes. Assuming that they would be okay with us removing their organs, rather than leaving them be if we don't know, is a fairly major change in how the state treats the dead. If you assume some kind of continuity between a dead person's identity and a live person's - which you should if you support the use of wills - then it most certainly does strike at our relationship with the state.

Balancing the dignity of the dead against the interests of the living is the philosophical question at the heart of any reasoned consideration of this problem. Plenty of people get very angry at the idea that their autonomy over the final fate of their bodies is being limited. Justin's rant isn't going to win them over. It isn't designed to. Those who die for lack of organs are never really used as anything but a rhetorical stick with which to beat assorted enemies.

Such a debate would look at alternatives like reforming how the health services treats grieving families. The Department of Health reckon they could increase organ donations by 50 per cent by better managing that process. That isn't enough but throw in some inventive new ways to get people to consent before death and I think you'd be fine. Beyond that, there's always commoditisation. Wat Tyler has more on the various alternatives to Brown's initiative.

I find the idea of an opt-out system for organ donation alarming for the same reason I found the idea - floated a while ago - that the HMRC should be able to take money straight out of our bank accounts alarming. It will mean that when inevitable screw-ups take place it will be far more likely that someone will wind up having their organs removed against their wishes. Bureaucratic procedure tends to err on the side of the default position; it seems almost certain that scandals thanks to overlooked opt-outs would become commonplace very quickly.

I don't actually feel outraged myself - I'm blessed with a rather moderate temperament - but I absolutely understand those who just feel very affronted at the idea anyone would presume consent to take their organs. As Justin says, even many of those who will quite happily take a donor card are angry at the presumption. Just the way plenty of people will give to charity but wouldn't like to find the RNLI lifting their wallet. Our bodies are our own, even after our death our wishes over how our corpses should be disposed of are quite rightly respected, and having them stolen grates even if it is for a good cause.

Canadian Heroics

This is the opening statement of Ezra Levant - brought up before the Albertan Human Rights Commission thought police - defending his decision, and freedom, to republish the Danish Cartoons. A real hero for our time.



There are more excellent videos on his website, from the actual interrogation, including his refusal to accept that his intentions should be a relevant matter, description of how these cases diminish journalistic expression and do more to contribute to racial animosity than the cartoons and finally how he refuses to answer to the state, rather than civil society, for his views.

You can donate, at his site, to support him in his struggle. A worthy cause.

Best of Blogpower 2007

There's an excellent set of self-nominated 'Best of 2007' blogs up at the Blogpower home. An excellent showcase of the variety the group has to offer. Go and take a look.

I nominated my post which set out, using some pretty simple statistics, why a clearly expensive survey by the British Council actually completely disproved the Tranzi line that we all need to think like 'global citizens' that they were trying to push.

The policy choices driving high oil and gas prices

Some excellent quotes highlighted by Tim Newman, from ExxonMobil President Rex Tillerson:

"High oil prices and perceptions of soaring industry profits have prompted many producing countries to give national oil companies more power to extract richer fiscal terms and greater control over resources, pushing out international players, Rex Tillerson, chief executive of US supermajor ExxonMobil, said.

Such policies will lead to tighter oil supplies as ExxonMobil and other majors stop deploying their technology, know-how and capital in some of those countries, he said.

“If there’s no room to share it then there is no role for us - it’s a simple as that,” he told business and political leaders at a meeting in Calgary, Reuters reported."

And:

"ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson, speaking in the wake of last week’s dire warnings from the International Energy Agency about unsustainable growth in energy use, sought to warn of the dangers of resource nationalism.

Talking about oil supply tightness, Tillerson told reporters during this week’s World Energy Congress in Rome that: “It’s not a resource problem. The world has plenty of oil.”

Instead, “it is an issue of whether or not the investment dollars, technology and the know-how to develop those resources in an efficient and reliable way…is going to be brought to bear on those resources”, he argued.

Tillerson talked about such nationalism as being counter-productive for the resource-rich countries where the people miss out on revenues and opportunities."

