poderpolitico.net

The FIFA soap opera continues, and Placido Domingo, Johan Cruyff and Henry Kissinger have been drafted in to save world football.

As Sepp Blatter put it:

“These gentlemen are more or less advisers, they are not the experts but advisers and what they should be also is the kind of council of wisdom which my executive committee would not like because they think they are the council of wisdom,” Blatter said.

“I have also contacted the Spanish singer … help me with the name.”

“Prompted with Domingo’s name by interviewer Alex Thomas, he went on: “Placido Domingo will be part [of the committee]. He is happy, he is proud that he is part – as Kissinger also! People say he [Kissinger] is an old man, but he is a wise man.”

That reminds of a nursery rhyme:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And how do you think they got there?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker,
They all jumped out of a rotten potato,
‘Twas enough to make a man stare.

Given that these three weren’t aware that Sepp Blatter had dropped them into the tub before he announced it, it’s hardly surprising that at least one of these is being slightly hesitant:

“Kissinger has also poured cold water on Blatter’s attempts to fast-track him on to the committee, telling the BBC on Sunday that he would wait to see the terms of reference before agreeing to join.”

I’m stuggling for an analogy, but the best I can do is that somewhere there is Caligula in the background, and that Sepp Blatter is the horse.

So where next for FIFA? And how to achieve it?

Or do we go back to cricket?

Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon’s burrow.

The Wardman Wire

I’m hoping to be back soon.

Political life is looking a little bit more interesting, with the teeny-bopping revolutionaries over at UKUNCUT discovering what it means to be a marketing campaign with no product (why has no one on the right documented where the wider anti-cuts movement came from, and asked why they keep so quiet about their origins and lynchpins?), Libel Reform beginning to hot up, and the Coalition getting into the really important work.

It’s been a busy few months at Wardman Towers, and I owe a number of people apologies for sudden absence, or failed sputtering restarts before now. Sorry.

I’m now in the Mark Thompson camp – less time, other things to do, plus a possible change of career this year. There’ll also be a little less heavy lifting and technical experimentation here.

And I’d say that no, the blogosphere hasn’t died; people who say it has died have stopped thinking.

(Updated: not good to be too waspish after a break)

The Wardman Wire

For some time Nadine Dorries has been pursuing Tim Ireland with allegations of stalking, after Tim turned up at a meeting where Nadine was speaking on 4th May 2010and recorded it with permission from the organisers, while simultaneously being a mosquito-like online critic/satirist. Nadine turned out to be slightly annoyed and complained to the constabulary.

Since then it has been a terrier match.

Last Friday, Dorries asserted:

Today I had a meeting with Bedfordshire Police. They informed me that under caution and recorded on tape at Guldford Police station, Tim Ireland, of bloggerheads, has been issued with a warning under section two of the harassment act.

Whereas Tim has published the text of his message from the police :

I write to inform you that the harassment complaint made against you by Nadine Dorries, MP, on 12th July 2010 is now concluded.

This was in relation to you attending the Flitwick Hall Hustings, Bedfordshire on 4th May 2010, knowing that Nadine Dorries was in attendance. As advised, others could construe this type of behaviour as harassment or stalking. There is no action against you concerning this matter, apart from the verbal warning given by me to you during the Voluntary Interview in January 2011.

Nadine Dorries has been informed of this result.

The above Non Crime Report has been generated today, Monday 16th May 2011, as the paperwork for this complaint now needs to be referenced and filed.

If I were the member of the Constabulary I would be asserting:

Phew !

For me the clincher is the phrase “non-Crime Report”, and the confirmation of “no action”; I’m taking that “verbal warning” as “you did nothing, sir, but take care in future”.

Did Tim Ireland stalk Nadine Dorries? No.

It’s also a warning to bloggers not to back down, but to take care that they are in a defensible position when they don’t back down.

The Wardman Wire

They’ve caught up with Europe after 3 years … good job it wasn’t a ruling on anyone who was locked up.

Via the BBC:

Rules allowing police forces to keep the fingerprints and DNA samples of innocent people are unlawful, says the UK Supreme Court.

The decision comes nearly three years after the European Court of Human Rights came to a similar conclusion.

Judges said government plans for changes to the law were already in the pipeline.

The ECHR ruled that the guidelines did not differentiate between criminals and people who had never been convicted.

