Heresy Corner

Lib Dems guilty of airbrushing ASA ruling

2009-12-16T15:22:00.007Z

The Liberal Democrats' Jo Swinson is celebrating the first major victory in her nannyish campaign to restrict airbrushing in adverts, on the supposed grounds that looking at unrealistic pictures in magazines may lead teenage girls to develop a negative body-image. This year's Lib Dem conference adopted with little opposition her policy of forcing advertisers to disclose if any airbrushing had gone one, and to ban it entirely in publications aimed at under 16s. To advance her case, Swinson had earlier encouraged people to complain to the Advertising Standards Agency about an advert featuring the 59-year old Twiggy.

Swinson's campaign garnered considerable publicity, partly, no doubt, because of the opportunity it gave the Daily Mail to run an unflattering photo of the model at the supermarket looking her age. In the event, some 700 people responded to the invitation to complaint by registering at a Lib Dem website. That's not much, these days - it doesn't compare to the forty thousand who were motivated to complain about Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, for example. There was also a single "independent" complaint.

The ASA have now agreed that this particular image of the Sixties survivor, used to advertise Olay eye lotion, may have been misleading. Since the advert has been withdrawn, the company acknowledging that the digital manipulation was "inconsistent with their own policies" the adjudication was a purely academic exercise. Nevertheless, the quango looked into the matter. The adjudication says,

We acknowledged that advertisers were keen to present their products in their most positive light using techniques such as post-production enhancement and the re-touching of images. However, we considered that the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve. We considered that the combination of references to "younger-looking eyes", including the claim "Reduces the look of wrinkles and dark circles for brighter, young-looking eyes", and post-production re-touching of Twiggys image around the eye area was likely to mislead.

The ASA, in short, accepted that, in the specific circumstances of an advert for allegedly wrinkle-reducing eye-cream, to airbrush out the wrinkles constituted a breach of the advertising code.

This isn't a surprise. As I noted around the time that Swinson launched her "Real Women" campaign, "there are already tough rules in place to deal with advertisements which make misleading claims." But of course the campaign wasn't about whether or not consumers were likely to be misled about the magical powers of Olay's eye lotion. The group complaint accused the ad of being "socially irresponsible". In her press release today, Swinson expresses the hope that the ASA's decision "marks the first step in really getting airbrushing in advertising under control" and goes on:

Experts have already proved that airbrushing contributes to a host of problems in women and young girls such as depression and eating disorders.

Liberal Democrats believe in the freedom of companies to advertise but we also believe in the freedom of women to be as comfortable as possible with their bodies. They shouldn’t constantly feel the need to measure up to a very narrow range of digitally manipulated pictures.

Experts have proved no such thing, of course; and Swinson's concept of a "freedom" not to see airbrushed adverts is, from a liberal point of view, rather a strange one. But what the press release doesn't say is that the main thrust of the campaign, that the advert was "socially irresponsible", was specifically rejected by the ASA ruling.

The adjudication noted that the advert was aimed at older women - indeed, it appeared in a magazine read mainly be a more mature readership. The ASA considered that the readers "would understand that the ad set out to associate the well-known mature female model with a brand, and would not infer that Twiggys appearance in the ad was achieved solely through the use of Olay Definity." [This seems to contradict the decision that it was "likely to mislead".] Most importantly:

We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible.

This ought to be a considerable setback for the Swinson campaign. The ASA have not said that an airbrushed advert could never be considered "socially irresponsible"; merely that the one advert that she decided to concentrate on to make her point was not. But if there are other, more clearly "irresponsible" examples of airbrushing out there, why did Swinson decide to focus on this one in particular? Couldn't she find any that better fitted her case?

The Lib Dem press release doesn't claim that the ASA accepted their main complaint, but neither does it mention the fact that it was rejected. That inconvenient detail has been airbrushed out. It might be thought that the failure of the complaint demonstrates the necessity for laws of the kind Swinson is pushing for - in which case, Swinson would have done better (from her point of view) to play up the rejection of proof that the ASA code is wholly inadequate. But that would sit oddly with the fact that the one advert she thought it worthwhile to complain about was found to be in breach. So instead she "welcomes" the ruling as proof of the success of her campaign. Yet by so doing, she gives the impression that the existing code is up to the job. So why the need for new laws?

Adapting to a changing climate

2009-12-15T15:46:00.004Z

Who said this?

All life on Earth shares one atmosphere and each nation, each state, bears a responsibility to all to protect it. Our government officials need to be well-informed as the debates continue on legislation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Al Gore? Ed Miliband? George Monbiot?

No, it was Sarah Palin, writing to Alaskan citizens in July 2008, shortly before she came to the international prominence that she still, despite everything, enjoys. She also said this:

Alaska’s climate is warming. While there have been warming and cooling trends before, climatologists tell us that the current rate of warming is unprecedented within the time of human civilization. Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other areas, and the warming will continue for decades.

She was explaining why she had set up a sub-cabinet with special responsibility for climate change, the purpose of which was "to identify priorities needing immediate attention along with longer-term steps we can take as a state to best serve all Alaskans and to do our part in the global response to this global phenomenon."

These days, Palin is more likely to say things like this:

While we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs.

In the same article (which appeared in the Washington Post and the Guardian) she highlighted the "Climategate" emails which, she wrote recently,

reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd.

It might be that Palin has genuinely changed her mind, her world-view rocked by the shocking information leaked/hacked from East Anglia. Or it might be political positioning. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who unearthed the circular (pdf) from last summer, comments that

When she was in office, Palin treated the issue as serious, complex and worthy of urgent attention. Now that she's the iconic leader of a populist movement that reacts with anger at the slightest whiff of pointy-headed, "one world" intellectualism, she writes as if the idea of seeking ways to mitigate climate change is a crock.

It fits with a pattern I've identified before. The pre-election Palin was a small-town and fairly sensible conservative, her populist approach in keeping with her credentials as an ordinary "hockey mom" who, by dint of hard work and a belief in public service, found herself moving with extraordinary speed from a seat on Wasilla town council to the governorship of her state. Post-election she is an opinionated celebrity, a kind of shock-jock without a radio show. If there's a simplistic, populist bandwagon she'll climb aboard. She has even winked at the conspiracy theorists who doubt Obama's right to be president. Adopting climate change scepticism - whatever might be said about the subject scientifically - is, politically, a badge of dissent, part of her rejection of (and by) the elites of Washington and New York. In just the same way, David Cameron's embrace of green policies has been central to his attempt to position the Conservative party in the centre of British politics.

The transformation of Palin from a mainstream politician, however untypical her background and route into politics, to maverick outsider may have begun during the presidential election campaign as a strategy of appealing to the Republican grassroots dubious about John McCain. But it was the intense mockery that followed - much of it, as Michael Jeffries points out, based on snobbery - that typecast her forever as a naive right-winger. Originally, as her policy on climate change while governor demonstrates, she was a much more nuanced figure. She was never an evangelistic Green, of course. One of her proudest achievements as governor was to block the listing of the polar bear as an endgangered species. What emerges from her Alaskan policy, rather, is a hard-headed pragmatism, adopting strategies to deal with the effects of global warming and at the same time ensuring that the new low-carbon energy regime could be turned to Alaska's economic benefit.

Ironically, Robinson reports, the chairman of the Cabinet working group that Palin assembled to develop a climate change strategy, Larry Hartig, "is scheduled to deliver a presentation at Copenhagen. Posted in advance on the Internet, the presentation shows that Alaskans aren't just fretting about the abstract possibility of effects from warming. They're dealing with a real, live situation."

As governor, Sarah Palin had to deal with that situation. The situation she now has to deal with is rather different: it is to maintain her profile, possibly for a future return to electoral politics, mainly at the moment because that is now her career. So far, it seems to be working. A recent opinion poll showed that her personal approval rating was as high as Barack Obama's - but, unlike his, moving in an upward direction.

Climate change scepticism, undeniably, is a populist cause. It may now be becoming a popular one. And Sarah Palin is determined to be its poster-girl.

"Loony Left" now swimming in Conservative mainstream

2009-12-14T15:09:00.002Z

This is a guest post by Rev Julian Mann

Back in 1986, I attended the annual conference of the National Union of Students as a Conservative delegate. It was there that I got a sense as a young man of a new political ideology emerging in Britain. Political correctness was then in its adolescence and, outside student politics, was confined mainly to what was then known as the 'Loony Left'.

Now it appears to be mainstream Conservative thinking.

I am not now a member of any political party, but I was invited to apply for tickets to a Cameron Direct question and answer session with the Conservative leader here in north Sheffield on Friday. I raised with Mr Cameron the serious crisis facing the orthodox Christian community from the Equality Bill and in particular its impact on our desire to uphold heterosexual marriage. I asked him a). whether he wanted to do anything about our concerns and b). whether he could because of the pressure from Europe to take away our religious exemptions.

He said he was in favour of some aspects of the Equality Bill (the fact that it tidies up various bits of legislation) but he had some concerns about its impact on faith groups. He ended by saying something along the lines that he was in favour of faith groups being allowed to continue
provided they don't discriminate.

Though I am very much a layman on political philosophy, this struck me as a quite extraordinary statement from a Conservative. I thought they believed in a limited role for government. I also thought they had an ideological commitment to safeguarding people's rights over their property.

Mr Cameron is clearly a very bright and able man and has sincere and deeply-held convictions about the need for greater personal responsibility in society. It was also impressive how he was able to give answers on such a wide range of issues. I certainly wouldn't be able to think that quickly on my feet.

But it seemed to be astonishing that a Conservative leader refrained from offering a firm assurance that his party would oppose any moves to compel churches to host blessings for civil partnerships on our premises and to employ staff who do not adhere to our Christian moral standards.

Instead, he spoke in terms of politicians giving permission to faith groups to operate in society. Mrs Thatcher was a strong-minded character but the thought would never have occurred to her that Caesar should tell God what to do over the couples He allows to get married in His churches and the kind of people He employs to serve in them. She certainly never would have invoked 'anti-discrimination' as the rationale for government intervention in the voluntary sector. Mr Cameron's terms of reference reminded me of the NUS back in the 1980s.

Christian churches in fact have a spiritual and moral obligation to discriminate in favour of heterosexual marriage and in terms of who we employ. They must be good Christian role models to the people in their care. We certainly don't discriminate in terms of the people to whom we proclaim the living Christ and look after in our groups and social care programmes.

We have no desire to impose our standards on non-Christian voluntary associations and charities. But we do ask to be free to uphold our Christian spiritual and moral standards in ours.

The man who did (for) God

2009-12-13T18:57:00.004Z

The present British government is notoriously faith-friendly. Communities Secretary John Denham, despite claiming to be a secular humanist, has taken to giving speeches lazily singing the virtues of "faith", while (after a brief hiatus under Hazel Blears) his department has gone back to its bad old ways of bunging large wads of cash at radical Islamists. Meanwhile, the drive to expand religious schooling continues apace. And this weekend, memories of Tony Blair's faith-drenched time at the top were revived by his saccharine, yet curiously revealing, interview with Fern Britton which I forced myself to sit through this morning.

Blair was careful not to blame God for the decision to invade Iraq. His religious faith, he noted, merely have him the strength to take difficult decisions, however they turned out. What was ringingly clear as always, however, was the moral certainty with which he pursued his goal of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and that certainty was indeed driven by religion. Blair exemplifies the phenomenon described recently by researchers at the University of Chicago for religious believers to be strengthened in the opinions they already hold by the conviction that they are shared by God. In Blair's case, even if the invasion of Iraq didn't have explicit divine sanction it fitted in with his general worldview, which did.

That worldview, we are led to believe, teaches him that the way to deal with dictators like Saddam Hussein (or, indeed Milosevic) is to invade their countries and remove them from power. At least, that's what he felt at the time. Perhaps he's mellowed. Recently, Blair was in Azerbaijan, picking up a cool £90,000 for opening a formaldehyde factory - one whose environmental sustainability he was anxious to assert - and heaping praises on the government of President Aliyev, despite what is generally admitted to be a lamentable human rights record. I can't help wondering how much he might have collected from Saddam Hussein for opening an oil refinery in Iraq, if only the Baathist dictator were still in power. Missed opportunities, Mr Blair.

It was hard not to recall the Blair years when trying to make sense of Rowan Williams' latest pronouncements on the alleged sidelining of religion in modern politics. According to the Archbishop, who was speaking to the Telegraph's George Pitcher,

The trouble with a lot of government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it’s an eccentricity, it’s practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities. The effect is to de-normalise faith, to intensify the perception that faith is not part of our bloodstream.

Given that religious leaders are consulted by this government to a degree unprecedented in modern Britain, and even a non-religious Cabinet minister subscribes to a central role for "faith" in the political process, Williams' frustration with Labour's use of "faith initiatives" seems a bit strange. Surely the government ought to concentrate on dealing with the problems that religion causes - and where it isn't seen as a problem, leave it alone.

While that quote was the most eye-catching in the interview, he also had some broader comments on the relationship between politics and religion. He appears to think - like John Denham, like Blair - that religious belief ("faith") is most important as a source of motivation and strength, and that therefore politicians ought to have, and talk about, their own personal faith. This way, religion would be "normalised". Yet he also claimed that "we, curiously, have three party leaders, all of whom have a very strong moral sense of some spiritual flavour". Even the openly atheist Nick Clegg, who "takes it seriously"(!). Williams went on:

I think it’s important for politicians not to be too protected, to be able to establish their human credentials in front of a living audience... Part of establishing their human credentials is saying 'This is where my motivation comes from ... I’m in politics because this is what I believe.' And that includes religious conviction.

As always with Dr Williams, it's possible to read that in several ways. But he seems to be saying that discussion religion is another form of the "transparency" expected of modern politicians, like coming clean about their expenses claims, perhaps. The logical conclusion of this line of thought would be a Register of Members' Religious Interests, in which MPs were compelled to list the churches, mosques or whatever with which they were affiliated, what donations they had made (since we are paying their salaries, it's Our Money, after all) and how often they conversed with religious professionals. It might, indeed, be very revealing. Something similar goes on in the United States, informally at least. Before last year's presidential election Barack Obama was forced to devote an entire speech to explaining his relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose Chicago church used to attend, while one of Sarah Palin's former religious contacts turned out to have a sideline in Witch-finding. Do we really want to see that here?

