Aug 22 2012

Expertise in the House of Lords

House of Lords reform is now in the news, with the recent introduction of a Bill followed by a vote in favour of a second reading but the withdrawal of the timetable motion which would smooth the passage of the bill through parliament*. In this post I’d like to address a recent report published by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) on the impact of the proposed reforms on expertise in the House of Lords. CaSE is an advocacy organisation which is run with the support of a wide range of universities, learned societies, charities and technology companies.

The CaSE report on the House of Lords is well worth a read, it has a nice summary of what is meant by expertise, the proposed reforms, international comparisons, opinion from a survey of a small group of Lords and some specific examples of the influence of the Lords in the area of science and technology: specifically the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (2008), Health and Social Care Bill 2011 (adding research as a core goal), and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Report on Nuclear Research and Development capabilities (2011).

The report ends with some proposals which, are as follows:

  • a 30% appointed House of Lords, rather than 20%;
  • a fully independent Appointments Commission;
  • more employees with STEM degrees in the civil service supporting the House of Lords;
  • increased not decreased resources for the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee;
  • compulsory training in STEM for MPs and Lords.

As an aside, it is possible that professional politicians are indifferent to the statement in the report that the Lords have provided the present government with fifty defeats in 2 years, in support of the idea that they are an important revising chamber, but to me it seems like a poor way to win friends and influence people in government.

Returning to the measures proposed: two of these measures I support, one requires some clarification and two I don’t support. I support a fully independent Appointments Commission, this is the logic of a largely elected upper house with an Appointments Commission whose role is to populate the non-elected element. I believe the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee requires at least flat resources.

I provide my objections to increasing the proposed level of appointments from 20% to 30% in following bullet form:

  • The House of Lords is a largely political house which carries out a political function: it provides a check on legislation originally drafted in the House of Commons. In my view this means that it should be elected to give democratic legitimacy to the role it plays. The current proposal for Lords reform contain an allowance for 20% of the upper chamber to be appointed, including Bishops from the Church of England, I see this as a necessary concession in order to gain wider acceptance which goes against democratic principles. The figure of 20% broadly matches the number of crossbench Peers in the current house, expanding this concession is  undesirable;
  • my second objection is against special pleading: this proposal is asking for special treatment for a particular group in society (scientists and engineers), if it applies to them why not to other groups? Should other religious groups have guaranteed representation? What about the lucrative football industry?
  • the contents of the report do not provide supporting evidence for the level of appointments they propose; indeed James Wilsdon’s section on expertise highlights how expertise is available to the Lords via the civil service and the committee system and quotes Lord Rees in saying that “we are all depressingly ‘lay’ outside our expertise”;
  • Once you’ve gone to the trouble of appointing scientists to the House of Lords are they actually going to turn up to vote? Lord Rees, Lord Krebs and Baroness Finlay are explicitly mentioned by the report, they have attendances to vote of, respectively 12% since 2005, 9% since 2007 and 39% since 2001.

If we, as scientists and engineers, want more representation in the reformed, elected House of Lords we should be standing for election, not pleading for special treatment.

The proposal for more scientists and engineers in the civil service requires some more investigation: are scientists and engineers applying to the civil service? If not I can imagine why: long ago as a shiny, new graduate I considered applying to the civil service but my strong impression was that the types of jobs available would not match my skills. Except in specialist areas there are no labs in the civil service, and the alternative on offer seemed to involve rather more essay-style writing for which I, trained as a scientist, was woefully under-prepared.

Compulsory courses in STEM for new Lords and MPs are superficially attractive, a voluntary course was offered following the 2010 General Election, with an uptake of 12; given this low take up it seems to me that such a course is not falling on fertile ground, I know my approach to such compulsion in work-related courses: rather surly looks and a considerable antipathy to what the company has forced me to learn.

