The most dangerous man in the world?

We are not worried enough about Hugo Chavez. He may not have nuclear weapons (like Kim Il-Jong), he may not command a mighty army (like Vladiamir Putin) and he may not support terrorists (like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) but that does not stop him posing a real threat to his own people, to his region and ultimately to the rest of the world. He has a weapon that is far more dangerous than any WMD: showmanship. His talent for self promotion has made him the world's leading spokesperson for the anti-democratic populism that his regime practices at home and is trying to spread abroad.

Before we go any further let us be clear about what Hugo Chavez is and what he has done. He first sought power in a military coup and only sought power through elections once this had failed. Once he had gained power, he has been ruthless in ensuring that he would be able to hold onto it. Opposition activists have faced violence, free speech has been stifled and an independent judiciary replaced with political puppets.

This abysmal record should come as no surprise to anyone. For all his talk of socialism, Chavez cannot really be described as a socialist. His cultivation of a personality cult give the clearest indication of the fact that his true ideological home is Peronism. Which is itself modeled on Italian Fascism. He comes from a tradition that is deeply nationalistic and treats democracy, human rights and an open economy as worthless foreign imports.

Chavez's malevolent influence is felt far beyond Venezuela. Candidates modeling themselves on and funded by Chavez have won elections in Bolivia and Ecuador. They have come close to doing so in Peru and Mexico. Venezuela gives considerable support to the Cuba's communist government, without which it is doubtful that the regime could maintain the economic isolation that it uses to cut off its people. He is also more than happy to back Iran's appalling government.This influence is possible due to Venezuela's huge oil reserves, which give Mr Chavez the money to spend on Costa Rican elections, Iranian power stations and London's commuters.

What makes Chavez uniquely dangerous is the fact that he has successfully managed to present his record in Government as something worthy of emulation. Few people look at the totalitarian government of North Korea and wish that there country had its own 'dear leader.' Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's brand of repressive theocracy has a very narrow appeal and is increasingly unpopular even in Iran. Vladimir Putin tends to be feared rather loved by non-Russians. He has shown very little interest in public opinion outside of Russia and its immediate sphere of influence, which is just as well since he lacks Mr Chavez's charisma. By contrast the perception of Venezuela in many parts of the world is that it is an example of a successful socialist economy which has stood up to the United States. This is a model that particularly in Latin America many will wish to imitate.

The reality is, of course, very different. The success of Venzuala's economy is not the result of any move towards socialism. Inequality has actually risen under Mr Chavez and a new class of well connected, very wealthy businessmen known as 'Boligarchs' have emerged. Instead he has been fortunate enough to have his presidency coincide with a spike in the price of oil that has enabled him to pour money into his much vaunted anti-poverty programs that have led to big reductions in poverty. This mirage of success has given Chavez the chance to claim that he has produced a new model of 'bolivarian socialism' that other countries should imitate. The xenophobia and the suppression of political and economic freedom that this ideology implies is a deeply unwelcome and Chavez's role in unleashing it illustrates just how dangerous a charlatan with a bit of luck and a flair for presentation can be.

DOH!

This will be my final potshot at the Sun over its absurd shark stories but I just can't resist posting something about the Sun's story turning out to be a hoax.

The video that sparked this whole thing was of a Great White shark, the only problem was that it was not in Newquay but Johannesburg. The film was taken by a night club bouncer while on holiday in South Africa, he sent it into the Sun as a joke, not expecting it to be taken seriously.

According to the Guardians report into the incident: "Newquay townsfolk seem to have thought the story was nonsense from the start. For one thing, the water looks mirror-like and it is usually choppy off north Cornwall. Nor did the angle look right if the shark had really been 100ft (30 metres) away.

A Newquay lifeguard, Paul Benney, said he had smiled because he had known Mr Keeble had just returned from South Africa. "He also has really bad eyesight so I laughed when I read he saw it from 100ft away. We have had a few kids a bit scared about sharks here but we told them not to worry. You are in far greater danger of being hurt by a weaver fish than a shark, he said."

I doubt that the Sun will mind being duped given how well its shark editions have sold but should the rest of us?

