h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Governments always try to suppress information - especially about themselves."

So why pass a Freedom of Information Act, then? Surely a government that wants to suppress information would be better doing no such thing.

"I'm sorry - you actually think that if you give an illegal immigrant a ticket to an asylum centre he goes there ?"

I'm sorry, but you missed my point. I said that what the police were doing was both within the law and the correct thing to do. I never said that their charges were necessarily going to obey them.

Incidentally, what do you think should be done in these circumstances?

No, the insinuation is there is no coherent policy. The Police, despite being the body most likely to encounter illegal immigrants, do not have powers of arrest over them (to the best of my knowledge). It is naive in the extreme to believe that these people who know they are here illegally, who have succesfully managed to evade what controls exist are going to say "Fair enough Guv, it's a fair cop. We'll just give ourselves up".

With regard to money sent abroad. The common mantra is that jobs are good for communities and obviously good for the economy. That makes sense. A new factory opens in a town and 100 people have money they didn't have before. This is spent on goods and services in the local area, creating more jobs and the cycle continues. When that cycle is interrupted by the workers taking those 100 jobs not spending the money locally, but sending their money back to other countries, the local economy does not benefit to the same degree. Having worked for Moneygram for a year, not even the biggest money transfer company, the sums transferred are astonishing. Official estimates put such transfers at £3-4bn per year. That's £3-4bn that isn't being spent in the UK retail sector. (Not that all of it would be, but a significant proportion would.) Take that spending power out of a retail sector which is frankly flat at the moment and you're looking at the beginnings of a recession. Not to mention the loss of VAT on £3-4bn which amounts to up to £700m.

There is a simple answer of course. Charge VAT on money transfers, thus reclaiming the VAT that would have been earned on purchases.

""No, it's a VERY MINOR threat, comparable to the danger posed by lightning and bathtubs. For anyone who thinks that terrorism is something we should be worried about, please read my article on the subject at:""

I'd like to add another point regarding something we agreed on in a separate thread a while ago.

You'll recall the BNP member (or was it ex-member) who was caught stockpiling explosives and armaments. On a separate thread I recall we were in rare agreement that this case should have been given more publicity and that neo-nazi terrorism is a credible threat (indeed, I'd argue that it's quite possibly the second-greatest terrorist threat to the UK at the moment after Islamist terrorism given that the Irish republicans seem quiet at the moment). However, your argument is that the Islamist terrorist threat is too small a threat (to life, a least) to justify the actions taken to combat it but I seem to recall you regarded the neo-nazi threat as something that needs taken more seriously. Now, personally, I think the threat to life from the neo-nazi threat is miniscule but the potential *political threat* is enormous. The aforementioned BNP/ex-BNP bod was stockpiling for a coming "race war". A war of cultures is what both the British extreme-right and the Islamist extreme-right want. If, for example, there was a credible neo-nazi threat to bomb a mosque then I would expect the British security services to act to prevent it. Not because I think it would kill an enormous number of people (there'd probably be more killed on the roads in a week etc etc) but because the political fallout would be huge: huge anger in the Islamic community, Islamists declaring that the British state not only didn't protect them but "won't" protect them ("but you were more likely to die in a road accident!" says government minister), increasing numbers of angry young muslims attracted to extremist groups; you'd be looking at a nightmare of shockwaves. Then possibly an islamist bombing of a BNP meeting in revenge. Then a counter-attack.

This is why we cannot and *must not* treat the threat to life from terrorism in the same way as the threat to life from accidents. It is quite simply not the same thing.

"With regard to money sent abroad. The common mantra is that jobs are good for communities and obviously good for the economy. That makes sense. A new factory opens in a town and 100 people have money they didn't have before. This is spent on goods and services in the local area, creating more jobs and the cycle continues. When that cycle is interrupted by the workers taking those 100 jobs not spending the money locally, but sending their money back to other countries, the local economy does not benefit to the same degree. Having worked for Moneygram for a year, not even the biggest money transfer company, the sums transferred are astonishing. Official estimates put such transfers at £3-4bn per year. That's £3-4bn that isn't being spent in the UK retail sector. (Not that all of it would be, but a significant proportion would.) Take that spending power out of a retail sector which is frankly flat at the moment and you're looking at the beginnings of a recession. Not to mention the loss of VAT on £3-4bn which amounts to up to £700m."

