Monday 31 March 2014

Cinderella's vengeance...


When the bridal couple walked into the church, the older sister walked on their right side and the younger on their left side, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards, as they came out of the church, the older one was on the left side, and the younger one on the right side, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each of them. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness as long as they lived.

The fussbuckets of the children's services world appear to have won their campaign to allow the government to lock up parents who are emotionally cruel to their children:

Parents who fail to show love and affection towards their children could be sent to prison for up to 10 years under a “Cinderella Law” to be announced in the Queen’s Speech in June, according to a report.
The move will make “emotional cruelty” a criminal offence for the first time.

The decision was hailed as a “monumental step” forwards by a children’s charity, which said children could grow up with “ lifelong mental health problems” or end up taking their own lives.

There is only one question to ask here - who is deciding when being strict and brusque tips over into 'emotional cruelty'? The MP promoting the bill chooses the stigmatise step-parents (most of which do an OK job helping to bring up someone else's children) and uses the most pathetic appeal to emotion available - the fairy tale:

“Not too many years after the Brothers Grimm popularised the story of Cinderella, the offence of child neglect was introduced,” he said, but added: “Our criminal law has never reflected the full range of emotional suffering experienced by children who are abused by their parents or carers.

“The sad truth is that, until now, the Wicked Stepmother would have got away scot-free."

Now, as I remember it, the Wicked Stepmother's sin was to treat Cinders as a skivvy and not let her go to the ball. There's nothing in the tale to suggest that Cinderella was emotionally scarred by this treatment however egregious it was and however much the Wicked Stepmother favoured her own (famously ugly) daughters. I fail to see in this how locking up the Wicked Stepmother would have achieved anything? Would it have made Cinders' life better somehow? Or, more likely, would it have provided a little cruel schadenfreude for her as she jollied off into the sunset with the Prince!

Just as we have done with 'offence' where the police are close to being able to arrest people randomly for just saying stuff, with this new idea we hand the power to public agencies to seize children and lock up their parents for almost anything. There is no boundary to emotional or social cruelty, it is simply a judgement made by one flawed individual about another flawed individual.

And it hands real power to people who say things like this:

Sir Tony Hawkhead, chief executive of Action for Children, said he had met children who had been “scapegoated in their families, constantly humiliated and made to feel unloved”.

Think of the teenage girl screaming at Mum (or worse step-mum); "you don't love me, you don't care". Or the grunting young lad refusing to make eye contact with Dad (god forbid, Step-dad) for days on end because he turned off the football and insisted he did his homework.

Child protection authorities already have the powers they need to respond to children who are being damaged by their home environment. What we have here are people who don't just want to protect the children, they want to punish the parents.

This proposal isn't about child protection, it's about vengeance.And we don't need it.

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Sunday 30 March 2014

Thomas Piketty, New Fascist?

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On the face of it Piketty's work is orthodox, envy-ridden social democracy. Backed up by dodgy charts. But when we poke around at the words in the FT article there's an odd smell:

US inequality may now be so sharp, and the political process so tightly captured by top earners, that necessary reforms will not happen – much like in Europe before the first world war.

Here's the thing - the masterpiece created by the Great War was Fascism. It's authoritarian, directed, Listian autarky was the solution to those very problems that Piketty alludes to - essetially the excesses of capitalism.

The essence of the the New Fascism is that there must be a new authoritarian, directed, Listian solution - but petty nationalist autarky is rejected just as is personal liberty, choice and the idea of individual achievement. The fruits of success are not ours but the state's to determine.

The deepest irony of the New Fascism is that its adherents use the old discredited Fascism as a threat to beat us into submission. We are told that we must embrace their new order or suffer a return to that frightening past, a past that scarred Europe so terribly:

Short of that, many may turn against globalisation. If, one day, they found a common voice, it would speak the disremembered mantras of nationalism and economic isolation.

But Piketty and others propose the same solutions as did Gentile and Spirito - that identity is subsumed in a wider society and individual sovereignty is a false aspiration. Above all this is the central idea that the state must enforce society's sacrifice for the greater good. In this case it is a vain search for material equality built on the idea that we are unequal because the powerful have stolen from the weak.

I don't comment here on Piketty's economics but on the imperative behind his words - that liberty must be sacrificed on the altar of equality. This is the New Fascism.

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Politicians and booze - how drunk or sober are MPs?

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The Mirror has revealed (or so it says) just how sloshed our MPs are:

Politicians and workers in the House of Commons guzzled £1.4m of booze last year, shock figures have revealed.

The newspaper goes on to list, will growing shrillness, just how many bottles of champagne, beer, cider and  wine were sold. And we are shocked!

But should we be so shocked (other than by the subsidy)?

There are 650 MPs and let's assume that the rest of the people employed at the House of Commons amount to a further 650 folk. I'm ignoring drinks bought for guests or visitors (although I'm sure a fair bit of the booze was in the form of such entertaining by MPs). That's a nice, tidy 1300 people who spent that shocking amount of £1.4m.

The House of Commons sits for about 150 days each year (again we can argue whether this is too many or too few) so on each day £9,300 is spent on booze there. This amounts to £7.15 per person - essentially a round of drinks. Even if only MPs are drinking that's only £15 each - is this really so shocking?

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How I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons





The other day I bumped into this article entitled 'How we won the war on Dungeons & Dragons'. It was about the excitement generated by Christian conservative groups in the USA about the role playing game:


My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren't getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.


An awful deal of fuss and bother (not to mention damage) created by a game. And the children so mistreated by schools and parents had no defence against the "Dungeons and Dragons is just devil worship" line - they were just kids playing a game.

We didn't have quite the same problem in the UK. Our Christianity is altogether more calm and moderate and, while there were some who complained (we saw them rise again like some form of undead when the Harry Potter books were published), they were few and far between. As far as I know there weren't any kids kicked out of school or sent to bizarre indoctrination camps to expunge the influence of devil worship or the glorification of witchcraft.

What I do know is that Dungeons & Dragons changed my life. I'd had a pretty orthodox catholic upbringing, I'd learnt the catechism, I attended mass faithfully and I thought I got the religion malarkey. But what I'd never done in all this certainty and absolutism is consider the meaning of good and evil, tried to understand what these terms we gaily bandy about actually mean. Much of the religious discussion about evil, for all its invoking of demons and condemnation of magic, is more precisely about actions - outputs, if you prefer. Evil is defined as doing things that 'we' (the religion in question) disapprove of.

So I arrive at university and get stuck into playing Dungeons & Dragons. And, because it is inherent to the game, we talk about this:




This is the D&D 'alignment chart' and it's really important if you play the game. Since it's a role playing game you have to try and play your character in character (we used to hate the sort of game playing where player interaction was shoved aside for the sake of vast armouries of magical goodies). And this means that, if your character is evil, you need to understand what evil means. Not in terms of actions but in the context of feelings, motivations and behaviours - at least enough to make the game fun.

