Financial Suicide?

I read recently that all the great democratic societies of history (surprisingly including the Ancient Greeks and Rome - though their idea of 'democracy' was rather different from the modern one) eventually commit financial suicide within 200 - 250 years of their establishment. The reason? Someone eventually begins to promise the electorate that voting for them will mean getting something 'free' from the State. There is only one way a 'State' can hand out money or goods, they must first take it from the citizenry.

The electorate may not be stupid, but offer someone a share of someone else's wealth and they'll take it. This is where the suicide comes in, because the handouts, be they cash or goods, eventually exceed the ability of those being taxed, to pay for it ...

Margaret Thatcher is credited with remarking: "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." She was absolutely right. While we may not all agree with everything she stood for or did, we have to acknowledge that she had an extremely sharp grasp of where the money was coming from - and why it couldn't continue.

The American Statesman, Thomas Jefferson, is credited with the observation that; "Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work, and give to those who would not." That, perhaps sums up a large part of the problem. I think everyone will agree that there needs to be a safety net in any civilised society for those who cannot work, the sick, the disabled, the aged and those temporarily out of work. The trouble is that this has, in every society, very quickly become a "right' to be demanded and paid to everyone who doesn't have the slightest intention of ever working.

Allowing that situation to continue for far too long has led us to the brink of the precipice. Interestingly, the UK has really only been a real deomcracy since 1836. What passed for 'democracy' prior to that was a strictly limited system - one 'borough' only had one voter, but returned a Member of Parliament - with only the rich landowning class actually having a vote. By my reckoning that makes it about due for committing financial suicide. The US is now 'democratically' close to the 250 year mark, as is France ...

Interesting times?

Cutting Defences

I'm currently reading an excellent book on the future of the Royal Navy. It is, in places, heavy going, but it poses some interesting questions as well as putting forward some good arguments. Since the end of World War 1 the Royal Navy has been, if not in decline, then certainly shrinking. If the author of the book I'm reading is right, this is a twofold thing. First, the Navy has always enjoyed the position of knowing that 'everybody knows we need a Navy' and secondly, because its ships are such expensive items, it is easy, when making 'savings' on defence, to make a 'big' saving by simply deleting a new build or a planned build or scrapping several ships.

Politicians and civil servants never think further than five years (Capital Budgets) or one year (Operating Budgets). Knock a project costing a couple of billion on the head and - "Gosh! Look at what we've saved, Mr Chancellor, sir." This is why Britain entered the Second World War with a Fleet List of 22 'Capital' Ships, most of them obsolete. There were five in building in 1939, and the most modern were the already out of date HMS Rodney and Nelson. The "Queen Elizabeths" had been upgraded in 1925 - 30 and three had been "rebuilt" and modernised by 1940, the remaining pair, HMS Barham (Sunk off Mersa Mutru by the U331, probably as a result of the torpedoes starting a fire in her 4 inch magazines which had been 'inserted' adjacent to her 15 inch magazines) and HMS Malaya, were, for a time the best the RN had available.

The Naval Estimates were knocked back in 1928 and again in 1932, so building of the KGV Class could not begin before 1936. At the formation of the Royal Air Force, the Navy had been forced to give up the Fleet Air Arm, something they did not regain control over until 1938 and then had to find the money to build the ships they needed for the coming war (Winston Churchill is a bit disingenuous about this - he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who would not allow the Navy the money in the 1928 Estimates) and replace the redundant aircraft they were lumbered with. The KGV Class were started building in 1936/7 and in 1939 the three "Lion" Class were started, alongside the "War Emergency Class" HMS Vanguard. She was not completed until 1945 and she was armed with the guns taken from two battle cruisers converted to aircraft carriers in the 1920s.

The three Lions were cancelled and scrapped on the slipways. The official reason was that they could not be completed in time and the war effort needed the steel for other projects. I am not alone in believing that the real reason was that Whitehall had belatedly discovered that the guns they were designed to carry, 16 inch guns of a more advanced type than those fitted to the Rodney and Nelson, could not be produced in Britain. The reason was simple, Whitehall had cancelled all forward orders (more budget 'savings') for these guns and for 15 inch guns, so the gun foundry that produced them had been closed in 1928 and dismantled. The largest bore gun the UK could produce for itself in 1936 was a 6 inch, which is one reason why this became the standard gun fitted to the very successful classes of 'cruisers' built between 1936 and 1950.

