Simon T. Kaye

…or, why Bono shouldn’t pay up.

This week, U2 will be headlining at the Glastonbury festival. As expected, rock music purists are debating whether U2 is just too pop; whether this might be another symptom in the festival’s dumbing-down (Snoop Dogg, Beyonce and Jay-Z being among recent headlining artists).

But the musical discussion has been overshadowed by a political one. Art Uncut, a spin-off from the  UK Uncut protest movement which we heard so much about during the tuition fees arguments of late last year, is staging a demonstration against U2. Not because Bono isn’t rock’n'roll enough, but because he – in their view – is dodging his taxes.

I encourage you to read the 3rd June piece about this on the Art Uncut website. Titled “It’s crucial we send a message to Bono that what he is doing is wrong”,  the piece forwards what is now becoming a very familiar argument: that there is a moral obligation to maximise individual tax contributions.

The ‘Bono Pay Up’ Facebook event page now has around 200 registered participants, all of them (presumably) ticket-holders for the expensive Glastonbury event. Perhaps this seems a little meagre, given that around 177,000 people are set to attend the festival. But the overall power of a moral argument against tax-avoidance has gathered massive support elsewhere, mixed well into a generally politics-flavoured cocktail of state spending cuts opposition and distaste for specific coalition reforms. Protests and sit-ins at Fortnum & Mason, Topshop and the like have attracted news headlines and big-name support from the likes of the Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee.

Let’s run through the ‘uncut’ argument.

1. State spending cuts are bad, and will undermine valued services which are best provided by the state.
2. Budget deficits, like the UK’s annual £170 billion debt rate, are also bad. It is right to try and reduce national debt and the spending deficit.
3. Raising taxes is not always good, though preferable to reductions in public spending.
4. How then do we plug the deficit, without reducing spending or raising taxes too much? Simple: we force rich companies and individuals to stop avoiding their taxes.

On the face of it, this is a powerful, practical ‘everyone wins’ argument. Congratulations should be offered to UK Uncut and its spin-off campaigns for bringing their agenda into the public eye through the targeting of a few case-studies. Bono and U2 are just the latest example of this.

So what’s the problem? Let’s dig down into the case against Bono and U2.

1. We are not morally or legally obliged to maximise our tax contributions.

I would even view this as a human right. We have the human right to act rationally wherever such action is legal. Minimising our tax contribution is always rational – particularly, in fact, for the very rich, as they are far less likely to need state support at some later point.

Being a multinational company or rich individual and earning a lot of money shouldn’t change this. Human rights aren’t human rights if they stop applying to you over a certain income threshold. Put it another way: at what point does a state gain the remit to delimit human rationality?

This is not to say that civil society shouldn’t be concerned with encouraging selfless, generous, charitable and social behaviours. But Bono surely ticks a lot of these boxes independently, as we shall see below.

2. Ireland is not a ‘developing country’…

…not in the sense that this term is usually understood, anyway. Art Uncut argues:

… [T]ax issues are crucial to development. Christian Aid estimates that developing countries lose $160bn annually, more than the global aid budget, thanks to unscrupulous multinational companies dodging tax. If we want poor countries to become richer, we need to adopt an ethical approach to taxation. It’s clear that U2 take anything but an ethical approach to taxation.

Even allowing this assertion – that developing countries are often screwed by tax-dodging multinationals – cannot help in the case of U2 and Ireland. Ireland is a highly developed and economically modern country.

3. Why should Bono trust Ireland with his money?

There is a reason, after all, why Ireland is now having to embark on a significant austerity programme. As a state, Ireland has hardly demonstrated fiscal prudence.

Irish spending policies contributed to a landmark unemployment rate and the country’s first recession since the 1980s. When the financial crisis occurred, the cost of bank-bailouts contributed to an already-vast deficit. Eventually, the EU and IMF stepped in, and other countries lent fiscal support to Ireland.

