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I Vote Life – The complicated e-petition of Britain and Capital Punishment

Aug 9

Posted by Guest Blog in Crime, Society, Westminster | 6 Comments

Another guest post, this one from Alex MacDonald who is a social entrepreneur, political activist and university student.  He loves following current affairs and in particular, to read and write about the controversial issues of the day.  Susceptible to having his opinion swayed, and therefore would welcome your thoughts and views – brave man!

Epetitions.direct.gov.uk allows members of the public to create and sign petitions of their choice. The website is a fantastic opportunity to raise awareness of important and sometimes tender issues that the public want addressed in parliament and when it went live on 4th August, it crashed later that day due to overwhelming demand. Petitions need over 100,000 signatures to be passed into the House of Commons for debate and for parliamentary procedures to begin.  So far, the site’s first and second most popular petitions relate to Britain’s stance on the death penalty, with one calling for the restoration of capital punishment:

“We petition the government to review all treaties and international commitments which may inhibit the ability of Parliament to restore capital punishment. Following this review, the Ministry of Justice should map out the necessary legislative steps which will be required to restore the death penalty for the murder of children and police officers when killed in the line of duty. The findings of the review and the necessary substantive legislation to be presented to House of Commons for debate no later than 12 months after this petition passes the acceptance threshold.” 

According to this petition, should an offender murder a child then the offender would be sentenced to death but should an offender commit serial murder on people over the age of 21, the offender would receive a life sentence.  This policy does not address murder as an entity but as two separate entities, murder that is not acceptable and murder that is more acceptable. It also promotes the understanding of hate crimes across the United Kingdom as it is a policy that protects a collective body of people. When in reality murder should be addressed as murder and not divided between social groups, gender and other variables.

The murder of a child is a devastating incident that  affects the whole country. However, another problem with this category is that it may be difficult to classify an individual as a ‘child’. Who exactly is a child, and by definition when is a child no longer a child? Parents  are able to claim child benefit until their children reach the age of 20, yet it may be hard to justify describing a 20 year old  as a ‘child’. As individuals, we can marry at 16, and we can drink, smoke and vote at 18. However, these milestones show how difficult it is to define the point when an individual is considered mature enough to take responsibility for their own decisions, which is an integral part of adulthood. So how can an arbitrary reference to age adopted in legislation be justified?

According to this petition, the intentional killing of a child is one of the more serious forms of murder. It could be argued that children are defenceless and particularly vulnerable victims. This acts as an aggravating factor, which makes the offence more serious. So from a legal perspective it can be argued that a separate sentencing may be appropriate for child murder.

This leaves many questions left unanswered as children are not the only defenceless and vulnerable group in society. Other vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the disabled should therefore be considered to be included in this petition. Yet further questions surround this issue, how old would one have to be to be considered elderly, and how disabled would one have to be to be considered handicapped? This new law on many occasions would fall into a grey area. Age is not a defining factor for the elderly, as people grow and die at different ages. Nor does disability necessarily inhibit a person’s understanding of certain situations and scenarios to make them more of a vulnerable victim.

Emotionally I feel that child murder is worse than any other murder, to lose a life that young is a devastating tragedy. However, logically it should not be the case that the law is based around emotional perspectives. If the law is written around emotional perspectives then that will counter balance a fair system.

The new law would promote one life over another and set up divisions between groups of people. One niche group would be protected by the death penalty where as other groups would not be. The law would be found asking itself which group is more important to society. If a crime is illegal then why is there the need of mixed sentencing? Murder is murder, regardless of the age, race, sexuality and etc of its victims. With this petition we question who is vulnerable and who is not. Minority groups and the homosexuals and lesbians are all examples of vulnerable people, so should the law protect them differently? Or as I previously mentioned, does this just needlessly group people?

The murder of police officers acting in the course of duty often provokes a public outcry. The police do a vital job in keeping Britain safe, and so when the death of a police officer hits the headlines, it is always difficult and upsetting to see.

However the idea of a law that solely protects the police promotes inequality amongst the British public, which further adds to bias crime acknowledgement. According to this policy the murder of an on duty policeman is worse than the murder of any other professional in any other job. What about when that policeman goes off duty? Is it still bias motivated crime? Or is it then a personal attack?

