Conspiracy for Dummies, Lesson 1: don't write it down

A rare - minor - case in which the conspiratorial (dishonest, co-ordinated, unacknowledged) behaviour that's an integral part of big business as usual is actually blown wide open.

BBC News:

Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), has been found guilty of tricking people into switching from their existing energy firms.
...
Steve Playle, of Surrey County Council Trading Standards, which brought the prosecution, said he was delighted with the court's decision.

"When we first became aware of the sales script being used by Scottish and Southern Energy we were convinced that it overstepped the mark and was misleading to potential customers," he said.

"A doorstep seller had a print out which he claimed showed consumers were paying too much with their current energy supplier, but the print out did not show this.

"The seller didn't actually have a clue but the sales script was cleverly designed to put potential customers on the back foot and to open the door to a sale," he added.

'Wilful mis-selling'

It is thought to be the first time that one of the big six energy firms has been prosecuted for using dishonest sales techniques.

The problem of doorstep trickery has plagued gas and electricity consumers since the industry was privatised in the 1990s.

Audrey Gallacher, of Consumer Focus, said the firm's behaviour had involved "deliberate and wilful mis-selling."

"'Misleading doorstep energy sales have been a nightmare for consumers for years, leaving many switching to a worse energy deal," she said.

"This verdict has revealed a deliberate tactic by SSE, not the behaviour of a rogue salesperson."

Honestly, it's really not difficult to do it properly: you employ the right kind of people (this can be by trial and error - just sack those who don't reach their targets) and rely on them to use a bit of initiative in making up the gap between your required result and what they can get by being honest. Even if managers coach the slower sales staff to improve their dirty tricks skills, they don't actually build it into a written script. That way, you have ample deniability, because as intimated, without the script, if you get caught you can simply blame "the behaviour of a rogue salesperson". No controlling mind, no awareness at upper management level, one expendable drone sacked and replaced, business as usual.

Let that be a lesson to these firms. Consumer protection means you do have to put a modicum of effort into making it look good.

Still, it's no biggy. The appeals process will no doubt be pursued (by the richer side) until such time as it's exhausted or finds that this was a case of a rogue manager and not the company's fault. And if past form is anything to go by, the fine will be manageable enough: for all I know it will be outweighed by the financial benefits of running a fraud without needing to pay for staff who have enough initiative to take a hint.

UPDATE, originally 12 May (Blogger has had a meltdown and quietly rolled back a few days' changes to this and other blogs, it seems):

Audrey Gallacher, Head of Energy at something called Consumer Focus agrees that This verdict is a wake-up call for the energy industry, but seems to take a more sanguine view than I do about what lessons might actually be learned:

Firms should be reviewing their...pay and incentives systems for salespeople...

Since this must be intended as a remedy for 'don't ask don't tell' sharp practice on the doorstep, it amounts to the suggestion that sales as we know it be abolished.

Hysteria for Women, or: What has Julian Assange got that David Aaronovitch hasn't?

So did Wikileaks really help spark the Tunisian revolt? Probably. I think commenter 'eleny' on some messageboard I was looking at had it right:

"Maybe people believed that there was corruption. But when they had concrete examples in the words of their leaders it infuriated the citizenry."

Believing is one thing but knowing is all important. And facts appear to be what WikiLeaks provides.

Secrecy, its degrees and varieties and its penumbra of deniability and doubt, is a favourite topic in these my sporadic and desultory remarks. I haven't attempted anything approaching thorough investigation or analysis of the situation in Tunisia, but the idea that a credible source certifying previously penumbral factoids can catalyse latent resentment seems fairly plausible to me. (One aspect is the idea that publicity provides a standard around which previously private opinion can rally, as in the Emperor's New Clothes parable.)

But letting that issue dangle unargued, I'll turn instead to the burning question of the moment: what would Serious Political Analyst and unwonted but determined Radio 4 colonist David Aaronovitch have to say about this? I don't know the answer to that either, which is probably good for the old equanimity. I imagine he subscribes to one of the 'power to the people as long as they do what we want' arguments that have emerged among the neocons and all the usual suspects, but again, I don't actually know, and don't intend coughing up whatever it costs to find out.