There’s going to be quite a bit of complication on this, and grey areas galore, so I’m making no further comment.

The Wardman Wire

Alerted by a rather simplistic, often factually inaccurate article over on Liberal Conspiracy, I’ve ended up checking out the new British campaign for a referendum on continued British membership of the EU, The People’s Pledge. More to the point, I’ve had a quick look at its five key arguments:

The choice concerning our relationship with the EU is now clear: either we accept being primarily and increasingly governed from Brussels or we decide to abandon membership and negotiate a new relationship with the EU based on trade and, where this makes sense, voluntary co-operation.

*sigh*

Herewith, a very quick and dirty demolition of their “5 key reasons why we must have a referendum on Britain and the EU”, originally written as a comment under that Liberal Conspiracy piece:

1) No one under 54 has had the chance to vote on our relationship with Brussels.

- And no one – full-stop – has had the chance to vote on the role of the House of Commons, House of Lords, Cabinet, Prime Minister, Civil Service, etc. etc. etc. On pretty much any aspect of the British constitution, in fact, since the Acts of Union 300+ years ago.

2) The European Union now makes a majority of the laws we must obey

- This is simply bollocks. See, for example, the recent House of Commons Library paper (PDF) on the issue, or my old What percentage of laws come from the EU post. The true figure is more like 10-20% of laws, with regulations coming in at around 20-30%. Both figures are declining year on year.

3) The UK has less than 10% of the votes in the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament

- Our representation is (approximately) in line with our population size – with population taken into account on many votes in the Council, giving the UK a very strong position. Would anything other than that be fair on the other member states with whom we are cooperating? And how much relative say do we have in the WTO, NATO or the UN?

4) The EU is costing Britain more and more money

- This is justified by the classic £48m a day claim (it used to be £40m, but the exchange rate’s got worse), which is abject nonsense, based on gross rather than net, and rounded up, as shown in this old post – and is backed up by some nonsense about the cost of the Greek bailout (ignoring the British investment money that would be lost if Greece/Ireland/Portugal had been allowed to go bankrupt), and in any case ignores the wider impact of EU membership on the economy as a whole. Simplistic tosh.

5) The EU wants to give itself new powers of “economic governance”

- Erm… For the Eurozone. Of which Britain is not a member. Britain would only benefit by her neighbours (and major trading partners) being economically more stable and prosperous.

Utter rubbish, all five of them.

Nosemonkey’s EUtopia

“Let’s leave the EU and join the EEA or EFTA – Norway and Switzerland are doing fine without EU membership!” It’s a perennial argument of a surprisingly large number of anti-EU types, and I’ve been meaning to do a proper post on it for (literally) years. It is, needless to say, a nonsense argument based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Norwegian/Swiss relations with the EU.

Norway has oil. Switzerland’s a tax haven. Both have far, far smaller populations than the UK, accounting for their far higher GDPs per capita (and hence relative prosperity). They are not comparable with Britain.

Even if they were – both also have to pay in to the EU budget proportionate to their economies. Norway currently pays c.340 million euros per annum. This is more than many EU member states – especially when you consider the fact that actual members get money back, reducing their net contributions.

In fact, judging from this chart of net contributions, Norway would – if included in the chart – be about the 10th highest contributor to the EU budget, despite not being a member.

Rough maths tells us that, all things being equal, as the UK’s GDP is approximately 5.7 times that of Norway’s, the UK would still need to contribute around 2 billion euros a year to the EU budget if part of the EEA/EFTA. While having no say in what EU laws and regulations we’d still have to follow.

Because both Norway and Switzerland also – without having any say in their formulation – have to abide by 80-90% of EU rules and regulations in order to be part of the Common Market.

Because you know what you need for a Common Market to function? Common rules and regulations.

That’s the whole reason *why* the EEC has been shifting down the path towards elements of political union over the last five decades – you need a certain amount of political harmonisation to enable functional, stable economic harmonisation. The lack of greater political cohesion (especially the lack of a common fiscal policy) is one of the major contributing factors to the current eurozone crisis, FFS.

Also worth remembering – these “we’d be better off in EFTA/the EEA” arguments used to have a third “look how well so-and-so’s doing” country included: Iceland.

We don’t hear much about how well Iceland’s doing in the EEA any more, do we?

You see – it’s all very well saying “let’s leave the EU”. But if you’re advocating ditching the status quo you’d better have a pretty bloody well thought-through alternative plan.