What about the murder of on duty doctors, firemen and the Prime Minister? Further to this, what about receptionists, jockeys and bankers? Surely all people should be protected equally by the law?

Such a distinction can be justified; children are vulnerable and need to be protected, and the police risk their lives on a daily basis to keep the public safe.  However, in conclusion , this petition fails to protect other vulnerable groups such as the disabled and the elderly.  The law should not draw an arbitrary distinction between different groups.

I am against capital punishment. If the state sentences a murderer to death, then the state is stepping on common ground with that murderer, regardless of the atrocities of the crime.

However, from a hypothetical perspective, if capital punishment is to be introduced back into the UK, then the law should protect all groups of people, regardless of age, career and other variables, as the law should be set to protect everyone in society.

But what do you think?

 

 

 

Let’s not pretend that we don’t understand the rioters

Aug 9

Posted by Jeff in Crime | 23 Comments

I sometimes tell a story from my High School years that still gets a good laugh. It involves myself and a few friends throwing snowballs at cars from a fence at the bottom of a big grassy hill in a park. We had a pretty rubbish aim but for one poor driver, each snowball hit the target – the driver-side window which was rolled down halfway. We thought nothing of it after the cheers and carried on until we heard a roar from behind us. Said driver was careering down the hill towards us, having driven his car (deliberately) through the fence at the top of the hill in a rage. My friends ran off to the side and got away easily. I, stupidly, ran up the hill, one slip no doubt resulting in a well-deserved beating from this man. A series of garden runs followed to get away and we survived intact. What great fun. We were fourteen.

The violence and thuggery that we are seeing on London’s streets is of course a far cry from throwing a few snowballs; however, we disrespected this man’s car as much as the rioters disrespected a family’s furniture shop last night and we disrespected wherever it was he might have been going as much as rioters are disrespecting the impact of families being homeless.

The activity over the past few nights has been mindless but it is tiring and frustrating to be the same person for the entirety of our lives and getting out of our minds is something that we all do. Getting drunk on a weekend night, playing Grand Theft Auto, blasting music at top volume, grooving like a maniac on the dancefloor or even just going to the cinema. Escaping ourselves has become a modern necessity and for some people that escape is less easy than it is for others.

I’m no psychologist so I won’t embarrass myself by trying to talk about the correlation between a lack of strong parental figures and a disrespect for private property, police and other people and the frustration and boredom that that can bring but families that have broken down in some way shape or form have to come into this somewhere. A marriage tax allowance won’t fix it but the police asking the public ‘Where are your kids?’ is getting closer to a solution.

Don’t get me wrong, the violence and damage that was visible last night, the two nights before and, no doubt, for the next few evenings is indefensible and intolerable. It is a choice of whether you’re with Cameron, Boris and May or the rioters and I am firmly with the former camp, whatever they choose to do. I’ve believed for a while that gangs of youths up to no good should not be indulged with the softly-softly policing approach that is no doubt employed with good intentions but, rather, these groups should be hit for six by a no-nonsense police hardcore to get them off the streets, interrogated individually to understand what drives them to cause problems and then solutions proposed by the state accordingly.

I see no reason why similar tactics shouldn’t be employed tonight including, if need be and safely employed, water cannons, tazers, rubber bullets, the army and tear gas. Kids throwing snowballs is one thing but David Cameron is back at the helm now, a COBRA meeting is taking place as I type and the kids need to know they don’t run the streets.

So, mindless violence? Yes. Understandable? In our heart of hearts, it has to be a yes.

Cast your mind back to when you were in your teens and I’d be surprised if, even a tiny bit, you couldn’t appreciate how fun it might be to play cat and mouse with police and be on tv each night.

What future for Scotland? – A constitutional sleight of hand

Aug 8

Posted by Jeff in Ideology | 16 Comments

Continuing the series of blog posts looking at the chapters of the 2001 book ‘What future for Scotland?’ from the Policy Institute, we now turn to the second chapter ‘A constituional sleight of hand’ by Gerald Warner, columnist at the Scotland on Sunday and Telegraph.

The Executive Summary states: There is one ‘nuclear option’ open to Westminster, which would make accountability real and would bring the devolved parliament into stark interface with its electorate. The Scotland Act could be amended to include a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid. By imposing such a qualification for Holyrood, the prospect of four consensual parties carving up power, to the exclusion of their own electorate, would be eliminated.

