Labour has been obsessed with introducing ID cards. A solution looking for a problem, Labour has tried almost every excuse in the book to justify them - anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti fraud, to help pay benefits to people, to help pay benefits only to British people, to help access healthcare, etc. etc.

As with so much of government procurement, they grossly underestimated the cost of the scheme both the amount to be paid from taxation and the amounts to be paid by those receiving cards. They overstated what the technology would be able to deliver. And they also disingenuously said that cards would be optional, but that those applying for or renewing a British passport would receive an ID card as well, making them optional only for those with no intention of ever travelling abroad.

Eventually, public scepticism, helped by a very efficient lobbying campaign by NO2ID, meant that ID cards have been delayed indefinitely. And it seems that an incoming Conservative administration will ditch both the cards and the database that it relies upon.

Labour, on the other hand, will take both projects forward again. A vote for Labour is a very unwelcome step towards a police state.

Filed under: Politics with tags conservatives, no2id, privacy, reasons not to vote labour
24951 Comment »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F05%2Freasons-not-to-vote-labour-20-id-cards%2FReasons+not+to+vote+Labour+%2320+-+ID+cards2010-05-02+13%3A51%3A36Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D2495

In 2000/01 there were 1.2 million people on the national DNA database. In 2007/08 there were 4.1 million people on the database - more than doubled in seven years.

Many of them are innocent people who had never been charged with a crime.

The government only agreed to take innocent people off the database when forced to by European law. They simply can't be trusted with your privacy.

Filed under: Politics with tags dna database, privacy, reasons not to vote labour
21024 Comments »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Freasons-not-to-vote-labour-91-expansion-of-the-dna-database%2FReasons+not+to+vote+Labour+%2391+-+expansion+of+the+DNA+database2010-04-24+09%3A00%3A51Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D2102

There’s an odd sort of an article on CiF today, in which a young man, arrested for smoking cannabis in public although later released without charge, argues that innocent people such as him shouldn’t be on the DNA database.

Now, I happen to think that I don’t want people smoking cannabis in the street, even at night, and I also think that the police probably called this just about right – arrest to put the fear of God into him, then let him go without charge. However, on the subject of whether we then want people like this within the DNA database forever, I agree with the author – we don’t.

Happily, there would appear to be a market-based solution to this: pay people to be on the database. This then makes the police decide which innocent people they really want on the database, and those they are only keeping ‘just in case’.

There are an estimated 850,000 innocent people on the database. So a DNA rental payment of £1,000 per annum to each of these people would cost less than £1 billion, which would not break the bank, even if the police decided to keep all of them on the database. However, the payment is big enough to be attractive to individuals while acting as a significant deterrent to the police’s natural inclination to go on fishing expeditions. Under my proposal, either side could opt out of the arrangement, in which case the DNA record would be destroyed and the rental arrangement would cease.

I would extend this proposal to the less-than-innocent, on the proviso that it’s fair that the state should have some claim to the DNA records of those who have committed a crime, given our knowledge about recidivism rates. As a starter for ten, it would seem to make sense for the police to be allowed to retain DNA records without rental payment for the same period as the original sentence (whether served or suspended), possibly with a minimum term of (say) six years.

Would you choose to take such a payment?

Filed under: Politics with tags cannabis, dna database, guardian, privacy
19232 Comments »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Fdna-for-hire%2FDNA+for+hire2010-04-16+19%3A07%3A11Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D1923

I've been having a lively debate with Jon Chambers on Twitter. At the heart of our argument was my taking Jon to task over his claim that Chris Grayling was homophobic for his views on B&B owners.

It's hard to debate properly on Twitter. 140 characters isn't really enough, and the time lag and other people's tweets can make following the thread difficult. Jon's basic argument, as I understand it at least, is that Chris Grayling supports the right of B&B owners to discriminate against others on the grounds of their sexuality and that this, in itself, makes him homophobic.

I believe this line of reasoning is flawed.

As a society we don't care whether people are racist/sexist/homophobic or otherwise discriminatory unless their behaviour manifests itself in negative ways in our society. So a man can hold the most abhorrent views in his mind so long as he never acts on them. As far as discrimination goes, we only prosecute for deeds and words, not thoughts.

Even then, such behaviour is only considered discriminatory if it discriminates. The test is sine qua non. If it weren't for their discriminatory views, they would have behaved differently. A man who treats men and women equally badly might be many things but cannot be sexist. This doesn't mean that different types of discrimination aren't cumulative - you could have a sexist homophobe, for example.

