In which I get a little Marxist in the cause of minimum government

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This is quite a difficult thing for me to write - partly because I'm stepping out from the areas where I'm comfortable with my knowledge but also because it challenges a more or less universal misunderstanding. And it begins with this quote from Engels:

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” it withers away.

Setting to one side the vast (and largely incomprehensible) corpus of Marxist thinking, it strikes me that there is nothing to disagree with in the idea that the state will become superfluous. And those of the right (or at least the freedom-loving bit of the right) should share the objective - or is it the consequence - of Marxism.

Now I take the view that Marx's historical determinism - that the process from the hypothetical cave to a free socialist life is inevitable - is a load of nonsense. But this doesn't negate the ambition to which Engels alludes - that a perfectly just society would not need government. It is an admirable liberal aim.

The problem - and all the disagreement - comes from the route that Marxists (or rather 'communists', which I understand is a slightly different thing) choose to reach the shared objective of a free society, by which I mean one that does not require governing. Here's another Engels quote:

At the same time we have always held that in order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the state and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the capitalist class and re-organise society.

The contradiction - an acknowledged contradiction - here is that in order to create a world free of the oppression of government it is necessary to seize control of government and through those means 'oppress' any people or organisations ('the capitalist class' is a conveniently broad concept) that stand between today's society and that perfectly just society we desire.

The problem here isn't that Marx's ideas were wrong but that the programme developed with Engels and operationalised by Lenin, Mao and others was wrong. This was a failure of strategy not a mistaken ambition - if we agree that, in part, this ambition is a just society free from the inevitable oppression that comes with government.

What is most bizarre however isn't that some people still adhere to the failed prescription of Engels (although this is somewhat odd) but that Marxists make common cause with Fabian Socialists, who had - and have - a very different view of the state. Here's Mark Bevir:

Fabian economic theories, unlike those of the Marxists, almost required their adherents to call for an interventionist state. The Fabians believed that rents could not be eliminated since they arose from the variable productivity of different pieces of land and capital.  The only solution was for the state to collect rent and use it for the collective good.

We have -on "the left" as we like to call it - an alliance between people whose end game is a free society without government and those who, in a manner reminiscent of Plato's 'guardians', believe that a (courageous) state is necessary for the just society to operate. It seems to me that Marxists are making common cause with people whose ideology is not simply different but diametrically opposed to what they believe. Those who want Marx's end game (and who could argue with that - other than Fascists and Fabians) need to make common cause with people who share the same broad objective but embrace a different strategy, who think making government smaller now makes more sense than trusting to those controlling government rejecting power.

Clinging to a failed strategy is daft. Yet that is what many on the Marxist left are doing - clutching to a belief that controlling the state is what matters rather than joining with those who wish to see a smaller state now. The principles of cooperation, collaboration and coproduction that Marxists applaud are shared but the means to the end are not.

I may misunderstand Marx here, in which case tear what I say to shreds, but if a free, just society is the end - and surely it is - then Marxists, rather than sneering at libertarians, Randians and anarcho-capitalists, should spot the shared ground and see that a society where the state directs or controls over half of human activity is not the sunlit uplands that Marx imagined.

Or maybe not...

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New Charity Commission boss starts well...

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There has been a deal of debate about the funding of charities and the extent to which too many are too dependent and too close to the state. And William Shawcross, the new Charity Commission Chairman has picked this up:

Some charities risk becoming too dependent on the state, the new chair of the Charity Commission has warned, saying there needs to be debate on whether the charity register should make clear how an organisation is funded.

And Shawcross pointed us at how the public perceives charity:

He suggested that some charities risk becoming too dependent on the state, adding that most members of the public would say a charity was an organisation funded by private donations not public funds.

A reminder that the legal definition of charity - the purposes of the organisation - is very different from the public perception.

A big - and welcome - contrast with the previous Chair, I feel.

