Punish them? Yes. But if we don't listen to them we punish ourselves.

 There has got to be a process over the next few weeks of getting those who have looted, burned and destroyed our cities to talk. They need to explain to us not only why they thought they could act in the way that they did but, more importantly, why they thought they should act in the way that they did. The long-term solution to what I would call the greatest sociological crisis this country has seen in many years lies in making everyone feel like society and community has something to offer them. Because they don't at the moment.

My personal feeling is that these riots have been gestating for years, and I would like to run through how. Regular readers of my writings will attest that I am no bleeding heart liberal and I am also no foaming-mouthed conservative either. The reality is though that we need to look at ideas from all parts of the ideological spectrum. At the moment, too many people I am seeing in the media, on social networks and just talking to are closing their ears and singing "la-la-la" as loud as they can when certain arguments are aired. I think this is dangerous.

Parenting

It was one of the most haunting conversations of my life. I was in the internal suspension room at my old school and a by was telling me about his brother's release from Feltham Young Offenders' institute. I asked him what it had been like and he said "seriously Sir, my brother loved it." "Loved it?" I asked. "Get this right, it was the first time in his life that he didn't have to worry about where the next meal was coming from and there was always stuff to do. It was so much better than home." This made me really rather sad. What is our society coming to when life is better in prison than at home for some of it's members? If you think about the conspicuous consumption of those who have come into large amounts of money (by whatever means) you can see why people are insisting that we have two options to solve this problem - punish those who riot or try to find a way to share the proceeds of society more equally.

That said, there is little doubt that some of the behaviour we have seen has been caused by some outrageously lax parenting. I've seen it myself - the parents who treated my old school as a state babysitter, the parents who told me when I called to talk about their child's behaviour that "it's not my fault you can't control my kid." Police and politicians asked on monday for parents to contact their children if they were on the streets and ask or order them to come home. At what point was that going to work? The rioters may have been kids but if we are going to solve this problem we need to look at the conditions in which they are brought up, and the skills of their parents.

For instance, many students in Years 10 and 11 (15 and 16 year olds) at my old school had baby brothers and sisters. We need to look at the effect this has on them - their mother's time and attention is neccessarily taken up with a tiny baby and so the young people look outside the home for attention and a "family life" (read 'gangs').

Education system

Of the many things said to me on the day I told my old school (a state school) I was leaving to join my current school (a private school), the one that stuck most in my memory was this from an assistant head. "I can't believe you are taking your skills away from young people who need them and giving them to people who don't need them." In one sense, this was hyperbole, because all young people need a teacher's skills, albiet in different ways. But in another sense she had a point about the students at my old school. They need teachers, not just to teach them academic subjects, but to help them engage with life.

An amusing article I read once described a conversation a new teacher had with an old mate. "He asked me what this PSHCE was and I went through it in detail, how it teaches about sexual health, drugs, alcohol, relationships, citizenship skills and all that. There was a pause.....and then he said 'Oh, right, so it's basically doing what parents should do'."

The education system needs to be looked into, because every single person involved in the riots has been through it at some point in their lives. Yes, some of them may have truanted. Some will have left at 16. But even if schools haven't caused the problems, they can be involved in the solution.

We need to look at making sure the education system inculcates the right values and behaviours to ensure young people can get on in society. It also needs to be offering them opportunities to learn subjects that help them get a career and feel there is some hope in the future. We need to look at other education systems around the world. Let's start with Germany, for many reasons, but not least this one:

Britain's Gini coefficient (a measure of equality that puts an entirely unequal society at 1 and an entirely equal one at 0) is 0.36, France’s 0.32 and Germany’s 0.28. Germany's economy has recovered very strongly from the recession, but they also have an education system based upon matching their young people to appropriate educational pathways, and the result is higher equality.

Rights without responsibility

This is where something has, in my opinion, gone rather wrong in society. Somehow or other our young people are very cognisant of their 'rights' but far less accepting of their 'responsibility'. I still recall with a shake of the head what Ramzi Mohammed (one of the failed 21/7/2005 London bombers) shouted as he cowered behind a door as the police tried to break in..."I have rights! I have rights!"...this from a man who had attempted to murder hundreds of people.

It is the ultimate expression of a perfectly honourable attempt in the late 1990s to ensure that everyone was aware of their rights to make sure that they didn't accept ill-treatment and got what they were entitled to. New Labour made it very clear at the time that these rights - enshrined in the 1998 Human Rights Act - were to be given in return for citizens being responsible too. But it led to a distortion of the 'rights-culture' into what we have now.

As a teacher, I have heard many times that the school has "no right to have my kid in detention" from parents, perhaps in response to a detention for not doing homework or something nasty said to someone else. The problem is that those same parents never quite understood that not only did the school have a right to discipline their child, but it was our responsibility to do so, for their own good.

An interesting extension of this has been seen in the term "respect". Young people these days are constantly on the look out for respect. Interestingly, they feel they have a right to respect and they have no responsibility to earn that respect. I was listening to an interview with  a girl the other day saying something I have heard quite a few times along the lines of "they are disrespecting me so I'm gonna disrespect them. When they respect me I'll respect them." Trouble is, it is never clear what this 'respect' entails, and it may appear to some that 'disrespect' actually means 'trying to stop me committing crime'.

I prefer to look at it another way. As a society we should find out what would make young people feel they are being "respected" and try to offer it. Maybe it's feeling listened to. Maybe it's feeling cared about. It might actually be something we can do. But when we do it, we must insist on reciprocal responsibility.

Relations with the police

The middle class tend to look at relations with the police like they do immigration. Because they don't feel the negative side of it they think it isn't a problem for others. Immigration has been only good for me - I get cheap food from around the world and cheap cleaners and builders etc and a wonderful diversity of pupils to teach in school. But many people have seen themselves marginalised in society in favour of immigrants in terms of both jobs and housing, and we middle class intelligensia seem to brush those feelings aside as racism instead of empathising with the genuine frustration some people feel. It's the same with relations with the police. We in the middle class - not experiencing the constant hassle from the police that many in society do, never subject to constant stop and search and constant suspicion in the course of what the police will regard as just doing their job - just brush aside these claims with an "if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about." Well, as I talked about in point 4 of a previous article (click here), some people in society do nothing wrong and still have to worry. We need constant dialogue and understanding between the police (who are supposed, after all, to have a 'monopoly on power') and the policed. Some, of course, see the police as an impediment to them committing crimes, and hide that behind complaints of brutality and bias, but that is a very small minority.The police have made so many positive strides since the horrors of the 80s and the institutional racism laid bare by the McPherson report in the 90s in terms of their engagement with communities. But they are not there yet, and the alleged refusal to communicate with the family of Mark Duggan after he was shot dead shows that.

Restrictions on the police

The Met Police have admitted today that they gave strict orders to those on the street to "stand and observe" rather than go on the offensive against the rioters. This was because of the risk of legal challenge to their actions in the light of the ongoing court cases related to the policing of the G20 protests and the student fees protests. I have written about this (read here) and pointed out that the rioters will have guessed that this might happen and will have taken full advantage of it. By yesterday, there seemed to be a public consensus that the police should be allowed to do their job properly. Through the media the plans to use plastic bullets was aired and water cannons discussed and given that there wasn't the usual backlash to these ideas they would have probably gone through with it should there have been serious disturbances in London. BUT we need to have a debate about how it came to this. The police effectively admitted that the constant legal challenges to their actions have made them fear doing their job and the result was looting, arson and violence. Have we, in our attempt to be a liberal society, gone too far? Have we now got the police force we deserve? The vigilante groups set up yesterday and out in force all over London certainly think so.