What I do know, though, thanks to a recent foraging expedition among some old chip wrappers, is what Aaronovitch was writing about Wikileaks in his Times column a few months ago. And in light of some evidence that Wikileaks is capable of having a role in some pretty spectacular and broadly welcome events, it seems worth looking at what he was saying then in some detail.

The Times, Thursday December 9 2010, Opinion, p33

This is no Robin Hood. They were our secrets

The Assangeists don't trust the State to run foreign or defence policy. So why do they trust it to run everything else?

David Aaronovitch

I had the same conversation half a dozen times yesterday in different forms and on different media. Wasn't there something strangely "convenient" about the legal process under way to investigate sexual allegations against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks? What this must mean, if anything, is this: is there some kind of plot whereby Mr Assange's enemies have somehow procured these charges to silence him? In other words the Yanks have secretly (ha!) leant on the Swedes, the Swedes have silently manipulated two women, and there we are, halfway to the fourth Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl with the Badly Constructed Condom.

Aaronovitch has approximated accuracy here: what people were saying - huge numbers of people who are not normally interested in observing conspiratorial behaviour - is that Mr Assange's enemies have had a hand in these charges. But not necessarily to silence him - perhaps to spoil his attempt to gain permanent residence in Sweden, perhaps to taint his reputation, perhaps to hobble, disrupt or undermine the work of Wikileaks, and perhaps of course - watch this space - in order to get him into custody while they decide on the best way to inveigle him into the US penal system or its Kafkaesque shadowland. The latest development in the extradition proceedings against Assange have an irrelevant magistrate giving his decision (against Assange), in the certain knowledge that appeal proceedings will begin with his words still hanging in the air. [Edit: since that was written, a District Judge has taken the appeals procedure another unedifying step closer to exhaustion.]

Anyone who is interested in the motivation and merits of the action taken against Assange by Swedish prosecutors can find plenty of material on the web; I'm not going to analyse it in detail here. One can certainly say, though, that these suspicions are not exactly tinfoil-hat territory - the US is indisputably out to get Assange, the charges are incredibly dubious on a large number of counts, and the announcement that Assange had surrendered to custody was followed with amazing swiftness by an announcement from the US state department that they 'may' seek to extradite Mr Assange - out of the Anglo-Swedish frying pan and directly into the inferno, Stateside.

Aaronovitch does his best to isolate a weak and paranoid-sounding strand from the web of evidence: so his chosen quote is "convenient" ( not that he is necessarily quoting any actual words he has actually heard, of course). "Isn't this a bit convenient?", as in 'isn't it convenient for the international Jewish Illuminati that this earthquake should keep the West Kettering UFO Working Group's inaugural conference and buffet off the front pages?'. The idea is to suggest a very weak circumstantial case, one so weak that it can only be hinted at. But Aaronovitch is really pushing it here - not many are going to fall for his Emperor's New Clothes schtick this time. Avert your eyes, gentle reader, for the Grand Panjandrum Aaronovitch stands before us, naked and quivering with indignation. (My concern is not of course to spare his ample blushes, but to save you from a disturbing and, I fear, indelible image.)

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Scarlett in the Black

John Scarlett, who as head of the JIC showed such independence in ensuring that nothing dodgy could get into any dossiers or anything like that, has now been appointed to the board of News International (Roy Greenslade, his background link.), which is supposedly meant to ensure the independence of the Times papers (you know, the ones hidden from the scrutiny of bloggers behind a paywall.)

Which for the most part a nice sinecure to add to his previous rewards in the shape of a brief stint as head of the SIS, and the consequent KCMG.

But the Eye (1283, 4 Mar 2011, p5) points out that this is splendid timing given that the Chilcott inquiry is going to be rolling out its bland admonishments soon, to be analysed in forensic detail by the News Corp titles, no doubt.

