«Ethical Post»

Funding Long-Term Social Care

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:00:00 +0000

I’ve just completed re-reading the Government’s green paper on the reform of long-term social care for the elderly, as a friend told me that there were features of it that were ill-explained and ill-covered by the media. In particular, he argued, there was a policy proposal that struck him as radically redistributive and, in his view, extremely just.

One rationale for government intervention is in the provision of public goods. Public goods are those which are non-rivalled and non-excludable. Lighthouses are the classic example of a good that if person A uses the lighthouse their use does not prevent person B from using that good; neither can person C be excluded from using the lighthouse even if person C doesn’t contribute towards its upkeep.

There are some public goods in the field of health, such as the prevention of communicable diseases and medical research. But an individual’s good health is not a public good (even though it may be provided by the public through a state-supported programme). There are other justifications economists may employ to support government intervention, such as co-ordination problems, however the primary justification for the large-scale government involvement that has typified the post-war era has been founded on questions of social justice. That is, the Government’s obligation seems to be more about ensuring equitable access to certain health goods.

Dealing with long-term social care, there are many complicated questions when one tries to analyse the policy options through the perspective of social justice. When I’ve looked at policy issues on this blog before I have often sought to balance two principles: first guaranteeing as full a spectrum of civil liberties as possible (primarily allowing individuals to pursue and revise different conceptions of the good) whilst within the policy options available opting for the system that benefits the least-advantaged most compared to the other systems.

Previously I looked at the case Norman Daniels made for establishing social institutions that provided healthcare. He argued that such a case could primarily be made from the grounds of equality of opportunity and I thought that this made three general circles of diminishing government obligation: first in providing critical and catastrophic care with no access problems and based primarily on need; second in regulating a system of social insurance for recognised primary and allied care services but allowing individuals significant freedom in the choice of care they received using a co-payment system; and third in provided medical savings accounts that allowed individuals to freely choice any health treatment or therapy they desired, even if was not necessarily recognised (e.g. acupuncture or Scientology treatments), with some support (perhaps vouchers or matched-savings) for the least-advantaged.

Aspects of long-term social care fall under all three of these brackets, although the majority (and the part of particular concern) clearly fall under the primary and allied care services. The Government put forward three proposals to deal with this area: (1) a “partnership” approach, (2) an insurance-based approach and (3) a “comprehensive” approach. My friend was most enthused by the third policy option.

An initial principle set forth by the Government is that the public should not provide for the accommodation costs of someone needing long-term social care, as we do not ordinarily seek Government support for these things in our everyday lives. This suggests that people should be given the opportunity to save for accommodation and associated costs, with Government support for the least-advantaged (perhaps through a credits scheme “earned” by the receipt of certain benefits during an individual’s working life, e.g. income support or disability benefit).

The “comprehensive” option would essentially be a social insurance scheme that provided everyone would receive care that was based on need and not ability to pay (similar to the NHS principle). It would be paid for by a fee paid upon retirement either based upon the savings and assets an individual had when they retired or it would be a set amount that individuals over a certain threshold would need to pay (effectively a form of wealth tax). Individuals would be encouraged to save for this amount throughout their working life and could pay the fee in instalments or allow the Government to collect it from them after their death (with attached interest). The Government’s own equality impact statement leaned towards this option as impacting most positively on low-income groups and meeting diverse cultural aspirations. However most of these were met by the increasing use of personal budgets, not necessarily through the new funding mechanism (which seems to include maximising inheritable assets as a legitimate cultural aspiration).

The comprehensive solution obviously doesn’t cover everything: for instance, most people will be required to cover their board and lodging costs when in residential care. Then there is a further issue of allowing different individuals to purchase different types of care. For instance individuals of certain faith backgrounds may wish to be cared-for in a certain faith-based environment or access services grounded in a particular faith. Gay or transgender individuals, for instance, may wish to be looked after by LGBT or LGBT-friendly individuals. More widely people will have different conceptions of the good informed by their cultural background that will affect would sort of long-term care they would like and what sort of life they would like to have in their twilight years and these desires should be respected.

Personal budgets are one way to try to meet this end, yet it seems difficult to attempt to design a system of personal budgets that adequately catered for widely different desires for social care. For example there are fewer gay nurses than nurses in general, so they are likely to be more expensive. Older gay individuals are more likely to have smaller extended families to call upon. Both these factors might increase the cost of the services gay individuals need.

Personal budgets strike me as an unsatisfactory solution to this problem when compared with a market of long-term care insurance products. Individuals will seek culturally sensitive products or use their care coverage to purchase such products. There will be market niches and products would be likely to fill those niches.

So from an equitable distribution of goods the “comprehensive” options seems attractive. Yet there are three fundamental problems: (1) It does not justly allow individuals to pursue their different ends. (2) It doesn’t necessarily make care more affordable. The Government is not going to pay for board and lodging and yet these are considerable costs. (The different between a residential home and a nursing home is as the names imply. From personal experience I know how costly a residential home can be yet most of these costs would not be met by the state.) Individuals would still need to save or find other means of support to meet these costs. (3) I’ve spoken before of the problem with a free at the point of use system or flat-rate charge system, which is that it denies relevant information to autonomous agents to make meaningful choices about their treatment.

The green paper points out that it is fairer to pay for social care costs through a wealth tax because otherwise the burden on the working age population would be disproportionate, especially given the concentration of wealth among the over-65s compared to those who are off a working age. In this way the paper contains a radical policy proposal that is highly welcome from a social justice perspective. However the paper leaves many problems completely unresolved.

In the next post I will but forward a policy proposal which might meet the requirements above based upon the Government's comprehensive option. In a later post I will look at the Netherlands system of health insurance, as there are elements from the system that are relevant to both the healthcare debate in the USA and also the long-term social care debate in the UK.

Debbie Purdy, Autonomy and Euthanasia

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Many families who help terminally ill loved ones to die will now more than likely be free of prosecution after the Lords’ ruling today in the case of Debbie Purdy. In much of the press it is being presented as a landmark ruling, but we should be clear what the exact issue at the heart of the case was and why even an anti-euthanasia Kantian would support the decision.

Ms Purdy’s case was not that she wanted her husband, Omar, to be granted immunity to help her die. If that had been her case then it would have rightly been thrown out as law-making is the responsibility of the legislature not the judiciary. Ms Purdy was instead arguing that there was an asymmetry of information that prevented her from making an autonomous choice about the end of her life.

Assisting someone in a suicide is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Relatives who have helped loved ones go abroad to die have repeatedly been investigated and eight cases been handed on to the public prosecution service. Some individuals have been arrested. However none of the hundred or so Britons that have helped relatives go abroad to die have been prosecuted. This therefore has created uncertainty about how the Director of Public Prosecutions will behave; what criteria is being used to determine whether or not it is in the public interest to prosecute families if they have helped loved ones to die abroad.

What Ms Purdy sought was merely the information that was currently being denied to her so that she could make her decision about when she was going to go abroad to end her life and whether her husband could accompany her. The Lords concluded that Ms Purdy was being denied information that she had a right to know to make her decision and directed the Director of Public Prosecutions to provide a “custom-built policy statement” to provide clarity.

I’ve previously looked at Kant’s famous injunction against lying and tried to show that what he cared about what not dishonesty per se but, rather, what economists call information asymmetries, which he thought comprised an individual’s autonomy and was therefore a form of exploitation. His infamous “murderer at the door” example was designed to show that information should be provided (and autonomy thereby enhanced) even when it might lead to immoral consequences. From the Kantian perspective, then, it is clear that Ms Purdy was entitled to know the criteria under which the DPP would pursue a prosecution against someone who assisted a suicide.

However this does not underwrite a right to die. Kant did not think that individuals had the right to die; this was, he thought, incoherent from a perspective of moral autonomy. I myself remain uncommitted on the question of voluntary euthanasia in a way that I am not about questions of abortion or euthanasia in cases where individuals are in persistent vegetative states.

Few in the UK’s public discourse advocate true voluntary euthanasia; most instead advocate the liberty to hasten one’s death if one is terminally ill. The cases of Daniel James and Sir Edward Downes involved the decision to end their lives because the practical identity (sportsman, composer) under which they had made autonomous decisions for much of their lives had ceased to be practicable not because either were suffering from a terminal illness. Both full and limited voluntary euthanasia are problematic and hinge on the complexities of moral autonomy in ways that abortion and PVS-related non-voluntary euthanasia do not.

A “right to die” is also a troubling conception. What if Ms Purdy has a right to die and everyone other person in the world refuses to kill her on conscientious grounds? Does this require that one individual has a duty to kill her even if they have a conscientious objection to killing her? Euthanasia is a far more complex topic than it is currently being made out to be by various parts of the media.

Dignity in Dying and the Right to Die

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Euthanasia is in the news again. What is most poignant about some of these recent cases is that many do not concern terminally ill individuals. The cases of both Daniel James and that of Sir Edward Downes and his wife Joan reveal very different arguments being used to justify euthanasia.

Daniel James was only 23 years old and had been almost completely paralysed in a rugby accident. Whilst Joan Downes had terminal cancer her husband was not terminally ill. The retired conductor was almost completely blind and deaf; his wife had become his full-time carer. The decision that both Daniel and Sir Edward came to, was that the shapes of their lives were complete and their rational choice was that they therefore did not wish to continue to survive without thriving. This personal perspective on one’s life can be traced back to Aristotle and other perspectives in the virtue ethics tradition.

One way of understanding the approach of virtue ethics is to see individuals as having life projects which they wish to fulfil. Virtue ethicists judge individuals not in terms of traditional normative questions of right or wrong, good or bad. Instead they see how well someone tries to live out that life project. As a species of relativism we can see how virtue ethicists would question legal restrictions on assisted suicide, even in cases outside terminal illness.

Peter Singer, the preference utilitarian, similarly doesn’t have much problem with assisted suicide. Many of today’s supporters argue that individuals should have the right to have a dignity in death, which is a very ambiguous argument and I’m not entirely sure on what grounds such people make such claims. However I detect in such claims another utilitarian, John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill what a rule utilitarian who made a qualitative distinction in types of pleasure. This makes him, like Singer, a complicated hedonist. So complicated, in fact, that some have suggested his ethics come closer to the Aristotelian model.

Some might argue that Mill was incoherent or, at the least, not a utilitarian. His most important principle was the Harm Principle that restricted intervention only in cases where the liberty of others might be infringed, which is more similar to the liberalism of personal autonomy professed by many virtue ethicists and Kantians, not certainly not utilitarians. Similarly I see such incoherence in claims that people have the right to die with dignity.

What might be the argument from personal autonomy. Well Kantians see an individual’s moral autonomy as the most precious thing. Kant therefore thought that most forms of suicide were incompatible with moral reasoning because suicide denied someone the very autonomy upon which they reach moral decisions. Suicide cannot be a rational choice. Advance directives or living wills, that is life and death directives intended to be implemented when someone was so incapacitated they would be unable to make such decisions, are clearly compatible with this view.

