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What the EU referendum says about our democracy

I campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU, and I’m extremely upset that we voted to leave. But the fact of leaving isn’t the thing that’s most depressing: far worse is what it has told me about our democracy. Successful Leave campaigners should be every bit as worried as I am about some of the things I’m about to discuss.

The first thing that alarms me is the way the referendum was allowed to operate. Anyone on either side of the argument was able to make any statement, however outlandish, however false, with total impunity. After a parliamentary or local government election, voters can punish a false campaign promise by voting against the person who makes it (or at least against their party) at future elections. In the referendum, campaigners could tell whatever lies they wanted to in the knowledge that all they had to do was to get 50.00001% of the votes on the day, and that once that was over, nothing else mattered.

Both sides indulged in outrageously indefensible rhetoric. I happen to think that the Leave side’s was particularly egregious, but that’s not the point: the problem is that a major decision that will affect our country for decades and maybe more was made after a campaign characterised by a tissue of lies.

I’m also disturbed by the referendum’s reduction of the highly complex matter of our relationship with Europe to a single In/Out question, without in any way defining what “Out” meant. Are we talking about “the Norwegian Solution” of remaining in the free trade agreement while continuing to comply with EU regulations? The “Swiss solution” of continuing to contribute to the EU budget? Or a total withdrawal from the free trade zone? Whichever of these options is chosen, the Prime Minister who implements Brexit risks a huge backlash from whichever part of the leave constituency had assumed either (a) we’re going to have fewer rules from Brussels, (b) we can stop contributing to the EU budget or (c) we can continue to be in the free trade block. Because truly, if anyone thinks we’re so important to the EU that they will continue to grant all of our former privileges while releasing us from all of the rules an obligations, they are living in a delusive state. All this means that far from resolving the EU debate, this referendum has merely fired its starting gun.

Why was it constitutionally OK for a political party in government to propose such a simplistic referendum? Of the reasons for doing so, it is now reasonably clear that (a) Cameron had no intention of putting out EU membership at risk and thought he was taking a safe bet; (b) the principal intent was to resolve tensions within the Conservative party and (c) Cameron and his aides didn’t think the electorate were intelligent enough to understand a more nuanced set of questions (I’m guessing on this last one, admittedly, but I think it’s a fairly safe guess). I’m afraid I don’t buy the idea that Cameron called the referendum because he genuinely believed that “the people deserved their say”: I’ve never yet seen a referendum called for that reason and I don’t expect to.

Having spoken to a lot of people in the days leading up to June 23rd, I don’t think the majority of voters made a serious attempt to research and understand the facts. The most intelligent conversation I had with a probable Leave voter was with a doctor of African extraction who is deeply unhappy with EU policy in Africa, which she had checked out in a great deal of detail. Every other conversation showed rampant confirmation bias: people were simply not interested even in discussing their reasons for voting in detail and certainly didn’t want to understand the views of anyone on the opposing side.

One of the important arguments on the Leave side is the idea that outside the EU, we can regain total control of our democratic process. But that’s small comfort when you see the immediate effect of the referendum on that process. The first thing that is going to happen is that from around October, the country will be run for close to four years by an unelected Prime Minister – and probably, in the circumstances, by a Prime Minister of a very different complexion from the one who we voted for a year ago. How was it OK for Cameron to omit to mention that he would be resigning if he lost the referendum?

Early on Friday, I was pretty much in the #AshamedToBeBritish camp, living in the wonderful, open city that London is, but surrounded by a country full of racists. I’ve calmed down from that view, but I still fear greatly that most people who voted leave (not all, of course) did so because they were looking for someone to blame for twenty years of stagnant disposable incomes and ever reducing job opportunities. And the easiest people to blame were “everyone except us” – the immigrants and the foreigners. How much easier to blame a Brussels bureaucrat than to accept that we’ve lagged the world in productivity improvements, that a rash of people got into debt they couldn’t afford, or that the Blairite expansion of university places wasn’t fundable without either increasing taxes or making the students pay for it.

Indulging in arbitrary blame without being prepared to debate the facts isn’t a good way to make important decisions. Allowing a party’s internal issues to have such a huge and immediate impact on our future is worrying. So is having an unelected Prime Minister at what will now be a critical moment in history. And our permitting of demagogues – racist or otherwise – to tell a pack of lies with impunity is the scariest of all.

