Signing the Human Rights Convention

It was on December 10th, 1948, that the United Nations Convention on Human Rights was signed by 48 countries, with 8 abstaining and none opposed. It was a reaction to the horrors and the atrocities committed during the Second World War. It was felt there needed to be some internationally agreed standard that would protect people from the criminal abuse that had been perpetrated by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and others.

Its 30 articles are not legally binding, though some lawyers have tried to make them so. They are, however, a strong moral force to restrain those inclined to engage in systematic violation of accepted standards of human decency.

The US Supreme Court (Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 2004), ruled that the Declaration "does not of its own force impose obligations as a matter of international law." Other countries have similarly ruled that the Declaration does not constitute part of their domestic law.

The Declaration sets out protection of human dignity, liberty and equality (meaning equal access to justice and legal protection, rather than equality of economic condition). It sets out the right to life, and the rejection of slavery and torture. It specifies freedom of movement, including the right to leave one’s country. It asserts the right to freedom of thought, opinion, religion and conscience, word, and peaceful associations.

It specifies what are called economic rights, “including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." It lists rights for the disabled, and “those in motherhood or childhood.”

South Africa abstained because they wanted to protect and continue their policy of apartheid. The Saudi delegation thought that the freedom to change one’s religion contravened sharia law, and the Soviet bloc had reservations about conceding the right of people to leave their country. These dissenters abstained rather than voting against because it was not binding.

If it were to be law, there would need to be an international police body to enforce it and courts to impose punishments for transgression, which nations were not, and are not, ready to sign up to.

The Declaration has been criticized for being Western oriented in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and insensitive to the values of other cultures and religions. Despite these misgivings, however, it remains a powerful moral force to restrain those who would abuse basic human values.

It has to be regarded as a set of aspirations, rather than something that should be guaranteed. Every right imposes a corresponding duty, in that one’s right to life imposes an obligation on others not to kill them. The right to ‘free’ education and healthcare means that someone, somewhere, has to pay for it, which in many poor countries is scarcely possible.

Obviously, some nations today do not respect the human rights set out in the Convention. They murder dissenters and journalists who speak out against government abuse. They execute those who do not follow the religious or moral code that the country espouses. They deny rights to women and minorities. Some of the countries that do this actually sit on the UN body that is supposed to oversee these rights. But all of these reservations notwithstanding, it represented an assertion by the international body that all human beings are entitled to be treated as individuals worthy of respect and decent treatment, and as such, represented an advance, an assertion that all humans are entitled to protection from mistreatment and abuse. It set a standard by which the world can judge when nations fall short of the values it expressed.

McKenzie Friends - The usual professional conspiracy against the public

We’re told that there has been a boom in the use of McKenzie Friends in the court system. Therefore McKenzie Friends must be banned from the court system:

A new breed of untrained legal advocates who are ripping off the public with “flawed” and “dangerous” legal advice should be banned, lawyers’ leaders and politicians have urged ministers.

The Bar Council, Law Society and head of the Commons Justice Committee are alarmed by cases where unregulated and uninsured advocates - known as McKenzie Friends - have left “vulnerable” clients out of pocket or even led them into breaking the law through their poor advice.

The past few decades have seen a determined fight against the professional conspiracy which is that neckchoke lawyers have upon the general public. Solicitors now can appear in court, this is no longer the preserve of the barrister caste. House sales can now be dealt with by someone merely trained to deal with house sales, not a full blown solicitor.

The background being, as Adam Smith pointedly noted, that professional guilds always do devolve down into being conspiracies against that general public. By limiting who may do what it is possible to ensure juicy fees and to channel them to the favoured, insider, few.

The rise in McKenzie Friends is just a further eating away at the privilege of monopoly and as such is to be welcomed for itself. Except, obviously, by those who run the legal profession, that one being nibbled away at. Thus the opposition and the call to ban. Almost as an aside we’d note that the first three listed members of the Justice Committee are, by profession, barrister, solicitor, barrister - we’ve the interests of that general public well represented here.

