Friday 28 February 2014

Sarah Palin, Foreign Policy Sage

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At the time the lovely Mrs Palin was the subject of much snickering, pointing and general ribaldry from the oh-so-wise punditry. What she had said was this:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.

Looks like she had a point!

...

"De-growth" or how Greens think drinking less take-out coffee is an economic policy

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The Greens and their associated useful idiots are a pretty strange bunch. But nothing is stranger than when these good, kind and utterly barmy people start talking about work:

“Why do we work? What do we do with the money we earn?” asks Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation. “Can we begin to think differently about how much we need—to get out of the fast lane and live life at a more sustainable pace, to do things that are better for the planet, better for ourselves?”

Now I'm not sure how many hours Ms Coote puts in or precisely how much she gets paid to spout this sort of stuff. But I'll guess that her take home pay is a damn sight more that the average pay for the average British worker.

And here lies the problem. I once had a conversation with a hairdresser about his business. He wasn't moaning just making the matter-of-fact observation that, with the shop open long hours, the time spent managing stock and staff plus the time at home in the evening book-keeping, paying bills and planning, his hourly income was below the minimum wage.

If Ms Coote and her sort - comfortably off, employed people - had their way, the cost of basic things like having your hair cut or the windows cleaned would soar. Even worst people would have us believe that somehow we can get out of the fast lane - presumably while they carry on with big salaries and pleasant jobs, the rest of us can lump it on less money.

Such people - when they aren't weeping crocodile tears about 'the poor' - believe that every job is like theirs. The sort who subscribe to Sierra Magazine where they suggest:

"...you move to a smaller house or an apartment, downsize to one or no car, or simply have fewer lattes to-go, a smaller paycheck could reduce consumption overall...” 

Isn't that lovely! We're going to save the planet by having fewer take-out coffees! These people really do live in a bizarre otherland. OK it's not quite living in teepees and growing organic vegetables. In fact it's probably worse because it implies some sort of moral urbanism exists in the green mind - presumably because the core constituency for modern greenery is decidedly urban and hipsterish. It's more about planting herbs in gutters than a return to the land.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against down time - all work and no play does make for a dull life. But the idea that there is some sort of Malthusian imperative requiring "de-growth" is ridiculous. If people only want to work 20 hours a week that's fine by me and I hope they enjoy the free time but don't try to pretend that your different lifestyle is somehow not consumption, somehow superior to those folk who like a take-out latte and a shiny new car.

What Ms Coote and her friends fail to appreciate is that by stopping all their consumption they end all those businesses, all those jobs that serve such sinful indulgence. All the baristas, the car salesmen, the brewers and cake makers - gone. And with less money circulating that means lower tax revenues - less money to sweep the streets, teach children and care for Ms Coote's elderly relatives.

If these ideas come to pass we'll be less healthy, less happy and live shorter lives. But we'll have saved the planet!

As I said these people are utterly barmy.

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Why Spike Lee is wrong. Some thoughts on gentrification.


American film producer, Spike Lee went off on one about the gentrification of Brooklyn:

Then comes the motherfuckin' Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can't discover this! We been here. You just can't come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin' African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can't do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father's a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin'-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin' people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He's not — he doesn't even play electric bass! It's acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin' house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin'-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!

Language aside this is a pretty classic critique of gentrification - wealthy hipster incomers buying up cheap properties and doing them up. Soon followed by trendy bars, whole food stores and the other paraphernalia of hip modern urban life. And the place is unwelcoming to the people who were living there before the trend-setting bearded ones.

The problem is that, despite Spike's passion, he's wrong. That Christopher Columbus Syndrome applied as much to his Dad as it does to these white folk moving in on Brooklyn. Indeed, gentrification is a necessary urban process not something to be prevented. More to the point, as Spike polemically explains, the consequence of gentrification is better schools, more responsive public services, safer streets and, overall, a more pleasant environment.

Gentrification isn't slum clearance - people are buying property on the open market and improving it, they aren't rounding up poor folk and marching them to the next slum up the line. And don't those poor folk also benefit from better schools, safer streets and the litter getting cleared up?

Here's a slightly different take on gentrification - it contains some angst and a warning but it isn't the 'this-is-my-place-you-can't-live-here' attitude that Spike Lee (and many others who attack gentrification as anti-poor). This is Atlanta:

Personally, I credit her (together with many other people) for creating a lot of value over the years. Compassionate value. But that’s where irony steps in. Because value, once created, doesn’t just sit quietly in a vacuum. It attracts people and money and change at an increasingly accelerated pace. After the risk oblivious — my wife and me in our youthful naiveté — come the risk aware (folks who recognize the challenges associated with disadvantaged or depressed areas but are willing to accept them, at least conditionally) and, finally, the risk averse (those who’re only attracted to an area once certain levels of safety, predictability and comfort present themselves).

The process of gentrification does exclude but, in this case, it took 20 years. And in that 20 years the prior residents of the area have benefited from those improved schools, those better services and those safer streets. The very things they'd urged politically for years but that were delivered in a (relative) breath by economic change. Moreover, some of those 'natives' - if that's a word we can really use - will still be there happy and smiling because their lives were made better by gentrification. OK it will be a pleasant, maybe a little dull, middle-class neighbourhood rather than an edgy urban place.

However, we aren't all hipsters and seeking affordable urban edge isn't what we do. We want a safe, reliable, pleasant and stable community - Cheam rather than Peckham. And gentrification - not always but mostly - delivers just that sort of community.

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Thursday 27 February 2014

Rebuilding urban conservatism isn't about working class voters

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There has been much talk of how the Conservative Party should muscle its way into Labour territory and become the 'Workers' Party'. It has generated a great deal of mirth amongst nice, well-educated, middle-class left-wing pundits - the sort who think being a football supporter and drinking a pint in the local gastropub qualifies them as 'working class'. The sort of people who really don't understand the extent to which the left's authoritarian streak is displayed in its ever more strident attack on working class pleasures like drinking, smoking, burger and chips or a flutter on the horses.

Oddly I really don't think that the Conservative Party has much of a problem with its working class support. We know that, back in 1979, the votes of the skilled working classes elected Margaret Thatcher and that those voters - and their children - have stuck with the party since. And we know that Conservative support amongst the 'unskilled' working class (I dislike that term but calling them DE Social Class is even more impersonal) was at or close to its highest in 2010.

So despite the admirable efforts of David Skelton and his Renewal group, there isn't all that much more scope for increasing support from these groups. Don't get me wrong, the Party is right to talk about the living wage, about the value of trade unions and about building affordable homes. Just as important there is a strong argument in saying to working class voters that the Labour Party takes them for granted, abandoning them to the worst communities, the poorest schools and the least stable jobs.

But this will not sort out the Conservative Party's long term renewal (although it will help in getting a Conservative government in 2015) because it's not those working class voters that are the Party's problem. The problem is two other groups - ethnic minorities and the urban middle class.

On the former the problem is stark - here's Tim Wigmore setting out the issue:

BME voters are 33 per cent more likely to vote for Labour than white voters – but they are seven points less likely to vote Conservative than white voters. Unless this changes dramatically, it will be a roadblock to the Tories ever winning another election.

We know that the single indication that someone won't be a Conservative voter is that they are "Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic" (BAME as the ghastly acronym goes). And we shake our heads and ask why? It's not that the Party lacks ethnic minority MPs or that those MPs don't get attention or preferment - one of them was even discussed as a possible leadership challenger. Just as importantly those ethnic minority Tory MPs represent very safe seats places like Witham, Windsor, Stratford, Bromsgrove and were selected as candidates by an overwhelmingly white membership. The Party simply doesn't look racist in these places.

