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Ireland should take a punt on a No vote

May 31

Posted by Jeff in Economy, Europe | 6 Comments

Ireland takes to the polls today to state its opinion on the new EU Fiscal Pact. The country may be in dire straits, but it can still hold its head up high and proudly play its part in Europe, and even lead Europe by voting No in this referendum.

Despite only 12 of the 17 Eurozone countries required to back this Treaty change for it to pass, a healthy challenge to the myopic solutions in place would be beneficial to the debate at this stage. It is likely, however, that the Irish will forego a more Keynesian suggestion and grudgingly continue to accept the austerity medicine that it has been administered by voting Yes.

This would be unfortunate. A lefty solution to the financial storm wreaking its way through Europe has bobbed to the surface recently with Tsipras’ anti-bailout party set to increase its vote share at the Greek elections on June 17th, Francois Hollande’s growth-based Socialist arguments pipping Sarkozy to the French presidency earlier this month and Christine Lagarde urging George Osborne to consider a Plan B to boost British, and European, growth prospects. Angela Merkel is a lady that may yet be for turning if more pressure could be placed on the Chancellor to make Germany take up more of the Euro strain given its trade surpluses and strong credit rating, relieving the burden on the struggling countries in the Eurozone. Ireland is currently best placed to keep this pressure up with its referendum today.

The banks and businesses that have a self-centred vested interest in Greece and Spain and Ireland enduring a more impoverished short to medium term future are against having their loans commuted or written off. However, if you back the wrong horse in any other gambling market you don’t get your money back; so these banks that backed the wrong countries should surely be made to bear the brunt of their mistakes. The Irish are being tricked into a sense of guilt and responsibility in accepting their fate by ‘the markets’ directing them down a one-way street.

How did we get to the position where companies are dictating to countries what should happen? Should we be electing representatives into Greece, Ireland and the UK or JP Morgan, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs? Why shouldn’t countries adopt the Icelandic model of telling banks to ‘get stuffed’ when they ask for their money back?

The whole point of the European Union was to raise standards for all and progress peacefully together as a Continent. Stronger together and weaker apart etc. I don’t see how that works when member states have their noses pressed to the dirt while others continue to enjoy relative luxury. Germany had its house in order for the past two decades, Scandinavian economies are motoring on very nicely and even Britain has built up a nice buffer zone keeping disaster at bay. European solutions for European problems is surely the way forward if we can all just pull together.

This isn’t just a referendum between an onwards march to a European superstate or countries going back to punts, drachma and pesetas. The Irish are also voting Yes for continued slavish obedience to the markets or voting No for a Socialist solution to a Capitalist mess.

It seems an easy decision from where I am sitting.

Why taking down GM field trials is pro-science

May 26

Posted by James in Science | 5 Comments

There’s been a lot of fuss this week about Jenny Jones’ support for Take The Flour Back, a revival of mid-1990s anti-GM activism. On one side, so the story goes, you have plucky scientists just doing research, and on the other side you’ve got anti-science vandals and woo-merchants.

The truth is rather different, but to be fair to the skeptic firing squad, some of the Take The Flour Back logic was poor. They’re  worried that one of the genes inserted at Rothamsted is ‘most similar to a cow’. Moo moo moooo moo. At best this is a ill-expressed concern with a marginal aspect of the trial. At worst it’s like Chris Morris’s Brass Eye sketch in which some hapless berk is given a crab and persuaded to say that paedophiles have more in common with the crab, genetically, than they do with people.

Even if it had been a gene sequence from an actual cow that’d hardly be the point, although eating flour from a crop of that sort be unacceptable to some vegetarians, Hindus and so on.

But on the question of whether this trial should go ahead, and whether it’s appropriate to intervene to stop it, the protesters are still right and the so-called skeptics are still wrong.

I should declare an interest, or at least some history – I was convicted in Edinburgh in 1999 for an anti-GM protest, and acquitted on appeal in 2003. You regularly hear that one side of this fight makes emotional arguments and the other relies on science, and that’s true. We brought scientific expertise into court to talk about the existing evidence of gene flow, instability of the genome from retroviral DNA insertion, and issues with specific genes, including those used as antibiotic resistance markers, or to express the BT toxin, or to confer tolerance to herbicides made by the same companies.

