2013-05-22T07:49:46-04:00 Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=nick-harkaway Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nick Harkaway Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3107541 2013-04-18T06:50:29-04:00 2013-04-18T07:37:28-04:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/
Leave aside for a moment Thatcher's social conservatism - the busybodyish Orwellian desire to get into everyone's bedroom and bowdlerize the business of teaching children about sexuality - not because it was not obnoxious, but because it was obviously so. That face of Thatcherism was, and is understood by reasonable and compassionate people to have been, grim and grey and ugly. Look instead at the nation and at what she wanted it to be.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th Century. Canadian foreign policy was controlled from London until after the First World War. India became independent in 1947. The last administrative ties between Westminster and the Australian government were severed by the Australia Act in 1987, under Thatcher herself. At the same time, changes in the makeup of the labour force, the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, the increasing use of telecommunications, robots and computers, and the beginnings of globalisation entailed a shift in the economic and social structure of the country. In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable Imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline. Thatcher rejected the idea that the function of the government was purely to manage that decline. She put forward a vision of the country as a leader in the world, a powerhouse still, and at the same time offered a notion of Britain as a place of personal responsibility rather than faceless collective nannying. Her infamous statement - "there is no such thing as society" - is less absurd when quoted in full: "They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then also to look after our neighbour."

Perhaps that final phrase is open to too much interpretation, but I see a schoolmarmish, Methodist insistence - Thatcher's father, Alfred Roberts, was a Methodist preacher - on an obligation to good work in the tradition of Kingdomtide, the thirteen week season before Advent during which the Methodist church emphasizes alleviating the suffering of the poor. It is a personal duty for each individual, not something which can be devolved upon the state. Like David Cameron today, Thatcher expected private individuals to step into the void left by the retreat of government, but somehow that nuance went astray (somehow it always does) and the result was a repugnant greed-fest with precious little in the way of a culture of charity - although in retrospect it looks oddly bashful when set against today. The 80s money men would have loved to create such a fatuous instrument as the complicitly blind-eyed market in duff CDOs, but they lacked either the gall or the imagination. I wonder if they were still restrained, somehow, by the style of business from which capitalism evolved, the Protestant work ethic which attributed success in business to the favour of God. I don't mean that all those yuppies and traders believed in God, just that they were carrying the last lingering notion of how to do money bequeathed to them by those who did, who understood that the financial system was not simply a cow to be milked for profit but also a beast which must be fed with value.

It seems to me from this distance that Thatcher's vision was a harmonious Christian Britain with a withered administrative state apparatus and powerful, stewardly middle and upper classes composed of nuclear families intent on continuing the Victorian project of uplifting mankind, a working class respectful and striving, seeking to earn their way to a better station. It was almost a neo-Victorian rendering of the American Dream, a place where diligent work made dignified but not excessive prosperity for the common man. If she could have brought it about, the result would have been very different from what actually happened - but of course, that country never existed, and never could have. She couldn't bring herself to acknowledge the existence of various kinds of people who did not fit with it, but they existed all the same, and they too had needs and rights and hopes and families. Perhaps her dreamworld was an idealised picture of Grantham, the Lincolnshire town where she grew up: a Conservative stronghold with a powerful Christian presence, which has a proud history of military industry and service, and which incidentally was apparently the second place in the world - after London - to recruit women to serve as police officers. Or perhaps Thatcher's vision was Blake's green and pleasant land made fit for business in the modern world.

Be that as it may, this is her original sin: not the handouts to big business or the godmothering of a culture of financial industry gambling - with other people's money, of course - which still afflicts us today, but the inability to compromise the dream for the sake of the human beings who must live with it. The flashpoints of her time, from the Poll Tax to Section 28 and the miners' strikes, derived from the encounter of her vision with the reality of people crushed and marginalised by the method or the consequences of its implementation. She made Britain into a Procrustean Bed. It's a common failing among visionaries of any stripe, a conviction that present bad is a path to future good, and it ignores the truth that we never really reach the goal of any political project. The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means. The Economist acknowledges, almost in passing, that under Thatcher the Conservative party went from being a national force to the party of the wealthy south, but doesn't find the time to examine why. The simple answer is "pain".

The claim made on Thatcher's behalf is that this was necessary pain, that it was pain needed to restore the fabric of the nation. The same argument is made now regarding the new austerity, with the same gaping inability to notice that that fabric is fraying because of, not in spite of, the cuts to local institutions which are the lifeline many need to get ahead - and if they can't get their bank accounts into the black, they can't spend. The chief economist of the IMF - hardly a tax and spend organisation - has criticised this government's strict adherence to austerity. The fund has also lowered Britain's forecasted growth by more than any other advanced economy. Necessary pain starts to look like self-harm.