Perhaps Bono wouldn’t agree with the spending priorities of the Irish state. Perhaps he didn’t agree with the largely ineffective 40 billion Euro stimulus package, or the policy of buying out failing banks with their toxic credit. By the time of the 2008 crisis, U2 was already tax-resident in a different country; this was both legal and rational and, as an internationally successful band, not particularly strange either.

4. What if Bono spends his money more wisely and charitably anyway?

As the Art Uncut article states,

Bono presents himself as someone who cares deeply about development.

This is putting it mildly. U2′s philanthropy is near-legendary. The band has spent more than a decade (perhaps ironically) campaigning on third-world debt. Bono co-organised the Live 8 charity concert project. He is a founder of the Product Red charity brand campaign. He has his own charity – the One Foundation. This and other work represents millions of pounds of charitable contributions, on top of robust political activism.

I’m not a particular U2 fan, and there may be many good reasons to arch an eyebrow at some of Bono’s posturing, or question the effectiveness or sensibility of his approach. But to suggest that Bono is money-grubbing seems decidedly churlish.

Indeed, if Bono is choosing to reduce his contribution to one or another state infrastructure, and then pumps what surely amounts to more than the difference into charitable projects, and he chooses to do so legally, who has a moral basis for questioning his actions or attacking his civic sensibilities?

To conclude…

I suppose the broader point is that it would seem peculiarly trusting, even naive, if people imagined that in all cases the state they happen to live in is better placed to dispose of their money with wisdom. Yet to volunteer taxes – to offer, as it were, additional taxes, above those that are legally required – would be exactly the same as minimising personal disposable wealth. It would be an admission of incompetence, perhaps, or a wholesale acceptance of the idea that the state knows best.

Surely, and especially in the aftermath of the last few years, nobody actually still thinks this way?

Happy New Year!

I forgot to say that I wrote another piece for First Drafts, Prospect Magazine UK’s blog.

It’s called Shouldn’t students put voting ahead of activism?, which was (I thought) a fairly uncontroversial thing to suggest.

Here’s an extract:

Students’ tendency to self-disenfranchise may contribute to their willingness to express themselves in alternative ways. But to engage in the public sphere in a non-systemic way without participating in the institutionalised structures of democratic change seems terribly incoherent.

Old news now, I know, but any thoughts or reactions would be welcome.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is justly getting glowing notices in every Parliamentary sketch column in the papers today. I’m thrilled to see someone whom I’ve long suspected is the most talented MP in Westminster picking up some recognition.

Otherwise known as one of the central negotiators and architects of an extremely favourable coalition agreement, David Laws is now cementing his reputation as possibly the only man who can peddle the fiscal pain of the coming years and keep everyone on-board.

Here, theatre poster style, is the praise from the broadsheets:

“A dazzling debut” ****

-Simon Carr, The Independent

“…seeing off the other side with contempt and contumely” ****

-Simon Hoggart, The Guardian

“A star is born” *****

-Ann Treneman, The Times

“The Chief Secretary displayed a calm mastery of his brief: clever without being clever-clever, concise without sounding glib, self-assured without looking arrogant.” *****

- The Daily Telegraph

It’s all recorded as a 45-minute session on the BBC. Alastair Darling opens in an excitable way, which I wasn’t entirely sure was possible for him. Do watch it, I promise you won’t be bored. Here’s the link.

I’ve scribbled a bit more over at First Drafts, Prospect Magazine’s blog. Mostly to do with Disraeli’s failed ambition to form a government with Gladstone and his angry clique of free-trading “Peelites” in 1852: has David Cameron simply succeeded where Disraeli failed?

Take a look here.

Here’s a wee excerpt:

He [Disraeli] seemed to see that coalitions indicate a recognition that differing, conflicting ideas can be equally valid. In both cases he was able to play the hand he was dealt as if it were the one he had been hoping for all along: one trait that Cameron really can claim to share.

