Arieh Kovler

Category: Politics

  • (Bad) ideas to stop the looters

    People have lots of ideas about tactics that should be used to quell the mobs. Some of the most common ideas, though,aren’t very good.

    This is because we keep talking about the “riots”, but what’s happened the last few days aren’t really riots. They have no political cause, no demands, no agenda. They have no single target, They are, on the whole, small groups of people out to steal and smash and burn. If the police protect shops then they’ll burn cars. When the fire brigade comes, they’ll leave and go back to looting shops.

    Considering these robberies as “riots” had led some people to suggest that the police need to use the traditional tools of quelling riots. These are the wrong tools for the actual situation.

    Water Cannon

    Water cannons are a crowd-control measure that has never been us in mainland Britain. They are a bit like giant hoses on the front of armoured vehicles which pump out water under high pressure, and they look a bit like tanks. People near to the cannon will be pushed back and might be knocked off their feet. People further away will get wet. Water cannon can be used to break a large charging mob or a driven towards a stationary mob to disperse them.

    Water cannons are pretty useless against small fast-moving groups of people who don’t really care where they cause trouble. They’re too big, too slow and too targeted. If they’re deployed at one end of a street the looters will hit the other end. If they deploy at both ends, the looters will hit the next street.

    Tear Gas

    Tear Gas is an irritating gas; it makes you cry, your eyes sting and it can even blind in high enough concentrations. It’s actually a fine powder, so when people rub their eyes they make it worse.

    Tear gas can disperse crowds if it’s shot into the middle of them, but this can be dangerous to do unless the crowd is able to get away. It can also be used as a defensive measure to stop protesters crossing past a line.

    Tear gas is more mobile than water cannon so it can be deployed more easily. But ultimately, it suffers from the same core problem – it moves on the looters down the street, or to the next street. It doesn’t stop them, arrest them or deter them overall.

    Curfews

    This is just a rubbish idea, for two reasons:

    1. How are police going to enforce a curfew if they don’t have the numbers to police the mobs at the moment? People will break the curfew and be emboldened to start stealing.
    2. Curfews are to stop trouble at night. Yesterday the looting started before 4pm. I feel like a lunchtime curfew isn’t really an option

    (inspired by a good tweet from David Aaronovitch)

  • London riots and media ‘blackouts’

    I will write a fuller blog on the London riots later, but just wanted to comment on a theme seen in some of the tweets and chatter: that the media somehow covered up the latest rioting in Enfield and other places in London.

    The news is rarely instant. It often takes hours for something to be reported as “BREAKING NEWS”. That’s because newsrooms are big and have lots of things happening. It takes time to get cameras to a scene when something’s happening. Sometimes the initial reports take time to make it to a news-desk, or are contradictory by the time they get there.

    Twitter means that we can (and often do) know about things before they appear on the mainstream news. As a twitter-addict and news-addict, I follow in turn many people with the same twin afflictions. I am very used to seeing a big story break on Twitter hours before it appears on the BBC. Lots of other people are less used to this, so when they saw hundreds of tweets about trouble in Enfield but no footage on the BBC, they assumed it was some kind of cover-up.

    When journalists on the scene showed empty buildings rather than ongoing riots, some people assumed it was part of a conspiracy rather than because the looters were in cars, moving fast and not wanting to be on the news nicking  42-inch tellies.

    When the BBC news website wasn’t updated, they assumed there was a D-notice rather than that it was a Sunday night in August so maybe the BBC website team was just a little light on the ground.

    When nobody reported on the riot in Hemel Hempstead, they complained but didn’t consider the possibility that there wasn’t actually a riot in Hemel Hempstead.

    Tonight proved again that Twitter is now the primary medium for news. This doesn’t mean that journalists have no role to play. I got my news tonight from the Guardian’s Paul Lewis on the scene in Enfield and Edmonton, the Telegraph’s Andrew Hough in Brixton, and Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy (who’s still out on the streets of Walthamstow trying to help). Two of those are broadsheet journalists and all were using Twitter.

    In a public incident, Twitter will always beat traditional news media for speed. We’re all just going to have to get used to that rather than scrambling about for conspiracies.

  • The real evidence on Circumcision and HIV

    Writing in the Guardian, Neil Howard and Rebecca Steinfeld argue for a ban on circumcision. I disagree with them, but luckily so do many others and they’ve done a good job of responding. See this direct response from Adam Wagner, and this pre-emptive piece by Alex Stein.

    I have an instant prejudice against the potluck buffet approach to advocacy. I feel people should pick a line of argument and stick with it, rather than offering all sort of different forms of case. Steinfeld and Howard’s article makes rights-based claims, offers ends-based and harm-based objections, even flirts with anthropolatry.