David Cameron's invocation of Thatcherism as a policy for the present is the thing I find most bizarre, because - aside from its debatable success and its undeniable divisiveness - purely economic Thatcherism is incomplete. You can't have a positive Thatcherite vision without the subtext of Methodism, the sense of self-restraint and above all of obligation. And while politicians love to talk about duty, they don't seem to be able to create a sense of it by loosening regulation. Thatcher herself favoured a quotation from Abraham Lincoln which includes a line which explains why - though Dan Ariely might be able to say it more clearly. The City of London chooses not to think about this favoured Thatcher mantra: "You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift." Our financial industry, wedded to excess and titanic personal wealth, prefers the next part: "You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer." As with the society speech, so here: the meaning is cut in half by a petulant desire to decouple profit and obligation. Of course: we wouldn't need all that frustrating regulation if the financial industry could be trusted to behave responsibly and take on a role of stewardship of the flow of capital to where it's needed rather than creating ever more absurd engines for the extraction of fool's gold profits. We wouldn't need a social safety net if people of means would look after their less fortunate or able neighbours, if they would observe a perpetual Kingdomtide. We wouldn't need higher tax rates if large companies actually paid any tax. Thatcherism would work fine if people were all like Margaret Thatcher herself, if they felt that duty to look after their neighbour. But the Big Society somehow isn't nearly big enough to take on the safety net functions of the state - probably because to do so it would require a widespread culture of personal charity to the point of personal sacrifice - so instead Thatcherism - as its primary beneficiaries interpret it - creates the Greed Is Good ethos and its most recent and purest expression in the sub-prime fiasco, and misery for anyone who isn't inured by wealth to global economic crisis. If we need an -ism at all today, we need one which can flex and learn from the world to avoid the ghastly injuries the small-minded moralistic side of Thatcher's government inflicted, which grasps the reality of life in the poor parts of Britain as well as the rich, and which expresses some version of that lingering Methodist acknowledgement of, yes, society, in a way which transcends religion, culture, and politics. We don't need to chase a nostalgic rendering of Britain as it never was and never can be: we need instead an understand of who we really are and what a happy, prosperous, just nation might look like.

Baroness Thatcher was buried yesterday. She was once Prime Minister, and she did the job she was elected to do as best she knew how. She expressed something which mattered greatly to many, offended profoundly against many others, and shaped to some extent the world in which we live. She was of her time, her ideas bear the stamp of her time, and her time is over. Let the Iron Lady go down into the ground, and move on.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2381006 2012-12-29T11:08:41-05:00 2013-02-28T05:12:01-05:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ Dear Prime Minister,

Well done! I must say, that was quick work! I will confess I was a bit worried because I hadn't heard from you, but you seem to have sorted out this whole cheese business in double quick time. And the genius of it, if I may say so, was that you didn't have to do anything at all - a masterstroke of modern political judo, getting parliament to follow its natural inclinations.

I found out - as you will have done as soon as you fired up your experts and so on - that MRSA isn't notably different in the context of cheese from ordinary staphylococcus, and the cheesemakers of the United Kingdom and Europe have that well under control. It has to do with science, something I know the Conservative party has a bit of trouble with, but apparently milk isn't the most hospitable environment for staph in the first place, and once you acidify it a bit it becomes positively hostile. Staph concetrations seem to peak around 2-3 days into the process and tail off. As long as everyone follows the established best practices - and cheesemakers are crash hot keen on best practices, because other practices produce horrible cheese as well as poisonous muck - it's pretty unlikely to be a problem. There are some stringent EU regulations in place, too - Europeans knowing a thing or two about cheese, too - so we're golden. Well, actually, not golden, which in this context is better because the 'A' in MRSA stands for 'aureus', which Boris Johnson will gladly translate for you next time he pops in to Downing Street to measure the place for new curtains. Mind you, if we get thrown out of the EU we'll have to make sure we have comparable rules in place, so you might want to rein in your loonies a bit. Well, quite a lot, actually.

But the point is that you sorted it out without lifting a finger - a major bonus in this cash-strapped climate. You've got momentum now! And something, if I may say so, of a reputation to maintain! This leaves you in a perfect position to carry on your brilliant campaign against the looming horrors in our food supply by tackling the other issues I mentioned in my first letter: the overuse of antibiotics, creating drug-resistant strains of bugs such as E. coli; the demise of the honey bee - which pollinates more than 100 crops and is vital to human food production and to billions of pounds of EU agribusiness - owing to a combination of factors probably including neonicotinoid insecticides; and the depletion of global fisheries to the point where the Atlantic had its greatest annual harvest in the 1970s and is now in what in a human patient would be called a death spiral. (Well, not by anyone in the post-Blair NHS, I grant you. But still.) I realise that these, being actual problems rather than the sudden Boxing Day nightmare of a drunken fabulist, may need a bit more effort, but on the other hand they're problems which could actual kill people and cause economic disaster, so they have to be worth a bit of effort. And look: you fixed the cheese crisis without even breaking a sweat!

