I Had A Dream

I had a dream about Jeremy Corbyn last night. Well, I think it was Jeremy Corbyn, it could have been Keith Allen, to whom he bears a passing resemblance. On balance, though I think it was JC, since in return for my borrowing his Kindle (yes, really), he treated me to a lecture on Labour Party policy, not that I can remember any of it, although I do know that it went on  long enough for me to miss my bus. Dreams are weird, aren't they?

The leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, and an actor/comedian.

Why did I dream about Jeremy Corbyn? It could have been a surfeit of cheese too close to bed-time, but more likely because he is rarely out of the news. In fact, if you are like me and glean most of your news from Apple's News aggregator, you would believe that Corbyn is one of only a handful of newsworthy politicians on the planet, the others being Donald Trump (inevitably), Boris Johnson, and the late John McCain, with Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau trailing in their wake.

Rarely out of the news, regularly decrying it.

On the face of it, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have little in common; their politics are, after all, poles apart (no pun intended), but one thing they share is a fragile relationship with the press, or more specifically, the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM). Donald Trump regularly rails against what he calls 'Fake news,' i.e. anything published or broadcast that either criticises him or does not share his worldview, while Jeremy Corbyn has recently acquitted himself less than impressively by displaying no little contempt in front of the cameras on a couple of occasions. Questioned about his involvement in a wreath laying at a Palestinian Martyrs Cemetery in 2014, Mr Corbyn rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at the interviewer's temerity in asking a question of significant interest to the public. Then, when asked by Channel 4 news if he honestly thought that the UK was better off outside the European Union, he responded no less than six times with evasive answers. And let's not even get started on the furore about allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

"I'm not rolling my eyes! Have you seen that cobweb up there?"

If I give the impression of singling out Jeremy Corbyn for dissembling and providing disingenuous answers, it is only to illustrate a universal truth about politicians, that they only want to give answers to questions they wished they had been asked, not the more difficult ones that interviewers throw their way. An exception, of course, is Fox News who in interviewing Donald Trump lob him a few easy balls that he proceeds to attempt to knock into the next parish, albeit that he sometimes comes close to failing even with these dolly-drops.

One of the reasons that Mr Corbyn featured in my nocturnal subconscious may have been thanks to a speech that he gave last week at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which he raised some interesting, but ultimately worrying points. To a large degree I go along with his idea that the BBC's licence fee needs reviewing, although I'd take issue with his view that in part this needs to be done to reduce the cost of the licence fee to poorer households. A year's TV licence is £150.50; the cheapest Sky package is about £480 per annum - to which many families who fall in the category of poorer households subscribe - and that is before additional services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the like are factored in. If the BBC loses its ability to raise funds through the licence and does not take on advertising, then revenue generation is probably going to come in the form of subscriptions or Pay-Per-View, rather than Mr Corbyn's proposal that 'tech giants and Internet Service Providers' pay a digital licence fee. Such a fee may be difficult to implement or would be passed on to customers in the event that it was introduced. None the more for that, Corbyn is right to raise the matter; licence fee reform is long overdue, and while his proposals may not fly, they will at least spark debate.

The TV Licence; an anachronism these days?

Mr Corbyn's speech included a Trump-like criticism of the press and came with a proposal that journalists be given the right to elect their editors once newspaper or broadcaster becomes “particularly large or influential," which I guess would encompass most of the current British press even now. It exposes a typical politician's support for a free press, which exists only as long as the free press is being nice to them and not asking awkward questions.

The digital information age we find ourselves in today has changed the way we consume news irrevocably. There is little that I have read lately that sums this up better than an article on The Conversation website written by Doug Specht of the University of Westminster [1]. "In the “old” media landscape of even just a few years ago, Specht writes, the public was able to collectively develop ways of identifying bias and distinguish truth from lies and propaganda. But today that’s much harder – not just because of the volume of information, but also because algorithmic curation makes it increasingly difficult for laypeople to develop strategies that successfully identify bias."  He goes on to say, "While a certain amount of scepticism is useful when deciding what sources to trust, the level of ambivalence, distrust and cynicism on display today is something else. Thanks to the sheer volume of information with which users are now inundated, compounded by skewed algorithms and bellicose Trumpian rhetoric railing against fake news, readers and viewers are increasingly unable to discern that which demands scepticism from that which doesn’t. The net result is a terminal sense of ambivalence."

