Tag Archives: UK

Broken Britain

I’ve written before about my perception that the UK took a drastic turn in the wrong direction during the 1970s, and that it has been deteriorating ever since. My perception is that the UK now has political and economic problems worse even than the USA. This is not a popular opinion, particularly among those who still live in the UK. Some accused me of callousness, but I have friends and family in the UK. I still return from time to time—most recently about a year ago—so I am far from uncaring about what happens to the nation.

Having explained that, I’d like to draw attention to an article titled “Broken Britain” which recently appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Written by Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, it takes the UK riots of August 2011 as a starting point.

The riots were almost universally portrayed in the UK media as meaningless violence perpetrated by a bunch of criminals who wanted something for nothing. And yet, as Vulliamy points out, they were predicted:

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, however, had predicted the riots more than a year earlier. On April 11, 2010, he had appeared on Sky News to discuss the rioting then going on in Greece. He warned that if a Conservative government came to power in Britain and were to, as he put it, “slash and burn public services on a thin mandate,” “a lot of people [would] react badly to that.” Asked whether the anticipated reaction could include “rioting in the streets,” Clegg replied, “I think there is a very serious risk.”

Clegg’s Liberal Democrats went on to make broken promises a major issue in their election campaign. Clegg promised to oppose a rise in tuition fees for students, and asked people to vote Liberal Democrat to make Britain fair.

And then came the election in May 2010, and a hung Parliament. Nick Clegg led the Liberal Democrats to join up with the Conservatives, allowing the Tories to grab power with only 36% of the vote. He then broke his promise on tuition fees by backing Conservative plans which tripled them. He cut pensions, cut child tax credits, cut the NHS, and supported a budget which cut police and courts in a way that even the far-right Daily Mail described as ‘savage’.

Clegg was attacked with blue paint by disgusted former Liberal Democrats, and burnt in effigy by angry students. His party’s support dropped like a stone to its lowest level in 14 years. People were so angry that when there was a referendum on electoral reform in May 2011, former Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain begged voters to put aside their hatred of Nick Clegg and vote for reform anyway. Clegg himself also asked for people to look past their desire to poke him in the eye.

It didn’t work. The referendum failed, and with it went all hope of seeing the UK’s bent electoral system improved within my lifetime. The UK would remain with a voting system as hopelessly broken as the one that keeps the Democrats and Republicans in power in the US.

After I reached voting age, I voted Liberal Democrat in every UK election, until I left the country and ceased to be able to vote anywhere. To me, fixing the electoral system was the first priority, because nothing would ever change as long as two parties could collude to exclude any other options.

I believe Nick Clegg singlehandedly destroyed electoral reform in the UK, and destroyed the Liberal Democrats too. If I were still there, I’d have been burning the lying piece of shit in effigy myself for Bonfire Night. Even now, nearly 8000km away, I find myself taking breaks from writing about Nick Clegg in order to pace around and swear. But I digress…

In August 2011 came those riots Nick Clegg had warned about—brought on by his very own actions as coalition leader. Yet suddenly Clegg seemed to suffer some kind of amnesia. He blamed “smash and grab, get what you can” values, and insisted that in spite of rioting across the country, those savage cuts in police funding would still be going ahead. By the time the remaining Liberal Democrats held their party conference in September, newspapers were comparing Clegg to Tony Blair: a polished performer, but someone who had betrayed his supporters and now mostly brings to mind the word “liar”.

Yes, just as America has two corrupt major parties equally in the pay of the financial industries who destroyed the economy, so the UK is bipartisan when it comes to corruption. The expenses scandal which unravelled in September turned out to be an all-party affair. Labour MP Hazel Blears was revealed to have claimed expenses for three different homes, having sold two more and used a loophole to avoid paying tax on the profits. Conservative Douglas Hogg had the taxpayers pay for having his manor’s moat cleaned and his piano tuned. Labour’s Sir Gerald Kaufman billed the taxpayers £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen LCD TV. Conservative Sir Peter Viggers had £40,000 in fraudulent expenses, including £1,645 for a floating ornamental duck house. Liberal Democrat David Laws broke a few by claiming £40,000 in rent and then paying it to his partner. (His excuse? He said he did it because he didn’t want people to realize he was gay. I wonder if he’s a Pet Shop Boys fan?)  And of course, nobody was surprised to find Nick Clegg’s name on the list; he had to pay back part of a £3,900 claim he submitted for having his gardening done.

As Vulliamy puts it:

The “moral collapse,” it seems, starts at the top. Yet no one wanted to connect the dots—to look at the miasma of treaties, social and political alliances, cycles of back-scratching and mutual convergences that define the British elite. Britain’s problems are singular: singularly serious, singularly fetid, and singularly vulgar. The country that packages itself as “Cool Britannia” has become greedy, obsessed with commercialism at the expense of any other value or norm, xenophobic, belligerent and hubristic.

I think he’s wrong about the xenophobia, but probably right about the hubris. As I used to say in the years before I left, the UK is complacent and lazy. People are content to let the status quo continue, to overlook corruption and dishonesty, to carry on doing things the same way simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done, and to put up with terrible service and then moan about it afterwards rather than actually taking their business elsewhere.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. “Fawlty Towers” and Monty Python made the same points repeatedly back in the 1970s; all that has changed now is that everything has been given a sprinkling of vacuous slogans and corporate marketingspeak:

Britain itself is a corporate mediocrity, a place where the customer is almost always wrong and people always seem to be working but not much gets done very well.

Or as one book I saw put it, rather more bluntly: Is it just me, or is everything shit?

