Current Affairs

Bishops and Lords

~ Cheryl

I’m catching up on some UK news here. A couple of days ago the synod of the Church of England decided, against some fairly high powered advice, not to allow women to become bishops. I am, of course, very sad for my friend Caroline Symcox, who I am sure would make a wonderful bishop one day, and for all of the other hard-working and dedicated women in the lower ranks of the CofE clergy. This post, however, is not about them, it is about political power.

To a large extent I don’t care what policies the CofE has internally. I’m not even a Christian, let alone a CofE member. If they want to ban women bishops, that’s up to them. But CofE bishops are more than just religious leaders. They all get a seat in the House of Lords, and thus all get to make laws for the rest of the country. The net result of that is that a bunch of conservative old men with huge hang-ups about sex have an important say in the law of the land. And the bishops have been a particular thorn in the side of LGBT people over the years.

It is not acceptable that an organization that discriminates so obviously against large parts of its membership should have the right to appoint representatives to Parliament. There is a petition on the Govermnent website calling for the disestablishment of the CofE. I have signed it.

Thank You, United Nations #TDOR

~ Cheryl

Some of you may remember a huge fuss a couple of years back when the UN voted to remove “sexual orientation” from its annual resolution condemning extrajudicial killings. Hilary Clinton and Susan Rice turned up last year to get that overturned. This year Sweden introduced the motion and added to it, for the very first time, protection for “gender identity”. What’s more they did this yesterday, on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which of course specifically commemorates those killed because of their gender identity.

The motion was opposed by the usual unholy coalition of Muslim countries, the Vatican, and various states with hardline Christian traditions, but all of their attempts to remove the protections failed. In the final vote only Iran voted against, though I’m deeply disappointed in the United States which chose to abstain.

Full details, included the texts of the various resolutions and the voting record, is available here.

Political Stories

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’ve not been commenting on the US election, partly because I’ve lived there and know that the situation is far more complex than most people over this side of the pond think it is, and partly because I deeply distrusted most of the reporting. Now it is all over, here are a few thoughts.

Although Obama’s share of the vote went down this time, he still won the electoral college by a massive margin. Yet most media outlets were constantly telling us that the election was neck-and-neck. People who understand the system, like Nate Silver, and doubtless the bookies, were confidently predicting an Obama win. Why? Do no TV or newspaper politics pundits understand how Presidential elections work?

Also, various people in the social media lists I’m following are hoping that some sort of third party will arise, or at least that the next election will be less acrimonious and divisive. Any chance of that?

Personally I suspect that the journalists know exactly what they are doing, and that this sort of election will become more of the norm, not just in America, but worldwide. Why? Because elections are becoming more about the media event than about politics. The media wants stories, preferably simple stories with a good guy and a bad guy. Exactly who was the good guy and who was the bad guy will depend on which news outlets you follow, but in both cases those telling the story want the result to be in doubt right until the last moment.

Quite what this means for the idea of democracy isn’t clear, but we monkeys are deeply addicted to stories and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

Off The Rails

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

I’m doing this post mainly for the benefit of Kevin, who is very interested in rail policy, but today’s fiasco does have relevance to my day job as well. Lets start with a brief recap.

Many years ago the previous Tory government came up with a mad scheme to make a competitive industry out of passenger rail. I can’t see how this was ever going to work, but we are now stuck with it. Part of the process is that the Train Operating Companies have to bid for franchises to run the various routes. A recent franchise auction awarded the West Coast Mainline route to First Group (who run my local services) ahead of the incumbent, Virgin Rail. Sir Richard Branson and his colleagues were furious, insisting that the Department for Transport (DfT) must have got their sums wrong. They threatened to sue. And in the early hours of this morning the DfT finally admitted that they had made some fairly basic errors, and that the whole process would have to be reviewed, at massive cost to the public.

Exercises of this sort have been a staple part of my day job for many years, although in the field of energy, not transport. The possibility of making this sort of error gives me nightmares. I am keen to know what went wrong here.

Before I get to that, however, a quick comment on the public reaction. My Twitter feed this morning was full of calls for the re-nationalization of the railways. While that would certainly remove the need for any further franchise auctions, I’m a little bemused. This is a regulatory failing. If the policy wonks at the DfT can’t manage to run a simple franchise auction properly, how is putting them in charge of the entire network a smart thing to do?

(And on a related note, the Department of Energy Climate Change is in the middle of forcing through regulatory changes that would give them the right to micro-manage the UK’s energy industry. This worries me greatly.)

Anyway, back to the question of what went wrong. This afternoon the BBC’s Robert Peston came up with some more information (see here and scroll down). We’ve known from early on that the supposed errors were to do with inflation and passenger numbers, but not the precise nature of the errors. Peston says of the DfT:

First it unfairly discriminated against the incumbent, Virgin, by attaching far too great a probability to the projections by the rival bidder First Group that its revenues in the later years of the contract would be much bigger than Virgin’s.

This mistake was compounded in the department’s own internal forecasting model, which also attached too little risk to the possibility that passenger numbers and inflation would be significantly different from what First Group was projecting after 2021.

As a result, the government demanded too little guaranteed money for taxpayers from First Group.

What I get from this is that these “errors” are not actual technical errors, for example forgetting to include inflation in their calculations, but rather errors in the assumptions fed into the models.

There’s a very important difference here. Getting your equations wrong is a serious error that no one should make. Using the “wrong” assumptions may be a result of a difference of opinion as to what the right assumptions should be. Often this is policy driven. I could tell stories, but I’d better not.

So what has really happened here? One possibility is that the DfT was persuaded to use a particular set of assumptions that benefited First Group and penalized Virgin. If that’s the case, we should be asking how that came to happen, and whether any undue influence was brought to bear. The other possibility is a change of policy. There has been a recent change in the Minister for Transport. This could be because Mr. Cameron got wind of the impending disaster and decided to fire the person responsible. Alternatively the new Minister may have a very different view of the future of Britain’s railways to the previous one.