Thus, the Royal Navy, in 1939, found itself equipped with ships that were, for the most part, obsolete and even the new ones being built, The King George V Class, had to be equipped with very large and complex quadruple turrets carrying 14 inch guns salvaged from the ships scrapped in 1922 by the 'Geddes' Axe which reduced the once proud fleet to a shadow of its former self. In truth, they should have focussed on building more aircraft carriers, but Churchill and his fellows still believed that battleships could force an enemy to sue for peace. One of his more ludicrous schemes, thankfully thwarted by Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, then First Sea Lord, was to sacrifice the 'R' Class battleships, Royal Oak, Royal Sovereign, Revenge and Ramillies, in an attack through the Skaggerak, Great Belt and into the Baltic to attack the German base in Kiel.

The problem in all 'Defence Reviews' is that they are entered into and conducted with the same goals in mind. "Where can we cut the costs and how much can we cut" rather than any real appraisal of what the Armed Forces may be called upon to deal with. This has been exposed again and again, but still Whitehall and Westminster are attempting to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. The Defence Chiefs find themselves caught in the same trap over and over - how do they defend the expenditure on ships, aircraft, tanks, personnel and training, when all the Treasury wants is cuts, all the politicians want is to be able to look good afterward and the civil service just keeps expanding.

Sir John Nott's slashing of the Royal Navy's resources and the withdrawal of the Falklands Patrol exposed just how little Whitehall and Westminster actually understand about Defence of the Realm. Blair's excursions into Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed massive gaps in materiel and equipment for the Army and the RN and now we face a drum beating Iran and an upsurge in piracy, not just off the Horn of Africa, but increasingly elsewhere as well. Blair and then Cameron's interventions in Libya, Sierra Leone and elsewhere continues to expose the fact that the RN is stretched to the limit, the Army is as well, and now the RAF is to be crunched again, with the ludicrous suggestion, once again, that 'piloted aircraft can be replaced by remote vehicles and missiles. They tried that stupid argument in 1964 - but, of course, hope everybody has forgotten how that worked out.

The Naval Staff have a very difficult role. Their efforts to maintain a 'balanced' fleet, one capable of meeting the demands most likely to be placed on it, are increasingly difficult. In Nott's review, the aircraft carriers were scrapped on the grounds that the RAF would provide all air cover from land bases or the US Navy would from their carriers. Falklands proved how good an assessment that was! Now we have the expensive "air defence" Type 45 Destroyers being deployed to roles they are not designed for in the Middle East, and the carriers have, again, been scrapped. Mind you, that was inevitable as soon as the Whitehall Wonders scrapped the only aircraft that could be operated from them!

The real problem is this. Whitehall cannot look at the big picture, their focus is on 'this budget' and 'this government.' Westminster lacks the competence and the expertise to see anything outside of their ideological goals and, as a result, believe what any civil servant tells them. If the Treasury says something is too expensive, it must be cut. There is no understanding of what is being destroyed and lost, or of the consequences of not having something - until it affects them directly. Tragically, the biggest problem all three armed services face at present is that Whitehall and Westminster see them as a necessary evil, something one has to have, but really doesn't like to think about too much.

They have no vision of what the Royal Navy, the Army or the Royal Air Force should look like, should have or may have to deal with in future. Sadly, like Churchill and his generation, they still think that 'British Industry' and 'the British People' can rise to the challenge, build the ships and aircraft, man them and fill the gaps in the Army and go marching off to deal with any threat at the drop of a hat. They seem to think they can use the nations former glory as a negotiating tool, as a 'trading card' in diplomacy, forgetting that the diplomacy of the 19th and early 20th Century was backed by those 'Grey Diplomats' on the horizon in every ocean.

