Guardian :

An analysis of local authority documents reveals that the number of council redundancies directly resulting from the coalition's austerity measures is expected to break the 100,000 mark by early in the new year, fuelled by the swingeing cuts announced this week to councils' budgets and the pressure to start cutting before the new financial year in April.

Update : Meanwhile, the government's smash-and-grab raid on the state continues, as it rushes to hand over serious powers to Britain's oligarchs.

A number of business heavyweights were appointed as non-executive directors to beefed-up boards of government departments to help the coalition implement its efficiency drive.

For the first time, boards will be able to ask the prime minister to sack permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servants, if they fail to fulfil their mandates, such as meeting departmental budget targets.

My friend Oli's summing up of the issue of student fees :

You raise taxes against things as a disincentive to consumption (eg. cigarettes, alcohol). If you raise taxes against education, you decrease consumption of it. Is this what you want to be doing when the economy needs to be increasing productivity and creating more high-value products and services to be globally competitive?

It's seductive. I can't help noticing that the same argument could be used to argue that we shouldn't be taxing anything we approve of (eg. paying people salaries). And I'm not sure I want, ultimately, to accept that the arguments for or against education must be reduced to questions of national economic interest. But putting aside such caveats for a moment, I agree.

Here's a great post, covering (in more depth) some of the themes I touched on here.

The diplomat in question gave an interview some months ago :

But anyway, here’s the part where the story he told a year ago starts to diverge from his story of last week:

I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.


Catch all that? Reporting atrocities to Ottawa was a “futile exercise”; instead of giving his government “the ammunition it needed,” Gilmore’s point is that recording what was actually happening on the ground was “to bear silent witness,” an experience of the uselessness of diplomacy which upset and depressed him. He’s telling a story of his disillusionment with the foreign service.

Wow!

Nice conclusion too.

I don’t know how to highly to value that proof; I’m not sure whether Wikileaks just adds to a store of knowledge that we already have or if it represents something new. But the idea that it’s a bad thing to know more about the how the governments that act in our names actually behave is laughable, and the idea that impeding their ability to act secretly prevents them from advancing the cause of justice and human rights, it seems to me, is utterly without merit. There may be a human rights argument against what Wikileaks does; it may be that they’ve been sloppy in the data they’ve released. But given how many times I’ve seen that charge laid at their feet, and how completely unsupported by any credible evidence it has been, without exception, I’m not willing to give people like Gilmore the benefit of the doubt. If anyone has actual examples of a time when government secrecy was used for something other than exerting force in support of self-interest, I’d like to hear it. But until then, I’m going to continue to assume, as usual, that the only check on the amorality of the state is a moral citizenry. And the only way that citizens can act as a check on the state’s amorality is when they know what their government is doing. Hiding cables from the public does the opposite of accomplishing that.

Chris Floyd :

What is perhaps most remarkable is that this joint action by the world elite to shut down WikiLeaks – which has been operating for four years – comes after the release of diplomatic cables, not in response to earlier leaks which provided detailed evidence of crimes and atrocities committed by the perpetrators and continuers of Washington’s Terror War. I suppose this is because the diplomatic cables have upset the smooth running of the corrupt and cynical backroom operations that actually govern our world, behind the ludicrous lies and self-righteous posturing that our great and good lay on for the public. They didn’t mind being unmasked as accomplices in mass murder and fomenters of suffering and hatred; in fact, they were rather proud of it. And they certainly knew that their fellow corruptocrats in foreign governments – not to mention the perpetually stunned and supine American people – wouldn’t give a toss about a bunch of worthless peons in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed. But the diplomatic cables have caused an embarrassing stink among the closed little clique of the movers and shakers. And that is a crime deserving of vast eons in stir – or death.

Oh, by the way, it's Open Data Day :-)

Slightly ironic to be celebrating open-data when so many governments are proving how closed they'd really like to be. But nevertheless, let's celebrate the good.

Congratulations to all governments who are in the process of opening their data.

Keith Hart on Iceland's Revenge

Irony of ironies.

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world's financial markets while they ``rewrite the rules of international finance.''

``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.''

The cry goes up in the markets : "Help! Mr. Government! Save us from ourselves"

Remember, the reality is that markets have never been anything but the junior partners to political power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to fool you into not exercising that power.