Over the Kitchen, DK not only refrains from his usual line in invective but relates a rather disturbing story about the use of Chip and Pin cards which resulted in this statement being made by a senior member of staff in HBOS’s retail banking division…

Up to 40 minutes after any Chip & PIN card transaction, the retailer may access your confidential details [this includes your card number and your PIN number] and submit any number of further transactions without your presence or consent. This is perfectly legal practice. The onus is then on the customer to challenge these subsequent transactions with their bank, once the customer actually becomes aware of them.

I beg your pardon?

DK has the full backstory to this, which started out innocently enough with a cock-up at a petrol station but which goes on to raise some fairly serious question marks about whether the Chip and Pin system is quite so secure as the public have been led to think.

One thing that isn’t clear from DK’s article, as I suspect the explicit question wasn’t asked, is quite what HBOS means when it states that ‘the retailer may access your confidential details [this includes your card number and you PIN number]’.

Do they mean access in the sense of being able to pull up a transaction screen in which this information is already inserted in the relevant place, albeit obfuscated by lines of asterisks - as is common practice when web browsers pull a password out of cookie to save you the bother of typing in [and remembering] your password for loggin in to something like Gmail or Hotmail - or are they actually saying that this information is revealed to the retailer in a transcribable form which could be written down and used at a later date?

One would certainly hope that we’re talking about the former, but can one really be sure?

Second, there this whole business of the retailer being in position submit further transactions using your card details, for up to forty minutes, and without you either being present or even knowing what the hell they’re up to. The potential for fraud in this should be fairly obvious to anyone and it does rather make a mockery of the whole claim that Chip and Pin transactions are much more secure than the old-style swipe and sign way of paying for your shopping.

Third, given that retailers have this kind of access, and that your card details are either stored or still accessible, locally, for forty minute after your original transaction one has to wonder exactly how secure the equipment is in terms of the potential for tampering. Is it possible, yet, for an electronic reader to be attached to a Chip and Pin terminal in such a way as the stored/accessible card information might be downloaded from the system to enternal storage device.

If this hasn’t already been done, then you can bet that it will be in the not too distant future, as from long experience it should be obvious that no matter how secure you think a particular system is, someone, somewhere, will eventually crack it - and in the case of Chip and Pin, and with the increasing use by Supermarkets of ’self-service’ checkouts, the incentives to develop such a system to enable Chip and Pin cards to be easily cloned is going to be pretty high.

Finally, and as aside, one would presume that the rationale for premitting retailers this kind of access to the system is to allow for corrections to be made when the retailer realises that the customer has been either overcharged (yeah, sure) or undercharged for their purchase but has left the premises before the error has been spotted.

Thinking about that, one cannot help but think of all the shops one has used, especially newsagents (for some reason) where one finds displayed prominantly behind the counter, a sign bearing a legend to the effect that, in the view of the retailer, its the customer’s reposnsibility to check their change before leaving the counter, after which point the transaction is concluded and any mistakes cannot be corrected.

Quite how this sits, legally speaking, I’ve never got around to checking as its generally the kind of thing that one accepts as being a game of swings and roundabouts - sometimes you get given too little change and you lose out, other times you get given too, and if you can make it out the shop without the retailer cottoning on to their mistake then the money’s yours by dint of all the times you’ve lost out the other way. One way or another, the assumption is that, all things being equally, these things will break even over time, so you take the occasional loss philosophically as long its a matter of loose change and note something like a fiver ot tenner.

Obviously, if retailers can alter or transactions after the fact without your knowledge then that alters the nature of the game and, in turn, make the question of the legality of the ‘please check you change’ sign a mater worth pursuing.

One way or another, the lesson here has to be not to assume that Chip and Pin is in anyway foolproof, while at the same time, the question has to be asked as to why the banks have neglected to mention any of this up to now?

Any blogging Parliamentarians about who’d care to do the asking?

Aside from being a day for dissecting the latest set of gushings from dear old Polly Pot, Friday is also Home Office press release day (particularly when there are unpromising statistics that need burying).

And so, on the Labour Party website, we find that Dr Demento doing his level best to polish up his shiny, patent leather, jackboots by administering a good kicking to David Cameron:

JOHN REID MP, Labour’s Home Secretary, has challenged Conservative leader David Cameron MP to back the government’s plans on ID cards if he is serious about managing migration. It follows the Conservatives launch of their flagship immigration policy document Controlling Economic Migration.