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“...it’s not a matter of whether you win or lose but how you place the blame”

 

I recall a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon that took the rise out of an old saw with:

“...it’s not a matter of whether you win or lose but how you place the blame”

We all smiled but underneath this pleasure at a little witticism lies a darker truth – we do, all of us, seek to lay the blame somewhere other than on ourselves. And with this goes our pleasure – that schadenfreude – at going over past failings so as to point the finger of condemnation, to lay the blame. Such passing of responsibility’s buck has become not only institutionalised but expensive.

The Saville report's numbers are their own indictment – 434 days in session, 12 years from inception to publication, a £191m budget, tens of millions of words and finally a retail price of £572.

It’s not for me to enquire whether this enquiry provided catharsis for those involved or merely a bully pulpit for republicanism but merely for us to appreciate that the blame game now sits at the core of how we behave. Everywhere we look people seek excuses for this mistakes, faults and failings – we have become a nation of Heinz Kiosks crying at every opportunity: “we are all guilty”.

We have become dependent rather than free, supplicants to the state in all its forms and ready to play a fine hand of excuses – race, sex, social upbringing, drink, drugs, peer pressure – whenever something goes wrong. We are no longer prepared – unless forced by authority – to accept personal responsibility for our lives and how we live them.

For the conservative this is a problem – personal responsibility is central to what we believe. Yet human instinct seems to draw us away from accepting that responsibility – the first response of the sales clerk or shop assistant is seldom to apologise. More usually it is to seek excuse – to explain why the product or service failed. As if we care about how short staffed they are or how the supplier let them down or whether they were ill - that is their problem, not mine. It is their responsibility.

The problem is that this culture of dependence and supplication leads us to an expectation that our problems will be resolved by others – parents, employer and, most commonly, the government. The state must act to “create jobs”, to “protect families”, to “promote well-being” – to lay down “solutions” to all the problems of our lives. And when there’s a problem – new or old – there’s a lobby group on hand and opposition politicians ready and waiting to call for action, for “something to be done”.

There are two big problems with this dependence – the first is that is creates a class of folk dependent on the government. Either because they – in ever larger numbers – work for that government or because they are financially dependent on the handouts of that government (rather ironically called “benefits”). But there is a second problem, more insidious yet – the rejection by so many of any responsibility for ordering their lives divides society.

The big divide in western societies is no longer between rich and poor, nor is it between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes, the big schism is between the dependent and the independent. Between those who, most of the time, act independently of government and those who depend on the state. The growth of the latter – of the state-dependent – squeezes out private action and initiative, stifles innovation. Why get involved, why innovate when there is a benign state to care for us? I recall my mother bemoaning how difficult it was to recruit volunteers for the day centre – the most common reason for rejection: “that’s the council’s job”.

The principle of responsibility has become so compromised that it results in injustice:

Reggie Bush is a good case in point. Playing for the University of Southern California, he won the 2005 Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding college football player in the USA, while his team won the national championship. The results of an NCAA investigation, however, found that Bush knowingly broke the rules by allowing a sports agent hoping to represent him someday to provide free housing for his parents. Although Bush might have to return some awards, he is safe and sound as a very well paid professional football player. His coach at the time of his violations, Pete Carroll, is now coaching the Seattle Seahawks professional football team and will not be punished. The penalties go to the school, USC, and its current football players who will be barred from bowl games for a couple of years. The people most responsible for the violation -- Bush and his coaches -- go mostly unpunished.

And our rejection of personal responsibility has led to a veritable frenzy of lawyers scrapping over the opportunity to extract value from blaming someone else – personal injury claims, employment tribunals, class action cases against smoking or drinking and a host of other lucrative sources of legal business. For sure, I know the defence – sometimes it really is someone else’s fault – but we have reached a stage where the first response of some to a trip or a bump is to ring the lawyer, to lay the blame on some other poor fellow. “Ah, but the insurance will pay” is the cry – as if the insurance company owns a special breed of money tree! And when the premiums rise there’s a lobby on hand to call for government action, for regulation.

