Union debates about free speech

The Oxford Union is a very old and highly respected debating society. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with Oxford University Student Union - people often get confused about this. In the past, they have had names such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Ian Paisley, William Hague and Stephen Fry. The Union covers a range of subjects and there can be input from students and academics.

Recently, there has been a huge amount of controversy about a debate on free speech which featured Nick Griffin and David Irving. The former is the chairman of the British National Party - widely regarded as racist and the latter is famous for denying the existence of the holocaust - one of the most horrifying aspects of World War II. Apart from the controversy, there has also been protests against the debate and an MP has quit the Oxford Union because the debate was going to take place.

Despite all these protests and negative media coverage, the Oxford Union insisted that the debate should still happen:

"I find the views of the BNP and David Irving awful and abhorrent but my members agreed that the best way to beat extremism is through debate."

A collection of quotes from people against the debate are on the United Against Fascism. One of the quotes is from the President of the National Union of students - Gemma Tumelty:

"The Holocaust denier, David Irving and leader of the fascist BNP, Nick Griffin have no place in our multicultural society let alone on our diverse university campuses. NUS utterly opposes racism and fascism wherever it arises and will certainly oppose any attempt by Oxford University's Debating Society to invite Irving and Griffin to speak.

The pair's racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, Islamophobic views threaten the safety of our diverse university communities. For example, wherever the BNP is active, racist attacks and other hate crimes increase."

Yes - Griffin and Irving express views that are racist and anti-semitic. However, the best way of destroying the credibility of those views is to have a group of highly intelligent people debate with them. Preventing the debate from happening makes them martyrs. Apart from that, they are not advertising political parties - that's not the subject of the debate. The subject was free speech - it would be ironic to prevent them from debating this.

"Kill Tryl" was one of the slogans in the protests outside the union building, according to this news article(the slogan is directed towards Luke Tryl - the President of the Oxford Union). This means he is getting persecuted for providing an opportunity for people to humiliate and discredit two racist and anti-semitic people. Does that make sense to you?

However, if this wasn't a debate, it would be a different matter altogether. If the British National Party were advertising their policies without any opportunity for someone to respond - for instance, an on-campus campaign - that would deserve a 'no platform'.

To conclude, I will say that I am strongly against racism. A debate featuring intelligent people discrediting and humiliating racists seems like a great way to comabat it. The Oxford Union was not organising a biased campaign platform for one political party. The death threats directed towards Luke Tryl are totally stupid.

So, what do you think?

Technorati tags: Oxford Union, Free Speech, Nick Griffin, David Irving

An unbelievable loss

Prior to the event happening, many people would have assumed this sort of thing could never happen. Maybe you thought that there would be enough safeguards in place. Obviously, we now know that this is not true. What am I talking about? This blog entry is about the 25 million Inland Revenue records that were lost in the post recently.

This article contains a timeline of the events leading to the current situation:

1. 18 October - Junior official from HMRC in Washington, Tyne and Wear, sends two CDs containing password-protected records to audit office in London through courier TNT, neither recorded nor registered
2. 24 October - When package fails to arrive, second one is sent by registered post and arrives safely
3. 3 November - Senior managers are told first package has been lost
4. 10 November - Prime minister and other ministers are informed
5. 12 November - HMRC tell ministers CDs will probably be found
6. 14 November - When HMRC searches fail, Metropolitan Police are called in
7. 15 November - Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, says remedial action must be taken before public is informed
8. 20 November - HMRC Chairman Paul Gray resigns; Chancellor Alistair Darling makes announcement to House of Commons

In addition to this, HMRC gave the National Audit Office a full copy of child benefit data in March, which is a "breach of protocol". Also, 15000 records went missing in September after HMRC sent them to Standard Life and a laptop containing 400 ISA details was stolen.

A few interesting questions arise from the timeline above. Firstly, why was the original package not sent using recorded delivery and why wasn't it registered? Secondly, was there anything done between the 18th and the 24th to ensure this mistake wouldn't happen with the second package? Thirdly, why were senior managers told of the loss of the first package several days after the successful delivery of the second? Surely they should have been told straight away. Lastly, were ministers told of the specifics of the HMRC search? 'Probably' is a very vague term to use and inappropriate for the situation.

I also wonder about the password protection on the discs. There are multiple ways to implement password protection. Also, was anything encrypted? If it was, what was the strength of the encryption. If a mistake of this magnitude was made, can we automatically assume that there was appropriate security measures on the discs? I have not heard answers for any of these questions yet.

In this article, the following was mentioned:

"Darling stressed that there was no evidence that the data had fallen into criminal hands, but urged Britons to keep a close eye on their bank accounts."

This is definitely true - we don't have any evidence which implies that crimes have been committed using the information. However, we don't know that crimes haven't been committed either.

I the House of Commons, Conservative leader David Cameron said this:

"Millions of people today will be worrying about the safety of their bank accounts and the security of their family details, but they will not just be worried, they will be angry that the government has failed in its first duty to protect the public."

Well, it's not just the government that's to blame - however, they are at fault because they oversee HM Revenue and Customs and are supposed to be making sure that they always do their job properly. It's also the fault of HMRC themselves though - they should have ensured that existing security procedures are correctly implemented - especially after the earlier mistake in March.

