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un pedazo de cielo (a patch of sky)

5/16/2021

505 words; 4-minute read

When you’re lucky enough to be able to buy a house, a flat or an apartment there are a few things you’re encouraged think about. Is it structurally sound? What’s the roof like? Plumbing and electrics OK? What’s the area like? And the neighbours? And make sure you go back a few times so you get a feel for the property under different conditions.

What nobody thinks about is the night sky you’re going to have a view of. However many times you revisit a property you’re probably not going to check it out at night-time. If you’ve got a house with a garden or you’re some way up a high rise the odds are you’ll have a fair bit of night sky to look up at and you'll most likely take the view for granted. But if not, then the first time you think about the stars and planets above your flat will be the night after you’ve handed over your money and moved in.

So I’ve struck lucky. It’s mid-May so I can only talk about the stars we’ve got above us in our patch of sky at about 10 in the evening at this time of year. But it could be less interesting. A lot less interesting.

Right overhead is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, with its four stars in a rough rectangle, and three more curving away eastwards. The light pollution of the city stops me from seeing the naked eye double star - Mizar and Alcor - in the middle of the pan handle, but I know it’s there and that’s good enough for me.

Follow the curve and there’s Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the night sky, a red giant in the last stages of its life. It’s 36.7 light years away which means that the light from it striking our patio last night set off in late 1984 when in the UK the miners’ strike was being broken and British Telecom was privatised. In Spain, Felipe González was in his second year as Prime Minister and Neanderthal bones nearly half a million years old were found in a cave at Atapuerca.

On the other side of our patch of sky, to the west, are the Heavenly Twins (Gemini), Castor and Pollux, and across to the right and a little way down there’s Capella, the sixth brightest star in the sky, 42.9 light years away, and one of the strongest X-ray sources in our galaxy.

And right now there’s an extra treat on view because Mars is visible just below Gemini, an unmistakeable red counterpoint to Arcturus.

All in all not a bad haul for what’s in effect just a sliver of sky above us. If or when we come to sell this apartment I’ll be sure to include the May night sky among its unlikely attractions.

where is the libertarian left?

4/5/2021

479 words; 4-minute read

It’s become a commonplace that Covid has amplified features and fissures in society that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged.

For instance there’s the importance of people who keep things going without us realising: shop workers, parcel deliverers, lorry drivers. If reward is a function of indispensability, we now know that these people are poorly rewarded. (Though the UK government’s 1% pay rise for nurses shows that recognition by no means leads directly to justice).

Then there’s the dispute over the role of experts, and attempts by populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to sideline them in favour of quack remedies or downright Covid denialism.

We always knew that wages are awarded in inverse proportion to a person’s usefulness to society and that populism is dangerous, but it took the glare of Covid to make these things unavoidably obvious.

But there’s another fissure that was barely visible pre-Covid yet which has come to define much of the reaction to the pandemic: the gulf between libertarians and authoritarians. Unfortunately, and with potentially disastrous post-Covid consequences, the libertarian position has been entirely dominated by the right, leaving the left defenceless as the capitalist state arrogates more and more power to itself under cover of Covid darkness.

Over the past twelve months it’s been something of a surprise to see how readily people on the political left have lined up behind disciplinary policies and practices that in normal times they’d have fought tooth and nail. Whether it’s increased police powers, enhanced surveillance, Covid passports or the criminalising of information, leftists have either waved through repressive measures or raised the stakes by suggesting how helpful even more repression would be. Voices on the left calling out these measures have been few and far between.

Most disturbing of all is the shock horror these same people display when a bill comes before parliament increasing police powers and curbing the right to protest. What, one wonders, did they expect? Politically literate leftists shouldn’t have to read Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben on states of exception to know that regimes will always take advantage of emergency to intensify their authority.