As a conservative, I believe I have a primary duty to myself, to my family and to my neighbours. This duty is not discharged by passing across responsibility to government in return for a tax bill. It is discharged by me taking responsibility for my life, for all the crisis and chaos, for all the pleasure and excitement, for all the ups and downs. It is discharged by me doing the right thing by my family, my friends and my neighbours. There is no government in this, no regulation, no lawyers, no church, no god – just me and my responsibility. As Robert Heinlein put it:

I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

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Ed Miliband, flat-earther

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I try hard to find some semblance of consistency, of common-sense within what passes for policy for the Labour Party but as ever it is notable by its absence. Take growth - here's Ed Miliband:

Growth, he said, was the current "missing ingredient"

Let's grant him that observation. But what part of an effective growth strategy involves tax rises? How can you believe that - when the problem is that people have too little to spend and that there's too little business investment - the right approach is to take more money off people?

If the problem isn't the need for "austerity" but the need for "growth" the solution isn't - and will never be - to make sure that people have less money. Yet this is exactly and precisely what the Labour Party - not to mention assorted socialists across Europe - are proposing.

A brave left-wing leader would reject the "government can fix it" solution and argue for something different - perhaps a return to mutualism and co-operation, maybe flexible employment laws and a Swedish or German approach to minimum wages or even (inspired by a re-reading of Thomas Paine) the embracing of free trade in finance and food.

But instead Ed Miliband joins the flat-earthers - visiting a dreadful deception on people by claiming that, contrary to truth, there is no need for austerity, that there is no recession and that we can carry on blithely spending other people's (and our grandchildrens') money on grand schemes, central planning and on the sustaining of a vast bureaucracy.

No government - right, left, centre, socialist, liberal, rainbow coalition - ever created growth. All government does is spend money - consume. People on the left rant and rave about out "consumerist" society but never recognise that the biggest and most indulgent consumer - the monster devouring ever more scarce resource - is not the rich banker or the flashy football star but their beloved state.

Once - as is now the case right across Europe - the state sucks up more than half what other people earn, the dire, inevitable end is in sight. Half of the state's spending is "nice to have" rather than essential to the nation's smooth operation. Yet people like Miliband persist with this bizarre belief that it will be OK is we just take even more away from those who earn it and give it to those who don't.

There is a problem and it is a problem of regulation, of the establishment, of selfishness.

The selfishness of a bloated state.

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Are we really a Christian country?

Barely a week passes without the words appearing somewhere, uttered by a politician or, more likely, by an ageing Anglican clergyman...

“...Britain is a Christian country!”

This cry – used down the ages to exclude Jews and, more recently, to marginalise Muslims – may have been true once but I do not believe that we can make that claim any more. But first to understand the claim.

In one respect the argument is about numbers – two-thirds of the population express their identity as Christian so we are, ipso facto, a Christian nation. We still grant a privileged position to representatives of the protestant hierarchy – not just seats in the House of Lords but an almost divine right to airtime wherein to pontificate about the issues of the day.

And these bishops are listened to, just as the local vicar gets a hearing that you as just a bloke in the village won’t get. The established church as an institution also exercises power through its secular role as one of the nation’s two or three biggest landowners. Wherever we look we see evidence of the worldly presence of the church and every day we hear that church express its worldly power.

However, like other institutions (the political parties spring to mind), the church is all fur coat and no knickers. Those self-identifying Christians are little better than agnostics – only about 5% of the population turn out to the established church’s weekly offering. This is little different to that rather more secular religion- association football.

These grand, purple-robed men (and maybe women in a year or so) are sustained by a vast property holding not by the support of the populace. Indeed the public’s general view of religion is to mutter something about “good men” and then shrug. Our religion has declined to the symbols and sounds of a forgotten faith – we sing carols, get the vicar to conduct rites of passage and pay no attention at all to the message.

Our Christianity is hard to distinguish from believing in fairies, ghosts or boggarts. That hard-nosed faith founded in the idea of grace and personal salvation has been replaced by a mushy set of superstitions.

 “Maybe there’s a god and we were told something about Jesus at school. I like those hymns. Did I tell you about the clairvoyant I went to at the pub?”