If the current trend continues, Britain may no longer have a navy in the not too distant future. Perhaps some future historian will ponder over why such an obvious essential for an island nation, dependent on the sea for some 60 - 80% of its food, raw materials and trade, allowed its leaders to scrap its most important military asset.

The danger of cutting defence too deeply ...

It seems the New Zealand government has a major problem on its hands. In order to 'save money' they took the axe to that favourite target of western socialists, Defence. They slashed away happily and triggered a flood of resignations from their armed forces personell, particularly the navy. Now they have a problem, they need patrol ships (they've just bought a squadron of new ocean going ones) to enforce their maritime borders and stop the flood of illegal immigrants ...

Only they haven't got enough sailors to man them. Even if they 'lay-up' some of their other ships, they still face the problem of trying to find enough replacement crews in the longer term.

This is a major problem faced by the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force in the UK. Successive governments have slashed Defence Budgets, and the last one actually imposed vast numbers of expensive Civil Servants on the Ministry of Defence, while cutting the numbers of fighting service personnel. This was supposed to be a 'cost saving' exercise. The idea Whitehall has of 'cutting' cost is to sack the service men and women who are generally earning below the national average, and replace them with pen pushers who are generally earning well over the national average wages (with other benefits such as expensive pensions and so on as well). So, on the one hand the Whitehall W*nk*rs are able to claim they have 'focussed on the core delivery' by relieving uniformed personnel from clerical duties, but they fail to notice that the wage bill actually increases because they've replaced those 'uniformed chappies' with higher paid paper shufflers.

You can't send a paper shuffler out to man a Type 45 Destroyer, or let them drive a tank, nor refuel, service or perhaps rearm a strike fighter. But you could do that if the 'jobs' now occupied by civil servants were still filled by uniformed staff.

The real problem which our political classes don't seem to be able to get their heads round is this. Defence now requires a great deal more than being able to march and fire a rifle or throw a hand grenade. At sea the ships have become so sophisticated it needs several years of training just to get a man or woman competent to fill the role they are assigned to. The WW2 days of being able to take a draft off the streets, give them six months at a Training 'Ship' and send them off to fight are long gone. That is as true for the Army as it is for the Navy and the Air Force. And the Training issue is actually the shortest and least problematic part of it.

Where a destroyer or escort frigate could be built, launched and commissioned in a year or less, the modern ships take at least that long to build, fit out and get all the bugs out of the systems before you can start training a crew for it. OK, in an emergency, you could probably have a crew 'in training' on simulators and so on while the ship is built, but even then you would need a minimum of three to six months before it was fully operational.

I read somewhere that in WW2 a fighter pilot would come into the service, do around two months flying on trainers, then move up to a more sophisticated bit of solo flying and training and, after about three months and a brief "type rating" run in a Spitfire, Hurricane or similar, be turned loose to a squadron. Even then many didn't survive their first real combat. To do a similar system now, with the complex and sophisticated aircraft now in use would be to guarantee failure.

Alongside this is the fact that Spitfires were being churned out in weeks, the main holdup being the supply of engines for them, whereas today's new Typhoon requires several months to assemble just one. Even the Army has a replacement material pronlem. Yes, they have some very good tanks and armoured vehicles, but they are very few in number in real terms and we simply don't have the manufacturing capacity any longer to produce masses of them on demand. Nor can you simply 'shop around' and buy in what you need.

I suspect the New Zealand government is only the first of many western governments to discover, embarrassingly, that they have finally managed to cut their National Defences below the point of recovery. It will be interesting to see what they do now.

Independence Day

I wish all my American readers a happy and safe celebration of their independence. Wikipedia informs me that the Continental Congress of the thirteen colonies actually voted to declare their independence from the British Crown on the 2nd July, 1776, the date John Adams wrote to his wife "should be commemorated with parades, fayres and feasts."

Congress adopted and signed the actual "Declaration of Independence" on the 4th July 1776 and that is the date that has come down in history as the 'birthday' of the United States.

I am sure I am not alone in wishing the US and all its citizens all the best for the future.

The Tories were right? Is this Ms P Toynbee writing?