The civil servant working for HMRC who originally made the mistake, remains unnamed according to this Telegraph article. For that person, it is probably a good thing - if he was named then a large portion of the country would be tracking him down. However, he needs to be punished and I hope that he has lost his job because of this fiasco.

Paul Gray, the Chairman of HMRC has left - which is the right thing to do. What about Alistair Darling though? He is at the top of the Treasury and in generally in charge of financial matters. What will happen to him? This article highlighted a poor performance in the Commons following the data loss. He hasn't resigned though - which is interesting. I think he should resign, but how would that affect Gordon Brown, who chose him to be the Chancellor?

Banks are preparing for panicking masses who will be enquiring about their personal details. The current levels of identity theft in this country definitely doesn't help. CIFAS, the fraud prevention service in the UK, has the following statistics:

Year	Cases recorded
2006	80000
2005	66000
2004	56000
2003	46000
2002	34000
2001	24000
2000	16000
1999	9000

Those figures show that although it's not yet a massive crime, it is on the increase - it could increase even more now that this problem has happened. Even if it doesn't, the worry will still exist amongst the general public.

So, what do you think?

Technorati tags: Inland Revenue, Finance, Government

BBC job cuts - oh dear

On Wednesday, October 17th, the BBC Trust approved plans to make job cuts which supposedly help the corporation become more financially efficient. The follow points are from this article:

• Closing 2,500 job posts over the next six years.
• Creating about 1,000 new jobs, many of which will be filled internally.
• Making 10% fewer original TV programmes by 2012/13, focusing on fewer, high quality shows.
• Establishing an integrated newsroom - merging TV, radio, and online.
• Reducing the size of the BBC's property portfolio by selling BBC Television Centre by 2012/13.
• Scrapping proposals for new activities, including plans for four new local radio stations.

The second point is cleverly written because it mentions the creation of jobs, but it's only internal reorganisation - there's no net gain there. The point about focusing on fewer high quality shows is worrying. High quality programming is what the BBC is all about. That will mean more repeats. The same article also provides net redundancy stats for each department:

Department	Responsible for	Redundancies
Vision	Factual, childrens, entertainment	640-660
Nations and Regions	Regional programmes	510-550
News	TV, radio & new media news	355-370
Future Media & Tech	Online, mobile, interactive, archives	120-130
Audio and Music	Audio on all platforms	65-75
Professional Services	Marketing, legal, finance	Up to 75
Sport	Sport on all platforms	Up to 20

BBC Northern Ireland will be losing 100 jobs across a range of departments. They only employ 675 people at the moment, so that's a considerable loss. BBC Scotland will have 210 jobs cut, but because of some jobs being created there will be a net loss of 80.

"Among the ideas approved by the trust were an undertaking to commission 10% fewer programmes as part of Mr Thompson's 'fewer, bigger, better' strategy. The move will mean budget cuts, more repeats on BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 and also more 'repurposing' of content for the web."

The above quote is interesting because it highlights a flaw in Mark Thompson's thinking. In my blog post about the TV licence fee, I highlighted the fact that a number of digital channels have low ratings. If they were cut then there would be a huge finiancial saving and any original content could be moved on the other channels to reduce the number of repeats. Using Mark Thompson's strategy, those uncsuccessful channels will still exist, but they'll have more repeats and therefore fewer quality. There will also be fewer people to maintain what is already there.

The following is reported by Kate Holton (Reuters):

"News and factual departments will be hardest hit in the move, which follows almost 4,000 job cuts announced in 2005. The public service division employs about 18,000 people and most job cuts are likely to happen sooner than the plan's 2012-13 deadline."

It's worrying that news will be one of the biggest casualties. The BBC News is widely regarded as one of the best news services in the world and having fewer people maintaining that standard could potentially meant that there will be an impact on quality and the reputation of the service will be reduced. Fewer journalists means fewer original stories. If you watch the 24hr news service, this will mean that you could see even more of the same.

These job losses will mean a saving of £155m per year for five years according to this Telegraph article. The big figure will have made the BBC Trust members happy.

However, there is another point. Trustees are meant to be separated from the day-to-day management of the BBC. As this is the case, they are more likely to approve decisions of the management as it has already been through their processes once. This does not mean they automatically approve everything though. Major job cuts may be good financially, but as I said it could affect the general quality of programming and could cause viewing figures to go down. Strategically, this is very bad and is a reason for the trustees to reject anything on this scale.

The following quote is from the online version of The Scotsman:

"The BBC has come under fire for paying Jonathan Ross £6 million a year, comic Graham Norton £2.5 million and Jeremy Paxman a reported £1 million."

If those 'stars' were paid much less, surely that would make a significant finiancial saving and/or sustain the jobs of some journalists in the news department. I would have thought that that my suggestion of cutting the digital channels alongside this would be hugely beneficial.

The National Union of Journalists has said there may be a strike. The problem is that because there is so much choice on TV, people will just choose another channel if it affects any of the broadcasts. I can understand why people would want to protest though.

In conclusion, I would say that although financial savings may be needed, Mark Thompson's strategy is the wrong approach. I think the BBC Trust should have rejected the proposals.

So, what do you think?

Technorati tags: BBC, Employment, Finance