SWL, you have a good point about VAT but I'm afraid I can't accept the rest of your argument for the reasons I put in my previous post. You're basically arguing that money made here should be spent here and I think that, in the long term and taking an internationalist rather than nationalist look at it in the short term, this isn't the case.

Zagreb, you don't read the papers - yet you know all about them "The conservative press are appalling hippocrites and I've never claimed otherwise. What's also interesting about the "speed camera" issue is what it says about the grassroots conservative attitude to personal responsiblity. Suddenly breaking the law becomes some sort of harmless act that we're all prone to now and then and attempts to enforce the law (and it's a law that exists for a damn good reason) are some sort of oppression. I'd like to see the response the Mail and the Sun took if every other petty criminal took the same line as they do on their pet illegalities."

You re-inforce your own prejudices in a self perpetuating circle.

A lot of economists predict a recession of some degree in the coming 1-3 years. The first victims of a recession are always the lower-paid. I simply do not believe that immigrant workers have not caused displacement already. When competition for low-paid jobs starts to really heat up, then we will see racial strife. It is possible the mobile workforce represented by EEs will largely move on to pastures new, but more likely they will claim benefits as they are entitled to. How wise will it appear to be to have imported millions of hungry mouths?

Mass movement of cheap labour benefits only the most base of capitalists - those paying subsistence rates. It certainly does not benefit the working classes to have so many new competitors. Wages are driven by supply and demand. We have increased the supply of workers so it's inevitable that wages have been depressed.

The claim is that immigrants do the jobs the lazy Brits are unwilling to do. Tosh. When the minimum wage is so close to benefit levels, there is no incentive to work. It's not laziness, it's economics. Either raise minimum wages (which I've argued elsewhere is a vicious circle that achieves nothing), lower benefits or control the size of the workforce. And don't say it isn't possible to limit EE immigration. Other countries used their opt-out to refuse entry to economic migrants. Britain chose not to.

I'm confused SWL, are you for free market economics or not?

Free market economies don't exist. Never have and never will. Economies are manipulated by governments, usually for the financial well-being of the nation. Internationalists play to a wider constituency and work on the canvas Zagreb describes. Unfortunately, it's not the constituency that voted for them.

Zagreb,

"Since you've leftwing in a fairly mainstream way I'll argue this in a way that I think will engage your prejudices and I'd ask you to think carefully about what I'm saying."

I'm not usually a big fan of these smilies, but...



I tell you what, I'll explain to you in simple terms why the government is wrong about terrorism.

Case #1: Government doesn't introduce illiberal anti-terrorism laws. Terrorism deaths average at 5/year. No innocents are detained for 1-3 months, Muslims aren't targeted by the police, etc. De Menezes doesn't get shot. Democratic institutions are retained, safeguarding us against future abuses of governmental power.

Case #2: Government introduces illiberal anti-terrorism laws. Terrorism deaths average at 4/year. Many innocents detained for 1-3 months, Muslims are targeted by the police, etc. De Menezes does get shot. Democratic institutions are weakened, making us more susceptible to future abuses of governmental power.

What is so great about case #2?

"The rightwing Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s were terrorists but I imagine natural causes killed more Nicaraguans. Would you have accepted the argument that the Sanidista government should therefore have spent more time fighting cancer than the Contras or that the highlighting of the threat from these terrorists was some sort of scaremongering?"

Of course natural causes killed more! You have sort of missed the point of my analogy. In the US, lightning kills around 40 people a year, which suggests that here it probably kills around 8 people per year. This is not significant enough that it's worth doing a lot about it. You'd have to put an awful lot of effort into reducing that figure, at an awfully high cost, and the result would probably only mean reducing that death rate by a fairly small amount (imagine making it illegal to go out in thunderstorms for example). Similarly with bathtub related deaths. In these cases, you can fairly clearly see why it is that we don't put more effort into preventing these deaths. They're accidental, and to a certain extent preventable, but because they're very minor and because the cost required to reduce the rates is so very high, we judge it as not worth it, even though that means people will die as a result of our inaction. We could, after all, make it illegal to go out during a thunderstorm. But here's the big point: terrorism is exactly the same. The number of dead are comparable. The cost of reducing those numbers is comparable.