At that time, we also raised concerns about corporate control over the food chain, and the consequences of that were already being seen in America, India and Brazil. The arguments against us mostly implied we sought to take food from the mouths of starving children in the South, and described us as Luddites, people wanting to take us back to the dark ages and deny the public a shiny future of bountiful crops. Despite this 180˚ distortion, their PR megaphones had some success reversing the roles and pitching themselves as the rationalists taking on the emotional and ill-informed opposition.

They also successfully narrowed down what science should be to appeal to a group who should have been amongst our chief allies – actual scientists, even including some who’d describe themselves as environmentalists. This appeal spread even to some parts of the left who ought to have been anxious about corporate control of the food chain even if biodiversity seemed a frivolous concern for them. They didn’t want to look like Luddites, especially if somehow these magical new products could end hunger.

Specific experiments aren’t necessarily intrinsically good science, for all sorts of possible reasons. Is the methodology robust? Has a subset of the results been cherry-picked to suit funders? Can the results be statistically significant? Have extraneous factors been minimised? Should it have been done double-blind? Fundamentally, for the GM field trial question, is it ethical? Ethics isn’t something alien to science, some hippie obsession. It’s embedded in good science. Academic research has to pass the universities’ ethics committees, and it’s easy enough to think of research that would fail without having to Godwin the debate.

Research could be unethical if it exploits subjects, but also if it has potentially irreversible consequences. There were some, for instance, at the Trinity experiments who admitted a fear that nuclear fission would start an unstoppable chain reaction and destroy the world. Fortunately they were wrong. It wouldn’t be acceptable to test oil spill response technologies by replicating the Exxon Valdez.

And GM field trials tell you only one thing more than GM trials in secure labs – how those crops interact with their environment. Lots of those interactions are already demonstrated, and proving them again is hardly worthwhile. For pollinating crops, we know that genes will spread. But wheat is largely self-pollinating, the defenders of the Rothamsted experiment tell us, and that should be good enough. Don’t bother your pretty little heads about that word “largely”. But the science is against them – including this wheat-specific research. We know that traits like herbicide tolerance spread widely, to other conventional crops, to organic crops and to weedy relatives.

And it’s not just wind or insect pollination that leads to gene flow. Back in 1999 we argued about horizontal gene transfer through soil bacteria, too, and that’s happening as well: “the successful transfer of transgene-borne antibiotic resistance genes to bacteria might be unavoidable according to a plethora of scientific data“. More alarmingly still, from the same paper, “several commercial [GMOs] contain antibiotic resistance genes that are still under the control of bacterial promoters as remnants of the bacterial vectors used to construct the [GMOs].”

The most important question for the defenders of field trials is this – what happens if problematic gene flow takes place from your trial, and how would you seek to rectify it? There is as yet no recall button, especially when (as with herbicide tolerance or the BT gene) an inserted sequence has adaptive qualities, and until there is it’s simply unforgivable to plant GM crops in the wild, especially fertile ones.

The other confusion here is between science and the technological implementation of it.

I am resolutely pro-science, although I have no post-school scientific qualifications. I admire Ben Goldacre’s regular destruction of myths, dodgy research, and woo groupthink. To take the alternative medicine debate, I don’t believe in homeopathy or acupuncture or iridology. Or anything that’s not been properly scientifically tested and found effective. I do, however, believe that there can be benefits from going to see a doctor who takes an interest in your lifestyle, not just your symptoms. Combined with a placebo, and an understanding of reversion to the mean, I see why some alternative treatments feel effective. But for me that’s a case for proper doctors to be trained and paid sufficiently to adopt some of the wider human concern in their patients that the quacks rely upon, rather than dishing out water and mint breath fresheners or worse.

