Friday 31 October 2014

Friday Fungus: Halloween! Why witches fly on broomsticks...

Ah ergot, driving us all mad for centuries (and killing us). The active ingredient in this fungus that grows on cereal crops is pretty similar, in chestry and effect, to LSD. So, not surprisingly, people used to to take a trip - on a broomstick:

A number of Spanish witches admitted during their inquisitions that they engaged in night-flying. This is because witches would use hallucinogenic drugs to get high and make them believe they were flying. Their way of administering the drugs was rather novel even by modern day standards.

The hallucinogenic they used was called ergot, it came from a mould that grew on rye bread. In high doses ergot is fatal, but small amounts would lead to extremely intense experiences. Therefore, in order to avoid the risk of death, witches looked for alternative ways to absorb the drug quickly into their blood stream.

The most effective way, and the one with the least ill-effects, was through the female genitals. Witches would rub an ointment made with ergot onto the end of their broomsticks and quite literally sit on it.

So there you go - that's how witches fly!

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Can we have a feminist outcry about this please?

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From the report - a flawed report, for sure, but valuable nonetheless - by Labour MP Anne Coffey and commissioned by Greater Manchester Police. If we want to know one of the biggest reasons why we're failing to protect girls and young women from rape and abuse try this:

In a normally confidential file, prosecutors spell out how a young abuse victim dressing in provocative clothes was enough for them not to take the case to court.

It states: ‘The victim is known (as highlighted by social workers) to tend to wear sexualised clothes when she is out of school, such as cropped tops.’

‘While her age at the time and the date of the decision are not given, it gives two similarly disturbing examples for prosecutors not proceeding with abuse allegations. One said how a girl’s “unsettled background” made her “far from an ideal victim”’, while another pointed out, “I note her father has referred to her to a social worker as being a slag, saying she is responsible for what has happened”.

Can we be clear about this once and for all - how a girl dresses, how she speaks and how much vodka she's consumed are not invitations for men to rape her. Yet that is precisely what the police, social services and the prosecutors are saying. And, as a result, rapists are getting away with it. These are girls - children - and we've a duty to protect them. We aren't.

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Can we still trust the police?

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This report worries me:

Police investigated the political beliefs of a grieving woman – including her views on human rights and the war in Afghanistan – after she complained about the police’s handling of the death of her mother.

The police also claimed that the woman appeared to be mentally ill and placed her on an official register for vulnerable adults without consulting any medical professionals. They later conceded that she was not mentally ill.

Internal police documents reveal how Sussex police compiled a 14-page secret report on Eccy de Jonge, a philosophy academic, shortly after her 83-year-old mother died in a road accident.

The police carried out “full intelligence checks” on de Jonge and gathered comments she had posted on media sites.

It seems to me that this is an abuse of power plain and simple. Perhaps the police here were over-zealous and the woman in question was persistent in her complaints. But the defence put up is equally disturbing:

“There are objectively no credible grounds on which to base an allegation of police officers being engaged in secret operations against the complainant or seeking to protect any officer involved in the tragic road traffic collision.

“In fact, we have done everything to seek to resolve allegations in a fair and proportionate way and attempt to act in the complainant’s best interests.

“Officers are entitled or expected to have discussions as to how to address complaints, make decisions, or how to attempt to make progress with fatal road traffic collision victim’s relatives – this is not evidence of nefarious dossiers, collusion, or protectionism.”

Now there may be more to all this than meets the eye but I fail to see how trawling through someone's life to see if they're 'anti-police' is not why we employ police officers. And more to the point the spokesman is wrong - we know this because the police did compile a 14-page document that did not relate in any manner at all to the matter under investigation (a complaint about the handling of a road traffic fatality).

This story reminds me that the police probably haven't got enough to do, are not subject to sufficient scrutiny and have more than sufficient powers. We are told that "if we've done nothing wrong, we've nothing to fear" - the woman in this case did nothing wrong yet the police used their powers to set about compiling a hatchet job - we do have something to fear after all.

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Thursday 30 October 2014

More politics should be local - if we want people to understand it and take part


Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute has written - taking this piece from Ezra Klein as his text - about ideology, ignorance and information. Sam observes:

The vast majority of the public is shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, with the informational ‘elite’ also happening to be the more closed-minded. The alternative to closed-mindedness may simply be to be extremely uninformed.

I find this interesting because, as I am deeply embedded in an ideological system, I see the degree to which this lack of information dominates. Our debates are couched in terms of what will appeal to the voter (or a section of the voter audience) regardless of whether the position is backed by facts. We even - as evidenced by the Government's response to a Home Office report on drugs - lay claim to being evidence-based when we aren't, usually through a process of circular reasoning and appeals to our preferred 'experts'.