However I do not think this is the complete picture for the Kantian. I think there are questions such as when someone, such as Daniel James or Sir Edward Downes, still clearly retains their moral autonomy but, in their view they are unable to fulfil it or the obligations arising from their own practical identity (sportsman, say, or conductor). I’m not entirely sure that is a genuinely moral difference between someone no longer to fulfil the obligations arising from their own practical identity and their no longer being morally autonomous. If we recall back to my posts on the health service, I felt that the obligations on social institutions were tied to opportunity ranges and practical identities. Nor does it seem entirely satisfactory to force an individual to experience a few more weeks or months of autonomy but thereby render them incapable of appreciating their own death.

If there is no such difference then the separate choices of Joan and her husband are therefore of the same order and are either both permissible or both impermissible. I remain uncommitted, or at least want to prod the question further. But my compassion, if not my reason, wonders if it would have been acceptable to prohibit Sir Edward ending his life when he did but letting his wife do so. Such a prohibition seems to me as troubling as I find the prohibition on assisted suicide for those with terminal illnesses who wish to appreciate their own deaths.

Social Care

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:46:00 +0000

Andy Burnham, Health Secretary, has announced plans for reforming the provision of social care in England. There was an opportunity, especially given the problems with dental care, to reform the structure of health and social care in a more socially just direction. Transferring primary care and allied services into a compulsory social insurance scheme would have given an opportunity to include extras such as long-term social care.

The current proposals do little to ensure effective and socially just provision based on need and not ability to pay, which merely continues many of the inequities of the current system.

Long in the Tooth

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0000

On the 22nd June the Government published a report on NHS dentistry that effectively signalled a u-turn on a policy just three years old. It’s hard not to see reforms as anything more than shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.

Some major differences are that (1) dentists are to be paid partly according to the number of patients on their register (a partial return to the old system), and (2) the co-payments system is to be reformed. For most of us this is pretty much equivalent to someone in a famine being told that food rations are being changed in the country next door.

One million fewer patients visited an NHS dentist in the two years after the introduction of the 2006 reforms compared to the two years previous. Dentists opted to extract more often than in the past and decided against more complicated procedures such as crowns and bridges. Under the new system there will be up to ten new price bands for treatment.

Such proposals are wrong as they do not promote patient autonomy. I’ve argued before that, besides emergency and catastrophic care, healthcare should be funded through a multi-payer system of competing sickness funds, which reimburse up to three-quarters of the costs of care with patients either topping up through complementary insurance or medical savings accounts, with young people and those on income support receiving vouchers or free treatment. I argued that such a system promotes autonomy, allowing the patient to choose what course of treatment was right for them.

Having a banded system of fees, like flat-rates for prescriptions, engenders information asymmetries which mean that patients can’t make meaningful decisions about their possible courses treatment. The current system also reinforces inequality as the least-advantages are unlikely to pursue care once they cease receiving free treatment and, if they do seek it, it is often substandard.

Time for social insurance for dentistry.

Don't Ban the BNP

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Ed Balls is contemplating banning BNP members from being teachers. Prima facie this seems to be a thoroughly good thing. Someone with particular views on cultural and racial integration might try to further those views in sinister ways: ignoring or encouraging bullying, report writing, even exam marking. It isn’t that the individuals concerned aren’t allowed to express their own conception of the good, we might argue, it is that their position as teachers would expose young people to the consequences of such ideas at the crucial, formative stage of their lives.

There are problems with such arguments, however. There are plenty of racist teachers out there who deliberately mark non-white students down or indulge in subtler forms of discrimination in the classroom; being a member of the BNP is not a necessary condition for behaving in such a way. A witch-hunt, then, isn’t going to solve such pernicious problems.

The second problem is the deeper problem of to what extent individuals in public services should be allowed to act according to their conscience (however warped or unwholesome we may find it to be).

For me the way the Government has responded to the BNP is wrong-headed on many counts. First if an individual is prejudiced and as a consequence unfairly disadvantages another individual, this is often grounds for a civil complaint or, in some cases, criminal proceedings. Second trying to suppress the expressions of certain unsavoury views does nothing to genuine counteract them. I am optimistic that now the BNP has elected representatives its leaders will be exposed for the bunch of half-wits and amateurs they really are. More so I hope that the ideas and policies such men and women profess will get a public airing and revealed to be irrational and an offence to human dignity and our most deeply-held moral convictions.

Extremism thrives on being ostracised; alienation is one of its main mechanisms for recruitment. It thrives in this way because it offers solace to the forsaken without any need to work for change and redress.

If the fear is that the liberal state is under threat then the Government and the political elite in general should be a little more relaxed. That is the purpose of checks and balances, of constitutional principles, of bills of rights and the courts. Such fears should certainly not underwrite unnecessary and wrong curtailments of fundamental civil liberties such as freedom of thought, conscience and expression.

Speakers and Lotteries

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:49:00 +0000

So we have a new Speaker, John Bercow. In this post I don’t want to say anything of the merits or otherwise of the new Speaker. However I do want to consider the election process a little in a way that touches on the debates about how to reform the chamber.

I’ve given the idea of a democracy a little thought and considered what model we would choose in the Original Position. First it seems clear that we would not choose a majoritarian, winner-takes-all system – which counts out our current system. Were we to use the maximin strategy we would quickly see that the least-advantaged would always do least-well in this system.

Second a strictly proportional system doesn’t seem to suffice either. As members of smaller political communities our power to pursue our own conceptions of the good would be proportional to our numbers. Again applying the maximin strategy this does not appear acceptable either.

Consider the dilemma of whether we should save one person from drowning or five people from drowning, in circumstances where we can only save one or the other. Under the veil of ignorance we would never choose a majoritarian system because it is just as likely that we would end up the lonely individual as we would be part of the larger group. We would not want matters to be simply proportional to the numbers. Under these circumstances we would want our chance of being saved to be equal to that of everyone else.

This does not mean that our chance would be equal to saving the whole of the five – this would not be showing the other agents proper respect either. Rather we would want our chance of being saved to be proportional; that is we would choose to have a one in six chance of being saved. Such a lottery would be weighted in favour of the five of course, as if any of them get picked they all get saved.

That is the Kantian solution to the Rescue Problem. A Kantian system, then, would strongly favour an electoral system where your chances of having your views represented were equal to the chances of everyone else. This system is known as sortition, a method used to elect the Doge of Venice way back when.

Obviously there is a question of practicality; it isn’t feasible in a large democracy to have everyone directly participate in a sortition process. It is also isn’t particularly autonomy enhancing – that is why we form political associations to help further our political will and persuade others of our conception of the good. We would therefore opt for the most autonomy-enhancing proportional system on offer. This would either be the single transferable vote with multi-member constituencies or a strictly proportional system with open lists.

We would choose such a method to select a chamber of representatives. We would then opt for our representatives to have an equal chance of furthering our interests. This would require that their ultimate role would be decided on a regular basis by sortition. This suggests something like the Federal Council of Switzerland, a seven-member executive council that collectively acts as the head of state and is jointly responsible for the federal administration. Rather than the members being elected proportionally, the members would be selected by lot (with the better represented parties obviously having a greater chance of being represented) on a regular basis (presumably annually or biennially).

We would also like to increase the likelihood of our interests being represented by increasing the number of mechanism, perhaps through standing committees as powerful as those in the US Congress.

The argument against such a system is the same as that brought against proportional systems: they increase the likelihood of views being represented that the majority find repugnant. That, however, is an argument against democracy not a particular form of democracy. Kantians tend to argue for a system of checks and balances (including as full a bill of civil rights as possible) and basic constitutional principles that would prevent some interests being put into effect – on the ground that we would choose for those interests to be prevented from being put into effect under a veil of ignorance or from a perspective of impartiality. (That is the same grounds upon which democratic institutions are argued for.)

Such a system is actually quite similar to David Hume’s Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, where an indirectly elected senate meets and appoints members to commissions based on a sortition process. Perhaps this is a better reform of our Parliamentary system, to have the Speaker and the chairs and members of the standing committees to be appointed by lottery. Private members bills could also be selected in this way. Doing so would remove the influence of the party whips and strengthen the chance that our interests will be represented in some way.

Parliamentary Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 +0000

There are two models of reform being discussed in the papers over the past couple of days. The first would be a fundamental reform: a referendum on Alternative Vote Plus (AV+) as put forward by Alan Johnson in what might or might not be a leadership bid. The second – which seems to be gaining support in both Opposition and Government circles – concerns a change in the way Parliament runs itself.

I picked up in a previous post the argument put forward by the Economist that much of the anger against the political class demanded institutional change (not constitutional). Cameron and Straw recognise that (1) all the main parties have been accused and this may mean that they are not susceptible to the sort of anti-vote that the Tories received in 1997 and (2) the way to dominate the agenda and exploit this issue isn’t to apportion blame but to look “leaderly” by being at the forefront of change.

Johnson’s own analysis is that the upcoming election is going to result in a Labour loss which can be mitigated in the long-run by a move towards a more proportional system and in the short-term by identifying an issue on which the Lib Dems (MPs and voters) and the Tories have fundamentally divergent views.

Whilst Machiavelli or Aristotle might have been interested in such explanations being, as they were, more political scientists than political philosophers, here I’m more interested in the justification of such policies.

Many of the arguments put forward for institutional reform follow from the thought that MPs have too little power and that there needs to be a separate career path as parliamentarian rather than as a member (or potential member) of Government. Many of the proposals put forward by Straw and Cameron involve reducing the power of the whips by introducing a business committee and allowing Parliament to decide on the members and chairs of the Select Committees. Cameron also favours a Petitions Committee system (presumably similar to the Scottish Parliament and the Bundestag).

A business committee would allow a greater time for the hearing of Private Members’ Bills – of which pitifully (and suspiciously) few every make their way to the statute books. I’m not convinced this is the most productive avenue to open up – I’ve discussed previously the idea that Select Committees should be allowed to sponsor legislation, something a business committee should promote by distancing the Government from the control over Parliament’s legislative timetable.

Johnson’s idea of a referendum plus general election deserves consideration but I’m suspicious of introducing a conflict between direct and representative democracy in these ways. Given that I think we would choose a representative democracy in the Kingdom of Ends I think we should therefore opt for procedures that deepened the political power of citizens without undermining representative procedures. Referenda are dangerous because they exacerbate inconsistencies the occur when aggregating individual preferences and because they increase the likelihood of majoritarian decisions (the plebiscite is a favourite of the tyrant).

How could Labour introduce electoral reform without a referendum but ensuring the same sort of accountability? I believe there is a way of passing an electoral reform bill with legitimacy. Firstly, it requires a short bill introducing the class of Basic Law into UK law. Basic Law would require a supermajority to be passed, repealed or amended. I also believe the task of producing chapters of Basic Law (which together would comprise a codified constitution) should be tasked to a Royal Commission of both houses.