An article in The Independent caught my eye, or rather was sent to me by someone so it would catch my eye. The headline is "The Tories were right: workfare really works" and I had to read it twice to make sure I had understood what Ms Polly Toynbee, yes, she of the Gruaniad, the ultimate champagne socialist, had written. The Tories were right.

She goes on to say though, that the Tories are right and will take the necessary action, but that Labour will reap the benefits of the Tories actions. Sadly, she's probably right on that one as well. The medicine the Tories will apply to the welfare system will, ultimately, benefit everyone who truly deserves to be on the benefit system as originally envisaged by Beveridge. The problem is that old and rather immutable law - the Law of Unintended Consequences. If you offer someone money for not working, they soon find a way to stay not working and take the money. As Ms Toynbee says (and I never imagined I would one day find myself agreeing with something she says) that outspoken (Labour) MP, Frank Field, has claimed for years that the present system is designed to be milked by drones and frauds.

Certainly a recent experiment in Hull and the Medway has seen 'unemployment benefit' claimants fall by 50% since it was introduced. Officials and experts are astonished, not because of the fall, but because of what it tells them the figures have been hiding. Only 920 of the 3,100 who have 'signed off' the benefits have declared they had found work. So, either the remainder had work to begin with or were double claiming, or have decided to starve without benefit rather than find work. I find that last extremely unlikely. There are probably a large number who have decided to do their own thing, perhaps were already 'working for themselves' and now will make it official (hopefully also paying tax and National Insurance) or will seek employment themselves.

The two she interviewed for the article were interesting. One is a 'plasterer' who refuses to consider working for less than GBP300 per week, but was apparently happy to live on GBP95 per week benefit. He would, of course, have also qualified for Housing Benefit and probably Income Support Benefit which would add up to around GBP200 per week, so perhaps he has a point in setting his sights so high. The second man apparently owned a substantial house, refused to be "retrained" alongside "illiterate halfwits" and so has let his house out for rent and is using the proceeds to rent a flat in London while he looks for work there.

The rent on his house must be fairly generous if he can afford to rent a flat in London, buy Travel Cards and food on it! One does wonder how many more 'Barry's' are living quite nicely in their paid up houses and drawing benefits?

What the Workfare "Project Work" is throwing up seems to have surprised the Treasury as well as politicians. It seems that the impact from just these two 'pilots' has made everyone sit up and take notice. Hopefully it will result in a complete and long lasting overhaul of a system that was intended to help those who really needed help, but which political cowardice and bureaucratic incompetence has allowed to grow to become an "entitlement" to many who are, as Mr Field says, drones and fraudsters milking the taxpayer.

What a shame though that the remedial action will benefit the very party that allowed it to get out of hand - Labour.

Evolution, Technology and Intelligence ...

An interesting article came my way today, courtesy the Postulant. Published in the Atlantic, it is by Professor Dennett of Tufts University. Under the title A Perfect and Beautiful Machine: What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence, it explores some interesting aspects of what has become a much used and sometimes abused term in modern 'training' circles. He points out that both Darwin's theory of evolution and Turing' creation of the 'computational engine' are underpinned by the idea that competence does not require intelligence.

Yes, you did read that correctly. You see, as Turing proved, it isn't necessary for a computer to understand mathematics for it to carry out extremely complex calculations. Darwin also pointed out that the evolution or adaptation of any given species did not require a complex understanding within the species to make the necessary adaptations to become 'competent' for the new environment it faced. But therein lies a small problem. As everyone who has ever used a 'computational engine' to perform a complex calculation can tell you, when it goes wrong, it requires someone who understands how it does what it does and why it does it to repair it. That is one reason species sometimes become extinct - they can't fix themselves when something changes too rapidly, and adaptation takes far too long. Example, the various species of flightless birds which have vanished from habitats because they could no longer outrun, hide or eat the new species that hunted them.

