On British government plans to privatise all viruses and bacteria (and other matters of potential interest)

It's been announced tonight in a sweeping programme of privatisations - leaked in exclusive to this blog for some utterly unknown reason - that Andrew Lansley, the man irresponsible for health services in England, has drawn up a blueprint to privatise 99 percent of all known viruses and bacteria.

The rationale behind such a move is unclear at the moment but it is believed that five extra layers of viral and bacterial management may serve to slow down the capacity of such organisms to attack English citizens - especially the still gainfully employed who may yet serve the nation well. 

Meanwhile, in a separate announcement, Iain Duncan Smith (or IDS as we prefer to call him), the man irresponsible for generating a more inclusive level of poverty in the realm, has publicly admitted for the first time in polite society that the government is working closely together with the famously philanthropic Close The Stable Door After The Horse Has Bolted Foundation to develop a brand new type of anti-serum designed to target those poisoned individuals who don't agree wholeheartedly with all Coalition policies. 

It would appear - at the same time - that IDS is also working hand-in-glove with Theresa May, the woman irresponsible for emptying the streets of hard-working police officers, as they attempt to rid the country of all abnormal people classified by the DWP as officially workshy.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, are said - as I write these very lines - to be preparing their barricades and defences.

And that's the way it is.

Good night.

How the Coalition is deliberately engineering a competitive deficit in British business

Prologue

I will try and limit myself to simply quoting two contrasting situations tonight, though this may prove rather difficult - if not entirely impossible.  [Editor's observation: in hindsight it was!]

Act I - Banking on it!

The first involves the Royal Bank of Scotland.  Quote number one here from our dearly beloved Guardian:

Royal Bank of Scotland stoked a political row on Thursday night after it announced it had awarded its chief executive, Stephen Hester, a bonus worth almost £1m.

The payment was derided as "utterly unacceptable" by one Liberal Democrat peer, while a Foreign Office minister calculated that Hester's package meant he was paid in three days what a soldier in Afghanistan, "risking his life", earned in a whole year.

What's more:

The bailed-out bank attempted to justify the bonus – which is being paid in shares that Hester will be able to gain access to in 2014 – by saying it needed to reward the chief executive for the progress he had made in reducing the size of RBS.

Since he joined in November 2008, the bank has cut 33,000 jobs.

So Hester needs to have his already lavish salary almost doubled - in this case it is the state, as 80 percent shareholder, which has voluntarily chosen to act thus (for no prior contractual agreement imposed by a previous regime was operating in this particular instance) - in order to reward him for the magnificent skills and prescience required which allowed him to discover how to save pots of shareholder money by prejudicing the lives and times of what we must conclude are 33,000 unskilled and short-sighted workers.

So let's just weigh that one up as we move onto quote number two, from the same newspaper:

The Royal Bank of Scotland has spent more than $4m (£2.5m) of British taxpayers' money on lobbyists in Washington since it was bailed out by the government, documents disclose.

Both in-house and commercial lobbyists have been paid to influence American senators and congressmen reforming US finance law since the bank's collapse and government bail-out in October 2008.

The money has been handed over despite calls from ministers for RBS and other banks that have received taxpayers' handouts to refrain from hiring public affairs firms.

So is there anything I can add to this which you are not already thinking?

One rule for the rich - and quite another for the poor?

Act II - In the black!

It looks like the government might be trying to work out a way to limit the black economy in the UK to a maximum of £1000 in cash payments.  I'm not sure how many cash payments this might eliminate in reality - but let's put that thought to one side for the moment.  Anyhow, today I read from tris over at Munguin's Republic the following pair of golfing metaphors (ie par for the whole damn bloody dispiriting public-private sector course):

HMCR chief Dave Hartnett (you remember him, don’t you?),  says that it is the public's duty not to pay tradesmen cash in hand, otherwise said tradesmen may be tempted (look away if you are of a sensitive disposition) to 'evade paying their fair share of tax.' (Shock, horror.)

And, if you do not act as tax collectors (unpaid), and they do "forget" to declare all their earnings, this might result in even deeper government cuts to public services. (More shock and horror!!)