We spent hours discussing, for example, what 'chaotic neutral' meant - was it a sort of carefreeness on steroids or something more profound, more religious. A rejection of order - the Dice Man of the fantasy world?  The answer doesn't matter, what mattered was that we talked about good, evil, the meaning of law and how these could be personal. It was a far better moral education than the platitudes of RE at school or the banalities of the typical catholic homily.

If you want to live a good life, it has to be on the basis of understanding what that means. You can get out the book and read the (often contradictory) guidance from the ancients or else you can work it out from first principles. And the D&D alignment chart seems to me a good place to start - it tells me that executing the adulteress for her sin may be lawful but it is probably evil at the same time and that saving that adulteress - however sinful she may be - is a chaotic act but also an act of goodness.

Religion told me none of these things. I learnt that god is good and the devil is bad. And that if I follow the rules I will live forever. I learnt nothing about what all this meant, about whether there's a devil or whether that god is all he's cracked up to be.

This doesn't make me an atheist. Nor does my favourite D&D creation, a neutral evil mage called Tim with a withered hand, make me evil. And I don't want to make out that fantasy role playing is the route to salvation - unless your idea of salvation is spending 30 hours clearing out one of Chris Barlow's slightly manic dungeons.

But for me, playing Dungeons & Dragons, taught me more about good and evil than all the priests and brothers who'd taught me about god. And, although I didn't realise it at the time, those months in 1979 were when I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons.

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Saturday 29 March 2014

Is £5 a lot of money?





I know it's an odd sort of question but it's one that has, from time to time exercised my mind. I think it helps to show how our understanding of value is shaped by perceptions and circumstance.

The story starts back in, I think, 1990 or 1991 when John Hinchcliffe and I has a heated debate about this very question - "is £5 a lot of money". Now at the time we were the account planning and research boffins at a leading direct marketing agency - the issue had arisen during a 'meeting' (I use the word loosely here) to talk about a savings product we promoted with the line 'only £9 per month'.

So, given that we had the skills and resources available we conducted some research. Not the most scientific piece of research but rather better than much of the rubbish that masquerades as public policy research these days. And our findings were significant - some people though £5 was a lot of money and some people didn't. However, we'd expected those answering 'yes' to the question would be the less well-paid employees of the agency (and any clients we stumbled across in the couple of days we were paying attention to our vital study).

What we found (you'll have to trust me on this because we didn't keep the results) was more interesting - the only factor that appeared to correlate to thinking £5 a lot of money was age. The older people were the more they thought £5 a significant lump of cash. The 55 year-old agency director saw £5 a more valuable that the 17 year-old receptionist. We concluded - before moving on to more important things (that we were actually paid to do) - that this might have something to do with inflation.

So for all those clever behavioural economists and such here's the question again:

"Is £5 a lot of money?"

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Friday 28 March 2014

Friday Fungus: more on mushrooms and cancer...

At risk of sounding like the Daily Mail here but there's some further evidence that mushrooms (to be exact, shitake mushrooms) might help prevent cervical cancer;

An extract from a Japanese mushroom kills the sexually transmitted virus HPV that can cause cervical cancer. Human papilloma virus (HPV) is a common, and highly contagious, infection that affects skin and the moist membrane linings of the body, for example, in the cervix, mouth and throat.

Pretty good news for mushroom lovers!

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Thursday 27 March 2014

Health Fascism - the new normal for public health

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Today marks a new low - we've got used to the endless dribble of health scare stories in the media but there has been a shift. Where response was once left up to our judgement - if the Daily Mail told us some bloke in a white coat had found that bacon causes cancer we were left with a choice of whether to ignore his advice. Now though, officialdom throws out misinformation, scares and exaggeration in order to prosecute their philosophy - I've called them nannying fussbuckets for some while now but this no longer fits, it's too friendly, too cuddly.

These people are fascists. Health Fascists.

Here's today's selection of their health fascism:

The winner is Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer with another demand for sugar taxes based on the complete fiction that "overweight is seen as the norm". Perhaps she can explain that to this woman who was told she was 'obese' by Dame Sally's cohorts.

Not content with talking rubbish about obesity, Dame Sally then launched into an idiotic attack on soap operas. Apparently there's too much drinking:

Hard-drinking soap characters offer an "irresponsible" portrayal of excessive alcohol consumption, according to the Chief Medical Officer for England

Elsewhere we've got:

The doctor who thinks e-cigarettes are like methadone. Seriously.

Or the people who want to ban cigarettes for everyone born after 2000 - which means come the end of this decade some adults can buy fags and some can't. These people are barking mad.

Still we can rely on academia to provide some bad research. Like that showing e-cigs don't aid quitting.

Plus public health people complaining because Council's have directed public health spending into things like reducing road accidents, improving air quality, reducing excess winter deaths in the elderly and improving food safety education or enforcement. Aren't all these things actually public health? It appears the doctors don't think so.

Health fascism everywhere you look. For public health it's the new normal.

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Wednesday 26 March 2014

Building the future - from mushrooms!

The future of building is revealed - and it involves mushrooms:

Typically “fungus” and “building” are not words people like to hear together. While we were busy scrubbing the black mold off our bathtubs, David Benjamin, head of the New York architectural firm The Living, was designing the Hy-Fi, a 40-foot-tall circular fungal tower, and potential precursor for more eco-friendly skyscrapers.

As the winner of MoMA’s annual Young Architects Program (YAP), Benjamin will exhibit the Hy-Fi in the courtyard at MoMA’s satellite art and event space PS1 in Queens starting late June. Now in its 15th season, YAP’s theme this year is sustainability and recycling. YAP also wanted a design that would provide shade, seating, and water for attendees of MoMA PS1’s 2014 Warm Up summer music series. Benjamin prevailed with a design he claims will generate no waste, requires no energy, and is 100% organic.

We've already discovered how mushrooms can solve our waste management problems and will grow into eco-friendly cars so it should be no surprise that we will be growing buildings from the little mycological darlings:

To create the Hy-Fi, the fungus bricks will be placed at the bottom the structure, while a second kind of reflective bricks, created with a daylighting mirror film devised by 3M, will be placed at the top. The reflective bricks will focus the light down the tower to create a kind of supersized petri dish, encouraging the mycelium to grow and the bricks to solidify and bond together.

Wonderful!

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Tuesday 25 March 2014

Now about those young people binge drinking...

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Today at Bradford's full council meeting one councillor (from 'the party formerly known as Respect') asked a question about the 'night time economy' on Great Horton Road. Now those who know Bradford will appreciate that this is the area around the University and, it appears, there is the familiar 'students are spoiling our lovely community by enjoying themselves' campaign.

