Our Word is Our Weapon

In his speech today on crime, Tony Blair supplied us with further evidence that he might be about to lose the plot completely:

It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960’s revolution, that didn’t always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offender’s rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality. All through the 1970s and 1980s, under all Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility. The worst criminals became better organised and more violent. The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense. And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others. All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.

Even this brief extract is just choc-a-bloc with completely baffling statements. There’s this:

with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960’s revolution, that didn’t always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offender’s rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality.

This suggests that you can either focus on offender rights, protecting the innocent and understanding the social causes of criminality OR you can ensure that with freedom comes responsibility. Which is just bollocks.

Then there’s the next bit:

All through the 1970s and 1980s, under all Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility.

Why would you juxtapose these two propositions unless you wanted to imply a line of causation, i.e. trying to prevent miscarriages of justice causing people to enjoy freedom without responsibility?

Then he just goes bats:

The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense.

“Bungling but wrong-headed villains of old”???? Seriously, if anyone can provide a rational explanation for what he’s on about here I’d love to hear it. But it’s also rather chilling that he follows this entertaining bit of lunacy by casually remarking that people involved with drugs have no “residual moral sense”. Making them animals, really.

In tomorrow’s press, most attention will probably be focused on the deteriorating mental state of the Leader, and that is a shame, because there are several aspects to Labour’s crime policy that I actually agree with. More money for drug treatment and youth inclusion programmes, for example. I think the jury’s still out on community wardens but they can be effective. More tagging instead of prison is probably a good thing, as is more support for witnesses and victims of crime.

All of these could potentially make positive differences, which is more than you can say for TB’s confused intervention. He needs to go sit in the corner for a while and let the others get on with the job of running the country.

It seems churlish to have such mixed views about the announcement of much more international aid from the UK Government over the next few years. It’s a lot more money, but it’s not much in comparison to the size of the problem or amounts spent elsewhere. It’s good to have a timetable of sorts to reach the UN target of 0.7% of national income being spent on aid, but it’s too slow - by the time we get there in about 2013, thousands will have died needlessly because we chose to do it so gradually.

It’s a very good thing that Labour are increasing aid spending like this - and the Tories would probably spend much less. But it’s a sign of the times that we have to feel so grateful to the government for spending such a comparatively tiny amount on the biggest challenges facing the world. So let’s try to keep our sense of proportion.

I’ve kept myself amused the past couple of days by defending the idea of social housing against the readers of the Adam Smith Institute blog, which is written by the kind of people who worry that Blue Peter promotes communism. It’s been fun, because the subject of housing shows up quite clearly the complete inadequacy of economic libertarian doctrine. Feel free to join in, but be nice with your comments: for such fervent liberty-lovers, they’re a bit keen on censoring people, even for simply pointing out that some of their contributors are idiots.

Great news! Cornershop are back, and judging by this interview in the Guardian, they are as surly and uncooperative as ever. Hopefully the new single ‘Topknot’ is an improvement on the last album, which was a bit rubbish really.

That is all.

Ask a neoliberal economist why some countries are stuck in poverty and they’ll probably give you some waffle about how these countries just haven’t learnt to really embrace free markets or are scared of globalisation, or something along those lines. This is a good reason why you shouldn’t listen to neoliberal economists.

Ask a structuralist economist the same question and they might actually give you a good answer. Charles Gore is an example of a very good structuralist economist, and his paper here on the international poverty trap is well worth reading. It includes the following diagram of the poverty trap (click for a larger, more readable version):

The only disadvantage being that it’s a little less catchy than just saying that Africans hate freedom.

The Chronic Poverty Centre has just published a Chronic Poverty Report, which measures chronic poverty as the amount of people who spend most or all of the time in destitution, i.e. on an income of less than $1 a day. It’s interesting stuff, but one thing really grabs the attention: this map (click for a larger version) of chronic poverty around the world, where a country’s size represents its number of chronically poor, and it’s shade the proportion of the whole population who are chronically poor.

The chronic poverty report looks pretty interesting, and there are masses of background papers available here and here.

The map shown above is only a preliminary version, as it’s based on only a few dozen full country datasets. However, it would be perfectly possible to do a similar map for ordinary $1-a-day poverty, as the World Bank has those figures for most countries in the world. Any volunteers?

I’ve removed all comments from the site for now*, as I’m finding it hard to access the server in order to install the anti-spam Movable Type plugins required. Once that happens, I’ll delete all the spam comments (approx. 1700) and reinstate the genuine ones (approx. 50). In the meantime, if you want to contact me, email me on: james at vinyltest dot co dot uk.

*Yes, I know there’s still a ‘Comments’ link at the end of each post, but it leads to a blank page.

While I was on holiday my blog was hit with over a thousand spam comments, some of which manage to be both meaningless and obscene. I’ve blocked all new comments and am working on deleting the backlog.

One of the papers from the WIDER conference mentioned earlier is “Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Iraq” by Almas Heshmati. It’s got lots of details on the present situation in Iraq and it reconstruction needs. Towards the back there’s a few charts, and one which particularly caught my eye was this, comparing trends in infant mortality in Iraq and several of its neighbours (Iraq is the pink line - click for the full-sized version).

Looks like the combination of bombings, sanctions and Saddam in the 1990s had devestating consequences, almost tripling the infant mortality rate in Iraq, previously one of the best performaing countries in the region.

Also interesting is another graph, showing Iraq with 39% adult illiteracy, much higher than other countries in the region. I’m quite surprised, as I was under the impression that Iraqis were comparatively well educated - a glance at UNICEF’s statistics confirms that (if we take literacy as the basic measure of education) I was completely wrong.

Someone pointed me towards this page on a conference that took place last month in Helsinki on “Making Peace Work”. Most of the papers are available online, and they’re an interesting lot. These two were particularly eye-catching:

-“An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators of Genocide”, by Philip Verwimp:

Our results show that age, sexe, the sex of the head of the household, the size of rented land, personal off-farm income, gross household income and farm-level anti-erosion investment significantly determine the probability of a household member to become a perpetrator of genocide … Peasant participation in genocide may be understood as complex behaviour whereby poor people expected to gain something, but in addition hoped to preserve what they already had.

-“Is the international community helping to recreate the pre-conditions for war in Sierra Leone?”, by Joseph Hanlon:

“In a very real sense, the conditions that spawned the war and inflicted gruesome casualties on Sierra Leone’s citizens have not disappeared,” warned the International Crisis Group. In this paper we argue that many of those conditions are being recreated. The same old men who were responsible for the war are still in power, both in government and in a reinstated chieftaincy system, and corruption is still endemic, while young people remain jobless and largely uneducated. Further, we argue that the policies of the international community are, perhaps inadvertently, promoting a return to pre-war conditions.”