Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2014

David Friedman on the historical uses of torture in legal situations

Filed under: Greece, History, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:50

David Friedman discusses a few of the legal systems under which torture was not only possible, but omnipresent:

The use of torture to extract information is not a new idea. Under both Athenian and Roman law, slave testimony could only be taken under torture. Presumably the theory was that slaves were interrogated in order to get evidence against their owners, the owner had ways of putting pressure on the slave, so torture was needed to get the slave to tell the truth. In Imperial Chinese law, not only the defendant but also witnesses could be tortured. In that system, and I think also in some legal systems of medieval and renaissance Europe, a defendant could only be convicted by his own confession. Torture was one way of getting it.

The argument against torture, that the victim will say whatever he thinks will end it whether true or false, is also old — people in the past were not stupid. Our main source of information on Athenian law consists of orations written by professional orators to be memorized by a party to a law suit in a legal system where there were no lawyers and each party had to represent himself. There is one oration which claims that slave testimony under torture is perfectly reliable, that there has never been a case where it turned out to be false. There is another making the obvious argument on the other side, that such testimony is worthless since the slave will say whatever the torturer wants him to say.

They were both written by the same orator.

People in other legal systems that used torture were also aware of the problem. There is a collection of Chinese cases compiled in the 13th century for the use of magistrates. Many of them are cases where a clever judge realizes that an innocent person has been forced to confess under torture and figures out who is really guilty.

That raises an obvious question — if they saw the problem with torture, why did they continue to employ it? One answer is that extracting information might only have been an excuse, that the real purpose was to punish someone without having first to convict him. That is a possible explanation in some contexts, including the current case of torture by the CIA. But it does not explain contexts where the person being tortured was not the suspect but a potential witness.

A second possible explanation is the belief that a competent interrogator could distinguish a real confession from a fake one. That strikes me as the most likely explanation in the Roman and Athenian cases, where it was the defendant’s slave, not the defendant, who was being interrogated.

A third explanation is that torture might produce information that could be checked. That is the situation in the hypothetical cases sometimes offered in defense of the use of torture — the suspect is being forced to say where the kidnap victim, or the terrorist time bomb, is concealed. More plausibly, to say where the loot is hidden.

London’s Transport System During World War Two – 1941

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Published on 31 Mar 2013

Filmed after the start of the Blitz, ‘City Bound’ is an exploration of the daily commute into London from the suburbs in 1941.

‘Between half past five and ten o’clock each morning five million people are moved from home to work by London’s transport system. Before this can be done, underground and overground transport must be cleaned and refuelled. Then from the outer ring of London, past green fields and suburban gardens, the move into London begins. Trains, motor omnibuses, and electric trams bring hundreds of thousands into the centre of the city, to work in the shops, offices, and factories of the largest city in the world.’
(Films of Britain – British Council Film Department Catalogue – 1941)

QotD: Favourite expressions of the Emperor Augustus

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

“What about Apollo?” interrupted Vinicianus. “I never heard that Apollo was married. That seems to me a very lame argument.” The Consul called Vinicianus to order. It was clear that the word “lame” was intended offensively. But I was accustomed to insults and answered quietly: “I have always understood that the god Apollo remains a bachelor either because he is unable to choose between the Nine Muses, or because he cannot afford to offend eight of them by choosing the other as his bride. And he is immortally young, and so are they, and it is quite safe for him to postpone his choice indefinitely; for they are all in love with him, as the poet What’s-his-name says. But perhaps Augustus will naturally persuade him to do his duty by Olympus, by taking one of the Nine in honourable wedlock, and raising a large family — ‘as quick as boiled asparagus’.”

