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Bishop Hill May 15, 2009 Blogs I've set up Bishop Hill for mobile devices using MoFuse. Not having one of the aforementioned mobile devices, I have no idea if this has worked or not. Perhaps someone can tell me. The URL is: http://bishophill.mofuse.mobi/
Bishop Hill May 14, 2009 Nanny state Politicians Regulation Security I chanced upon this site, which puts up a daily photo of the police at work. This is a protest against the government's silly law criminalising the photographing of law enforcement officers.
This prompted a thought. A policeman friend told me that there is a police open day at Fife Police HQ this weekend. Some awkward sod should report everyone who takes a snap of a copper to, erm, one of the coppers present.
This should cause complete and utter chaos, ruin the police's PR day and publicise what a terrible law Mr Brown and his legions of lunatics have put in place.
Just a thought.
Bishop Hill May 14, 2009 Economics The Adam Smith Institute has an interesting article about how Tax Freedom Day, the day on which you stop working for the state and start working for yourself, has now reached June 25th (at least if you take into account the surplus of government spending over its income).
Tax Freedom Day is a good idea, transforming a rather abstruse number (the percentage of GDP taken by government spending) into something that is readily comprehensible by the man in the street.
The problem with the concept though is that it only comes round once a year. It would be better public relations to have a tax freedom time, the point each day when you stop working for the government and start working for yourself.
By my calculations, if you normally work a 7 1/2 hour day, starting at 9am, you will probably still be working for the government when you knock off for lunch at 12:30. So when you buy lunch, you still haven't retained a single penny of your salary in order to pay for it - Gordon's had everything you've earned so far. Then, you return at 1:30, you have to work for another seven minutes until finally at 1:37pm, you finally reach tax freedom time.
And it's the same thing tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Bishop Hill May 13, 2009 Crime The fact that the Association of Chief Police Officers is allowed to operate as a private limited company, thus making it exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, is one of the more outrageous innovations of the kleptocrats that run the country.
There is however, the merest hint that this may be about to change. According to a government minister, some private organisations are to be brought into the scope of the FoI Act. Of course, we know from bitter experience that just because the government announces something, doesn't mean it will happen, so we will have to watch this one closely.
It is a solution of a sort, I suppose, but I'm not sure it's the right one. I can see no obvious rationale for keeping ACPO in the private sector. Is there any rationale?
Bishop Hill May 13, 2009 Politicians Sleaze It's not often that one gets a blog link from someone currently being hailed as a national heroine. In my case, it's Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner who has, more than anyone, been responsible for getting the details of MPs' expenses out into the open.
Heather picked up on my posting about Michael Martin's use of the s34 exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to quash a request about MPs' paid-for trips abroad. It turns out that this exemption was put in place to deal with pressing matters of national security! This is starting to look like a pattern in government legislation isn't it? "Counter-terrorism laws will only be used against terrorists" and so on.
Mr Speaker has also, it seems, used the exemption to deal with matters even less pressingly important than overseas junkets - for example the setting up of the Parliamentary Beer Group.
MPs' tolerance of Martin in the position of speaker is starting to look almost as culpable as their expense claims.
In the meantime, Heather has been setting up an online petition. Together with the Taxpayers' Alliance, she is demanding full disclosure of MPs' expenses. This seems like a pretty good one to sign up for.
Bishop Hill May 13, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Reading between the lines of the reports of Cameron's press conference on Tory MPs' expenses yesterday, he has gone as far as he can with the parliamentary Conservative party. As Adam Boulton explains, paying back the ill-gotten gains is as far as Tory MPs are willing to go.
When someone is punished, either they are contrite and take their punishment or they are not. Clearly the Tory MPs are not. They still feel that they are in a position to negotiate over what their punishment will be. They presumably still feel they have done nothing wrong - the argument that "it was within the rules" argument seems to dominate their thoughts.
Lots of people have pointed out that this kind of thinking suggests an inability to distinguish right from wrong. This is undoubtedly true.
And we can't have people like that as our representatives in Parliament.
It's very sad for Cameron, who I think would go further if he had the ability to do so, but he relies on the parliamentary party for his position. He cannot force the crooks out. So there's no alternative but for the electorate to deal with the issue themselves. The fact remains that decent people cannot vote for the three big parties and I hope they give their verdict accordingly.
Bishop Hill May 12, 2009 Politicians Sleaze What jolly japes this expenses saga is launching.
Lord Tebbit has announced this morning that people should not vote Tory - or words to that effect; it was slightly more nuanced than that. This has got readers at Conservative Home in a bit of a tizzy, with Jonathan Isaby arguing that the whip should be withdrawn from the noble lord.
