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Of the Bishops’ conscience, Real Politik, and the rapid implosion of Labour in the dis-United Kingdom

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent

24 Jan 2012. Westminister.  It is High Noon for two major Coalition policies, the “reform” of Welfare and the “reform” of the National Health Services. As the week began, both bills faced major tests in a rebellious House of Lords. 

This drama provides a study in contrasts between the stands of conscience of the nations’ Bishops on Welfare Reform (and rebellious Social Democrats among the Liberal Democrats on NHS Reform) and the real politik of the nation’s Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders.  

The drama may also seal the deal for Labour’s current leadership.  It comes at a time Labour appears to be imploding rapidly, at least in terms of electorate support, due, it is widely argued, to a right turn in its leaders’ rhetoric, if not their actual policies. 

Of the issues, the reform of the National Health Service (NHS) is probably of most interest to (and most easily understood by) most Americans. The United States is itself struggling to define the appropriate boundaries for government involvement in the provision of care.   Some have looked to the NHS as a model alternative system.  So the debate over NHS strengths, weaknesses, and affordability would be of great interest and an easier connect.

But for those very reasons, the NHS debate deserves a focused article. This I will undertake another time. I raise the issue now only to flesh out the drama that this week represents.

Turning to Welfare Reform

Turning to Welfare Reform, the Tory led Coalition government has introduced several initiatives to dramatically cut the costs of benefits.

The packaging rhetoric is a social conservative attack on the “something for nothing culture.”  Welfare recipients are widely portrayed as “scroungers” who do not deserve the support.  The Coalition argues that benefits should not pay more than work. It is not “fair” for a taxpayer earning less than a welfare recipient to pay taxes toward that benefit.

Fair enough, but the Coalition is not seeking to increase wages or harmonize tax levels to welfare levels. Far from it.  The coalition simply seeks to diminish benefits and force recipients onto an already glutted labour market.  

Moreover, the Coalition sweeps together what Americans would recognize as Welfare (support to families with dependent children) together with what Americans would regard as Social Security (recipients of “incapacity benefit” who paid into the equivalent of Social Security while they worked but became permanently or temporarily disabled from performing the work for which they trained or in which they were experienced).   Both groups now must make efforts to secure a job or face sanctions. Even failing to accept a “voluntary” unpaid position can lead to loss of benefits for an entire year.  

This, in a job market where there are already between 5 and 200 able bodied applicants for every job.  Not counting the welfare recipients, most observers project that the ratio of seekers to jobs will only worsen as the UK slips once again into recession.  Which employer, given the choice, is going to pick a person with a history of disability when given the option of 5-200 able-bodied and qualified applicants?

The Ambassador Effect

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I have been having an ongoing e-mail conversation about whether and what kind of influence the US and Western Europe can and should have on the political situation in Russia in view of the recent anti-government demonstrations protesting Putin’s cavalier changing places announcement last September and the well-documented and blatant electoral fraud in the December 4 parliamentary elections which was employed – almost Soviet style - to maintain his party in power.   

No, this was not a send-in-the-NATO-tanks-as-Putin-plays-hardball-with-the-Russian-political-opposition sort of conversation.  It was more about moral suasion and whether the new US Ambassador can have a positive influence on Russian internal politics at a time when the situation is more fluid than at any other period since 1991 only this time with Putin and his henchmen assuming the roles of the drunken coup-makers of twenty years ago.

What sort of influence can an Ambassador have on another country’s internal affairs – if at all?  This is what the tough and broader question boils down to.  Or should a US Ambassador in a country like Russia, China or even Syria confine his or her activities to dealing with the government in power as the best way to represent this country’s interests. 

There’s been a fair amount of play in the US news media and American academia about soft power and the importance of an Ambassador’s role as the country’s chief public face or public diplomacy representative and what sort of message that individual sends or should send to the people and the government of the country to which he or she is accredited.

Leave USTR Alone, Consolidation is Not the Answer

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Why is it that Democratic administrations – in particular - think that shrinking the federal government means forcing agencies including small, highly effective ones with excellent track records like the USTR (Office of the US Trade Representative), into large, lumbering ones like the Commerce Department?

You’d think people would have learned from the ill-fated consolidation of the US Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the State Department and almost eviscerating the US Agency for Development under President Clinton that this is a really bad idea.  Aside from Monica Lewinsky, the consolidation of the foreign affairs agencies into State was by far the worst decision Clinton made during his entire presidency. 