There then follows, in entirely predictable fashion, the usual diatribe on the subject of Cameron being ’soft’ on whatever it that Dr Demento is wittering on about at any given time, plus the requisite list of things that Cameron has voted against in Parliament in recent years, as if to suggest that Reid still hasn’t quite worked out why the people who sit on the other side of Commons Chamber from where he plants his own impeccably uniformed (in his dreams) arse are called the ‘Opposition’.

What’s most interesting about this press release, as it comes from a man who is, at the present time Britain’s most prominent ex-Communist, is the following statement.

I challenge David Cameron, if he means what he says, to come out and support our plans for ID management because it is the key tool to manage migration in the 21st century.

ID Management? What an interesting turn of phrase.

There are several ways in which one might reasonably view this remark, not least of which is within the context of the obsessive managerialism that has been the hallmark of New Labour - see Chris Dillow’s remarks here and then, in the absence of a search facility on his blog, search Google from references to ‘Blair’ and/or ‘New Labour’ and ‘managerialism’, which was surely turn up a fair amount of Chris’s other work. Also, this article by Phil Edwards on his new blog/collection of past writing ‘What I wrote’, is also well worth a look, not least as it dates from 1997.

Reid’s one-time communist proclivities, however, suggest another potentially fruitful line of inquiry, one both in keeping with his political background - and that of several other New Labour notables including Jack Straw, Charles Clarke and Peter Mandelson, all of whom were at one time members of communist groupings/organisations - and with New Labour’s dominant managerialist credo.

Although today most clearly associated with Marxism and the Communist view of the state and its inevitable demise in the wake of revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was actually one of the founders of Positivism (and the first clearly identifiable socialist), Henri de Saint Simon, who advanced the maxim that the government of men would ultimately be replaced by the administration of things, a concept that Marx then appropriated in his own writings.

For Reid to refer, in this press release, to the government’s plans to introduce identity cards and a national identity register in terms of the government’s ‘plans for ID management’ is, therefore, to expose the scheme as being one founded on essentially Marxian/Postivist roots.

Within the present government’s worldview, identity, a concept that the majority of people would consider to be both highly personal and individual in character, has become something to be managed, i.e. a thing to be administered by the state. This, in turn, accounts in no small measure for the palpable sense of dislocation that has characterised the public debate surrounding ID cards in relation to civil liberties-based objections to their introduction.

In this debate one finds, therefore, on one side, libertarians and liberal individualists, whose perception of the nature of identity is that it belongs intrinsically to the personal domain, and on the other the government, who view the nature of identity, at it relates to the functions of the state, in mechanistic terms and from what is essentially a technocratic/managerialist perspective. There is, in this, not simply a dispute over the nature of liberty (and civil liberties) but a fundamental disagreement about the nature of identity itself, such that the government not merely see that objections to the introduction of ID cards as carrying much ‘weight’ but is, in fact, rendered largely incapable of even understanding such objections as they derive from a view of the nature of identity that the government does not accept as valid.

This, in turn, also explains how it is that Blair, quite happily, can advance a line of argument that characterises the ID cards debate as a contest between personal liberty and modernity but also that view that, in the context of such a contest, modernity is assured of being the victor. From both Positivist and Marxian perspectives, theat stage in social development in which government becomes the administration of things is synonymous with society reaching the apex of its development and the ‘end of history’. The mere fact that the government’s ID cards scheme treats identity as a thing to be administered is, to Blair and others who share his worldview, conclusive and unimpeachable proof of the schemes modernity and, consequently, the inevitability of its superceding both the personal view of the nature of identity espoused by the scheme’s opponents and, consequently, also any objections to the scheme raised on civil liberties grounds; objections which, being rooted in what is perceived to be an archaic notion of the nature of identity, are themselves archaic and outmoded.

Both Blair’s juxtaposition of liberty and modernity as contending ‘forces’ and Reid’s reference to ‘ID management’ mark the introduction of ID cards and the national identity register as being an instrinsically Positivist/Marxian venture founded on a deep-seated belief that it is the interlinked forces of technology and historical determinism that drives society forward.

With that, I’ll point you in the direction of another article by Chris Dillow, this time at the Sharpener, which explores the possible Marxian influences on Blair’s worldview.

By way of commentary and critique, the one this I will add to Chris’s comments is the note that, like Marxism, Neo-liberalism, which animates belief in the absolute virtues of globalisation and the universal free market, is itself derivative of and heavily influenced by Positivism through the influence of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle on the later work of Milton Friedman, Francis Fukayama and the Chicago School of Economics. As such one can just as easily contruct an argument around Blair’s views and values, similar to that which Chris put forward, in which Neo-liberalism is substituted for Marxism without, for the most part, diminishing the validity of the argument itself.