Vinicianus was silenced in the burst of laughter that followed, ‘quick as boiled asparagus’ was one of Augustus’s favourite expressions. He had several others: ‘As easily as a dog squats’ and ‘There are more ways than one of killing a cat’ and ‘You mind your own business, I’ll mind mine’ and ‘I’ll see that it gets done on the Greek Kalends’ (which, of course, means never) and ‘The knee is nearer than the shin’ (which means that one’s first concern is with matters that affect one personally). And if anyone tried to contradict him on a point of literary scholarship, he used to say: ‘A radish may know no Greek, but I do’. And whenever he was encouraging anyone to bear an unpleasant condition patiently he always used to say: ‘Let us content ourselves with this Cato’. From what I have told you about Cato, that virtuous man, you will easily understand what he meant. I now found myself often using these phrases of Augustus’s: I suppose that this was because I had consented to adopt his name and position. The handiest was the one he used when he was making a speech and had lost his way in a sentence — a thing that constantly happens to me, because I am inclined, when I make an extempore speech, and in historical writing too when I am not watching myself, to get involved in long, ambitious sentences — and now I am doing it again, you notice. However, the point is that Augustus, whenever he got into a tangle, used to cut the Gordian knot, like Alexander, saying ‘Words fail me, my Lords. Nothing that I might utter could possibly match the depth of my feelings in this matter.”

Robert Graves, Claudius the God, 1935.

December 10, 2014

How Did Gas Shells Work in WW1? – OUT OF THE TRENCHES #4

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Published on 8 Dec 2014

Indy is answering your questions again and this week explains, among other things, how gas shells worked and what role Spain played during the war. You can always ask more questions in the comments, on Facebook or on Twitter and Indy will gladly answer them in on of the next episodes.

Orwell at the BBC

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

The most recent issue of Intelligent Life looks at the brief interlude of George Orwell’s career while he was working at the BBC during the Second World War:

Orwell spent a mere two years (1941-43) at the BBC, which he joined as a talks assistant in the Indian section of the Eastern Service. No recording survives of him giving a talk, which is perhaps fitting; for what is most striking about his essays and journalism is the tart, compelling timbre of his voice. The critic Cyril Connolly, an exact contemporary, thought that only D.H. Lawrence rivalled Orwell in the degree to which his personality “shines out in everything he said or wrote”. Any reader of Orwell’s non-fiction will pick up on the brisk, buttonholing manner (“two things are immediately obvious”), the ear-catching assertions (“the Great War…could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented”) and the squashing epithets: “miry”, “odious”, “squalid”, “hideous”, “mealy-mouthed”, “beastly”, “boneless”, “fetid” and — a term he could have applied to himself — “frowsy”.

Orwell might well have damned this new honour too. In his studio on the edge of the Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire, Martin Jennings, the sculptor working on the eight-foot likeness, told me that Orwell had made some disobliging remarks about public statues, thinking that they got in the way of perfectly good views. The bronze Orwell will look down on the comings and goings of BBC staff who, returning his gaze, can read some chiselled wisdom from his works on the wall behind him. The Financial Times recently called Orwell “the true patron saint of our profession”, another tribute he would probably resist. “Saints”, he warned, “should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

Why Orwell? His time at the BBC was ambivalent at best. As students of 1984 soon discover, the novel’s dreary, wartime ambience and the prominence of propaganda owe much to his BBC experiences; Room 101, where Winston Smith confronts his worst nightmares, was named after an airless BBC conference room. “Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,” Orwell wrote in his diary on March 14th 1942, “and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.”

One answer to “why Orwell?” is because of his posthumous career. Five years before his death in 1950, he was, in the words of one of his biographers, D.J. Taylor, “still a faintly marginal figure”. He had published seven books, four of them novels, none of which put him in the front rank of novelists, two of which he had refused to have reprinted. He was acknowledged as a superb political essayist and bold literary critic, but his contemporary and friend Malcolm Muggeridge, first choice as his biographer, frankly considered him “no good as a novelist”. It was only with his last two books, Animal Farm and 1984 (published in 1945 and 1949), that Orwell transformed his reputation as a writer. These two books would change the way we think about our lives.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

December 9, 2014

Exodus: Gods and Kings gets panned by Forbes

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Scott Mendelson reviews the soon-to-open movie by Ridley Scott, and finds it awful:

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a terrible film. It is a badly acted and badly written melodrama that takes what should be a passionate and emotionally wrenching story and drains it of all life and all dramatic interest. It hits all the major points, like checking off boxes on a list, yet tells its tale at an arms-length reserve with paper-thin characters. It is arguably a film intended for adults, with violence that makes a mockery of its PG-13 rating, yet it has far less nuance, emotional impact, and moral shading than DreamWorks Animation’s PG-rated and seemingly kid-targeted The Prince of Egypt.