There’s a lot that can be said from even the several short sentences above. For one, the indication that the writer was not in favour of the Scottish Parliament comes through (to me at least) loud and clear. For a book looking at Scotland’s Future, it is odd to decide to talk of Westminster neutering a Parliament that is only two years old when there is no reason to believe that Holyrood would work just as effectively as any other Parliament across the world. It is an exanmple of the negativity that Holyrood itself was built to shake off Scotland’s back.

Another interesting point to note is that, far from four (three, two or even one in the SNP’s case) conensual parties “carving up power”, each of the three Governments that have been formed in Scotland and completed their terms have largely delivered, or at least attempted to deliver, what they promised to in their manifestos. Compare and contrast with the current UK Government (a comparison I won’t dwell on) and the Scottish Parliament looks positively buxom in its healthiness. It does beg the question therefore why anyone would assume Holyrood is any more likely of falling short with a democratic deficit than Westminster (or, say, the European Parliament) would.

However, at its core, this chapter deserves to be taken at face value whereby turnout needs to be above a certain level in order for an election to be valid. So, where better to start than by looking at turnouts in Scottish Parliament elections in the past four elections:

1999 – 59%
2003 – 49%
2007 – 52%
2011 – 50%

Technically that is a declining trend which would, strictly speaking, support the notion that interest in Holyrood is waning. However, the turnout in 1999 is presumably higher simply because it was the first election and there was a novelty to going out to that ballot box the first time. The bump in 2007 may be due to the election being so close that year (I am not going to entertain the notion that 2011 should have seen a bump with Scots rushing out to vote Yes or NO to AV).

Gerald writes with typical intellect and literal references that I shan’t reproduce, other than to note his opening mentioning of the earliest Scottish soundbite from the Roman era, coming from a defeated Caledonian chief – ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. So born, according to Gerald, was the grievance politics that has supposedly plagued Scotland for much of the time since.

It is this grievance that devolution sprang from, the “weasel worded” ‘democratic deficit’ supposedly used to cloak more selfish interests by the parties of the left in Scotland. Gerald charts the history of the Scottish Parliament, from 1967 when the Tories supported an Assembly via Edward Heath’s Declaration of Perth, through to 1999 when “at the zenith of (the Scottish Parliament’s popularity”, the number of people voting Yes was 1,775,045, out of an electorate of just under 4 million.

Gerald goes on to point to further democratic deficits in the system, the first of which lives on today and is surely unsustainable. “Out of
129 MSPs, 56 are ‘elected’ from closed lists, drawn up by the party leadership. The elector is constrained to vote for an anonymous ‘regional’ candidate by endorsing a political party rather than an individual.”

I agree with the unsatisfactory nature of this method to Holyrood elections. We are seeing voting fodder being put into the Scottish Parliament and it seems undemocratic that, of the 8 MSPs that represent any one Scot, he/she only had a direct say in the suitability of one of them.

Granted, this, to an extent, is the price we pay for PR and we can (and should) join parties to ensure a healthy democracy resides within political parties as well as outside of them. However, there is no valid argument for closed lists over open lists that I can see if we not only want a stronger democracy but want to attract more quality and more variety to the ballot slip.

Gerald continues the article by arguing that Holyrood safeguards the vested interests of the four main parties, either through increased representation relative to Westminster (SNP, Tories) or increased power and privilege (Labour/Lib Dems) and, under such circumstances, who is is going to “actively seek root and branch reform of the Scotland Act, for fear of becoming turkeys voting for Christmas”?

It’s a good question but it’s relevance hinges on the question of how bad things really are. Are the people really shut out from debate? Is there endemic corruption at the Scottish Parliament? They are notions that would appeal to the conspiracy theorists out there but my impression is that the Parliament is, and largely always has been, a tight ship run efficiently by whoever happens to have their hands on the tiller.

Perhaps the most cutting part of Gerald’s piece is the needlessly personal attack that “MSPs are recruited from the most venal and least articulate elements of the nation”. Now, to be fair, the broad argument that is being made here is something that I have voiced before so I can’t be too critical. Holyrood is a far cry from the greatest minds of the nation wrestling with the economic, science, sociological issues of the day and, often, merely a miserable extension of student politic with salaries attached.