From the link supplied by Greenslade:

217. It is questionable how effective the Independent National Directors have been, even with the increased powers that Rupert Murdoch agreed to give them. The system was strongly criticised by Harold Evans who was Editor of The Sunday Times when Rupert Murdoch bought it, and who was then appointed as Editor of The Times. Mr Evans had fought for the increased powers of the Independent National Directors but in practice, he found they provided him with no effective protection. In his autobiography he wrote that none of the guarantees that Rupert Murdoch gave to safeguard editorial independence "are worth the paper they are written on—unless the proprietor shares the spirit of them. If he does, they are merely ornamental; if he does not, they are unworkable … Internal freedom cannot be acquired by external rules"[91]. Andrew Neil, Editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994, agreed "It was a conceit invented ... to allow Mr Murdoch to take over these papers in the first place, and it was put in place for that reason. It was not really put in place to protect the independence of the editors" (Q 1689).

I'm sure Scarlett will feel very much at home in such a setup, especially one run by the equally reputable Murdoch.

How to Finish Off the Welfare State, in One Easy Term

Cameron looks obliquely through the window, surveying his domain. He leans lightly against the right-hand frame, as though the Overton window itself had somehow crystallised into real hardwood and Heritage eggshell and bulletproof glass.

He idly contemplates life after his successful foray into parliamentary politics. In this rare quiet moment of stillness, Cameron permits himself, too, a few idle thoughts about the present.

Life is good.

A PM with captive backbenchers and no concern for the next ballot is remarkably close to a dictator, he muses. And his backbenchers are as caged as they come. The Orange-Bookers of course are happy as pigs in shit; the bovine remainder of the Lib Dems, those not wedged firmly in government salaried stalls waiting to be milked for votes, are irrelevant.

His own backbenchers are a mixture of neophyte lambs to the electoral slaughter, carnivorous lemmings in the grip of the privatising bloodlust, and baffled Tory dinosaurs with nowhere to go but the Lords. Altogether a very managable menagerie.

Initiating the final phase of NHS privatisation has been easy enough. To spice up the task, he has played a private little game. The challenge: to do it without explicit recourse to the standing pretext, the economic state of emergency, and indeed without giving any reason at all for pushing through this particular 'modernisation', and at such a pace.

He has simply relied on the capacity of the press to internalise the government's position and forget how they got there. The economic state of emergency is, well, a banker. It's estalished to the point that 'deficit-denier' is used without irony. The need for cuts elided into 'reforms' that don't actually involve any short-term savings, that was the main pinch-point, and went through without demur.

Another cheeky on-air pseudo-gaffe, this time a less-than-Freudian slip of the tongue describing the NHS as 'second rate' - he'd enjoyed that one. And the rest was repetition, repetition, repetition.

This must be done. It has to be done. If not now then when? There is no time to lose. We cannot delay.

Which is true of course - we cannot delay, cannot lose momentum, or it's just possible that someone who matters might start asking questions. And we certainly can't delay beyond the parliamentary term: there may very well not be a second. Which would not be a bad thing, with such a huge quantity of shit hitting an accelerating fan: a second term really could be rather tedious.

Yes, it has been a good day's work. Cameron is particularly pleased at having spelled it out quite clearly: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform our public services. The press loved that little soundbite. They lapped it up without a murmer, never asking why exactly, especially if the reforms are really such a good idea, this moment is the one opportunity in a lifetime to carry them out. None dare call it opportunism, even when he insists that it is.

Yes, David Cameron is very much amused.


[edit @ 19 Jan 2008 07:50 - clarified and expanded main points, cut verbiage]

Fetishising the Threat Level (the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien)

Counter terrorism arrests 'absolutely necessary', says police chief

This afternoon, standing outside New Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates said it was "absolutely vital" that the public remained vigilant.

"...what I would say is that with the current threat level in the UK at severe and with the information we have, I believe today's arrests were absolutely necessary in order to keep the public safe."

So the threat level is severe is it? Let's take that at face value. Either the threat level is (1) related to the information and allegations involved in these arrests, or (2) unrelated to them.