Second a bill passing electoral reform would require not only a two-thirds majority (which would require the support of not only all of the Labour and Lib Dem benches but also would need another eight MPs) but further with a clause that allowed such a law to be challenged. Laws in Switzerland can be challenged if 50,000 signatures are assembled within a 100 days. Constitutional amendments can be put to referenda if 100,000 signatures are assembled in 18 months. The central principle of representative democracy is that Parliament needs the final say, so I think that were there to de some sort of popular challenge to a law it would require a second vote to be had in Parliament (perhaps after a general election) with a higher supermajority or even a double majority. A double majority would require, for instance, not only a two-thirds majority overall but also a two-thirds majority in all the constituent nations.

Perhaps a mechanism would replicate the legitimacy of a referendum seemingly bestows. A similar proportion of the population would require 360,000 signatures (about 0.6 per cent of the population) within a hundred days. Normal UK convention is for 5 per cent of the electorate (roughly 2million signatures) and perhaps there might a minimum number of signatures in each of the constituent nations of the UK (something like 200,000 signatures from Scotland, 100,000 from Wales, 50,000 for NI and 1½ million for England). A further restriction would be that challenges could only be made for such Basic Laws.

Anyway back to the cricket.

A Further Modest Proposal for Reform of the House of Lords

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Many arguments have been put forward concerning a new constitutional settlement in the wake of the various scandals. I believe, in time, consensus will gravitate towards (1) electoral reform, (2) state funding for parties and (3) a codified constitution. One constitutional reform that I think will be most intractable will be the reform of the Second Chamber.

I’ve pointed out previously that the reason why reforming the Second Chamber is such an intractable issue is because the UK is a unitary state. A Second Chamber tries to represent a nation in a distinctly different way to the lower chamber. Normally it does this be representing the constituent regions or states that comprise the nation-state. A Second Chamber is especially amenable to federal states. In the UK’s case, then, it is difficult to work out what its distinctive role should be.

When searching for ways to describe the role and function of the Second Chamber most people reach for history – the Senate of Rome, or the notion of a council of wise elders. The Second Chamber under this conception should be a deliberative body of expertise with a delaying power over the lower house to act as a check and balance.

In the past I’ve argued for senators of merit to be appointed (perhaps every three to six years) along the lines of the Nobel Prizes: the Poet(s) Laureate, the Astronomers Royal, an Economist Royal as well as scientists, musicians and artists. This would, I argued, increase the level of accountability whilst retaining the independence and expertise of the upper house.

In this post I would like to make an argument for re-introducing university seats into Parliament. The House of Commons used to have University seats that were elected according to the single transferable vote. The kernel of this idea came from Ireland – a case of a unitary state with a distinctive upper chamber. In particular it comes from the movement to reform the upper chamber.

Currently there are six senators elected by the graduates of the National University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. On Kantian grounds this seems unfair: it is wrong to allow part of the population, on the basis of educational attainment alone, to participate in an election and deny such participation to the majority. It is unrepresentative and dangerously close to Plato’s authoritarian philosopher-kings. If a new UK Senate were to have representation from just Oxbridge this would be highly undemocratic.

Yet election by graduates provides a genuinely distinctive voice in the Second Chamber and, further, it tends to result in independently-minded senators who have been predominantly non-party political. It also allows those who have made a contribution to UK life a say in the governance of country they might have left or that they would otherwise be denied. Most importantly, the senators elected by the university constituencies in Ireland have been the individuals who have made some of the most important contributions to the life of the Senate.

Here is the essential feature of university seats that I would like to draw attention to. When we consider our desired character of the Second Chamber – independence and expertise – it seems that a practical way to ensure this is draw upon the universities. Indeed this has been the main experience in the Irish Senate. It answers the challenge given by Plato’s ship of state metaphor: we would like those with specialist expertise to have a say in how we are governed. It also provides checks and balances because it is one of the few viable mechanisms that can provide capable representatives without the need for party patronage. Finally it partly deals with all of those arguments against an elected Second Chamber which state that direct election would led to a loss of expertise.

But here is the problem: it is still anti-democratic. One response is that it is decreasingly so as participation in higher education increases. The reform proposed for the Irish Senate is to give the electorate the option of either voting for a geographic constituency or university constituency. Graduates of universities would be given an alternative and distinctive way of participating in a popular election in way to confers benefit on all through an independently-minded Second Chamber with considerable expertise.

There is no reason, of course, why the national constituency or university constituency option could not be extended to some other functional constituencies. Civil servants or those who have served in the armed forces could similarly have functional constituencies. Again these would typically lead to independently-minded, non-party senators with relevant expertise.

The important thing is that the principle of one-man-one-vote not be infringed. If an individual decided to vote in the university constituency then they could not vote in the geographical constituency.

The reform proposal for the Irish Senate is for nearly half the Second Chamber to be elected in this way. About four-fifths of the seats would be under a national constituency and the remainder would be a “higher education constituency”. For a UK Senate of a hundred members, that would be fifty seats, with ten representing various functional constituencies (graduates, public administration or military service).

I’ve now put forward two modest proposals for a reformed Second Chamber. The first was for a small number of merit peers and the second was for half the house to be elected either from a national or three functional constituencies, both types elected by the single transferable vote. I argue that this would fulfil the two aims of a Second Chamber that it would act as a check and balance on the lower house whilst also being more deliberative and able to draw upon considerable expertise.

Direct v Representative Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:42:00 +0000

More talk, especially in The Times and The Guardian, about transforming politics. The Economist forwards a good argument in response to these things: the source of public anger was not the constitution per se but the expenses being claimed. Sure the consitution might, ultimately, be to blame for the expenses scandal but the scandal is self-correcting: with the greater accountability (MPs' expenses are to be published online) the systemic abuses are unlikely to happen again.

But there are some worrying proposals that the Opposition (both Tories and Lib Dems) seem keen on; proposals that directly conflict with the basic principles of representative democracy. These proposals need to be challenged or there is a danger that the UK might go the way of California.

There are many reforms on the table. The most worrying are citizens' initiatives (CIs), the recall of MPs and open primaries. I've argued at length why CIs are a very bad thing. An acceptable form of popular expression could be in the form of a Petitions Committee - as in the Scottish Parliament and the Bundestag - which would leave the final say up to MPs. But with the fuel protests, the Gurkhas' right to settle and countless other issues the UK Parliament has show susceptibility to popular opinion and when it hasn't that is the the electorate to have the final say upon in the next election.

Democracy is about checks and balances not about majoritarian decision-making. CIs and the right to recall MPs (both significant features of California's constitution) would lead to an imbalanced constitution. Single-issue groups, with well-funded backers, will be hugely empowered and will distort the decision-making process. One can see how the climate change bill in the US Congress is rapidly turning into a bad piece of legislation because of the power of well-funded, single-issue groups. Legislation would become distorted, incoherent and often self-refuting.

So what of the plan for open primaries? The German constitution puts political parties on statutory footing saying that they have a duty to "form the public will". For that reason they are given public funding to establish charitable trusts to help with policy development and democratic education (an idea nicked by Francis Maude a few years ago). Political parties are the way in which citizens express and resolve their autonomy. Socialists and free marketeers and libertarians will join specific parties that further their conception of the good to compete in a market place of ideas. Political parties are autonomy enhancing.

To give all voters the right to register in a primary and have say on the candidate undermines this fundamental liberty. The Democrats and the Republicans in the US are not ideologically distinct in the ways that European parties are. It would also do nothing to tackle the fundmanental problem of safe seats. Safe seats are an inevitable feature of representative democracy but are significant exacerbated by a First Past The Post system. To tackle the fact that there are often only a small cabal involved in the nomination of an MP in a safe seat it seems that the solution is to move to multi-member constituencies and/or some form of proportional representation. I believe the most democratic would be the single transferable vote but there is a ready-made proposal to hand in the form of the Jenkins' Commission's proposal for the Alternative Vote Plus. It is not necessary to remove liberties essential to pluralist society.

Multi-member constituencies would be autonomy enhancing in two ways. (1) It would make it harder to gerrymander constituencies around certain demographics (again a feature of California's system). (2) If I am die-hard support of the Purple party but my representative is of the White party I will be less likely to take my concerns to her. If there are three MPs in my constituency, I will be able to take my concerns to the MP whose views are closer to my own.

Improving the system does not require sweeping constitutional reform. There are a few institutional tweaks that would improve matters. I've argued that allowing more time for MPs to pass Private Members' Bills and allowing Select Committees to sponsor legislation would enhance the power of MPs whilst diminishing the power of whips and party patronage. Combined with a Petitions Committee these institutional tweaks would do much to repair the sovereignty of Parliament over the executive.

Some of the major reforms also being touted are: a written consitution, a reformed House of Lords and widescale devolution. A written constitution is a non-starter. There is no agreement on the way ahead so it is unclear what the content of such a document should or could be. A better solution is one I've discussed previously modelled on the Harari Proposal for the Israeli Knesset. a short Bill would do two things: (1) Introduce the notion of a fundamental or basic law which would require a super-majority to pass or amend and (2) set up a Royal Commission to recommend chapters of basic law to Parliament.

(The Harari Proposal itself reads: "the First Knesset assigns to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee the preparation of a proposed constitution for the state. The constitution will be made up of chapters, each of which will constitute a separate basic law. The chapters will be brought to the Knesset, as the Committee completes its work, and all the chapters together will constitute the constitution of the state.")

House of Lords reform is a stumped question. And this is due to the fact that upper chambers are normally the mechanism by which component states or regions of a nation-state hold a check on the powers of the central government. If our upper chamber is to be a revising chamber of expertise then it seems to be a democratic move would be to opt for something like the Irish Senate. This would maintain the current nature of the upper chamber whilst making it more democratic. Wholescale reform would be left unless the nature of the UK changed, dramatically from a unitary to a federal state.

This brings me to the final reform being bandied about: devolution or, as I like to call it, home rule all round.

DR. MACGREGOR (Invernessshire) I beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether, in re-introducing the Government of Ireland Bill, the Government will consider the expediency of embracing in it a scheme of Home Rule all round, applicable alike to all countries in the United Kingdom, with a view to relieving the Imperial Parliament of the conduct of local affairs?
19 December 1893

The argument for home rule or devolution is that it would reduce the work of MPs in our national legislature. This invokes the principle of subsidiarity that matters should be handled by the most compentent authority closest to the people. Many constitutions enumerate the powers of different levels of government. MPs should be focused on matters of national importance, not rubbish collection or the issuance of entertainment licenses. MPs do the work of both MPs and local councillors. If we returned the workload back to local councillors, MPs would be given the opportunity to do a more effective job.

I don't think Home Rule would have the effect of improving the callibre of MPs (indeed, there might suddenly be competition at the lower levels of government as talented MPs left Parliament to govern different parts of the country). For this reason I think we should follow the Economist and not confuse institutional reform of Parliament with widescale constitutional reform.