Yet go into inner-city Bradford, to East London or to Leicester and people will tell you that the Tory Party isn't for them, it's out-of-touch, elitist and, most significantly, racist. Until the Party shifts this perception - and the problem is perception not fact - then it will not get the support from among those minorities it needs. The problem is visceral, fundamental and won't be sorted from the centre. The Party has to be active in those communities. We should also shift our language on immigration - right now we're on the horns of a UKIP dilemma but this isn't a long-term issue in the way that ethnic minorities not voting for us at all is a long-term issue.

The second group may seem very different - that young urban middle class, the sort of trendy, hipster vote. The kind of people who are buying £600,000 houses in Hackney. If they've that sort of money and a belief in home ownership and hard-work then shouldn't they be voting Conservative? The problem is that they're not, they're voting anything but Conservative. Why? For many of the same reasons that those ethnic minority voters don't vote Conservative - they see the Party as out-of-touch, elitist and socially repressive.

These people didn't see the legalising of same sex marriage as a triumph for a Conservative Prime Minister. They saw the debate as a few Tories forced into accepting the change while most screamed blue murder from the side.  If we are to change this we need to start talking a different language - not gimmicks about greenery or tokenistic policy platforms - but the language of community action and involvement. And we need to be on the ground in the urban places where the young urban middle class is living, in East Dulwich, in Stoke Newington, in Chapel Allerton. The sad thing is we once were in these places but have withdrawn to the suburbs further out and to rural exurbia.

Building a genuinely national party should be the aim. And that means putting resources on the ground knowing that the fruit could be eight, ten, even twenty years before it's ripe. So long as the Conservative Party combines short-term targeting with centralised message management, we will continue to decline. We do need renewal - David Skelton is right - but that renewal is as much about presence and activity as it's about policy. And the message, instead of central and controlled, must be local and specific - we should talk directly about the concerns we hear from the communities we want to support us.

It's great that there's a campaign to change the Party. What we now need is something more than a nod of partial agreement from the leadership. We need to resource the fightback, to support the few Tories on the ground in urban England and to start listening to the voices of those urban communities.

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Wednesday 26 February 2014

The Arts: white, middle-class, posh. Why?

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There's an interesting comparison made in a Spectator article between those working in The Arts and the evil dark ones working in the City:

The evil scumbags who work in the City appear to be doing a better job at being modern and liberal than the state-subsidised art world. According to last year’s Creative Skillset Employment Census, 5.4 per cent of those working in the arts were from the black or ethnic minorities. In the City, by contrast, figures from 2012 show that 30.5 per cent of employees were from the black or ethnic minorities.

So why is this? The author of the article doesn't speculate, he merely presents the information with a huge grin on his face. After all The Arts is filled with the insufferably right-on, puffed up to their middle-class ears with a sort of sub-Gramscian socialist nonsense. Always good to take them down a step from their righteous moral high ground.

Maybe that's it. Perhaps all those sons and daughters of immigrants are heading off into the private sector because that's where the opportunities are? I recall a speech to a "Pakistani Power 100" dinner from a news presenter. This successful Pakistani woman described the mantra of her childhood about careers - one I'm sure familiar to every child of immigrants - "doctor, lawyer, accountant; doctor, lawyer, accountant."

And I'm guessing that the young Black or Asian who announces an intention to work in the City will be applauded and encouraged. Perhaps too, the other young child of immigrants who announces a plan to work in a theatre or in 'arts marketing' will get the lecture about parental sacrifice and how they're damn well going to go to college and study accountancy or law.

So "the arts" is filled with the children of the English middle-classes. Nice young men and women who think it somehow nobler than working in the grubby world of banking or stockbroking. And less boring. Trendies who didn't grow out of their student leftiness to embrace the real world preferring instead a world where they can pretend to be radical and iconoclastic while relying for cash on the largess of the Arts Council and local government.

Don't get me wrong here, I think The Arts are important, just as I think other pleasures - beer, football, bad TV, even stand up comedy - are important. But all those slightly scruffy, 'more-rad-than-thou' folk that populate arts organisations - attacking the establishment while snaffling every farthing that same establishment holds out to them - those people, seen from the perspective of a Black of Asian young person, are not the way to make it from a Manningham terrace or Brixton council flat to a more comfortable life.

Unlike the City of London, of course.

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The Hegemony of Nanny



Hilaire Belloc penned a cautionary tale about Jim who ran away from nurse and was eaten by a lion. It ends like this:

When Nurse informed his Parents, they
Were more Concerned than I can say:--
His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, ``Well--it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!''
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James's miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse. 

A summation of our governments' current outlook. We are badly behaved children who are at risk from whole prides of terrible lions - lions clutching burgers, lions pushing cigarettes, lions in bars serving us gin slings with a smile and lions urging us to have a little flutter on the ponies. And, as uncontrolled, ignorant children we must be protected, must be made to hold tightly to nurse so as these dreadful things do not harm us.

The masters who command this attachment to nanny do so for our own good. And for the good of society. Those devilous lions are a temptation into ways of sin, of the worst two sins: disobeying the government and putting our health at risk (thereby causing the masters to expend money caring for us). The problem is that we do not learn the lesson of Jim and continue to shun nanny's apron strings for the will o' the wisp that is private pleasure. We will not behave. As John Keats put it:

There was a naughty boy,
A naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He could not quiet be-

Off we go, playing, singing, writing poems, drinking beer, smoking and sticking our tongue out at nanny. So nanny goes to government reminding them of Jim's sorry end and how we are not behaving as that government has ordered. So more rules are set, more fences built and stronger apron strings tied, to the point of choking us. We cannot be allowed to disobey, we cannot be permitted to cost the government money by damaging our health.

Nanny is happy, the new rules are in place. Those unruly children will be brought to heel, made to comply and to conform. But we know better, we know that we'll break the rules - the more there are the more we'll break. We know we will seek out fun, enjoy forbidden pleasures that children in past times enjoyed.

And we know that nanny will return again to the government asking for more - more rules for nanny to crush our spirits, more rules that create a virtue of rule-breaking, more about those two great sins - disobedience and indulgence. For now the power is with nanny but when every pleasure is a sin, when every indulgence forbidden - what then? Then there'll be a reckoning.

And a return to pleasure. As a great sage once said:

“Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.” 

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Tuesday 25 February 2014

Bradford and The Cuts

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There are some useful figures here about the actual changes to Bradford Council's budget since 2007/8 on the Conservative Group blog. It concludes with this paragraph which rather sums it up:

The truth is that Bradford Council has faced significant reductions in grants and that, outside the protected areas of education and public health, this has had quite an impact on service provision. However, we can find over £500,000 for union officials and their perks, can spend nearly £5m on ‘strategic support’ and can willfully turn down government grants so as to make a political point about council tax. This isn’t the sign of an organisation in crisis but of one that is only just getting to grips with waste and excess.

Do have a read of the whole piece.

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Want to get round advertising regulation - just pay the newspaper for editorial

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Nothing new in the idea of advertorial except that, to be fair, the newspaper industry has always been a little prickly about the practice. Essentially giving an individual or organisation favourable press coverage because they pay you to do so seems somehow corrupt and disingenuous. And editors have always been under pressure to give that good press coverage to paying customers.

The advertorial is overt - it usually contains the words 'advertising feature' across the top of the page distinguishing it from the run-of-paper. Sometimes the layout or typeface was different. However the copy was written by journalists rather than the ad agency's copywriters with the aim of making it seem like part of the paper's news coverage.

In the lifestyle sector advertorial is the dominant form of coverage. Other than photographs of events, magazines such as Yorkshire Life offer editorial coverage on the back of advertising. This is sometimes less overt than the 'advertising feature' approach preferred by newspapers but few are fooled - the glowing editorial portrait of a given hotel, restaurant or kitchen company is accompanied by a prominent advertisement from said company.

It seems, however, that the game has moved on - perhaps reflecting the challenges facing newspapers. There are suggestions that favourable coverage is simply purchased. The European Union paid the London Evening Standard £65,000 for an editorial item "in association with" the EU and entitled 'the European Debate'. It was, unremarkably, very supportive of the EU.

