Discourse.net

We Predicted This Would Happen: Man Jailed in UK for Failing to Disclose Passphrase

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files.

In the UK under the odious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), if you are served with an order to disclose a passphrase to an encrypted file and you don't, you're guilty.

We saw this coming ten years ago,

Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said ministers still had the power to reintroduce such “objectionable proposals” later as regulations. He said two new offences in the bill raised serious civil liberties concerns:

“The bill will give police the power to demand decryption keys from anyone they suspect of possessing them, and failure to hand keys over can lead to a two-year jail sentence.

“Defendants will be presumed guilty of withholding a key unless they can prove otherwise, a likely contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights, and decryption notices will be secret, so it will be impossible to complain effectively if they are used in an oppressive way.”

A “tipping-off” offence could prevent innocent associates from complaining publicly, with a penalty of five-years imprisonment, he added.

The National Council for Civil Liberties took a similar line. Liberty's Director, John Wadham, said :

“These powers are too sweeping, and in some respects problematic. It's difficult to discern quite how an individual could prove that they didn't have a key: you can't prove a negative. This reversal of the burden of proof may well infringe the right to a fair trial. The indefinite gagging order on any individual whose e-mail has been intercepted is extraordinary.”

…

A Home Office spokeswoman denied the bill would mean defendants being presumed guilty. “The bill doesn't reverse the onus of proof, the authorities still have to prove that an offence has been committed for it to get off the ground,” she said.

What Sir Humphrey didn't tell the reporter, of course, is that the relevant “offence” is not disclosing the passphrase, not some underlying crime — of which in this case there is no evidence, although the defendant certainly has issues. But there's evidence that he didn't disclose his passphrase, and that is all it takes to jail him for nine months.

No Gavels in English Courts? But I Saw it on the BBC

According to Marcel Berlins, English judges have never had gavels, despite what you routinely see on the BBC.

He is not amused.

(via The Magistrate's Blog)

Meanwhile, in the British News

The UK papers are all, ahem, a-Twitter, about this story: Scientist announces that she is call girl and blogger Belle de Jour.

It seems that one of the leading 'sex bloggers' in the UK took up the oldest profession in order to pay for her 'education habit'—her Ph.D.

Magnanti said she was working on a doctoral study for the department of forensic pathology of Sheffield University in 2003 when she began her secret life. “I was getting ready to submit my thesis. I saved up a bit of money. I thought, I'll just move to London, because that's where the jobs are, and I'll see what happens.

“I couldn't find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn't have my PhD yet. I didn't have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would.”

Unable to pay her rent, Magnanti's mind turned to other things. She told the Sunday Times she wanted to start doing something straightaway, “that doesn't require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that's cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in” Her solution was prostitution.

Full Sunday Times story here.

You have to wonder about a world in which a person decides that the optimal way to finance a Ph.D. in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science is hooking, however (apparently) happy. Even at £300 an hour.

(No idea if the fact that she went to high school in Florida is relevant.)

On her blog she says, yes, I paid my taxes. It seems that is what people wanted to know.

Fowl Humour

Maybe due to my sick sense of humor, but I think this is one of the funniest political videos I've seen in a long time—Open Up: Stately Home.

The back story, for those who don't follow British politics, has to do with MPs claiming all sorts of things on their housing allowances — including, famously, a Tory MP claiming for a duck house. More here and here and here

(via Boing Boing)

Be Grateful for the First Amendment (and the Internet)

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

Fortunately, sanity (and the internet) prevailed. Gag on Guardian reporting MP's Trafigura question lifted,

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

It's called the Streisand effect now,

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted.

Having one major country with the First Amendment and lots of servers means that most other countries cannot at present easily censor like they used. (See my 1997 article The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage). But there are exceptions: countries with almost no Internet access, and countries that have managed to control both the basic routing information and limit the number of connections to the outside world. That would be China, so far.

The Joys of International Cell Phone Roaming

When I went shopping for a cell phone about a year ago, I knew I wanted four things: I wanted great call quality and a speakerphone; I wanted a clamshell style phone; I wanted a GSM world phone so I could take it anywhere, and swap out the SIM card when needed; I wanted a national family plan that didn't cost too much since even the kids don't chew up the minutes, but we do use them when we are away from home. We were more or less stuck with AT&T as a call provider, as they have the strongest signal indoors in our house; there was only one other company that had a strong signal too, but they were much more expensive.

I ended up with a RAZR Z9. It seemed to fit my needs, being a quad-band clamshell with great sound. It had some other disadvantages, like clunky software and a reputation for a little lack of ruggedness, but I decided I could live with those. AT&T unlocked it for me without any argument.

Indeed, everything has gone fine with this phone until I got off the plane in Manchester. Unlike my old, reliable but sometimes comical, NEC 525, it wouldn't find a signal.

On the old phone I had to reset the networks to Europe; there's no control for that on the Z9, and the manual suggests it should switch automatically.

So I go to the AT&T help pages. Nothing seems of much use. I check out the plan description and see that international roaming isn't selected — aha! Now, why anyone would want a quad-band phone that wasn't set up to work abroad, I can't begin to imagine, but then again, AT&T has gotten into legal trouble for turning int'l roaming on without warning people and then sticking them with their insanely high rates. So I'll just turn it on then. Wait, what's this? There's been a problem with my request, and they can't fulfill it. And I should click the image below for live person assistance? But there is no image below…. Ah. In the very fine print well below it says that if there is no image, I should just call them… but the PHONE ISN“T WORKING.

So I email for help. And I get a reply within minutes:

Thank you for contacting AT&T.

We appreciate your business and know that your time is valuable. An AT&T Online Specialist has been assigned to your case and will respond to your concern within 2 business days; however, our response may be sooner. We will do our best to exceed your expectations.

Now at this point, I'm thinking that isn't going to be hard, since my expectations are pretty low. Good thing I've got a UK SIM card sitting somewhere in my luggage. I only want the US SIM connection to pick up messages anyway.

Between the time when I started this note, and getting to this point in the account, I got a second note from AT&T, this time from a real person. The person tells me I don't have international roaming set up on my account. So I reply asking to have it activated. And they say it's fixed, turn it off, wait a minute, turn it on.

So I do. But it still doesn't work.

And then 10 minutes later, it does.

I'll Be Good

I'm leaving for the UK today, but I won't be going to any parties — especially not any all-night parties.

I'm aware that US cops can use excessive force in busting up a party — a political fund-raiser at that! — but the difference is that by all accounts the US cops were acting illegally and used excessive force. It appears that the UK cops were just a little enthusiastic about enforcing a pretty draconian law.

Even so, it's instructive to recall that although the civil liberties situation in this country is in many (but not all!) respects at an ebb, things are in fact worse in several other liberal democracies. I'd take French health care, but not French cops or treatment of minorities. I'd take British tolerance for middle-class dissent and eccentricity, but not the intolerance for young people enforced by ASBOS. According to the worn notices tied to lampposts in the part of Manchester I visit there was, and maybe still is, an ASBOS order in effect which pretty much makes it an offense for groups to congregate on the street in the evening. In practice, I imagine that it's a license to arrest young people, at the cops' whims.

Studies in Comparative Stress Reduction

Blenderlaw catches something at fighting stress in the uk and in miami:

The BBC and the Miami Herald both addressed the issue of how to fight stress this week. The proposed solutions aren’t exactly the same. Top of the BBC’s list are lightboxes - which we don’t need in Miami!

The BBC’s list:

• lightboxes,
• get out in the garden,
• get yourself out of breath,
• cook a meal from scratch,
• stroke a cat,
• pat yourself on the back,
• take up a lifetime hobby,
• do something for someone else…for free,
• seek intimacy and
• good things take time.

The Miami Herald:

• exercise,
• positive thinking,
• hypnosis,
• massage,
• tai chi,
• yoga,
• laughter,
• music,
• meditation,
• biofeedback,
• make a friend,
• acupuncture and
• get going.

Blenderlaw again:

There are some similarities here: both lists suggest exercise and positive thinking, for example. But whereas the Miami list is largely focused on what the stressed out person can do for herself, the BBC’s list encourages more looking outwards. Even stroking a cat is presented as being a good thing partly because it involves giving: “in a way we reward ourselves by being nice”. Nowhere does the Miami list suggest that being nice to others or volunteering can help you fight stress.

She's right. But if I were making the Miami stressbusters list, suggestion #1 would be, “Don't drive.”

This England (War On Terror ed.)

Sierra Charlie, who blogs as a bobby on the beat, tells a tale of Terror!. Worth the click.

Spotted via schneier.

Something About International Conferences Brings Out the Worst in Police

There must be something about a boatload of visiting foreign dignitaries that brings out the worst in police. Miami's cops have had to pay out substantial damages for their civil rights violations when we had trade talks here.

And now the British police in London appear to have misbehaved rather badly in their attempt to clear out a peaceful static protest during the G20 summit. See Indymedia London | Videos | Show | film of police attack on G20 climate camp.

Spotted via The Magistrate's Blog, What Should We Make Of This?.

Why the Queen Can Enjoy Her New iPod

EFF's Fred von Lohmann has a very nice analysis of the copyright law quagmire caused by President Obama's gift of an iPod with 40 show tunes to the Queen of England.

I am not a copyright scholar, but I think Fred may have left out one aspect of the issue which I think means that the Queen can enjoy her iPod in peace: sovereign immunity.

In the US “sovereign immunity” is something that keeps you and me from suing the government for certain classes of misdeeds. But, as I understand it, in the UK sovereign immunity means…sovereign immunity. The Queen IS the THE sovereign. She has immunity. It's really pretty much that simple.

The government in the UK doesn't have “sovereign” immunity because it's not sovereign. Sovereigns have two legs. The UK government just has “government” immunity. In practice that works like our sovereign immunity, so no one minds. But the distinction matters when you are thinking about the Queen's legal exposure in what are “her own courts.” And although I don't know UK copyright law, I'm guessing she didn't waive anything….

(As Fred noted when I sent him an earlier draft of the above, Obama's import to the UK is likely protected by diplomatic immunity. So the issues, whatever they are, are US law issues.)

DataBase State (UK)

A quarter of the UK's largest public-sector database projects, including the ID cards register, are fundamentally flawed and violate European data protection laws, according to DataBase State, a report published today. The report also fingers the UK's national DNA database and the Contactpoint index of all children in England as particularly flawed.

Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, the report identifies 46 UK government databases and systems, more than half of which it says fail tests of privacy or effectiveness, and thus could be illegal under European privacy law.

Cambridge University -- the Unauthorised History

Ross Anderson, Cambridge University - the Unauthorised History

Cambridge University — the Unauthorised History

Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th anniversary in 2009. The official history tells the tale of the buildings; but what about the ideas?