However, it seems to me that, compared to my experience thirty years ago, today's students are a more abstemious, more serious bunch:

Many seemed to be cutting back their alcohol intake - only 22 per cent of undergraduates reported drinking more than 11 units a week (equivalent to about five and a half pints of beer), compared with 28 per cent in 2010 and 33 per cent in 2008.

And dig a little deeper and we find that a third of students report that they don't drink at all and a further 40% limited the drinking to just once a week. Now there are plenty of reasons for this - partly it's the additional pressure that having big loans brings and partly it's a wider shift (non-students in this age group are a pretty sober bunch as well). However, what it does tell us, is that the old hedonistic 'party party' image of student life really doesn't describe the reality.

Yet again the lie of public health (and Daily Mail) campaigns about 'binge drinking' is revealed - most young people have neither the cash nor the inclination to drink in the manner of past generations. Despite this truth - revealed in survey after survey, study upon study - we're still told that young people are being corrupted by drink ads and offers, are 'pre-loading' with super-cheap alcohol and generally destroying their health.

Will there ever be a point when the public health folk stop the fibs about binge drinking?

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Monday 24 March 2014

On the state of English education...

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From the Leeds school teaching all its pupils English as a foreign language:

She said that British pupils would benefit from the lessons because in many cases they had such poor command of formal English they would not be able to achieve good GCSE grades. 

What an terrible observation - all those Leeds-born children have (ignoring the now ubiquitous pre-school education) had nearly seven years of formal education before they arrive at the City of Leeds School.

What have the primary schools been doing?

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"Leeds, Leeds...everyone hates us but we don't care" (except you do really)

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OK, so I'm in Bradford meaning that what I say about Leeds is filtered through a historic rivalry. More recently that rivalry has been further tempered by a sort of sophisticated grumpiness - how come it is that Leeds is ever so shiny while Bradford struggles. We seek out the little wins - the fact that Bradford, all stone and grandeur, is so much better looking than Leeds; the superiority of the South Pennine uplands to grey, man-ruined central Yorkshire coalfield. And we point or laugh at the struggles of Leeds United.

But we're allowed this indulgence. It's a sort of West Riding sibling rivalry and, when the chips are down, both cities are both great and also in Yorkshire. Unlike Manchester.

So I smiled at this passionate grumble inspired (if that is the right word) by Evan Davies' 'Mind the Gap' programme on the BBC and its conclusion that 'only Manchester could compete with London'. Here's a flavour:

What the BBC tend to do on such occasions is ‘confuse’ the city of Manchester with Greater Manchester, which is not a city but a type of county. I’ve no idea how they sneaked Greater Manchester past the people of Salford, Bolton or Wigan. I do know that if, at any point in history, you suggested that an area of Yorkshire was called Greater Leeds then the proud people of Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax or Keighley (a town bigger than Wigan) would, quite rightly, be out on the street smashing and burning stuff.

Fighting stuff! But Mick McCann (in the mix for the biggest fan of Leeds as a city) needs to step back and ask a serious question. Why is it that Evan Davies concluded what he did about Manchester (other than rank bias because the BBC got transplanted - or is it dumped - in a city that isn't Manchester but is close by)?

Mick sets out all the statistics, observing that Leeds folk are wealthier, brainier and prettier than Mancunians, but this isn't the point. The point is that, while everyone knows about Manchester (blame football for this), Leeds is best described as "oh yes, Leeds, I forget about Leeds". Folk out there in the wide world know about Yorkshire - the Yorkshire marketing folk win prizes for their efforts:

Yorkshire's bumptious tourist board has retained its title as best marketeer in the World Travel Awards, the nearest thing to the Oscars in the industry.

And the county is great - what other English county gets its name chanted at rock concerts? (The London indie band Goodshoes, when they first appeared at the Cockpit in Leeds were taken aback - they thought the 'Yorkshire, Yorkshire' chant was 'You're shit, you're shit').  Across the world, Yorkshire ex-pats are telling people that it's the grandest, greatest, most beautiful and definitely most manly place on the planet.

But somehow this doesn't rub off on Leeds.

Leeds is boring, workaday, the dullsville of the West Riding. And not just because it lacks the glamour of a premier league football team. Ask people what there is in Leeds and they'll go, "er, shops?" People will stay in Leeds (hotels, restaurants) but remember the trips out of town - to Saltaire or Ilkley, to York and up into the Dales. So when someone asks those visitors where they went, the answer is Yorkshire not Leeds. Never Leeds.

Leeds needn't be boring - after all there's little to recommend Manchester (football and telly apart - and that's not really in Manchester anyhow) but it has scrubbed up well, put on its new pair of Converse and made out that it's the trendy place in the North.

Here's the problem for Leeds. Instead of a shaggy haircut, a beard and skinny jeans (or whatever is trendy these days - I'm not an expert) what Leeds has done is buy a Hugo Boss suit, some shiny shoes and a man bag. All those hipsterish trendsetters (or people who think they are and have access to a TV camera) aren't impressed.

So rather than dwelling on a (pretty impressive) arena, a (very fine) new shopping centre and some (splendidly grand) art and music venues, what Leeds needs to do is find something edgier, rougher and tougher. Perhaps change the perception so those visitors who came to Yorkshire go home and tell people they went to Leeds.

But what I do know is that moaning about how the BBC (or anyone else for that matter) has some sort of down on Leeds will get the city precisely nowhere.

Trust me on this, I'm from Bradford.

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What Sharia says about leaving your wealth to the cats home

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It's OK folks I'm not channelling some Muslim scholar or even Karl Sharro. But I am bothered by the kneejerk reaction to the Law Society's guidance on sharia wills:

The Law Society was accused of giving its stamp of approval to discriminatory practices after it published advice on writing wills which deny women an equal share and exclude “illegitimate” children or unbelievers. 

My problem is that wills are intended to be discriminatory and, more to the point, it's the testator's wealth not society's. This means that the person making the will can do so on whatever basis he or she wants. We do not need the permission of parliament to write a will in which:

“The male heirs in most cases receive double the amount inherited by a female heir of the same class. Non-Muslims may not inherit at all, and only Muslim marriages are recognised. Similarly, a divorced spouse is no longer a Sharia heir, as the entitlement depends on a valid Muslim marriage existing at the date of death.” 

This may offend you - it certainly offended ex-Conservative MP, Lousie Mensch - but there is nothing in English law to prevent people from ordering their affairs in this way.

By way of comparison, why no faux-offence at the regular decisions made by worshippers of Bast:

When the much-loved British actress Beryl Reid died, she left her £1 million home to her four cats, all of which had been strays that she had rescued.

Hamish, Coco, Boon, Tuffnel and Eileen continued to live in luxury even after their besotted owner’s death.

Is this not as egregious a decision as deciding that the strictures of an ancient religion will determine who gets what?

As a society we have two choices here: we either believe that people can decide how their wealth is distributed after they die or else we don't. And in the latter case (which those so agitated by Sharia wills seem to have adopted) we would have to accept some intervention of the state to determine how the money is divided. Tell me folks, do you want parliament to decide how you organise your estate?