Williams seems to want a sort of celebrity politics, where who the leaders are (which includes what supernaturalist belief-system they subscribe to) matters more than their policies. But political decisions should be based on evidence and open democratic debate, not private conviction. And if, as is probable, religious beliefs don't translate into political decisions anyway, merely providing the politician with personal consolation, then what they believe has little actual relevance. There are exceptions - like abortion - where specific beliefs can have direct influence on political decision-making, but even here most British politicians have been able to separate their personal convictions from the wider interests of society.

Tony Blair, of course, that master of ambiguity, managed to be simultaneously open and private about his faith. The official position was that he "didn't do God"; but unofficially, his God-doing was obvious and unabashed (or fairly unabashed: he recoiled in horror from Jeremy Paxman's notorious question about whether he prayed with George Bush). In any event, there was never any doubt about the centrality of religion to his political mission. "I only know what I believe," he once announced, as though that were a virtue. Presumably Rowan Williams would approve. But I find it hard to imagine (perhaps I'm wrong) that Christians generally in this country took great pride in the fact that Tony Blair, while he was in Downing Street, was overtly devout. When, shortly after leaving office, he went over to Rome I could detect no deafening chorus of jubilation from Britain's Catholics, although some Anglicans expressed themselves glad to be rid of him.

When he first came to office, Blair's religiosity was generally seen as a plus, largely because "having faith" is still generally seen as an indication of decency and moral conviction. It was only towards the end that he became widely ridiculed for it. Indeed, it's possible that much of the current hostility towards politicians "doing God" owes less to a traditional British reluctance to emote about religion than to the experience of ten years of Tony Blair. If so, then it may be one of his few positive legacies.

An illegal picture of Tiger Woods

2009-12-12T09:53:00.007Z

The injunction obtained on Thursday by Schillings, on behalf of Tiger Woods - granted by Mr Justice Seedy (who else?) - bans the reproduction of "any photographs, footage or images taken or obtained of the Claimant naked or any naked parts of the Claimant's body or of him involved in any sexual activity".

Presumably that would include this one:

It's hard to tell what his hand is doing but he's certainly got a big smile on his face.

TMZ, the American gossip site, have released the full injunction in pdf form. Schillings are anxious to point out that

For the avoidance of doubt this Order is not to be taken as an admission that any such photographs exist, and in the event that these photographs do exist, and it is not admitted, any such images may have been fabricated, altered, manipulated and or changed to create the false appearance and impression that they are nude photgraphs of our client.

So no Photoshopping. Got that?

Reproduced without permission

2009-12-11T17:52:00.008Z

Three years ago, almost to the day, Liverpool-based web developer Thom Shannon took some amusing photos of himself and his friends posing with their faces partially obscured by banknotes. The effect, as you can see from the example below (reproduced with permission) is to create an eerie merging of the face on the note with the human being in the picture. I've no idea who thought of it first, but it has been doing the rounds for some time - see, for example, this how-to guide from June 2007. Anyway, Thom posted the pictures to his Flickr album and shared it with other like-minded jokers in a group called Money Shots. There are several such groups out there: here's another.

According to the Mail, these images are now "littering the web" in what is "the latest craze". They seem to have lifted the story - along with the pictures - from the blog Intense Zone, which ran them last week (without permission) in a post about "a new craze going around the world". The Mail's version - minimally altered - appeared on their website on Tuesday. Thus far, a typical story of the mainstream media discovering a trend years after it started and imagining it was new. But then Shannon, alerted via a friend on Twitter, took exception to this uncredited use of his photograph, for which he, after all, holds the copyright. He left an indignant comment below the article:

You did not ask permission to use any of my photos and haven't even credited me. I do not want my face appearing on this website and neither do my friends, please remove them immediately.

They didn't.

The photographs have since appeared in the Telegraph and the Sun, the Telegraph initially crediting them to Intense Zone. Thom Shannon spent much of this morning trying to contact the organisations concerned. The Telegraph have complied with his request for a picture credit (he did not ask for payment) and he has spoken to someone at the Sun. The Mail, so far, have ignored his protestations.

Thom has no idea how Intense Zone got hold of the pictures, though he tells me that "they've been used around the web a bit but most people have made some effort to credit them clearly." As for the unauthorised reproduction of them in the newspapers, he says that he is "annoyed that a paper like the Mail can just get away with it," adding that "I have no practical recourse, and legal action is out of the question."

Writing about the affair on his blog, Charlie Beckett of the think-tank POLIS couldn't see much problem. He even congratulated the Mail on not deleting the complaints from Thom Shannon and several others who pointed out the blatant copyright violation. He argues that people published the photos on the Internet with no thought of financial gain and, presumably, because they wanted people to see them. The pictures served merely to illustrate a "slight" news story that was worth reporting; and anyway, some of those featured might be happy for their funny photos to be shared with millions of others via the good offices of the Daily Mail.

Beckett spectacularly misses the point (though perhaps he is just being provocative) when he writes:

If they had wanted privacy then they should have changed their security settings. If they wanted payment then a little note or code would have made that clear...Generally, the principle online has always been that sharing is good. So what if the Mail made money out of it? Isn’t the point of open source and creative commons that we all benefit from the Internet’s link economy?

Let's take these points in turn.

Just because a photo is on the Internet doesn't mean it is supposed to be publicly visible. Most of the photography to be found on Flickr and tumblr albums are put up for the benefit of the friends and family of the people who took them. Even though they're often publicly accessible via search engines they rarely circulate far. That's why many people imagine they can display their personal photos in virtual anonymity, and why incautious postings can come back to haunt people who have a brush with fame or notoriety. An embarrassing photo or email, intended to be confined to a small group of friends (or even sent to just one other person) can go viral, and sooner or later will reach a journalist looking to fill space. In the case of Amanda Knox, it may even have sent her to prison.

In any case, this is not merely, or even primarily, about "privacy". Beckett's claim is tantamount to saying that if you don't want your house burgled you should install an alarm: good advice, no doubt, but no excuse for theft.

As for the right to re-use the images, there was a copyright notice (allowing limited non-commercial use) on Shannon's original Flickr page. Thom has now reposted the original pictures with digital watermarks and a message that reads "I've never felt I needed to use watermarks before but having the Daily Mail rip off my photos without any credits and completely ignore my requests for them to remove them has bothered me."

Beckett asks "at what point does material in the public domain become copyright?" There's a simple answer to that: a photograph becomes copyright the moment it is taken, a piece of writing the moment it is written. You retain the copyright even of personal letters you have sent to other people, which they cannot legally republish without your permission. Just because something is widely shared on the Web doesn't mean it is "in the public domain". A custom of fair use, often (but not always) set out in a Creative Commons licence, has emerged online; bloggers, of course, quote extensively from each others posts, generally without causing upset. But that's no more than a custom. It doesn't alter the law of copyright.

The re-use of photos even online is a controversial area. It's a good principle to seek permission for images you intend to re-use, although in practice the spread of images is often impossible to police; indeed, the original copyright holder may be difficult to trace. There was a good discussion of this issue on Pandora Blake's blog in the summer, prompted by her discovery that one of her watermarked spanking photographs had resurfaced on someone else's Tumblr page. She was able to trace the trail back no fewer than 22 "reblogs" to her original image, and comments:

I very nearly decided not to bother. After all, I'm not making money off these images. But I persisted; it's a point of principle, especially when I'm not the only person whose copyrighted material is being stolen. By the time I'd written an email to the support team reporting the infringement, I'd worked up a nice head of steam, and felt thoroughly justified.

Even so, there's surely an important distinction, morally if not legally, between social networking sites and the websites maintained by large profit-driven organisations. As Will Sturgeon notes, the line is often crossed, "the moment the tabloids start monetising this content". Several companies that have recently become obsessed with protecting their own copyright take a cavalier approach to material discovered on Facebook or a blog. The Mail, incidentally, is one of the worst offenders. As long ago as 2001, it was taking material from websites and republishing it without permission - in one case, after the copyright owner had explicitly refused to allow publication, even for a fee. Last year, the Mail on Sunday decided to run a "blog of the week" feature, reproducing entire blogposts in its print edition, without payment and even without informing copyright-holders of what it had done.

When one such blogger, Johnny B, complained the MoS agreed to pay him for his article. But their reply also contained this revealing comment:

We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.

Even if this is true, it doesn't alter the fact of copyright violation. As the digital rights expert Mathias Klang pointed out at the time, what is strange about such incidents is that they reveal a "misguided belief that what is online is somehow in the public domain and that these mistakes are being made not only by amateurs but also be the 'professional' media. And this is despite the fact that the discussion on online copyright is almost as old as the internet itself."

In any case, how can they presume to know, without asking, that someone wants to have their work reproduced? And how, indeed, can they be sure that anyone writing a blog is an "amateur writer" at all? Many blogs are written by people who have also had material professionally published. This applies even more to images, given that almost all professional photographers and artists now have an established online presence.

Whatever the law says, it's impossible to control the flow of copyrighted material online. But a professional media organisation shouldn't hide behind this fact of digital life to evade their legal and moral responsibility. And the hypocrisy can be striking. The mass media are happy to embrace the free-and-easy culture of content-sharing when the copyright belongs to non-professional (or assumed to be non-professional) photographers, writers and film-makers. At least, they understand it as meaning that they have a perfect right to rip it off for their own commercial advantage. They are increasingly reluctant to extend the same latitude to their customers. As Kevin Anderson writes in a comment on Charlie Beckett's blog, "if newspapers show a rather fuzzy view of rights online, they can hardly seize the moral high ground on this issue, although they are trying."

We all know that the media increasingly depend on material filched from the internet to fill their pages and drive traffic to their sites. When a tasty little morsel arrives in a journalist's inbox, it's tempting to use it, and to rationalise the publication as just another step in the great chain of sharing. But there's a large media organisation is in a wholly different league from a normal internet user. If someone's amusing photo or scandalous email has provided a newspaper with good copy, it's surely not asking too much for them to take the trouble to find out who it belongs to, and give them some credit.

Britain turns into Poundland

2009-12-10T18:30:00.007Z

One thing's clear after yesterday's abject performance from Alistair Darling - and you will excuse, I hope, an untypical lapse into the vernacular - we are, as a country, in the shit. Not just in the shit, but choking and spluttering in a Loch Ness of slurry. The chancellor can count himself fortunate that, whatever the outcome of the election, he won't be the one having to take the measures necessary to tackle the deficit crisis - because the man who does, whether George Osborne, Ed Balls or even Vince Cable (a good possibility if there's a hung Parliament) is likely to be very unpopular indeed.

A perceptive analysis by Carsten Volkery, albeit well-larded with Teutonic schadenfreude, appears in Der Spiegel. Tim Montgomerie points it out. He also notes the clever double entendre in the German title: Großbritannien schrumpft zur Mini-Macht means, literally, "Great Britain shrinks to a mini-power", but "mini-macht" also sounds rather like the term for a corner shop ("mini-markt").

In other words, Britain is now Poundland - a shrinking country with a sinking currency.

Volkery's piece is thus far only available in German - or, for readers without any German, in the gobbledegook served up by Google's auto-translator. Here's a paraphrase:

London - The United Kingdom is anticipating dark times. In the coming years cash-strapped local authorities could be forced to ration the streetlighting, reports the Financial Times. Shopkeepers could be asked to pay for the police themselves. And the public would have to wave goodbye to amenities from libraries to swimming pools.

Welcome to formerly booming Britain. With the disastrous state of the public finances, not only local government is threatened with cutbacks. The reason is that the economic crisis has hit the island far more than other European countries. Britain is the only country in the G-20 group of leading industrial nations, which has not yet come out of recession. In the third quarter of 2009 the economy for the fifth consecutive time has shrunk. For the current fourth quarter, the long-awaited turnaround is expected, but growth will remain weak for the foreseeable future.

Volkery then looks at the decisions made by Alistair Darling in the face of the record £178 billion deficit, noting that he "refrained from harsh cuts" because of the looming election. As for the future, Volkery predicts that by 2015 the UK will no longer number among the world's top ten economies - falling behind even Russia, Brazil and Canada: an "alarming" decline. Darling has remained vague about future cuts in the face of threats to the country's vital AAA credit rating, instead going for a populist but largely symbolic attack on bank bonuses. And Volkery wonders, as many do, where on earth future growth in the economy is going to come from.

The three major engines of growth in the past decade - financial services, the property market and public sector expansion - are all finished for the time being, he suggests. And after the de-industrialisation of the Eighties and Nineties - which continued under Labour - there's not much else. Labour and Conservative politicians keep talking up the green economy, but here Britain lags behind other major countries. The strength of the financial sector, he concludes, allowed the rapid expansion of the public sector and both disguised underlying the weakness of the economy: now the country is cruelly exposed.

The piece is more than a little gleeful, and I don't know why Volkery thinks the housing market is so weak. He also displays a typically German preference for industrial manufacture over other (equally valid) forms of wealth-generation. But his general analysis rings chillingly true. Darling got a big laugh yesterday when he claimed that "we make these decisions from a position of strength". It could be he know's the game's up and was injecting a dash of gallows humour into the proceedings; more likely, I think, that Gordon Brown, a stranger to irony, insisted the phrase went in. It was almost a Ceaucescu moment.

There was more pessimism on display in the Economist's Bagehot column, which noted how the Empire still casts a long shadow on national life. The highlight is this savage dissection of the psychology of Brown's Britain:

Beneath all this is the peculiar British combination of bragging and bewilderment, an air of expectations great but unmet and of unrealised specialness. It is hard to think of another country so keen to magnify its accomplishments (everything must be "the best in the world"), yet also to wallow in its failings; so deluded and yet so morbidly disappointed. Every recent prime minister has struggled to overcome this sense of thwartedness and decline, and to come up with a notion of Britishness to replace the defunct imperial version. Mr Blair tried Cool Britannia. It flopped. The gloom may be almost as acute now as it was in the late 1950s or 1970s.

Gordon Brown's most un-British obsession with "Britishness" certainly falls into this category - unlike Cool Britannia, which was really just a bit of froth. Even at the time it seemed as hubristic and empty as the Dome that was its symbol, yet that didn't really matter because it tasted like the head on a pint of Guinness. Now that the bubbles have evaporated, it is evident that there never was any beer.