The vast, vast majority of EU withdrawalists, however, seem simply not to have done their research.

(This originally posted as a comment here, and now slightly modified with additional links)

Nosemonkey’s EUtopia

This morning I was granted an insight into the image of England as it may be seen from abroad, complete with our funny English superinjunctions and our ruritanian judges bumptiously demanding that they have the right to rule the media worldwide. It is quite remarkable.

We’ve all seen the Strauss-Kahn case on the satellite news.

The story of the Presidential-candidate-in-waiting suddenly deciding to leave the country after a sexual escapade, which may or may not turn out to be a criminal sexual assault, and being caught on the plane to sanctuary from charge as it was sitting on the runway.

All very cloak and dagger, and now a news story for the next week or so, the probable end of a career for Mr Strauss-Kahn, and a possible very long jail sentence if he is charged and found guilty.

And we’ve all seen the film of a distinguished looking, grey-haired man being led from the aircraft back towards a process of inquiry and justice. Except maybe in France, because in France they have strong privacy law.

There was a small note on the BBC News 24 pictures of Strauss-Kahn being led back from the aircraft:

‘in France we would not be able to show you this due to French privacy laws’.

Is this right? The footage was clearly News, clearly a public figure, clearly a matter of public interest, and clearly not in any way frivolous. It all seems a little bit like a throwback to a fairytale – you can’t know, little boy, because this they say you can’t.

And according to French legal commentator Thomas Roussineau, a lawyer specialising in privacy law:

However, in the case of Mr Strauss-Kahn, he has never been open to the media about his private life, so benefits from stricter protection, he said.

Even the photo circulating of Mr Strauss-Kahn handcuffed in theory breached the law on the presumption of innocence and image rights, he said.

That’s why this debate needs to be about worldwide jurisdiction and news, protection of sources, and helping people in Third World and non-democratic countries not to be killed by powerful individuals who don’t like them revealing inconvenient facts.

That’s how our Libel regime looks to more advanced countries.

In Britain we still have the situation where a judge in London can decide that he has jurisdiction over, for example, a case brought by a Ukrainian against another Ukrainian, about an article published in Ukrainian, on a Ukrainian website, of interest to Ukrainians, with hardly any (in this case about 100) subscribers in the UK.

This was the Rinat Akhmetov (a Ukrainian Oligarch) vs Obozrevatel case, as reported in the “Free Speech is Not For Sale” report, and also mentioned in the Law Gazette here. Akhmetov obtained a default judgement in £60,000 in a UK Court.

DEFAULT JUDGMENT (2007-08) Claimant: Rinat Akhmetov, businessman, Ukraine Respondent: Obozrevatel, two of its editors, and one of its journalists, Ukraine

Obozrevatel is a Ukraine-based internet news site that publishes in Ukrainian, with only a few dozen readers in Britain. This case was brought by Akhmetov in relation to a series of four articles about Akhmetov’s youth, published in January and February of 2007. Default judgment in Akhmetov’s favour was obtained, along with damages of £50,000 and costs, in June 2008. There is no doubt that these cases will have had a chilling effect on Ukrainian journalists.

So we shouldn’t swallow the “this is mainly about the right to privacy” line, no matter where it comes from. This is about more than which Home Counties Hero is shagging or not shagging which model girl, socialite or celebrity this week, even though that is the steamy lens through which this debate is seen.

Instead, ignore Max Mosley’s focus on privacy of particular figures and make the impact on news and politics, and the issues of libel tourism and worldwide jurisdiction, the focus of the debate.

In the meantime, you can follow Carl Gardner’s blog for legally literate reporting on the Strauss-Kahn case.

Conversation on this post is over at the Raccoon’s place.

The Wardman Wire

Talk about wasting Parliamentary time on trivia:

Chris Bryant (Rhondda, Labour)

May we have a debate in Government time about Government policy on singing “Jerusalem” at weddings?

If a heterosexual couple get married in church, many clergy will refuse to allow it to be sung, because it is not a hymn addressed to God; if a straight couple get married in a civil wedding, they are point blank not allowed it, because it is a religious song; if, however, a gay couple have a civil partnership, under Government plans they will be allowed to sing it. So can we make sure that “Jerusalem” is not just reserved for homosexuals?

Duh.