Their argument, at root, being that there never has been a lawyer who is a dullard, dolt, drunk or dingbat and that therefore we should all be protected from the possibility that our legal adviser should be any of these. Given who the courts have, at times, seen arguing cases this is not an entirely supportable contention. Actually, as Bernard Levin used to claim, it’s not certain that the system has managed to ensure this of the judges, let alone the advocates.

In short, we’ve known all about this since 1776:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

– The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.

Or, as we can put it more simply, the use of McKenzie Friends annoys people who should be annoyed. More power to McKenzie Friends therefore.

Fritz Haber fixed nitrogen

Fritz Haber, who was born on December 9th, 1868, made it possible for us to pluck useful stuff out of thin air. Specifically, he developed the chemical process that enables us to turn atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen found in natural gas into ammonia and nitrates. He joined the industrialist, Carl Bosch, of BASF to scale this up into an industrial process – the Haber Bosch process - that could manufacture huge quantities of ammonia and nitrates to use for fertilizers and explosives. One of my vivid memories from school chemistry classes was the huge chart on the laboratory wall of the Haber process.

The process fed in atmospheric nitrogen combined with methane as a source of hydrogen under high temperatures and pressures using iron-based catalysts. It revolutionized industrial chemistry because prior to it, fertilizer and chemical feedstocks had depended on limited natural supplies of chemicals such as sodium and potassium nitrate, found notably in Chile. During World War I, the Allies embargoed Chilean nitrates to limit Germany's access to explosives. After the Haber process was introduced, the work-force that mined Chile's nitrates dropped by three-quarters, and their price more than halved.

Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918, and today half the world is fed on crops grown with fertilizers produced by his method. The extra food it makes possible has saved billions from starvation.

Yet Haber also pioneered chemical warfare, and in World War I developed the use of chlorine and other poisons to attack allied troops, especially at the second battle of Ypres, at which he personally helped supervise the chemical attacks that caused 67,000 casualties. His reputation suffered in consequence, and when he visited Cambridge after the war, Rutherford declined his handshake. The institute he helped establish developed a cyanide fumigant, Zyklon A, to free grain stores of pests, but Haber, as a Jew, left in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power, and died early in 1934, long before Zyklon B was used to murder millions.

Fritz Haber thus joins the ranks of those whose work has benefitted humanity, but which was compounded with a dark side that aided wickedness. Alfred Nobel made dynamite, but his prizes have inspired people to improve the human condition. Wernher von Braun invented the V2 rockets launched by Hitler, but his later work enabled the US to deter Soviet aggression, and he inflicted a great morale defeat on the Soviets when he put Americans on the moon. Deng Xiaoping presided over the Tiananmen Square massacre, but his rejection of socialism and embrace of capitalist methods lifted more than a billion people out of subsistence and starvation.

The bad that is done or made possible by such flawed figures is rightly condemned, but the good that is done or made possible by them should stand alongside it when they are judged.

This seems entirely sensible

As we know the rise of internet shopping is making some portion of the current retail estate superfluous to requirements. We are also told that we’ve rather a shortage of places to live where people happen to be and wish to live. That seems like a problem ripe for a simple solution:

But the property industry’s view is that 30% of the UK’s 111m sq metres of shop space is redundant and needs to be repurposed as hotels and leisure destinations – or, particularly within the M25, as housing.

The question then becomes well, who should be doing the repurposing? And which bits and places should be repurposed?

The answer being that we’ve a method to sort through these sorts of problems. The market.

What should be done is exactly what has been done with commercial, office, space. Conversion to residential usage requires no change in planning permission - just get on and do it. The same regime would achieve the same end in retail space. If it’s worth more to an owner to have someone living in it then that’s what will happen, someone will live in it. And the very definition of moving the asset to a higher valued use - that cause of our all getting richer, when assets are moved to higher value uses - is that someone is willing to pay more money for the new use of the asset.