Which raises an interesting question about the next election. Given that whoever wins will be faced with the biggest mess to have confronted an incoming government since the end of the Second World War, and with it the near certain prospect of deep unpopularity, wouldn't the wisest long-term political strategy be to try very hard indeed to lose?

Stone of Contention

2009-12-09T18:49:00.010Z

It is written in the first Book of Kings, Chapter 14, vv 25-26:

And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; and he took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all; and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.

What Shishak (generally identified with Shoshenq I, c. 945 – 924 BC) did with these treasures once he had got back to Egypt isn't recorded. Presumably he had the gold shields melted down and turned into something else - Egypt was never short of goldsmiths, after all - while he may have kept some of the more ornamental treasures to decorate his palace. The ancient Egyptians didn't, so far as anyone knows, have public museums, and it's most unlikely that two hundred years later a delegation came from Jerusalem to demand the goods back.

That, though, is what the publicity-hungry head of the Egyptian Council of Antiquities, Dr Zahi Hawass, is doing. He has a list of the most famous artefacts of Pharaonic Egypt that have been dispersed across the world since the country first attracted the attention of European archaeologists at the beginning of the 19th century, and he has been making increasingly strident demands for their "return". Today he's been in London demanding (not for the first time) that the British Museum hands back the Rosetta Stone, which has been happily sitting there since 1803. It belongs to Egypt, he argues, because more than two thousand years ago it was carved there, by people who may or may not have been the ancestors of modern Egyptians. It's not much of an argument.

If Hawass had his way, the world's museums would be emptied of Egyptian artefacts, or at least of everything of beauty and interest (he also, for example, wants the bust of Nefertiti returned from Berlin). And to what purpose? Not, surely, to the enhancement of Egypt. Hawass already has the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings. The treasures of Tutankhamun are in Cairo, as are the mummies of most of the significant pharaohs whose remains have been preserved. Every year new treasures are reclaimed from the rich sands of the Nile Valley, more often than not by international teams which nevertheless dutifully give up their finds to Hawass's already overstuffed museums. To ask for more is just greedy.

Some countries - Egypt, Greece, China, Italy (especially Italy) - have more than their fair share of cultural patrimony, a small proportion of which has been exported abroad. This process has not only taken knowledge and appreciation of the original cultures far beyond their borders, it has often inspired new creativity in the lands to which they've been brought. Even theft enriched the societies that indulged in it. There could have been no Michelangelo without the ancient Greek sculptures that inspired him, sculptures plundered by the Romans a millennium and a half before his birth. By such (to us) dubious activities the generals and emperors demonstrated their taste as well as their power. The alternative to looting, after all, wasn't to leave things alone, it was to smash them up. As for the heritage of Egypt, for centuries it was appreciated only in Europe. In Arabic-speaking and Islamic Egypt the remnants of the ancient civilisation were regarded with a combination of superstition, indifference and religiously-motivated disapproval.

The age-old tradition of plundering artworks - already well-established in Shoshenq's day - continued right up until the Second World War, but Britain, which like the United States has received more great art than it has managed to produce, has rarely been guilty of looting. Our museum-pieces, by and large, were picked up legitimately on cultural expeditions, collected by grand tourists, or (like the Elgin marbles) acquired lawfully from the local authorities. But however it has occurred in the past, the movement of artefacts is part of the great human story of cultural exchange and influence. Hawass's demand for the Rosetta Stone misses this. But there are also specific reasons why he has no claim on it.

What is the Rosetta Stone, after all, except a slab of text? It isn't particularly interesting or distinguished in itself. It's neither beautiful nor intrinsically valuable. It's a boring piece of Ptolemaic state propaganda, recording the granting of a tax concession to some local temple, not much more than a departmental press release - though written in the exalted prose that was the ancient equivalent of spin. I doubt the inhabitants of Hellenistic Egypt ever gave it much thought. For several hundred years it was propping up a wall, and no-one paid it the slightest attention. But then it was found by a member of the French military expedition that arrived with Napoleon right at the end of the 18th century. It was the French, not the Egyptians, who realised that with its bilingual text the Stone offered a unique opportunity to crack the hieroglyphic code, the meaning of which had defeated scholars and mystics for centuries. And although it was soon enough nabbed by the British, it was a Frenchman, Jean-François Champollion, who made the decisive breakthrough.

There is, perhaps, a case for the Rosetta Stone to be returned to Paris, although the French have not yet demanded it. But there is none for it to be sent back to Egypt. For the importance of the Stone lies in the spur it gave to the Europeans who created modern Egyptology. Without Champollion, the boasts of pharaohs and the thoughts of scribes would be a closed book, there would be no annual influx of tourists eager to soak up romance of the Nile valley, and Dr Zahi Hawass himself would be out of a job.

Eady declares victory

2009-12-08T20:10:00.004Z

I missed the fact that Mr Justice Eady gave a major speech last week - to a conference organised by Justice - which touched on two areas for which he has been widely criticised: privacy, and libel tourism. According to the Guardian's report of the event, Eady is "hurt" by some of the personal abuse that has been directed his way by free-speech campaigners and newspaper editors (most notably, the Mail's Paul Dacre). But I've now read the speech (pdf), and he actually sounded quite bullish. It was, in part, a very modest summary of the way in which the law of privacy has developed in recent years (modest, because he scarcely mentioned the fact that he himself played the starring role in most of the big cases). But it also gave Sir David the opportunity for a little judicial gloating.

While the Mail's Supreme Editor devoted most of his speech last year to an onslaught on the judge, Eady couldn't quite bring himself to mention Dacre by name. He was merely "the man from the Daily Mail". But he could afford to be archly indulgent of the poor man's predicament - at the end of the day, Eady has the scarlet robe and the wig and Dacre doesn't. Or, translated into legalese:

The media have nowhere to vent their frustrations other than through personal abuse of the particular judge who happens to have made the decision. Certain individual judges, of course, have been singled out for the treatment – much to the innocent amusement of colleagues and friends. That is easier than going by way of appeal.

Dacre's personal attacks, Eady benignly noted, were merely a way of "letting off steam" that "did absolutely nothing to further the debate". As for the accusation that he was "unaccountable" - as he pointed out, that's really just another word for "independent".

Reviewing the cases - his cases, in the main - Eady suggested that the law of privacy was now more-or-less settled. The days of kiss-and-tell were over, as were those of intrusive paparazzi shots of celebrities sunbathing nude in their own gardens. He was prepared to concede that it might be "excessive to render unlawful (say) snapshots of a fully clothed actress strolling down the road for a new tube of sun lotion." But that was about as far as media freedom now went, Eady was pleased to note. He also hit back at Dacre's indignation, made more than a year ago, that Eady's "subjective and highly relativist moral sense" was preventing the tabloids from policing morality through the "public shaming" of errant celebrities:

Where the subject-matter is inherently private, such as sexual behaviour, it is not for judges to refuse a remedy on grounds of distaste or moral disapproval, or to accord protection on a graduated basis, according to how conventional or unconventional the sexual activity may be. This is quite a recent development. There is no logic to the stance taken a few years ago (in A v B Plc [2003] QB 195) that marital relations are entitled to greater privacy protection than a footballer’s one night stand.

Thanks to his good work on the bench, the kiss-and-tell days were over. "One person’s life story cannot be uninhibitedly told," he commented, "if it encroaches, to an unacceptable degree, on another person’s reasonable expectation of privacy." Tell that, one might think, to Tiger Woods.

Things now seem to be settling down remarkably quickly. One media commentator, at the beginning of the year, was already claiming that he had seen one Sunday tabloid “turning the corner” and “cleaning up its act”. He thought the editor showed signs (for whatever reason) of moving away from sleazy stories originating in the bedroom. Whether he is right or not we shall see. A similar conclusion was reached by the recent report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, based in Oxford. Its authors, Stephen Whittle and Glenda Cooper, decided that the only “chilling effect” had been upon those in the business of “kiss and tell”.

Eady approvingly quoted Whittle and Cooper's remark that "the courts [i.e. Eady] are making it clear that they require media responsibility... They should now be the place of last resort." He also noted that "there are now very few privacy cases being contested." Instead, in-house lawyers were advising newspapers not to push their luck whenever there's a prospect of an injunction. So thorough a job has he done, indeed, that he's more or less put himself out of business - journalists often don't even need to consult a lawyer to know that they can no longer get away with old-style exposés. "I see no evidence of a current storm," he declared, "let alone one of which I am at the centre." Game set and match to Mr Justice Eady.

Still, there's always libel. Here, Eady is undoubtedly at the centre of a current storm, one that shows no signs of abating unless and until Parliament finds time to intervene. The judge had a few things to say about libel tourism. He complained that there was a "large juggernaut of a campaign" based on the ridiculous notion that libel tourism is a "pressing problem which requires urgent attention". Au contraire. Libel tourism scarcely exists at all, he maintained. Eady and his fellow libel judges (a select, and virtually self-selecting, band) read about this alleged scandal in the papers, but "it is not a phenomenon that we actually come across in our daily lives". The notion that there is "a large queue of people, loosely classified as 'foreigners', waiting to clog up our courts with libel actions" is obviously untrue, he maintained. (One might almost call it bogus.) It 'ardly ever 'appens. One wonders what the Libel Reform campaign or the international press are making such a fuss about.

Of course, one reason why Eady doesn't see a large number of cases (he remarked, en passant, that there are only a handful of full jury libel trials every year) is that the burden on defendants is so great, and the costs so high, that most publications threatened with legal action back down and apologise. He didn't address the "chilling" effect of the law at all.

Eady put the unhappiness of Americans who find themselves being sued in London down to "long-standing cultural differences rather than mere backwardness on our part." In England, like most other jurisdictions, "truth and reputation" were at least as important as free speech, which was given "a particular degree of sanctification" in the Bill of Rights. He seems to regard belief in free expression as a purely American aberration. He also demanded know what evidence there was for the idea that the burden of proof in libel cases - placing the onus on the defendant to prove justification - encouraged jurisdiction shopping, given that other Commonwealth countries have similar rules. "If there is no such evidence, then there can be no reason to suppose that this pressing problem will be solved by reversing the burden of proof." He went on to speculate about the effect of any change in the law on journalistic standards of accuracy, before concluding that it probably wouldn't make much difference in practice anyway.

This is quite extraordinary:

How many libel actions turn upon the burden of proof? I have been trying to recall one and have drawn a blank. Perhaps some of you can give an example.

Er, BCA v Simon Singh?

In perhaps his most striking passage, Eady contended that, where a serious allegation has been made, it should be up to the defence to prove it - otherwise juries unsure of the balance of evidence would be required to find claimants "guilty" of terrorism, or sex abuse or corruption. He even suggested that changing the burden of proof would fall foul of Article 6 of the European Convention, since it would deprive the plaintiff of a fair hearing before an unbiased tribunal. "It needs to be carefully considered whether a tribunal could be classified as unbiased if required by law to presume that you are guilty," he declared.

But it's not the plaintiff who's "on trial" here, but the defendant - who is presumably just as entitled to a fair hearing, even if with Eady on the bench they don't always get one. Criminal trials are a different matter entirely. As for allegations of corruption: one has to admire Eady's chutzpah here, given the fondness of seriously corrupt individuals - such as the Robert Maxwell, or others still alive who must remain nameless - for using our courts to suppress hostile comment in the press.

Anyway, that's Mr Justice Eady's side of the story - or, as he said in conclusion, "I just thought I would throw these random thoughts into the pot". On privacy, he carries all before him (at least when it's the privacy of celebrities or the rich and powerful that's at stake), reducing the likes of Paul Dacre to the status of malcontents cast aside by the onward march of history. And as for libel tourism, nothing to see here. He appears, in short, to inhabit a parallel universe. Otherwise known as the law.

Thanks for the lovely meal

2009-12-08T11:16:00.009Z

The trend for historical apologies, in which politicians get to display their moral worthiness by expressing regret for ancient wrongs that are in no sense their fault, seems to be spreading. The BBC reports that a tribe on the Pacific island of Erromango in Vanuatu have apologised to the descendants of an English missionary eaten by their forebears.

The Revd John Williams and his colleague John Harris were attempting to bring the benefits of the gospel to that obscure corner of the world 170 years ago. Instead, they ended up supplying the islanders with some much-needed protein. But now eighteen members of the missionary's family, including great-grandson Charles Milner-Williams, have travelled to the island to accept a humble apology. Islanders staged a re-enactment of the fatal events. Then, in a "sombre ceremony" described as "hugely moving", tribal elders "bowed before the visitors and grasped their hands, clearing their consciences of past deeds". They also "ceremonially handed" Mr Milner-Williams a seven year old girl. He "agreed to accept responsibility for her education".

So let me get this right - their ancestors murdered his ancestor, and as part of their apology he has to pay for the girl's schooling. And he has to travel all the way to the middle of nowhere - BBC film-crew in tow - to acknowledge their contrition. If they were really sorry, wouldn't they be paying for his children's education?

We're told that their ancestors' crime has weighed heavily on the islanders of Erromango. The Vanuatan president said that some of them felt under a "curse", while an MP and anthropologist, Ralph Regenvanu - who helped organise the ceremony - spoke of their "psychological guilt or complex" about the incident. However, he went on,

Reconciliation is very much part of our culture. Saying sorry is part of it but all reconciliation ceremonies require something from each side, there's always that element of exchange.

So it seems that, indeed, the apology isn't just the islanders' way of making amends. They really do expect something in return. And Mr Regenvanu himself was at pains to point out the positive aspects of cannibalism. He insisted that "contrary to what a lot of people think" it was "a very ritualistic and sacred practice". It was also seen as a way of "absorbing the power of an enemy." Quite an honour, really. As for the unfortunate missionaries, it was probably their fault for being white colonialists anyway: "John Williams may have been eaten because he represented this threat, this incursion of European civilisation that was coming into Erromango at that time."

Nothing much to apologise for, then. If anything, it should be the missionaries' descendants apologising to the islanders.

Two Weeks to Save the World

2009-12-07T15:33:00.006Z

Today the Guardian is proud to join more than fifty other dull, worthy and virtually bankrupt dead-tree publications as we wag our collective fingers about Climate Change. Never before have so many newspapers combined their front pages in this way: proof, if any were needed, of the vital importance of the matter at hand. Our message is a simple one: adopt the policies we suggest or you all die.