The thing is though, surely Lord Rottweiler is right - surely nobody with a shred of decency would want to vote for a party awash in corruption and graft? Jonathan Isaby is obviously keen to maintain internal discipline in the party he supports, but this is the problem with party politics. At times, you are put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between what is best for your party and what is best for your country.
I would have thought that the only possible answer to the dilemma is to choose country over party, if one is to maintain even a shred of self-respect. Decent people will refuse to vote Tory, just as Lord Tebbit suggests.
I wonder how many Conservatives support the Isaby line?
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze What an odd coincidence.
While passing my eye over recent decisions of the Information Commissioner (as one does), this ruling caught my attention. A member of the public had asked for correspondence and documentation relating to whether members of parliament should declare overseas trips paid for by the British Council.
The Parliamentary authorities ruled that the information was exempt under the Freedom of Information Act, because its release would "infringe the privileges of the house".
The request went to internal review, was rejected again, and was then passed to the Information Commissioner for a final decision.
At this point, who should intervene but Speaker Martin, Gorbals Mick himself, who promptly issued a certificate under s43(3). This part of the Freedom of Information Act essentially says that the Speaker is going to be the arbiter of whether Parliamentary privilege is in danger or not.
He decided that it was. Quelle surprise.
So, reading between the lines, would you say that the British Council has been paying for MPs holidays and that Speaker Martin has intervened to keep everything hushed up?
Rotten timing for Mr Speaker, isn't it?
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Michael Martin loses it over expenses....
Douglas Carswell tables a motion calling for Martin to quit, the first such call for a speak to go since 1694....
Conservative Home says tomorrow will be very ugly for the Tories...
And there's hints of more to come...
Bishop Hill May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Here's a plan for how MPs' expenses should be dealt with in future. It goes without saying that immediate steps, such as displaying the heads of the current batch of malefactors at Traitors Gate, will have to precede any of this.
MPs represent their constitutents. They do not represent the state, or parliament or themselves. Their remuneration should therefore be strictly a matter between them and their respective constituents. 
My plan is therefore that during each general election campaign, candidates should announce how much they will cost their constituents if elected to serve at Westminster. This prospective cost will be registered with, say, the Electoral Commission. After the election, the winning candidate will go on to be paid the amount of money they originally proposed, each year for the duration of their time in Parliament.
In an ideal world, the cost would not only be agreed with the constituents but also be borne by them (or perhaps even by the electors who voted for him - that might concentrate minds!) but a practical way of putting this into practice eludes me for the moment. However, even the simple link between the cost of an MP and the electorate who choose him would have a salutory effect on Westminster.
For example, it would undoubtedly bring down the cost of an MP. If I recall correctly, the typical MP costs the taxpayer about £250,000 a year. I don't believe for a minute that this is a reasonable figure - much or it is surely "padding" - family members' sinecures a la Conway and so on - but there is absolutely nothing to stop candidates pitching for this kind of money if that's what they feel it takes. The big parties will have to look carefully at this issue in order to decide how much they need to pay to attract the kind of people they want. If the answer is £250 big ones then so be it. Smaller parties may feel they can win votes by pitching their candidates at a lower level. That's fine too. Who knows, maybe Dave Cameron will find that expensive old Etonians are suddenly not quite so important to Project Tory as he had previously thought.
There's no doubt that as soon the more a candidate's bid is seen as excessive, the more it will become a stick with which rival candidates can beat him. This can only be a good thing.
It would also deal with the different costs of representing different constituencies. The MP for the Western Isles (or whatever it's called these days) will probably have a different cost-base to the MP for Chelsea and Fulham (or wherever). Whether the cost of maintaining a constituency home in Benbecula rather than Chelsea offsets the cost of flying to the Isles each week as opposed to catching the number 24 bus from Westminster to your front door is a moot point. Let candidates and their constituents decide it among themselves.
Fixing MPs' expenses doesn't just mean "mending the system". I also mean "fixing" the cost of MPs: the remuneration figure would be static until the next election. No index-linking, "no adjustments". If politicians vote for inflationary policies, they have to live with the consequences. If they want to go on fact-finding missions to New Zealand, then that is their prerogative, but not a penny more should find its way to their coffers.
Of course, some will be concerned that rich Tory candidates will be able to undercut working class Labour candidates. There are a number of responses to this. Firstly, most candidates for elected office are now career politicians and they are therefore all in the same boat - they have essentially the same pecuniary needs. Secondly, it's not immediately obvious that Labour candidates are any less wealthy than Tories. Shaun Woodward is hardly worried about where his next meal is coming from. Thirdly, today's release of the Tory expenses scandals suggest that extreme wealth does little to attenutate politicians desire to extract money from the public purse: the risk of wealthy candidates offering to work for nothing seems limited. regrettable as that is. If this issue proved to be a sticking point, it would of course be quite easy to institute a statutory minimum: say twice median earnings, and perhaps with a minimal allowance for travel.