If you want to check out the piece - you can read it here. Definitely a piece of advertorial in my opinion.

Mark Reckless MP complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying the the coverage wasn't clearly marked as advertising in accordance with the ASA's Code. They have responded saying 'nothing to do with us guv':

"In order to establish whether the material concerned was within our remit to investigate, we contacted the Evening Standard for further information.  The Evening Standard has confirmed that they had complete control over the content of this piece.  In order for material such as this to be considered an ad, and therefore subject to the CAP Code, a company or organisation must both pay for the material to appear in a publication, and also have control over the editorial content of the piece.  Given that, in this instance, the European Union did not have any control over the content, it was editorial material rather than a marketing communication and as such, was not required to be labelled as an ad feature.  We therefore cannot take any action on your complaint, but if you would like to pursue the matter you may wish to contact the Evening Standard directly with your concerns."

Somehow I doubt that the ASA undertook a proper investigation. We do know that the European Commission paid £65,000 for the item so it already smells a funny colour.  We also know that the EU was proud of the impact its payment achieved - as Mark Wallace at Conservative Home discovered:

In their reply they even boasted of the “value for money” in reaching 2.6m people with their political message.

An almost identical piece - same headlines, same authors, same images, same quotes - appeared in The Independent suggesting that the ASA is wrong to simply take the Evening Standard's word that they had complete editorial control. Unless The Independent didn't have that control (or worse still just plagiarised the Standard piece).

It seems to me that, unless the ASA is prepared to act over such abuse of its code, the EU can - and will - continue to use tax money to buy editorial coverage favourable to its interests. It's bad enough that the EU pays over millions to sock-puppets who happily spin its story but directly buying favourable press coverage!

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Monday 24 February 2014

Allowing barn conversions won't help provide housing. Really?

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Or so says Sarah Wollaston (that she is a Conservative MP makes me want to weep) presumably following a meeting with the folk who want her local National Park to be an unchanging place where only the wealthy can afford to live:

The average house price within the Dartmoor national park is in excess of £270,000; nine times the median local income and over sixteen times incomes in the lowest quartile. The chance of finding affordable rented accommodation is also grim, and the situation is forcing out young people and families with serious consequences for rural communities.

An increase in housing supply will do nothing to reduce prices if it caters for an entirely different demand. The proposals would allow for new developments to be almost twice the guideline size for affordable housing. Rather than meeting a genuine need they would unleash a second and luxury homes bonanza, creating yet more ghost villages and hamlets inhabited only at weekends or in season.

So what exactly are these changes? Well the main one is this:

 In brief the new measures would:

• Allow up to 3 additional dwelling houses (which includes flats) to be converted on an agricultural unit.
• Enable the physical development necessary to allow for the conversion, and where appropriate the demolition and rebuild, of the property on the same footprint.
• Include prior approval for siting and design to ensure physical development complies with local plan policies on design, materials and outlook.
• Include prior approval for transport and highways impact, noise impact, contamination and flood risks to ensure that change of use takes place only in sustainable locations.

The new proposed changes will only apply to buildings constructed prior 20th March 2013, but will also include properties within the boundaries of the National Parks, AONB’s and other conservation areas. 

That's it folks. Owners of redundant agricultural buildings can (subject to complying with rules on design, materials, outlook, highways impact, noise, contamination and flood risk) go ahead an build without the need for planning permission.

I really can't see the problem, indeed I wrote about the stupidity of blocking conversions to residential nearly two years ago pointing out that this could deliver 500 new homes in my ward without any 'take' from green belt or loss of openness.

Dr Wollaston's other moan is about affordable housing and the rural exemption policy. This policy, in effect, allows the breaking of green belt rules because there is no other way of delivering small scale affordable housing developments:

Where the landowner knows there is no possibility of selling to developers at open market housing rates, affordable housing is cross-subsidised by a small percentage of open market value properties.

Of course this policy still exists and housing associations are still able to secure developments on exemption sites. Nothing has changed except that the potential supply of market housing is increased. Not, as the scaremongers are saying, by the 'suburbanisation' of the countryside, but by existing and unused buildings being turned into homes. Seems to me this is a good thing?

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Sunday 23 February 2014

Sorry LGA, controlling stuff on social media really isn't the purpose of local government

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The LGA is a lobby and support organisation for local government. Some of us have long harboured doubts about its value and on occasion its purpose. However, it is wandering into areas that really are nothing to do with local government, I'm guessing to get a headline:

"We believe social media operators have a responsibility to provide health warnings to user groups and individuals. The LGA is looking for these corporations to show leadership and not ignore what is happening on their sites. We are urging Facebook and Twitter executives to sit down with us and discuss a way forward which tackles this issue head on.”

In quick order:

1. Social media owners have no such responsibility
2. Even if they do it really is nothing to do with English local government

Mission creep pure and simple.

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Friday 21 February 2014

So how much power do your councillors have?

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It's not new to say that local government isn't really master of its own destiny. Nor would I be the first to observe that local councillors - the people we elect to make decisions about that local government - have even less control over that destiny. Most thoughtful local councillors know that the big decisions about funding are outside local control and also that many of the ways in which that funding is distributed are not within the local council's gift either.

Back in 1961, when my Dad was first elected to the Municipal Borough of Beckenham, local councils undertook duties placed on them by national governments (e.g. refuse collection) but the funding for those duties, as well as the other things a council chose to do, was entirely raised locally through the rates or through charges. There was no revenue support grant, no centralised setting of business rates and no national fee levels. It was down to the councillors.

Between then and now something changed. My Dad always blamed the 1970 Local Authority Social Services Act for starting the rot but whatever the cause we moved from a situation where local government was controlled locally to a situation where, for most councils, what they do is defined by national regulation and the necessary funding provided by central government. In 2011 local government spent £147billion and £103billion of this - 70% - was central government grant funding (one caveat here - this is a net spending figure not a gross spending figure, the £147bn is the call on tax revenue from local government).

Not surprisingly governments have sought to control this level of expenditure (it is about a quarter of total government spending after all) and to try and direct the way in which the money is used. To understand how this budget works we can divide the activities funded through local government into three areas: education; social services and social care; and municipal services (bins, potholes, parks and so forth). This is an oversimplification but helps to explain how local government actually works.

For education the local council (as 'local education authority') is two things - a route for money to be paid to schools and the provider of services to those schools. The bulk of the funding is in the form of the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) - the formula for distributing this grant is defined nationally but administered through a schools forum rather than, as in times past, a committee of the local council. The schools forum is not an elected body, it is not accountable to the council and its membership is institutional (schools, LEA, unions, colleges, etc.). Put simply, local councillors do not control the funding of schools. So when you blame your local council for not improving education try to remember this fact.

In the case of social services and social care local councils provide services in response to demand - or 'need' if you prefer the approved social care word. The budget is what the US Federal Government would call "relatively uncontrollable". In any given budget period the council has to estimate how many people will require social services and/or social care. That's how many children might be taken into care, how many disabled people will require support, how many of the elderly population will need home helps and so forth. Since education funding is effectively outside the local authority this is the biggest area of council spending. And while councils have some funding flexibility, at bottom they have a duty to meet the need identified.

Municipal services consists of everything else the council does - this includes statutory services such as planning, libraries, youth services and the registrar of births, marriages and deaths. As well as those things we tend to think of as what councils do - empty our bins and maintain the roads, run parks and provide swimming pools. Councillors do have more discretion over these services and over how much funding they receive. For some things - swimming pools and public lavatories, for example - the council has absolute control and can open or close them as it wishes.

The truth of all this is that 80-90% of the spending and activity undertaken by your council (or councils if you live in the shires) is simply given - determined by regulation, set out in statute or otherwise required by central government. And three-quarters of what your council spends comes in the form of central government grant - with all the strings and restrictions that come with this. Ministers and bureacrats down in London will always want to make sure that, wherever possible, the agenda of the national government is met by the local council. As a result we have had restrictions of borrowing, limits to tax-raising powers such as rate capping, the use of regulation or ring-fencing to direct spending and, if all else fails, simply removing any power for councillors to control or change what the council does. We even got an instruction this year to hold a 'named vote' on setting the council tax!