No-one any longer questions the Fact of global warming. Yet what, so far, has been done about it? Almost nothing! That, of course, is largely the fault of the United States, led for many years by the evil Texan oil-polluter George W Bush. Boo! But now that the US is led by Barack Obama, who does want to save the world, obviously, there's hope. Hooray! Unfortunately, there are still evil people in America who don't want to save the world - who want the world to fry to a small, burnt crisp where All Life will be extinguished - because that'll mean more money for them. Hence the need for this wake-up call.

Make no mistake: the Copenhagen conference will be the last ever chance to save the planet. If there isn't a binding international agreement in the next few days, the seas will boil, the atmosphere will vaporize, and all life on earth will be extinguished in a giant fireball of death. That's how serious it is. But if we all work together, cancel our holidays and hand over vast sums to UN bureaucrats, we can defeat the pessimists and everything will work out OK. After all, we found the money to bail out the banks. And that was way more.

It's all about working together for the greater good. That's why, by printing this message to the world, we are doing Our Bit to stave off global catastrophe. Setting an example. After all, if we can all print the same tranche of unreadable prose in all our different newspapers, getting the world's governments to agree will be a piece of piss.

Is Speaker Bercow in bed with Carter-Ruck?

2009-12-06T17:30:00.004Z

Richard Wilson of Don't Get Fooled Again links to this alarming piece in the Sunday Times. Underneath a gossipy story about John Bercow's prospects of remaining Speaker after the election, post-Sallygate (I'm already pining for Michael Martin) comes the news that the Speaker's official counsel has apparently agreed with a man from the unpopular law firm Carter-Ruck that super-injunctions (in which the existence of an injunction is in itself subject to an injunction) do indeed fetter reporting of Parliament.

Previously, MPs (including members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, now putting the finishing touches to what one hopes will be a hard-hitting report on Privacy and Libel) had proceeded on the basis that the Bill of Rights 1688 - reinforced by the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840 - laid down that any proceeding in Parliament could be freely reported by the press. Parliamentary privilege is regularly used by MPs wishing to raise matters of public interest which might otherwise fall foul of libel law. It is, of course, a loophole - but, given the draconian nature of English libel law, a most valuable one. As John Whittingdale, the Committee chairman, has said, "the right of a newspaper or publication to quote what is said in parliament, without restraint, is fundamental. If that is not the case, it raises serious questions which parliament will need to address."

C-R partner Andrew Stephenson told the committee that they were under a "misapprehension" that the gagging order sought and obtained by the firm in relation to Trafigura (this was, of course, the super-injunction that according to Internet folklore was destroyed by a Twitterstorm in October) would have fallen as a result of Parliamentary Privilege.

Stephenson was at pains to point out that C-R never claimed "that the interim Orders made in the Trafigura case could or would have the effect of restraining debate within Parliament itself." He did, however, claim that Article 9 of the Bill of Rights, which states "that the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament" applied only inside the Palace of Westminster and to reports appearing in Hansard. He asserted that the Guardian's desire to report the question tabled by friendly MP Paul Farrelly was "an entirely different matter" and not covered by Privilege. The Guardian's lawyers had in fact agreed with this assessment, which is why instead of reporting the question itself Alan Rusbridger ran a piece complaining about the gag.

The implications of Stephenson's claim are profound. If he is right, then quoting from Hansard might be a contempt of court if it contained information that was the subject of a pre-existing injunction, even though Hansard itself is freely available online. This is unsustainable; and it would seem to be contradicted by s3 of the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, which protects the publication of "any extract from or abstract of" an official Parliamentary paper (such as Hansard), provided the publisher acts "with absence of malice".

It is widely believed - and the Committee members had assumed - that all reports of Parliamentary proceedings are covered by Article 9. Justice minister Bridget Prentice said so explicitly. Stephenson however produced a number of precedents which, he asserted, showed that his interpretation of the law had been accepted in the past. (Though looking at the cases this is far from clear: he offered no precedent for the court holding in contempt a straight report of Parliament.) He argued from silence - for example, the Contempt of Court Act 1981 did not explicitly exempt reports of Parliamentary proceedings but did exempt reports of court hearings that were not subject to specific restrictions. He also referred to a report into Parliamentary Privilege from 1999, which looked at the operation of the sub judice rule and included the following comment:

Although in such circumstances reporting a matter divulged in parliamentary proceedings is strictly a contempt of court, the courts are in practice reluctant to proceed against a report of what was said in Parliament. Indeed, with live broadcasting and the publication of Hansard on the Internet, it may be considered pointless to do so. But it is the reporting of such a breach, and the publicity given to it, which force Parliament to consider whether to place its own restrictions on this particular use of free speech.

A very interesting paragraph indeed, though the situation it describes is not unambiguously in Stephenson's favour - it seems to say that reporting in such circumstances, while forbidden in theory, would be allowed in practice. It also reveals how reluctant Parliamentary lawyers are to precipitate a conflict with the courts, which may be why the Speaker's legal adviser is backing Stephenson's interpretation. But the question is, Stephenson admits, "moot", and it would appear that Carter-Ruck wishes to keep it that way:

As my firm has made clear in our letter to the Speaker dated 14 October 2009 at the time the interim Orders were made, none of the parties nor the Court had in contemplation the possibility of the matter being raised in the House of Commons. If they had, then the order may well have been formulated (as was done, it appears on the initiative of the Court of Appeal, in the Spycatcher litigation) to allow for such reporting. However, on the wording of the Order as it then stood, it was clear to us that, absent a variation of its terms, it would amount to a breach and therefore a contempt for the Guardian to publish, as it proposed, information about Mr Farrelly's parliamentary question, referring to the existence of the injunction.

The question is, then, whether Carter-Ruck or any other law firm would press the issue if another Trafigura occurred - or, conversely, whether a newspaper would take the risk of publishing and being potentially held in contempt, when asking politely for a variation in the terms of the super-injunction would probably be accepted with little demur. When it appeared that Carter-Ruck might indeed be intending to test the super-injunction, Jack of Kent anticipated "potentially the most significant constitutional case of our generation" - a formulation I described as "hyperbolic". It would, of course, be very significant, because it would clarify what is a grey area. Do courts have the right to issue injunctions that, by their terms, would restrict the reporting of Parliament - and would such an injunction be enforceable? If, as the 1999 report states, a court would be reluctant to proceed in such a case (even if such a case were ever brought) it may well be that reporting of Parliament is de facto protected by Privilege, and the court would recognise this principle. But if newspapers like the Guardian are unwilling to take the risk of being taken to court for breaching a super-injunction then the strictest interpretation of the law will prevail by default.

We are left with a stalemate - a stalemate most convenient for the likes of Carter-Ruck, who can continue to intimidate news organisations into silence. Whether this amounts to a conscious attempt, as Richard Wilson writes, to "overturn a centuries-old democratic freedom", this may be the effect. And yet, of course, the flood of information will not be dammed; this rather arcane debate about principles formulated in the 17th century takes place against a backdrop of Facebook groups and Twitter and Wikileaks. Wilson wonders if he, along with all the other bloggers and Twitterers who posted details of the Farrelly question back in October, was technically in contempt of court. The answer may well be yes, but with the emphasis on "technically". It will never be tested, because it would never be in Carter-Ruck's interests to test it.

UFO cutbacks show the way

2009-12-05T18:48:00.010Z

Nick Pope, who once did the job himself before finding a (presumably lucrative) niche as an author of books about the subject, is disappointed that the Ministry of Defence is no longer to investigate UFO sightings. Previously - I didn't know this - there was a section on the MoD website that actively invited submissions. You clicked a link titled "How to report a UFO sighting" and were directed to what was officially described as a "dedicated UFO hotline answer-phone service and e-mail address". That the MoD find themselves having to deal with the kind of time-wasters who typically report seeing interplanetary craft - and may have appointed someone to deal with them is unsurprising. But why on earth (or on Mars, for that matter) should the Ministry be encouraging these nitwits by making it easy for them?

But then it's been an open secret for decades that the Ministry of Defence is horribly overstaffed.

Anyway, the MoD's Ufology department is no more. Britain's X-Files - which were released online last year for all to enjoy - are officially being closed, and Pope is upset about it. The news was "slipped out", he complains. The official explanation, that the £50,000 saved would be spent on equipment for our forces in Afghanistan, he finds unconvincing, though he admits that "the defence budget is under huge pressure and the UFO project was doubtless an easy target". Nevetheless, he finds the MoD's reasoning - that "if it doesn't behave like a conventional aircraft, we're not interested" - to be indicative of a "very dangerous mindset". After all, it might be a new type of aircraft, or even a hijacked plane.

But presumably the MoD has other mechanisms in place for dealing with such eventualities. The purpose of its UFO-reporting service was to collect and collate reports from (usually confused, sometimes inebriated) members of the public and, if appropriate, "investigate" them. And, as the statement posted on the MoD website makes plain and Pope tacitly admits, never in all the sixty years the government spent looking into these reports did they discover "any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom". If the official investigations haven't yielded anything of value so far, it's unlikely they would in future. Yet with the ease of communication facilitated by email and the Web, and with the need to deal with FoI requests, the workload has probably been increasing in recent years.

Pope claims that "UFO sightings are at record levels and public interest is at an all-time high". I find that doubtful. Ufology is much less fashionable today than it was in the Nineties, when much of the world was glued to the X-Files and fascinated by accounts of "alien abduction". There have been other peaks in interest - during the weirdness that was the 1970s (culminating in the two Spielberg movies Close Encounters and ET), or the Cold War paranoia of the Fifties, for example. Modern fears centre around the environment and terrorism, neither of which have much UFO resonance, while the wider percolation of scientific knowledge through the general public makes extraterrestrial visitation seem less plausible to many. Of course, there will always be strange sightings and even stranger people reporting them, but there's no reason why the government should devote any public resources to the subject.

After all, this is an area that is perfectly well served - perhaps over-served - by unofficial channels. There's no shortage of amateur investigators, some with particular areas of expertise (some, indeed, ex-servicemen), happy to devote most of their spare time to pursuing the most obscure and tedious details of UFO reports. Occasionally, as with Gary McKinnon, the obsession can lead to tragic results but for most it's a harmless enough hobby. And these days, there are numerous discussion boards and other websites where reports can be filed and dissected by believers and sceptics alike. No-one who sees something strange need be alone with their puzzlement: they can go online and find out. They can have their experience analysed and explained in far more detail than a bored and professionally tight-lipped clerk at the MoD could provide. And it doesn't cost the taxpayer a penny.

Nick Pope, ex-civil-servant that he is, takes it as axiomatic that if there's a mystery to be solved somebody working for the government should be responsible for solving it. But that doesn't follow at all. The fact that an investigation is officially endorsed or carried out at public expense does not mean that it will be in any sense superior or more worthy of being taken seriously. Take the current Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War. This is a far more elaborate and expensive affair than the perfunctory UFO investigations that are now being scrapped. But even if Sir John Chilcot does not intend to produce the much-anticipated whitewash, it seems unlikely that it will reveal anything significant that we did not already know, or result in any of the serious consequences (war crimes charges being laid against Tony Blair, for example) that would justify the time and money spent on it. That isn't because of an official cover-up. It's because almost everything worth knowing about the background to that mistaken military adventure has been pored over in exhaustive detail already. The work that has been done exposing the facts about Iraq is no worse - is probably better - for being unofficial.

The suggested saving of £50,000 may not sound much. It isn't much when set, for example, against the billions squandered through bad procurement decisions like Eurofighter or Nimrod. But it's a good start. Why stop at UFO reports? Almost all official statistics, from the wasteful ten-year Census to the monthly economic reports from the Treasury, reveal little that is not available from other sources, often free and certainly much cheaper. There are many thousands of unnecessary jobs being carried out by government or government-funded bodies, jobs that either don't need doing at all or, more commonly, merely replicate work done perfectly well by the private sector or by volunteers. Just because something's worth doing, there's no reason to suppose that it's the government that should be doing it.

Going Rogue on Climate Change

2009-12-04T17:58:00.005Z

It was going so well for Climategate. The real or imagined scandal has been getting more Web hits than the saga of Tiger's Wood EU Referendum, via James Delingpole). The scientists behind the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are struggling to regain public credibility. Al Gore has cancelled his trip to Copenhagen. But then it turned out that the only major country officially denying the reality of AGW was Saudi Arabia, that progressive bastion of democracy and human rights. And now I learn that the Anti-warmists have a new and vocal supporter. One who hails from one of the few places on earth that stands to benefit from an overheated planet. Yes, it's Sarah Palin:

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. ...Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil I took a stand against such snake oil science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population has increased.... The drastic economic measures being pushed by dogmatic environmentalists won’t change the weather, but will dramatically change our economy for the worse.

Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a “sin” against the planet.

Perhaps she's right. About the economic impact of anti-warming policies, I tend to think she is, on the whole. But it does rather bear out what I was saying yesterday about anti-warmism being the preserve of political mavericks. And does she really think it helps her case to remind the world of her vendetta against polar bears?

Cameron's Climategate

2009-12-03T19:39:00.008Z

Max Planck famously said that scientific theories prevail not because their opponents are converted, but because they eventually die. A similar thought seems to have occurred to Tim Yeo, chairman of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee, hitting back at climate-change sceptic Tories (who include, with varying degrees of conviction, the heavy-hitters David Davis, John Redwood and Peter Lilley). According to the Independent, he believes that those who are "reluctant to accept the evidence... will gradually diminish in the population." He also prophesied that "the dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed" and that in five years time no-one will argue against man-made global warming.

The last couple weeks, however, have demonstrated, if nothing else, that the "deniers" have more than a few dying gasps in them. I haven't so far written about "Climategate", partly because I haven't had the energy or time to plough through all the leaked emails and partly because it has been covered so well elsewhere. (Bishop Hill being the undisputed champion here, though this guest post on DK is perhaps the best place to start.) But, mainly, I'm not qualified to comment about the science, not being a climate researcher and not having a close acquaintance with the academic backbiting and sharp practice that the emails have undoubtedly exposed, even if they have no deeper significance. It's not just about science, though. It's not even mainly about science.

