Questions on the EU referendum

This morning, questions were invited by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, to be addressed in a future programme.  I supplied the following, and may well use them for similar purposes elsewhere.

Question 1

Everybody is asking what would happen after we leave the EU, but the period of years between a vote to Leave and the agreement of a new relationship would have economic impact.  This is probably more predictable, being closer in time and mostly a matter of unncertainty.  What projections can you make about what we might call the Brinterim?

(Michael Gove has said he doesn't see us leaving the EU "this parliament" and the House Of Lords report on the subject agrees it would be a long and complicated process.)

Question 2

Is it not true that, as a matter of international law, the UK could not make trade agreements with any other country until we finalised an agreement with the EU and were no longer a member?  Wouldn't some prospective partners in any case want to see what arrangements we made with the EU, to understand what kind of deal they could make with us themselves?

Question 3

Is it not true that, as a matter of international law, any unilateral attempt to restrict immigration from the EU (and other unilateral measures) could be declared unacceptable?  It would also change the stance taken by EU negotiators.

Letter to my MP - unaccompanied child refugees

I must express my concern at your vote against the Dubs amendment to the Immigration Bill, which attempted to commit the government to taking a share of the unaccompanied child refugees currently languishing in various locations across Europe.  The figure of 3000 such children has been proposed by Save the Children since at least last summer, and at least the same number of unaccompanied children is still recorded by charities despite large numbers having apparently disappeared, perhaps abducted for who knows what purposes.

The repeated wheeling out of the "pull factors" argument horrifies me.  It means that those children who have already travelled into EU countries, wherever they come from and whatever they are fleeing, must not be helped for fear of encouraging others to travel.  Their fate is irrelevant.  They must stay in the mud of the camps, at the mercy of illness, violence and gangs, in the service of this "greater imperative".

The UK government has rightly, and to its great credit, spent large sums on supporting refugee camps around Syria, and tried to enlist other countries to make similar provision.  But our attitude to those who, for whatever reason, have travelled westwards seems to be that they must be punished for their foolish decisions, or the foolish decisions of their parents.

I can only hope that you will think again when Lord Dubs' second amendment arrives in the Commons.  I would be ashamed if this country's policy continues to be that these people should just go away.

Letter to my MP - home office powers in the context of the EU referendum

In the run up to the EU referendum it is important that we operate as far as possible on the basis of factual information, which is not always easy.

I note from Baroness Neville-Jones's piece in the Guardian last Friday that about 6000 non-British EEA nationals have been turned away from our borders on security grounds since 2010.

On the other side, the Vote Leave campaign tells us today that 50 people with previous convictions have committed serious crimes while in the UK.  I assume that both these claims are fundamentally true.

In his statement following the European Council on 19 February the prime minister told us that he (and Theresa May I think) had negotiated:

1. new powers to stop criminals from other countries entering the UK, and to deport them if they are already here
2. longer re-entry bans for fraudsters and people who collude in sham marriages
3. powers to prevent EU nationals avoiding British immigration rules when bringing their families from outside the EU.

I have found it difficult to find any further information on these new powers, and would be grateful if you could help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Calling myself to arms

Yesterday on his weekly LBC self-promotion (with a relatively youthful Michael Crick standing in for David Mellor) Ken Livingstone pronounced on the Labour campaign to Remain in the European Union.  About the most positive thing he said was that Alan Johnson, "Labour's most popular man", was on the job.

Ignoring for now the implications of that throwaway label, just note that it was all he had to say about the campaign as such.  But "where is it?" demanded Crick.  Anyone who's bumped into Johnson as he tours the country, or found a lonely handful of leafleters in a shopping centre somewhere might have noticed that Labour is running a campaign, but for many of us it's just the occasional media interview with Johnson himself or some random Labour MP who's clearly not devoted much time to the question.

The other insights I got from Livingstone before I turned off in exasperation were:

1. he thinks the EU is pretty useless but we should stay in to improve it (probably using the "Make it so" method of those who can criticise at the drop of a hat but have nothing but slogans to replace the various evils they identify)
2. he reminded us that there are more pressing votes before 23 June, and that Labour will turn its attention across the Channel after 5 May (when they will be celebrating/lamenting their results in English councils, Scotland, Wales and London) and "get the core vote out".

Before clicking the off switch I tweeted

Your core vote, Mr Livingstone, isn't big enough to win the referendum, and a third of them are talking to UKIP anyway. @lbc

— Ed Wilson (@eddwilson) March 26, 2016

Three months to go before the referendum, and I see a Remain campaign presented by Tories who otherwise don't deserve support and minor figures who are either unprepared or so obviously public relations types that they deserve to be ignored.

Grassroots Out was reported yesterday to have spent £7 million already (spending is not properly controlled until the regulated 10-week campaigning period.  This is a grassroots organisation of people who only really care about this referendum.