Of course, if the law has already been changed to accommodate the process then the problem is already solved. If it hasn’t been then it should be so as to solve it.

Or, as is so often the case, less government is the solution.

Eli Whitney

A remarkable American who made a profound impact on history was born on December 8th, 1765. This was Eli Whitney, an inventor, engineer and manufacturer. He found fame not only as the inventor of the cotton gin, a device that separated the cotton fibres from the hard seeds, but also as the pioneer of mass manufacture based on putting together interchangeable parts.

The new machines of England's Industrial Revolution needed cotton, but it was very labour-intensive. It took one person a full day to separate one pound of the cotton fibres from the attached seeds by hand. Whitney thought this process might be done by a simple hand-cranked machine, easy to make, operate and repair. Cotton was fed via a hopper onto a revolving cylinder bristling with short wire hooks to snag the fibre. A mesh allowed the fibre through, but not the seeds, and finally a drum rotating in the opposite direction brushed off and collected the cotton. The seeds could be used to plant more cotton, or to make cottonseed oil,

Whitney's simple cotton gin could enable someone to process 50 pounds of cotton in a day, vastly increasing he profitability of the crop, and transforming the economy of the American South. Whitney gained a patent in 1794, but the planters were reluctant to pay for his machines and service costs because the machine was too easily copied. Bootleg versions spread through the South, and Whitney was unable to enforce his patent protection in the courts. Planters grew rich by using slave labour to plant and harvest their cotton, and to process it, but Whitney's reward was a tiny fraction of the profits his machine made possible.

Arguably his bigger contribution came when the US government feared there might be a war with France, and needed muskets. They turned to outside contractors to supply 40,000, since the government armouries had only made 1,000 over a three-year period. While other suppliers made muskets using skilled artisans to fashion each piece, Whitney had derived an idea from his cotton gin manufacture, and bid to make 10,000 muskets by fitting together parts made by specially designed machine tools. Since the parts, including the stock, the barrel, the trigger, and so on were all made with precision separately, any of them could be fitted together with any of the others to make a musket.

Whitney described his tools as being "like an engraving on a copper plate," from which many identical prints could be made. In 1801 in front of newly elected President Thomas Jefferson and US officials, he had them pick parts at random from assembled piles of musket constituents and fit them together into complete muskets. They did so, and the age of mass manufacture from constituent parts was born.

Skilled craftsmen and artisans, together with their privileged patrons, bemoaned the fact that the products were identical, lacking individual craftsmanship. But they were cheap to make, and became accessible to those of more limited means. Henry Ford, later to invent the moving production line, gloried in the similarity and low cost of his cars, offering "any colour you like, as long as it's black."

The development of modern information technology and automation means that products are no longer identical. During manufacture the customer can specify individual requirements such as trim, colours, materials, etc., which are fed into the production process so that in the case of cars, no two coming off the production line are identical. Each one instead is custom made for the buyer. The process has become sophisticated enough to combine mass production with individual variation, such that each customer receives a different product. Whitney, who stared the process, would have ben astounded, but probably delighted, to see where it would lead.

We understand the claim about universalism but what's the reality?

A stirring rally call in the lead up to the election. Labour is just promising the return of universalism. There are certain things that all should have at a minimum standard and those things should be supplied by the state. We’d even agree with the base theory - all should have civil liberty for example. It the what as in, what things should all have provided by the state that we disagree with.

At which point the justification of that universalism as Labour is insisting:

But in the UK the arguments grounding this approach have to be made afresh. And they go like this: universal provision is more efficient, better quality, less stigmatising and builds social participation, while tackling poverty and hardship.

It’s the efficiency and quality claims we would argue with. People do tend to be more efficient in their use of things that they must directly pay for after all. And quality?

The state schools are better quality than the private? The NHS is better quality than private health care? The GPO was better quality than BT and today’s competitors? A government food service would be better quality than private sector supermarkets? We’ve not tried that one in Britain but the evidence from the Soviet system wouldn’t lead us to think so.