The revelations do not alter the fact that the majority of research in this area tends to support the hypothesis ("AGW") that human activity is responsible for a large percentage of the global warming that has been observed. Nor do they alter the fact that most scientists in the field expect global warming to continue. It's doubtful that they will have much impact at Copenhagen, which will be in any case a political fudge. The damage to the image of science, however, has been considerable. UEA's Climatic Research Unit, in particular, now looks more like a campaigning organisation than a source of objective data. What has been revealed lends support to one of the major claims of the AGW sceptics, that the consensus view has become an intolerant orthodoxy, sustained by a huge apparatus of funding, political commitment and other vested interests, determined to prevent challenges to its authority.

Of course, science is a human activity and cannot exist in a vacuum. When a consensus develops around a particular theory, whatever we may like to believe about the neutrality of the scientific method, it can be powerfully self-reinforcing. As Thomas Kuhn showed, the vast majority of research takes place within a prevailing paradigm, which shapes the questions that are asked and the answers that are expected. Inconvenient data will often be cast aside or downplayed because it doesn't fit; and that is not necessarily a bad thing, if everything else does fit. Science deals in probabilities far more often than certainties. So the behaviour revealed in the leaked emails, however dubious, does not of itself destroy the case for man-made global warming. It may not even weaken it. What it does demonstrate, however, is that contradictory evidence does exist. Those who (for pure or impure motives) do not accept the consensus may be heretics or dissidents but they are not "deniers".

That's the science. But this isn't really a story about science so much as a story about politics. Science can describe the world; the point, though, as Marx said, is to change it. Even the consensus view of AGW can only offer scenarios that might come to pass in the fullness (or perhaps even the nearness) of time. General trends can be predicted, but only the climate change that has already occurred is certain. The debate between the orthodox and the heterodox can only be settled in retrospect. Fifty years hence all may have become clear. If the most alarming predictions come true, it will by then be too late. But then if the most alarming predictions are true, it is probably already too late. The most effective strategy may well be to adapt rather than emark upon the Canute-like strategies favoured by most politicians signed up to the consensus.

Politicians and scientists have different agendas, and it is always dangerous to pretend that there can be any simple read-through from scientific findings to political solutions. Uppermost in any politician's mind will be the need to win elections (which is not, of course, to say that they do not also desire to "save the planet"). This means, among other things, tacking to the centre-ground and not deviating too far from what is generally perceived as sensible. (I'm talking, obviously, about mainstream politicians rather than mavericks of right or left.) Adopting environmental policies based on the delusion that it is possible to restrain climate change - policies which will only appear to work, curiously enough, if the consensus is wrong and there isn't any significant global warming after all - carries great future risks. It will almost certainly retard economic progress, for one thing, and the environmental taxes will sooner or later prove extremely unpopular, if they are onerous enough to "do any good".

But in the short term, the political advantage lies in being seen as environmentally virtuous. Copenhagen will provide a grandstanding opportunity on an almost unprecedented scale. To be able to return, paper in hand, having saved the world from ecological catastrophe, is a consummation devoutly wished by leaders of every kind. It will be Gordon Brown's last major opportunity to appear significant on the world stage, one that he will be determined not to squander. Any deal that is reached may eventually unravel, of course, but deal there will certainly be.

This brings me back, by a somewhat circuitous route, to the Conservatives. The Climategate emails have been seized upon by that very considerable section of the Tory party that has always been suspicious of environmentalism as a left-wing plot. Scepticism about the science of global warming is informed by scepticism about the means being proposed to tackle it: regulations, targets, interventions, the shadow of global governance, top-down control. Free-marketeers naturally hate the artificial mechanisms that are beloved of meddling politicians. Many are equally suspicious of piety and cant, which environmentalism is drenched in. It seems, moreover (despite the tough action that is promised) a soft and fluffy cause, rather effete - beloved, indeed, of the effete green-wellied Old Etonians who are now back in charge.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of environmentalism to David Cameron's leadership. It's not just about saving the planet - it's far more important than that, it's about changing the image of the party. Going Green has been a vital plank in Cameron's strategy of putting distance between himself and the Tory past (which is ironic, given that Mrs Thatcher herself went a little bit green towards the end of her time in office). A raft of green initiatives will form the centrepiece of next year's Conservative manifesto. Being environmentally aware, embracing the AGW consensus and promising a load of green policies sends signals about being Centrist and Progressive. And the signals matter more than the policies and certainly more than the truth of the science behind climate change.

This is why Climategate poses a dangerous and unexpected challenge to the Cameron project. Dissenters - from the new Toryism as much as from the climate consensus - have leapt upon the evidence of suberterfuge at the CRU because it offers the possibility of undermining the political consensus, not because it destroys the science. And, of course, it seems to confirm their long-held suspicions that the whole climate change industry is a politically-motivated fix. It's a godsend. But a consensus - especially a political consensus - does not crumble so easily. The presence on the Tory backbenches of an emboldened group of AGW sceptics raises the horrible spectre of division and the equally horrible spectre of the loss of hard-won centre ground. Already, Ed Miliband (whose very job title embodies the consensus view) is proclaiming that "the true face of the Tory party is on show."

So it's little wonder Tim Yeo (and, no doubt, his boss) is hoping that the sceptics will do the decent thing and quietly die.

On not being extremely happy

2009-12-02T15:39:00.002Z

This must be one of the most bizarre opening paragraphs I've ever read. It comes from Jennifer Howse writing on the Times "Alpha Mummy" blog:

I’m in Spain writing a piece for the Times’s website and I caught the last few minutes of a Newsnight last night on Spanish TV. It featured esteemed professor of sociology Frank Furedi, author of Politics of Fear, Therapy Culture and Paranoid Parenting, talking about our outsized fear of risk in modern life, especially as it relates to children. Watching their discussion made me extremely happy to be living in the UK.

Why? Does she actually approve of the over-regulation that makes head teachers demand CRB checks of parents attending carol services, or looks set to force sixth formers to register with the Orwellian "Safeguarding Authority" in order to take part in Gordon Brown's compulsory volunteering programme? She does not. She goes on, with similar frustration to Henry Porter (though with less eloquence), to enumerate some of the absurdities that have made modern Britain a paranoid, paedophile-obsessed surveillance state unmatched in the "free world". In fact, she agrees with Furedi in his campaign against "cotton wool" parenting.

Howse objects to our "overarching culture of fear for parents and children", especially as it affects men:

Many dads I’ve talked to have described feeling conspicuous and viewed with suspicion at the local playground when they take their children. Heather Piper, a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, described a childminder whose 18-year-old son and her husband aren’t allowed to help her with nappy changing or supervising young girls.

She worries that the sinsiter absurdities of the ISA system have slipped from the headlines. She even praises Furedi's "utterly sensible observation" "there’s a big range between the risk of breaking your neck and getting a graze on your knee and we have to know the difference."

Most other European countries seem to have escaped the quintessentially British mania, almost entirely a product of the New Labour years, which Porter admirably sums up as an "almost sociopathic" mistrust. What we see in this country, as Porter describes week after week, is an excessive concern for children as a group coexisting with the incompetent neglect of those particular children - the Baby Peters - who are actually at risk. It's the worst of all possible worlds: good, well-meaning parents faced at every turn with intrusive bureaucracy, petty-minded, suspicious officialdom and endless unnecessary lectures, while the minority of truly appalling parents slip under the radar screen. Prague-based Sarka, commenting on Porter's latest piece, notes that "even Central Europeans who are used to an amazing amount of bureaucratic regulation and interference are staring at the British in consternation".

All of which makes you wonder - if she's so despairing about the damage done to society by official paranoia and the stifling safety-first culture, why is Jennifer Howes "extremely happy to be living in the UK?" The answer seems to be that Jeremy Paxman had Furedi on his show.

Not only do we have newscasters like Paxman asking questions and follow-up questions and further follow-up questions (compare with most soft-ball interviewers on American TV) but you have academics like Furedi challenging the popular thinking that when it comes to children we need to be more afraid, more careful and more alarmist.

It's true enough that Furedi and those like him (who speak, I think, for the great majority of people in this country) are not banned from the airwaves or, for that matter, from the newspapers. There is no "popular thinking" that we need to be ever-more alarmist when it comes to protecting children. This is unpopular thinking. Indeed, it can scarcely be described as "thinking" at all; it is simply what has happened under a government obsessed by process and outcomes, which has almost no sense of the autonomy of the individual. Yesterday our probable next prime minister David Cameron railed against the Health and Safety culture, and even offered some suggestions about how its worst excesses might be curtailed. I don't doubt his sincerity. I do, however, doubt his chances of success. The damage that has been done is all-but irreparable.

The tragedy is that there is now widespread recognition of the miserable results of the government's determination to "protect" children, even widespread anger, but this is accompanied by an equally widespread shrugging of shoulders. There's acceptance, too. The headmaster who believes that Ofsted guidelines force him to CRB-check parents accompanying their children to a carol sevice - a story flagged up by Furedi, incidentally - went on record as saying "Parents accept it’s about safeguarding the welfare of children. They accept... it’s a necessary chore." Similarly, when Jeff Overs, a BBC photographer, objected to being questioned under terrorism laws for photographing St Paul's Cathedral, he was told that no-one else had complained.

Academic critics like Frank Furedi, campaigners like Jennie Bristow, and journalists like Camilla Cavendish or Henry Porter are part of a culture of dissent, along with the many blogs that concern themselves with these issues. Just look at the comments that follow Porter's CIF columns - hosted by the Guardian, for heaven's sake - if you think there's any real appetite for any more official suspicion and surveillance. The fact that Furedi is allowed onto mainstream news programme is not a sign of a healthy society, however, as Howse seems to think, because a healthy society would never have got into this situation in the first place. Instead of nodding in agreement while Furedi made his blindingly obvious points, millions of us would simply refuse to participate in this madness.

"What the hell is going on in this country?" asks Henry Porter. I don't know. But I'm sure as hell not "extremely happy" to be part of it.

Agreeing with God

2009-12-01T18:08:00.003Z

It's nice to have confirmation of something you knew all along.

Some research from the University of Chicago into religious opinions suggests that most people who believe in God think God agrees with them. Or, as the paper's title rather wonderfully puts it, "Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs". The scientists discovered that deciding what you think about a given issue and deciding what God thinks about it is more or less the same thing. But you probably knew that.

There were seven studies in all. Four involved surveys in which people were invited to give their opinions about various moral questions, along with what they imagined other people (such as Bill Gates, George Bush or the "Average American") would think about the same issue, and what God would think about it. For most people there was a strong correlation between what they believed and what they thought God believed. But respondents had a more "objective" assessment of what other human beings believed. In other words, they were prepared to entertain the thought that they disagreed with the former president, but not that they disagreed with the Almighty. Hardly rocket science, you might think. After all, it's how US foreign policy was formulated for eight years of this past decade.

In two further studies, the scientists "directly manipulated people’s own beliefs" by, for example, asking them to make a presentation about capital punishment in front of a video camera, "an exercise known to affect people’s reported beliefs." Asking people to think seriously about something hardly amounts to manipulating their beliefs, I wouldn't have thought, but in any case the researchers concluded that "inferences about God’s beliefs tracked their own beliefs." People who started off believing in capital punishment but after a few hours' intense thought changed their mind felt that God endorsed their new opinion just as strongly as he had endorsed their previous one. Again, no surprise there.

Another study involved the inevitable brainscans (always a sure-fire way of getting your findings taken seriously). Researchers MRI'd people's brains as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The "data demonstrated that reasoning about God’s beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs." Presumably that's because they were reasoning about their own beliefs.

It would be amazing if believers didn't use the same part of their brains when thinking about what God felt about a given issue as when considering their own opinions. It would imply that there was a separation between God and morality, which is almost a contradiction.

And the conclusion:

The researchers noted that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God’s standards. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing,” they conclude. “This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

In a sense, of course, that's the whole point of religion-based morality. God is supposed to be the ultimate source of right and wrong, the guarantor of absolute values. A large part of religion can be summed up as "find out what God wants you to do, and do it". So to say "I think this is right" and "God thinks this is right" is to say more or less the same thing. This has two major side-effects: fanaticism and neurosis.

"Because God says so", or "it is written in the Bible" is not much of a defence, intellectually speaking, to a philosophical challenge: it is usually a sign of weakness, frustration or a desire to close down debate. But for most people, for most of history, religious precepts have provided moral guidance, in thought if not in deed. The belief that one's opinions chime with those of the Creator of the Universe is powerfully reinforcing. That is why bigotry and self-righteousness are often so marked a feature of the religious mindset. The most dangerous fanatics are those who believe that they are doing God's will. This is the core of Richard Dawkins' insight that for good people to do evil, you need religion. But even good people who don't do evil things can fall prey to a similar fanaticism. Karen Armstrong, for example, is as unshakeably certain that God is "compassion" as any Taliban commander is convinced that God wants to stone adulterers. She is just as convinced as he is that God agrees with her point of view.

But not everyone is quite so comfortable with what they imagine to be God's views on morality. To act contrary to the perceived will of God is to sin, and sin brings with it guilt, consciousness of having done wrong. The result can be misery. Fortunately, there are ways round the problem.

Say you've read in the Bible that homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord, and you're gay (or your best friend is). There are three ways out. One is to stop believing in God. A second is to try to become heterosexual, or at least celibate, neither of which is reliably a route to happiness; or to live with the knowledge that you are offending God, which is probably worse. Where God is concerned you can hardly just agree to differ. The third option is to discover that God doesn't hate homosexuality after all, that the Bible is open to interpretation (or even wrong), because God is love. What you're most unlikely to conclude, if you take this convenient third option, is that God has changed his mind on the question, that when he said in the Bible that gay sex was an abomination punishable by death he really meant it, but that a perusal of New Labour's anti-discrimination legislation has prompted a divine rethink. What you will say, instead, is that previous generations, and traditionalist believers in this generation, have all been limited in their understanding of the true nature of God, which is, however, available to you.

