US-style primaries will never work in the UK

I wrote the following in response to an article in the First Post by Daniel Hannan MEP entitled: 'The primary reason MPs don’t listen to the voters' which can be read at http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45945,opinion,the-primary-reason-mps-dont-listen-to-voters.

Today, I write in praise of Mr Hannan and his well-written piece advocating the introduction of US-style primaries for the election of our own MPs here in the UK. However, as much as I agree with his criticisms of the government's proposals to make Parliament more representative, I must confess that I don't believe replicating US-style primaries in the UK would ever work for the simple reason that US-style elections require US-style political systems.

Anybody who votes in a general election does so, with the odd exception of course, with the intention of deciding who they want to run their country. In the US people directly elect their President; in the UK, the Prime Minister is chosen by the party with the most seats in Parliament. And whilst it is foolish to pretend that the party to which a presidential nominee belongs in America, and the person who leads their party in the UK, are of no consequence, it still holds that the 2008 US election was between Barack Obama and John McCain and that the next general election in the UK will be between Labour and the Conservatives.

Also, as attractive as primaries may appear in principle -and indeed I do envy the time and opportunity American voters are given to grill their candidates for office- they are by no means perfect. Having to get elected twice means having to campaign twice and campaigning costs money. The more money a politician needs to fund their campaign, the more likely they are to sell their soul -or at least some political favours - to rich people on fancy yachts. As a result, whilst Daniel Hannan may champion primaries in the US as giving power to the people, the vast sums needed to run a meaningful campaign end up giving far more power to industry leaders, tycoons and pressure groups than ordinary Joe Public.

Although state-funding for political parties would go some way to rectifying this, US-style primaries do still raise the question: what kind of democracy suits us best? A more representative democracy of the sort we currently have in Britain is immensely valuable because it allows the electorate to choose a person or a party whose general outlook and value systems they most agree with, whilst allowing those elected the freedom to make informed decisions on important national issues even if they defy popular opinion - the death penalty being a good example. Tilting the balance towards the more direct style of democracy that primary contests engender, however, can lead to legislative gridlock, as it often does in the United States, with elected representatives more concerned about re-election than governing in the national interest.

The only viable argument for introducing primaries in the UK is that it could increase voter turnout by giving people more of a stake in their chosen candidate, as Hannan himself says. Yet when the Conservatives tried this for the London Mayoral elections, an election far more suited to US style primaries precisely because Londoners were being asked to vote for the person, not the party, they most wanted to run their city, only 20,000 people in a city of 10m turned out to vote. On top of that, they had to pay £1 a minute for the luxury of registering to vote by phone and had to be Conservative supporters, although I have no idea whether they had to have membership cards on the ready to prove it. Their guy might have won, but I don't feel like democracy in London has been particularly enriched in the process.

As for Harriet 'half-baked' Harman's proposals for women only shortlists and ethnic minority quotas, I can't think of any nobler plan more likely to backfire spectacularly. Whilst I completely agree that Parliament should be more demographically representative, I also believe that distinguishing our candidates for poltical office by their gender or the colour of their skin only serves to undermine sexual and racial equality. As Barack Obama has proved, a gifted person destined for high office will get there regardless of their skin colour and will open more minds than any number of ethnic minority politicians who had their positions handed to them on a plate.

Private security or public safety?

I phrase this blog post as a question as I have begun to worry, particularly this week, that it is impossible to have both public safety and private security at the same time. I mean this in reference only to street crime; not always the most serious type of crime, but certainly the most prevalent and most commonly experienced.

In theory the safety of our streets, provided for us by the police service, (public) should be enough to secure the safety of our homes, our cars and other property as well as our families (private). In reality of course, limited police resources restrict them to a more reactive role and no matter how fast they respond to a 999 call, more often than not they arrive too late.

So eventually, after the third or fourth burglary or maybe just one truly harrowing assault, we look to other means of protecting ourselves. We use state of the art technology for our homes and cars, security firms to patrol our roads, and perhaps even hand-held weapons to defend ourselves and our families.

This was precisely the context of the congregation of tired and frightened neighbours I observed on Monday night. Approximately 50 of us turned up to the attractive mini mansion owned by our gracious host, himself a victim of several burglaries. He had invited us there to hear Peter Williams, who runs a private security firm called London Community Services, pitch to us his firm's private security package, by his own admission the most expensive of those offered by all security services in north London.

