Lethal Force

The guidance to police officers on the use of lethal force has been honed over the years and in the light of several publicised incidents. Discretion is given to commanders to respond appropriately in the light of what could be fast-developing situations. It seems to me that this responsibility is in the right place, and that the principle of maintaining a cadre of well-trained firearms officers to be deployed in critical situations is the right one.

So the pressure to arm regular constables as a matter of routine should be resisted. Apart from the difficulty of bringing every ordinary PC up to the required standard, arming them is going to inhibit their relations with the public and also tend to make them a target.

The lesson from Paris is not that the police did not have enough fire power but that better intelligence is needed, along with the sense to act on it.

Capitalism

Ben Chu has a provocative article in the Indy. Beginning by quoting Confucius in support of the necessity to define terms precisely (with which I agree) he suggests that because capitalism is no longer capable of definition we should abandon the term.

Well, I thought I knew what it meant: using money to make more money. However, there had to be a technical definition, did there not? The first surprise was that the first appearance was as late as 1854 according to the Shorter Oxford, although capitaliste was in use in France in the preceding century. Still, the definition was crisp enough: The condition of possessing capital, or using it for production; a system of society based on this; dominance of private capitalists.

Things became a little more complicated on checking with a mid-twentieth-century Britannica. The entry for CAPITALISM (by Joseph Schumpeter) begins:
A society is called capitalist if it trusts its economic progress to the guidance of the private businessman. This may be said to imply, first, private ownership of nonpersonal means of production, such as land, mines, industrial plant and equipment; and, second, production for private account, i.e. production by private initiative for private profit. But, third, the institution of bank credit is so essential to the functioning of the capitalist system that, though not strictly implied in the definition, it should be added to the other two criteria.

Schumpeter, writing in the aftermath of the second world war and the New Deal, which both involved some federal government direction of labour and capital, with rationing and nationalisation in addition on this side of the ocean, saw the then economic system as fettered or at best guided capitalism. He saw the possibility of reversal but did not predict it. That came in with a vengeance a generation after his death under Reagan and Thatcher.

So I am surprised that Ben Chu concludes that:
“Capitalism” doesn’t really exist. There are various modes of market-based economic, social and legal organisation in rich countries, some of which work well in some respects, and some of which don’t.
and that the term:
has outlived its usefulness. It now merely spreads confusion and breeds dogmatism.

It seems to me that the dogmatism has always been there.  Also, governments have always distorted the system, even without moving to outright socialism, when it suited them, especially in times of war. I believe that OED definition is good for a few years yet.

It has not failed

Nor has "capitalism failed" as the Occupy movement would have us believe. What has failed is regulation of markets and of the behaviour of the participants in them. Cartels and private monopolies thrive. After a short period when banks were reined in, we are beginning to revert to the bad days of Clinton-Bush-Blair-Brown.

State socialism has failed, but capitalism and the market society will continue. What elected governments must do is ensure that markets are fair and that capitalism works for all the people, not just the capitalists.

No agency will own up to Workie

You must have seen Workie, the three-metre furry beastie who bestrode the prime-time ITV (among other) screens. You probably know that he cost £8.54m at a time when DWP had frozen benefits and proposed to cut tax credits (which proposal the House of Lords fortunately blocked). It has been difficult to find out much more, beyond the fact that Baroness Altmann was happy to take credit for helping to design the creature.

I have this theory that the Conservative party pays off advertising agencies who have aided successful election campaigns with big government campaigns. Usually agencies are not shy about their multi-million contracts (remember Saatchi in the 1980s?) - denying of course that these are hand-outs. However, I have spent a good hour or more searching the Web for the identity of the agency responsible for Workie, or even who built him. Quite a few marketing consultants are ready to criticise the construct, but of the progenitors, there is no sign.

Horror must not be met with horror

The death toll in Paris has exceeded 120 130 and there are nearly 100 people on the critical list, not to mention those with lesser injuries. The scale of mortality is the worst since the second world war, but in nature the terrorism ranks with that of the red brigades in Germany and Italy. Good sense in these two countries prevented a spiral of violence in the 1970s.