But let’s go back to ask how we got to this point, as I did in my earlier article. Vulliamy again:

Exactly how and why Britain has decomposed into a more rotten country than it was two or three decades ago is hard to gauge, but some answers can, I think, be found in the destruction of an industrial society and the loss of the cohesion and community afforded by the manufacturing base. The devastation of manufacturing and its social fabric occurred, during the 1980s and ’90s, in parallel with an extreme form of privatization of infrastructure, utilities, and services that were (and in continental Western Europe largely still are) seen as public and civic functions, not merely opportunities to make money. Traditional industries were replaced by retail and “service” industries, and one in particular—financial services—so that the economy came to rest on the whims and needs of supranational banking.

But while infrastructure privatization was a mixed bag, the shifting of the UK economy to financial and service industries was the more disastrous change in the long term. It was probably a good thing that Margaret Thatcher broke up the cosy old boys club that used to control the London Stock Exchange with her 1986 “Big Bang”. Unfortunately, her policies made the country’s economic health far too dependent on the City. The USA may have an unhealthy relationship with the financial services sector, but at least the USA still has a manufacturing industry to speak of, unlike the UK.

With the City of London deregulated, the Tories set about “selling off the family silver”, as Labour politicians of the time put it:

[…] the National Coal Board, British Rail, the Gas Board, the Water Board. They were the names of publicly run and owned industries and services. They were often inefficient, but they were run by people who knew what they were doing and provided what they promised—water, heating, lighting, railways—not just shareholder dividends.

Even America often recognizes the need for utilities to remain in public ownership. Here in Austin, Texas, the city owns and operates the electrical and water utilities, on a not-for-profit basis. Many other US towns and cities do the same, particularly in rural areas.

But when the Conservatives finally got kicked out of power after 18 miserable years, it was into the warm embrace of Tony Blair’s “New Labour”.

Labour continued a psychotic privatization not even the Conservatives would have dreamed of: selling off different lines of the capital city’s subway system to different consortia, in what was called a Public-Private Partnership.

(Vulliamy points out that the Jubilee line seems to be the most troubled, even though it’s so new that I remember it opening in 1979; whereas the Bakerloo line continues to work quite well, even though it opened in 1906. Again, it seems that modern Britain does a lot of stuff, but none of it is done very well.)

So why did the selloffs continue? The simple answer is that it was the only way the governments of the 90s and 2000s—whether Conservative or Labour—could get the books to balance. Between 1999 and 2002, Labour got so desperate that it sold half of Britain’s gold reserves in an attempt to avoid having to implement cuts. Like Saudi Arabia’s government propping itself up with oil profits, successive UK governments propped themselves up with fire sales of infrastructure and state-owned resources.

Now that there’s nothing left to sell, the obvious question is how much long term benefit came from those sales. Obviously selling off the gold reserves looks like a pretty bad move at this point, but given that the proceeds wouldn’t even cover a tenth of the cost of the bank bailouts it’s all a bit academic. More worrying is the state of UK society:

The state of modern Britain was molded in large part by the Blair years. In 2007, a decade into the New Labour enterprise, a UNICEF report placed Britain last among twenty-one developed countries for the well-being of children. […]
By May 2009, after ten years of Blair’s Labour government (and two years of Gordon Brown’s), the gap between the rich and the poor in Britain was larger than at any time since record-keeping began in the early 1960s. […] The government had not managed to reduce the number of impoverished children and pensioners, despite increases in both categories in 2008.

In other words, if you look at graphs of trends in social inequality and social mobility, you find that the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever before. Worse, if you’re born into poverty, the chances of improving your situation are lower than ever before. The UK even gives the USA a run for its money in inequality, which is a staggering accomplishment.

As I mentioned earlier, the Cameron/Clegg government is now performing the kind of ruthless slashing of expenditure that US Republicans favor. This suggests that things will get worse; in the US, research shows that states which slashed expenditure in response to recession did worse than the ones that didn’t. Conventional economic wisdom is that you get out of recession by spending money to create jobs. To be fair, the Tories are also trying to do some of that, bizarrely even while claiming that government can’t create jobs.

So, two corrupt major parties. Both authoritarian, both selling off anything they can grab in a desperate attempt to prop up a collapsing economy, both paying billions in bailouts to their friends in the big banks, both facing social unrest, both cutting taxes and spending in the middle of a recession.

Neither Tony Blair’s authoritarianism nor David Cameron’s promise to unravel it represents transformation of any kind, because any professed differences between politicians and parties in Britain are spurious political pantomime.

In that respect, the UK and USA are perhaps closer now than they have ever been before.

Christmas 2010: Flying to the UK

As you may have seen on the news, the UK has been experiencing some freakishly cold weather. The weekend before Christmas was marked by a sudden record breaking cold snap. Chesham in Buckinghamshire hit -26 Celsius, a temperature I don’t think I ever experienced during the years I lived in the area.

Heathrow airport was engulfed in snow and ice, thousands of passengers were stranded at the airport for days, and it started to look as if our Christmas trip to see my family was going to be canceled at the last minute. That would have been ironic, as it was pretty much arranged at the last minute.

The Spanish company that now owns the airport hadn’t foreseen that this winter might be like… well, last winter, which was also freakishly cold and snowy. There weren’t enough staff on hand to clear snow, so by end of day Monday there were still buried planes, and almost all flights were canceled.

On Tuesday, rothko found the BAA web site and discovered that it was publishing a daily list of the lucky planes that were being allowed in or out. That day, the early evening flight from Houston to London was one of the lucky ones. On Wednesday it was listed as a winner again, so we gamely set off for the airport.

In spite of all the TSA horror stories, I have to say that I’ve never had any problems with the staff at Austin. As usual, security theater was a painless procedure, and everyone was friendly. We were soon sitting at the gate for our connecting flight to Houston, sipping a couple of lattes and trying not to feel foolish wearing winter boots. Unfortunately, our mood was rather spoilt when our flight’s departure was delayed by an hour. I’ve come to expect this sort of thing, and this year I had taken multiple precautions. Firstly, I had booked our flights with a two hour gap in Houston. Secondly, I had booked us on the earlier transatlantic flight–so if we missed that, we would still have the possibility of being bumped onto the later flight. It turned out that we arrived in Houston and had time to walk to our departure gate, getting there just as the flight was just starting to board. We got to our cattle-class seats and settled in, and I tried to relax.

