UK Government centralises ethical decision making (no, really)

[Jubal]

So here's an article on this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-boycott-local-councils-public-bodies-and-student-unions-to-be-banned-from-shunning-israeli-a6874006.html

A lot of the implications of this aren't made clear in the article, because they're mainly reporting the Israel angle which is how the government are selling this. The key paragraph in the report is this:

Under the new rules all contracting authorities including local councils, quangos and universities which receive the majority of their funding from the Government will lose the freedom to take ethical decisions about whom they purchase goods and services from. The only exemption will be UK-wide sanctions decided by the Government in Westminster. Government sources said the ban could also apply to student union boycotts but added this was a “grey area”.

So basically the only people now allowed to make ethical decisions in the state sector are the government. Universities and local councils aren't even supposed to be primarily responsible to the government, so this is a fairly large increase in state power. It's not that public sector boycotts can't happen - it's that they'll be centrally controlled and rolled out to everywhere by Westminster, which I strongly dislike. The other vital thing to note is that it doesn't just cover Israel or even countries of origin, it seems to be covering companies as well which is a far larger area. It's unclear as year whether this will apply to procurement or to investment as well - if the latter, it could for example end up banning NHS trusts from refusing to invest in the tobacco industry and other oddities like that. Certainly the legislation as given at the moment would have prevented boycott action against, for example, the apartheid regime in South Africa.

There's also a parliamentary petition being organised by a person who may be familiar to some of you, if you feel strongly enough about it to sign.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/121704

[Clockwork]

portugal Corbyn, he's the worst form of scum.


"-lose the freedom to take ethical decisions about whom they purchase goods and services from. The only exemption will be UK-wide sanctions decided by the Government in Westminster."


Not only is that sentence awful but the article misses out on the importance of what it's trying to say. The government is still banning businesses they fund from things like sweatshops and actually harmful working environments that's the kind of thing Westminster will be banning. Making the state owned businesses practice the best kind of business they can (within reason), hell yeah I'm in favour of that. If you want to make a stand against something, do it with your own money in your own business.


If there was a petition against petitions against this then I'd sign that.


EDIT: And the independent is so portugaling anti-semitic it's ridiculous.

[Jubal]

OK, a few points here

- Corbyn doesn't really come into this tbh? Confused.
- The state does not own universities and it does not own local government. I'm not sure it technically owns quangos either. It's vital in a democratic society that universities maintain their operational independence from government, because they're precisely the people we need to be scrutinising what government is doing a lot of the time. This move is a direct attack on that principle. Secondly, local government is not accountable to Westminster, it's accountable to its electorate. Again, operational independence principles should apply, or we may as well abolish local democracy altogether and run everything out of Westminster. If you're going to reduce local government to a question of managerialism rather than letting them make their own spending decisions, then there's literally no point in running it democratically any more.
- You refer to state-owned "businesses", but none of the things discussed here are businesses.
- This measure doesn't force them to do the best work they can, it restricts their ability to do that by making it such that if Westminster hasn't said it, they can't do it. I don't think government ministers, regardless of party, actually necessarily have a better ability to deal with procurement than people on the ground, and this could be extremely damaging because unless ministers do act, very regularly, on this then the incentives for ethical business will dramatically go downhill. And to be honest, if you think this government is likely to produce a stringent set of national procurement guidelines that will include the freedom to boycott companies that are destroying the environment internationally, or arms dealers, then I'm not sure we're living on the same planet.
- In terms of BDS and Israel: I generally oppose BDS, I don't think it's a productive contribution to the situation, if anything it's increasing Israel's siege mentality which makes it less likely that the boycotters will achieve their goal of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank. I also think that Israel is very much singled out in this regard compared to other countries with equally poor or considerably worse records on human rights and other issues. However, I'm not sure that banning councils from boycotting West Bank products is going to decrease anti-Semitic sentiment in the UK, it's attacking symptom (which makes relatively little difference numerically) rather than cause. Also, as I've said, this is not just about BDS/Israel. This stops institutions boycotting goods from the Saudis, or from many other equally horrendous regimes.

Speaking for myself I am (more or less) an academic, in that I'm a member of a university who's primarily doing research. The idea that my institution should be forced to procure without ethical considerations by the government is . The government funds universities because we provide a public good in the research that we do; it does not fund us to be an arm of the state, nor should it. If bodies of researchers - including most of the people who are building our technological future and analysing policy impacts in the present - are not allowed to make political statements in how we procure and how we invest, what kind of a free society is that?

Similarly, I (like everyone else) am a local council elector. I want to be able to actually get my local council to act in a way that I see as ethical, and that may well include, for example, refusing to further enrich the dictatorial autocrats of the Saudi royal family, and it could certainly include thinking when a company is given a contract about whether their record elsewhere is morally, rather than just fiscally, worthy of rewarding with taxpayers' money. Why should the rights of local electors to decide what their councils do be taken away? As local taxpayers that IS our money, and by electing councillors we're deciding how it should be spent.