It’s taken Covid to bring both the outright and the naive disciplinarian left out of the woodwork, and as the Covid crisis draws to a close it may be too late to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle. It wouldn't be too bad if ceding a libertarian approach to Covid to the right had just left it in the hands of crazed denialists prepared to go to the wall for the right not to wear a mask. But actually it's made possible the government's truly scary Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, waved through in the wake of the softening up offered by Covid 'necessities'.

In sum there is huge gap where the left should have been designing, advocating and enacting a progressive libertarian approach to Covid, and the authoritarian capitalist state is gleefully sailing straight into it.

Deliberative democracy and criminal justice

4/3/2021

649 words; 5-minute read

There are all sorts of types of democracy and one is called ‘deliberative democracy’. It’s called that because it puts deliberation rather than counting votes at its heart. In deliberative democracy it’s the process rather than the outcome that counts. And the process is designed to reflect the belief that the best decisions are ones arrived at by discussion between free and equal people. Anything else is just a variation on coercion.

Here are some of the basic rules for good deliberation:

Participants should treat each other with mutual respect and equal concern
They should listen to one another
They should speak truthfully
There should be no use of force, strategising or deceit, and no sign of partisanship, self-interest or ideology

By the same token, decisions reached by strategising and deceit, and characterised by poor listening and a lack of respect and concern, will be bad ones.

Deliberative democracy might be accused of being massively impractical, or at the very least difficult to put into practice. But this doesn’t undermine its attractiveness as a regulative ideal, or something we should strive to approximate to when it comes to good decision-making. We might reasonably expect every institution charged with making good decisions to get as close to these ideals as possible.

But there’s one arena of decision-making - one which has the profoundest consequences for roughly 1.5 million UK citizens every year - where the principles of decision-making are the exact opposite of the ones above.

That arena is the English criminal justice system.

From arrest to sentence, the criminal justice system is defined by self-interest, strategising, deceit, lack of respect, dissembling, and a systematic failure to listen.

Self-interest is on display by everyone throughout. Take the police force, for instance. Its job is to secure convictions (definitely not justice), and police officers would be crazy to do anything that undermined that objective (what would we think of a police force that never secured convictions?). Police strategising is common (if they can interview without a lawyer present they’ll do so), as is deceit (evidence that might be useful to the defence is regularly withheld).

None of this means that police officers are behaving inappropriately. Far from it. They’re doing no more than what a non-deliberative approach to justice enjoins them to do: maximising the advantages they have to ensure they get as many convictions as possible.

Likewise, strategising is not only present in the courtroom, it is essential to how it works. Prosecution and defence plan and plot their way through to their desired outcome with little regard for what should actually count - truth and justice (understood as getting what one deserves).

This month, after one of the UK's biggest ever miscarriages of justice, 39 Post Office workers had their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting quashed. It was revealed that one of the accused was advised by his barrister to plead guilty to avoid a longer prison sentence. In fact this is standard practice in UK criminal justice (you get a third off your sentence if you plead guilty to whatever you've been charged with), and outside that system it is known as bribery. The maximum custodial sentence that can be imposed by the very court system that regularly uses it is ten years.

Finally, the consensual approach that characterises deliberative decision-making is completely absent in the criminal justice system, where the confrontational alternative is personified in the battles between prosecution and defence so beloved by TV dramas. And all of this in a mise-en-scène designed to emphasise inequality and hierarchy, and induce intimidation - the courtroom itself (raised platform for the judge, bowing and scraping, wigs and gowns).

The ‘Secret Barrister’, famed for supposedly lifting the lid on the failures of the criminal justice system, gets nowhere near the heart of the problem. Her or his claim that it’s all about a funding shortfall is a distraction from the real issue. Throwing more money at an abominable system would just make it better at being bad.

All in all, if someone was invited to come up with a process designed to produce unreliable, even obtuse, decisions, they’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything better than the English criminal justice system. We need to start again from the first principles of free and equal deliberation if we’re to have a criminal justice system worthy of the name.

decarceration, men and women

3/1/2021

742 words; 6-minute read

The UK government is planning on creating 500 more places for women in prison. In response, Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist, has written a powerful piece recommending the phasing out of women’s prisons altogether.