The Tories have long opposed bringing an elected element to the House of Lords despite the Coalition Agreement we can expect them to provide luke-warm support for the proposed reforms. Labour have long had the reform of the House of Lords as a policy, they made significant changes in 1999 principally to remove the hereditary (frequently Tory) Peers but, once they had addressed the disadvantage they felt, they appear to have lost interest in further reform. We can expect Labour to make every appearance of supporting reform of the Lords whilst doing everything in their power procedurally in the Commons to block the proposed changes and indeed use those procedures to disrupt other government legislation. Except for a few recidivist Liberal Democrat peers we should expect to see uniform support for the House of Lords reform from Liberal Democrats in parliament.

The way this Bill will die is by none of the supporters of Lords Reform accepting anything but their own Lords Reform proposal.

References

CaSE House of Lords and Expertise report, June 2012

*Since I wrote this the reforms have been dropped: (link)

Aug 18 2012

Sharepoint–how do I hate thee?

Sharepoint is Microsoft’s document sharing and collaboration tool. It allows you to share and manage documents, and to build websites – so it’s a content management system too. For work I am strapped to the mast of Sharepoint: we need to share files across the world, previously we used shared network drives, as a byproduct individual teams can also create websites. There are close on 100,000 of us.

The file sharing/content management schizophrenia can lead to horrible websites, on a normal website you might expect that following a link in a page will take you seamlessly to another web page to be rendered in your browser. Not in Sharepoint: the siren voice of the file sharing side means that all to often website authors are going to link you to documents – so you hit a link and if you’re lucky you get asked whether you want to open a document in Microsoft Office, if you’re unlucky you get asked to enter your credentials first. Either way it breaks your expectation as to what a website should do: hit link – go to another webpage.

For every function you can imagine Sharepoint has a tick in the box:

  • Blogging – tick.
  • Social media – tick.
  • Wiki – tick.
  • Discussion forums – tick.
  • Version control – tick.

The problem is that whilst it nominally ticks these boxes it is uniformly awful at implementing them. I’ve used WordPress and Blogger for blogging, phpBB for discussion forums, moinmoin and Project Forum wiki software, source control software, twitter, delicious, bit.ly, Yammer for social media and in comparison Sharepoint’s equivalent is laughable.

This ineptitude has spawned a whole industry of companies plugging the gaps.

Sharepoint does feature some neat integration into Microsoft Office: viewing shared calendars in Outlook, saving directly to Sharepoint from office application but this facility is a bit flakey – Office will try to auto-populate a "My SharePoint sites" area but does it via a cryptic set of rules which can’t be relied on to give you access to all of your sites.

For the technically minded part of the problem is the underlying product but part of the problem is down to how your company decides to implement Sharepoint. My WordPress-based site looks pretty much how I want it, bar the odd area where my CSS-fu has proved inadequate. In a corporate Sharepoint environment other people’s design decisions are foisted upon me, although Sharepoint’s underlying design often seems to be the root of the problem

Take this piece of design (shown below), this is part of the new Sharepoint social media facilities but it’s ugly as sin, most of what you see for each Note is Sharepoint boilerplate (Posted a note on – View Related Activities – Delete) rather than your content, furthermore I have repeatedly set my dates to format dd/mm/yyyy in the UK style and this part of my site remains steadfastly on the US mm/dd/yyyy format.

NastySharepointDesign

Here’s another nasty piece of design.The core of the document sharing facility is the Document Library, below is a default view of one of my libraries (with some blurring). All of the Sharepointy magic for a document is run off a dropdown menu accessed via a small downward pointing triangle on the "Name" field, the little triangle is only visible when you float over that particular line, note also that if you click on the name in the name field then that takes you to the document – so you trigger two different behaviours in one field.

NastySharepointDocumentLibraryBlurred

Other items in this table are hyperlinks but take you to entirely uninteresting content.

It didn’t have to be this way, the Document Library could functionality could have been integrated into the Windows File Explorer. Applications like the source control software TortoiseSVN and TortoiseHG do this, putting little overlays onto file icons and providing functionality via the right click menu. Windows 7 even has a panel at the bottom of the screen which seems to offer quasi-Sharepoint functionality – you can set tags for documents which could map to the "properties" that Sharepoint uses.

