Stick your hand in your pocket, No2ID are calling in the pledge:

The Identity Cards Act 2006 is now law, and - despite growing opposition, significant delays and rising costs - the new Prime Minister shows no sign of calling a halt to the National Identity Scheme. In 2008, the government intends to pilot fingerprinting and to issue the first 'biometric residence visas' to non-EU foreign nationals as a precursor to registering British Citizens.

The legal powers to do these all these things will shortly begin to be applied. Now is the time to call in the legal defence fund part of the pledge.

H/T:Liberal Conspiracy

Born Free?

I've come across a dreadful series of self-congratulatory assertions on a couple of the less cerebral right-wing blogs. It ties into the fairly widespread idea of a golden age in the past, when you didn't have to lock your doors, and kids could play out all day with no supervision. But the divergence from reality is such I'm willing to bet it never rained in this world, and, never mind qualifying for them, England always won football tournaments. It starts like this:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

Now, it should immediately be obvious what is wrong with that as an opening, but if not, I refer you to Unity's suggestion how to address the British Crime Survey's omission of murder as a crime:

1. Have you been a victim of murder in the last year?

It goes on:

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Geoff Adams-Spink was born in the target decades. His mother took one tablet of Thalidomide. I wonder how he reacts to this narrative.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a van - loose - was always great fun.

"Always great fun"? Remember, none of our respondents have been the victims of murder in the past twelve months.

Made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes.

I'm going to get anecdotal for a second, here: I've hinted before that I nearly lost an eye to a bungee rope. I'll tell the story one day, but for now just let me say I was the only person to blame. The really bizarre thing, though, was that my girlfriend of the time had an elder brother. As a boy, he had lost his eye to his catapult - not from a missile, but from it twanging into his face. I still don't know how he managed it - I inevitably get images from the silent-movie era of the guy looking down the hosepipe, wondering where the water went...

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

Hmm, wasn't it Remembrance Sunday over the weekend? I believe the two world wars saw their fair share of risk-taking and problem-solving. And remind me again where the term "Renaissance man" comes from. But, again, it's a captive audience: you won't go too far wrong massaging the egos of your readers, who by amazing coincidence pretty much all fall into this generation.

The point that I am labouring is that the narrative is bollocks: obviously if you're around to read it today, you didn't go through the windscreen of your dad's car or meet your end in any other grisly way. The piece acts like the TV psychic who asks you the viewer to choose a number between one and five - he's bound to choose right for at least 20% of you. As I mentioned at the start, it also successfully intertwines itself into the notion of a golden age when things were simpler.

So what is it aiming to do? Is it just someone's lament for a bygone age that never was? No, I think this is the crucial sentence, tucked away at the end, just after another "CONGRATULATIONS" - the shouting is in the original - has softened you up:

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

Ah, so that's what's going on. It's a quite cleverly-disguised propaganda piece boosting the idea that government regulation has made us all soft and namby-pamby, and has dulled our sense of responsibility. Whereas I think what really matters to those responsible for this garbage is regulation eats into their bottom line. Never mind a few crippled workers or children, or the odd bit of toxic waste, eh?

If anyone knows the original author of the piece I've been citing, please do let me know. Amongst other things, I'd love to give them due acknowledgement and credit.

Radio Silence

Charlie Brooker describes the general feeling of sadness and disappointment at the news that Cerys Matthews is abasing herself in the jungle as "a bit like when Kirsty MacColl died." Funnily enough, I can sort of see where he's coming from. In the context of desperate has-been celebs - and she's not, really, is she? - it's fitting that I have a memory of Cerys doing a haunting cover of Kirsty's "Fifteen Minutes".

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, I also have a memory of the day DJ Fatboy Slim and celebrity radio presenter Zoe Ball announced their engagement line on-air. A dream died for me that day: for sure, Zoe was easy enough on the eye and seemed like she'd be fun to be around, but surely one of the very best reasons for being with her would be your father-in-law. The very same day, Mark Radcliffe announced the engagement of his partner Lard to none other than Cerys Matthews; Lard hadn't known Radcliffe was planning this, and Cerys sounded aghast when Radcliffe called her up live on air. I can still hear Lard's "I didn't know; we'll talk when we get home, love." Anyway, there was clearly tension between Mark and Lard, and an unwontedly long spell of music with none of the usual between-song banter you'd expect from the duo. In fact, Radcliffe faded his mic up only once in half an hour, to reassure listeners that "We're still here, just talking through things." Serious stuff, but they managed not to fall out on air. In fact, it was never mentioned again, except for once a few days later when a caller asked how the engagement to Cerys was going, at which Lard said it was off: his wife hadn't been keen on the idea. Hook. Line. Sinker.

