Adams and Northstead II: Just what is actually going on?

Hello again, 

[Ignore this for the moment. It'll be rewritten eventually as a piece on the British Constitution - David, 13th Feb 2011]

The Northern Irish blogger Slugger O'Toole has now suggested that it's illegal to appoint Adams as Steward against his will. He argues that the wording of the 1975 House of Commons Disqualification Act means that he cannot be appointed if he doesn't want the job. Namely:

'8.— (1) No person being a member of the House of Commons, or for the time being nominated as a candidate for election to that House, shall be required to accept any office or place by virtue of which he would be disqualified by this Act for membership of that House, or for membership of that House for the constituency for which he is sitting or is a candidate.'

So Adams is back to being an MP. Alex Massie meanwhile is arguing in The Spectator that in taking the Stewardship he could be disqualified from standing as an Irish MP. 

Article 40.2.2 of the Irish Constitution states that: 

'No title of nobility or of honour may be accepted by any citizen except with the prior approval of the Government.'

At which point I'm persuaded to go back to my thesis........ 

Sinn Fein and the 2011 Irish Election; a re-written post.

Hello,

This is a re-written version of a post I did earlier. Originally it was a briefly done, humorous piece. I thought it also raised an important point and so I wanted to re-do it properly.

Still though, anyone who gets bored easily by politics will probably want to skip this one.

Until recently Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein, was the British MP for Belfast West. He resigned his post a few weeks ago in order to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming Irish Parliamentary elections.



At the last Irish General Election, the party lost one of its five seats in the Irish Parliament (the Dail). This time round though, things are different. Though The Economist was openly questioning its survival, in 2007 the long Irish economic boom that had transformed it into the 'Celtic Tiger' was still, just about, going.

How times change. Barely two years later (April 2009) the respected economist Paul Krugman wrote this article in the New York Times that the worst case scenario for the United States was that it could 'turn Irish'. Between December 2007 and May 2010 the unemployment rate in the Republic has trebled, according to the OECD.

Which is where Mr. Adams and his party come in. Witness this electoral broadcast:

Now admittedly the probable next Taioseach - Enda Kenney of the main opposition Fine Gael party - has publicly stated that he lead his party into coalition with Sinn Fein. However, in that report the Irish Times put Sinn Fein's poll ratings at 10%. Their political commentator, Deaglan De Breadun, has urged us to admit that Sinn Fein are not going away. 'It will be suprising' he wrote in an analysis piece on Friday 'if they don't make it to double-figures in this election'.

Why is any of this important? Firstly because SF are attempting, it seems, to make more of themselves than simply being the party of Irish unity. Secondly, because they have never stopped being the party of Irish unity. Witness this from their manifesto. 

Sinn Fein becoming a presence in the politics of Eire could have ramifications for a long time to come. 

Bankers' salaries #2: some thoughts upon competition and game theory

Hello,

This is a continuation of the previous post on bankers' salaries. The blog post by Robert Peston that I highlighted touches upon an interesting point that I wanted to consider more fully.

Part of what Peston's post suggests is that the problem with lower said salaries lies with the risk to one's own institution. As I said previously, if you are offering your employees less than what they could get elsewhere, so the theory goes, you risk losing the best and brightest to your competitors.

Now Peston draws a comparison with English Premier League football clubs here and salary inflation that's worth following up upon. His argument is that the average salary for a Premiership footballer is now largely divorced from actual performance. This is what has, for better or worse, created the situation we now see in the EPL: a league of three parts (those who can afford to lead, those who can afford to stay, and those who can with some risk afford to take part). 

We can extent this parallel further. Essentially now clubs like Manchester United are the AIG of the footballing world. Despite the level of debt that the Glazers took upon the club when they purchased it, it is in no-one's interest for United to fail. Much the same can be said of Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool (increasingly less so there), Manchester City and possibly Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle.

Yet United, especially, are despite their power trapped by circumstances. To be able to afford to do what they're doing, they need to keep on winning. To afford to win, they need to keep on doing what they're doing.

It's this that interests me. Part of what I'm doing for my thesis involves looking at Anglo-German relations in the early 20th century (1905-1914). Diplomatic relations between  countries are complex things; since the advent of Pluralistic International Relations theory (1960s/70s I believe), they have tended to be thought of as happening across multiple levels. What I'm looking at though is defence relations. These were characterised by one series of events: the Anglo-German (naval) rivalry of 1906-1914.

Basically put, British strategic doctrine of the time rested on a loose policy called the 'Two Power Standard'. What this meant in practice is that at all times the Royal Navy should have the capacity to defend the Home Islands and the Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOCs) against the conceivable enemies of the Crown. Especially important was the Home Waters (those around the British Isles). Now in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany began to build a major 'High Seas Fleet' that threatened to usurp British domination of the North Sea/Channel/Western approaches region.

This was not the sole cause of the First World War, but it played a considerable part in starting it. Both sides began to build ships up and beyond what was, malcontents argued, necessary for national defence. Efforts were made to encourage a reduction in armaments, but crucially neither side trusted the other enough for it to work.