But, going back to the distinction between science and technology, and returning to the atom, Rutherford’s research was elegant and admirable pure science, while Oppenheimer’s role on the Manhattan Project was at best an ethically dubious development drawing on that research. We gained a lot from Rutherford’s work, but Oppenheimer’s legacy has hung over the world for more than half a century. I have no problem with the discovery of PCBs in the lab, but if I could go back in time and monkeywrench efforts to put them into the environment I would.

I’m not even anti-GM. We were promised secure vats of GM bacteria churning out medicines or other resources. Go for it. Let’s see it. Start with treatments for the diseases of the South which have proved so uneconomic for the drug companies. I’ll be right there, and I’ll do you your glowing press release for nothing.

But field trials of GM crops are bad science. It’s time for the skeptics to look again at that actual science, rather than just lauding field trials as obviously valuable research. In fact, if they want to support good science rather than this irretrievable externalisation of risk onto the environment and the food chain, they should get their hands dirty with us.

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Yes Scotland!

May 25

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 34 Comments

Tell you what, nothing fires you up to vote Yes to independence than an actor reading out a transcript from Shcotland’s favourite tax exile.

Ok, that’s it, cynicism out of the way. And anyway, the nation’s media have the cynicism cup running over what with their gritted teeth reporting of today’s Yes Scotland! event, from what I could glean on Twitter today at least. Suggesting a PR-disaster because Prometheus happens to be out with a strapline of ‘the beginning of the end’ or some such had to be one of the lamest takes on today’s proceedings.

The catcalls that this was Scotland’s z-list of celebrities was in equal parts childish and mistaken. Brian Cox, Liz Lochhead, Denis Canavan, Tommy Brennan and Alan Cumming et al all taking to the Cineworld stage and explaining their reasons for declaring their Yes votes is a significant contribution to the independence debate. Sure, today was glitzy and ultimately a bit hollow but as the counter ticks over with real people signing up to this declaration to vote Yes in Autumn 2014, there will at least be a sense of a momentum building towards an end result of Salmond’s choosing. That said, I don’t really follow the First Minister’s logic that one million declared Yes votes will deliver a Yes result at the referendum itself.

I am also concerned that this is very much preaching to the converted. Will any floating voters be turned by today’s events? Probably not, there’s plenty for proponents of independence to be gloomy about given the Yes camp seem stuck on 33% support for independence, according to a poll out today (with a biased question according to James Kelly).

However, today wasn’t about winning over the electorate, there’s plenty of time for that and the undecideds will probably wait till the last few weeks before breaking one way or the other. Today is about making some noise and building a base for the SNP + friends to push on from, creating a team that will knock the doors and make the calls that will outpower the opposition. I’m not at all convinced that an equivalent Yes Britain (or No Scotland?) coalition would yield the same zeal and volunteers as today will, though surely something will have to be cobbled together by Darling and Goldie etc at some point down the line to show a united unionist front. Perhaps the Cameo is a more suitable location for an event with some otherwise incompatible walk on parts? Glibness aside, today isn’t a game changer but it shows what one side is able to do whereas the other side can’t. Yet, at least.

As it is, the SNP, the Greens, the Socialists and quite a few Old Labour personalities make for an interesting alliance at this stage of the referendum campaign. Out-labouring Labour may well remain the SNP’s best chances of success in two years’ time, given the political Tory cross-dressing that Ed Miliband will have to do in order to win the 2015 Westminster election, arguably his highest priority, even over keeping Britain together.

Getting a left wing alliance behind a single declaration is a simple straightforward move that may builder a broader alliance. So what is this declaration:

“I believe that it is fundamentally better for us all if decisions about Scotland’s future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland, that is, by the people of Scotland.

Being independent means Scotland’s future will be in Scotland’s hands.

There is no doubt that Scotland has great potential. We are blessed with talent, resources and creativity. We have the opportunity to make our nation a better place to live, for this and future generations. We can build a greener, fairer and more prosperous society that is stronger and more successful than it is today.

I want a Scotland that speaks with her own voice and makes her own unique contribution to the world – a Scotland that stands alongside the other nations on these isles, as an independent nation.