So when, as we did in Bradford yesterday, councillors get together and "set the budget" bear in mind that what you're seeing is a finely tuned political row about a few million quid out of a budget totally over a billion. The budget debate - "we've found £200,000 to invest in saving kittens", "the Tories are casting old people into the darkness by reducing the walking stick budget by £50,000" and "Labour are failing youngsters by removing the swing seat cleaning service" - this debate isn't really about the budget at all, it's about the tiny bit of the budget that our system of local government allows us to control.

Sometimes it makes me wonder?

....

Thursday 20 February 2014

Why we shouldn't be banning vaping

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Via the estimable Dick Puddlecote comes the report on this piece of research:


Safety evaluation and risk assessment of electronic cigarettes as tobacco cigarette substitutes: a systematic review

The authors look at 97 studies examining the health impacts of vaping. And what do they find:

Currently available evidence indicates that electronic cigarettes are by far a less harmful alternative to smoking and significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch from tobacco to electronic cigarettes. Research will help make electronic cigarettes more effective as smoking substitutes and will better define and further reduce residual risks from use to as low as possible, by establishing appropriate quality control and standards. 

Note that folks - "significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch". We should be encouraging these things not trying to ban them or ban their promotion.

....

On blocking access...a slight rant

****

I sent an email entitled "a slight rant". It went like this:

Hi,

Corporate Overview & Scrutiny are running a review of drugs and alcohol work in the district. The Council spends some £12 million every year on this work with similar amounts spent by health services. That's a lot of money and some important services.
 
However, if I want to do a little research into drugs policy - look at the case for deregulation or at some of the work being done by charities and health services maybe...
 
...I can't because the Council blocks just about every site and I'm not going to keep sending requests to the 'infosec' address.
 
I'm a grown up. I am not about to start up a drugs peddling site nor am I about to use council IT to make or promote the illegal purchase of drugs. The presence of drugs references - or alcohol or smoking, for that matter - on my screen is not about to turn me into some sort of crack-addled speed freak.
 
What exactly are we doing? Who exactly are we protecting? And how am I to do my job?
 
Many thanks
 
Simon

Nothing to add to this but am I alone in finding this stuff utterly maddening.

....

A glimpse of another Africa

Nairobi

You're all familiar with the Oxfam picture of Africa. The starving children, the smiling farmers kept from death's door by the good work of one or other 'aid programme', the wells dug and the women with bundles on their heads.

This is the Africa of development charity marketing and of the politicians' justification for the international aid budget. It's a rural, poor Africa where food crises are only a dry month away and where fair trade evangelists bring the good news - you can stay on your smallholding barely scraping a living for another year!

And the image is something of an insult - dare I say it, a rather neo-colonial insult. The implication is that, without the expertise of us rich, clever Europeans those Africans are condemned to a life of malnutrition, disease and desolation. It is wrong.

Think back to the terrible events in Kenya back in October - not the terrorism but the target of the terrorists. It was a Westfield shopping mall. Hardly the Oxfam image of Africa. This is another Africa, an urban Africa that isn't filled with subsistence farmers and big-eyed hungry children but with trade, with making, buying and selling things and with entrepreneurs:

I present to you Africa’s brightest young entrepreneurs. These are the ones who are making the most dramatic impact in Africa today in manufacturing, technology, real estate, media & entertainment, financial services, agriculture, fashion and the service industry. They are impatient to explore new possibilities and slowly but surely, they are building empires. 

OK, it's a bit gushing but this is a positive, exciting, growing Africa not the supposed basket case that the likes of Oxfam would have us believe. An Africa with people like Christian Ngan:

After working in financial services in France, first as an analyst at French investment bank Quilvest Group and as an associate at Findercord in Paris, Christian Ngan returned home to Cameroon to start his own business in 2012. With $3,000 of his savings, he founded Madlyn Cazalis, an African hand-made bio cosmetic company that produces body oils, natural lotions, creams, scrubs, masks and soaps. Madlyn Cazalis products are sold and distributed across more than 30 chemist stores, beauty institutes and retail outlets in Cameroon and neighboring countries in Central Africa. 

And with Seth Akumani:

Akumani, 30 is a co-founder of ClaimSync, an end-to-end claims processing software that enables hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities all over the world to automate patients’ medical records and to process records electronically. Claimsync’s solution allows these healthcare providers to easily prepare medical claims and send electronically to health insurance companies. In 2013 ClaimSync was the sole African company to participate in the high-profile, IBM, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline backed Accelerator program HealthXL in Dublin. ClaimSync was recently acquired by GenKey, a Dutch-based biometrics company.

These men and women - more than all the international aid, fair trade campaigns and guilt-tripping charity appeals - are the future hope for Africa. But we never talk about them preferring instead our cosy little colonial myth. Believing it when we're told - again and again - that Africa is filled with poor farmers whose only protection and hope is the caring, kind and white face of Oxfam. That somehow the sort of society we enjoy - of urban wealth rather than rural poverty - is not something Africa can attain.

Africa has a long way to go - it's still too rural and too poor. But the answer isn't propping up poverty with subsidy but rather promoting business, entrepreneurship and trade. Backing the continent's entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs did for Europe, Japan and the USA - make us all, compared to today's Africans - rich.

....

Wednesday 19 February 2014

On the setting of council budgets...

****

Bradford Council is about to set its budget for 2014-2016. I can hear your excitement at the prospect, the sounds of cynical snorts echo through the grand rooms of City Hall, even the odd snigger is heard. "Budget! Useless shower, what do they know about budget!"

All eighty-nine of us Councillors will troop into the Council Chamber at 16:00 tomorrow clutching our agenda and our copies of the budget. Few will have read the budget.

Your cynicism has turned to rage as you splutter - "what d'you mean, haven't read the budget?".

Absolutely most won't have read the budget because the Labour-controlled executive only published said budget yesterday - 48 hours before we get to vote on it. This was the last possible moment at which they could publish - leaving the rest of us with little or no time to read, absorb and propose amendments in time for the deadline for submission of those amendments (10:00 on the morning of the full council meeting). Bearing in mind that the Finance Director has to sign off any amendments.

I shan't bore you with the details of the Labour budget. Suffice it to say that they've done what we expect them to do - make cuts they don't need to make for maximum political impact and charged local residents as much as they possibly can for the pleasure of not receiving services they used to receive.

What bothers me is that, for all the council leader's protestations about the 'budget process', this is how we've always gone about the task of setting a budget in excess of £1 billion. A flurry of activity as we argue the toss over a few million quid. As my grandfather once said about the budget for Penge Urban Distrct Council (of which he was Chairman): "the amount of time spent on an item is in inverse proportion to that item's cost".

So Bradford Council's gross budget is around £1.2 billion. And we are scrabbling around down the back of the sofa looking for about £1.5m so we don't have to withdraw youth services from any community where the youth aren't actually running riot. And £65,000 to keep the public loos open in Haworth (a place that gets several million visitors every year).

At the end of the meeting we will have fulfilled our responsibility - setting a Council Tax for 2014/15 (and, yes, Labour propose an increase) and agreeing the associated budget. The problem is that none of the Councillors and few, if any, Council Officers will have read the whole of this budget. I know that, having done my best to wade through the budget, I will have missed something. And, at some point in the year something will come up and the response will be: "oh, it was in the budget" accompanied by a finger pointed at the offending line.

I could say that this is no way to run anything but, given the scale of Bradford Council, I can't see any way in which setting the budget can be anything other than 'top line'. And this means that, rather than the 'budget management' approach most councils adopt, we should use a priority-setting approach. At the planning stage, regardless of statutory duties and the exercise of statutory powers, we should ask what it is we think the council must do, what we think is nice to have and what is essentially a waste of time or money (or both).