Mr Williams was a large gentleman whose default expression was 'hard-arse'. Running a security firm seemed like a natural progression for him, probably from being a pub bouncer and school bully before that. After all this was a man who had retired Ghurkas working for him. In fact they, he boasted, were the reason his firm was so expensive - apparently no-one is better placed to guarantee the safety of your children than a gang of short, angry Asian men with broken English and a chip on their shoulder.

In any case his pitch was terrible. It amounted to him telling us that we must buy into his security scheme after admitting that he thought it would never work when originally approached by our caped crusader neighbour; telling us that he could stop and prevent criminals from terrorising our road even though his team of militias had no more legal authority to detain them than any of us; promising his state of the art alarms, linked up to his HQ, would be more effective than calling the police and then explaining that if one were to go off his team's response would be...to call the police.

The highlight of his performance was when he told us that he could offer an escort service (no not the kind you're thinking of) for anyone walking home in the dark, but that the escort would under no circumstances be allowed out of his patrol van, nor the 'client' allowed in, and would be absolutely forbidden to converse with the 'client' in any way shape or form. That's like a real escort service charging£1000 for a handshake. Incidentally, £1000 per year per person was the estimated cost given for providing the service for 60 people on one stretch of road.

Yet, there was still vocal support for the scheme amongst the audience as they shared the trauma they had suffered, such as the woman who had been pinned to the ground and mugged on her doorstep or the man who woke up in the middle of the night to find a burglar in his front room. Simply by recalling their own harrowing experiences to an already fearful audience, they did a much better of job of selling Mr Williams' service than Mr Williams himself.

Nevertheless, questions came from all corners of the floor, none of which were particularly well received or dealt with. The lowest moment for Williams was when he silenced the room after snapping at a "dissenter" that she should buy her son a stab jacket for his 16th birthday if she didn't like his service. Eventually I managed to get my question in and I asked him if he thought that a private security service for the few who could afford it would convince the police they were no longer needed and jeopardise the safety of those who couldn't. He laughed this off, mocking me for suggesting that the police had ever ventured down our way to begin with (they had and they still do if but very occasionally).

The point was still valid though. In fact he took several minutes to stress to the questioner before me that his team would alter their patrol routes, quite drastically if necessary, to avoid even passing households who weren't paying for their services.

Now the Metropolitan Police, quite understandably, allocate their resources based on local crime stats that identify trouble-spots. Fortunately for me, my area is no Gotham City; statistically, crime is low - or at least lower than the other surrounding areas - the very reason why so few police turn up to patrol it already. So, it does not seem unreasonable to fathom that they may stop bothering at all if they see street crime fall by a few percent. That's assuming the ridiculously expensive private patrol service actually works of course, for which there is no guarantee.

But what if it does work and keeps the rest of us none paying scroungers safe by association; what happens then? Mr Williams' best guess was that the crime that once plagued our street would move over to the next and make a new bunch of unsuspecting residents miserable and afraid. That didn't seem to bother him though, whereas at least even the most ardent supporters amongst the audience expressed some remorse about it (although understandably if forced to choose between the safety of their family and someone else's, it would be no contest). I couldn't get over the thought though that we wouldn't simply be profiting out of the hardship of our distant neighbours (if the criminals are over there, they're not over here) but that we would be indirectly causing it.

I'm still convinced there's a better way though: setting up a voluntary neighbourhood scheme for example, informed by the Met's own publicly available crime maps of each road in London; setting up a security committee comprised of members of local residents' associations which would liaise with the Safer Neighbourhoods Panel and the wardens of the local estates on a regular basis; and organised lobbying of the local council for better security systems for council housing and better street lighting. A large role for the council is particularly crucial, as we enter our first recession in almost two decades, if the causes of crime, crucial to any long term solution, are to be addressed too.

These are just ideas from off the top of my head. They could be rubbish, but I think they're at least a start. Bottom line is until we recognise that we each have a stake in each other's safety and that we must be prepared to take some responsibility for ensuring it by working together, rather than leaving it all to a skeletal police service or toothless vigilantes, the private security/public safety paradox will never be broken.