You simply can't pretend that the death rates involved are not important.

Getting back to the Contras - about which, despite your prejudices about my prejudices, I know very little - assuming that the Sandinistas had been able to maintain a stable state in the face of Contra actions, that the Contra killings were random and in comparable numbers to bathtub related deaths, and that their pouring money into cancer research would have had any effect, then yes it would have been better to do that than to fight them. Were those conditions satisfied? I'd guess not, and so the comparison doesn't really hold.

"On a separate thread I recall we were in rare agreement that this case should have been given more publicity and that neo-nazi terrorism is a credible threat"

We weren't in agreement. I was arguing that that is displayed hypocrisy on the part of the press that the BNP terrorist wannabe with a weapons cache didn't receive any coverage, whereas Muslim terrorist wannabes with castor beans received blanket coverage for many days. I don't think neo-nazi terrorism is a credible threat. I was arguing in that thread that the ideology of the BNP is more significant than the ideology of Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

Mostly however, I posted that link to my article for other people to read, not because I have any hopes of persuading you. No offence intended, you have about as much hope of changing my mind on this as I do of changing yours. I tell you what though, here's one thing you said where I concede you have a point:

"... terrorism is ... a political act with repercussions beyond the immediate deaths/injuries"

I agree. In a way, we're feeling those political effects right now, with 28 day detentions here, torture overseas, etc. But look, in the spirit of détente which I'm suddenly overcome with, perhaps you can concede this point to me as a sort of tit-for-tat: The specifically political repercussions are that people *over-react* to the threat. That IS the political repercussion. There is nothing more to it than that. If people refused to be terrorised by a danger that is of the same order as the danger posed by lightning, there would be no political repercussions.

Those repercussions are a choice, and they're a choice that you are complicit in by taking the terrorist threat as seriously as you do.

"Dogster, I've already explained why comparing death statistics and declaring the terrorist threat irrelevant is to completely ignore the fact that terrorism
is a) a political act with repercussions beyond the immediate deaths/injuries and b) murder. There is an awful lot of hypocrisy on this issue. Since you've
leftwing in a fairly mainstream way I'll argue this in a way that I think will engage your prejudices and I'd ask you to think carefully about what I'm
saying."

Stick. Wong end of. exactly. if we pander to the requests of the terrorists (who BTW are grosely incompetant even beyond the gross incompetancy of our own govermnet), Then they've won.

Reduce civil libertys'. make everyones every day actions and thoughts and travels an absolute hell by restrictive travel, compulsotry mandatory stop and search, X-ray scanners at shops, stations, bus stations etc., then cuel. they've won. I am guessing anyone argueing from taht point of view is on teh side of the terrosits.

Or to put it another way. numbers?; how many people have died from terrorist acts as a result of 9/11/Iraq/etc, bugger all. which isnt' a reason to wholescale and without due thought and evidence instill a total and utter rewriting of the libertitys we all take for granted.

I'd personally sooner die as a result of a higherly unlikely suicide/terrorist attack than see ID cards, routeen security of the nature of airports occuring on train stations etc.

Anyone remember those pathetic bombings on teh London underground not that long ago?; yeh, its sad people died, but dieing is something we do. check it out with any one of a number of families who've lost lives to teh war in Iraq, or through RTAs in the recent past. I never remember a single person saying anytihgn about the bombings afecting their use or otherwise of the underground (I was on the underground myself a week to the day after the bombings, many people were using it just ht eday after). We don't care, its not a threat as big as the powers that might wnat to be would have us believe, hence we don't think terrorism being used as a catalist to put into place all kinds of rediculus laws is a good thing.

And, of course, none of it would make any f*****g differnce anyhow.

With 25 million Child Benefit recipients' personal details LOST IN THE POST, can there be any hope for the ID Card project?

Surely ID cards are dead in the water now?

They awarded the contract for developing the system about 2 weeks ago.

Just stumbled on this thread.

>>Whistleblowers are executed (David Kelly).<< From post 1

I'd be interested to know what hard *evidence* this conclusion is based on.



