Canada’s resounding victory
John Barber seems to have been so enthusiastic about reporting the Canadian Liberals’ victory in our latest federal elections that he forgot to check some of his “facts” and missed others altogether. As far as I know, Thomas Mulcair has not resigned as leader of the NDP. According to Radio Canada, his party has even encouraged him to stay on. As for the triumphant statement that the NDP has lost “all but 44 of the 95 seats it held in the last parliament”, it barely qualifies as objective reporting. The Conservatives lost 60 seats. Was that all but 99 of their previous 159 seats?
Much could have been said but wasn’t about the cost of a 78-week campaign and its toll on parties that do not enjoy the support of Big Money, such as the NDP but also the Green party and the Bloc Québécois, which did not deserve a mention by Barber.
In addition, most Canadian media have stressed that the Liberals’ victory owed much to strategic voting. “Anything but Harper” strategic voting also cost the NDP, the Greens and the Bloc large numbers of votes: all issues that have been fuelling a debate on the democratic merits of our current, winner-takes-all voting system. Wasn’t that worth mentioning?
I would have appreciated less fanfare and more analysis in this so-called analysis.
Jean-Claude Havard
Plantagenet, Ontario, Canada
MPs should fault themselves
Your leader Surveillance: Licence to pry on MPs (23 October) is a sad epitaph for modern democracy. In 800 years since Magna Carta, the great charter of English liberties forced from King John, history has come full circle. Today, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the courageous persons who exposed the lies of western leaders, are in prison or in exile.
The wrongdoers, Bush, Blair and [former Australian leader John] Howard and their advisers, are enjoying their retirement while the people of the west are losing their freedom on a daily basis as a consequence of the war.
The greatest discovery in this technological age is that you can electronically tag the whole population of a nation to monitor their communication, movement and actions in prison conditions without really keeping them in prisons.
There is no need for the British MPs to whinge about the situation they have gotten into, because they abrogated their duties to create it. It is time for the people of the free world to prepare for another Magna Carta so that a future generation can enjoy freedom.
Bill Mathew
Melbourne, Australia
Open corruption in Brazil
On first blush your front-page headline, Brazil mired in political chaos (23 October), invokes nightmarish thoughts. One imagines the collapse of the bolsa família, which leads the world in serving the children of the poor, or the return of the neoliberal looting of Brazil’s public sector and natural resources after the rule of the death-squad generals allied to the US brought Brazil into the real chaos of its history.
The chaos proclaimed here is more familiar. It is led by a bigot of the right, Eduardo Cunha. In a hard spot over charges related to a bribery scandal at state oil company Petrobras, he is spending all his energy as opposition leader attacking President Dilma Rousseff, whom prosecutors have exculpated from any charges.
Projecting all the corruption on to the Workers’ party president has, so far, worked. The media proclaim corruption everywhere in the elected government, which has for the first time in history represented the interests of the workers and the poor, often against the commands of Wall Street and the US Treasury and in defiance of the local oligarchs of a nation of over 200 million people.
The real point is that the practice of using public sector funds for personal enrichment is not being covered up. Like the 2013 Brazil public riots against overspending on soccer stadiums, the rot is now out into the open. It is not slid under the rug – as was, say, the multi-trillion dollar Wall Street looting of the US Treasury after 2008.
Instead, it is faced head-on. We might learn from Brazil.
John McMurtry
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Workers and their bosses
According to Paul Mason (2 October), research published by Morgan Stanley’s economists concludes that “hire and fire” damages innovation and labour productivity. This is a widespread practice in the US and UK, but not in much of Europe.
He also notes that when workplace cultures turned, as in the 1960s, they have generally turned big time. Unfortunately, for workers to improve their relative position in the earnings hierarchy, education has first to be widened to embrace everyone who can gain from it. Without this, the benefits do not reach the least well-paid.
British teachers are underpaid and in short supply in maths and the sciences. Britain also has poor training facilities with few really well regarded apprenticeships.
Many of those who have read Thomas Piketty’s Capital will not agree, however, with the Morgan Stanley economists, whose research has so much impressed the Davos crowd, concerning Piketty’s “dire predictions”.
The best US universities are mainly only available to the richest students. The broadening of education to reach all who could benefit will surely take a very long time, if it occurs at all.
Piketty also demonstrates that in the US social mobility now hardly exists, if at all. Therefore those in rich families will continue to take very well-paid jobs.
I am much more convinced by Piketty than by the Morgan Stanley paper and doubt whether workers will significantly better their position in the next few decades.
Simon Baguley
Schliersee, Germany
• “Calling in sick is an act of resistance,” says Suzanne Moore (30 October). Really? Against who or what? I doubt the Chinese economic model or the concept of wage slavery will be undermined by a bunch of Brits bunking off work for the day. What happens in the short term is honest colleagues have to pick up the workload. In the longer term if absence is not properly managed productivity goes down and costs go up. I’m not sure who that benefits.
If people want to work fewer hours there are plenty of part-time jobs out there – too many in fact. If they want more control of their work they can seek self-employment – there are plenty of opportunities. If they want to change more than their own workplace there are such things as trade unions, political parties, collective action.
Moore probably knows this, but I guess a journalist earns their daily pay by getting a reaction. Job done.
David Roman
Newport, UK
Briefly
• Thank you for James Walton’s excellent review of the two books about computers and robots (23 October). But the review and the books become squeamish when the obvious repercussions stare them in the face. They whistle in the dark as they tiptoe past the grave of human extinction. Whether it is 20 years or a hundred, whether promoted by a few plutocrats or a suitably malleable population, the end of purely biological Homo sapiens cannot be evaded. And no, over 7 billion people will not be kept in amusement parks, as one of the books conjectures. There’s no reason why a future super-intelligence should be sentimental about a species whose use-by date is over.
Sam Nejad
Geraldton, Western Australia
• What inhumanity, what wickedness, to kill the moustached kingfisher merely to prove that it existed (23 October). The technology to which we have access makes it easy to photograph a rare species and its habitat from every angle. There is absolutely no need to kill the creature, and the fact that in the Solomon Islands the birds are numerous is no excuse. All animal specimens in museums should be destroyed and replaced by photographs, so scientists will have no incentive to commit such evil acts.
Gillian Heywood
Rimini, Italy
• Yes, the “spirit of the Pan-African Congress should be revived”, as Kehinde Andrews suggests (23 October). Kwame Nkrumah and other west Africans who attended the 1945 congress tried hard to further the aims of unity, independence and equality, but were prevented from doing so. They were labelled communists, which necessitated interference by the west, as this was the cold war era. For example, the colonial authorities used their prohibited immigrant designations to prevent people attending the conference called by Nkrumah in 1953.
Marika Sherwood
London, UK
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