Ambivalence is most certainly something that I feel on reading the news these days (along with cynicism and distrust). You know how it goes, a newspaper or website reports something uncomplimentary about someone - usually a politician, often POTUS45 - they decry it as fake news, and then they or their cronies come out with some rebuttal that contains as many, if not more, inaccuracies, unsubstantiated statements and even downright falsehoods as the original statement they were complaining about. Donald Trump has gone so far as to claim that Google is showing only fake news stories about him. When politicians complain that the free-press is giving them a hard time,  we surely are only a step or two from them deciding that state intervention in guiding the news agenda is a desirable goal.

Perhaps Mr Trump, who once claimed that he could call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet to curb radical extremism, should get together with Mr Corbyn, who in his recent Edinburgh speech floated the idea of a publicly owned social media platform to rival Facebook. The free-press, so called because it is free of government influence and control, may be in the hands of 'unaccountable billionaires,' and may not report on politicians in the way they would like, but how much more damaging would state-controlled media, in which I include internet companies and social media, be? Facebook may have faced scandals recently over the harvesting of personal information by Cambridge Analytica, and we may reasonably have concerns over what data the social media giant has on us and how they use it, but how much scarier would it be if our social media accounts were state-run, state-controlled? How much more likely would data be lost, compromised or misused?

Graphic: bestdroidplayer.com

On reflection, we would probably have nothing to fear. Given the track record of successive British governments in large IT projects,  a state-run equivalent of Facebook would be so awful that no one would use it, and if they did, it would probably crash immediately and never recover.

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[1] http://theconversation.com/nicaragua-crisis-how-democracy-dies-in-the-era-of-fake-news-101403

The Freedom To Choose

As at October 2017, 85% of the UK population had a smartphone;[1] bog standard mobiles are passé, and feature phones are in many ways a pointless compromise between the devices that can only call and text and those that have all the bells and whistles, but the smartphone juggernaut trundles on. The smartphone is now so fully integrated into the lives of millions of people that if they were suddenly removed, or simply unusable for any reason, it's difficult to see how many people could actually function. And our reliance on them, both from a practical point of view and from an addictive perspective, is increasing. The flip-side of that is a marginalisation of groups within the population who, for whatever reason, do not embrace the smartphone and its various uses.

The majority of people under the age of twenty-five - the generation that has not known a world without mobile phones -  are comfortable with the increasing number and variety of uses for their smartphones, whether it is messaging, social media, navigation, payments, or games, their phones are their world and mobile phone dependence is now accepted as being as real as a substance addiction.[2]  Contrarily, one of the things that they use them for less and less is making phone calls. This addiction is fed by the number of new ways in which smartphones are being enabled to perform everyday functions, provide solutions to problems we didn't know we had, and generally replace the means by which we have traditionally performed those everyday functions in the past. Want to pay for your coffee? Use Starbucks' app (or Costa's or Caffe Nero's, depending on your coffee shop of choice). Travel on the tube, or the bus? Use TfL's Oyster Card app to pay your fare. Popping into Tesco for some groceries? Pay with one of the payment apps like Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Then there are the car parking apps; increasingly car parks are offering pay by smartphone options through apps like RingGo and here is one area in which the future may come with some frustrations.

I downloaded the RingGo app after entering a car park where paying by cash was not possible. Living in London I have been long familiar with the fact that if you want to travel by bus, then cash is no longer king and it's an Oyster or contactless payment card or nothing, but my visit to one car park recently offered me the option to pay for my parking by phone only. Vending or parking machines that do not accept cash, but do accept cards, are one thing, but no machines at all means that to pay for parking it is phone and pay, or use the app. So I downloaded the app, and in fairness I have no complaints - in fact it's almost faultless - except for the lack of choice; without a mobile phone of some kind it is not possible to pay to park, and this increasingly has to be an area of concern for people who would prefer not to use their phone for that purpose, don't have a phone capable of the task, or simply don't have a phone at all, although that last group is shrinking every day.

