Peter’s Blog

Captain Kidd, human rights victim - International Herald Tribune

While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights. British warships patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia were advised that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain and that those who were returned to Somalia faced beheading for murder or a hand chopped off for theft under Islamic law.

BBC NEWS | Business | UK in Liechtenstein tax data deal

The UK’s tax authority has confirmed that it has paid an informant for data regarding British citizens who have accounts in tax haven Liechtenstein.

First Germany, now the UK. So much for Liechtenstein’s claims about client confidentiality. Laws are nothing when you have much larger, richer countries willing to pay leakers millions of dollars for secret client lists.

Charlemagne | Ask a silly question | Economist.com

The commissioner charged with “communicating Europe to citizens”, Margot Wallstrom, has unveiled proposals for opinion polling to be used “strategically”, so the wrinkles of pan-European opinion are not just taken into account when selling finished laws and directives to the public, but during the cut and thrust of policy making. On paper, the commission’s aim is straightforward: to respond to citizens’ concerns about big, trans-national phenomena such as climate change, migration or globalisation, and convince them that action at the European level is the answer. Tantalisingly for Eurocrats, Eurobarometer polls tell them that voters like European-wide action on all sorts of issues (fully 81% say they want joint European action against terrorism). Yet national governments can point to other Eurobarometer polls showing that among the very same citizens, support for the EU is not that high. Across the club, support for EU membership has hovered stubbornly around the 50% mark for years (the most recent poll showed 58% support, a 13-year high).

To some officials, supportive opinion polls offer a form of quasi-democratic mandate. One Brussels official admits that his commissioner “absolutely” uses poll data to browbeat reluctant governments, in private and in public. With the new Lisbon treaty about to create the first full-time president of the EU council (the bit of the machine that represents national governments), the same Brussels official says the commission must become more political and “open” to survive, “especially if we get some fantastic Mr Blair-type as president of the council.”

There are several problems with relying upon polling and other (hopefully) representative forms of gathering citizens’ opinions to guide public policy. First, if you truly wanted going to incorporate popular will into a current decision, you should have a general election or referendum. Second, it implies a failure of representative democracy, with the people’s elective representatives either lacking the knowledge or sense of national opinions or without enough legitimacy to create the public policy they were elected to make. Part of this may be attributed how politicians are elected. When elections are contested within a narrower and narrower range of policy prescriptions and related to this a desire to highlight just seemingly dramatic policy differences with one’s opponents, it becomes more and more likely that victorious politicians will encounter political issues that they have not discussed on the campaign trail and thus have little established popular support for their solutions.

Giving the desire to be everything to everyone both during and after elections (and under the ‘permanent campaign’, there is apparently no distinction anyway), it is not surprising that recent politicians have been the most aggressive in their polling. The Blair government in the UK perhaps institutionalized it the most with the e-petitions website.

One criticism of polling that is somewhat easier to dismiss is that it inordinately favors special interests passionate enough to take them time to stand and be counted. But this is also true in every country where voting is optional (ie everywhere but Belgium and Australia), for in both cases the opinions of the apathetic will not be taken into consideration. That being said, there is a significant difference between hearing from 1000 people in a survey and from the 122 million who voted in the 2004 US presidential election.

While polling and may seem democratic, direct democracy it is not. Instead it is really nothing more than what the Chinese are calling consultative democracy – nicer than simple authoritarianism, for sure, but smacking of superficial openness rather than true acceptance of popular will.

The UK Defence Minister is taking a leave of absence to try to qualify for Le Mans. Sure, because it’s not like the British military is in the midst of major overseas deployments are anything.

A British politicians thinks the unemployed should get longer sentences for their crimes, as they have more free time. Am I the only one reminded of debtors’ prisons?

That’s right, Asian Dub Foundation has an opera about Qaddifi coming out next month. And to think I’ll be in California.

The Observer looks at the News of the World’s editor in light of the bugging accusations, and what’s really amazing is that tabloids bugging people’s phones is so widespread and accepted.

So says EasyJet in response to MPs clamoring for an airplane tax. But really, isn’t air travel, budget or otherwise, a luxury, not a necessity? Sure an air tax would make up a larger proprotion of a budget ticket than a luxury one, but honestly, it hardly seems like this is a case to worry that the poor might be getting gouged.

But could you imagine US politicians considering additional taxes in order to cut carbon dioxide emissions? Quelle horreur! What obviousy should be done is that jet fuel should be taxed, and it would have to be taxed worldwide to roughly equivalent rates to avoid airlines just flying their jets around for the lowest tax rates (obviously they would only have the incentive anyways to make minor detours for cheaper fuel). Currently the US has a 4.3¢ per gallon tax, while rates are similarly low, or even non-existent, in European countries. To give you an idea of how low the taxes are, according to the South Dakota DOT, “the per gallon Federal Motor Fuel Excise Tax is 18.4 cents on gasoline, 13.6 cents on LPG, 24.4 cents on diesel fuel, 18.4 cents on gasohol, 19.4 cents on aviation gas, and 4.4 cents on jet fuel.” In Wisconsin the state jet fuel tax is 6¢, while gasoline is taxed 28.5¢. Some small planes use normal automobile gasoline but even dealers of this fuel, for planes, get the lower rate, as long as they purchase at least 100 gallons.

The Economist has a good overview of the West Lothian question.

The European Commission has dropped its efforts to force UK customs to allow travellers to bring in more goods from other EU countries duty free. Fair enough, one might say, as the UK government would lose a significant source of tax revenue by those going to France for cheaper goods.

Except the whole point of the Single Market is to allow cross-border trade. Good job Britain, way to really stand up for your free trading principles in the EU.