Manifesto thoughts

Like all other Labour members, I was asked about what I felt should have been included in the manifesto. I decided to focus on areas that are traditionally overlooked by political parties. Within a strict character limit, I could only give short descriptions and links to books. Here, I will give longer ones.

Criminal justice

Anyone, anywhere can be a victim of a crime. They could also be falsely accused. In either case, they are thrust into a system that is underfunded, under-resourced and chaotic — in no small part thanks to the cuts of the last 9 years. They risk having to spend a lot of money to clear their name or, if they are the victim, seeing the trial collapse and the criminal walk free due to a systemic failing.

Unlike failings in the NHS, problems with the legal system rarely hit the headlines. The dominant narrative is that any problems are due to ‘liberal judges being soft on crime’ and not cuts. Yet, overworked barristers, lack of legal aid, courts forced to rush cases, the CPS not releasing evidence on time or releasing incomplete evidence combine to make the justice system malfunction all too often — and anyone could be affected by this at any time. Therefore:

• All criminal law should be open source. It should be available online and searchable by any legal professional, defendant or victim. This database should be updated in a timely fashion as new laws are passed and new court judgements come in.
• Sufficient crown courts need to be opened and adequately staffed to deal with the volume of cases without having to rush through every single one. The backlog of cases should be cleared.
• ‘Floating trials’ should be kept to a minimum. If a case overruns, a different courtroom should be available to avoid having all the participants come in on a different day or, possibly, to a different city.
• All criminal barristers need to be able to see all the relevant evidence 7 days before a trial. When the CPS fails to release evidence on time, without an explicit reason, the offending officials should be deemed to be in contempt of court.
• The number of CPS caseworkers should be increased.
• Court interpreter services should be brought in-house.
• Probation services should be brought in-house.
• The coalition legal aid cuts should be reverted. When defendants are forced to represent themselves, this almost always ensures a longer trial and a massive waste of resources — as well as a potential miscarriage of justice leading to costly appeals.
• Defendants’ cost orders should be re-introduced. The so called ‘innocence tax’ should be gone.
• Magistrates should be professionalised. At least one of any three sitting magistrates should have some form of legal training.
• Sentencing guidelines should be drastically simplified.
• Cuts to forensics should be reverted. The Forensic Science Service should be restored.

The above is based on the book ‘Stories of law and how it is broken’, by the ‘Secret Barrister’.

Higher education

The debate around higher education has for 22 years revolved around the subject of tuition fees, but in reality the problems are far more complicated than that. Fees are only a part of the internal market in academia, only one symptom of the corporate structure that has been imposed upon it. This structure wastes the time of teaching and research staff, produces substandard outcomes for students and short-changes those of the employers who still expect a university degree to represent quality.

In other words, our universities are geared for one thing: making money and attracting students, grants and donations. This comes at the expense of the quality of their research and teaching output. Rather than helping the rest of the economy, they are an economy of their own, in which turning a profit is the end goal.

This is an attitude that will lead to Britain for ever being a service provider, making money off education but not creating differentiating capacities in research or enough sufficiently skilled graduates for the domestic job market. And it is a dangerous path to tread: we can live off our past reputation for excellence for only so long whilst dumbing down courses before employers stop recognising our degrees as worthwhile. When that happens, students will head to cheaper destinations such as Belgium and the Netherlands. A break with the corporate tradition is needed:

• No academic should be disciplined or otherwise suffer for speaking out against their employer. They should be free to advise prospective students to go elsewhere, criticise management or blow the whistle on poor practices without any fear of harming their future prospects.
• Universities should be discouraged from competing for students. The mould in which the student is seen as the ‘customer’ and the university as the ‘provider’ trying to attract their custom should be broken, as it encourages dumbing down. Students should treat university as a place of learning in which they are the most junior members, not a service they are purchasing and can demand things from.
• Consequently, the ‘student experience’ should not be prioritised over education.
• Central funding for courses, to replace fees, should be offered based on skills being taught, the needs of industry and educational considerations. The aim is for universities to offer courses not based on student demand but with the aim of creating a pool of graduates with the right skills to contribute to economy and society. This should resolve the (real or perceived) problem of ‘too few medics and too many media studies graduates’.
• A permanent lecturer to student ratio should be enforced. If universities wish to admit more students, they should be required by law to hire permanent members to teach them.
• Academics should not be evaluated by the grant money they bring in. It should be recognised that the best research is not always one that is popular and that its value may be realised a long way down the line. It should be further recognised that preparation of grant applications is a highly complex and time-consuming process, full of red tape, that in itself contributes nothing to research output.
• Public grant-giving bodies such as the ESPRC and decision-making bodies such as HEFCE should be led by academics. A minimum requirement for being on their board should be a PhD and several years of lecturing experience.
• University departments should preserve (or regain) a strong degree of autonomy in how they are run. This includes: decisions on hiring, admission, choice of computer systems or teaching practices.
• Age discrimination in hiring should be discouraged. A well-qualified 50 year-old applying for a post should be treated the same as an equally well-qualified 28-year old. It should not be the case that people ‘miss the boat’ for a permanent lectureship and are left jumping from temp job to temp job for the rest of their lives despite a world class record of research.
• Finally, there should be a general commitment against managerialism, red tape, targets cultures, performance metrics and unreliable data practices. (For instance, a student satisfaction survey should be recognised as very unreliable data on true student feeling). Some managerial practices do still have a place — they do in any organisation. But the power of administrators should be limited.

Some of the arguments for the above come from Stephan Collini’s ‘Speaking of Universities’.

Land reform

Brett Christophers describes a massive sell-off of public land assets over the past 40–45 years. From school playing fields to NHS hospital sites, public property has inexorably passed into private hands: since 1979 10% of Britain’s land area has been sold off.

In hindsight, this decision cost us billions upon billions of revenue. Land is a profitable asset that the public purse could have reaped the benefits of. Even if one feels that private sector can manage it better (questionable, given Christophers’ research and known practices such as land-banking), it could have been rented to them, the government keeping ownership of the asset itself. Yet, it was sold — and when these assets needed to be bought back, the differences in price between what the government originally received and what they had to pay were often staggering. Therefore:

• It should be standard practice for the government to retain land ownership and seek to let rather than sell.
• If money does urgently need to be raised, it should be borrowed against the value of the land asset and not realised by selling it.
• Any public asset sell-off should need to go through a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to buy it later should there be a demand for it. The local public would need to be meaningfully consulted on the issue, with maybe even vetoing powers over the sale.
• A register of all public land sales nationwide should be available online and kept up to date, for people to understand the scale of the sell-off. Any sites likely to be considered for rent and sale should be advertised 2 years in advance.

A separate but related question is that of land value tax. Adam Smith famously said that land, being a finite resource, is not a true market commodity and is the preserve of rentier capitalism, which he despised. In Scotland in particular, land ownership is the most unequal in the Western world. However, England does little better, with the Duke of Westminster famously owning large parts of Central London. Therefore the initial plan should be:

• An exhastive land registry for the UK —following standard practice in France or Spain. In case of corporate ownership, this should count land owned by subsiduaries as if it were owned by the parent company.
• Land value tax to be introduced on large estates and separately on overseas corporate landowners, with the stated aim of having a greater number of smaller landowners in this country.
• This should be levied on exceeding a (quite generous) land area threshold and based on actual land value.
• Take measures to stop farmland being bought up to avoid inheritance tax by changing the inheritance tax breaks on farmland.
• Contrary to public fears, this will not be a ‘garden tax’, for the simple reason that the vast majority of the population do not possess a garden of many hectares in size.

Money laundering and tax avoidance.

It should be recognised that Britain — both its mainland and overseas territories — is one of the world’s leading money laundering centres. Natural resources and national wealth of third world counties is plundered by their own corrupt elites and stashed away within our financial system.

This is then used to buy British property, send children to British private schools and otherwise enjoy ‘the high life’ in one of the world’s premier liberal democracies. (That means us.)

This is a form of neo-colonialism. What we used to take from the third world by force, we now take through a rigged system that siphons off stolen wealth, proceeds of corruption or of crime and enables it to settle in the West. The methods have changed, but the principle has not.

Furthermore, some of those regimes — Russia deserving a particular special mention — are our geopolitical opponents against whom we have levied sanctions. Cutting off the Russian elites’ backdoor access to our financial system would be a powerful tool of influence, far more powerful than anything attempted thus far.