If you believe in a free society where we may order our affairs as we wish then you have to accept that some people wish to live according to the rules set by their faith. And for a devout Muslim this means Sharia. This doesn't mean that we can require people to order their affairs in this way merely that, if this is what a person chooses, they've every right - in England have always had every right - to do that unhindered by the intervention of the state.

And for those who adhere to other faiths, criticising the rules set by Sharia is, to put it mildly, monumental hypocrisy.

I am still unsure though what Sharia says about leaving your wealth to the cats home?

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Thursday 20 March 2014

An everyday story of booze and bingo

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So we had a budget. We get one every year to great fanfare accompanied by every single pundit on everything issuing their 'budget review' or similar. No one sane human being can begin to comprehend the scale of gobbledegook production that is responding to the budget mere moments after the Chancellor of the Exchequer sits down.

Many years ago, in the days when I had a proper job in the private sector, we used to prop the office telly up in the board room, drag a few clients in and watch the budget. As the thing closed, we'd realise that the detail we needed wasn't in the great man's actual speech (there was always something somewhere in the darker recesses of the budget documentation about tax free limits on friendly society bonds or some bizarre but important tweak to postal regulations).

Now because this was in the days before the wild west of the web arrived, the next event was the arrival of a thick, badly printed and poorly proof-read analysis from either a bank or a big accountancy firm. This involved the firm's experts (I know they were experts because they told me so) restating what the Chancellor said only using longer words and maybe some graphs - or "charts" as they call them. All this being accompanied by urging us to take advantage of the expensive services of the bank, accountancy firm or consultancy.

Meanwhile the world returned to normal. The newspapers ran their headlines, crafting them to meet the expected tone of the rag in question all filtered through the tribal preferences of whoever was running the show at that time. The rest of us headed out to stock up on cigars, whisky and petrol ahead of the imminent deadline when, 'ping', all the prices would go up.

Budgets matter because people notice them. For once the apathetic Brit sits up and takes notice. Perhaps even talks to another person about how this political event impacts on their lives. More importantly, some time soon, the budget decision will really affect them - a few more pounds of take home pay, perhaps a more expensive shopping basket at the supermarket or maybe a little more saving and a little less taxing.

But understand this, it's not the headlines that are driving all this but the actual changes made in the budget. Cutting the duty on beer by a couple of pennies might not make any difference to what we pay but it might mean that your local doesn't close. And the same goes for bingo - for sure, it'll be a little cheaper for the punter but the real win is that the bingo halls stay open, carry on providing entertainment (and jobs) in places where those things are limited.

So when middle-class people who don't go to pubs and wouldn't be seen dead in a bingo hall accuse the chancellor of 'patronising' the working-classes by cutting taxes on beer and bingo, they miss the point entirely. And even worse when they dredge through 1984 to find the quote about beer and gambling as social control they just show contempt for people whose lives don't revolve around making grand (but still witty, ever so witty) statements about politics while paying £8 for a small bottle of achingly trendy craft beer.

And the irony of accusing the government of 'social control' when cutting those booze and bingo taxes becomes stark when the big deal in the budget - reforming pensions - is discussed. Here's where the real contempt that those good thinking 'progressives' have for ordinary people comes gushing out - "you can't trust people to spend their own money sensibly" explains one especially smug Labour advisor while others tweet that people are bad at making long-term decisions.

If making it a little easier or cheaper to drink or gamble is social control then, compared to forcing people to invest their money in a specific, government-approved manner, it's a peculiarly liberating form of social control. And one I'm quite happy with! I know I'm supposed to nod sagely at the comparing of 'booze and bingo' to 'bread and circuses' (although Juvenal's quote does start with 'now no-one buys our votes any more') but these are examples of the little pleasures that, for most people, are what makes life something other than a drudge.

For the three-and-a-half million or so bingo players and about twenty-five million beer drinkers yesterday's budget will have been cheering - not so cheering as to change much about their lives (although raising the tax threshold will have helped too) but worth a smile and a cynical 'thanks, George'.

The proof will be in the cooking and eating. But so far the budget looks OK for ordinary folk and less good for the arrogant folk who think they know better.

Cheers George!

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Wednesday 19 March 2014

Procurement and local protectionism - how 'progressive' procurement will make communities poorer

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Writing in New Start (the house journal of the Centre for Local Economic Studies, CLES) Matthew Jackson, the Centre's associate director sets out his argument for using local government procurement to do something other than securing the best price and quality for the goods or services procured. Matthew wants local protectionism:

For me, there is too much about using local government procurement to achieve efficiencies and to mitigate the impact of the cuts as opposed to advocating a progressive new future around local government procurement being used for local economic and social benefit.

This is, essentially, consultant-speak speak for finding ways round the strictures placed on procurement by the EU and Westminster governments. Rather than the commissioning and procurement process being about securing efficient and effective public services, Matthew wants to stretch its purpose to encompass the usual litany of 'progressive' politics:

Procurement should not be a narrow corporate function restricted to local government, nor is localism its primary concern. It sits at the heart of what we want and need from our public services in the future.  Of course it needs to focus on efficiencies, but effectiveness in supporting growth, addressing poverty and inequality and creating great places is the real prize.

The problem here is that these things often conflict - so which gets priority.  If using a large multinational guarantees quality and a lower price does that get the nod over the less reliable and higher cost local supplier? Matthew doesn't answer this question except to suggest that somehow we rig the procurement process.

There should therefore be a defined understanding of the key considerations of what an effective purchase is, regardless of whether it is being undertaken by central government, local government, an NHS Trust or a private business. Of course cost should be a key factor, but so should providing a great future role for our public services, as well as fairness, equality, and the opportunity to create local employment and develop local businesses.

Sadly these weasel words will infect local government leaderships, they'll cluck around the wise words of Matthew and his ilk and they'll fail to realise that the losers in all this are the very local people CLES claim their protectionist model will help.

The only way in which the model can work is for procurement costs to be higher than they would be in a system driven by seeking to maximise efficiency. And that means one of two things - either fewer services delivered to local people because more money has gone on procuring those services than was needed. Or higher taxes meaning that local people have less money to spend.

All this talk of 'fairness' and 'social benefit' coming from local protection is, quite simply, a deception typical of 'progressive' policy-making. The real result is worse government, fewer services and higher taxes.

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Tuesday 18 March 2014

On US start-ups - or rather the lack of them

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From Joel Kotkin in New Geography:

2010 SBA report found that federal regulations cost firms with less than 20 employees more than $10,000 a year per employee, while bigger firms paid roughly $7,500 per employee. The biggest hit to small business is environmental regulations, which cost small firms 364 more percent than large ones. Small companies spend an average $4,101 per employee on such regulations, compared with $1,294 at medium-size companies (20 to 499 employees) and $883 at the largest companies. This has come over a period when many of the key costs faced by the business-owning middle class – house prices, health insurance, utilities and college tuition – have all soared.