Users are familiar with the file explorer, Sharepoint discards that familiarity for a new, clunky web-based alternative. Furthermore users sharing files are often moving from a directory-based shared hard-drive scheme, Sharepoint allows you to use directories in Document Libraries but it breaks the property-based view which is arguably a better scheme but forcing users over to it wholesale is unreasonable.

In summary: Sharepoint suffers from trying to be a system to share documents and a system for making websites. It features a poor web interface for functionality which could be integrated into the Windows file explorer.

Aug 14 2012

Why I’m a liberal, and Giles Fraser isn’t

This post is stimulated by a piece Giles Fraser wrote a few weeks ago about why he wasn’t a liberal. It got me thinking as to why I am a liberal and clarified some things about the Church of England and socialists. This is a small revelation because I’ve never paid much attention to political theory – I’m more instinctive than that. I use the term “socialist” because alongside “communitarian” this is how Fraser describes himself.

 

I should point out that Giles Fraser’s post arose because of attacks on him, which he perceived to come from liberals, following his defence of circumcision in response to a legal decision in Germany outlawing the practice on children for religious reasons. Personally I think he was mistaken in this: he was being attacked by vociferous atheists who I would argue are a distinct group from liberals.

 

His argument is that the state or the Church of England, who represent the community, must step in and give individuals moral direction – that community interests trump those of the individual; liberalism, he argues, leaves us with a moral “anything goes” attitude that puts individual desires first. It strikes me that this thinking is at the heart of problems the Church has over equal rights for women and gay people. The church believes that it is the interests of the community that woman and practising homosexuals do not become bishops, and that gay people cannot marry each other. The liberal, individual-focused view is: why shouldn’t they?

 

Extending this beyond the immediate case: my view of democracy is that it is to enable all individuals to make their views know, and powerful in government. The communitarian view appears to be that it is an all or nothing bid to be *the* representative of the community. So if you look around the union movement you will see them seeking to be *the* representative of their group, similarly the Labour party appears to have little interest in anything but one party rule by itself. Similarly the Church of England clearly feels itself to be *the* moral conscience for the nation.

 

Perhaps the problem for me with communitarianism is the size of the unit on which it is now enacted: in Britain a group of approximately 60 million people, this is meaningless to a human. Our real communities are usually at the level of neighbourhoods, parishes or boroughs – although I would argue these days that we can form communities ignorant of geographical location – but surely no one can believe in a community of 60 million people? It’s true we have a form of local democracy but this is relatively weak compared to the centre and is subject to one-party states in many parts of the country based on the first-past-the-post electoral system rather than any truly democratic mandate.

 

Liberalism does not deny the existence of community, in fact takes an active part in it both on the really local scale and nationally: the state pension in the UK was introduced by Lloyd George and the remainder of the welfare state followed from a report written by another liberal, William Beveridge. From a liberal point of view the welfare state is a mechanism to enable individuals to maximise their potential. Whilst atheist myself, I don’t see the liberal position as being intrinsically atheist, as Fraser suggests, liberalism says that individuals should be free to follow their own religious beliefs, only limited when they impinge on others.

 

Returning to the events that launched Fraser’s post: can you imagine the uproar if the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels announced that from today they were going to circumcise each of their male children shortly after birth?

 

My liberal view is that men should be free to decide for themselves if they wish to have their foreskin removed but not impose that view on their children. If opposition to this is a touchstone of communitarianism, then I’m proud to be a liberal!

Aug 13 2012

The Peevish Olympic Spectator

As a follow up to being a Peevish Physicist, I thought I’d be a Peevish Olympic Spectator too.

Since Team GB started scaling the heights of the medals table I have been gripped by patriotic fervour; I am an armchair critic able to pontificate on the rules of various sports: keirin is a cycling event involving chasing a moped, that turn in the womens backstroke looked a bit poor, Usain Bolt normally stops trying a few yards short of the line. Each morning I have checked our national progress in the medal table.