Is there a fourth option? Kingsley Amis (reports Martin) was once asked if he was an atheist. "It's more that I hate him," he replied. Martin thought it was the "most revealing thing" his father ever said, but what it reveals is a style of atheism rather than a style of belief. God is available to the believer, some of the time, through religious experience. The main source for the believer's idea of God will usually be the religious tradition to which he or she belongs, but even this will be experienced as something personal. But for the non-believer, the only source of information about God is what believers say or have written - or, perhaps, what he or she used to believe. So a negative opinion about God is really a negative opinion about religion: about believers, or about the version of God that believers have described over the centuries.

Once you start believing in God you're already committed to agreeing with him. But don't worry, he already agrees with you.

Shadow of the minaret

2009-11-30T16:30:00.005Z

You're allowed to be racist against the Swiss. Just as you're allowed to be racist against the Israelis, or the Serbs, or the Ulster protestants, or the white working class in Britain (and the United States). Making generalised slurs about the national character of the varied and polyglot cantons whose primitive democracy somehow survived the various tidying-up exercises of history is a way of demonstrating your own liberal allegiances. The Swiss are, after all, xenophobic, small-minded, dissimulating, money-obsessed yodellers. Their trains may run on time, but we all know what that means.

The Swiss are insular and clannish: that's why they've managed to rub along together for centuries with several languages and very little in the way of central administration. They are reactionary and bigoted: that explains why the Red Cross was a Swiss invention, why for decades Geneva was the centre of the human rights industry. They are, in the worst sense of the word, conservative: why, they even believe in direct democracy and universal gun-ownership. And, of course, they were only neutral during the War so they could get their greedy Niebelungisch hands on all that Nazi gold.

It's always pleasant to discover a dark side to the antiseptic prosperity and clockwork efficiency of the Swiss, and yesterday's vote to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland has allowed anti-Swiss bigotry free reign. They have done a Bad Thing by objecting to the visible spread of Islam - a decision that, to judge by some of the coverage, is tantamount to deporting the country's Muslims to concentration camps. The Guardian was typical (but then the Guardian always is). The Swiss, the leader column notes, (as though it were relevant) "give shelter to wealthy migrants seeking to escape taxes" but have now "pulled aside their veneer of internationalism" to display an "Alpine distrust of outsiders". Referring to the poster used to encourage a Yes vote, the Guardian notes "the provocative nature of a campaign fought in the Nazi colours of red, black and white."

Stereotyping the Swiss is just one avenue of explanation available. There's also the Thick Public line. The anti-mosque campaigners (which included some high-profile feminists as well as the more obvious xenophobes) exploited deep-seated but mistaken fears - "particularly among rural communities" writes the BBC's Imogen Foulkes - of Islamic expansionism. Or as the Guardian put it, "voters were really being lured to express their views on religion and race." The subtext here is that democracy is dangerous because it gives power to the ignorant and the bigoted. Joan Smith, for example, finds it "cheering" that the vote - one among many hundreds held each year - "demonstrates the idiocy of referendums". That's no different from saying that Tony Blair's repeated election victories demonstrated the idiocy of general elections. Which, in a sense, they did.

"Can we be sure" asks the Guardian, "that the people of Austria, France, Britain or the Netherlands would have voted differently, if given the chance?" Fortunately, they'll never have the opportunity. Indeed, Foulkes reports that the Swiss Justice Minister "apparently told her advisers there ought to be some restrictions on what the general public can actually vote on." The Swiss tradition of direct democracy has not led to a noticeably less liberal society than exists in the rest of Europe - the very opposite, in some respects - but the people do have a habit of voting in ways uncongenial to politicians (not wanting to join the European Union, for example). It was perhaps only a matter of time before Swiss leaders began to adopt the suspicion of popular opinion that has become second nature to most members of the European elite.

Another common response to the vote has been the usual elitist Islamophobia: i.e. the fear that there will be an uncontrollable backlash from Muslims comparable with the Danish cartoons crisis. Le Temps, described as Geneva's" establishment" newspaper, warned of the "spectacular" backlash that awaited. "Vengeance, boycotts, retaliation ... this clash with Islam could cost dearly." Among Swiss politicians there is said to be "an expectation" that the economy will suffer (money, you see, it's all these Swiss really care about) and the "traditionally good trade relations" with the Arab world take a hit. Other tax havens, after all, are available for the Gulf sheikhs to put their oil-money; and where else would they get their luxury watches? So far, there have been few signs of a violent backlash, either, among the non-Rolex wearing rentamobs. Egypt's Grand Mufti called it "an attempt to insult the feelings of the Muslim community in and outside Switzerland", but that's about it.

Given that there's no actual blasphemy involved, I don't expect there will be too many negative repercussions. After all, Saudi Arabia bans all Christian churches, not just those with bell-towers, while in Egypt religiously-motivated planning rules have made it virtually impossible for the Coptic community to repair their existing churches, let alone build any new ones. When it comes to religious pluralism, few Muslim countries are in much position to complain.

Of course, it's hard to describe the vote as a victory for tolerance or liberal attitudes. But it would be equally wrong to assume that the enemies of the prayer-towers were all frothing xenophobes. There were also secularists and feminists in the mix. A feminist quoted in the Guardian claimed that minarets were "male power symbols" and "a visible signal of the state's acceptance of the oppression of women." She is described as a psychologist, which may be a clue. In fact, minarets are no more phallic in appearance than many church spires or the skyline of Dubai. Architecture is, however, often an expression of confidence, expansionism and arrogance: you don't have to be an out-and-out Islamophobe to feel queasy about the proposed construction of a 70,000 capacity "mega-mosque" in East London. The referendum result was symbolic and at first sight seems rather absurd. The absence of minarets will not prevent the spread of radical Islam, after all. But it will prevent the spread of Islamic architecture, and perhaps that's the point. As minarets sprout all over Europe, Swiss Islam will remain quiet and unobtrusive. How very Swiss.

Gary McKinnon: the backlash

2009-11-28T18:55:00.010Z

Gary McKinnon the autistic-spectrum computer hacker now looks set to be handed over to a vengeful US justice system. The increasingly disappointing home secretary Alan Johnson has concluded, as he wrote to McKinnon's tirelessly campaigning mother Janis Sharp, that McKinnon's human rights would not be violated by extradition. So that - barring an unlikely intervention from the courts - is that.

Of course, Alan Johnson could save McKinnon if he wanted to. Johnson has continually claimed that he has minimal discretion, that his hands are tied, that the law allows him no leeway, that there is nothing he can do. His hand-wringing and expressions of regret, though, carry all the conviction of the tears shed by Lewis Carroll's Walrus on behalf of the oysters he had just eaten. That decision was his (or at least rubber-stamped by him). The new evidence he was invited to consider included a compelling psychological assessment that McKinnon was a high suicide risk. That alone, had Johnson wished it, would have been enough.

In any case, a decision of the balance of legal arguments need only have been provisional. Even if he had been advised that a decision to stay McKinnon's extradition was dubious - under the terms, let it be remembered, of the treaty that his own party had forced through Parliament, against strong and principled opposition on all sides - there was nothing to prevent him from making it.

The worst that might have happened (though it seems doubtful) is that the decision would have been overturned by the courts - in which case Johnson would have had the consolation of having tried his best, not to mention a good deal of positive press coverage. Recent Home Secretaries have not been shy of making legally questionable decisions that stand the risk of being overturned on appeal. It happens all the time - especially under this government. Think Geert Wilders - or the latest Strasbourg-baiting proposals on DNA retention. The job of Home Office lawyers is to produce justifications for political decisions that are at least arguable in court. The Home Secretary's decision, whatever the theory may say, is invariably a political one. The decision to extradite Gary McKinnon is self-evidently a political one. Those who argue that the law left Johnson with no option are being either naive or mischievous.

This fact does, however, raise problems of its own. Gary McKinnon's case is a famous one. It has powerful backing from human rights groups, from Opposition politicians, from the Labour-led home affairs select committee and from most of the press. He has benefited from a skilful PR campaign, fronted by Janis Sharp but joined by numerous celebrities and campaigners. He has a large measure of public sympathy. The basest political calculation ought to impel Alan Johnson to block the extradition - or at least to hold it up till after the election, when perhaps another politician will be responsible for it. To stand up to the American bully - which is how the case has been presented, accurately or not - would be popular. It would help restore his battered image. It would be cheap, effective publicity. In political terms, a no-brainer.

It's not surprising to find a politician making a popular but immoral decision, nor even an unpopular but correct one. But to see a politician set his face against both popularity and justice is very odd indeed - so odd that a special explanation seems to be required. The commonest points to intense US pressure, and the supposedly supine attitude of the British authorities in the face of it. McKinnon was arrested - and confessed to his actions - as early as March 2002, well before the "unequal" extradition treaty was ratified, but that the Americans (with possible British encouragement) held back until requesting his extradition. No satisfactory explanation has ever been offered as to why a trial in Britain was impossible. It may well be that, for technical reasons, an American trial could be considered more "appropriate", but that is a rather different question. Geoffrey Robertson QC, writing in the Independent, recalls defending, some years ago, "a young man whose hacking was alleged to be even more serious that McKinnon's". The trial, however, took place in Britain. The prosecution claimed he had "caused more damage to the Pentagon than the KGB"; yet he received a non-custodial sentence. Robertson sees no reason that could not have been the case with Gary McKinnon.

Some have even suggested that McKinnon is being offered up as a way of soothing American anger over the release of the supposed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi. That wouldn't of course explain why the process against him was begun; but it might explain why the present Home Secretary has been so reluctant to take a risk for justice.

An entirely different explanation has been gaining ground in recent days, especially on parts of the Left: that Johnson is right, the McKinnon deserves to be extradited to face long years in a tough US jail, and that those who think differently have been hoodwinked by a clever PR campaign. The Labour MP and blogger Tom Harris has become the most prominent member of this camp. Andy Newman, writing at Socialist Unity, has however set out the most detailed case. Newman makes a number of points worthy of consideration. His principal objection, though, seems to be to the fact that McKinnon's cause has been adopted by (absit omen) the Daily Mail. (My own prejudice, needless to say, impels me to an equal aversion to any message being put over at a far-left site like SU.)

For some on the Left, even their suspicion of the USA would seem to be dwarfed by their hatred of the Daily Mail. They might be felt to have a natural sympathy for someone who, in addition to his interest in UFOs, also left remarks sharply critical of American foreign policy on the servers he hacked. But the warmth with which the Mail has supported him undermines his credibility. And it's not just the Mail, either. Newman complains that "his case has been taken up because of reactionary British nationalism, and assumptions of our superiority over the Americans" - a remarkable claim for which he produces no evidence. Newman also thinks that "there is something very wrong in the way Gary McKinnon’s campaign has sought to mobilise public opinion through tabloid sensationalism to avoid a trial for a criminal offence." But given the failure of the legal system to prevent McKinnon's extradition, his backers can scarcely be criticised for their use of whatever weapons they are able to deploy. And even if, in this particular case, the savagery of American justice has been exaggerated, suspicions are not entirely without foundation. Guantanamo Bay, anyone?

Newman is also anxious to rebut suggestions that there is anything objectionable or unequal about the 2003 Extradition Act or the Treaty with the USA which it brought into law. He claims, indeed, that the Act was passed primarily because of the difficulty that had been experienced in extraditing General Pinochet. Pinochet, he maintains, "exploited" the need to prove a prima facie case before agreeing to extradition requests by "dragging out the process". As a result, the 2003 Act "was designed to streamline the process to make high profile cases less susceptible to political and diplomatic pressure." I've no idea whether this is true. If it is, I find it extremely disturbing. Pinochet's was a single, unrepresentative case. That it proved impossible to pack him off to Spain, where he was the subject of an opportunistic arrest warrant, may have disappointed some old Lefties; but that does not mean that 60 million British citizens should therefore have been stripped of their rights. As for political and diplomatic pressure being a bad thing: sometimes it's all that stands between a manifestly innocent person and an oppressive prosecution.

An example of the good workings of the prima facie rule prior to 2003 is the case of Lotfi Raissi, an innocent Algerian who as a result of a number of unfortunate coincidences was suspected by US investigators of involvement in the 9/11 plot. He was held for months in the harsh conditions of Belmarsh while the courts generously granted the Americans time to present any evidence they might have against him. They had none, and eventually Raissi was released. Had the current treaty been in force, there would have been nothing to prevent his transportation to the US, where he would have disappeared into the vaults where high-security terror suspects are held, perhaps not to emerge for years.

In McKinnon's case, of course, the prima facie rule would not apply: he has confessed to most of what he has been accused of. It is indeed probably better not to become too bogged down in technicalities. In any case, it is not the inequality of the extradition treaty that is its most objectionable feature, but the lack of protection it gives to British citizens when faced with demands from foreign courts (many of the same objections apply, with force, to the avowedly "equal" European Arrest Warrant). It is not the Americans' fault that they have inherited the protections afforded by their constitution, it is merely their good fortune in the wisdom of their founding fathers. Would that we had such protections. Instead, Gary McKinnon finds himself in the position of an inverted Don Pacifico, discovering that the blind eye and feeble arm of England will do nothing to protect him, even if he never leaves these shores. The contrast with France's protection of Roman Polanski is striking.

Nor I am comfortable with the manner in which the coverage has infantilised a 42-year old man who, whatever compulsion drove him, was responsible for his own decisions. But the case is actually quite straightforward. It is a good general rule that the punishment should fit the crime. McKinnon's crime was to have caused a certain amount of damage to the security systems of the US military's IT (a sum large by most people's personal standards - enough to buy a fairly decent house, perhaps - but utterly negligible when set against the gargantuan budget of the Pentagon). But mainly he caused embarrassment. He exposed weaknesses in the Pentagon's defences at a time when fear of terrorism was at its post-9/11 height. He probably did them a favour. The punishment he is facing, given his personal circumstances, is manifestly disproportionate, indeed unjust. Alan Johnson could have intervened. He chose not to. And that really is all there is to it.

The abuse of Catholicism

2009-11-27T09:38:00.016Z

Damian Thompson fears that the latest revelations about clerical sex-abuse - and the church's blatant, cynical and long-lasting attempts to cover it up - "could finish off Catholic Ireland". It will, he predicts, "make the Catholic Church even more loathed in Ireland than it already is."

Let's hope so.