Down through the years, Oxford has produced many powerful men and Cambridge many iconoclasts – scientists, philosophers and revolutionaries. The polarisation is by no means total: Oxford's alumni include the reformer John Wyclif and the father of economics Adam Smith, while ours include the Prime Minister Charles Grey, who abolished slavery and passed the Great Reform Bill. But we've long produced more of the rebels; way back in the Civil War, for example, we were parliamentarian while Oxford was royalist. Why should this be?

I can't find anyone else trying to tell the tale, so I'll try. This web page explains how disruption has been in our DNA from the very beginning.

I spent two very happy years at Cambridge. But it seemed more middle and upper class than iconoclast. Still, who can resist an account that proclaims,

Just as fire regenerates the forest, so a great university regenerates human culture – our view of the world and our understanding of it. We incinerate the rubbish. And Cambridge has long been the hottest flamethrower; we're the most creatively destructive institution in all of human history.

How to Complain in British

The British press are suggesting that this missive to Virgin Airlines might be is The best complaint letter ever.

I think the US version, were there one, would be a little less…polite…

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to be Mayor of London

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who once described himself, quite flatteringly, as a buffoon, appears to have been elected Mayor of London, displacing the competent but unpleasant Ken Livingsone.

I never even thought he was that funny on the radio.

I predict that Londoners will regret this, although not as much as we regret Bush — but only because the Mayor of London doesn't have as much power as even the Mayor of New York.

Judicial Humour

From The Magistrate's Blog:

It is reported that after the second time that a mobile phone had rung in the public gallery the Judge put down his pen, and glared across at the flustered-looking owner of the phone. “If that happens again” said His Honour, “you may discover why they are known as cell phones”.

UK ISPs Join the Spy Brigade

UK ISPs to Spy on Google Users (and Others):

Greetings. Given the CCTV surveillance fetish in the UK these days, it seems somehow sickly appropriate that British ISPs are in the forefront when it comes to spying on the content of their subscribers' Web browsing — and it appears that Google users are in the bull's-eye.

Most of the related media attention so far has revolved around the manner in which the three largest UK ISPs have gone to bed with “Phorm” — toward the goal of monetizing Web browsing habits of subscribers and providing targeted ads ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/ ).

Of course, there's a lot “soothing” promotional blather on the BT site claiming that the data collected regarding the sites that you visit is quickly deleted or anonymized. And while officially the ISPs claim that they haven't made a decision about opt-out vs. opt-in, the current British Telecom limited deployment — they call the “service” “Webwise” ( http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/index.html ) and promote it as mainly an anti-phishing system — appears to be opt-out (requiring either maintaining a special cookie in your browser or blocking all cookies from a particular site).

Third-party tracking of the Web sites that you visit is bad enough, but Webwise (and presumably the other incarnations of the Phorm system) go one big step farther — they actually spy on your Web content and extract for their own use the search terms that you enter into search engines:

“We [Webwise] use the website address, keywords and search terms from the page viewed to match a category or area of interest (e.g., travel or finance).”

Given that the vast majority of searches these days are conducted with Google, it's obvious that this ISP-based system will be attempting to monetize the vast number of search transactions between users and Google, in a technical manner that seems eerily similar to wiretapping.

What is this, an epidemic?

UK Considers Trying Criminal Case Without Jury

In what can only be described as a close shave for civil rights, an English Judge has rebuffed an attempt by the UK government to get him to exercise for the first time the statutory power to try a criminal case without a jury.

Details of the request are at Judge may sit alone in drugs case deemed too dangerous for a jury. England long ago dispensed with the civil jury for the large majority of cases (libel being one notorious exception) and the Brown government is apparently contemplating using the Parliament Act 1949 to force through a law allowing the most complex fraud cases to be tried without a jury.

The power to waive a jury in criminal cases is relatively new and so far never used. And, it appears, despite the prosecution's request, this time the UK has dodged the bullet:

A judge has rejected the first attempt in England and Wales to hold a big criminal trial without a jury. Prosecution lawyers applied for the case to be tried by a judge alone because of fears that jurors could intimidated or bribed. The judge ruled that steps could be put in place to ensure the jury was protected, and that he could still discharge the jury and hear the case if evidence of tampering emerged.

Eno Watch

Brian Eno has agreed to serve as adviser on youth affairs to the UK Liberal Democratic Party.

Good for both of them.

Behold the Blogging Magistrate

I know we have at least one blogging ex-judge in the US. There's the judge who collects legal humor. And, of course, there's Judge Posner, something of a law unto himself, who give his views online (mostly with his law & economics professor hat on), but do we have any serving judges with a full-time blog who discuss matters at all close to their service on the bench?

England (allegedly) does. See the (pseudonymous) The Magistrate's Blog. [In fact, I've just realized as I was editing this post, there's more than one, as the View From The Bench plausibly claims to “Being the thoughts, rants, speculations and anecdotes of a magistrate on a northern bench.”]

An English magistrate is a judge of limited jurisdiction, mostly petty offenses punishable by up to six months in gaol. Interestingly, many magistrates are not trained lawyers, although they do have legal advisers. (See the Wikipedia entry for more comprehensive, and perhaps even accurate, information.)

Whoever “Bystander” is, real magistrate or not, The Magistrate's Blog is an erudite and interesting blog. Yet there are some obvious ethical issues raised by a judge commenting on things that touch on past cases; these concerns are perhaps lessened by the magistrate's historical role as something of a representative of community values, or (traditionally) at least of the values of the better and rather more upper-crust elements of the community.

The magistrate, if that s/he be, deals with these with this self-description and disclaimer:

Musings and Snippets from an English Magistrate This blog is anonymous, and Bystander's views are his and his alone. Where his views differ from the letter of the law, he will enforce the letter of the law because that is what he has sworn to do. If you think that you can identify a particular case from one of the posts you are wrong. Enough facts are changed to preserve the truth of the tale but to disguise its exact source.

And perhaps that is enough.

Even so, I don't think that a sitting US judge would dare do anything like this. We've seen a prosecutor get in trouble for blogging. And of course there was the defendant who blogged about his own case pseudonymously — and lost the case when opposing counsel figured out who he was.

There are also a host of juror-bloggers. There's nothing wrong with a (petit) juror blogging after the trial is over, but it's obviously a ground for major concern if it happens during the trial as it provides a conduit for juror to lawyer/party communications which (a) might give one side an unfair advantage if only one side is learning what arguments are working ; (b) facilitate jury tampering; (c) provides fertile grounds for appeals. (More on blogging jurors here and here and no doubt elsewhere.)

Don't get me wrong, as a reader, I'm a fan. And I'm prepared to agree that the world is better off with the Magistrate's Blog than without it — so long as it's being true to its promise to change enough facts “to preserve the truth of the tale but to disguise its exact source”. But that is very difficult to do consistently over a long period of time. How, I wonder, was it done in this post, for example? (In the comments, Bystander even states that counsel read a particular case to the court!) If indeed the blog is by an actual Magistrate, the danger of slipping, or even of discovery over time without any slipping, is all too real.

Would discovery be that bad? In principle there's no difference between a judge writing an academic article about law reform and a magistrate blogging about legal issues that come up in and around the court s/he serves on. Were I a judge, however, I don't think I'd blog, and I certainly wouldn't do it pseudonymously if only because people would be sure to see that — however unfairly — as a sign of a guilty conscience. More importantly, print usually has editors and always takes time, which gives one opportunities for reflection. Blogging is quick and usually unedited. Risky….

But meanwhile, I'm going to be reading what “Bystander” writes.

One for the History Books

Via the Nielsenhayden Sidelights, a link to an unusual obituary which begins, as follows,

Sammy Duddy was a colourful Belfast character who combined membership of one of the city's most lethal paramilitary groups with a career as “Samantha”, a highly suggestive drag act.

Maybe my life is just boring. And maybe that's a good thing.

By the way, this guy is for real. There's also an article about him in an Irish newspaper,

ALMOST every journalist who covered the Troubles in the North has a story about the Ulster Defence Association spokesman, Sammy Duddy who died of a heart attack last week, aged 62.

As well as his role in the UDA, Duddy was a cabaret comedian, often dressing in drag, whose lewd acts were a great draw in loyalist drinking clubs across Belfast in the 1970s. He took serious exception to one New York-based journalist who innocently described him as a transvestite, thinking it suggested he was homosexual. Duddy was married at the time and had five children.

He was also a serious terrorist whose day job involved gathering intelligence and directing attacks against suspected republican terrorists.

David Howarth, Shadow Solicitor General

New role for Howarth: My friend David Howarth has been promoted to the Liberal Democrat's front bench, and will be serving as shadow Solicitor General.

“I will use the role to demand answers from the Government on their role on the BAE Systems scandal and will fight for electoral reform as well as taking part in debates on criminal justice and the reform of the legal system.”

Another smart move by the LDs.

A Day in the Park in Didsbury

I am currently in East Didsbury. Didsbury is a little village which has been subsumed into greater Manchester and now falls just within the outer limits of the city. Long known as a home to academics from the nearby University of Manchester, in recent years Didsbury, or at least West Didsbury which is the other part of town, is also gradually becoming something of a fashionable home to media figures of various degrees of fame. The formerly sleepy village center has long enjoyed a first-class cheese shop, the Cheese Hamlet, but in recent years has also accumulated an increasing number of nice restaurants with a variety of Asian and Mediterranean cuisines.

On Saturday we walked a few blocks to a local park which was the setting for the annual village fair. In addition to rides for the kids, there were dozens of booths either raising funds for good causes (mostly local schools) or publicizing good causes (everything from local history to Amnesty International and helping Darfur). What particularly struck me, however, was the large sign on the booth that had the most prominent location by the entrance, “Free the Miami Five”.

The booth, it seems, belonged to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a group that sports three web sites, and which has gotten very worked up about the trial of five Cuban agents convicted in 2001 of conspiracy and being foreign agents. From what I recall of the trial — being here on a slow and expensive dial-up link I'm not going to look up the details (but invite commentators to do so) — there were valid questions about whether a Miami jury could give alleged Cuban agents a fair trial, or whether the trial should be moved elsewhere. And, if I recall, not all the judges who looked at the issue were of the same view. And although, from what I recall, the basic mechanics of the trial were fair, a reasonable person could question the decision as to the jury. In fact, my knee-jerk reaction — not knowing the facts of how the actual jury was selected, which I'm sure might change my mind — is that a change of venue to somewhere less reflexively anti-Castro might have been a pretty good idea to ensure the fairness of the jury pool.