However, according to tris the very same Mr Hartnett has also been responsible for a number of other matters over the past couple of years about which the Telegraph actually had this to say way back in December; matters which, in reality, cast a teensy bit of doubt on his intellectual cogency.  These matters are somewhat distanced from the alleged behaviours of your neighbourhood builder (who, incidentally, though probably irrelevantly to civil servants like the aforementioned individual, may as a result of government economic policy be currently struggling to make ends meet).  To continue in tris's own words:

Now, would this be the same Dave Hartnett who, having allowed himself to be bought, on over 100 occasions, incredibly expensive meals, arranged multi-billion pound tax avoidance schemes with the Goldman Sachs and Vodafone...who, by strange co-incidence, had picked up the tabs for these "fine dining experiences"?

And did this multi-billion pound drop in tax revenue not in some way result in the government having less money to spend?

Meanwhile, we have a story from False Economy from September 2011 which clearly indicates that the government is actually being extremely coherent indeed (table here):

Disturbingly our research shows that some of the companies lining up to take a slice of the mushrooming multi-billion pound public service sector are among the most unethical in the UK and many remain largely unknown to the public

We’ve found that the biggest companies that are playing an increasingly important role in running our public services have the bottom rating for many of our ethical and environmental criteria, including environmental reporting, supply chain management, human and workers’ rights and political activity.

The government is now selling our public services to companies seemingly without any scrutiny of a company’s ethical or environmental policies. This apparent policy vacuum challenges the coalition’s stated claim that ‘this will be the greenest government that the UK has seen’. This is significant as it threatens to undermine the progress that the previous government had made in terms of its ethical and environmental purchasing policies.

And what's more:

Another area that gives great cause for concern is the evidence we have uncovered that shows that 13 of the companies we surveyed have subsidiaries in countries that are widely considered to be tax havens, something that is included in our Anti-Social Finance category.

This implies that the companies concerned, including some of biggest names in the outsourcing industry such as BUPA, Capita and Sodexo, are managing their finances in such a way that they may be actively avoiding paying tax here in the UK.

Coherent government, that is, in the sense we have already observed: one set of permissible behaviours for the poorer end of society - and clearly quite another set for the wealthier ones amongst us.

Epilogue

I'm beginning to get the feeling that this government and its civil servants are not only being actively encouraged through close and carefully weaved private connections to set up a two-tier Britain as far as public services are concerned, they're also being actively encouraged to create a Britain whereby:

1. everything which private companies need in order to function in the public space is externalised onto a rapidly shrinking state evermore at the exclusive service of private sector interests - that is to say, we as a voting public lose out twice: a) fewer public resources will remain as a whole and b) of the fewer resources that remain, more of them will end up in the pockets of private sector advocates
2. large industry interests will be massively prioritised at the expense of the small - that is to say, whilst only big companies will be able to afford the technical advice to avoid paying tax, small companies will inevitably end up paying proportionately far more than their big cousins ever will

This is in no way a free-market level playing-field of any kind whatsoever.  Traditional economies of scale mean those with a monopolistic stranglehold over whole sectors and industries already have a substantial advantage over their small- and medium-sized competitors.  But factor into the mix the reality that most large companies will now interpret the government's recent agreements on tax liability as providing a green light for such behaviours ... well, we can only then conclude that a competitive deficit is being deliberately engineered into the British business environment - a deficit intentionally designed to prejudice the smaller companies on that spectrum of economic activity and favour the much larger.

There must, of course, be a better way.  The question, of course, is who may provide the leadership we need on the matter.

I would like it to be someone from the party I belong to.

And I do wonder if, one day, it could ever be the case.

Yesterday

It wasn't yesterday - I think it was the day before - but on the digital TV channel Yesterday, at the very least this week, I caught a little of a programme on Auschwitz and the Final Solution. 

Now much of my TV is out of the corner of my eyes these days, as I sit at my computer more often than on the traditional sofa of yore.  So this is how I saw what I saw.  No graphic images as such.  Just the calm and measured tone of the narrator - as well as that of some still inevitably shell-shocked interviewees. 