It being an overnight eastbound flight, my plan was to skip all caffeine and try to sleep on the plane. I switched my watch to UTC and unpacked my latest piece of experimental travel sleepwear. Desperation has led me to try a lot of purported solutions to the problem of sleeping on planes.

There’s the chemical approach, of course; I tried melatonin, and found that it did indeed make me sleepy and give my body clock a good kick into UK time. Unfortunately, it also left me feeling weird and spacey, and on one business trip I spent a perfectly normal day in the office working with colleagues, only to discover the next morning that I had absolutely no recollection of anything I had done or said. So, now I avoid melatonin unless I can’t get to sleep any other way.

The main problem with sleeping in an economy class seat is that they don’t recline significantly, and your head ends up lolling around and waking you up. So after the melatonin experiment, the next thing I tried was one of those neck pillows shaped like a letter C. Mine was cheap and inflatable, but there are all kinds of fancy ones with buckwheat filling and deluxe covering. My experience is that they’re useless; they don’t stop your head from falling forward at all, and they don’t stop sideways movement enough to prevent a painful crick in the neck.

After that, I tried a wedge-shaped inflatable pillow device that you’ve probably seen in the SkyMall catalog. The idea is that you inflate it, and it fills the space between you and the seat in front. You then lean forward onto it and sleep. The first problem with this plan is that as you sit and inflate what looks like a misshapen beige beach ball, you can’t help feeling like a colossal tool. Once you deal with your pesky self esteem issue by reminding yourself that you will never see any of the people on the plane ever again, you discover that the pillow is designed on the assumption that the person in front will remain in their seat for the duration of the flight and not keep reclining and un-reclining. It also helps if you don’t have anything to eat or drink, and so don’t need to use your tray table. I tried to look past all those snags and sleep on the thing, but it turns out that the inflatable surface naturally ends up bulging outwards, and my head would keep sliding off to one side or the other. I tried letting some air out, but that just made the thing fail to maintain enough shape to rest on. Imagine trying to sleep by hugging a PVC beach ball and resting your head on the back of the seat in front, and you’ll get the idea. Utterly, utterly useless, even though it looks really plausible. Then again, isn’t that the case for so many SkyMall items?

This trip I had a new device to try, and it actually works. That is, it solves the head lolling about problem; there are still plenty of other difficulties you’ll face trying to sleep on a plane, but at least you won’t wake up every time your chin hits your chest. This latest gadget is called Nap Strap. You start by wrapping a belt-like loop of Velcro around the headrest. Once that’s securely in place, you put on an elasticated headband which has two Velcro elastic side pieces that stick to the headrest strap, and gently hold your head against the headrest. The headband also has a soft fabric eyeshade. As far as the tool factor goes, it doesn’t look all that different from the sleep masks people wear on planes all the time. The only gotcha is making sure the strap doesn’t get in the way of any in flight entertainment being enjoyed by the person in the seat behind. Well, that and the price–the Nap Strap seems to sell for an utterly outrageous $99, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay that much when I bought it a year or three ago.

So, the head strap did its job, and I slept a little. That is, until the poor ergonomics and hard seat cushion of the seat itself made my butt start to ache… So next time, I’ll be trying a pillow of some sort to sit on.

We arrived at Heathrow on time, and the plane touched down gently–and then started swerving from side to side in a terrifying manner until the pilot brought it under control. But we were down, we had made it, Christmas was saved. I sped through immigration with my EU passport, collected our luggage, and waited for rothko, then we emerged into the arrivals hall where my delighted parents were waiting to greet us.

My trip to the UK [long]

It’s July 23. I’m in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. It’s a relatively small airport, rarely crowded, and with an open and airy feeling. The queue to get to security screening was short, as usual. I gave my best performance of Security Theater; my liquids and gels were pre-packaged in a ziplock bag, which I dumped into a plastic tray along with my shoes. I’ve made a habit of removing all metal from my person before I even get to the airport. This makes getting through security screening less error-prone, though it does mean I have to keep pulling my trousers up as I stand in line. I’m surprised nobody markets metal-free travel belts.

I had to wait for rothko to clear security. While CPAP machines are explicitly listed as allowed carry-on items, actually traveling with one seems to be a good way to get asked to step aside for additional security screening. Presumably the sound of snoring must echo around the mountain caves of Afghanistan every night. No wonder Al Qaeda are so angry, they must be chronically sleep-deprived.

§

Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. The superstition dates back to the 17th Century, though its precise origins are obscure. It is a comparatively widespread phobia in the USA, with around 1 in 13 people admitting to it. For that reason it’s fairly common for skyscrapers to have no floor numbered 13, skipping straight to 14 instead. Aircraft seating often has no row numbered 13.

Franklin D Roosevelt didn’t realize that it’s bad luck to be superstitious. He refused to travel on the 13th of any month, and if attending a lunch or dinner party of 13 people he would ask his secretary to join to make an even 14.

The Great Seal of the United States features 13 arrows in the eagle’s talon, 13 stars above its head, 13 stripes on the shield, and 13 leaves on the olive branch. On the reverse is a pyramid with 13 levels. It’s a wonder FDR dared be President.

Charles Manson is a name with 13 letters. So are Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Harold Shipman. So, for that matter, is Bernard Madoff.

Apollo 13 was launched at 13:13 Central Time. On 13 April, one of its oxygen tanks exploded.

§

It’s now 14:15. I’m at Gate 13.

