Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

If some of the claims getting published these days is anything to go by, they seem never to have had to submit an expense claim as a subordinate working in some company or indeed, perhaps more appropriately, the civil service.

Although the vast majority claim to have kept their expenses claims “within the rules” that’s not really the issue and claims that they have “done nothing wrong” isn’t relevant. The issue is that the rules themselves are, in many cases, quite ridiculous.

For example, it would be quite convenient had I been able to claim expenses for a home that was closer to work. Clearly this would have meant that I’d have been more available to work late and so on. Yet, of course, I can’t do that because there’s no way the company would pay for that. I see that Peter Mandelson has claimed for work done to repair his roof as it was leaking. Ironically, Peter is one of the more honest of the politicians yet the thing is: it’s his roof, so why should he be able to claim it as an expense?

What is clear is that there is a need for politicians to have a home near to Westminster and it’s reasonable that expenses for this should be paid for. After all, it is (in principle) a temporary job and moreover they also need to live in their own constituencies where, in effect, their true home is. What’s not reasonable is that all MPs should be claiming for this second home because obviously many already live in London and it’s also unreasonable for them to be able to constantly switch which is their main and their second home which seems, in most cases, to be done solely to work the system.

More generally they also need to recognise that it’s unreasonable for them to be the only arbitrators for their own salaries. Whilst recognising that it was far from perfect the simplest way of doing this seems to have been to tie their salaries down to specific civil service ranks and perhaps while they’re at it, follow the rules on expenses that the civil servants do.

Freedom of expression is one of those things that we kind of just assume we have in western societies but in reality there are generally limits to it.

For example, the issue of Madeline McCann is freely spoken about in Portugal yet in the UK a range of comments are censored. Joana on her own blogspot blog clearly is none too impressed about the British media on this one. After all, in Portugal the law states that

1. Everyone shall possess the right to freely express and publicise his thoughts in words, images or by any other means, as well as the right to inform others, inform himself and be informed without hindrance or discrimination.
2. Exercise of the said rights shall not be hindered or limited by any type or form of censorship.

Seems clear, doesn’t it? Well, the problem is that what that particular law doesn’t allow for is how individual publishers operate. After all, it is up to the publisher to decide whether or not to publish stuff on their site. What that law is saying that anyone can publish anything; it doesn’t say that an individual publisher is required to publish everything. After all, Joana moderates comments on her site: is that not the very same censorship that she accuses the British media of?

In America, the first amendment is similarly clear on freedom of expression in that it states

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

However, that’s been modified somewhat over the centuries and notably does NOT apply to commercial speech so, for example, it doesn’t allow all and sundry to send out junk mail to everyone. Having said that, the freedom of expression is taken very seriously and other laws and administrative procedures have had to change to allow for us, for example, full details of ongoing trials are published as they happen.

In theory Europe as a whole has a similar freedom of expression courtesy of the Human Rights Convention which states in Article 10:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In many respects this is an updating of the American first amendment, or at least the freedom of expression bits are. As always, lawmakers tack on seemingly unrelated clauses thus whilst we would see freedom of religion as being separate from freedom of expression, clearly in the 1700s the Americans didn’t. Likewise, the business about not restricting the licensing of broadcasting enterprises isn’t altogether appropriate these days with the likes of Youtube.

Interestingly though the second paragraph in clarifying this freedom does not list the prohibition of publication of current court proceedings as being one of those things that isn’t allowed as this does not appear to affect the “authority and impartiality” of the judiciary as shown by the American example. However, yet again that doesn’t mean that publishers are required to publish everything that comes their way, merely that they are allowed to do so if they wish to.

So where does that place our freedom of expression in the UK? Well, the Human Rights Convention is enacted in UK law. So, the publisher would be permitted to publish those comments of Joana but would not be required to do so. However, it does suggest that the action in taking down our own sites last week was NOT legal as our right of freedom of expression as per Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention would override the reporting restriction ie the contempt of court action was itself illegal.

There’s been an ongoing debate for a number of years now as to whether or not bloggers are the same as journalists some of the time, all of the time, or never but thanks to moves from an unexpected quarter that debate is starting to become a moot point.