In the name of progress, and conceivably in the name of convenience, more and more functions are migrating to our phones, which is fair enough, so long as alternatives that do not require a smartphone continue to be offered, which is where I have an issue. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem in embracing many of these apps; I habitually use coffee shop apps to pay for food and drinks, I use Google Pay more than any other payment method these days (I can go the best part of a week sometimes without paying cash for anything), I use the RingGo app in car parks that offer it, and of course I use my phone for browsing retailer's websites and buying stuff online. But - and here's the nub of the matter - I like to have a choice, and increasingly our choices are being taken away from us - slowly, perhaps, but being taken away nonetheless.

More and more companies, and more and more local authorities and utility companies are becoming like secret societies. Look at any number of websites and click on the Contact Us link and one thing that is either missing or nigh on impossible to find is a telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a 'Contact Us' option, preferring instead to bury any contact details behind a whole series of pages and innumerable clicks that eventually offer the promise of being able to contact them by phone, but don't provide a number to dial. From experience, the best way to find a phone number for most companies is to ignore their website and just Google it.

Spot (or not) the Contact Us link in Amazon's website.

One of my hobbies is watching my team, Romford FC, play football, and when I go to a game I like to get a programme. There has been a trend in recent years for clubs to move away from the traditional programme towards digital offerings; some clubs, like Barnet FC in the Vanarama National League, Cheshunt FC in the Bostik League, and Hashtag United of the Eastern Counties League Division One publish online programmes only, so no paper programmes at all.[3] With increasing print costs, this move is understandable, but for many people, there is little or no appeal in reading a programme on their phone, and if you don't have a smartphone, or can't get a signal, you'll not be able to read the programme where most people read them, at the ground. And speaking of Hashtag United, when Romford played them in a friendly recently, one of their followers had no cash with them and expected to be able to pay to get into the ground using a card, so just as some people may be excluded from certain services by their inability to access them using a smartphone, so some people may be excluded for exactly the opposite reason, having embraced technology so completely that they have no 'old-fashioned' alternatives.

The online only programme...

...personally, I prefer the old-fashioned paper variety.

Amazon, Tesco, and Sainsbury's are all trialling stores where the customer uses their phone to scan and pay for their purchases[4] and till-free stores are clearly considered to be the way forward by many large retailers. I am happy to use the self-service tills that are to be found in many stores and use contactless or mobile payment methods to pay, and it's probable that when they are more widespread, I'll use the till-less stores too. But, I like to have the choice not to use my phone, I like to be able to buy a physical programme at a football ground, I like to go to a till and interact with a human being to exchange my cash for their goods and services. In a nutshell, I like choice. Progress is good, change is good, but freedom of choice is better.

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[1] Source: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/14113/uk-smartphone-penetration-continues-to-rise-to-85-of-adult-population

[2] Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20121207/Cell-phone-dependence-e28098just-as-real-as-substance-addictione28099.aspx

[3] This move has angered and disappointed a lot of people; some people won't even watch a game if there is no programme; http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2017/08/chasing-paper.html

[4] See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45172631

Deal, or No Deal?

Comparisons have been made recently between the Millennium (Y2K) bug and Brexit.  Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin recently told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We will look back and wonder what all the fuss (about Brexit) was about - a bit like the millennium bug, remember all the experts on the millennium bug?" Ah yes, experts, let us not rely on experts if their view does not match with ours; as Michael Gove said, “people in this country have had enough of experts”.

Sir Bernard Jenkins, whose comparison of Brexit and the millennium bug is somewhat wide of the mark.

There undoubtedly are similarities between Y2K and Brexit: In 1999 there were dire warnings of food shortages, the health service in meltdown and planes falling out of the sky. Now, with the United Kingdom set to leave the European Union in March 2019 there are similar predictions, except this time the planes won't be falling out of the sky because they won't be allowed off the ground. There is one major difference between the approach to the dawn of the new millennium and the prospect of the UK outside the EU, and that is as the year 2000 approached, thousands of people in companies large and small, and in government, were working tirelessly to make sure that all of the computer systems, all of the code, and all of the infrastructure was Y2K compliant. I was one of them, and I put in hundreds of hours making sure that the systems within HSBC that I worked on would not collapse in a heap as the date rolled over.

Doom-laden prophesies ahead of 1st January 2000 did not come to pass thanks to
diligent and thorough testing, not through some stroke of luck or because there was no threat.

