The Times - UK (2020-07-31)

24 1GM Friday July 31 2020 | the times

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Tickets for

the lido are

harder to get

than Glasto

T

he new early-morning goal

at our house is to not only

be awake but functioning

by 6am, with fingers

poised over the “Book

Now” button on the website for the

pool in the village of Hathersage in

the Peak Park.

I always thought the lido, which

just had a refurb and celebrated its

84th birthday, was probably the

best in the country and I am not

alone.

Corona rules finally allow it to be

open but with very few swimmers at

any one time. Competition is fierce

for the hourly and half-hourly

tickets released at 6am a week ahead

on a day-by-day basis. “Up at 5.45am

and still didn’t get a ticket,” reports

one would-be swimmer. “It’s like

booking for Glasto!”

Amazingly, and I am still not sure

how, I bagged two half-hour tickets

last week for my daughter and me.

Tech giants that

crush competition

should be split up

Oliver Kamm

P

oliticians are rarely diffident

before the cameras. David

Cicilline, a Democratic

congressman, said this week:

“Our founders would not

bow before a king. Nor should we

bow before the emperors of the

online economy.” He and fellow

members of the House judiciary

subcommittee on antitrust were

questioning the bosses of Amazon,

Apple, Facebook and Google.

Cicilline’s words may have seemed

portentous but they were apt. The

tech giants wield unaccountable

power and curb competition. They

do not work in consumers’ interests.

They give capitalism a bad name.

Armed with the conclusions of a

long investigation into tech company

practices, congressional critics are

seeking tougher regulation but that

is a limited aim. The tech giants

should be confronted and broken up.

For all its theatre, America’s

adversarial political culture, along

with the EU’s tough investigations, is

a model for Britain to follow in

holding these corporate behemoths

to account.

It is a mere truism that the world

has been transformed by online

technology. The digital age, from

grocery deliveries to dating apps, has

improved lives and expanded

consumer choice. But the corporate

environment has not stayed the

same. Though ostensibly there are

low barriers to entry provided you

have a good idea or product, there is

copious evidence that the tech giants

exploit their monopoly power to

suppress competition. Because

Amazon is the dominant global force

in online retailing, other firms have

to go through the Amazon

marketplace to reach consumers.

Their own margins are at the mercy

of whatever cut Amazon takes. So far

from being the champion of the

consumer, the tech companies either

gobble up their competitors or

suppress them through predatory

pricing and other expedients.

The longstanding retort of the tech

companies is that they are being

targeted by politicians not because of

malpractice but because of success.

They have grown big because they

offer consumers what they want and

they strive to maintain competitive

advantage through constant

innovation. It’s a threadbare case that

not even the companies themselves

can seriously believe. The data

harvesting scandal, in which the

Facebook information of as many as

87 million people was improperly

shared, demonstrated that they wield

power without responsibility.

A century ago, the great

muckraking American journalist Ida

Tarbell exposed the scandal by which

Standard Oil, in collusion with the

railroad companies, set out to crush

competition. “They had never played

fair,” she wrote, “and that ruined

their greatness for me.” Their

descendants are among us.

Our government seems incapable of being transparent about anything from virus testing to tax

Britain needs to cure its addiction to secrecy

too fat to want to kill mice (MPs

sometimes truly know nothing). But

now Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Mr Speaker,

has just gone and done the obvious

thing. His cat, Patrick, who seemed

“posh” and so was named after the

Tory grandee Patrick Cormack, one

of my favourite subjects, is now

dining out in sumptuous style.

Grave warning

O

ne of the pluses of the

lockdown was uncut verges

and graveyards. I loved the

beauty of Bakewell churchyard after

rain and wind, the grass swaying

among the gravestones. Others think

it is untidy but surely this is the way

things should be, good for wildlife

and wonderful too. Sadly it’s now

been cut, so I can once again see my

favourite gravestone, which belongs

to Robert Papes, who died in 1787,

and his pointed epitaph: “Remember

Man, as thou past by/ As thou once

was, so once was I/ Remember thou

must die”. Cheery, hey?

K sera sera

W

ord of the week is the

k-heavy “kakapo”, a large

flightless New Zealand

parrot which is nocturnal, ground-

dwelling and endangered or, if you

want to use a k-word, nearly kaput.

where products are made and by

whom. Some have gone further,

embracing what has become known

as “ultra transparency”. The US

clothing company Everlane publishes

breakdowns of the cost of each of its

products: materials, labour and even

its profit margin: something that

might once have been considered

corporate suicide.

Yet while British ministers preach

the gospel of transparency —

“embrace data to deliver for the

public,” Steve Barclay, the Treasury

chief secretary, urged Whitehall this

week — their own efforts are

conspicuously half-baked. Indeed,

few departments guard their data

more jealously than the Treasury,

which has dribbled out minimal

information about the biggest

economic intervention in

generations.

We know astoundingly little about

how many people from which

sectors are still being furloughed,

whereas the French government has

published detailed, up-to-date data

of far greater clarity on their scheme.

The Treasury is not alone. The Bank

of England has been basing many of

its recent economic scenarios on

payments data it sees as it monitors

the financial system, yet it refuses to

release that data routinely.