This is absolutely the right objective. The record regarding women and prisons is appalling: the number of women in UK prisons has doubled since 1993 (as if women are twice as bad as they were 27 years ago!); the use of community sentences has halved in a decade; 62% of women serve sentences of less than 6 months (up from 30% in 1993) causing massive disruption to their lives and those of their dependants. The government’s mindless response to this last point is to allow more children to sleep with their mothers in prison.

So yes, for a host of reasons women’s prisons should be done away with.

Interestingly, there is no suggestion in Sodha’s piece that men’s prisons should be done away with too. The reason why women’s prisons should be eliminated while men’s are retained is, she says, because ‘female offenders are very different from their male counterparts’.

How are they different?

First, says Sodha, men are ‘far more violent than women, and always have been’. This is absolutely true. ‘Prison sentences are most appropriate for dangerous and violent crime’, she continues. So because men commit the ‘vast majority’ of violent crime, men’s prisons must be retained.

But a 2019 report by the Prison Reform Trust shows that 69% of the 59,000 people sent to prison in 2018 had committed a non-violent offence. Some of these will have been women, but given that ‘only’ 5% of the people in prison in the UK are women, the vast majority of these non-violent offences will have been carried out by men.

So on Sodha’s criterion that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, two-thirds of men’s prisons should be closed down too.

A second reason she gives for why female offenders are different to their male counterparts is that ‘two-thirds of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse’, and that while ‘not every female criminal is a victim … coercive abusive relationships can serve to draw women into crime’. This is also absolutely true and it’s a chilling reminder that behind many crimes lie stories of damaged lives.

But if a history of damage and disadvantage is a reason for an offender’s decarceration then perhaps this applies to histories other than those of abusive relationships too?

For example, 62% of people entering prison have a reading age of 11 or lower (four times greater than the general population). Similarly, a third of people (34%) assessed in prison in 2017–18 reported that they had a learning disability or difficulty. Low literacy leads to non/underemployment and a potential turn to crime for survival. And these statistics are themselves a reflection of profound structural disadvantage.

Just as not every female criminal is a victim, as Sodha says, not everyone with a low reading age or learning disability ends up in prison. But in both cases the chances of eventual imprisonment are increased. So once again, if a history of harm leads us to conclude that women’s prisons should be shut down, should not the same criterion be applied to men’s?

While Sodha is right about the specifics of the differences between female and male offenders (the former’s non-violent crimes are different to those of the latter, as is the nature of the harm they suffer that predisposes them to imprisonment), they share the key features that Sodha says should lead to the phase out - or at least a reduction in the number - of prisons: non-violent crime and a history of harm.

I very much hope that women’s prisons are phased out, or at the very least that the government’s plans to increase the number of places for women are abandoned, never to return.

And once that happens I look forward to Sodha turning her fire on incarceration in general, for there is more in the arguments that unite the genders against imprisonment than keeps them apart.

shamima begum

2/27/2021

744 words; 6-minute read

Yesterday, 26th February, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that 21-year-old Shamima Begum would not be allowed to return to Britain from Syria to fight to have her UK citizenship restored.

In 2019 the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid took away her citizenship on the grounds that she was a threat to national security, a stance reaffirmed yesterday by the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Patel said, ‘The government will always take the strongest possible action to protect our national security and our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of our citizens’.

Begum fled the UK for Syria at the age of 15 to join Isis. She married a Dutch Isis fighter (as far as we know being held in a different camp) and she has had three children all of whom have died. She was captured by Syrian Kurds in 2019 and is now in the Al-Hol detention camp, along with around 11,000 other foreign nationals and their dependants.