My Ethical Dilemna

This week marks the opening of the infamous Dr Gunther von Hagens exhibition: 'Body Worlds and the Mirror of Time', a collection of carefully preserved corpses whose bodies have been skinned and filled with a plastic that allows them to be shaped into a range of poses. The exhibition appears to be part science part art in aim, educating visitors on the ins and outs of the human body (such as how a diseased lung after a lifetime of smoking looks in its natural habitat) in a way only medical students are normally privvy to, whilst fostering a new appreciation of human anatomy in all its glory.

There is a reason, however, why Dr von Hagens' reputation is one of infamy, why he was only reluctantly allowed to put on his exhibition in London and why across Europe he is known as 'Dr Death' and, in his own native Germany, as Dr Mengele. The bodies von Hagens uses are at the centre of the controversy; bodies' whose background stories the Doctor prefers to say as little about as possible as he doesn't want any 'human' stories to detract from appreciation of the anatomy on show. He insists that every single one of them has been legitimately donated to science, but his detractors say different.

In 2004, German magazine Der Spiegel published an expose on von Hagens, whose laboratories are based in China and Kyrgyzstan and whom German authorities refused to recognise as a professor because he qualified for the title in the Far East. They accused him of using the bodies of Chinese political prisoners and aborted foetuses, victims of the regime's one-child policy, as well as of buying the bodies of the homeless and mentally ill from Russia with the added charge of not even consulting their relatives beforehand. The end result of the subsequent investigations, two years after his exhibition first came to the UK, was that von Hagens was forced to return several corpses to China after admitting they 'may have been' executed prisoners.

The public reaction, mirrored in the press has naturally been quite polarised. The anatomist's critics were quick to leap on the revelations to qualify their initial revulsion at the exhibition whilst his supporters defended him as an open minded pioneer of progress whose achievements could be used to gain a whole new understanding of the human body.

These reactions pretty much sum up my own mixed feelings towards the exhibition. On the one hand, how fascinating it must be simply to see other humans in this form; to study an Alzeihmers ridden brain not from a book or TV show, but from within the very skull it was encased all along; to see the posture of the basketball player and all the muscles, organs and bones once shrouded in the mystery of a thin layer of skin, paralysed in time as if just for our benefit. Yet, how sickening the feeling that the dead foetus and mother on show might ne nothing but props in a scientist's fantasy with absolutely no regard for their story; no regard for the baby who might have lived a long and happy life if only it were born in a country that valued that life; eve less regard for the woman whose family might still be asking after her, unbeknown to them that her body was sold off like meat in an abbatoir, to the highest bidder, after she met her end alone in a Siberian mental asylum.

There are wider implications of this ghastly cadaver trade though. Warwick University just spend hundreds of thousands of pounds purchasing some of von Hagens' bodies for their own medical students to study on. People across Europe have been paying good money to see these bodies, introducing a cash incentive for their exploitation and, in some cases, murder. What about stem cell research, the scope of which has now been significantly widened by the successful passage of the goverment's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill? If it is morally repugnant to use the corpses of individuals for possibly ground-breaking research without their express consent, then what of growing and discarding human embryos for exactly the same purpose and under the same circumstances - especially if you believe, as I do, that the absence of unequivocal proof that an unborn child is not alive requires it to be endowed with the same right to life as the rest of us?

Why The European Constitution Has Imperilled European Security

I wrote this post for Eurodefense UK - www.eurodefense.co.uk

Few reforms are needed more urgently in Europe today than the forging of a coherent and, as far as possible, single EU foreign policy and yet few reforms are less likely to see the light of day in the current political climate. The blame for this must lie squarely at the feet of the European Council, ultimately responsible for trying to insert the proposals for an enhanced decision making process and an EU foreign minister, amongst others, into a confusing constitution that never had much chance of being approved by an angry electorate.

When the citizens of the EU were asked to rank the most serious problems facing the continent earlier this year by the German Marshall Fund, they naturally put terrorism and the credit crisis at the top of the agenda. However, a large majority also expressed grave concerns about the resurrection of the Russian bear and its use of its energy supplies as a weapon, not to mention its tanks and warships, whilst almost as many said they wanted closer relations with America and that NATO was still essential to their security.

It’s safe to say the ‘masses’ were on the money in their assessment of the most immediate threats to European security. Indeed, their concerns, along with illegal immigration, cyber-crime and climate change, have featured heavily in the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy’s drive to establish a new security strategy for Europe. Central to formulating a single European response to these challenges, therefore, has been the push to update the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP).