It’s obviously incredibly couragous of me (in the suicidal Yes, Minister sense) to stick my head above the parapet with anything that looks like a public prediction of the outcome of this election. But here are a few things that I think aren’t being included in the debates – specifically, some reasons why (despite the predictions of most Men Behind The Polls) Cameron’s Tories might not get their outright majority on May 6th.

1. The Liberal Democrats will hold on in the South

I’ve obviously got an interest which doesn’t need to be declared here, but all the same. Uniform swing predictions are absolutely useless when talking about the Lib Dem/Tory marginals in the South of England. I had the pleasure of helping out in Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake’s south London constituency of Carshalton and Wallington. The figures suggest that this place is on an electoral knife-edge, and the seat is high on the Tories’ target list. But local people are big fans of Tom Brake, who happens to be an incredibly hard-working MP, one of the very few who came out of the expenses scandal looking like a saint, and also happens to be rather good at his job. In other words, I’d still put my money on Tom holding on (at pretty good odds, but anyway). Seat-by-seat, I think the Lib Dems are going to hold on rather well in the south – better, that is, than many predictions suggest. And this means that the Tories will have to do all the better in places where, traditionally, they tend to struggle to attract votes – places like…

2. The North

People are talking a lot right now about how the Conservatives have ‘won’ the first week of campaigning. Perhaps they have – they’ve seemed to control the agenda, at least. But all Labour really needs to do at this point is look like a tenable government. If they achieve the appearance of anything like a votable or supportable political force, then the electoral hill the Tories must climb in the North of England turns into a mountain. And I’d argue that the first week of campaigning has at the very least shown Labour to be competitive in this minimal way. The credibility gap has been bridged. By a similar token, the Tory ‘coup’ of getting into bed with apparently every single businessman in the country in the NI debate could backfire badly beyond the South. They’re publishing an endorsement from the former head of Meryll Lynch, for crying out loud. Have we forgotten about the financial crisis already?

3. Labour gets the credit for escaping the recession

It’s been little reported, but a number of polls have shown that a healthy majority of British people thank Brown, Darling et al. for fixing the economy. It’s a pretty simple rule of electoral analysis, actually: the sitting government always gets blamed for a bad economy, the sitting government always gets rewarded for a bouyant one. We can explain the majority of all electoral outcomes in history by pointing to the personal finantial situation of the average voting citizen, and frankly things could be a lot worse for Labour in this regard. Cameron may find himself having to explain why he opposed (and opposes) many of the measures which appear to have done the trick, whether or not this line of questioning is fair.

4. Brown could win the debates

Don’t laugh, it’s perfectly possible. I’ve just been discussing this with a friend who suspects that Brown will simply look too uncharismatic and ponderous and dull next to Clegg and Cameron, but I have my doubts. Surely Cameron will have the greatest expectations heaped upon his shoulders? In the US, where these debates are not novel at all, the Democrat and Republican political machines have become adept in the art of ‘expectations management’: minimise the general expectation of your guy’s performance as much as possible, and then any kind of success will have a strong effect. Woe unto the candidate who is expected to perform brilliantly and merely performs well. Cameron is this candidate, and for all his preparation, I think he does rather better in the direct, adversarial type of debate that we see in PMQs every week. Brown will be fine in the carefully clinical, rules-driven encounters that people will actually watch. Never underestimate the pursuasive strength of a statistic. Brown likes statistics.

Of course, the biggest opportunity in the debate belongs to Clegg, and he may very well shine. But anybody ‘winning’ who isn’t Cameron will be a disaster for the Conservative campaign. My friend points out that the narratives are pre-set: the newspapers and commentators have probably already decided who won these debates. But this is a chance to talk directly to voters, and get a precious thirty seconds of speech into the news: very hard to argue with.

Last note – Just so you know, my long-promised, long-delayed political science analysis of AV voting reforms will emerge soon.

