Category Archives: Politics

Google having doubts about China?

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Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Has Google begun recalibrating its Evil Scale? If it hasn’t yet, it certainly seems to be considering it. Addressing reporters in Washington yesterday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that the company has compromised its principles by acceding to Chinese censorship demands and hinted that Google could adjust its stance in the country in the future. “We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense. It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path. It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.”

Quite a change, as GMSV observes, from CEO Schmidt’s confident tone when the original capitulation was announced. “We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one,” he said at the time. “From our perspective, we must comply with the local law, and indeed, we have all made commitments to the government that we will absolutely follow Chinese law.”

That Ken Loach film…

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… already has Britain’s reactionary newspaper columnists (including Michael Gove, one of Dave Cameron’s friends and relations) in a frenzy of indignation (though it seems that none of them has actually, er, seen the film). Their basic line is the hoary old one — that ‘our’ boys would never do anything nasty to people, like shooting them in the back, or clubbing them to death. (Try telling that to the relatives of the people who were shot dead by the Paras in the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry all those years ago.)

There’s a nice column in today’s Guardian by George Monbiot, in which he ingeniously draws a parallel between the Black and Tans who inadvertently persuaded my countrymen to support a war of independence, and what we are now finding out about the behaviour of the Americans in Iraq. And the moral? If you’re occupying someone else’s country, brutality comes with the territory.

My paternal grandfather was not a political animal. He believed in keeping his head down. But his views about the British were irrevocably shaped when he and his brother were dragged off a donkey cart in Connemara by a passing detachment of Tans who gave them a casual beating before going on their merry way. I expect that many ‘non-political’ Iraqis feel the same about the Yanks — and, who knows? — maybe about the Brits too.

Dave’s new friend

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From today’s Guardian…

One of Conservative leader David Cameron’s new breed of business backers is a millionaire landlord who has been accused of using ruthless tactics against tenants. Trevor Pears, 42, whose family owns 15,000 properties, is alleged to be driving out small shops in favour of supermarkets and forcing out tenants through legal loopholes.Mr Cameron is trying to boost his party by adopting green themes and criticising big business. He has accused supermarkets of using their financial muscle to drive small shops out of business. Mr Pears is among the property tycoons and hedge fund traders who put up almost £500,000 for his leadership campaign. The tycoon has been heavily criticised by small shopkeepers in north London, where his firm owns rows of premises in Fortess Road, Kentish Town…

Such a nice friend, too. For example:

The Pears empire is estimated to be worth more than £1bn. In one year the family paid themselves a £42m dividend. But there have been repeated complaints about their methods. In 2000, they used what a court called a “repugnant” device to try to force out housing benefit tenants along the Brighton seafront. The company used the terms of obscure agreements to raise rents to an impossible £25,000 a year. It then sought evictions for arrears. The appeal court said this was “very serious”, and could have bankrupted tenants.

A Pears company bought housing blocks the same year from Greenwich Hospital, originally an elderly seafarers’ charity. Nick Raynsford, Labour MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, says the firm exploited its position once the property passed out of control of the crown. Rents were raised from £50 a week to £190 and many were forced out. Mr Raynsford said: “The Pears Group acted in a reprehensible way in their dealings with the elderly residents.”

A case of “Vote Dave, get Rachman” perhaps?

It gets worse

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From GMSV…

Now comes word that the Justice Department has told Google, Microsoft and other major Net companies that it wants them to keep records of every Web page their users visit for two years, a polite request now, maybe a law later. Search sites, portals and ISPs are sweating, not wanting to side with the pedophiles and terrorists but not wanting to appear to bend over so readily that their customers scream. “Child pornography is disgusting and illegal,” said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google. But he said any proposals related to users’ data “require careful review and must balance the legitimate interests of individual users, law enforcement agencies and Internet companies.”

Current regulations require companies to preserve data that is the subject of specific criminal investigations for up to 180 days while law enforcement collects evidence that could support a warrant or subpoena. “This is a radical departure from current practices,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Mercury News. “We’ve opposed it because we think it creates an unnecessary risk to privacy and security of Internet users.” And that risk is only one of the problems. Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said requiring companies to keep such data could end up costing billions of dollars, raising the price of Net access. “The Department of Justice has yet to tell us what they want us to store.”‘ McClure said. “If they decide they want us to store everything, there isn’t a storage facility in the U.S. large enough to store that.”

Beginnings of wisdom?