Putting this into predicate logic, we're saying for a subset S of the population, we're asserting that a person p is discriminatory if and only if, for a particular behaviour B

∀x,y S(x) & ¬S(y) → B(p,x) ≠ B(p,y)
(for all x and y, if x is part of S and y isn't, then the behaviour B of p towards x is different to the behaviour B of p towards y)

We have laws that forbid this relationship for certain behaviours and subsets. For example, you're not allowed to discriminate when employing people if the particular subset is people of a particular sex, race, religion or sexual preference. For other behaviours and subsets we don't regulate. So it's okay for gentlemen to continue to prefer blondes.

Back to the predicate calculus (unfortunately we have to go second order here):

RB
(B is a regulated behaviour function)

RS
(S is a regulated segment)

So we wouldn't say that someone who, say, dated only Chinese men was racist. This tells us that the 'bad' discriminatory behaviours are necessarily a function of both behaviour and subset together. So, putting this all together, we have the following assertion, where D(p) is the function of being illegally discriminatory:

D(p) ↔ ∃B ∃S (RB & RS & (∀x,y S(x) & ¬S(y) → B(p,x) ≠ B(p,y)))
(p discriminates illegally if and only if there exist behaviour B and subset S, both of which are regulated, for which p's behaviour for members of S differs to p's behaviour for non-members of S)

So, what has Chris Grayling done? He has said that, in certain defined situations he believes that some behaviours (renting B&B rooms to people) which are currently regulated with respect to a particular subset (homosexual people) should not be. Jon asserts that this makes him homophobic. It doesn't.

Let's give Chris Grayling the symbol c. In order for us to be able to assert that D(c), we need to be able to demonstrate:

∃B ∃S (RB & RS & (∀x,y S(x) & ¬S(y) → B(c,x) ≠ B(c,y))

where, in this case, S is the subset of homosexual men. What regulated function R satisfies the expression? There isn't one, as far as we can tell. Ergo, we must conclude that Chris Grayling is not homophobic.

To which Jon has replied:

@fcablog This isn't about free speech - You subscribe to the same view that you should be able to turn somebody away from a business.
@fcablog Based on their sexuality. That is wrong, and yes, it is homophobic.

If this is homophobia, it's certainly not first order homophobia. If anything, it can only be second order homophobia, which isn't the same thing. We don't know what Chris Grayling himself would do if he ran a B&B in his own home. We might suppose that he would want to discriminate, but that's only supposition. And we don't have any way of looking inside his brain to know what motivated his comments. Labour supporters like to assert that this demonstrates that the Tories are still the 'nasty party'.

Yet there's an alternative explanation - that Chris Grayling believes that an individual's rights to private property are more important than society's rights to regulate their business. Where the business takes place within the home you're left with two difficult choices: either waive others' right to equal treatment or force small businesses to close. It would appear that Grayling favours the former, whereas Labour voters perhaps favour the latter.

I believe that it's worth debating these sorts of issues, without resorting to the 'yah boo' form of mindless politics. Balancing the limits of the state and the protections it should afford to all citizens requires careful, measured consideration.

Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags chris grayling, gay rights, homophobia, jon chambers, predicate logic, privacy, twitter
1745No Comments »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Ffirst-order-and-second-order-homophobia%2FFirst+order+and+second+order+homophobia2010-04-07+21%3A36%3A35Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D1745

This isn't an easy post to write. Before I write it, I want to get this out on the record. Although I may be an economic hardliner, I am a social liberal. I believe fervently in people's rights to live their lives however they want to, so long as their behaviour doesn't interfere in the private lives of others. And that includes the right of people to be gay.

That said, I've watched with disappointment the media furore over comments made by Chris Grayling about the rights of bed and breakfast owners to refuse to allow gay couples to stay in a single room. The media has presented this as an example ("as if it were needed," I hear you cry) of old-school Tory bigotry. But the issues raised by Grayling's musings are much more finely balanced. He was very careful to stress that he saw a distinction between B&Bs and hotels. This makes it clear that his views aren't prompted by anti-gay sentiment. Instead, he views the rights of the individual in their own home as more important. At the heart is the conflict between the private rights of the individual and the public rights of the state.

Clashes between the rights of individuals and the state aren't always easy to resolve, especially when they involve an individual's home. Take the case last year of two police officers who were collaborating on their childcare arrangements. They thought that their non-cash arrangement should be nobody else's business but their own. Yet Ofsted inspectors disagreed, and asked them to call a halt to their arrangements. Ed Balls later intervened to clarify that he didn't think that had been the law's intention.