The bit of the programme I caught described an apparently "illegal" and "devolved" lead-up to the gas chambers, which were of course later sanctioned and constructed with the full complicity and intentionality of the Nazi regime and its leaders.  It described how from relatively small beginnings - using "hell vans" to gas small numbers of gypsies with carbon monoxide - the experiment was extended to Jews who lived in the locality.  One lady villager was interviewed describing how the cries of those dying under such circumstances were heard across the village.  Her face was a picture. 

Not a picture you'd like to see.

And the most shocking thing about it all was that apparently - as I pointed out above - these initial experiments, these examples of what we might crudely describe as "genocidal DIY", were carried out by someone (I didn't catch the name) who took it on himself to push the envelope of evil off his own awful bat.  Somewhere, then, in some place amongst that regime of punctilious civil servants, they had found time to record that the authority and line of command did not entirely register as it should have done.  Which didn't - even then - stop them from going ahead with the experiment.

No matter.  In the event, it wasn't to be long before it was proven an interpretation of a wider score - a sick symphony of prejudiced harmonies which soon enough claimed for itself a right to decide who could exist and who could not.

*

Over Christmas, my wife and my daughter watched the Spanish version of the "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas".  Even as the viewers' desires to hurt the wickedness of the Nazi regime, as exemplified by the father in the story, lead us unerringly into the narrative trap the film sets, we cannot but sense a terrible duality at the end. 

Punishment, whilst sometimes inevitable, as well as unavoidably just, surely also requires us in each and every case to dig two graves.

*

And if I remember what I saw rightly when I watched that snippet of that documentary this week, the almost Heath Robinsonian aspect of the - at the time - small events I saw described showed how easily from petty infamy humanity could reach a morally corrupting industrialisation. 

In a sense, perhaps, then, the Nazi Final Solution was nothing more nor less than a logical consequence - even where not inevitably so - of the brutalisation of human relationships which the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century incited us to. 

For we are still little more than serfs under the thumbs of all-commanding lords.  Even as we have the daily opportunity to use mediums such as this to not only defend but also try and extend our freedoms.

So if you have forgotten, just a little, and maybe daily life makes us all do so from time to time, take some time out to read this from Wikipedia - and remind yourself what's really at stake.

"Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo"

A few choice phrases from Fraser Nelson's latest piece over at the Telegraph:

George Osborne should be having similar thoughts. His old routine is now failing. The embarrassing truth is that, for all his talk about how you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis, he is now trying to do just that. [...]

And this (the bold is mine):

Treasury officials who have worked for both men are struck not by the differences between them, but the similarities. Brown was nicknamed Macavity for his habit of disappearing at the first sign of trouble; Osborne is known as The Submarine, surfacing only a handful of times a year. Both see economics as a game of political chess, each policy designed to outwit the opposition. [...]

Not a way of making the world a better place, then - more a tool to batter what the rest of us can only define as a proxy enemy.  For the real enemy is what we live from day to day.

Nelson also points out that:

[...] The political narrative thus detaches from the economic reality. And this is why a Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow.

And this:

Even Osborne’s critics cannot deny that, politically, his policy has brought devastating success. He has won the argument on cuts, even though – as the monthly spending figures show – he has hardly made any. [...]

Whilst for Labour the comfort is getting forever colder:

[...] The Chancellor told friends that he expected to be the most hated man in Britain by 2012, but there is surprisingly little hatred. Instead, there is ridicule – and it is largely heaped upon a Labour leader whose skills seem not to extend much beyond solving a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds.

Or, indeed, not eating a chocolate orange ...

As I sift through Nelson's piece - as always tightly, pointedly and fairly written (you can tell he worked for a tabloid, can't you?  Nothing better for those with the verbose tendency to write about politics than to have to do so in the context of flashy headlines and tawdry entertainment stories) - I can't avoid coming to the conclusion that Osborne is actually truly some politician of considerable standing.  More adept, perhaps, at the presentational arts than the PR man that is Cameron himself.

What has Osborne - in reality - achieved then?  Well.  He's increased the indebtedness of the nation whilst at the same time savaging all manner of social services.  "And this is an achievement?" you wonder.  Well, yes - mightily so.  Because Osborne is a three-dimensional politician who plays the long game.  "And what may that be?" you might ask.  Why, make it financially impossible - absolutely out of the question - for Labour ever to bring back the socialism by stealth we enjoyed for so many years under the New Labour regime.