There will be some things the council sees as a waste that have to be done because some numpty down in London says so ('equalities impact assessments' spring to mind here) but, by deprioritising them, we reduce the cost to the minimum needed to meet the duty. In contrast, there will be things we consider absolutely essential but which aren't a duty (providing public lavatories, for example).

The hard part of this approach to budget setting is that your decisions - I'd close down the essentially useless smoking cessation services, for example - will result in criticism from those associated with the service. A climate change department (Bradford has one of these) would be down near the bottom of my list of essential council services but the greens and 'save the planet' obsessives may take a different view - very loudly.

Most of the time the result of this process is that no-one is satisfied but equally there isn't enough dissatisfaction to result in big protests or (much more concerning for councillors) people voting you out of office. The result is that essential services are run on the same rickety basis as 'nice to have' services and bureaucracy we can do without. A sort of shared pain.

....

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Possibly quote of the century!

****

Speaking at their home in Bradford, Mr Barraclough, 27, said: "We had a brilliant day. It was great and you've got to expect a good punch up at a wedding." 

Of course, of course!

....

Monday 17 February 2014

An e-cig tale from Bradford Councillor Imran Khan - sometimes I despair

****

I was in the local paper being quoted about e-cigs. This followed the awful decision of West Yorkshire Metro to ban vaping on buses and in bus stations. I'd written a letter - here's an excerpt:

Forcing e-cigarette users out into the cold and wet with regular smokers is a stupid idea and one that will merely encourage people to go back to smoking regular – and much more dangerous – cigarettes.

Perhaps Metro and its partners would care to explain how they justify this ban, especially since there is no secondary or sidestream smoke risk and the devices are acting to reduce the users harm from smoking.

I suspect the argument will be as crass as “well it looks like smoking”, which is frankly pathetic. 

This prompted a little article where Bradford Councillor, Imran Hussein, a vaper, said this:

 “I think there’s a big difference between traditional smoking and vaping. If there wasn’t, there would be no need for me to use an e-cigarette. But it’s a matter of public perception.

“I think the sight of adults vaping could encourage children to try cigarettes. If they see vaping as not harmful, it could be the first step to smoking.”

The man is an idiot - doesn't he realise that it's the very similarity with smoking that makes vaping work? And am I the only one who finds the who "it looks like smoking, it must be bad" argument a little tiresome? There is precisely no evidence to suggest that e-cigs are dangerous to health but the BMA and others among the health fascists persist in pretending that somehow these things are scary.

E-cigs are saving lives. This is really all you need to know about them. Millions of people have switched from lethal cigarettes to take up vaping. And that's millions of people less likely to be in the lung cancer and heart attack queue. Isn't that what we want?

Sometimes I despair

Update: The eagle-eyed will spot I made an error - got the wrong Imran! The Council Deputy Leader is a vaper (so an easy mistake) and is called Imran. Nothing much to add except 'oops sorry'!

....

Sunday 16 February 2014

Advertising doesn't cause riots, make people gamble or cause revolution!

****

She said she was particularly concerned about gambling advertising before the 9pm watershed and went as far as saying that "excessive marketing" had been a factor in 2011’s London riots, when looters had gone in criminal search of expensive trainer brands.

Read that very carefully. What Helen Goodman (for it is she) is saying here is that some of society's problems - in this case gambling and rioting - can be laid at the the door of advertising. This is clearly illiberal, when it comes to gambling certainly judgemental, but worst of all is utterly ignorant of advertising and marketing and what it does.

It makes me incredibly cross that people like Helen Goodman (who is a leftie but not everyone who wants bans or controls on advertising and marketing is such) simply fail to understand that commercial speech is still 'speech'. And that it is as worthy of us defending it as any other form of speech. I know that Helen probably read 'No Logo' a few years back and has signed up to the Naomi Klein school, that "brands are the work of Satan" line, but the truth is that marketing communications are a tiny proportion of all the communications we receive every day.

If someone like Helen Goodman is going to stand up and talk about advertising, to propose legislative intervention of some kind, then the least we can expect is that some effort has been made to understand the business of marketing. Let's start with whether advertising increases aggregate demand, what we might call the 'false demand' hypothesis:

“The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence that consumption may cause advertising is presented.”

Unwrapping the academic language this research says that advertising doesn't (in aggregate) cause demand and may even be caused by consumption. Funnily enough us advertising and marketing folk have known this for years - most of our advertising isn't about creating demand it's about us not losing our bit of that demand. As I wrote a while ago:

Why should I spend my client’s scarce cash on making the market bigger – promoting sausages rather than Fred’s Grand Yorkshire Sausage, The Champion on Your Plate?

This isn't to say that an advertisement has never prompted someone to buy something they haven't bought before but it is to say that there isn't a strong connection between advertising and demand growth. To illustrate this, here's a graph of US cigarette advertising against cigarette consumption:


If you can find some sort of causal link here you're a better man than I am!

If shadow ministers (or government ministers for that matter) are going to pass opinion about advertising and marketing - rather than merely court a headline - then they really should start to understand what marketing does and how advertising works. And that it's as much a part of free speech as their address to the house or my torrent of tweets.

And if Helen Goodman wants to know about the revolution - it won't be televised you know!

...

Saturday 15 February 2014

Independence? And why not!

****

They tell o' lands wi' brighter skies,
Where freedom's voices ne're rang;
Gie me the hills where Ossian lies,
And Coila's minstrel sang,
That ken na to be free.
Then Scotland's right, and Scotland's might,
And Scotland's hills for me;"
I'll drink a cup to Scotland yet,
Wi' a' the honours three!

In one respect Scotland voting on independence is none of my business. I'm not Scottish. I don't live in Scotland. And I rather dislike the whining politics of the Scottish National Party.

But I am however fascinated by the idea of independence and self-determination. And what exactly defines a nation. I believe that the debate is important since it's about identity and origin as much as it's about government, currency and economics.

Some Scottish people who - mostly for economic reasons - have left to live and work elsewhere have complained that they are somehow excluded from this great event, from the chance to decide whether that place they left should be independent.

This is one view of nation, the idea that it is defined by ethnicity, that even though you go to the other side of the world, you remain part of the Scottish nation. This is the nationalism that plays to the gallery of ethnicity, that hates the English merely for being English and that celebrates hatred or bitterness. If this is the reason for independence, it is a frightening message and one that should be rejected. If the USA proves anything by its existence then it is that ethnicity isn't the definition of nation.

I've heard Scottish people complain that they are somehow victims - oppressed by the English (or "London" as many Nats put it). Here the argument is that, had Scotland not been wedded to its larger southern neighbour, life would have been so much better. Sometimes this is about oil but often it harks back to a more distant past with echoes of absentee landlords, crofters thrown from their homes and posh voiced masters. All then seen through a weird prism of 1970s factory and pit closures to create a position that demands independence to free Scotland from its English oppressors.

As with the ethnic definition of nation, the idea of independence being justified on the basis of victimhood is a false argument. Is Scotland uniquely oppressed - compared to other places, to Cornwall, to the North East or even Essex? To justify independence on these grounds is to believe that Scotland was oppressed because it is Scotland - this, even if you accept the fact of oppression (which I don't really), is manifestly untrue. More importantly this defines Scottishness - the reason for independence - on the basis of what it isn't not what it is.

The third argument we hear is one of economics. The Scottish government published a vast work describing the economic case for independence. That government - led by the advocates of independence - had to make this case because it knows that a fair proportion of Scots really aren't fussed one way or the other. But they will vote in their own self-interest - if independence makes me richer then I'm off to vote for it and pronto!

Again this is a pretty weak argument and not just because many of the assertions made (about economic growth, about banking and currency and about the role of government) are open to challenge. The real thing with economics is that, quite frankly, we haven't a clue one way or the other. And, since we can't construct a controlled experiment, we'll never know the truth or otherwise of that economic argument.