There's still a good chance of legal battles when one of the rival Leave organisations is designated as the lead campaign, but it's time people like me did something useful rather than just moaning about the pitiful inadequacy of Ken Livingstone's "core vote strategy".

What country do I live in?

2016 sees events in Ireland and elsewhere to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, the first of a series of events which shaped the country I live in, not least by making it rather smaller.

This is also the year of a referendum which the prime minister has presented as a choice between a "great Britain in the European Union" and a "great leap in the dark".

It's hardly surprising, then, that I find myself thinking about the country I live in.

David Cameron's image of a great Britain (and his invocation of a "greater Britain" at last year's Conservative party conference) plays with the idea of Great Britain, but that is not actually the name of the country.

Great Britain came into being at the union of Scotland and England (which had incorporated Wales since the 13th century) and then was subsumed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  Today's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland came into being in 1922, and is therefore not yet 100 years old.

But what is our nationality?  Not UKish but British.  This includes Northern Ireland, which isn't part of Great Britain, but not Ireland (which is part of the British Isles, but let's not go there).  And Britain is often used as shorthand for the UK - more acceptable, perhaps, for the non-royalists among us - though some in Northern Ireland bridle at that while still considering themselves British.

Confusing, aren't we?

In sport we see Team GB (the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team), the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board), an Irish Rugby Football Union which covers both the Republic and Northern Ireland and a Great Britain tennis team which this time does exclude Northern Ireland (but competed under the name British Isles, including all of Ireland, until 1912).

In football the four "home nations" of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a team, while the Six Nations rugby union competition also features four "home nations" but this time Ireland is the whole island.

Foreigners often refer to the country as Great Britain, which annoys many in Northern Ireland and some in Scotland, or England, which should annoy everybody.  The "Queen of England" often features in American reports (and they have their own problems, since some Canadians still hold out against the equation of "America" and "USA").

We seem to delight in adding to the confusion.  There's the mining company Anglo American (founded in South Africa) and various Anglo-Irish agreements (which certainly apply to the whole United Kingdom with the Republic).

With devolution of some governmental powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland over the last 20 years a new chapter has opened.  England is wondering where and what it is.  Some polls find majority support for an English parliament, which leaves the UK parliament worried about what it would do.

This asymmetrical state is symbolised in sport. When the anthems are played at an England v Scotland football match, one side sings Flower of Scotland and the other God Save the Queen, which is also the national anthem of Scotland (Peace! You know what I mean.).  Another of the periodic outbursts of campaigning is underway to adopt an English anthem - Jerusalem in this case - though many traditionalists harrumph at the very idea.

We really ought to sort ourselves out.

And what do we call ourselves?  I'm British, but I am a... what?  The word "Brit" is often heard, but it's rather informal.  The obvious answer is "Briton", but that rarely escapes from ancient history.  It remains the obvious answer though.

And if we are Britons, what else?  We talk about the British Pakistani community (for example) while in the USA they have Pakistani Americans.  The "American" is the person, and "Pakistani" indicates a subgroup of Americans.  We could refer to Pakistani Britons, Italian Britons etc.  What effect might that have on the sore topics of multiculturalism and integration?

For now, let's just count the options we have for celebrating so many countries' sporting successes as our own.

Was Today trying to tell us something?

The top headline for the Today programme on 11 March was that the Archbishop of Canterbury believes it is not racist to be concerned by high levels of immigration.  In the news bulletins that headline was supplemented by other points from the archbishop's interview with House magazine, such as the need for a Europe-wide response to the migrant crisis, the inadequacy of the current response, that the UK should take its share of refugees and that the government's proposed 20,000 in four years looks "very thin".

The overall impression of the story, however, reinforced by repetition of the headline several times an hour, was that fear is a reasonable response to large migration flows and that it is "absolutely outrageous" to label such a response racist.

I agree with every point quoted in the programme, but they make up a small part of the whole (the interview may be found at the archbishop's own site), and the headline about fear being reasonable and not racist makes up a small part of that small part.

Iain Duncan Smith then came on for the 8:10 interview and ventured into the same subject area as he presented his case for leaving the EU.  I will not dwell here on the content of that interview, though I thought he sailed through quite easily with little interrogation.  My concern is with the last two minutes of the programme.

At approximately 08:58:22, John Humphrys repeated the "fear is not racist" headline yet again, then introduced without comment a clip from Iain Duncan Smith's interview.  I cannot remember such a pay off to the programme before, and can only assume that listeners were supposed to go away with that message ringing in our ears.

Complaints about BBC bias are frequent, and I do not agree with all of them at all, but I can see this particular item in no other way.


[I have sent this as a letter to the Radio 4 Feedback programme, and will copy it to others.]