What's odd, though, is to pick on this case, of all the justice-related issues in the USA (much less the world), as the one to make an issue of in a park in East Didsbury. If I were going to try to get the good people of Didsbury worked up about a US justice issue, or a Cuba-related justice issue, I might start with Guantanamo. Somewhere not too far down the list we might have the treatment of political dissidents in Cuba itself. Or maybe the move in Florida to cut the pay of court-appointed defenders in order to save a buck and make sure that they can't afford to mount much of a defense. The “Miami 5,” for all that there may be a question about the underlying fairness of the jury selection for their trial, would not be near the head of my list.

I have no idea to what extent the “Cuba Solidarity Campaign” represents something genuine among the British soft left, or to what extent it is funded by the Cuban government or whatever remains of the Communist International. Despite its location, their booth didn't seem to be nearly as popular as the ones offering used books, or the various tombolas, or the one selling very good Indian snacks. Still, “Free the Miami 5” was a funny first thing to see at at the Didsbury fair.

UK Update

I got my luggage. Clean clothes — nice.

The big news, in the Guardian at least, for the last few days, has been the role of the British government in what appear to be a series of giant quarterly payments, more than $2 billion in total (yes, two billion) to Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia. The payments have both domestic and international ramifications. Domestically, here in the UK there are issues about who lied to whom to coverup what. There may not be domestic Saudi legal issues if, as Bandar claims, the money flows were blessed by the Saudi defense ministry … conveniently run by his dad. (Here's the Guardian version and the NYT version).

Internationally, there are issues about why the UK is paying off Saudis (aren't they the ones with the money?) — although we know the reason is to get arms sales. And what it meant for the man who was for a time thought to have been GW Bush's prime adviser on foreign affairs (during his first Presidential campaign, and early in the first term) to have been on the UK take. How this ties into the decision to invade Iraq, I'm not quite sure, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Stuff You Find Online

Ex MI6 agent and continuing thorn in the side of the UK spy establishment Richard Tomlinson has a blog entitled MI6 v Tomlinson.

UK-France Merger Discussed in 1956

Stranger than fiction.

Guardian, France and UK considered 1950s 'merger',

Britain and France talked about a "union" in the 1950s, even discussing the possibility of the Queen becoming the French head of state, it was reported today.

On September 10 1956, Guy Mollet, the then French prime minister, came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two countries with his British counterpart, Sir Anthony Eden, according to declassified papers from the National Archives, uncovered by the BBC.

Not, it seems, a joke, as it's also at the Times, Were we nearly les franglais?

Traumatised by Suez and the fighting in Algeria, a desperate French Prime Minister floated the idea of merging with Britain in 1956 and installing the Queen as head of state of the two countries, the BBC will report tonight.

Records of conversations between Anthony Eden, the British Prime Minister, and his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, show that the idea was swiftly dismissed but that serious thought was given to a secondary proposal to make France a member of the Commonwealth.

The (Maybe) Princess and the Metaphor

I never thought I would care anything about the British royal family one way or another, but I'm actually starting to feel sorry for the woman who attracts this sort of press coverage:

Kate, as she is fast becoming known by the English (actress Kate Winslet and model Kate Moss are still two-namers), is a middle-class descendant of a coal-mining family, with an art history degree and conservative hemlines.

She is as English as thickly buttered toast, and roughly as controversial. Her courtship with William is chronicled by the press the way lions chronicle antelopes.

I think it's that metaphor what did it.

And I imagine that I'll get over it.

Everybody's Podcasting Now

Queen to release Christmas speech on Podcast

Britons and Their Speed Cameras

I'm interested in surveillance and in privacy in public places. Here's an article about how Britons feel about one sort of public surveillance: they hate it. In addition to actually destroying a number of speed cameras, Britons are also trying to undermine them,

Cameras Catch Speeding Britons and Lots of Grief: Technology has moved on considerably since the 1990s, when the first speed cameras were installed in Britain. Now, in addition to the standard cameras that photograph the speeding cars’ license plates, there are cameras that can accurately photograph drivers’ faces — so that they cannot claim someone else was driving at the time — and cameras that work in teams, calculating average speeds along a stretch of road.

Of course, for every ingenious new camera, there is an ingenious new camera-thwarting device. These include constantly-updating G.P.S. equipment that alerts drivers to camera locations and a special material that, when sprayed on a license plate, is said to make it impervious to flash photographs.

There are also the low-tech methods of covering a license plate with mud or altering its letters with black electrical tape

UK Lord Chancellor: US willing to do things beyond the law

Buried on page A12 of the Saturday (lowest weekly circulation) Washington Post, is a little lecture from the Lord Falconer. As you read this consider that this is undoubtedly a case of British understatement.

Briton Cites 'Divergence' With U.S.: Charles Falconer, one of the highest-ranking justice officials in Britain, said Friday that there is a "great divergence" in how Britain and the United States are handling the fight against terrorists, describing the U.S. approach as a willingness "to do things beyond the law."

Falconer said in an interview that the practices of holding terrorism suspects without charge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and interrogating them in secret CIA prisons have made it "harder to identify to the world what your values are."

...

Falconer recently called Guantanamo Bay "an affront to the principles of democracy." In a lengthy interview Friday, he said Britain had learned hard lessons in the 1970s when it pursued a hard-line course in response to the bombing campaign of the Irish Republican Army. Police got new leeway in interrogation, while suspects' civil protections were reduced. In multiple cases, innocent people were convicted and sentenced.

"We suffered badly in the '70s and '80s," Falconer said, adding that the United States was among those criticizing the British approach at the time. He also noted that IRA fundraising "shot up" during this period.

...

"Keep your justice system as pure as you can," Falconer said. "This is advice to a friend from the experience we have had."

...

Falconer said both countries value democracy and rule of law. But some U.S. practices are "undercutting the very values both countries adhere to," he said.

Asked whether these practices had hurt U.S. prestige in the world, Falconer said, "it is something that is raised a lot."

In the UK, It Really Matters What Newspaper You Read

I've spent a total of five years off and on living in the UK, and that doesn't count a vacation trip or two a year for the past decade and a half. It's a cliche that the UK, and especially England, is nation that is not only marked by class, but by accent. In London, at least, it also seemed to be a place in which people made snap judgments about each other based on the newspapers they read. (Caroline and I tended to read the Guardian and the Financial Times, which confused people.)

I'm about to go there again for a 'fortnight', and just in time I see that the importance of what newspaper you read has only increased: Police hold mother-of-three for reading 'Independent' outside Downing Street.

Indeed, there are many signs that the UK today, taking a leaf out of the US playbook, is even less free than it was even under Thatcher. Of course, living in the US makes it hard to criticize behavior that sounds a lot like the sort of thing they seem to get up to all over the US; consider for example the latest news form California (via amygdalagf).

Stealth UK Bill Would Give Government Power to Rule Without Parliament

David Howarth is an old friend, one of the smarter lawyers I know, and definitely one of the smartest politicians around (he's a Reader in Law at Cambridge and Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge). David is currently the campaign manager for one of the two leading candidates in the Liberal Democrat leadership election.

So please do not dismiss what follows as some weird backbench conspiracy stuff. And keep in mind that this bill has already had its second reading, so it's one step away from law (the vote follows the third reading): Who wants the Abolition of Parliament Bill is an alarm by a serious person:

The boring title of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill hides an astonishing proposal. It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voilà, the law is changed.

For ministers the advantages are obvious: no more tedious debates in which they have to answer awkward questions. Instead of a full day’s debate on the principle of the proposal, detailed line-by-line examination in committee, a second chance at specific amendment in the Commons and a final debate and vote, ministers will have to face at most a short debate in a committee and a one-and-a-half hour debate on the floor. Frequently the Government will face less than that. No amendments will be allowed. The legislative process will be reduced to a game of take-it-or-leave-it.

The Bill replaces an existing law that allows ministers to relieve regulatory burdens. Business was enthusiastic about that principle and the Government seems to have convinced the business lobby that the latest Bill is just a new, improved version. What makes the new law different, however, is not only that it allows the Government to create extra regulation, including new crimes, but also that it allows ministers to change the structure of government itself. There might be business people so attached to the notion of efficiency and so ignorant or scornful of the principles of democracy that they find such a proposition attractive. Ordinary citizens should find it alarming.

Any body created by statute, including local authorities, the courts and even companies, might find themselves reorganised or even abolished. Since the powers of the House of Lords are defined in Acts of Parliament, even they are subject to the Bill.

Looking back at last week’s business in the Commons, the Bill makes a mockery of the decisions MPs took. Carrying ID cards could be made compulsory, smoking in one’s own home could be outlawed and the definition of terrorism altered to make ordinary political protest punishable by life imprisonment. Nor will the Human Rights Act save us since the Bill makes no exception for it.

The Bill, bizarrely, even applies to itself, so that ministers could propose orders to remove the limitations about two-year sentences and taxation. It also includes a few desultory questions (along the lines of “am I satisfied that I am doing the right thing?”) that ministers have to ask themselves before proceeding, all drafted subjectively so that court challenges will fail, no matter how preposterous the minister’s answer. Even these questions can be removed using the Bill’s own procedure. Indeed, at its most extreme, in a manoeuvre akin to a legislative Indian rope trick, ministers could use it to transfer all legislative power permanently to themselves.

More links at JURIST - Paper Chase: UK bill amounts to abolishing Parliament, warn Cambridge law professors.

Free Software, the Public Domain, and the People Who Don't Get It

This article on free software by a Mozilla Foundation staffer (or is he a bannana seller?) is really really funny. Or tragic. Or both.

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft -- that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

On a more serious note, the same cast of mind is visible at WIPO, where it can do far more damage. As EFF notes,

Intellectual property rights are supposed to promote the same goals ["a rich and accessible public domain" -mf], but you'd never know it from the comments of some participants who seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the essential relationship between IP and the public domain. Apparently under the mistaken impression that the public domain is the opposite of intellectual property, these participants claimed that the proposal was outside WIPO's mandate.

EFF's (and Jamie Love & Jamie Boyle's) work is transforming WIPO one post at a time:

The public interest groups continue to subversively write down what's going on and publish it, something that WIPO's Secretariat once described as "abusing WIPO's hospitality" -- normally, the Secretariat would release a report six months after the fact, once everyone quoted in it had the chance to revise the report of what they'd said. EFF and others publish their account of the WIPO deliberations daily -- twice a day, when it's going hot and heavy -- and it gets slashdotted, read by delegates' bosses in their capitols, and distributed. It has a genuinely disruptive effect on the orderly dividing-and-conquering of the world that's underway there.

I Used to Live at 'No Mother'

Fun Anagram Map of the London Tube (via Boing Boing).

We lived at 'What Stampedes' and 'No Mother' while worked near 'Spicular Dicyclic'. Caroline usually walked to work from 'Lob Horn'. (Ordinary tube map for comparison.)

One Million Hedgehogs Are Missing

In other British animal news, hedgehogs are vanishing.