If it's (1), then citing the threat level is blatant double-counting - you have the information, and the fact that as a result the 'threat level' has been increased is a side-effect, not an additional cause for concern.

If it's (2), then the threat level is irrelevant.

In either case, there's an odd kind of fetishisation of this Threat Level. It's treated as if it were some kind of terror-barometer, a source rather than a summary of information. It's also treated as if it measured some free-floating ambient substance, 'terror-risk', which somehow ebbs and flows, casting its baleful influence quite independently of particular facts about suspects or bombs or suspicious behaviour.

Wikileaks Cables: Possibly a Plant of Selective Information? (A comment montage)

I've been speculating in the blog comments for a while about the possibility that the leaker of the latest Wikileaks dump might have been selective about what was leaked. Now I call in those comments, being far too lazy to type it all out again, still less to reorganise
it and tidy up. Come home, my pretties!

from http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/2010/11/sort-of-response-to-recent-anonymous.html, 2-5 Dec 2010:

 Tim Wilkinson said...

[...] so undamaging to the US - and so convenient in many cases for their PR effort - is

the preponderance of the documents I've come across so far that I'm inclined to give some consideration to the possibility that Akhmadi-Najad is on the right track when he claims that this latest batch was an engineered 'leak' of selected material.


Though the pronounced (though not too blatant, obviously) pro-US bias could just be down to what the papers have focussed on. It may be that this is influenced by the pseudo-coercive machinery of D-notices rather than just their customary obesiance to the authorities, though the latter could probably explain it.


But at some point Wikileaks was/is bound to be on the wrong end of such a trick (which is after all a standard bit of spy work, including adding just enough material just damaging enough to make it convincing).


Ideally I'd like to see some evidence that the selection of cables leaked doesn't have gaps in it. But I don;t really know what such evidence would look like, let alone think it likely that any is going to be forthcoming.

12/02/2010 05:02:00 PM

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The Bleeding Obvious Part 3562 - Local Planning

Just heard on radio 4 news that the 'Coalition' are planning to introduce - as part of its localisation agenda blah blah - local planning schemes set up by the locals blah blah. The bit that got my attention was where they mentioned that 'residents' would be able to make alteration to their homes without getting planning approval from the (local!) council.

Here's the bleeding obvious bit - this is about making things easier for Tesco and other corporate developers. That's the whole thing, end of story, all the rest is window dressing.
Right I'm in a hurry so I won't go off on a two thousand word ramble for once. I'm not even going to look it up ont web.

Expect the penny to drop with media commentators in about two days time.

Annie Machon v Christopher Andrew on MI5

...on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4:



Less interesting and entertaining, but included for completeness, the first half of the segment:



UPDATE: Machon's book Spies Lies and Whistleblowers can be found here.

No Smoky Room, No Smoking Gun: Corporate priorities in the case of BP

Reportage relating to the the US commission into BP's catastrophic oil spillage:

BP, firms did not shirk safety for money - panel

Well, that is the headline, but what was actually said is:

"To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favour dollars over safety," the commission's Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

This is a general problem in corporate governance: heads of corporations operate by setting incentives, and really don't want to know (certainly not undeniably) the dirty details of how objectives are met. No-one needs to say 'prioritise profit over safety'. We know that safety regimes on oil rigs are dreadful, and it's pretty clear that the reason is one of cost (what else? Love of carnage?). Budgets are set, regulators are captured. Of course profit has priority over safety: the safest course would be to go out of business, and the reason that course is not taken is profit. The rest is haggling, and the 'Health and Safety' side in that arbitration is very obviously not going to get the better of that arbitration.

To take a slight tangent 'Heath and Safety', thanks to a media campaign which goes in tandem with the anti-EU-regulation crusade, has becone a dirty word in common parlance, not by coincidence. Both campaigns resemble that mounted in the early 80's, most notably by the Sun, against the 'Loony Left' and what would now be called 'political correctness', particularly in their cherry-picking and gross exaggeration and distortion of anecdotal accounts - 'baa baa green sheep' and other stories. Poltical correctness is now a confirmed third member of the unholy trinity, though opposition to it is less obviously (or less directly) related to the interests of business.

