vendredi 15 novembre 2019

Government Incentives

Government Incentives
Two ways to govern a country are to do what you think is best for the country or two plunder it to make you and your associates rich. If you choose the latter, à la south America, you obviously need passpaorts or rights of residence from/in other countries. UK national debt since 2007 has risen from 68% of GDP to 85% of GDP, money borrowed by the government while public services such as the police, fire brigade and NHS have all suffered cuts in budget and services have degraded. So who got the money and for what? Look at candidates for the general election in this light and draw your own conclusions.

lundi 11 novembre 2019

Standards Of Information

Standards Of Information
In a previous post I said that I think that the British Standards Institution should create a standard for information integrity to which media might sign up or not, as they wished, with the obvious connotations. I feel that even more strongly now.

Institutions are not just bricks, mortar and committees but can be abstract as, for instance, in the British reputed insistence on fair play in sport. That, at one time, was an accepted British characteristic and, as such, an abstract institution. As an aside, a French IT colleague once said to me that the English breakfast was not really a meal but an instituiion. Something simuilar, in my youth, was true of The Times newspaper; it rigourously separated news reporting from opnion so that you knew which was which in any article you were reading and could make up your mind accordingly. Again we have an abstract institution, in this example on information integrity. And, in times past, the BBC was viewed by millions throughout the world as a medium through which they could learn the truth when they could not rely on their national media. That may still be true of foreign news coverage but…...

It’s a personal view, but I think that all these previously respected abstract institutions have more recently failed to live up to their billing, generally quite demonstrably so. The void that needs to be filled is one of integrity. There are practical difficulties as I know from personal experience in chairing an IT standards committee at BSI in 1996. Standards typically take around 2 years to formulate, for practical not bureaurocratic reasons, but can be fast-tracked in around 9 months (as my own committee did). Any standard implies at least and may specifically state tests that have to be passed to meet the standard and some very simple tests on reasonable attempts to verify facts are possible. Indeed, the assumed professuonal code for journalists implies most of the tests. I think we need such a standard on the integrity of published information as soon as possible. Without it, the population at large is at the mercy of very clever manipulators and the considerable sums needed to employ them. If you disagree, are you happy to be manipulated or what would you suggest ?


jeudi 7 novembre 2019

Birthday And Dark Money

My Birthday
My birthday in Scotland was great. I’d booked to fly by Ryanair for economic reasons and also because that was the most convenient flight, although the flight was to Edinburgh rather tha my eventual destination of Glasgow. L had the usual caveats one has with Ryanair but, in the event, all went well both coming and going. I spent the afternoon happily and interestingly after my early arrival with friends in Edinburgh and then continued to Glasgow and my family in time to see my grand-daughter, my daughter and son-in-law in the early evening. Mission accomplished!



I was taken out by Nat and Andy to lunch on my birthday, the following Monday, to a tapas restaurant which was excellent and spent the rest of the 10 days with my family doing nothing much of consequence other than visiting the Kelvingrove museum/art gallery and the house for art lovers of MacKenzie. Both were good experiences but the best experiences were with my family. I also did some shopping (my daughter characterised it as intensive) to get items hard or expensive to find in France and presents for my French friends here. I’m pleased to say that all the presents were well received, plus one to come, a kind of French Burns evening which we will do with the haggis I brought back. All good, photos included.





 


Back to reality in France has proved easy. Daniel and Evelyne picled me up from Marseilles airport and I was home in under two hours with all my merchandise. It took me 2-3 days to get myself together but then life resumed as normal. I had arrived in Marseilles somewhat to my surprise in the middle of a rain storm as in the six weeks prior to my departure we had had only 5cm of rain in 6 weeks. What the hell, the rain was welcome.

Now, having got myself together, I’m back into the morass of documentation demanded by the French for the right to stay and for citizenship. I’m also, it seems, into a general election because I still have the right to vote in UK elections, not that in my case that will serve much purpose When I was in the UK my constituency was Reading east, which was swingable; I now find myself, for reasons unknown, in Wokingham which has something like a 20,000 Tory majority. Nonetheless I will try to reduce that by at least one vote.

I’ve no idea what the outcome of the election will be but hope that it will be for the good of the UK, which is most certainly not Johnson in my opinion. My hopes rest on one statistic that I’ve seen, that if 40 percent of Remainers vote tactically then Johnson doesn’t win. All the media messages to Remainers are to forget party loyalty and vote tactically so I have to hope they do that correctly. Fingers crossed.

Dark Money
I’m increasingly preoccupied by the directive given to the Watergate investigative journalists to «follow the money». Dark money is money that arrives somewhere from no currently identifiable source. We know that it played a part and was used illegally (and unprosecuted) in the Leave campaign and that Boris Johnson is sitting on and refusing to publish a report that would at least shed some light on the matter.

We also know that it arrived in northern Ireland and that northern Ireland has different electoral rules to the rest of the UK. That may surprise some people but the source of money used in democratic electoral campaigns has to be declared in all of the UK apart from northern Ireland. The obvious question here is why that situation persists and the only obvious answer is because it suits some power-seeking group to have it that way.

The EU directive due to come into force next year aimed at reducing tax avoidance will, incidentally, curtail the movement of dark money, including money being laundered. Officially, countries in the developed economies are united in trying to prevent money laundering so why are anomalies like northern Ireland allowed to continue? As suggested above, it must suit some power-seeking group; it also, incidentally, suits the funding of the IRA. Which opens up the question of security and terrorism and what security agencies know about the movement of dark money and what governments allow them to say and do about it. Now enlightenment there could be really interesting, such as what happens when dark money is useful to the government.