Osborne, in his apparent ineptness, has shown himself to be not a son of Blair but a son of Brown.  For neither have ever been inept; both are consummate manipulators of the body politic.

This isn't, after all, a battle between right and left but - rather - between those who would use politics as a tool to do something useful in the outside world - and those who do politics simply to keep the opposition at bay.

The pursuit of power above all is at the heart of Osbornomics.  As Nelson so memorably points out in his piece:

[...] Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo.

With one small caveat: whilst the placebo is designed to strategically convince us he's doing everything he should, in reality it's there in order for him to have the time to burn all those bridges back to any kind of British socialism.  That is to say, on his part it's not unconscious at all.  It's a deliberate administration of a drug which allows us to die.

And therein my absolute misery this morning.


http://youtu.be/zxg7j6rQDLM

Redemption (II)

I posted about redemption - and a rather partial forgiveness too - in my previous post "Redemption".  A couple of tweets on the back of that post have made me think again; at least, in relation to the second half of the post on the subject of the erstwhile software businessman, and now - perhaps - self-redeeming philanthropist, Bill Gates.

Deborah, from the excellent World Development Movement, has these two points to make.  Firstly, that:

@eiohel it's not just a matter of how Gates acquired his fortune but that 1 man has the power to decide how to solve the world's problems

To continue with:

@eiohel and his version is top down technocratic favouring his cronies in pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies

It does, therefore, lead one to wonder - maybe a little uncharitably - that Gates the philanthropist, wrapped up in that mindset of excluding copyright and IP laws and legislation - a mindset which has served to make him so much money in the software publishing and development businesses - is now quite naturally setting up the ground rules for branded medicine and crops the world over.

It is only human to favour those who think as one also thinks.  That he may believe in massive technological solutions - implemented by pyramidal organisations where one or two men (or very occasionally women) are paid enormous amounts of money to take relatively dictatorial decisions - is hardly surprising in the circumstances.  But as I pointed out in reply to the first of Deborah's tweets above:

@DeborahDoaneWDM Yes. That's absolutely the problem. Excellent point. For where one man can decide for better, one man can decide for worse.

And so it is we come back to the paradox of devolved governance and democracy in general: one highly driven man can do so much more and so very much more quickly.  But once the tools and structures are in place for this to happen for the wider good, those who would wish to abuse for their own advancement may do so far more easily.

And in a sense, as the BBC did indicate on Wednesday, Gates hasn't changed from his Microsoft days:

His foundation's work is carried out with a "hard-nosed mathematical" approach, he says, calculating the impact in terms of "dollars per year of life saved".

He is applying the same attention to detail that made him such a business success into the business of saving lives.

Substitute "dollars per year of life saved" with "dollars per year of sales bonus achieved at the expense of sustainable, safe, cost-effective and user-controllable software" and you might get a flavour of what I'm getting at. 

All those shady agreements to load only Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player on new computers or the decisions which made it impossible to open new Word documents with older versions of the same software are simply a few reminders of how empires are built.

So Deborah is right to take me to task.  And I'm glad she did.  I'm glad she did.

Redemption

Two examples of redemption tonight.  There's not enough of it about.  We need more. 

Firstly, the Twitter storm-in-a-teacup that today has been the hashtag #savetheintern.  The full story can be found here at Tom Watson's blog.  This is the bit I most like about the whole matter:

8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.

This is true.  And needs to be said, far more often.  Without, that is, the desire to redeem being worn too brightly on one's sleeve.  A normal humane instinct to treat people as people.  Instead of cattle to be disposed of all too hurriedly.

Meanwhile, another case where redemption seems to be an unspoken driver is the philanthropic Bill Gates of today.  Firstly, from the BBC, this quote yesterday:

"If I hadn't given my money away, I would now have more money than anyone else on the planet," he said casually.

And it's the giving away that makes him so interesting.

But it's not quite true.  What really makes Gates interesting is that he can publish letters like this - thoughtful, considered, accurate, needed - at the same time as maintaining the monopolistic empire that is Microsoft's Office and Windows operating system software. 