The way I see it going, providing MPs were not greedy about it, the cost of their remuneration would simply not be an issue at election time. If one candidate went in at £80k and another at £100k, nobody is going to treat it as an issue at the doorstep. People have bigger fish to fry than a difference of this size. But as soon as someone starts to look like they're on the make, they are electoral toast.
Which is as it should be.
(*The mystery is why he can manage this, but not one of the other MPs can. Anyone would think MPs were installing family members on sinecures rather than paying for staff.)
Bishop Hill May 10, 2009 Conservatives Eamonn Butler says the Tories look as though they are going to try to make government more efficient.
If Osborn hasn't even worked out that teaching a bureaucrat to be efficient is about as plausible as teaching a pig to sing, then we are in bigger trouble than even I had imagined.
Bishop Hill May 10, 2009 Economics President Obama continues to horrify many Americans with his apparent disdain for business and investors. His plans for putting the tottering Chrysler corporation back on its feet look to be another step on the road to a full-scale depression:
Unlike a traditional reorganization, in which the parties negotiate the terms of a restructuring that is then voted on by each class of creditors and shareholders, the administration plans to quickly sell Chrysler’s most important assets to a new entity—“New Chrysler”—whose stock will be owned by Chrysler’s employees and Fiat. The senior lenders who objected to the government’s offer (which amounted to little more than 30 percent of their claims) will not have any vote on the sale. Their only option is the one they have pursued: objecting to the sale, and praying that bankruptcy judge Arthur Gonzalez takes a hard look at its terms even while the government is breathing down his neck and saying in a sense, he better approve or else.
If investors think their assets are going to be handed over to insiders by the bankruptcy courts then they are simply not going to invest in the American economy. That's a recipe for full-scale depression.
And if there's to be a depression in the US, the effects will surely be felt on this side of the Atlantic too.
More here.
Bishop Hill May 9, 2009 Media Iain Dale's internet talk radio debut seems to have been a roaring success, although I didn't listen myself - the household tranny is, well, a tranny and doesn't pick up the internet.
Iain knows his way around a the meedja of course, so we'd expect nothing else from him.
I've been searching for a half-decent talk radio station for years - there's little available here beyond BBC Radios 4 and 5, which are great if you are a superannuated trotskyite revolutionary, but a fat lot of use if your thinking on economics or politics is informed by anything more liberal than Mao Tse Tung or Arthur Scargill.
It would be liberating - literally - to have a regular source of radio comment that didn't fly the red flag as it went.
Maybe Iain Dale can be just that.
Bishop Hill May 8, 2009 Liberalism Chris Dillow wonders if people aren't disposed to a truly liberal society, their preferences being distorted by cognitive biases - for example that they might prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't, or that they might see only the benefits of a step in an authoritarian direction but not the hidden costs.
His points are not obviously wrong, but I do wonder if the importance of what he is saying is a function more of the kind of society we have become in the last twenty years than a reflection of the way things have to be.
As the British state has become more and more centralised, it has become virtually impossible for meaningful experiments into different ways of running society to be undertaken. Everything has to be processed by the Whitehall machine with its wide array of British Leyland minds struggling to deal with any idea not rooted in 1940s economic thinking.
Innovation has been well and truly stifled.
In a society where innovation in ways of running things are so difficult, the problems which Chris Dillow identifies are made so much the worse. Rather than having to persuade a majority of people somewhere to overcome their cognitive biases, it is necessary to persuade a majority of people everywhere. In practice it doesn't happen.
It's the same in America, where the constitutional guarantees of federalism and individual sovereignty have been undermined by the Supreme Court leaving the ninth and tenth amendments as mere words that hold no fear for the executive and the legislature alike.
I was therefore interested to see this attempt to add a whole new bill to the constitution, rolling back decades of judicial undermining of American federalism. It remains to be seen if it will amount to anything, but it at least provides a modicum of hope for our transatlantic cousins.
For us in the UK, with our (mainly) unwritten constitution, this sort of grand rewriting of the rules is, of course, not possible. We simply have to choose a government that will devolve power downwards.
I think we could be waiting a long time.
Bishop Hill May 8, 2009 Economics Weak demand at a Treasury bond auction touched off worries in the stock market Thursday about the government's ability to raise funds to fight the recession.
The government had to pay greater interest than expected in a sale of 30-year Treasurys. That is worrisome to traders because it could signal that it will become harder for Washington to finance its ambitious economic recovery plans. The higher interest rates also could push up costs for borrowing in areas like mortgages.
This is the US Government rather than ours, but coming so soon after a failure of a UK gilt auction, it does start to look like the markets sending a signal to Messrs Brown and Obama.
Hold on to your hats.