What they see as acceptable in society

Many of the youths involved in the rioting see a society that has excluded them from 'having'. They see footballers exhibiting vast wealth and even minor celebrities flaunting their possessions. They will also have been told by some of the ringleaders that looting is OK because the rich are looters too. Tax avoidance is seen by many as stealing from society. Causing a financial crisis then rewarding yourself with 'a bonus in order to retain talent in a global employment marketplace' is also seen as looting as well. Too many people, in the eyes of the marginalised in society, have taken from us without giving. Now it's their turn. There was an interesting stand-off in Clapham where a group of residents blocked off their road to be confronted by a group of youths shouting   "you are rich, we are poor" and "we rule London tonight, not you." Others, talking to the press said that "we're going to show the rich that we can do what we want, just like they can". This, to most people, seems like a shallow excuse, but in their minds, they may believe that our current society rewards those who take what they can - but only legalises some of the methods.

"The cuts"

Ken Livingstone was called an "opportunist" for saying on Newsnight that "if you are making massive cuts, there's always the potential for this sort of revolt against that".  He talked about the social divisions created by the government's austerity drive and also the effect of the cuts in police that are taking place - pointing out that he raised the number of police by 7,000 in his time as mayor. No doubt this is electioneering by Livingstone, and, as is always required by those on the left wing, it ignores the £1 trillion of debt this government inherited from Labour but to call it 'opportunistic' is, welll, 'opportunistic' too. Because Ken is right, we do have to look at the effect of the cuts as part of looking at the causes and solutions to the current crisis in our society. From Sure Start to other children's services through to youth clubs and the like, we need to be careful what is being done away with, because the effects will be in the long run. It seems to me that the government is happy to attack the entitlements of those who don't or can't vote (the young) whilst leaving along the entitlements of those who do (the old) even though many of the older recipients of bus passes and fuel benefit are very wealthy and don't need it. I would like to see, as part of whatever inquiry arises from these riots, a closer scrutiny as to who is being affected negatively by the austerity drive. I believe in the reasons for the austerity drive, but that doesn't mean I neccessarily agree with how it is being done.


Lack of opportunities

And here lies the nub of this crisis. Many of the rioters just didn't care. So what if they got arrested? So what if they got sent to prison? Arrest and prison are a badge of courage where they come from. It doesn't make a difference to them anyway. We might say - "if you go to prison you'll find problems getting a job". To which they might legimately answer "well I didn't have any chance of getting a job before this so what difference will going to prison make?"

No, we need to get together as a society and work out how to make all young people feel they have opportunities to be successful in life. But we need to make sure their targets are actually attainable and realistic. Through help with parenting, education, sensitive policing, ensuring they learn the importance of the responsibilities of a citizen as well as the rights we can see that there are benefits from being part of a community, from being part of society.

Or we can just hang-em and flog-em.

I think I know what is more likely to work.

Rioters benefit from the "Simon Harwood problem"

I once took some students to see "Question Time" being recorded. During a conversation on knife crime and how to stop it the panel were wittering on about youth clubs and the like when one of my students put his hand up. David Dimbleby pointed to him and the boy - who lives on a troubled estate in West London - said "people commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. If you make laws and enforce them properly so no-one can get away with a crime they'll stop". It was the end of the debate on that issue because no-one could argue with him.

If you look at the pictures on the TV and in the newspapers you will see gangs of youths rampaging through the streets of London looting shops, setting cars and buildings alight and attacking the police. Someone watching from another country would stare in wonderment at what looks like a lawless society in which police are powerless to intervene when crimes are being committed. They would be wrong, the police DO have the power, but are scared to use it. At an institutional level they are scared of accusations of over-reaction, racism and brutality, but it's much more important at an individual level, in which the "Simon Harwood problem" seems to have taken over the mindset of many of the extremely brave men and women who are our only legitimate form of protection against these thugs.

For those of you who are wondering who Simon Harwood is, he is the police officer who has been charged with the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Tomlinson was attempting to get home from his work when he was struck from behind by PC Harwood, an action which allegedly led directly to his death. Video of PC Harwood's behaviour during the hours leading up to that action show a man not entirely in control of himself, getting involved in a variety of scuffles with protesters when his actual job was to stay with his vehicle. The inquest which returned a verdict of unlawful killing on PC Harwood has led to him being personally charged with manslaughter.

But let's take a step back. On that day in April 2009 we saw a phenomenon we are now used to. The majority of people came to protest but a violent minority came to riot. Being a police officer on those occasions is very difficult as first you have to distinguish between protester and rioter and then you have to deal with the rioters, many of whom are intent on violence and have hidden their identity. PC Harwood got it horribly wrong with Ian Tomlinson, but in the course of his duty that day it is quite understandable that he, as a human being, had become increasingly wound up as the day went on. He went far too far and was stripped of his duties.

Now, imagine you are a police officer on the lines these past few nights (and probably the next few nights). You are under extreme stress and provocation. You know that you are confronting young men intent on violence who are hiding their identity. You know that you are not allowed to hide your identity and that the moment you actually take action to stop this rioting there will be people there who will film you and report you and question you and in some cases charge you. You have a family and a mortgage and a life which all could be ended by what you do and how you act.

You can stand, riot shield up, protecting yourself, possibly cordoning off vital areas, but resulting in you being screamed at for "not doing anything to stop the rioters". Or you can advance on the rioters, arrest them, basically do what you have to do, in which case you may feel there is a chance you could yourself be hauled before the courts, personally tried and convicted.

The Times says this morning that "today's rioters appear both cynically aware of police wariness and adept at exploiting it". Which goes back to the story at the start of this piece, and what my student said - ""people commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. If you make laws and enforce them properly so no-one can get away with a crime they'll stop."

These boys think they can get away with it. Yes, some of it is a reaction to poverty. Some of it is saying "well, people have got rich by taking from society and giving nothing back so this is our way of doing it." Some of it is a reaction to issues with the way the police do their job.

But when the police feel they can't do their job, and quite a few experienced policemen have suggested that is going through their heads right now, you get what we are seeing.

And by the way, those who bemoan the paucity of met police intelligence about London's youth gangs should ponder this - there are 60 (SIXTY) met police officers working right now on the phone hacking case.

Priorities, London. Priorities.

We must learn from these riots

We could call the riots that have swept London this weekend either common criminality or the anguished roar of the politically dispossessed and economically disenfranchised. The truth is probably in the middle, but we should take every chance we can to learn from what happened and why in order to make sure they don't continue.

But first some pertinent stories and statistics:

1) Being a policeman is a hard job. One told me about being screamed at outside a tube station on July 21st 2005 (the day there was a failed suicide bomb attempt - a fortnight after a "successful" one). "Why aren't you stopping them?" he was asked "you should do everything in your power to stop them." Yet when they do make attempts to stop 'them' they are often accused of racism or brutality. "I feel like I can't win" said this particular police officer, "because I'm damned if I don't stop crime and damned if I try and stop it."

2) Being a 15 year old boy in London is also a hard job. A lovely young man at my old school who is now at university told me of the time he was stopped and searched by police three times in one day. It was cold, so he had his hoodie up and he was walking fast. He wondered if he was guilty of looking like he was about to commit a crime or of being a 15 year old black boy in London.

3) On average every year the armed police units get called out about 10,000 times. They only actually reach their destinations about 2,000 times as normally on their journey it is found they are not needed. They draw their guns on average about 100 times a year and on average around 10 bullets are fired. If you are an armed police officer and you shoot your gun you are immediately placed on what might be termed an "honourable suspension" and you will never be allowed to be an armed police officer again. You are trained NOT to fire your gun, and you know that to shoot it will be the end of that particular career.

4) During recessions it is like the tide going out and revealing us as a society. Some of us saddled with unpayable debt, some of us with no form of income, some of us homeless, and some of us so rich that we actually can't find ways to spend our money.

Social unrest is created by many things. Take Tottenham for instance. In Tottenham here are more than 50 people for each unfilled job, and 10% more people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance this year than last. Last week Mark Duggan, about which we know very little, was shot by a police officer. The family wanted answers as to how it happened, but, partly due to it being the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry, they were not getting any. So they marched to the police station in Tottenham peacefully on Saturday afternoon demanding "justice" for the killing of Mr Duggan. What this "justice" actually involved, I'm not sure.