Where have all our hedgehogs gone?: the British hedgehog population in the mid-90s was, very roughly, about two million. Today, that figure might be down to a million. As nobody has any idea of the population dynamics once the overall numbers are so radically depleted, there is no telling what will happen next.

...

Does it matter? Of course it matters. The loss of the hedgehog would be more than just the loss of a small, prickly Mrs Tiggywinkle. Unlike any other animal in this country - except, perhaps, the mole, whose condition is, if anything, even more opaque, and just as likely to be following its own chute to oblivion - the hedgehog has always been a symbol and embodiment of something subtle and tender in the landscape. It is not a flamboyant showman of a creature, but quiet, nocturnal and discreet. Even though it has a great sense of smell - it can sniff a dog 35ft away - and can jump two feet to catch a beetle, and that a Russian hedgehog once found its way back home after it had been dropped 48 miles away across the tundra, the hedgehog is not, on the whole, a very clever creature. It has a very small brain and very conservative habits. It is no fox. One owner tried to teach his hedgehog a simple lesson - open the red door for lunch - 4,000 times. It looked the other way.

...

It is a widely treasured creature. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has more than 600 "carers" on its list, the stars of which are probably Ken and Sue Lewis of Rochdale, who take in up to 2,000 injured, poisoned, orphaned or burned hedgehogs a year (157 there this week). Why? "I suppose because they have adorable faces," Mrs Lewis says. Fay Vass, chief executive of the BHPS, thinks: 'He's just a useful chap to have around. And if what we are doing is damaging hedgehogs, people need to buckle down and start to think of other animals apart from ourselves." Only in England would the conservation of wild mammals be discussed in these terms, but "a useful chap to have around" sounds strangely like what a hedgehog's rather modest description of itself might be.

...

This is, straightforwardly, a question of knowledge. The hedgehogs are dying because we don't know what we are doing to them. Without that knowledge, quite silently, an unobtrusive world is being mauled and, because it is largely invisible, nothing much is being said about it. Unless that knowledge is acquired - and acted on - the hedgehog, in our lifetimes, will end up as little more than a memory.

There's lots more lyrical stuff there I didn't quote -- including ties to a Philip Larkin poem.

I forget: Is hedgehogs vanishing one of the signs of global warming or of the Apocalypse? Or just routine ecological disaster?

In Britain, Birds Are Bugs

In the USA we worry about the NSA tapping our calls, faxes and emails. In the UK, it seems the new thing to fear is ... talking parrots.

Talking parrot gives away girlfriend's secret lover: At first, 30-year-old Mr Taylor was amused when Ziggy started screeching "Hiya, Gary" everytime it heard Miss Collins's mobile phone ring.

He even saw the funny side when the parrot began making kissing noises when the same name was mentioned on television or radio.

But the truth finally dawned as the couple snuggled alongside one another on the sofa and Ziggy blurted out, "I love you, Gary" in her voice.

What I wonder, assuming this isn't another one of those great British journalistic hoaxes, is how the Telegraph got the story.

David Howarth, MP, Front Bencher, Stages A Different Sort of Sit-In

My friend David Howarth, MP for Cambridge City, is getting a good press:

Sofa, so good for MP who is winning battles large and small:THE best moment of David Howarth's six months as Cambridge MP came on Wednesday when the opposition parties and Labour rebels came within one vote of defeating the Government over their Anti Terror Bill.

Only David Blunkett marching through the "aye" lobby just hours after quitting the Cabinet saved Tony Blair's bacon over a new offence of glorifying terrorism.

Mr Howarth told me: "That was undoubtedly the best moment of my time at Westminster. I was very surprised.

"When I came here I thought voting would just be a way of registering a protest and a challenge to the Government. I never thought we could get the majority down to one.

"In the previous two parliaments the lowest it got was three, over tuition fees.

"But now we appear to have got the Government to change its mind about aspects of the Terrorism Bill. We've got to keep up the pressure."

The strangest thing that has happened is the attempts of the House of Commons' authorities to claim back the sofa in his office. Perhaps they think that the offending pieces of furniture encourage unwanted intimacy in Westminster offices.

But Mr Howarth is having none of it: "I share an office with Cheltenham MP Martin Hallwood. We have a desk at either end and two armchairs and a sofa in the middle.

"They keep coming round to try to get the sofa but we just sit on it until they go away. They're not having our sofa."

That's Charming

Isn't this just charming: the UK is considering establishing Secret courts for terror cases. That's “Special anti-terror courts sitting in secret to determine how long suspects should be detained without charge.”

We had to kill liberty and justice in order to save it?

Gorgeous George Galloway, Sub-Loony

Via Crooked Timber, Gorgeous George, how are ya, part 2, a link to this extended clip of George Galloway saying wicked and stupid things.

It's ok to be mad at Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It's ok to to accuse the US of imperial designs on the Middle East, although these days it's probably shifting fast to tail-between-legs time.

But telling an Arab Muslim audience that Jerusalem and Baghdad are their beautiful daughters being raped by westerners? And that they and their governments should do more to protect those daughters? Inciting the audience with the suggestion that Western leaders (and one presumes, their soldiers?) are really just terrorists?

I called Galloway a raving loon back when he made mincemeat of Senator Coleman a few weeks ago, to some criticism. I wish now to apologize to the fine folks in the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, as I now appreciate that the Loony Party has standards; I accept that Galloway wouldn't qualify.

Thoughts on the Polansky Trial

Lots of people apparently find Roman Polansky's libel victory over Conde Nast to be an odd result. The claim was that Vanity Fair falsely asserted that in 1969, while en route to the funeral of Sharon Tate, his wife, who had just been murdered, Polanski groped and propositioned a Scandinavian model, promising to "make another Sharon Tate out of you." Polanski denied it, in tears, and the jury agreed. (England has generally abolished juries in civil cases but still uses them for libel cases.)

The trial did indeed have several strange features. The first was that the plaintiff was not a nice person: Roman Polansky is a long-time fugitive from US justice, having fled while on bail before sentencing, after admitting the statutory rape of a 13 year old girl. This fact caused the second odd feature of the trial: fearing extradition to the US to serve his sentence were he to set foot in the UK, Polansky was allowed to give his evidence by video. Which of course exacerbates the third apparent oddity of the trial: that it was held in the UK (a country with pro-plaintiff libel laws), when the Vanity Fair, the magazine in which the article at issue appeared, is US-based.

Actually, it's not that strange. Vanity Fair circulates in the UK, so it's fair game there -- and since its sold on newsstands and (I imagine) to subscribers, it's considerably fairer game in the UK than, say, web pages which are delivered for free and by the readers decision to pull a page rather than a publisher's decision to send physical copies to the jurisdiction.

The decision to allow the video testimony is a closer call; I could certainly understand a court saying that if plaintiff has unclean hands he shouldn't come to court. And I'm no great fan of video testimony in general. But idea that the courts should be open to do justice even in the exceptional case where the plaintiff cannot risk being in the jurisdiction has its admirable qualities too.

The least strange aspect of this decision is that Polanski won.

The defense tried to blacken Polanski's name by suggesting he slept around. He admitted it. End of issue: that sort of tactic doesn't work anymore, at least against men. More substantive was the suggestion that a fugitive from justice for statutory rape is the sort of person who can't be libeled -- like (traditionally) a prostitute or (contemporaneously) a war criminal. What overcame that, I suspect, was the seeming cruel falseness of the anecdote, and Polanski's emotional reaction to it.

I began to suspect Polanski might win as soon as I learned the name of the source of the allegation in question: Lewis Lapham.

Yes, that would be the same Lewis Lapham who wrote and published a fabricated summary of the speeches at the GOP convention -- a summary written before the speeches were given, but published after it.

OK, Polanski is not a nice guy. But despite the fancy pedigree...

Mr. Lapham has lectured at many of the nation's leading universities, among them Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and Oregon. He is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows both in the United States and in England, France, Canada, Germany and Australia. He was the host and author of the six-part documentary series "America's Century," broadcast on public television in the United States and in England on Channel Four in the autumn of 1989. Between 1989 and 1991 he was the host and Executive Editor of "Bookmark," a weekly public television series seen on over 150 stations nationwide. Lapham is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Century Club, the Advisory Council to the New School University and Chair of the Board for The Americans for Libraries Council.

... Lapham's credibility as a reliable reporter must surely now be reduced be zero?

After all, Lapham testified that while parts of his story were wrong, like the date, the key allegations were true:

Testifying in a libel case setting Mr. Polanski, 71, against Vanity Fair magazine, which reported the anecdote in an article in July 2002, Mr. Lapham said the incident had embedded itself in his memory.

"I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar, but because it was a cliché," the 70-year-old editor said.

And now, to ice the cake, the model whom Polanski supposedly tried to pick up -- who wasn't called to testify in the libel trial -- says no such thing ever happened.

On balance, this verdict feels like justice. But I fear it will not have the consequences it should. In ye olde days, a man disgraced by being found by a jury to be a less believable witness than a rapist would resign his clubs and go hide out somewhere and take up drink. Now, I suppose Lapham will just write about it. But whoever publishes it better hire a good fact-checker.

---

Update (7/26): Over at the Yin Blog, Tung Yin makes an excellent point:

If Polanski has been libeled, he deserves to be vindicated. But he also deserves to serve his sentence. So a truly just result would have had him testify by video -- because he was in one of our prisons.

I should add that one of the reasons why I think the issue of allowing the extraterritorial testimony is genuinely hard on these facts is that there's zero chance that denying relief might compel Polanski to travel and risk serving his time. Thus, the case for withholding access as a coercive means to compel compliance is weak; the withholding must be justified either as retributive (which is not the UK court's job here) or as somehow beneath the court's dignity. Counterbalancing the latter is the idea that two wrongs don't make a right.

LD's Draft Howarth for Policy Review

Well, the LD's don't miss much. Their leader announced a 'clean sheet' policy review, and picked a committee to run it. Included is the newly elected David Howarth MP. Details at Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Kennedy pledges policy overhaul. Which makes sense: David's very smart, a glutton for work, and has political smarts. What more could you want?

Climate Change Follies

EnergyBulletin.net has a jolly little item about a little ice age about to erupt on England: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows:

CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.

...

Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C.

Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080. This would spell disaster for Arctic wildlife such as the polar bear, which could face extinction.

As I recall, that makes sea level rise one to three meters. And Florida is -- what? -- a median of about six inches above sea level?