I do not make these observations in some sort of skeptical rapture – the skeptics like Dawkins are ghastly and ignorant in their denial of metaphysics. I wish simply to point out that we are an agnostic place, we like the comfort blanket of the church (especially when it’s a beautiful piece of gothic splendour or Norman survival) but we do not see that the church offers us anything beyond that comfort.

So while I have no beef with faith schools and see the obsessing about creation that typifies atheist debate as largely an irrelevance, I do not think that we’re a Christian country. I don’t believe that Christians deserve any special treatment – any more than I believe that so-called “faith leaders” should be afforded a special place or privileged access to power.

We should be gently moving the Church of England towards the retirement home. Not some drastic, painful and purposeless disestablishment but a gradual recognition that priests have no more rights to influence than publicans.  Religion will never go away – as Gordon Dickson observed in the Dorsai trilogy, part of man’s psyche is a preference for certainty, order and the direction of a god. But as someone once said, the work of the state is no business of god’s:

“And Jesus answering, said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's: and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him.” (Mark 12:17)

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They say Caesar was ambitious...but did the state fund his party?

It has been a bad week for my love of politics and all who sail in her. Not for the usual, “what on earth are they on about now” stuff but for two other reasons:

1. A “draft” report proposes the state funding of political parties
2. I went to the cinema - with anticipation – to watch “Ides of March”

The first of these two things makes me angry and the second depressed. And it all comes back to the perennial cynicism about the process of politics – the seeming inevitability that everyone is there for personal advancement, that no one is honourable and that only the state can be relied on.

The report proposes:

The cash, worth up to £100 million over a five-year parliament, would be used to compensate parties for a loss of income as a result of a £50,000 cap on individual donations, it was reportedly proposed.

The Conservatives are expected to lose out from the cap, arguing that it will result in the party losing up to a third of its income from donors.

But the Liberal Democrats have much to gain from the new arrangements as they have less independent income than the other two parties.

Note here the automatic attention to winners and losers under such a system. There isn’t any discussion as to whether the taxpayer should be paying for the running of political parties. Which brings us to the justification for the state taking over – that political parties can be bought and sold by wealthy individuals.  After all, the Labour Party isn’t really any bigger than, say, Manchester City or Chelsea and very rich folk bought them up!

This rather brings me to the “Ides of March” (in which Caesar is corrupted and compromised rather than simply stabbed a few times) and the manner of American politics. We are used to the characterisation of American politics as dominated by the money – much larger sums than we see in Britain – and take the cynicism of films like “Ides of March” as given even when we don’t fully understand the actual processes of Yankee politics.

The problem is that the bureaucrats employed by the political elite to look at the funding of the political elite are not going to ask the big question. So I will:

In a country where we elect an individual to represent us (we call that person an MP, in the USA it’s a congressman, senator or president) why is it felt necessary to institutionalise party politics?

That is what state funding brings you – a rigid, unchanging and sterile system controlled by faceless party apparatchiks. Nobody is likely to propose a system whereby – for example – national, party-focused campaigns are forbidden during election times and all the money is constrained within the limits set by the Electoral Commission for spending in a local constituency.

Such an approach has two advantages – firstly the campaign is conducted locally rather than on the back of a sloganised, sound bite ridden, national campaign; and secondly the possibility for party capture by the wealthy is reduced since campaigning is affordable locally. However, this rather hobbles the central party machines – which explains why it’s never proposed by those given their paid job by the political elite.

It seems depressingly inevitable that the party bosses will get their state funding:

Near the top of the tottering pile in the government's too-difficult tray lurks the question of paying for politics. From time to time another committee is sent off, like Noah's dove, to search for a solution that will be both acceptable to the public and reasonably equitable to the parties. In the next few weeks the latest attempt at an answer will be revealed. As we report today, some degree of state funding will be part of the mix. 

And as a result the corrupting Westminster bubble will no longer be a force of nature but will be an institution of the state.

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Charity isn't independent so long as it takes the government's cash...