In a June 2019 visit to the camp, Human Rights Watch found ‘overflowing latrines, sewage trickling into tattered tents, and residents drinking wash water from tanks containing worms. Young children with skin rashes, emaciated limbs, and swollen bellies sifted through mounds of stinking garbage under a scorching sun or lay limp on tent floors, their bodies dusted with dirt and flies. Children are dying from acute diarrhea and flu-like infections, aid groups and camp managers said’. In January this year there were twelve murders in the camp.

Begum’s case for returning to the UK to have her plea heard in person was based on the claim that is impossible for her to fight her case from a detention camp where she can’t have proper contact with her legal team.

In refusing to allow her to return the Supreme Court reiterated the belief that she is a threat to national security, and that no court could overrule the Home Secretary’s judgement in that regard.

Reaction to this decision has been predictably polarised. On the one hand there are those who say that no punishment is harsh enough for Begum given her association with Isis.

On the other are those who argue it’s ridiculous to regard a 21 year-old woman in a detention camp as a threat to national security; that she was underage when she left the UK and was likely groomed into doing so; and that in any case it’s illegal to leave someone effectively stateless by taking away their citizenship. (There is some dispute as to whether she has access to Bangladeshi citizenship or not).

Whatever arguments there may be over points of law, one thing is absolutely clear: yesterday’s decision condemns a young woman who has lost three children to unlimited detention in a camp in the conditions described above.

In other words the Supreme Court has in effect sided with those who reckon there’s no punishment harsh enough for Begum.

Who are the people - the actual, individual people - who are able to sleep at night knowing that this is what they’ve done? There are lots of them in the ‘justice’ factory, starting with Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, from whom we should expect absolutely nothing except heartless cruelty (they have form).

But what about Robert Reed, President of the Supreme Court, who got to read out the verdict? Watch him do so and marvel at the equanimity he displays as he bangs one nail after another into the life chances of a damaged young woman. It’s stunning, really, the way he manages to blot out the latrines, the murders, the sewage, the worm-infested water, the skin rashes, the emaciation, the garbage, dirt and flies. It’s hard not to marvel at the capacity he displays to obliterate even the tiniest vestige of compassion.

The Supreme Court’s decison was unanimous, which means that there are ten other people in the highest reaches of the system ready to renounce sympathy, mercy, kindness, grace in the name of … what? Ah yes, of course. Justice! Look at the smiles they take home with them while they condemn a vulnerable young woman, and by implication thousands of other women, men and children, to conditions they wouldn’t condone for their dogs.

Justice is supposed to be blind. How numbing to see that it’s heartless as well.

identity politics and economic inequality

2/13/2021

348 words; 3-minute read

Yesterday I pointed out the coincidence between the rise in acceptance of the equality claims of discriminated identitarian groups and the increase in levels of economic inequality in OECD nations. I didn’t argue for either correlation or causation between these two phenomena. The possibilities range from them being completely unrelated to strict causality.

In a recent London Review of Books article William Davies asks ‘why, in an age when inequality has been rising, have work and wealth ceased to provide the grounds of political identity?’ By way of an answer he’s right to point out the structural obstacles: ‘The relationship between class and voting behaviour grows progressively weaker as society becomes economically, culturally and morally more individualistic’. But maybe there’s more to it than that.

Davies also refers to the classic Marxist distinction between a class ‘in itself’ which has objective interests as a class, and a class ‘for-itself’ where that class becomes self-conscious of these interests and acts to get them realised. The progress from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’ is rocky and unpredictable and it depends on a combination of (shared) lived experience and intellectual work (‘consciousness-raising’). So another way of putting Davies’ question is why is it proving increasingly difficult for the economically dispossessed to realise its ‘for-itself’ identity?

All politics is identity politics in the sense of collectives coming to be aware of shared interests rooted in a shared identity. But it seems to be easier to mobilise collectives grounded in ethnicity, gender, and religion than those with shared interests as a social class. Members of the former collectives seem to ‘know’ and recognise each other more readily than members of the latter.

Is it fair to say that it’s harder work to ground political identity in economic inequality than in ethnicity, gender and religion? More particularly does it require different work? If so, what is that work and have we forgotten how to do it?