As they are, the policies have failed to unify the EU in its dealings with the rest of the world, rendering the Union inefficient on the occasions when member states do take a common approach, such as in the Balkans, and wide open to manipulation by foreign powers when they don’t, such as the United States during the Iraq war and Russia now. The reforms envisaged by the constitution went some way to addressing these problems: a single foreign minister to represent the EU abroad; a legal personality to allow the EU to conclude international agreements; EU-wide investment in research and development; an EU equivalent of NATO’s clause 5 committing all states to collective “aid and assistance by all the means in their power”; the agreement of all member states to make available troops assigned to other multi-national task-forces to European battle-groups too; as well as a refined decision making process with opt-outs for any member state opposed to any EU decision to deploy troops.

So why then, if European electorates agreed on the supra-national nature of the threats and challenges facing their countries and their governments agreed on a set of measures to tackle them, were the proposed reforms thrown out by the Irish this year when they voted in a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, seen by many as simply a watered down version of the constitution? The answer is simple. The EU’s attempts to package these paramount changes within a vast and unreadable document that few wanted made it impossible to pass them. Indeed a poll taken of voters immediately after the Irish referendum revealed that the majority of those who voted ‘no’ did so because they did not understand what they were voting on.

However, Europe’s electorates lost faith in their elites long before then. The reasons behind the French and Dutch ‘no’ votes on the constitution proper in 2005 were far less kind than the Irish and revealed a deep-seated resentment of European elites and indeed their own. And for what? A flag and an anthem that we already have and that nobody cares about. Since then, any attempt to do the sensible thing and try and pass the reforms necessary to create a single coherent foreign policy has been viewed with suspicion and contempt. Indeed if the Lisbon Treaty hadn’t been voted down by the Irish it probably would have fallen at a later hurdle. Of course, the peddling of half-truths and even outright lies by the Europhobic press in countries most likely to need a referendum on such treaties like Ireland and the UK hardly helps.

What hope remains for a single European foreign policy then? Ironically, it would seem that the security of the continent now lies in the hands of national leaders regaining their people’s trust and convincing of the merit and the need for a unified approach. The election of a President in the United States with a respect for the transatlantic alliance and an understanding of the importance of a multi-lateral approach to the world’s most serious problems would go a long way too.

Is it fair to villify the bankers?

'The week that shook the world' is the modest term being used by one of my favourite online publications, 'The First Post', to describe this week's events starting with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Investment Bank. The economic turmoil and mass panic that has ensued has inevitably led the press, hungry for the 'goodies and baddies' formula that sells their papers by the dozen, to pin the blame on whoever they hastily declare to be guilty within minutes of the news breaking. No prizes for guessing who they decided to pick on.

Will Self of the Evening Standard, for example, said: "All you bankers have had your fat years. Now get ready for some very thin ones."

Alice Miles wrote in The Times of "compensations in watching the comeuppance of the hubristic and the avaricious".

Now, anybody who knows me also knows that I'm not in the business of painting multi-millionaire investment bankers as an innocent and victimised minority. Indeed I must confess that when I first saw the pictures of all the newly unemployed brokers on the front of the papers, I reacted with a distinct sense of schadenfreude rather than the compassion my better judgement mandates of me.

I also agree that the corruption, greed and complaceny that has poisoned the City over the last couple of decades, following its rise to pre-eminence during the Thatcher years, is predominantly to blame for this crisis. However, the sadist, self-righteous and personal nature of the media's attacks with their "Don't let the spivs destroy Britain" headlines has truly made me wince over the last few days.

This is not only because bankers are still people with families to feed and mortgages to pay(despite their many shortcomings)nor the fact that it is hard to deny that the success of the City is what kept this economy so strong for so long right up until the crash. Rather, it is because the last thing any of them were actually worried about when the story of the biggest crash since 1929 broke was the suffering that would be felt across the country as a result.

Where were these crusaders, apart from the odd legitimately concerned journalist, when the City's excesses led the nation's wealth gap to widen into a chasm, when the bankers - now villified by all - were paying less tax than their cleaners on their salaries and no tax on their bonuses, and when the rest of us were being hopelessly priced out of the housing market? There might have been a day's headlines to be sure, but nothing compared to the vitriol heaped on benefit 'scroungers', unruly youths and unwelcome immigrants that filled the tabloids' pages on a daily basis.