 

 

 

 

Gaijin view 3: Hiroshima

 

Atomic Dome
Hiroshima Atomic Dome

As one would hope, visiting the Peace Museum in Hiroshima is a deeply moving experience. The horrors of the atomic bomb are told with an icy clarity. The sheer magnitude of a single blast is shown by a scale model of the flattened city and the fireball that caused the damage. Real portions of damaged building attest to the unnatural power of the weapon. Most tellingly of all, the human stories are told by charred fragments of clothing accompanied by the stories of the people who wore them. A child’s much beloved tricycle, buried with the child by his grieving father, tells the tragedy as strongly as the recording of a mother who describes walking every day, for years, down the usual road to work of her daughter, whose body was never found. Model of Hiroshima destroyedMessages of peace and goodwill from a plethora of world leaders provide a thimbleful of soothing balm, while just down the road, the Children’s Peace Monument tells the story of the girl who hoped that if she could make a thousand origami cranes, she might survive her A-bomb related leukaemia. She did not.

 

And yet.

Once I’ve choked back the tears and got rid of the lump in my throat, I’m more disturbed by what’s missing from the Peace Museum than by what’s in it. The problem is this: at the end of my visit, my emotions have been stirred and I’ve dutifully  signed the petition to call upon the world’s leaders to discuss nuclear weapons reductions, but I haven’t actually learned much that matters – merely a bunch of details about an event of whose horrific nature I was already utterly aware.

Children's Peace Memorial
Children’s Peace Memorial

What I wanted to learn was some insight into how the A bomb dropping came about, from the Japanese point of view: what is their view of the causes of World War II and what made things escalate to the point where the US even considered such desperate measures. And perhaps even from the American point of view: I’d have loved to see the briefing papers given to Truman on the day the decision to drop the bomb was made, or to Roosevelt when authorising the Manhattan Project.

Rather, in this museum, the start of the war was glossed over by a single sentence in a single panel, saying that “tensions arose” after the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Later events – until the bomb itself and its aftermath – get little or no attention.

I can’t help but compare this with Berlin’s Museum of German History, which devotes considerably more space to the question of how Hitler could have risen to power in the first place as it does to, say, the plight of the Germans ethnically cleansed from Pomerania after the war. I came out of the Berlin museum with a clear feeling that the Germans have taken a good, hard look in the mirror and understood the place of Hitler and World War II in their history. I did not get the equivalent impression in Hiroshima.

Saying that “this must never happen again” is, of course, the best possible starting point. But it’s not enough. The burning question is the one of how these wars happen and how the chance of them can be mitigated.

The museum is being renovated, with the new facilities due to open in 2018. Among what is promised is an exhibition floor devoted to the dangers of nuclear weapons, which may well address some of these concerns. I hope it does so. As I gaze at a clear blue sky – just like the one on 6th August 1945 from which such horrors emerged – I can hardly contain my gratitude for having been born into what is now seventy years of peace for my country. Hiroshima should be an ideal site for focusing minds on maintaining peace as best we can.

Origami cranes at Children's Peace Memorial
Origami cranes

Gai-jin view 1: bureaucracy, shrines and cedars

As soon as you hit the immigration queue, you realise that things are different in Japan: the people managing the queue are brisk, friendly and efficient: guys are moving the tapes around so that you don’t have an interminable zig-zag through empty lanes, a single girl dispatches each traveller to one of ten kiosks, checking paperwork for gross errors as she does it. The briskness and efficiency continues with the lady at the JR (Japan Rail) desk at Haneda Airport, who, in spite of limited English, sorts out our rail cards and various reservations, including getting us seated in the right places, telling us which side of the train we need to be on for Mt Fuji (not something I’d realised was an issue) and so on.

 

IMG_1575
Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district

Having said which, they need to be: this country still does bureaucracy – on real paper – in a big way. Every train reservation took several pieces of paper, innumerable stamps and a bewildering number of different screens. The railway network isn’t integrated, so reservations outside the JR East region require the use of a whole different set of processes, including timetabling printed out on an ancient tractor-fed impact printer (anyone remember those?). The banking IT isn’t exactly integrated to global standards, either: lots of places don’t take credit cards, there are fewer ATMs than any city I’ve been to for years. In Nikko, a couple of hours outside Tokyo but still a major tourist site, there appears to be only three ATMs, none of which take foreign credit cards.