Scapegoat Mick

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:44:00 +0000

scapegoat n. One that is made to bear the blame of others.

So Michael Martin has resigned, a high-profile casualty of the MPs' expenses scandal. Like Fred Godwin, Martin doesn't quite fit the description of a scapegoat - he was, at least, partly to blame and, at most, representative of the whole awful mess. But I wonder if by falling on his sword, he has let Parliament escape a worse punishment and avoid desperately needed reforms.

Martin stood in the way of reform, that much is true. But Parliament needs to change quite radically and the role of the MP needs to develop far beyond the current weak, asinine and, often unaccountable, model.

I've written before that several changes are required. First, the power of MPs needs to be strengthened. This will attract far more talented individuals than any sort of bumper payrise would. I've argued that this can be done by cutting the number of MPs and allowing Committees to sponsor legislation. (Read more about this here.)

Second MPs must become more accountable - which means an end to "safe seats". Again the answer to me seems to be the single transferable vote or, at the least, the resurrection of Jenkins' Alternative Vote proposal. Additionally I've suggested that whilst Citizens' Initiatives a potentially anti-democratic, there is certainly scope to have Petitions Committee similar to the German and Scottish Parliaments.

Finally there must be proper checks and balances and that meansa reformed upper chamber. I've argued before that this might entail a move towards something more like the Irish Senate. It is clear that an upper chamber needs to have a legitimacy of its own to challenge the "decided will" of the lower house.

There are plenty of important reforms that could (and need) to be made to ensure proper checks and balances in our democratic system. However I fear that Martin's passing has increased the likelihood that known of these necessary reforms will come to pass.

SATS Boycott and the End of GCSEs

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Much comment in recent days concerns the fate of two of the main exams British youngsters face in the compulsory educational career (although that career is soon to get longer). I’ve posted previously that I think it would promote social justice and the efficiency of the exam administration system to replace the “core” GCSEs with a battery of standardised SAT-like tests that could be taken whenever students were ready. But what of the suggestion that we replace GCSEs with internal assessment? I believe that many of these debates concerning education confuse two very different goals of education. Further I believe that many in the political class have all but forgotten one of those goals.

My parents could leave school at fourteen. I had to wait until sixteen before I was allowed to leave school. I stayed on to do some A Levels and then trundled off to university. The Government wants to increase the number of people who did what I did and reap the economic benefits of having a degree. By 2013, all teenagers will have to stay in education and training until they are seventeen. This will eventually rise to eighteen by 2015. Currently there are rumours that the change will be brought in sooner. The rise is wholly consistent with New Labour’s other education policies and with one clear objective. Educational Maintenance Allowances were brought in and the Government has introduced policies to increase the number of young people who experience higher education.

Such policies are informed by the post-Fordist view on education. In the post-Fordist view, labour is the key asset for industry. Therefore, training and education are the fundamental ways for increasing a firm’s asset base. Education should fit the needs of the labour market. New Labour has always seen education in this way – as of instrumental value in promoting economic opportunity and overall economic growth. By promoting both, the cherished goal of social justice can be fulfilled.

GCSES will now have free standing components called functional skills that will “allow individuals to work confidently, effectively and independently in life.” They were first touted as part of the Tomlinson Review into 14-19 education. Then their role was to sit at the heart of an overarching diploma that united functional competencies, vocational qualifications and academic qualifications.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider what education actually is. It clearly is not indoctrination and allows for the free operation of a learner’s (emerging) rationality. It is also in some transformative. Beyond that however it has no directed purpose: it concerns itself with the pursuit of knowledge, possibly for no discernible benefit allow it often leads to many beneficial things. Transformative is a difficult concept, though, and clearly takes us into the arena of virtue theory. This demands a notion of a self-actualising or flourishing individual, which in itself is contested.

Competing with education as a good we pursue simply because we pursue it, comes the demands of a socially just society. Does this place a duty on the Government to engineer more socially just outcomes? In particular, should the Government intervene in qualifications, institutions and classrooms and, most of all, coerce morally autonomous individuals to “be educated” in order to ensure socially just outcomes. Should Government constrain the pursuit of knowledge in itself in order to make a state of affairs fairer?

We could have a range of states of affairs: W1, W2, …, Wn. In W1 society has relatively high levels of inequality but education is freely pursued. In some state of affairs, W4, there are relatively low levels of inequality but education is constrained in many ways. How to impose an ordering on these states of affairs? It seems to me we should prefer W4 to W1. We could argue that educational freedom leads to greater equality or, at least, is more likely to create the conditions of greater equality and social justice. But let’s accept that there is likely trade-off between the social equality and education freedom in a few cases. There are, I believe, many moral reasons why should prefer W1 to W4.

W1 allows a free exchange of ideas and allows what Mill calls “experiments in living”. Autonomy in W4, however, is severely constrained. With a centrally-directed education system there is unlikely to be a range of conceptions of the good on offer to individuals. Education should be a good in itself. Individuals should be allowed to devote themselves to the advancement of knowledge. Of course, it is a false dilemma to say we only have the choice between W1 and W4. There are many examples of societies that have a liberal education system alongside high levels of social equality.

It is also a false dilemma to say we can either have an education system that delivers skilled workers or we can have an education system that pursues learning for the sake of learning. Indeed part of the Tomlinson report was devoted to this problem. His solution was to have a diploma core range of competencies as the heart of a free programme of learning. There is no reason why a range of standardised, SATs in the core competencies (in a previous post I highlighted critical reading, scientific reasoning, quantitative reasoning and language arts) alongside a free and general programme of study.

So long as schools met a general education requirement (which could be specified in terms of “student hours” and integrated into the UCAS tariff) there is no reason why schools couldn’t become their own assessment centres if they so wished, certainly at GCSE level. They would be accredited by the QCA just as other awarding bodies are now. The IB already operates a system like this as part of its Middle Years Programme.

The solution to these problems is not going to be a one-size-fits-all. Indeed it seems to me that there is already a nascent solution to these recurring problems: Turn the UCAS tariff system into a matriculation certificate and disband the QCA or at least merge it with the UCAS system. The new matriculation organisation would simply accredit awards and qualifications and specify how many credits or points the award was worth compared to other qualifications. It would be up to schools, students and parents to decide which qualifications students pursued (again this is something I have spoken about previously).

Liberalising the qualifications system with a core battery of standardised tests at the heart of it would mean that the two goals of education (the post-Fordist and the learning-for-the-sake-of-learning) could be pursued simultaneously. However it seems likely that this would necessitate the diversity of the secondary school sector, with liberal arts colleges alongside vocational colleges alongside technical colleges alongside conservatoires and many other types of institution. I’m not sure such things are palatable to the current political class.

A 0.5p Blow to National Insurance

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:00:00 +0000

The Government nearly managed to slip it past us when delivering the Budget: National Insurance contributions are to go up by half a penny in the pound. Although I’m more than willing to defend the near higher rate of income tax, this one exasperates me because it continues to undermine an already weak institution of social justice in the UK: National Insurance.

There are many problems with the current system of National Insurance: (1) it looks like a tax; (2) contributions are earnings related but benefits are flat-rate; (3) benefits provided are insufficient; and (4) overall individuals feel alienated by the current system.

The system proposed by Beveridge was that a scheme of flat-rate contributions would provide for a range of flat-rate benefits available to everyone, with individuals topping-up through private and voluntary schemes. This stands in marked contrast to most of the social insurance schemes in Europe and, further, has been violated by making NI contributions earnings related and integrating collection into the tax system. Even though income from National Insurance is ring-fenced (and can’t be raided by the Treasury) individuals do not feel that this is the case.

As the benefits are flat-rate and not linked to the level of contributions, this causes another problem: benefits are normally insufficient – especially for families above the poverty line. Benefit entitlement has been curtailed whilst contribution rates have increased. Further such benefits rise according to prices not earnings, another violation of the contributory principle. The basic principle of income protection has been dropped (one’s income is not being protected by NI) and this in turn reduces support for a key redistributive mechanism.

The problem in aggregate is that individuals are no longer connected to National Insurance and the contributory principle on which social insurance is founded has been eroded beyond repair. National Insurance can’t continue in this form: it is no longer a distinctive part of our social welfare system. If the current trend continues, benefits will be restricted to fewer and fewer groups and the value of those benefits relative to earnings will continue to be reduced.

Social insurance captures two ideas of social justice. First that income should transfer horizontally from groups of working age to groups of people whom it isn’t expected will be able to get earnings from work. The second is the notion of desert: individuals feel that as they work and contribute to society they are building up personal entitlements to support at points in their life when they are unable to fully support themselves.

There is a difficulty with the first in that it can either be interpreted as a “social minimum” or, as is the case in much of Western Europe, it can be interpreted as maintaining living standards. I believe it should be the latter because (1) this includes middle class families in the system and thus maintains high levels of public support and (2) because it is inconsistent to have a contributory system with earnings-related premiums but flat-rate benefits that also affords little income protection – such a scheme cannot properly be called National Insurance. Income smoothing and protection is the proper aim of social insurance. Income redistribution should properly be made through other cash transfer mechanisms (such as tax credits).

By making the system worthwhile to middle class earners it becomes politically feasible to increase the level of provision for the least-advantaged (the Difference Principle again). Things like long-term care and parental insurance could be added to the package for the benefit of everybody; the sort of Nordic-style ambitions people like me harbour.

However, the current state of National Insurance makes such things unlikely to come to pass. In a closing annex on the subject of National Insurance the Fabian Commission on Taxation and Citizenship, Paying for Progress, suggested that the National Insurance Fund could be administered by independent friendly societies owned by contributors. The aim would be to reduce public concerns that the Government might renege on the contributory principle at some future date whilst providing the opportunity to have a public debate on the benefits provided by the system.

The proposal would actually return the NI system to its origins. The 1911 National Insurance Act set up a national scheme of income protection and health insurance. Although many hold it up as the foundation of the modern welfare state, it established a rather different system to the post-1945 one with which we still live today. The crucial difference is that the 1911 system was more genuinely a social insurance scheme (as many modern European state use) and it was fully administered by independent, not-for-profit friendly societies – so-called Approved Societies. It was a tripartite system: employees, employers and the Government contributed into a shared pot in fixed ratios.

As a liberal pluralist, the idea of enhancing individuals’ ability to pursue their own conceptions of the good is of itself exceptionally appealing. But how what a system like this look like?

The right-wing think tank the Adam Smith Institute has argued for a ‘Stakeholder Protection Account’ (although they previously called it a Fortune Account). Loath as I am to endorse one of their ideas, I think it has possible merits for the reasons outlined above. It would rekindle public support for a scheme of social insurance whilst providing an opportunity to expand to list of things it covers.