True, it wasn’t just the Clinton administration that acted alone.  Republican connivance was there front and center, too.  Without isolationist Jesse Helms as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee spurring, or perhaps goading, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on – in fact, forcing her to choose between USIA and a Chemical Weapons Treaty – this fiasco wouldn’t have happened.  

In the end, consolidation is a questionable money-saving device and it certainly won’t make the USTR – the agency responsible for negotiating our international trade agreements - more effective by cramming it into the behemoth Commerce bureaucracy – likely the opposite on both accounts.

Consolidation is expensive, time-consuming and disruptive

First, the process of consolidation itself is expensive, time consuming and disruptive.  Second, it creates a knowledge deficit that will not be easily filled because professionals who excel working in small, nimble environments will leave. The USTR staff I’ve met and heard speak at conferences over the years were and are excellent, experienced international economists who can and will find jobs in the private sector or at one of the international banks or funds.  Or those who are close enough to retirement will find an island in the sun, pronto.    

Attrition at USIA was huge after the merger with State 12 years ago:  the two cultures were night and day and the pachyderm, as expected, rolled over the mouse.  If I remember correctly a good 25% of the very experienced staff was gone within two years.  The State Department made a travesty of public diplomacy expertise from day one – so it’s no wonder.    

As a consequence, the US government lacks a nimble, coordinated agency designed to improve America’s image abroad. Instead, the current operation resembles a pair of torn jeans with a few shiny new colorful patches sewn on and a strong Pentagon tilt. Because State was so ineffective after 9/11, most public diplomacy funds went to the can-do Pentagon. 

But here’s one little problem:  selling America abroad works far better when this country’s interface with foreigners is undertaken by civilians and our tanks, uniforms and battleships are kept in mothballs - or at least over the horizon.   

Yes, Madeleine, it was a huge mistake

Even Madeleine Albright, a chief proponent of the ill-fated consolidation has been heard to question whether the whole consolidation affair wasn’t a mistake.

Yes, Madeleine. It was. Hindsight is often better than foresight.  History is not dead and the US still needs a flexible governmental organization along USIA’s lines to tend this country’s image throughout much of the troubled world. 

Meanwhile, the Obama administration - which in my view has done a lot right otherwise - needs to shift into reverse before it’s too late on this latest ill-thought-through proposal.  Small is often more effective.  The National Security Council, for instance, is small.  Doesn’t mean it should be broken up and made parts of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department. 

Please. Leave USTR alone.  This proposal should be dead on arrival.           

 

 

What do Coalition Education Secretary and Labour MP Chris Bryant have in common?

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent

Nothing, you reply?

At first glance it might seem preposterous.  

Chris Bryant is a Labour MP, Shadow Minister for Borders and Immigration. Bryant was last seen in vigorous attack mode, seeking Home Secretary Theresa May’s head over a little experiment gone ‘orribly wrong (at least ‘orribly visible in the fishbowl).  Bryant is better known, however, for his battle with Rupert Murdoch, whose grubby fingered underlings exposed Bryant to unseemly and embarrassing (not to mention politically difficult) ridicule.  Bryant recently appraised Rupert Murdoch, an unflattering comparison to Sivio Berlusconi.  

Michael Gove is, on the other hand, a Conservative MP, current Coalition Education Secretary.  Gove’s very name makes die hard Labour supporters awaken in the night with cold sweats. He is the bane of public educators, dedicated to the overthrow of public education through private Academies (albeit to be fair to Mr. Gove, he would see it as their fulfillment and betterment).  His “reforms” are legion and legendary, opposed vigorously by Chris Bryant and Bryant’s Labour Party. So black and white is this it does not bear citation. Michael Gove is also a well known “Neo Conservative.”     Gove served Murdoch as an editor at The Times.  His appraisal of Murdoch now?  A great man.

So what could Chris Bryant and Michael Gove possibly have in common? Outside the fact they presumably put their pants on the same way in the morning, although maybe we shouldn’t assume.    The answer is, the Henry M. Jackson Society.   And a little more as will unfold.

The Henry M. Jackson society is an astro turf “Think Tank” with an agenda.  That isn’t greatly editorialized. It calls itself a think tank and it has an expressed agenda.  I dub it “astro turf” because it looks like a pressure group, acts like a pressure group, is funded like a pressure group, and has assiduously cultivated rich and powerful people with agenda and connections, like a pressure group. But it calls itself a think tank and is organized as a charity. How benign. Rather like Atlantic Bridge, but more on that in a moment.