It is all quite telling. Some

government departments don’t trust

the data (testing), others don’t trust

us with the data (pretty much

everything else). Either way, it’s not

good enough. No one is suggesting

we go the way of Norway or Hong

Kong. Even so, you don’t build trust

by hiding stuff from people. More

transparency, please, and soon.

out on transparency like Belgium but

at the very least it needs to be clear

about what it’s doing and why.

The muddle over quarantines is

one example of how not to do it.

Why do you have to quarantine

when coming back from Spain but

not from the Bahamas, where the

infection rate is nearly twice the

Spanish rate? There is probably a

reasonable answer somewhere in the

data — an equation involving

tourism numbers and Covid-19

prevalence — but the government

has been so vague that everyone is

suddenly terrified about going on

holiday anywhere. Perhaps that’s the

plan but this feels like an odd way of

going about it.

For transparency builds trust and

trust matters. That’s a lesson the

corporate world has absorbed in

recent years. Once upon a time

businesses closely guarded details of

employees’ salaries but these days

some tech companies, most notably

Netflix, publish their senior workers’

salaries — not because they have to

but because they want to. They

believe openness rather than secrecy

is the route to a better workplace.

A few years ago the Norwegian

government went one step further

and published every citizen’s salary

and tax return online. Anyone can

look up anyone else’s salary, though

doing so will alert the person whose

details are being inspected. It is hard

to imagine such a policy taking root

here, though the Norwegians insist it

has helped combat tax evasion and

bolstered equality. In the face of

concerns about workers’ labour

conditions, many fashion retailers

now produce granular details of

N

ot long ago an old friend

emailed me from hospital

in Hong Kong. “I’ve got

Covid-19,” he announced.

Happily his symptoms

were mild; indeed he might never

have realised he’d caught it had he

not been tested after flying back in

from London. Anyway, he pointed

me towards some data on the Hong

Kong government’s website.

“Look! You can see me on there.”

And sure enough there he was in the

spreadsheet — not his name but a

patient number, age, sex and plenty

of other details: where he picked up

the disease, date of onset, status and

so on. The Hong Kong government

even has a map showing the

apartment block where each Covid-

19 patient lives.

The data is even richer and more

transparent in Singapore; in South

Korea whenever someone tests

positive the authorities send alerts to

those living nearby with the infected

person’s age, gender and even a log

of their recent movements: this

nightclub, that church, that public

lavatory. Authorities believe that this

semi-public shaming helps explain

the success of the country’s test and

trace system. It is rather spooky and

raises all sorts of questions about

civil liberties, yet these strategies are

hardly confined to Asia. You can

download details of every patient in

Belgium who has contracted the

disease. Some South American

countries are doing similar stuff and,

as we face another surge in

infections, it is probably only a

matter of time before public shaming

becomes the norm in Europe.

It’s worth saying that these policies

hardly correlate with Covid-19

success: Belgium has one of Europe’s

highest death tolls per capita and

Hong Kong is facing a third wave

and a tight lockdown. Yet it is

instructive to compare the level of

data transparency with Britain’s.

Here, the collection and production

of statistics has been so shambolic

that we are still unclear about

precisely how many people have had

the disease or been tested for it, let

alone a public database of every

single one of them. The real question

is not whether the government

would ever go down the same road

but whether they’re capable of it.

This stuff matters because data is

central to the pandemic. Surviving

the next 12 months as a society and

an economy will mean clamping

down hard wherever the disease is

detected and doing that means

marshalling the data and acting on it.

It means building trust in the data:

after all, local lockdowns won’t work

if no one buys into them. The

government may not want to go all-

We know astoundingly

little about furlough

numbers in each sector

The omnipresent Derbyshire rain let

up briefly as we swam, occasionally

flipping over to do the backstroke

and watch the birds cavort with the

clouds. Heaven.

My lost letter

M

odern predicaments No 510.

About a month ago, the top

of the letter “k” pinged off my

laptop keyboard. I didn’t panic. After

all it is not a vowel. Indeed, as

everyone should know, “k” is

only the 19th most used letter of

the alphabet (followed by v, x, z,

j, q) and I had no plans to write

a novel about k-heavy topics

such as knickknacks.

But I have found

writing with a taped-

on “k” to be a total

pain and so this

week I decided to

try to fix it. Not

easy. The HP

helpline was not

(surprise

surprise) that

helpful.

It

seems

that

it is impossible to buy

just one letter and it

may not even be

possible to buy the right keyboard

just to harvest the “k”. Krazee or

what?

Weird title fight

N

ews from The Author magazine

reveals the winners of the

Diagram prize for the oddest

book title, which is now in its 41st

year. The top spot went to

The Dirt Hole and its

Variations which you

will be pleased to know

is to do with trapping

animals. Second place

was Ending the War

on Artisan Cheese by

Dr Catherine

Donnelly and third

was for a book of

“naughty” Bible

stories called Noah

Gets Naked. What a

list! Top that, Booker

prize.

House

mouse

A

key lesson of

politics is that

common sense

counts for almost nothing,

so I was shocked to hear

that the ban on cats in

the vermin-infested

House of Commons

has ended.

As sketchwriter,

I despaired at MPs

dithering over whether a cat

would make them sneeze or get

Ann Treneman Notebook

@anntreneman

G

I

Ed Conway

@edconwaysky