The reason that I raise this question is that political views regarding the level of passenger growth are often at the heart of rail policy debates. In California it is not unusual for right-wing think tanks to predict disaster for rail projects on the assumption that improvements to services would result in zero increase in passenger numbers (because only poor people ride the rails, and then only when absolutely necessary — I mean, who would want to ride a train when he can be driving a stretch Hummer?)

It seems likely that First Group would have over-egged their predictions of passenger growth, simply because that’s the sort of thing a challenger for the franchise would do. However, whenever I hear a right-wing government talking about optimistic assumptions about passenger growth I always tend to worry that the car-is-god philosophy is working its way back into power. I look forward to seeing what Christian Wolmar has to say. This must seen like mana from heaven to him, given that he’s both the UK’s foremost rail journalist and an aspiring Labour politician.

Freeloaders, We Hates Them

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

My American friends have been having a good laugh recently over the fact that Mitt Romney told a bunch of his rich backers that Obama voters are freeloaders who live off state handouts. It seems an odd audience to say that to, given that most of them, like Romney himself, will employ clever accounts to keep their tax bills down to the absolute minimum (though I guess they must resent having to pay for those accountants). However, I’m not sure that the message will play out quite as badly as my Liberal friends expect.

My evidence from this is something called the British Social Attitudes survey. The 29th edition was published yesterday, and its findings are consistent with the fact that an awful lot of Britons read the Daily Malice. I quote from their conclusions:

Neither redistribution in general nor welfare benefits in particular are as popular as they once were. This is by no means a recent change and certainly predates the recession. It primarily reflects a change in public attitudes during Labour’s years in power between 1997 and 2010.

These findings point towards an increased sense of ‘them and us’, with the most vulnerable in the labour market being viewed far less sympathetically than before, despite Britain’s current economic difficulties.

Somehow I doubt that Britons are unique in having become more mean-spirited (not to mention xenophobic — apparently 52% of Britons think immigration is a bad thing). And Americans tend to be more individualistic than Britons, not less.

The trouble is that no one is a freeloader in their own mind. Also everyone has anecdata about “real” freeloaders (mostly gleaned from the right wing media). In times of austerity the temptation to think that you are working hard, while others are sponging off the state, will be greater. A message that “people who vote for me are hard working, while those who vote for Obama are freeloaders” might work very well for Romney.

A Public Spectacle

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

I hadn’t been intending to watch the Olympics opening ceremony, but I’m visiting my mother this weekend and she put the TV on around 9:00pm to see what was going on. I spent the next 4 hours glued to the screen wondering what Danny Boyle would manage to get away with next.

Of course he wasn’t in change of everything. The old men in suits managed to get to make boring speeches eventually, and I’d like to comment briefly on Jacques Rogge’s self-congratulatory comments about gender equality. Yes it is a good thing that even the Saudis have caved in and allowed women to compete, but set against that M. Rogge is presiding over some entirely unjustified rule changes. As this recent New Scientist article notes, while testerone might help build muscle, there’s no evidence that it inevitably makes you a better Olympic athlete in any disciple. What testosterone does to is make you look less conventionally pretty or, as the tabloid newspapers would have it, “look like a man”. These new rules are not about excluding people who are not female, or excluding people with an unfair advantage, they are about excluding women whom the IOC think are likely to be picked on by the media and accused of being “really men”. It is an exercise in spin, and nothing to do with sport.

But back to Danny Boyle and his remarkably exuberant celebration of British culture as it really is, rather than as right wing politicians would like it to be. Given how little love there has been for the Olympics in my Twitter stream up until now, what happened last night was remarkable. The only poms whingeing were those for whom the word “multi-cultural” is anathema. And their complaints did not go down well. If it were possible to recall MPs in this country, Aidan Burley’s arse would be toast by now. As it is, I suspect his constituency party will be getting a strongly worded letter from Tory HQ suggesting that they find a new candidate for the next election.

Of course Boyle can’t have been free of political constraints. His job was to celebrate Britain, not to point out all of the horrors from our history, so celebrate he did. It is what he managed to celebrate that was remarkable. We got the Sex Pistols, we got a lesbian kiss, and we got a remarkably moving (and multicultural) tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombings. All of these things, so Twitter tells me, were beamed live to Saudi Arabia where they took live coverage. The USA opted for a long delay in coverage so that they could censor anything that might offend Americans Rush Limbaugh. Twitter tells me that all of the above items disappeared from the US coverage.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in London, the Metropolitan Police were doing what they do best: kettling, beating and pepper-spraying protestors.

Pop music, of course, is meant to distract us from all that. But one of the things about pop music is that most people don’t listen closely to the lyrics. Danny Boyle, I think, does. Thankfully I didn’t hear “Turning Japanese” being played at any point – using that song is a very common error at international events. But tucked into the ceremony there was a brief reference to London’s railway system, and with that we got a song by The Jam. Here’s an except from the lyrics:

What you see is what you get
You’ve made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You’ll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets
But I don’t get what this society wants
I’m going underground, (going underground)

(Lyrics by Paul Weller, © Universal Music Publishing Group – read the whole thing here.)

Yes, right in the middle of the biggest public spectacle the UK has had in ages, and in the middle of a double-dip recession, Danny Boyle sneaked in a song that satirizes public spectacle as a distraction from political problems. Well played, Mr. Boyle, well played.

Cookie Law Update

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well the deadline for the imposition of the EU’s cookie law has come and gone, and I suspect that thousands of websites throughout Europe are still massively non-compliant. I checked my bank’s website last week and while they had something it clearly wasn’t compliant. The BBC doesn’t seen to have even tried.