So, no, the claim doesn’t stand. Further, there’s a slightly more subtle reason why it doesn’t. We know that it is competition which improves productivity and standards of output. The one universal system of provision is exactly what does not allow that competition thus everything becomes worse than it could be over time in such a one producer system.

After all, we do want the citizenry to have the best - which is exactly why we don’t want monopoly provision of it, whether that monopoly is being run by the state or anyone else.

A day that will live in infamy

One day after the Japanese attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7th, 1941, President Roosevelt made a speech to Congress describing it as “a date which will live in infamy.” History has usually shortened and corrected “a date which” to “a day that,” and often abbreviated it simply to “Day of Infamy.”

The Japanese attack was made without a declaration of war against a country at peace that had hitherto refrained from entering the Second World War, already raging in Europe and elsewhere. Japanese diplomats in Washington DC were pretending to talk peace even as its carrier fleet sailed towards its target in the Hawaiian Islands.

The unprovoked nature of the peacetime attack, compounded by the duplicity of the Japanese, outraged American opinion. Congress declared war immediately after the President’s speech, and Americans rushed to enlist in the armed forces. Roosevelt had long been trying to edge US public opinion towards what he saw as an inevitable war with Nazi Germany. He had been unsuccessful, but now Hitler solved the problem by declaring war on the United States four days after the Japanese attack. His action enabled Roosevelt to make Europe the main theatre of US action, even though it had been attacked in the Pacific by Japan.

The Japanese people had been brainwashed by a ruthless and racist ideology that regarded other races as lower forms of humanity, just as their Nazi counterparts in Germany had idealized the ‘superior’ Aryan race. Japan thought it could win a short war against the US by a preemptive strike against its ability to hit back. They needed overseas possessions to provide raw materials and slave labour for their imperial ambitions.

While the Japanese attack sank or severely damaged US battleships, cruisers and destroyers, the US aircraft carriers had left port days earlier and were not hit. This was a serious blow because naval warfare was on the cusp of a change from direct ship-to-ship engagements to attacks from long range by carrier aircraft. The Japanese attack therefore failed to establish their command of the Pacific waters.

When the US hit Tokyo with B25 Mitchell bombers flown from the USS Hornet, Japan sought to establish a protective shield by taking Midway Island. US Navy codebreakers uncovered the plan and enabled the Japanese task force to be attacked by US carriers lying in wait. Four of the carriers that had carried out the Pearl Harbour attack were destroyed, and hundreds of their most skilled and experienced pilots were killed. This took place only 6 months after their Pearl Harbour attack.

A fatal weakness of the Japanese was their neglect of defence. It was part of their ideology that they would attack. Their Zero fighter was a superb machine, fast and agile, but it lacked any protective armour or fuel tank baffles, and a single hit could turn it into a fireball. Their carriers, unlike the US ones, lacked effective fire control systems. Their fuel hoses did not shut down during a battle, and torpedoes and bombs were scattered across the decks instead of safely stowed. The result was that when a bomb struck, the Japanese carriers became exploding and raging infernos.

The lessons of Pearl Harbour lasted throughout the Cold War, in that the West was determined that no surprise attack should destroy its ability to retaliate. Aircraft sat fueled up on runways, with some already airborne. Ballistic missile submarines patrolled the oceans, with reconnaissance planes and later satellites watching for any signs of a surprise attack. It was fraught with danger, but it kept the peace. That December day in 1941 had taught vigilance, and the lesson lasted.

The ONS wealth inequality figures don't show what people think they do

The Office for National Statistics has released the latest wealth figures for the UK. About which The Guardian says:

Britain’s total wealth grew by 13% in the two years to 2018 to reach a record £14.6tn, with wealth among the richest 10% of households increasing almost four times faster than those of the poorest 10%.

A study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also found that the poorest 10% of households had debts three times greater than their assets compared with the richest 10% who amassed a wealth pile 35 times larger than their total debts.