[Clockwork]

Corbyn is just a alpaca. He is just the worst thing to happen to British politics since Cromwell. Doesn't have to be relevant.


Uni's are given a ton of money by the government apart from like three or something. Money which is not repaid as a loan, just given. How is it fair that uni's can decide to boycott with tax money? It's also nothing to do with freedom. Freedom isn't specifically anti-restriction, the government has freedom to give uni's money and also to say 'don't discriminate'. With that the uni's then have the freedom to either take the money and abide by the limitations or to not take it. They do have the power to become private if they want to. As for quangos, they're so inexorably linked with the government surely non-discrimination should be in place anyway?

You refer to state-owned "businesses", but none of the things discussed are businesses"

I did make a mistake of adding an extra 'owned', it should have read 'state business practices'. I rewrote that sentence a lot of times, each time veering further from the point until I deleted it all and reeled it in like a giant marlin that turns into a minnow.I probably made the last post too short however so, to add to what I said before 'business practices' is what's being changed (obviously, hear me out a sec) and the institutions being dealt with are businesses, not like a shop or whatever but something that provides a good/service like education or council'ing.


I don't know how you figure this restricts them. It requires that they work smarter, it's not like Westminster have a list of people you can work with and then no to everyone else. It'll be the reverse. I think they will say you have to boycott 'x' businesses who do 'x' illegal things and the commission that governs it will be asked daily by these institutions it affects to allow them to boycott something else. I doubt very much that this is practical not that it isn't good.


Are you saying that right now there are incentives to ethically conduct business that will be taken away? I don't see that anywhere here at all.


Finally - Local government is representative of a portion of a portion of a type of people in an area who probably even then don't agree on what constitutes ethical business. Having a flat, standard rule across the country is way more fair than a vocal minority having their way just because most people don't care enough to form a counter complaint. It's not that they're not needed or that the views of so few don't matter at all but it's like twitter, the people on twitter may have been shocked when lib dems didn't get into power last general election and the Conservatives did when most of the twitter polls showed libs way ahead. One group of people make a lot of noise and bluster over something that the more conservatively minded get along with. Again, not bashing anyone's anything just...y'know.

[Jubal]

Not going to spend too long on this because let's be honest, we're not going to agree anytime fast! You seem to be under the impression that the only thing any taxpayer ever wants ever from their tax money is for it to be spent at maximum "efficiency" to gain a service or product as cheaply as possible, regardless of moral considerations; I don't think that's necessarily true, nor do I think it's necessarily a good way of achieving policy objectives. I certainly don't see universities and councils as businesses.

Uni's are given on average under a third of their income in central funding, yet the government is proposing to restrict how we spend all of our money. How is that reasonable? Indeed, by the same token students should have more say in how a Uni spends it money than the government does, and I don't see anyone advocating to put students in charge of deciding the morality of procurement policies. As a student, I'm certainly paying a lot more into my uni than the average Conservative voter is, so if we're bringing it down to a question of funding then I should surely be able to demand more say than they get.

As for incentives - of course there are incentives. The investment and procurement portfolios of local government are huge, and divestment and ethical procurement policies have been an increasing part of that in the last few years. For companies to want to keep the business of these bodies and councils they are, increasingly, needing to make the pitch not only that they are able to do a job for minimal cost but that their business practices are in keeping with the ethics of the people they are working for. And that's surely a perfectly reasonable thing in a free market, it's people competing to be the company that institutions most want to buy from or invest in.

As for local government, sure, but you could say the same about Westminster, the Tories are making these decisions with only a bit over 1/3 support and that's out of the 2/3 of people who actually vote. Hell, according to some calculations I did recently the Lords is arguably more representative of the parties people voted for than the Commons. Again - if you're going to do that to local government, you may as well just abolish local government. Personally I'd just rather not have that power vested in Westminster; I mean, if the economy tanks again and the Tories lose ground as a result, would you really be happy to see Jez Corbyn making the calls on national-level boycotts that would be instantly rolled out to every council and university?

[Clockwork]

I'm not under that impression. What I do believe is that discriminating business based on the prejudices of some people who don't represent the whole is unfair and anti-free market.


The government is not restricting, it's the side that wants to remove self-imposed restrictions based on prejudice. It's restricting public institutions ability to be prejudice, granted.


There aren't incentives to conduct business within a few peoples specific moral compass. Investment and procurement portfolios look better if you make smarter decisions rather than only buy from people you like. Ethical procurement policies are usually not buying from poor countries at low cost because they need what business they get and instead giving them a fair shake, doesn't usually include 'don't buy from Jews, Hispanics or Pygmies'. (https://www.ungm.org/Areas/Public/pph/ch02s03.html)


I do say that, I'd like compulsory voting tbh but more than that I'd like informed compulsory voting so people know what they're voting for. The current state of things is a sham. Local government is needed to represent other things than just procurement. I would not be happy to see Corbyn until he's six feet under. Even then I wouldn't be happy. But that's just me. Supposing someone I disagreed with did get into power and boycotted america or some other such moral stance, I'd have done my bit already by voting against them. Sometimes you just lose.