You Deserve Better

Face Masks and Personal Responsibility

I had to go into a hospital today (nothing major for me, in case anyone wonders!) and I was genuinely surprised by something. Only around one person in every five was wearing a face mask, despite these being given out for free at every entrance. This really made me think about personal responsibility and how that would be applied to face masks. Personal responsibility is central to a number of political stances, not least libertarianism, which seems to have been wholly embraced by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng (disastrously so). So how might or should this principle apply to wearing a face mask? What is Personal Responsibility? (NB, this gets a bit deeper into the philosophy of ethics than I originally thought, so feel free to skip to the next section for the meat of the argument). It might be an obvious question with an even more obvious answer to some, but it is an interesting philosophical point. In my view, it is about taking ownership of decisions or actions you make and agreeing to help if your actions cause negative consequences. In other words, if you harm someone whether directly or through inaction (thank you Isaac Asimov) then you indemnify the victim for that harm and adjust your behaviour to minimise future harm. This becomes a little more difficult when you have a cost to mitigating your current behaviour and you need to compare that cost to the harm that you do. At that point you would need to assign relative costs to both the actions you take and the harm that would be done as a result. This ends up being hugely subjective and has been the subject of endless debates between ethicists for millennia. Personal responsibility is a balancing act In my view, though, the moral position can be reduced to: Within most moral systems there is the idea that causing harm to others is generally worse than minimising a loss for oneself. In other words, one could be better off by stealing from someone else, but unless that theft is necessary to preserve life or reduce harm to others, it is genuinely hard to see how this could be considered moral. What are Face Masks? Face Masks – what do they do? This might fall into the category of blindingly obvious, but it might be worth revisiting what these are for. Masks aren’t just for virtue signalling or decoration, after all. They provide a tangible benefit in the control of infections. Importantly the main benefit isn’t to the mask wearer. Instead the mask helps to stop the wearer from passing on their germs to others. It’s a little like sneezing into a tissue – that action isn’t for the sneezer, but for all the people around them that might otherwise be sneezed on. When it comes to certain pathogens (viruses, bacteria and fungi), airborne transmission is the primary means of infection. Sometimes you can be a carrier of an infectious pathogen without displaying any symptoms, so simply “feeling fine” is not a guarantee that you aren’t carrying an infection that could be lethal to someone else. I mentioned cost above as a reason not to do something, so it’s worth revisiting the costs of wearing a face mask: This is obviously different for people that cannot wear a mask for medical reasons – clearly the cost for them is insurmountable. For most of us, though, wearing a mask is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Personal Responsibility and Face Masks Here we come to the discussion of how personal responsibility and face masks intersect. When it comes to personal responsibility, I summarised that it would be immoral to do something that caused harm to others if the cost was negligible to not do that. Under the topic of face masks, I concluded that, for most of us, the cost of wearing a face mask is negligible. I therefore think that the conclusion is inescapable. Wearing a mask has minimal or no cost and potentially saves lives. As such, it certainly seems to me to be entirely moral to wear them where there is likely to be a positive effect. Hospitals are likely the place most likely to result in deaths if infections are allowed to spread uncontrolled, and they are the place where masks are still provided free of charge for everyone. Possibly more importantly, in most hospitals there is a good chance that there will be some patients there who did not make a choice to go there – instead they are there because of an illness or injury that they certainly would not have chosen to acquire. As such, there can be no use of the “they chose to go there and accept the risks” type of argument that could be used to oppose mask mandates. My conclusion is not to suggest that a mask mandate should be reintroduced nationally. However, I genuinely feel that those who turn down free masks in hospitals run the risk of killing someone else by accident, and personal responsibility should make them pick up face masks and wear them with pride.

Buy Some Merchandise, Support My Campaign

First batch of products in my store that you can buy to aid my campaign.

Lessons Learned from my Launch

If you’ve been paying even cursory attention over the last few weeks, you will likely have seen that my campaign launch was coming up. In fact, it was yesterday. I think it’s important to reflect on events and the lessons learned from what occurred during my launch. Tickets Without question, it’s going to be a good idea in future to offer a discount for early ticket purchases, or at least free tickets to the raffle. The issue I had this time was that I set the ticket price as a flat fee, which meant that someone giving 12 weeks of notice would be paying the same as someone who gave 12 minutes! Economically, this makes little sense, so a staggered pricing that increases towards the deadline makes sense, especially if I retain the flexibility to let someone come along at the standard price. I definitely made a rod for my own back with this one in terms of catering numbers, and as such I definitely overbought (what a shame!). Lessons Learned from my Launch #1: consider pricing the tickets so that early birds get a discount. Location, location, location What’s a party without a venue? Well, we found out yesterday, when the owners of the venue that we had paid for and turned up to did not themselves turn up to let us in. It seems that they had accidentally put our booking down as a March rather than a February booking. This had been mentioned and corrected by me in January, but apparently it did not manage to get corrected on the community hall’s calendar. After some drinking in the car park while we waited, we eventually decided that it was just too cold, so we decided that the best bet was to find an alternative venue. I don’t know if you know this (I didn’t) but there was a fairly major football match on yesterday, so most venues just weren’t available. As such, we needed a “volunteer” with a private residence not too far away who would be happy for a large group of political activists to turn up en masse. Long story short, it was me. I was the “volunteer”. So we had an impromptu party at my house. Which I loved, by the way, so I might volunteer to do again! Lessons Learned from my Launch #2: don’t deal with any venue unless you have a mobile number for the person who is in charge of letting you in. Raffles The raffle went quite well, notwithstanding the fact that my photography was the least popular prize of all! That said, it makes sense to ensure that the person selling the tickets (thanks again, Sue!) knows the rules of the raffle first rather than asking how it works after selling 30 tickets or so. Luckily this was all sorted long before the problem became permanent. Of course, it also makes sense to draw the winners before anyone departs, in case they have the winning tickets. In this instance, I thought that two of our departed guests had one of the winning tickets, so I held it back for them, only to find out the next day that they did not in fact have the winning ticket. Who did? Sue. Sue had the winning ticket. She’d sold it to herself, then forgotten to actually check whether she had won! Lessons Learned from my Launch #3: Sue is great at persuading people to part with their money for raffle tickets. Sue is not so great at actually claiming the prizes she wins! Conclusion In spite of my fairly sarcastic tone in the lessons learned from my launch above, I genuinely had a great time. Having so many friends and family descend unexpectedly on my house was lovely, and it was great to have the Morassi Quartet playing in my lounge! Thanks to them, and also to Dom, who did amazing work in the kitchen to produce food for everyone. Bring on the next one – maybe next time it will actually be planned as a house party!