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

2/12/2021

444 words; 4-minute read

‘One of the principal problems of democratic co-existence is the proliferation of so-called ‘hate speech’”. So begins a recent Serge Champeau and Daniel Innerarity article in El País (7 February 2021), reproduced here.

There’s certainly plenty of hate speech about and social media have made it a lot easier to dispense it. There’s also no doubt that hate speech does real damage to individuals and - this is Champeau’s and Innerarity’s point - it can have a corrosive effect on the ties that bind democracies together.

But there’s more to be said about hate speech and democracy. The clue is here: ‘This debate is less about classic ideological confrontation and more at the level of the personal’. The suggestion is that where we used to argue about issues that divide left and right, issues around poverty and economic equality, now we dish out and - and take - personal offence instead.

Lots of political capital has gone into combating hate speech because it’s not just personal: it’s directed at individuals by virtue of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Progress has been made, at least as far as law-making goes, in regard to protecting these identities and the people who wear them.

Whether all this has damped down the centrifugal forces threatening democratic cohesion or exacerbated them by shining the bright light of the law on what separates us, is a matter for conjecture. More to the point here is whether this attention to the personal has crowded out the political in the traditional, ideological, sense of the word.

Three observations on this:

1. At the same time as there’s been huge progress in recognising the equality claims of discriminated identities, income inequality has risen across all OECD countries
2. Right-wing parties (though not all of them) have found it easier to ‘modernise’ and accept LGBT equality claims (for example), than claims for economic equality. The UK Conservative Party is a good example.
3. I have no idea if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a decrease in economic equality in the same countries.

However (3) turns out, economic inequality is surely as much a threat to democratic co-existence as hate speech. In fact, if there was less of the former we might see less of the latter, a strategy that seems not to have occurred to the French government as it pursues its laicité agenda while leaving the Muslim banlieues to their economically marginalised fate.

Flu and covid-19: numbers, trust and owen jones

1/3/2021

387 words; 3-minute read

I like Owen Jones, the Guardian journalist. He’s generally close to my political opinions and he’s written three first-class books dissecting aspects of the corrupt and moribund state of British politics and society.

So I was a little surprised when I read in a recent article of his that Covid-19 is ‘at least 10 times deadlier than the flu’. Even to my untrained eye this looked rather on the high side given what I’ve read elsewhere, so I opened the link. It turns out that Owen’s source was a May 14th 2020 article in JAMA Internal Medicine. This was some time ago - quite near the beginning of the pandemic in fact, and it was based on Worldometers data rather than primary research.

I wondered if there was any more recent evidence that Jones might have used. A quick search turned up this December 17th 2020 article in The Lancet comparing flu and Covid deaths in France. There I read that, ‘In-hospital mortality was higher in patients with COVID-19 than in patients with influenza (15,104 [16·9%] of 89,530 vs 2,640 [5·8%] of 45,819), with a relative risk of death of 2·9 (95% CI 2·8–3·0) and an age-standardised mortality ratio of 2·82’.

So in the light of this most recent evidence Covid-19 is three times, rather than ten times, more deadly than flu. I would imagine that Jones did the same as me when he was looking for flu/Covid-19 comparative figures - he carried out an internet search - and I would imagine he came across the Lancet figures, just like I did.

So why did he use seven-month-old research based on secondary data rather than two-week-old research based on primary data?

Could it possibly be that the Lancet figures didn’t fit his narrative, summed up in his article’s title: ‘Giving people false hope about the pandemic isn't “balanced” – it's dangerous’? As dangerous as cherry-picking figures to suit an unexamined position, perhaps. 'The media should not promote disinformation under the guise of debate', says Jones.

