A referendum on Scottish independence should be a constitutional impossibility. After all, one of the reasons behind choosing the Additional Member System for elections to the Scottish Parliament was to deny any single party (and, one suspects, the SNP in particular) a majority. Yet some time between March and May this year, something spectacular happened.
Read more over at Scottish Times.
This entry was originally published over at HuffPo UK on Monday October 24th, 2011.
Parliament today is debating Britain’s membership in the EU, following an online petition signed by over 100,000 people. Clearly, with the economy having ground to a halt, unemployment at a historic high, and the Eurozone in crisis, we have nothing better to do than navel-gaze, expose divisions within one of the governing parties, and thereby create further economic and political uncertainty. What strikes me in all this are some of the spectacular rhetorical feats of Conservative politicians when it comes to Europe. I have prepared a brief dictionary.
Bernard Jenkin MP: “It’s about growth. The economy is not growing, and one of the reasons why the economy is not growing is … a business survey showed that over £60 billions per year of burden of EU regulation rests on our economy now. (…) We used to have well below the average of youth unemployment, we’re now on the average and youth unemployment is growing.”
Translation: “I need someone to blame for this mess, and the ‘previous government’s legacy’ line doesn’t quite wash anymore. Who else is around? Ah, the EU! Quick, let’s make up some numbers!”
Here are some questions I would like to ask of the Member for Harwich and North Essex:
There’s the rub: if Britain wishes to continue trading with the largest single market on the planet, it is going to have to take the regulations that go with that. Surely, it is better to have a seat at the table when it comes to creating those regulations. And while we’re making up numbers, the EU has some of its very own. Unsurprisingly, they show an increase in GDP and jobs directly attributable to the Single Market, and an appreciable decrease in “red tape”.
Everyone: “Renegotiate our terms of EU membership!”
This can be neatly translated as “We want a pick-and-mix Europe. We will play nicely when it suits us and when we’re directly benefiting from our membership but will refuse to lift a finger to actually contribute to the community.”
Economists have a word for this kind of behaviour: it’s called “free-riding”; see also “tragedy of the commons”. There is a fatal flaw with this kind of thinking and it’s this: if the UK “renegotiates the terms”, other countries will either not allow that or want much the same thing for themselves. After all, if the UK can reap the rewards of membership without fully contributing, why shouldn’t everyone else? You can see where this is heading. If no one wants to contribute, if everyone only cherry-picks the best bits for themselves, sooner rather than later there’ll be no community left, and no benefits for anyone to pick.
William Hague MP: “There can be very small, narrow treaty changes, there can be major treaty changes. (…) I do not believe that it is in every instance (…) that you need to have referendum.”
This is of course code for “We will give you a referendum when it’s in our interest and we think we can get the outcome we want from it.”
Ultimately this raises the question of whether referenda are a meaningful way to decide on complex constitutional issues such as electoral reform or EU membership. My experience from the recent AV referendum would suggest that they are useful only under certain conditions, which are unlikely to be present if and when it comes to a referendum on the nature of Britain’s EU membership or future treaty changes. Referendum campaigns – especially ones which happen under time pressure, as any campaign on a treaty change would – tend to boil down extremely complex issue into five-word slogans. “Small change, big difference” and “She needs a maternity unit, not an Alternative Voting system”, some of the key slogans from both sides of the AV campaign, are patronising, overly simplistic, lacking in substance. Now imagine having to reduce something like the Lisbon Treaty into a slogan. Far from increasing the level and quality of political debate, referenda like the one on AV or any we are likely to get on the European Union have a tendency to shut debate down. Only if political discourse can develop naturally, over and appropriate time span which allows for issues to be explored in depth – like for instance in the proposed Scottish independence referendum – are referenda a truly meaningful way of making political choices. So in some ways, this whole debate is a huge red herring.
William Hague MP: “…the return of other powers to the United Kingdom, particularly in the field of social and employment laws, things like the Working Time Directive, things of that kind.”
Read: “Rights for workers? What is this EU nonsense? You must be joking!”
