government incompetence

...a society made up almost entirely of mendacious megalomaniacal psychopaths, do declare that the causes of the current economic crisis are basically nothing to do with us:

3. During a period of strong global growth, growing capital flows, and prolonged stability earlier this decade, market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence. At the same time, weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices, increasingly complex and opaque financial products, and consequent excessive leverage combined to create vulnerabilities in the system. Policy-makers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets, keep pace with financial innovation, or take into account the systemic ramifications of domestic regulatory actions.

4. Major underlying factors to the current situation were, among others, inconsistent and insufficiently coordinated macroeconomic policies, inadequate structural reforms, which led to unsustainable global macroeconomic outcomes. These developments, together, contributed to excesses and ultimately resulted in severe market disruption.

God it makes me sick. Lying miserable tossers. Understand this well. Maintaining low interest rates, in order to get more people borrowing more to put into a land price bubble which would enable others to borrow to spend our way out of a mini-recession at the beginning of the century was DELIBERATE PUBLIC POLICY. Deliberate public policy the effects of which were to make the poorest and weakest in society attempt to take on unacceptable levels of debt and risk just to prevent themselves from being ripped off even more in the future.

Not only that, but they knew at the time it would lead to problems later (Eddie George said: "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out',"). They simply hoped their successors could get us out of those problems. I think we should take their prescriptions for recovery with all the salt in the world's oceans.

The emotional outpourings of grief and anger at the case of Baby P (as evinced on this Lib Dem Voice thread for example - h/t Alix too!) are to be expected. It is truly a galling case with a litany of failures on the part of those supposed to protect the vulnerable and unutterable cruelty by those who should have been closest to the child.

This was to have been a rant that leaving things up to "the authorities" is a recipe for disaster. I was going to say that these sort of incidents are mercifully rare. So I looked around for some statistics (a PDF file) to back up my assertion and I found that, whilst we are still talking about small numbers (child homicides have hovered between about 60 and 100 a year for a long time)what is clear is that there *ought* to be a story like Baby P's every month or so somewhere. There is, it would appear, about one death a month of a child under one by its parents under the category of "acts of cruelty" (as opposed, I suppose, to whole family suicide incidents or throwing them off an hotel balcony). There's about one other of a child between one and four, again by parents, and about half as much again over all a month by strangers or less closely related family.

So, the big question for me out of this now becomes less "what happened to Baby P", so much as "why don't we have this horrific outrage a couple of times a month?" Of course the fact Baby P had been seen more than sixty times makes the failure all the greater, and it may be that these other couple of dozen cases a year are completely below the radar of the relevant child protection agencies.

But that on its own begs the question "why"? Even if they are not known to local authorities, these deaths represent a failure of the system simply because they have never come to anyone's attention before it's too late. A failure just as egregious as that of Haringey. Perhaps more so - for we know that people go to all sorts of lengths to conceal the sickest secrets - just think of Joseph Fritzl, as if you could forget.

So, is Haringey a victim of its own previous failings - making a death under their watch a more significant failing? Or is the real symptom of systemic failure the fact that this sort of thing is not all over the media twice a month elsewhere?

Over the years the government's regional governance strategy has been a complete and utter shambles. The Regional Development Agencies are QUANGOs unaccountable to anyone other than within what was then the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions. Then a layer of pseudo accountability was added in the form of not directly elected Regional Assemblies(most members were at least appointed by local authorities to which they had themselves been elected). Their attempt to give the regions more "autonomy" by setting up directly elected assemblies foundered at the first attempt in the North East referendum. And justifiably - there was very little additional power being devolved to them and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be designed to accrete more power from lower level tiers of government like counties and districts.

So when they abandoned that idea they decided to replace the half-democratic Regional Assemblies with a minister and parliamentary select committee for each region. So what a surprise to see the results of yesterday's Commons' debate on the establishment of the regional committees. Yup, you guessed it, they have somehow contrived to make a practically undemocratic system somewhat less democratic and accountable.

The government has decided that, unlike with local government or even the half-bakedelected Regional Assemblies, they are going to keep a majority on every committee, irrespective of the proportion of MPs each party holds at Westminster for each individual region. Not only that, but they will allow the importing of MPs from other regions whose constituency responsibilities have nothing to do with the region they are going to be deliberating about.

So, a region in which the party of government holds the fewest number of Westminster seats will have a committee with a majority of members from the governing party scrutinizing the decisions and plans of a minister from that governing party which that region rejected when given the chance.