The Henry M. Jackson society was formulated in 2005, named after US Senator Henry M. Jackson. No, not for his public welfare agenda, but for his “hawkish” interventionist agenda. Again, not editorializing.  It is well documented and the Society says so itself. 

The Henry M. Jackson Society promotes trans Atlantic cooperation in the intervention into the affairs of other nations, particularly in the Middle East, allegedly to spread liberal democracy.  This agenda can be seen directly in the Society’s own activities. 

Lobsters in the Pot: Is Privacy Still Possible?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Let’s dispense quickly with the contradictions besetting the Republican notion of privacy during this amazing rundown to the upcoming presidential election.  Privacy à la GOP largely involves business and finance, which means allowing the close-mouthed  denizens of the executive suite to connive exorbitant profit-making opportunities free of interference from regulations designed to protect consumers from confusion, manipulation, deception or outright fraud.  Meanwhile, most Republican presidential candidates want to regulate every aspect of the sex lives of consenting adults.  Surely having government tromping around like an elephant in the bedroom is a gross invasion of privacy.

But my primary interest here involves the ever-increasing, ever more pervasive and intrusive  invasions of privacy made possible by modern technology.  At this point, we can be monitored day and night no matter where we are.  Even our private thoughts are in danger.  There is virtually no escape from the watchfulness of the national security state.

The Naked Ape in the Airport

Personal privacy is a thing of the past for those who wish to board an airplane.  We must be scanned or wanded or patted down, and if we are too sassy, we’ll be interrogated in a frightening little room, like criminals, which means the flight will leave without us.  Although we are assured that no other passengers can see our nakedness, the fact is that we are undressed by the machinery operated by TSA personnel, who can view our underwire bras, the titaniam repairs to broken bones, the depth of our fat layers, the subtle details of our posture, thus totally violating our bodily integrity.  Worse, official assurances not withstanding, we have no way to prove that our images are not stored, like fingerprints, for future purposes beyond our control.

Herded along like cattle, we dare not utter a word of protest.  We cannot make jokes. We can’t protest too vehemently when a pat down is too intimate or a person with a colostomy bag is humiliated.  We must simply put up and shut up, even though we know that this supposedly sophisticated equipment routinely misses dangerous weapons and that the regs about lotions and so on have no basis in science.

Maybe the whole purpose of the exercise is to teach us docility.

The Fear that Shuts Us Up

It’s not only the fear of missing a flight that turns us mute, passive, as abject as captives in a slave market. If we say or do something that leads us to be apprehended as possible terrorists, we could lose every liberty and right supposedly guaranteed to every citizen by our Constitution, which has been more or less amended by various incarnations of the “Patriot” Act as endorsed by compliant courts and judges.  If we end up in legal limbo, we might never be tried.   We would, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist. 

So we toe the line, remembering how proud and happy we were when democracy overcame totalitarianism.  Perhaps we need an Occupy Airports movement to reclaim our privacy and our dignity.


Brain-Reading as Non-Fiction

But personally invasive science is offering even more license to those who would control us by taking away our privacy.  The latest wrinkle is this: those thoughts that we keep rigorously to ourselves in the hope that we may pass unscathed through the TSA inspections system may not be sacrosanct much longer.  I’m not talking of old hat truth sera.   I’m not referring to the familiar misuse of the notoriously unreliable lie detector test that terrifies the unpracticed and unsophisticated.  I’m talking about the evolving ability of brain monitoring devices to evoke reasonable facsimiles of images that we have seen and thought of.  At the moment, this technology seems to be tentative and crude, but the usual trajectory of such technology is refinement toward perfection. Maybe words won’t be recovered from our brain cells anytime soon, but imagine this: no longer being able to retreat into the pleasant privacy of your own thoughts. Talk about self incrimination!

The Surveillance Octopus

Other surveillance technologies have already reached high levels of reliability.  Heat detectors can tell if we are home, even if the car isn’t outside and we aren’t standing in front of a window.  Sound monitors can pick up conversations from considerable distance, and there isn’t a single electronic communications device that can’t be turned against us.  What’s more, anything hacking doesn’t reveal, documents may, and the courts are all too happy to ask IPOs and phone companies to supply them.  To make the invasion of privacy even more pernicious, it may be illegal for those who supply the records to tell us that the documents have been seized. 