Aw Heck! I had to go and ruin this nice scare story with facts. The mean elevation of Coral Gables is not six inches--it's ten whole feet! We'll be the New Venice while it 's South Beach that will be wholly submerged:

Total Area	Florida covers 65,758 square miles, making it the 22nd largest of the 50 states.
Land Area	53,997 square miles of Florida are land areas.
Water Area	11,761 square miles of Florida are covered by water making Florida the 3rd wettest state behind Alaska and Michigan.
Highest Point	The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill, Lakewood Park in Walton County and is only 345 feet above sea level. Walton County is located in the Florida Panhandle.
Lowest Point	The lowest point in Florida is sea level where Florida meets the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Mean Elevation	The Mean Elevation of the state of Florida is only 100 feet above sea level

David Howarth, MP

It's David Howarth MP - Thank You Cambridge! (Cambridge Liberal Democrats).

4000 majority! That's huge by British standards. David told me he would win when I saw him a few months ago, but every good politician believes that.

In his acceptance speech, David said: “This has been an extraordinary campaign, an extraordinary day, and an extraordinary result. Cambridge has rejected Tony Blair's war, his tuition fees, his council tax, and his 'third way'.”

…

David Howarth Liberal Democrat 19,152 44% (+18.9% from 2001)

Anne Campbell Labour 14,813 34% (-11.1%)

Ian Lyon Conservative 7,193 16.5% (-6.4%)

Others 2,411 5.5%

TURNOUT 43,847 62% (+1%)

Congratulations! (Now get a better photo on that web page, please).

Two/Too Good For Parliament

David Howarth and James Raven, both good friends of mine from graduate school days, are standing for Parliament as Liberal Democrats in tomorrow's election.

James is not going to get elected in Essex North (Colchester), even though he's a local — the Tory he is running against (someone my wife knew in college, small world) has one of the safest seats in the UK, even if he is now a discredited demoted former front bencher who tied his future to the ultra-conservative wing of the party.

David Howarth probably isn't going to get elected from Cambridge either, even though he's the perfect town-gown candidate being both a don and a councilor. He needs a 10% swing, which is a lot but not beyond the bounds of hope this year in that constituency.

Both of them look better in real life than the pictures on their campaign web pages. David's is particuarly awful.

Hey guys, I'm thinking of you.

Blair Publishes Legal Advice On Legality of Iraq Invasion

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose re-election campaign has been dogged by charges that he joined the invasion of Iraq in the face of advice by his Attorney General that the invasion would be illegal, has published the final draft of the legal advice sent to his office.

I've only had time to read this very quickly, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I invite corrections and amplifications.

To the extent that Blair may have claimed in the past that the advice told him the invasion was legal, the document reveals a somewhat more equivocal endorsement, more of the form of “maybe” or “good arguable case, might not ultimately convince a tribunal.' But the memo clearly doesn't forbid it.

In domestic UK terms, this may still be damaging, since Blair didn't disclose the existence of the doubts to Parliament, and thus can be accused of lack of candor. In US terms, the memo is pretty middle of the road, and won't make partisans on either side terribly happy.

Smiles Have Accents

(via Boing-Boing) The Times (UK): The smile that says where you’re from

While we British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths.

So distinct is the difference that the scientist behind the research was able last week to pick out Britons from Americans from close-cropped pictures of their smiles alone, with an accuracy of more than 90%.

The study by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California in Berkeley, near San Francisco, analysed the 43 facial muscles used by humans to charm, smirk and appease.

He found the British were also more likely to raise their cheeks when they smile, showing the crow’s feet at the corners of the eyes. This produces a more sincere, hard-to-fake smile.

But what happens when Irish eyes are smiling?

'What Has Europe Ever Done for Us?'

In response to UKIP and other get-out-of-Europe types, this hysterically funny Monty-Python dervived animation, What has Europe ever done for us?.

(Via Caroline Bradley, who notes that there is a a quicktime clip online of Monty Python’s “What have the Romans ever done for us?” from The Life of Brian.)

Snow!

It snowed in Manchester this evening, to the delight of two Miami-born kids.

Downtown Manchester is Blanketed With These Posters

Downtown Manchester (UK) seems to have one of these posters on every block:

They all advertise HungryRats.com, and are part of a campaign to educate Manchester residents about rat control — especially not throwing food where rats can get to it.

They're spooky posters, and it is probably an effective campaign, but how can the rats be “getting closer” if they are already close enough to eat your discarded food?

Common Market, But No Common Sense of Humor

The Guardian runs its annual story about the German fascination with an ancient 18-minute British comedy sketch featuring Freddie Frinton called “Dinner for One”. (As far as I can tell the Guardian runs some version of this story almost every year, always saying that no one in the UK has ever heard of the skit….)

At 7.40pm on New Year's Eve millions of Germans gather reverently round their TV sets to watch Dinner For One - an 18-minute British comedy sketch featuring Freddie Frinton as drunken butler James and May Warden as his elderly aristocratic boss Miss Sophie.

….

Since it was first shown in 1963 the sketch has achieved a cult following in Germany. It is one of the country's most successful TV programmes - no mean feat given that it is shown in a language that most Germans don't actually speak. But nobody in Britain has ever heard of it.

It's an amazing example of cultural non-comprehension: the Germans think the UK sketch is so funny that it has become a major Christmas tradition, complete with (optional) drinking game. The British, well the English anyway, don't think the sketch is particularly funny and can't understand why the Germans think its such a riot. The Germans can't understand why the English don't understand just how funny it is. Both nations conclude that the other nation lacks a sense of humor. (Or humour.) There's no question that the British (and especially English) sense of humour is quirky: witty repartee, check, funny skits (think Monty Python), check, jokes, nope. But although there is much to admire about Germany, I would have to say that German humor is to me about as inscrutable as it gets. There's a certain taste for slapstick, a form of 'humor' I always think is too mean-spirited to be funny. There are a few jokes, but I hardly ever get them. And otherwise its just not funny.

Here's the full script of 'Dinner for One', complete with the famous final lines as Frinton carries Warden up the stairs:

“Same procedure as last year, Madam? - Same procedure as every year, James.”

Leading UK Lawyer Won't Take Part in Detention Cases

The Guardian reports that Ian MacDonald QC, one a relatively small number of British barristers allowed to represent suspected terror suspects before the UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission , has announced he will not longer take those cases following the House of Lords ruling that the detentions are illegal. The Guardian speculates that many, perhaps all, of the other barristers with similar status will follow suit, putting a real spanner in the works. Once again, the British lawyers are ahead of us.

Hair Today, Tenure Tomorrow

A study of 1800 male UK academics reveals that professors are twice as likely to have beards as lecturers:

Women in academia lose out by a whisker: While 10.5 per cent of lecturers were bewhiskered, the figure rose to 13.6 per cent for senior lecturers, 16.7 per cent for readers and 21.4 per cent for professors.

The study's authors suggest that whatever it is that makes departments like hairy faces may also contribute to discrimination against women:

One theory is that being unshorn makes men more likely to be appointed to professorships, as facial hair is linked with high testosterone and aggression.

Hmm. Does that mean that if I want to convince my students that I'm really just a pussy cat then I should shave my beard?

UK's House of Lords Holds that Indefinite Detention Violates European Convention on Human Rights!

You know you are in trouble when the House of Lords is more protective of civil rights than the US court system: Law lords back terror detainees

Detaining foreigners without trial under emergency anti-terror legislation breaks European human rights powers, law lords ruled today.

The decision from the law lords, Britain's highest court, throws the government's security policies into chaos.

A specially-convened committee of nine law lords upheld an appeal by nine foreigners who have been detained without charge or trial, most of them in Belmarsh prison, south-east London, for around three years.

Experts said today's decision would probably force the government to repeal the section of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 which has permitted the indefinite detention of foreigners.

The law lords, making the ruling in the chamber of the House of Lords, described the legislation as “draconian” and “anathema” to the rule of law.

OK, OK, my slur on our Supreme Court is ever so slightly unfair, as the US case with the most closely related fact pattern, the Padilla case, was turned down on procedural grounds. (Both cases involve domestic detention of a suspect arrested domestically; the cases differ slightly, however, in that Padilla was a US citizen while the persons in the UK case are foreign nationals, albeit presumably legally admitted to the UK.) Read between the lines of Padilla and the other detention cases and you could get to a point where we end up a bit like the UK….but my point is that this requires some squinting and meanwhile Padilla is still in jail without charges or prospect of trial or indeed any idea of when he might get out.

Note also that in the US the Bush administration has implemented indefinite no-trial detention without a shred of statutory justification. Conversely, in the UK the detentions were not by executive fiat, but pursuant to an act of Parliament. Nevertheless, the Law Lords — who once proclaimed Parliamentary supremacy, but now have new powers under the European Convention and the UK's Human Rights Act, —have struck down indefinite detention in no uncertain terms, and by an 8-1 vote, as barbaric and uncivilized.

History will be cruel to this administration, which is indeed barbaric and uncivilized. Squandering the US's moral capital while looting the Treasury for the rich and debasing our currency is an historic achievement, but not one that one wishes to live through; it seems likely that the aftermath will be substantially worse.

Briton Says Torture Continues at Guantánamo

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Guantánamo torture and humiliation still going on, says shackled Briton:

Fresh allegations about a regime of torture and humiliation inflicted on detainees by their American captors at Guantánamo Bay have been made by a Briton still held there, according to Foreign Office documents seen by the Guardian.

The claims by Martin Mubanga, from London, are the latest to surface from the prison where the US holds 550 Muslim men it claims are terrorists in conditions that have sparked worldwide condemnation.

Mr Mubanga, 31, alleges that only months ago he was kept shackled for so long that he wet himself, and then was forced to clean up his own urine. He claims to have been threatened, that an interrogator stood on his hair, and that he was subjected to extremes of temperature rising to 36C (97F). He was kept chained to the floor by his feet for an hour during a welfare visit from a British government official.

Where the hell is the outrage? The Senate hearings? The — excuse the term — Democrats?

Not that the British government is exactly covering itself with glory here either:

Mr Mubanga was arrested in Zambia and has been held as a terrorist for more than two years without access to a lawyer. During a visit by a Foreign Office official on October 3, a record of which the Guardian has seen, Mr Mubanga was kept trussed up for the entire 60 minutes. The official noted: “Martin's feet were shackled to the ring in the floor.” Mr Mubanga also said his weight had plunged in captivity from 84kg to 75kg (13st 3lb to 11st 11lb), and that he got tired and dizzy and did not get enough food.

He is allowed 30 minutes of exercise every second day.

…

According to the Foreign Office letter, the US claims Mr Mubanga attacked his interrogator, despite the fact he almost certainly would have been shackled: “The US authorities said that their records show that Martin grabbed the interrogator's hand and applied a pressure point hold. The interrogator stated that he would call the military police and Martin let go without further incident.”

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: “We have raised with the US authorities the allegations of maltreatment raised with us by Mr Mubanga during a welfare visit. The US authorities have investigated them and their response is that they are without merit.

“At this stage we would not propose to pursue this further.”

The Foreign Office had originally refused to give Mr Mubanga's family details of his claims of ill-treatment, blaming the data protection act.