I suppose that in order to do something about the items on this new list you'd need to face down - respectively - pharmaceutical companies and our culture of immaculate shiny surfaces, farming and chemical giants, and fishing. Oh, and supermarkets. But surely that sort of thing is why you wanted the big chair? And once again, this must be something we can all get behind, right? Access to food is hardly a party political issue, not like global climate change, which I don't think anyone actually expects our system to get any sort of a grip on before Parliament Square is under seven feet of water.

You know, the more I talk to you, prime minister, the more I feel we're developing a rapport. I think we should do this more often, not just at holidays. Do let me know if you ever want to drop round and have a cup of tea (with or without milk - your choice, but it's perfectly safe). I know you're very busy, but I think we can really help one another out. And don't worry if you can't make it - I'll drop you a line whenever one of these killer wheezes occurs to me. Think of me as an earnest member of Hufflepuff, letting all you clever fellows in Gryffindor and Slytherin and so on know when something's up. I look forward to chatting some more. It's great fun.

All the best,

(And please don't forget to save the bees and the fish and so on, you could even make it a New Year's Resolution),

Nick Harkaway

PS a lot of very clever people helped me come to an understanding about cheese; I can put you in touch with them if you crave reassurance, as I did, but in any case you should probably think about some OBEs for them to say 'thank you'. It's only polite.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2370262 2012-12-27T10:52:42-05:00 2013-02-26T05:12:01-05:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ Dear Prime Minister,

I appreciate that you have a lot on your plate right now, what with trying to legalise gay marriage in the face of some of the silliest opposition in the history of British politics, and a somewhat less agreeable attempt to reintroduce the Star Chamber in anti-terror cases. Nice work sidestepping a triple dip recession, mind you, and let's hope you don't accidentally misplace Scotland at any point in the next few years. I suspect the Queen might be a bit short with you if you manage to give away an entire kingdom.

Yes, all right, I'm not a Tory voter. But we can surely agree on cheese. Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese. There's a really strong argument that cheddar is actually the greatest cheese on Earth (so long as you avoid that muck they call 'cheddar' in the United States, which we know over here as 'axel grease').

So I'm sure it troubles you as much as it does me that cheese is under a really serious threat, a genuinely scary, apocalyptic Nemesis of all things cheesy: drug-resistant MRSA in the UK's milk supply.

I didn't know about this until the other day, and I must say it rather scared the bejesus out of me. I looked at the cup of tea I was drinking and wondered whether I was about to be admitted to hospital. Fortunately, it's perfectly safe as long as the milk has been pasteurized, which of course it had because I shop at a supermarket rather than going out into the field and milking an actual cow. Fine and dandy, then? Well, no, because cheddar, along with most of the UK's other distinctive, beloved, delicious, exportable, and famous cheeses, is often made from unpasteurised milk. The other stuff lacks bite. It tastes tame.

I told my wife, and she shuddered. She's pregnant at the moment, so she's not allowed the good stuff. The prospect of a lifetime devoid of real cheese looms large in her mind. It does not please her. In fact, it apalls her, and she's right. "First fish, then honey, now this," she muttered, and I have to be honest and say that I hadn't thought of it that way, but she's absolutely right. I'm sure we should be worried that our food groups are being winnowed away in this fashion: plummeting fish stocks, the inexorable death of bees, and this latest Käsedämmerung, as our friends in Appenzell would have it - it's got to stop.

Can I be honest? I'm a bit more frightened about this than I'm perhaps making out. Beneath this jocular tone lurks a genuine horror that we may be creating a world we can't live in. Alongside that runs a suspicion that our present system is simply unable to cope with this sort of challenge. The rough pattern I expect this crisis to follow is: the cheese issue becomes a real concern; legislation and action are proposed; a number of powerful interest groups engage in a well-managed rubbishing exercise which strongly suggests that it's a storm in a teacup and that any action will ruin our farming sector and cause colossal price hikes in supermarkets; nothing happens until we find ourselves surviving on boiled feta. Because - as it seems - part of the problem is the conditions in which cattle are kept in response to the supermarket chains' demands for lower and lower prices so that they can continue to claim to the public that nothing's really that expensive and your local shop is just ripping you off. And I just don't know whether our political system or, alas, our political class have the spine to stand up to that sort of thing any more. I really don't.