Some people have expressed concerns about the fear of shark attacks will drive away tourists. The Google searches that have led people to this site would support that. Nervous individuals are googling questions like: "how often do sharks attacks happen in the UK." However, I suspect that provided surfers don't start losing limbs that the fear this story has caused will pass.

What is has given us is a response next time the Sun runs a story about 'Gypsy beggar camps in Romania' or something similar, the voices of reason will have a perfect response: 'Oh and I suppose there is a Great White shark in Cornwall.'

Why the Tories lose again and again

There's a fascinating article in today's Guardian about the role of emotion in politics. It looks at how the Democratic presidential candidates have failed to understand that voters react much more strongly to stories that politicians tell than to the arguments they make. Clinical logic is not enough, a successful vote winner requires something else. As the author puts it: 'the data is crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments.' You can watch the author discuss his ideas here.

In Britain it is not on the left but on the right that we find the people, who do not understand the emotional side of politics. The Labour party has successfully created a narrative, first around the idea that it was time for a change and then around providing successful, stable leadership. By contrast, the Conservatives have made a similar mistake to the Democrats. They looked at opinion polls, saw that the public appeared to share their hostility to immigration and the EU, went out and argued for their positions on those issues and were trounced. What they had failed to appreciate was that by carping on about those two issues without presenting any kind of positive vision, that voters would construct their own story about the Conservative party. Instead of being the heroes, the voters made them into negative thinking villains obsessed with foreigners. This was not the kind of party that anyone wants to vote for.

David Cameron understood the need to change the story and when it comes to convincing the public that he is a nice guy, he has succeeded. Opinion polls show that the public believe that Cameron is an affable, non threatening individual. The visits to the arctic and the hoody hugging have served their purpose. However, his attempt to construct a broader narrative about it being a time for a change and him being the man to deliver it has failed. This failure is at the heart of his recent trouble and it has come about for two very good reasons. Firstly, few people believe that he is really that different from the Government he is seeking to replace. It is not for nothing that his political opponents have seized on the similarity between him and Blair. A more significant problem stems from his reluctance to articulate policies, which means that he is unable to tell people what changes he wants. Unless he can produce a more convincing vision for Britain then like his unfortunate predecessors he will carry on losing.

As for the narrative that will propel British politics other perpetual losers back into power, uhh, can I get back to you on that one...

The least worst tax

There is something distasteful about massive fortunes acquired by a mere accident of birth. I will happily defend inequality, when it comes about as a result of some people working harder, showing more initiative and taken more risks than others but when it is based solely on certain individuals being lucky enough to inherit money then it is indefensible. So I am rather bemused why anyone would be campaigning to abolish inheritance tax. It is without a doubt one of the best ways of taxing people: it does not reduce incentives to work and is only paid by a wealthy minority. There would be a real cost to scrapping it because you would have to increase other taxes to pay for it.

A market economy rests on a bargain. The rewards for our labour (our wage) depend on the value put on our work by the market, which in turn reflects the demands of other members of society expressed by what they are willing to spend money on. In this way we are given incentives for people to do the type of work that the other members of our society think is most valuable. This results in a wide divergence in incomes but we accept this because it is in our interest to do so. It may irk us that a doctor is richer than we are but if the alternative is not getting medical care, then it is a price most people are willing to pay.

Inherited wealth does not provide any such incentives since it is acquired by being born into the right family rather than by actually doing anything. For this reason, a tax on it is an ideal way to help fund government spending.

Abolishing inheritance tax would create a bizarre situation, where somebody who goes out and earns a fortune has to hand over almost 40% of it to the taxman but the Paris Hiltons of this world, would pay no tax at all on money they have acquired for doing nothing other than being born.

The arguments usually used to argue for the abolition of inheritance tax tend either to be logically incoherent or factually inaccurate. Take, for example, the claim that it means someone paying tax twice on the same money. The problem with this reasoning is that the money has changed hands, the income tax is paid by the person who bequeaths the wealth and inheritance tax by the inheritor.