Well, the political news is full of the planned Commons vote-on- referendum for electoral reform. This is one occasion where my job and political beliefs as a Liberal Democrat coincide very nicely with my vocation and my research for a PhD in Political Theory – so I hope you’ll permit me to indulge in a little bit of an academic approach to this situation.

The system to be voted on is a classic – the old ‘AV’ system. This is no surprise. Elements of the Labour party have long preferred the Alternative Vote or ‘Instant Runoff Voting’ as the basis for electoral reform (though I suspect that the majority of that parliamentary party has never quite seen the point).

The political motivations of Labour’s move appear to be twofold. Firstly, they hope to show up the Conservatives as visibly opposed to a reform that, following the whole Adventure of the Abused Expenses, may be viewed as a popular measure to hand stronger accountability to the public.

The other reason boils down to electoral mathematics: by building the mandate for electoral reform now, Labour is eyeing a future election where the tories are still broadly the most popular party nationally, but will be unable to build anything resembling Labour’s 1997-2005 unofficial supermajority in the Commons. It’s possible that serious treatment of voting reform could only ever emerge from a vaguely leftist, unpopular government. The truth is that the vast majority of voters for Labour would rather vote for the Libdems than the Tories, and that most (though a few less) Libdems would rather have a Labour government than a Conservative one. Together they’re a (50%+) majority, so at the most basic level the maths of this make sense for Labour. Moreover, the motivation for such reforms evaporate with the promise of political success in the First Past the Post system (FPTP) – why kick away the ladder that let you climb up?

Labour’s political machinations aside, as a Liberal Democrat I can only get excited about any half-serious approach to a change in the voting system. There’s no question that the Libdem preference – Single Tansferable Vote (STV) – would be more proportional in effect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our MPs demurr during the vote on the basis that the reforms don’t go far enough. But there are other grounds for criticism of the AV system, beyond the “it goes too far” or “it doesn’t go far enough” cries that you’ll be hearing for a the next few weeks.

As part of my research, I’m working on something called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. I won’t go into too much detail here, but Kenneth Arrow basically came up with mathematical expressions of democratic norms, and then asserted that within the boundaries of these requirements there could be no voting system between three alternatives that could guarantee stable and non-arbitrary outcomes.

Well, since Labour’s announcement I’ve been doing some thinking about this, and worked up a couple of examples, and I think I’m ready to assert that the AV system is not capable of increasing Democratic meaninfulness even as we know it has only limited ability to improve the proportionality of electoral outcomes.
I’ll leave it there for now, and put up part two, with all my more academic objections, very soon.

With the Copenhagen Summit underway and the low rumble of discontent over the hacked emails debacle still audible, I feel the need to communicate my feelings on all the claims and counter-claims on the ‘science’ of global warming.

I marched on the ‘Copenhagen Wave’ last weekend, along with tens of thousands of other people from all around the UK. It’s a worthwhile cause, I’m strongly in favour of firm emissions reduction targets, and I believe that human activity is responsible for the climate change going on around us. Note, however, the use of the word ‘believe’ – I don’t know anything – not scientifically, anyway.

‘Scientific facts’ are curious beasts. Science may be said to be incapable of producing hard-and-fast facts. One formulates a hypothesis; one tests it; if the hypothesis is upheld, and is upheld repeatably, then surely we have a scientific fact on our hands? Well, yes and no.

Within the framework of the experiment, we have shown a ‘fact’ – but it’s possible that laboratory conditions or the specific arrangements of a test differ from what we’d assume to be ‘normal’ conditions. Test conditions are capable of presenting spurious, irrelevant or simply untrue ‘facts’. It works the same way as the framing of verbal logic.

So, scientific facts prove only the specific hypothesis which are tested. More importantly, they can only be assumed to do so temporarily. Facts have use-by dates. The first relevant experiment to come along and throw new light on a question or display slightly different results will once again throw doubt onto any ‘scientific fact’, and it is a part of scientific method to assume that proofs are finite in this way. A statement is true until proven false, just as the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that reasonable doubt runs the other way: if there is reasonable doubt as to the truth of a scientific statement, then it cannot really be called a fact. For this reason, there must be much, much more evidence in support of a claim of scientific fact than there need to be made against it in order to ‘disprove’ it – which is parallel to our legal metaphor, where the onus lies with the prosecution to eradicate reasonable doubt.

