The UK General Election campaign could start as soon as next week, and it is already clear that one of the battlegrounds will be the relationship between the citizen and society. Both parties are keen to demonstrate that they don’t agree with Margaret Thatcher’s adage that “There is no such thing as society”. Yesterday, the Conservative Party set out their “Big Society” ideas, including a new “neighbourhood army” of 5,000 professional community organisers.
As Labour puts the finishing touches to its election manifesto, sources familiar with the process say that a new big idea is taking shape. The proposal is to extend the concept of “earned autonomy” in public services down to individuals. Labour plans to put every citizen who has completed full-time education into prison. Citizens will then be able to earn their way out, by getting a job and using their spare time for voluntary service to the community. When they demonstrate that they are not terrorists, and when they can prove that they do not have any kind of mental illness that predisposes them towards a crime, they will move first to an open prison from which they can get a job, and eventually to their own homes. People close to Ministers say that they have been impressed with how well this approach has worked with asylum seekers, who start off imprisoned until they can demonstrate their value to society, and think that this approach would be popular in seats where Labour is alarmed by the rising popularity of the British National Party.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a minister familiar with the details of the manifesto said:
Hard working families will welcome these steps. Honest, law abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Where individuals demonstrate the capacity and capability to do more we want to work with them to test how greater individual control can deliver more effectively and more efficiently. We want a new relationship between the citizen and government, one based on a partnership approach to delivery. It is not sufficient to say that citizens should have more control and freedom; this is a partnership and citizens need to be clear as to what they are asking us for, and how changes will benefit everyone. We are ready to cede control where individuals can demonstrate that they will use those freedoms effectively, but greater control must be balanced with responsibility and accountability.
Owen Barder
1 April, 2010
When Google decided to set up a censored version of its search engine in China in 2006, I was among those who criticised the company for its decision (here and here).
As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing (“Don’t Be Evil”) and does another will eventually suffer from the contradiction between their values and their actions.
So I applaud their announcement today that they are taking a new approach in China and their threat to pull out of the market.
(Ironically, Google’s own blog is censored here in Ethiopia. You cannot access blogspot blogs.)
Google is standing up to dictatorship and speaking out for free speech, and putting this ahead of their immediate commercial interests.
It is hard to imagine other companies standing up for their – and our – values in this way. (Can you imagine Microsoft withdrawing their Bing search engine instead of producing sanitized results?)
Bloggers are quick to criticise when companies do the wrong thing. So let’s be equally unstinting in our praise when they do things right.
Good on yer, Google.
Martin Wolf in the Financial Times says he is calling for “a debate” about immigration but his article is, in truth, a thinly-veiled diatribe against immigration on the grounds that it harms the economy, the environment and society.
The most important step in his argument is the first one. Wolf says:
I, for one, have no difficulty with arguing that immigration is a privilege, not a right. Most people agree.
The assertion that “immigration is a privilege not a right” seems to me to be the wrong starting point. I would begin with an opposite premise that seems to me to be much more basic and compelling: “The burden of proof rests on those who would restrict human freedom.” If someone wants to move from one part of the planet to another, to live and work and raise their family, then we ought to have a very good reason before we set up a system to stop them.
To construct his argument, Martin Wolf wants us to believe both the following claims:
- Immigration has a negative impact on the existing population; and
- We ought to pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than the interests of the migrants.
On the first leg of this argument, Martin Wolf (under the guise of “calling for a debate”) claims that immigration is harmful to the economy, environment and society of the existing population. As it happens, I don’t agree with any of this, though since that is not the point I want to focus on, I shall restrict myself to pointing to the economic and social success of countries that have been open to large-scale immigration. But while I think the first leg of the argument is wrong, it is the second leg of the argument that I most want to challenge.
I doubt if anyone would seriously contest the view that even if if immigration causes some harm to the existing population, this harm is in total is far less than the very significant benefits to the migrants themselves. So the case for restricting the freedom of people to live where they choose can only be made if you accept that we should pay more attention to the interests of the existing population than to the interests of the migrants.
There is no question that it is a widely-held view that we should give more weight to the interests of the existing population. For example, Wolf says:
My view is that the interests of the existing citizens are of decisive weight, though we should also place some weight, too, on the interests of immigrants.
Perhaps I was born with faulty wiring, but I simply do not understand this view.
I believe we should give equal weight to the rights and interests of every human being. The idea that the interests of people born in our own country should weigh more in our moral calculus than the interests of people born elsewhere is, in my view, indefensible. To say that we will less attention to the interests of another human because they happen to have been born far away is organised racism, directly comparable with the pass laws under apartheid.
