Contrariwise

Dave Gibbons on computer drawing (not computer animation)

2009-08-13T11:35:00.002+01:00

Gibbons uses Photoshop software on his Mac, and Manga Studio, from Japan: "It's tailor-made for doing comics: it's got some wonderful drawing tools in it. I use a Wacom Cintiq tablet, which has an LCD so you're drawing on what you're drawing, not looking away at a screen. That's my weapon of choice, now, for professional work. You can get different nibs for the pens, with different degrees of resistance. You can also swivel it round, and so on."

Duckhouse envy

2009-05-24T09:27:00.001+01:00

Jonathan Pearce has a new post at Samizdata, admiring Camilla Cavendish's article in The Times, Our powerless MPs overwhelmed with trivia. I think Cavendish's article is good, but I think its hook is weak. But JP accepts that hook as a substantive point. He writes:

... the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption.

But 'us' ≠ 'the general public'. It doesn't include me either, because I don't feel contempt for MPs in general (though I couldn't say the same for most current ministers). I am more of the Cavendish position: MPs are many of them talented, but working hard on the wrong things. However, both he and Cavendish (though the latter in passing only) suppose far too much political/constitutional awareness and interest on behalf of the general public, I fear.

I wish the article were correct in that respect. I really do. But I don't think it is. The analysis of the real problem with Westminster politics is first class. But to attribute current public anger to any widespread appreciation that MPs have little power and are therefore 'getting money for nothing' is mistaken. Nor is it really anger at hypocrisy. I think Anthony Steen's diagnosis, however hopelessly self-regarding in expression and misjudged as a public comment, of envy, is actually more accurate.

The received wisdom of the man in the street has always been that politicians are 'all the same and only in it for what they can get' - which is doublethought with an authoritarian presupposition that if there is any social problem, substantial or confected, 'the government' (a term encompassing both Westminster and Whitehall) or 'they' should do something about it. What's changed is the availability of detail.

We live in a world where daytime TV and lottery scratchcards can present £100,000 as an unimaginable, life-changing, prize. For a majority it might well be. Most people cannot comprehend how well off their GP is - doing pretty close to as well as an ordinary MP. But they never see it.

It is because the meaningless cliché of political corruption is now embodied in terms the most ordinary person can understand, with pictures of the sort of objects purchased with 'our money', that there is such fury. That the part-time chairman of the South East England Development Agency spent more of our money on taxis in 2006-7 than all MPs put together made a headline or two, but I never heard calls for quangocrats to be hung from lampposts - it is all too abstract and aggregate. An £8,000 TV, a floating duck house, 'moat dredging' have metonymic force: they form a dramatic impression of what may be a new idea to many: that all MPs live with an opulence that will forever be denied to the average punter, at the average punter's expense. The picture readily attaches itself to MPs because the corrupt politics cliché has prepared the ground.

The truth is that weird though their system may be, MPs have their hands less deep in the public pocket than others. Much of the senior public sector (not to mention its consultants), lives at the public expense at a similar level to managers and partners in corporations or professional firms. For the average punter this too is unreachable - but also invisible and unimagined - opulence. An executive director in an executive agency can expect about £130-£140,000 in salary plus a pension and other benefits. Guido, who is not disposed to underestimate, calculates thus:

Examine the situation: an MP’s current compensation package (without dishonesty or blatant looting) is worth some £120,000 to £130,000 if added to the basic salary are their “within the rules” allowances and pensions valued at pre-tax equivalent market rates. Guido gives a range because of arguments as to the value of their pension package. So let us settle on a figure of £125,000 as the current all-in value of their package.

I wonder if a top broadsheet columnist can get by on that? If the Telegraph's series on 'the coping classes' a couple of years back is anything to go by, probably not. But the public in general finds it to be incomprehensible riches, and does not bother to grasp what MPs are doing at all. The general public is angry simply because of the money, not because of what MPs do or don't do for it. Those of us who wouldn't mind what they cost if only they could and would control the growth of the modern bureaucratic state, are in a small minority.