But what we do know is since then we have had rioting, looting and the attacking of police officers in Tottenham, Enfield, Walthamstow, Edmonton and Brixton. It seems to have been organised over the internet, and people have been coming in from quite a distance to get involved. Shops up and down highstreets, from chain stores to independent newsagents, have been ransacked and looted by mobs of youths, and there has even been the almost ridiculous sounding scene of about 100 people in a retail park in North London emerging holding boxes of trainers and loading them into cars.Today (Monday 8th August) we have looting and quite a lot of setting fire to things in Lewisham, Peckham and Hackney.

So, again I ask - common criminality or the anguished roar of the politically dispossessed and economically disenfranchised? I believe it is both, and we must do something about both in order for it to stop.

For democracy's sake Charlie Gilmour's appeal must be successful

I've got to give Charlie Gilmour credit - it takes a lot for me to consider a grave miscarriage of justice to be justified, but he gave it a good go. That doesn't change the reality that his disproportionate sentence of 16 months for his behaviour last December during the Tuition fees protest has serious implications for our supposedly pluralist democracy. The result of his appeal will tell us a lot about the type of country we live in now.

From the outset he was a complete and utter PR disaster for the tuition fee protest movement. I have said (click here and click here) that there are legitimate arguments for an against the imposition of tuition fees, but at it's most basic, the issue is whether or not taxpayers' money should be used to fund the university education of (if New Labour's target is reached) 50% of the school leaving population.

If you wanted to paint a picture of why that shouldn't happen, I imagine you might create the image of Charlie Gilmour. Adopted son of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, he is the scion of a multi-million pound fortune. The two Saville Row suits he received as a reward for getting into Cambridge (click here for proof!) would go a long way towards paying for a year's tuition there under the proposed fee plan. Not the best poster boy when you are asking someone on minimum wage to fund university education (let's not forget that everyone pays tax, not just the rich, and it is the poor who can't avoid it).

Gilmour, allegedly under the influence of a cocktail of drugs, spent the day swinging on the Union Jack hanging from the Cenotaph (insisting he wasn't aware of the significance of the Cenotaph), attempting to start a fire outside the Supreme Court, allegedly throwing a rubbish bin at the Royal Convoy taking the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Royal Variety Performance as well as reading poetry to the police and shouting political slogans such as “you broke the moral law, we are going to break all the laws”, "storm Parliament", and, simply, "arson". He was also part of a mob who smashed windows at Top Shop in Oxford street as staff cowered inside.

16 months in prison. You can get less for sexual assault, GBH and many other crimes where people actually get hurt. What's more, Gilmour pleaded guilty from the start. No waste of court time trying to prove the case against him, just the matter of sentencing. 16 months in prison.

I don't know where to start. Apparently it is a legitimate practice for sentencing to be "exemplary" - to discourage others from acting in the same manner. Actually, it may discourage others from acting in the same manner - in that it may discourage others from protesting when they feel they are being wronged.

Let's go back to the apparent "problem" with Charlie Gilmour. He is rich. Whatever happens he will be OK because his parents have a lot of money. So, some people argued that he had no business being on that march. In that case, about 90% of the people on that march had no business being there either. In fact 90% of people on any march have no business being there.

For instance, almost all of those on the march against the Iraq War in 2003 were not actually going to be "affected" by the war. They weren't going to die, they weren't going to go throught what the Iraqi people have gone through in the last 8 years, yet there they were, arguing against a government policy they didn't agree with. Tony Blair, PM at the time - said on that day that being able to protest is a "natural part of our democratic process".

The protesters on that day were there not just in support of themselves but for those who might be students in the future. The word, I believe, is "solidarity". As Barbara Ellen points out in an excellent article on this in the Guardian (click here) "effective protest relies on disinterested participants like Charlie. Society needs, has always needed, people at marches, who don't really have a "reason" to be there, who aren't directly affected by the issues. This is not only to swell numbers, but to demonstrate that different groups will not be left stranded and isolated to fight lonely, desperate battles and that many feel, to borrow a tainted phrase, "all in this together".

Let's move on now to the concept of an "exemplary" sentence. Why prison? Surely that is a missed opportunity to use a far more effective example. Gilmour's crimes were against the community. Although he wasn't charged for what he did at the Cenotaph (as it wasn't a crime) his behaviour - even in the words of Barbara Ellen "was like watching a baboon shit on the faces of the war dead." He did attempt arson and his behaviour around the royal convoy did cause considerable distress to those within it, whether or not he threw the dustbin. So why not community service? Why not ask him, for instance, to use his considerable academic gifts to educate children about the meaning of the Cenotaph? Why not ask him to clear up after the next protest/riot (and there will be one) so he really understands the consequences of the destruction he was part of causing?

Why not find a way to ensure that the young, many of whom have been written off as apathetic but who are just finding their political voice,  learn from Charlie Gilmour's fate something more than that if you show up to protest about something you believe in you run the risk of 'exemplary' justice being done to you, whatever that means.

When we teach the functions of pressure groups in AS politics, we talk about their value as a "pressure" valve, releasing tension and allowing people to "let off steam" about their cause or sectional interest. A pluralist democracy allows power to spread amongst different groups in society. If young people feel powerless, they need to be able to associate with each other as they have done over tuition fees, and make themselves heard. Suddenly, we have our young people politically active, and we need to encourage that.

Yes, Charlie Gilmour went too far. He admitted that and he should have been punished.

But 16 months in jail? For democracy's sake this should be reconsidered.
 

Murdoch - 'Willful Blindness' or just plain old Diseconomies of scale?

The professed lack of knowledge possessed by Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch of phone hacking at News International demonstrated either that their company is too big for them to co-ordinate and control successfully, or that they are guilty of "willful blindness".

Diseconomies of scale are easy to explain. Economies of scale are where firms produce more efficiently as output grows. This can be because they can for instance buy in bulk, use the best technology or have access to the best finance terms. Diseconomies of scale are where firms produce more inefficiently as output grows. It happens past a certain point which is different in every industry. It certainly appears to have happened at News Corp.

Diseconomies of scale can happen for a variety of reasons but suffice it to say that the bigger a firm is, the harder communication and co-ordination of all the firm's resources are. In order to deal with this, the firm may put in certain safeguards (for instance, the reason Rupert Murdoch didn't hear about the payoffs to Max Clifford and Gordon Taylor in 2007 was because it wasn't for large enough sums for him to be told about it). No-one who watched or read the reports of the select committee inquiry yesterday could fail to be amazed at just how much wrong-doing the Murdochs weren't aware of within their family company. Rupert Murdoch said that the News of the World is only 1% of his company which is why he wasn't aware of it. But because he and James weren't aware of it, their company is paying to the tune of billions off their valuation. This is diseconomies of scale, and a very good example of it.

But there is another explanation, and committee member Adrian Sanders brought it up yesterday in the inquiry. He asked whether the Murdochs were aware of the term "wilful blindness". Rupert Murdoch indicated he had 'heard of it'.

As Margaret Heffernan has suggested in an excellent article in the Huffington Post (click here to read full article) every institutional debacle features the same arguments from those in charge - that 'it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top was to blame.  A few rogue, or over-zealous employees just went off piste'. As the crisis deepens the explanation moves to "no one could possibly have seen this coming". Both arguments were used in Abu Ghraib, Enron, WorldCom, BP and Lehman Brothers. Both were wrong then and are wrong now.

Heffernan believes that the phone hacking scandal, and the enormous price paid for it by News Corporation, isn’t the unfortunate byproduct of a few naughty freelancers. Nor was it an unpredictable, unforeseeable event. Rather, it was the product of a series of systemic failures any one of which was visible, but each one of which Rupert Murdoch and his UK-based chose to ignore.

She goes on to define 'Willful blindness' as a legal term, cited in the trial of Enron’s Skilling and Lay (about this here) . It states that if there is knowledge that you could have had and should have had but chose not to have, you are still responsible. The causes of organizational willful blindness are many but News International demonstrated most of them.

Ideology - Murdoch believes in political power and the importance of economies of scale. This had once made him successful but now blinded him to the British public's recently acquired distates for politics (MP's expenses) and foreign takeovers (Cadburys).