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"The possibility of becoming the most powerful man on the planet is irresistibly beguiling to many rich men"

Robert Gavron has some useful comments on Murdoch's bid to take full ownership of Sky News, though he is either being diplomatic in that nakedly arbitrary 'present company excepted' kind of way, or he has fallen prey to the 'I've met him and he seems qute affable' fallacy, or he's placing quite a bit of weight on the term 'comparatively' in his record as a media proprietor in the UK will stand up comparatively well.

Still, the sentiment quoted in this post's title showed a refreshingly forthright realism, in contrast to the usual approach of the commentariat which is to regard this kind of observation as lurid and jejune. Maybe it is, but if so, it would appear that reality exhibits a pronounced lurid and jejune bias.

Lords Hansard 4 Nov 2010, Column 1783


Lord Gavron:


Rupert Murdoch was described the other day by the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, as the most powerful man on the planet. I have known Rupert Murdoch for a great many years. I have found him to be straight, loyal and honourable. He is a man of his word. Although I have frequently, if not usually, disagreed with him, his record as a media proprietor in the UK will stand up comparatively well to analysis by future historians.


However, I am against his plan to acquire the rest of Sky. People have said, "He already controls Sky, so buying the rest will make no difference". We can all talk about the difference, but Rupert Murdoch is not the sort of man who would spend £7.8 billion buying shares which make no difference. Sky, as the Economist of 16 October said, is Britain's leading media company. It has almost 10 million subscribers and almost £6 billion of annual revenue-already almost double that of the BBC. Apparently, we spend more on Sky than we spend on bread. In addition to its 39 per cent of Sky, News Corporation's four newspapers already have 37 per cent of our total national newspaper circulation-a share that is as much as the next two biggest newspaper groups combined.


Next March, Rupert Murdoch will be 80. He enters what I heard rather unattractively defined last week as "the drop zone". He has said that when his health gives out he will get out of the way. He has made plans for succession. However, history tells us that when a great tycoon goes, his assets tend to change hands. Rupert Murdoch has not maximised his corporation's profits. He is sentimental about newspapers. There are media experts who think that News Corporation, valued in the market at some $38 billion, is undervalued by almost 30 per cent. So it is an attractive takeover prospect in financial terms alone. In addition, the possibility of becoming the most powerful man on the planet is irresistibly beguiling to many rich men. Quite a few of them have access to, or can raise, the means to acquire the company. We could end up with a Russian oligarch, an Arab prince, or a hedge fund billionaire. Whoever it is might be honourable and principled-or they might not be.


We have the power to prevent a media baron from extending his empire. We have tended not to use that power. I hope that this time we will. Even if we do, my major concern remains. It is very difficult to stop someone who has the money from buying a public company. It is very difficult to say, "We let Rupert Murdoch have it, but we like you less, so we are going to stop you from buying it". The potential influence of News Corporation in the United Kingdom is enormous. The damage that could be done if it fell into the wrong hands is incalculable. We should be extremely worried.

Hunter and Hunted: the two pathologists of David Kelly

The latest grudging drip-feed of information about the Kelly case was the release of pathology and toxicology reports. Searchable text of the pathology report is here).

I'll concentrate mainly on the pathology document. It appears to tell us little of interest that we didn't already know - as those who decided to publish it must have been well aware. There are however a few interesting aspects:

The report's content is at odds with the remarks Dr Hunt recently made to the press (the 'textbook suicide' remarks) which were widely reported (not for the first - or the last - time) by all the usual commentators as laying to rest 'conspiracy theories' about Dr Kelly's death.

Those remarks were I believe made with the agreement of Hunt's Home Office employers. In fact it strains credulity to imagine that Hunt came up with the idea himself and the HO just granted permission. I think 'at the insistence and under the supervision of' would probably describe the facts better than 'with the agreement of '. Indeed, Hunt must have known that he was breaking confidentiality in making those statements, and he was sanctioned by the GMC for doing so without the permission of the coroner in the case.