The reality is, that without intelligence, it is difficult to pass on knowledge or understanding of complex matters. Computers are actually extremely stupid. They don't think, they can only regurgitate what is in their memory bank or what is fed into it to allow the processing of whatever formula it has been told to use. I can recall being incredibly frustrated when using an early sprinkler design and assessment program, that it would never tell me where something was wrong, only that the outcome was not correct. Something a bit more like Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld "Hex" with its neatly written message of ***Out of Cheese Error***Reboot From Start*** would have at least told me it needed feeding!

Turing's great breakthrough in computing was to see that the machine didn't need to understand the process. Essentially the computing part is a mindless process. So is evolution. It happens, thinking about it doesn't speed it up, nor does it alter what is already in process. This is where modern computers and the whole concept of creating "Artificial Intelligence" part company. An AI 'computer' needs to think, not to compute. That is the nub of the problem.

For a computer to compute at present it doesn't need to 'think' in fact it can't, but that doesn't make it 'incompetent.' That is where, I believe, much of the modern 'thinking' on training has gone spectacularly off the rails. If I want a human to 'compute' things they must understand the mathematics. To be 'competent' they must think. Some of my readers will recall being told when a new 'training' scheme was forced onto the UK Fire and Rescue Service, that 'competence' didn't require thinking, you only had to be able to 'do' whatever it was. I'm happy to say that we, the dinosaurs of training, have been proved right, competence does require thinking, it does require knowledge and above all else it does require being able to learn from mistakes and correct them.

Darwin postulated, according to some (though I can find nothing of the sort in his words reading his book and his correspondence), that in order for us to have evolved, all that was necessary was a series of accidental changes in our genes over several billion years. No, I'm NOT a subscriber to 'intelligent design,' but I do believe that the whole evolution of all the diverse species and forms of living creatures that make up the biosphere and are all interdependent, cannot have been entirely accidental. Who knows, perhaps some ancestor of Darwin's finches did decide a different shaped beak would be advantageous and set about stropping his on a convenient rock. Then, perhaps having proved his point, convinced others to do the same... Sort of puts a different spin on evolution and intelligence, doesn't it.

As Professor Dennett says, Darwin and Turing both had to 'invert reason' to arrive at their conclusions. There is still a lot we don't understand about either computers or evolution, but we're getting there. I rather think the ultimate answers may hold a few surprises for everyone.

Offensive to God ...

I read that centuries old monuments and structures in Timbuktu, now a World Heritage Site, are being destroyed by Islamic Fundamentalists. Apparently these monuments, many of them the Mausolea of early Islamic converts and rulers, are, according to the fundamentalists, "offensive to God."

The report reminded me of the wave of destruction unleashed across Europe by the fundamentalist Protestants. In England the "Iconoclasts" destroyed statues, defaced paintings and even tore down a few ancient churches - all in the belief that the statue, image, painting or the building "offended God." The trail of damage they did is visible to this day, many cathedrals fell to their demolition teams, the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity in Downpatrick being one. Carlisle's cathedral lost its Nave and Transepts to Cromwell's rampage and we are lucky the "Quire" survived at all. Elsewhere pricless windows were smashed, tombs torn open and the remains ejected and scattered and ancient churches turned into prisons, stables (Cromwell again) or partially demolished and "reordered" to prevent the re-institution of the saying of the Eucharist in them.

The Timbuktu vandalsim reminded me of the destruction in Afghanistan of centuries old Buddhist images around 20 years ago and reports of similar destruction in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Could Islam be going through a phase of "reform" in which the extreme elements are surfacing and running with a new and, as with the Iconoclastic end of the Reformation, dangerous and destructive interpretation of their faith? I think this is very likely the case. The parallels between the determination these folk show to an agenda of forcibly converting others to their belief or eradicating them has some rather disturbing parallels with the manner in which Protestant and Roman Catholic elements approached each other (and, in some places, still do - at least verbally!).

The world is currently a very dangerous place, in terms of political and national instabilities. Again, there is a parallel with the situation in the 1500s in Europe, old Orders were collapsing, new ones springing up. In Africa, many of the current boundaries are very artificial and tribal tensions are being exacerbated by religious ones.

In the meantime we can only hope the local people can act to protect their heritage and repel the misguided fervour behind it.