What this, perhaps, suggests is that much of the ease with which both Blair and New Labour’s cabal of ex-Communists have made the transition from Marxism to Neo-liberalism, in terms, at least, of economic policy, may be accounted for by the Positivist roots to be found in both doctrines, for all that conventional wisdom sees each of them as being in diametric opposition to the other.

On the back of the release of the report ‘Doing God: A future for faith in the public square‘ by the Theos ‘think-tank’, AC Grayling not only describes the report as ‘confused’ - discursive, meandering, sophistic, would all have been equally valid adjectives - but also gives the authors a well-deserved lesson in semantics.

Needless to say, this is required reading.

I may comment more fully on the report, myself, if and when I can find any meaningul content, however I cannot pass up the opportunity to highlight on passage that I found of particular interest in its section on ‘identity politics’…

It should not need saying (but, again, regrettably will) that treating religious groups as valid participants within the identity debates to which modern politics is gravitating does not mean failing to scrutinise or criticise them. Indeed, it means the very opposite. If religious groups wish to participate in this area of the public square, they must be willing to defend themselves without recourse to sectarian or inscrutable reasons. They must be self-critical and willing to utilise (if also challenge) public reason. That is the price of admission. It is precisely inclusion of this nature that is likely to qualify any extreme positions. If you have to argue your case and negotiate in the public realm, you are obliged to work with the standards and assumptions of people who don’t share your convictions; and this can (challengingly) extend the conversation on both sides.

Given that this report has the backing of both Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, and advocates that religious groups seeking to engage in wider political debate and discourse must be ‘willing to defend themselves [and, by extensions their opinions] without recourse to sectarian or inscrutable reasons’; can we now assume from this that, in the ongoing debate on equality legislation that provides for equal treatment for the gay community in regards to the provision of good and services, both Churches will now be dropping their inscrutable and sectarian demands for exemptions to the legislation on grounds of religious belief, which are based solely on the content of a 1700 year old collection of myths and folk tales and not on rational argument or public reason?

Also on Comment is Free, is a rather strange article by Andrew Brown, entitled ‘Why God Needs Heretics’ in which he spends a considerable amount of time exploring the idea that ‘religion and science don’t mix’ to no great conclusion before offering up the view that:

The fact that there is no rational basis for choosing between gods is precisely what makes them such a good way to decide political questions. Arguing about the kinds of things that cannot by their nature be decided or susceptible to proof is much the best way to ensure that what is really being measured is something else: political power, debating skill, or determination.

So it is not irrational for religion to spread in the modern world and why we can expect it to spread still more. If theological disputes gain popularity as a way of fighting over resources at a time of political change, this is going to be a good century for religious correspondents. Even the Church of England might revive — as a way of expressing an English identity that was firmly anti-Islamic.

In short, forget any aspirations to logic, reason and rationality and embrace religious nationalism, irrationalism and Sophism as the dominant political philosophies of the 21st Century.

So, if it weren’t for that bastard Plato and his strange notions of logic and reason, everything would be hunky dory, or if not, then at least it would keep religious correspondents in a job for life.
(At the time of writing, I find myself still trying to decide whether this last article is an artfully contructed, if wholly abstruse, piece of satire on the author’s part or whether he simply had a column to fill and banged out the first piece of confused old tosh he could come up with in order to get a paycheck).

Not sure how this will go down with the PLP, but while mooching through some of the search terms that have brought people here when they were obviously looking for something else entire, I’ve just discovered that on Yahoo UK search, I’m now the top result for ‘Labour Ministry UK’, beating the official Labour Party website (and a page on it about the Ministry of Defence) into second place, with the Wikipedia entry on the Labour Party in third.

Now if only I got a ministerial salary to go with it….

It’s Friday and Polly Pot is in full flow - and remember the Graun have coughed up around £1,400 for what follows.

Labour needs a woman at the top to win female votes back from Cameron

It is amazing that Labour has lost the backing of those who have gained most. But there is a way to reclaim their support

The back story here is a Populous opnion poll in the Times that shows Labour and the Tories running neck and neck amongst men but has the Tories six points ahead amongst women voters, which Times columnist, Mary Ann Sieghart, ascribes to Cameron’s ‘personal appeal’ by means of a welter of sweeping generalisations, beginning with…

If women hadn’t had the vote, Labour would have won every general election since the Second World War.