It always strikes me how the first (and as far as I can tell only) area of community competency that William Hague wants to repatriate is to do with social justice, equality, and protecting workers. He’s been singing that particular song ever since he was Tory leader and came to speak at my school in Vienna about Britain’s awkward relationship with the EU. Let’s have a quick look at the much-maligned Working Time Directive, for instance. These are some of the things it regulates:
If this is William Hague’s main bone of contention with the EU, then I know what side I stand on. And if you are an employee of any kind – salaried, agency worker, occasional – then so should you.
The Europe debate is of course one that is never far from the surface on this sceptered isle. Yet bringing all this to the fore right now, as the EU and the Eurozone struggle to find the political will to overcome a huge crisis, and as it becomes increasingly apparent that the UK economy itself will need some sort of intervention to get moving again seems a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Mind you, it’s entertaining enough.
I have just nominated Sue Marsh (@suey2y) to be a torchbearer at the London Paralympic Games in 2012. When I first heard that LOCOG were looking for “people who have made a difference in their community and inspired or supported disabled people”, Sue was the first person who came to mind.
I first found Sue the way I find anything these days: on Twitter. Somebody linked to one of her blog posts, I can’t remember which. I found her writing sensitive, eloquent, thought-provoking. I followed her. A few months later, I helped her out with some research on disability benefits in Germany (short version: some things are better, some things are worse). Through Twitter, we have stayed in touch, and while I don’t read her blog religiously, chances are that if I see a link from her in my timeline I will click on it.
Sue suffers from a rare form of Crohn’s disease, a debilitating illness which can leave her incapable to move or eat, vomiting for hours, in unbearable pain for days. Strong painkillers take a lot of her energy but help her manage the pain; surgery can provide temporary relief – until it gets worse again.
Over the past 18 months, as budget cuts have begun to hit the most vulnerable, as the disabled have been demonised as “benefit scroungers”, as people on death’s door have been declared “fit for work”, Sue has been at the centre of The Broken of Britain campaign fighting for disabled rights. Her writing has touched thousands of disabled people, raised awareness of disability issues among those of us lucky enough to be able-bodied, and serves as a constant reminder of the importance of solidarity.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned from Sue and the Broken of Britain is about the sheer diversity when it comes to disability. Our iconography for disabled people focuses on what we can see. A person in a wheelchair, a blind person with a white cane – these are the traditional symbols of the disabled in our society. Yet disability comes in so many more varieties than that, some visible and some not. Vision and hearing impairments, mobility issues, those are the forms of disability that we can easily identify. Chronic conditions like MS, CFS or Crohn’s disease are just as debilitating, but they don’t fit into our mental model of disability. One day a person is fine, the next they cannot move, and the day after they are fine again. Our brains seem to have a binary switch – your body either works or doesn’t; we find it hard to make allowances for variable conditions, bodies which work some of the time, unreliably. We find it even harder to deal with mental health conditions, which can be just as debilitating. Just because a person doesn’t conform to our expectations of disability does not mean that they are “faking it”, “scrounging”, or even “fit for work”.
Another lesson I have learned from Sue is how close you and I – the average able-bodied people – are to the precipice of disability. An accident that puts us in a wheelchair may be just around the corner. I may feel fine today, but that means nothing when it comes to what nightmare condition my body may develop tomorrow. Every day you live as an able-bodied person is a day you’ve been lucky and a day you should be thankful for. If simple humanity isn’t enough to make us want to care for the vulnerable in our society, to show solidarity and help people in need, then this awareness of our own fragility and mortality at least should point us in the right direction.
A final lesson: this one from Sue, Chris Grayling and the Paralympic Games. Odd combination, I know. It was Chris Grayling who said (Q286) to the Work and Pensions Committee earlier this year that with the proposed welfare and benefits reforms he was trying to address a situation where “a Paralympic athlete with a university degree has no obligation to look for a job”. This is, of course, cheap and lazy rhetoric. Yes, Britain has world class Paralympic athletes. Yes, they are incredibly inspiring, both to disabled people and to the able-bodied. Yet equating all “deserving” disabled people with Paralympic athletes in the public’s mind – which is precisely what Chris Grayling sought to do with his remarks – is deliberately deceptive. It ignores the diversity of conditions which can cause disability, denies disabled people their individuality, implies that those who are not breaking world records on a daily basis are somehow worth less. On the other hand, one of the weird and wonderful things about competitive sports for the disabled is the sheer complexity of the rules: because everyone’s condition is different, you have to find a way to more or less compare like with like. Unlike Chris Grayling, this system allows disabled to people to compete on a level playing field. We as a society, too, should be able to allow for that. We should treat the disabled with dignity and respect, as individuals, and give them the support they need to have a meaningful and fulfilling life as part of our society.