I’m waiting for our flight to Dallas/Fort Worth. The flight is scheduled to leave at 14:50, and arrive in Dallas at 15:54. We then have until 17:35 to locate the plane that will take us to Heathrow. Our tickets were purchased from British Airways, but the short hop to Dallas is operated by American Airlines as flight AA698, which will later leave Dallas and proceed to Tampa, Florida.

The AUS-DFW portion of AA698 is on time 76% of the time. When it’s not on time, the flight is delayed by an average of 19.0 minutes. The delay time varies with a standard deviation of 38.1 minutes. I know all of this because I looked it up last week on the Internet.

§

I grew up in Buckinghamshire, which is one of the few counties in England that still has a state-run selective secondary education system. That is, children are given exams, and then assigned to schools on the basis of how smart they seem to be. There are grammar schools for smart kids, regular comprehensive schools for middle-scoring children, and presumably also some educational establishments that specialize in finger paint.

The alleged benefit of this approach is that the smart kids get to go study algebra without having to wait for the less-smart kids to master basic arithmetic, and so on. Some people feel that this is unfair, and would rather that the future rocket scientists be kept in the same classrooms as the future glue sniffers, in the hope that the latter might be challenged and inspired to better things by the former. Yeahright.

Anyway, I took the so-called Twelve Plus examination, and in the August of my 12th year I was due to move up to a new and more challenging school. In spite of my academic promise I wasn’t a confident child. I fully expected to be surrounded by kids bigger than me, smarter than me, and probably better prepared than me — especially the ones who had been privately tutored.

The day of my first day at grammar school also happened to be the first day of any kind of school for my younger brother, James. The day before that, my mother came home from hospital after giving birth to my youngest brother, Edward.

My mother isn’t the most punctual of people at the best of times. James’s school day started first, traffic was bad, one thing led to another, and I arrived at my new place of learning 10 minutes after the school day had started. There I discovered to my horror that all the other new students had already been given photostat-duplicated information sheets telling them about the school timetable, and providing a sketch map of the locations of the various classrooms. All the other new students were sitting in the main hall, listening to some sort of introductory presentation. Also in the hall were the teachers who had handed out the information sheets. I seemed to be the only one who was late. I stood on my own in the playground and waited until everyone came out, then tried to find out what was going on.

Twenty years later, I was still having occasional nightmares about being in a new school, and being the only one without a timetable or map of the grounds.

I should mention that I don’t hold any grudge against my mother for this. It was just one of those random childhood traumas. If it hadn’t been my bad luck to be the one late to school, James probably would have been late for his first school day ever, and he would have ended up the neurotic one instead.

Regardless, the whole experience is probably the major cause of my fear of travel. It’s not that I’m scared of flying, it’s more that I’m scared of being late, or of not having some important piece of information. The nightmare scenarios are endless: Perhaps I’ll arrive late at the airport without my flight itinerary, and they’ll be unable to find me in the computer. Maybe I’ll suddenly realize something important is missing from my luggage, but it will be too late to do anything about it because I’ll already be behind schedule. Maybe I’ll get one of the times wrong, and be left standing on my own at the departure gate.

I deal with my travel fears by planning to excess. By the time I get to the airport I have a full printed itinerary, printed receipts for the tickets, and I’m usually over an hour early. If I’m going somewhere new, I have a map of the destination. Sometimes I have a GPS too. I also have all the information in my BlackBerry, in case I lose the paperwork.

When a flight connection is involved, I’ve usually done some calculations as to the likelihood of missing it. Back in the ancient pre-Internet past, I’d just allow ridiculous amounts of time; now, I can look up actual statistical information to fuel my concern.

§

So now it’s 14:38. Behind the desk by the door to the jetway, a flat panel monitor shows that our flight is delayed by 9 minutes. I am performing mental arithmetic.

Two standard deviations of 38.1 minutes is 76.2 minutes. Add the average delay of 19.0 minutes and you get 95.2 minutes. Add those minutes to our scheduled 15:54 arrival in Dallas, and you get 17:30 or so. So, even though we’re one of the unlucky 24% for whom flight AA698 is delayed, there’s still a 95% chance, statistically speaking, that we’ll be in Dallas before our flight to Heathrow departs.

Of course, this doesn’t account for the time taken to get from our arrival gate to the next departure gate, which tends to be in a different terminal when you’re changing airlines. Nor does it allow for the requirements airlines place on how many minutes before departure you must be on board the aircraft; the days of dashing up at the last minute and getting on board seem to be over. On the other hand, I think to myself, my calculation also fails to account for the possibility that our transatlantic flight will also be delayed. I’m optimistic like that.

My left eye is twitching slightly. This is one of my normal signs of stress.

There are a large number of middle-aged people in identical red polo shirts milling around Gate 13. An embroidered logo on each says “Walk Worthy Missions”. They are talking about whether they will get their connecting flight to Brazil. I deduce that they are Christian missionaries of some sort. I thought Brazil was already pretty Christian, what with that big statue of JC in Rio and all, but maybe they’re going to do volunteer work for street kids or something.

I joke to rothko that if something goes horribly wrong, presumably the red shirted people will be the first to die, like on Star Trek.

§

It’s 14:55. Our flight is finally boarding. As we wait for our group number to be called, one of the redshirts offers us a New Testament. We politely decline.

Boarding proceeds in the usual manner: people crowd the gate, making it hard to get by when your number is called, and as I walk to my seat I see the usual selfish idiots scattered in the front half of the coach section–the ones who board early so they can grab extra overhead locker storage, even though it means they end up delaying everyone else by blocking the aisle.

By 15:15 the plane is on its way to the runway. My tray table is stowed and my seat back is in the upright position. As I try to relax, I realize that my cell phone is still switched on. What’s more, it’s in a side pocket of my carry on luggage, stowed in the overhead compartment.

I consider my options. The plane is moving, the seatbelt sign is illuminated, and my guess is that this is the worst possible time for a passenger to unexpectedly clamber out into the aisle of the plane. On the other hand, the airlines are always very insistent that cell phones and electronic devices must be turned off during takeoff and landing.