Sal Brinton, in her address as federal president to the Welsh Liberal Democrat conference yesterday, called for a measured, intelligent response to the dreadful terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut. (This was echoed by the leader in the Independent.) She warned that far-right groups were already capitalising on the indication that at least one of the dead terrorists had come in to the EU with refugees on a Syrian passport, possibly fake. We must resist simplistic, repressive, policies. If there is a lesson, I feel it is that we must increase our resources for vetting asylum claimants, in the UK and the continental EU, as well as improving our intelligence.

There is a comment on al-Jazeera about that finger-pointing and Simone Frosini Simon had an appropriate pictorial comment, passed on by the splendid German anti-Nazi website Storch Heinar:

It's a hard road, but we have to trudge it

The Western Mail, owned by the Labour-supporting Trinity Mirror group, gave decent coverage of the Welsh Liberal Democrat conference in Swansea yesterday. It highlighted our leaders' call for a Liberal Democrat fightback in Wales, as well as the reasons why Wales needs the Liberal Democrats - and those go beyond decent staffing levels in our hospitals, an increase in housing and attacking unjustified pay rises for politicians. The journal was right to point out that there is no inevitability about a recovery from our low point, but it would have been fair to acknowledge that this lesson was emphasised in speeches by Kirsty Williams, Tim Farron and federal president Sal Brinton.

On a happier note, here is the presentation which should have been made at Bournemouth of the award for the best UK by-election campaign of 2014/15:

Eluned Parrott AM and Neil Fawcett of ALDC with the winning Wrexham organiser

Blogging may be sporadic

If today were not already dominated by the Welsh Liberal Democrat AGM all day in Swansea, I would not in any case feel like writing in view of the terrorism on the streets of Paris. That over forty innocent people have lost their lives in one of the world's great capitals is - words fail. If "awful" had not lost its meaning over the years that would come close. These fearful attacks have obviously been well planned and there must now be concern about the climate change conference due to take place at the end of this month.

A scab which should not have been picked

http://www.libdemvoice.org/chris-rennard-elected-to-federal-executive-by-lib-dem-peers-48220.html refers.

My father taught me not to pick at scabs. They were nature's way of covering up wounds so that they could heal.

When it was clear that the Liberal Democrat party had exhausted all processes for dealing with Chris Rennard's exploitative behaviour (not forgetting that he had already been effectively and quietly sidelined after the first complaint by a young woman member had been made) and that protocols had been put in place which should prevent a recurrence, I suggested to the last of the Channel 4 Six who was still a member that pursuing the matter publicly would do harm to the party and her reputation without giving her the satisfaction that she desired. She did not take it well, but the public row died down anyway.

One would have thought that the senior people in the Lord's would have had the sense not to open the wound again. The argument that Lord Rennard has "served his sentence and been rehabilitated" is all well and good, but to my mind retaining his party membership was sufficient rehabilitation. The public - nudged by the media, especially the online media - will not understand. As young public relations practitioners are taught, “If the public thinks you have a problem, you have a problem.”. Jane Brophy in Oldham West will not welcome this distraction. If the affair drags on into 2016, it is going to affect our campaigns in the Scottish and Welsh general elections.

There are Lords (and even Ladies) who believe that Chris Rennard was hard done by. They are of a generation which believes that "boys will be boys" excuses everything. They no doubt also hark back to the golden days when Rennard-inspired campaigns won by-election after by-election and may even believe that we lost so badly in the 2015 general election because Rennard was not at the helm. They should recognise that things have moved on, even in the last decade. Not only have sexual politics changed, but so has campaigning. Today and the immediate future belong to the likes of Michael Ashcroft and Mark Pack. Pickles and Rennard are yesterday's men.

Britain's part in the restoration of the Shah

Cathy Fox's blog excerpts corroboration of the leading rôle played by Britain in unseating the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran. In my opinion, the ex-spook Cavendish exaggerates the influence of communists and neglects that of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). However, the very fact that he writes from the perspective of a different interest tends to confirm the evidence that Britain instigated the coup. Now that Iran is back at the international conference table and clearly willing to cooperate in bringing an end to the Daesh insurgency in Syria, surely the time has come for that apology by the UK government.