And I know that it may seem a rather unlikely place to take a stand, but I'm begging you to do it. Food, after all, is fundamental. There's really nothing more basic. To be the prime minister who saved the milk supply has to be a noble thing. You could dicker with the economy for years and still get stuffed by a crisis in China or the US. You could intervene in ten foreign nations where a local monster is being monstrous and never see a real democracy emerge in your lifetime. You could haul us into a more powerful EU or yank us away from it and half the electorate will always think you were wrong. But surely, surely, saving cheese is a thing you can do and know it will never be held against you? And not just cheese, of course, because realistically in order to tackle the onrushing apocalypse of cheese you have to save milk. (For the children!) And maybe, just maybe, with a bit of momentum there you could do something about fish and honey, too, and before you know it you're an actual, honest-to-goodness, memorably wise, long-term leader.

Please, Mr Cameron. Save the cheese.

Yours Sincerely,

Nick Harkaway]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2157642 2012-11-19T06:23:53-05:00 2013-01-19T05:12:01-05:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/

Britain's membership of the EU is up for discussion - and it's liable to be a wretchedly stupid discussion. It's a hard truth to say aloud, but Britain is pathologically incapable of a serious debate on this issue, because a kind of dogwhistle version of Godwin's Law applies: whenever the EU is mentioned, it's almost guaranteed that someone will invoke - if only by implication - the Blitz and Dunkirk. As soon as that happens, we're in idiot country. You'd think the Dastardly Hun was poised on the beaches of France waiting to bring doom and horror to the cast of Dad's Army. You say I'm being unkind? We can't even play an international football match against Germany without WWII being mentioned. In fact, we can't even advertise beer without falling into a xenophobic, triumphalist (and, just for completeness, quietly homophobic - the missing poster in the line-up read 'rear gunners drink lager shandy') rant about the Luftwaffe. (Yes, they're very funny. They're also not really very funny at all.)

So the public conversation about the EU will take place in three arenas: there will be a largely-incomprehensible and clouded debate about the economics of the EU - it will cost XYZ to leave, it will rejuvenate our economy because PQR - which will shade into issues of sovereignty in the form of whether our government can set aside human rights which it finds inconvenient and whether the banking community can continue to function in the blissful absence of real regulation it has used to such good effect over the last decade. And there will be a background of people humming the theme to The Dambusters.

And the ghastly irony of this is that the first two arguments will miss the point entirely, while the third is closer to the mark, if only by chance: the EU was created to prevent us from going to war with one another.

If you go back to the roots of the modern European project, it's absolutely overt. The 1950 Schuman Declaration is about the prevention of a repeat of the wars which shattered Europe in the first part of the 20th Century. The economic structure is a means to an end, as well as a way of kicking the nations of Europe into a recovery.

We're smug in 2012. We think that Europe could not ever go to war with itself again. Our confidence is misplaced. The far right is on the rise in Greece and elsewhere. It's relatively easy to imagine an extrematised and factionalised Europe if our economy tanks for a few more years - and it's not even very hard to see an internally hostile Europe by 2050 if we don't get our energy policy sorted out and we're all in competition for limited power supplies while increasing desertification moves up from the south into Europe's farmlands.

Peace is not a state, it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum and your equilibrium is gone, too. Bad news for the egg.

It's idle to pretend that the EU is an unalloyed positive. It's a mess, as it must inevitably be given that it is created by the intersection of squabbling political groups with differing understandings of what is right and what is necessary. It's unrepresentative and mired in red tape. It costs too much. Like democracy, it's a rotten way of doing things until you consider the alternatives. The point about all this is that it's the tithe we pay to our own nature to have one more obstacle between us and Dresden and Coventry. We should improve it. We must. But until we can say with honesty and confidence that we've mastered our will to (self-) destruction, the claim that we have no need of a European Union lacks intellectual integrity and practical wisdom.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2116037 2012-11-12T07:04:54-05:00 2012-11-12T08:26:34-05:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/
At the table opposite, though, it was rather a different story. As my reminder went off, a woman received a call on her phone from someone who was apparently near the Cenotaph. The caller wanted her to know that the two-minute silence was about to start. They then talked all the way through it, and when she concluded the call she went on to complain to her companions that no one had been silent in the restaurant. It was a bravura performance of absolute self-centred nonsense. No one said anything to her, but a lot of people did so in a very British, pointed way which she absolutely did not notice - despite being, I should point out for the record, British herself.

It was infuriating: rude and a utterly vacuous - but it was plainly not a crime.
Well, I say that.

Kent Police, it seems, have just arrested a young man for posting an image of a burning poppy on Remembrance Day. The law he may have broken is part of the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, which makes it illegal to send a message which would cause 'gross offense' to those to whom it is related, who need not be the recipients. It is not relevant whether the message is received by anyone: the breach of the law occurs in the sending. (Kent Police, incidentally, are taking some criticism for this. Don't blame them, they didn't make the rule.)