Encouraging ignorance of politics

2009-05-21T06:56:00.004+01:00

Sometimes one has to think people deserve what they get when they vote, just as they do when they buy a product for some irrelevant reason without reading the label or figuring out how they will use it.

Hackney blogger Blood and Property, proudly proclaims 'I've lived in Hackney for 10 years, not voting, not knowing who my MP or councillors are and not paying attention to Hackney current affairs. Am I missing anything?' Their latest post allows us to answer the question definitively: yes.

It is also a classic example of how TheyWorkForYou.com doesn't work for us, failing in a way its creators almost certainly didn't predict. The elegant interface assists human stupidity. Most people just don't have sufficient grasp of politics to be let near the site. It has produced a widespread blight on political commentary. Forums and comment columns everywhere are full of the sort of numbskulled quotation of division extracts that Blood and Property provides here:

Info from theyworkforyou.com shows that in August of the same year [2005] Meg Hillier "voted very strongly for introducing ID cards. votes, speeches" it also says she " Voted very strongly against investigation into the Iraq war. votes, speeches"

Well, dur. Those were heavily whipped votes. No Labour MP except for the Socialist Campaign Group would show any different. Blood and Property has focussed on this empty, highly selected pseudo-information, and neither noticed that Hillier is a junior minister (so that under no circumstances could she vote against the government), nor that, a much stronger case for the contradiction s/he set out to point out, that Hillier is actually the minister responsible for the ID scheme.

Even if you look at the votes of the Socialist Campaign Group on any issue other than right-on lefty totems, then they are solidly conformist too. Do we see principled abstentions on government amendments to incomprehensibly obscure tax or companies legislation or sentencing rules accessible only to specialists? No. They vote as the whips tell 'em. An MP's voting record tells you almost nothing about their personal beliefs. Only votes against the whip and free votes are significant, and there are almost none of them. Sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, far from demystifying politics, make this sort of misunderstanding because they create highly selective pictures of MP's activity. Their top users and creators are essentially drawn from a liberalish tradition of interest in politics, so the questions that are highlighted are the very same right-on lefty totems.

TheyWorkForYou and its relations are useful tools, if you already understand something more than superficially about politics. But they aren't helping the general public get more insight. Contrariwise.

Fil(l)ing space

2009-05-01T07:50:00.000+01:00

My zero readers will have noticed (I think propositional calculus allows a null predicate to have any properties I choose to attribute to it) that I am putting up my old letters to the editor. I hope to lure a few readers via their searches that way, as well as to establish where I stand - generally on the anti-populist side of any question, hence the title of this blog. It also gets me into the habit of posting something, which is a good habit.

Common law?

2009-04-30T15:00:00.000+01:00

To: Editor, The Daily Telegraph

Sir,

Before yesterday, I'd assumed that if you were to produce even a very small knife on Parliament Square, the dozens of armed police nearby would within 30 seconds have you prone on the pavement with a Heckler & Koch submachinegun pointed at the back of your head. Certainly MPs of every party have been vying to see who can demand the longest mandatory prison terms for mere possession of an "article with blade or point in public place", and plenty of politicians, notably the Mayor of London, have encouraged the use of 'knife arches' to allow police to evade controls on their powers of lawful search.

Yet every front page this morning has a photo of Miss Joanna Lumley holding up a Kukri, without an accompanying account of her brave arrest and forthcoming prosecution under the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006.

Is this a return to sanity about knives? Or does it just show there is one law for the famous, and another for the peaceable private citizen.

Yours faithfully

--
Guy E S Herbert

What 50p top rate?

2009-04-23T07:54:00.001+01:00

To: Editor, The Times

Sir,

Why all the headlines about a 50% top rate of income tax? The effective maginal rate on those earning between £100,000 and £150,000 is being increased to _60%_ if you take account of the withdrawal of allowances. It seems the Chancellor has not learned from the debacle over the abolition of the lower rate. Either that or he doesn't understand what he's doing.