The figures highlight the growing divide between those at the top of the wealth ladder, many of whom have retained their pension rights, property values and invested their savings since the 2008 financial crash, while those on low incomes live in rented accommodation with meagre pension entitlements and rising debts

This is not quite so. The ONS is producing figures which show the market wealth figures. Which isn’t the thing we’re interested in even if we are one of those who worry about inequality. What we actually want to know is what is the wealth distribution after all the things we do to change it?

When we measure income inequality we study the numbers after the impact of taxes and benefits - what inequality is there left after the welfare state that is. If we were to run around shouting about the pure market distribution of incomes we’d be looked at as the idiot ginger stepchild of the conversation.

With the wealth distribution though we don’t measure the effects of what we do to change it. For example, only fully funded pensions count - the fact that everyone gets either a state pension of the pension guarantee is not included. With housing, it is only equity in private sector housing which counts - the capital value of a below market rent tenancy is ignored. Private wealth which might be used to pay school fees is measured - that any and every child gains some £5,000 a year’s worth of state education is ignored. Private money to pay for health care is counted, the capital value to the citizen of free health care through the NHS is ignored.

Wealth inequality is wrongly measured for we don’t include the effects of all that is currently done to reduce it. Therefore we’re never going to gain any useful guidance about what should be done next by perusing these figures. After all, the thing we’re trying to work out is, well, what should we be doing next? Something that does require looking at the effects of what we’ve already done.

Is Spain's Constitution outdated?

Today being the Spanish Day of the Constitution, it is an apt time to reflect on said Constitution and its commitment to democracy. While it may have worked in 1978, Spain ought to amend its constitution to be truly democratic, especially with regards to the question of Catalan independence. 

On 14th October, nine of Catalonia’s independence leaders were jailed for a total of over 100 years but what Madrid seemingly fails to realise time and time again is that imprisoning their leaders doesn’t address the complaints of angry Catalan nationalists— and may exacerbate the issue. Support for independence and anti-Spanish rhetoric is still prominent both within Catalonia and internationally. 

Catalonia’s now infamous 2017 independence referendum was allowed under the Law on Referendum on Self-determination of Catalonia passed by the Parliament of Catalonia. It was not, however, permissible under the Spanish constitution. And so, Spain’s national government enacted Article 155 which allowed them to use ‘necessary measures’ to force Catalonia to comply with the idea of ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation’. Madrid’s idea of ‘necessary measures’ included dissolving parliament, and police brutality, actions that would ultimately add fuel to the (now literal) fire(s). 

Whether or not the referendum should have gone ahead, Madrid’s response of clamping down on Catalonia so harshly is telling of how desperate they are.  Prohibiting the referendum today seems just as anachronistic as Spain declaring war in Catalonia back, in 1934. It seems that the government strategy has changed little since. The ban on Spain’s autonomous regions gaining independence was written in the constitution after the Franco dictatorship in order to keep Spain unified while it regained its feet. Madrid shouldn’t cling to this outdated system. By amending the constitution, Spain may seem less fragile and tension will likely be eased. Indeed the reforms are a step in the right direction. 

The neoliberal standpoint is that liberty is of utmost importance and as such, the legitimacy of state ought to depend on its people. If the majority of Catalans withhold their consent to being part of Spain, then the region should be able to leave Spain.

Allowing a real vote does not mean that Spain will automatically lose Catalonia. It is important to remember that the result of the 2017 referendum should not be viewed as gospel. The referendum was not verified and there are claims that some people voted twice. Furthermore, it is likely that those who would have voted against independence would have also wanted to obey central government and not legitimise referendum by voting in it. This suggests that were Spain to hold a legitimate referendum it is possible that the outcome would be less overwhelmingly pro independence. While 90% of votes being in favour of independence may seem pretty conclusive, it was 90% of 43% of the population. When discussing Catalonia, the debate shouldn’t simply be pro independence or anti independence, but rather pro choice or anti choice. Catalonia should only have independence if the majority of Catalans do genuinely support it.

