The Pin Factory Blog

It's time to make the Olympics not only profit making but also interesting. Every four years the Olympics rolls into some poor naïve city and proceeds to prove to all and sundry that it wasn't worth the time, the effort, or the money that was spent on it.

With London 2012 expected to be enormously over-budget, I would suggest implementing the following plan - not just to save money, but to also put some life back into the Olympics. Post 2008, regional qualifying should take place over three years, reducing the field of competing athletes to a cream of the region. Then, when the Olympics come around, the events are simply a series of finals with no one but champions competing in them. Perhaps the Olympics could be reduced to a three-day event. Infrastructure would then be dispersed around the World and costs shared, and the event itself would be short and sweet.

The amount of taxpayer's money that is going to be wasted upon on the upcoming London Olympics is not even known by the current administration. The honesty of their continual claims that it will not be over budget is hard to believe, but they could insure themselves against dramatic loses by seeking to have the cost of the games shared across the globe! The Olympic Committee will continue to seek others to pay for their games and, unfortunately, many cities/governments will continue to force their taxpayers to pay.

It has to be remembered that governments are vain, and there is nothing better than an Olympics to rub the egos of those in power.

[Ed - I also like Sir Simon Jenkins' rather more modest proposal: that we deliver the Olympic games at the originally agreed cost and not a penny more. If that means we have to use existing stadiums and venues, well, so much the better!]

Noel Edmonds may be as mad as box of frogs, but his recent stand against the BBC licence fee should be supported. He is not against the BBC per se, but against the harassment surrounding their way of extracting the licence fee. Speaking on a BCC breakfast show at the weekend, he stated:

I worked for the BBC for 30 years. When I was there it promoted the licence fee by saying how wonderful it was. But now Auntie’s put boxing gloves on. I am not going to have the BBC or any other organisation threatening me. I’ve cancelled my TV licence and they haven’t found me. Nobody’s coming knocking on my door. There are too many organisations that seem to think it is OK to badger, hector and threaten people.

Our Director, Dr Eamonn Butler was one of the first to point out the Gestapo tactics the BBC’s latest Orwellian drive to strike fear into homes around the country. A campaign that those in the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of.

Of course Edmonds should not break the law, but the license fee really should not be enshrined in law in the first place. If the BBC has any value at all, it should be able to survive in a competitive market, if it cannot, it should go to the wall like any other service provider. Without doubt it now fails to fulfil even that most patronizing ideal, 'public service' broadcasting. After all, they put Noel Edmonds' House Party on the television every Saturday night for eight years... What kind of public service was that?

As an example of dodgy government statistics, the Taking Part Survey* by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport takes some beating. In an effort to prove their success at encouraging participation, they’ve come up with some gems of creative terminology:

• ‘Attending an art event’ stretches to seeing “street arts (art in everyday surroundings like parks, streets or shopping centres)".
•  'Visiting a historic site is as easy as going to “a city or town with historic character".
•  It counts as using a public library if one “used a computer outside the library to view the website".
• The most popular way for Britons to participate in an arts activity in 2007 was by “buying original/handmade crafts".
• The list of “active sports" includes snooker.

Shameless.

*Technical Note PSA21: Indicator 6", “annual data 2006/07", “Final assessment of progress on PSA3: complete estimates from year three, 2007/08." All published since May 2008.

The news that the BBC may be planning to radically shrink the output of its local radio stations, merging them into the output of Radio Five Live, should not surprise us.

The ASI has been saying for some years that the BBC – as a free-to-air tax-funded institution – is fatally flawed. Our view has also been that it will die of a thousand cuts like this week's news, as it fails to cope with multiple global media organisations that can price their services for customers.

Crucially, those competitors learn from those customers and can innovate to capture new revenues. If it were priced, some local BBC stations might well find their feet as a voice for a subscribing local community audience. They would use low powered cheap transmitters, small studios with modern small scale equipment and a lot of volunteer staff. Of all electronic media radio it might be the one to survive like this, although my bet is that it would be on the internet more than the airwaves.