However, natural selection at each election has largely driven standards higher to the point that the SNP is now a professional outfit and is being rewarded accordingly, with the other parties playing catch up in a ‘race to the top’ that will serve Holyrood very well indeed. Gerald’s expectations started out low and, if anything, when looking forwards sunk deeper. That is not the positive, optimistic outlook that I wish to see in our political culture and it betrays a defeatism that has been the scourge of Scotland for far too long.

The pinpointing of the shortcomings of the d’hondt system is the shining light of Gerald’s article but his proposed solutions are a regressive rather than progressive step:

(1) 118 MSPs elected through FPTP, two each from the 59 Westminster boundaries that currently exist (presumably this dropping to 50 constituencies would reduce the number of MSPs to a positively anaemic 100?).
(2) “The Scotland Act could be amended to iclude a proviso that any Scottish election where the turnout fell below a certain percentage would be ipso facto invalid”

Both solutions are terrible ideas. The first suggestion would lead to a very poor Parliament with smaller parties not represented at all and, much of the time, one party dominating proceedings even more so than the SNP do currently.

The second suggestion is unnecessary as, as I have shown, turnout is holding up reasonably well, and, anyway, this suggestion insinuates that politicians currently believe that the public exists to serve MSPs rather than the other way around. I have no doubt that politicians of all parties in Scotland would dearly love for turnout to be 100% and they certainly put the hard yards in to ensure that this is the case. To punish the very people who are holding democracy together in Scotland, the people who join parties, put policy papers together, deliver leaflets and organise hustings would be to deal a needlessly self-inflicting blow on ourselves and create a hole in our society. Who would write the cheques if the 2011 election result, for example, was deemed invalid? What chaos would ensue then?

The Scottish Parliamet deserves to be held to the same standard as other Parliaments across the world, no higher and no lower. In trying to apply unique constraints on Holyrood, an instiution that the writer clearly didn’t want created in the first place, one has to question the motives behind the largely unnecessary suggestions put forward in this article.

However, on moving from closed party lists to open party lists at election time, Gerald Warner has a proposal that is still relevant today, even if it is perhaps the right answer for the wrong reasons.

Misunderstanding the markets.

Aug 7

Posted by James in Economy | 14 Comments

DrugchartThere’s an awful lot of guff being produced about the holy, inevitable, all-powerful markets. First, despite the evidence of this financial crisis, very few are debating whether we should continue to have our economic future determined by the direction in which trillions of pounds of complex financial instruments slosh around. Richard Murphy did so, although his piece uses the word “feral” so often that it started to look very odd to me.

Choices were made to open our economy up to volatile shareholder capitalism. It’s not some scientifically proven approach to economics, any more than it’s god-given. These choices favoured some, notably the buccaneer capitalists and pension funds whose exploits Adam Curtis set out in The Mayfair Set (Google Video). And they turned over others, most obviously those who directly faced redundancy at their hands, but also the wider set of taxpayers whose interests they undermined. We could still make other choices, or at least we could if all the parties of government weren’t utterly beholden to these modern-day Gnomes of Zurich (Westminster, primarily, not that there’s evidence the SNP would take a different economic approach if they had the levers to hand).

Second, though, markets don’t “give verdicts”. They look for margins and they put a value on risk. When interest rates are cut, you regularly hear “the stock market responded positively”, as if these reified and disembodied forces were independently assessing those cuts as indicators of a stronger economy in the future. Utter nonsense. Falling interest rates mean bonds deliver a lower return, so, relatively, the stock market becomes a more appealing place to buy. Sure, if a proposal comes forward to relax restrictions on deepwater drilling, shares in Cairn or Shell will rise, but that’s an expression of expected change in the relative return on investment, not “confidence” or somesuch anthropomorphic sentiment.

The current fiasco isn’t primarily driven by Greek debt or even Republican reluctance to raise revenue from those most able to pay. Nor is it a collective judgement on the future of the Euro (doomed as it surely is at least in anything like the current form), any more than Black Wednesday was a view that Britain’s economic interests would be better served by sterling not being pinned to a basket of European currencies.

Black Wednesday occurred because a UK Government committed itself to a particular exchange rate band despite the existence of a free trade in currencies, a trade an earlier phase of that same Tory government had opened up. That meant George Soros and the gang could freely bet against them, and the traders knew Norman Lamont would have to keep buying while they kept short selling.