The idea of a Stakeholder account is that it would mix income protection insurance (disability, long-term sickness, widowhood, unemployment, maternity, parental leave, legal aid) with a long-term saving plan and short-term contingency saving account. The accounts would be regulated as stakeholder pensions now are (an annual cap on contributions, a cap on charges) and payments would be split between employees, employers and the Government in fixed ratios. Individuals would be able to transfer between different friendly societies. Remaining state benefits would be integrated fully into the state welfare system, where the grounds of entitlement rest more on the basis of citizenship and need rather than level of contribution.

Either National Insurance continues to decline in the UK or else it is rejuvenated in a fairly radical way. The Fabian-Adam Smith hybrid sketched above is one way to do this. But I think the need for reform becomes ever-pressing.

Tax and Fairness

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:00:00 +0000

The Liberal Democrats have argued that the Government should increase personal allowances up to £10,000 and increase taxes on those earning over £100,000. The claim is that this would make the tax system more socially just. This argument is wrong; Labour’s own policy is much better at promoting social justice.

One (Kantian) account of social justice is Rawls’ Difference Principle. The Difference Principle says that we should choose the option that would leave the worst-off better-off than under any of the other competing options. I would argue, firstly, that a market economy with some inequality in income actually leaves the worst-off in a better situation than they would be in under strict inequality.

But given the choice between a tax cut for the poor or maintaining a certain level of public spending, which should we choose according to the Difference Principle? Here the evidence points towards continuing to maintain a certain level of public spending. A study published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 1997 found that a cut in income tax for those on low-incomes would do little to improve their relative situation. However continued social spending would disproportionately advance the welfare of the least-advantaged.

Measures such as an improved minimum wage and increased social security spending would have an even greater impact. The policy of the Lib Dems, then, would do little to improve the lot of the worst-off in society. It would also have other negative effects. A broad tax base with an overall moderate rate of incidence is a more reliable source of revenue than a narrow base with a high rate of incidence. It is less susceptible to evasion and to dramatic changes in economic circumstances. The Lib Dem policy would have the UK switch from the former system to the latter, greatly reducing the Government’s ability to advance socially just policies.

If we return to last year’s debacle with the abolition of the 10p starting rate we can demonstrate that tax rises can actually leave the worst-off in a better situation. Under those changes anyone earning under approximately £20,000 would have been worse-off whilst middle income earners (under £40,000) would have been left better off. However Brown at the time raise personal allowances for the over-65s, increased the child tax credit and increased the thresholds at which tax credits begin to be withdrawn. Some low income people (mostly young and single) lost out with these changes, but not so many to justify the sort of arguments that were presented against the abolition of the rate.

The increase in the top rate of taxation was welcome because it was a progressive measure. However it is more than likely that other taxes will need to be raised, not least the basic rate of income tax. Given the evidence that low income people will benefit more social spending than their contribution in income tax, the Government should avoid arguments that tax rises will be unfair to low income earners. Such arguments are disingenuous; tax cuts always benefit the better-off more than the worst-off. A more progressive measure, as I’ve said elsewhere, would be to introduce a flat-rate “citizen’s allowance” to replace personal allowances. Increasing it would also be a cost-effective way to help the least-advantaged.

The next Government is faced with a stark choice: (a) protect as much social spending as possible and therefore raise taxes or (b) reduce taxes and therefore reduce social spending as much as possible. Social justice suggests we choose (a).

Gordo's Final Flourish

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Forgive me for a flight of political fantasy. Imagine over the summer during the parliamentary recess that Gordon Brown sits down with his electoral calculator. He visits politicalbetting.com and surveys the odds on the spread betting indices. He sees that the best he can hope for is a hung parliament, but then he looks at the voting sympathies of the Lib Dems and sees that they are split 50-50 Labour-Conservative. He sighs an expansive sigh and the his eye catches something beside him.

Beside him is all the research papers he commissioned on constitutional reform, which was to be the big centrepiece of the incoming Brown administration. And there, at the very bottom of it all, is the Jenkins Report on electoral reform. Brown huffs the dust away, licks his big clumsy thumb and begins to read...

Pure fantasy I know. It is strange to think of the days in which the Jenkins Commission was established; New Labour was a popular new government and it seemed as if the country was riding a new progressive wave (the apotheosis of which was the 1p increase to fund the NHS). It recommended a unique, hybrid system known as AV (alternative vote) plus. Under this system, voters would have two votes: a transferable vote for their constituency MP and a top-up vote based on an open list for their county. The constituency MP would need the support of over half the voting population as voters would rank the candidates in order of preference, with these preferences being redistributed until one candidate garnered more than 50 per cent of the vote.

The “plus” element would be a proportional vote for a larger county constituency – between 15 and 20 per cent of MPs were to be elected in this way. Importantly the Commission recommended that these votes be on an open rather than closed list, to prevent the strengthening of the party machine. The result would have been to substantially alter the basic dynamic of elections and exponentially increase voter choice. Election results would be much harder to predict because voters would be able to use their votes in dynamic ways. In Peckham, for example, one might be tempted to vote send a signal to the sitting (Labour MP) by putting her lower down on my preference ranking, whilst voting for a more progressive party in the London-wide constituency.

The Jenkins Report makes good reading – at least for those so inclined. It also neatly explains why a more proportional electoral system speaks to my Kantian sympathies. When discussing electoral fairness, the Report captures the concerns we might have in a Kantain though experiment (such as the veil of ignorance). We would want to ensure that our preferences were as effectively realised as possible (recognising such a realisation would always be imperfect), ensuring minority voices were represented but not given power beyond their numbers (as is the case in the Israeli parliament).

The most interesting thing about the Report’s recommendation is that that it would increase the stability of the UK electoral system. First past the post actually has a tendency to produce big government majorities that gradually get whittled away into a period of uncertainty rather than decisively switching from one governing party to the next. Ironically the charge against any form of PR is better made against FPTP systems.

The main point against the Jenkins Report is the massive blow it would deal to the two big parties. In the voting scenario described above, translated across many other voters the result would be a significant depletion in the core vote that the big two could count upon. Whilst the preference system would mean that ultimately the fight would be between the main contenders (indeed many recent elections would still have resulted in single-party governments) nobody would be sure how these dynamics would play out. Especially given the interaction of local with national politics at a constituency level.

The Report and its recommended system was a comprise, in many respects unsatisfactory, but one that was – and is – contingently suited to the contextual needs it was formulated to meet. Brown is unlikely to introduce it as his final flourish. The left of the party and the trade unionists are against it because it would potentially drag the party further from its socialist-unionist roots. Many Labour MPs are against it because it puts a good number of the careers on the line (even if many of those careers are already on the line).

Brown is also unlikely to introduce because of two questions of legitimacy, both of which I question. The first question is the unpopularity of both Brown and Labour in the polls. It is undemocratic to use this to question the actions of a government and parliament because it remains that case that it is a legitimately constituted parliament in the middle of a parliamentary term. It is also the case that Brown and Labour continue to have a substantial majority in that legitimately-constituted parliament.

The second problem of legitimacy is the issue of a referendum. So the argument goes, if a reform is to greatly alter the relationship of the electorate with its governing institutions then the reform should be put to the people at large. Again the grounds on which this claim are shaky and the precedent is, at best, patchy. It remains the case that the UK is a representative, parliamentary democracy. It is not a direct democracy and I believe there is a heavyweight case against a direct democracy on the grounds of social justice. Further the UK Parliament is sovereign in this system and it can, theoretically, vote through any law it wishes. The way constitutional law is passed is a separate argument that needs to be visited separately and shouldn’t be used to undermine the cases for other independent reforms in the public interest. Given that electoral reform has been a manifesto commitment for the governing party in previous election it is not the case that the Government doesn’t have a mandate to pursue such reforms.

One way that a hypothetical electoral reform law could be passed without a referendum is to introduce a sunset clause and/or a petition clause. A sunset clause would require the electoral reform to expire after the next parliament unless it was renewed by a further vote. A petition clause would permit the electoral reform to be challenged if a significant number of voters challenged it in a petition. Another provision might be to require a two-thirds vote in Parliament for the legislation to pass (similar to the Basic Law provisions in the Israeli Parliament).

The Prime Minister caught between what was right and what was expedient decided to do nothing.

Lazy Commoners

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:00:00 +0000

It looks as if the press are going in for the kill with the whole MPs expenses thing. A report in today’s Times details the lack of attendance of some MPs to select committees. At least 60 of the 220 members on the important select committees have missed more than half the meetings over the past year.

Departmental select committees are the most important components of democratic scrutiny and, surprisingly, have only really been around for thirty years, although select committees have played a role in Parliament for centuries. Several important changes in Government policy have been made due to the publication of influential committee reports. The public has also been delighted in recent by the spectacle of the evidence-taking sessions of the Treasury committee.

As I said in my last post, I’m sceptical of claims that this batch of MPs is any worse than any previous batch. But departmental select committees are the lifeblood of parliamentary democracy; in the American congressional system the legislative standing committees are the mechanisms through which laws are made. So, if at all possible, those of us interested in making democratic accountability more robust should have an interest in bolstering select committees.

There are at least three possible reforms arising from three salient weaknesses of the current committee system, concerning (1) powers, (2) incentives and (3) talent.

On the question of powers select committees only have an indirect influence on the work of government because they do not have a legislative role and cannot block government spending decisions as their US counterparts can. The separation of powers in the US system means that congressional committees will always have more power than a comparable committee in a parliamentary system.

One potential reform, however, is to give select committees the legislative role that they have in the Scottish Parliament. There it is the departmental select committees that normally deal with proposed legislation rather than separate standing committees (public bill committees) as is the case in Westminster. Second the Scottish select committees can put forward their own proposals for legislation. They may also consider petitions submitted to the Parliament. Giving the select committees a more powerful role would introduce more robust checks and balances on the executive and enhance their appeal to MPs juxtaposed to the appeal of the ministerial red box.

The second weakness concerns the incentives of the allowance system. Annual salaries were introduced for MPs in 1911 with the princely sum then of about £400 (which, doing a very rough calculation, works out at around £20,000 in today’s money). The annual salary of an MP in this financial year is £64,766. In addition, MPs can claim up to £23,083 for staying away from home (with a London supplement); up to £21,339 for running an office and £90,505 for staff; up to £7,000 for centrally published stationery as well as travel, unforeseen costs, family travel and employees’ travel.

In comparison, a member of the House of Lords is paid an allowance based upon sittings of the House and meetings of committees. Each of these allowances has a capped daily rate. You can compare the different allowance scales on the UK Parliament website: the Lords versus the Commons. I would be interested in a comparative study of the work of the Lords compared to that of the Commons. I only know from anecdotal evidence that the most active members of the Lords are no more so than the most active members of the Commons. However, the comatose members of the Lords cannot free ride on the work of others as is the case in the Commons – if they don’t turn up they don’t get paid. A stingier approach to allowance in the Commons would also (marginally) improve their public standing.