Will the Revolution Be Subsidized?

The BBC calls it Rise of the anoraks (“anoraks” being English slang for people who wear uncool windbreakers and study science or math). Demos, probably the UK's most interesting think tank, calls it The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society.

Demos says that the people it calls “Pro-Ams”—meaning “amateurs who pursue a hobby to a professional standard” including serious amateur astronomers and open source coders—should receive government funding to “promote community cohesion”.

It's nice to see the bottom-up revolution being noticed. Whether it needs subsidizing, though, and how one would do so without distorting it (and without enormous waste), seem like fairly hard questions. But I haven't yet read the full report.

English Humor or Smart Marketing

I clipped this ad from a British newspaper during my recent trip to the UK. Rare Classic? Save £1000 on the cost of buying a computer? I'm still wondering if they were serious, and if so how many they sold.

London Theater Update

It's been slim pickings at TKTS, maybe because I've been showing up too early. Show up at or before 10am opening you don't have to wait very long, but there's less choice I suspect than if I showed up at noon and queued a long time. I would have loved to see the new David Hare play, but it's not on while I'm in town.

So last night I saw Jerry Springer: the Opera. I am more of straight theater kind of guy, but I'd read about this and, well, I guess I'm glad I saw it. I've only ever seen about five minutes of Springer in some hotel somewhere, and I was fairly disgusted. The show is pretty smart about walking a line between joining in with Springer and condemning him. It revels in his horribleness while at the same time inviting you to revel too while at the same time marking an ironic distance. That's clever. And uncomfortable. It's a somewhat well, not raunchy but defiantly rude show. And it's a real spectacle. The use of the audience as a modern trailer-trash manipulated Greek chorus is clever.

Jerry gets sent to visit hell, but the permanence of his stay is left ambiguous.

I left wondering what on earth Springer himself thought of it.

Apparently he liked it

“I 'm honored to the point that I realize that I'm the only human being on the planet earth that's an opera,” Springer says. “There have been others, but they're dead.”

This evening I saw an RSC production of “Twelfth Night” set in an Indian milieu. It did the play no harm, allowed the addition of nice costumes and some good physical jokes, and thus distracted a little from the play's utter implausibility. Orisnio was a drip who mostly didn't speak loud enough. Viola played the role very straight, which mostly was not too good except in her scenes with Olivia, who was generally magnificent…topped only by the Fool who kept stealing the show. On the whole a good production of one of Shakespear's weakest plays, but not in the same class as the History Boys, or the RSC production of Coriolanus I saw the last time I was in London, which I'm sure is the best Coriolanus I'll ever see in my life.

Tomorrow it's back to the National for “A Funny Thing Happened”.

Blogging may be sparse until I get back to the US late on Tuesday. Or, if we go on campus to watch the election returns with the students, maybe not till Wednesday…

ROFL

Talk about two cultures divided by a common language. Wonkette channels the Guardian's followup to its letter-writing campaign directed to Clark County, Ohio in So Long and Thanks for All the Castles:

Americans respond to the Guardian's call for Britons to lobby Ohio voters against Bush. Mostly, they are not pleased, though some are more polite than others:

I used to visit the UK every year. I love the history and culture of your country. But after I heard about your campaign to influence our elections, I've decided that neither myself, nor my family will ever visit again. I'm offended by your campaign and because of it, I'm remembering more of the negative aspects I've seen in the UK than the positive ones. Though I still love the castles!

Versus, say:

Who in the hell do you think you are??? Well, I'll tell you, you're a bunch of meddling socialist pricks! Stay the hell out of our country and politics. And another thing, John Kerry is a worthless lying sack of crap so it doesn't surprise me that a socialist rag like yours would back him. I hope your cynical ploy blows up in your cowardly faces, you bunch of mealy-mouthed morons!

Our take: Yeah! Imagine that! A foreign power trying to, you know, assert control over a sovereign nation by writing letters. Why don't they just hand-pick a ruling coalition like a real empire would? Pussies.

Dear Limey assholes [Guardian]

Scenes From the Hartlepool By Election

The Guardian has a first-class piece of detailed local reporting, giving a ground-eye view of the Hartlepool by-election: part one and part two. Hartlepool was Peter Mandelson's seat.

All politics is local. This is a well-told tale, of interest to retail politics political junkies everywhere. (Bloggers will also enjoy the role that one of the candidate's campaign blogs plays in the story.) The election will be the 30th.

Antiquarian's Delight

Don't hold your breath, but apparently in the UK, impeachment, a procedure last used in 1805 remains vital today.

Tony Blair could be impeached before the House of Lords for misleading Parliament over the basis for military action against Iraq, two leading lawyers say in advice published today.

They believe there is a case that the Prime Minister is guilty of a serious breach of constitutional principles.

Rabinder Singh, QC, and Prof Conor Gearty say the ancient procedure, under which MPs initiate criminal proceedings for actions that would otherwise go unprosecuted, can still be used to call ministers to account.

There's no chance that the Commons, controlled by the New Labour Party, would ever convict. But I suppose there's a real non-zero chance that the quirky House of Lords might at least debate the issue of voting a bill of impeachment.

Of course here in the US we only impeach people for lying about sex, not for lying to Congress and the nation about why we are going to war.

The Daily Telegraph Makes Another Error About Jews

When I'm in England, I read the Guardian and the Financial Times. The FT may be the best written paper in the English-speaking world, and it has great international coverage. The Guardian has great UK political coverage, good jokes, and they spell as badly as I do. I would never be caught dead with the right-wing and relatively lowbrow Daily Telegraph (before Rupert Murdoch destroyed the Times of London, which could then claim to be the best paper in Britain, the old putdown used to be that 'gentlemen read the Times and their footmen read the Telegraph').

But when I'm in the US I tend to get my British news from the Daily Telegraph online instead of the Guardian. Partly this is because the Telegraph used to have a much better web site although the Guardian is catching up; mostly it's because the DT updates much earlier and I get tomorrow's news before going to bed.

Ordinarily that's ok, especially as I never read the editorial page, but every so often the Telegraph's biases set my teeth on edge. And one subject that they absolutely cannot deal with properly is Jews. The level of casual and unthinking antisemitism is beyond anything we'd tolerate in the US, at least before the new Mel Gibson movie hits the streets.

Today's example is fairly trivial compared to, say, John Keegan's defense of Holocaust denier David Irving but it was pretty typical. (I wrote the DT to complain about the Keegan article, but they edited out my claim of antisemitism, and only ran it online…plus it doesn't seem to be in their archives. The only copy I could find online today is at a Holocaust “revisionist” site, and I'm not going to link to it.)

Like I said, today's example is much tamer, but it's still annoying because it's hard to believe anyone could get this one so wrong. In an otherwise unremarkable account of the Yale ties of the Bushes and many of the Democratic candidates, and a fairly tame account of the Skull and Bones connections, the Telegraph reported (free registration needed) that,

Mr Lieberman, the grandson of immigrants, arrived from a state school, probably a beneficiary of an unofficial 10 per cent quota of places for Jews that Yale then operated.

In fact, the suggestion that Lieberman may have benefitted from a quota system is completely backward. Yale's notorious Jewish quota (not abandoned until the early '60s) was a maximum, not a set-aside, and existed because so many Jewish applicants had stronger academic credentials than the Protestant applicants then so dear to the university's WASP leadership.

Leiberman didn't benefit from a quota—he got in despite it.

Hutton Live

The Guardian is scribing the live delivery of the Hutton report. So far it looks bad for the BBC and good for Tony Blair.

Update: It's over. Full summary is now here, with the headline “BBC targeted as Hutton clears Blair”.

Sun Claims Hutton Report Will Clear Blair

The Hutton Report is due out in a few hours. Meanwhile, the Sun Newspaper — a British tabloid best known for running daily pix of half-naked women to pump up circulation — reports that it has had advance access to the Hutton Report and that the report 'clears' Blair.

Hutton 'clears Blair': The Sun newspaper has tonight claimed to have a leak of the Hutton report. The paper says Tony Blair has been cleared of wrongdoing but that the BBC and the governors have been criticised for not investigating the veracity of the Andrew Gilligan report that sparked the row between the corporation and the government.

But the slant the Sun has taken is already being treated with some scepticism - Lord Hutton demanded that everyone who received an early copy of his report sign an undertaking not to disclose its contents and there is suspicion that the tabloid may have got its leak from a source sympathetic to the government.

…

The Sun has supported the Labour party throughout the Kelly affair and it appears that it has not the seen the full report, but has only had part of the conclusions read to it.

The paper's front page story claims the prime minister will not be blamed for the 'naming strategy' that led to the public identification of Dr Kelly as the 'mole' who had an unauthorised meeting with Gilligan.

According to the Sun, the BBC has also been criticised for not making more rigorous checks to establish the truth of Gilligan's central claim that the government had knowingly 'sexed up' the Iraq dossier that made the case for war.

Although once Margret Thatcher's biggest cheerleader, Ruport Murdoch's newspaper has been a big supporter of Blair, especially as regards Iraq.

UK To Adopt Greater (Partial) Separation of Powers

If this news report is correct, the UK will adopt a greater separation of powers for the judiciary. Members of the House of Lords Judicial Committee, who are currently not technically judges but actually members of the upper chamber of the legislature, will cease to sit in the House of Lords and become an independent court. [Will the body be renamed 'the Supreme Court'? The article does not say.]

There will, however, be no increase in the (total lack of) (formal) separation between the legislature and the executive.

Falconer reaches deal with judges over reform: The proposals, which were announced in Parliament after four months of hard-fought negotiations, promised a “statutory guarantee of the vital principle of the independence of the judiciary”.

Lord Falconer: 'Enduring platform for the future'

Although concessions were made by both sides, it is understood that the Government did not want to take on the judiciary, thereby jeopardising its proposals to abolish the Lord Chancellor, set up a judicial appointments commission and replace the law lords with a supreme court.

Under the plans, the Lord Chief Justice will become the constitutionally-recognised leader of the judiciary and take the additional title of President of the Courts of England and Wales. A Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) will be headed by someone who is neither a judge nor a lawyer, and no judges would be appointed without its recommendation.

Lord Falconer said the sole criterion for appointment would be merit. Ministers' powers to list and reject candidates will be “severely curtailed” although they will retain powers to challenge JAC recommendations and keep responsibility for the final appointment of judges.

The commission would include five judges, two lawyers, one magistrate, one tribunal member and six lay people. The whole process will be overseen by a judicial ombudsman while discipline of judges will be the joint responsibility of the Constitutional Affairs Secretary and the President of the Courts.

The Constitutional Affairs Secretary will also be accountable to Parliament for administration of the courts and will have a “separate, specific duty” to defend judicial independence.

