Cameron in Africa – Scrap The Aid Budget Now

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David Cameron is in South Africa at the beginning of a visit which has been cut from five days to two as the size of the problems at home become clearer.

Cameron is apparently going to say that trade not aid is way to overcome poverty on the continent. Obviously I am glad that this obvious truth has finally dawned on Dave, but why hasn’t he realised that it is in direct contradiction with his commitment to maintain the international aid budget at a time when there is a desperate need for big reductions in government spending.

There are plans for a 26-nation African free trade area intended to cover 600 million people and more than half the area of the continent within three years. This is not only a a very good idea, it is essential for business within the African continent to develop.

Cameron  will say that an African free trade area could increase the continent’s GDP by £38 billion ($62 billion) – £12 billion ($20 billion) more than the world’s entire annual aid budget for sub-Saharan Africa. He cannot be any more sure about these figures than anyone else can, but it is absolutely true that the potential growth from building proper trade and enterprise will be far greater than the amounts of money that will ever be available from aid.

Given the history of corruption and incompetence in African governments, there cannot be any confidence that they will succeed in putting their free trade area in place, but what is certain is that it is the only prospect for real improvement in the lives of very poor Africans.

The best thing that the British government could do to help Africa is to bring an end to the dependence that has come with so called ‘development aid’. It is patronising and offensive to be telling African countries that they need to be told how to build their economies, but much worse than that, the result of aid is the opposite of what is claimed. Far from getting people out of poverty the aid helps to keep corrupt and often murderous tyrannies in place and produces dependancy which prevents people from going where genuine opportunities exist for work and community building.

British politicians would do well to read some of the excellent work by African economists such as Dambisa Moyo who have shown what damage is being done by aid from the developed world.

When natural and other disasters strike poor countries it is obviously right to provide the short term assistance that is needed to save lives and help people through conditions which they are not well equipped to meet. That is totally different from spending decades and enormous amounts of money claiming that you are helping people to develop when the reality is that you are getting in the way of any real chance they may have of improving their lives.

It is not a bad thing that Cameron’s trip has been shortened. The message is simple. We would like to do business and African countries should put in place the conditions for free trade so that we can trade in the interests of all parties. That is actually a message for the rest of the world too.  As soon as he has given that simple message, the Prime Minister should come home and abolish the Department for International Development (DfID). We must honour all existing contracts, but apart from that the international development aid budget should be run down to zero as soon as possible.

That is the way forward to a prosperous future for Africans and Britons alike.

Get back quickly Dave or the Coulson affair might mean that you won’t play a big part in that future.

Related articles

• David Cameron: The time has come for African free trade (guardian.co.uk)
• British PM Calls African Trip Short To Handle Scandal (huffingtonpost.co.uk)

Abolish the Jury System

It is regularly pointed out that juries have difficulty dealing with the evidence in complex fraud cases. Expert witness evidence is commonly given inappropriate weight by juries, such as in the Sally Clarke case where she was convicted of murdering her baby which had actually died from natural causes. As society, and crime, have become more complicated, trials have got longer and tying up members of the public for weeks and months is not only unsatisfactory for their lives, it means that they are being asked to apply an expertise that they do not have.

The crucial flaw in the jury system is its susceptibility to the public mood. Whenever some atrocity takes place whether it is terrorist mass murder or child rape and murder for example, the pressure to apprehend and convict somebody is intense. This has led to horrible miscarriages of justice. The Birmingham six and the Guildford four are examples in the case of terrorism. Stefan Kiszko‘s wrongful imprisonment is just one example of the sex murder of a child. (Ref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed ). What happens is that the ferocity of opinion conveyed by tabloid media and court gate crowds causes jurors to feel that they must convict and they do convict even if the evidence is weak or suspect. To get a feeling for this, consider the recent murder of Joanna Yeates. Her landlord was arrested and immediately subjected to character destruction and crowds baying for his conviction. Had he been charged at an early stage, the investigation to find the real killer would have ceased and his chances of aquittal would have been minimal. That is despite the fact that there was no evidence to link him to the crime, there was only the circumstance of him having had the opportunity and the prejudice that he was a likely candidate.

In the USA there are large numbers of cases of executions having taken place of people who have subsequently been proved to be innocent or whose convictions were unsafe. There are good indications of racial, class and lifestyle bias playing a part in the jury decisions that sent these people to their deaths.

In recent decades, justice has improved substantially in developed nations. This owes nothing to justice systems which have remained trapped in very poor historic processes. The improvements have come from the emergence of DNA evidence, progress generally in forensics and most of all, the spread of mobile phone video and photography. Without the video there is not a chance that Ian Tomlinson‘s death would have been examined and the brutal police behaviour given any credibility at all.

Again the US gave us an early and shocking example with the severe beating of Rodney King. This kind of racist assault by police had been common practice and gone without redress until video evidence from the public forced some accountability. (Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King ).

The origin of juries is when fixed courts and police did not exist. When a crime was committed in a community a jury of responsible people would apprehend a suspect. They put that person in the local lock-up and waited for a circuit judge to come round. The jurors would then tell the judge why their detainee was known to be guilty and the judge passed sentence. This kind of ‘trial’ would take a few minutes, even when the sentence might be death. It can be seen here that the respectable sounding jury is the equivalent of the posse and lynching where no process exists at all. To that extent it was progress towards justice by due process. It has changed over time, but it can no longer meet the needs of justice.