Make running a small business more expensive and there will be fewer small businesses. It's worth remembering that, when you talk to business people, it's almost always regulatory barriers that they cite as the source of growth problems. And, for large and established businesses, it makes good business sense to accept those regulatory costs since they prevent new entrants and increased competition.

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Quote of the day: on the distribution of wealth...

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From Tim:

If you've no debt and a £10 note then you, yes just you on your lonesome, has more wealth that the bottom 20% of British society in its entirety.

Worth remembering this for next time some left-wing numptie confuses wealth and income.

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Monday 17 March 2014

In which Oxfam deceive and Huff Post (and the Guardian) publish without question.

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Here's the headline:

Income Inequality Soars With Five UK Families Wealthier Than Bottom 20%


We begin with a confusion between 'wealth' and 'income' (wealth is a stock and income is a flow). The author then digs her hole of ignorance (or maybe deception) a little deeper:


The UK's five richest families have more cash between them than the poorest 20% of the entire population, 12.6 million Britons, with new research showing the chasm between rich and poor is growing wider.

The truth is that Jessica Elgot, who wrote the article has simply lifted the lies straight from the Oxfam press release without thinking - churnalism at its worst. At the top of the 'rich list' here is the Duke of Westminster with £13 billion in assets. I'm prepared to bet that, while the Duke's not short of cash, that £13 billion is nearly all land and property - and Ms Elgot put in the word cash not Oxfam.

What it isn't is income, which makes the next line of the press release (and the articles) deceptive:

Oxfam's figures also show that over the past two decades the wealthiest 0.1 percent have seen their income grow nearly four times faster than the least well off 90 percent of the population. 

This may be true but it hasn't got anything to do with wealth, with those assets that the Duke owns. Oxfam (not for the first time) are suggesting that the imbalance in wealth equates directly to an imbalance in income when it doesn't.

Whatever the political differences over inequality, we really shouldn't be making the arguments in this sloppy (or deceptive) and ignorant (or misleading) way.

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Sunday 16 March 2014

God gave us small hearts - the rebirth of nationalism

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For most of my life the 'direction of travel' (as the trendy term goes) has been towards supranationalism, towards the idea of economic blocs and even the merger of states to produce a still bigger state. In some ways this was an understandable reaction to forty years of 'cold war', to a geopolitical contest between giant states - the USSR and the USA.

So we created our own union - just as did nations in South East Asia and South America. Pushing aside all the fine words and grand statements, these blocs were comfort blankets for smaller nations in a world of power bloc politics. The politicians would point out that the EU 'prevented' another war in Europe (it's all right folks, I know this is a pretty drastic rewriting of history but that's what politicians do) and allowed us to 'compete' with the USA, with the old Warsaw Pact and with China.

Petty nationalisms - the grumbles of Catalans, Venetians, Scots and Flemings about being subsumed into a larger identity - were disparaged. Either dismissed as rose-tinted nostalgia, indulged as sweet romanticism or condemned as fascism. The great future was deeper and closer union, an inevitable journey towards a New Europe free from the old tyranny of nationalism. Only a few nationalisms, the violent ones in Ireland and the Basque country, stirred us into action but this was simply to police the problem rather than find a solution.

Today Venetians are heading to the polls to decide whether to pursue secession from Italy, to recreate the old Venetian Republic (or at least the bits of it that still remain in Italy - we forget that a fair old chunk is now in Slovenia and Croatia). Although today's vote isn't binding on the Italian government, it would be hard to see how greater autonomy cannot follow if the vote matches the opinion polls showing 65% support for the idea across the Veneto.

We are approaching a vote on Scottish independence, there will be a similar poll in Catalonia and probably one in Galicia. And places like Corsica and Sardinia have active independence movements. At its recent conference, the UK's Liberal Democrats came out in support of devolved powers - the first step on the road to independence - for Cornwall.

Those petty nationalisms that the grand Europeans sneered at have become a new politics in Europe. One that threatens not just the EU but the nations that make up the EU - Spain, Italy, the UK, Belgium. And we can no longer simply dismiss the politics of nationalism as the work of a few lunatics.

For me there are two things driving these changes - the first one is economic, expressed here by a Venetian:

"Venetians not only want out of Italy, but we also want out of the euro, the EU and Nato," said Raffaele Serafini, another pro-independence activist

The EU - and most of all, the Euro - has completely failed places like Italy. The hope that Europe would free Italy from the corrupt institutions it inherited from Fascism was dashed as those institutions - the creatures of the corporate state - became the vehicles of the commission's control.

But there's also a romantic notion here, the idea that those old and smaller places are places with which we can identify, that we can love. And that, as Venice did before and small nations - Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, Iceland - do today, such love engenders success through trade, through business rather than through the idea of the big stick implied by the economics of the power bloc.

Above all it's about the size of our hearts:

GOD gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good. 

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Saturday 15 March 2014

Why don't people complain about bad public services?

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Perhaps it's the futility of the exercise?


Nearly half of people who complained about problems with a public service in the past year felt their complaint was ignored, according to new research from Which?

The research also found that a third of people who experienced problems with public services did not complain, with most saying it was not worth the effort. Of those that did complain, 39% said they were unhappy with the outcome.

I don't know about my councillor colleagues but these findings are something of a damning statement about our councils' services (not to mention other public agencies services). Not that we get stuff wrong and generate complaints but that the public - or a whole lot of them - don't think complaining is worth while and, when they do complain, the response from the offending public service isn't good enough.

We spend a lot of time (well I don't but lots of officers and councillors do) pontificating about 'public sector ethos' and sneeringly referring to the private sector as a place of wickedness and ethical inadequacy. What this Which survey tells us is that all this grand talk of public sector moral superiority is just a load of wibble when is comes to the very basics of service.

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Friday 14 March 2014

Why do people hate social services?

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At a meeting yesterday we heard a presentation about the impact of welfare reform. The presenter, a housing officer, explained some of the issues and challenges facing families as well as some of the successes. In this presentation one comment stood out - speaking of the client group in question the officer remarked that:

"...they all have a fear of social services."

These very poor families often with huge challenges are utterly terrified of social services and the social worker because they believe that they'll take the children away. These are families where the only 'abuse' is not having enough money and the problems going along with that condition - malnourishment, ill-health, cold and so forth.

The families are happy to deal with the housing association, with outreach workers from Job Centre Plus, with any number of voluntary organisation but suggest social services and they will run a mile.

It may well be that council social services departments have real problem, one they perhaps don't fully appreciate. How do you support a family that lives in fear of you and what you might do? That considers you to be just a child snatcher?

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Thursday 13 March 2014

On corresponding with politicians...