The United States Declaration of Independence asserts:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence does not limit its assertion of equality to people born within a single country. Nor is the pursuit of happiness bounded by national borders created by man. (This is just as well, as in the period following US independence one third of Europe’s population migrated to the Americas.)
Of course, the view that we should give equal weight to the interests of all human beings is unlikely to get very far in political systems designed to represent the interests of the citizens within existing borders. But just because a political system makes it possible to ignore the rights and interests of a group of people who are weakly represented in it does not mean that it is morally right to do so.
My view is that the burden of proof lies with those who would restrict the freedom of people to live anywhere they choose. This argument would require, at minimum, weighing up the costs and benefits of a restriction to show that we are better off in total if we curtail this freedom. A case could only be made by placing more weight on the interests of the existing population than on the interests of other people. I understand that there is a a widely-held view that we should do exactly that, but I nonetheless think it is profoundly wrong. When we weigh up the argument for a policy to restrict people’s freedom based on the benefits that such a restriction will bring, we should place equal weight on the rights and interests of all people, and not privilege the interests of some people who happen to be like ourselves. The case for restricting immigration rests on denying the equal humanity of people born abroad. I hope that, over time, we will come to see this with the same moral outrage as we now view slavery and apartheid.
When I was a teenager, I visited Berlin, and read the grafitti on the Berlin Wall that said “No wall can stand forever”. Now on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we look back with horror at the way the wall was used to keep people in. Perhaps in another twenty years we will look back with equal disgust at the walls we build today to keep people out.
I’ve just heard Jack Straw tell the Today programme that one of Mr Blair’s great successes was to persuade the United States at Gleneagles to increase aid to Africa.
The transcript of the briefing by US officials on Air Force One going home from Gleneagles says different.
One of Tony Blair’s blind spots – as I think he would be among the first to admit – is that he has tended to underestimate the importance and value of effective and lasting institutions. As he contemplates his legacy he seems now to be coming round to understanding this.
Looking back at the successes of previous governments, we remember mainly the institutions they built as their lasting legacies. Lloyd George gave us national insurance; Clem Attlee gave us the National Health Service. We don’t remember Andrew Bonar Law much, because he built nothing. Harold Wilson famously cited the creation of the Open University as his greatest achievement.
This Government’s most notable institutional changes have been devolution, the independence of the Bank of England and the partial reform of the House of Lords: planned in opposition and implemented soon after the 1997 election. In Government, the PM has taken the view that the priority is to put in place the right people to take the right decisions. I think this is a manifestation of New Labour’s philosophy that they would go with “what works”. They would govern with pragmatism, not ideology; and that meant appointing the right people and getting on with it rather than constructing effective and long-lasting institutions that might limit their discretion.
In that context, the Prime Minister’s speech on 27 January in Davos made interesting reading, because it is all about the need for more effective international institutions:
This is my major reflection on 10 years of trying to meet these challenges, 10 years in which, as a deliberate policy, Britain has been at the forefront, for better or worse, of each of these major global issues. Interdependence is an accepted fact. It is giving rise to a great yearning for a sense of global purpose, underpinned by global values, to overcome challenges, global in nature.
But we are woefully short of the instruments to make multilateral action effective. We acknowledge the interdependent reality. We can sketch the purpose and describe the values. What we lack is capacity, capability, the concerted means to act. We need a multilateralism that is muscular. Instead, too often, it is disjointed, imbued with the right ideas but the wrong or inadequate methods of achieving them.
None of this should make us underestimate what has been done. But there is too often a yawning gap between our description of an issue’s importance and the matching capability to determine it. … Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.
This emphasis on the need for more effective multilateral institutions is both right and important. As the world become more interdependent, there are more and more choices that we need to make collectively. These include the provision of global public goods, collective security, and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are fairly shared so that progress can be sustained. As I think the Prime Minister is now saying, if we do not have legitimate and effective institutions to take these decisions, we will find that we have no way to meet these needs and aspirations, nor to resolve the world’s tensions.
Britain has quite a specific long-term interest in this too. We are witnessing the rise of new world powers such as China, India and Brazil. I personally welcome this, though there is a lot of angst around about what it means for us. One thing it almost certainly means is that in 20 years time, Britain will no longer be a major world power with the same amount strategic influence at the most important forums such as the G8 and the Security Council. If and when that happens, we will depend on the existence of effective multilateral institutions to protect our interests, and those of other middle-ranking powers. It seems to me that we should be using the power that we have today, while we still have it, to put in place those institutions and build them up so that they are effective and legitimate in the future. That is a legacy for which future generations in Britain may well thank us.