Democracy eh? Dontcha just love it! Here's the story from the Lib Dem newsfeed:

The Liberal Democrats yesterday accused the Government of abusing the opportunity to provide decent regional accountability by imposing its parliamentary majority on new regional Select Committees, even in areas where they have the fewest MPs. Shadow Leader of the House, Simon Hughes MP, challenged the proposed make up of the new committees in a House of Commons debate, as MPs voted in their favour yesterday. The need for the Committees to reflect voting patterns was, he said, a "central obligation" of devolution and something the Government had "failed to grasp". Simon illustrated the problems with the proposal by highlighting the situation in the south-west region...(read more)

I don't normally get to see the Daily Politics, but I'm on a week off at the moment and saw today's after PMQs. There was Yvette Cooper being grilled by Brillo who was asking whether Britons' status as the most personally indebted population in the G7 was anything to do with our current travails.

She kept avoiding the point, as usual, insisting that it was an American thing from which we had got infected. For your benefit, Yvette, you lying cow, here's what Eddie George said just eighteen months ago:

"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

I hardly expect tomorrow's papers to cover the news of Mrs Balls's resignation - but she is deliberately misleading the public and that would be the honourable course. I understand that you can only really begin to tackle a problem if you admit to it in the first place. Eddie George did; it's time this government did too. Disgusting, lying bunch of shit-crocks.

Just what did she study at Balliol, Harvard and the LSE?  Does she really believe we will just think she is stupid or mistaken?  What the fuck have the people of Pontefract done to deserve her?

When Gordon Brown came to power last year he promised a "government of all the talents". A year or so on and with what, 45,000,000 adults to choose from (most of whom of course would not touch his government, probably any government, with a very long barge-pole), one has to wonder just what talents he had in mind to bring this motley crew together:

Come to think of it, there's probably not one talent between them. These three, and this choice by the "dear leader" to bring them into government, just highlights for me how hopeless the very idea of state government is. There is no way that these people are somehow uniquely capable, any more than anyone else in the country, to make the momentous decisions we stupidly cede to the state to take on our behalf.

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead!

...and we still don't seem to know what to do about bankers!

The Bank of Scotland, whatever is now left of it, is 312 years old. That of England just two years older. Ever since the banking system has been built on state protectionism, corporate welfare, monopoly privilege and, at its heart, a gigantic fraud.

The fraud was that a goldsmith could give both you and I receipts for my gold stored in his vaults and make money on both - from me a fee for keeping my gold, from you interest on the receipt you had borrowed from him. Indeed they found they could duplicate this so frequently, fraud upon fraud if you like, that though gold is perhaps regrettably no longer the basis of our money, the "hardest money", real "hard cash", amounts now to just three per cent of our total money supply in terms of everything we all have collectively borrowed and deposited.

To be fair, most goldsmiths at least issued notes of their own. Customers - both depositors and borrowers - chose which goldsmith to bank with on their reputation. If they became overstretched, issued what was felt to be too many receipts for the same gold, their notes would be less desirable in trade, there may even be a "run" when all the receipt holders tried to get their "real" money, the gold, out of the bank, which of course had much less gold than he had issued such receipts for. Nowadays, however, what they create and destroy in their lending business is denominated in the national currency, a currency issued nominally at least, by the state and guaranteed by the state.

This means it is no longer a private affair between a bank and its customers as to whether their business practices jeopardise their customers' savings; it is a problem for us all. We have ceded control of the supply of money issued in our name to private businesses whose main aim is to make profit for themselves and who, in the course of that otherwise noble pursuit, play fast and loose with the very air the entire economic system requires to function. And states protect them, bail them out as seems about to be the case in the US to the tune of almost countless billions, because they have to guarantee the currency they have so little control over.

Regular readers will know I am very fond of a quotation from Josiah Stamp, Liberal politican, Chairman of the Midland Bank in the 1920s and reputedly second wealthiest man in Britain in his lifetime:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again.

"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."

It rather seems to me that with the events of the past few days, we may be "taking the earth away from them" (or, more accurately and nauseatingly, buying it back from them) which they have stolen from us with their inflationary approach to money, but leaving them the power to create those deposits all over again with which, in the next bubble, they will buy it all back again.

