bushytailedfox

So far 120 Labour MPs are lining up to vote against privatisation of the Royal Mail. It's not enough, but it's a start.

What I find frustrating is that we even have the possibility of a privatisation of a core public service. Particularly a privatisation caused by creating a "crisis" of profitability to justify it. They Royal Mail is only unprofitable becuase the governement created competition in the form of private companies, who pay lower salaries, provide worse working conditions, provide no final salary pension, and who have no controls on their investment decisions or prices. A rigged market in other words.

It was the same when the NHS contracted out its cleaning, with the result that less contract cleaners on poorer salaries and heavier workloads leave our hospitals dirty and full of MRSA and C-Diff. The only winners from that one were the cleaning company executives and the funeral directors. Not the hospitals or the patients (i.e. us), that's for sure.

Somehow I don't see privatisation of the Royal Mail going any differently, do you? Less posties, poorer pay and conditions for those that remain, worse service for customers if you can't afford the private companies' premiums to get the second class post service we got 15 years ago for a fraction of the current price. Rich executives with big bonuses though, I think we can be pretty sure of that.

by the way artificial "competition" was created to cause a crisis as the

What's the difference between an under-developed country and a developing one?

The answer of course is in the cultural baggage we attach to the words. Under-developed is like under-fed, under-resourced, under-appreciated, under-weight, under-represented, they all suggest problems and that someone is to blame. Developing sounds like something is improving and will get there, so no blame there then, just sadness that we aren't there quite yet.

So, is Chad, say, a developing nation or an under-developed one? Or Congo? Or Kenya? of Mali? Or Peru? Or Somalia? Or Oman?

It's all in the words isn't it?

My money is on under-developed, how about you?

Norther Rock is about to start lending again, but only if the EU Commission give permission.

So, the British Government, whom we elect, cannot lend money to its own citizens without the approval of people from other countries whom we don't elect and have no control over. So much for democracy then.

The argument as I understand it, is that the governement may not "interfere" or "distort" in the single market. This will be the banking market run by corrupt and incompetent bankers then? A market that the commission was quite keen on us interfering with when their corrupt and incompetent banking friends was about to go bust. Well, we wouldn't want the champagne and the bonuses to stop flowing would we?

I used to be quite keen on the EU. I saw it as a way of creating a political system bigger than the multi-national corporations who have the power to bully individual states. The more I look at the details, the more I realize its just a way to entrench their power through rules and regulations over which we have no real effective control.

As I've said before: no power without accountability.

Today I want to go further. I do not accept the right of anyone that I cannot directly elect to enact laws on my behalf. To use a very old term, I assert that they hold no dominion over me.

I found one of the most intersting aspects of blogging is the statistical data you get on your visitors. What we get at blog.co.uk isn't fantastic, but we do at least get total mumber of unique views and total page views for each day. Yesterday's were the worst figures for a while - even for days when I didn't post any new content.

That's right, when I write nothing more people read my blog than when I write about Cambodia. In fact the original blog entry I linked to yesterday also got very low viewing figures.

Considering that you have to click through to the blog entry to see more than the title and the first few words, I assume the problem was with the subject matter, not the content (granted that might have been a problem had anyone actually clicked).

I suspect I'm not alone in this, and that there are some "graveyard subjects" out there that rapidly disappear into obscurity from the moment the "save" button is pressed. Cambodia and the Kmher Rouge would seem to be two of them.

It shows how much skill you need when writing about unpopular and unfashionable subjects. It's like the Andrex puppy. No-one wants to be told about how well Andrex may wipe their bum, and they certainly don't want to see the proof, so the advertiser give you a happy image of a puppy playing with a roll of loo paper, and leaves the rest to your imagination.

Catching up on world events, the first prosecution of Kmher Rouge leaders finally began last week. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/17/war-crimes-tribunal-cambodia
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I wrote about The Knher Rouge in my blog last December: http://bushytailedfox.blog.co.uk/2008/12/16/year-zero-where-was-i-5233260/

Whilst it's good to see the trial finally under way (the man has been in custody for over nine years which isn't a exactly great example of international justice) it's depressing to see how few people are being prosecuted. Five I believe. And none of them are those responsible for arming, training, and feeding the Kmher Rouge after they were defeated and driven out of Cambodia by Vietnam. That, shockingly, was mostly the UK on behalf of the US (see my linked blog entry). Most specifically it was the adminstrations of Margaret Thatcher that was most invelved, at the request of Ronald Reagan.

So, in addition the likes of the five on trial, we could quite easily add a few more criminals closer to home. And I wouls start with those who instructed the SAS to go on missions with the Kmher Rouge to plant anti-personnel landmines in the middle of civilian populations. We know they did that becuase one member of the SAS was so digusted that he broke ranks and told a journalist.

There's a website called The Pirate Bay to provides a search engine to help find video content to download using Bit Torrent (a file sharing application). They are currently being prosecuted in Sweden for assisting copyright violations (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7895026.stm).