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The other week the people who make sure Bradford Council complies with data protection rules and regulations popped along to talk to the Conservative Group. Not specially as they'd planned visits to other groups too with the aim of explaining what we could and couldn't do, what permissions we needed and how we should keep stuff (electronically and otherwise).

The discussion raised a few splutterings - we were told that, without the person's permission, we couldn't share a constituents letter with our ward colleagues or, technically, with an officer, which until you think about it seems a little daft. But, as anyone dealing with the public's interaction with politicians knows, people do not always behave rationally or indeed contact us with wholly benign purpose.

And, as I'm sure all the journalists and such like know, data protection trumps freedom of information - the letter that Mrs Smith wrote to me isn't governed by those rules, it's governed by data protection rules. And unless she has given me permission to share your FOI request will fall on stony ground.

Indeed why should you believe you have some sort of right to see a private exchange of correspondence between me, as a politicians, and a person who chooses to write to me? It really is - in the true meaning of the phrase - none of your business. It seems reasonable for me to say, if asked, that I have corresponded with Mrs Smith but the content of the letters is a matter between me and Mrs Smith not between me, Mrs Smith and the whole of humanity.

And this is as it should be. Those who believe that every last exchange that every single public official has with anyone and everyone should be made public are not only wrong in law but damage the proper delivery of public service, whether it's the MP or councillor responding to the concerns of a resident about her noisy neighbour, a minister fielding letters from people who think they're more important than they are, or indeed a public official dealing with a complaint about his department.

There's a debate to be had about transparency but it isn't about private correspondence but about the manner in which policy decisions are made and the information on which those decisions are taken. At no point does private correspondence between the politician or official and someone outside government come within the scope of that transparency.

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Wednesday 12 March 2014

How public monopoly prevents transport innovation

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For perhaps the wrong reasons we're focused again on issues relating to public transport. And this is done knowing that the majority of Brits favour the nationalisation of the railways and, I assume, believe that mayors or councils should run the buses, trams and tubes.

The problem is that we're in a time of new opportunity and change that challenges the dominant idea that city transportation schemes need to be planned. That challenge sits in our pocket or our handbag.

Just as we've seen with financial transactions, governments and the agency businesses that feed off the granting of monopolies are resistant to the disaggregated and dispersed self-service models emerging as a result of the smartphone's growing ubiquity. And in doing so we do the public a disservice.

Before I talk about some specifics - drawing on US examples where the challenge to public transportation monopoly is more developed - here's a section of Boris Johnson's 'tribute' to union boss, Bow Crow:

"Whatever our political differences, and there were many, this is tragic news," he said.

"Bob fought tirelessly for his beliefs and for his members.

"There can be absolutely no doubt that he played a big part in the success of the Tube, and he shared my goal to make transport in London an even greater success. It's a sad day."

Now I'm sure that these were nice words about the boss of a key London 'stakeholder' but it beggars belief to say that a union forcing costs up and resisting change or efficiency is in the interests of London's transport systems.

So to San Francisco where there have been a series of battles around what are know as "tech buses" - these are services, provided by Silicon Valley business, that take workers from the city out into the valley for work. And they are unpopular with users of existing (more expensive and less reliable) public transport systems. Resulting in a variety of bus-based class warfare:

This December, several anti-bus rallies were held in the Mission District by a group that called themselves the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency. The group blocked buses and held up signs with statements like “Warning: Two-Tier System.” One man made headlines by dressing up, and, after claiming he worked for Google, berating the protestors with appalling class rhetoric. But it turned out he was really just an imposter, having worked previously as an Occupy organizer. Another protest in Oakland led — as ones there often do — to bus vandalism.

Note the words 'two-tier system' - hipster techie folk who earn good money out in the valley get a lovely shiny bus service whereas the other folk have to make do with late, dirty buses. And it spills over into the Bay Area's gentrification rows:

“In case you’re wondering why this happened, we’ll be extremely clear. The people outside your Google bus serve you coffee, watch your kids, have sex with you for money, make you food, and are being driven out of their neighborhoods. While you guys live fat as hogs with your free 24/7 buffets, everyone else is scraping the bottom of their wallets, barely existing in this expensive world that you and your chums have helped create."

The problem isn't American capitalism though. The problem is the municipal monopoly - the unholy alliance between the city government and unions to deliver an inefficient, expensive and unresponsive transportation system:

Muni, the city’s local bus, rail, and cable car service, is similarly inefficient. A study last May found that its on-time ratings hovered around 50 percent due to rail cars that regularly broke down. These delays cost an estimated $50 million in productivity — yet Muni has California’s second-highest paid transit workers.

The government-run rail that follows a similar route as the tech buses is Caltrain. Today, its customers endure a plodding, 90-minute ride from San Francisco to San Jose. This same trip takes under an hour by automobile, helping explain why some companies now bus in their employees.

Those 'tech buses' are a response to a failed service monopoly (and that monopoly's owner - the city council - has got its rents from the 'tech buses' by charging them a fee to stop at a bus stop) that doesn't meet the needs of local commuters. Looking a little deeper we find that the San Francisco authorities want to stamp out any innovation - not just the 'tech buses' but the growing use of ridesharing, a business that threatens the lucrative taxi monopoly (a license in San Francisco is over $250,000, in New York the coveted 'medallion' sells at touching $1m).

Indeed the business threat of this 'sharing economy' (we've seen the same regulatory response to Airbnb, for example) is repeated across other US cities - Seattle, for example, has threatened rules that would limit the numbers of drivers using services like Uber and Lyft, and one Seattle councillor proposes that the cab drivers become 'unionized city employees'.

Back in San Francisco, where Uber started, the debate is stuck at finding ways to control these new private transportation systems, to force the 35,000 people using the 'tech buses' back onto the old creaking public system and to regulated cabs rather than find a neighbour to share your ride with.

For Britain (outside London) the situation remains more flexible with a mixed economy of provision as well as the widespread availability of mini-cabs as well as Hackney cabs. There are moves by public transport authorities towards more directed and planned models such as 'quality bus contracts' and local councils jealously guard the revenue generator that is the taxi trade. But what isn't happening - with one or two striking exceptions - is the exploration of new economy solutions to urban transportation. Indeed the debate, such as it is, seems to me moving more towards greater use of monopoly power to prevent innovation than towards actually meeting the transport needs of local residents.

But then, so long as we think union bosses like Bob Crow are part of the solution rather than an obstacle to better services we will be stuck in this dead debate. Even worse if we persist with the 'Big City Boss' approach to delivering those services that Boris Johnson (drifting ever nearer to Bloomberg's urban fascism) seems to prefer. The development of better transport really isn't down to pouring billions of borrowed money into the ground and cosy deals between union bosses and city mayors.

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Tuesday 11 March 2014

...but who will build the roads?







The same sort of folk as built the last lot I guess.

Next question please?

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Monday 10 March 2014

Funny what you read in the Spanish papers!