Two weeks in Club La Santa in Lanzarote. Feeling fitter, more tanned, and (oddly) a little heavier than when we left.
Take a look at Clive writing about Food Miles:
Food miles are useless. There is no doubt that transport intensity in the food supply system has been increasing – driven by forces of globalisation, consolidation in retailing, larger shops with more choice meeting demand for year-round supply, car-based shopping etc. But “food miles” are barely useful in capturing or articulating any of this interesting complexity.
Absolutely.
I heard Des Smith on the BBC this morning. He said:
“I was literally hung out to dry by Tony Blair”
It seems he said the same to the Scotsman.
I find it hard to believe that he was literally hung out to dry. Metaphorically, perhaps?
You would think a former head teacher would know what ‘literally’ means.
Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute writes:
Over the past couple of years there has been a growing consensus that conditionality does not work. … It has failed because imposing good policies on countries that don’t want to do them just results in countries taking the cash and then not doing the agreed policies. … Instead of conditionality, the approach should be to set minimum levels of governance and anti-corruption that countries must attain before receiving budgetary support – those countries are likely to absorb the money well and pursue good policies, thereby not needing the conditionality.
This is exactly right. (It is also what I argued in a presentation I gave in a meeting at the Africa Centre in December 2001, what the British Government set out in its policy paper of March 2005, and which I described at greater length here in December 2005.)
Alex goes on:
DFID currently pays lip-service to governance, but in practice just writes the cheque. In countries where money is likely to be misspent by government, that is a mistake. Instead money should be spent through local, domestic NGOs, and through other bottom-up mechanisms like aid vouchers.
I don't agree at all that DFID only pays lip-service to governance. DFID has just published an entire White Paper about Making Governance Work for the Poor. It has recently reallocated its aid in both Uganda and Ethiopia in response to concerns about governance. That is why DFID refuses to give budget support in countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe.
A new study has found that aid channeled into vaccination has had a significant effect on improving childhood vaccination rates in the poorest countries.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing in the current edition of The Lancet (pdf), have analyzed how funding provided by aid donors through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has raised the percentage of children receiving the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine between 1995 and 2004.
This independent assessment of the effect of GAVI on DTP3 coverage shows that GAVI has contributed to increased DTP3 coverage in countries with baseline DTP3 coverage of 65% or less at their first approval for GAVI funding. We estimate the cost to GAVI to be about $8·40–20 per additional child immunised. This estimate is close to the proposed cost to GAVI of $20 per additional immunised child.
Once again, immunization has been shown to be one of the most cost-effective interventions in development.
The Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation joined forces yesterday to fund the development of a green revolution in Africa (see washingtonpost.com)
The Africa program will begin with a relatively small Gates contribution of $100 million over five years, plus $50 million from Rockefeller, to fund development of more robust disease- and drought-resistant seeds for primary African foodstuffs, enhanced distribution networks for seed and fertilizer, and university-level training for African crop scientists.
The green revolution in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s – building on research started in the 1940s – transformed food production, incomes and kick started the industrialization of Asian economies. That too was the result of an investment by the Rockefeller Foundation, who commissioned Norman Borlaug to work on developing new wheat varieties and managing education campaigns to get the new varieties to farmers. Since 1970, wheat yields in India and Pakistan have grown ten-fold.
If the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation can repeat that success, it could make a very significant contribution to Africa’s future economic development and industrialisation.
Via: Pienso. More via the Gates
and Rockefeller
foundations
Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today:
To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.
Quite so. But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.
Another Britblog Roundup from Mr Worstall.
Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little:
Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.
The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal. Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money. In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses. So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?
A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance). About 40% of US aid is spent this way. Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted. We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop.
The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development. Technical cooperation has an important role to play. But we need to do it much better.
Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years. I know of what I speak.
The Times of India reports that the Human Resources Department of the Indian Government is opposed to the proposed $100 laptop
HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.
And The Register reports that the education ministry is far from convinced that this is a good use of funds:
The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "paedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."
The Indian Government is asking the right questions: Is this really the best use of $100 per child? Why is this right for developing countries, but not being rolled out in industrialized countries?
Like many others, I am perplexed by the determination of Nicholas Negroponte, whom I admire, to make this new laptop only available to large-scale government purchasers.
