[Gllug] To LLU or Not to LLU?

[Nix]

On 28 Mar 2009, Christopher Hunter told this:

> On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 22:01 +0000, Nix wrote:
>
>> Boy d'you think you could let your biases hang out a bit more? We don't
>> see enough political flaming on the net.
>
> No "political bias" here - I'm just frustrated that this crowd of
> criminals got into power by pretending to be cleaner than the last bunch
> of criminals.  As the old song says: "It doesn't matter who you vote
> for, the Government always gets in"!

They're politicians. We've had better, we've had worse (it would be hard
to beat some of the early-to-mid-19th-century ones).

'Criminals' is overstating the case, if only because they make the law
(and the slightest familiarity with other countries would make it plain
the the UK really isn't all that bad. Rags like Private Eye do an
excellent job of shining bright lights on corruption here, even if they
do sometimes go over the top and assume that because the government is
backing something it *must* be bad, e.g. the Eye's lamentable MMR-
conspiracy-theorizing, which thankfully has tailed off, although without
any sort of admission that they were wrong for all those years.)

>> (Do you seriously think that there were no other calls on government
>> money? Do you seriously think that the govt as then was would have
>> subsidized BT to that extent? It had much more politically important
>> things to spend money on, e.g. subsidizing incompetent train companies.)
>
> Actually, when you consider the mess that this country is in, fibre
> communication links SHOULD come quite high up on their list.

Why? What possible benefit will it bring to give random residences
fibre to the door? Hey, faster botnets, just what we need.

>> Yeah, the scare quotes are really useful. We don't actually have a
>> government: the UK is *just* like, say, Somalia.
>
> In terms of the degree of corruption, we're actually worse than many
> "third world" countries.  The stench from Whitehall is becoming
> overpowering.

It took me moments to locate Transparency International's Corruption
Perceptions Index for 2008 (the 2009 edition has obviously not yet been
compiled) at <http://www.transparency.org/content/download/32783/502157>
(pp297-298).

Britain is tied at twelfth place with Luxembourg, behind Denmark,
Finland, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Canada, Norway, and Australia, (the ranges for the top
fifteen or so entries nearly overlap anyway).

Which of these do you consider 'third world'? (Or do you not consider
Transparency International a reputable organization? If not, where are
you getting your data?)

(By comparison, Italy is at #41, below Qatar and just above South
Africa; Greece is at #56, just above Namibia.)

(Somalia is, of course, at the bottom, although if somewhere has no
effective government at all I'm not sure how useful it is to define it
as 'corrupt'.)


Please at least *try* to come up with arguments that takes more than
thirty seconds to disprove.
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