Shortly after the big round of EU enlargement in 2004, I took a look at future prospects for enlargement. At the time, I called prospective members, “largely a collection of the poor, ill-governed and recently-at-war.” Most of them are much less recently at war, many of them are better governed, and almost all of them are less poor, yet for all but a few prospects for EU accession seem to me more distant than in 2004.
What has happened?
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Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigns as Germany’s defense minister, regrets heeding career advice from Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky
Helen Pidd of the Guardian writes that the now ex-minister was widely tipped as a future chancellor, but I can’t imagine who was doing the tipping. Bavarians don’t get elected chancellor in Germany: a career at the federal level in Berlin (and previously in Bonn ) takes them too far away from the maneuvering needed to put or keep them atop the CSU, while a stint as Minister-President of Bavaria takes them too far away from Germany’s mainstream to get elected chancellor.
While it doesn’t compare to the turmoil in the Arab world, Ireland is having its own abrupt political turnover this weekend. Although the broad outline of the results is clear, confirming a collapse in the vote of the hitherto natural party of government Fianna Fail, there is still significant uncertainty about the seat counts, which in turn will affect the calculations about forming the next government.
Henry Farrell has a post explaining many of the ins and outs of the upcoming (February 25) election in Ireland. Comments are good, too, if sometimes very insidery on Irish media.
Apologies for the continuation in blatantly political UK-centric blogging, but I couldn’t pass on this one:
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has defended planned cuts to housing benefit after Labour accused the government of “threatening people’s homes”. He said the changes, announced in the Spending Review, were “fair”. And it was not fair that people who went out to work got less help with accommodation than those who did not.
Nick Clegg does give the impression here that he doesn’t know that being without a job isn’t a condition of eligibility for housing benefit. You can work like a draft horse and still get housing benefit: the principal eligibility condition is low income. Details of this are widely available. I wonder if Nick could come to see a mild irony in that the only way to guarantee that people with jobs always get at least as much housing benefit as those without is either to pay everyone housing benefit, or to cut it completely for the unemployed (or both, of course). I don’t know, maybe it’d be worth it, if we could avoid a situation where upon getting a proper job (one that pays £145,492 p.a., say) a person suffers the appalling unfairness of having to see someone on a lesser income get more help with the rent.
As a side-note, yes, this does mean that we don’t just subsidise fields and hedgerows here in the UK, we also subsidise some of the roofed-over parts. Not only that, it’s been arranged so that those who benefit from this housing subsidy are all mixed in with everyone else. That’s because – historically – we’ve preferred this arrangement to townships and bussed-in labour.
See also this.
If you can work and if you’re offered a job and you don’t take it, you cannot continue to claim benefits. It will be extremely tough.
This statement has a partner. David could have gone on to say:
If you’re able to hire, and if you define a role for someone and you don’t offer minimally decent wages and conditions, you cannot expect to prosper through recruitment. It will be extremely tough.
State benefits aren’t just a signal to workers, they also send a message to employers: treat your people at least as well as this, or they’ll tend to prefer living on benefits. It shouldn’t always be the case that you’re better off working: in fact, one way to guarantee that work makes a person better off involves putting slackers in jail. It’s been tried.* For those who don’t want that sort of country (or something closer to it than we currently are) discussion of benefits can’t just be about the unemployed. More balance in the rhetoric please, Tories, or we’ll assume you don’t understand this.
* If you think that coming up with an actual example involves confirming Godwin’s Law, well, you’d be wrong. Apparently the Swiss had an arbeitsscheu policy of their own up until the early 1980s.
So they capped the leaking oil well in the end. What about the other one? Not so much.
Back before the summer break, we’d just had the eruption of the “microparties”, and Nicolas Sarkozy had discovered that it was suddenly imperative to lock up gypsies. Everyone knew very well that the scandal would take the summer off, getting out of Paris to the sea as if it was itself a character in the story. And now, it’s back. There’s been a certain amount of fallout about the Roma, by the way; this week’s leak reveals that Brice Hortefeux’s original circular to all prefects did indeed mention them by name as an ethnic group, which isn’t meant to be something that the Republic believes in. In fact, that’s precisely what Immigration Minister Eric Besson has been saying in public – so he’s been left to protest that he didn’t get the e-mail.
This is, however, now a side issue, one with the passing summer, even though the European Commission is officially displeased. As August came to an end, a few new tarballs began to wash up on the beaches. Eric Woerth turned out to have intervened to get Patrice de Maistre, Liliane Bettencourt’s financial adviser and his wife’s employer, a Légion d’Honneur. He’d initially denied this. Then, Le Canard Enchainé ran a slightly gnomic story mentioning that one David Sénat, an official on Justice Minister Michéle Alliot-Marie’s staff, had been forced to resign.