In recognition of this, the authorities performed a massive climbdown at the weekend. As this Guardian article explains, the UK’s Information Commissioner changed its guidelines at the last minute. Initially they insisted that active consent was required: that is you had to actively ask the user if using cookies was OK before any cookie was deployed. The new guidelines (which my bank appears to have followed) say that implied consent is OK. So as long as information about cookie use is clearly displayed the site’s visitors can be assumed to have consented to that use. As The Guardian notes, this appears to be in direct contravention of the EU guidelines, so the UK may be in trouble over this in future, but until they are UK businesses should be safe following the local rules.

US readers may find this a bit confusing, but this is the way that “states’ rights” tend to be dealt with in the EU. If Brussels passes a daft law, everyone just ignores it. Well, almost everyone. The UK seems to delight in enforcing the daftest laws in draconian fashion so as to give the tabloid newspapers something to write scare stories about, but in this case we seem to have done the smart thing.

Anyway, as a result, I have posted what I hope is a clear description of how cookies are used on this website. If anyone has any questions or concerns, I’d be delighted to hear from you so that I can improve things. You can read the site’s cookie policy here.

More Borders Weirdness

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last week I wrote about the plight of Felix Wamala, a gay man from Uganda whom the Borders Agency is keen to deport. Last Friday they tried for a third time to put him on a plane out of the country, and for a third time they failed. According to LGBT History Month, “his escorts refused to take him from Colnbrook Detention Centre to the waiting plane.”

What happened here? A bunch of government bureaucrats tried to deport someone, and the security guards they hired to take him away refused to do so on humanitarian grounds? I can’t be certain about that because the media is resolutely ignoring the story, but if so it’s pretty remarkable.

In other news, Cricinfo reports that the West Indies cricket team, due to start a test series against England in under two weeks, is seriously under strength, in part because three of their number can’t get visas to enter the UK.

What sort of country have we become?

EU Cookie Law

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

Most of the time I am fairly much in favor of the EU. I’m an internationalist, and anything that gets up the noises of the jingoists at places like the Daily Mail and Daily Express has to be doing something good. Like most governments, however, it is often woefully ignorant when it comes to IT issues, and that means that it is prone to doing things that are monumentally stupid. Here is a case in point.

Last year the EU decided that cookies on websites were an unacceptable intrusion into citizen’s lives, and that all websites would have to gain consent from users before creating any cookies. The IT industry complained that doing this would require time, so they were given until May 26th this year to get their act together. Nevertheless, a KPMG survey published in April estimated that only 5% of major UK companies were compliant. The level of compliance is likely to be much lower amongst small businesses. Indeed, I suspect that vast numbers of small businesses, and private individuals who own websites, don’t even know that the law exists, and wouldn’t have a clue how to comply if they did.

What’s a cookie? Well, it is a piece of software that allows a website to store information in your browser and pass that information on, either from page to page on that site, to another website you visit, or simply back to itself next time you visit. It is a very useful tool. Yes, it can be used to install malware, or to harvest personal data, but sharp knives can be used to kill people and that doesn’t stop cooks using them on a daily basis.

To give you some idea of the problem, here are the different ways in which cookies are used on this website.

1. Google Analytics — this is a very useful piece of software that very many websites install to get an idea of the where their visitors are coming from. Google is apparently negotiating with the EU, but as yet no statement has been issued.

2. Spam prevention — one of my main tools for preventing comment spam uses a cookie.

3. Social media — those nice little buttons that allow you to easily share posts with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google + use cookies.

4. Comments — WordPress (the software on which this blog runs) uses cookies to remember your name, email and URL so that once you have made one comment here you don’t have to type those things in each time.

5. Links to other sites — those nice little widgets that allow you to click through and buy books from my bookstore? Yeah, they use cookies too.

So now I have to give you the option as to whether any of these cookies will be created so that you can opt out if you wish. Ideally I should do that individually for each type of cookie, because you might approve of some and not of others. And I have to do that before you interact with the site, so that no cookies can possibly be generated without your consent. And I may have to do it each time you visit the site because the only way to remember from one visit to another whether you consent to cookie use or not is to create a cookie, and you might not want me to do that.

See the problem?

It gets worse. All of those systems I mentioned above are supplied by third parties. I didn’t code any of it myself. I know that the cookies are there because I’m smart enough to know how to find them. Other people may not be. Ignorance, sadly, is no excuse under the law. I can’t change the code myself. All I can do is either disable the particular piece of software that uses the cookie, or turn the cookie off if such an option is provided. The spam blocker has provided an alternate mechanism that doesn’t use cookies but will be less effective at spam blocking. With the comments I can add text to every post noting that by commenting you are consenting to cookie use. But Google Analytics, the social media buttons and the bookstore links will have to go.

As is depressingly typical these days, the law is also very vague. It says that cookies are allowed if they are “essential” to the operation of the website, but what exactly does that mean? How essential does the cookie have to be? I can do without all of the above, it is just a total pain to have to do so.

Then there’s the scope. All of my websites are hosted in the US. The domains are registered in the US. But I’m a UK citizen living in the UK. Am I covered by the law? Probably, but I may not be. What about the bookstore? I don’t host that myself. It is part of the Shopify site. If it is covered by the law, then in all likelihood my LiveJournal account is too, and that has cookies all over it. What about my Twitter account? Or Facebook? The dividing line between a website that you own, and are responsible for, and one where you are simply a customer, is very blurred.

All of these things will doubtless be sorted out by test cases eventually, and hopefully common sense will prevail. However, I have no particular desire to be a test case (if you want to know why, see yesterday’s post on equality under the law). So I’m going to do my best to comply. This may result in various websites becoming rather annoying, for which I apologize in advance.