In keeping with the polarised state of public debate on most things nowadays we’ve all (me included) got a bit entrenched in our Covid-19 foxholes. Perhaps Jones has too.

sweden reprised

12/23/2020

482 words; 4-minute read

On the 10th July I wrote a blog called ‘Two Cheers for Sweden’, arguing for a broader range of criteria for success in dealing with Covid-19 than just counting Coronavirus deaths. So how’s that going? On the face of it things don’t look too good, and even the King of Sweden is now putting the boot in. The Swedish light-touch approach was criticised at the outset for the country’s much higher death-rate then neighbouring Scandinavian countries. This remains the case. (But it’s also true that Sweden’s Covid death figures are still better than heavy lockdown countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy).

It’s fair to point out that my airy claim on 10th July that the Swedes would experience no second wave has been proved completely wrong. Along with much of the rest of Europe Sweden is in the grip of a second spike of cases, hospitalisations and deaths - with more deaths at the beginning of December than at any other time during the pandemic.

It’s also true that the Swedes are adopting measures that look increasingly mainstream: reducing public gatherings from 50 to 8, banning sales of alcohol after 10 pm, moving high school teaching online, and advising mask wearing.

So does this mean that the Swedish experiment has failed, and that those of us who held (hold?) a candle for it have been sadly misled? It’s only honest to say that things are less clear-cut and more complicated than they looked back in July.

But what seems to be happening is something like policy convergence in the short term. So just as Sweden is taking baby steps lifted from the lockdown playbook, so lockdown countries are moving their own red lines in the Swedish direction. This is most obvious in the schools context. Where Sweden was the outlier in keeping schools open at the beginning of the pandemic, now virtually everyone is doing it.

Beyond the short term, the Corona jury should stay out for a few months - maybe years - yet. The evidence on other criteria - the economy, children missing out on school for months, the mental health problems that go with lockdown and isolation, lonely deaths, divided families, the non-Covid patients missing out on treatment, an increase in domestic violence, and the corrosive effects of policing lockdown - will take a while to come in.

What the last few months do seem to have shown unequivocally is that calls to eliminate the virus are utter fantasy. The question remains how to live with it, and it could be that experience and experiment are distilling a series of practices that will serve us well in the next pandemic.

Because, give the total unwillingness to address the root causes of this one, there surely will be more.

the great conjunction

12/19/2020

411 words - 3 minute read

While the particle a millionth of an inch long whose defences are destroyed by washing our hands in soap and water for 20 seconds, also known as Covid-19, continues to wreak havoc around the world, the cosmos is doing its best to entertain us.

Since the summer I have been watching Jupiter and Saturn closing in on each other in the night sky. Back in England I had a telescope, good enough to see the Jupiter’s four biggest moons (just like Galileo), as well as the rings of Saturn. Even with the telescope, the planets look tinier than my little fingernail - but it’s like the difference between a photo of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and seeing the original in London’s National Gallery.

So I could see the planets getting closer but I had no idea until a few days ago that they were heading for a Great Conjunction, appearing side-by-side in the night sky. And closer than they’ve been since 1623 when Shakesepeare’s First Folio was being published.

Now I’m in Valencia, Spain, without a telescope, but with pretty much guaranteed clear skies every night. Saturn is bearing down on Jupiter, or so it seems on the two-dimensional canvas that’s the night sky. Last night they were half a fingernail’s width apart, and at 19.37 on the 21st December they’ll be indistinguishable with the naked eye. Yet looked at ‘from the side’ they’ll be about 650m kms distant from one another. Then they’ll begin drifting apart and won’t be so close again until 2080. For me this is very much a one-off event.

The 21st December is also the Winter Solstice, so some eight hours before the Great Conjunction the earth’s northern hemisphere will begin to tilt back towards the sun and the days will get longer. And the universe turns another notch, insensible to our trials and tribulations.

So here are we humans, stuck somewhere between a tiny particle that threatens to undo us in the short term and the motion of the quantic universe leading inexorably to heat death. The cosmos doesn’t much mind what happens to us. But on the other hand we may be the only beings in the universe capable of that thought, so we should take care of ourselves and all that sustains us.

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Notes from a cliff-edge