This has been recognised where very difficult situations exist. For example, from 1973 to 2007 jury trials had to be abandoned in northern Ireland for many cases because the sectarian divide and the influence of paramilitaries meant that it was not safe for jurors and they could not be relied on to overcome sectarian bias. So called Diplock courts were established in which judgement was given by a judge. These courts were phased out as part of the peace process, but trial without jury may still take place in special circumstances. The concern in these cases is of ‘perverse acquittals’ rather than the wrongful convictions which I have described above.

In grand crimes such as those handled by the Nuremberg hearings of the Nazis or the International Criminal Court and its trials of Charles Taylor and others it is taken for granted that a panel of judges must produce the verdict.

It is time for us to recognise that the evaluation of evidence and the establishment of guilt beyond reasonable doubt requires a degree of skill and objectivity which can only come from professional training and substantial experience. The whole of the lay magistracy needs to be abolished as well for similar reasons.

What is needed is for the summary hearings which are now handled by magistrates to be conducted by a single district judge. Middle range cases carrying potential sentences of between one and ten years custody need to be adjudicated by a panel of three senior judges. Above that level of seriousness the judging panel should be five. The appeal system doesn’t need radical reform because juries have no part in it

Moving from a jury and magistracy system to a properly professional system for determining guilt or innocence is only one part of the restructuring the judicial system requires. It is also necessary to move away from the adversarial court system. This is just a continuation of trial by combat and should be discontinued.

Our present theatrical joust of two be-wigged posers competing to see whose eloquence can win the favour of a jury for their client is a pathetically inadequate substitute for a genuine investigation into whether a person may or may not have committed a specific crime. But that is a whole other subject which must wait for now.

Who Benefits From Minimum Wage?

Abolition of the minimum wage is one of the Libertarian policies that causes some people to worry about us. They believe that it is a protection for some of the less powerful members of society and we are seen as uncaring in wanting to remove this supposed protection.

 

First of all I would say that the government did not introduce the minimum wage to protect anybody other than themselves. It is the sort of populist action that governments do all the time in an attempt to buy votes and keep themselves in power. It is really aimed at middle class campaigners, activists and voters rather than those who will be employed at this low level income.

 

The economic issues are really quite straightforward. A completely free market with good information will result in everybody who is seeking work being employed at a wage that is the real value of the work they do and every employer will be able to fill their employment needs at a price that the sale of goods or services will support. Of course, such perfection can never be achieved, but the closer we can get to it the more prosperous we will all be.

 

At whatever level you set a minimum wage, there will be some potential workers who cannot contribute sufficient to justify that pay. What happens then is that these people are unemployed or they work outside of the ‘legitimate’ economy. It also means that employers cannot fill all their requirements at market prices so they are less productive than they could be or their costs are higher than they should be. Either way, the situation is less efficient than it should be and this damage to productivity diminishes total wealth for the country.

 

It follows from the argument up to now that the higher you set the minimum wage, the greater level of unemployment it will create or the larger number of people will be forced into the informal, or black, economy. Pushing people out of lawful employment results in higher benefit costs and larger taxes to support them as well as diminishing overall wealth production.

 

It is for this reason that the state sets the minimum wage as low as it thinks it can get away with and not alienate the campaigners whose support it was trying to buy in the first place. The consequence of keeping the minimum wage is that we all lose.

 

In addition to these direct effects, the minimum wage is also a bad thing because it encourages unscrupulous employers to tell some staff that they can’t pay them more than minimum when they may be worth more. They can get away with this because they know that the alternative jobs open to that employee would be likely to be at minimum because it becomes a standard in jobs like catering, hospitality, care, leisure, etc. There is also the overhead of bureaucrats employed to administer and police the minimum wage. These people contribute nothing to the real wealth of the nation, but require taxes to pay them.

 

In summary, the national minimum wage does not protect anybody from exploitation or poverty, but it impoverishes all of us to a small extent by distorting the market and imposing an unnecessary overhead on us.

 

Visit the Libertarian Party UK website to take part in discussion on this and other topics:

 

http://lpuk.org/

 

Abolish Minimum Wage

 

Wages are the price of labour. All attempts to control prices against market forces create distortions that damage wealth. The minimum wage destroys jobs and adds to the black economy.

Abolish All Transport Subsidies

 

The people who use public transport should pay the market price for their seat. There is no justification for taxing poor people to subsidise the travel of others.

Monarchy

With Prince Andrew expressing political views about British and American decisions to invade Iraq, and Prince Charles continuing to interfere with his views on everything from Islam and fake ‘complementary’ medicine  to organic farming and climate change it is time again to raise the issue of making Britain a proper democracy.

 It is time for the abolition of monarchy throughout the world. Hereditary political power is unacceptable. The British Queen can continue to call herself that if she wishes, but not be head of state or possessing any political rights or responsibilities other than those of any other citizen. The personal possessions of the royal family need to be separated from the national assets that are associated with the royal family.