It’s a bit happy-clappy to be fair. There’s nothing in the above that will lance the potent arguments about the Greek Euro issues directly undermining the SNP’s stance of a currency union with no political union, for example. Furthermore, Scotland is already greener and fairer under devolution and there can be no assurances that we’ll be more prosperous and more successful when independent, given that is simply a leap of faith.

The devil is in the detail but the saving grace is the last line. Seeing Scotland standing alongside other nations on the world stage will, I believe, bring untold benefits to Scotland’s ambitions, its confidence and its collective self esteem, which is why I had no hesitation in signing up to the pledge earlier today.

Hiring and Firing

May 24

Posted by Kirsty in Economy, Westminster | 5 Comments

To be denounced as “a socialist” by a venture capitalist and Tory donor certainly counts as a compliment by my reckoning.

Adrian Beecroft might not have noticed when he meant to insult Vince Cable, but given the recent electoral success of Francois Hollande in France, Elio du Rupo in Belgium and Alexis Tsipras in Greece it doesn’t seem the political trend as European economies continue to crumble is for voters to shelter in the austere arms of the right.

But it is a path the Westminster government seems intent to remain on. Described as the UK government’s “most important independent economic policy review so far” in The Telegraph, the Beecroft Report is a continuation of the coalition’s Red Tape Challenge – getting rid of all the regulations impeding the economy – moving this time to focus on employment law.

The coalition has already diminished workers’ rights, by increasing the qualifying period to two years before a worker is able to claim unfair dismissal. But in his 16 page report, Beecroft proposes a decidedly Dickensian way for us all to be in it together.

Unfair dismissal rights removed from employees and replaced by the employer’s right to no-fault dismissal, including complete immunity from unfair dismissal claims for small employers. Reducing the statutory redundancy consultation period from 90 to 30 days. Reducing rights for TUPE and collective redundancies. Introducing fees for tribunals and letting employers ignore their statutory liability in third party harassment cases. Excluding small businesses from the pension auto-enrolment. Not compelling employers that lose an equal pay case at tribunal to conduct an Equal Pay Audit. Allowing companies to choose to opt-out of flexible parental leave, right to request flexible working, and licensing for employing children.

As barrister David Renton dryly notes, “Imagine: if, by waving a magic wand, the Coalition could undo every employment law reform of the past 40 years.”

Beecroft’s assault is based on the premise that removing employment rights increases employment – an assumption even the Financial Times states is “unproven”.

But this is nothing new. A previous liberal-conservative coalition has tried this before.

In 2006, Australian PM John Howard enacted the Workplace Relations Amendment Act 2005. This legislation massively revised Australia’s industrial relations legislation, in an attempt to improve employment and economic performance through dispensing with unfair dismissal laws, reducing rights to strike through requiring workers to bargain for previously guaranteed conditions without collective representation, and significantly restricting trade union activity.

Studies into the impact of WorkChoices, the Orwellian name for these interventions, showed a climate was created “where some employers licensed to act with unilateral disdain”, with cuts in conditions without improvements in pay or conditions. More than a million Australians suffered a real pay cut due to changes in setting the minimum wage, hundreds of thousands lost annual leave, overtime and public holidays, and more than 3.5 million Australians lost protection from unfair dismissal.

But was it worth it? In the phraseology of the coalition, was it “a price worth paying”?

According to Dr Sarah Wright, decentralising wages had no impact on increasing labour productivity. Getting rid of unfair dismissal protection did not encourage employers to take on more staff, with employment growth decreasing from 3.9% in 1994 (when the protection was introduced) to 2.6% after the protection was abolished. Wages share declined from 56.2% of national income when Howard came to power in 1997 to 53.3% by 2008.

As Wright states: “The Government at the time argued that WorkChoices would create more jobs, lift wages and result in a stronger economy; WorkChoices had the opposite effect”.

Back in Britain, apparently the intervention of the Liberal Democrats will ensure Beecroft’s proposals are consigned to the filing cabinet where they’re storing all the rest of Steve Hilton’s nutty ideas.