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The Lib Dems are proposing an MP (or MPs given the number of Brits there) for the Costa del Sol:

The Liberal Democrats will fight to introduce a Costa del Sol MP after agreeing on a policy for overseas constituencies at their spring party conference.

An interesting idea but it seems a little odd to me. Right now ex-pats retain voting rights (at either a registered address or in the constituency where they last resided) for 15 years after departing these shores.

Now I've a bit of a problem with this idea.  Someone who departs for good to some other land (and, in the case of Spain at least) will get all those democratic rights in the new place - why should they retain them in the place they moved from? Were I to depart from Cullingworth for, let's say, Billericay, I wouldn't expect to retain the right to vote in Bradford's elections when I get the wonderful opportunity to elect people to Basildon District and Essex County!

Why do this for folk living in Benahavis who will either retain their registration in the UK or else will get the chance to elect people to the Benahavis council, the Andalucia region and the Madrid parliament?

Perhaps the Lib Dems think these ex-pats will vote for them? They are in for a cruel shock I think!

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Sunday 9 March 2014

Assisted suicide requires one person to kill another person. That's wrong.

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We have taken another step towards allowing the killing or the old and the ill - or 'assisted suicide' as the modern euphemism describes it.

The legislation of assisted suicide has moved a significant step closer after the Government made clear that it would not stand in the way of a change in the law.
Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs and peers – including Coalition ministers – will be given a free vote on a Bill that would enable doctors to help terminally ill patients to die.

Such a step would be terrible and tragic. I don't say this for reasons of religious conviction - I'm not sure I have much of that left - but for reasons of consequence and because we assume that the motives of the killer are always pure.

I've written before that my Mum worked with the elderly for over two decades - running a day centre, delivering meals-on-wheels and organising a whole range of other support and service. And one thing she said more than once was that almost every day she heard at least one old person wish they were dead.

"I'm just a burden" the old person would say. Or "I'm trapped in this flat, it's not worth living". Even "were I dead the grandkids could have the money".

And my mum, in her practical way, would tell them not to be so daft, to have a cup of tea and that she'd get her onto the minibus next week for the trip to Ramsgate. If mum knew the family or the neighbour she'd ask them to call roand - give a bit of cheer to a depressed old person.

Imagine instead the world of 'assisted suicide'. There'd be a form to fill in, a signature or other indication of assent to obtain and probably a certificate from a doctor confirming the old person was compus mentus. The minibus wouldn't be to Ramsgate but to a comfortable hospital bed where that old person would be made comfortable. The family might cluck round a bit but probably not - just enough to make sure the deed was done.

And then the doctor would kill that person. Dead.

Is this what we want in a civilised society? Is this progress?

I don't think so. It doesn't matter how you wrap it up, how many tragic circumstances are produced to support the proposals, 'assisted suicide' requires one person to kill another person. And that is wrong.

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Saturday 8 March 2014

Nannying fussbucket of the week: Tracey "Ban Alcohol" Crouch MP

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Some "charity" or other has got some headlines by saying that serving drinks at school events 'sets a bad example' to children. And, as ever there's a politician on hand to call for the ban:

Swanswell (that's the "charity" in question) has given evidence to an all-party parliamentary group on alcohol misuse.

Tracey Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford, who chairs the committee, said she would support reforms to ensure that the sale of alcohol was not permitted in schools. "Alcohol is so visible elsewhere that I don't think it needs to be on school premises."

Ms Crouch has form and joins a growing list of Tory MPs I'd find it very difficult to vote for.

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Thursday 6 March 2014

Brass bands or opera? The tale of arts funding

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Shipley's MP Phil Davies has highlighted a concern that many of us have raised before - the way in which arts funding is dominated by a limited number of elite arts including opera:

Philip Davies, who sits on Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport select committee, says he shares concerns that the north is being overlooked for arts funding.

He uncovered figures which show that opera is getting £347.4 million during the five years of the current Parliament, compared to just £1.8 million for brass bands. 

Now much though I like opera, I find this a shockingly disproportionate distribution - assuming we support the idea of government funding for the arts (not everyone does, I know), surely art forms like brass band music deserve a fairer share?

What is more dispiriting is that the Director North for Arts Council England (I note the pretentious styling of the organisation's titles and name) can only parrot the official line from their London press office:

There are valuable and varied accounts of the arts and culture landscape across the country and we hope that the Committee receives a range of submissions that show this diversity of experience and opinion

Wibble. The truth is that the Royal Opera House alone will receive £77.5m in Arts Council grant between 2012 and 2015. As far as I can tell this is significantly more that the entire amount of grant funding given by the Arts Council to Bradford organisations. And it dwarfs support for traditional working class arts like brass band music.

It has long seemed to me that we subsidise art for the wealthy while allowing genuine community arts to wither away for lack of support.

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It was either this or a red nose...


Via the brilliant Pop-up City we discover that the Finnish Reindeer Herders Association is trying out a new way to reduce the estimated 2000 plus reindeer-related road accidents:

A new experiment involving the protection of free-roaming reindeer may just be inspired by Rudolph’s most virtuous characteristic. The project involves coating reindeer antlers with a specially formulated glow-in-the-dark liquid that aims to reduce reindeer-related traffic accidents.

Does make Rudolf's nose redundant though!

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Wednesday 5 March 2014

On the popularity of politics

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Us politicians like to think that what we do is grabbing the attention of the masses. We kid ourselves that people are actually interested in out rants, ramblings and petty spats. The truth is that people aren't interested - only about 1% of the population joins a political party and perhaps less than 10% is actually interested in politics.

An illustration of this comes from election news aggregator, Electionista, who tweeted the top seven most followed political parties in Europe:
What is interesting here isn't the order but the number of followers - the 'Five Star' movement in Italy is the most followed with 270,000 followers, not surprising for a web-savvy populist movement. For the UK, the two big parties have far fewer - 125,000 for Labour and 104,000 for the Conservatives. To put this in a bit of context here are the seven most followed premier league football teams:

Arsenal 3.56m
Chelsea 3.46m
Liverpool 2.40m
Man United 2.01m
Man City 1.55m
Spurs 775k
Everton 376k

Only two premier league teams have fewer followers than the Conservatives (Crystal Palace and Hull since you ask) add Cardiff City and you have the three teams with fewer followers than Labour. This might not be an entirely fair comparison but it does suggest politics has something of a problem. Or maybe we are a mature enough society not to be all that fussed about the antics of us politicians?

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Tuesday 4 March 2014

The Chief Medical Officer misleads parliament about sugar and obesity...again

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This is 'normal service':

She said she believes "the research will find sugar is addictive" and that "we may need to introduce a sugar tax".