The question of whether cell phones endanger flight safety is still controversial. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has concluded that they can interfere with pre-1984 avionics equipment. Even much newer planes can have old equipment on board, due to equipment being swapped in and out during servicing. However, a 2006 article in IEEE Spectrum concluded that well-maintained aircraft have heavily shielded equipment, and that phones are of little danger. It stated that phones are not allowed mainly because neither the FAA nor the FCC will spend the money to perform extensive safety tests. Boeing has spent a lot of time trying to get cellphones to cause glitches in their avionics equipment, and has failed. So overall, chances of a cell phone causing a major air disaster seem to be pretty remote. Studies have also concluded that on most flights, at least one cell phone is left switched on due to passenger non-compliance.

I am that passenger.

After careful thought, I decide that trying to do something about the problem will only make the situation worse. I settle for feeling guilty instead.

§

There’s a motor noise from the wings as the flaps are deployed. The plane accelerates down the runway and takes off. Austin slowly falls away as I look out of the window.

It’s 15:20. We’re late, but there’s still plenty of time for us to get to Dallas and make our connecting flight. The plane banks gently northwards. A few second later, the pilot activates the intercom.

“American, American. This is American Airlines flight six ninety eight declaring an emergency. Returning to Austin.”

The intercom clicks off and the plane banks smoothly but steeply.

I’ve always wondered how I would actually respond in an emergency. Everyone likes to think that they will be calm and capable. Governments and corporations, on the other hand, seem to think that we will panic if not reassured and given explicit instructions.

Before now, my guess had always been that I would remain calm. Working as a system administrator, I’m used to situations that make people panic. When multiple servers crash simultaneously for unknown reasons, my general reaction is “Hmm, this is an interesting situation, I wonder if I can work out what’s going on?”

As the seconds tick past on flight 698, similar thoughts are going through my head. Something interesting is clearly happening. I’ve never heard an announcement like that before. Yet at the same time, the plane doesn’t seem to be crashing, the oxygen masks haven’t dropped down, and nobody has told us to get into crash position.

I decide that it’s probably some stupid equipment fault. I start to feel annoyed that something so trivial is going to force us to return to Austin. That’ll mean waiting while they put the plane through diagnostics and repeat the pre-flight checks. It’ll probably delay the flight by half an hour, minimum. We’ll miss our connection, I think angrily.

A few other thoughts go through my mind too, but none of them amount to “Oh my god, we’re going to die.” Fear remains absent. I just sigh.

The pilot activates the intercom again. “Sorry about that earlier announcement, folks. You weren’t supposed to hear that. I pushed the wrong button.”

There’s nervous laughter in the cabin. My mind is flashing back to the movie “Airplane!”, which featured exactly this scenario as a joke. Yet this isn’t a joke, because we’re descending.

The pilot explains the situation. As the plane had turned northwards, a sensor had triggered an alarm on the flight deck indicating that one of the engines was on fire. Since this is generally a major problem when taking off and ascending to cruising altitude, he had declared the emergency situation. As soon as he had turned the plane around, the alarm had turned itself off. He was pretty sure the engine wasn’t actually on fire now, but for obvious reasons he wasn’t going to take any chances.

The landing is like every other landing, except that a fire truck speeds up to the plane with sirens wailing; then it just sits there for a minute or so. The pilot tells us that the fire crew can’t see any evidence of fire, so he’s just going to taxi the plane back to the gate in a relaxed fashion and get the engineers to investigate.

We reach the gate, the seatbelt light goes off, and I retrieve my phone and turn it off.

§

Half an hour later I’m still on board the plane, trying to pretend I don’t have a wristwatch. On the plus side, I’m alive and I’m not on fire, two things I’m a big fan of. On the minus side, I’m pretty sure we’ve missed our flight to the UK. I try to read a book and not think about it.

Every fifteen minutes or so, we’re told that engineers are investigating the situation, and that there will be some actual news real soon now. This doesn’t do anything to help my efforts at stoic calm. The flight attendants bring us water and orange juice. A few people demand to leave, and are allowed to do so.

Finally, at 16:45 the pilot informs us that there definitely was no fire, and it was a sensor error, but that the engineers can’t work out why the sensor system is still misbehaving. They’ve tried replacing the sensor, they’ve tried resetting the system, and they still aren’t sure what’s going on. Without a working safety system for detecting engine fires, the flight is canceled. We shuffle off the plane, back into the terminal.

§

Back at gate 13, American Airlines has allocated one lone member of staff to rearrange the travel of everyone on the flight. A long Z-shaped line stretches from the counter.

In my experience, this kind of situation is pretty much standard operating procedure for American Airlines. If you search for flights online, AA are usually the cheapest, so IBM love them for business trips. I’ve flown on AA dozens of times, and I’d say something has gone horribly wrong about 75% of the time.

I think the problem is that AA cut costs as far as any reasonable person would cut them; and then they cut some more. To get an idea of how determined they are, look at one of their planes.

AA planes are all shiny metal, with just a thin red and blue stripe to provide branding. That’s because aircraft paint costs money, and repainting planes to keep them looking good costs money too. A thin stripe can get scuffed up and still look pretty good; so can bare metal.

The planes also look the way they do because paint is heavy. By not painting the planes, AA make them a few kilograms lighter, slightly reducing the fuel required for each journey. I’m not making this up; I read it in an AA in-flight magazine.

The same focus on cost-cutting extends to ground staff. Generally speaking, any time something needs to be done by someone, AA will have exactly one person in place to do it. If anything unexpected happens, like a plane possibly catching fire, that person will likely be overwhelmed with work, passenger journeys will get backed up, and a chain reaction of epic fail will ensue.

I am reminded of all this as I stand in line.