Oh, and before anyone mansplains me, yes, I do know that various people are offering tools to help you get around this. If you can find one that doesn’t use cookies to store visitors’ cookie preferences, and which allows visitors to choose which cookies to allow, please let me know.

Equal Under The Law?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One of the supposed cornerstones of democracies is that we are all equal under the law. Rich people, of course, always have means of avoiding consequences, but once you end up in front of The Beak (that’s a judge, non-UK readers) you expect to be treated fairly. Well, some of you do.

You’ve doubtless all heard of the case of Trayvon Martin who was gunned down in Florida earlier this year. His killer, George Zimmerman, claimed that Martin had attacked him and he had acted in self-defense. Martin was armed with a hoodie, some iced tea and a packet of fruit candy. The local authorities initially declined to take any action against Zimmerman. Florida is one of the parts of the US that has a “Stand Your Ground” law that protects people acting in self defense.

As a comparison, consider the case of trans woman CeCe McDonald. Last year she and some friends, all African-American but not all trans, went out to buy groceries in Minneapolis. As they passed a bar a gang of white people began yelling transphobic abuse at them and attacked them. CeCe had a glass smashed in her face which cut her cheek. The group ran, and were chased down the street by their assailants. At some point, CeCe decided that enough was enough. She took a pair of scissors out of her bag and stopped. Dean Schmitz charged at her, was impaled on the scissors, and later died.

The reaction of the Minneapolis authorities was very different to that in Florida. CeCe was arrested and charged with murder. Yesterday she accepted a plea bargain for a charge of manslaughter that carries a custodial sentence of 41 months. Well, she did kill someone while trying to defend herself, and Minnesota does not have a Florida-style Stand Your Ground law. But it is the way the trial was conducted that shows how the justice system can be perverted.

Firstly it is entirely legal in Minnesota to remove someone from a jury because they are LGBT. The assumption is that such people would be biased against decent, upstanding citizens, and in favor of, well, people like themselves. So CeCe would be facing a jury comprised entirely of straight cis people. Then there’s the matter of what evidence would be presented. Judges, at least in Minnesota, have quite a lot of leeway in defining what they deem relevant to a case. CeCe had a previous conviction for passing a bad check, and the prosecution was planning to mention that as evidence of her criminal nature. Schmitz had three previous convictions for assault. They were all domestic abuse cases. He had attacked his ex-girlfriend, her father, and her 14-year-old daughter. He had a swastika tattooed on his chest. He judge refused to allow any of this to be mentioned in court. He also refused testimony from an expert on the dangers faced by local trans people. Some of Schmitz’s friends, who would be standing as witnesses, had convictions for theft. Again the judge refused to allow this to be mentioned.

There’s a lot more in this article at Bilerico, but the basic fact is that CeCe could either accept 41 months in jail, or go to trial on a murder case that was clearly being stacked against her by the judge, and expect a 40-year sentence.

You might ask why she chose to defend herself. Wasn’t that a little unwise? Well, here’s what happens to trans people who don’t defend themselves. On Sunday night Brandy Martell and two friends were sat chatting in Brandy’s car in Oakland. Two men came up and talked to them. The fact that the women were trans was mentioned. The men went away. Some time later they came back with an automatic weapon and opened fire. The two other women got away, but Brandy died from gunshot wounds.

It took until yesterday (Wednesday) for the San Francisco Chronicle to run an article on the murder. Kudos to Laura Anthony of ABC News who appears to have been the only local journalist from a major outlet to cover the story the day after the murder. As the Daily Kos put it, “Transgender Woman Murdered in Oakland. Nobody Cares”.

One thing we can conclude, of course, is that Brandy and her friends were not prostitutes. It would have been all over the media had there been any evidence of that. In fact Brandy worked as a peer advocate at the TransVision center in Fremont, the Bay Area city where Kevin and I had our home. I wasn’t much involved with the local trans scene when I lived there, but had I been I would have met Brandy, possibly known her as a friend.

Well, you may say, that’s America, and Oakland at that. And it is true that people don’t wander around the streets with automatic weapons in every country. But don’t assume that the sort of official manipulation of the justice system that happened to CeCe can’t happen anywhere else.

Felix Wamala is a gay man from Uganda who is seeking to stay in the UK, where he has lived since 1995. He has been in detention since 2010 when his request for asylum was “lost” by the Home Office. Uganda is a country where instituting the death penalty for homosexuality has been seriously discussed in parliament recently. The British authorities have already tired to deport Felix twice, once on December 24th and once on January 2nd. I’m not sure why the previous attempts failed, but there have been cases of pilots refusing to accept such deportees onto their planes on humanitarian grounds. Another attempt to deport him will be made tomorrow. Note that all of these actions have been timed for holiday weekends.

Felix has been trying to get his case reviewed. A post on the LGBT History month blog explains what happened.

But there are further signs that Felix has been strait-jacketed in terms of his appeal. First, he cannot challenge the Judicial Review of the 22nd of March because he has not been provided with the deportation order on paper that he needs to appeal against. Second, a 14 year rule application that he made on the grounds that he has lived here for over 14 years, and which he sent to the Home Office with the correct funds was returned month ago with the funds returned. It was then refused on the grounds that he had not provided “sufficient funds” to secure the application!

The Borders Agency has also said that they can’t grant him asylum because he can’t prove to their satisfaction that he is gay. One wonders how he is supposed to do that. So much for fair treatment under the law.

If you are white and a UK citizen things are probably a bit different, but even so I’m not inclined to take chances. My sole brush with the courts was almost 20 years ago, and thankfully it wasn’t anything that might have resulted in a criminal conviction. Nevertheless, like CeCe I quietly took whatever the judge chose to throw at me. I well remember my lawyer saying, “There’s no justice in British courts for people like you.” Since then we have had the Gender Recognition Act, so hopefully things are better, but I’m not going to assume that.

