Sunk costs, bankruptcy, and sudden discoveries of principle

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Most large organisations fall prey, at some time or another, to the sunk cost fallacy. A project, especially an IT project, in which significant sums of money have been invested over a time fails to deliver on time and on budget, but the argument is made that having already invested £n million, it would be wasteful to not spend just a few £million more to complete the work. And when even that first tranche of extra money fails to bring the project to a conclusion, the process is repeated. At each decision point, the decision to invest a ‘small’ additional sum looks easier and more reasonable than agreeing to write off the much larger sum. And so some projects continue for years in a zombie form; always around 95% complete and never ever coming to fruition because the decision makers are afraid to admit not only that they got it wrong at the first decision point, but also at every subsequent decision point. Their personal investment grows with every wrong decision.

It doesn’t only work in terms of time and money though; in other scenarios, the investment can be in terms of credibility, or reputation. Take the current government as an example. All those Tory ministers and MPs who have been sent out, time and time again, to debase themselves just a little further in defending the indefensible should surely be asking themselves at what point they write off the damage to their reputations and stop digging the hole in which they find themselves. In truth, the sunk cost fallacy tells us that it’s much easier to believe that, with one more act of self-abasement, one more voluntary humiliation, perhaps things can be turned around. If the project turns out successfully as a result, they might just recover some of the reputational damage they have suffered. Two major players (interestingly, both former bankers, presumably familiar with the fallacy) and a handful of minions finally snapped yesterday, and decided to throw no more of themselves into a lost cause. However, most have, thus far, shown themselves willing to continue the self-sacrifice. In the case of those who know that no-one else would ever give them a job in government, they may well be concluding that they have nothing to lose. Even they can occasionally be right about something. As for the rest, those with more than a solitary functioning neuron must surely realise by now that the flow of scandal, untruth and misjudgement emanating from Downing Street isn’t going to stop, not just any time soon, but ever; although the caveat might itself exclude a lot of MPs and ministers as well as explaining their inaction.

Hemingway had one of his characters respond to a question about how he went bankrupt with the words, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s a concept which doesn’t just apply to bankruptcy; it happens in other contexts as well. When it comes to collapsing governments, we might just be moving from the gradual phase to the sudden phase.

Failure is a feature of the UK, not a bug

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As a general rule, I support the UK being generous towards those who come to these shores fleeing war and oppression, and even those who are fleeing poverty (who some prefer to call economic migrants), especially given the UK’s historical role in creating the poverty which they are trying to escape. I’ll admit though that when I read yesterday’s news, the uncharitable thought crossed my mind that the UK today might be an altogether kinder and gentler place if Mr & Mrs Patel, Mr & Mrs Sunak, and Mr & Mrs Javid had been detained at the border and flown to a detention centre in Rwanda, and if Mr & Mrs Johnson had been prevented from bringing any US-born offspring into the UK. (People criticising Sunak for being a permanent US resident whilst also being Chancellor of the Exchequer tend to forget that until he renounced his US citizenship in 2016 – and only then to avoid a tax bill – the current PM was himself both a member of parliament and a US citizen obliged to pay tax under US rules on all his earnings. Even if Sunak had told his boss about the Green Card issue, it’s unlikely that someone who saw no significant problem in a full US citizen becoming Foreign Secretary would object to a Chancellor holding the much lower status of mere permanent resident of the US.)

Whether the policy will ever be implemented or is just a very cruel gimmick to try and get racist voters to back the Tories in local elections next month, or even an attempt to divert attention from the government’s other misdeeds by appealing to that sense of racism, is an open question. I don’t doubt that money will change hands and Rwanda will receive some much-needed cash (although I wouldn’t put it past the current government to take the money out of the overseas aid budget), but that doesn’t mean anyone will actually be sent there. There are more than a few legal issues to overcome (in domestic law as well as in international law), which is why Johnson himself is already firing warning shots at the lawyers who might be tempted to use the courts to prevent any flights from taking place (or to enforce the actual law of the UK rather than what Johnson and Patel think the law should be, to describe it more accurately). He and Patel like to refer to lawyers as ‘politically-motivated lefty activists’, although a more accurate description would be ‘people who believe that following the rule of law is, on the whole, rather a good thing’. The rule of law is, however, an increasingly strange concept to the corrupt lawbreakers who staged a coup within the Tory Party and are now doing the same to the UK as a whole. I’m still waiting for the defence that it’s only breaking the law in a “very specific and limited way” (just like committing a murder or two, really).

Both nationally and internationally, the move has generated a great deal of condemnation, including from the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. The UK ought to be sanctioned for its actions, including expulsion from the Council or Europe and all international human rights organisations. The problem with that is that those behind this policy would see that as a positive, not a punishment. Our own Mark Drakeford has, in fairness and as one would expect, condemned the policy unreservedly, but what he and others like him need to realise is that this sort of thing isn’t a bug in the UK system which can be put right by a change of government in England (even if that looked like a remotely conceivable possibility, and even if English Labour wasn’t trying to present itself as being as keen as the Tories to enforce border controls), it’s a feature with which we will have to put up until Wales decides to opt out of the failed state which the UK is rapidly becoming.

Pots and kettles

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The Guardian quotes Sajid Javid as having said on BBC’s Today programme this morning:

"The Russians just don’t seem that they can be trusted, and especially President Putin, who we know is a compulsive liar. We know that he has difficulty in separating fiction from fact."