While Tillerson is talking about the really oil rich states very similar logic applies to the UK as well. Brown's response to rising oil prices was a big hike in taxation on North Sea oil. This will speed up the process of North Sea production winding down. This makes a small contribution to world supplies but makes our economy far more vulnerable to rising prices for oil and gas.

An unrelated, but fascinating, little fact in another post of Tim's:

"McDonalds is so highly thought of in Sakhalin that a few people we know there asked us to bring back a few McDonalds meals for them. At first I thought they were joking, but it turned out they genuinely wanted us to stick a load of McDonalds in the overhead locker for nine hours so they could reheat it and eat it on arrival. Madness."

Peter Hain and a house of cards

Should Peter Hain resign?

Well, it looks like he's broken the law. But, so did Wendy Alexander. If she didn't resign...

His failures can hardly be compared, in terms of the massive harm done, to the numerous failures at the Treasury. If Alistair Darling didn't resign...

There has to be a fear that if one of these people - or another Labour figure implicated in a new scandal - resigns the comparisons are going to become very uncomfortable. The house of cards will start to fall and the Government will be in an even deeper mess.

Tatchell vs. Nuclear Power

What Peter Tatchell has done in this article for Comment is Free is exploit Gordon Brown's turn of phrase. Of course, when Gordon Brown says "there is no alternative" to nuclear power that is just a lie. We could massacre nine out of every ten Britons, close off the country to immigration and our energy use would rapidly decline. We could give up on the whole idea of a modern economy and go live in the trees.


There are very few absolute, categorical musts in public policy. Although politicians and commentators prefer such statements - one example is the ludicrous and repeated statement that we just 'have' to recycle more - real life almost invariably requires balancing costs and benefits.


I'm pretty certain that what Brown really meant was that there is no alternative to nuclear power if you want to obtain serious cuts in carbon emissions without the economic costs being too high. This is a very plausible position and one that Tatchell's article does little to address. After all, it doesn't contain any numbers. None of his different measures comes with a price tag or a carbon emission saving attached.


The big difference between nuclear power and most renewable options is well summed up by this graph, via Wat Tyler:

That is why anyone serious about cutting carbon emissions - including, to his credit, the rather messianic originator of the Gaia theory James Lovelock - should think very seriously about nuclear power. It is, by a significant margin, the most economic low-carbon method for producing energy.

Nokia N95 8GB

Apologies for the lack of posts. Work has been pretty busy.

I've got a new phone. It's a Nokia N95 8GB. It's amazing.

The camera is 5MP which means huge amounts of detail and it focusses and shoots really quickly. It is good enough to handle just about any task that doesn't need an SLR.

I took this picture of Westminster Abbey while getting lunch:

The video camera's footage doesn't look like it was shot on a mobile phone. The frame rate is high (30 fps) and the detail is superb. The final footage looks like it comes from a reasonable dedicated digital camcorder.

It connects to the Internet both through its own 3G (or even 3.5G) connection and through a wireless network if there is one within range. I tried reading a few blogs and it is very usable thanks to a big, high-resolution screen.

With 8GB of memory you can store plenty of music and video. In fact, it comes preloaded with Spiderman 3. Having an entire movie on a phone is strange but could be pretty welcome on a long train journey. I think I'll fill it with South Park. It may also displace my iPod for the journey to work. The display quality is good enough to use its TV Out to watch a film or something you've recorded on the camcorder on a decent sized TV - which I did for a bit - and still have it look sharp.

It contains maps to, I think, the entire world - if not the entire world then most of the important bits - but also GPS. That allows you to give it two addresses and ask it to plot a route or one address and ask it to find you a way there. The very idea of sat nav in a phone seems insane. I tried it out and it followed me down Victoria Street pretty efficiently. It can also work out a route between my Hertfordshire and London homes with no trouble at all. I'll try more exotic journeys at some point.

It does have other features like the N-Gage gaming system but that doesn't particularly interest me. I haven't tried it out with e-mail yet but, to be honest, I'm not terribly interested in that either. I'm rarely away from my desk for too long at work so there isn't much need and it is nice to be disconnected sometimes. If you want to do a lot of e-mailing a Blackberry of some description is probably the best way forward.