But much like ignoring the elections of socialists elsewhere on the continent, the Tories might want to note, given WorkChoices was one of the major issues in the 2007 federal election campaign, just what happened to Howard’s government (and his parliamentary seat).

Workers’ rights should be universal. I suspect voters’ reactions to having them removed might be likewise.

There’s no aye in Team GB

May 23

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 25 Comments

Looking forward to the Olympics? The first time that we’ve hosted it since 1948 and all those tourists are coming here, to our country, to party with us.

How about the Eurovision? Britain’s finest performer singing for us on our combined behalves, showcasing the talent that we hold on these shores and stirring latent patriotic passions that lie deep within.

Or perhaps the Diamond Jubilee? How wonderful that our monarch has ruled over us for so long, a triumph that befits the festooning of local communities’ lampposts with Union Jacks and tea towels, all part of the street parties that I am sure you, yes you, are assiduously planning for next month.

Or maybe you don’t feel a part of any of it.

The Sunday Mail recently had a great story from Glasgow’s North East, an area scarred by deep unemployment. Two undercover journalists took only two days to find (unskilled) paid work in an area that has the highest levels of unemployment in the UK. Separate, but not unrelated to this, Arnold Clark yesterday lamented that 80% of young Scots are unemployable. Jeremy Clarkson likes to joke about lazy, feckless Mexicans, so maybe he should have looked only to the North for his tired gags? Well, I suspect the reasons for such apparent detachment are more complicated than either the Sunday Mail or Jeremy would have it.

We work for many reasons; mostly to pay the bills and improve the quality of our lives, but we also work as part of a national heave, as part of a team to better our society and provide our Government with the funds with which to create the country we wish to live in. Hitler’s Germany had zero unemployment in the run up to World War 2. An extreme example I grant thee, but having something for your country to revolve around gets people out and working.

So, what will the Scottish national heave result in under this coalition Government, after our hard-earned tax receipts are passed over to the Treasury? A reorganisation and part-privatisation of the NHS, another generation of nuclear weapons with the upgrade of Trident, a defence budget that balloons beyond other European nations per capita, a misguided High Speed rail link from London to Birmingham, a £24bn Olympic Games that will see a few football games up in Scotland or a new wave of nuclear power stations scatter over the mainland.

It’s enough to make one take their tie off on a Wednesday morning, sack off work and snuggle into the warm embrace of Jeremy Kyle and Cash in the Attic.

The analogy with the Eurovision Song Contest is nigh on perfect. If, heck, The Proclaimers were taking to the stage on Saturday under a Saltire banner, Scotland would be right behind them willing them onto success. However, this weekend’s British performer will suffer the same fate as Blue, Josh Dubovie, Scooch, Daz Sampson et al; utter indifference north of Gretna. There’s no pride in the badge, no playing for the team and the gap breeds an atrophy that has seeped into Scottish life for countless years.

Politically it is the same story. 16.7% of Scots are represented by a UK Government that they voted for (I’m going to ignore for this post the notion that Scottish Lib Dem voters got the Government that they wanted). For the Scottish Government the equivalent figure is 45%. Much healthier, if still not PR-proof given the parliamentary majority in place at Holyrood. What kind of nation accepts being so poorly represented and being so irrelevant for, at least, every other election?

Scotland is facing the prospect of a lost decade under Tory rule, where the direction that the vast majority of us want to move in is stymied and undermined by an opposite direction of travel by the British Government. Sure, we can wait for a Labour Government to be voted in which will align more closely with a Scottish view of the world, but will such a Government scrap the nuclear power stations that are due to be created, will they cancel Trident, will they sort out the money-sapping privatised trains, will they rebalance income taxes? Not while they have to win over the kingmakers of Middle England at the next election they won’t, and the election after that, and the election after that…

Stronger together, weaker apart the Unionists of various party colours call. Where does that leave us if we’re already apart?

After all, let’s be honest, David Cameron, George Osborne and other future British Prime Ministers represent us just as much as Engelbert Humperdinck will this Saturday.