Who would ever have imagined that a government led by a compulsive liar who struggles to separate fiction from fact would find that others might not entirely trust anything it says? And are we supposed to laugh or despair at the imbecility of any minister in Johnson’s government who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness as to say such a thing about a government leader somewhere else?

Pursuing a new career?

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There were suggestions yesterday that, following his sudden resignation from the cabinet, the former chancellor might also be about to resign from parliament and pursue an alternative career.  In the light of his surprise discovery yesterday of the fossilised remains of a human backbone, perhaps he could be guided towards an exciting new career in archaeology.  Almost anything would be better (for the rest of us anyway) than for him to return to his former life selling the sort of dodgy derivatives which caused the 2008 financial crisis.

The reactions to his departure have caused me to question my memory.  I was sure that the slogan on the barn read ‘four legs good, two legs bad’.  I have a vivid recollection that, for the last ten years, the Tories have been telling us that a balanced budget was absolutely essential, and that the markets wouldn’t stand for unfunded expenditure.  Yet the immediate reaction in the financial markets to a suggestion that replacing Javid with someone who will do whatever Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson tells him to do, including abandoning the aim of a balanced budget so that Johnson can ‘splash the cash’, was very positive, and the pound soared.  I don’t think I dreamt the bit about the party (Labour) that is now looking like the fiscal conservatives being regularly accused of being profligate for urging rather less expenditure than the PM is now proposing.  Either my memory is seriously defective, or else the Tories have simply been lying to us for the last decade.  It’s not exactly a tough call between the two.

It all depends on where you are standing...

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I’m not a big fan of using words like ‘left’ ‘right’, ‘centre’ or ‘extreme’ to describe political positions; they’re far too often used as a term of abuse rather than a serious contribution to debate.  But setting aside my reluctance to use such terms for a moment, there can be few better examples of the way in which what is generally called the ‘centre’ has shifted than the statement last Friday by Sajid Javid praising Nigel Farage for not being an extremist, because he walked away from UKIP and called his former party a bunch of ‘thugs and extremists’.

Farage has never said anything to make one believe that he’s changed his mind about his previous use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, such as his statement that he’d feel uncomfortable if Romanians moved in next door, or that he feels awkward hearing people on a train speaking anything other than English, "because I don't understand them" (although why he feels it necessary to understand a conversation between strangers on a train was left unexplained).  It’s the sort of casual anti-foreigner sentiment which seems to come naturally to the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all behind the Brexit project, and Javid has effectively declared that he considers it normal and acceptable.

‘Extremist’ is not an easy term to define, because it’s a relative rather than an absolute term.  Whether someone is an extremist or not depends largely on where you are standing in relation to him or her.  In effect, the closer you are standing to someone, the less extreme that person will appear to be.  Javid’s claim that Farage is not an extremist tells us more about the position in which he and the Conservative Party find themselves than it does about Farage himself.

Chasing the succession

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One of the problems which results from having a lame duck Prime Minister who everyone knows is going to resign at some point in the comparatively near future is that those around her are inevitably focussing more on how to put themselves in the best position to succeed her than on anything else.  In the same way that Brexit itself has come to dominate the PM’s every waking hour (and quite a few of the sleeping ones as well, I wouldn’t be surprised), and destroyed her domestic agenda (insofar as she ever had one), so the timing and nature of her departure and the succession have come to dominate the time and thoughts of the host of backstabbers loyal allies around her.

Over the past week, the threat to Sajid Javid’s chances of succeeding Theresa May posed by a handful of migrants crossing to the UK from France has clearly caused him a great deal of concern.  Far more concern, in fact, than the fate of the people involved.  Apparently, he believes that those MPs (and, if he gets into the final two, the party members) who will make the choice of leader will be suitably impressed if he is seen to be tough on migration (I’d be tempted to add the Blairite rider ‘and tough on the causes of migration’, except that I don’t believe he cares a fig about those).  In this, he is deluded; those involved are less concerned with whether he is or is not tough on anything than about whether they can spin a story that he is simply not up to speed with what is happening.  It’s not about the substance of either policy or action; it’s about finding a way of discrediting him.  The migrants are just what the military might call 'collateral damage' in the continuing internal Tory intrigues.

But mistakenly believing that the facts of the situation are of any relevance at all to that small electorate which he is targeting, he is tying himself further in knots with every utterance.  He has managed to suggest an approach which is illegal in international law, and his determination to work closely with the French to uphold the EU rule that asylum-seekers must apply for asylum in the first country which they reach appears to ignore the fact that the government of which he is a part is actively seeking to extricate itself from any obligation to follow the relevant EU rules.  He seems to be assuming that just because the UK is no longer going to be part of the relevant agreement, that’s no reason for the French not to abide by it and accept that it is somehow ‘their’ problem.

His claim that those involved are not ‘real’ asylum-seekers makes him sound more like a railway company blaming ‘the wrong type of snow’ than a government minister seeking to address the reasons why people put themselves through a perilous journey to reach these shores.  I struggle to understand why an attempt to escape poverty in some way makes people less deserving of our assistance than an attempt to escape war – particularly when both poverty and war are largely caused or facilitated by countries such as the UK in the first place – yet it’s a distinction which trickles casually from the mouths of people like Javid, who would prefer to send people back into poverty and an early death than do anything to address the problems which provoke people into migration.  Labelling the victims as the ‘wrong type of migrant’ is a shameful distraction from the real issues.