So this later Hunt appears to have been under some pressure to make public statements which he must have been aware would be a breach of fundamental professional ethics unless properly authorised (which they weren't). One lever for the exertion of such pressure might have been his ongoing investigation by a Disciplinary Committee which via a Byzantine layering of official bodies - the Pathology Delivery Board under the Police, Science and Forensics Unit of the National Policing Improvement Agency - is evidently basically controlled by the Home Office. Hunt, under pressure, seems to have been wlling to blur the distinction between the roles of coroner and expert witness, since his scripted remarks give the impression that he is in a position to draw conclusions about matters other than the direct cause of death.

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Jonathan Evans #2: Like murderous intrigue? Join MI5! (Also, conspiracy in ancient Rome)

As part of the recent campaign to project a more touchy-feely image (as opposed to the sneaky-watchy, breaky-entery, even hurty-killy image that has somehow emerged over the years), Jonathan Evans, the latest head of MI5, has been chatting to Martha Kearney:

MI5 boss attracted by 'intrigue' of I, Claudius - The head of MI5 had admitted he was attracted by "the intrigue" of I, Claudius as a boy as he disclosed the details of his classical education background."
(- Telegraph)

Since the Telegraph (and the Today programme, which drew my attention to the story), have emphasised the idea - not so far as I can tell explicitly reflected in the content of the interviews - that Evans was attracted to the Service by a fondness for tales of intrigue and murder in Imperial Rome, I'll happily if flippanty take their sensationalist spin a tiny step further, hence the title of this post.

On coming across this titbit, I was reminded of a book that emphasises the ubiquity of conspiracy in ancient Rome, especially perhaps in the Imperial period: Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History. The book starts well, emphasising for example the peculiar problems that conspiracy poses for historians:

because conspiracy is a hidden, secret event, it resists—defies—exposition. In recording any conspiracy, important facts always remain in the shadows; to tell the tale of a conspiracy is to guess at a very great deal. So how does one reveal something that is deliberately kept secret? How does one speak with any authority on matters about which one knows little or nothing for certain? Of course, all historians face uncertainty and ignorance about their subject matter at some point. For all these reasons, I maintain that a conspiracy is an ideal circumstance in which to observe how a historian confronts the limits of knowledge.

I would agree with this for the most part, though I would go further and suggest that these problems create the need for a distinctive epistemic which deals with the deviant conditions of the conspiratorial realm - 'opposed' or 'adversary' epistemics. This is analogous in some ways to 'non-ideal theory' in political philosophy - that is, theory which, in taking account of the radical complications caused by recalcitrant people who refuse to behave as one's simple, 'ideal' theory would prefer, may well become a very different beast. I'd suggest that forensics will be a useful source here, though I think I mean this in a broader sense than Pagán when she writes: Forensics, ballistics, acoustics, optics: every available scientific method has been applied and reapplied to the evidence. My conception of forensics is not merely as another word for forensic science as seen (so I understand, sniff) in those CSI programmes, but as encompassing the whole theory of what it is that detectives and prosecutors do, or rather what they ought to do, and how they ought to go about doing it.

[UPDATE 4 Nov 2010: Actually, not just detectives and prosecutors but also perhaps courts, though the standard and burden of proof need not be the same. Those are determined largely by pragmatic concerns such as the costs of trying or punishing the innocent.]

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The Hallmarks of Al Qaeda

Yahoo News:

Cameron wrote in the News of the World, Britain's biggest selling Sunday newspaper, that the bomb "bears the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda".

In Dubai police said the bomb found there contained the high explosive PETN -- the same substance used by the would-be 2009 Christmas Day "underpants" bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab and 2001 attempted shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

Dubai police chief General Dahi Khalfan told AFP: "This was a parcel bomb and a terrorist act could have occurred," adding that the device could have "exploded" on board the airplane had it not been intercepted in time.