Thompson puts the problem down to the "arrogance" of bishops who "believe that almost anything can be kept secret from the laity if it might 'damage the good name of the Church'." But it's more than just arrogance. What is described in the report is full-scale criminal complicity. No fewer than four archbishops of Dublin protected known paedophiles, allowed them to move to new parishes to find new victims and refused to inform the police of serious crimes, instead locking up damning evidence inside "a secret vault" in Dublin. They also cultivated "inappropriately close relations with senior police officers", who were persuaded to ignore complaints of molestation and rape. As good Catholics, they too were concerned with the good name of the Church.

That was all decades ago. But even this year the Vatican was obstructing the investigation. The report's author, Judge Yvonne Murphy, wrote repeatedly to Rome and to the papal nuncio in Ireland seeking information, and received no reply. They are still seeking to protect their "good name", even though they no longer have one.

The present head of the church in Ireland has belatedly apologised - to God. Obviously, the worst crimes were committed by individuals. But as the report notes, it was "the structures and rules of the Catholic Church" that facilitated the cover-up. It was the whole rotten edifice - the whole idea of the church as an organisation set up by God, with the divine right to decide what is true and false, right and wrong, to tell people how to live their lives - that enabled the situation to develop. It wasn't just the arrogance of particular bishops. It was the arrogance inherent in an institution that believes itself to be literally infallible.

If these people had any shame they would close their doors tomorrow, sell off all the churches to fund homes for the poor and compensation for the victims, admit that an organisation that is capable of such manifest corruption simply has no moral right to continue in being. Any other institution, revealed to have had, over decades, an official policy of covering up such vile crimes would be disbanded, its leaders put on trial, its assets seized. No decent person would want anything to do with it. Yet this Sunday, as every Sunday, its official representatives will dress up in their fancy vestments, deliver their sermons, dish out their bread and wine, as though nothing has changed, as though the behaviour of the messengers in no way detracts from the truth of the message.

How can they?

For Catholics, the truth of Christianity is bound up with the institution of the church. Jesus, they believe, gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and Herr Ratzinger still has them clutched tightly in his crabbed little hands. The church is more than the community of believers: it is itself a large part of the belief. Individual priests, bishops, even popes (when they are not being infallible, that is) may err, but the church itself embodies Truth and Rightness, and its followers are meant to accept (in the words of the Catechism) "with docility" what the leadership tells them. For many decades, in Ireland, this was taken for granted. The extravagant, absurd, domineering claims of the church were a natural part of life. Sadists and child molesters had only to get themselves ordained and they received carte blanche to do whatever they liked. They were, after all, working for God. If you believe that the church is God's chosen mechanism for salvation, it stands to reason that its "good name" counts for more than justice, or the law, or the suffering of individuals in its care.

Throughout its history, the Catholic church has behaved atrociously: persecuting heretics, launching crusades, stoking up antisemitism, retarding scientific progress, propping up fascist dictatorships, promoting fake miracles and fraudulent relics, selling indulgences, instilling sexual guilt. Even its leaders admit that not everything the church has done has been good. Yet they don't draw the obvious conclusion, that when an organisation is guilty of sustained wickedness there must be something profoundly wrong with it as such. Of course, it has been responsible for some good things. Palestrina wrote nice music for its services, Michelangelo decorated the Sistine Chapel tolerably well, there's even a case to be made for a few of its saints. But for all that it is a preposterous, anachronistic and fundamentally abusive institution. Neither its antiquity, the fact that it boasts a billion members, nor its status as a religion should protect it from collapse. It has lost all moral legitimacy. It should be wound up.

Last week at the Vatican, Ratzinger snubbed the Church of England's saintly but muddled Rowan Williams by according him just twenty minutes of his precious time. Next year, he will be in Britain. It would be appropriate, would it not, if Williams were to find himself urgently called away on business?

Going round in circles

2009-11-26T18:45:00.009Z

A bizarre story in the Telegraph left me suspecting some sort of hoax. A senior space scientist associated with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, we are told, claims to be in touch with extraterrestrials. Lachezar Filipov announced the other day that "aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time". They were not hostile, though they did have concerns about what human beings were doing to the environment (little Green men, I suppose), and hoped to establish communication with us "through the power of thought". In the meantime, Filipov and his colleagues are analysing crop circles, which he believes contain messages from the aliens.

An earlier source for the story, the Sofia Echo, adds some further details. It states that that Filipov - deputy director of the Space Research Institute - "claimed that some alien species were present" (at the press conference?) and had answered more than 30 questions put forward by the scientists. As to the extraterrestrials' message, "They say that global warming is attributed mainly to infrastructural engineering. Additionally, they are very skeptical of our use of cosmetics, and artificial insemination because this is 'unnatural.'" There's also a convenient explanation as to why other scientists haven't discovered their existence:

Filipov reckons that it will be impossible to try and track extraterrestrial life with our current radar equipment, or through the usage of radio telescopes. Apparently, the aliens were "categorical" that any future means of contact between us and them would be conducted through mental power and telepathy.

So has Filipov - a genuine astrophysicist with a fairly impressive CV - been contacted by extraterrestrials? Not exactly. The background to the story doesn't appear in any of the press or newswire coverage, but isn't hard to track down. Filipov's name appears along with several other Bulgarian scientists (presumably the members of his team) on a website called Our Planet, the avowed aim of which is to provide a communication tool between "the science" and the aliens supposedly responsible for creating crop circles. It also demonstrates the still powerful overlap between committed environmentalism and woo-woo.

The site appears to be the brainchild of Mariana Vezneva, a Bulgarian writer described as "an expert in the cosmic language of symbols and allegories called Cenzar" and "a truly remarkable person with powers to unlock the secrets of the crop circles formations." She is "not a medium", we are told, but rather "a supersensory explorer who has been trained in the cosmic language of symbols for more than 20 years." Her "incredible discoveries" include (in addition to her crop circles breakthrough) "the code of symbols in the Cyrillic alphabet; the enigma of the natural numbers (1-10)". One of her aims in embarking on this project with Filipov is "to strengthen the links between the science and the invisible world by using this extraordinary communication tool for tackling the global earth crisis."

There's a lengthy report of a meeting held on 1st June of this year at which the scientists reported the results of their experiment. It explains the mysterious process by which the alien intelligence behind the crop circles answered the scientists' queries. First, the scientists posed their questions, which were put up on the website. Here are some typical examples:

Are we to expect a contact with extraterrestrial intelligence as part of the SETI projects in the nearest future?

What is the symbolic meaning of the Sphinx of Giza and is the Sphinx older than the pyramids?

The energy sources will be exhausted in the future, the global warming will lead to draught and war for water and food supply. How we can manage the energy crises? (this is one of Filipov's own questions)

Is the human species a product of the evolution process or it has been transported to Earth from another planet?

Then everyone sat back and waited for the crop circles to form spontaneously (because, of course, they cannot possibly be man-made) in southern England. The formations were then interpreted by Mariana using her "telepathic skills". "The communication with crop circles intelligence was described as 'mental pictogram dialogue'." The picture shown above represents the extraterrestrials' answer to Filipov's question, for example. Not all the scientists' questions received a satisfactory answer: of the 16 posed, only 8 have been resolved. Perhaps the aliens didn't consider the unanswered questions interesting enough.

Nevertheless, the experiment was declared a success - at least as an important first stage in human-circlemaker dialogue:

It has been acknowledged that a unique dialogue between scientists and the creating force behind the crop circles has been successfully established. An agreement has been reached as below:

A. More efforts need to be put in making the experiment and the unique communication tool with crop circles intelligence popular to a wider audience and authorities;
B. It was suggested for a scientific center for crop circles communication to be established;
C. A second meeting to be organized for those unable to attend the present one on which to be discussed a detailed plan for actions.

The meeting was closed in uplifting spirit and rallying thoughts.

It's nice to know that the spirit of unfettered scientific inquiry is alive and well in eastern Europe.

Saudis' zero-tolerance approach to fake psychics

2009-11-25T16:44:00.005Z

Witchcraft in Saudi Arabia is back in the news again. Human Rights Watch has taken up the cause of Ali Sabit, who is described as a Lebanese television personality (albeit on a satellite channel so obscure I was unable to find out any details about it) who has apparently been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for sorcery as a result of his broadcasts. Sibat was sentenced on November 9, but he has been in detention for the past 18 months. HRW states:

Religious police arrested Ali Sibat in his hotel room in Medina on May 7, 2008, where he was on pilgrimage before returning to his native Lebanon. Before his arrest, Sibat frequently gave advice on general life questions and predictions about the future on the Lebanese satellite television station Sheherazade, according to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar and the French newspaper Le Monde. These appearances are said to be the only evidence against Sibat.

I've been unable to discover any further details about this case, but I did find a report from last September that may shed light on the background to it. This quoted Sheikh Saleh al-Foza, a senior cleric, as demanding the death penalty for "sorcerers who appear on satellite channels". The report asserted that "many of the hundreds" of Arab-language satellite stations "specialise in horoscopes and other advice to callers on solving problems that is seen as 'sorcery'." TV astrologers weren't the only target: another cleric had demanded the death penalty for producers of "indecent" soap-operas beamed into the country during the month of Ramadan. It's likely, then, that Sibat is the victim of a moral panic about the corrupting influence of satellite TV. The campaign against witchcraft, though, is a broader one.

HRW is using the Sibat case to highlight the growing number of arrests and convictions for occult practices in that topsy-turvy kingdom. Sarah Leah Whitson, who leads their Middle East section, complained that "Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police. The crime of ‘witchcraft' is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state-sanctioned executions." The press release notes two other cases in the past month alone. It also revisits the case of Fawza Falih, an elderly woman who was sentenced to death in February of last year following what HRW calls her "arbitrary arrest, coerced confession, unfair trial, and wrongful conviction." Despite widespread international condemnation, and an internet campaign to free her, she is apparently still on death row.

There have been actual executions. In 2007, for example, an Egyptian man, Mustafa Ibrahim, was executed for sorcery after paraphernalia including "foul smelling herbs" and books of magic spells were found in his home. However, since he also "confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom" he no doubt deserved everything he got. But whatever view you take on capital punishment, few would deny that there is a genuine problem with witchcraft and sorcery in Saudi Arabia. The facts speak for themselves. Take, for example, this report from Arab News from this September, in which Laura Bashraheel wrote that "hardly a day passes without a local newspaper reporting the arrest of a sorcerer in the Kingdom".

Bashraheel believes that the high incidence of judicial activity is"indicative of the widespread meddling in sorcery". Sorcerers and others who profess magical powers are "rolling in dollars", she maintains, because "some weak-hearted people end up resorting to sorcerers to mend troubled marriages, ensure husbands remain faithful or cause harm to adversaries." She tells the cautionary tale of 28-year old Sara, who visited the house of an African witch-doctor - a “rotten place with a terrible stench”; he told her that her ex-financé had put a spell on her - and offered to remove it for a large sum of money. Another woman, Abeer Saleh "said some members of her family are so infatuated with magic that they act strange and perform nonsensical rituals." Bashraheel concludes that "people underestimate how serious a sin magic actually is."

Sin or not, it's undoubtedly nonsense. I can even - up to a point - sympathise with the austere guardians of the kingdom's Islamic purity when faced with the growing popularity of wizards, astrologers and faith-healers, many of whom are charlatans exploiting the vulnerable. Bashraheel's report gives several more examples of practices which combine (sacrilegiously, from the point of view of the religious authorities) Islamic traditions with occult and pagan survivals. For example, there are "sheikhs who cure those afflicted with magic by reciting verses of the Qur’an over Zamzam water, olive oil or honey which they then administer to those affected." Some of these people make a good living: they are, perhaps, the respectable face of sorcery, happily promoting bogus remedies for which there is not a jot of evidence.

Fortunately, the authorities are doing their best to combat the problem. As I reported in January, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice - the body which oversees the religious police and ensures conformity with Wahhabi standards in the country - has introduced a new anti-witch strategy. Previous cases had "revealed the spread of witchcraft and magic throughout the country" and thus the inadequacy of the current laws. The new plans were intended to produce a more coherent approach "by making legal and regulatory determinations, as well as clarify the burden of evidence for magic and witchcraft cases as being scientific and practical, while also increasing the number of those involved in combating such cases".

They sought, among other things, "a scientific definition to magical practices, and a model in order to help uncover such practices." A joint task-force was set up embracing the religious police and security agencies, encouraging them to work more closely together in the campaign against sorcery.

The experts were anxious "to protect the public from communication and television channels that promote magic" - partly through a publicity campaign warning about the dangers - and also expressed concerns about the Internet. As I noted at the time, if you ignore the supernatural dimension the plan sounds remarkably like the sort of government initiative we're used to hearing from New Labour: the same concerns with public protection, setting targets and the inherent dangers of new technology were all there, along with the usual rhetoric of getting tough and adopting an evidence-based approach.

Obviously, the priorities of the Saudi religious police are not our priorities: it is the un-Islamic nature of the sorcery that they object to, rather than its scientific impossibility. The penalties being imposed, obviously, are outrageous, the judicial process is open to widespread abuse and there have been cases of manifest injustice like that of Fawza Falih. I wouldn't want to detract from HRW's campaign. Nevertheless the non-existence of occult powers does not mean that there are no self-professed sorcerers claiming to possess such powers - there would seem to be many - or that they do not deserve to be shut down.

A campaign against witchcraft is not, of itself, proof that Saudi Arabia is stuck in "the middle ages". It may in fact be something like the opposite. The kind of people being targeted are, after all, not unique to Saudi Arabia or the Arab world in general. We have our own equivalents. Some of them, like Sibat, even have their own slots on TV, where they claim to contact the dead and invite viewers to call premium-rate phone lines. Fortune-tellers and psychics are a modern plague. But while the Saudis can set the fearsome religious police on them, we have to make do with Chris French and Derren Brown.

DNA: looking for the evidence

2009-11-24T19:59:00.006Z

Today's report (pdf) into the national DNA database by the Human Genetics Commission - the indepedent body charged with advising the government in such matters - is a very worthwhile document. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a thorough grounding in the history of the database and the current debate surrounding it. News coverage this morning focussed on two striking findings - suggestions (not exactly new) that the police were arresting people for no better reason than to give them an excuse to take their DNA, the claim that three quarters of all black men were now on the database. These are important issues, but there's much more.

