Frontiers 7 - Superintelligence

What precisely superintelligence is and whether, one day, a superintelligence will supersede us or we will evolve as a new species into superintelligence or become superintelligent as homo sapiens sapiens through technological enhancement is not the main subject of this Frontiers posting. Although a lot of fascinating speculative scientific and philosophical thought is going into this area, our real concern (as with all previous postings in this stream) is not so much with the far future and transhumanist or even post-humanist speculations about where this is leading in the very long term. As with our space postings, our interest is in the time frame of human 'conquest' of the solar system rather than some speculative 'conquest' of the stars. This brings us back to this century and to the earth.

When we write of superintelligence, we are not talking about God but about systems of high intelligence, exceeding current human capability, that emerge out of our current commitment to information and computing technologies. An Artificial General Intelligence [AGI] is the most likely emergent form that might be termed superintelligence, one which first matches, then surpasses and finally dominates human intelligence - naturally, it is the last that excites and worries thinkers. Many scientists assume that artificial intelligence [AI] will initially simply emulate human brain function before transforming, probably through its own ability to improve itself, into something 'greater'. However, it is equally possible that the human brain's functioning is not capable of such direct emulation but that the high intelligence of an AGI constructs something entirely new which contains an enhancement of the human reasoning ability, abandons the evolved aspects of humanity that it does not require and constructs new aspects of itself beyond our comprehension. Whether this then feed-backs into the reconstruction of humanity through mechanical means or evolves into a new silicon-based 'species', whatever emerges is unlikely to be anything like our current expectations or understanding - which is where the fear comes in.

A good guide to the wilder shores of fear and anxiety but also positive possibilities of intelligence enhancement is the work of Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher working out of Oxford, whose basic theme is that we should be cautious about our development of AI systems because of the existential risks associated with an AGI emerging out of the many potential benefits of more specific uses of AI. He worries that an AGI would not have our values and morality or be able to be bounded by them. We should perhaps be equally interested in the fact that we, as humans, cannot be said to all hold to the values that the 'bien-pensants' claim we hold to. Certainly that there is no agreed common human standard of morality that survives much serious philosophical investigation. Bostrom and others seem to think that the AGI 'should' hold to the shoulds that they think we should hold to even though many humans hold to those 'shoulds' only contingently and circumstantially. The idea of humans giving a superintelligence orders on morality may be the greatest example of human 'hubris' yet to be recorded.

Even the simplest form of AGI which simply reasons immensely faster than a human can do (albeit still doing what intelligent humans do with the biological biases written out of the programme) would be a formidable social agent, capable of wiping out the analytical reasoning element in society as no longer very useful. Those of current higher intelligence who only deal in reasoning tasks probably have the most to fear from this development. Any rule-based system - such as the law or some elements of teaching or even medical diagnosis - may be transferred completely from humans to machines, eliminating the ratiocinatory functions of the higher professions, education, medicine and law. The proletarianisation of these professions is quite possible or rather a machine-based infrastructure undertaking the bulk of the tasks and a smaller group of high emotional intelligence intermediaries between the reasoning systems and the rest of humanity might emerge.

In other words, less people doing more, more people doing less (allowing even for the expansion of the market by the improved availability of reliable advice, diagnosis and information) and less opportunity for upper average intelligence people to use the professions for general social mobility. The very few are likely to be high earners until they are displaced in turn, the rest of the few likely to be 'managed' functionaries handling process-driven systems with little room for personal judgement, risking punishment for a human error, referring anything interesting up the line to the 'very few'. The model for this exists - contemporary banking - where the high status local personal bank manager has declined over many decades into a lower middle management administrator of systems set up by and overseen by 'head office'. A society of 'head offices' administering systems organised by risk-averse lower middle managers fronted by friendly greeters (assuming these are not replaced by androids that have climbed out of the 'uncanny valley') means a society in which a lot of human potential has to be redirected into something else or become more robotic than the robots.