Well, maybe you had to be there. But I started posting this in the vein of Radcliffe fading up the mic: I'm still here, just a bit quiet; wondering about my relationship with blogging, and what I want to do with it, whether I still had anything at all I wanted to say, and if I had, was this how I wanted to be saying it? Three paragraphs later... I'm actually not that much closer to any answers, but I can state categorically that, for once, I agree with Mr Euginedes: Homage to Catatonia could hardly be better named.

Justin on Gordon's review of ID card technology:

Who says this government is lacking in new ideas? Here’s a stunning piece of innovative thinking from the Prime Minister on the subject of the much-hated ID card scheme.

[T]he PM was concerned enough about introducing such a huge multi-billion pound scheme to insist that the technology must work before it is introduced.

Sound thinking and it’s only taken ten years of a Labour government to come up with the plan. Makes you wonder if government ministers have been weeing before undoing their flies all this time as well.

And there's more

Ionoclast

I don't know why I am so taken aback by my Blogpower colleague Mike Ion's phraseology over the past couple of days. Lord knows, there is no shortage of right-wing blogging that riles me - I wonder, mischievously, if I think they are beyond hope - and most days I would be cheering on anyone having a pop at Iain Dale. But Mike has two pretty bad examples right now. Firstly, he deplores the fact that certain Tories (guess who) and Lib Dems are "making political capital" out of the De Menezes verdict. I was calm enough earlier on, and simply asked Mike in a comment at what point expressing an opinion that differs with his becomes "making political capital". But the more I think about it, the worse it gets. His post concludes with this remark:

Trying to exploit the tragedy of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes for political gain is cheap - I expect many Tories and Lib Dems agree.

That sounds to me like the braying horns of a false dilemma: if you dare to disagree, you're cheap or, worse, exploiting tragedy. Try as I might, I can't help seeing that as an attempt to close down debate from the side that knows it has slipped up big time. Really, if the police shooting innocent people on the streets in the underground systems of our country is not a fit subject for politicians to discuss, and yes, deplore, then I don't know what is. So trying to prevent the discussion is bad enough, but reaching for burial shrouds to help you do so is, well, cheap.

The other post that has got to me also revolves around the law-and-order debate, although it also ties into a point raised by Gracchi (who I'm citing a lot, tonight), about glamour politics, in that political reporting seems much more concerned with who's up and who's down at Westminster than with the nuts and bolts of a given issue. Mike tells us that

There is speculation that Gordon Brown will use next week's Queen's Speech as a means to attack David Cameron for being weak on national security.

Apparently, Brown may make another attempt to introduce a longer term of detention without trial for terrorist subjects, and Mike's expecting 56 to be the magic number. Now, he doesn't ask whether we actually would be any safer with a longer term - and, frankly, given that previous Terrorism acts have been (ab)used to detain hecklers at Labour party conferences, for pity's sake, the prospect that I might be banged up for two months without trial makes me feel a whole lot less safe. Nope, Mike's question is "If true is Brown engaging in serious politics or clever tactics?" Me, I'm going for option [c]: Brown is engaging in macho posturing. Our civil liberties are rapidly becoming like Hebden Bridge second-hand bookshops, on their last legs, and I really don't appreciate them being made the stakes in a party political parlour game.

The More We Know, the Less I Understand

The last second-hand bookshop in Hebden Bridge closed last week, although its demise is being drawn out: it seems the shutters won't actually go up until the very last volume has sold. It's a blow, my first adult memories of days out here involved pleasurable wanderings around the decent handful of shops selling previously-enjoyed books, and now we have none. Of course, having lived here a year, I must have only gone in once or twice. I already have more books than it seems I will be able to read in the one lifetime, and there's always next week, right?

But I did go in for a brief hello/last farewell, and came out with a fiver's worth of printed matter. The other day, Gracchi excoriated a list of humanity's ten toppermost geniuses, describing as "intellectual suburbanisation" the notion that we only need read the "top ten novels" (or whatever) in order to be well-read. As he argues, in fact, intellectual curiosity can never be assuaged: an enquiring mind will never cease its enquiries.

But, as Gracchi also pointed out, knowledge is becoming increasingly specialised: renaissance people are a thing of the past. I had a good academic school, I have two degrees, and I'm halfway or so along the way to my third. I could, then, make a reasonable case for being well-educated. But, if anything, the opposite is true, I have come so far along my own particular branch that it has taken on twig-like proportions. My tree grows in the field of Russian studies, but don't go asking me what the current consensus on Chekhov is. Still less can I hope to keep up with current medical trends, say, or contemporary classical music.