In contrast, preparations for Brexit can best be described as chaotic. No one knows for sure exactly what this country will be like once it has disentangled itself from the EU; one thing is for sure, things will be different, but how different and how that is dealt with requires clarity of purpose, clear planning and policies, practices and processes being in place to mitigate the risks inherent in what is essentially a step into the unknown. And at present, I feel we should all be more than a little concerned that precious few of these seem to have been talked about, far less made ready for March 2019.

Danny Dyer proved an unlikely sage of Brexit when he said, “Who knows about Brexit? No one has got a f*****g clue what Brexit is.”

Article 50 - the invoking of which starts the process by which a member state may leave the EU -  states that the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. This is done in accordance with Article 218, however the issue with these articles is their utter vagueness, and it is vagueness that has marked the UK Government's negotiations with the EU, while there is similar vagueness within Theresa May's government. Frankly, the process by which one disentangles oneself from a mobile phone contract or gym membership is better written and more water-tight than the one for leaving the EU, although I believe there's a reason for that. It has been said that Article 50 was drafted merely to address the absence in the EU's articles of any procedure that catered for a member state leaving, but that in their arrogance the EU never seriously considered this as a possibility, believing that once a state became a member, they would always be fully committed to an ever closer union and that there be no need for a provision for withdrawal. Thus the vagueness of the article; withdrawal was never considered a possibility and hence the complete lack of specifics about the future state of a nation and its relationship with the EU after withdrawal.


So to a large extent, the EU is as much to blame as the UK Government for the chaos that surrounds Brexit; the EU had no idea what a deal for any country leaving it would be, so how could an individual state, how could the electorate?

Many in the Leave camp, when challenged on the basis that they did not know what they were voting for in 2016, claim that they knew exactly what they were voting for, but how could they? Even two years down the line no one knows what deal the UK will get, so how did these sages know back then? Apart from some vague claims about taking back control, or 'getting our country back' - which mostly seem to entail keeping foreigners out and changing the colour of our passports - no one has adequately explained what deal they thought the UK would get; how could they, no one knows even now.

And talking of deals, the mantra remains that 'No deal is better than a bad deal.'  I'm not sure what the proponents of that idea think it means, but to me no deal will always, in any circumstances, be worse than a bad deal; after all, if there is something that you must have, at any price, then no deal (i.e. where you don't get what you need) must be worse than a bad deal (where you do). But perhaps this is just semantics, and like Humpty Dumpty, who said "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean" advocates of 'no deal' mean something completely different from the accepted norm. In the same way,  the awful platitude, "Brexit means Brexit" clearly means something to everyone who utters it, even if they don't have a grasp of the specifics.

The idea of a second referendum - either on the principle of Brexit or on the final deal that is negotiated - is anathema to those who voted Leave, greeted with rebuttals such as, "What part of democracy don't you understand?" Except of course that the right to change one's mind on the basis of new information is an integral part of a democracy - if not women would still not have the vote and the 1732 Act of Parliament that prevented the export of hats  from any of the colonies (including America) -the Hat Act- would still be on the statutes. And the last two years of negotiations count as new information in my book. Another argument against a second referendum that is frequently trotted out is that any such vote would see an even greater majority in favour of leaving the EU, which in itself is the best possible reason for having a second vote; imagine Leave maintaining or increasing their majority, as their supporters believe would be the case, and opposition to Brexit would be all the weaker.

Back in 2016, in the run-up to the referendum, I was conflicted. The arguments from both sides were persuasive, even if the 'facts' being used to support them were unproven, unsubstantiated, and wildly optimistic (or pessimistic); sometimes they were quite obviously wrong, but eventually I sided with Remain, not through any great affection for the EU, but rather on the basis of 'better the devil you know,' and a gut feeling that while Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin might have been able to achieve a 'conscious uncoupling,' the UK's separation from the EU would be much more acrimonious. After the result, I was prepared to accept it in the same way that I've accepted General and Local Election results that were contrary to the way I had voted, give it the benefit of the doubt and hope that a good Brexit deal could be achieved. 

Of course, there could suddenly be a breakthrough in the negotiations; the EU and the UK could agree on an amicable separation, on mutually beneficial terms, but that seems about as likely as Boris Johnson opening his mouth without inserting his foot in it, or Jeremy Corbyn being invited round for tea by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Sadly, I think that pursuing the 'no deal is better than a bad deal' approach will leave the United Kingdom like the contestant on the game show who declines the Banker's offer and opens a box containing just one penny.