Poppy burning has been put on trial before. Emdadur Chaudhury of Muslims Against Crusades was convicted of a "calculated and deliberate" insult to Britain's war dead in 2011. MAC is an organisation which apparently annoys even Index On Censorship, the free speech charity, but as the Index blog points out, Chaudhury was not punished for any links he may have with global jihadists, but for burning plastic flowers. It's inappropriate but to me unavoidable that that phrase in his conviction holds an echo of Harry Patch, the last known survivor of Passchendaele, who died in 2009. In one interview, Patch called war a "calculated and a condoned slaughter of human beings" (about 30 seconds in). Elsewhere, he was even more forthright. The Times reported him as saying: "To me, [war is] a licence to go out and murder." If he had Tweeted that statement on the morning of 11 November, would he technically have been guilt of grossly insulting himself - or equally ridiculous, of insulting others who venerate the dead of Passchendaele, but were not there?

I'm not an absolutist about free speech. Intellectually, I believe that most of the time it's better to let things get said, argue them, and put lies and stupidities to rest. Practically, I know that newspapers rarely issue corrections with the same prominence they give to denouncements - and Twitter, by its nature, never does. And some things - say, the locations of women's shelters, the names of suspects in some criminal cases, the details of undercover operations in progress - need to be held close. I also don't have great sympathy for the newspapers which stepped over the line with Chris Jeffries in the matter of Joanna Yeates's murder, and I dislike the present sense on social media that breaking injunctions and naming names in celebrity gossip cases is an assertion of free speech. With true free speech has to come an understanding of when and when not to use it. But you can't legislate that. It must be voluntary - especially in a world where a whisper can reach a million people in an eyeblink.

The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us. Orthodoxies which cannot be disputed are what ultimately create moments like Passchendaele. The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering. Saying so at the time would have seen you shunned at best, on trial at worst. Looking around the world, it isn't hard to find contemporary examples, often propped up by national fury.

None of this diminishes the heroism of some or the sacrifice of many in war, but as Harry Patch said, that doesn't make it something to think well of. Spreading a patriotic blanket over the shortcomings of war and our reasons for waging it diminishes the people who die in it rather than cherishing their memory. Remembrance Day is about all our wars, of course, not just that one, but even so: government should not be the arbiter of what is or is not an appropriate response to the two-minute silence. Government in a democracy should push us to consider viewpoints we want to reject, to listen to arguments we dislike and disagree with, and yes, which offend us - otherwise our ability to participate in a genuine democratic society is curtailed, and we perpetuate the pandering, insipid, and unsatisfying charade that is modern political life in the UK.

Burning a poppy on Remembrance Day is obnoxious. It no doubt puts the person doing it at risk of a punch in the nose - and that is, in a way, a perfectly appropriate human response, expressing very effectively a countervailing personal perception of the situation, for all that it's also the wrong response. But that a symbolic action of this kind puts one at risk of arrest is a mistake, in terms both of the practice of democracy and of the ethics of our society, and we should move to strike the law.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1550078 2012-05-28T07:11:56-04:00 2012-07-28T05:12:10-04:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ Google StreetView, it transpires, did not scoop up private data from wireless networks by accident. The system included a bit of code called "gstumbler" which was expressly designed to rake in what it could. The people at Google's core apparently had no idea this was going on, and indeed it seems Google never used the data for anything or even had plans to do so - although given the frankly slipshod investigation of the issue, in the UK at least, it's a bit optimistic to suggest we know that for certain. But Google says it didn't, and David Cameron's government, which knows the company quite well, evidently feels it would be impolite to pry.

That might be because Mr Cameron is very eager to get his hands on exactly this sort of data himself. The Communications Capabilities Development Programme the Coalition is advancing is a rehash of Gordon Brown's Intercept Modernisation Programme, the failed Snooper's Charter against which the Conservatives spoke passionately while in opposition. It would allow the government to gather data from everyone who uses digital communications, all the time: who contacted whom, from where, and at what time. It wouldn't actually provide access to the content of those communications - that would still need a warrant - but in a strange way content is actually less important than metadata, at least at a macro level. Never mind that you can, as a matter of reality, put together a great deal of personal information about an individual from fragments of data about their online movements and calling habits; that is intrusive and can be very spooky - as when your online supermarket deduces that you're probably pregnant or trying to be from your recent web history and starts quietly recommending appropriate products - but it's not the whole story.