Right now, what started as a similar series of minor chinks in the single currency, apparent only to specialist traders and some politicians outside the soggy centre in both directions, is becoming a series of chasms. It’s not that the markets have a view on whether a single currency would idealistically be better or worse for European economies, just that there are self-fulfilling margins to be made in the diverging rates of return on member state bonds. Traders have found a new game, and no amount of austerity, cuts to public services or privatisation (the icing on their cake) will end that game. Either the chasms get closed with a single economic and fiscal policy for the Eurozone – effectively an end to national politics – or, sooner or later, they’ll smash it like a piñata and take all the taxpayer-funded sweeties.

The American situation is a little different, largely because of the disproportionate power the Chinese hold over the US economy and policy-makers. Each month a balance of trade deficit pushes roughly $20bn from American consumers to Chinese companies, and the Chinese in turn bought US Treasury bonds – up to a peak of more than $1.1tn in October last year.

Effectively, the Chinese have been pushing home the economic advantage they hold by virtue of using cheap (or sometimes slave) labour. Not only are they draining capital from the USA, but they’re using it to gain massive leverage and undermine the US Government’s autonomy. The American economy has acted like an enthusiastic addict, welcoming the dealer’s reliability. But the signs are that the Chinese administration thinks this phase will have to come to an end. The Chinese even used the same language when upbraiding the Americans’ “addiction to debt”, in just the way I imagine some heroin dealers shake their heads sadly at their customers – “not you again – I thought you’d gone clean, man.”

The disconnect between the real economy and the tides of profit-taking and short-termism has never been larger, while the consequences of market failure for everyone outside the gilded feral elite have never been higher. The question is – will policy-makers anywhere ever be brave enough to go through the short- or medium-term pain of restraining the markets, trying to force the genie back into the bottle, and trying to build an economy where the interests of society, the workforce, and the planet come first?

Some would say it’s impossible, but read the business pages (or, increasingly, the front pages) if you want to see the kind of world they’re saying is inevitable. How far through this sequence of ever-deeper crashes and ever-shallower and more unequal recoveries will we have to go before there’s a willingness to address the real problems here? And that’s before we consider the additional risks the economy faces as oil production gets ready for the bumpy ride down from the plateau of its final peak. The signs aren’t promising.

Worst motion of the week – John Mason

Aug 4

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 107 Comments

Many moons ago, I started up a blog called Crap Holyrood Chat, a half serious and half fun look at the motions that were lodged at the Scottish Parliament with a view to pulling out the ones that were a blatant waste of time either due to sycophancy, idiocy or just general crapness.

The venture ultimately failed because I only rarely found myself scrolling through the hundreds of important motions that make it onto the Scottish Parliament website each week but, now, with a team of four, the other three of which being much closer both geographically and, em, mentally(?) to Holyrood than I am, we think it might be time to start something similar up again.

So, without further ado, I am pleased to announce Better Nation’s weekly feature – worst motion of the week!

By all means feel free to forward suggestions (editors@betternation.org) but we have a doozy to kick things off. Take a bow, John Mason:

The Equal Marriage Debate
That the Parliament notes the current discussion about same-sex marriages and the Scottish Government’s forthcoming public consultation concerning equal marriage; further notes that, while some in society approve of same-sex sexual relationships, others do not agree with them; desires that Scotland should be a pluralistic society where all minorities can live together in peace and mutual tolerance; believes that free speech is a fundamental right and that even when there is disagreement with another person’s views, that person has the right to express these views, and considers that no person or organisation should be forced to be involved in or to approve of same-sex marriages.

Supported by: Bill Walker, Dennis Robertson, Gil Paterson, Richard Lyle, Mike MacKenzie

Now, I don’t know what is more surprising in the above, that John Mason believes that people may be forced to approve of anything or that five MSPs (all SNP) felt the need to support this.

There is a valid question to be asked here – should, for example, a Catholic priest be forced by law into marrying two people of the same sex? My answer to that would be no but, nonetheless, there is no absolution from me for the sheer cack-handed and completely unnecessary motion pasted in full above.

Congratulations John Mason, the first of many I am sure to win the award of Better Nation’s Worst Motion of the Week.