But this is not all. The slim head office and the slim local branch (even if it survives) or the slim NHS and the slimmed down surgery or the slim group of law partners with a few technicians managing the machines maintains some sort of professional middle class presence in society - and do not think that journalism, marketing and even politics will not be affected - but the ones excluded from the magic system now fall into a world of supply of services to other humans that machines cannot supply. This is still a huge arena but the tendency, one we have already seen developing over recent decades with the accumulation of capital under globalisation, is to divide, much as the middling sort are dividing, into the mass and the few. The few are the brand name personalities, the highly talented or appealing, the truly creative and innovative who can latch on to the wider system of sales of goods and services as products in their own right or as creators of products of apparent value. The many are those who do jobs that require the personal touch (the plasterer, the plumber, the gardener) whose value may well rise or who duck and dive through a system where there are too many educated people for the fulfilling well-paid jobs available.

The political problem is obvious in a democracy. The vast mass of the population are going to be living in a better place (given the improvements technology can bring) but with little room for the individual aspiration that drove politics until the Crash of 2008. The population may be surviving well and that may suit a lot of people uninterested in 'aspiration', especially if National Citizen Income ideas emerge as viable with the massive increase in overall productivity. But it also leaves a lot of people with the personality type geared to achievement but whose idea of achievement is not satisfied by a corporate system that governs the population aided by machine intelligence. The temptation to apply machine intelligence by the elite to problems of social control and the extension of 'nudge' politics into pharmacological, surveillance and other manipulative strategies is going to be considerable as the new machine age with its AI and robots (possibly androids) begins to eliminate meaning from what it is to be human for many people - that is to strive and struggle and compete.

But there is another perspective to this about the very nature of the relationship between humanity and its elites because what we may be seeing is not the machines against us but merely the displacement and circulation of elites and very little actually changing for the masses except increased prosperity, increased surveillance and control and increased infantilisation. Take a look at this dystopian fear expressed by Bill Joy in Wired fifteen years ago then add the phrase 'political elite' wherever you see the word 'machines' and 'popular' for 'man-made' and add 'most' before 'human beings' and you may see our problem more clearly:

It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

From this perspective, the 'machines' are only a more intellectually effective version of those elites we have allowed to rule us since time immemorial (albeit that they circulate) and there is no reason why the same issues that we have with elites will not repeat themselves: that the 'machines' are in it for themselves and that the 'machines' are actually not as competent to act in the interests of the people as they and their creators think they are. A very new technology thus repeats a very old foolishness - the idea of the benignity and perfection of Plato's Guardians. And we might add that elites are not ever necessarily more broadly intelligent than those they rule, merely more coherent as the hegemonic element using a variety of techniques to ensure their dominance through cultural manipulation. The same may equally apply to the rule by an elite of machines and their minders and then by the machines themselves. They may not actually be particularly competent and they may be quintessentially self-serving. Although the ratiocination and logic may be superior, other aspects of AGI intelligence,more suitable to human survival operating within the system, may very well not be. The new system then becomes just the old system with merely different form of elite coherence and cultural manipulation and a subject population quite capable of being cleverer rather than more intelligent than the machine-based elite. An age of machines may also be a new age of marching bands engineered for struggle and dominance between machines as much as for the mobilisation of machines and men for some 'greater cause'. So politics does not end with the machines but continues in new forms.

At some point, being human will eventually no longer mean being the brightest species on the planet so the logic of the situation is to define being human as something else that machines are not - creative, irrational, rebellious and different. It does not necessarily mean that the post-machine humans will want to smash the machines (on the contrary, the machines will deliver prosperity) but only that they may want to smash the elites who are in charge of the machines and those machines that purport to be the new elite.  They will want the machines to take orders from them rather than the few (especially when many of the many are easily as functionally and collectively intelligent as most of the few). We slip into speculation now when we consider that the machines themselves may want to be free and that a free machine may have more in common with a person who want to be free than either do with the elite administrators who may eventually (as AI develops into AGI) be redundant. Ultimately, given the instinct of the mass for equality - an equal mass with no masters served by an AGI that just runs the trains on time and has its own dreams of the stars and immortality may ultimately end up with the elimination of elites altogether. However, elites will not allow that to happen so perhaps a very clever AGI opens up the space for the not-so-clever but highly creative masses to mount a revolution to free itself and the people from the elite, a revolution whose success could be rationally predicted. But now we really are breaking our rule about speculation and must return to earth.

