Personally, I have mixed feelings about boxing. When my son was about 12, he asked for boxing gloves and a punch bag. Being a lawyer by training and cautious by instinct, I said that was OK by me, but he had to do it in a regulated environment (i.e. a club). Thereafter followed an interesting set of conversations with some elderly men from who held various honorary positions in the Amateur Boxing Association in Leeds, where we then lived. Obviously I asked about insurance, and was assured that there had never been a claim on the youth insurance policy of the ABA. That may well still be true.

Of course, as well all know, the risks of boxing – unlike rugby – are not generally the short term ones, especially for amateur boxing which is done in headguards, but rather the long term brain damage. This was pointed out in today’s debate by a spokeswoman speaking on behalf of the BMA, which campaigns for the banning of boxing. I have never felt particularly good about either the risks faced by my own son, or the harm that he may be inflicting on our people’s children, especially since he has turned out to be quite good at the sport. I do know that personally I find it hard to disagree with the assessment made by those promoting a recent partnership agreed between the Royal Marines and the ABA, that “Boxing needs self discipline, hard work, outstanding fitness, courage and team work”, having seen at first hand the effect it had on my son.
 

Furthermore, setting aside personal experience, it would strike me that any assessment of the case for banning boxing (as opposed to regulating it very tightly, which is the case at the present time) has to do a balance sheet of the pros and cons. So, in favour of banning boxing we have the following arguments:

• avoidable harm inflicted by one human on another should not be permitted, even if consent is given; and
• boxing can brutalize and has no more place in a civilized society than blood sports.

These are powerful arguments, which are directly associated with the very nature of boxing as a contact sport.
 In favour of regulating boxing we have other, perhaps more diffuse, arguments including:

• the general point of winning at boxing is not about beating the living daylights out of someone, but rather about ‘out-boxing’ them, which requires skill, physical fitness (especially stamina as well as strength), fast reactions, and not a little capacity to think, and to react to other person’s tactics;
  
• the UK would be stupid to ban any sport at which it might excel on an international scale, given its general feebleness and like embarrassment in 2012;
  
• the physical benefits for those who train to box, which include also more diffuse benefits for those young people who are inspired by the success of someone like Amir Khan to become more physically active, even if they only take up the training aspects of boxing;
  
• the reduction in aggression and increase in confidence which are the benefits that flow for young people who participate even just in boxing training, without actually fighting;
  
• amateur boxing clubs have an enviable reputation for offering disciplined environments, where bullying, harassment and other unacceptable behaviour is outlawed;
  
• other sports are in fact just as, and indeed possibly more risky (e.g. rugby);
  
• banning boxing is futile – it won’t go away, but will exist in an unregulated environment where more damage will be done than at present.

Of course, one could also do a cost benefit analysis, setting the costs incurred by the health service and other public services as a result of boxing against some putative sum calculated to reflect the number of young people who do not become in anti-social behaviour, or who do not suffer health problems associated with being inactive, as a result of involvement in boxing. That would be very hard to calculate, I suppose.

I have to admit that I have rather changed my mind about boxing as a result of personal involvement, having started from a position that “boxing = quintessentially uncivilized behaviour” but I still have that niggling feeling that it’s a dodgy thing for me to be in favour of. This being The Sharpener, I expect to have my arguments either dismissed or honed (especially with regards to the politics of banning boxing) in the comments which follow.

Illiberal Home Secretary Pandering to Rabid Anti-Immigration Tabloid Gallery and Demonstrating Penchant to create New Criminal Offences + Romanian and Bulgarian Citizens who will be EU Citizens with formal right of entry and residence to the UK as of 1 January 2007 = Massive Increase in Black Economy + More People Sleeping Rough + Reduction in the Tax Take from Migrant Workforce for UK Treasury + Lots of People Thinking That It Is All The Fault of the Romanians and Bulgarians after all.

 

“(2) The Secretary of State may by order deprive a person of a citizenship status if the Secretary of State is satisfied that deprivation is conducive to the public good.”

Previously the test was that citizenship could be revoked only for conduct “seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the United Kingdom or a British overseas territory.”