Obedience - As Murdoch's power increased, people wanted more and more to please him - for instance by getting big exclusives, however so acquired - and no one will intervene as non-compliance looks like disharmony.

Conformity - people in large organisations become so determined to 'belong' that they will give the wrong answer rather than be left out. So no-one would tell Murdoch what that something was wrong.

Money - there have been many experiments to show that large amounts of money undermines our social connections - making a person like Murdoch 'blind' to their customers, markets and political mood swings.

Power - the more powerful people become, the more likely they are to take big risks, think in abstract terms, and be absolutely certain they are right.

Affirmation - It is always nice to be surrounded by people just like us, confirming our sense that we are good and right. Murdoch's children surround him and may have blinded him to the full ramifications of what was going on.

'Willful blindness' is convenient. It means you can create an atmosphere and culture in which people will do absolutely anything to please you get noticed yet take no responsibility for their actions. As the executives at Enron found out (and sit in jail because of it) and the Murdochs may be about to find out, it is no excuse.

If Ed Miliband keeps going he may get the biggest scalp - David Cameron

Ed Miliband is onto something. He knows it too. He's chipping away at a fault line in David Cameron's defences which could turn into a massive earthquake if Cameron has to answer one question on oath - "was the retention of Andy Coulson in Downing Street after the election the condition on which you got the support of News International's papers?" I'm not one for hyperbole, but if it's true, then he will be truly compromised and may have to resign.

Miliband has had an excellent fortnight. He has gone from a laughing stock to the central pillar around whom the country's horror at the behaviour of the News of the World has been built. He tells of the day he decided to come out against them and it says a lot about the power News International thought they had.  He talked in Saturday's Guardian about receiving a phone call from News International to ask what his response will be to the allegations about hacking into Milly Dowler's phone, went into Parliament and demanded an investigation and the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, and received another phone call from News International to warn him that "now he was making it personal against them they would make it personal against him." To his credit, he hasn't backed off since and he is reaping the political dividends rightfully.

Another person who has grown massively in stature throughout this process is the Labour MP Tom Watson. Once one of Gordon Brown's main attack dogs, he has already been named "Committeman of the Year" by the House of Commons for his persistent attempts to get action on phone hacking as a member of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. He talked on radio the other day about being called rude names by Sun reporters two weeks ago, and being insulted about his weight (which he wasn't bothered by). Then, he alleges, he was told by the Sun journalist that they were sitting on stories about him and if he didn't "back off" they would print them. Thankfully, Watson either has enormous backbone or knows that they have nothing on him because he hasn't backed off one bit.

Back to Miliband though. At the same time as wanting to know about the past he is focussing on the future too. He produced an excellent speech back in June on "responsibility" - putting together bankers and welfare cheats and asking them to show more responsibility (worth a read here). This crisis has come along at a time when he has been able to expand that to all of those with any power. An A-level student of mine once wrote a global politics exam essay around the quote "with great power comes great responsibility", attributing it to Gandhi when it fact it was from Spiderman the movie (!). His sentiments were correct though, and Miliband has expanded his narrative to include politicians, media owners and anyone else who has a bit of power. Even if he has been "lucky" to have so effectively captured the zeitgeist, he may well have a narrative that can propel him and the Labour Party forward to 2015 when they will so need a compelling narrative in order to get back into government. If he can hang some compelling policies around this he really will be going in the right direction.

Connected to that is the question raised by both Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg about whether the type of media power prevalent in this country should ever be allowed. Rupert Murdoch owned newspapers totalling 40% of circulation in this country and a major broadcaster. Richard Desmond owns a few newspapers and a terrestrial channel. That is a large concentration of power and the dividends Murdoch in particular received for the power he held were huge. It has been shown that David Cameron met News International executives since he got into power as many times as all other newspapers put together. Is that right? Expect to see as part of this whole process a decision on the limit of media ownership allowed. This isn't an argument about private vs public or capitalism vs state, it's about government ensuring that democracy isn't affected by the proceeds of capitalism. The basic tenets of Conservatism argue that the role of the state is to ensure that the worst excesses of capitalism and private sector ownership are curbed (thereby ensuring, as Thomas Hobbes stated, we don't live a "nasty, brutish and short existence"). It assumes that man is born with "original sin" and needs to be guided. Turns out that News International needs to be guided, and in the absence of any sense of leadership on this from David Cameron and the Conservatives, Miliband has stepped into the breach.

Which leads us onto the question that David Cameron may one day have to answer. Was Rupert Murdoch's power so great that he could insist that a man clearly tainted by association with scandal had to remain at David Cameron's side, a direct contact for News International into the corridors of power? If so, and if Cameron didn't act responsibly and say that their support wasn't worth the risk, then he may have to take ultimate responsibility for that. Ultimate responsibility is what Sir Paul Stephenson has just taken by resigning from the Met Police for their links to Neil Wallis, links about which he says he didn't know. Cameron insists he didn't know either, yet he still took the risk and now may need to take responsibility for the outcome.

NOTW - Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It was illegal and many people would argue it should not be allowed. An office worker was paid to download private information about the spending habits of their organisation's employees onto a series of disks and hand them over to journalists who would scour through them and publish anything of interest. In that case, it was MP's abuse of expenses that were revealed. If we are not careful, the current witch hunt against the media could result in a the type of hurriedly and badly drafted law that would make it impossible to hold those in power to account. We have the right media laws, we just need to implement them properly.

In what has been a fascinating week for watchers of politics and the media, some other issues spring to mind in terms of what has happened with the closure of the 168 year-old News of the World (NOTW) worth a look for politics and economics students.

1) The Principal- Agent problem -  in very large organisations there is a divorce between ownership and control. Sometimes this can lead to  managers and employees of a company not to act as the owners might have wished. This is certainly the angle that Rupert Murdoch is taking during this crisis. Starting off by blaming the phone hacking on bad eggs within the company, the owners of News International have had to change their tone and verbiage as the realisation has grown that they aren't going to be able to bluff and obstruct their way out of this one. As I said in January (click here), I believe that the culture created by Andy Coulson encouraged journalists to do anything for a story. I would argue the same thing again for the culture created by Rebekah Brooks (then Wade), who was editor at the time when Milly Dowler's mobile phone message box was being hacked (and messages deleted to make room for more, making the police and her parents think she might be alive) by private investigators hired by NOTW journalists. She insists she didn't know about it and was on holiday at the time - but she didn't need to know about it - she was in charge, which is why we have the witch hunt that we do now. Worse for Rupert Murdoch is the involvement of his son, James - who has had nothing to do with the NOTW but may possibly be accused of obstructing justice during the investigation. At the moment, Brooks is taking the heat, as a human lightning rod for the Murdoch family (I wonder how much money persuaded her to do that). But I have heard quite a few times this weekend that there is a possibility James Murdoch could end up dragged into this to the extent he is fighting to stay out of jail. Rupert Murdoch will sacrifice ANYBODY to stop that happening, as we saw last week.

Going back to the Principal - agent problem - some News Corp shareholders have filed a suit in the USA arguing that News Corp management's failure six years ago to take sufficient action when the phone-hacking candal first broke demonstrated an "unwillingness by management to provide adult supervision". This large scale failure of governance was a failure of management and went against the owners' interests. Fact is that management seemed not to have been incentivised to investigate properly.

2) The power of the unions (and lack of power here) - Wither the NUJ? Whilst 200 journalists, many of whom had nothing to do with phonehacking, were stripped of their livelihoods in order to save the person who was editor when the worst of it happened - the NUJ were nowhere to be seen. Unions were set up for this reason, to protect the jobs and working conditions of their members, and this hasn't happened. At first, I was despairing - instead of going on strike against demographics, they should have been fighting against the exact example of capitalist destruction (particularly given it was done to protect a member of management). But then I did a bit of research and found that Donnacha Delong in the Guardian could explain it:

"Unfortunately, the NUJ remains locked out of News International due to a ridiculous loophole in the law on union recognition. While claims for applications for recognition can only be made by independent trade unions, they are blocked from doing so if there is pre-existing recognition of a non-independent "trade union". In the case of News International, that so-called trade union is the News International Staff Association (Nisa), which the Certification Office denied recognition as an independent trade union in 2001. Nisa remains what then NUJ general secretary, John Foster, then called "a company union, set up largely to keep independent unions out". Yet in the three-hour debate in the Commons on Wednesday, or on Thursday night's BBC Question Time, not one political figure mentioned this ridiculous situation."