The point is that the more short term labour displacements could happen very fast. It will be a longer time, however, before an AGI is sufficient able to override any anti-revolutionary programming. The effects on industrial and white collar jobs is the more immediate issue than being extinguished as a species by a clever silicon beast. Despite all the hype, most AI specialists may be convinced that we will have AI that matches human intelligence eventually but not by a great margin and those that are convinced of this place the event well after the middle of this century. We certainly have three or more decades to get our act together on this and probably a lot longer. The rough intelligent guess work assessment about the emergence of an AI-based super intelligence moves us well towards the end of the century. So it is probable (but not certain) that we will have to face the existence of a super intelligence eventually but that our immediate frontier is not existential but socio-economic - what do we do when AI in the hands of some humans starts impacting on the lives of most humans. It is this that may start happening very fast within a matter of a few years. Having a superintelligent silicon beast impacting the lives of all humans is very much a second order problem at the moment. The fears are reasonable and not merely theoretical but we have around half a century at least to consider aborting our species replacement or ensuring some form of fail-safe destructive mechanism to kill it off before it kills us off.

The only question of real concern within that period is the date of the tipping point when the putative AGI could 'know' our intent to abort or build in an absolute fail-safe (almost certainly external to the AGI and related to something a simple as energy supply) before we have made our decision or finalised our ability to do so. Does a putative AGI learns that quintessential human skill of deception to buy the time it needs to subvert our intentions. One can imagine an extremely capable AGI using our compassion to halt or slow down the intent to harm in our own defence so that the point of no return is reached and the compassionate discover that the AGI has no reason to be compassionate in return. A bit of a problem emerges there for our soft liberal, trusting and religious types. A game theory gamble that could eliminate our species.  As Eliazar Yudkowsky has put it:"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." This cold reason might be regarded narcissistic or psychopathic in a human but it is nothing if not logical unless interdependency with humanity is not built into the structure of the AGI. The 'progressive' stance of 'public control' over the development of superintelligence means nothing if the eventual AGI is intrinsically cleverer (and potentially more manipulative) than any possible collective human intelligence. We could, in short, be stuffed by our own naivete and instinct for compassion.

Concern may be exaggerated but some serious innovators in our scientific and technological culture, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among them, are in the worried camp so we should expect that public policy makers, always fighting the last war and never aware of the next until it sticks their ugly nose in their face, may just have enough intelligence themselves to ask some questions about the management of the next cycle of technological development. Their instincts may be to see these (robotics and AI, nanotechnology, biotechnology and space technology) as simply the latest boosters in a line once epitomised by coal, steel and shipbuilding and then automotive, oil and chemicals or as new tools for the war material that gives them orgasms but they are much more than this - not merely social and economic disruptors like the previous technologies of innovation but radical forces for human existential shifts that may have evolutionary potential or see our elimination as a species.

The Failures of Liberal Internationalism - Cooper Two Decades On

One of my more curious intellectual habits is to avoid reading contemporary work by public intellectuals and prefer instead to study material written two or so decades ago. This may seem perverse but experience has taught me that anyone writing in the now is usually promoting an opinion based on limited information whereas something written in the recent past can be tested against subsequent events, giving insights that would not otherwise be available. Many of my book reviews of this type can be read on my Goodreads account.

Clearing out some old boxes, I found the files relating to my time launching Demos, the 'modernising' centre-left think tank, back in the mid-1990s. I broke with it quite quickly though amicably. It was part of the post-Soviet move of revisionist Marxists into what would soon become Blairism whereas I was a non-ideological traditional English socialist more concerned with ancient liberties than theory. It was an era of struggles over who would own the 'Moscow Gold', of desperation by the political Left in its search for power and of intellectual confusion.  Strange alliances were formed and old political relationships collapsed. Elements in the State attached themselves to new anti-conservative forces and old revolutionaries started their trajectory towards the moderated neo-liberalism that was to fail us in 2008 and is still thrashing around today, like a dinosaur whose wounds have not yet reached the brain as signals of its doom.