Instead, BBC local radio carries all the overheads of cushioned personnel, over-sized buildings, globally capable equipment, and the electronic networking capabilities of the worldwide BBC News agency, acting as a journalistic "stringer" to the very expensive core news operation.

The BBC cannot go on like this. It has to face the real world, grow into new challenges and compete with new media. It does not need to retain its local arms at high cost to the taxpayer. Shrinking their airtime to become a small element buried inside Radio Five Live which is the present proposal is a good start. My guess is that this is the beginning of the end for the network of local stations.

An interview in the Daily Telegraph with Tourism Minister Barbara Follett prompted me to check out the new "Tourism Strategy" recently published by the Department of Culture Media and Sport.

The strategy is almost entirely devoted to making the Olympics a booster for tourism. More importantly, it shows just how true the old adage is about any pot of taxpayers' money being like honey for the busy bees of the public purse.

In her remarks about her plans, the minister revealed some unintentional truths about government support for tourism. Eight government departments have responsibilities relating to tourism, but she also pointed to five other publicly funded organisations and four QUANGO-managed initiatives chewing on the public purse to "promote" tourism.

Unravelling QUANGO budgets is as always nigh on impossible, but if we take an average of 50 staff members in each entity or initiative paid at the average wage of £25,000pa involved in the above that's £11.25 million in wages alone on this industry "support". If you double that for the cost of interference by the eight government departments you get a public-expense equal to almost exactly a quarter of the entire £85 million turnover of the industry.

How about disbanding them all. Taking that expense off National Insurance taxes in a staff intensive industry and you' could have a 20% price reduction on all UK holidays – which 95% of people say are overpriced.

Governments love to govern, but they so often achieve outcomes that are the opposite of their intentions.

The government has announced "plans to help secure Britain's place at the head of a new media age". We should be cautious whenever we see governments combining future visions with the word "plan".

Not surprisingly, the headline measures involve the use of force to construct a "transformation" - in Gordon Browns words - of the distribution of digital broadband, comparing it with what he calls "essential services such as electricity, gas and water".

This is an upside-down policy approach. Technology, delivery methods and service product innovations are changing rapidly under private initiative, individual traders are juggling for profitable commercial position and the industry is moving on fast. Now leviathan wants in on the act to re-invent a commanding height in the economy that they control. That's mad.

If ever there was the case for getting out of the way, this is it. The dangers of larger players getting into bed with government using new legislation as an excuse are huge. Producers and service providers are bound to follow market incentives and the government appears about to create incentives to cartelise the industry in the name of equality for old ladies and slow-witted shopkeepers who do not have broadband, and an unknown method of curtailing individuals engaging in file-sharing.

We should not forget that it is possible to get your granny on the internet for essentially zero cost if she can cope with a computer, and as the part owner of a specialist jazz download site I happen to know that it is within the scope of even small companies to develop fullproof watermarking of music. These innovations will strengthen through market incentives through time.

The tangle web the government is weaving is made complicated by their interest in what happens in digitalised television, now under threat from broadband internet. But the threat is a chimera, created by the ossified structures of a quasi-nationalised television industry. We are likely to see a carve up of bandwidth use rights decided on by government which guarantees various incumbent players a secure channel to broadcast audiences. But this horsetrading negates what the market actually does; i.e. fine tune audience preferences through the creative innovation which the internet makes happen. It is time that some old things failed so that new things can take their place. For example, why should local news always be delivered on television? Would it not do local internet services some good it it migrated to the internet? Hey, they could even compete with the tax subsidised BBC online service.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to have a feast of purported details about the "plan" to develop "digital Britain". Listen, but keep looking at the wider picture, these are dinosaurs stumbling around in Jurassic Park, digitally focussed mammals have been through the fence and out in the new world for a long time and are creating new ways of doing things that governments haven't even thought about yet.