At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that across the board people make free and relatively rational decisions; that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent. Google's key tenet is that more available information makes us better at these decisions, and indeed makes us better people. The company's mission is to make the world's information accessible and useful - to make money thereby, sure, but ultimately to improve the world. It's about empowerment through access. But that throws up a dilemma for Google, a genuine fractureline in its core identity. Google's revenue comes from targeted ads. On the one hand, that could be as simple as connecting a buyer and a seller in an equal and even exchange. But there is a thing called 'choice architecture', and a field of expertise called 'behavioural economics', and these disciplines make the situation much less simple, because they deal in the business of influencing decisionmaking, and they are made possible essentially by access to large amounts of data about how and when and where people do things; all the data, in fact, that Google - and various other sites including Facebook - collect as a matter of course.

Choice architecture has recently become popular in some political circles as a way of getting the general population to accept things they ought to want, but which for some reason they don't. Organ donation is the obvious example; if it were made the default option, very few people would bother to carry a card asserting that their organs could not be used in the event of their death, and the perpetual shortage of transplant donors would get a lot less fraught. But that wouldn't be a decision; it would be the path of least resistance. And there are a lot of issues like that. At what point does this friendly nudging towards what we ought to want become control? At what point, actually, have we abdicated democracy in favour of a species of blurred technocracy? (In fairness: to what extent do we have genuine democratic choice now?)

I dislike this model intensely; it seems to create an electorate which is never required to think seriously and never has to balance one priority with another - an electorate which is infantilised and malleable.

So Google's dilemma is that on the one hand its ambition is to improve mankind by empowerment, while on the other it survives - flourishes - by providing a service which potentially becomes more disempowering as it gets more accurate.

David Cameron is to a certain extent in a similar position; he is bound to a dream of personal responsibility, but as the head of government he desperately wants to get things done. A vast trove of behavioural data would be breathtakingly valuable in this respect, telling him when to launch a given sort of initiative - a study of Twitter posts has shown a mood cycle through the week; that information in concert with habits of buying and reading news could yield hard insights into when we are at our most persuadable and how to approach us before ever we come to a well-framed decision point. The applications are clever and subtle, and the more information you have, the more fine-grained it is, the more you know and can achieve.

This is where the rubber meets the road on privacy; it's not simply the legitimate concern about a Peeping Tom state or nosy multinationals, or the right of the individual to conduct business, pleasure, and discourse without being monitored - although I personally regard those as serious and valid objections to the frenzy of data-gathering presently under weigh. There is a serious complementary issue of the creation of a society which is predicated on loaded choices offered to a placidly compliant populace.

There is an argument on that score which I find compelling: that if such information is to be gathered, it should be considered the property of the members of the public it describes, and made accessible to them so that they can also make use of it to understand their own behaviour and move - in a genuinely democratic and self-willed way - in a direction of their own choosing. The data sets would obviously have to be stripped of their overt identifying features - IP addresses and so on - to prevent abuse. The extraordinary potential for a better understanding of our collective choices and therefore an improvement of our ability to make good decisions is as appealing as its opposite is repellent.

The alternative is the creation of a broader Verpixelungsrecht - the German right to be removed from online images to protect one's private life - and the creation of proper, enforceable safeguards for Internet users requiring minimum standards of data control for users. Such regulation would shatter the business models of sites like Facebook, which is premised on a data-for-usage arrangement. There are also, as Jeff Jarvis points out, implications for the health of public space.

Whatever we choose, the discussion should be loud and wide. It should happen in public, not as an aside while David Cameron struggles with the Greek debt and the unacknowledged reality that a collapse of the Euro, so delightful to some in his party, would be ruinously expensive for Britain. The economy is vital, but it's not the only show in town - and this issue is too important to be decided backstage.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1402685 2012-04-04T11:16:07-04:00 2012-06-04T05:12:02-04:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ Disclosure: I should state for the record that I am married to Clare Algar, the Executive Director of the small but plucky band of heroes known as Reprieve. This speaks to my possible bias, but also to a basic understanding of what's at stake; it was my good fortune, for example, to discuss the underlying issues with the late Tom Bingham, Lord Bingham of Cornhill. If you take an interest in the idea of justice and the nature of a free society and have not read his book on the rule of law: run, don't walk, to the bookshop and order it immediately. It is a clear and elegant statement of what the rule of law is and why we should cherish it.

Reprieve, meanwhile, is a human rights legal organisation of around twenty five people which punches ridiculously above its weight. The charity handles death row cases around the world, getting Brits out of appalling situations in countries where very bad things happen, and also deals with the 'war on terror'. The latter part has included persuading the US authorities that a confused teenager was not an Al Qaeda financial mastermind, and that the man who lost an eye during his detention was not in fact the dead Chechen leader "Walid" but Omar Deghayes. More well-known, of course, is the case brought on behalf of Binyam Mohamed which exposed evidence of his treatment at the hands of the US - after already having been grotesquely tortured in Morocco - and which has led to the new government's present attempt to change the law in favour of a star chamber in which ministers cannot be embarrassed or made to look like monsters, even if they deserve it.