But the brisk, friendly, get-things-done kind of attitude seems to pervade everyday life: the everyday virtues of politeness and kindness to strangers are continually apparent. When we asked the way to the correct platform at Tokyo’s large and confusing Shimbashi station, perish the thought that the thirty-something man we asked should merely tell us the answer: in spite of having looked in the tearing hurry that characterises most users of the Tokyo subway, he turned round and accompanied us a goodly long way to the correct ticket gate for our line change.

We were expecting the high population density in Tokyo – it’s pretty well charted knowledge, after all, and we all know that the subway at rush hour is a serious crush. But it’s other things that bring it home to you: the amazing network of canals as you arrive from Haneda are a tell-tale of land reclamation from Tokyo Bay on a large scale, and when you’re at the Edo-Tokyo museum, well out of the centre of town, you’re still on the kind of density of high-rise building that you would normally expect only in downtown city centres. And when you finally take a Shinkansen train out of the capital, the dense urbanisation continues, only slightly abated, for just about the whole of the hour or so trip to Utsonomiya.

IMG_1610We all know that Japan’s cuisine is very separate from those of the rest of the world – different flavours, super-high quality fish, etc. The striking thing we weren’t expecting was the attention to how food looks. At the kaiseki (Japanese haute cuisine) restaurant in our ryokan in Nikko, we must have used some 20-30 items of crockery each, every one carefully chosen – sometimes to match some particular seasonal theme such as, in our case, plum blossom.

This is also the country of food packaging. The sweets/biscuits/general goodies shops pack everything in individual portions (down to a single biscuit or piece of crystallised fruit) before arraying it neatly in a box so beautifully that you could hardly conceive of gift-wrapping it: special see through model boxes are provided so that you can see what you’re buying. And it’s not the factories that go for multiple packaging. When the rice course at one of our dinners had utterly defeated us (rice is typically eaten at the end of a Japanese meal, which in this case meant about the tenth course), our leftover rice dish was given to us to take away in four individual portions, each in its own tray and lovingly wrapped in four layers of cling film. (We didn’t ask, by the way, it just appeared in a bag when we paid the bill).

DSC01375Nikko epitomises some of the contrasts in the country. The town is famous for its major shrines of the Tokugawa shoguns (the first of whom, Ieyasu, was the single most important figure in making Japan into the single country that it remains today). The Tokugawa shrines and temples are in a sort of Japanese baroque – gigantically ornamented to the point where it’s quite hard to get your head round the sensory overload of different themes and motifs. And – on a holiday week end, at least – they are packed rigid with visitors. It’s all very well organised, but Buddhist calm and Ieyasu’s own rather austere-sounding personality are very much submerged in the throng.

DSC01389But step just a few yards off the beaten track and the world changes. In the blink of an eye, you find yourself in the utter serenity and clear air of the mountain cedar forests; as you tread the well tended path through giant, ancient trees, you pass ancient shrines which don’t attract the big restoration funds: there might be a single brazier of incense burning, but the tiny stone buddhas with fractured limbs have not been tended. Yet amazing carvings can await you, and these are places of deep spiritual calm.

Back at the ryokan, the onsen bath is utterly seductive: a tub with continually circulating hot water, the perfect way to soothe limbs aching from a day’s hiking on mountain paths. There’s plenty of ritual attached – as in all Japanese things, there’s a precise schema of what order you’re supposed to do everything in – but the ritual works. In one of the busiest, most crowded countries on the planet, we finish the day more relaxed than I can remember.

Three questions you should ask your cloud-based software provider

Back in the day, if you were a software company pitching to investors, the first questions they asked you were much the ones you might expect: your turnover, margins, how many customers you have and so on. Smarter investors asked about things like retention rates and cost of customer acquisition. Around 2005 or so, all that changed: the question at the top of the list became “What’s your SaaS strategy?” A couple of years later, that morphed into “What’s your Cloud strategy?”

A few years later, I run a business which is small (9 employees) but complex (multi-currency, multi-lingual, multi-country). And indeed, pretty much everything that isn’t on our own server is run in the cloud: I finally moved our accounting system from Intuit’s Quickbooks desktop to Quickbooks Online eighteen months ago.

The move to Online has resulted in some small wins. The main one is that I don’t have to run a Windows Virtual Machine any more (I run Macs because I develop software and the tools require a Unix-family operating system). And it’s occasionally but infrequently useful to be able to get some of the accounts done at home in the evening. But the truth is that most of the product works very similarly and, broadly speaking, going cloud hasn’t affected things much either way.