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It may be the effect of opposition but Labour folk are keen to see the "third sector" distance itself from government. Here's the fresh new MP for Wigan:

"The Labour government treated the third sector like a third arm of the state and I was troubled by that," she said. "I thought it was problematic. Delivering government services means you have to agree with the government about how those services should be run."

As they say, Lisa, 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'!

Despite this the sector seems ever more conflicted over its relationship with government - sure, charities, social enterprises and such want to be 'independent' but they also seem to be firmly attached to the teat of public money. You cannot have it both ways - you can't take the government's money and then campaign against that government's policies.

So if you want an independent voice of advocacy on behalf of your beneficiaries then stop taking the government's cash, stop being sub-contractors to the state and raise your money privately from people who actually support your aims. Simple really!

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Untouchable...

Not surprisingly, many from the left are praising Peter Oborne’s latest grumble about the corruption of Britain’s business, political and social elite – a continuation of his theme of the last several years:

Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.

The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.

Oborne’s thesis is that we face a moral crisis rather than an economic or political crisis – this suits the left’s world view since it suggests the need for moral leadership. Indeed left wing leaders of the past have taken the same position as Oborne – that what we need is a remaking of man rather than a reinvention of the state. It is part of socialism’s essence that man is perfectible and that leaders are needed to direct that programme – to manage the moral reformation.

But all those people Oborne scourges – fiddling MPs, millionaires taking their money overseas to reduce their tax burden and feral youth smashing and looting in London – are they not acting as rational individuals? Or are they swept along into some immoral maelstrom created by our leaders’ failures?

Unlike Oborne – and unlike the left – I reject the idea of man’s perfectibility. Or indeed that we are in need of a “moral reformation” – it is an economic and political reformation we require, a change to the order of things. It is not moral decadence that links the powerful to the rioter but a belief that they are untouchable, that the normal rules of society do not apply.

So rather than rant about the moral failings of such powerful men, we should instead ask how they might be made touchable – subject to the mores of England rather than to the decadent glitter of elite society. And the answer to that – in as much as we can ever free the world from corruption – rests in removing power not in moral lectures.

In my days as a marketer I used to describe the point and purpose of marketing as being the securing of monopoly – markets in a state of equilibrium are not profit-making so we must create dysfunction so as to achieve our business aims. Much of marketing – the bit condemned by Naomi Klein – is directed towards securing a monopoly of attention in the individual consumer’s mind. This is what all that advertising, all those carefully crafted brands are for – not selling you stuff but making sure my stuff is what you think of first.

But think for a second or two – if our marketing investment is directed to the creation of a monopoly we control, is it not quicker and probably cheaper simply to bribe the state into giving us that monopoly? Rather than directing our limited marketing resource towards the tricky business of building brand equity, we can influence politicians, newspaper editors, bureaucrats and broadcasters so they see the evident rightness of fixing the market in our favour.

It is this marketing effort that Oborne is attacking – because governments have assumed the power to interfere in, limit and even control important markets, the people making money from those markets are both the creatures and the controllers of government. It is a symbiosis of corruption, a cartel against the interests of the ordinary man. So when those on the left rail about how the banks dragged down the economy, they are right. And when their right-wing counterpoints blame government, taxation and regulation they too are right since that regulation, taxation and governance has been conducted in co-operation with those very bankers.

And when we peek a little further into this, we find other groups engaged in the system protecting and promoting their especial monopolies – in healthcare, in education, in the production and distribution of food and in the making of guns, planes and bombs. We see the same monopoly and self-interest prevail in the law, in accountancy and even in sport – rather than fight fair in a free, competitive market, the businesses, trade unions and professional bodies prefer to get government to fix the rules.

The reformation is simple – we should neuter government, take away from it the power to fix markets in the interests of those with the best lobbyists and biggest bribes. It is the overweening state that created the sinful world Oborne describes not some wider moral malaise.

The solution is in our hands. We probably won’t take it.

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A loud celebration of being right wing...

Disraeli - a great right winger!