The medal table is interesting: the US and China are riding high, a function of their large populations and the importance they attach to the games, although early in the games the US position was driven by its performance in the pool. The Russians were doing poorly to start with but only on the basis of gold medals – the table is ranked by number of golds won. Australia have done less well than recently but again a shortage of gold medals has emphasised this. Looking back, Great Britain has bobbed around 10th position in the table since 1928 with a disastrous 36th position in Atlanta 1996 and a 4th position in the most recent games in Beijing – this year we have finished 3rd!


Before the games had started I was something of a cynic: it’s an expensive exercise ~£10bn with dubious financial return. Companies like mine have scaled back activities during the Games, in part to avoid partners getting dragged into the predicted but perhaps not real “travel chaos” in London. Prior to the games it was predicted that non-Olympic tourism to London would be reduced.  The law has been re-written to protect brands sponsoring the Olympics not just from other companies but from the public, in view of this the spectacle of people being criticised for selling their Olympic torches on ebay was rather ironic. The sailing is taking place near where I grew up, in Weymouth, and the locals find themselves mightily disrupted. It’s been distressing to see the British media anticipating gold medals for British athletes to the extent where a silver or gold is almost seen a failure: “why didn’t you get a gold?”, in China this function is carried out by the state.
As the games come to a close politicians have developed a sudden enthusiasm for competitive games to be taught at school. Personally, I think this is an awful idea, PE lessons were the bane of my school life as I invariably was picked pretty much last for any team game, and once playing a team game I was invariably treated like the person you least wanted on the team. What I needed from PE was a life long enthusiasm for at least some form of physical activity, which I gained rather later in life from solitary pursuits in the gym. Medal success in the Olympic Games is a matter of ability and application for athletes and will for a country, in the eighties relatively small and not particularly wealthy countries such as East Germany and Romania came high in the table because of political will – but is this really a model we want to replicate?

Britain has done a creditable job of running the Olympics, building work went to schedule, transport infrastructure has worked well, the opening ceremony was outstanding, Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture has given the TV coverage a distinctive look and our athletes have even done very well in the medal table.
If I might inject my own political note: Mohamed Farah, a Somali immigrant, won two gold medals for Britain – maybe we should consider the value immigrants bring across our economy.

Aug 08 2012

Lords Reform – aftermath

Lords reform is looking quite dead, there is an outside chance that David Cameron is bluffing his 91 rebels – faced with the realisation that they may have just blow chances of a Tory win at the next election due to the loss of boundary changes, they may relent.

As for the boundary changes, I’m indifferent to them. In best case for Tories they address an imbalance in the electoral system for them which lost them the last election. To Liberal Democrats they mean nothing in a system which is grossly weighted against them. I believe the Tories may just get through the changes they want, the arithmetic is very tight and I wouldn’t put it past a group of Labour MPs to vote for on the grounds that they prefer kicking the Lib Dems to the Tories.

Labour’s behaviour has been laughable: this is a reform they say they believe in and yet they are happier to see it fall than vote with Liberal Democrats.  Talk of a “badly written bill” is simply the flimsiest of pretexts to vote it down, the Bill is built on the work that Labour did on Lords Reform and was extensively consulted upon. “Badly written” is code for “we’re voting against because we’re automatic opposition”.

As for freeing up time in parliament in order to legislate to boost growth – I don’t think even socialists believe that legislation will boost growth – Tories spouting it is outright surreal.

The Tories have violated the Coalition Agreement – the Liberal Democrats have not. There is no careful algebra of this being tied to that: it has been broken. Even over tuition fees the Lib Dems kept their side of the bargain – the Tories haven’t. Liberal Democrats now opposing boundary changes is straightforward retribution – you break an agreement, there is a punishment.

We often piously say at election time that people have died for us to be able to vote. I’ve said it myself. It is utter cobblers: no one died so an appointed house of cronies, party funders and has been MPs could Lord it over us. No one died so that 37% of a turnout of 61% could give one party absolute power.

When you see Lords Reform in Labour and Tory manifestos at the 2015 general election have a hearty laugh and ignore them.