Finally, but related to the first point, is the issue of talent or the lack thereof. The executive now swallows a huge amount of parliamentary talent (some might argue that the executive is so large as to necessitate it taking on some of the not-so-talented). There are currently 125 names on the ministerial list. There are more who are implicated in the executive as parliamentary private secretaries. That the executive sucks in so many MPs reduces the number of talented MPs that the select committees can draw upon. If you want to effect change then you are more likely to pursue a governmental role rather than a committee role. The further consequence of this is to reduce the number of MPs who aren’t beholden to the success of the Government of the day.

The increase in the size of Government is entailed by the logic of a centralised, unitary state. The vast majority of the UK is still governed directly by Westminster and powers and responsibilities tend to travel upwards rather than downwards. One potential reform, then, is devolution and in so doing reducing the number of responsibilities carried out by the national government.

Unfortunately the UK Government has been historically disinclined to reverse the flow of power. A further solution, then, would be to allow the Government to appoint ministers from outside Parliament. Currently, the only way for the prime minister to do this is to make someone a Lord. Were the prime minister able to appoint to the junior ministerial level from outside Parliament this would increase the independence of MPs and also increase the pool of talent available to select committees.

These reforms are small in scale. But one should be weary of big constitutional reforms promising a new settlement. Especially when the suggestion is that such reforms would reduce the level of lazy and greedy members of the political class; they will be with us as long as there is a political class.

MPs' Expenses and Democracy's Rotten Side

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:00:00 +0000

There is a big public backlash brewing over the issue of MPs’ expenses. All the MPs are susceptible, as Mike Smithson points out, just witness the grueling evisceration of Tory Chairman Eric Pickles. My worry is that calls for reform are based on beliefs that do not underpin democracy but other ideas of how we should be governed.

Image via Wikipedia

The first thing to note about all this is to be sceptical of any claims that “cynicism about the political class” is historically at high levels. Perhaps in the short term this might be the case, but I doubt it. Pick up any politically-orientated piece of literature from almost any period of time in the past hundred or so years and I don’t think public sentiment would be appreciably any different. House of Cards, for example, was not created to shock the public but to feed already existent suspicions.

The second thing to note is that we actually have much less to be cynical about here than in other countries. Even restricting our survey to other mature democracies, the UK seems to come out pretty well. A study by Transparency International UK in 2004 found that, although there remain some concerns, levels of integrity in UK public life were generally high.

A further point to consider is that we are now lucky enough to know what our MPs have been up to thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. That we know about all over these dodgy expenses claims (my favourite has to be John Prescott’s unreceipted food bill of £400) is actually a healthy sign of a functioning democracy and increasing transparency.

Here we reach my main point. Plato, a good while back now, argued that the political class was self-serving and so needed to be replaced by philosophers or, in his (translated) words, “philosophers must become kings or those now called kings must genuinely and adequately philosophise.” His utopia, Callipolis, was ruled by philosopher guardians who were to be disinterested and, further, were to be placed in a condition which would make their status undesirable to commoners. Plato would have made short shrift of arguments that the salaries of public servants should be competitive with those of the public sector.

His guardians were to live in poverty and they were to have their families in common. Plato thought a universal system of education would be required to designed to discern and cultivate the appropriate attributes to become a philosopher-king. The result was that the philosopher-kings were to be about fifty by the time they were able to do any actual governing.

We might find many of these ideas appealing. Intuitively it seems that our governing class should be disinterested and wise: we set entrance tests for the civil service and require them to be non-political. But that is for the civil service; Plato goes further as he does not want there to be a separate political class. It is this specific requirement that has garnered Plato fairly justified criticism. Kant and other classical liberals would baulk at the lack of checks and balances in Plato’s constitution. Modern liberals would find the lack of democratic accountability unsettling.

Ayatollah Khomeini was said to have been heavily influenced by Plato when devising his theocratic post-revolutionary Iran. Indeed the English translation of one key part to the Iranian constitution is the Council of Guardians, who check the credentials of the candidates for election. Karl Popper and other post-war thinkers heavily criticised the Platonic justifications underlying the foundation of totalitarian states.

Opposed to the Platonic ideal is the democratic ideal, where individuals can have their own individual preferences influence the social preferences of the community as a whole.

There is no denying that a good many of political class are venal and self-interested. Rousseau and Kant thought – well, hoped – that the members of the legislature should legislate according to the General Will, considering what everyone could agree to and acting for the common good. They should legislate on behalf of everybody and not according to some more narrowly defined interests. Whilst Transparency International demonstrates that, by and large, that is an overriding goal for many MPs and public servants, there are clearly those motivated by somewhat baser goals.

But that is why we have elections. And why we need Freedom of Information Acts to helpfully inform those elections. And why we have a free press to investigate and expose corruption when it occurs. In many respects democracy is rotten yet, perversely, it is when we know about its rotten side that it is at its most healthy and flourishing.

Stand Up to Bullying

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000

The LibDems have just published a new Freedom Bill to highlight the civil liberties that have been curtailed under Labour over the past decade. I'm incredibly sympathetic to these arguments but dislike the approach taken by many civil liberties campaigners, who argue that we are sleep-walking into a police state.

A few years ago a Japanese film called I Just Didn’t Do It was released based upon the true story of a young man who was charged with molesting a school girl on a crowded train. In the film the man is subjected to brutal police behaviour and seems to confront an attitude that presumes guilt before innocence. Fortunately the real life case it was based on didn’t quite go that way.

However the statistics seem to support the film’s interpretation of Japanese justice. Uniquely for a democratic country, Japan acquires confessions from 95 per cent of all people arrested and, of those, the courts convict 99.9 per cent of all suspects brought before them. A suspect can be held for 48 hours without contact with the outside world and they face the possibility of up to 23 days grilling. Interrogators are not required to use tape recorders for interviews. Amnesty International has criticised the frequent accusations of confessions obtained under duress – which is especially troubling given that Japan still has the death penalty.

Japan is an example of a democratic country with authoritarian tendencies. It is in no way an example of authoritarianism of the worst kind – such as countries with arbitrary arrest and detention, something to which Russia seems close to returning. Rather Japan is an example of a bullying state.

When we use the term bullying we are normally referring some subtle method of coercion where the abuser or abusers use their social power and dominance to harass or subdue their victim or victims. It hardly needs saying that the Kantian rules this out as it is a fairly unacceptable use of another autonomous individual as a means to an end rather than respecting the humanity within their victims as an ends in itself.

Oftentimes bullying is a set of covert and underhand behaviours or actions that are disrespectful. Clearly there are many variables: the number of victims, the (morally arbitrary) grounds for the bullying actions and, of course, the scale of the negative actions. Bullying can be seen as small scale, perpetrated by one individual against another, all the way up to wholesale state tyranny.

Shami Chakrabati has, in some ways admirably, campaigned against restrictions on civil liberties. However she and the many who hero-worship her are guilty of the slippery slope fallacy. Britain, the argument usually goes, is sleep-working into tyranny. I dislike this argument on two grounds: (1) it is evidently unlikely that Britain is heading towards a V for Vendetta fascist government, and (2) it fails to address the unacceptability of the society we are no living in, one with a bullying state.

It is not merely the state that is bullying (but if you have ever had to sign-on for benefits that are your legal entitlement you will know what I mean), it is much the wider state apparatus too. British Gas, British Telecom and, most especially, public transport services are prime examples of this bullying state. The coercive, heavy-handedness with which my local train station, Peckham Rye, is regularly besieged by transport police and ticket inspectors is intolerable. TV Licensing will send you threatening letters – even if you are paying for a TV License and they have simply got it wrong.

I have been physically intimidated by ticket inspectors and forced to pay fines despite the fact I have a legal right to walk on board a train without a ticket if the train company fails to provide with a ticket within five minutes of my arrival at a train station. I know that there have been similar cases on London Buses.

The way I have been treated by and seen others be treated by the police has also been shocking. Often interactions with the wider state apparatus are wholly uncivil and sometimes even aggressive on the part of the state employee; the presumption seems to be that citizens should be coerced into behaving how the state or the company prefer. ID Cards and the ever increasing level of state surveillance are not the first step to a dictatorship, they are an example of bully boy tactics that are happening now and are unacceptable.

Here’s a perfect example of the bully boy state:

But there are plenty more on the LibDems page for their new Freedom Bill here.

Isaiah Berlin sums it up best:

“I think I object more to that. I think I object to being treated like a child. I think I object to not being reasoned with. I object to paternalism, I mean, ultimately, I think, what I object to is being treated like a schoolboy, being told for my own good that there are certain things to do, or being driven in a perfectly beneficent direction by [a] perfectly disinterested, pure-hearted body of – anyone you like, governments or manufacturers – it doesn’t matter which – even if you assume that they are pure-hearted men not seeking profit at all.”

You can read the LibDems’ Freedom Bill here or you can even sign their petition here.

Cameron, Referenda and Social Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000

David Cameron plans to decentralise the UK’s political system by introducing elected mayors and allowing for a widespread use of Citizen’s Initiatives. Were to introduce both or either of these policies they would amount to a radical restructuring of the relationship between citizen and political authority in the UK. But are his plans acceptable?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Most people have probable heard about Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem for Social Choice Methods. Consider a relatively small population of Rod, Jane and Freddy with a finite range of options A, B and C. Rod prefers A over B over C. Jane prefers B over C over A. Freddy prefers C over A over B. So two rank A over B; two rank B over C and two rank C over A. Requiring choice consistency and majority rule, out of A and B, A should be chosen. And out of B and C, B should be chosen. And finally out of A and C, C should be chosen. Therefore none of the options should be chosen.

The implications of Arrow’s proof are controversial. What they demonstrate is that no method of social choice is going to be ideal. It is impossible to aggregate individual preferences by translating them into social preferences.

What troubles me about Arrow’s proof is that because social choice methods will always be non-ideal then that means some social choice methods will, over time, lead to more and more inconsistent choices being made. One such method of social choice is, of course, to put legislative questions to regular citizen’s referenda.

California, indeed many parts of the US, offer so-called Citizen’s Initiatives of varying degrees – as does Switzerland. Such methods turn the entire body of citizens directly into the legislature. And not just for foundational, constitutional questions – but for the minutiae of everyday policy-making. In California this has led to huge inconsistencies in policy: Californians have regularly voted to keep taxes down but also voted for measures that have increased public spending. As a result, California has now had to fire 20,000 public sector workers to stave of bankruptcy.

This is not to say that many of the other non-ideal systems out there wouldn’t replicate the problem. Italy has current spending problems, as does France: representative polity does not necessarily control these inconsistencies any more greatly that direct democracy. It is difficult, however, to see how introducing Citizen’s Referenda would not lead to an even greater degree of irrationality in public policy-making.

Under some Kantian-style impartial viewpoint, I don’t think we would choose Citizen’s Initiative has a method of social choice. We would probably choose something that guaranteed minorities were not ignored and one that ultimately held our government accountable to us. We might deal with the non-ideal nature of systems of social choice by opting for more than one system to hold our governments accountable. But it seems that Citizen’s Initiative is one of the worst methods of offer.