Marriage, It’s Complicated

~ Cheryl

The UK government is currently running a public consultation on the subject of equality in marriage law. Last night my friends at Shout Out Bristol were right on topic when they chose to interview a trans couple about the legal difficulties of transitioning when married. (April 12th show if you come to it late, segment begins about 24 minutes in.)

As you may know, the UK currently allows “marriage” for opposite-sex couples, and “civil partnerships” for same-sex couples. Neither type of couple is allowed to have the type of union reserved for the other, although legally the options are very similar. Transitioning while married drives a coach and horses through this ridiculous system. As Nicola and Meg explain on the program, if Nicola wants to be recognized as fully legally female in the UK it would be necessary for the couple to have their marriage annulled. That’s not just a divorce, that’s saying that it never, ever happened, because it would have been illegal.

Some couples, like Nicola and Meg, have elected to preserve their relationship and fore-go the legal recognition of the gender change. Others have spent a lot of money on lawyers exchanging their marriage for a civil partnership. If you are a UK citizen and are responding to the government consultation, please remember these people and ask for something to be done for them.

The Bad News: No World Fantasy For Me

~ Cheryl ~ 17 Comments

The thing I have been looking forward to most this year is World Fantasy in Toronto. It was going to cost more than I can afford to get there (including most of my remaining United frequent flier points), but it is an event that Kevin can get to relatively cheaply and I haven’t seen him for almost a year now. Also my friends Liz Hand, John Clute and Gary K. Wolfe are all on the Guest of Honor list. But now it looks like I can’t risk trying to go.

Via this article in the Independent I have discovered that the USA is insisting that its “no fly” list be enforced for all flights to North America, not just ones to or transiting the USA. Having been denied entry to the US, I am almost certainly on that list. But even if I am not, I can’t afford to find out. That’s because the only way to know for certain whether I’m on the list is to buy a ticket and turn up at the airport hoping to travel. I have already wasted the cost of a trans-Atlantic air ticket once, and that was when my business was doing reasonably well. I can’t afford to do so again, especially now.

Kevin has already fulminated about this on his LiveJournal, with predictable immediate results in the comments. I’m sure that there are very many people in the USA who believe that any measure, no matter how draconian, is justified in order to protect their borders. What I don’t accept is that you can be convicted of being a danger to the US simply because one immigration officer deems you “suspicious”, and that there should be no way of clearing your name without recourse to the sort of money you need a lottery win to obtain.

Spot Betting Scandal Hits British SF

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

The British Science Fiction Community was thrown into disarray this week after two undercover Guardian journalists, Alison Flood and Damien Walter, claimed to have obtained footage of a juror for the Arthur C. Clarke Award agreeing to fix the results of the short list in return for a substantial bribe. The affair is believe to be connected to a betting scam based on the popular Guess the Clarke Short List game run by the online gambling company, Vector. Flood and Walter say they have sent a copy of their evidence to the Metropolitan Police.

Mr. Tom Hunter, the Chief Executive of the Clarke Award, dismissed the allegations as nonsense. “This is just two desperate journalists making up a story for the muck-raking media”, he commented. “Flood and Walter have been camped outside my flat for weeks hoping to get a scoop on the short list before it was announced. Once I even caught Walter going through my waste bin, but I think that’s because journalists are so badly paid these days. I had just thrown away half a hot Cornish pasty. There will be more detailed allegations of misconduct in my forthcoming submission to the Leveson Inquiry.”

Political and religious figures have been quick to weigh in on the controversy. In Pakistan Imran Khan said he was not surprised about the allegations. “What can you expect from a country that gives literary awards to Salman Rushdie?”, he asked. Britain’s Prime Minister, Call-Me-Dave Cameron, hit back angrily. “It’s clearly not enough for Mr. Khan for his cricket team to have thrashed us 3-0 in the recent test series, now he has to rub it in by being rude about our science fiction awards too. I was so upset by his comments that I had to whip Clegg for almost half an hour before I could calm down. There is a word for this, and that word is ‘bullying’. I will be asking the United Nations to consider an emergency motion on the subject of cyber-bullying by politicians from foreign countries. And if Mr. Khan doesn’t apologize immediately I shall tell Mr. Obama on him and we’ll carpet-bomb a small Muslim nation into oblivion. So there!”

ArchbishopNewly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Paul Cornell, placed emphasis on the morality of gambling. “It seems that someone may have been very naughty here”, he said, “and in the Anglican Church, as of policy adopted at our last synod, we frown on naughtiness. People shouldn’t do it. I don’t have the eyebrows to frown as well as my illustrious predecessor, but frowning I am.”

Other religious leaders were less restrained. One such was Rev. Christopher Islander, the High Priest of the Wessex Baptist Church, a small fundamentalist sect whose tenets include the belief that the Israeli philosopher, Lavie Tidhar, is the new messiah. Islander’s church is quite popular amongst the London arts community where members are often known as “lavies” in recognition of their faith. Islander fulminated at length on the evils of the Clarke Award in his sermon this morning, calling for the jury to be burned at the stake and their remains thrown into a pit of boiling lava. He described the authors of the short-listed books as “demon-spawn”, “sons and daughters of Satan”, “avatars of Evil”, “a stinking pile of foetid LOLcat feces” and, more unusually, as “Internet puppies”. Members of the Wessex Church are now picketing the Clarke Award offices in St. Johns Wood waving placards that read “God Hates Dogs”.

God hates DogsNot everyone is impressed with Islander’s statements. Damien Walter claims to have a fresh scoop. “I paid a cat burglar to raid the offices of Rev. Islander’s psychiatrist”, he said. “I can now exclusively reveal that Islander is a frustrated science fiction writer. He’s been worried about declining membership of his church and thinks he will do better if he could emulate his idol, L. Ron Hubbard, and write blockbuster SF as well as found a religion.”