Unions are absolutely vital for situations like this. I find it annoying when they dress up self-interest and avarice as being in the public interest and when they protect inadequate workers (particularly teachers) but in the case of journalism the unions would not only have caused a justifiable fuss about what happened to NOTW staff last week but in journalism the unions have a record of upholding standards and ethics - such as the time when members of the print unions refused to print a picture of Arthur Scargill making what looked like a nazi salute during the miners' strike and when journalists of the Express stopped working until the paper pulled a regular page called the "Daily Fatwa".

3) The chicken and egg question of just how powerful are newspaper proprietors - On Question Time last week Baroness Shirley Williams pointed out the need for two public inquiries: One to look into phone hacking and the other to look at the relationship between politicians and the media. Politicians have been lining up to admit that they have been too close to newspaper proprietors in the past and want to change now. Ed Miliband had a very good week in being one step ahead of David Cameron by disassociating himself with News International.

Cameron eventually spoke about it on Friday but the fact is that he is a personal friend of Rebekah Brooks, who lives in his consistuency. The other fact is that the major political parties have become terrified of Rupert Murdoch since he claimed to have won the election for the Tories in 1992 then his switches to Labour in 1997 and back to the Tories in 2010 were also influential. Not only have politicians felt this but journalists have done so too. Tom Watson, the Labour politician who has been at the forefront of the backlash against News International, has told of a stream of personal abuse being hurled at him by their journalists and a message being given to him that The Sun were holding back stuff they could print about him but would print it unless he backed off. If journalists feel they have that much power then we are not in a good position.

But actually there is possibly a chicken and egg situation here. People who have worked in communications in Downing Street have been telling on the radio and TV of how policies get sent back to departments unless they are tabloid friendly, and this is seen as a sign of how powerful the tabloids are. Murdoch has argued that he is merely reflecting public opinion. But does he? Or does he impose his opinions - or the opinions and preferred policies of his major advertisers (who are so important that they caused the closure of the papers) on the public, pretending that it reflects everyone's views?

4) Competition policy -  this is a great example of the difficulty when dealing with mergers and acquisitions in this country. Politics gets involved. It got involved with Kraft's acquisition of Cadburys last year (when the withdrawal by Labour of a condition that tested whether a merger was "in the national interest" left them powerless to intervene when a crown jewel of British manufacturing was bought). It is getting involved now with News International's attempt to buy the remainder of BSkyB (they own 39.1% already). Labour and Lib Dem politicians are arguing that the government should pull the plug on that now. I have written before (click here and go about half-way down for this) about why News International wants to do this. Let's just say it would give them access to a massive amount of money. Given the link between money and power and the belief that Rupert Murdoch has quite enough for now you can see why politicians (and rival newspaper proprietors, who must be absolutely delighted with this latest turn of events) are so interested in derailing it.

However, the laws on this are pretty clear, and in a statement today News International pointed it out - "News Corporation continues to believe that, taking into account the only relevant legal test, its proposed acquisition will not lead to there being insufficient plurality in news provision in the UK." Given that Sky News only has about 7% of the TV news viewers, they might be right, although when added to the amount of newspapers owned by News Corp (a far greater proportion than in any other country), one can see what the problem might be. 

But opponents of the deal are bringing in the "fit and proper test", which OfCom can apply under the 1990 Broadcasting Act to make sure that owners of broadcasting companies meet ethical requirements. The problem there is that the Act does not make clear what "fit and proper" means, nor gives any guidance on the matter. News Corporation have not had any compliance issues before and should OfCom decide that what has happened is reason to reboke their licence to broadcast they will open up a pandora's box of legal problems for themselves as News Corp will argue that the decision has been politically influenced, in particular because until the law is tightened up and a proper definition of "fit and proper" is created then News Corp's lawyers will have a field day.

Today, News Corp announced they had dropped their commitment to make Sky News independent, which automatically triggered the Competition Commission investigation. This could have been done for a few reasons. One was to give the government breathing space to refer the bid instead of stopping it. The other could be as a pre-cursor to News Corp simply dropping their ownership of UK newspapers. Given they have been subsidising the Times for the past few years we may need to be careful what we wish for. 

5) Media laws - The Press Complaints Commission defines public interest as including but not confined to: detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety; protecting public health and safety; preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation. It points out that there is a public interest in freedom of expression itself. If journalists rely on a public interest defence, editors must be able to demonstrate that they reasonably believed that publication, or journalistic activity undertaken with a view to publication, would be in the public interest. The problem with what the NOTW did was that there is certainly no public interest in deleting Milly Dowler's voicemail messages and, given Gordon Brown's determination never to use his children publicly, no public interest in an exclusive that his son had cystic fibrosis. Rio Ferdinand is at the moment arguing that his sexual pecadillos are also not in the public interest, even if they are interesting to the public.

The point is that undercover methods will always be needed if wrongdoers are to be held to account. You CAN pretend to be soemone else to gain access to private information. You CAN pay someone to download sensistive company data onto a disk. You CAN secretly record conversations. But ONLY if you can prove that the material is obtained in order to publish a story in the public interest. The Watergate scandal, the information on the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war, MPs' expenses, the publication of diplomatic cables provided by Wikileaks - all were obtained illegally but led to stories that were in the public interest. My concern is that new media laws are created that stops this happening.

The history of politics is littered with examples of hurriedly drafted bad laws to respond to public and  political clamour. The laws may need to be clarified, but more importantly, they need to be implemented. There was not a proper police investigation here - partly because the case was passed to the anti-terrorism squad on the very day that the plot to blow up airplanes was discovered, but also allegedly due to the police being compromised by their relationship with the NOTW and possibly being intimidated by the way they operate.

That, I hope, is the change that ensues. What is certain is that much more is to come on this story.

Should public sector workers be going on strike against demographics?

There's going to be some strange scenes over the next few months if the leaders of the public sector unions have their way. You're going to see a lot of people take to the streets to complain about medical advancements and the skills of doctors.

Make no bones about it, the Coalition government want this battle to go ahead. Should there be a strike, David Cameron will get a different human shield than Nick Clegg - the unions. Because whilst there are plenty of issues for which strikes are appropriate, pensions reform isn't one of them.

Because it's not the government's fault that life expectancy has increased by 20 years since the pensionable age was set at 65 (60 for women). It's not the government's fault that at the time the default retirement age was set at 65 one person's pension was paid by 5 taxpayers and now it's less than 2 taxpayers. It's not the government's fault that the unfunded cost of servicing our public sector pension liabilities of £1.2 trillion is now running at about £45 billion a year — in effect a second, hidden deficit.

This was the problem facing Lord Hutton (a former Labour Pensions Minister) when he was asked by the Coalition government to lead a Pensions Review. Last week the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, took up most of Hutton’s proposals by announcing that the retirement age of public sector workers — other than those in the army and the emergency services — will rise from 60 to 66, and that state employees will on average have to pay 3.2% more in pension contributions.

However, this change will not be applied to workers on less than £15,000 a year, and those earning less than £18,000 will have their additional pension contributions capped at 1.5%, so the usual appeals to compassion cannot be easily made. 

What's more while no existing public sector employees will lose any accrued rights — that would be both illegal and immoral — final salary pensions will gradually be replaced by those based on career-average earnings; but the most valuable aspect of the traditional public sector pension — that it will be index-linked and guaranteed by the exchequer, no matter how high future inflation rates — will remain.