Decentralisation, a federal system of government, seems on the whole a good thing that helps guarantee our fundamental interests. But Citizen’s Initiatives seem to present a danger to our fundamental interests – to be governed consistently, responsibly and orderly. Cameron’s bad policy-making good lead to a legacy of bad policy-making after bad.

Protectionism

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Lord Mandelson, for all his faults, is at least being consistent. New Labour, however, are having problems. First, Gordon Brown in 2007 promised “British jobs for British workers” and, second, many present and former members of the Labour Government seem to be beating the protectionist drums. As a result Mandie looks a bit precarious and a bit at odds among the traditional Labour sentiments gaining momentum about him.

Few debates are as confused the protectionist/free trade debate. But this is understandable given the basic drives both sides of the debate seem to offend. Losing a job that had formed a core part of one’s life project can be a devastating event. It is natural to make basic reasoning errors, such as correlation not causation, and make the leap from one’s own troubles to a wide pattern of inequity and injustice.

Protectionism is the imposition of partiality in economic relations. Its starting premise is that there are morally relevant distinctions between individuals in country X and country Y and therefore one is justified in discriminating against the other. To see the world from an impartial point of view is to adopt a cosmopolitan perspective, which finds such distinctions to be morally arbitrary. The phrase “British jobs for British workers”, under this view, is somewhat repellent. As Mandie himself pointed out, there are worrying continuities between the views being expressed by some of the strikers and the xenophobic views of some of the more distasteful political organisations in the UK. That well known cosmopolitan Karl Marx would have had problems sympathising with such views. It is an ironic quirk of history that during the nineteenth century it was often the liberal left who campaigned for freer trade.

To a certain extent, economists point of that such individuals who demand “BJ4BW” are actually being irrational and acting against their own self-interests. Tariffs and subsidies aimed at maintaining the livelihoods of certain constituencies only act to increase the costs of living for those constituencies. But that is a prudential argument and not a moral one.

Where the protectionist/free trade debate becomes a little more confused is over the notion of fairness. “Fair trade” is a concept that is vaguely and ambiguously defined, meaning that both sides are able to adopt it as their own. At the heart of the debate is the basic idea that “one should treat others as one would wish to be treated.” Those on the fair trade side argue, correctly, that the West through tariffs, subsidies, import quotas and dumping practices is not acting in a way that one could describe as “fair”.

On the other hand the free traders argue that the Fair Trade brand is wholly partial. It cannot work on the scale required and so often improves the livelihood of the not-so vulnerable and in doing so harms the very vulnerable. There is also something uncompetitive about the brand and its effects are insignificant when compared with the benefits of traditional foreign investment in a developing economy brought about through good, old-fashioned globalisation.

Neither the fair traders nor the free traders would be the on the side of the wildcat strikes currently taking place. Their implicit demands for protectionist measures strike no chords with either the fair traders – concerned with the very least-advantaged in the world – nor the free traders – who find the starting premise of such demands rather worrying.

Let’s return to that “impartial viewpoint” with which we started. Kantian ethics finds the use of threat advantages unethical. Effectively the developed world is exploiting one threat advantage after another in its relations with the developing world. If indeed the companies charged by the strikers of discriminating against British workers were culpable in the ways they are accused then they would have been using their own threat advantages, which would be impermissible. But this does not seem to be the case. Yet the BJ4BW position is also unacceptable.

For any worker to suffer because their industry, through no fault of their own, is no longer sustainable is acceptable. But the moral imperative there requires re-training and compensation so that an individual can revise their life projects and pursue new ones. It does not require that the Government exploit its economic power and the vulnerability of its competitors in the developing world.

Finally, I have in the past explained the Rawlsian notion that Kantian impartiality requires some basic equality of opportunity principle. If we were to hold this principle alongside the cosmopolitan principle then there is nothing unjustifiable about Italian workers taking jobs offered in Britain so long as the means by which they were awarded their employment were not unjust.

I cannot sympathise with the arguments put forward by the strikers although they elicit my sympathies for their actual plight.

Channel 4 and Public Service Broadcasting.

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:00:00 +0000

A few days ago Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, published its proposals for the development of public service broadcasting in the UK. Ofcom wants there to be a choice of high quality viewing options for the populace; but is concerned as to how this may be sustained in an era of multi-channel and multimedia broadcasting. However, I believe their proposals rest on an error.

Image via WikipediaOfcom defines public broadcasting as programming that produces public benefit and not just commercial value. There are four public service broadcasters in the UK: the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and, believe it or not, Five. All broadcasters receive a license for, what was once, valuable spectrum space and, in return, must provide all kinds of worthy things like news, education, current affairs, children’s and religious programming. And Celebrity Big Brother. Unfortunately every broadcaster bar the BBC had to survive on advertising revenue and in an age where audiences are declining, moving to niche channels and programming. Innovations like iPlayer and on-demand content will only exacerbate this trend.

Why is public service broadcasting (PSB) of value? Clearly a liberal democracy is dependent on a diverse and plural public realm. It can be autonomy enhancing for there to be a range of competing conceptions of the good available and the most obvious way to ensure this is be ensuring as many voices are heard as possible. But PSB isn’t necessarily autonomy enhancing. The Government decides what is of public benefit and requires broadcasters to provide this service. The very notion of “Auntie Beeb” carries with it paternalist ideas about what people should be watching.

There is a second argument from the standpoint of social justice. It does not seem entirely justifiable to tax the population, more of whom are going to be poor than are going to be rich, to pay for the sort of programming the rich would like to watch, read or listen to. Quite frankly, if the rich like these things they should pay for it themselves.

However, the BBC seems to survive both of these critiques. It is arms-length from the Government and gets to interpret its mission to provide public service broadcasting. It has proven remarkably successful at providing public benefit programming. It provides a relatively impartial news service and produces programmes that are popular, entertaining and, more often than not, educational. It is still watched by the majority of the population. The content it produces, also, meets most of the PSB demands of the public – e.g. plenty of regional news and serious factual programming. It does this because it is held accountable, ultimately, due to its funding mechanism.

As for ITV, Channel 4 and Five it is not clear that any of these broadcasters are autonomy enhancing. ITV was initially a plural broadcaster, made up different franchises for different regions and (early on) different franchises for different time slots (such as breakfast time and the weekends) and with an independent news organisation. Consolidation and centralisation has removed many of these features. Channel 4 was established with the explicit requirement that it provide innovative, distinctive and experimental content – which it did for a good long while.
But Channel 4 now comprises a fairly large media empire and it has stated it will be unable to fund its public service commitments in the near future. Several proposals have been put forward, such as a merger with Five or a merger with BBC Worldwide (the corporation’s preferred option). Neither make any sense. Ofcom, however, want to enhance Channel 4’s public service remit.

What Ofcom have done it confuse the value of an autonomy-enhancing diverse and plural media landscape with a more narrow definition of PSB. It is not the case that the former necessarily bestows values upon the latter. Further there are other broadcasting models that would protect a diverse and plural media without creating another BBC clone.

HBO has produced programming that I would consider to have greater public benefit than much that Channel 4 has produced over the past decade or so. But HBO is a premium subscription service, meaning that it is incentivised to attract regular viewers and not advertising revenue. If such as a service were to be democratically run, with an elected supervisory board then it would be even more “autonomy-enhancing”. HBO survives in a competitive, multi-channel environment because its funding mechanism, like the BBC’s, ensures that it produces diverse and distinctive content.

If Ofcom really wanted to ensure a diverse broadcasting sector that produces programmes of public, but not necessarily commercial, benefit then it should begin to consider the mixed economy of provision that would actually guarantee such a thing.

A Modest Suggestion for Why the Second Bail-Out Won’t Work

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:00:00 +0000

I was, secretly, pleased that Gordon Brown’s recapitalisation of the banks three months ago earned him such kudos – being, as I am, a closet leftie with strong emotional ties to the Labour Party. Countries around the world followed suit and Labour enjoyed a surprising – and welcome – bounce. But this second effort, precipitated by the sudden collapse in key banks after the ban on short selling was lifted, leaves a lot to be desired and Brown has been suitably bruised by a similar collapse in his poll rating. It is also unlikely to work.

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeAt the heart of the crisis – even going all the way back to Northern Rock – is a problem of credit. The phrase “credit crunch” is as it implies – there’s none of it going around. Banks won’t lend to each other, least of all to businesses needing to tide things over, which is where the problem has infected the so-called real economy. Businesses are finding that loans are being called in or not being refinanced, that overdraft facilities are being and more. That credit markets are illiquid is due to a problem in confidence (magnificently signalled by the short selling of bank shares). Low levels of confidence are inevitable given the unprivileged epistemic position everyone seems to be in.

No one really knows how toxic all the “toxic debts” really are. So the Treasury scheme was partly to deal with this problem and detoxify all these swathes of possible (probably) bad debts by insuring the losses. But such a scheme doesn’t deal with the epistemological problem at the heart of the crisis – it still doesn’t put a price on these debts and no-one knows how big the bill might eventually be. Indeed this spooked even more people because now nobody knows precisely how liable the UK Government might turn out to be. Cue falling pound.

Our Kantian would be very displeased with this whole situation. That market participants cannot make informed decisions means that others are exploiting their lack of autonomy. There are also disturbing implications for social justice.

There is a solution to this problem, pointed out by Tim Hartford. The Government could hold a reverse auction. The Government would put up bunch of cash and the sellers of bad debts could then outbid one another with different combinations of assets. Just as ebay encourages market participants to truly value the good they are bidding for and so treat all other participants as an end in themselves, a reverse auction would establish a genuine market value for these toxic assets. A degree of transparency would be restored and the repercussions would be to improve the confidence of market participants in one another. Some banks might even be shown to have had healthy balance sheets all along.

Kant liked it when agents rationally submitted to a mechanism that ensured they acted according to the moral law, in this case with transparency and equality. The Government could have put all these toxic assets into a so-called “bad bank”, as Sweden did, and acted decisively in restoring the proper functioning of financial markets. Instead the suspicion is that the Government sought to achieve the same effect on the cheap, rather than using the insurance scheme to encourage the issuance of new credit, which the real economy so badly needs.

Do I Have a Duty to Spend? (and other credit crunch riddles)

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:33:00 +0000

After a great deal of reluctance, Germany is starting to spend money on a fiscal stimulus. It is actually spending more in direct stimulus than the UK, €50 billion on top of the initial €12 billion nearly double the UK’s stimulus package. (Although the UK also has the eye-watering bank bailouts on top of that.) At the end of the last year, Germany was noted for its grumpy line towards the reckless Anglo-Saxon who were exhorting her to spend money to get them out of a pickle.