Tonight, the ASI's Director Eamonn Butler will be appearing on both Channel 4 and Sky News. At 7pm he will be discussing Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms on Sky News' Jeff Randall Live, and then at 9pm Eamonn will be appearing in Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story on Channel 4.

Channel 4's film explains the full extent of the financial mess this country is in – with an estimated £4.8 trillion of national debt and counting. It argues that the recent spending review hasn’t gone far enough, and to put Britain back on track we need to radically rethink the role of the state, stop politicians spending money in our name, and drastically lower taxes to make Britain’s economy grow again.

So, a very sound night’s viewing lies ahead…

I was really rather shocked to see this statement for it's such an inversion of the truth.

It is beyond question that every industry should be aiming for a workforce that is inclusive, non-discriminatory and accurately reflects the demographics of its market. As many companies are quick to acknowledge, this doesn't just make moral sense, it makes business sense.

It's an entire mockery of the most basic economic explanation of how wealth is created. Which is, as Our Adam pointed out, through the division and specialisation of labour and the trade in the resultant production. The implication of this is that far from our wanting the workforce of any particular industry to reflect the demographics of its market we want said workforce to be entirely different from the customers.

The point is most obvious at the extremes: we don't get babies to make nappies nor the crippled elderly install chairlifts. And it would be a very odd prostitute indeed who reflected the gender characteristics of her customer base (his, perhaps, her, no).

But when we abandon such extremes we're still in fact trying to do precisely the opposite of making the workforce the same as or reflect the characteristics of the customer base. Bakers employ people who both can and are willing to bake bread: bread is purchased from bakers by those who either cannot or do not wish to bake bread. And I'm certainly entirely happy that those who make airplanes are not as cackhanded as I am.

So it isn't just that we shouldn't worry about the demographics of the workforce, something that the impersonal activities of the market allow us to ignore. It's that the very functioning of the market, the very division and specialisation of labour that brings the market into existence as a means of distributing production, insists that far from wanting the workforce to be the same as the customers we're actually insisting that they must be different.

It's entirely true that certain forms of difference are not important: skin colour never, genitalia in only very specific circumstances and so on. But the idea that the workforce must reflect the customers is simply arrant, absolute, nonsense. For the entire point of the whole enterprise is that the skills, needs and desires of the two groups are different.

YouTube is an incredibly easy way for ordinary people to communicate with one another and the world. It is therefore open to abuse, the consequence being that much of its content is not to be taken seriously: extraterrestrial Freemasons, Leonid Brezhnev rap videos, and amateur films mocking religion and religious figures -- any religion you can think of, from Scientology to the Church of Raptor Jesus -- abound. Yet last week Google took the unprecedented step of banning one single YouTube video in three countries (Egypt, Libya and India) in order to protect the sensibilities of the peoples who populate those lands.

Amid all of the stupidity one can find on YouTube, it is difficult to understand why this is necessary. In individual life, one would only expend such an effort on behalf of a truly delicate little snowflake, someone for whom the facts are simply unbearable. One does not tell one's three-year-old that the cat, Fluffy, has died; Fluffy goes "to Cat Heaven". One does not, in a group, call out a compulsive liar mid-flow; one "smiles and nods" and pretends to be amused, and then slowly backs away. One does these things of one's own free will, to protect an interlocutor from shock or humiliation, and for the sake of convenience, because causing a scene would result in the expenditure of far more effort than it is worth.

To try this trick with nations of men is another matter, and one with civil liberties implications. Steve Henn, writing for National Public Radio, points out that in the present context, Google's censorship is "an example of the challenges of balancing U.S. free speech concerns and of something known as the 'heckler's veto'" -- the problem faced when one person or a group of people resort to extreme means (e.g. threats of violence) in order to silence public discourse. This has happened several times in the past several years (think Terry Jones and Jyllands-Posten). And on each occasion, the riots failed utterly in their aims: as even the most cursory search on Google will reveal (find it yourself - I will not provide a hyperlink for reasons which will become readily apparent in the following paragraph), the liberal peoples of the West have responded to extremist tantrums by producing mountains of blasphemy and ridicule, the most recent iteration being the film implicated in last week's unrest.