Historically, these gold-plated pension plans, along with shorter hours, longer holidays and greater job security,  have been compensation for the lower salary one could expect in public service compared to those of equivalent rank or skills in the private sector.

However, 13 years of Labour rule saw public sector pay increased to the extent that recent research by the Policy Exchange think tank, based on figures from the Office for National Statistics, shows there is now a significant premium in pay for taxpayer-funded workers, whether measured by both mean and median annual salaries, or by typical hourly wage rates.

When you add the value of an index-linked final salary pension, the employment market is further distorted. Last year the Public Sector Pensions Commission, after a nine-month investigation, concluded that “the true value of the [unfunded] ... public sector scheme ... is over 40% of salary”. In other words, in order to acquire the same benefits in retirement, a private sector employee would have to pay 40% of his salary in contributions (his employer certainly won’t).

It's important we look at this further. Britain has a workforce of around 30 million workers. Around 25 million of those work in the private sector with 5 million the public sector. The average private sector employee has a pension pot of around £30,000 which is enough to buy an annuity on retirement at 60 of £900 a year.

So when Mark Serwotka, the leader of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCSU) tries to attract our sympathy by pointing at the average pension of £6,000 a year that his members earn, bear that £900 a year figure in mind. Also remember that to get £6,000 a year means a pension pot of around £200,000 a year on the open market. The taxpayer has to provide that pension pot.

The question is, if the PCSU members (and, I have to say sadly, the teachers union members), won't pay the full market cost of their pensions, why should the nation's workforce, most of whom will not be benefitting from it, do so instead?

As I said earlier, there are many issues that  public sector workers could strike about. Job losses is one thing. Working conditions may be another. Teachers could walk out in protest at proposed cuts in educational provision. But instead the first strike may be about pensions reform. This is a massive mistake, and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, is spot on by saying that the Coalition government would rub their hands with glee if the public sector workers went on strike for this reason, as they would be able to claim the unions are harming the economic recovery, not the Coalition's policies.

Serwotka has tried out the familiar routine of declaring it it immoral that their members should pay for the consequences of a crisis caused by the idiocies of overpaid bankers. But they could throw all the bankers into the sea and not solve the pensions crisis.

Private companies have long ago stopped final salary pensions for their employees, as they would make them bunkrupt. With pensions, the government can't get trapped into promising its employees more than it could possibly recoup from the taxpayers.

There are two ways to solve the pensions crisis. Stop people living longer by turning back medical advancements and possibly well targetted euthanasia. Or we can get real and cut down the gap between the contributions public sector workers make to their pensions and how much they receive in income from their pensions.

Which one makes sense? Even though it reduces my own income in retirement, I know the answer.

The dismal science of getting disabled people into the workplace

It's hard to find a better reason why people call economics the "dismal science" than the fact that when Philip Davies MP says that disabled people should work for less than the minimum wage to increase their chances of being taken on by employers, he is backed up by economic theory.

In case you didn't know, here is Davies quoted directly on Thursday 16th June in the House of Commons:

"If an employer is looking at two candidates, one who has got disabilities and one who hasn't, and they have got to pay them both the same rate, I invite you to guess which one the employer is more likely to take on. Given that some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable that, given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same, they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk. My view is that for some people the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.If those people who consider it is being a hindrance to them, and in my view that's some of the most vulnerable people in society, if they feel that for a short period of time, taking a lower rate of pay to help them get on their first rung of the jobs ladder, if they judge that that is a good thing, I don't see why we should be standing in their way."

Reaction to this statement has been fierce. The Conservative party quickly distanced themselves from them and  Labour's Anne Begg, chair of the work and pensions select committee, called the remarks "outrageous and unacceptable", saying they showed "what a warped world some Tories....inhabit."

Yet, if you study basic Labour market microeconomic theory, you will know that Davies has a point. It sates that an employer, when deciding whether or not to take on a new employee will look at two numbers. One is the wage that person demands (the marginal cost of the unit of labour) and one is the monetary value of the goods or services that person provides (the marginal revenue product of the unit of labour). Should the latter be greater than the former, then they will employ that person. Should someone with a disability not be as productive, they are less likely to be taken on.

In the example Davies gives, a rational (in economic terms) employer, faced with two candidates, one with disabilities and one without, to whom they would have to pay the minimum wage, will choose the candidate who will be the most productive, as that is the only way to compare them, unless one of them accepts below the minimum wage, which they are not allowed to do.

I imagine Philip Davies will feel this is a similar argument to those who feel that maternity laws are making it less likely that a woman of child bearing age will get chosen for a job over other people, given the assumption is made that in the short term they may be less productive. Effectively, the argument goes, maternity laws are more of a hindrance than a help.

Davies believes he has some supporting evidence - he said he had talked to people with mental health problems when he met recently with the charity Mind, and he said they agreed with his analysis.

But that's because his analysis is basic microeconomic theory, and basic microeconomics is a science, and a dismal science at that. Because Davies has missed the point about what the National Minimum Wage is for.

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) is about dignity. It's about being paid a decent wage for the work you do. The reason it was necessary is that basic economic theory suggested that the equilbrium wage (where demand for labour meets supply of labour) should be paid and sometimes that equilibrium wage was so low that it was impossible to live off it. So a minimum wage had to be set above that equilibrium


The NMW also aimed to solve another problem, which was that of the "unemployment trap". In basic terms if the benefits you get are more than, equal to, or not much less than what you would get paid in work then you may as well stay unemployed and get paid to do nothing. So the NMW was seen as a "supply-side" policy as it incentivised people to join or rejoin the workforce.


Someone who is registered disabled will get disability benefit, and the wage they would earn in employment really needs to be far enough above the benefit to make it worthwhile for them to take a job.

Where Davies has a point though is that sometimes it's about getting that first foot on the job ladder and proving yourself. Many young people are sometimes prepared to work as "interns" for free for as long as a year to get themselves on the job ladder (even though that's normally funded by the 'bank of mum and dad'). Davies is suggesting that those with disabilities may want to be free to do the same without an employer breaking the law.

Recently, the Associated Press raan a story about the Ohio legislation that does exactly what Davies is suggesting. Despite the vitroilic reaction, the mother of an autistic man working for below minimum wage in Ohio said that her son's new job "allows him to have a purpose in life....he has a place to go and a reason to get up in the morning. I don't care about the money."

Also, a single adult under the age of 24 is entitled to benefits of around £70 a week, but the minimum wage would give him more than £200 a week. We talk about the need to be a significant difference between benefits and the lowest wage, well this may indicate that there is. So should the state be not allowing those who wish to earn say £140 a week (double benefits earning) to do so?

My point is, like most ideas in economics, there are two sides to this story. Despite the insults and rage Davies invited, should we really be dismissing his analysis out of hand?

In these times of mass unemployment do we not want as many people as possible in work? In this time of a massive deficit would we not prefer people in jobs earning and paying tax to people not working and paying benefits?

If so then we really should look at every option seriously, however unpalatable. Even though I will admit this one is particularly unpalatable.

Ratko Mladic reminds me why we are in Libya

I'll always remember their faces when I told them about Bosnia. I once taught a group of boys, the majority of whom were Muslim. We had some fascinating conversations about foreign policy, particularly around the time they were going on the protest marches against Israel's actions in Gaza. They were in the middle of insisting that it was another example of the Christian world sitting back once again whilst Muslims are massacred.

I asked them to explain to me why then Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had intervened in Bosnia to stop the Christian Serbs killing the Bosnian Muslims. They sat, and they stared at me in complete incomprehension. I asked them the question again. Blank faces. It began to dawn on me that they had no idea what I was talking about. Bosnia didn't fit with 'the narrative', so they hadn't been told about it by those in their community who were (for reasons I won't guess) been fuelling their victim complex. It had simply been erased from history as an inconvenient anomaly. Or so I thought.

After the weekend they came back into class with triumphant looks on their faces. "Why Sir did the UK and USA wait until after so many Muslims had been killed before interveneing? Why did the West allow Sebrenica to happen?"