So that's where I begin. I do not propose that everyone in Guantánamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture. It's vile and it doesn't even work. It makes us enemies - deserved ones, alas - and it cheapens and sullies what we strive to be, all for the sake of information we can't rely on which, if true, we could probably have had faster by other methods.

Which brings us at last to the point of this post (sorry, but you really do need the background): this coalition, which promised to do away with Labour's ugly authoritarian approach to the law, proposes to introduce a number of changes to the legal system. These changes are illiberal, unjust and unworkable, and they are part of a wide streak of instinctive control freakery which runs through this government. Don't look at the Green Paper on Justice and Security alone - look at it alongside the Communications Capabilities Development Programme [2].

The CCDP, as the Telegraph newspaper recently pointed out, is essentially a revival of Labour's ill-fated Intercept Modernisation Programme, which both Tories and Lib Dems spoke against in opposition. It calls for providers of mobile phones and Internet access to keep logs of every action made online, essentially equivalent to requiring the Post Office to keep a note of the sender and addressee of every letter and parcel. It would also keep a record of where a given message or call was made, allowing the plotting of personal habits on a map. This is not, incidentally, a counter-terror initiative. Terror investigations already get access to this sort of thing when they need it. This is for everything else. And Nick Clegg seems to be perfectly okay with all that, thus reducing to zero the chance of my ever voting for him again.

So, back to the Green Paper on Justice and Security, which, with the sort of Orwellian flourish traditional in recent government nomenclature, is neither likely to increase access to justice nor to enhance security. Rather, it makes the government's job easier at the expense of the citizenry's legal protections. It protects the government from the possibility that, as in the Binyam Mohamed case, judges might order them to produce what they know in order that a trial should be fair, at the expense of their perceived right to avoid a merited public shaming.

This is about the creation of a system which can deny a plaintiff a fair hearing when that fairness might upset a foreign intelligence agency or trouble the minister. It is the dismantling of a key part of our criminal justice system and the undermining of a key tenet of our jurisprudence.

The paper calls for a setup in which government misdeeds are examined in secret. We already have a system of 'special advocates' in which approved defenders represent a client who may not know the evidence against him. (See how that goes? I accuse you of something, but I won't tell you specifically what it is. Your lawyer, dealing with a span of your life which may be years long, has to defend you without asking you what you were doing in a particular day, or asking what witnesses you would call to rebut allegations.) In this new context, what a secret court system means is that the government's own wrongdoings - and sadly there seem to be quite a few in this arena - cannot effectively be scrutinised by those to whom wrong has been (or may have been) done. Understand, this isn't only about terrorism or incidences of torture, but also cases which might be brought by the families of soldiers killed or injured as a result of inadequate equipment. What the Green Paper proposes to do is place the government beyond reach of its own court system - something which is simply and in the most profound way undemocratic.

Put these two things together and you have a gloriously complete structure for bad governmental behaviour: a population monitored at all times, most especially in their communications with one another and their access to information, and a secret court system which can be invoked to prevent plaintiffs against government from hearing the government's case, and even accused persons from hearing evidence brought against them. It's a world of judicidal murkiness in which the power of the state is hard to interrogate or even assess. And lest you imagine that such great powers must inevitably be used responsibly, do remember the go-round we had with evidence being witheld in the 90s: innocent men went to prison because a government didn't want to confess its sins. And remember, on a more ludicrous note, the bold deployment of anti-terror laws by local councils to prevent that terrible jihadist menace: fly-tipping.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'. It's not that they can't be trusted with that sort of power; it is that no one can. Its very availability creates rot. We must not surrender the Rule of Law to the rule of ministerial fiat, or the tradition of fair trial to the convenience of the security machine.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1384600 2012-03-28T06:48:05-04:00 2012-05-28T05:12:02-04:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ The UK, like much of the rest of the world, is in a dire financial mess.

Our government labours to conceal this, or at least ignore it, because it is in the nature of the financial system that the appearance of being in a mess causes all kinds of woes which make the mess worse. And, of course, because voters don't love governments which can't sort out the money, however appalling the situation they inherited.

We got where we are by buying into a kind of financial perpetual motion machine, forgetting the most basic rules of prudence and sanity and agreeing - tacitly or unknowingly in most cases, overtly in others - that we were just getting richer and that was how it was always going to be. Our hallucinatory world was one where a knife gets sharper when you use it and wearing a coat will turn it from cotton into silk over the course of time.

All this has been documented by writers vastly better qualified than I am to explain it; Michael Lewis's wonderful The Big Short (about the US end of the sub-prime madness) and its companion piece Boomerang (about Europe's even more looney version) are a great way to start, and from there one can move on to Mitch Feierstein's somewhat terrifying Planet Ponzi, in which the author is so ungenerous as to explain as many hidden and untallied costs as he can, and point out that far from being past the worst, we're just getting started on our feast of economic crow.