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From today’s New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 31 — After 27 years in which the United States has refused substantive talks with Iran, President Bush reversed course on Wednesday because it was made clear to him — by his allies, by the Russians, by the Chinese, and eventually by some of his advisers — that he no longer had a choice…

Bet Cheney is spitting feathers. And as for Rumsfeld, well… And then there are all those far-right ‘think’ tanks. And Rush Limbaugh. Delicious!

Neocon mistakes

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Andrew Sullivan writing in TIME Magazine…

Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies–and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism of government’s ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad…

Yep to all three.

Prescott gives up Dorneywood

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From BBC Online…

Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott has announced he is to give up his grace-and-favour home, Dorneywood.

Mr Prescott lost his department but kept his £133,000-a-year Cabinet salary and two grace-and-favour homes after he admitted an affair with a secretary.

He said he had now taken a “personal decision” to give up Dorneywood because the public controversy over it was “getting in the way of doing my job”…

He’s doomed. Now for the really interesting question: who will get Dorneywood now? It used to be the country house allocated to the Foreign Secretary, but Margaret Beckett prefers to stay in her caravan when she goes to the country. So the hot money is on Jack Straw. He deserves a consolation prize, if only for saying that the idea of invading Iran was barmy.

After Blair

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Max Hastings, gushing about Dave ‘Vote Blue get Green’ Cameron in the Guardian.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, the circumstances of Blair’s departure will be at best undignified, at worst humiliating. Whatever Gordon Brown does on inheriting the mantle, he will find himself in the position of an aged Broadway star summoned to London to revive the fortunes of a flagging musical – deprived even of its custard-pie turn with the announcement that John Prescott is “resting”, as he surely soon will be.

The highlights of Brown’s early premiership will be supervision of a more or less ignominious retreat from Iraq, further increases in taxation, pressures on public spending and – if Brown is foolish – a lurch back to “old Labour values”. Leave morality out of this. As Blair always understood and the left never does, there are not enough poor people in Britain to elect a government. The majority of “haves” will always care more about what happens to them than about compassion for the less fortunate…

So what happens now?

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This doesn’t affect me, because I’m boycotting the US until they elect a new president, but the European Court’s decision is going to cause some interesting problems. Here’s the NYT report…

PARIS, May 30 — The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday that the Union had overstepped its authority by agreeing to give the United States personal details about airline passengers on flights to America in an effort to fight terrorism.

The decision will force the two sides to renegotiate the deal at a time of heightened concerns about possible infringements of civil liberties by the Bush administration in its campaign against terrorism, and the extent to which European governments have cooperated. The ruling gave both sides four months to approve a new agreement, and American officials expressed optimism that one could be reached. But without an agreement, the United States could take punitive action, in theory even denying landing rights to airlines that withhold the information. That could cause major disruptions in trans-Atlantic air travel, which accounts for nearly half of all foreign air travel to the United States….

The real cause of “systemic failure”

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Terrific column by Jackie Ashley, putting her finger on the nub of the problem of “systemic failure”. Many of the problems that have come to light in the last few months are only incidentally about ministerial failure. They are about the inability of Britain’s civil service to manage complex organisations. Excerpt:

John Reid is absolutely right. Traditionally, ministers have been nervous about criticising officials, and for obvious reasons. It’s like standing on the top of a wobbly ladder abusing the chap holding it at the bottom. Since the days of Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson, Labour ministers have privately complained about civil service competence. All too aware of the leaks and career-ending embarrassments angry officials could visit on them, they have put up with the responsibility for every failure, leaving their servants anonymously blameless.

There desperately needs to be a change in the rules of the game. The days when the civil service was a badly paid, understaffed operation are long gone. The people in charge of major departments are well-paid managers with excellent pensions and job security. Why shouldn’t they bear responsibility when things go wrong? Everybody else does. If a journalist makes a mistake, she doesn’t expect the editor to be sacked. If a shop manager loses billing information, the chief executive doesn’t resign.

The civil service knows how bad the situation really is. A survey of senior officials by SCS found that just 16% thought poor performance was effectively dealt with – a figure that dropped to a terrifying 6% at the Home Office. Meanwhile, a “Have Your Say” survey of all Home Office staff found only 19% thought the Home Office was well managed. Yet when the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, appeared before the public administration committee recently he enraged MPs who wanted to know who was carrying the can for the foreign criminals fiasco. It was “a complex issue” was his inadequate reply…