This conversation (and the faces of my former pupils) came into my head when I heard that Ratko Mladic had been arrested in Serbia this week. It was he and Radovan Karadzic who had led the Sebrenica massacre in 1995. It was three more years before the UK and USA intervened.

And this leads to the situation in Libya. It seems the mission has crept, in that the words of Barack Obama and David Cameron this week suggest they will not leave until Muammar Gaddafi is 'removed' as leader of the country. They call this 'removing the war machine' but many call it 'regime change'. The problem, of course, is that the West went into Libya without really understanding what would mark the end of the campaign. That gives useful fuel to those who question why we actually went into Libya in the first place, and why we are there but not doing anything about similar issues in Syria and Bahrain.

The facile answer is that we are in Libya because it has oil and Syria doesn't. (Bahrain DOES have oil but again probably not useful for 'the narrative').  I say facile because it is easy to say but hard to prove. The Arab League itself had asked the Western World to intervene in Libya and Gadaffi and sons had loudly proclaimed their intention to go "house-to-house" killing people in Benghazi.

This put David Cameron in an awkward position. If he believes in muscular liberalism then he had little choice but to intervene in Libya given from what Gaddafi was saying there was about to be a massacre in Benghazi. The trouble was that, had Kosovo and Sierra Leone been the last examples of liberal interventionism it would have been consistent to have also got involved in Libya. Alas, Iraq and Afghanistan had made it far more complicated.

Also making it far more complicated was the inability to understand the consequences of intervention. In one day a few weeks ago I read two articles in different broadsheets. One argued that getting involved in  Libya would be a recruiting tool for Islamic terrorism as we would end up killing Muslims. The other argued that not getting involved in Libya would be a recruiting tool for Islamic terrorism as we would be doing nothing about the killing of Muslims.

If you think that sounds ridiculous, let's go back to the conversation in my classroom over two and half years ago. The 6th form boys I was talking too said that it was as much a problem that the West was killing Muslims in Iraq as it was that the West allowed Muslims to be killed in Bosnia. Damned when we do, damned when we don't.

At the end of the day, there is a reason why most of Parliament (I believe it was less than 10 MPs who voted against) voted for intervention in Libya. It's because of one of the more impressive lines David Cameron has come up with so far. "Just because we can't do everything doesn't mean we should do nothing". We simply can't afford to be in Bahrain and Syria as well, so does that mean we let people die in Libya?

If we had we would have learned nothing from Sebrenica. And that, for me, would have been a worse crime.

Privacy laws leave a vacuum, causing "information-jigsaws"

Having revealed the fact that Sir Fred Goodwin - former CEO of RBS - had obtained an injunction to cover up details of his affair with a "senior colleague", Lord Stoneham then provided some information which, for those wanting to know what actually happened and who understand the way public companies are run, was extremely useful.

Let's look at the central part of what Lord Stoneham said.....

"Every taxpayer has a direct public interest in the events leading up to the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, so how can it be right for a super-injunction to hide the alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a senior colleague. If true, it would be a serious breach of corporate governance and not even the Financial Services Authority would be allowed to know about it."

After he said it, the High Court was forced to lift the part of the injunction that was hiding Goodwin's name, allowing it to be released into the media. However, the name was unaccompanied by the name of the "senior female employee" not any details of the "alleged relationship". So, in the absence of this information we are left putting pieces of the jigsaw together, because an information vacuum usually has to be filled with something, and in the absence of facts, rumour is King.

But let's take a step back. Why do we need to know anything about the alleged relationship? Just because something is interesting to the public doesn't make it in the public interest, surely?

In the Sunday Times today, Dominic Lawson suggested that the idea that Sir Fred Goodwin's affair distracted him from running RBS properly is preposterous - if only he had been distracted he wouldn't have made so many mistakes Lawson said, and so the affair is irrelevant to the public interest.

But the clue comes in Lord Stoneham's use of the word "corporate governance", and that he felt the Financial Services Authority might want to know about it. Lawson's article didn't mention this, but it is important.

The "senior colleague" is not allowed to be named, but if they are a colleague then they were on the RBS payroll. For this affair to have had corporate governance implications the colleague would have likely been in either legal or compliance or finance. If she was a "senior colleague" she would have been high up in her department and responsible for advising Goodwin on actions he undertook as CEO. If that advice was compromised in any way it IS in the public interest as it could be said to have contributed to the downfall of RBS to the point where they had to be taken into State ownership.

Let me give you a hypothetical example:

In 2007 RBS (as part of a consortium) bought ABN-AMRO, the Dutch Bank, for over 3 times its book value. In the run up to the deal ABN-AMRO had sold its best asset (the LaSalle unit) to Bank of America - leaving RBS acquiring only the ABN-AMRO's underperforming London based investment banking franchise (which had plenty of bad loans on its books) and some smallish Asian operations. Added to this, the credit crunch started to hit in 2007. Put those two issues together RBS should have tried to amend the terms before the sale went through. But they didn't, and the rest...is now history.

So, why did Sir Fred Goodwin push through with this toxic deal? What happened to the trusted financial advisers within RBS? What happened to those within RBS paid to speak truth to power? Was Fred Goodwin in a relationship with one of those advisors? Was that the "senior colleague". If it was, then that is a corporate governance issue.

Ah, you might say, but surely the board needed to agree to an acquisition that large? Don't shareholders have to have a vote? What if the presentations given to try and persuade the board and the shareholders included this "senior colleague", helping the person she was allegely in a relationship with to continue to build his empire to an enormous size? THAT is also a corporate governance issue.

I am actually reasonably relaxed about the current privacy issue. I agree that everyone has some right to privacy. I do believe that if a footballer is earning money from endorsements from his family man image then an injunction to stop details of an affair emerging is not about privacy, it's about protecting those endorsements. I believe that if an actor famed for playing reliable family men uses an injunction to stop details of an affair emerging then that too is not about privacy, it's about protecting their career. But in the absence of ulterior motives I do agree they should have a right to privacy.

But if Fred Goodwin's affair led in any way to the State having to bail out RBS to the tune of as many billion pounds as it did, then it IS in the public interest, and privacy be damned.

"We got him" - but was justice done?

One of the reasons I love politics is that there is rarely a right answer. The question of whether Osama Bin Laden should have been captured alive at all costs and tried in a court of law is one of them. You would imagine it is a simple answer - yes - he should have a fair trial and the Western World should act as an exemplar of what to do with people who commit crimes. But, as with everything in global politics especially, it is far more nuanced than that.

Let's start with the members of Navy Seal Team 6 who performed the actual operation. In the UK especially we lack understanding of the chain of command (which is why many still want the person who shot Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005 to be put on trial instead of the person or people who ordered him to do it). In the US they don't have that problem, and they understand that the man who shot Osama Bin Laden was aware of the need not to risk anyone's lives and had to make a split second decision on whether he or others were in danger.  We know wasn't armed and he didn't use his wife as a human shield (what WERE they thinking saying that?!) but he was retreating into the bedroom, and as far as the soldier know could have been getting a weapon. The only way to know he wasn't carrying a suicide bomb underneath his clothing was if he had been naked. In fact his clothes were bulky (which turned out to be money sewn into them).  As more information comes out of the US, it is becoming more and more clear that capturing Bin Laden was most probably a secondary objective, killing him the first.  But is that wrong?

First of all, and most importantly, you will hear many people talk about 'international law'. There is no such thing (yet). There are some agreed principles and an attempt at global governance through the United Nations but there is no binding body of law that covers all eventualities all over the world. So the argument that Bin Laden should have been tried under the principles of International law is not as applicable as many think. To illustrate the complications, we have an International Criminal Court (in which we attempted to try Slobodan Milosevic and are trying Charles Taylor) but it's jurisdiction applies from when it was created (April 2002) and it can exercise jurisdictiononly in cases where the accused is a national of a state party, the alleged crime took place on the territory of a state party, or a situation is referred to the court by the United Nations Security Council. Effectively, Osama Bin Laden could not be tried by this court.