Yours faithfully

Guy E.S. Herbert

Rape convictions

2009-04-21T07:55:00.000+01:00

To: The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

Hi -

You (and the government) are on very dangerous grounds when comparing rape conviction rates in this country and others, and assuming higher is better. It is extremely unlikely that like is being compared with like. The proportion of victims coming forward, and the circumstances in which they feel it valid or worthwhile to make a complaint, will depend on different social mores in different places. And legal systems are very different (and again affected by social mores).

For instance, in the US a high proportion of those imprisoned for "rape" are actually punished for statutory rape: consensual intercourse under the age of consent, which is 18 in many states. This is not generally prosecuted at all in the UK, and not usually classified as rape when it is. It isn't at all hard to get a conviction for, since the big problem with rape trials is seldom proving sex but the question of consent, which is wholly avoided when statutory rape is tried. This alone massively increases US conviction rates. Then you need to consider plea bargaining...

Yours truly

--
Guy E S Herbert

There's no one like Macavity

2009-04-17T07:58:00.000+01:00

To: The Daily Telegraph

Sir,

On the day Damian Green was arrested the cabinet was meeting in Birmingham, and ministers were otherwise engaged in the afternoon in a full schedule of West Midlands regional press events. On the day that charges were dropped, the cabinet met in Scotland to the same effect. The innovation in any case looks suspiciously like an exercise in electioneering rather than government, but is this a case of mere synchronicity, or 'while the cat's away' - or what?

Yours faithfully

--
Guy E S Herbert

Post-bureaucratic?

2009-03-22T08:01:00.000Z

To: The Daily Telegraph

Sir,

David Cameron writes as if we are already living in "the post-bureaucratic age". We don't. This is the hyper-bureaucratic age, as Sarah Standing's riff on NHS consultation forms overleaf demonstrates. If Mr Cameron wants a post-bureaucratic age he'll have to sack a million bureaucrats (at least - no hyperbole meant) when he gains office.

Yours faithfully

--
Guy E S Herbert

Here goes

2009-02-19T12:39:00.001Z

I've been blogging patchily under the aegis of Samizdata for a while, but often find myself with something to say that is too slight, too personal, too silly, or too contumely, to belong in that grand company. Whether my fleeting commonplaces will actually get written down here, and whether they will find an audience if they do, is hard to guess. I'm a procrastinator of the first rank, so it will be a victory to get to my first post of substance. Don't bet that I do.

Not fines, dammit!

2008-05-05T09:34:00.000+01:00

To: The Today Programme

Hi -

Your Home Affairs correspondent failed to mention that what the Home Ofice has done is not to prosecute more employers of illegal workers. What are being levied are not fines - whatever Mr Byrne says.

They are now issuing administrative penalties, which are dealt with under civil procedure, if the person penalised understands how to fight them. (Which means an appeals process, eventually legal action.) The burden of proof has been reversed.

It is therefore no surprise that many more penalties have been levied than prosecutions and fines under the old, just, system. But worse, there has been nowhere enough time for significant numbers of appeals since the new regulations came into effect; the minister is cheerfully presuming that anyone his officials have chosen to punish is guilty.

It is a system that ought to be repugnant to any conception of fairness: punishment first, then condemnation, then the opportunity to prove your innocence at your own expense. And Mr Byrne is proud of that!

Yours sincerely

--
Guy E S Herbert

How the Empire was built.

2008-03-16T09:38:00.000Z

To: The Economist:

Sir,

The right analogy (Leader, 15 March) is not New York's loss of the bond market, but the flight of private equity to St James's after Sarbanes-Oxley. It is the uncertainty and threatened disclosure that will frighten away the super rich; the £30,000 levy they will not notice, but may drive out highly skilled city workers. If equity is the object then why not get rid of the real anomaly whereby HMRC claims extraterritorial powers over Britons? Let anyone make money abroad without question and bring it home to spend it. That's how the Empire was built.