This could well be true, although Sieghart offers no evidence to support of this claim, in which case the reasonable conclusion to draw is that women are the main swing voters in general elections, while men are somewhat more tribal in their voting habits.

As facts go, that moderately interesting if you’re a committed psephologist or media pundit, but otherwise hardly the stuff of headline news, not that that dissuades Sieghary from waxing lyrical on the subject of Cameron’s charms for long enough to fill up most of her column (and justify her paycheck) nor can one quite escape the feeling that the whole piece would make rather more sense if one replaced each occurance of the word ‘women’ with the words ‘Mary Ann Sieghart.

It’s a classic puff-piece enlivened on by the the fact that Sieghart manages to an argument that is both patronising and gloriously antediluvian at the same time in following up her reference to the apparent effects of women’s suffrage since 1945 with comments like this:

One look at page 4 of The Times on Tuesday gave a powerful clue to Cameron’s attractiveness to women. I don’t mean that he is good-looking. He isn’t particularly. But women love to see a fully-involved dad. Our photograph showed the Tory leader pushing his disabled son in a buggy with one hand, while clasping the ankle of the small daughter who is sitting on his shoulders with the other. Behind him, his wife Samantha steers a pushchair with their baby inside.

His wife adds to his political appeal. She is a working mother with her own career. But she isn’t scarily glamorous. The two epitomise modern family life: sharing the breadwinning, sharing the domestic tasks, supporting each other. That one of their children is severely disabled prevents their world from being too impossibly perfect.

By now any feminist readers will be beating thier keyboards with frustation - one of the most prominent (and hopelessly sexist) Victorian arguments against women’s suffrage was that women lacked the ‘head’ for politics and were congenitally incapable of approaching the subject seriously, which is nonsense, of course, and yet precisely the image that Sieghart conveys.

But enough of Mary Ann’s personal predilictions, lets get back to Polly Pot, if only to going down the road of speculating as to whether they might share parallel tastes in the use of organic vegetables.

The first thing of note is that, unless you’re psephologically inclined, you can safely skip most the first half of her piece, which largely explores the whole business of female voting patterns in rather more detail that Sieghart managed before arriving at the conclusion that;

Brown will have to pay rapt attention to what women think and what women want: he can’t win without reclaiming them.

And so, it seems, democracy recedes even further than usual - its bad enough that our current electoral system pretty much ensures that that the government of the day is determined by the outcome of no more than 100-150 key marginal (and predominantly middle class) constituencies, but now it would also appear that only 50% or so of the electorate in those seats actually matter - at this rate we’ll one day arrive at the point where the Beeb’s election coverage will consist of parking David Dimbleby and Peter Snow on the doorstep of Mrs Phiilomena Snotgobbler-Smith (with a hyphen) of 73, The Avenues, East Cheam, until she emerges, groundhog-style, to announce who she’ll be voting for, at which point they’ll be able to safely call the outcome of the election.
But that’s all by the by for the time being, as Polly moves on to, after a brief foray into the realms of ‘look what Labour’s done for you, you ungrateful bints’ to ask the $64,000 question.

What’s gone wrong?

Oh, do tell, Polly. Please do tell…

Women hate war, and they hate it more than men do: that held good in voting patterns in the US elections, as it does in opinion polls across Europe.

I’ve no doubt it does and, as such, its an observation that would be entirely germain in the context of a referendum on the Iraq War, but, unfortunately, there is rather more to general elections that simply Iraq. Still, Polly continues…

Deborah Mattinson of Opinion Leader Research runs focus groups with women:

‘Opinion Leader Research’? ‘Runs focus groups’?

Bullshit Alert! Bullshit Alert! You are about to enter a bullshit zone. Please be careful where you tread…

“They are more upset about Iraq,” she finds, yet she sees the varnish start to peel off Cameron: “Women’s bullshit radar is more finely tuned that men’s.”

But hang on, Polly. While you were hacking through the stats did you not point out that:

David Cameron owes his lead in the polls entirely to women’s votes.

And more importantly…

British women are odd: traditionally, in France, Germany and Italy women lean to the left and men lean rightwards; but in Britain the right only ever won on the women’s vote. The suffragettes’ achievement made the last century the Conservative century; are women about to do it again? 

And also don’t you also mention…

…Tony Blair, the man who was the magician of women’s votes

Is there not a fairly obvious inference to be drawn from the assertion that in Britain women tend to be incline to vote Tory and the depiction of Tony Blair as the ‘magician of women’s votes’?

