Monthly Archives: December 2011

Copy and paste for all

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Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, yesterday invited former German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to “promote internet freedom globally”.
Mr zu Guttenberg is an interesting choice for this position. It doesn’t take much digging through his CV, even for non-German-speakers, to find that he has had personal – and recent – experience of the power of the internet. It was barely a year ago that a web-based collaboration of scientists and citizens demonstrated that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis was shamelessly plagiarised from over 130 different sources. There is barely a page in the work that doesn’t contain a plagiarised passage. Nearly two thirds of the text are copy-and-pasted – unattributed – from a variety of other works, including the essay of a first-year student and the writings of some of Mr zu Guttenberg’s party colleagues. Ultimately, this cost Mr zu Guttenberg his job as Defence Minister back in March.
Commissioner Kroes justified her choice of consultant saying she wanted “talent, not saints”. Yet surely the fact that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis is barren of original thought shows that the one thing he lacks is talent. Given the challenges facing online activists in authoritarian regimes, one has to question Ms Kroes’ judgement on this matter. In a world where news is constantly manipulated to somebody’s advantage, trust is the rarest of commodities. Any blogger or activist wishing to be truly effective, to really touch and inspire people, needs to earn their readers’ trust while at the same time walking the fine line of ensuring their own personal safety. Disappearances and crackdowns on Chinese bloggers illustrate the importance of anonymity for personal safety. Conversely, the case of “Amina Arraf” or “Gay Girl in Damascus” – a blog which turned out to be run by a middle-aged American man – shows both the potential of the internet to truly touch people, and the disappointment which results when trust between blogger and reader is breached.
Ultimately, when the commodity you are trading in is trust, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the last person you want fighting your corner.

Ever closer union

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So Dave used his veto. That must have made him feel manly, and powerful, and in control. For all of twelve seconds. Until someone pointed out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
What strikes me about this sorry mess is how short a time it has taken for the “we must protect the City at all costs” attitude to become acceptable again. Rewind, if you will, back to 2008. Remember the collapse of Lehman Brothers? The credit crunch and the global liquidity crisis? The resulting recession and flatlining of the UK economy? Am I the only one who remembers the intellectual discourse of 2008/09 questioning whether capitalism had failed, whether the financial system was fit for purpose? Did I hallucinate all these things?
Well, apparently not. It was earlier this year that Mr Cameron’s own Business Secretary was still talking about banking reform and splitting retail and investment banking activities. Back in 2008, David Cameron himself said (emphasis mine),

I’m pleased that the European regulators are looking at our proposal to bring stability to the banking system.

and

Many bankers in the City were quite simply irresponsible.
They paid themselves vast rewards when it was all going well……
…and the minute it went wrong, they came running to us to bail them out.
There will be a day of reckoning but today is not that day.

And yet, not only has that day of reckoning not come; barely three years later it seems to be perfectly acceptable for the Prime Minister to put Britain’s membership of the European Union and the country’s standing in foreign policy at risk in order to protect those very same financial institutions for which he promised a day of reckoning. I seem to have blinked and missed something. What happened?
A second question here has to be what the hell have the Lib Dems done? The Deputy Prime Minister claims to be “bitterly disappointed”, almost as if the situation was nothing to do with him. But where was Mr Clegg last week when Britain’s negotiating position for the EU summit was being decided?
In Germany, Cameron’s name is becoming a by-word for causing a breach with Europe (German link). Much like Mr Cameron, the FDP – the junior partner in the German coalition government – are playing party politics with the future of Europe. Much like Mr Cameron, they are being petty, irresponsible, and myopic.