The phone looks pretty good and the ability to slide the screen up and down to expose either the keypad or the media controls - and change the screen from portrait to landscape - is pretty cool. It's reasonably chunky though - you can't fit features like the ones on this phone in a RAZR.

The performance, which was apparently a problem on the earlier N95, is fine. The applications run pretty smoothly and you can flick around the various menus and applications reasonably freely without slowing it down.

A few days after getting it I'm still somewhat amazed at its features. When it effortlessly tapped into the TPA network; when it quickly found my position by satellite and when I saw the quality of the video it recorded I was stunned. Just a few short years ago carrying around five devices and a generator in a van couldn't get you these kinds of features at this kind of standard.

What a world.

Army advertising

Is accountancy fun? The Chairman of KPMG UK certainly makes it sound that way:

"I’ve been at KPMG for over 30 years and, broadly speaking, I’ve loved every, every minute of it. I think my experience, if I was to summarise it, is the sheer variety of experiences. I’ve had some wonderful clients, big clients, small clients, entrepreneurs, clients in trouble, clients doing extremely well. Every single size and shape, and in lots of different industries. I’ve had some wonderful people experiences. We’re a people organisation so there’s the sort of leadership and management challenges as you move up through the organisation, and I’ve had those challenges very early in my career and I’ve still got those challenges today."

On the other hand, this suggests it might be rather dull:



Neither account is exclusively accurate. It depends on who you are, the company or other organisation you join, when you join and innumerable other factors. You'll only really find out if it is for you after you've started - though you can get a pretty good idea before hand if you ask around. Is it some kind of unconscionable fraud that KPMG's chairman focusses on the positive? Of course not. It's staff advertising.

Yet, somehow when the Army - whose ability to recruit staff is a very public good - does the same, makes the positive case for a life in the Forces, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust decides (PDF) that is a great injustice. As Lawrence James points out, there is no shortage of voices telling a young person that life in the army will have its hard side. Movies about the horrors of war and a strong folk memory of the trenches that they are likely to have had reinforced in school, for example. There is no reason the Army should be expected to forgo advertising and suffer resulting shortages of personnel.

Being in the Forces can do wonderful things for a person. Had my grandfather not joined the Army - as a boy soldier no less - he would have been far worse off. I would probably be worse off. He had few skills having finished a misspent education at just fourteen. He could still have reached a respectable position but would probably not have had the opportunity that allowed him to progress to become an officer. Also, he would have missed out on the intangible benefits of a career that inculcated discipline and would not have had a quality, specially provided, education for his children. Without all those things it is quite possible my family would not have done nearly as well for themselves as they all have. There is nothing wrong with joining the Army and its recruiters should not feel guilty for trying to recruit the soldiers that do such an important service for their country.

It is necessarily harder to leave the Army than it is to leave many other careers after a certain point but the process is not instantaneous and a term of a few years is not forever. Of course, there are particular dangers but everyone knows that.

Some people may find that they do not enjoy the Army life, just as some people may discover that they hate accountancy. This isn't due to misleading recruitment ads but the fact that it is impossible to know what being a part of the Army is really like before you start. No matter how balanced the advertising that will always be the case.

The conclusion to Lawrence James' article sums up the study well:

"The trust’s report is as predictable as it is misjudged. An understanding of the values of the military world are absent, just as we would expect from a Quaker institution. One might as well ask a vegan to review the charcuteries of Paris."

Wars aren't short

Great article by Max Boot for the Wall Street Journal. He makes the very simple point that short and sharp wars are not the historical norm. He then sets out one interesting example of a long conflict, that between England and Scotland. Shorter wars are a creation of particularly determined European nation states more than anything.

As he says, this does recast Israel-Palestine. There is a solid argument that Americans, with a history of short wars, assume it is overdue to end. The reality could be that, regardless of whether the Palestinians have a state, this conflict will rumble on for decades yet.

This can be added to the list of myths about war that the War Nerd set out years ago: that wars involve battles, that you win by killing the enemy, that hi-tech beats lo-tech, that insurgents will quit and that everyone really wants peace. All these are myths. Understanding that brings home the real strategic challenges of the coming century.