The authors make a number of recommendations that, from my point of view, are disappointingly lame. They call for more regulation (has any report ever called for less regulation?) and they have little to say about the government's proposals to circumvent the Strasbourg ruling in S and Marper. But they also frame the debate in unusually clear terms, laying out precisely how it came about that Britain (or rather England) now has, per capita, by far the largest such database anywhere in the world.

Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? makes plain just how piecemeal and uninformed by either principle or evidence the growth of the database has been. Set up almost 15 years ago - under pre-existing legislation passed before DNA fingerprinting was even thought of - it has grown by steady accretion without ever having been debated properly in Parliament. One consequence of this is an "ambivalence" about what the main purpose of the database actually is. There's a distinct lack of evidence as to its "forensic utility" - how efficient is it when it comes to solving crimes or eliminating the innocent - or whether the rapid extension of the database has helped, or hindered, its usefulness. There has been "little concerted opposition" to the growth of the DNA database, not necessarily because of widespread enthusiasm, but because there has been surprisingly little discussion of any kind.

The result has been "function creep", and the growth of the database has become an end in itself. And all this, the report repeatedly stresses, has come about with very little in the way of informed public discussion. There are, moreover, "significant concerns that have never been fully addressed".

No-one doubts that having a DNA database containing records of habitual criminals is a valuable tool for fingering the guilty. Even I wouldn't want to dismantle it entirely. Nevertheless, concentration on a few high-profile and thus unusual cases distorts the public's perception of the issues. Not least, it tends to obscure the fact that, by and large, the police used to manage perfectly well before DNA fingerprinting was ever thought of. It's far from obvious, in any event, that a large database, containing the details of everyone who has ever been arrested, is more effective than one narrowly focussed on those who have actually been convicted. It will help to solve some extra crimes, but the cost in storage and administration is far from negligible - and these resources might have been spent on other crime-detection or prevention initiatives. The argument for an arrest-based system only makes sense if you believe that there are a large number of lifestyle criminals who consistently manage to avoid being convicted. There's also an argument that the database is a deterrent, but that case is rarely made in public, and (as the report notes) there is as yet no evidence to support it.

Attachment to a mega-database distorts police practice and fundamentally alters the relationship between the citizen and the state. That this is so emerges clearly from this passage:

A retired senior police officer ... described his own early training, which emphasised the seriousness of depriving a citizen of their liberty by using the common law or statutory powers of arrest, and the preference, in the light of this, for alternative measures, such as reporting a suspect for summons by a magistrate, unless the offence was very serious or the suspect likely to abscond. Then he continued:

“It is obvious … that the system I have described no longer prevails. It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so … It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained: samples can be obtained after arrest but not if there is a report for summons. It matters not, of course, whether the arrest leads to no action, a caution or a charge, because the DNA is kept on the database anyway.”

It's a remarkable statement, not just because of what it says about the DNA database, but of what it says about how things have changed in the past couple of decades. We are all suspects now.

But there are more subtle forces at work, too. The report suggests that "by shaping the context in which it is used, DNA-based forensic policing produces the conditions for establishing acceptance of its own legitimacy and for increasing the criminal justice system’s dependence upon it." A ratchet effect is introduced, making each subsequent extension more difficult to resist. And it has a distorting effect on other parts of the criminal justice system. "A challenging finding," it argues,

would be not merely that DNA analysis has entered the context of crime management and investigation but that its introduction has been able to shape the legal, operational and political context itself: the way that a decision to create a national DNA database can result in changes to police practice, to the likelihood and procedure of arrest, to decisions about which crimes are investigated, to the way crimes are committed and even to the sorts of crimes that are committed.

Pandora's Box, when opened, often turns out to contain Schrödinger's Cat.

In other words, the feedback between technological development, policing practice and ethico-legal acceptability creates the conditions for further developments that, as we become committed to them in turn, take us progressively further away from the alternative approaches that were equally possible at an earlier stage.

Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) told us that it was "aware of anecdotal evidence that police may drop investigations if DNA evidence is not found at the crime scene."

A potential scandal, if true. A lot of the evidence, both for and against the NDNAD, is anecdotal. Hard evidence is hard to come by.

Here's an interesting quote from Dr Ruth McNally :

People whose profiles are on the database are the ‘pre-suspects’ … the first to be suspected (and eliminated) whenever a new crime scene profile is entered onto the database. In this respect they occupy a different space within the criminal justice system from the rest of the population; they are under greater surveillance and, with the advent of familial searching, this differential status can be extended to their relatives too.

I was quite alarmed by one of the recommendations in the report - that members of the police, and anyone else professionally involved in crime investigations, should have their DNA taken and stored on the database "as a condition of employment". This is presented as the police living up to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" soundbite they so often trot out in defence of whatever measure of surveillance or security they are justifying or seeking - and the reluctance of the police to take this step, noted by the authors, is certainly interesting. But the idea strikes me as profoundly dangerous. Firstly, it would represent a further extension of the database at a time when we should be trying to reduce it. Second, once the principle of DNA sampling as a condition of employment, it would surely be extended - initially to all those working with children and "vulnerable adults", or in other sensitive occupations (including, no doubt, private security). It would be the first step towards a universal database.

Worst of all, the move would undermine the idea - already under pressure, and more honoured in the breach - that the national DNA database is a tool of criminal investigation, rather than a vague and blanket monitoring of the population.

In a mildly entertaining passage towards the end, the report's authors try to anatomise the debate surrounding DNA. The identify five broad positions. "Forensic utilitarians" are mainly interested in the database's effectiveness - they are "evidence-based". "Negative libertarians" believe as a matter of principle that the database should be as circumscribed as possible. By contrast, "securitarians" (a great word) believe that the more powers the police have, the better. "Proportionalists" think in terms of a delicate balancing act between privacy and public protection, while "personalists" keep changing their mind. (Putting it more politely, the report notes that "this group recognises, and may themselves demonstrate, how abstract arguments and scientific evidence can be influenced by people’s beliefs and emotions.")

No prizes for guessing which group the Heresiarch belongs to.

Palin's prospects

2009-11-23T17:55:00.006Z

After a lengthy hiatus - ever since she left the governor's mansion in July - Sarah Palin is now back in the land of Tweets, with a new page decorated with a map of the US coloured Republican red (not so odd: back in the 18th century, red was the Tory colour in Britain, too), a cartoon moose captioned "Go Rogue with Sarah" and - obviously - a copy of her book. The Tweets themselves are as you might expect, a combination of the strident and the syruppy. There are gushing messages of thanks to her loyal supporters ("Good folks have been lined up outside... UR inspiring!"). She's "excited to meet Indiana folks who want to read about solutions to US challenges". She's evidently trying to patch things up with John McCain: "spoke w/John yestrdy;he truly is a hero & thx for shout out on the book!" Her strange obsession with blocking healthcare reform continues ("horrible govt healthcare takeover"). She spells "tonight", "tonite" (it's only one extra letter). She has had a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to meet Billy Graham: "The patriarch's message of faith is needed in US today more thn ever".

Palin, of course, long ago descended into self-parody. She was once a genuine political phenomenon who, despite shortcomings (including inexperience and a lack of philosophical sophistication) did manage to get things done. Her pitch of being an ordinary "hockey mom" sorting out complacent and out-of-touch politicians had an element of truth. Her achievement in becoming governor of Alaska was remarkable in itself; more remarkable was that, for two years, she appeared to be doing a good job. That should have been enough. But for the intervention of last year's presidential election, she would still be in the governor's mansion, gearing herself for re-election, still a local heroine. Now she trudges round the bleaker parts of America signing books.

A typical Palin book-signing. More pictures on Mudflats.

Gary Younge claims that "She had a thin record when she was picked to run as vice-president" and that her "rise to prominence, from little-known governor to one of the most popular and arguably most charismatic Republicans in the country in just a year, has been startling." But in fact it is her fall, rather than her rise, that needs to be accounted for. She had a perfectly good record as governor, and if she had stuck to it could have been - perhaps in a few years' time - an effective candidate. True, she was little-known outside Alaska - but then in 1992 Bill Clinton was little-known outside Arkansas, and a couple of years ago not many people had heard of Barack Obama. Palin was charismatic in her Convention speech and many believed that a new political star had arrived. Her resignation speech a few months later was so embarrassing it almost certainly destroyed the last serious chance of resurrecting her political career.

What has happened to her is a tragedy on several levels. For herself first of all: she has exchanged power and regard for money and celebrity, and in the process rendered herself more-or-less irrelevant. The greater her fame, the more adoring the fans, the less credibility she possesses. She has become the leading character in an increasingly bizarre soap-opera, a professional entertainer rather than a politician. From a potential Thatcher she has sunk to the condition of Ann Widdecombe or even Christine Hamilton. She has also become much more ideological, the spokeswoman for a Republican fundamentalism that she did not originally espouse. Or at least didn't make much fuss about. The almost Survivalist aversion to government, the uber-religiosity (which sits so oddly with her chaotic domestic life), the extreme narrowness of outlook are part of the Palin persona that developed after she was introduced to national politics. She appears to have adopted as her personality, wholesale, the caricature that her opponents created for her. The original Palin, hard-working, level-headed and bi-partisan, has vanished.

It's not obvious why this has happened. Sexism probably has something to do with it. And Naomi Wolf might be on to something in Saturday's Times when she suggests that when Palin became candidate for VP she was taken over by the same people who gave us George W Bush.

When the McCain campaign professionals finally step forward in the second half of the book, they treat her like a Stepford vice-presidential candidate. They buy her beautiful clothes and have her turn in front of the mirrors while they style her: but they hand her a copy of a statement they’ve crafted about her daughter’s pregnancy — putting feelings in words she doesn’t share — and when she tries to edit them, they’ve already released their version to the national media. They keep her from calling her press contacts. They stop her from staying near supporters on the rope lines; they hustle her away from the special-needs children in wheelchairs into the private plane. They make her wear $70 pantyhose. They try to tell her what she can and cannot eat. This is not a vice-presidential campaign — and I say that as someone who has worked for the Vice-President in such a campaign in 2000. It is the high-level grooming of a political geisha.

Her job, in that campaign, was to speak to, and for, the Republican base (like John Prescott, almost) and such was her inexperience that she was happy to go along with being used as a puppet - for a while, at least. She became, for a time, extremely popular, but the price to be paid was the destruction, not just of her political credibility, but of her as a politician. As governor of Alaska, she actually did things and was treated as a serious decision-maker. As candidate, she said what she was told to say, wore what she was told to wear - and was rewarded with derision. She was a good instinctive politician (how else can we explain her ascent from nowhere to state governorship?) but a bad actress, and it was acting that was required of her.

In their desire to hold onto the "base", Republican strategists created a pseudo-candidate indistinguishable from one that might have been invented by the elitist liberals she devotes so much of her time these days to ridiculing. She found herself typecast, as her juvenile avatar Carrie Prejean has more recently been, as Bible Barbie. Yet her personal story and homespun style was genuinely appealing. Gary Younge claims that "the very things that liberal commentators ridicule her for – being inarticulate, unworldly, simplistic and hokey – are the very things that make her attractive to her base." That's a tendentious way of putting it. Her supporters, rather, are prepared to overlook these glaring faults, even to interpret her shortcomings as proof of a conspiracy against her, because they share her strong convictions - God and country - and see in her struggle with life and the establishment their own daily battles writ large. Indeed, every time she is taunted she becomes more popular because it reaffirms the (not entirely mistaken) view that the deeply held values of a sizable section of the population are being disparaged.

To that extent she does indeed speak to "the thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment" (Younge again) of America's white working class - which is at least as marginalised politically as ours is. But this does not necessarily mean that large numbers of people actually want to vote for her. In fact, it may be a mistake to look upon the Sarah Palin phenomenon as political at all (although it is to a large extent anti-politics). Her attraction for her fanbase, now queuing for her book-signings, is one of solidarity and sympathy (and, for the men, a strong admixture of sex). In this she resembles a tough-but-vulnerable Country and Western singer - Dolly Parton, say - more than she does any politician.

Wolf thinks that Palin "is going to be around, and she is going to be a force". I disagree: around, yes, but scarcely a force. Not a political force, anyway. There is a life - and a career - outside politics for failed polticians willing to perform as parodies of themselves: Tony Benn, Ann Widdecombe, Al Gore (perhaps even Bill Clinton falls into this category). But they were all something to begin with. What Palin was and what she has become are so different that her current incarnation strikes a duff note. And you can tell from her faltering public performances - so unlike the confidence she exuded when she was first talent-spotted by the McCain team - that she doesn't really believe it herself. In any case, she lacks the articulacy and clarity to be the demogogue that Naomi Wolf fears. She'll continue to make money - she has enough die-hard followers to keep her in lipstick - and the soap opera will continue to prove irresistible. But it's just entertainment.

On the House

2009-11-22T13:45:00.004Z

Desperately trying to cash in on the Belle de Jour fallout, the News of the World carries an interview with an artificially busty 25-year old who - strapped for cash as a student - threw over a potential legal career for the easy money of the "high-class" escorting circuit.

"Six years later she has £300,000 in the bank, a posh North London flat, a soft-top sports car and a boob job," we learn. "Stunning" Paige Ashley tells of posing as the wife of a businessman in his sixties - £30,000 for a week - and a £20,000 night with three Arab plutocrats in Abu Dhabi. It sounds - and is clearly meant to - sleazy rather than glamorous. Paige is full of the usual regrets about her champagne lifestyle, wishing she was still poor and honest. "I'd love to turn back the clock and be slumming it in a bedsit."

And yet of course these trinkets are endearing...

Paige's parents, whose refusal to help her out when she started university was, she claims, responsible for her fall into vice, took the news in their stride. Her mother's attitude was "as long as they wear a condom"; dad "shook his head and got on with life". It makes you wonder.

Anyway, this was the bit that caught my eye:

Her worst bookings with her new agency have been in Britain - with MPs. She said: "My job has taken me right to the heart of Westminster. I've had sex with about a dozen MPs at different times, all of them Conservatives and all what I'd term upper-class.

"They seem to think they're being naughty by spending £5,000 to have a night with me. They're rubbish in bed - all fingers and fumbling. I find them pretty distasteful.

"Funnily enough, since the expenses scandal broke I haven't met any."

Why not? Were they putting her on expenses?