Finally, tax avoidance attracts some the brightest and the best individuals and sets them to work on an activity that generates no wealth at all. One could equally get them to dig holes and fill them in — the net benefit would be the same and the harm much less. Thus we should propose:

• A strict control on the registration of new companies. It should not be possible for ‘just anyone’ to register a company in Britain and there should be rigorous background checks for anyone attempting to do so. This would involve a reversal of the changes to company registration from 2011.
• Strict regulation on any company hosting businesses, namely organisations that exist purely to give companies a postal address, enabling thousands of them to be ‘based’ in the same physical location. Better regulation of limited liability partnerships and company formation agents.
• When foreign property is owned by a British shell company (like for instance the property of former President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich), British courts should be able to determine if it is the proceeds of embezzlement and return it to the respective state. Merely the risk of this would force foreign kleptocrats avoid being involved with Britain in this way.
• Countries (such as Russia) could be sanctioned so that their citizens lose their right to pursue certain libel claims in British courts. This would protect journalists wishing to expose corruption and money-laundering.

The information in this section comes from Oliver Bullough’s ‘Moneyland’.

AI governance.

In the debate about privatisation, nationalisation or in/out-sourcing of public services, one question looms large: whether civil servants or the markets are best at efficiently allocating resources within, say, the NHS or the Royal Mail. When genuine competition is possible, markets are indeed good at resource allocation: the problem is that the artificial internal markets that have been set up within transport, health or education are just not genuine markets to a sufficient degree. There is no competition at all between train operators along a given route, and whilst there is formally patient/parent/student choice within health and education, all too often it is not an informed choice, based on, at best, artificial performance metrics. Attempting to fulfil and maximise those metrics wastes the valuable time of frontline staff in each case.

However, this does not address the original problem of resource allocation that was the motivation for those services to be privatised and outsourced. For example, when we scrap tuition fees … how does one allocate funding to various university departments, offering an education of differing quality? Without a market or consumer choice deciding resource allocation, it would have to be once again carried out by human decision makers, with their associated imperfections.

Yet, help might eventually be at hand. AI algorthims have been much maligned of late, for lack of transparency and for entrenching the biases of their creators, however resource allocation is one of the most basic applications of AI. One can foresee a time when AI algorithms start allocating public resources so efficiently that there would be no need to have a market within public services. Public sector waste would be ‘managed’ using AI.

Likewise, in the case of outsourcing, the argument for it is that the private provider can make efficiency savings and provide the service more cheaply. However, this optimisation could also be carried out by an algorithm and not by the private provider. This will also avoid these efficiency savings coming at the expense of the quality of service.

To reiterate, the private sector’s main argument is that it provides services more efficiently, and this offsets the profits that it makes. AI could well take away one of its main arguments in the case of public services.

There are a few ground rules. All algorithms need to be open source and explainable. They need to be transparent and able to fully explain any decision they make. They have to show that they do not discriminate — and this includes ‘discrimination by proxy’ when people’s addresses are correlated to their race or ethnicity. They should not be treated as the word of god and front-life staff should be able to challenge their decisions.

Most importantly, it should be realised that this is a medium to long-term goal. The workings of even a single hospital are so dizzyingly intractable that no existing AI algorithm will model them accurately, despite what various people might promise. However, this should be a subject of heavy research in the UK. Britain should aim to become a hub for research into algorithmic governance, that would allow public services to be run efficiently without having to have a fake internal market or outsource vital services.

Data ownership.

Data, according to many people, is the new wealth. Yet, many people give it away for free, voluntarily, not realising what valuable stuff it is. It could end up with a data broker, be repackaged and resold (and, you are hoping, anonimised in the process, with your name, gender, race, sexuality and health status removed). It could be kept in-house by Facebook or Google, who would make a lot of money from advertisers paying to show you their targeted adverts.

Either way, most of us are sitting on a goldmine which makes money for someone else. The trouble is, compensating people individually for their data is not easy, because data is typically valuable in large datasets from many people. When anonimised, it cannot even be associated with a name. There is discussion of how to define data ownership, however many issues are unresolved.

While the technological and legal frameworks for data ownership will not be drawn up quickly, it should be far easier to identify data that comes from a particular country, and on this tax could be levied. This could provide a better, more justified way of taxing tech companies as was suggested on Thursday. As already mentioned, data is most valuable in large datasets and so could be seen as a common asset, a common source of wealth. Companies who make money on British people’s data could be giving us something back for that.