So could the USA have tried him in one of their courts? Well, the National Defence Authorization Act that went through Congress recently effectively bars anyone that would be detained in Guantanamo from being tried on USA soil. There is little chance that Osama Bin Laden would have been held in a prison on USA soil as no state would have agreed to take him. So it would have been a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the results of which would not have been recognised by many people.

But let's get away from practicalities and look at the reality. Holding Osama Bin Laden in captivity would have most probably unleashed a wave of terror the like of which we haven't seen in order to secure his release. The USA were never going to be prepared to risk that. Even retaining his body on land would make it a shrine and a focus for serious disturbances. Furthermore, the trial process would have dragged on for many years as it was a very complicated case. We are looking at someone, for example, who was for a fact armed and trained by the Americans in the 80s in order to help the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There are serious skeletons in Osama's cupboard, and many would not want them to come out. Finally, Eric Holder, the US Attorney General pointed out that it is a War on Terror and Bin Laden was an enemy combatant so the USA had the right to kill him.

The most important reality is that the USA wanted closure. Yes, it wasn't 'justice' in many peoples' sense of the word. There is a reason why people get tried in Western Courts in front of a jury of their peers and victims aren't allowed to decide on guilt or sentence, and in a way the USA was a major victim of Osama Bin Laden and decided to be the judge jury and executioner. We can certainly question this. But the Americans in this particular case felt that justice was done for the crimes Bin Laden committed, including the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole in 1998 and 9/11 most of all meant he should face the death penalty and in the long term the world is a safer and better place without him.

The irony of it all was that Al-Qaeda had been weakened beyond all recognition by the events of the last few months. They believed, and stated often, that the Muslim people wanted to live under Sharia Law and Islam wasn't compatible with democracy. Yet the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other places makes it quite clear that young Muslims especially really DO want to have some input into their lives and really DO want some form of democracy. Effectively then, all Al-Qaeda were doing were killing people who didn't share their view of how the world should be run, which is why more victims of Al-Qaeda were Muslims than those of any other faith.

The argument that killing Bin Laden will unleash a new wave of terrorism is irrelevant. It can be added to all the other explanations and excuses for new waves of terrorism which are likely to happen all the time.

On a personal level, I would have preferred if at all possible for the West to have shown the restraint and respect for justice as an example to everyone else of how to treat those who have comitted a crime. I do understand though why it just wasn't possible, or even advisable, in this particular instance.

The people spoke - and this is what I heard

It has been a fascinating fortnight in politics and I wanted to wait a little bit to see if there was any major fallout from last Thursday's referendum, local and devolved national elections before I made any comment.

First, here are the headlines..

1) The AV referendum vote was a resounding 'No'. I always felt that if AV was the answer we were asking thh wrong question. So it was that less than a third of a surprisingly high 42% turnout voted 'Yes' to AV. I do wonder what would have happened if it had been a choice between FPTP and AV Plus or AMS or a properly proportionally representative system. But we now won't find out for a generation. The Lib Dems blamed Ed Miliband for not pulling his Labour party together behind the 'Yes' vote. But Miliband did the right thing, more than half his MPs were voting 'No' so he really couldn't afford to push too hard. The fact that the 'Yes' camp had the burden of proof that FPTP needed to be changed and hid behind hogwash like 'it will stop expenses scandals' or 'it will make MPs work harder' instead of the real arguments, and wheeled out Eddie Izzard and Colin Firth against David Cameron is the reason the country voted 'No'. Does this mean the fabled 'progressive majority' doesn't actually exist?

2) In Scotland, the AMS electoral system - which was brought in for the sole reason that it would ONLY produce coalition governments - produced a majority government for the SNP. This was a fantastic result for Alex Salmond, who has grown into the role of Scotland's First Minister in ways nobody expected when he first took power in 2007. I do worry for him though. Firstly, he will have to hold a referendum on independence, and 2/3rds of Scots are against it, mainly because they know that should it happen they would have to pay for their own national defence and their share of the UK's deficit, which was hugely affected by having to bail out RBS and HBOS (and we all know what the 'S' stands for!). Secondly, Salmond won the election partly because of promises he made on having no tuition fees and free prescription charges among other things. He is an economist so will know there is an opportunity cost to these promises - in that some things will have less money. OR he will have to borrow a large amount of money and put Scotland in even more debt. It is quite possible the electorate didn't understand that. More likely is that they had little reason to vote for the others.

3) The local election results were surprisingly favourable to the Conservatives, unsurprisingly damning for the Lib Dems, and in my view unsurprisingly unrewarding for Labour. Labour increased their share of the vote by 11% but the Conservatives still won on share of the vote, although they lost 2% of their vote in 2007. The Conservatives also gained seats when it was believed they could lose as much as 800. . I believe Labour didn't do as well as they might because they haven't come up with a realistic alternative to the Conservatives' current course of action. Talking to a Labour activist the other day I asked what the alternative was, and he said "cut less" and I said "cut WHAT less" and he said "you know, just cut slower". Couldn't tell me what changes he would actually make apart from say he wouldn't do anything the Conservatives are doing - at which point I said, "yes, but what WOULD you do" and he went back to "cut less", and we were back at the beginning. I  believe that unless he is playing a canny long game, Ed Miliband is going to have to become far more of a leader than someone who seems merely to carp from the sidelines, because his followers have no idea where they are going.

As for the Lib Dems, they were almost obliterated, and are very unhappy about it. They have complained about the tactics the 'No' campaign used and they have complained about being a human shield for the Conservatives.  But here's a little story for you.

During last year's election campaign I happened to know the Conservative and Labour candidates in a particular constituency quite well. They finished up 42 votes apart and actually got on very well, with mutual respect developing between them despite clear ideological differences. The Lib Dem candidate finished third in this particular consistuency with over 16,500 votes, which is a considerable amount for a third placed candidate, and more than many seat-winners elsewhere.

During this campaign, the Conservative candidate was questioned about his pro-Israel fervour as a result of a leaflet produced by the Lib Dem campaign that assured voters he was heavily pro-Palestinian. Nothing strange there right? Well you'll be interested to know that the Labour candidate was also questioned about her Pro-Palestinian views as a result of a leaflet ALSO produced by the Lib Dem campaign assuing voters that the candidate was, in fact, a committed supporter of Israel.

The winning candidate noted that in her many years of politics it was the nastiest campaign she had been involved in, entirely because of the behaviour of the Lib Dem candidate. On further investigation it was found that the Lib Dems are particularly happy to fight dirty, something revealed by the press in response to the Phil Woolas case last year, where a Labour MP was stripped of his seat because of lies his campaign spread about the Lib Dem candidate in Oldham East.

The reason I'm telling you about this is because when the Lib Dems cry foul about others' campaigns, as they did about the 'No' campaign during the AV referendum (and I don't disagree - see this blog), they need to be careful as the stones they throw are all piled up next to them in their glass house.

The real issue for the Lib Dems is that when you are a protest party of opposition you can gain plenty by being all things to all people - as they famously were over issues like tuition fees, and in the example above, the Middle East peace process - but when you are a responsible member of a Coalition government you can't get away with that. Granted - there are plenty of Lib Dem Ministers who aren't very good at acting responsibly (HELLOOO Mr Cable), but to be fair to Nick Clegg, at the very least he has understood his collective responsibilities now he is Deputy Prime Minister (which is lucky because so unused are we as a country to coalition that it seems very few of the public or the media understand at all).

Ultimately - right now there is very little reason to vote for the Lib Dems. When they went into Coalition with the Conservatives they must have known that for the first year or two they would struggle in the polls. Given that the Coalition is front-loading the pain in terms of deficit cutting, there was always going to be protests and fightbacks and yes, the Lib Dems are bearing the brunt of it.

But if they have any guts they will stay the Coalition out until the year before the next election in 2015, then develop a programme of their own which takes into account this time that they MIGHT actually get into government, instead of the 2010 manifesto, which can only have assumed that they wouldn't. Should they do that, they could, with proven experience that they can govern a country, do better than the last election. But if not, we could be back to a two-party system again in the UK, and politics will be all the poorer for it.