The claim it is a tax on the middle class is only true due to the rather elastic way we English define the middle class. There is no way a middle income family is going to pay it. The inland revenue estimate that a mere 4% of estates are eligible for inheritance tax, which makes it one of the most progressive taxes out there. This has posed a bit of a problem for those who want to scrap the tax because it is hard to get people worked up about a tax they are not going to pay. But do not fear many of these enterprising campaigners have found a way around this problem: lying. In his book, lies and the lying liars who tell them, the liberal comedian and journalist Al Franken, shows how Republicans campaigning for the repeal of the estate tax in the US consistently misled voters about who paid the tax. The estate tax affects an even smaller portion of the population than its UK equivalent yet Republican TV adverts showed people who own small farms, fretting about having to pay 'the death tax.' Here in the UK the role of the Republican party has been taken n by the Daily express, which constantly talks of ordinary families facing, what they have started calling 'the death tax.'

It is true that the number of people paying inheritance tax has increased in recent years. But what this represents is how the property boom has created many more large estates and pushed up levels of inequality. In this context, inheritance tax is more important than ever.

This is not to say that inheritance tax is perfect and that it could not be made to work better. A recent paper from IPPR sets out the kind of changes that are needed. Notably closing loopholes to reduce evasion and basing the tax on accessions rather than legacies

The debate over inheritance tax is part of a wider debate about the kind of society we want to live in. Do we want a meritocracy or an aristocracy. Do we want social justice or social privilege. Do we want a society united by opportunity or a society divided by inequality. There is no reason to scrap inheritance tax and every reason to keep. It is time to make the case for the least worst tax.

The Banality of Evil

On the 11th April 1961, Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity. It could legitimately be described as the trial of the century. The man who organised the holocaust being put on trial by the people he had tried to destroy. The New Yorker magazine asked the philosopher, Hannah Ardent, to cover the trial. What she found was not a fanatic or a sadist or a psychopath but an ordinary, almost boring person playing by the rules of the society in which he lived. He was so apparently normal, that Ardent subtitled her classic account of the trial: 'report on the banality of evil.'

A similar feeling seems to have struck Observer columnist, Jasper Gerard while following the trial of Chris Langham. In todays Observer, he examines how it is possible that Langham 'is not the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of red-top demonisation' but a man 'into carbon offsetting and charity fun runs.' He concludes that we need to comprehend as well as condemn, if we are to prevent people from turning into abusers.

The need to look into what causes people to commit unspeakable acts was underlined by an experiment conducted a few months after Eichmann's trial. A psychologist named Stanley Millgram wanted to find out if men like Eichmann could really have committed mass murder simply because they were following orders. A volunteer is presented with a 'teacher' asking questions of a 'student' (apparently another volunteer but in reality a member of the research team.) Every time the 'student' gets one of the questions wrong, the 'teacher' orders the volunteer to administer a large electronic shock to the 'student.' The results were startling; rather than as might be expected disobeying an order to cause another human being considerable pain, it appears that if an authority figure tells us to do something that in most cases we will obey.

This fundamentally altered our view of the perpetrators of the holocaust. It suggested that many, perhaps most of us, would in certain circumstances be willing to participate in an atrocity. This is not for a minute to excuse anybody. Just because we choose not to say no does not mean that we shouldn't. What it does do is force us to consider more complicated and more ambiguous explanations of how the holocaust came about. It forces us to examine how a situation came about, where mass murder was not only considered socially acceptable but to be civic duty.

To dismiss people like Eichmann and Langham as monsters is an understandable impulse, it allows us to avoid the uncomfortable truth that they are humans just like us. It is, however, a mistake because it allows us to forget that monsters are made not born and that the only way we can unmake them is to understand them. As distasteful a process as that may be.

More Shark nonsense

JK Galbraith once joked that the 'economists exist to make astrologers look good.' I sometimes think that something similar goes on with Britain's trashier tabloids because there can be no reason for the Daily Star other than to make the Sun look good. Not to be outdone by the Sun's screw up over supposed sightings of a Great White Shark in Cornwall, the Star produces its own not terribly scary scare story.