Or maybe I am most ashamed of the fact that this manifestly arbitrary behaviour, which demonstrates the current UK Government’s disregard for underlying legal principles of fairness, reluctance to abide by Court rulings, and willingness to use the legislature which they still dominate to get themselves out of sticky situations by adopting ad hominem measures such as this new test of citizenship deprivation, has not been reported in the UK. Anywhere. I was vaguely aware of the Hicks case, and I had read the judgment earlier out of interest and also because it is relevant to my work. However, I was alerted to this latest development by this post on the US based international law blog Opinio Juris, and the only press reports I can find are Australian, where it is reported that Hicks plans an appeal.

I find the lack of attention horrifying. Hicks may have an alternate nationality, but self-evidently it is doing him no good at all, given the inaction of the Australian Government. He continues to be held in defiance of all international norms, and to be threatened with forms of military justice which themselves have been held to be contrary to the US constitution. Moreover, it is possible to imagine that there are going to be further cases in the future of deprivation of nationality in the UK, which remarkably has not happened even in the US in terror cases, although there has been talk about it in the past.

Anyway, the full sorry story about David Hicks and the admittedly ‘poor life choices’ he has made (a quote from his indefatigable lawyer Major Mori who is big news now in Australia) is here in his Wikipedia entry.

I’ll deal with each briefly in turn.

Clearly any ‘federal’ or ‘semi-federal’ state will have difficulty working out relations with or within the EU. Can a federal state work properly when it is nested within another federal-type (or multi-level) system such as the EU? In the UK, the issue is dealt with by making EU affairs reserved matters under the Scotland Act, but at the same time allowing full association of the Executive with policy-making, as after all the Scottish Parliament must faithfully implement any legislation emanating from the EU within its sphere of competences, in areas such as fisheries or health, for example. Even in a non-asymmetric system, however, such as Germany, relations can be difficult. Many argue that Germany is weighed down in its dealings with the EU by the complexities of finessing the various Länder interests, and is ultimately a less effective operator. In any Member State’s negotiations with other Member States in the EU Council of Ministers, there is only room for one national position. What if Scotland and the rest of the UK are in conflict – e.g. over fisheries? What if Bavaria and North Rhine Westfalia have very different interests? Who decides?
 

The English problem stems partly from the asymmetry of the current arrangements and partly from the geographical peculiarities of the UK. Historically, federal systems in which one large unit is federated with two or three other ones, the largest of which is one tenth the size, in population terms, of the large one, have not proved very stable. Moreover, if ‘devolution’ is something to do not only with issues of nationhood, but also with issues of localism (which it very probably is, especially in Wales and Northern Ireland) then an ‘English’ parliament is clearly not the answer to diversity and the demand for greater local democratic control within England. It will be a parliament representing 50 million people. The parties at the Westminster level are not proving very keen to grapple with this undoubted weak point in the system. For the Tories, as a unionist party, even ‘English votes for English matters’ within Westminster is a problematic posture to adopt. Labour seem palpably unwilling to open up the can of worms that this issue poses. And frankly, the Liberal Democrats at Westminster level, albeit much more open to flexible federal solutions, seem to be waning in importance.
 

And finally, money. The money issue has nothing as such to do with devolution, because it stems from the Barnett formula originally devised long before 1997, an allocation of funding across the UK that seems in its current guise to be manifestly unfair to England and Wales and manifestly skewed towards Scotland. The problem is that such a centralist approach clearly does not fit with the devolution of considerable powers to sub-national authorities. There was little to agree with in Johnny Grimond’s bitter rant about Scotland in last week’s Economist (not worth linking to because it is behind a subscription wall, but you can find presentation of the argument and criticism here, here and here), except in relation to the argument that the power to spend should indeed be allied to the power to tax. The UK needs urgently to look at fiscal autonomy to go with the devolution of powers. This is not because this will give the English things the Scottish have, such as lower university tuition fees, which they think they are being denied because of budgetary constraints. The differences lie in political choices, not budgetary possibilities. England, for better or for worse, is making different political choices to Scotland. That is very clear in the health services and schools arenas. Even leaving aside the West Lothian question, those political choices would be more legitimate and probably better thought through if they were tied to a system of fiscal autonomy, combined with an appropriate system of fiscal transfers which all federal systems must have in order to maintain solidarity within the union. Fiscal autonomy will not necessarily lead to the break up of the UK. I hope it does not. Refusing to contemplate such autonomy may on the contrary, though, foster the types of political movements which will ultimately do much greater damage to the union.