In fact, myself and particularly Wendy have been legally declared as being the equivalent of journalists by none other than the Old Bailey in London when they issued a missive to us in connection with a contempt of court action regarding a reporting restriction on a current court case. I’m not naming the case in question here because it isn’t relevant to the current discussion and would merely detract from this discussion.

It is interesting though that prior to that particular missive it would not have been possible for us to obtain details of any court reporting restrictions because we did not qualify as journalists and therefore couldn’t obtain these from the courts as our colleagues over at journalism.co.uk discovered when they tried getting similar information themselves last December. Thus there was the ludricuous situation where we could be held in contempt because of a ruling that we were unable to discover (and, no, they aren’t on the court website).

As it’s the weekend, we can’t try out our new categorisation but hope to give it a spin in the coming week.

One consequence of this change in categorisation is that we felt it necessary to begin publishing our blogs in America and thereby gain some protection of our right to free speech. This isn’t because we felt that we should be able to continue “publishing” the information that was felt to be in contempt of court because now that we are aware that there is a “reporting restriction” and that it applies to us, we’re content to leave that information off the blog until it is legally acceptable to publish it. However, we were sadly disappointed in the attitude of our former UK ISP who took down ALL of our sites when only one comment on one post on one blog apparently triggered the contempt action; our American based registrar supported our freedom of speech. So, as we would like to retain the freedom to express our opinions we have moved the blogs outside the jurisdiction of the English authorities.

Incidently, I have delibrately omitted any links from outside articles from this post to avoid legal issues that were raised by a specific case but are really not relevant to the discussion here. Regretably, it would appear that all of the references which I can dig up on this one refer to that particular case.

One of the principal aims of the Northern Ireland education minister is to end the 11+ selection system and thus kill off the grammar school system.

However, her thinking is extremely flawed. Yes, socialism is all about equality of opportunity but it seems to me that it’s more than that: it’s about giving the opportunities to those who are able to benefit from them. Her banning of selection tests removes the ability of the education system to allocate places on the basis of ability rather than on the basis of how much money one’s parents have.

Whilst clearly it makes some sense to allocate places on the basis of distance from the school what that does is raise property prices in areas near good schools as it already has done in England. Thus the ability of a working class family to send their child to one of these “good schools” is severely diminished as they are priced out of the housing market near these schools very quickly.

Making the primary selection criteria that the child is entitled to free school meals just seems like a joke. What that really means is that those in relatively deprived areas get priority over those in areas a little better off however it also discriminates against the many families who could claim but won’t claim free school meals on principle. Taking that particular criteria what seems sure to happen is that, by and large, those who would have gone to a grammar school will go to the secondary school instead and vice versa. That’s a system that’s sure to fail everyone. How long will it take the less able pupils to do the typical one or two hours a night grammar school homeworks? Three? Four? In reality it’s not going to take long before they fall behind. Similarly in the secondary school system there just aren’t the mechanisms in place to stretch the pupils. Thus we will have a school system that will be suitable for nobody.

However, the main problem with removing selection is that those that can afford it will simply move into the private school system which seems set for a major expansion on the back of her “no academic selection” policy. Without a grammar school system many children from working class families who would have benefited from a grammar school (which is, after all, effectively a private schooling but without the cost) will lose out as will we all.

Of course, banning selection at 11 doesn’t remove selection. In France, everyone is guaranteed a place in university which seems a grand socialist ideal and so it is. The problem is that it results in a dropout rate of 50% in the first year (and is up to 70%) compared to only 8% in the UK.  Surely it can’t make sense to raise expectations unrealistically as they do in France?

The working class need grammar schools. Yes, the selection process isn’t perfect but let’s not kill off the biggest educational advantage that they’ve ever had by wiping out grammar schools.

Frankly I figured that the relabelling of “unemployment offices” in the UK some years ago as “job centres” as just a PR gimmic by the government but it would appear that there’s a little more behind it than I’d thought.

As y’all know I’m technically between jobs at the moment. However, I hadn’t really thought about myself as being unemployed until Wendy pointed out that I should probably be off claiming some sort of unemployment benefit. These days, of course, it’s called jobseekers allowance to distance it both from unemployment and benefits but ’tis still the old unemployment benefit office that you go to if you want to claim it, so off we went last week.

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.