The third important point about scientific facts is that, in an important way, they can never get beyond inference. We may observe the correlation between two different things a hundred times in experiments – but all we’ve really seen is the same correlation, a hundred times. So even with the non-existence of contrary evidence, ‘scientific fact’ requires someone to look at the evidence and draw a causal conclusion about it all – to claim “these things are not coincidental: one causes the other”.

These three question-marks can help us to look at the human-caused (‘anthropogenic’) global warming argument objectively:

First of all, anyone who tells you that anthropocentric climate change is proven, certain, a done deal, is either lying to you, or doesn’t know much about science. These will be the sort of people who say ‘climate change deniers’ instead of ‘skeptics’. Even in so far as there is any such thing as a ‘scientific fact’, I cannot in good conscience write that anthropogenic climate change is one – no matter how useful that could be politically.

Why isn’t anthropogenic climate change a scientific fact? First of all, our planet’s atmosphere does not constitute a nice, stable test condition. It has its own ups and downs, is sensitive to the activity of the sun and to its own internal weather patterns, such as el niño. Even today our weather and climate can be altered by unpredictable, freak occurences. Trying to draw a general trend out of this mess, even over fairly long periods, is very hard work. Even worse, climate change scientists will always be frustrated in their efforts to project changes into the future, and a key element of scientific proof is in the success of a model: can we extrapolate our findings into a means to predict what will happen next? In this case, the short-term answer is no.

Instrumental data on warming. The range since useful records began is about 1 degree centigrade in total. From Wikicommons.

Secondly, even with something like an upward trend (which is more or less visible in the data – see the diagram above), there is the problem of cause-attribution. This is made a bigger issue by the fact that the two curves under scrutiny here do not scale particularly well together.

I take as absolutely true that greenhouse gas levels are increasing significantly in the atmosphere, and that these gases are being released because of human activity.

More difficult to prove, but still, in my opinion, true, is the general trend of a warming climate over the last fifty years or so.

But these facts together signify only correlation. I, personally, believe that there is enough evidence to link them causally. This third leap is required for ‘scientific fact’. But the problem is that the rate of the increase in temperature does not match in terms of scale the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or adhere to the predictions of scientists. There can be little doubt of an increase in CO2 levels – whereas warming levels can be attributed to other causes, such as solar activity or the (thus far barely understood) planetary rhythm of ice-age to warm-patch.

One word of warning  – stick to the instrumental data. Information on the ‘medieval warm period’ is worse than useless, because of course there is no reliable measurement information from that far back. We are limited to the last hundred years or so, and this is both bad news and good news for climate change scientists. It means we must discount the geological probabilities that this planet has been considerably warmer and considerably cooler than it is now at various points in its history, over the course of millions of years.

But these ‘good’ records do show a temperature increase, and it corresponds in terms of timeframe with the start of human industrial activity in earnest. This is enough for me.

Skepticism, it must be noted, is a good thing. It is the scientist’s responsibility to be skeptical, which is why the activities of the UEA scientists is particularly reprehensible. But skeptics must be skeptical always: there is far, far less evidence for ‘alternative’ causes of temperature increase than there is for the greenhouse effect argument, and this is what must be said at the Copenhagen summit.

It is with healthy skepticism that we ought to take action against CO2 emissions. We don’t know anything for certain – but shouldn’t we hedge our bets? I don’t think that scientific rationalism should ever form the basis, by itself, for public policy. But the intuitive response to all this information is to detect a cause, and the response to that intuition is clear.

And wouldn’t it be a noble human objective to cut down on pollution regardless of its relationship with climate-change? Why does no-one ever make that argument?