The significance of this has just become more obvious than it perhaps was.
Le Monde opened this week by announcing on the front page that the newspaper was about to bring criminal charges alleging that persons unknown had been spying on communications between one of its reporters and a source. Communications between journalists and their sources are legally privileged in France under a measure introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy. The source, it turns out, is none other than David Sénat, and in practice, the persons unknown can only have been agents of the state.
Wham! It’s a gusher!
The UMP, through its general secretary Xavier Bertrand, responded immediately:
Pourquoi un journal comme Le Monde se permet d’accuser sans preuve, pourquoi une telle agressivité du journal Le Monde?
He also blamed the Socialists and the Communists and claimed there was no proof of anything in the story. This may not have been the best decision ever, as within the day, the Director General of the National Police confirmed in an interview with the same newspaper that the DCRI – Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, the reorganised counter-intelligence agency – had indeed carried out an investigation into leaks to the press in which they had monitored Sénat’s office phone. To sum up: Le Monde alleged that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had “examined” Sénat’s phone, had demanded communications data from a mobile operator, and had identified Sénat. Bertrand denied all this.
The DGPN Director then confirmed that the DCRI had been ordered to find out who was communicating with the press, had examined the phone, had demanded data from the operator, and had identified Sénat. Xavier Bertrand would therefore appear to be in a certain amount of trouble.
The only difference in their accounts is that the DGPN Director denies that they intercepted Sénat’s phone calls, only that they retrieved the call-detail records showing who he had been telephoning, when, and for how long (and also possibly from where and under which billing codes). He seems to be relying on this distinction to claim that this exercise was legal. Le Monde‘s sources, whose PGP keys are presumably getting a workout, claim that they also obtained geolocation data.
Keen and agile minds will recall that this is precisely the argument the US National Security Agency asserted in the case of STELLAR WIND, its mammoth and illegal Bush-era surveillance operation which also relied on the analysis of CDRs rather than on the interception of calls. It is a telecomms industry truth that the real business is all about signalling and billing and operations support – telephony itself is a relatively small part of the machine. This is never more true than in surveillance cases.
It does not seem to be the strongest argument ever that journalistic sources are protected as to the content of their communications but not as to the fact of being a source, but that’s a matter for the courts. The police have also claimed that they ran the idea by the national commission for the supervision of surveillance, which unfortunately denies this as well, and it seems to be confirmed that the leaks in question were ones about the Woerth-Bettencourt affair.
Who is David Sénat, anyway? A judge by training, he’s been working for MAM for years, at the ministries of Defence, the Interior, and now Justice, and also in her capacity as head of the RPR in its shadow existence as part of the UMP.
MAM considered running for president in 2007, during the period when it appeared that the traditional Gaullist wing of politics and the circle around Jacques Chirac might stand a spoiler candidate to derail the Sarkozy campaign. Not surprisingly, she’s considered much more of a conservative conservative than Sarko, and a potential future presidential candidate. Even her microparty seems designed to contrast with either Sarko’s Rolex-and-yacht look or the IT-director professionalism of someone like Francois Fillon – it’s called Le Chêne, The Oak. Feel the Burkean traditions on that. So the fact that…someone…called the spooks on her office implies a certain tension, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the “someone”? Who he? Well, the President did have the DCRI investigate the source of rumours about his wife. So he’s got form for making use of the intelligence services personally. She’s in the news as well, by the way:
..avoids charity work, held up filming on Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and had three former lovers as houseguests when Nicolas Sarkozy first visited her Mediterranean villa.
Who was it who said that the cavalry lent tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl?
Anyway, it’s hard to overstate and understate the importance of this story. Imagine if the Bush administration had been spying on the New York Times‘s phone calls to, say, Valerie Plame – not perhaps the biggest leap of fantasy ever undertaken – and the Times both detected this somehow, and called the FBI to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under a source-protection law introduced by the same administration. On the other hand, the weirder any political scandal gets, the greater the pressure to find some sort of amicable resolution. (See the quote above.) The system, after all, must preserve itself. But the exit strategy from here is very far from obvious.
The BBC’s Today Programme interviewed Philip Green last Friday. Green, who whose foreign-domiciled spouse owns the Arcadia group of clothing retailers of which Green is the boss, has been appointed by the UK coalition government to advise on a review of government spending. It’s been reported that Green’s familial company ownership arrangements reduce his tax obligations under UK law; naturally, the Today Programme invited him to comment on this. Green then made use of an article in the Mail on Sunday to respond:
For whatever people may think, this is not about me, it’s about them. We are a team. I might be the strategist but I can’t do this on my own. There will always be people who will criticise. Since the announcement was made on Friday, I have received my fair share of backbiting. I was asked on to Radio 4′s Today programme to speak about our new role but such was the lack of focus, the interviewer seemed more interested in my friendship with Naomi Campbell. Perhaps when I finish this job, my next could be to review the strategy and costs of the BBC.