The film starts with an arbitrary mass battle scene, one which serves no purpose save for having a mass battle sequence to toss into the trailers. The primary alteration to the story is the inclusion of said gratuitous action beats. The film is relentlessly grim yet oddly unemotional, which is a tricky balance to accidentally pull off. The actors (who have all done excellent work elsewhere) are all oddly miscast, and that’s not even getting to the whole “really white actors playing Egyptians” thing. Oh right, that little issue… It’s actually worse than you’ve heard.

In retrospect, it may have been better to just make a 100% white cast similar to Noah. This film instead is filled with minorities in subservient roles, be it slaves, servants, or (implied) palace sex toys. Instead of merely having a film filled with only white actors, what the film does is implicitly impose a racially-based class system, where the white characters are prestigious and/or important while the various minorities are inherently second or third-class citizens almost by virtue of their skin color. I am sure this was unintentional, but that’s the visual picture that Exodus paints.

Now to be absolutely fair, even if Exodus was cast with 100% racial/ethnic authenticity, it would still be a pretty bad motion picture. The screenplay has our poor, miscast actors speaking in various accents and in a bizarre hybrid of “ancient times period piece” English and more modern American English, which leads to lines like “From an economic standpoint alone, what you’re asking is problematic,” which is Rameses’s (Joel Edgerton) response to Moses’s initial plea to “Let my people go!”

Colby Cosh on the recent “unprecedented” terror attacks

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In his latest Maclean’s article, Colby Cosh talks about the recent “freelance” terror attacks on Canadian soil and points out that no matter what the reporters say, they’re hardly “unprecedented”:

There has been much discussion about how to think of the type of freelance Islamist terrorist that has recently begun to belabour Canada. What labels and metaphors are appropriate for such an unprecedented phenomenon? I possess the secret: It is not unprecedented. This has been kept a secret only through some odd mischance, some failure of attention that is hard to explain.

I discovered the secret through reading about 19th-century history, particularly the years from the 1848 revolutions to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The key was Bismarck, the Prussian minister-president who unified Germany. If you want to learn about Bismarck, you will probably pick up a book by some historian of international relations, such as A.J.P. Taylor. That’s the right place to start. But it means you can read a lot about Bismarck before finding out about the time in May 1866 when a guy shot him.

Ferdinand Cohen-Blind, a Badenese student of pan-German sentiments, waylaid Bismarck with a pistol on the Unter den Linden. He fired five rounds. None missed. Three merely grazed his midsection, and two ricocheted off his ribs. He went home and ate a big lunch before letting himself be examined by a doctor.

[…]

The point is not that Bismarck was particularly hated, although he was. The point is that this period of European (and American) history was crawling with young, often solitary male terrorists, most of whom showed signs of mental disorder when caught and tried, and most of whom were attached to some prevailing utopian cause. They tended to be anarchists, nationalists or socialists, but the distinctions are not always clear, and were not thought particularly important. The 19th-century mind identified these young men as congenital conspirators. It emphasized what they had in common: social maladjustment, mania, an overwhelming sense of mission and, usually, a prior record of minor crimes.

In my Origins of WW1 series, I quoted from The War That Ended Peace (which I still heartily recommend):

Margaret MacMillan describes the typical members of the Young Bosnians, who were of a type that we probably recognize more readily now than at any time since 1914:

    [They] were mostly young Serb and Croat peasant boys who had left the countryside to study and work in the towns and cities of the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. While they had put on suits in place of their traditional dress and condemned the conservatism of their elders, they nevertheless found much in the modern world bewildering and disturbing. It is hard not to compare them to the extreme groups among Islamic fundamentalists such as Al Qaeda a century later. Like those later fanatics, the Young Bosnians were usually fiercely puritanical, despising such things as alcohol and sexual intercourse. They hated Austria-Hungary in part because they blamed it for corrupting its South Slav subjects. Few of the Young Bosnians had regular jobs. Rather they depended on handouts from their families, with whom they had usually quarreled. They shared their few possessions, slept on each other’s floors, and spent hours over a single cup of coffee in cheap cafés arguing about life and politics. They were idealistic, and passionately committed to liberating Bosnia from foreign rule and to building a new and fairer world. Strongly influenced by the great Russian revolutionaries and anarchists, the Young Bosnians believed that they could only achieve their goals through violence and, if necessary, the sacrifice of their own lives.