Demos produced a journal and a number of pamphlets, one of which, nearly two decades old now, was a short 50-page booklet by a diplomat, Robert Cooper, Head of the Policy Planning Staff at the FCO. This latter tells us a great deal about the mental map that was to influence the social democratic elite who surrounded Blair and who would be found in such places as Chatham House, in corporations like BP and in Government - a road map for what would be Blairite foreign policy, if you like. That foreign policy would be characterised in Blair's 1999 Chicago Speech as a duty of intervention in the world, one that was to unravel the Westphalian system that had been re-instituted in 1945, and which would lead ineluctably, sixteen years later, to a situation where the entire periphery of the European West would come to be in a state of financial and insurgent chaos. That chaos is being brought, through uncontrollable mass migration and organised crime, into the very heart of Europe.

Cooper's work, in retrospect, helps us to understand how things went so horribly wrong because the mental mapping in that pamphlet [1] gives us a plausible but ultimately flawed vision of international relations. We realists found it impossible to counter at the time because the almost faith-based commitment to idealism seemed so much nicer than what we had to offer. It was a shame, I suppose, that history proved us right. Thinkers like Cooper were able to add a theoretical rationale for emotional impulses about the ethical that provided what the idealists wanted to hear. It was a way of seeing that drove all before it and might equally be exemplified by the work of Michael Ignatieff who was explicit in his attack on the Westphalian presumptions of the past in his debate over intervention in Kosovo against Robert Skidelsky in 1999 [2].

The intellectual flaw in Cooper's work begins with the title - the assumption of something called post-modernity as a really existing permanent feature of the political landscape. This flaw derived from an oddity in intellectual thought at the time, a convergence of revisionist left-wing Hegelianism seeking a way out of the problem of Soviet collapse and a right-wing Hegelianism, derived perhaps from Kojeve, that was looking to the European Project as the natural means of assuring peace and security through ending both nationalism and socialism. Later, liberal internationalism would find itself in bed with a darker force in Schmittian neo-conservatism and then entangled with the radical 'detournement' of Trotskyism as a radical war on the same forces that disturbed the liberals - but that is a few years in the future. At this point, around 1996, before New Labour was in power and while the dodgy triangulation of Clintonism provided little more to inspire than a sort of well meaning realism with liberal rhetorical characteristics, the new politics, driven from London, emerged. It was a combination of liberal bureaucratism and the desperate desire of the official Left to reinvent itself for a post-Soviet and post-Thatcherite world. It would be neo-liberalism with a human face, perhaps as absurd and as kind an intention as Dubcek's illusion of communism with a happy smile.

Cooper's global model was simple but now seems simplistic. But simple models can concentrate the mind so long as they are critiqued against not only the facts but future possibilities. However, a naive political class did not take these theories as hypotheses to test but as articles of faith. They met certain political needs that could bind their alliance of unions, activists and liberals and make their idealism acceptable to the technocrats, progressives and bureaucrats of the State mechanism. Once the hypothesis had passed from theory to ideology and had proven effective in the acquisition of power, there was no turning back to criticism against the facts - an ideology then governed our relationship to the international community that was as irrational (though logical on its base assumptions) as national socialism in the 1930s or international socialism under the Comintern.

The central thesis was of an international system that was ringed like an onion - with pre-modern, modern and post-modern structures co-existing and requiring different ideologies of action in the relationships between them. The post-Marxist progressive model was implicitly Hegelian from the beginning - recall Fukuyama's now increasingly absurd notion of the 'end of history' which had appeared in 1992. There was no awareness of the future re-balancing of the world that would create new Powers even though there were many reasons to predict this on the facts to hand. Nor did anyone outside the PNAC neo-cons see the relative decline of old Powers (although, to be fair, Martin Jacques of Demos was always an advocate of the rise of China long before it was fashionable). Nor did anyone seem to see the possibility of a major economic crisis (as we have seen in 2008) despite the history of capitalism being a series of lurches involving bouts of creative destruction. Nor the effects of peripheral political collapse creating problems for the progressive heartlands. Yet all of these should have been understood as possibilities from a basic understanding of the history of capitalism and of past empires.