Those were the days when it might have been appropriate to pour scorn over the financial sector and even then it was the system and woeful lack of regulation that was to blame rather than the people themselves (not that I doubt that investment banks have had more than their fair share of sociopaths amongst their ranks). Now though, is the time to be getting behind those who have lost their jobs and their employers who have lost everything else. For should they continue to fall down the big black hole they admittedly dug for themselves, there is little doubt that the whole country will follow right behind.

Diagnosis by google and the man who ate too much fish

So, on Monday I had to go to Accident and Emergency. Nothing serious, but worth getting checked out to assuage my own over-active paranoia. However, before going to the A&E I went to the walk-in clinic in Soho - kind of like an emergency GP's office - to make sure that it wasn't something that could wait a few days to go see my actual GP about.

After spending an hour waiting to see someone, and having to subsequently cancel my evening with two old friends to which I had been looking forward for some time, this little Irish lady popped her head out of her room and called my name like it was an item off an Indian takeaway menu. Nevertheless, I followed her in and I told her what was wrong. Now what followed was possibly the least confidence inspiring experience I have ever had in a doctor's office.

At first, everything was going normal. She checked my vitals and asked all the right questions, but then it came to making a diagnosis - or even just a rough estimate would have been helpful. After reading all my symptoms that she had scribbled hastily on to her little notepad for the third time, she said: "oh my God, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. If I were you, I'd go to A&E, but I just don't know."

Now, you can imagine how I, the patient who had been panickly saying those exact words to myself for the last hour, felt on hearing these words. Fair to say, I was starting to have my doubts about the ability of this particular nurse practicioner. Yet lo and behold, she had an idea. Perhaps I had misjudged her. Maybe she did know her stuff all along and I was just being too hard on her.

So, I stood next to her and watched as she typed my symptoms into google and then proceeded to scroll through each website that came up, most of which were internet forums dominated by random people discussing the details of their own exotic illnesses to each other. For a brief moment she thought she had struck gold when she found one post listing all the same symptoms as me. Alas her hopes were dashed as she read on and discovered that the author had in fact been complaining about mercury poisoning he had contracted through eating too much fish.

So, I finally put our brave friend out of her misery, informing her that I now definitely would be going to the A&E where I could see, you know, an actual doctor. She asked for my number (try not to get too hot under the collar here - it's not what you think) so she could check on my progress because she was "just curious" as to what the hell exactly was wrong with me. Luckily she has not yet called me, so either she forgot or she finally found the answer she was looking for on google. In any case, she has saved me an awkward conversation and an unwanted reminder of the dilapidated state of British medicine today.

God bless the NHS!

Obama-Biden: Pleasant Surprise and Wise Choice

Back during the primaries, I cited this pairing as my idea of the dream ticket - not because I could foresee it happening, but because I liked the look of Biden just as much, if not secretly more, than Obama, mainly because of his foreign policy experience. I was, therefore, thrilled to hear him announced as running mate, even though I never realisitically expected him to get it.

The immediate response to him in the press has been predictable in terms of the pros and cons assessment of Biden and what he will bring to the ticket. Only one commentator though, Justin Webb of the BBC, has mentioned what for me is the biggest risk of Obama´s choice: people starting to wander if the ticket should not be the other way round. As admirably mature as Obama´s decision was, bringing in a popular, headstrong, wise and very experienced Senator who is more than a match for McCain in his own right, has ironically made Obama look like something of a rookie.That said, I am not too concerned. Once the campaign is in full swing, Obama won´t hesistate to remind people who is calling the shots and his maturity will shine through. Besides, a fresh open minded approach is exactly what the US needs right now.

In many ways, Obama´s selection of Biden is very much like Kennedy´s choice of Johnson for running mate in 1960 - an experienced and accomplished political operator who knows Washington better than anybody. However, there is a warning in that too. Johnson and Kennedy strongly disagreed on foreign policy with Johnson lacking Kennedy´s in depth understanding of foreign affairs and innovative approach to dealing with the Soviet Union. Fortunately, this time it´s the VP who has all the foreign policy nous and as long as Obama is serious about making the right decisions for the country he´ll pay close attention to what he has to say.