Letter to my MP - Google's tax deal

I am concerned by the deal between HMRC and Google which was announced this weekend. It is hard to believe that the UK has come out well from the negotiations.

Google's position throughout has been that it pays all the tax it is bound to.  Matt Brittin, President of Business and Operations in Europe, is quoted by the BBC as saying "We were applying the rules as they were and that was then and now we are going to be applying the new rules, which means we will be paying more tax".

If Google was really applying the "rules as they were" then no back tax is due, yet the settlement includes a payment of £130 million for taxes owed since 2005. This is obviously inconsistent, and does not make me confident that the result of the negotiations has been presented honestly.

Then again, is £130 million the right sum?   Tax specialist Jolyon Maugham does not think so.  He calculates that £200 million would be appropriate for 2014 alone, and doubts that the company's tax payments in future years will be acceptable, since the company organisation allows it to report different earnings in the UK accounts and in those it presents to Google's investors.

The deal is criticised across the political spectrum, with Mark Garnier MP of the Treasury select committee observing that the agreement represents a "relatively small" amount of money compared with Google's UK profits.

George Osborne describes the deal as a "victory" but Robert Peston of ITV puts it more sophisticatedly.  The critics "may well have natural justice on [their] side; whereas Osborne may have done as well as any Chancellor could, given the power of global companies to move their homes to minimise their tax liabilities".

I would be interested in your views, because I suspect that many voters will join me in taking the "natural justice" position.

A short letter to my MP

Yesterday the prime minister called MPs who are not convinced by his proposal to bomb Syria "terrorist sympathisers".  In so doing he has applied the same label to millions of people in the UK who are also unconvinced.  I ask you to request that he withdraw this slur on the character of a large part of the British people.

Letter to my MP, trying not to be just angry

I share the concern voiced in many quarters that proposed reductions in tax credits are unfair and will have serious negative effects on a large number of working people.  When even the Sun raises its voice in opposition the government surely cannot ignore the many objections raised.

When Gordon Brown introduced tax credits it was against a background of punishingly low wages.  (I knew a security guard who worked a 72-hour continuously on-duty weekend shift to be not a very rich man at all.)  And, so that employers did not simply leave it to the government to pay their workforce, the minimum wage came in alongside.

Over the years since then the appalling administration of tax credits has improved, and real time information has made it far more workable, but the amount paid out under this heading has increased significantly, as ministers of your government never tire of reminding us.  Partly it was government policy to increase coverage, but much of the difference may be due to changes in the way the British economy works, with employers increasingly relying on the state to keep their workers alive despite the original intentions.

I therefore agree that a rebalancing is desirable, with employers becoming responsible for a greater proportion of wages paid.  Apart from anything else it would bring a greater degree of honesty to the world of employment.

The chancellor's declared intention to raise the minimum wage significantly over the next five years is therefore welcome, though his decision to restrict this rate to workers of 25 and above is unreasonable.  Such a series of pay rises could sensibly be matched by reductions in tax credits, so that workers in a particular low-paid position in 2020 would be in effectively the same position as those in 2015, but with employers taking a greater responsibility for their earnings.

The chancellor's decision to label this increased minimum wage a "national living wage" is unfortunate and misleading since, as you will know, the Living Wage Foundation's 2015 pay rate is much higher than the proposed "national living wage" for April 2016 and their 2015 London rate is already around the level that Mr Osborne has indicated for his country-wide hourly rate in 2020.

Most disturbing, however, is that the plan is not to withdraw tax credit payments in parallel with this healthy upward nudge in minimum pay rates.  Instead, the entire reduction is to be done in one go, and in year 1.  Many people, including obviously select committee chairs, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation (now headed by Lord Willetts, who knows the insides of a Conservative-led government) have pointed out the significant reductions in income that these cuts represent for millions of working people at the lower end of the earning range.  

How these developments will fit in with other government policies will be interesting to observe.  The ongoing (under-25) minimum wage, for example, is now the basis for a continuously rising income tax personal allowance.  Also, with public sector pay intended to be held to minimal increases over coming years what effect will the "national living wage" have on those at the bottom of government-controlled pay scales?

The Living Wage Foundation is expected to announce its updated Living Wage within the next few weeks, with further announcements in subsequent years.  Since the calculation takes account of tax credits, it can be expected to jump significantly above the current figures.  I have seen several ministers over the last year or so, proudly announcing that their department pays no member of staff less than the current Living Wage.  Will we be seeing a succession of ministers proclaiming their determination to continue to keep up with the real Living Wage, or will things go quiet?

I hope that you will consider my letter and, no doubt, many others and use your good offices to help convince the chancellor that it is not too late to revise his policy so as to avoid the widespread suffering which at present seems unavoidable.