The “peaceful century” from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War was far from peaceful — we only see it as such in contrast to the bloodbath of 1914-1918. And terrorists of a type we readily recognize from the front pages of the newspapers today were prefigured exactly by the anarchist revolutionaries of a century ago.

QotD: The rise of the word “fuck” in common usage

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

During the first World war use of the four-letter word, as it is now called, became universal, or more probably its universal use was first observed by the literate classes. Between the wars the word was presented by writers in a modified form — mucking or flicking — or with its initial only: f—ing. Its use in full — fuck — now seems to be approaching literary, though not conversational, respectability.

A.J.P. Taylor, A History of England: England 1914-1945, 1961.

December 8, 2014

The Luftwaffe attack at Bari in 1943

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Patrick K. O’Donnell discusses one of the Luftwaffe‘s most deadly attacks and why most people have never heard of it:

Americans remember December 7 as Pearl Harbor Day, but most Americans have never even heard of the “Little Pearl Harbor,” which occurred in Bari Harbor, Italy, on December 2, 1943. More than 100 Luftwaffe bombers mounted a surprise attack on Allied ships moored in the harbor. Their bombs sank or rendered inoperable 28 of these ships. Nearly a thousand Allied troops were killed or wounded. along with hundreds of civilians.

Unbeknownst to those in the port, one of the ships carried liquid death in its belly. The American freighter John Harvey was secretly carrying mustard agent, in violation of international agreements that banned its use. President Franklin Roosevelt had covertly ordered the shipment of 100 tons of mustard agent to Italy for retaliation in the event that the Germans used chemical warfare against the Allied troops. The incident was covered up and remained a secret for decades.

When the German bombs hit the John Harvey, the ship’s hold immediately exploded with devastating violence, killing all those who knew about the mustard [gas]. Deadly liquid and gas flew high into the air and then slowly settled back down into the harbor, coating everything and everyone in the vicinity. Casualties would mount over the coming days and weeks as the agent slowly and painfully claimed the lives of many who had survived the initial attack.

Mustard gas was one of the nastiest relics of the attempts to break the trench lines during the First World War. Wikipedia says:

The sulfur mustards, or sulphur mustards, commonly known as mustard gas, are a class of related cytotoxic and vesicant chemical warfare agents with the ability to form large blisters on the exposed skin and in the lungs. Pure sulfur mustards are colorless, viscous liquids at room temperature. When used in impure form, such as warfare agents, they are usually yellow-brown in color and have an odor resembling mustard plants, garlic, or horseradish, hence the name. Mustard gas was originally assigned the name LOST, after the scientists Wilhelm Lommel and Wilhelm Steinkopf, who developed a method for the large-scale production of mustard gas for the Imperial German Army in 1916.

Mustard agents are regulated under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Three classes of chemicals are monitored under this Convention, with sulfur and nitrogen mustard grouped in Schedule 1, as substances with no use other than in chemical warfare. Mustard agents could be deployed on the battlefield by means of artillery shells, aerial bombs, rockets, or by spraying from warplanes.

December 7, 2014

QotD: December 7, 1941 – the truth is stranger than fiction

Filed under: History, Japan, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I watched Tora! Tora! Tora! recently. That movie is supposed to be the most historically accurate and truthful ever made about the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was an entertaining and informative movie packed with good performances and some of the most spectacular plane crashes and stunts on an airfield I’ve ever seen.

And at the same time, the sequence of events that led up to the Japanese attack were almost inconceivable. The level of incompetence, stupidity, bad luck, mistake-making, and almost deliberate failure to let the Japanese attack be so successful defies imagination. This was one of those legendary sequences where truth is stranger than fiction.

When the radar crew (which stayed longer than their night shift required) spotted the incoming Japanese planes, they were mistaken for B-17s being delivered to the airbase and the radar station was told “yeah? Well don’t worry about it.”

When intelligence services using cracked Japanese codes figured that an attack was imminent, they were unable to radio Hawaii about it because the atmospheric conditions were bad. So they sent a telegram, which was shelved for eventual delivery because it wasn’t marked “urgent.”