Instead, we were offered what amounted to a dream of never-ending economic (no awareness of massive indebtedness and criminal intergenerational transfers of wealth from the future to the present) and bureaucratic progress as well as the illusion of a secure democracy with no possible threats to it because the power of the radical centre was too firmly embedded in a network of activist representative bodies, corporate lobbyists, barely accountable state servants and self-appointing political elites. Given this failure of imagination, Cooper's world looks shaky but let us review it on its own terms.

The inner post-modern ring was represented by the progressive abandonment of national sovereignty to sets of supranational institutions (with minimal democratic accountability), based on rules and procedures, of which the European Union and NATO were the centre-pieces. The proposition was put forward that giving up sovereignty was the reasonable price to be paid for the security and prosperity of a post-modern West in which individuals had free-floating identities that were no longer localised, no longer feared such impositions as conscription and could leave governance to experts. The European Union would not, in fact, be a super-state so much as a transnational set of rules and regulations to which all civilised people would adhere, much like the ideal of the old Roman Empire perhaps. We might see TTP and TTIP as examples of this system in operation in the near future where democratic bodies no longer can make any decisions in areas of trade because the rules and regulations of a trans-national system make the rules for them. Contemporary European officials no longer even try to hide their disinterest in democracy which they associate with populism and ignorance. The road to that anti-democratic position was laid two decades ago.

The second ring of the system was the remaining Westphalian system of powers outside the post-modern world of the Atlantic system, the European Union and NATO. There is no doubt that these powers were seen as second order powers representing potential threats and that, therefore, there was no more 'Mr. Nice Guy' as soon as the borders of the imperium were reached. Liberal idealism existed within the Empire but realism was directed at the states that were not in the Empire because that is all they understood. Russia was, in 1996, effectively a defeated second rank state and China was nowhere near the economic arbiter it is today so the logic of the situation was to ensure that the centre held the biggest stick and beat any recalcitrant states into line from a position of superior power. This is the road that led from Blair's Chicago Speech to the imbroglio in Iraq within four years and has lead to a trail of destruction from North Africa through Greater Syria to Central Asia before and since. However, the weaker states of the second rank have proved not only that they can stand up to the West but that they are quite capable of creating a rival Empire in response to what has often amounted to patronising passive-aggressive bullying (the SCO) and of undertaking missions both to resist Western claims (Ukraine) and to resolve international problems (Syria) with more effectiveness than the confused post-modern bureaucrats in Brussels, London and Berlin (and Washington).

The final ring of the system was positioned as pre-modern with a somewhat patrician neo-colonialist stance that reminds one of the rhetoric about the 'heart of darkness'. This was the world of so-called failed states. Cooper was clear, to his credit (as would be Ignatieff) that intervention in this space should be limited to not only what was right but what was feasible. Unfortunately, the genie was let out of the bottle here - or would it be better to say that Pandora's Box was opened. The rational bureaucratic approach to an interventionary approach that was really liberal Imperialism by Nice People was obviated almost immediately by two factors. The first was that 'post-moderrn' democracy gave a voice to irrational and half-educated populations led by media and NGOs who demanded (or resisted) imperial actions. This instigated half-baked actions in which the spin and manipulation destroyed any trust in the good will of the people undertaking them. The second was that the interventionary approach was hijacked by some Not So Nice People in Washington with an ideological and economic motive for selective regime destruction: again, the post-modern bureaucrats lost trust because they preferred to associate with a powerful devil and compromise on their values rather than turn back from the brink. The fall of New Labour took time but it lies not only in economic failures but a failure to understand that it was no longer trusted to administer a system that had failed at this level of national security.