From the Center for Global Development website:
Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing countries can absorb and use effectively — and that large aid flows might even be harmful. Could a large increase in aid be “too much of a good thing?”In this essay, CGD Senior Program Associate Owen Barder disentangles the seven possible reasons why additional aid might not be effective. These include microeconomic effects (e.g. transactions costs), macroeconomic effects (e.g. ‘Dutch Disease’) and the impact on political economy (e.g. the ‘Resource Curse’). The paper looks at each possible constraint in turn.
The paper finds that there are indeed serious obstacles to effective use of increased aid, but than none is immutable. All of the constraints which limit the effective use of additional aid can be addressed by a relatively small set of practical improvements in the way that aid is provided and used. Donors have already committed themselves to a significant program of aid reform. If the measures to which donors are committed were consistently implemented, the seven constraints to effective aid absorption could be relaxed.
The paper concludes that, provided that increased aid is accompanied by reforms to the way aid is delivered, the capacity of developing countries to absorb and use aid should not be presented as a barrier to the increases in aid which would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
The US Congress is currently discussing an issue which sounds rather technical and dull but which could have profound implications for the future of the internet. If you care about whether the internet remains innovative, vibrant and open you should pay attention to the obscure-sounding question of net neutrality.
The issue is simple: should internet service providers be under an obligation to carry all network traffic without discrimination? Those in favour of net neutrality say that such a requirement is needed to protect the open, innovative nature of the net. Those against net neutrality say that market forces will ensure continued innovation and that legislating this requirement will stifle investment in new broadband services.
I have just heard Christopher Hitchens tell the BBC Politics UK program that
the job of the intellectual is to confront faith.
I admire Hitchens for his advocacy of secular, scientific and rational thought. (He calls himself a "anti-theist" rather than an atheist.)
Many people of faith regard it as important to try convince others of their ideas. (In some faiths, that is an essential activity of a believer.) The rest of us tend to be passive: after all, we believe in freedom to worship. But this creates an asymmetry: people of faith try to convert others, but those of us who do not believe do little to try to balance the argument. I am with Hitchens in thinking that we have to do more to confront faith. We should explain the origins of the supersitions that underpin religions, and use scientific evidence to challenge the claims. Unless we take on the argument, we risk losing it by default. Religion is not harmless, like astrology or Harry Potter books: it is a significant cause of conflict and individual tragedy.
A the Hay on Wye Festival last year, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchen discussed the proposed blasphemy laws. You can download an MP3 (lasting 78 minutes) of their discussion here. (Thanks to Dave Hoatson for recommending this.)
I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, and I wear plastic rather than leather shoes. I do this because I believe that animals have a rights, and that it is wrong to kill animals simply for pleasure.
I do not regard this as a purely personal choice: I would readily vote for a political party which was committed to making it a criminal offence to eat an animal for pleasure.
Even so I would have no hesitation in eating an animal if my life depended on it. To say that animals have rights is not the same as saying that they have the same rights as humans. (I would also have few qualms about a group of people killing and eating a fellow passenger in a shipwreck if there is no other way to survive. Rights can be trumped by other rights.)
I believe that the qualitities that attract moral consideration – essentially, consciousness and especially self-consciousness – are present in many animals but are more significant in humans than in guinea pigs and rats. I believe that a human being has a more signficant claim on our moral attention than a guinea pig.
I today signed ‘The People’s Petition‘ supporting the use of animals in medical research in the UK. The petition says
‘I believe that medical research is essential for developing new medical and veterinary treatments. I understand that finding safe and effective treatments and medicines requires some studies using animals.
I believe that medical research using animals, carried out to the highest standards of care and welfare, and where there is not alternative available, should continue in the UK.
I believe that people involved in medical research using animals have a right to work and live without fear of intimidation or attack.’
I do not support animal testing for cosmetics. But I believe that the good to mankind of medical research far exceeds the harm done to animals. I understand that animal models are not perfect measures of the risk and benefit to humans, but they are not, as the critics would have us believe, useless. They provide essential information that saves millions of lives and reduces suffering and disability. Even as a committed member of the vegetarian jihad, I therefore support the controlled use of animal testing.
Alex Tabarook has written an open letter on immigration from the economics community:
Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.. America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.
Economists from any political background are invited to sign. I agree, of course, and have emailed to say so (though I am far less eminent than many of the economists who have already signed up.)
Personally, I would go further. My sympathies are with Chris Dillow, who argues for free immigration. He makes this interesting point:
I’m not saying here that immigrants should have rights to welfare benefits. They have a liberty right to live where they like, not a claim right upon our money (ta, Norm). I suspect most hostility to immigration is based upon the failure to see this distinction.
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