My memory may be unreliable, but that's not because it exists

Michio Kaku was on the radio this morning with that old chestnut, the idea of storing our memories electronically and recalling them at a later time.  He talked about being able to converse with a person long dead, and looked forward to maintaining a Library of Souls.

Now, I have no doubt at all that we can look forward to wonderful advances in observation and analysis of brain function (some but not all of which, Professor Kaku, could be called "thinking"), and that certain structures of brain impulses might be reconstructable from stored representations.  But I'm not convinced that something called "my memory" actually exists.

Michio Kaku has serious credentials in theoretical physics and can be very stimulating when he applies his mind to other areas.  He's a populariser of science but he tends towards the sensational and has been accused of weird mysticism.

I have a memory. It goes something like this.

I'm in a bus, an express bus, from London to somewhere in the north - probably Chorley or Preston, maybe Wigan.  I'm with my girlfriend, but I don't know which one.  And I'm sitting towards the back, on the left of the aisle.

There's nothing visual, except what I can fill in generally about what sitting in a bus is like - no colours, no movement inside, no scenery outside.  It was probably pretty full.

A woman is on the back seat, on the right hand side, with two children, probably both between her and the side window.  One is little - two? three? - and the other is older, a boy (I think) of sevenish.  I think I register them because there's more audible talking in that corner - trying to keep them under control and maybe interested on a long journey.

There's a squeaking of brakes.  It must come from our bus because it happens more than once.  Then there's a squeal from the younger child, and another.  The woman tries to hush him/her but fails.  The squealing continues, then the older one picks it up and starts squealing back.  The woman isn't happy, but eventually (I have no idea how or when) it stops.

The main part of the memory is my thinking and emotions at the time.  I realise that the small child is responding to the brakes, being at an age when sound input is of huge importance and the mind is working to make sense of it and produce answers (I am, or recently have been, a linguistics student at the time).  The older child is certainly responding to the younger, and might possibly have worked out what's going on and that they share a new way to annoy mother.

I'm pleased with myself for identifying these connections, and probably tell my girlfriend.

Also attached to the memory is a doubt, a worry that I've got the wrong end of the stick, that I'm making up the whole analysis out of nothing.

I've told this at some length, because I want to consider what this "memory" is.  The episode has no meaning to me without my pride in a small intellectual achievement.  Without that the bus ride would probably have faded completely, along with hundreds and thousands of others.  On the other hand, if someone said "Remember when you went to X?", other parts of the journey might suddenly come back, with or without the knowledge that those two children were travelling with me.

****

We don't store everything that comes into our eyes, ears etc.  We don't retain every fleeting emotion.  We couldn't, or we'd be full up and useless well before school age.

We select what to see (as is demonstrated beautifully by the Monkey Business Illusion) and we select what we remember (otherwise I'd be able to recall the sound of every keystroke I've used to type this short piece - I'd go mad).  Above all, we reconstruct memories when we retrieve them.  It's not just a matter of pressing Play and giving over body and mind to reliving a certain number of seconds from the past.

My bus memory is a single thing, not a period of time replayed.  I don't remember it as five minutes of nothing much, punctured by a few sounds and a flash of inspiration.

Of course we don't always retain what might be useful in later life, and we also sometimes store more than we ever realise (if somebody gives you the right prompt, you might be able to spout large amounts of what you learned at school, or remember an old friend who hasn't come to mind for decades).

And whether and how we remember something depends on our state at the time.  Am I stressed or relaxed?  Am I with somebody who prompts a memory or someone who should never hear what is suddenly clamouring to be let out?

"Remembering" is a process of construction. The story doesn't always come out the same, and sometimes the process of telling a memory might change what is associated with it, so that it's different next time you tell it (see my feeling of doubt above, which was probably added some years after the day itself).  And sometimes we remember things that didn't happen that way (consider newsman Brian Williams' recent bout of false memory).

How then, Professor Kaku, do you propose to upload, store and reproduce "my memory"?  And how might you converse with something which contains lots of information (or at least data) but has no current sensory and intellectual state and no reason to construct memories for your satisfaction?

As Brian walked deeper into the caves, I saw...

Belatedly catching up on Brian Cox's Human Universe (I got rather annoyed with the first two, but I'll write about that another time) I came to episode 5

We started in the El Castillo caves of Cantabria, Spain, which I rapidly remembered as one of the oldest cave art sites in the world.  Prof Cox described the caves' usefulness for shelter and safe haven, then took us on.  As he walked into the darker corridors I knew we were going to see bison and other animals on the walls and wonder at the dedication and perhaps belief that had led to their painting.

As Brian walked deeper into the caves, I saw...

The cave art was just round the corner, but what do you see?

I know this is pareidolia, but spooky, don't you think?