I wonder to what extent this is a function of being educated in England; I am regularly surprised by the way in which a Russian engineer, for example, can not only cite poetry, but can cite an appropriate quotation for the situation. I can't do that in Russian or English. C.P. Snow years back talked of the rift between the Two Cultures, Science and the Humanities, and it's certainly applicable to the route my education took. I was forced to specialise early, and my Earth-shattering decision at age 13 to learn Russian was based on no more compelling a reason than the fact I didn't want to study German... Well, what can you ask of a person barely into their teens?

Two of the books I purchased in Hebden Bridge's last second-hand bookshop, however, hark back to a time when it was thought possible to have at least a basic understanding of the current position in many fields. In 1956, Gollancz published The New Outline of Modern Knowledge, with articles ranging from "The Philosophy of Theism" to, simply, "Painting". Frankly, I may mock, but it will do me good to glean some understanding of representational art even if only in the period up to 1956, because I have very little as it stands. The other volume - a 1967 reprint of a 1936 original - has a rather more intriguing title: "The Story of Human Error", which is quite a clever title for a general history of science. Gracchi bemoans the fact he has no way of comparing the genius levels of Feynman and Bohr, or even whether they would play in the same league. My trouble is that I don't even understand which game they are playing. What I need is a 2007 "New Outline of Modern Knowledge", so that I at least have a baseline from which to start, an idea of what is canonical, but I guess that in our post-modern age the very idea of one volume to perform this function would be ridiculed. But I am genuinely open to suggestions.

Donald Rumsfled?

Rumsfeld flees France fearing arrest
Sat. 10/27/2007 - 08:45

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

US embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

More (although the URL is down at the time of writing).

Matt Sinclair and the Morality of Capitalism

Gracchi points us to a well-made argument from our newest colleague in Blogpower Matt Sinclair suggesting that capitalism actually promotes less selfishness than other ways of organising society, but I wonder if it is too abstract. He argues, for example, that "In a capitalist system my well being depends upon anticipating and satisfying the needs of others." Could it be the case that much actual commercial activity is devoted to persuading people they have needs they were previously unaware of that, just coincidentally, Acme corporation can meet with their new product.

Also, does it risk under-estimating the complexity and potential incompatibility of the recipient's needs? I shudder, for example, at the memory of my job in a well-known IT outsourcing company (the Company Sponsored Cycling, if that's a clue). The client's buyer wants the best deal for his company, by which s/he means the highest level of service for the cheapest price. The outsourcer's seller wants a commission, so promises the earth, or at least service level agreements that in practice have no earthly chance of being met. So the client's need for a low price is met, but watch out when the data centres go down... Admittedly, the link points to a public-sector IT contract, which notoriously provide excuses for private-sector gouging, but my experience was on a private sector account which saw also increasing cuts to the service provided. In my happy position as first-line support, I had direct testimony from the clients which left me in no doubt at all about the needs that were not being met.

You may retort that in this case the outsourcer will not see its contract renewed, as a competitor will come in offering a better contract. Well, maybe, but in practice there is only a handful of players who are realistically capable of bidding for large-scale IT support contracts, and they all play the same game. One contract is lost, but you'll get another when a rival/colleague's contract suffers the same fate. The free market has in fact led to, if not a monopoly, then a situation that bears many hallmarks of a cartel.

And I have to take issue with Matt's conclusion:

Social breakdown has come not because of capitalism but because it has been endangered: By welfare dependency (both personal and regional) that means people can advance their interests best by scamming or politically manoevring for more welfare. By the breakdown of the institutions of law, order and tradition that separate any system of government - capitalism in this case - from anarchy. Restoring true capitalist order is the way we might see our society healed.

In fact, surely the tendency to remove restrictions on managed capitalism in the name of the free market has had a significant impact on social breakdown - traditional industries have collapsed, whilst only mcjobs have replaced them. Say what you like about union dinosaurs, and I realise Matt is far from absurd positions that suggest the cuddly capitalists are actually responsible for the improvement in people's working conditions, but there was a real pride in craftsmanship and a camaraderie in the face of the shared physical danger that the heavy industries presented. It's all well and good if your grandfather then gets on his bike and looks for work, but what about the rupture in the community and traditions he leaves behind? And, obviously, he shouldn't cross any state boundaries, certainly not into ours... All of which is a very long-winded way of asking what Matt means by "true capitalist order".

*** Update: no sooner do I publish this than I see Vino has made a very succinct critique of the same piece. ***