The device consisted of a computer printer whose ink contained explosive material, connected to a mobile phone SIM card and a circuit board, a police statement said.

The statement said it "bears the hallmarks of those used by terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda."

So, those hallmarks of 'Al Qaeda' in full:

1. Being the kind of thing a terrorist does (e.g. a bomb)

2. Including a standard kind of high-explosive

David Kelly: pathologist's report to the coroner - text version

A transcription of the report at http://www.justice.gov.uk/pathologist-report-dpa.pdf 

[Update, 30 Jul 2013: this link is now dead; the pdf is archived at http://wikispooks.com/w/images/a/ad/David_Kelly_Post-Mortem_Report.pdf . Also, 1 OCR error noticed, on p7 in the potentially very important section 'Right lower limb'. 'A any red lesion' corrected to 'A tiny red lesion'.]

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The House of Cards and the Numbers Game: Two Models of Secrecy

'Coventrian', in Aaronovitch Watch comments, describes discovering Denis MacShane's dodgy dealings:

'However, the big mystery is the strange sequence of invoices from The European Policy Institute (EPI), which doesn't seem to have any presence on the Internet other than it was founded by Denis MacShane. The invoices are strangely repetitive, lacking in detail as to what work was done and with all contact details redacted. Why?

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The Economic State of Emergency

So Cameron has been using patriotic military rhetoric and continuing the "we're all in this together" theme. (All except the hordes of breed-like-rabbits benefit scum who refuse to take up all those unfilled vacancies, of course).

I am slightly surprised at the crassness of it, but otherwise this is what I expected - below is what I was saying in Crooked Timber comments just before the election. In particular: Under the pretext of an economic state of emergency, there is the prospect of further near-irreversible moves toward the ‘free-market’ paradise that the Conservatives are obviously so keen on – while of course, as ever, being intensely relaxed about people being dirt poor.


Meanwhile, some people seem to view the recent exaggerated outrage at the proposal to remove child benefit from high earners as indicating a failure by Osborne. Not at all.

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Jonathan Evans #1: 'A Unicorn forcene Argent armed maned tufted and unguled Or the dexter forehoof enfiling the hasp of a Padlock Azure'

A speech is delivered by the latest head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, to something called the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals, an ersatz guild formed in 1999 complete with newfangled heraldry ('A Unicorn forcene Argent armed maned tufted and unguled Or the dexter forehoof enfiling the hasp of a Padlock Azure...'). I assume this organisation is some kind of strange joke on someone's part.

Quoth Evans:

10. It is interesting to note in this context that in the last ten years what might be called a "zero tolerance” attitude to terrorist risk in Great Britain has become more widespread. While it has always been the case that the authorities have made every effort to prevent terrorist attacks, it used to be accepted as part of everyday life that sometimes the terrorists would get lucky and there would be an attack. In recent years we appear increasingly to have imported from the American media the assumption that terrorism is 100% preventable and any incident that is not prevented is seen as a culpable government failure. This is a nonsensical way to consider terrorist risk and only plays into the hands of the terrorists themselves. Risk can be managed and reduced but it cannot realistically be abolished and if we delude ourselves that it can we are setting ourselves up for a nasty disappointment.

This starts promisingly, rejecting a 'zero tolerance' approach to terrorist risk. I take this phrase to mean aiming to reduce such risk as far as possible, regardless of the costs. This kind of approach is seen in comments of the 'I for one would be only too happy to submit to [insert tyrannical and/or ludicrous measure] if it might prevent even one death at the hands of the evil ones' (but not in a traffic accident, NHS ward, or cardboard village).

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Crooked Timber comment overflow: Wikipedia on Conspiracy Theories (via the New York Times)

Comment overflow from Crooked Timber, on this article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times (reproduced at the end):

Krugman quotes from Wikipedia:

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, "attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance."