Allowing a real vote would, however, allow Spain to gauge the Catalan people’s level of discontent with the rest of Spain. It allows discussions to go ahead to de-escalate the situation, knowing whether independence truly is the desired outcome from the majority of the Catalan people. 

If Spain were to ever allow its autonomous regions independence, then a key detail that should be ironed out is whether or not any final negotiations must be voted on. As we have seen with Brexit, there are calls for a ‘people’s vote’ on any possible withdrawal agreement. This ambiguity can be avoided by making it clear whether it is the government or the citizens that have the  final say in any agreements. 

The issues arising in Catalonia could stem from the inflexibility of a written constitution. When discussing Catalonia, comparisons with Scotland seem natural, however, Spain and the United Kingdom are very different countries. First of all, it is not illegal in Britain for different regions to secede from the union. The question of a Scottish independence referendum was not as outlandish. Another key difference between the two countries, is that Spain, unlike the UK, has a written constitution. Having a written constitution makes Spain inflexible and forced into upholding principles that may now seem archaic. Spain has had its current constitution since 1978 which may not sound like a long time, but Spain has changed a lot since then. In 1978, Spain had transitioned from a dictatorship that spanned five decades to a fledgling democracy. Now, it is a democratic country (or at least it is well on its way to being one). Any efforts to update the constitution will undergo much scrutiny and debate, making Spain a cumbersome nation and making it harder to adapt and keep up with the modern world. 

The question should not be whether or not you support an independent Catalonia but if you support democracy. For those who do support democracy, the way of achieving it is clear: in the spirit of liberty, reform the constitution and have a real vote.

The ruin of Venezuela

Venezuela’s collapse from one of Latin America’s richest countries to one of its poorest began on December 6th, 1998, with the election of Hugo Chavez as its President. Chavez had imbibed Marxist communism as a teenager, and was affected by the FALM communist insurgency in Venezuela, one supported by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He was by no means a Marxist intellectual, enrolling in the Military Academy to receive expert baseball coaching, but lacked talent, and was remembered as a barely adequate student who graduated near the bottom of his class.

With fellow officers, he took part in a failed coup in 1992, but established a popular leftwing political party and won the presidency in 1998 with 56 percent of the vote, having persuaded the country’s outsiders and impoverished groups to unite behind his banner in opposition to the established parties.

When he started to rule increasingly by decree, taking Venezuela down the path that Cuba had followed, it provoked a general strike, at the centre of which was the state oil company that earned 80 percent of the country’s export revenue. Chavez broke the strike by firing half its workforce and replacing them with his cronies who had no expertise in the oil business.

The price of oil was rising, however, bringing in revenues that Chavez began spending on lavish social programmes. His economy became dangerously dependent on a single commodity, and had not built up any kind of reserve to cope with a fall in oil prices.

When oil prices did fall, the government printed extra money to cover the shortfall, and when inflation inevitably followed, it fixed prices by law, causing shortages of basics such as sugar, milk and beans. Prices rocketed for food, water, medical supplies and household goods. A package of constitutional changes, passed by a referendum in 2009 cleared the way for Chavez’s perpetual reelection, which he responded to by cracking down on opponents, stifling a free press, and shutting down the one independent TV channel that was in opposition.

Fake government statistics concealed a high infant mortality rate and increasing malnutrition. When Chavez died of cancer in 2013, he was succeeded by his chosen nominee, Nicolas Maduro, who continued his policies and led Venezuela down the ever-closing spiral to poverty and degradation. Inflation exceeded 80,000 percent, and the poverty rate reached 90 percent. Millions emigrated. The country relapsed into authoritarianism as its economy collapsed.

It was, alas, a familiar story, seen before in other countries that followed the same failed policies. Adam Smith observed that:

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”

Poor Venezuela had none of these, and went from comparative affluence to utter squalor and poverty. A country can do many things wrong, yet still thrive if it has fairly free markets and fairly light taxes. There are three things, however, that it cannot do if it is to prosper: genocide, civil war and socialism.