The Clarke Award jury has been largely silent on the matter, though Juliet McKenna did generously offer to meet Rev. Islander as discuss the matter with him privately over an Aikido mat.

The authors attacked by Islander have been more forthcoming. Sheri Tepper released a statement that was read to journalists for her by her secretary, a horse named Ed. The text was as follows:

“As I have often written, patriarchal religions of the sort led by Rev. Islander are a scourge upon the planet. For the good of all the species of Earth we should cull all male religious leaders like the pestilence they are. There can be no leniency, no exceptions.”

Charles Stross made no comment, but did let his tongue hang out and panted enthusiastically. His partner, Feòrag, commented happily, “this has done wonders for Charlie’s training. I lined his litter tray with photographs of Rev. Islander, and now his poop is on target every time.”

Speaking from his Seattle home, Greg “Killer B” Bear said, “I am so happy to have another excuse to go to Merrie Olde London. I love that city. It is so great to visit somewhere that hasn’t changed since the days of Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare. I’m really looking forward to seeing those great London landmarks such as Big Ben, Bucking Ham Palace, Stone Hinge and the Eiffel Tower. And if I meet that Islander guy there I’ll happily give him a bloody nose.”

The scandal has come to the attention of worldwide literary bodies. Speaking for the International Awards Association, Mr. Kevin Standlee called for a full and frank inquiry to be carried out by the England & Wales Science Fiction Board. “Corruption in literary awards will not be tolerated”, said Standlee. If the England & Wales Board cannot clear up this matter to our satisfaction then we may be forced to impose sanctions, up to and including denying their request to host the World Science Fiction Contest in London in 2014. If necessary we will relocate the event to Glasgow, a nearby city that has a distinguished record of hosting the event.

British fandom has also been discussing the scandal enthusiastically. Mr. Richard Bheerbhelly, who describes himself as a life-long BSFA member and someone who has attended every Eastercon since it was founded in 1833, was scathing in his condemnation of the Clarke. “I am delighted that this has been exposed at last”, he said. “I have suspected for some time that the Clarke was corrupt. Nothing else could explain the fact that fine science novels such as The Eye of Argon, March of the Robots, Battlefield Earth, Atlanta Nights and the Wheel of Time series have failed to win the Clarke. None of these jurors have any idea what true hard science fiction is.”

Another British fan, Mr. Jonathan Agnew, blamed America. “Our finest writers are being lured abroad to write in the American Premier Literary League for silly money. Everyone knows that the juries for the Hugos, Nebulas and Locus Awards are on the make. You only have to look at the luxurious, jet-setting lifestyle they lead to realize that they must be raking it in. No wonder our British lads and lasses are tempted.”

The UK publishing industry has been quick to cash in on the crisis. Noted science fiction satirist, A.R.R.R.R.R.R. Roberts, has been contracted to write a series of darkly humorous thrillers set in the high finance world of science fiction awards. The Clarke Inheritance is already written and in production, with The Clarke Legacy due to follow next week and several more sequels planned. The dashing young hero of the books, Tim Huntsman, fights an increasingly bizarre series of foreign plots against British science fiction while investigating the possibility that he is the secret son of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. A Hollywood studio has already taken out an option on the first book, though it is understood that the story will be changed for the movie so that it can be set in Los Angeles and feature the Hugo Awards instead of the Clarke.

Author Norman Nobbish, whose self-published novel, Cyber-Wolf Pirates of the Death Galaxy, was overlooked for this year’s Clarke, will be challenging the Award results in the courts. On his blog he said:

“Corruption in the Clarke has cost me million’s in unpayed royalty’s. I demand to be constipated not only for this but for the billon’s I wood have received from the movie that wood have been made from my book had I one as I deserved!!!”

Meanwhile Hunter is becoming increasingly frustrated with the affair. Speaking from in front of his office, and struggling to make himself heard above the constant chanting of “God Hates Dogs”, he said, “all of the work on this award is done by volunteers, and in this climate of fear no one is willing to help out. I have to go to my day job now, so I can’t talk to you any more. I need help. Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

[My apologies to non-UK readers who might not be 100% up on such urgent matters of British politics as betting scandals in cricket and PastyGate. I have tried to provide informative links where possible so as to establish the veracity of this story.]

Lies, Damned Lies and Bishops

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Over the past couple of the weeks the UK’s bishops, both Anglican and Catholic, have been bleatingly mightily about the government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriages. Apparently letting a gay or lesbian couple get married is an abomination on a par with abortion and slavery. And what’s more, churches will be forced to perform these marriages, even though they find them morally abhorrent.

Well, actually, no.

The government’s proposals, issued today, make it quite clear that the change in the law will apply only to marriages conducted by civil authorities in registry offices. It will still be illegal for same-sex couples to marry in church. That’s stated clearly by Home Secretary Theresa May here, and by Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone here. And it is set out clearly in the government’s consultation paper here (PDF).

I find it very hard to believe that the bishops did not know that they would be offered this protection. Why would the government not have told them that they were doing this? It has to be a piece of horse trading. And yet the bishops have publicly argued that the government’s plans were exactly the opposite.

Worse still, as this provision is only in there as a sop to the bishops (large portions of their congregations, and even many of their clergy, seem perfectly happy with same-sex marriages), look at the effects. In order to justify their own bigotry, the bishops have persuaded the government to ban all religious organizations from conducting same-sex marriages, whether they approve of them or not. As the Pink News article linked to above notes, many religions, including Quakers, Unitarians, Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism, want to be able to solemnize same-sex marriages, and will continue to be prevented from doing so. Where exactly is the “tyranny of tolerance” in all this?