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few. (Benjamin Disraeli)

A while back I penned a little joyful celebration of being “Tory Scum”:

For me, yelling “Tory Scum, Here We Come” is an admission once again of socialism’s defeat. There is no rational, intelligent argument in this dystopic, dehumanising creed’s favour so its advocates must resort to insult – to hurling abuse, to fear, aggression and destruction as a substitute for debate and discussion.

Socialism died in 1989 – us “Tory Scum” were proved right. And when I hear it now, I smile.

I forgot, in writing this, that there is a wider problem for the failure that is Labour – the need to condemn its enemy, anyone who disagrees with the numbing, controlling, interfering, mistrusting and uncaring “democratic socialism”. And the way this is done is – along with thinking it cool to attack people personally for believing in free markets and independence – to use the dread term “right wing”. Especially when that term can link free marketer libertarians with state-loving fascists.

The problems with this position are two-fold – firstly, it represents an act of desperation by social democrats. The term “right wing” represents (in the mind of the social democrat) all that is bad an evil – Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, these are the incarnate representatives of what it means to right wing. And it is but a short journey from not actually supporting social democracy to building gas chambers or machine gunning children.

Secondly – and most importantly – Fascism, in whatever incarnation we chose, is not right-wing but is the bastard child of Fabian social democracy. Yes the social democracy was corrupted, forced into a marriage with militarism (rather as we see with Castro, with Ortega and with Chavez) and made to serve aggressive nationalism. But, in the end, it is socialism – the idea that the state could perfect man – that sits in the middle of fascism. No observer free from the left’s prejudice could describe National Socialism as ‘right wing’.

So let us rescue being right wing from this corrupted view of the left wing commentariat, let us set out what is really means to be right wing:

·         For the right “caring” doesn’t mean raising taxes from the relatively poor, paying them to middle class professionals who then ‘care’ for the poor. Caring is something we do personally – it is an individual act, done without looking to a nice salary and an index-linked public pension. Right wingers do not view charity as a sin

·         Right wing people seek out independence and self-reliance – our aspiration is to provide for ourselves, to care (that word again) for our families, to look out for our friends and to pay our way in the world without recourse to the support of the state

·         As right wingers we do not see the words ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ as problematic or slippery  terms only salvageable through the appending of the word ‘social’ – these words are central of belief that, left to their own devices, people will take advantage of the market’s natural laws to better themselves and, in doing so, better society

·         Right wing people recognise the importance of place – not as something to be managed, let alone created, by the agents of government but as the mud on our boots, the soil in which we have settled and grown strong. And the right to own that place – to be able to use our property as we see fit – is essential to that understanding. Place without private property is serfdom

·         And lastly those of us on the right doubt and question the role and purpose of government. It is not simply to echo Ronald Reagan’s joke – the most frightening words in the English Language, “I from the government and I’m here to help”- but to believe that independence, enterprise and the busy-ness of hard work are driving betterment and that the state is, most of the time, a barrier to a better place, a better society and happier people

This is what is means to be right wing. It is to be celebrated not muttered secretly behind our hands in case some BBC executive or Guardian columnist hears and points the finger crying; "look they admit to being right wing, they must be stopped before terrible things happen".

And those terrible things? Ah yes – peace, freedom, democracy, self-reliance, independence and the ownership of place.

Whatever the Guardian and the BBC may say, whatever lies they made spread, never forget....

...being right wing is good, you’re helping save the world from the controlling state, you’re making it better, cleaner, wealthier and safer for everyone.

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Seems Robert Halfon wants the government to regulate the Internet (but only for businesses). And he's a Tory?

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Now before I go any further let’s be clear that I know little of the technical whizz-bangery that underlies on-line advertising and marketing. Indeed, it is possible – just as was the case with a previous generation of targeted marketing – that the technical possibilities get in the way of sense and good tactical thinking.

The objective of targeted market hasn’t changed – the aim is to reduce cost-per-order. That is it. There is no other justification for targeting customer and prospects. The only point is to raise the productivity of marketing activity and to improve the return on marketing investment.