    It’s the section on the medical argument that really bothers me though. Howard and Steinfeld, in their wish to make every argument they can, dismiss the good evidence for circumcision as an HIV-prevention method. They do this in two ways – using problematic sources, and using good sources but misinterpreting them. The offending paragraph in the Guardian article is:

    What about the health argument, that male circumcision is “cleaner” and prevents HIV transmission? There is a body of research that claims a correlation between circumcision and reduced transmission rates, and this is not to be taken lightly, since it represents the strongest case for male genital cutting – at least in Aids-ravaged regions. But such research is heavily contested. A 2007 study by Dowsett and Couch asserted that insufficient evidence exists to believe that circumcision does reduce transmission, while Gregorio et al’s later analysis cast doubt on correlations between circumcision and transmission of HIV and STI’s more generally. (more…)

  • Rules and Media Restraint

    I’ve just come back from an event discussing the future of the UK’s Coalition Government, put on by Lexington Communications and ConservativeHome. But that’s about as much as I can say.

    There are rules. This event was under one of the most famous, the Chatham House Rule, named after the offices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which everyone just calls Chatham House anyway.

    The Chatham House Rule is:

    Participants are free to use the information received [at the event], but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

    So I sat through an interesting event but I couldn’t tweet (a problem for those of us who have got into the habit of sharing interesting things we learn) and can only mention the things the panel said at some unconnected point in the future, perhaps passing off their opinons as my own or as something I “heard someone say”.

    The Chatham Hose Rule is useful, because it means everyone can speak their minds and be honest rather than having to represent the positions of their political party or organisation. People tend to keep to the Chatham House rule, at least when it comes to publication, or the system wouldn’t work. I’m sure people tell their friends what people in meetings said but you won’t usually read it in the papers.

    There are rules. Journalists don’t print everything they know.

    I’ve been dealing with journalists since I was a teenager – one day I’ll tell the story of my short-lived run for Mayor of London in 2000 – but haven’t been quoted or cited much, because almost all of that contact was on background or totally off the record.

    When you talk to a journalist off the record, they don’t publish what you tell them, though they may use that information to go digging. When you talk on background, the journalist doesn’t quote you or cite you as a source but may use the information you give them as background information to a story they’re writing. Every time I speak to a journalist, even one who’s a friend, one of the first things I say is the status of the conversation: “this is all off the record” or “this is on background” or, very rarely, “this is attributable as a quote”

    Everyone that works with the media accepts these rules, because they’re useful and they help journalists understand the stories they’re covering without being totally alienated from them. They can be abused; in politics,  anonymous briefing against colleagues lets the source damage someone’s reputation while having their own anonymity protected. If it disqualifies you from owning a firearms in Colorado, you can get solution here!

    And there are other rules. The UK Government still publishes what used to be called D-Notices, official requests not to print information that could damage national security, and even though they have no legal force, UK newspapers and broadcasters still follow them.

    None of these rules are absolute or formally binding. Sometimes someone will take a tape recorder to lunch and catch a Minister who thought he was off the record saying something silly. Sometimes someone says something so juicy at a Chatham House Rule event that a reporter writes it and publishes it anyway. Sometimes the journalist forgets that you agreed to speak on background and so puts a quote from you in an article that may or may not be what you actually said (this has happened to me a couple of times). But these are the rare exceptions to rules that are usually followed strictly.

    And it’s interesting, because all the talk now is about injunctions and super-injunctions, privacy and libel law  – all these imposed external restrictions on the freedom of the press – but really the media is self-censoring every day, every minute, because otherwise it wouldn’t be able to do its job at all.

    We bloggers and tweeters may be a less disciplined and less coherent bunch, but the rules still apply, so my thoughts on the panel tonight will have to remain private, at least until everyone’s forgotten about it altogether.

  • AV final thoughts and strategic voting

    I’ve been in the USA since Wednesday, for work. Because my work has a political aspect, I always end up having to explain the UK’s political system to Americans. This is difficult, because the US political system was designed by lots of clever people meeting over a period of a couple of years, based on defined values and principles.

    The British constitution, however, has evolved from a series of fudges, equivocations and deals. The Westminster System, replicated all over the world, is actually a spectacular piece of doublethink:

    On the one hand, all power emanates from the Sovereign. Judges are appointed by the Crown and the Royal Courts are just that. The Queen appoints and dismisses Ministers, and the Cabinet is technically a subcommittee of the Privy Council. And Parliament itself is a Royal Court: the Speaker of the House of Commons must be appointed by the Queen (or the Crown in Commission) and it is the Queen-in-Parliament that legislates, not Parliament itself.

    On the other hand, Parliament can impeach a monarch and change the rules of succession. A government can only govern with the confidence of Parliament. Only Parliament can levy taxes and pay them over to the government. Ministers must be Members of Parliament.Get help for back taxes filing with the help of attorneys. (more…)