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BBC NEWS | UK | How holiday scam snared thousands

A gang which cheated thousands of holiday makers out of a total of more than £6 million have been given sentences of between three and seven years, but £5.6 million of the money is unrecovered, and will be paid back by credit card and insurance companies and an industry body. So, is this a fair sentence, or are we encouraging criminals?

A few months ago someone broke into my car. He caused about £500 worth of damage, didn’t get my SatNav which wasn’t in the car anyway, but did find my iPod which I had left somewhere because I’d forgotten about it. In exchange, he left behind one drop of blood which, thanks to CSI Bordesley Green (soon to be a major US series endlessly repeated on Channel 5), resulted in a conviction and two months in jail. He probably got fifty quid for my iPod, or maybe as little as twenty. Twenty pounds for two months in jail — you’d think that would deter him. As it happens, in the week that he would have got out, my car was broken into in exactly the same way again, and with the things rummaged through identically. This time the thief didn’t get anything, only broke a window (the previous time he destroyed the locking glove compartment), and left no blood behind. Same bloke? Very probably. If it was the same bloke, then he clearly decided that risking two months in jail was worth it for an iPod.

2 months for £20, versus three years for a million pounds (I understand there were six in the gang). To make crime pay at the same rate, the holiday-scam gang should have been given 4166 years each. Or the kid who broke into my car should have been given 58 minutes.

Our system doesn’t add up. Of course, the gang now have criminal records, and will be tagged by the police if ever they try to scam again. But if the bloke who stole my iPod read the story, he’s probably thinking that three years for £1 million is time worth doing. After all, to earn that much, once you take income tax into account, he would have to be on more than half a million a year. Which, unless he also has talents in football and gets picked by a top side, is unlikely ever to come his way.

There are three things which deter criminals, and you need all three to make the system work. There has to be a high chance of them being caught, there has to be a relatively short time between the offence and the conviction, and the punishment has to significantly outweigh the apparent benefits of committing the crime. As a nation, we seem addicted to increasing the sentences for crimes we find particularly horrifying. This is emotionally satisfying, but doesn’t actually help: making the criminal certain he (or she) will be caught, and catching them quickly, before they offend again, is a much more effective strategy. However, with crimes where the criminal believes they are getting a substantial financial benefit, the penalty must be substantial enough that, even with calculations about the likelihood of being caught, the kind of calculating criminals who are expert in financial crime and fraud decide that it is simply not worth it. Until then, sentences like this one will simply encourage potential criminals to have a go.

How dismal.

Here’s an unpopular thought: how far should Free Tibet protesters be allowed to go? Should they, for example, have the right to clamp down on free speech in order to prevent their case being challenged?

Don’t get me wrong here. I believe Tibet ought to be free, and I believe that China should face up to world opinion. But that is not a blank cheque for protesters.

Here’s the story. According to PR Week, “Any PR agency that works for the Chinese government runs the risk of demonstrations outside its offices, campaigners have warned”. Apparently the Free Tibet Campaign has issued a warning, saying “Any PR agency that is trying to assist China in its twisted distortion of the truth would be potentially exposing itself to our protests outside its offices”.

If this really is true, and if this really what they meant, then I think that the Free Tibet Campaign has established that it is really not so different from the Chinese government it opposes. I sincerely hope that this is not what they meant.

In a free society, everyone must have the freedom to make their case to the media, to other people, and to opinion formers. Hiring a PR agency to help you make that case is legal, and it should remain so. There are lots of people, organisations and groups out there that I don’t agree with. But, in a free society, I must defend their right to make their case. As soon as I decide that one case is too heinous to be presented, then I have moved from being a free-speaker in a free-society, to a totalitarian advocating that only views which chime with my own should be expressed.

Twenty or so years ago, everybody thought that Robert Mugabe was marvellous, for the peaceful transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Events have shown that Mugabe was never interested in justice and fairness, but only in the promotion of his own interests and those of his own followers. This is by total contrast with the work of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

I hope that China eventually gets the message that freeing Tibet is in its own interests — and, even more, that ceasing to support atrocities in Sudan is a must-do if it is to play a full role in the international community. But I hope also that the Free Tibet Campaign learns that making threats against free speech is neither helpful to their cause, nor appropriate to the society in which we, here in Britain, live.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron Olympic dithering claim

It’s one of the days of the week which ends in ‘day’, so, sure as sure, David Cameron is sniping at Gordon Brown again. This time it’s for dithering over the Olympics. Of course, when Mr Cameron himself was dithering over expelling Derek Conway MP for paying his son public money, it wasn’t dithering, it was ‘leadership’. The fact is, we all know that Gordon Brown is not the decisive figure that Tony Blair was. Brown has been ‘Mr Prudence’ for as long as we’ve been aware of him. After ten years of Tony, many people were glad to have something a bit different.

The real issue is that David Cameron does not seem to have anything in his arsenal except for sniping. Well, perhaps that’s a little harsh. After all, he can also mock, jeer, deride, damn with faint praise, and hold up for ridicule. But that’s it. No wonder the public are losing confidence in their MPs: if they behave like schoolboys, people will trust them like schoolboys.