These three arguments -  I see them as central to the case being made by the SNP - are all wrong. Playing the ethnic card is quite simply racist. Crying victim is to make out that Scots are uniquely hard done by, which is something of an insult to all those successful Scots in every walk of life. And relying on economics for your case simply leads to games of fruitless statistical tennis and policy snooker.

But there's another argument. The real argument. It's emotional, instinctive - visceral even. It's the idea of belonging to something, looking out the window at those hills, smiling and thinking "this is Scotland". It's not the anti-Englishness that gives us "Flower of Scotland" but a deeper, truer attachment to the place - whether it's the East End of Glasgow or the heather covered hills of Sutherland.

It's the idea of Scotland in that quote from Henry Scott Riddell's 'Scotland Yet' - not about some idea of superiority, certainly no hatred or dislike, just a message of pride, joy and love for the place. And the nation - that thing we try to define with grand words - is all those who share those emotions, that association.

When Kipling wrote about men having small hearts it was about these feelings - we cannot love everywhere and we cannot expect everyone to love the place we love. But we can share that love with those who do and that is nationhood. No government, no kings, no lords, no oil, no First Minister. Just people placing their boots in the soil and saying "this is my country and I'll work with you to make it better".

If you want independence for reason of blood, for reason of hatred or for reason of greed then you deserve to lose. But if you want independence for pride, joy and love of the place that is Scotland then - for what it's worth - you have my blessing and I wish you well.

....

Why football is better for its millionaire players

****

Tom Finney was a great player. I have this on good authority - Stanley Matthews, Matt Busby, Bobby Charlton, Booby Moore all said so. Who am I to argue.

And it was a different age, the grounds were packed, crammed to the rafters with fans of all ages. But the players, for all that we described them as heroes, were treated like corporate chattels:

On a pre-War summer tour with England against Italy, Austria and Switzerland, he was made an astonishing offer by Prince Roberto Lanza di Trabia, millionaire president of Palermo in Sicily, a then astonishing £130 a month, a villa by the shore, a Ferrari, flights for his family whenever wished, and a £10,000 signing-on fee.

With the retain-and-transfer slavery employment of the Football League, by which a player could never leave without his club’s approval, Finney could do no more than quietly make his way home. To the end of his days, he would smile quietly about the memory. 

Because Preston North End wouldn't let Tom Finney go his wages - the maximum wage - were just £20 a week. And there was nothing he, or any other player, could do about this, the clubs - private businesses - were profitable, taking the money from millions through the turnstiles but living under the football league's rules meant they could keep that money. The people who brought the fans in their thousands every Saturday afternoon - Finney, Mortenson, Matthews and so on - they didn't get to see that cash.

Today the biggest chunk of the money the fans pay to watch football goes to pay the wages of the players not the dividends of the clubs' owners. "They're not worth it", we say. "Whatever happened to the working class game" we exclaim. And we are wrong. The game is better for player power, better for so much of the money going to the men who make the product, who provide such glorious entertainment for us and who are the focus of childhood dreams and adult passion.

Football is a better game for its millionaire players.

....

Friday 14 February 2014

On by-elections...

****

His Grace asks us to:

Consider the turnout - 28%.

So taking his exhortation I shall do just this - try to understand why nearly three out of four electors in  Wythenshawe and Sale East didn't bother to vote in yesterday's by-election.

His Grace suggests that this abstention gives greater credence to the Russell Brand argument against voting (which, I understand, is that voting only encourages them and let's have a revolution instead, so much more fun). And that the lack of public interest in voting yesterday - despite having had a waste bin full of leaflets rammed through the letterbox - reflects public disillusionment with democracy.

For my part I take a different lesson from His Grace's text, the low turnout simply reflects the wisdom of the population. After all yesterday's by-election was in a safe Labour seat, its result would change nothing for the electors and certainly not the nature or direction of government. So, given that Manchester yesterday wasn't a place to venture out into without good reason, people went about their normal day and, in the evening, chose to stop in and watch telly rather than stagger down to the church hall for voting.

Indeed, had there not been over 10,000 postal votes (much to the chagrin of Mr Farage), the turnout would have been even lower!

The point we all ignore is that people had the option. I'm pretty sure that most of the 72% not voting knew full well there was a by-election. And they chose not to go and vote. It simply wasn't something that was important to them.

This is wonderful. Really wonderful - people are comfortable enough in their lives that they do not feel the need to play their tiny little part in democracy. And when we go and ask them why they didn't bother they'll give those familiar answers - politicians are all the same, voting doesn't change anything, Labour always win here so no point in voting. Or perhaps just the simple statement - I never vote.

Some people are bothered that the act of voting doesn't really change anything (I would argue that this isn't really true but that doesn't matter for this discussion) and fret about raising turnout - hence the easy to corrupt postal voting system. They are wrong, the fault doesn't lie with electors but with us politicians. We have lost control of things we used to control. We too often raise our hands and shrug, "nothing I can do really" when faced with a real problem for real people.

So people are wise. They know that replacing one politician with another at a by-election isn't really a big deal. And they stay home in the warm doing something that isn't politics.

...

Thursday 13 February 2014

Conservative Values

"...I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs, have souls."
Giovanni Guareschi

When my left wing friends aren't describing Conservatives as 'scum', 'vile' or 'vermin', they like to opine about a thing they call values. It's common currency among such folk that there was a time in the bucolic past when us Conservatives held to a set of 'values' that meant we were, while wrong, at least in some unspecified way 'decent'.

Now I'm not entirely sure what those values were - I could have a stab but I'd end up with a list that is essentially a definition of either 'Butskellism' or, worse, social democracy. The truth is that my left-wing friends believe their 'values' are the only righteous and moral values meaning that anyone holding to a different set of values must be wrong (if not actually evil then pretty close to the abyss).

I'm guessing that this (rather overused) word 'values' refers to a set of guiding principles, universal ideas about how we should act and about what is important. And what makes we smile is that, far more than socialism or liberalism, being a conservative is absolutely grounded in a set of values. Wherever you go in the world you'll find people who hold as important such things as family, neighbourliness, independence, duty and effort. That you should work hard, contribute, look out for the neighbours, bring up your family as honest, self-reliant and care for those less fortunate.

And these are conservative values, the building blocks of community. None of them are about government, large or small. None of them see society as greater than the sum of its individual parts. And none of them are predicated on knowing better what is good for your neighbour. I know that, compared to changing the economic system or destroying the capitalist state, this is all pretty boring but it's what most folk want.

At the heart of these values (and here I'm going to use the language of the left so they can understand) is the idea of coproduction, that value is created by individual exchange. Indeed the essence of conservative values is a belief that, left to their own devices, people will cooperate, collaborate and create community. That the consequence of freedom - in speech, in enterprise, in trade - is exchange, is cooperation. Free markets aren't about 'dog eat dog' but the very opposite of this: mutual benefit.

When conservatives go wrong it is to try an enforce these values and there is a fine line between enforcement, incentive and reward. But those left wing experts on conservatism, who have decided we have dumped our values by believing in free exchange, are so very wrong. But then such people never really understood in the first place.

....

Wednesday 12 February 2014

Scrapping the position of Council chief executive? Well it's a thought...

****

Indeed a thought that Bradford Council's Conservative Group has proposed in its last two budget submissions (more specifically we've asked that the position is included within a wider review of governance and leadership). It seems that the government down in London agrees with us:

‘The Government believes that the traditional model of chief executive, with a wide public role and a significant salary, is unnecessary and can weaken the ability of a council’s political leadership to set a direction through the executive role of elected members.'

Now partly this is all part of the "no public servant should be paid more than the prime minister" nonsense but there's a more important and broader issue here of governance. As council chief executives have drifted away from their traditional town clerk role they have become what one Bradford councillor called "the unelected mayor", individuals with an enormous amount of discretionary (even arbitrary) power. Moreover this power is exercised without the capacity of the electorate and its representatives to control or correct actions.