On and on it went, delays, mistakes, confusion, circumstances, almost a perfect set of events that if you read about them in a book you’d complain was too contrived and unbelievable. That would never happen! you’d cry and close the book in disgust.

But that’s what really happened.

Christopher Taylor, “TORA TORA 9-11”, Word Around the Net, 2014-09-10.

December 6, 2014

The “low-information voter”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:02

At The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Richard Anderson charts the sad decline of Michael Chong (whose brave attempt to reform our political system has been thoroughly neutered by the powers-that-be), and talks about the infamous “low-information voters” who somehow keep screwing up democracy … or something:

There has been much bemoaning in recent months about the “low information voter.” This is a polite euphemism for “lazy dumb asses.” The lazy dumb ass is a universal phenomenon but our age has take this once marginal figure and made him central to our political concerns. Different eras would have simply ignored the lazy dumb asses and restricted the franchise to people who give a rat’s ass about the political process. Oh what a Golden Age that was!

Why does it matter? A politician who knows that he must confront an engaged and informed electorate won’t try to pull half as many political stunts. Politics is the art of the possible which is another way of saying the art of whatever hell you can get away with. When a critical mass of the electorate are lazy dumb asses the job of the politician becomes easier. Lying is easier. Evading responsibility is easier. It’s the difference between dealing with an omniscience mother and an idiot man child. The electorate was never quite the former but it has now largely become the latter.

Sometimes half a loaf is worse than no loaf. Mr Chong earned some very impressive brownie points with the civic minded set when he resigned from cabinet and then proposed this bill. There was a kind of teary eyed delusion when it was first introduced. A principled politician making a principled stand on the very important principle of responsible government. Many of us nearly fainted from righteous appreciation.

The spectacle of the great and the good talking about the “low-information voter” is quite amusing: what you think they’re talking about isn’t actually the case. In most cases, they’re talking about you.

It’s been less than a century since the franchise was extended to most adults (by chronology, anyway) and a decade or so less for those with two “X” chromosomes. Harking back to some imaginary golden age when voters actually cared seriously about how to cast their votes is nonsense … the vast majority of voters — regardless of how broad or restrictive the franchise might be — were, are, and will forever continue to be low-information voters. This is because of our old friend from the dismal field of economics, the opportunity cost.

The cost to you for educating yourself about the political situation and the current contenders in any given election is almost always orders of magnitude higher than any possible benefit you might personally derive from getting your vote “right”. As a rational being, it’s insane for you to spend any time at all in figuring out who to vote for — this is why party labels are so important. You don’t know whether to vote for Saba Chen-O’Toole-Wenger or Mohammed Jean-Claude Campbell-Mirkovich? Check their party affiliations for a cheater’s guide. Ms. Chen-O’Toole-Wenger is for the Jacobins, while Mr. Campbell-Mirkovich is for the Falangists at least lets you know whether option A is better (for you) than option B. I’m not really a fan of the party system, but it clearly does provide a useful benefit in the voting booth.

December 5, 2014

Mission Accomplished? – The Austro-Hungarian Empire Conquers Belgrade l THE GREAT WAR Week 19

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:51

Published on 4 Dec 2014

During the first week of December, Austria manages to capture Belgrade. Thereby Austria is the first nation to achieve one of its war aims. The victorious Austrians are joyful, but the Serbs strike back and the Austrian euphoria takes a sudden end. Meanwhile, the Russians fight against the German and Austrian troops in front of Cracow. But the Austrians are able to stop the Russian offensive and achieve yet another victory.

The atrocities, the Austrians committed in Serbia, were part of our episode from August 28, in which we are also talking about the so called Rape of Belgium, a series of atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium: http://bit.ly/1BhsysW

Ross Perot (of all people) and one of the earliest real computers

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

At Wired, Brendan I. Koerner talks about the odd circumstances which led to H. Ross Perot being instrumental in saving an iconic piece of computer history:

Eccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot’s staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I’s and Altair 880’s wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot’s people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.” The ENIAC was a 27-ton, 1,800-square-foot bundle of vacuum tubes and diodes that was arguably the world’s first true computer. The hardware that Perot’s team diligently unearthed and lovingly refurbished is now accessible to the general public for the first time, back at the same Army base where it almost rotted into oblivion.