Campaign Launch – 2 Weeks to Go

When I first booked a date for my campaign launch, it felt like a very long time in the future. Now we have only 2 weeks to go, it feels like it has crept up on me very fast indeed! If you’re in the area and looking for something to do on Sunday 26 February between 17:00 and 20:00, I’d love for you to come along, chat with me about the things that matter most to you, and enjoy our refreshments. We’ll also be holding a raffle with some amazing prizes. If you’re looking for inspiration for things to chat to me about, my personal manifesto is here. You can find tickets and full details here, or in the flyer below.

Labour vs Conservative – Economy

I was told recently that the economy always underperforms with a Labour government. I decided to check whether this was true.

My Political Journey

A story about how I got to the point of standing as a candidate. Includes a request for help!

Scandals

A brief look at some of the recent scandals of the Conservative government.

A Musing on Proportional Representation

How might proportional representation be implemented if we make a change? Does it need to be complicated?

Campaign Launch

I am officially launching my campaign! Support me if you also like democracy, equality and integrity in your elected officials.

Tax Evasion by MPs

I’m going to say something that might be deemed controversial by some (though hopefully not many) – MPs shouldn’t commit tax evasion! I know, I know, a radical suggestion that those elected to represent the country should be happy to pay the country what they owe in taxes. The news this week that Nadhim Zahawi, current Chair of the Conservative Party and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has agreed to pay up an amount that he (may have) evaded summing to around £3 million is frankly outrageous. So how should we respond to alleged tax evasion by MPs? In my view, this is yet another area that needs significant reform. It’s lower down my priority list than some other matters, but this seems like an easy thing to fix, so perhaps it will end up being higher on the agenda. What Happened? This story has really blown up in the last month, but it has been brewing for a long time. In essence, Nadhim Zahawi set up YouGov, and information-gathering firm. So far so good. Where it goes wrong is that he deliberately created this in an offshore vehicle, owned in large part by his parents. While the exact technicalities of this are beyond me and well into the realm of tax professional, the exact structuring has been analysed by Dan Neidle at Tax Policy Associates for several months. Worth a read here. Dan and I definitely don’t see eye to eye on all matters of tax, but on this we are without question united in our rage. Dan Niedle of Tax Policy Associates, probably Nadhim Zahawi’s worst nightmare at the moment. Importantly, that’s not where this ends. Zahawi clearly didn’t like this analysis, so he challenged it. Not just by disagreeing with the analysis, but by instructing solicitors Osborne Clarke to essentially threaten legal action against Dan Niedle. Dan being a former partner at a very successful London law firm was not the ideal target for such a threat, and he responded wonderfully. Again, the whole saga is worth a read, but the long and short of it is that Osborne Clarke ended up not pursuing a claim against Dan, and were in turn reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority for abuse of the legal system. End Result So how does this saga end? We have someone allegedly evading taxes of £3 million and only coughing up after months of analysis and questions from a very well-qualified outsider. His agreement to repay the taxes shows clearly that this amount should have been paid in the first place, and as such this looks like evasion rather than avoidance – the latter being legal use of things like ISAs and pensions, which HMRC would have no claim over. Given this is – apparently – tax evasion by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the current Chairman of the Conservative Party, what should we expect to happen? My prediction is “nothing at all”. The Conservative Party has displayed very little interest in punishing tax evaders of a certain level of wealth. It seems that once you get above a certain level of wealth, you get carte blanche to behave however you like, with barely even a slap on the wrist if you get caught. In this case, paying back the tax that should have been paid in the first place is nowhere near enough. This is a man who served as the Chancellor and before that called for the tightening of tax loopholes under the former Labour government. He clearly knew exactly what he was doing and chose to deny millions of owed tax to the UK regardless. Whether you support conservative principles or not, this sort of behaviour should not go unpunished. Zahawi should have to pay back considerably more than the tax he underpaid, and should right now be facing criminal charges to analyse whether his behaviour was egregious enough to warrant jail time. At the very least, he should no longer be allowed to serve as an MP.