There rests the nub of the matter. How do you encourage a manoeuvre that both sides will benefit from, but if one side takes independently will threaten their position? I would suggest four possibilities -

1. Do it anyway: And place your money on your potential opposition being brow-beaten by international/domestic pressure into following you.

2. Start small: One of the reasons the 1993 Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel worked is that both sides started negotiating on relative small details before working their way up to the bigger picture. Thus a culture of compromise is created, and in ironing out the small issues frequently the larger ones are compensated for as well.

3. Agree to trust and verify: The SALT talks between the USSR and the USA in the mid-1980s were underlined by the shared principle to allow observers from each country to report on the other's decommissioning. The initial attempt at trust was underlined by actual verification.

4. Appoint a neutral referee: Switzerland or the nearest relative equivalent is normally good.

Why bother at all? Because if you don't the situation tends to escalate and the entire system in which you're working is threatened.

Bankers' salaries #1; What to do about them

Hello,

Robert Peston, the BBC's Business Editor, offered us this interesting post last week in which he quoted Sir Philip Hampton (Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland) saying that:

"This explosive growth in financial services meant that thousands of people, arguably tens of thousands of people, are extraordinarily highly paid. The most peculiar thing about it all, actually, if you look at the last ten years of massive increases in pay is that the performance for shareholders has been pretty disastrous really across most banks. Some of them have gone out of business altogether and most banks have had a relatively poor performance for shareholders"

The BBC News report can be seen here.

Peston seems to be arguing that pay rates for members of the Financial Services industry have behaved broadly like pay rates for Premiership footballers. The outstanding members of the industry have earned that sort of levels of remuneration. However these levels of pay have subsequently been followed by the industry as a whole, meaning that many are now substantially overpaid given their relative performance.

How then can we encourage a culture of responsibility among the bankers? This would be worthwhile - we don't want to encourage a mentality of free and easy access to reserves of money among this class (ultimately). The problem comes in how to get one of the banks to take the first step. Why should you offer to pay your staff less when they can do the same work for a different bank and get the normal rate of pay?

Well here the Government may have to go back on its basic ideology and simply enforce a cap upon salaries at the banks it owns. In essence, introduce performance related pay to be decided upon in each case by an independent committee attached to each bank in which the state has a majority ownership.

Who wrote the Gospels?

Hello,

The following comes via the blog The Failed Atheist. It's a sort-of-but-not-actually-mine follow up to a few earlier posts on the historical origins of the Bible. Namely this and this. 

Let's start the new year with a Marxist

Hello, 

Quite a few things that deserve comment have accumulated while I've been off doing others things. However I wanted to highlight today's Guardian, where Tristam Hunt interviews Eric Hobshawn.

'Borrowed' from socialistunity.com

I would hope that he wouldn't be too offended if I described Hobshawn as a figure from another age. His age (93) has some part to play in that. The main cause of that statement though is his political views - Hobshawn is a Marxist. He is a controversial Marxist too. Many have accused him of conducting an apologist campaign for the Soviet Union (especially the Stalin-era USSR). I don't want to go into that at this point, but if you read some of the comments on this Guardian editorial in praise of Hobshawn then it should give you some idea.

Now unlike a great many names that I mention on this blog, I have actually read some of his work - I got through a fair chunk of his The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 during a research trip to Edinburgh last September. He writes fluently and engagingly, highlighting the seminal role that socio-economic forces played in the development of capitalistic empires during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. He displays too an exhaustive knowledge, binding together into his grand overview developments in cattle farming in the American midwest, nationalism in central Europe and movements in Russian ballet. 

There are some flaws to the book. A reader looking for central figures to hang their understanding of the narrative on will be look in vain (there's a reason why I only got through 'a large chunk' of it). He freely admits too to being casual in his referencing; understandable perhaps given the range of knowledge on display but nonetheless a violation of one of the cardinal rules of historiography (show your working!).
 

Then of course there's the Marxism. Hobshawn is not shy in admitting his ideological influences (there's an entire chapter labelled 'The Bourgeois World'). Nor is he alone in holding such views. Hunt, himself an historian, seems sympathetic in that interview, while Marx's ideas on economics and globalisation are receiving hearings not only in Historical Departments but also in Business Studies schools. 

I wouldn't like to say that we should all embrace our inner dialectic materialist. There are many reasons, mainly ideologically, why when reading what Marx, Engels and Hobshawn say, we should take their words with a large pinch of salt. If you going to read Hobshawn, please read Niall Ferguson (or another neo-liberal historian) to counterbalance Hobshawn's words.  Yet that doesn't mean we should stop our minds against consideration of what Marx had to say. Or indeed, and dare one bring some literary criticism into this, the times in which he and Engels said it. Marx and Engels had some interesting, apt and realistic points to say about globalisation, economics and society. Even if you disagree with them (and I write this as a conservative Christian), it's worth listening to what they had to say (and I write this as a man who hasn't picked up his copy of The Communist Manifesto in quite a while).

P.S: For an alternative view on Hobshawn - one that emphasises his questionable attitudes to the USSR -  see this Times article here