The Wardman Wire

The best “patchwork” video I have even seen – one constructed from a montage of sources – is “Right Wing Radio Duck”, where “Donald Duck meets Glenn Beck”, as I posted last year.

At the time I missed a brilliant follow-up from Rebellious Pixels, which shows Glenn Beck’s theory that this had been funded by some shadowy body in the background, rather than simply done by an individual who happens not to like him.

Wonderful.

[Update 2: Even better: This is a fuller version of the Glenn Beck reaction, in which he paraphrases Gandhi.
Glenn Beck\'s reflection on 'Right Wing Radio Duck'.].

The Wardman Wire

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned – it has been pretty much three months since my last post. This is the longest I’ve gone without updating this place since mid-2004.

Why? Mostly the real world – I’ve just got back from a month shunting aroung the US (for work) and Japan (for pleasure), with other work trips to Dublin, Athens and elsewhere during the last few months as the day job’s got more and more demanding (and interesting).

But it’s also got a fair amount to do with exasperation. The EU as a whole remains in crisis – and remains singularly incapable of doing anything constructive to deal with it. Or, at least, not without a great deal of petty member-state level bickering and infantile knee-jerking to minor issues that have been blown out of all proportion. Nationalist parties are on the rise. There’s a threat of reintroducing border controls. The ongoing euro crisis is still bubbling away, with some countries now (supposedly) considering a return to national currencies.

The European Union exists to make prosperous times more porsperous, but also to prevent crises turning into disasters. The way the various member state politicians have been pathetically beating their patriotic, xenophobic, blame-anyone-but-us drums of late, this latter bit seems to have been forgotten. Instead, the EU – or the euro – is being used as a scapegoat for a whole raft of problems which are almost exclusively due to the incompetence of national-level politicians. Hell – the problems in Greece and Portugal are prime examples: both due to cock-ups on a national level, and neither country (Greece especially) should have been allowed to join the euro in the first place.

In the past I’ve always said that I’ll avoid writing about economics here, as I’ve never felt sufficiently qualified. It’s becoming increasingly clear that neither is anyone else. The sheer idiocy on display whenever I read of yet another British idiot arguing that the UK shouldn’t contribute to the Irish/Greek/Portugese bailouts – desplaying either shocking ignorance of the vast amounts of British money that would be at risk if any of those countries defaulted, or an insane desire to bring about continent-wide economic collapse far worse than anything seen since the hyperinflation of the 1920s/30s – has led me to realise that I actually know rather more about economics than I previously thought.

This is, of course, not so much due to learning much more (though I have been reading a fair few books on international macroeconomics and trade of late, being a total spod) – it’s more that the standards of economic analysis everywhere outside the Economist and Financial Times (neither of which are exactly ideologically neutral) has fallen to historically dire levels of mediocrity.

And the saddest thing? So much of what’s currently happening could so easily have been prevented if anyone had bothered to take a longer view than the usual 5 year timescales in which most politicians seem to think. Greece? An economic basket-case? We’ve known that for decades, FFS. A continental currency with no common fiscal policy not being overly flexible in times of crisis? Who would have guessed? Politicians blaming foreigners as soon as times get tough? Never would have thought it…

Yet the current EU has been built primarily in either economic good times or post-Cold War periods of optimism. When things seem to be going well, there’s little incentive to get ambitious in case you do something to harm the status quo. But as soon as you enter a crisis period, the political will to collaborate starts to fade away.

Am I pessimistic for the future of the EU? Not overly. Not even for the future of the eurozone. If anything, I’m increasingly hopeful that this crisis may continue long enough to finally start pushing at least *some* EU member states towards the kind of radical reforms that I’ve long argued are necessary. But this may yet take a while – and there may well be a few casualties along the way. The eurozone can survive this crisis – the question is whether it should be allowed to without some fundamental reforms. The EU *will* survive the crisis – the question is whether it will survive with its internal relations intact.

We could be on the verge of a major round of reforms, or we could be about to backtrack and stagnate for another decade as everyone tries to recover. It’s very hard to call – and extremely frustrating to watch politician after politician spew out the usual populist nonsense in the meantime.

Which is the other major reason I’ve been quiet here of late – EU watching is usually fairly dull, but for the last few months it’s also been incredibly frustrating and predictable. That’s too much even for my patience to cope with.

Nosemonkey’s EUtopia