Daily Archives: October 12, 2016

Could Theresa May be smarter (and more devious) than we think?

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Martin Wolf has a typically insightful column in today’s FT (paywall) in which he argues that the only possible interpretation of Theresa May’s speeches to the Tory conference last week is that the country is on “a timetable to exit not just from the EU, but from the preferential terms of access to Eu markets on which investors, both foreign and domestic, rely. This would be a hard Brexit”.

Furthermore, he continues,

“UK trade negotiators simply could not negotiate offsetting agreements with the rest of the world. This is partly because no such possibility plausibly exists , since the EU takes almost half of the UK’s exports. It is also because the UK will not be deemed a credible negotiating partner until its EU deal is finalised. By March 2019, then, the UK is likely to find itself without preferential access to any markets.”

If you think that this is a prospect too horrendous to contemplate, then join the club. It seems incredible that a rational government could contemplate it either.

So what’s going on?

Discussing this with a colleague over lunch, he suggested an alternative explanation. It’s based on the premise that Theresa May is a rational actor who understands the logical consequences of current government policy. But she also knows that in the current febrile atmosphere, rational argument and policy-making is impossible. The failure of the sky to fall in after the Brexit vote has led to euphoria among Brexiteers and fuelled their hallucinations about the possibilities for a newly-liberated UK. (They remain unmoved by the precipitous fall in the value of the pound, arguing that it gives the UK a trading/export advantage and will eventually be seen as a good thing.)

So (my colleague continues), the thinking behind May’s conference speeches is that she needed to talk up the probability of a ‘hard’ Brexit in order to accelerate the arrival of bad news from all quarters and not just the currency markets. This will accelerate as the months go on, until it will be obvious to a majority of the population that a hard Brexit is not such a good idea after all. (The fanatical Brexiteers, nutters like Liam Fox, are — like Trump supporters — beyond the reach of logic or evidence, but they’re a minority). So, in a year or so, when the full awfulness of Brexit becomes manifestly clear, the way will be open for a cautious, pragmatic PM to say that, regretfully, the government will have to modify its position to safeguard the interests of the United Kingdom.

Howzat for a conspiracy theory, eh?

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter help cops to track minorities

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From Technology review:

Our love of social media makes it easy for us to be spied on—so could we just use it less? An investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union reveals that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram supplied police in Ferguson and Baltimore with data that was used to track minorities. The companies packaged up and provided data from public posts to a company called Geofeedia, which analyzes digital content to provide surveillance information to law enforcement agencies. The companies have now cut off, or at least modified, their supply of data—but it’s a reminder of how we all, perhaps unwittingly, enable a surveillance society. Spying as a result of digitizing our lives isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s getting worse because we’re all so keen to connect. Much of the data is public, too, so simply banning police access won’t work. Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler, has an idea, borne out of a desire to be less beholden to the smartphone, that could ease the problem by encouraging us to step back from Facebook et al. He wants to introduce new criteria, standards, and even a Hippocratic oath for software designers to stop apps from being so addictive. If we can wean ourselves off social media even a little, its power for spying could, perhaps, be commensurately diminished.