I sorry but it simply is not true - not even a tiny little bit - that sugar is addictive. Except in the 'it's very nice and we like to eat it' sense of addiction.  The 'research' as the Chief Medical Officer is already there - lots of it - and it says that sugar isn't addictive. Here's Jan Ulbrecht, associate professor in biobehavioral health and medicine in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State University arguing that sugar isn't addictive:

"Since the human body does not become physically dependent on sugar the way it does on opiates like morphine and heroin, sugar is not addictive," 

The idea - commonplace amongst the purveyors of New Puritan junk science - is that, because sugar stimulates the brain to produce dopamine in the same way as cocaine therefore it is addictive.

The central issue here, however, isn't about addiction but about obesity - firstly whether we have increasing levels of obesity and secondly whether that obesity is caused by our increasing dependence on sugar.

Both of these things are false.

On the growth in obesity - here's a chart of mean BMI (body mass index) for the UK 1993-2007:

On average we really haven't got much fatter. And we know that childhood obesity is falling something that probably reflects the other unhelpful fact for anti-sugar campaigners - children are consuming less sugar (in every form).

Indeed sugar consumption has fallen - all forms of sugar not merely the white stuff in the sugar bowl but the scary 'hidden sugar' the campaigners keep telling us about. Our consumption of 'non-milk extrinsic sugars' has fallen by more than half since the 1970s and by 10% over the past decade. Sugars now represent about 16% of our total energy intake compare to about a third three decades ago. If there's a single culprit for the increased levels of obesity it isn't sugar. Indeed nothing other than fruit and fruit juices has increased compared to 1970.


So why, given the availability of this real information - that there isn't an 'obesity epidemic' and that sugar consumption has halved - does the Chief Medical Officer make out to MPs that sugar is a problem that requires regulation or a new tax?

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On being trade...a memory of Penge

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My mum used to deliver meals-on-wheels in Penge - delivering hot dinners to lots of old people who might otherwise have missed out on a decent meal.

Now, as older residents will know, near the centre of Penge there used to be set of alms houses called the William IV Naval Asylum (know back then as simply 'the naval cottages'). They are described here:

Forming three sides of a forecourt garden, the red-brick and stone almshouses were built in 1847 by Hayward & Nixon to a design by Philip Hardwick, designer of Euston Arch. The style was Tudor Gothic with many gables and clusters of tall octagonal chimneys, the three groups unified with horizontal string courses and parapets. The almshouses were opened in 1849 and living accommodation was generous with living room, dining room, three bedrooms and a tiny maid's room approached by its own winding staircase.

The houses weren't intended for able seamen or even petty officers but for the relicts of senior naval officers and, back in the early 1970s, those naval widows were getting meals-on-wheels. I can vaguely recall the place - in particular the chimneys which were so different from the predominantly late Victorian housing in the rest of Penge (or that part of the town not bombed by that nice Mr Hitler).

So mum delivered the dinners to these very posh ladies, so posh that, for one, mum had to go through the kitchen door. The front door was only opened for visitors and mum, for all that she was bringing the only hot meal that lady would get that day, didn't qualify as a visitor. Mum was trade. And trade used the kitchen door.

Sadly the naval cottages are no more (although the architecturally more interesting Watermen & Lightermen Almshouses still remain) but remembering that my mum's act of care was viewed as trade always brings a smile to my face. Indeed the idea that posh folk shouldn't sully their hands, let alone open the front door, seems somehow foreign and distant these days (even though we still privilege some jobs as better and special - the law and medicine in particular).

Back then the vestiges of that older world lingered on in Penge. Many of the women mum took dinners to had been in service up to getting married and there were still bits of that old wealthy Penge too. As well as the naval widows there was Dr Arnott, retired university professor and communist, and his wife (a former union general secretary) where three dinners were delivered, the third being for their maid. There were couples in houses too big for them on the grand Cator estate and there were old ladies on Belvedere Road in mansion flats filled with fading glory.

Even back then most Penge residents were cramming onto trains every day to London, working in banks, insurance companies and the other engines of commerce in town. Mostly these workers weren't the ones in suits but the others, the sort of City of London trade - janitors, repair men, receptionists, lift operators, boilermen and post boys. They joined, in that egalitarian way of the commuter train, managers from Bromley or Beckenham and grand folk from further into Kent, out Sevenoaks way where the stockbrokers and merchant bankers reside.

It's a long while since I was last in Penge but this picture of a place that changed as the grand houses around Crystal Palace declined and the town joined the London commuter world sticks with me. And the mild offence that making my mum go round that back to do someone a favour of taking a hot meal also remains. I will have been guilty of judging someone by what they do but I hope I've never given the impression that somehow another person isn't 'our sort' just because of the job they're doing.

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Leaving Bradford? Your views please

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OK, I most of you aren't from (or especially interested in) Bradford but for those who are there's a blog post at the Bingley Rural Conservatives website about whether Shipley, Bingley and Keighley should leave Bradford:

There are undoubtedly differing views about this idea – some feel that replacing rule from Bradford with rule from Keighley isn’t necessarily an improvement while others feel that the dominance of the old City over the wider District leads to misplaced priorities. Phil Davies is very concerned about planning decisions but there must be equal concern about the manner in which Bradford Labour has implemented its cuts to services.

Just recently, during the budget discussions, Labour proposed closing five children’s centres – every one in the Shipley and Keighley constituencies and every one in a ward with Conservative councillors. The same goes for spending on highways, on youth services and on regeneration – the focus is on the City and especially the City centre.

Happy to accept views from anywhere - politeness is, as always, urged on you!

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Monday 3 March 2014

Middle class bureaucrat attacks the working class for...er....being working class

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Peter Brant who is head of policy at the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (perhaps one of the more patronising job titles I've read recently) seems to think that working class parents are bringing up their children to be too working class.


He highlighted barriers to children from less well-off backgrounds being able to achieve their potential, including a lack of shared cultural experiences such as watching plays and taking up hobbies, and a lack of ‘cultural reference points’.

The working classes also have different attitudes towards people and relationships’, including more ‘subtext, nuance and casualness’ in middle class relationships.

The working and middle class also enjoy different food, restaurants, and clothes, he said.


There you have it folks. Nothing to do with working class children being dumped into the worst schools. Nothing about 'like selecting like'. Zilch about the expectations of parents, teachers and peers. Nope.

This man believes the problem poorer kids fail is not looking like middle class kids. And presumably liking a kebab after six pints of Carling. So we must send them to special classes where they can learn how to be like the middle class kids, so they can 'fit in'.

Perhaps, rather than running down working class pleasures and choices, people like Peter Brant need to think about challenging the sneering dismissal of those working class pastimes - whether it's the 'different restaurants', a different choice in drink or a liking for baseline, tattoos and the wearing of baseball caps the wrong way round.

Social mobility isn't about 'fitting in', about conforming to someone elses average. Social mobility is about opportunity, about giving people the chance to succeed, about education and about celebrating the passions that bring achievement. To say that the way someone talks, walks, dresses, drinks or eats is the problem is not just wrong but an insult to all those working class men and women who succeed in their lives.

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