That is to say, it is true that we must doff our virtual caps in admiration when the BBC points out that:

His philanthropy is on an epic scale. He is seriously planning to eradicate diseases in his lifetime that have plagued humanity for thousands of years.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already given $26bn (£17bn) to fund health, development and education projects.

Even the biggest cynic would have to be impressed by this massive engine of generosity, with Bill Gates working full time on donating the income from an endowment worth $33.5bn (£21.5bn).

But we must also remember that the money he so laudably donates was often arrived at in a less than seemly way; and perhaps, in some parts of the globe, continues to be questionably obtained to this day.

So it is that redemption is never simple - even as, in its messy and incomplete manner, it must be a better way than no kindness at all.

On messages and margherita pizzas

I prepare my children's lunchtimes thus - and for one of them there is this pizza today.  And so I am driven to consider the messages behind the messages in front of a margherita pizza.

"Established 1965" - that seems fair enough.  Pride in tradition; the value of longevity; the perfect practice that comes from plenty of practice.

"Pizza Express" - well, it's the name and brand that they are stuck with.  Perhaps the previous message is designed to undermine in some constructive way the negative connotations of fast food for supermarket consumers.

And so I come to the final message which caught my attention:

"Individually handmade" - as opposed to what then?  "Industrially handmade" - or perhaps "Individually manufactured?" 

You can see how the marketing teams and focus groups try to cover every base here.  And yet, as they try and anticipate every unspoken criticism we might have of the product under discussion, in truth - as consumers - we will more often than not buy because of a cheapening red sticker which proclaims "Half Price"!

A cheapening red sticker designed by a different marketing department - perhaps out of a cheapening desperation.

Oh, how our dreams and ambitions do tumble and fall.

Damn good pizza, by the way.

At the price ...

Do we need more customer focus in university education?

I have to say I speak out of ignorance - or, at least, an absence of firm data and inside knowledge - on the topic that I raise today in this post.  On the other hand, we may fairly retort, this hasn't stopped me from writing in the past.

Which is true.

Recent events, however, even so, have brought me to consider that as always politicians will prefer to deal with the most easily measurable matters before they deal with the most useful ones.  Whilst there was a big hoo-hah last year - and quite rightly so - on the tuition fee disgrace that was the transfer from students to both the banking industry and universities of yet more profit and business, little attention was placed on the matter of what all that money was supposed to be purchasing.

I mean, of course, the university teaching itself.

And whilst the government has recently announced plans to fire underperforming teachers, I'm not sure this is aimed at affecting precisely the sector (that is to say, the universities) where the direct customer (that is to say, the student) not only pays upfront but also pays the most.

My experience of university education was relatively benign.  I wasn't a particularly applied student but did thoroughly enjoy my three years at Warwick where I studied Film & Literature.  I managed to get a 2(i), probably due mainly to the results of my third year Creative Writing module under the inspiring Andrew Davies.  And the different elements of the course - film on the one hand and literary studies on the other - were well coordinated and structured.

The course influenced the rest of my life.  For better or worse, it changed me most profoundly.

Not long ago, however, I had the opportunity to talk to a student currently at a university in the North West of England.  This student seemed unhappy for a number of reasons.  Two appeared to be at the top of the list: first, the university teachers had been utterly unresponsive to the feedback the student had given about the level in which he had been situated at the beginning of the first year, an error of judgement on the part of the professionals the implications of which became compounded in the first semester of the second year - and apparently led to a reactive depression on the part of the student.

Second, and perhaps much more revealingly, in what is now clearly a consumer-driven and consumer-structured society, he felt - and, indeed, feels - that he wasn't getting his money's worth, his value for money, from the style, substance and take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the vast majority of his teachers.

Over the past decade or so, an enormous amount of work has gone into improving the quality of compulsory education: from inspection regimes to teacher-training; from school infrastructures to cross-curricular subjects ... all these items and far far more out there have helped to radically re-engineer the compulsory education system in the UK.  Yet, from my unpractised and looking-in-from-the-outside eye, it would seem very little has been done to track the behaviours, efficacy, pedagogical worth and consumer focus of university teaching - precisely the teaching, in fact, where the link between payer and payee would be easiest to establish, forge, develop and take advantage of.