There are other issues to be resolved as well. For example, the government expects that same-sex couples who previously enacted civil partnerships will want to convert their relationship to a marriage. There will be opposite-sex couples who would prefer to have a civil partnership, which the government does not propose to allow. Hence the need for a consultation period to work out what provisions need to be enacted.

Crucially from my point of view, there should be recompense for couples in which one partner has undergone gender transition. Because of the bishops’ insistence that same-sex marriages are abhorrent, the Gender Recognition Act stipulates that anyone wishing to change gender must end any existing marriage and, if desired, enter into a civil partnership with their former spouse. The government proposals state that this will no longer be necessary, but they offer no recompense to people whose marriages were forcibly dissolved. If they want to be married again, they will have to pay to convert their civil partnership to a marriage. The number of couples involved is not that large, and this seems to me unnecessarily cruel.

It is worth noting that the final legislation will not necessarily reflect the provisions set out in the consultation. We (British citizens) can change things for the better. Equally the bishops and their allies will be clamoring for the provisions to be watered down. Sadly I expect S’onewall to be whispering in the government’s ear that it will be OK to offer a further sop to the bishops by removing the sections relating to trans people. It won’t be the first time that they have presented themselves to government as legitimate representatives of Britain’s trans population while at the same time promoting transphobia within their own ranks.

Further information, including a link to an online response form, is available from the Home Office here. It is important that as many people as possible do respond, because the bishops will be mounting an aggressive campaign to get their side to respond. In particular it is important that non-trans people support the rights of trans people. The trans community itself is so small that if only trans people speak for it their arguments will seem insignificant.

There are some useful ideas for things to say in the consultation here.

Finally I should note that this really is a problem of bishops, not of Christians. I have many Christian friends, including a Catholic Priest, a Methodist Minister and an Anglican Curate. Large numbers of Christians are perfectly OK with LGBT people. Their leaders refuse to accept this, and are doing untold damage to their faith thereby. I wish God would hurry up and drop a clue stick on some of them.

Bristol Gets A Gay Lord Mayor

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Here’s another reason to be proud of Bristol. The City Council has just chosen a new Lord Mayor, and he’s gay. Peter Main is also chair of LGBT Bristol. He’ll take office in May. Full press release here.

Like many cities, Bristol is currently considering whether to go for an elected mayor. I venture to suggest that this would not have happened had elections been required.

Anti-Rights Grab Day

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I guess it is entirely typical of the Internet that today, when people are supposed to be protesting against a very dangerous proposed law, that my Twitter feed is full of people arguing over whether the protest is being carried out in the right way, or making jokes about Wikipedia. We are very easily distracted monkeys. Well, none of the sites I run have gone dark today, which doubtless makes me a villain in some quarters. Equally, I’m just about to write about SOPA, which will make me a boring killjoy in the eyes of others. Before deciding how to be outraged, however, please take some time to read the following.

Debates about proposed restrictive laws often founder on the argument of “it couldn’t happen to me”. It’s the “first they came for the X, but I was not an X” problem. The chances are that most of you won’t be directly affected. You’ll be indirectly affected because the choice of websites that you have access to, and the type of posts you can make on social media sites, will change drastically, but you are unlikely to be sued. That’s not the case for me. As far as I’m concerned, it will be only a matter of time before SOPA shuts down my publishing and book-selling business. Here’s why.

At the end of last year I wrote about a law case in the US under which HarperCollins (a division of News International) is trying to claim that it owns the ebook rights to every paper book it publishes, whether the contract mentions ebooks or not. As I predicted, this is already affecting my business. Publishers are doing their best to frighten authors off self-publishing their back catalogs in ebook form. Mostly they don’t have any intention of publishing the ebooks themselves, they just want to grab as many rights as they can, just in case.

However, if a publisher does want to stop an author selling ebook rights then currently they have to go to court, as HarperCollins are doing. Under SOPA they won’t have to. They can just state that their copyright is being infringed, and shut down any ebook publisher or bookseller that dares to deal with the titles.

Currently my author and retail contracts ask the author or publisher to attest that they have the rights to the material that they are asking me to publish or sell. Under SOPA that’s not enough. To be fully compliant I would have to undertake an expensive copyright check on every book I publish and sell. And I do mean every book. Under current laws if it turns out that something I’m selling has rights issues then I can take it down, which I’d be happy to do. Under SOPA there only has to be one, unsubstantiated, complaint and my entire website can be taken offline. And because SOPA is predicated on the idea that ordinary citizens are guilty until they can afford an expensive lawyer to prove them innocent, I’d have no chance of challenging this. Indeed, SOPA is written in such a way that the mere act of questioning whether a complaint is justified or not would expose me to the prospect of far worse penalties than simply giving up and closing my business. (See Mashable for the gory details.)

Now you may think that publishers simply wouldn’t bother with someone small like me. What’s in it for them? But that’s not the problem. The problem is that anyone who loses a SOPA case becomes liable for damages, and to pay the legal costs of the company that lodges the complaint. So the publishers don’t need to do anything. Very soon enterprising lawyers will be devoting their time to hunting around the Internet looking for potential victims, and encouraging complaints against them. If the victim shuts down, there is very little cost. If the victim fights then the lawyer has a nice piece of business that will probably cost the publisher nothing. It will be like the “sue companies for liability for accidents” business, except this time it will the companies who benefit and the little guys who get taken to the cleaners.

If you still think it won’t happen, here’s something to chew on:

To Harvey Silverglate, the author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent”, this is par for the course in America’s federal justice system today. A couple of trends have combined to threaten justice and liberty. First, federal statutes are often so poorly written and so vague that they are in effect incomprehensible. This gives excessive discretion to bureaucrats and prosecutors, with their own career ambitions, who apply them haphazardly.