Now you might think that in order to make the front page of a national newspaper it would have to have been spotted somewhere pretty unusual, like say the North Pole, the Falkland Islands or the River Thames. In fact, this sighting is in the Mediterranean, which is part of the Great Whites natural habitat.

The supposed danger posed to British tourists is also overplayed (I will overlook the Star's indifference to non-Brits being attacked). As the article admits the last shark attack in Spain occurred close to fifteen years ago and (they don't admit this) last year their were only sixty shark attacks across the entire world, of which a mere four were fatal. It is far more likely that a tourist will be killed by drowning than by a shark.

But you will be reassured to know that the Star still manages to blame Eastern Europeans for this.

Commander Crackpot for Mayor

It was an awfully nice idea. When Tony Blair created the office of mayor of London, he imagined that it would attract a new kind of politician, able to provide the city with visionary leadership. Instead the choice that Londoners will be presented with next year is between two distinctly unappealing examples of the old kind of politics. In the red corner, an apologist for Islamic extremism and in the blue, a reactionary buffoon who can barely read the autoque on have I got news for you.
I do not envy Londoners having to choose between them.

In these circumstances, the often asked question, what are the Liberal Democrats for? answers itself. The shear awfulness of the candidates from the major parties presents us with a unique opportunity to pull off a massive electoral upset. But this would require us to put forward a very strong candidate. This is something we have so far failed to do. We have already had to reopen to our selection once and the suggestions for candidates are getting odder and odder. So far only one candidate has been suggested who can really take on the gruesome twosome. That candidate is Deputy Assistant Commisioner Brian Paddick.

Paddick is one of Britain's most high profile police officers. As the Met's commander in the London Borough of Lambeth he oversaw a controversial but highly successful 'softly-softly' approach to possession of Cannabis, which paved the way for the reclassification of Cannabis as a Class C drug. He was a prominent figure in the response to the 21st July bombings. He is the most senior openly gay police officer. He is not a universally popular figure; the Daily Mail christened him Commander Crackpot for his comment that 'Anarchy held a certain appeal to him' and he was accused (and cleared) of taking drugs.

This background would help Paddick to overcome many of the problems that tend to afflict any Lib Dem. To the accusation that we are soft on crime, we could hit back with the fact that our candidate is a long serving and successful police officer. To the suggestion that we are a bunch of nice but woolly minded people who can't actually run anything, we could respond that our candidate had plenty of experience of management from his time in the police. Paddick's profile may not be as high as Ken and Boris's but it is still substantial and would go a long way to overcoming the perception that we can't win. He is certainly more recognisable than any of the other potential non-Lembit candidates.

The objections I would normally have to a police officer being a Lib Dem candidate, do not apply in Paddick's case. The stereotype of the authoritarian, socially conservative plod evidently does not apply to Paddick. I would also usually be concerned about how effective a communicator a police candidate would be but again this objection does not possibly apply. I do not think anyone could accuse Paddick of being camera shy and he has a reputation as a talented public speaker. A colleague said of him: "When he spoke at a meeting in the town hall in Brixton, it was the first time the community gave a senior police officer a standing ovation. He had them rolling around in peals of laughter with the borough commander rather than at the borough commander. He is a warm and friendly person, very human. He builds confidence, people trust him."

Paddick standing would pose serious problems for Boris Johnson because it would expose many of his weaknesses. I imagine that the targeted letter to Conservative supporters would have something like this: 'while Conservative candidate from Henley was being fired for lying by his own leader, Brian Paddick was working hard to make the streets safe for ordinary Londoners.' Boris's almost complete lack of management experience would be showed up by facing Paddick, who has held senior positions in the police force and Ken, who is already doing the job. Next to Paddick just how much of a featherweight Boris is would be painfully obvious.

Assuming they could get into second place, a Lib Dem candidate might find it easier to actually go on and win. Where as the second votes of Lib Dem supporters would be expected to split pretty evenly between the Tory and Labour candidates, the bulk of Tory second votes would probably to the Lib Dem. They would also take a much higher share of the transfers from Green and Respect voters than would a Conservative candidate.

Ken vs. Boris vs. DAC Paddick would certainly not be boring and at the end London might just have the mayor it deserves.