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We Live In Interesting Times

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Tim Hall

Only a fool dare predict the outcome of the next general election. Suggestions that either the Liberal Democrats will be wiped out or UKIP will gain more than a handful of seats are probably wishful thinking on some parties’ behalf.

It’s looking like the major battleground will be Scotland, where the latest poll suggests Scottish Labour faces being wiped out by SNP. If that poll really does reflect the way the election will go, then the SNP are on course to become the third largest party in the next Parliament.

What that means for the next government is anyone’s guess. A potentially fractious Labour/SNP/Liberal Democrat coalition is probably the least bad option as long as UKIP don’t gain enough seats to be potential power-brokers.

But the worst nightmare, perhaps even worse than a feared Conservative/UKIP coalition would be a grand coalition between Labour and the Conservatives. Such a government could bring out the very worst in both parties; the swivel-eyed social reactionary side of the Tories and the nasty authoritarian side of Labour that hasn’t completely purged the ghost of Joseph Stalin from its veins. Such a chimaeric monster risks being closer to actual real fascism than any coalition involving the right-wing UKIP.

“May you live in interesting times” was always a curse.

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Why are we not rioting on the streets?

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Tim Hall

phones4uWriting in that bastion of free-market conservatism, The Daily Telegraph, Alex Proud looks at the recent collapse of Phones 4U, and asks why aren’t the British middle-classes staging a revolution? He paints a grim picture of the endgame of late-stage capitalism.

Phones4U was bought by the private equity house, BC Partners, in 2011 for £200m. BC then borrowed £205m and, having saddled the company with vast amounts of debt, paid themselves a dividend of £223m. Crippled by debt, the company has now collapsed into administration.

The people who crippled it have walked away with nearly £20m million, while 5,600 people face losing their jobs. The taxman may also be stiffed on £90m in unpaid VAT and PAYE. It’s like a version of 1987’s Wall Street on steroids, the difference being that Gordon Gecko wins at the end and everyone shrugs and says, “Well, it’s not ideal, but really we need guys like him.”

I’m not financially sophisticated enough to understand the labyrinthine ins and outs of private equity deals. But I don’t think I need to be. Here, my relative ignorance is actually a plus. You took a viable company, ran up ridiculous levels of debt, paid yourselves millions and then walked away, leaving unemployment and unpaid tax bills in your wake. What’s to understand? We should be calling for your heads on a plate.

People like this are being allowed to loot the economy with impunity, and they’ve being allowed to get away with it because they’re being protected by the political establishment, which has allowed itself to be bought. It explains why nobody was prosecuted for fraud in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis, and there has been no tightening of the lax regulations that allowed this crisis to happen.

It’s exactly the same as the declining cities in parts of Italy and the United States where The Mafia has its hooks in goverment and bleeds the local economies dry. The only difference is The Mafia kill those who oppose them, and the private equity houses haven’t (yet) crossed that line.

The mantra is we must coddle the rich because they’re “wealth creators”. But this mantra comes from the paid shills of these thieves and from their useful idiots who have read too much Ayn Rand. But, as the Phones4U collapse shows, this is a lie. They don’t create wealth, they merely steal it.  As as for them being “job creators”, don’t make me laugh.

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Trust Fund Trolls

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Tim Hall

It probably ought not to be a surprise that some of the most annoying people on the interweb, from all-round bigot Vox Day to book-burning culture warrior Alex Lifschitz turn out to be trust fund brats. These are people who have either never needed to hold down a proper job in order to lead a comfortable lifestyle, or owe whatever positions they do hold to money and family connections rather than needing to demonstrate any actual ability. They don’t inhabit the same moral or financial universe as the rest of us, and never need to deal with the negative consequences of acting like assholes.

This is what “privilege” means.

The terrible thing is that this isn’t restricted to internet blowhards. Our government is made up of people like this. As the gap between the rich and everyone else grows ever larger in English-speaking world, we can only expect this to get worse.

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Help for Heroes duped by Murdoch?

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Tim Hall

The Sun This is an appalling story in The Guardian that seems to be dragging the name of a once-respected charity through the mud.

The Sun are claiming that Miliband refused to do a photo-op because supporting Help for Heroes might anger “Lefties”. Labour dismiss this as a lie.

And all too predictably the bottom half of Twitter is full of knuckle-dragging bigots who claim Miliband is pandering to Muslims.

I have supported this charity in the past; in recent years Mostly Autumn have done a lot of fundraising for their cause. Help for Heroes has always advertised itself as non-partisan and non-political; had they ever displayed an obvious right-wing or militaristic bias there is no way I would ever have supported them.