Apart from being appalling in itself, this sort of apparently casual threat making has consequences. One of those consequences is that if Green goes on to talk about ‘efficiency savings’ in any area of government spending, we’ll have to consider that it might be nothing more than bullying tit-for-tat. Maybe a decision on a particular saving will have been been carefully thought through. Or maybe it’ll just have been that a civil servant said something that offended Green. Thwack. In other words, the guy has disqualified himself from his own, uh, team.
Also, while on the topic of the coalition’s jaw-dropping, bullet-in-the-foot public appointments, what’s with the ‘social mobility tsar’? Which direction of social mobility are we talking about here?
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Well, this is certainly not the first time I have had cause to complain about the quality of the journalism and economic reporting served up over at the Economist, and I’m damn sure it won’t be the last. But this latest example of shoddy (I would almost even go so far as to use the word “gutter”) journalism certainly takes the biscuit. Catalunya, the august magazine informs its readers is the “Land of the Ban” – “First the burqa, now the bullfight. What will Catalonia outlaw next?” Evidently the author of the article is entitled to his opinion, but could it be that the long-standing practice of incorporating unsigned opinion pieces may now have lost its earlier justification, and may it not somehow have inadvertently converted itself into a rather cowardly way of expressing otherwise hard to justify opinions behind the safe shield of anonymity. Or would our author really like to show us that valour is, at least in this case, the better part of discretion, and enter the arena in persona in order to face the wrath of the Catalan bull?
“The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word,” wrote Hemingway in his classic treatise Death in the Afternoon, “that is, it is not an equal contest, or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather, it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved, and in which there is danger for the man, but certain death for the animal.”
A bit more on the Big Society. I mentioned that Rory Stewart wants faster broadband for his constituents in rural Cumbria. Now Rory is a decent guy – I knew him at school – but I don’t think he’s on to anything much with his play to relate the issue of rural broadband provision to Cameron’s Big Society. We might eventually end up with better broadband in Cumbria, but we’ll have gotten there by the hard road: the plan doesn’t do much for the idea of little platoons. The Guardian has a bit more about how Stewart describes his project. Apparently there are three components to it:
1) The government part. The government is going to open up its public infrastructure. It is going to allow us into the fibre optics thick pipes that run to the schools. It is going to put pressure on Network Rail to let us into the thick pipes that run along the Carlisle Settle line.
2) We, as communities, will get a very small government subsidy equivalent to what they would have given us in terms of their universal service commitment. You roll out a parish pump which is to say you go into that thick pipe at your school or on the railway and you bring out a little fibre optic cabinet. Then, and this is the key point, the parish comes and puts together its own plan to get the stuff from the parish pump into their home.
Many of our communities will want to go for fibre optics to the home so they can have super fast stuff. Others will be content to put a wireless hub on top of the pump that will give them two megabytes.3) The final government support for the community is to provide a loan. If it costs a £1,000 to put broadband into your house, if you have a soft loan over 15 to 20 years that is only costing you £50 a year.
Now there’s not quite enough technical detail here to comment on viability. What we can do, though, is make a quick comparison with the way Japan has set about solving the same problem. In 2008, JAXA launched a satellite – Kizuna – which allows any rural Japanese household to connect to the internet at 155 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload. That’s the domestic transmission rate. Small businesses get 1.2 Gbps download. Compare this with the default 2 Mbps rate mentioned in the Cumbrian plan. Note, that’s megabits. Rural Japanese already get between 75 to 600 times the data rate planned for Cumbria, once the parish meetings are held, and the thousand small disagreements about what to do have gotten thrashed out.
In terms of subscriber requirements, the Japanese subscribers only need to install a satellite dish (45 cm at the lower data rate) to get connected. The Cumbrians are expected to raise loans to get cables laid to their houses (note: wouldn’t line of sight microwave be better in some cases?).
In terms of scope and timescale: Kizuna gave coverage to the whole country from launch day onwards. The Eden Valley Big Society plan, once implemented, will cover part of one county of England.
The talk of parish pumps and railway lines is charming, but I think it’s a shame to be literally parochial about something like this. There are situations where a society needs to amass all of its resources to be effective. Communications infrastructure is one of those situations. What’s more, investment in satellites, specifically, is consistent with fiscal stimulus as generally understood (there are British satellite manufacturers). The Big Society talk is surely better saved for the human-to-human stuff, if we’re going to hear about it at all.
Anway, what do Fistful readers suggest vis-a-vis rural broadband. How has this been solved elsewhere?