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Thursday 12 February 2015

Let's not make this even more of a rich man's world.

With my job, I get to travel around a lot. From Minneapolis to Heidelberg, New York to Nice, I've enjoyed the ability to visit countries and cities with a frequency that I otherwise would not have been able to afford. The main activity of these trips is work related, be it presenting at a conference, having meetings or carrying out lab experiments. However, every single academic would be lying if they tried to say with any conviction that they haven't made use of such trips for a bit of pleasure.

A typical oversees conference (of which there are several each year) will cost around £1000 to attend. This includes the registration fees of the conference (several £100s depending on the conference), the accommodation (usually for more than 3 nights), flights, local transport, and any dinners needed outside the onslaught of free conference food. I'm not sure about you, but I can't really justify spending £1000 on a holiday for myself and my wife each year let alone several times a year in order to full-fill the conditions of my employment.

Naturally, you are not obliged to go to conferences, but missing out on attending means that you isolate yourself from the academic community of your field. Your name doesn't get out there, and you find it difficult to form the collaborations needed to bring in more funding for more work (and conferences).

So, why am I bringing this all up now? Well, I recently returned from a conference in the south of France where the dinner table turned to politics. There was a general dislike of politicians from the PhD students (and a couple of eminent professors) rising from the expenses scandal. Even outside the academic field, this is a major complaint for politicians.

Let me make this clear: We were sitting in a fancy restaurant in Nice, eating fine food, listening to people complain about Expenses being Exploited by Politicians, all before collecting our receipts so that we could claim back the dinner later!

Did any of these academics order a side salad with a side of water? Of course not. The amount we are allowed to spend on our per-day food costs isn't infinite, but it is enough that trips for work are comfortable enough that discussions can be held away from the screaming kids of a Burger King.

I'm not a rich man from working in Academia (I'd be in industry if I wanted that), but also, I am not an academic because I'm a rich man. If the expenses weren't there, most of the scientists working in the UK universities wouldn't be able to afford to do their job. This would ultimately close off the job to the upper echelons of our society (would a shallow gene pool really give us the best science? Prince Phillip, PhD etc?!).  It could also lead to increased intervention by companies, privately funding science and guiding it and its results towards their own ends*.

So, back to politicians:

Let's look at it the other way, let's cut every single politician off from the 'gravy train' of expenses. Let's make an MP for Inverness attend parliament and meetings in London on their own cash. Let's have the MP for the Highlands and Islands (Is that a constituency?) travel between London to Mull to London to Bute and back again under their own funds. What kind of people would be able to do this kind of job? Rich people. People with massive amounts of disposable income that they can use to fly around the place.

Is this the type of person that we want to restrict the job of running our country to?

Or, do we want to have a system in place such that the MP for the most northern parts of Scotland, or the MP for the most rural parts of Wales, to have the same ability to do their job as their South of England counterparts? I'm not saying that the current system is perfect, I believe that the amount of expenses available should be based on distance of travel. However, it absolutely should not be scrapped altogether because of a few bad eggs.

Ranting about a politician claiming £1.50 for a bottle of Irn Bru? No matter how much of an absolute, scheming, bastard that politician is, it only serves to divert attention away from more important matters (see also: politicians picking on a Glasgow Bar's sense of humour, or new politician's younger self's Twitter feed).

So, next time I'm at a conference, I will be on expenses, but because I want to keep my job (and I don't have the luxury of the public voting me in and out), I will play the game and have a sandwich and a bottle of Irn Bru rather than the caviar, foi gras and gold ice cream.

*Some of my work has been funded, in part, by a private company, but I have never been pressurised to or compensated for, guiding the results towards the companies manifesto. Science is Science, and if it doens't say what the company want's, then that's still what the company gets.

Monday 9 February 2015

If I'm so Left, why does the Left Wing Twitterati piss me off?

I associate myself with Left wing politics, I love the welfare system which we enjoy in the UK providing stuff such as the NHS and Child benefits. However, when I'm on the internet, I sometimes feel that my other love, that of rational thought, gets in the way of being truly 'Left'. Either with us or against us is the rallying cry when a small dissenting view might tweet in to view.

I felt my left wing credentials being called in to check (by only myself, I might add, but silence can speak louder than words or JSON) today when I brought up my twitter time-line and was presented with this lovely succinct image.
Left Wing Twitteratti caption: "This is the problem with catching tax avoiding companies".
Go on, look at it, let it make you hate, let the pixels contained allow your Red blood to boil until your heart explodes and tears itself from your sleeve. "This may help to explain things" cried Rupert Myers, "Can these figures really be true!?..If so the people at HMRC and DWP need a calculator for Christmas!!" asserted Susan Indy. "Learn to read a graph properly" declared my internal thought processes.

We are taught that as a business increases its profits, the tax it pays should increase proportionally to its income. Small businesses pay small tax, big businesses pay big tax, and HUGE companies pay small tax. Wait, hang on. So, the £70bn+ tax that has been evaded must surely come from HUGE companies? How many of them can there be?

There's Vodaphone, I've heard Laurie Penny talk about them (sometimes about tax, other times about her phone bill). There's Google, I use them. Oh, Starbucks! That's another. Jazzy's newsagent on Netherhill Road? Probably doesn't produce big enough profits, or despite being the classic Left enemy of a capitalist (well, why else would sell things for money?) a tax avoider.

So, we can assume for ourselves that the number of HUGE businesses avoiding tax to the level of £70bn is perhaps in the upper tens, if breeching the 100 mark at all.

Let's move on to benefit fraud, despite it's rather vague description. Is this all fraud from the DWP? or just Housing benefit fraud but no Child benefit fraud? Let's assume that it is over the same time period as the business figures, less we throw another parameter in to this graph (I'll get to that in a moment). In the UK for May 2014 there were 5.2 million claiming benefits. Most of these (99.3%) are claimed correctly and without fraud. Leaving 0.7% of 5.2M people apparently committing benefit fraud, that's 36,400 people. A tiny bit more than our estimate for the companies.

Right, so back to the graph. 300 people investigating around 100 companies gives no more than 3 people to a company, and 3250 investigating 36,400 people giving each investigator around 10 people to look at. However, and here's a difference: A company consists of many people, say one CEO and a board of directors. This would have the effect of, in some cases, rounding out the numbers such that both workforces were perfectly adequate for the task ahead.

A two dimensional graph, like the one above which shows two axis (amount of money and number of workers) represents a linear equation. To be an accurate graph, there should be changing variable except what the axis represent. In theory, this graph should actually be a 3 axis surface plot of money, workers and number of people under investigation. Until then, it's just a pointless exercise in the whole "those who shout loudest are the truth of the internet".

The best way to fix tax avoidance? Don't use Vodaphone. Don't buy coffee at Starbucks. Don't use Goog... in fact, I quite like my chromebook, android phone and android watch. Does this make me less of a left-winger?

No, I still vote for the party that I think will bring the better society rather than the ones that will dismantle it.