Has Help for Heroes jumped the shark by willingly getting involved in dirty party political mudslinging?  Or have they been misled by the Murdoch press and underestimated just how nasty the gutter tabloids can be?

Whichever is the case, it’s difficult for the charity’s reputation not to be tarnished by this.

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Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Tim Hall

The Scottish referendum has upset the applecart of British politics, and the fact we came dangerously close to the breakup of the UK has sent shockwaves through a complacent Westminster establishment. And it’s about time too.

As Fish eloquently explained in a long and heartfelt blog post, this is not really about Scottish nationalism at all. It’s a crisis of democratic legitimacy affecting the whole of the UK. We had a series of administrations, both Conservative and Labour who have become increasingly remote from the people who elected them, and care more about the financial markets than the voters. While “The Markets” are described as if they’re some impartial force of nature, they actually represent a small number of extremely rich people who do not like democracy. The failure to prosecute a single high-ranking banker for fraud in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis and instead impose a punishing austerity regime squeezing the living standards of the most vulnerable shows where Westminster’s priorities lie.

The mood in the country is that things cannot go on like this. Where we go from here is an interesting question. There is a lot of talk of constitutional reform, of increased powers not only to Scotland but to the English regions and big cities, and presumably to Wales. And if electoral reform isn’t also high on the agenda, it really ought to be.

But tinkering with administrative structures or electoral systems isn’t the only issue, since the crisis of legitimacy goes far deeper. There is a media that exists within a Westminster bubble, and gives the impression it’s on the side of the politicians rather than the people. And then there is the Labour Party which had adopted the same neo-liberal agenda and become indistinguishable from the Tories in any meaningful sense. This means we’re denied any real choice even if we’re fortunate to live in one of the small number of marginal constituencies where our votes actually matter.

With nobody to offer an alternative vision of a better, more hopeful world that isn’t ruled by unelected bankers, the only other vision on offer is UKIP’s fear-driven swivel-eyed xenophobia.

And we need something better than that.

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Will They Stay Or Will They Go?

Posted on September 14, 2014 by Tim Hall

Next week, Scotland may vote to end the 300-year union with England. If it happens, it won’t just change Scotland, but England as well, and there are legitimate fears than it will unleash ugly forces that will leave the remainder of the UK far less of a green and pleasant land.

Superficially, the removal of 60-odd Scottish seats from Parliament appears to benefit the Tories, who have barely existed as an electoral force north of the border for a generation. But it’s difficult to imagine the break-up of the United Kingdom not changing the political landscape south of the border. The possibility of England lurching to the right after Scottish independence is certainly possible but is by no means inevitable.

Another possibility is that it will provoke a backlash against the same forces that were seen as driving Scotland away from the UK, and are as true for Wales and the English regions. If the London-centric ruling elites are found guilty in the court of public opinion of destroying the union just to line their own pockets, there will be blood. Hopefully just metaphorical blood, but….

If we’d had electoral reform years ago we wouldn’t currently be facing the possibility of the break up of the UK. We would not have been electing governments who could afford to ignore entire regions of the country because a handful of marginal constituencies were all the mattered in elections. And we would not have been electing governments with a mandate to enact far-reaching and irreversible changes with the support of just 40% of the electorate.

I’m a former Liberal Democrat voter who’s currently politically homeless. I have always considered myself left-of-centre but I have never trusted the authoritarianism that was never far below the surface of the Labour Party. But, whatever Scotland decides next week, if Ed Miliband promises electoral reform as a manifesto commitment, he will have my vote.

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Calling time on the ice bucket challenge

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Tim Hall

I am sick of this ice bucket nonsense, I know I’m not the only one, and I can’t wait for it to die down. It’s like the mass hysteria following the death of Princess Diana, where half the country were caught up in it and the other half were left wondering if they were the last sane person left in the country.

I have even had to shut down all my social media accounts until the whole thing blows over. I know it’s all for charity, but despite all the money it’s raising there is something deeply disturbing about the whole thing. Many people seem to think that if something is for a good cause their methods should be above criticism. Others may be reluctant to voice their concerns publicly less they look like curmudgeonly party-poopers.

Well, bollocks to that.

The traditional means of doing stupid things for charity is to invite other people to sponsor you. Nobody should have a problem with that. But the ice bucket challenge doesn’t work like that.