Last November, Lord Woolf said of plans to abolish the Lord Chancellor as a central pillar of the constitution, that the last time the judiciary had faced a threat of such magnitude was in the 17th century, when “a lot of judges lost their heads”.

The Case of the Enamored Juror (cont)

An update on the previously blogged matter of the plight of Richard Latham, QC, the advocate whose victory was threatened because a lovelorn juror sent him champagne: “A woman juror who sent a flirtatious note and a bottle of champagne to the prosecuting counsel after a serious fraud trial ended cannot be questioned about the incident, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday.”

That doesn't mean, however, that poor Mr. Latham is out of the woods. The question of whether there “might be grounds for arguing that there was 'an appearance of bias'” will “be considered further by the Court of Appeal in the spring,” albeit it seems without the benefit of the juror's testimony.

Against Primogeniture

I'm not just a chromosomal faux pas (may require registration): The second daughter of the Thane of Cawdor argues that it's time to abolish male-only primogeniture so that her older sister inherits the title instead of her younger brother. And of course she's right. If the Japanese can change their rules to allow an Empress, why can't the English change their rules to allow a châtelaine of Cawdor?

It is a strange anomaly. After all, western women are no longer closeted at home or deprived of formal education. We have suffrage, have embraced the freedom that divorce and contraception have given us, have fought for our countries. Primogeniture harks back to a time when rape charges were reduced if a victim was pretty and when wives were chattels.

As a child, I was oblivious to our family's internal hierarchy until, at the age of about 11, my mother told me in passing how she had been “so desperate” after my arrival that she had bought a pile of self-help books - titles such as How To Conceive A Baby Boy and Conception: Sex Determination Made Simple. She followed a salt-free, low potassium, iron-rich diet, all in an attempt to have a boy.

As it turned out, she was already pregnant with my brother. She laughed gaily about the silliness of it all, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I had had no idea that boys were the favoured sex.

It was also confusing to be given this information by another female; one who clearly thought that what she was saying was completely normal. But it was normal and remains so. I know few women living within the primogeniture system who oppose it. They are so steeped in male dominance that they uphold it unthinkingly.

As I reached my teens, my father began to reinforce my secondary status. He had a phrase he liked to repeat in the car. It was: “Your face is your only fortune, so strap your belt.” If I asked him what he meant, he would reply: “It was ever thus.”

When my father died, there was no reference to the existence of three daughters in his will. The omission was chilling. Here was a document composed by a man who had adored us but who also held that we were always superfluous to requirements.

…

In our culture, a woman joins her husband's family by adopting his surname. The underlying fear about not having a son is the demise of the family name, and therefore the family's very identity. Some families found a half-baked way around impending disaster by creating double-barrelled names. None of this palaver is necessary. A woman changing her name to her husband's is merely a convention, not a law.

If there is a change from primogeniture to ultimogeniture or cognatic primogeniture - when the first born inherits, regardless of sex - then there is nothing to stop a husband either changing his name to his wife's, or their children bearing her name rather than his. Men might shudder with horror at the idea, but they will get used to it. We did.

Currently, men can elevate women to their titles, but not the other way around. My brother's wife is now a countess, but as ladies our husbands remain misters (and my mister doesn't even remain a husband). If titles are desirable at all, this surely, can be reversed.

…

In 1999, the European Court of Human Rights rejected as inadmissible several appeals in Spanish cases where elder daughters argued that the preference to males in the transmission of noble titles was a violation of their human rights. The court held that “amending the rules of law to comply with the principle of the equality of the sexes would be to introduce anachronistic requirements into a practice moulded by history”.

I wonder if they would rule that female circumcision was “moulded by history”? My hope is that it was just badly translated and should have read “a practice mildewed by history”.

Someone is Assaulting Stephen Hawking?

It seems too grotesque to believe that someone would be repeatedly assaulting Stephen Hawking in his home, but police are investigating: Hawking's nurses questioned over 'assaults'. The evidence includes cuts and bruises observed on Hawking, but the alleged victim—paralyzed, brilliant, confined to a wheelchair and dependant on a voice box—is not cooperating with the investigation, which also sounds pretty odd.

Mark Your Calendar: Hutton Report Due Jan. 28

Date set for Hutton report. Due Jan 28. The Hutton report is the one that will speak to what role Tony Blair and his administration had in the death of David Kelly (much more like “Vince Foster” than the real Vince Foster….) and is also expected to go into the issue of the extent to which Blair and his crew went beyond the evidence to support their claim that it was necessary to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile, it seems Tony Blair is not very popular in Spain. Here's what Jose Bono, one of the three most powerful figures in the opposition Socialist Party said about him when he wasn't aware a camera was recording…

“Blair? He's a complete dickhead (un gilipollas integral). He's an imbecile.”

UK House of Lords Takes Lord Chancellor Hostage

Because there are so few committees in the British Parliament, and because the majority party enforces iron discipline on its members to make them vote for all of its proposals, British MPs have much less to do than their counterparts in, say, the US. As a result they turn up for debates, which are often entertaining (and result in there being I suspect more coverage of the UK debates on cable in the US than there is on TV in the UK….).

There's a whole industry of UK 'sketch writers' whose job it is every day that Parliament sits to produce an entertaining vignette of the day in parliament. It's often the most fun part of the daily paper, as Parliament has its share of eccentrics, and the writers also often have a good eye for the telling detail or the comedic analogy.

The House of Lords tends to get a more gentle treatment, although it is not exempt. And indeed, there's stuff going on there:

Telegraph | News | Commons sketch

Last June Mr Blair suddenly announced in a statement from Number 10 that, after 1,000 years or so, the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished as part of a vague upheaval of our judicial system.

One of the Lord Chancellor's duties had been to sit on the Woolsack as Lords Speaker. But Mr Blair indicated that the Lords now had to decide who did that. Then someone remembered that a Lords standing order, dating from 1660, said that the Lord Chancellor could only be absent from the Chamber for more than one day by permission of the Lords as a whole. The Tories were certainly not going to give permission. So they took the Lord Chancellor hostage, holding him on the Woolsack until the legislation abolishing him.

The captured man's name is Lord Falconer, a former flatmate of Mr Blair. Yesterday he looked as if he was well-fed and was being treated reasonably well. But the inactivity and boredom must be getting to him.

British Self-Deprecation Taken to an Extreme

Guardian Unlimited | Sweet smell of failure. The possible loss of the much-hyped (here, anyway) Beagle 2 Mars Explorer has caused some dark humor. This article is a particularly funny example of it.

It begins, “the stubbornly silent Mars probe Beagle 2 has reminded us what Britain does best: heroic failure….”

Honours and Honors: Why the UK's Honours System Is Under Attack, and What the US Can Learn From It

The British press, and thus the British political class, are all in a lather about the Honours system; as a result of a pair of leaks, there is decent chance that the system will be reformed. Below, I give a quick summary of how the system works, then summarize both the valid and the slightly peculiar aspects of the current criticisms of it, and then discuss what I consider to be the strong case in favor of a non-monetary system of reward and praise for those who contribute to the community.

The biggest difficulties surround the implementation of an honors program in a manner that would be constitutional, fair and not stultifying. I don't have the perfect answer to that, but I do have some suggestions.

The British Honours System

Twice a year, that is at New Years and on the Queen’s Birthday (which is not the Queen’s actual birthday, but never mind), Her Majesty’s Government publishes a list of more than a thousand persons who will be granted various honors, or rather honours. The honours vary enormously. There are a variety of purely military awards, but the majority of them are for civilians who are rewarded for meritorious service to the community in any of a very wide variety of fields including politics, science, arts (both classical and popular), starting with MBEs which are medals called the “Member of the British Empire”, then ranging up through OBEs “Order of the British Empire”, to CBEs (Commander of the British Empire). MBEs are commonly given to long-serving postmen and church wardens and worthy folk who are not part of the ‘great and the good’; a CBE might be given to someone active in local politics, or to a popular actor or singer. The big awards, knighthoods, also come in various flavors and orders and ranks. For the Order of the Bath, these ranks are known to the cognoscenti as KG’s, KCMGs GCMG’s. While these really stand for Knight (Bachelor) of the Garter, Knight Commander and Knight Grand Cross of the Garter, the joke among the civil service – which gets the lion share of the elevated knighthoods – is that these stand for “Call me God,” “Kindly Call me God,” and “God Calls Me God”. Knighthoods (or, if the recipient is female, being named a Dame) differ from the lower honours in that after the recipient kneels before the Queen, they arise renamed. For example if Ms. Edna Average were to be made a Dame, she’d legally be Dame Edna, on her passport, credit cards, and so on, from then on. (In fact, there sort of is a Dame Edna[LINK], but that’s another story. There are also two special, separate honours called the Order of Merit (OM) which is limited to 24 living recipients at any time, and the Companion of Honour (CH), which are even higher than knighthoods, but don’t work a change on the name of the recipient. The OM is unusual among the major honours in that the Monarch actually selects them herself; almost all other honours other than those for members of the Royal Family, foreign Royals, and the Queen’s household are selected by the government although granted in the Queen’s name.

It used to be that governments also handed out higher honours twice a year: peerages. Until a generation ago, peerages were inherited. Exactly what all the ranks are or were, I’ve never quite been sure I sorted out, but they included — in increasing order of precedence — Baronetcy, Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquis, Duke. A Baronetcy is not a true peerage as it gives the inheritable right to be called ‘Sir Something’ but doesn’t carry with it the right to sit in the House of Lords. Like ordinary knights the holder has the right to vote, and can sit in the House of Commons if elected to it. True Peers of the Real, the Barons and up, lose their vote, and indeed lose their surnames, became Lord Something of Somewhere. Until recently all peers became life members of the House of Lords.

As the anti-democratic nature of an inherited second chamber became more and more troubling to the increasingly democratic Britons, the powers of the upper house were lessened, and the institution of the ‘life’ (ie not-inheritable) peerage was instituted. For a while it looked as if inheritable peerages might be abolished by disuse, but in a criticized move, former Labour prime minister Harold MacMillan accepted an hereditary Earldom from Margaret Thatcher. It was said at the time that both the giver and the recipient wanted to revive the tradition of traditional peerages for former PM’s in order to provide for their somewhat feckless offspring. (Ironically, MacMillan’s son predeceased him.)

The current government having (somewhat reluctantly) reformed the House of Lords, peerages no longer guarantee a seat in the upper house. Although Tony Blair refused to accept an elected upper chamber, presumably because it might get in the way of the near-despotism available to a party that controls the Commons, the House of Lords has been cut down in size, and only those whom peers elect from among their number will have a vote in the reformed chamber, along with a small number of so-called people's peers and working peers traditionally selected by the political parties since the mid-20th century to represent their interests.