The redshirts are discussing their situation. They’ve picked one representative to queue on their behalf. I overhear that there are 29 of them, and they are all traveling to Brazil together. They’ve missed their connecting flight, which consequently is likely to be a lot more empty than the airline would like.

There are several people in the line who sound English. I guess that they were trying to get to the same flight as us. We talk to one of them, and my hypothesis is confirmed. He tells us that he has managed to phone and get rebooked on another flight, so rothko calls American Airlines.

The AA representative listens to the problem, and says that we need to call British Airways. So rothko calls British Airways, who say that since it’s an American flight that has been canceled, it’s up to American to book us on an alternate flight. So rothko calls AA again, and tells them this. They respond that since BA owns the booking, they’re the only ones who can update it, and we need to call BA.

There’s an element of truth to this claim. American Airlines set up the Sabre system, developed for them by IBM in the 1960s, and spun it off as a separate company in 2000. It still runs today, on mainframes located in Oklahoma, and now handles all the airline reservations for around 400 airlines. Meanwhile, British Airways use their own system called Travicom, and refuse to allow Sabre permission to issue tickets for BA flights; something to bear in mind when you read about BA and AA’s “oneworld” alliance.

I hate telephones, but clearly this is a situation where a dual-pronged attack is needed. I call American Airlines and sound like a confused English person, and rothko calls British Airways and sounds like a confused American.

The woman at AA realizes that the “You have to call BA” approach is not going to work this time, and admits that there’s another flight to Dallas at 17:35, but that it’s completely full. So is the flight after that. She says that she might be able to get us seats, by putting us on standby; and if we can get to Dallas, there are two more American Airlines flights to Heathrow later this evening, and we can probably get a seat on one of those.

I politely point out that we paid extra for British Airways’ World Traveller Plus seats across the Atlantic. American doesn’t have anything like that, so could they try and get us something equivalent–say, a Business Class seat?

The AA woman asks me to hold while she calls another desk.

§

It’s around 17:05 and I’m listening to tinny classical music in my left ear. There’s still only one American Airlines staffer at the counter, the line has hardly moved, and people are starting to get visibly irritated.

The music stops, and the voice of the woman from AA returns to my phone. She is telling me that she has managed to get us two seats on the 17:35 flight that’s departing from gate 15, and we just need to go to the counter and pick them up. I’m extremely skeptical, but we tell our single serving friend what has happened, say goodbye, and walk briskly to gate 15, where boarding is already in progress.

Another lone American Airlines staffer is handling the entire boarding process. Once he has finished dealing with everyone else, we show him our boarding passes for 698, and give a brief summary of the story so far. He does some intense typing at the Sabre terminal, and tells us that he’s done something very complicated and not entirely orthodox. He can let us on the plane now, but we’ll have to get everything rebooked properly in Dallas. There’s no time for paperwork, not even boarding passes. We hurry down the jetway.

§

It’s 17:48 and I’m sitting in a business class seat on flight AA1774 to Dallas/Forth Worth. I feel like I want to cry, mostly out of relief that we’re actually going somewhere, but that wouldn’t be businesslike.

I realize that my question about seat upgrades had persuaded the AA customer service rep to contact their business class priority bookings desk, and they had placed us in two of the three empty business class seats. If we hadn’t paid for upgraded seats, we’d still be in Austin.

We’ve missed our UK flight, and we might not be able to get booked onto the two remaining flights this evening, but I feel that if we can at least get as far as Dallas, we can stay in a hotel overnight and get a flight tomorrow.

There’s no beverage service in cattle class on this short flight, but in business class they are handing around free drinks and a bag of assorted salty snacks. The bag has a warning on the back saying “This food was processed in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts.” Those warnings always irrationally annoy me, because peanuts are not nuts, they’re legumes. Like I need anything else to be annoyed about right now.

Business class also get a second in-flight magazine, “Celebrated Living”. It seems to consist mostly of advertisements for expensive things nobody needs, like fancy watches and holiday villas.

I try to relax, but I have a knot in my stomach.

§

It’s 18:12 and the plane is definitely descending. Better still, it hasn’t caught fire.

“Flight attendants prepare for landing please.”

We enjoy a bumpy touch down at 18:27. Connecting gates are announced as we taxi in. The plane shudders to a halt. “Time for a brake job,” mutters the guy sitting next to me.

§

It’s 18:40. I walk off of the plane into DFW terminal B. I meet up with rothko again, and we walk briskly to the transit point, and get the train to terminal D as quickly as possible. Once there we hurry to gate 22, which is the departure gate for the next flight to the UK.

My eye is twitching again.

There are three AA staff at this desk. One man is dressed a bit like a pilot, and is doing something complicated with a Sabre terminal. A second man is dressed like a baggage thrower, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything. A woman is sitting impassively waiting for the next customer, with a scowl that suggests she’s either at the end of a very long shift, or has been sucking on lemons to pass the time.

I stride up to the desk, putting on my best harried-but-affable expression, and attempting to smile. I politely summarize our tale of woe, trying to keep things as succinct as possible.

Keys are tapped, eyebrows are raised, and colleagues are consulted. Given our lack of boarding passes for the previous flight, plus whatever it says in Sabre, I get the impression we really shouldn’t be here. Clearly we are, however, so our presence is filed away under unexplained phenomena, and by 19:15 we’re rebooked on flight AA78 to Heathrow. There are no premium seats left on the flight, so we’ll be stuck in cattle class for eight hours, but at least we’ll get to our destination.

Our checked luggage, I’m less sure about. When you submit your luggage to the tender mercies of the airlines, it gets tagged with a unique tracking ID and logged in a big database, which I suspect runs on an IBM mainframe somewhere. If you are rerouted or transferred to a different flight, your bags are supposed to be rerouted automatically to match. However, since we had to rush to catch our successful Dallas flight, chances are our bags won’t have managed to make the same journey. Even if they have, they’ll be flagged for loading onto BA0192, which they’ll have missed, so all bets are off.