How much more naked can we be?  How much privacy is left to lose?

Oh dear!  I forgot about the spies in the sky. And, not only are there geosynchronous satellites that can watch us 24/7, there are spies in our cell phones and rental cars that reveal to those who have the right equipment exactly where were are whenever we’re away from home.  Finally, spy cameras are becoming a commonplace part of the urban landscape.  To foil criminals and terrorists, of course.  But how convenient for other purposes, too.  Talk about 1984! 

You can monitor your baby from afar, too, which may be a good thing.  But that's the trouble with technology.  It's two-faced, and too many people abuse it too frequently.

Lobsters in the Pot

In the era of voluntary self-revelation on Facebook and given the data-mining to which all users of the Internet are willynilly subjected, it may seem silly to worry about privacy.  Furthermore, many Americans would say that a little erosion of freedom is the small price we pay for increased security.  But I’m not sure that everyone has reflected on the extent to which privacy has become all but unattainable.  Nor, I fear, have they thought of the implications for extreme social control in a not so distant future.

It’s said that creatures who are immersed in a stew pot filled with cold water don’t realize that they are being cooked until it’s too late. The process is too slow.  The increase in heat is too gradual.  Just so, our freedom is eroding degree by degree as our opportunities for privacy fade toward zero.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the human lobsters who read this piece guffaw and decide I’m over-reacting. 

I guess they haven’t felt the heat yet.  If they don’t wake up soon, we’ll all be cooked.

 

     

       

 

The Ground Begins to Move Beneath the “United” Kingdom

By John C. Dyer, UK correspondent

9 January 2012 London and Edinburgh.  The simmering conflict between the governments of Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond and Prime Minister David Cameron has erupted in verbal warfare. 

Over the weekend Prime Minister David Cameron demanded that, subject to further legal advice due later this week, Scotland’s leadership set a date for its planned referendum on independence. Cameron also insisted there only be one issue on the ballot - in or out. In return Cameron offered the referendum would be binding. Cameron pointed out that the referendum could only be binding if Whitehall agreed.  Cameron would agree subject to an in or out vote to be scheduled within 18 months.

Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon responded for Scotland.  Sturgeon replied that the Prime Minister was interfering with a Scottish decision.  She argued that the Scottish people were entitled to have the referendum for which they voted in the time frame for which they voted when they handed the Scottish National Party a significant electoral mandate in the last election. 

During the campaign for that election, First Minister Alex Salmond promised a referendum no sooner than 2014. He has also suggested that the ballot raise the question of whether or not the government should instead seek repatriation of greater powers rather than full independence.    

By the night of the 9^th, Sky News reported that Cameron may have backed off the 18 month deadline in the face of Scottish anger.  But not a demand for it to be held "sooner rather than later."

On 10 January this became "only Westminster has the power" to schedule a referendum.  With these words Westminster opened what the British call a "consultation" on when the referendum should be held, what should its form should be, who should be able to vote.  The announcement was heralded as a historic gauntlet laid down to Scotland.  First Minister Salmon essentially told Westminster, in an American phrase, to "pound sand." 

The battle is now joined.

Cameron cited feedback from unnamed companies reluctant to invest in the UK while the issue remained unresolved. But BBC’s political analysts suggest the reason for the timing of Prime Minister Cameron’s gambit is the Prime Minister’s assessment that he cannot leave this to the capable First Minister’s management.

But I wonder if there is more to it than Scottish independence alone.

I raised this issue prior to the Prime Minister’s deadline during my reflections in this blog on the Prime Minister’s 2 January address to the country.  The demand for Scotland to set an in or out referendum comes less than a week after I warned that overall poll numbers that seem to suggest a consensus in support of the Prime Minister actually disguise serious division between the “Home Counties” and the balance of the UK.

2012 Elections: Shoot-Out at the Republican Corral Continues

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In a December 30 Newshour interview with Judy Woodruff, a group of five wavering Iowa Republicans described who they intended to support in the January 3, 2012 caucuses and why.  The whys ranged from thoughtful to questionable despite the fact the individuals had been carefully chosen by respected but unidentified educational and civic groups as articulate and informed Americans and also despite the fact that our news media has assured us that Iowans are better educated and more politically savvy than voters living in most other states.