Current Leaks and Scandals

The current imbroglio over the UK’s honours system was fueled by two leaks one about people who refused honours offered to them, and another about the secret committees that pick the honourees. The tradition in Britain is that once the government decides to honour someone it contacts them in secret to find out if they willing; it’s considered very bad form to let on you are in line for an honour before the official announcement and people almost never do. Similarly, it’s considered very bad form to let on that you were offered something and turned it down. Indeed, the official line was that this almost never happens. But in fact, the first leak revealed that refusing honours was much more common than anyone outside they system would have guessed, as it appears that some 300 people, a veritable honour role of leading figures in the arts and sciences, have refused the offer of honours in the last 50 years. The motives varied; some, it seemed, might have refused the offer of a lower honour in the hopes of a higher one, or in the belief that the lower one was beneath their dignity (although receipt of a lower level honour does not preclude the later grant of a higher one, and this does happen, it’s relatively rare; a recipient may feel that the danger of it being the only one is too great). There’s a big difference between even a CBE and a knighthood.

Although the first leak got the most attention, the second leak was probably more damning, and in the long run more damaging than the first. It seems that in response to criticisms that the system three years ago the civil service commissioned a report about the means by which British honouree s are selected. The report concluded that the committees and sub-committees making the choices were dominated by civil servants, and stacked with white elderly males – only two of the 54 people holding 89 places on the committees (some served on more than one) were nonwhite, and only seven were female. They were thus unrepresentative of Britain.

In a classic Yes Minister moment, the Cabinet secretary (chief civil servant) who commissioned the report didn’t tell the Prime Minister about its existence or its conclusions on the absurd grounds that – and this is the liberal Guardian reporting this – he “saw no need to do so.” Now the report is out, and the press at least is baying for change. The coming review will likely at least modernize the names of the awards (getting rid of the “Empire” stuff) and shake up the membership of the committees. Whether a review chaired by the man who runs the current system will do anything more fundamental once the furore has died down, especially as it might result in fewer ‘gongs’ for civil servants is open to doubt.

The case for reform gets an extra kick from the story about Colin Blakemore, the head of the Medical Research Council (MRC). The job usually earns the hodler a knighthood, but it's alleged his was denied because the government thought that his defense of animal experiments made him too controversial [an alternate version of the story floating around is that Prince Charles made it clear he didn't want to have to 'shake hands with a vivisectionist'].

The Case for the Right Sort of Honors System

An honors system has always seemed to me to be a very cost-efficient way for a society to motivate, reward, and celebrate people. Experience suggests that altruism alone is insufficient to motivate all the good works that one might ideally desire. Economics teaches that people can be motivated by money, and indeed this is the heart of the capitalist system. Nevertheless, there are some things we might like to encourage which are hard to monetize, and others that would be expensive to monetize on a national basis. Furthermore, there may be some people who are better motivated by non-monetary rewards, and others whom we might like to celebrate and thank without necessarily brining money into the transaction.

The US does have a small number of civilian honors, such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We also do (private) awards for the arts and letters reasonably well, such as the Pulitzers and the National Book Awards. We probably overdo awards for popular entertainment, with Oscars and Tonys and Emmys and Clios and People’s Choices and many other things that produce bad TV that no one will ever admit to have watched.

Overall, however, we in the US lack a properly designed honors system — one with the right sort of values - a combination of democracy and elitism - rather than the clubby elitist sort found in the British system, and of course one without the legislative aspect of the House of Lords. The first George Bush alluded to this with his thousand points of light but even if that effort was sincere, it petered out. I first heard of the Points of Light Foundation when I searched for the Bush speach inventing the term.

At the most exalted levels, it’s clear that the desire for prizes and recognition provides an extra spur for some. Many biographies of leading scientists recount their awareness that being the first to make a particular discovery might lead the way to a Nobel Prize; and while it’s likely that most or all of them would have pursued their science wholeheartedly even if there were no Nobel, it probably adds intensity to some efforts. Surely there’s room for intermediate levels of awards between the corner office or the eminent chair on the one hand and the Nobel prizes on the other?

The need for an honors system may be even greater at the local level. To pick an example close to home, my kids sometimes a chess club hosted at a local library by Chris Stormont. Chris runs two chess clubs every Saturday, at two different libraries, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. He provides the chess boards, timers, a small amount of instruction, and a very wholesome atmosphere in which large numbers of kids from three to about twelve, sometimes fifteen, play chess. Chris volunteers his time, has done for years, and accepts no payment; he just does it for the love of the game, and to introduce it to children. It would be really nice if there were some established method by which we could thank him and celebrate his generosity both in gratitude and as a model for others. If we lived in England, I’d be writing in to recommend Chris for an MBE or something, but if there’s a US address I can write to for some equivalent recognition, I never heard of it.

Implementation Is (Almost) Everything

The biggest problem, however, is how to administer an honors system without falling prey to the opposed dangers of a purely politicized award (pace the recent award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to WSJ Editor Robert L. Bartley) or an over-bureaucratized and self-rewarding one as it appears the British have got.

Simply leaving the award in the hands of the President seems likely to make them too political, and to create a class of gifts that might flow disproportionately to campaign donors.

On the other hand, most systems by which we try to “take things out of politics” end up having problems of their own. Trying to set up an governmental commission independent of political pressure is difficult constitutionally, and remains open to capture of various sorts. Even more likely is establishment appointments and a tendency towards timidity, with the example of the Karen Finley grant controversy involving the National Endowment for the Arts fresh in appointees’ and appointers’ minds. Perhaps, though, some awards, at least the local ones, could be channeled through local Boards picked at random from the adult population of a community – that might lead to some interesting results.

Reliance on advice from professional peer groups also will tend to a fairly timid and establishment perspective, although it may remove some of the dangers of (party) political manipulation.

Lastly, allowing popular election like we do for the selection of some All-Stars has advantages, but also many disadvantages. Many will find it undignified, and be hurt if they lose, possibly causing more harm than good provided by the awards. And, popular vote works only for those who are in fields known to the public, and whose work is national is scope. Chris Stormont is never going to win a national ballot for an award, however deserving he may be.

I don’t think I have the perfect answer to this problem, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to construct some hybrid system which had some awards distributed in each fashion. Failing that, I’d say go fully random: have even the national selection committee be composed of at least a majority of randomly chosen citizens, and see what happens. People in my experience tend to rise to the occasions that they are given responsibility (think ‘juries’), and we might just be able to get a system we could be proud of.

The UK is Closed for Xmas (and Boxing Day)

It used to be that the whole of the United Kingdom more or less shut down from Christmas to New Years. More recently, the shutdown has been limited to just Christmas and Boxing Day (the 26th), but the shutdown remains pretty complete. Newspapers don't publish (before the Internet I used to get a pretty bad case of news deprivation). Trains don't run. At all. All stores are closed (which when you figure that most British fridges are pretty small, means that you actually have to plan your food purchases pretty carefully so you don't run out…).

Nowadays the shutdown is a little less complete. A number of the larger department stores open on Boxing Day for their big annual sales. Walking through Didsbury this morining I noted a small number of resturants that say they will open for dinner on Boxing Day. Some years the Independent has published a vestigal paper on the 26th. Some bus compannies will run a few buses. But it's still a country locked up pretty tight.

So we'll stay home and watch the kids play with their new presents.

UK Government to Archive Websites

The British government announces that it is going to create to encourage its depostiary libraries to create a massive web archive.

Websites get legal place in national archive:
Millions of website pages, online magazines and CDs will be saved for the nation under a private member's bill which became law last week.

Today, the MP who sponsored the bill predicted that Guardian Unlimited website pages would be preserved in the national archive.

The Legal Deposit Law puts the growing number of electronic publications on the same footing as printed newspapers, books and documents which have been collected by law since 1911 for the use of scholars by the British Library and five other deposit libraries.

The existing print legal deposit arrangements have enabled the British Library alone to collect and save, in perpetuity for the nation, more than 50 million items. In the past year, the library has acquired 95,286 books, 248,686 journal issues, 1,994 maps and 2,357 newspaper titles through legal deposit. But that is likely to be dwarfed by the scale of potential electronic deposits: a study last year forecast a massive increase in online publications, predicting a near quadrupling (from 52,000 to 193,000) in the number of electronic journal issues published in the UK between 2002 and 2005. There are nearly 3 million websites with “.uk” in their titles and although many are of merely passing interest, many will be fascinating to future historians - the websites that sprang up after the September 11 attacks but have not disappeared, for instance.

Chris Mole, Labour MP for Ipswich, who introduced the bill in December, said he was thrilled. “This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation's published heritage will be safe and accessible as an important resource for business and education users in the future.”

He said the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales; the University Library, Cambridge; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and Trinity College Library, Dublin, would have to use their judgment in “harvesting” websites and electronic publications.

…

Publishers have negotiated reassurances from government that they would not be forced to disclose valuable information free of charge - for example short life financial forecasts will not be made available for three months, by which time they will no longer be commercially valuable.

Apart from websites, important local and national government documents, such as the Home Office series of online-only research reports and web-based government consultation papers, which are an important resource for lawyers and researchers in tracing the origin of legislation, and the minutes of the National Assembly for Wales, will be archived.

UK Appoints First Female Law Lord

The judicial review committee of the House of Lords is the UK's highest court, except that it isn't technically a court. So, technically, that honor belongs to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales , which is why the Master of the Rolls, the head of the Court of Appeal, is the ranking judge in civil cases. The ranking judge in criminal cases is the Lord Chief Justice, which always makes me think of Gilbert and Sullivan. In Scottish criminal cases the highest court is the High Court of Justiciary. The High Court is a lower court than the Court of Appeal, although not the lowest court. And in all cases except those which go to the Judicial Committe of the Privy Council, the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords is, in effect, the UK's Supreme Court. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair intends to take the Judicial Committee out of the upper chamber (the Law Lords are really Lords and they sit in the House of Lords — and even participate in debates relating to some legal matters), and replace it with a separate Supreme Court.

Anyway, whatever you may call it, the amazing thing is that the Judicial Committee/House of Lords/Supreme Court has never had a woman among its members. Until now: 'Incisive judge' becomes first female law lord.

'bout time.

Dame Brenda Hale is one of the new breed of judges who did not slowly rise up through the barristerial ranks, being graded on her chap-ness, but instead spent most of her career as an academic. What's more, she wasn't part of the London legal mafia — she was Northern. A Yorkshirewoman who taught at Manchester no less.

In the same interview, for the Law Society's handbook Women in the Law, she said she had been “deeply affronted” by the assumption at judges' lodgings that, as a woman, she would retire to another room after dinner while the male judges remained for port and conversation. On one occasion she insisted that neither she nor her female guest, a young barrister, would withdraw.

I think their Lordships are in for a little shock.