I think there are problems here - one is the assumption of pragmatic explanatory status (previously discussed), in which the word 'theory' plays a role, since it is capable of suggesting a parallel with paradigmatically explanatory endeavours like scientific theories. (The word often also, or instead, imports a presumption of mere speculation, or of  a lack of adequate evidence. I note with approval that Wiki doesn't include any such evaluative element in its definition.)

Relatedly, the assumption that some reasonably compact and dicrete event must be involved is inaccurate, though as a defender of 'good' conspiracy theories, and strategically an aspiring rehabilitator of the term 'conspiracy theory', I don't mind this too much since those 'conspiracy theories' which are short on determinate and significant events obviously tend to be vague about all sorts of things, as well as defective in other ways - and if they are booted out of the nominal category 'conspiracy theory' so much the better.

Another more substantive problem is the 'covert alliance' bit - secrecy and/or deceptiveness of the plan is one thing (though it can be challenged as inessential to conspiracy both as a matter of definition and as a matter of salience in this context; the same goes, less plausibly and importantly, for the requirement that an 'alliance' be involved). But specifying that the 'alliance' itself must be covert is wrong - especially on a natural reading which places 'covert' at the extreme end of the secretiveness spectrum (the Bilderberg Group provides a good illustration of this spectrum with its progressive relaxation of secrecy, thanks largely to the efforts of 'conspiracy theorists').

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Implausible Deniability #2: David Kelly

While I'm gathering unto me various bits and pieces from the four corners of the webosphere, below is a couple of comments I submitted to the tail end of  a rather good Aaronovitch Watch thread, relating to David Kelly's death and similar events, expanding on the notion of implausible denial.

But first, a piece from Private Eye which reports the first known use of the Kelly Affair as a threat. In these particular circumstances, the threat is rather implausible, and it's beginning to sound rather as though the scumbag issuing it got a bit carried away, to the point of slavering dementitude. But I'm sure other scumbags may be more plausible, in which case the threats are less likely to be splashed all over the Eye.

Regardless of the matter of actual explicit threats, what is called in the context of debates about libel law the 'chilling effect', and in general may be called the 'latent deterrent effect', probably has a rather wider application. Even if you only suspect that Kelly may have been rubbed out, you, a possessor of highly discreditable government secrets, are likely to keep you gob firmly shut, without anyone having to shout threats at you. In fact, this applies whatever you think actually happened to Kelly, since even on an unassisted suicide hypothesis he was pretty clearly hounded, and probably the most plausible motive for him to kill himself would have been the threat to remove his pension rights. (Whether this is actually very plausible depends on such matters as whether he would have expected his life insurance to be invalidated by suicide - which I admit I haven't looked into, not being an investigative journalist.)


MEDICINE BALLS
PFI at all costs
'M.D.'
Private Eye #1271, p12
17 Sept 2010
IN 2003 Dr Peter Brambleby, then director of public health for Norwich Primary Care Trust (PCT), received requests from senior clinicians at the PFI flagship Norfolk and Norwich hospital (Eyes passim) to look into their concerns about changes to the design and build that they believed put patients at risk.
The ventilation system and isolation facilities were top of their list, but so were a lack of management response and a culture of secrecy.

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Edward Feser on Counterknowledge and Conspiracy Theories

1. Conspiracy Theories

Edward Feser is a teacher of and writer on philosophy, who has written a couple of articles on 'conspiracy theories', one on the counterknowledge website, one not. 

Feser summarises his views on the possibility of treasonable or similarly criminal conspiracies carried out by members of the government and government agencies as follows:

First, that while conspiracies of a small-scale nature do sometimes occur, the nature of modern bureaucracies makes it practically impossible for would-be conspirators secretly and effectively to engineer anything on the scale of a 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenario. Second, while liberal democratic societies are capable of great evil, the adversarial nature of their institutions and the diverse ends and belief systems of the people staffing these institutions make it practically impossible for would-be conspirators to organize enough relevant personnel to do evil of the specific sort involved in 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenarios. Third, the scale of deception posited in conspiracy scenarios of this scale is so all-encompassing that it effectively undermines the very evidential base that conspiracy theorists themselves must rely on to support their theories.

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