But her focus groups say the government is “stale” and has “run out of steam”. John Reid’s announcement yesterday of yet more criminal-justice legislation hardly feels like refreshment: Labour’s 59 obsessive criminal-justice bills have often been repealed before they have been enacted. Blair and Reid hammer out security, security, security in a bid to outflank the Tories on the right, trying to brand Cameron “soft on crime”. Not only is that daft politics and triangulation gone mad; it also doesn’t work. Pollsters do find voters frightened and angry about crime, terror and immigration. But a necessary defensive strategy can’t become Labour’s defining purpose.

A ‘defensive strategy can’t become Labour’s defining purpose’ - what’s all this ‘become’ business, Polly. Have you been in coma for the last five years?

Oblivious to reality, as ever, Polly continues on…

There is a curious paradox here: psychological experiments, now pondered by the Downing Street strategy unit, find that people questioned about their political views are influenced rightwards by dark thoughts: a frightening poster on the wall makes people’s attitudes move to the right.

‘Now pondered’?

Are you seriously suggesting that Blair has only just figured out the connection between running a continous stream of scare stories and right-wing politics? I had thought we’d safely established that one years ago - in fact, has this not the raison d’etre of the Daily Mail for years?

And does anyone else feel a bit queasy at the idea of politicians pondering psychological experiments while making policy? Does that not sound, well, all a bit totalitarian?

All this leads Polly to the startling conclusion that…

…the more Blair goes on about security, war and crime, the more he may drive people into the arms of the Conservatives.

Talk about stating the bleeding obvious, but neve fear, Polly has the answer…

Winning back women has to be the project from now on. How can Labour do that? It could start by copying the Democrats in America in promoting more women up front.

And…

It now needs a woman right at the top who never lets up. Harriet Harman is the only candidate for the deputy leadership who campaigns loudly and unashamedly on women’s issues, always a jump ahead on what needs to be done next.

And again…

What Labour needs is a high-profile woman campaigner who never lets go, to make sure the policy reviews push these things high up the agenda. If women voters just don’t get the message about what Labour does for women, that’s because the wrong messengers at the top fail to convince. Mothers listen to mothers: to win, Labour needs its women up front. 

Aside from noting the obvious, i.e. that all the guff on women’s voting habits was little more than a scene-setting for a blatant shill for votes in support of Harriet Harman’s plan to run for the Labour Deputy leadership, what’s most apparent is that Polly can offer not a single shred of evidence to back up her contention that the antidote to women’s conservative voting tendancies in Britain is putting up women candidates.

Remember, the evidence on female voting patterns shows that British women exhibit a marked tendency to lean to the right and vote for conservative (small ‘c’) candidates, whether these are actual Tories or those in New Labour, like Blair, who display markedly conservative attitudes.

What she doesn’t supply is any evidence to show either that women have a marked tendancy to vote for other women or that such a tendancy in any way overrides other considerations.

The contention that women are, in general terms, conservative in the voting habits, in the sense of being influence in the decisions by issues, values and attitudes that are often ‘traditionally’ associated with conservative politics, what one might call, for want of a better term, ‘domestic’ issue, can be backed up with fairly substantive evidence, although one needs to look at more than simply how women voted in past general elections to be certain that such a connection is valid - one nees also to look at party manifestos, campaign literature and at the prevailing social attutides and issues of the time to identify which policies might have most influence such choices.

By constrast, the suggestion that women will simply vote for other women out of either a sense of feminine solidarity or in the belief that, as a woman, a particular candidate may be more undertsanding of, and sympathetic towards, their concerns, and therefore better able to represent their interest, is backed up by nothing more than evidence from the US that women hate war and the fact that, as a consequence of the Democrats success in the US mid-term elections, the next Speaker of the House of Representatives will be a woman (Nancy Pelosi) and that Hilary Clinton is ‘riding high’, in electoral terms, in what is a traditional Democrat area, without ever providing evidence to show that any of these things may be connected.

Not only that, but having described British women as ‘odd’ for not following their French, German and Italian counterparts in exhibiting a tradition of ‘leaning’ to the left, she leave the matter of whether, in political terms, women in the US traditionally tend to ‘dress’ to the left or the right hanging in mid-air, as much to suggest that either she doesn’t know (and hasn’t bothered to find out) or that if one looks at the voting habits of the American female, one might find that British women are equally ‘odd’ by comparison.

In all, its difficult to know quite which view of women is the more patronising, Mary Ann Sieghart’s paean to Victoriana or Polly’s 1970s sister act