So when we watch the Paralympic Games next year, let’s celebrate the amazing achievements on the athletes – and let’s at the same time remember all those other disabled people out there. Each of them, in their own unique way, tries their best every day – to get through the day, to contribute to society, to achieve something amazing.
This article was originally published on Huffington Post UK.
Apart from a ten-line blip in a seven-page speech David Cameron made back in April, whenever immigration comes up in the news in this country it is in a negative context. Ed Balls says Labour let too many of the likes of me in, and Theresa May seems to think that the country is overrun by evil immigrant cats – or something like that. Yet every day, millions of immigrants work hard, pay our taxes and try to contribute to the British economy and society as best we can – much like everyone else in the country. Here are some examples of what immigrants do for this country.
Work hard
The lady who cleans my house every couple of weeks is Bulgarian and works for an agency where the majority of the staff are from my native country too. This is not because of some Great Immigrant Conspiracy; but when I was looking for a cleaner I left voicemails for about five different companies, and by the time I got to this one I was so fed up I didn’t even bother. Five minutes later my phone rang: “We’re sorry we missed your call, madam. How can we help?” It was only when the proprietor turned up at my house to assess it that we found out we were from the same country.
My cleaner works hard. Sometimes she gets in at 7.30 in the morning, before I’ve left for work, and sometimes she leaves my house at 6pm and goes to yet another client. She puts up with all my idiosyncrasies, the constant mess that is my house thanks to my full-time job and numerous extracurricular activities, the occasional last-minute request for her to rearrange her entire schedule and please come back later. On top of that, most of the staff at the agency are doing NVQ qualifications in order to improve the service they give customers.
My cleaner and her colleagues are not the only ones who work hard. Claudia is from Germany. She works with autistic people. Michelle is American. She works as a producer and project manager for performance artists. Currently she is working on a project involving the performance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in various languages, including Sign. The nuclear physics group of a certain Scottish university is made up of 15 people of ten different nationalities. Immigrants can be found in every profession and walk of life, working hard to contribute to the economy and make a better life for themselves and their families.
Play hard
Sometimes even when we play, we work. When my Scottish friend Morna put out a call on Twitter earlier this year for developers, marketers and media professionals to help her start up her business using the unique “Sweatshop” method, I am not sure what she expected. What she got was a motley crew of 30 or so passionate professionals. While there were sizable English and Scottish contingents among us, immigrants were disproportionately represented. About a third of the Founders’ Team came from all over the world: Slovenia, Poland, Italy, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Denmark. In exchange for free food and lodgings and a small number of shares in the start-up, we travelled to Dundee and put three weekends’ worth of hard graft into bootstrapping a business from nothing. We didn’t do it for the money, nor for the glory. We did it because it was fun and because we believed in the project: a social platform with the potential to revolutionise adult and higher education in this country.
The FlockEdu crowd aren’t the only ones combining work and play. Kathryn, who is Canadian, uses her skills as a musician and composer to run her local church choir. Iman, a writer of Pakistani origin who grew up in Saudi Arabia, donates her time and skills to various campaigning groups and political publications. Even in something as British as the recent referendum on the voting system, we had a fair number of immigrants doing their bit to improve democratic representation for UK citizens.
Care in the community
It often strikes me how disproportionately engaged immigrants are in the communities I’m involved with. At the Star & Shadow, a small, entirely volunteer-run cinema and arts space in Newcastle where I occasionally help out, people from all over the world are at the heart of the community, side by side with our British friends. Stephanie from France runs great seasons of foreign films or cult British television sci-fi. Yaron from Israel puts on gigs with the most weird and wonderful local bands, giving them a much-needed opportunity for exposure. Cathy from China pulls pints like a pro behind the Star & Shadow bar.