I think however bad things may appear now, they don't begin to compare to the abject humiliation heaped upon this country in the eyes of the world by the Tory government on black wednesday, overseen by Burlington Bertie, Lamont, or Major's, air raid shelter as he was known; and Major himself, brilliant architect of 'back to basics'.

It may suit the Tory supporters consigned to the wilderness for so long, to present things this way, but I still think this government has a long way to fall before it begins to compare with the utter shambles of the Major years.

This present total cock-up about child benefit could have easily occurred under any government, as most people really know. But what we should be really concerned about is a series of decisions at clear cut and definitive government level, that reflect so badly on the present government that people would seriously contemplate the possibility of a Cameron government as an alternative. Because that's the *real world* choice people have to make. You can whine as much as you want about the present government, that's easy to do because they have to make the real life decisions. The nay sayers and critics can easily snipe from the sidelines, 'til the cows come home, like the Liberals have done for 80 odd years.

Yes it would be interesting to see what the Tory alternative could do, if they had to run the country for real.

This government are worse than *any* government we have had in living memory.

They took us into a war which has killed tens of thousands based upon a lie.

They promised a referendum as an election pledge - that was a lie.

They promised "education, education, education" and we've got the highest illiteracy levels in years.

They promised to breathe life into the NHS. Oh yeah? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/norfolk/7106402.stm A hospital declaring a major alert, basically because it can't cope. They reduced waiting lists by banning waiting lists

This government is a greater threat to civil liberties than any external body. In 1987, I was walking home at 2am, when I was bundled into a police van and thrown in a cell. I was released at 6am. No explanation was ever given, I was never even questioned let alone charged. Now, those same cops could throw me in a cell for a month without any explanation.

This government has all but admitted they don't even have a clue how many immigrants are here. They predicted 13000 Poles would come

(Incidentally, I've got a job brief in front of me for Western Union that says there are 6 million people in the UK that send money abroad at least once a month)

What's worse? An arguably harsh ideological government or a devious, lying, incompetent one?

Okay SWL, let's for instance assume you are correct and this is the worse living government in living memory, and you say,

>>The only thing saving them is an opposition almost as useless as Labour were in the 80s.<<

What alternative do you suggest? All the time I've been on h2g2, you have gone on and on about the government and how bad it is. I have NEVER EVER yet heard you suggest what we should have instead. Not once. So what should we now do to improve this situation?

Excuse me, I have repeatedly put forward a solution to the problem of inept, corrupt and useless politicians.

Shoot a few.

Seriously, we have a problem with politics in general. I do not believe we have a democracy. Party politics always takes precedence over representative democracy. People do not have a say in the running of the country. The level of fraud in British elections has been likened to a "banana republic" by a senior judge and we now have EU monitors at British ballot boxes.

What Labour have done is legitimise breathtaking lies by calling it "spin", as if that makes it acceptable. It does not. A lie is a lie is a lie. You've said in the past Fanny that Tories are just upset because Labour manipulate the media better than them. Hardly something to be proud of.

'We don't have a democracy'.

No, we don't and never have had. There's no such thing in reality - only a 'best effort' which works for some of us some of the time. Occasionally most of us...

EU monitors at our ballot boxes... Corruption monitoring corruption?

I do wonder why there isn't an outcry each time we're told that the EU's finances aren't signable offable. Perhaps because, like me, most people are weary of the current poor democracy.

Perhaps we're ready for a change - any change.

Morning Effers

The problem with the present government is not necessarily the lies dressed up as spin, it isn't that they are control freaks who want to know , film and monitor as much as they can in defiance of our civil liberties, and then lose the info in a casual act of lost postage.

It isn't their abhorrant policies either. It is that this government IS INCOMPETENT on a scale unimaginably massive. I am tempted to say "bring back TB" but we could all see how washed up and exhausted he was after 10 years of trying to keep the lids on the fiascos.

In respect of the lost CD's , it will be fascinating to see how far down the chain of command Gordon is able to push the blame, especially in view of the number of warnings the Govt. was given on it's entire approach to data handling.

Finally, the ID Database must surely be a dead duck now. Would YOU trust all your personal info to any linked up system run by this mob?

Novo