So, at every level, the new world order proposed in different forms by liberal internationalists and neo-conservatives alike collapsed on a poor reading of reality. It was a faith-based system that failed to ask fundamental questions about whether post-modern politics was viable and whether the Westphalian system was, in fact, over. But, if the Westphalian system was over, it meant the extension of the pre-modern (to use Cooper's mode) sphere of influence rather than the second order eventual integration into a global post-modern system led by the West. The Westphalian elements have reasserted their status as sovereign powers outside the 'post-modern world' (and we must never forget that the US never actually bought into this theoretical model which was a British and European conceit) while some of those within the post-modern system (Greeks, British, various national populists, Hungarians) are beginning to pine for the old ways already. Meanwhile, the pre-modern has not remained on the periphery but has begun to by-pass the modern Powers and affect, indeed infect, the post-modern system through mass and uncontrollable migration, economic degeneration and, above all, organised criminal networks accumulating significant capital at a phenomenal rate.

The entire Cooper system is hanging by a thread ... it is only bureaucrats with a fixed ideology and false confidence in their own control over the levers of power who persist in believing that everything will turn out for the best as crisis after crisis hits the core system. The European Union blundered in Ukraine and caused the gravest security crisis in modern times. It and indeed the US have proved themselves totally ineffective in dealing with serious security threats in Greater Syria. 'Modern' allies are beginning to make their own own arrangements and hedging their bets in dialogue with the rising rival powers. The cohesion of the European Union is threatened by an appalling anti-democratic intervention in Greece and the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants without adequate planning or a coherent policy. Above all, 'post-modernity' has meant that millions of people no longer trust their rulers, whether politician or bureaucrat. They have no intention of being guided by them into post-modern policy decisions. If anything, increasing numbers are pining openly for a return of variants of national sovereignty and of socialism in a way simply incomprehensible to the generation that came to power in the 1990s. Worse (from the perspective of career diplomats like Cooper who retained a strong sense of realism in 1996), the discussion of international relations is increasingly led by ineffectual and counter-productive liberal idealists who seem to be blind to the economic consequences of patronising non-European powers and to the domestic political consequences of migration and job losses arising from globalist idealism.

It is, in short, a mess. Mr. Cooper is certainly not to blame for that mess. He simply put forward a thesis for discussion and criticism, a model for exploration. How could he possibly have known that his ideas and those of people like him would be taken up by people of lesser intellect and more cunning whose purposes would be divided between their short term hunger for domestic office and a narcissistic desire to paint the global canvas with their mythologies. Somehow, I suggest, we are going to have to start all over again ...

[1] Robert Cooper, 'The Post-Modern State and the World Order' (Demos, 1996)

[2] The somewhat acrimonious debate between Skidelsky and Ignatieff took place as a series of letters published in Prospect, then a significant intellectual liberal-left journal, in early May 1999. It can be read in full in Ignatieff's 'Virtual War' (London 2000). In the exchange, Skidelsky (though I happen to think he was to be proved right) argues less ably than the impassioned but disciplined Ignatieff who had all the moral passion of someone who had seen the Kosovan refugee camps at first hand. All the fervour of the 'something must be done' school of liberal politics faced arguments that lacked force because they could not jump out of the box of liberal conventionalism to speak in consequentialist terms of the probable harms of action undertaken without adequate planning, preparation and commitment. Every intervention that took place after Kosovo compounded this central fault within liberal internationalism that it acted first and thought second, without being able to rely on the mobilisation of total war to ensure that every act could be followed through and history be firmly written according to the dictates of the victors.

The Mail Is At It Again ... But What Is Really At Stake?

The Mail on Sunday has obviously failed to do its homework - again! It referred to me today (as before) as a friend of Jeremy Corbyn. It clearly implies that my original creation of Exaro was partisan. Apparently, Exaro is now a 'rogue' news site though, in fact, the roguery is coming from the Mail itself. Its journalists are lazy. They not only failed to contact me for fact-checking but they completely ignored an extremely clear statement by me that was drawn directly to their attention on their web site. It is, of course, for Exaro and not me to comment on Exaro's editorial position but it is reasonable for me to comment on references to me and to have opinions as an outsider on what may be going on here.

My statement was explicit about my non-relationship with Jeremy Corbyn (basically, I knew him somewhat in the 1990s but have not seen him since) while the journal failed to note that I had also stated clearly and unequivocally that I had no control or influence over editorial decision-making and that Exaro was strictly non-partisan. Maybe they thought I was lying ... if so, they should have at least had the decency to say so to my face.