Edinburgh, too, has its own volunteer-run arts space. After the bankruptcy of their landlord, the Forest Café is currently on hiatus while trying to raise enough money to buy the building they have called their home for over a decade. Yet you only need to listen to the voices in their fundraising video to understand the passion of all their volunteers and the important contribution immigrants make to the project.
I spoke to Margarida, a 23-year-old Portuguese woman who is a Volunteer Coordinator and member of the Forest Action Team. For her, the Forest is a home and a family. Even after her European Volunteer Service funding ran out, Margarida chose to stay in Edinburgh.
“I couldn’t leave the Forest behind in such a crucial moment. Right now, the Forest needs everyone and I’m here to help bring the Forest back with everything I have to give, be it time, energy, creativity.”
She wants to make sure that the Forest lives and continues to provide a unique and amazing space and service to everyone in Edinburgh. At the same time, she is making new friends, learning new skills, developing projects old and new. Margarida finds Edinburgh as a city and the Forest as a community warm and welcoming – only the British press with its persistently negative coverage of immigration worries her; though, she adds cynically, it doesn’t surprise her.
Not only arts spaces but also charities which provide vital services often benefit from the contribution of immigrant volunteers. Mara, from the US, runs the Abortion Support Network – the only charity which provides practical help and funds to women from Northern and Southern Ireland who need to travel to England for an abortion. She and her small volunteer team provide a non-judgmental listening service, factual and impartial information, and much-needed funds and accommodation for women who otherwise would not be able to access safe and legal abortions. Immigrant volunteers are at the heart of the “Big Society”.
An experience many of us immigrants have in common is a kind of multiple personality disorder we observe in the country we have chosen to make our home. One on one, as individuals, we are welcomed by our British friends. We find communities we can contribute to and integrate in. We find people who reach out a helping hand, like the English Language Conversation Group at the Star & Shadow. We find our contributions valued. When, however, it comes to political gain and newspaper circulations, things turn quickly to an “us and them” mentality which is healthy for no one.
Recognising immigrants’ contributions to this country is the first step towards recognising how much we all have to learn from each other – and how much we can all gain from truly being “in this together”.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day – a day when bloggers around the world aim to raise awareness of women in science, technology and mathematics. One day, I would really like to be able to interview and profile my mother for this (she was a research chemist before circumstances forced her to change career) but so far I have not managed to make her comfortable with the idea of being written about. My subject this year, therefore, is Caroline Herschel.
In astronomy, the name Herschel is commonly associated with Sir Friedrich Wilhelm (or William), a German-born astronomer who lived and worked in Britain for much of his life. William made his own telescopes which are described by experts as very advanced, as well as discovering Uranus and a number of binary starts and deep sky objects. What is less well-known is that William’s younger sister, Karoline Lucretia (Caroline), was both his assistant and a successful and accomplished astronomer in her own right.
Caroline was born in 1750 in Hannover. After her growth was stunted as a result of a bout of typhus at the age of ten, Caroline’s family gave up hopes of marriage for her. She was expected to remain at home as a house servant. Upon the death of their father, however, Caroline was able to follow her brother William to England in 1772. At their house at 19, New King Street in Bath (now a museum to the Herschels), Caroline began helping her brother in cataloging his discoveries and also proved skillful at setting up and maintaining telescopes.
Tutored by her brother, she began to understand astronomy and make her own observations from about 1782. She made a number of independent discoveries, including eight comets (with unquestioned priority of discovery on five of them), 14 nebulae, and M110 (NGC 205), the second companion of the Andromeda galaxy. She also confirmed a number of her brother’s discoveries. In 1787, Caroline became the first woman to be granted a salary (of £50 annually, by George III) for scientific work.
Caroline’s work on documenting astronomical discoveries, both by simplifying, re-organising and extending existing catalogues and by compiling her own catalogue of nebulae, was a significant contribution to astronomy in its own right. After her brother’s death in 1822, she returned to Germany where she continued this work.