Am I perhaps doing the same thing, mocking poor Mr Cameron?

Perhaps.

But I do have a serious point to make. When someone is elected to parliament, they are being paid by the taxpayer to serve the public. As such, they should respect other public servants, and work constructively to create a better Britain. There are times when, for the sake of a better Britain, opposition MPs must oppose with vehemence and with passion. They must hold the government to account, questioning motives where they appear to be in doubt, questioning the wisdom of courses of action, and proposing alternatives. There are also times when the opposition should support the government of the day as it discharges its public duty. And, of course, opposition parties have a right to put forward their own policies and views, so that the public can know what they would be getting if one of those parties were in power.

It seems to me that this is what David Cameron is entirely failing to do. Every action by the government is held up to ridicule. Very seldom is a coherent argument put forward for why the government’s course of action is wrong, and the course of action which Mr Cameron proposes is right. Often, Mr Cameron has no course of action to propose.

By the law of averages, not everything that Mr Brown does can be ridiculous. Nonetheless, it appears that Mr Cameron thinks it is. This shows poor judgement, and a lack of proper respect for another public servant.

The most accident-prone and ridiculous prime-minister for many years was, of course, the last Tory prime minister, John Major. In retrospect, of course, the actual impact of John Major’s policies seems to have been no worse than his predecessor. Let us not forget that it was John Major who began the process that led to the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, even though Tony Blair completed it. But he was prone to gaffes, one of which was when he accused the Labour party of not being a proper opposition at all, more like ‘a government in waiting’.

David Cameron’s party have shown little effectiveness as an opposition, but neither do they show any sign of being ‘a government in waiting’. It would be entirely too self-serving of me at this point to suggest that there are parliamentarians and there is a party which has consistently attempted to hold the government to account, and questioned the substance rather than the style, while putting forward carefully formulated alternative paths. And it would be unfair to claim that that party never indulged in a little banter, and perhaps even some mockery. But herein lies the difference: it is a lot of hard questions, and a little mockery, not a lot of mockery, and merely a few hard questions.

Voters, take note: you will get the government you deserve.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Astronomers must make own case So are we going to fund science or not?

The main thrust of Gordon Brown’s argument on embryology is that if we do not pass controversial legislation, then the UK will be left behind as other countries move ahead. But, at the same time, his government is busy starving primary research in fields which are entirely legal and create no ethical dilemmas.

From the 1940s until the 1970s (or so I’m told, as I wasn’t there), the British attitude to scientific research was that it was a good thing, and the government should back it. Just here in the Midlands we saw the invention of Radar, the microwave, the heart pacemaker and holography. British universities could count on — if not funding royale — the solid support of government. But from the 1980s (remember who was in power?) Britain began to tighten its belt. Research grants suffered. Student loans were brought in as a cheaper alternative to full grants. In the 1990s universities continued to be squeezed, until Blair came in with ‘Education, Education and Education’. However, his vision was not greater depth, but greater breadth. Vastly more people would go to university, but they would pay tuition fees for it. Meanwhile, Britain continued to innovate, and many British inventions were then taken up overseas, for want of British backing.

We can point to a number of successes. Clive Sinclair’s ZX80 home computer and Electric Car. Dyson’s cyclone vacuum cleaner. Trevor Baylis’s amazing clockwork radio. But innovators and inventors consistently claim that Britain does not value them.

Blair’s government did not have a policy on science and technology, and Brown’s does not have one either. It may make complete economic sense to prepare Britain to be the heartland of embryology, but it makes no sense to starve astronomy and other disciplines while doing so. Of course, it can be argued that embryology is a science with a direct economic benefit over the next ten years. Brown may argue that if he wishes, but in advancing that argument he will demonstrate his utter lack of understanding of the nature of scientific research. The programme par excellence which demonstrated the spin-off benefits of ‘irrelevant’ research was NASA’s programme to reach the moon. Nobody has ever found anything on the moon worth bringing back. But everyone acknowledges that the spin-off benefits of NASA’s work have been immense and far-reaching.

It’s all very well telling astronomers that they have to make their own case. But the kinds of people who are good at primary scientific research are not necessarily the people who are good at making the case for funding. This has become more than apparent in other areas, such as the arts, where ability to make ones case is the primary means by which one gains funding. There is a small industry of lottery-award consultants which has grown up around the self-awareness of artists that being good at something and being able to sell it are not the same thing at all.

There is a group of people who are good at making the case for things, and who are paid to have a broad view and a generous understanding of what is important and why. These people are not scientists but politicians. For politicians, through their civil servants and arms-length organisations, to tell scientists they must make their own case is both ironic and dysfunctional. Britain needs a future in the sciences, and investment in primary research is something which has paid our nation dividends for the last four hundred years — from the chronometer to the steam engine, and from calculus to penicillin and on to the discovery of DNA.

Does Britain need the ethically dubious honour of being the easiest country in the West to conduct embryology experiments? That is a matter for debate, and, we have finally agreed, for a free vote in the House of Commons. Does it need a science policy which is more than a starvation diet? Absolutely, and without doubt.

Gordon Brown, get your act together.