Except that I’m now terrified. For three reasons.

What happens, it’s fair to ask,  if I do something really stupid with a transaction – of the sort that can’t be reversed. I’m accident-prone, after all, like anyone else. On the desktop product, it was easy to deal with: I would simply have reverted to the previous night’s or previous month’s backup and re-input a bunch of transactions. On the online product, backup and restore isn’t an option that’s provided. This isn’t unique to Intuit, by the way – the norm seems to be that most cloud vendors simply don’t offer this.

Lest you think this is unlikely to happen, I can tell you that when you advance payroll a month, there’s a large warning saying “This cannot be undone”: any mistakes and you’re toast. And when I have needed to work around bugs or omissions in Quickbooks, their technical support people have recommended with gay abandon that I do things that affect transactions in now-closed periods (i.e. would potentially make my VAT return illegal).

The next question for your vendor concerns their attitude to bugs. Not “technical support issues,” not “stray transactions that can be corrected,” but bugs – the real thing, where the system isn’t working. Perhaps intermittently, and perhaps just on your database. In desktop days, you had the option to simply not upgrade. Or to roll back an upgrade if it all went pear-shaped. In cloud days, you don’t. You really, really want your vendor to be completely committed to doing whatever it takes to bring you back on-line and running. And the truth is, these vendors are not. A missing feature deep in the multi-currency handling of Quickbooks Online kept my ledgers out of balance for most of a year until someone clever in Intuit figured out a workaround. Problems with my online banking interface are approaching their second birthday: the software worked fine when I evaluated it; two months in, Intuit deployed a rewrite which broke it. And there is no sign of them showing any commitment to getting it fixed: they work on it for a bit, and then give up. Fortunately, it’s only a time waster rather than a complete showstopper: because remember, I don’t have data portability of any viable sort. I have no easy way of exporting my data such that I could rapidly start again with another vendor.

The scariest problem (albeit the least frequent) is what happens if you or a vendor messes up your login credentials. You can all imagine the situation: you try to log in one morning and you get told that one of your passwords is wrong, or the software asks you to re-authenticate using one of your “memorable phrases,” and your phrase turns out to be less memorable than you thought.

With one of my cloud service vendors, that’s just what happened: I got locked out of certain areas of my account, and the vendor refused point blank to take the required steps to re-authenticate me. I was unable to satisfy them with the data they required in their online form, most probably because I couldn’t remember the month and year in which I originally joined the service, around a decade earlier, or which of my many email addresses I used at the time – but I can’t be sure.

And no, this wasn’t a small, fly-by-night operator: this was Microsoft. I actually had to stop using my old account (which still exists, by the way: they are unable/unwilling to delete it) and open a new one. Now losing a Skype account wasn’t the end of the world. I shudder to think how I would deal with the situation if this happened to my accounting system, or web host, or Gmail.

And that, by the way, is without considering the possibility of criminal malice: although, thank goodness, I’ve never personally had my identity stolen, I’ve watched it happen to one of my employees (who had a common first name and whose surname was Smith, which didn’t help) and I can assure you that it was a truly horrific experience.

So before you dive into the Cloud, here are three questions you should ask:

  1. What strategy do you support for me to back up and restore my data? (And while we’re on the subject, if I wish to move my data to another provider, how is that supported).
  2. If I hit a bug in my installation, what guarantees and timescales can you provide me that you will (a) provide a fix to get me up and running, and (b) fix the problem permanently?
  3. What, if any, data do you require me to hold to guarantee that, in the event of my being denied access to the system (whether because of identity theft or just my own forgetfulness), you will accept or replace my user credentials ?

The chances are that the answers to these will be something along the lines of (1) you don’t need to back up your data because we guarantee you 99.999% uptime; (2) our technical support team is available to help you 24/7 but we don’t provide specific guarantees and (3) we don’t publish security-sensitive information of this sort.  If they are and you’re a large organisation, you will need to write a set of large, ugly items into your corporate risk register.

Or, if you’re a small business, just lose some sleep.

Hello, from Polything

I’m lucky enough that writing is part of my job description. But on Bachtrack, I get to write strictly about opera and classical music. This blog is for all the other stuff: politics, software, business, cooking, the general randomness of living in London and anything else that I presume to think someone might want to bother reading.

The title was as close as I could get to “other stuff”, which someone else has already registered. I hope you enjoy it.

For tech and design heads, this is my first go with WordPress. Bear with me.

David