In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded Caroline its Gold Medal – no other woman would receive this until Vera Rubin in 1996. In 1835, she was elected an honourary member of the Royal Astronomical Society along with Mary Somerville. Unsurprisingly, Mary and Caroline were the first female honourary members of the Society. In 1846, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia.
Comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet which Caroline discovered is named after her. So is the asteroid 281 Lucretia and the C. Herschel crater on the Moon.
Caroline died peacefully in January 1848, aged 97. She left a legacy as an extraordinary woman and a pioneer astronomer.
Steve Jobs has died.
Many people have claimed that he changed the world, and many people have given accounts of his achievements. Charlie Stross points out that Jobs championed a number of ideas which ultimately made computing accessible to the masses – from graphical user interfaces, to smartphones and multi-touch interfaces. His passion for beautiful, flawless design made computing attractive too. For that, he deserves thanks.
There was, however, also a darker side to Steve Jobs’ impact on the world of computing. His flawless design led to computers becoming shiny black boxes which were not to be opened or played with. His drive for control – over hardware, software and content – led to users losing control of their own devices.
We live in a world where most of us haven’t got the faintest idea how the gadgets we rely on so heavily work, and where said gadgets are explicitly designed to discourage us from finding out. Apple’s approach to design also poses significant sustainability issues: if your gadget breaks, you cannot repair it. Apple may be able to, but often this comes with a price tag so large that you might as well buy the newer, shinier model instead. There is always a newer, shinier model.
When it comes to content, Apple’s control is absolute. There is a reason your iPod won’t talk to your computer without the intermediary of iTunes, and it’s that Apple likes to keep tabs on the content you consume. They also decide who can and can’t sell what through the App Store. What is perhaps worst is that Apple has conditioned an entire generation of users to believe that this is perfectly acceptable, even normal.
In his Commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs said that death was the “single best invention of life”.
It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But some day not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
We have an opportunity now. Jobs’ legacy was to make computing attractive and accessible to anyone and everyone, regardless of their level of technical ability; but he also made many of us slaves to our technology, users who are not in control and do not understand what the technology does or how. Our opportunity is to build upon the good bits of Steve Jobs’ legacy – the universality and accessibility of computing – while rejecting the dogma and casting off the mindset of the shiny, closed, black box.
In honour of Steve Jobs, here’s what I think we should do. Go find an old computer – you almost certainly have one lying around, or can get one from a friend. Find that old computer and open it up. Find out what’s inside. Take it apart. Put it back together. Install Ubuntu or Debian, or any other flavour of a free, open operating system you like. Learn to use it. Uninstall iTunes. Install Rockbox on your iPod instead. Go read up about cookies and how they can be used to invade your privacy. Learn how to control what information you pass on to whom. Learn to control your devices.
Goodbye Steve, and thank you. Now it is time for us to move on.
As the NHS Bill moves to the House of Lords, cuts to frontline services are already beginning to bite. New concerns have emerged over how fit for purpose the new arrangements will be.
Over at ORGZine, I talk about potential privacy implications of the NHS restructuring.
(I am starting a new category on this blog under the [Elsewhere] label. This is intended to collect all my writings published elsewhere on the web.)
I recently gave a talk at Skeptics in the Pub on digital rights. While the audience were lively, engaged, well-informed and provided lots of food for thought in the post-talk discussion, it didn’t escape my attention that only about 10% were female. Read more over at ORGZine.
In January 2010, before he came to power, David Cameron expressed an ambition for his government “to be the most family friendly government we’ve ever had in this country”. Since Cameron became Prime Minister, we have seen the scrapping of child benefit for higher rate tax payers, a number of changes in benefits and taxation and the scrapping of plans to extend further the right to request flexible working arrangements, among other measures which significantly disadvantage families.
Over on the F-Word, you can read my vision of what a family-friendly government really looks like.
In between Star Trek and episodes of True Blood I have been entertaining myself today with coverage of the Conservative Party Conference (or #cpc11 for the Twitterati). I have decided that this can only be survived with the aid of a drinking game, so I’m proposing a first draft below.
Anyone else want to add to it?