Now we know how targeted advertising and marketing raises privacy concerns – indeed MPs are very keen to apply standards of data protection, data gathering and data use to private business that are ignored in the operation of public activities (and especially security and law enforcement).

So we have an EDM – a pointless motion to be sure but a statement from some MPs – about “new data protection controls to protect people against the rise in targeted advertising.” Apparently, WPP have “...profiles of up to half a billion internet users, which the motion suggests may include almost all British citizens.”

We’ll return to Big Brother Watch’s scaremongering about WPP in a minute, but first the motion:

That this House is deeply concerned that privacy is gradually being eroded by private companies using the internet to obtain personal data and selling it for commercial gain; notes that the latest problem is with WPP Group plc, the advertising firm, which claims to have built up individual profiles for half a billion internet users across the world, including allegedly almost 100 per cent. of British people; further notes that secret monitoring of internet users is already a huge issue, with data scraping and cookies monitoring people without their consent; believes an internet bill of rights is needed to guard against the growing infringement of civil liberties that are not covered by existing legislation; and further believes that the Information Commissioner lacks the powers necessary to protect personal data and has done precious little to protect our privacy in recent tests such as the Google Street View project.

Note that the MPs aren’t expressing concern about the police collecting and storing personal data, or HMRC, or DWP, of the security services or your local council. These MPs are concerned that private businesses are “secretly monitoring the internet”. This is rubbish. Utter rubbish.

Now I don’t know for sure what it is that WPP have collected but I’m pretty sure that if it does contain data on “almost 100% of British people” that will be information that you or I – or even Robert Halfon, the motion sponsor – would be able to collect without much trouble. You know the stuff – name, address, maybe a phone number, some credit history analysis and, for some, a little purchase history. Understand that this is the collecting of information that people give across freely in order to play in the Internet’s happy world.

And it makes me smile when phrases like “using the Internet to obtain personal data and selling it for commercial gain” – what on earth do these people think businesses do? And the Internet is increasingly the place to do business. So for Mr Halfon – who is a Tory and should know better – let me explain targeting.

There’s a shopkeeper who, when a customer walks into his shop, engages them in conversation. He finds out where they live, what they like to do, how many kids they have, when their birthdays are, what sort of jam they prefer and so forth. That same shopkeeper also notes what the customer buys, how much they spend and even where else they shop. And he keeps a record of this “data”.

The shopkeeper sends the kids a birthday card – perhaps with a discount off some sweets or a toy. And he makes sure he stocks the right jam, tells those who like it when there’s an offer on and introduces new offers, maybe as a result of looking at what other similar customers are buying.

Now I’m pretty sure that Mr Halfon would applaud such enterprise from a shopkeeper in his Harlow constituency. Indeed, as MPs are wont to do, he might pass comment on such initiative in the House while urging some minister to support and encourage such entrepreneurship.

But it seems that when a business does just this – gathering information about people so it might make better offers to them, design the products they need or want and reduce costs through less wasteful advertising – Mr Halfon disapproves and talks darkly of “civil liberties”. Yet there is no real difference – other than efficiency (the shopkeepers records will be far better than WPP’s ‘profiles’) – between the two activities.

There is a problem with targeting – mostly that it doesn’t work nearly as well as those selling the technology claim. And indeed the most precious information – purchase history and responsiveness to offer – isn’t something that businesses are prepared to share with their competitors. Simple address-related data has some use but as a tool for targeting is of limited value – and bluntly this is most of what WPP will have gathered.

And finally let me make an important point. I know exactly and precisely why a business wants to collect, store and use information about me. The business does this in order to improve its chances of selling something to me. I get benefit from this. That is it.

the state collects, stores and makes use of information about me for reasons of control, direction and taxation. I derive no benefit from such activity. Perhaps, rather than getting in such a flap about WPP, Mr Halfon (and the assortment of lefties who have signed his motion) might like to turn their attention to the real problem – abuse of personal data by the state.

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