Woodward was careful to pose the most objective questions she possibly could.  She did not attempt to correct factual errors even though she must have known when she heard them.  The Newshour should, however, have run a follow-up Snopes Fact Check because without it, viewers could have all too likely passed on fiction as fact – in  a kind of 21^st century game of telephone - or simply think a Newshour senior staffer had problems herself making the distinctions.    

One of the more mistaken – but unsurprising - comments I heard from this focus group was that one of two reasons an interviewee supported a Republican candidate in 2012 was that America’s image abroad was poor.  Here’s the quote: “And I think, also, our world standing has declined.” 

Declined from when? Who was responsible?

Therefore, I suppose, blame it on Obama and the Democrats although she didn’t make that inference herself and she didn’t say when it had declined. This, in itself, is a dubious observation for a Republican to make because, well, our most recent Republican president, George W. Bush’s foreign policy mistakes sent this country’s international favorability ratings into the cellar.  But furthermore, and this is where a Snopes Fact Check should have come in, some of those international favorability ratings have recovered remarkably since Obama became president in 2009.         

From the nadir of the Bush presidency post Iraq invasion in 2003 to his departure from the White House January 20, 2009, Ms. Nawsike would have been right – with a few notable exceptions where George W. Bush’s administration was liked – as in Sub Saharan Africa where US aid continued at about the same levels as under Clinton and has continued to flow under Obama and where a war against terror, aka Islam, didn’t matter because most people are not Muslims.

In 2009, however, with the change in US administrations, the US favorability ratings rose dramatically throughout almost all of Europe and much of Asia especially in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, where Obama spent several years as a child with his anthropologist mother.

The ratings even spiked somewhat in the Muslim world as a result of his decision to send “the war on terror” packing and his acclaimed speeches in Istanbul and Cairo - although the numbers have declined somewhat since then.  Even in Turkey and Egypt, the US is not seen quite as negatively as during the Bush 43 administration by as much as 15 percentage points. 

What then are the major image problems for the US that recent polls have identified in Muslim majority countries? 

• First, the lack of progress in settling the Israel-Palestine conflict. (Note:  this is most visibly manifested in the US government’s support for the right wing “greater Israel” policies of the Netanyahu government); and
• Second, the continuation of the US military presence in the Middle East.  This principally means Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Whether the US troop withdrawal from Iraq on December 30 and the draw-down in Afghanistan will make a difference is too soon to tell - but it could.

2012, Gales Ahead for A House Divided Called the United Kingdom

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent

2 Jan 2012. London. 

David Cameron became the latest European leader to warn his country that this coming year will be severely challenging.  Last week fellow Conservatives Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel preceded Cameron with similar messages. 

Cameron defended his government’s policies as necessary, but pledged to "do whatever it takes” to pull Britain out of the difficulties ahead.  Cameron was short on the specifics of "whatever." Is this more than words meant to reassure restive UK businessmen? Does he mean something different or just more of the same? Cameron did pledge to tackle bank regulation, although, again, he mentioned no how. 

Cameron at least invoked hope for future improvement, just not in 2012.  Unlike Sarkozy, Cameron did not call for stoicism, precisely. But Cameron, like the Queen in her annual address the week prior, called upon the British public to “suck it up” or “dig deep” as it would be called in the United States. Both called up the British to summon their famed emotional strength in time of adversity to deal with the unnamed difficulties ahead.  While nonspecific, both speeches succeeded at conveying the aura of a Churchillian wartime address (albeit without the fine turn of phase). 

Perhaps the two clearest messages in Cameron’s speech were nonverbal.  The first message was conveyed in his face. His lips curled as if sucking a lemon. I have seen this expression before at moments of real political crisis for the Prime Minister.   The second message was the fact that Cameron delivered such a message at all. It was only last year he predicted the country would emerge from its difficulties in 2012.  My how time flies. . .   

Looking at the polls and British history one might wonder why Cameron displayed nervousness.

I will suggest the answer may lie in the intangibles of the character of David Cameron and in the dangers of separatist movements, but first a bit of background is required.

The electorate – those who say they will vote in the next election - appear to be in a frame of mind that would accept the Prime Minister’s message.    Polls have shown for months, that the majority of those intending to vote in the next parliamentary election believe the Prime Minister’s approach is necessary. This is so even though a separate composite figure shows a majority believe the approach hurts the economy.  A third composite majority continue to believe that Labour is more at fault for Britain’s situation than the Coalition.

The polls are not refined enough to tell the degree of overlap between these three composite majorities. However, understanding the nuances of those intending to vote may not require a PhD.