But all that is by the by, for my purposes - not that it's not important, because it is, and vitally so - it's just not what I'm bothered about right now.

What worries me is a sense that I've seen this before. My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler. Since I was little, I've been surrounded by stories of his world - and this feels oh-so-familiar: I can't shake the feeling that we're playing the shell game, and, inevitably, we're losing. Or you could be more dramatic and see it as the end of The Sting, with Lehman Brothers as the grifter who dies.

The sub-prime bubble was effectively the creation of notional money, economic fairy-dust which blew around the system making us all paper rich on the ultimate basis of massively overvalued assets. It was as if the banks of the world had just decided to print a boatload of extra money. What intrigues me is what happened when the bubble burst. If we'd all taken the same hit, that would be a correction, the financial system acknowledging that things had got completely out of hand. But I don't think that is what happened. It seems to me that when it all came crashing down, financial institutions managed to sequester to themselves the money which was in some way 'real' - the stuff not made from fairy dust - and pass on the costs of catastrophe to the rest of us. In that case, the crash represents not an equal correction but a massive de facto transfer of money from ordinary investors and from governments (and therefore taxpayers) to the industry responsible for the whole thing.

If that's true, it's absolutely far and away the best payout in the history of the con.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1355298 2012-03-17T10:06:11-04:00 2012-05-17T05:12:02-04:00

Nick Harkaway http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-harkaway/ On 22 November 2011, Owen Holland, a PhD student at Cambridge University read a poetic protest at an appearance by David Willets, the UK's Minister for Universities and Science, and prevented Willets from speaking (or so thoroughly annoyed him that he stormed out, depending on who you ask). And now there's a hullabaloo, because the university has rusticated Holland for seven terms - two and a half years. 'Rusticate' - from the English word rustic and therefore ultimately from the Latin rustici meaning heathens - is Cambridge's charming alternative to 'suspend', implying that anywhere which is not Cambridge is a sort of rural backwater where newts burp at one another and fungi sprout from whatever outdated texts may have survived the annual bonfire of knowledge.

I find this whole thing particularly annoying because I was at Cambridge - at Clare College, to be precise - and I routinely receive worthy, hopeful letters asking me to give money so that the old place can maintain its high standards in the face of financial woe. I never do, because of moments like this.



For perspective: the poet John Milton was rusticated for quarrelling with his tutor; cartoonist Mark Boxer, then editor of Granta, was rusticated for blasphemy but his sentence was commuted to a week's suspension; journalist Jon Snow was rusticated for being part of a political protest and never returned. And I recall during my time at Cambridge an incident of fairly serious physical violence which was dealt with quietly 'in college' and resulted in rustication - though not for anything like two and a half years. So we are to understand that Holland's sin is to be considered worse than blasphemy (some fifty six times worse at a minimum) and worse than assault and battery, but not as bad as whatever Jon Snow did. (I don't know, but now I'm dying to find out.)

Rustication is unevenly applied, which would make it suspect in any proper court, and this is a particularly wretched example of grumpy affront rather than justice. But the real shame here - and it is a shame, in the sense of something which should make the gut of anyone involved knot itself in a ball - is the decision to stamp on protest. The UK has no specific right to free speech in such a context, which makes it all the more important that universities should champion it. The country is in the midst of a prolonged crisis, and many of our most treasured riches - the NHS, the police service, and, yes, our education system - are under threat. It is entirely appropriate that ministers be challenged on their plans, that the ethos of this government be assailed, tested, and examined in public and by the public.

What Cambridge has done here is almost unforgivable: the university has implied that such challenge is frivolous, that it does not merit respect or protection, that it's the sort of thing only silly children do and for which they are sternly punished. It's actually not important now if Holland successfully appeals or is in some way granted clemency. It's done. The message is that protest is considered bad behaviour.

Here's what I think Cambridge should have said:

"Cambridge University regrets that David Willets felt unable to continue his appearance, and reminds all members of the community that free discussion is the beating heart of academic inquiry and the search for knowledge. At the same time, however, the university accepts that Mr Holland acted in good conscience and out of a desire to contest Mr Willets' perceptions and those of the government he represents. The stating of a passionately held viewpoint is not grounds for punishment by an educational institution, and ministers in government must expect and accept that their actions and policies will arouse opposition. The university therefore considers this matter as being between government and citizen, and celebrates the persistence of the vigorous and informed public sphere which is key to a thriving representative democracy."

If they'd managed something like that, I'd be proud to be an alumnus. Right now I just wish I'd gone to Warwick - even if the library was full of newts. ]]>