Everyone seems to think that money has somehow been pretty constant. The way it works I mean, not whether we call it shillings and guineas or pounds and pence. But the current confidence trick really began with the depression of the 1930s and the work of two extremely wealthy, powerful men in the US who persuaded the government of their day to set up the system that enabled them to create "our" money according to their corporate priorities. The results of John D Rockerfeller and John P Morgan Jnrs' work was the Federal Reserve and the rapid ramping up of fractional reserve banking, and the eventual demise of real solid backing for that currency.

If the current crisis really does turn out to be the "big crunch" at the end of the cycle begun by that 1930s "big bang" we should be ready with policy to replace that fraudulent, anti-competitive, oligarchical system, designed by the very wealthy to keep them that way for little actual productive work with something different. Entirely different. I do not detect any mainstream politicians with the cojones to say so. Our governments and politicians are but eunuchs to the bankers, and the longer that continues, the more the vast majority of us will suffer.

Following the revelation of yet more utter incompetence in government data handling the BBC asks...

Well, I posited a suggestion ten years ago now when I was on the Lib Dems' Civil Liberties Policy Working Group. At the time ID cards were but an evil glint in Liar, Liar, Tony Bliar's eyes but there was a clear feeling that they were pushing in that direction. But it was mainly in response to issues such as Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and government wanting more and more surreptitious access to data already held about us and our activities.

My suggestion was that if government felt the need to keep all this data on us, the very least they could do would be to put us in charge of how and when it was accessed. We could all have an encryption key - it need not even be supplied by government - you could purchase one perhaps from Thawte or someone like that if, when, you decided you could not trust the government.

Two encryption keys would be required any time any bureaucrat or official decided they wanted to take a peek at any data the government held identifying you as the subject. A bit like a "nuclear key" where you need two people to turn the key for anything to work, the official would have their own key which would identify them as the person trying to access the data and check they were authorized to do so, and they would have to be in contact with the data subject, you, and, like a bank call centre does when they phone you would have to authenticate they were dealing with the real you by getting you to enter some of your PIN or similar before they'd get access.

Every government database system that held any data on individuals could have to go through an annual independent audit to ensure there was no inbuilt mechanism for bypassing such a security measure or, for example, copying data en masse with personal identifiers in. The system could be extended, voluntarily, to any organization that holds personal data - such as banks - if they felt it was more effective than creating their own, and the whole principle could be embedded in Data Protection legislation (not that the presence of Data Protection legislation stops the government currently breaking their own laws).

Remember, it's not so very long ago that when you submitted your tax return each part of it, or schedule, would be dealt with by a different official so that no one person could actually gain a picture of what you were worth. We need to return to that culture. Modern technology is great stuff, or it can be. But at the moment the culture seems to be to assume that systems ought to be intrusive rather than actively looking for ways as part of systems specifications to maintain the benefits of fast modern communications and data (for there are many) whilst not being intrusive. Witness the debate about road pricing - "eye in the sky spies" or "black box" systems that don't need to transfer data about your movements, only about your overall journey for the purpose of billing.

Would it grind government to a halt? Perhaps, though in saying that the former tax regime was entirely paper based and so much more troublesome and it didn't exactly collapse then and banks and other large data processing organizations use similar technology and still operate reasonably efficiently. Would government grinding to a halt be a terribly bad thing in any case I wonder?

But, whether the data is about criminals, child benefit recipients or recruits to the armed forces, this current government has proven itself utterly incapable of managing data, or perhaps just contemptuous of our rights. Personally, I doubt any other party's government would be doing much better - contempt for the citizen is embedded in Whitehall and Westminster, but Straw and Smith should resign over this latest data loss immediately. Resign and be tried as any data controller be would with such brazen data losses under their watch. Enough is enough. These bastards need to get out of our lives, or perhaps some day we will collectively decide we need to make them butt out, forcibly.

UPDATE:  My boss just pointed me to this article in Computer Weekly about Lib Dems calling for data commissioners to protect data about the public.  I'm not sure it's anywhere near adequate.  The liberal response should be, of course, to reduce the quantities of data first by being ruthless about who needs to store any data about us, but I can't see a data commissioner, even one for every database, will be any more effective than the current DPA regime of a responsible Data Owner who can be prosecuted for failure to comply with the act.  Clealry government departments need to be held responsible in the courts, with individuals answerable, just as they are in other organizations.  And at the top of the tree comes the minister concerned.  It is not technology that is at fault but a lax attitude to how that technology should be used that matters.  We need to change the culture such that databases are designed from the bottom up toassume, essentially, that the data subject is the one who by default has access not the data owners.