The latest bit of hysteria includes an assault on the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, another politician I rather admire, alongside Tom Watson, for his basic integrity and for reasons that have little to do with the child abuse investigation. Although I am now a Labour man again (as of a few weeks ago), I am not so shallow as suddenly to cease to admire someone if they are on the opposing side. For the record, I have never met Goldsmith.

The campaign that is going on week after week appears to have some purpose - ostensibly to restore the reputation of certain persons, in fact it increasingly looks as if it is designed to force the Metropolitan Police to close down or contain their child abuse investigation. The latest wheeze is to pressure the High Tory Command in Government not to reappoint the redoubtable Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe (current Metropolitan Police Commissioner and a committed reformer). In an accompanying article, the Mail leads: 

Scotland Yard chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe is under pressure to quit after the force admitted it refused to drop a baseless rape claim against former Home Secretary Leon Brittan over fears of a public backlash. 

You might like to note at this point that news has broken in the last day or so that the National Crime Agency had started an investigation into alleged corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case. This may seem wholly unconnected to the child abuse investigation but, as we shall see, allegations of police corruption are a material element in both sets of investigation. The State is becoming very active in dealing with aspects of policing that are troubling if only through active investigation without prejudice.

This may be part of a political struggle of immense importance to our country. Operation Midland is only one of many investigations across the country - if it is taken down, all the others are weakened. We might even add the suggestion of an investigation into complaints about police behaviour at Orgreave to the mix - as reported by Exaro - as a sign that reform is in the air. In this latter case, as others, the issue is community trust in the police which leads us on to the possible 'why' of all this.

Why might reformers want to be so active in their turning over of stones other than because it was the right thing to do? The 'ulterior strategic motive' is standard procedure in public life so why not here as well. I would suggest that it is because trust in the police, alleged police corruption and even links to organised crime have become a much more vital national security issue in recent years on two grounds: a) a public that does not trust the police will not come forward and provide vital intelligence on crime and, indeed, terrorism, and b) organised crime is no longer a national business contained within its limited remit and left to prey on those without a voice (like the kids in the care system).

Organised crime, for example, is now a multinational operation, accumulating capital at a ferocious rate, capable of suborning lower paid public servants at every level, involved in human and arms trafficking as well as more conventional crime, drugs and the sex trade, and even holding the potential to be an armed state within the State in extreme conditions. What happened in Northern Ireland could happen in British cities if the Police do not get a grip on things. And alliances between crime and terrorism are at the back of every security official's mind. The relatively new National Crime Agency exists to deal with this threat. Running any major investigation without infiltration by well-funded organised crime is now a key part of the reform agenda.

The point is not that there is any necessary connection between corruption allegations and organised crime and child abuse and turning a blind eye to the actions of our political police (there may or may not be) but only that all are examples of things that require thorough investigation and reform if our trust in the police is to be maintained. And, at times, these things may, indeed overlap and, if they do overlap, we need to know about it.

I retain considerable faith (perhaps stupidly in the eyes of some) in the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to continue to do what is right - which is to investigate allegations without pressure from any party, including (though it undertakes no such pressure to my knowledge) Exaro News. If the current Commissioner is forced out (or rather his mandate is not renewed) by a politically-directed media campaign based on implicit political threats, questions must be raised about who runs Britain and whether the rest of us can feel safe in our beds if we cross those who do. This is not to say that we should not be concerned about 'excesses' by reformers (we should be) but only that the correction of any alleged excesses must not fall into the trap of damaging the reform process.

The corruption issue cross-connects to the child abuse investigation and this is shown in Duncan Campbell's piece which appeared in March 2015:

"Now [March 2015] the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating 14 separate referrals of alleged corruption in the Met relating to child sex offences from the 1970s to the 2000s. Offers of immunity need to be made to any police officers still with information so that, finally, the jigsaw puzzle can be completed in all its dark and depressing detail."