Being a fairly experienced traveler, I’ve got everything valuable or essential in my carry on bag; the checked luggage is just clothing, so I’m not overly concerned about it. We’ll get by. If the worst happens, there’s always Marks & Spencer.

With our new flight arrangements, we’ll be arriving at a different time, at a different Heathrow terminal. I can’t be sure my parents will read their e-mail before departing tomorrow morning to meet us at the airport. This seems like a legitimate reason to call them at 1 a.m. their time, so I do. Mindful of the cost of international cell phone calls, I try to keep the conversation short and to the point. I reassure mother that the plane wasn’t actually on fire at any point, that we are safe, that we definitely have seats on the next UK flight, and that we will arrive the next morning only three hours later than planned.

§

It’s now 19:30. With all immediate obstacles overcome, I’m suddenly feeling hungry. I wander DFW terminal D in search of food.

There’s an Einstein Bros Bagels, which is closed. There’s an allegedly gourmet burrito place, which is also closed. There’s a Fuddruckers, which seems to be the only thing open, and has a long line stretching out of the door. I cuss, trudge back to gate 22, and unwrap a Clif bar from my shoulder bag.

§

It’s 19:45 and I’m sitting on flight AA78. It is running 30 minutes late. This doesn’t bother me at all.

The plane is a 767. The overhead lockers above the central rows of seats move up and down, rather than swinging down like in most planes. When they’re up, there’s a curiously open and airy feeling inside the plane. The extra headroom makes it feel a lot less claustrophobic.

Of course, that doesn’t make the seats any more comfortable. I try to nap over the course of the flight, but don’t have much luck.

§

It’s 11:30 British Summer Time, and we’ve just touched down in Heathrow. British summer is in full effect, complete with thick gray cloudy skies and slow drizzle.

There’s another plane at the gate ours is supposed to arrive at. We sit on the plane, and the plane sits on the taxiway, for another 20 minutes. Finally we reach the gate, the seatbelt sign turns off, and I stand up. My back is sore, but not aching. I’m sleep-deprived, but more or less OK.

As I suspected, our luggage will not be joining us. We file paperwork with the American Airlines lost luggage desk. They check the computer, and rather worryingly announce that they can’t find any record of where our bags are. They say they’ll call us when they know.

§

Our bags finally turn up in Dallas a day later, and are delivered to us a day after that. Nothing is missing.

Solving the UK’s knife crime problem

From the Daily Telegraph:

Gordon Brown should levy a tax on violent video games to help tackle knife crime, according to the Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor.

[...]

The Tackling Knives Action Plan is a £2million programme aimed at reducing deaths and serious violence among teenagers due to knives.

Violent games are “too cheap” and taxes on them should be “very high”, Mr Taylor told MPs.

Wait a moment. It’s not my favorite genre, but I’ve played enough to know that violent video games rarely glamorize knives. Nobody in their right mind ever tried to complete Grand Theft Auto, Fallout 3 or Resident Evil 4 using knives; it’s shotguns and machine pistols all the way.

So if we’re serious about wanting to do something about knife crime, then what we really need to do is follow the same logic as the UK handgun ban, and try to reduce the availability of knives, right? We need to be tough on knives, tough on the causes of knives.

I call for an immediate and very high tax on unsliced loaves of bread. Have you seen a bread knife recently? If you’re an irresponsible potential murderer, you might even have one in your house–hopefully locked away in the knife cabinet where teenagers can’t get at it. Those evil serrations will slice through innocent flesh like it’s, well, a loaf of bread.

Speaking of flesh, we need a big tax on steak too. Steak knives are conveniently sized for hoodies to carry about their person. Any observant Daily Mail reader will recall incidents where steak knives have been used as stabbing weapons.

Ultimately, if we’re going to solve the problem of knife availability, the population of the UK is going to need to transition to eating only soft foods that require no sharp implements. We can look to the nation’s lunatic asylums and baby food manufacturers for guidance on assembling a safe menu for the nation.

Knives are only part of the problem, though. Damilola Taylor wasn’t killed with a knife; according to the prosecution, he was stabbed with broken glass from a bottle. So clearly, the UK needs to go beyond simple deposits on glass bottles, and start making it prohibitively expensive to put liquids in bottles.

Once everybody is eating baby food from plastic jars and drinking their beer from plastic bottles, the UK may finally see the same kind of change in the number of knife crimes that it has seen in handgun crimes.

US vs UK

A US court has ruled that authorities cannot force people to incriminate themselves by divulging their encryption passwords.

This is in marked contrast to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) makes it a crime to decline to hand over all your incriminating files if the police demand it. If the case doesn’t involve national security, you can be put in jail for two years. If it does, five years.

Of course, the authorities would only use that power if absolutely necessary to fight terrorism, right? Well, the first person to fall afoul of section III of RIPA was an animal rights protester. She claims she didn’t have any encrypted files.

Got any old encrypted e-mails for which you no longer have the key? The RIPA has no limit, they can demand keys for files years old. Lost or forgotten the key? Someone sent you something encrypted with the wrong key? Off to jail you go.

London

While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.

London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.

I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.

Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.

We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.

We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.

We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.

Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.

As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.

We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.

By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.

The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.

Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.

Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.

We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.

Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.

The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.

One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?

Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.

Arrival

I woke up on board a 747. Once I’d remembered why, I looked at my watch, and estimated we were an hour or two from landing. I took a drink of water. Soon the BA flight attendants started bringing in breakfast, and I gently prodded the spouse awake. Against all probability, I had managed to get 2 or 3 hours of pretty decent sleep onboard an airplane. Soon we landed at Heathrow Terminal 4.

As we disembarked from the plane, I started to hear raised voices. It turned out that some genius in the UK’s Department for Transport had set new airline luggage policies.