Similar arguments were raised in relation to the government's ban on smoking in public places. Although the ban has improved the environment for many millions of workers, it's disingenuous to pretend that the ban covers "public" places. The targets of the ban are largely private businesses. One could argue that these businesses, especially those which adjoin the proprietor's home (such as a public house), should be allowed to determine their own smoking arrangements. [And, indeed, ironically enough, many truly public places - parks, streets, bus stops, etc. - are still not covered by the government's smoking ban, although the government is thinking about going further]

And although one gay couple turned away from a B&B have told the press that they were shocked and embarrassed by the snub, it's unclear that the law is the right way to fix this sort of a problem. Do we really want our police spending time investigating crimes of this sort when they could be focussing their attention on matters that the public would perhaps afford greater priority, such as street robbery or violence? Is this law even enforceable? For example, many pubs require patrons to wear a shirt and shoes, or they won't be served, so we accept in certain (perhaps trivial) situations the rights of the business manager to discriminate. Are there to be no legitimate reasons for a B&B owner to refuse to serve a customer, whether gay or not? As Neil Midgley points out in the Telegraph, gay clubs can - and should be able to - ban bigoted B&B owners, so the rights are hardly symmetrical.

The market solution in this situation would be to allow businesses to choose which segments of the market they wish to sell to. And indeed there are B&Bs which market themselves directly as gay-friendly (look, here's one I picked at random from Google). That would avoid having to impinge upon the private property rights of owners, but marketing alone might not be enough to overcome hardened "no blacks, no Irish" cases. Yet, I find the argument that B&B owners should accept this regulation without question or close down deeply unpalatable.

So there are no easy answers. My personal view is that Grayling is technically right. Yet his views, coming as they do as a general election is about to be announced, are as much lousy politics as they are brilliant philosophy.

But there is one significant good news story as a result of this sorry affair. And that's the very fact that The Guardian, a national newspaper, felt that there was a story there at all, and that the story did indeed have "legs". That suggests that there is, generally speaking, sympathy for gays in modern society. A generation ago, that would have been almost inconceivable. Some have portrayed this change towards more social liberalism as Labour's legacy. I suspect that they rode the wave instead of creating it, but it's certainly a change for the better. Meantime, another Labour legacy - a gradual, creeping, insidious encroachment upon the private sphere by the state - is a lot less welcome.

Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags chris grayling, gay rights, privacy, public opinion, public places, smoking
16891 Comment »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Fwhy-on-balance-grayling-was-right%2FWhy%2C+on+balance%2C+Grayling+was+right2010-04-05+22%3A49%3A53Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D1689

The Times carries some useful tips today on how to check your tax code, the simply brilliant British invention that ensures that income from salaried employment is (usually) taxed at precisely the right amount. So I'm astonished to learn in the Telegraph via Guido that the Tories plan to axe the Pay-As-You-Earn system (PAYE) if they gain power.

Amazingly, PAYE dates from 1944, decades before computers. While it may be an imposition on employers, which probably explains why countries like the US don't have it, its huge benefit is that it liberates ordinary people with simple tax affairs from the need to file a tax return.

I don't see how a cashflow based taxation system will work.

Firstly, Britain is obsessed with having a progressive tax system; 'progressive' in this context means tax rates that go up as you earn more money. PAYE handles this by forcing the employer to do all the hard sums. If you get income from another source, they tell HMRC which then fixes it through either this year's or next year's tax code. How will the next pound you earn be taxed under the Conservative proposals?

Secondly, it's far from trivial to work out what a particular piece of income might be. Let's say I receive a Paypal payment from someone. Is it because I sold them something on eBay (possibly taxable at the marginal rate if it's a business, but not otherwise)? Is it a gift (not taxable)? While clever computing might help in some situations, it looks like another NHS supercomputer problem in the making. Times a million.

Thirdly, as Guido points out, there are serious privacy issues here. The State has the right to take you to court to force you to hand over money to it. That's not quite the same as allowing it instant access to your PIN so it can take your money when it likes.

Fourthly, this is simply bad politics. The Tories will be lifting a burden from companies, which cannot vote, and placing a heavy administrative burden on people, who more or less do. Lessons can be learned from the US. There, a quarter of a billion people have to navigate the fiendishly complex IRS rules and regulations to file their own personal tax return. Then they have to do exactly the same again in respect of their state taxes for every state they have worked in. It's insane.

Yes, there are faults in the system. But let's not underestimate how much PAYE has freed millions of ordinary people from tax filing drudgery. It doesn't deserve to be binned just yet.

Update: Clever Tim Worstall sees the upside - pressure for lower taxation.

Filed under: Current issues, Other blogs, Taxation with tags conservatives, guido fawkes, hmrc, nhs supercomputer, paye, privacy, tax returns, telegraph, tim worstall, times
4142 Comments »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F02%2Fgoodbye-paye%2FGoodbye%2C+PAYE%3F2010-02-20+10%3A35%3A10Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D414