But before we congratulate ourselves for our tolerance and humanity, we should take a hard look in the mirror. Last week, in Leeds, on 14 September (3 days after the attacks which destroyed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi), Azhar Ahmed, a 19-year-old from West Yorkshire, was convicted of making "derogatory, disrespectful and inflammatory" remarks under the Malicious Communications Act. His crime? Writing a Facebook post which stated, shortly after the funeral of a number of British soldiers from the area, that "all soldiers should go to hell". In the United Kingdom, such a communication falls foul of a provision of the Act which states that "a person who sends to another person a(n)... electronic communication... of any description which conveys a message which is indecent or grossly offensive... is guilty of an offence if his purpose [or one of them] in sending it is that it should... cause distress or anxiety to the recipient". He made the post; distress was intended and caused; judicial sanction followed.

At this point I would say, being a lawyer, that he made the crucial mistake of putting it in writing. But if he'd yelled the same thing at a funeral (or even a parade), that would have been of no assistance to the free exercise of his rights: a case on nearly identical material facts, but relating to spoken expression (R v Abdul, 2008) resulted in a half-dozen convictions under Section 5 of the Public Order Act. And this is far from the only case of its kind - there are dozens of reported cases showing that all manner of political speech, religious speech, and even the casual F-word can, under the right circumstances, fall foul of the legislation. The man on the Clapham omnibus has as much of a heckler's veto as the Salafist on a Cairo street; furthermore, the man on the Clapham omnibus is state-backed.

David Cameron described the attacks on the Libyan embassy as "senseless". I totally agree. In a free society the expression of a controversial opinion by an individual should not, under any circumstances, justify the threat or application of violence by other men in order to silence that opinion.

But Azhar Ahmed has been so silenced. Until we end the criminalisation of those opinions which offend us, we cannot justifiably claim that we are any different from the mob.

Allemannsrett (literally 'All Man's Law') is an ancient custom, most clearly found in Norway, Sweden (Allemansrätten) and Finland (Jokamiehenoikeus), where it has been formally enshrined in law.

Currently, in Britain I am largely restricted in my freedom of movement, despite thousands of miles of footpaths, bridleways and other rights of access,. Furthermore, in England and Wales, I cannot camp in the 'wild' – instead I must pay to use a campsite.

Implementing Allemannsrett in Britain would change this: it allows everyone to use rural, uncultivated land for walking, camping, foraging and other outdoor activities, regardless of who owns it.

An objection might be that this infringes on the right to personal property, but I believe Allemannsrett is in accordance with J.S. Mill's harm principle. The laws of the Nordic countries clearly demand that those taking advantage of the Allemannsrett are respectful to the land they are using: there are rules concerning littering, the lighting of fires and so on. The saying 'take only pictures, leave only footprints' sums it up well. Therefore, those who use Allemannsrett properly are acting within the basic libertarian principle. The rules on foraging, and other more controversial aspects could be adapted as desired.

Another issue is that of privacy: landowners would not want hikers peering in through their windows. The Nordic laws cover this as well: any 'trespassers' must maintain a respectful distance from houses or cabins at all times (at least 150 metres in Norway).

A final objection is the claim that it would be pointless to introduce the Allemannsrett in Britain as it is in Scandinavia, since here we have a much higher population density. But the vast majority of the British population lives in urban areas, and the country has many places of natural beauty and sparse population where greater rights of access could allow much greater appreciation of them.

Allemannsrett in Britain would allow each individual to enjoy the countryside to its full extent. It would out us back in touch with our ancestors, by allowing us to camp 'wild', away from the mod-cons of everyday life. All this could be achieved without infringing on the basic principle of liberty, as clear rules would ensure respect for the land and its owner.