The intention of the 2000 local government act (for all its myriad flaws and failures) was to re-establish the authority of elections and elected people either through the introduction of a directly elected mayor or else through a powerful leader and cabinet model. The presence, especially within the latter, of powerful chief executives undermines the authority of that political executive by creating a different nexus from which policy and strategic leadership can come.

In Bradford this problem is illustrated by the fact that the chief executive has over £4 million worth of officer resource directed to policy, strategy and 'change' whereas the entire political establishment has just two and a half policy officers (less than £100,000 worth). A moment's glance at this structure tells you that the political leadership of the council, in terms of positive policy-making, is completely dominated by the chief executive. Indeed it often seems that the only action us politicians can take is to veto a proposal. Positive proposals, if they don't accord with the professional leadership's 'vision', run the risk of simply staying just that, a proposal.

None of this is a criticism of the capability of chief executives merely to observe that the position has grown to such strength that the over-riding principle of democratic leadership and accountability is undermined. We need to look again at the role of leading the 'paid service' and consider how we can - if we like the idea of democracy that is - rejuvenate the role of councillors and political leadership.

....

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Nick Clegg's Lintilla moment...

****

Crisis is an essential ingredient in modern politics - without crisis, without some dread threat to civilization as we know it, people will go home, put the fire on and have a cup of tea.

As a result politicians invent existential threats - crises that threaten the very essence of modern society:

There are  just 100 days to stop the UK Independence Party becoming a permanent major force in British politics, Nick Clegg warns today.

And this of course is a crisis, a threat to something good and kind - in this case the opportunity for Nick and his friends to get nice, well-paid sinecures over in Brussels and for others of Nick's pals to siphon across lovely 'European Grant Funding'.

The problem here is that the crisis is entirely artificial. And UKIP only become a 'major force' in British politics if we indulge their rather eclectic range of self-contradictory policies - championing liberty when it suits an audience (smoking and drinking) and promoting bans or controls when it doesn't (burkas and immigrants).

What Nick Clegg has done - his Lintilla moment - is switch on the crisis inducer:


LINTILLA:
It’s a crisis inducer. Set it to ‘Mark Nine’ and… Hurry! They’re after us!

ARTHUR:
Who?

LINTILLA:
No one! Come on! Through the tunnel! They’re coming!


We really don't have only 100 days to save the universe (or Nick's future EU sinecure) from the dread UKIP. They're maybe going to get a few more MEPs and the Lib Dems might lose most of their MEPs. But that's it really. Nothing else will change. We will have elected a slightly different set of essentially pointless (but very expensive) politicians who can - as we've seen with e-cigs - simply choose to ignore the public's opinion knowing they aren't subject to any proper scrutiny as individual politicians.

Still Nick Clegg has activated his crisis inducer, got big headlines in sympathetic newspapers and got his dwindling troops agitated and active.

There is no real crisis just an artificial and pathetic flap.

....

Monday 10 February 2014

In which I angrily disassociate myself from most Tory MPs

"It's for the children" they cry and reel out carefully pre-packaged statistics showing how millions of kids are killed, maimed, left with brain damage and generally corrupted by their mum or dad having the occasional gasper whilst fighting the traffic on the school run. So-called facts are wheeled out about how smoke inside a car is so very much more damaging than any other sort of smoke resulting in ugly, pasty-faced children who fail all their maths exams.

And MPs clamber onto a bandwagon constructed from these lies - I guess if enough lie tissue is laid down it results in a solid structure ideal for politicians to demonstrate how much they care about "the children". These self-serving MPs then pontificate, nay compete, about how much they care, about how "the time is right" despite knowing the law is virtually unenforceable and utterly pointless. Indeed one such idiot MP - the public health minister no less - even said that it doesn't matter that the law can't be enforced.

This is bonkers. A sort of post-modern demon has captured the minds of our MPs and twisted them to believe that passing unenforceable, divisive and ugly laws is somehow a good thing - "for the children". These bizarre human beings, trapped in the glamour of a local paper headline, argue that banning smoking in cars will somehow change behaviour and that will be all fine and hunky-dory.

What we'll actually see is that nice middle-class mums and dads won't smoke in their cars (mostly because very few of them actually smoke) whereas the same people who use mobiles phones on the move, don't make sure their kids wear seatbelts (or indeed wear on themselves) and have been known to drive along with a five-year old on their lap - these people will carry right on smoking.

The people who voted for this have voted to open a new avenue for health fascism. It will be only a short time before social housing landlords are urged to ban smoking in their homes. And when they don't a law will be passed banning such smoking - housing officers will become like sniffer dogs hounding ordinary folk to the edge of despair for the terrible crime of having a fag while watching the late night movie on a Friday night.

And then we'll get the ban on smoking in houses - any houses - with children. Granting the health fascists right to smash into your privacy - "for the children".

There is no defence, no justification, no sense to this proposal yet nearly 400 of our MPs cheerfully voted for the amendment. And they did so knowing they could brag about how much they care - "for the children" you know, "for the children".

....



Sunday 9 February 2014

Why e-cigs matter. And the public health nannies are wrong...

****

Currently the tobacco cessation lobby are spending between eight and ten million quid a year to perhaps get two per cent of Britain's ten million smokers to quit. Here's the effect of electronic cigarettes - without a single penny of public funding:

...an increase in e-cigarette use from two per cent to 16 per cent in 28 months.  That is a 14 per cent increase in just over two years.  Basing that figure we see that there is a 14 per cent increase over 28 months which works out as an average monthly increase of 0.5 per cent.  This means that at present 40,625 smokers are switching to e-cigarettes each month[5].

It's probable that, before the EU's egregious Tobacco Products Directive comes into force, over a third of current smokers will have wholly or partly switched to vaping. And this will be, if you accept that smoking is the biggest preventable cause of death, the greatest public health breakthrough since the clean air acts of the 1950s.

And these idiots want to ban e-cigs? Seriously!

....

So what are local councils for? A thought on objective-setting

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I'm reading the agenda for Bradford Council's Regeneration and Culture Overview and Scrutiny committee (like you do). And I'm struck by the problem with local government - perhaps the problem with government everywhere - the problem of, for want of a better term, 'mission creep'.

Except it's not quite mission creep. The problem is that most of the time, in most places, government is really uncertain about its objectives. It's not that extraneous or new 'objectives' are added to an activity but that government doesn't actually know what its there to do.

Government is something we rather take for granted. We can see the things it does - everything from invading Iraq to emptying out rubbish bins once a week. At the front end, we tend to see the job being done more or less well. Satisfaction rates for waste collection in England are generally pretty high -  certainly over 80% and, in many cases, over 90%. And we don't need reminding how good our front-line troops are at their job.

However (and I'll stick with local government here), sit down with a big local council and ask them what their objectives are. What you'll get is everything from the stupidly banal - "to be a world class city" - to the utterly meaningless. Here by way of example is Manchester Council's 'objective':

As a Council our objective is to support the delivery of Manchester’s Community Strategy through the Manchester Partnership. The Community Strategy was refreshed during 2012/13, reaffirming our vision of Manchester as a world class city as competitive as the best international cities;
  • that stands out as enterprising, creative and industrious
  • with highly skilled and motivated people
  • living in successful neighbourhoods whose prosperity is environmentally sustainable  
  • where all our residents can meet their full potential, are valued and secure 
Who could disagree with any of this - as a mission statement it's wonderful, capturing the idea of a thriving, dynamic, international city. But is it actually an objective? Does it tell me anything about what I should be doing right now? Can it help Councillors and officers know what decisions they should be taking today? And is it a guide to developing a strategy?

Sadly the answer to all those questions is 'no' (I'm not picking on Manchester here - Bradford's will be just as anodyne, just as purposeless, I just couldn't find them).