Yours faithfully

--
Guy E S Herbert

new-CJD

2000-07-18T08:24:00.000+01:00

To The Daily Telegraph

Dear Comment:

While he's quite right about the fallacy of affirming the consequent—which
seems to inform most policy-making, not just BSE policy—perhaps Dr Ridley
will turn his attention in a future article to a null hypothesis rather than
an alternative theory of causation.

Quaere: Is new variant CJD the same as BSE? That its pathology appears similar (in the absence of much, if any, aetiological evidence) seems inadequate grounds to assume it. And: Is it an epidemic? Could it not be a rare sporadic disorder that is unchanged in its occurrence, but picked up more frequently—and now distinguished from its cousins—because of the recent research interest in prion diseases?

As for the Queniborough cluster—why not a statistical freak? If I win the
lottery, is that to be taken as evidence that I have a secret connection
with Camelot; and that they can fix it; and that they have, in my favour?

Best regards

Guy Herbert

Old Scatness

2000-05-16T08:17:00.002+01:00

To The Times

Sir:

Most people with an interest in history will have been astonished by the headline (May 16) "Stonehenge left standing by Iron Age village" and the use of statements from Historic Scotland in a way that suggests Old Scatness was an Iron Age settlement in 2,500 BC. Iron wasn't much used anywhere until a thousand years later. So—if true—this would be a fabulously important discovery.

What is nowhere clearly stated in the article—but can be deduced from careful reading, combined with a little general knowledge—is that Old Scatness was already known as a site of the Iron Age (brochs being typical monuments of Iron Age Scotland), but has now been discovered to contain evidence of much, much older occupation. It is possibly comparable in age to the early phases of Stonehenge (ca.3,000 BC onwards).

Should we be congratulating The Times for giving readers an exercise in practical archaeology—letting us sift the fascinating facts from disorderly rubbish and misleading clues?

Yours faithfully

Guy Herbert

How long should you wait for a No.73?

2000-03-29T08:08:00.001+01:00

To the Evening Standard

Sir:

Since I walk, mostly, I'm not an avid reader of your CommuterWatch column, but yesterday my eye lit on a paragraph about the punctuality of the No.73.

If it is true that LT estimates one should expect to wait two-and-a-half minutes for a bus scheduled to run at five minute intervals, then LT has no idea of the fundamentals of its job. I hope this is a journalistic misinterpretation. Having once temped on the seemingly pointless management reports required by LT of a bus company, I greatly fear it is not.

Because they are subject to unpredictable changes in traffic flow and passengers wishing to get on or off arbitrarily, the progress of buses along their routes is impossible to keep to timetable beyond a couple of stops. The only thing that is fixed is the time they leave the depot. So when one stands at a bus stop at random, one certainly cannot expect the bus to turn up in half the timetabled interval. Mathematically it can be shown that an average wait will be the full five minutes if services run five
minutes apart.

With the benefit of this elementary fact, one can see a four-and-a-half minute wait for the 73 isn't bad at all if, as you report, the service is supposed to be every 3-5 minutes at peak and every 5 minutes off-peak. [Actually, all it shows is that buses do leave the depots at the right intervals. Bravo!]

Trying to get city buses to run to timetable is not only futile. It is stupid. A better measure of good service is how long your journey takes--including waiting time.

What are needed are simple measures to improve the average speed of each bus over its whole route. The simplification of bus fares is good, but could be taken further with a universal, single-coin, £1 fare. Reducing the number of bus-stops (only 100 yards apart in many places) would also reduce stopping-starting. That would not just make bus travel quicker, but would reduce wear and tear on buses and drivers, cut pollution, and reduce the
delays to the rest of London's traffic.

Yours faithfully

Guy E S Herbert