So I do wonder as the government continues to fill the pockets of its sponsors in universities and the financial services sector, and at the expense I might say of the students, why it doesn't place as much emphasis on improving the teaching standards in higher education as it clearly wants to do for the rest.

I'm not saying we should go as far as to be able to fire a university lecturer in a term - for the relationship between lecturer, teaching and research is far more complex than compulsory education has to date been able to contemplate; but I do wonder if it isn't time for university lecturers and their teaching behaviours to come under the microscope of an institution with absolutely similar criteria to those a rejuvenated Ofsted might wish to contemplate.

And at the very least begin to create a shared university mindset which sees the student as a customer with the right to the very best pedagogical systems in the world - especially where in some cases they are being obliged to pay a very 21st century £30,000 for the often dubious honour of a 19th century kind of tuition.

Should our economy be democratic - and is this something Labour and its potential voters can agree on?

This introduction to the term "economic democracy" came my way via Tom on Facebook today.  I republish it in full below:

Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that suggests a shift in decision-making power from a small minority of corporate shareholders to a larger majority of public stakeholders. There is no single definition or approach for economic democracy, but most theories and real-world examples challenge the demonstrated tendencies of modern property relations to externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit, and deny the populace majority a democratic voice in economic policy decisions.[1]

It's the next bits which I really like, though (the bold is mine):

Classical liberals argue that the power to dispose of the means of production belongs to entrepreneurs and capitalists, and can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the marketplace.[2] "The capitalistic social order", they claim, therefore, "is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word."[3] Critics of this claim point out that consumers only vote on the value of the product when they make a purchase; they are not voting on who should own the means of production, on who can keep its profits or on the resulting income redistribution. Proponents of economic democracy generally agree, therefore, that modern capitalism tends to hinder or prevent society from earning enough income to purchase its output production. Centralized corporate monopoly of common resources typically forces conditions of artificial scarcity upon the greater majority, resulting in socio-economic imbalances that restrict workers from access to economic opportunity and diminish consumer purchasing power.[4][5]

Economic democracy has been proposed as a component of larger socioeconomic ideologies, as a stand-alone theory, and as a variety of reform agendas. In most cases, economic democracy promotes universal access to "common resources" that are typically privatized by corporate capitalism or centralized by state socialism. Assuming full political rights cannot be won without full economic rights,[1] economic democracy is a proposed solution for the problems of economic instability and deficiency of effective demand. As an alternative model, both market and non-market theories of economic democracy have been proposed. As a reform agenda, supporting theories and real-world examples range from decentralization and economic liberalization to democratic cooperatives, fair trade, and the regionalization of food production and currency.

It seems to me that in this concept we might have the seeds of a properly renewed Labour Party - even if some significant proportion of a decade down the line.  Rather than focussing on the "how" - the policy-making details so beloved of professional politicos but of so little immediate interest to the wider voting public - surely what at least Labour needs far more urgently is a "what" everyone, voters and supporters, can agree on.

"Responsible capitalism" is certainly a nicely turned phrase for policy wonks - but at least fifty percent tainted by many people's current experiences.  Meanwhile, applauding the ability to learn from one's enemies obviates the need to admit that choosing one's friends is a far more significant leap in political activity.

Far better surely, then, than the triangulation of the latter - or, even, the uncertain timbre of the former - is precisely the concept under discussion in this post which Tom has brought to our attention: bringing democracy to economic activity.

But as an overarching and shared meme to capture people's imaginations.  Neither workers' cooperatives nor mutual business structures; neither stakeholder consultations nor a popular capitalism.  No detailed instructions which would allow the enemy to pick away, perhaps quite rightly in the event, at the gorgeous potential of such an idea.

Rather, we should argue that where we really place the source of our deficit in modern societies is not in our voting system; not in our media; not in big or small business behaviours; not, even, in our politics.  Instead, it is entirely to do with how imperious that "consumers' ballot" isn't: a ballot, right now, which covers only a discrete set of purchasing decisions and ignores almost everything else of importance in the processes that run our economies.

An "everything else" which - to be honest - has clearly failed us of late.  Perhaps precisely because economic democracy in Western societies is such a limited, empty and anti-democratic practice.