Because modern government is complicated, modern politics is also complicated (and, as Sam says, the world is complicated too - but then it always was). And since most people are not interested in politics, most people are ignorant of the 'truth' about the "basic facts" that inform political debate. The individual's typical engagement with politics is either half-hearted (turning out to vote) or driven by a specific and urgent threat to his interests or in response to something that has damaged him personally.  As Tip O'Neill put it, all politics is local - and there's nothing more local than our own garden gate or our own family.

We choose to be shocked that people don't know how many immigrants there are, how much money we spend on foreign aid and how much it costs us to be a member of the European Union. Yet why should we expect the ordinary voter to know these facts when they are of no significance or interest to them in their daily lives? Indeed, those people can respond with a different set of facts that are just as important (to the individual voter) that we wouldn't reasonably expect the political elite to know - vital information like when the school parents evening is, how much money is there to pay for Christmas or buy a family holiday and where the local farmer plans to build a new barn.

Now the voters know there's a link between the everyday things that fill their lives - work, family, friends, the neighbourhood - and those grand questions debated on the Sunday morning politics shows they don't watch. But they struggle to see that link. They see little connection between the electing of politicians and the bins getting emptied or there being a village school.

However, this is better than the reverse situation - the typical politician or pundit makes no effort to connect the grand and sweeping debate about the economy, immigration and the welfare state to the specific concerns of those ordinary voters. We pretend to understand the link, to see the connection between the decisions the DWP, Home Office or Treasury make and the everyday lives of the people. But in truth there is no link, we are constantly shocked by the sub-optimal (I'm being kind here) outcomes of the decisions taken under our political system, yet fail to realise that it is our technocratic preference for 'evidence-based' politics that creates this problem.

Since we are talking about politics rather than ideological choices, I'll put to one side Sam's suggestion "... that less cognitively-demanding ways of making decisions, like markets, may be even more valuable than we realise", and talk instead about Tip O'Neill's dictum - all politics is local. This means that, if we want to make politics more comprehensible, we need to frame the discussion at the level of people's interests - at the local level. To be parochial, the precise numbers or type of immigrants matters little to people in Cullingworth but the fact of immigration does. And people want to debate the issue on the basis of how it affects them not in the manner of pundits on Newsnight bashing each other over the head with competing statistics.

The solution to our dilemma about information, if not to immigration, is to make more of our politics local, to devolve more decision-making down to the local level and to conduct debate and discussions about political issues within that local context. Tip O'Neill was a Boston Democrat in a state dominated by the Democrats but he knew that, not only was politics contested within his party at the local level, but there was always the possibility of a Republican winning if those locals thought he was the better man. And for all that O'Neill was a national figure, he still returned to the place that elected him - what happened there, what was said to him there, how his voters behaved informed his politics.

Tim Worstall has touched on this issue a few times in talking about Denmark:

We'd want their taxation system as well: the national income tax is 3.76% and the top national rate is 15%. True, total income taxes are high but the rest is levied by the commune, a political unit as small as 10,000 people. At that scale, taxation is subject to the Bjorn's Beer Effect. If you know that it's Bjorn who levies your taxes, Bjorn who spends your taxes and also know where Bjorn has his Friday night beer, then he's going to spend your money wisely. Otherwise he can't go out for a beer on Friday, can he?

And I would add that people talk to Bjorn - not about those grand matters beloved of our ideological punditry but about the wall that's falling down, how granny didn't get seen by the doctor quickly enough and about the smell from the chicken factory. Moreover, the people talking to Bjorn know he can do something to fix their problem. Here in Cullingworth, while I can sort some stuff out for folk, much of what bugs them is decided a long way away by people they don't know who more-or-less speak a different language. And those decisions taken a long way away mean I can speed up granny's appointment or stop the smell from the chicken factory.

If we want a more comprehensible politics we need to get the decision-making (and the money) down to that local level where people really can influence how those decisions are made. This isn't about educating stupid voters or bashing our foreheads at their utter idiocy - the default reaction of our punditry - but about a politics that matters to the voter by actually touching on the reality of their lives. But I guess the pull of those Sunday morning politics shows will win - politics will carry on being incomprehensible, still be irrelevant to the lives of the typical voter. For all the talk of localism and devolution, politics will remain something played with by fine folk a long way away from the voter and those fine folk will continue to think the voter stupid because he doesn't know some statistics or gets a fact wrong.