It’s the coercive element to the whole thing that’s deeply troubling. Charity is supposed to be voluntary; it should be up to you to decide how much you can afford to give, and it should be up to you to decide which charities are most deserving of your support. Trying to force people to donate to a specific cause or face social sanction crosses a significant ethical line. The way supporters try to shout down any criticism makes it clear that this is an aspect they really don’t want to talk about. Unfortunately the “success” of the ice bucket challenge sets a dangerous precedent, and there’s a high probability that other charities will be tempted to take similar ethically-questionable approaches in the future.

Worse, the whole thing has nasty overtones of bullying, and I was getting the impression from my Twitter feed that quite a few people were being pressurised against their will. Performing acts of public humiliation for other people’s entertainment is fine for people with an exhibitionist streak, which explains its popularity with attention-seeking celebrities and cynical politicians. But for some of those who are more camera-shy the prospect of being “nominated” is genuinely frightening, and I know there are plenty of other people who have shut down their social media accounts for the duration.

If you’ve willingly made a public idiot of yourself by dousing yourself in ice-cold water, good for you. But if you’ve then pressurised anyone else into doing the same, refused to take an initial “No” for an answer, or threatened to nominate someone who know will hate it, then you are guilty of bullying. If this is really the case, it might not be a bad thing to ackowledge this and give a sincere apology to  your victim.

And if you read this and think it would be a “larf” to try and challenge me, you’re a dick. As Will Wheaton famously said, “Don’t be a dick”.

Comments are disabled on the post. I’m not really interested in a “debate” on the issue, and this post may well attract more trolls than I have the mental energy to deal with.

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Ann Coulter Auto-Poes

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Tim Hall

Infamous foaming-at-the-mouth American conservative pundit Ann Coulter thinks any growing interest in soccer a sign of nation’s moral decay.

A taste:

The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

The whole thing is either a hilarious parody worthy of The Onion, or a terrifying insight into the world-view of American conservatism. And there is absolutely no way of telling which of the two it is. Another example of Poe’s Law in action.

If there are conservatives that genuinely take her seriously, it’s proof that spending too long in any echo chamber makes your bullshit detectors stop working.

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Will Everything Always Be Broken?

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Tim Hall

This piece entitled “Everything Is Broken” describes the dire state of internet security, with major security breaches every other day, with everyone from Russian criminals to The NSA making off with our data.

It was my exasperated acknowledgement that looking for good software to count on has been a losing battle. Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.

It paints a very depressing picture of an internet held together with sellotape and string, but do you know what it reminds me of?  Replace catastrophic data breaches with fatal accidents, and it reminds me of the railway industry when it had been around for about the same length of time as the internet has, somewhere in the middle of the 19th century.

If you read L.T.C.Rolt’s classic “Red For Danger”, the mid-Victorian railways suffered serious crashes on a regular basis. Primitive signalling systems were vulnerable to human error. Braking systems were crude and ineffective. And flimsy wooden carriages with gas lighting were reduced to matchwood in relatively low-speed collisions and often went up in flames.

But things got better. It took many years, but eventually a combination of legislation and market pressure saw safety taking a much higher priority, and serious crashes are now few and far between.

It’s anyone’s guess what the internet will look like in a century’s time. But it’s entirely possible that netizens of the 22nd century will look back at the data breaches and insecurity of today like we look upon 19th century industry.

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Time for Nick Clegg to go?

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Tim Hall

Now that they’ve had a big enough bite of the reality sandwich to go down with severe food poisoning, one or two Liberal Democrats are finally starting to get it. As reported in The Guardian.

In a sign that unease is spreading to normally loyal MPs, Sir Nick Harvey, who was sacked as a defence minister in a reshuffle in 2012, called on the party to put more distance between the Lib Dems and the Tories.

Harvey told The World at One on BBC Radio 4: “There is a perception on the part of voters that we have got ourselves too embroiled with the Conservatives. When they look at things like the NHS changes, Michael Gove out on adventures in the education field; when they look at some of the more draconian benefit cuts, people are asking themselves if there is a point having the Lib Dems in the government. Surely it is to stop some of these things happening.

“We must be willing to say no to the Tories more. When you have a coalition between a larger party and a smaller one it is difficult for the small party to make the larger party do things it doesn’t want to do. But it should be relatively easy to stop it from doing things we don’t want it to do. That does mean that we need to be more willing to say no.”

Yes, Nick Clegg. Nick Harvey has correctly identified why this previously lifelong Liberal Democrat (and Liberal before that) voter supported The Greens in this election. Privatising the NHS, Gove’s reactionary philistinism and the petty vindictiveness of Ian Duncan-Smith’s benefit changes are anathema to the sorts of people who have traditionally voted for your party.

Over to you…

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