Second, federal law has been moving away from mens rea (“guilty mind”), a common-law tradition that suggests that a person who had no idea he was breaking a law should not be accused of doing so. With bloated federal legislation and without mens rea you can accuse most people of something or other, says Mr Silverglate. The question should be, he says, whether charges are reasonable when they run “counter to all human instinct and experience”.

That’s nothing to do with SOPA, and it isn’t some ranting lefty who is complaining. It is from an article in The Economist, and the case is about a marine biologist filming orcas.

If that sort of thing worries you, and really it should, please use some of that spare time you have from not reading Wikipedia (hah!) to lodge a protest. WordPress has helpful links for people both inside and outside the US, and an informative video.

Cheaper Ebooks, But Only From Amazon

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There’s good news for UK buyers of ebooks. The price they pay for them is going to come down soon, but probably only if they buy them from Amazon. UK-based retailers may match them, but will have to swallow the price difference if they do. And this is all thanks to our beloved government.

This doesn’t affect me terribly much because it is all about VAT, and my business is sufficiently small that I’m not required to charge VAT on sales I make. As I pointed out last month, that means that publishers get substantially more money from a sale through me than for a sale of the same book through Amazon (39% more in the case of Tim Maughan’s Paintwork). I’d like to be able to undercut Amazon, but if I did there’s a huge risk that they would notice and reduce their prices to match, which would do a huge disservice to the publishers whose books I stock, and who have no control over what price Amazon sells their books at. But all this will go away soon, because the rate of VAT that Amazon charges will drop significantly in January. From then on it will only be 3%, not the 20% they currently charge.

Why is this possible? Well Amazon’s European operation is based in Luxembourg, and the government there has decided to bring down the rate of VAT on ebooks to help “local” industry. You can see why they might do that, especially as there are other small European countries that Amazon might decide to relocate to if Luxembourg proved unresponsive to their lobbying.

This will be a major headache for any UK-based company that sells ebooks and is unable to relocate to Luxembourg or a similar friendly outpost. Here we still have to charge 20% VAT on such purchases. (Yes, I know VAT is zero on physical books, but ebooks are apparently “software” so the standard rate applies). As the online buyer is extremely aware of price comparison, this means UK-based ebook sellers will either lose a lot of business to Amazon, or they’ll have to swallow that 17% difference, which is a pretty big hit to take on a low-margin business.

What does our fiercely nationalistic government have to say about this? Are they, perhaps, pleading poverty and the need for tax revenue to fund essential services? Not a bit of it, as The Bookseller explains, their defense is that EU law does not allow them to reduce VAT on ebooks, and they have to do what the EU says. Except that Luxembourg is part of the EU. And so is France, which is also reducing the rate of VAT on ebooks.

So there you have it. Mr. Cameron is very happy to show off his bulldog independence in economic summits, but when it comes down to providing multi-national companies with tax advantages that allow them to massively undercut British businesses it is a different matter. Amazon’s wishes must be respected, so in such cases the British chihuahua rolls over and explains how much it likes having its tummy tickled by Brussels, while the fierce French poodle looks on in stunned disbelief.

(Sorry Mexico)

Manufactured Proof

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

It must be great to be a right wing extremist. You don’t have to justify anything you say, you can just make it up. As long as your followers are prepared to swallow it, any old rubbish is OK. But why be content with any old rubbish when it can be funny.

A case in point. This morning Ken MacLeod re-tweeted a link from Jim Henley (who I don’t know, but who deserves the credit). The link is to a page on Conservapedia that contains a heap of “facts” intended to prove that the Earth cannot be more than a few thousand years old. You have to be pretty dumb to swallow some of it, but my attention was drawn to the section on Biology where point 1 is as follows:

The intelligence of humans is rapidly declining, whether measured by SAT scores, music, personal letters, quality of political debates, the quality of news articles, and many other measures. This means that if one goes back far enough, intelligence would measure at ridiculous heights, if humans were even tens of thousands of years old.

And the best evidence for the rapidly declining intelligence of humans is…

I cannot believe that anyone would have written this without their tongue firmly in their cheek. Will someone pay me to write this stuff? It would be so much fun.

The Government Has A Plan

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Today is a rather significant day in this history of trans rights in the UK. For the first time ever a government has issued an Action Plan with the intention of advancing trans equality. You can find the document on the Home Office website.

Of course, like much of what governments do, this is largely words. There are very few firm commitments to legislation. The one notable distinction is a promise to amend the Criminal Justice Act to provide for a minimum of 30 years as the sentence for transphobic murders. Most of the rest of the commitments are to provide guidance, to engage in consultations, and so on.

On the one hand, actual government guidance on trans issues is a very good thing. In many cases discrimination arises as much from ignorance as anything else, and the mere fact that official government instructions now exist is bound to improve things. On the other hand, the document says precisely nothing about the primary problem: the media. I’m sure that someone at the Daily Malice is working on an article about how this is all “political correctness gone mad”, and encouraging citizens to ignore any directions that the government might issue.

Still, there is an opening, and the Action Plan includes a 3-month consultation period next year during which trans activists will be able to suggest ways of making the plan actually work.

Also, I’m pleased to see that Action Plan making specific mention of what they call “non-gendered” people, which shows that the message about the diversity of the trans community is getting through.

Media Ownership – Time To Act

~ Cheryl

Back in October Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, launched a consultation into the issue of plurality of ownership in the UK’s media. Strictly speaking all that they are looking at in this case is how they should actually measure market concentration, but that’s a very convenient back door for News International and their buddies to creep through. You can bet your life that Ofcom will be getting heavily lobbied to adopt measures that would magically allow Rupert & co. to continue owning vast chunks of the UK’s press.

The online campaigning group, 38 Degrees, has launched a campaign to remind Ofcom just how important media ownership is to UK democracy. Hopefully this will concentrate the minds of the people evaluating responses to the consultation. If you want to add your voice, you can do so here.