The main shareholder in The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm, is a bit right wing to put it mildly (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfrid_Svartholm); anti-imigrant, Sweden for the Swedish, that level of nonsense. So, I'm no particular fan of his, or of his creations.

But I am intersted in the case because of the questions it raises. Do you have a right to make a profit, and if so, who has a right to make a profit and in what way? Does everything have a price?

on one side of the court case you have the movie and music industry that complain that The Pirate Bay allows people to copy their movies and music without payment. On the other side, The Pirate Bay claims to make its money from web advertising and that they simply provides a search engine to specialised web content outside of their control, just like Google. It will be interesting to see which way the case goes in the end.

Not surpsingly, if you have ever red much of my blog, my view is "a plague on both your houses".

My argument is that, yes, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that we have a right to a private life, but I see nothing that says that a private life requires the unfettered right to make a profit.

Do you have a right to make a movie? Well you certainly have a right to free expression, and in the modern world one of the pathways to that is through making movies.

Do you have the right to make money from your movie? Well, you have the right to distribute it, that's what freedom of expression means. You also have the right to associate with people who want to make movies and watch them. Assuming that anyone wants to see them of course.

Commerce itself is part of an economic system, involves all of society, and is very public. It is simply one way for private individuals to interact with each other and with the state. So its only one of many public means to an end, and not part of your private life.

So, on blance, I'd say you only have the right to make money by selling your movie if society as a whole, on the basis of an informed decision, agrees to that economic model. Whether it does or not doesn't affect your rights.

Personally, for many activities, I would question the use of that commercial model. I don't want people to make a profit out of policing, healthcare, soldiering, or teaching for a start. Then there are things like providing water and sanitation, electicity, gas, telephony, public transport, social care, prisons, law... None of which would I want some company thinking, "I'll do it this way, make this short-cut, to make more money".

I don't think I'm alone in my views. In fact, I suspect that given such a list, I would get quite a few supporters, and for many of the professions and services in the list, I would get a majority.

Two days agao I rescued a stray dog. It was 7.30pm and the council dog warden was off duty.

It was sub-zero, the dog, a bitch, was heavily pregnant, she was down on her honches, whimpering. And with one jealous doggy in the house, she couldn't stay there very easily (I had to lock Toby, howling, in the bedroom).

I called the RSPCA. All you get, having navigated their automated menu is a message telling you that strays are the responsibility of your local council.

This is the kind of grandstanding politics that really pisses me off.

Yes, the council should help, but a charity that claims to be about animal welfare needs to deal the situation as it stands, not just sit there playing politics.

So I had both the RSPCA and the local council out-of-hours service washing their hands of the problem, bot prepared to allow the dog and her unborn puppies to spend overnight outside in -3C.

In the end, after much phoning around, I found a boarding kennel 7 miles away took in strays overnight, so I coaxed the dog into the back of the car and took her there.

Now I'm fit and well, and I have a car. What if I'd been a pensioner, or had no transport?

I will never give another penny to the RSPCA until they change their policy and help with strays, especially in cases like this where the council is refusing to act.

I just watched our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, tell the BBC that it is more important to keep Anerica's secrets than for justice to be done.

Let's make this quite clear. Miliband thinks that the secret use torture by the US and its allies, whilst terrible, is not worthy of pursuance through the courts if that means the British public get to hear about it.

That would be Labour's "Ethical Foreign Policy" then, would it?

I've written about US torture of prisoners before, last time about a Canadian citizen whom the Canadian High Court has declared to have been tortured by the US with the complicity of the Canadian secret services.

Today, it seems to be the turn of the British High Court. David Davis raised a point of order in the House of Commons today (in order to get round reporting restictions I believe) to allege that the High Court has said Binyam Mohamed, being held at Guantanamo, has been tortured by the US, and that the US have threatened to withdraw all intelligence help from the UK if the details of the torture are made known to the court.

You may want read Nick Robinson's blog on this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2009/02/torture_allegat.html

I've just been reading Stephanie Flanders' blog on the BBC news website; she's the BBC's economics editor.

Her argument today, and it's a strong one, is that the Great Depression of the 1930's was not caused by protectionism, and that Peter Mandleson has got it completely wrong ( Mandelson warns on protectionism ).

She quotes economist Milton Friedman, and ex Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who say that the Great Depression was casued by the Federal Reserve when it failed to inject cash into the banking system after the crash in 1929. She also refers to the Gold Standard, where currencies were fixed to the price of gold, a sort of early version of the ERM and about as successful. Those countries who abandoned the Gold Standard were the first to come out of the Depression.

So, protectionism per se is unlikely to cause a depression. What it would do is make "Peter's Friends", the globalized multi-national corporations, suffer. They gain their power and (malign) influence from the scale of their operations, and you don't easily get that scale of operation when governements control the flow of capital, and insist on their own industrial strategy.

Peter's Friends must be looking aghast at the strength of feeling coming from the strikes surrounding Lindsey Oil Refinery. If that feeling gets attached to a political bandwagon, who knows where it will end. And in the end, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.