On the face of it, you can sort of see Germany’s point. Over the past few years I’ve paid off most of my most exorbitant student-incurred debts and began to save. Now I’m suffering paltry interest rates on my savings that come in just below inflation, whilst the Government has introduced measures to get all those spendthrift so-and-sos to keep on spending. I’m better off spending my money on goods to retain its value, even though this is a risky strategy, rather than effectively paying demurrage by keeping it in my relatively safe bank account. (To add insult to sanctimonious injury, my money rests in the “safe” institutions of the Co-operative and National Savings.) Why should I (and Germany) be forced to spend and shore up those people that have got everyone into this mess? Surely, the economist and the Kantian should be trilling about such things as “moral hazard”?

I posted previously about Keynes’ approach to trade accounts, which suggests that people like me and countries like Germany can’t quite sit there whingeing and ignore their responsibility for some of the mess. Savers, like countries with a trade account surplus, are relying on other people to invest their money – that is, put it out as a loan and get a return on it.

Kantian ethics has a particular take on such actions. For instance, not promise-keeping is unacceptable. For an agent to be acting morally for all their actions they must “want that p”, where p is some state of affairs in which everyone does that. In the example of not keeping a promise it is unintelligible to “want that p” where p is a state of affairs where no one keeps their promise. Were this the case then our non-promise-keeping agent would not be able to make promises for her to break. So it seems that not promise-keeping is based on a proposition where everyone does the opposite to our agent: for her to not keep promises requires that she “want that p,” where p is a state of affairs where everyone keeps their promise. If she isn’t promise-keeping then she is essentially free riding.

So our savers who have been earning wonderful returns on their savings have, to an extent, been free riding on the risk-taking of others. For Kant, when such an imbalance has occurred, the moral order must be restored with suitable compensation (as we’ve seen in his approach to punishment). Those countries that run up huge trade surpluses had just a great a duty to bring their trade balance down to zero as the countries with huge trade deficits had (and still have).

That savers are now effectively being levied demurrage is wholly justifiable. The argument has been made that countries should also have to pay demurrage in order to incentivise them to keep their trade accounts as close to zero as possible in the long term. (Although I don’t think Keynes’ proposal is practicable today.) Conceiving of the problem in these terms does raise the question of what form of saving and loan making is morally permissible. I don’t think the Kantian would go as far as to condemn interest, as in Islamic and early Christian finance, but it seems to be that there should be some mutual risk sharing under a co-operative banking model.

Not that any of this stops me being sanctimonious about it all.

Troubles in Palestine

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:42:00 +0000

There is no point my pretending that what I write here will make any difference. But there are two things we can draw from Kantian ethics that I believe are relevant to the current war in the Gaza Strip.

Image via WikipediaKantian ethics does not think there is anything particularly special about land. What matters are the autonomy claims made by autonomous moral agents. Having an historic connection to a land obviously gives someone a claim to that land. However those living there have a much stronger claim. Questions of security and livelihood also strengthen an autonomy claim. I’ve argued previously that I think the Kantian should be generally supportive of self-determination, devolution and decentralisation. And long live the dormant nations of Cornwall, Wessex and Northumbria. What I think is interesting about conceiving of autonomy claims in this way is that there is no necessary derivation from these autonomy claims of a requirement for a unitary state.

The notion that autonomy claims be met with unitary political institutions is an historically contingent one. It began in the early modern period, when lawyers began to distinguish between the reigning monarch and the state itself. That autonomy claims of political self-determination should be answered by separate unitary institutions, where tiers of government had not territorial competitors, became the overriding ideology from the end of the nineteenth century onwards.

The German peoples needed a Germany; the Italian peoples needed an Italy; the Greek peoples needed a Greece. And, of course, the Jews needed a homeland. The problem with such a perspective, what some cultural theorists would call a binary perspective, an either/or, is that it doesn’t settle competing autonomy claims over a disputed territory. The history of political self-determination is littered with the consequences of disputed realms and provinces: Northern Ireland, Kashmir and Israel being three bloody examples.

This is different to the situation explored in my earlier example of Kosovo. Kosovo is a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (more so than the culturally conflicted Northern Ireland) and I argued that it was owed political independence due to desert claims arising from the inequalities and persecution it had suffered as a province. Unfortunately, we can easily make this claim for both the Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis. One of the seemingly intractable features of this conflict is that both sides make to claim to victimhood.

No less than three faiths consider the territory as a site of considerable significance to their conceptions of the good life: Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Historically, the Jewish people have suffered egregiously and as a cultural and ethnic group we can say that there are weighty desert claims owed to them. Yet the Palestinians suffer terribly through their own moral luck of being born a Palestinian and so there are claims arising there, too. Israelis (who are not identical to the Jewish people and so do not have as strong a claim as we might have given to the Jewish people) have claims arising from the insecurity they suffer from extra-state terrorist organisations along their frontiers and from belligerent and unfriendly policies of some of their neighbours. Yet these claims are weakened by the relatively threat advantage they have over their opponents: Israeli has a well-supplied, technologically advanced and nuclear armed force.

How do all these claims balance up? The last I think is the most important: Israeli often acts disproportionately. The Kantian does not like retributive acts that exceeds the compensatory claims of the victim nor any retributive acts that impair or destroy the moral autonomy of those punished. The social and economic inequalities suffered by the Palestinians are also unjust. A balance book of utilities would show unacceptable between Palestinians and Israelis; what we might call sub-optimal. But for the historically generated claims, I believe these are what some philosophers call incommensurable. We cannot compare like-with-like and cannot determine a satisfactory solution to those claims.

Under a veil of ignorance or some other Kantian-style philosophical apparatus, much of the Israeli position would be unjustifiable. It holds a threat advantage over negotiations and is required to by the first to give in for there to be moves towards the Pareto frontier. Do the Palestinians have the right to withdraw from Israel then? And should Israeli give in to Palestinian demands for statehood before any of its demands are met? Taking those questions in reverse order: Yes to the latter question. The Kantian would prefer a Pareto improvement above the current state of affairs and would argue that the Isreali side is morally required to move towards the Pareto frontier to improve the utilities of the Palestinians. In response to the first question, I’m not sure Palestinian statehood is the answer. I believe the autonomy claims are too heterogeneously distributed across the Palestine-Israel territory for this to be a solution. There are (weak) claims of the Israeli settlers in the disputed areas and there are claims of Palestinians who live in Israel. There are the Palestinian refugees forced to leave as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars. Then, of course, there is Jerusalem.

Much of the focus of peace negotiations for the Arab-Israeli conflict is upon a two-state solution. Israel would retreat to its pre-1967 borders and the rest would be filled by a new Palestinian state and the Golan Heights would return to Syria. This is based on the model of single, unitary states. I do not think the complex distribution of claims can be answered by single institutions existed in the different territorial units. Therefore also rejected should be any simple transfer of sovereignty to, say, Egypt and Jordan; especially when the former – and to some extent the latter – don’t have the most democratic credentials. A Kantian would find unpalatable a population transfer to solve this unhelpful distribution of autonomy claims, as this would involve coercion.

What solution, then, would be acceptable? It would have to meet the conflicting autonomy claims, whilst trying to ensure a Pareto efficient outcome. Interestingly, there isn’t an outright majority in favour of the two-state solution. All of these factors point towards a community-federal model based on mixed sovereignty. One element might be a supra-national Court of Human Rights, similar to the European model and open to other countries in the region to join (although I can only imagine Lebanon and Jordan joining such initiatives).

A supra-national Ministerial Council that co-ordinates matters of common concern and make common laws, similar to the EU and as nearly existed in Ireland, also seems integral to any proposed solution. There would have to be a peace treaty enforced, again, by a supra-national Court.

Finally for Israel-Palestine itself, what solution meets the constraints that have been outlined above? One possible solution is binationalism, “sharing the land” as Edward Said called it. It suggests a federal state where the separation of powers into estates, each with their own separate and independent sphere of responsibility, but with different devolved entities operating at the same level, with no one entity taking precedence over the other. Citizens would be free to identify themselves as a member of the Palestinian community, Israeli community or Non-Aligned community. There might be three Community Assemblies running education, cultural services, driving licenses, passports etcetera across the whole of Israel-Palestine. Those who opted to be Non-Aligned would, presumably, receive UN passports as has been the case elsewhere.

Another requirement would be for a federal parliament that covered the whole territory. If we return to the veil of ignorance as an apparatus for choosing how to regulate political systems, I contend that behind such a partially-lifted veil we would choose the following criteria for the parliament:

It would need to be elected according to the Single Transferable Vote. The experience in Northern Ireland – and the disastrous consequences of strict PR in Israel and Weimar Germany – demonstrate the importance of this mechanism.
The executive and important laws would require a super-majority.
Standing committees and important positions such as the Presiding Officer would need to be appointed through a sortition process. An interesting paper on Public Reason argues that under a veil of ignorance, we would choose a lottery system.

Finally, Jerusalem would be removed from the equation. As many have recommended it seems to me the only way to meet the competing autonomy claims is to make the territory a city-state administered by an international trust. The Captains Regent of San Marino are the dual heads of government and are elected for six month periods – such a system seems an acceptable way to administer a neutral Jerusalem.

So there we have it. I imagine that there will be people who find some of the recommendations of this brief article unacceptable. My aim was to merely think through the problem in a philosophical manner in order to arrive at a “reasonable” solution. The main message, I believe is that Israel must make concessions regardless of Palestinian actions and a two-state solution is not necessarily the best outcome morally.

Happy New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Citizen) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:31:00 +0000

Whilst I contemplate the rights and wrongs of Israel's new offensive in the Gaza Strip, I would like to wish all the (few) readers of this blog a Happy New Year.

In the meantime, I created a little Amazon widget of books I'd recommend for the new year. If anyone's read one of my New Statesman contributions, you might note that they add up to the closest thing I have to a "spirituality". On the one hand are robust anti-faith books like Breaking the Spell. On the other hand are books more receptive to the point of having a spiritual approach to matters, such as Karen Armstrong's A History of God. For the few regular readers of this blog, I've spoken of some of these writers before - I think I gave a Nietzschean gloss on the poetry of T S Eliot before now. For some suitable music to listen to, can I suggest Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra- suitable New Year style music, too!

One further book I'd recommend is a lovely little book by a Quaker, Jim Pym, called The Pure Principle. I read the book several years ago whilst at university and it comes to mind every now and then - especially during times of seemingly irresolvable conflict.If the events of the past week have left you pessimistic about the possibility of peace and an end to strife, rather than Strauss you might prefer to listen to Gentle Words, which is a collection of Shaker songs arranged by Kevin Siegfried.

I know that there are book clubs all over the place dedicated to reading literature. Sometimes, I feel that people would draw more spiritual and ethical nourishment from discussing literature from a philosophical perspective - something Richard Rorty once suggested, extracts of which you can read here. Anyhow, some suggested titles for any book group that would like to move in a philosophical direction are listed below.

N.B. As a suitable displacement activity, I've produced a short eBook reading guide for the above titles just in case there are any reading groups that might (a) stumble upon this blog and (b) actually want to have a philosophical session.