ENIAC was conceived in the thick of World War II, as a tool to help artillerymen calculate the trajectories of shells. Though construction began a year before D-Day, the computer wasn’t activated until November 1945, by which time the U.S. Army’s guns had fallen silent. But the military still found plenty of use for ENIAC as the Cold War began — the machine’s 17,468 vacuum tubes were put to work by the developers of the first hydrogen bomb, who needed a way to test the feasibility of their early designs. The scientists at Los Alamos later declared that they could never have achieved success without ENIAC’s awesome computing might: the machine could execute 5,000 instructions per second, a capability that made it a thousand times faster than the electromechanical calculators of the day. (An iPhone 6, by contrast, can zip through 25 billion instructions per second.)

When the Army declared ENIAC obsolete in 1955, however, the historic invention was treated with scant respect: its 40 panels, each of which weighed an average of 858 pounds, were divvied up and strewn about with little care. Some of the hardware landed in the hands of folks who appreciated its significance — the engineer Arthur Burks, for example, donated his panel to the University of Michigan, and the Smithsonian managed to snag a couple of panels for its collection, too. But as Libby Craft, Perot’s director of special projects, found out to her chagrin, much of ENIAC vanished into disorganized warehouses, a bit like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Lost in the bureaucracy

An ENIAC technician changes a tube. (Photo: US Army)

An ENIAC technician changes a tube. (Photo: US Army)

December 4, 2014

Fully Fitted Freight (1957)

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Published on 29 Nov 2013

How freight was moved around Britain by rail in the 1950s, although in reality a lot of it was unfitted.

If you think your mortgage is bad, here’s a bit of perspective

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:02

Britain is deeply in debt, like most western countries, but some of the debt is much longer term than usual:

Britain will pay off all of its debt used to fund World War One next March, when it redeems a government bond first issued more than 80 years ago to help pay for the conflict.

The finance ministry said on Wednesday that it would redeem the 1.9 billion pound ($3 billion), 3.5 percent War Loan — a perpetual bond which means it has no fixed maturity date — on March 9 next year.

Issued in 1932, the War Loan was used to refinance debt accumulated during World War One, which ended in 1918.

Some market experts said they would miss the bond as a rare historical curiosity in modern finance.

“For those of us who’ve been looking at the gilt market for a long time, a little bit of magic has fallen out of the market,” said Barclays fixed income strategist Moyeen Islam.

What needs to be pointed out however, is that they’re not actually paying off the WW1 debt: they’re eliminating that particular interest-bearing bond (because it’s now paying a higher rate of interest than the UK government’s other debt instruments). The money to pay off the current holders of those bonds will be borrowed on the market at current market rates. That’s the government equivalent of paying off one credit card with another … you still have a debt, it’s just being held by a different lender now. Tim Worstall explains:

As background, yes, Britain ran up big debts in WWI. Those were those National War Bonds. And interest rates changed a bit, finances moved around, and in 1927 it was decided that those National War Bonds should be changed. And the change was to turn them into perpetual bonds: the capital would never be paid off, there would just be a stream of interest off into the indefinite future. The government retained the right to buy them in at any point (a “call option” on them) which is what Osborne is exercising now. One more thing: there were other bits and pieces of debt lying around. Odd bits and pieces from the 19th century, debt from the Crimean War, from those (not large enough) attempts to deal with the Great Famine in Ireland, bits and pieces relating to the Napoleonic Wars and even, would you believe it, some parts that related all the way back to the South Sea Company and the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s (although that connection is pretty remote).

All of these pieces were dumped into the same pot and “consolidated” into these perpetual bonds. They were and are thus known as “Consols”.

What Osborne is going to do is exercise that call option and bring those bonds back in. But he’s not actually “paying off” those debts. He’s going to issue other, more conventional, gilts in order to have the money to give to those sending in their Consols. He must be doing that: the government really is borrowing £100 billion a year and change at present. This is no more “paying off” those debts than my taking out a bank loan to pay off my credit card is paying off debts. It might well be a very good idea to do that, given the difference in the terms of the debts and the interest rates, but it’s still not paying off, is it?

H/T to Elizabeth for the original link.

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