Flying in to the UK, you can carry one piece of hand luggage, and one personal item such as a laptop. However, flying out of the UK, you can only carry the one piece of hand luggage. The piece de resistance: the restrictions apply even if you’re only changing planes at Heathrow.

Hence numerous business travelers had flown in with a travel bag containing valuable or fragile items, and a laptop bag containing their laptop. They were now arguing with airport security because they couldn’t fit the laptop bag inside their other bag, and didn’t want to trust the laptop or their carry-on to the tender mercies of the baggage throwers. And I can quite understand–I often travel with a carry-on bag containing SLR and lenses.

Still, it wasn’t our problem, so we strolled past the angry people and headed to immigration. Thanks to my European passport, I could waltz into the fast line. The woman who checked my passport was wearing a Muslim jilbāb, and the situation struck me as slightly ironic.

True to the promise, our luggage got priority, and hit the carousel first. We found our way through customs, and my parents were waiting to meet us. Mother was clearly very excited. Hugs were exchanged, and we got into the Range Rover for the trip to Bournemouth.

England was much as I remembered it. The countryside is not unlike the Texas Hill Country, though of course it lacks the cactus and vultures, and the trees are different species. The buildings are the main difference–old, often dirty, and made of brick.

Bournemouth isn’t home, and I don’t think it ever will be. However, pretty much my whole family decided to up and move there after I had left for the USA, and they love it. It’s like they’ve lived their all their lives. So the place gives me a strange feeling, as though Buckinghamshire is just an implanted false memory.

It’s certainly a nice enough town. But in spite of recent changes, it’s still a bit of a sleepy seaside resort, and not the kind of place I’d want to live. And since it’s the most expensive place in the UK for property, we couldn’t afford to live there anyway.

The sea is cold. After a week or so, when the weather warmed up, there were people swimming in it; but I wasn’t going to be one of them. However, we did walk along the sand, and splash around in the surf a bit.

Flying back to England

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

“It sucked. Can I have my £1m now?”

A couple of months ago, 15 UK troops were taken hostage in Iraq. They were eventually freed. Then I started seeing news stories about how everyone was furious because the troops were selling their personal stories to the highest bidder.

Maybe I’ve been in the US too long, but I didn’t understand what people were upset about. I still don’t.

Those troops went through a hideous ordeal. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to get money in return for telling people what it was like? If everyone can agree to give JK Rowling ten million quid for writing a bunch of guff about kids learning to be wizards, what’s the moral argument for not allowing troops to sell true stories for a sackful of cash? (I note that they even had explicit permission from the MOD to do so!)

Or maybe it was all faux outrage manufactured by the newspapers who lost out in the bidding war?

Operation Ore

A few years ago the UK police carried out Operation Ore. It was a major operation targeting online child pornography. Some 7,272 British residents were added to a police database of people who paid to view child porn online. 4,283 homes were searched, 3,744 people were arrested, 1,451 were convicted. It was a major blow against pedophiles.

Or at least, that was the theory.

The US had a similar operation, Operation Avalanche. They assembled 35,000 entries in their database. Curiously, though, they only charged 100. If the US police could only justify prosecuting less than 1% of their suspects, how could the UK police be arresting more than half of theirs?

The answer is that many of the UK cases are based entirely on use of credit cards to sign up for suspected child porn web sites. Unfortunately, many of the credit cards were stolen. Oh, and many of the web sites contained only legal material. Minor details to the UK police.

The problem comes from the fact that many small porn sites use online transaction processors to handle their credit card transactions, rather than setting up their own merchant accounts. In particular, a company called Landslide in Texas provided credit card subscription services to a large network of affiliate porn sites.

It’s estimated that up to half the money Landslide collected actually ended up in the hands of a ring of Indonesian credit card scammers operating the familiar “small charge” fraud. Also (ab)using the service was a Brazilian hacker who “signed up” more than 3,000 stolen credit card numbers.

Before long, Landslide found itself on the receiving end of thousands of chargebacks from irate credit card owners. The company went bankrupt. Clearly the owner had been a victim of fraud just as the credit card holders had. That wasn’t a good enough excuse for federal prosecutors, though; he ended up in federal prison serving a 180 year sentence.

Meanwhile, UK police were swooping on houses, smashing down doors, seizing computer equipment, and arresting thousands of people on the basis that their credit card numbers had been found on Landslide’s hard drives. Never mind the massive amount of fraud that had pulled Landslide under; never mind whether the affiliate site the credit card holder had supposedly paid to see was legal or not. The police reasoning was apparently: At least one affiliate site held child porn; Landslide membership theoretically allowed users access to all the affiliate sites; John Doe’s credit card was used to sign up via Landslide; therefore John Doe signed up to view child porn.

The problem with the hysteria around child pornography and pedophilia is that if you’re accused, your life can be ruined even if you’re innocent. Plenty of employers will fire anyone as soon as they’re accused. The alleged pedophile finds himself jobless, with all his computer equipment seized by police, who have no obligation ever to return it.

For example, consider the case of naval officer Commodore David White. He was suspended from the navy, who feared that the case would hit the newspapers. It did anyway, but not in the way they expected—the commodore committed suicide by drowning. It turned out that he was totally innocent.

So far, 39 people have committed suicide as a definite result of Operation Ore. The true number may be higher, as not everyone leaves a suicide note. Maybe a few of the dead were guilty, but I’d place bets that the majority were innocent.

A web site has been set up covering the unraveling of Operation Ore. The police must realize things are starting to look bad for them, as they have apparently pressured Google to remove the site from searches. Another web site has information about the forensic investigation of Landslide’s computers. Journalist Duncan Campbell has been acting as an expert witness in some of the defence cases, and has written about Operation Ore in The Guardian. A recent Slashdot article has some first hand experience in the comments.

Update 2007-04-26: More from the Guardian and from Ross Anderson.