Local councils are complicated beasts running a lot of different services that, other than being delivered locally, don't really have a great deal in common. Some are related to place - roads, paths, parks, trees and so on - while others such as home help services relate to individual people. Councils respond to emergency situations ranging from flooding through to taking abused children into care. And councils provide (although this is a little moot these days) services such as education across the whole population.

Go on then. Set a clear, understandable and quantified objective for all that activity. Pretty challenging! And this is the problem that results in terms like "world class city" cropping up. It seems to me that, in the absence of a clear external incentive (such as that coming from customers switching to another supplier or from the profit motive) Councils are forced to look within themselves for that incentive.

As a result Councils create visions, missions and objectives that aren't within their capacity to deliver - those four bullet points of Manchester's aren't really within the City Council's gift. The council can influence every one of them but doesn't control them. Nor for that matter are those bullets under the control of government (or 'the wider public sector' as we like to call it) making them almost entirely useless as an 'objective'.

I'm a 'soft loo-paper' Tory. Local government is not some sort of ideological mission to change the world but a fairly prosaic set of services that we think need providing - schools, waste collection and disposal, looking after the roads, helping old and disabled people who need support, protecting vulnerable people especially children and things like parks, swimming pools and libraries that provide for our leisure. Plus a set of statutory roles and functions including planning, licensing and environmental protection.

Our job as a council is to do these things well. Both to the satisfaction of local residents and to agreed objective standards of service quality. For sure we can add a little bit of vision and future planning into our mix of activities but our purpose isn't to change people's behaviour but to provide a place - safe, cared for and open - that allows people to make the most of their individual, personal lives.

The problem is that councils can't leave well alone. We have to poke about at the 'let's change people's behaviour', 'let's save the planet', 'we will transform lives in the borough' sort of stuff with the result being (as Bradford demonstrates) a host of essentially interfering strategies - a 'play strategy', a 'food strategy', a 'cycling strategy', an 'alcohol strategy'. The public hasn't asked for any of this expensive activity and wouldn't even notice if it wasn't there. Yet because the producers of these strategies can provide a tenuous link to the 'objective' or 'vision' they are claimed as vital and essential to the council's purpose.

We fuss and worry about the grandiose - indeed there's nothing us councillors like more than a bit of grandstanding (sorry, 'looking at the big picture'). It makes us sound good, the papers like it and we can pretend we're actually changing something when all we've really got is another wasteful strategy.

What really matters is whether the council has its finances straight, satisfies residents, and meets its own targets on service quality improvement. Making it so the highways engineer, the social worker and the bloke digging the spring beds in the park are all delivering to the objective of the organisation (and even better, can explain how).

Right now council leaderships - political and professional - spend too much time on grand words, strategies and visions but far too little time on making sure children and the old are protected, the roads are swept, the potholes filled, parks tidied and that the loos have soft loo-paper.

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Friday 7 February 2014

If your London housing policy doesn't mention planning reform it's wrong

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What follows doesn't alter the fact that London needs a lot of houses across every tenure but it does provide a little context and suggests that we need a better understanding of the drivers for housing demand in the metropolis. And hopefully gets us past articles filled with stuff like this:

She puts the micro-boom in Hackney down to the post-Olympics changes that have transformed an area which once had failing schools and high crime into a part of London appreciated for its architecture, parks and cafes, but which remains just affordable to people no longer able to live more centrally.

The problem with this is that discussing Hackney's delights (or the weird world in which it has become some sort of attractive neighbourhood) doesn't really help us understand "the heart of the housing bubble". It just tells us that house prices are going up in Hackney. Indeed, Hackney, like its next door neighbour Islington, has seen prices rise significantly faster than the London average.

This graph is something of an education for anyone considering London's housing situation (you can see a bigger version here):

The bar graph bit shows the differentials in London house prices from 2008 through to 2011. What seems clear from this graph is that the outer eastern boroughs (Newham, Waltham Forest, Barking & Dagenham, Bexley) have seen the biggest fall in house prices whereas - Tower Hamlets aside - inner eastern boroughs (Hackney, Islington, Southwark, Greenwich) have seen significant rises, in Southwark's case by over 20%.

The demand illustrated in the article above is younger, as the author makes clear:

Everyone who comes in is white, and in their late 20s and 30s, unless they are older parents accompanying their children; this demographic is repeated at each of the nine viewings and open days that Keatons allows us to attend over three days.

The question isn't just how long all this can go on before the bubble pops (the answer, if other international cities are any guide, is 'a lot longer than you think') but where are the workers going to live? Of course the folk spending £700,000 on a three-bed terrace in Hackney* will be working (very hard I suspect too) but in their offices there will be people on half the money.

For some of these people the answer is that they're at home with mum (which is not really sustainable), in expensive rented flats, probably sharing or else cramming onto a train from Southend, Chatham or Peterborough where they still have an outside chance of being able to afford either rents or a mortgage.

There's nothing new in this pattern - back in 1987 when I left London, I had a boss who commuted in from Eastborne and colleagues whose commute was from Peterborough, Maidstone and Hemel Hempstead. But it reminds us of the devil's deal we've done - constraining new build, limiting permitted development and making no compromise on London's green belt has been great news for property owners in the metropolis but not so great for the population who want to buy or rent property.

Add the time and cost of actually getting a planning permission on land you're allowed to develop and we have a recipe for a housing market so schlerotic that repeated heart attacks are simply inevitable. So I find it bizarre to hear London politicians opposing more liberal permitted development rights (converting empty shops into homes, for example), proposing daft politicies like rent controls and even suggesting tighter controls on housing development.

What we need to hear from these London politicians are proposals for planning reform. We never do though.

*We don't have these problems in Bradford. £700,000 would get you at least half-a-dozen three-bed terraces more if you're not too fussy about quality or location

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Thursday 6 February 2014

The King's Touch



"The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known."

So said Ioreth, the eldest of the women who tended the sick in Minas Tirith revealing that Aragon was the king.

In using the idea of the king as a healer, Tolkein was drawing on historical truth. The touch, even the mere presence of the king was believed to have miraculous healing powers:

"His Majesty sitting under his state [canopy] in the Banqueting-House, the chirurgeons [surgeons] caused the sick to be brought or led, up to the throne, where they kneeling, the King strokes their faces or cheeks with both his hands at once, at which instant a chaplain in his formalities says, 'He put his hands upon them, and he healed them.'" This is said to every one in particular. When they have been all touched, they come up again in the same order, and the other chaplain kneeling, and having angel [coin] gold strung on white ribbon on his arm, delivers them one by one to his Majesty, who puts them about the necks of the touched as they pass, while the first chaplain repeats, "That is the true light who came into the world."

Today, of course, we no longer believe such poppycock and mumbo jumbo (alternative medicine and most of public health practice aside). But we still clutch to the remnants of this view, that kings and princes - or their more prosaic modern day equivalents, presidents and prime ministers - by their very presence can tranforms the fortune of a place.

So when there is some disaster or other, we hear the clamouring of media voices for the minister - indeed the prime minister - to visit. As if that visit, with all its attendant disruption of the good work by people who actually can help on the ground, would bestow on the victims some special blessing and transform the fortune of the damaged place.

The Somerset Levels remain flooded. And, while most of the problem is down the the weather (and its a while since we believed kings could control the weather), it does seem that government actions - or inactions - had a part to play in make the problem worse. Ministers - even a Prince - have visited the Levels and have proclaimed it "a disaster" and opponents of those people have made a thing of it: "why hasn't so-and-so visited the area" is the cry. Done for political advantage but echoing the sad sight of people with tuberculosis crawling before the king vainly seeking a cure to their terminal disease.

Every time there is a disaster, we see the disruption of grand and important people - today's kings and princes - arriving in the disrupted and broken environment because it is expected of them, a 'king's duty'. But we know this is pointless, we know it changes nothing and is an illusion of action, a pretend salvation.

Yet still we insist on the King's Touch.

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