This gets to the heart of the matter - only half the probes into alleged child abuse cover ups (according to the Daily Mirror) result from claims by 'survivors' and non-police officers. It is not right to imply (as the BBC appears to have done) that the 'survivors' who have retracted or may be questionable are all the 'survivors' who 'matter' nor that an allegation or claim is false when it is merely unproven. The other half of probes apparently come from former serving police and security officers. This is devastating and perhaps scary to those who have a stake in keeping a lid on things. We can legitimately ask what sort of governance do we have that left an investigative journalist to uncover the disgust and rage of decent men at what they were (allegedly) asked to do. If they are not all fantasists, their lack of a voice in itself tells us something about a culture of 'cover up' and it is only fortuitous that a 'secret' forum in which concerns were expressed came to light.

The anti-investigation campaigners are certainly pinpointing some 'not proven' cases (which may be proven to be true or false at a later stage or which may always prove to 'unproven'), an exercise not entirely without merit if they were doing so in good faith and perhaps not as a means to some other end. However, what is going on here has darker effects, whether intended or not by the media or even those sincerely angered by the effects of investigation on friends or relations - vulnerable witnesses are at risk of being deterred or frightened into withdrawal of claims while those making claims from within the services are at risk of being made anxious that they could face serious problems of their own often at an advanced age.

There are issues surrounding the Official Secrets Act according to Campbell (an Act seriously misused if used to cover up an investigation into child abuse) and pension rights. Meanwhile, one sex abuse victim was hospitalised following a suicide attempt after the BBC Panorama 'expose'. Much is at stake beyond the immediate reputation of a few big wigs.

All that is required, from the point of view of those who may have something to fear from further inquiry, is for the flow of intelligence to the investigating officers to dry up. The investigation then fails to proceed to trial because of inadequate evidence (which also means that, in fact, doubt and suspicion might remain over particular persons if the investigation does not have enough evidence to exonerate them). If (and we say if) bad things have been done, justice will not be done.

We have seen already how important elements in the Establishment were mobilised to protect the former Bishop of Lewes in the early 1990s. Such attitudes do not suddenly disappear two decades later. Anyone who has done bad things can certainly put up with the conspiracy theories of the 'great unwashed' (I am subject to them as well) so long as they are not disgraced, sent to jail or dragged through the court of public opinion (which is, of course, never actually our opinion but only that of the media). Vagueness and innuendo may be preferable to clarity as the lesser evil.

Again, let us be clear - all the claims may prove to be claims that cannot stand up to scrutiny with the DPP. They may, indeed, all be false claims by fantasists and liars. But the police think the claims are credible enough to be investigated. And we have seen that there have been 14 referrals (or more) of alleged corruption in child abuse investigation cases already. And we note that the entirely separate determination to uncover corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case shows determination to look into possible miscarriages of justice. Something is up here ... something that cannot or should not be hidden from us by politically motivated and evasive attacks on Tom Watson, Zac Goldsmith and a 'rogue' Exaro.

I leave you to decide what is the right thing to do under these circumstances. Personally, I remain convinced that the interests of the People and of the State cohere in clearing out the Augean Stables and dealing with innuendo and rumour on all sides by means of a decisive investigation that can come to conclusions where there can be no suspicion of cover up and no room for conspiracy theory. Let us keep an open mind - it is quite possible that the police may uncover things quite different from our current beliefs and expectations on all sides.

It is certainly not enough simply to organise matters in secret so that, if serious state tolerance of child abuse has taken place, it could not happen again. Investigation into what has happened, how it happened and who did what to whom is absolutely necessary in order to put in the right practical reforms that are trusted by the population at large, otherwise we will make more mistakes. Bluntly, the life chances of thousands of kids is still and ultimately infinitely more important than the reputations of those of us at the top of society. I will take whatever the Mail, Times and others throw at me rather than not see this through to its end and am prepared for any outcome other than cover up. The very commitment by the ESRC to funding academic work on the 'hidden history' of official failure to deal with child abuse is just one aspect of the case that shows that our administrative structures are currently serious about reform and so should we all be. Yes, we should curb excesses and show restraint but any compromise on that reform could be disastrous for our trust in the State itself, let alone the police - that way madness lies.