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Wednesday 29 October 2014

The progressive left don't believe in free speech - and will redefine speech to pretend otherwise...

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Free speech is important. It's not just me saying that most people think free speech is one of our core values:

When asked what British values are, the most-chosen answers from all respondents were: respect for the law (69%); respect for free speech (66%); democracy (64%); respect for private property (62%); and equality between men and women (61%).

Now I know we can argue over what we mean by values but there's no doubt that most people have been raised with an essential belief in free speech. The problem comes when we begin to discuss what we mean by this free speech. Do we actually mean that people have the right to say whatever they like free from consequence? Take this comment from Norman Tebbit:

‘I’m not a particular friend of Leon Brittan, but this gentleman could equally well get up and accuse me of things like this – and I wouldn’t care for that. In fact I’d probably go round and smack him on the nose.’ 

This comment was in the context of parliamentary privilege - a peculiar form of free speech where there are, quite literally, no consequences. But in the context of free speech the words that upset Norman Tebbit enough for him to 'go round and smack him on the nose' are protected whereas the consequential physical violence isn't. However, in most circumstances, if we can demonstrate that the words spoken are untruthful, offensive and damaging then we have recourse to the law to get them withdrawn and to secure compensation.

None of this restricts free speech. You are quite at liberty to libel someone but you do so at the risk of having to withdraw the words and pay the offended person. However, we have added some other constraints on free speech within the criminal law through, for example, the Racism and Religious Hatred Act 2006. These constraints take the form of acting in response to words seen as incitement (in the case of the Act above, incitement to hatred). We have also seen constraints placed on 'offensive' or 'threatening' speech where it is broadcast or published including via social media like Twitter or Facebook. And finally we have direct and specific restrictions on free speech in the form of bans and controls on certain forms of commercial speech. The best example here is the ban on advertising tobacco products.

So while we say free speech is important we have allowed limits to be placed on speech that mean it is not always free and unlike the USA we have no First Amendment merely the goodwill of parliament in protecting our freedom. And this allows people to play a game of redefining what we mean by speech in order to justify censorship. Here's Anshuman A. Mondal setting out the premise for his justification of such censorship:

However, in his seminal book How to Do Things with Words, the Oxford philosopher J L Austin developed something known as 'speech act theory'. He argued that there were two broad categories of speech: the first, which he called 'constatives', are simply descriptive and informational; the second he called 'performatives', and they don’t simply say something, they do something. These forms of speech are therefore a kind of action.

In my book Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, I argue that the giving and taking of offence are performative speech acts in Austin’s sense. They act upon the world and the work they do is political insofar as they aim to establish a power relation between offender and offendee. Put simply, to offend someone is to subordinate them, to put them down. Conversely, to take offence is to draw attention to that subordination.

So we have two sorts of speech - one (facts and figures or stuff like that) Mondal would allow to be free while the other (opinions, observations and exhortations) should be constrained because to use such language is an act of oppression. Mondal argues (from his premise based on one philosopher's work) that the second type of speech isn't speech but action and thereby no different from Norman Tebbit's smack on the nose. Thus:

If some forms of speech are actions, then it follows that restricting or regulating them does not necessarily diminish freedom in speech in general, just as restrictions on some acts – say, robbery or murder – do not jeopardise freedom as such. Otherwise, the only true freedom would be anarchy.

Now this may be an entirely circular argument since you have to accept Austin's philosophical position that certain types of speech are actions, but it also raises a definitional problem because you have to set the boundary between speech that is protected and speech that isn't. And it is clear that Mondal intends this definition to be in the hands of the offended person - if they are offended then the speech should not be protected. Not only has Mondal redefined speech but, in doing so, he also redefines freedom (or rather suggests there is more than one sort of freedom):

If giving and taking offence is the idiom through which struggles over freedom and equality are being articulated in contemporary society then a society that desires a balance between freedom and equality is perfectly entitled to restrict and regulate offensive speech acts, either by legal means or through moral pressure. This is not the threat to freedom of speech that some might take it to be, but rather a shaping of the kind of freedom we, as a political community, believe to be desirable.

In essence we have the progressive dilemma - a vocal assertion of civil liberties combining with the desire to control the words people use through fiat. To square this particular circle it is essential to redefine both parts of the term 'free speech'. Thus some speech is redefined as action (not objectively different from a smack on the nose) and freedom is framed in the context of equality rather than individual autonomy. Neither of these new definitions make sense to the ordinary person, we are in a world where it isn't possible for a black person to be racist or a woman sexist.

Lastly such a redefinition hands to others an absolute power over what is said - I cannot predict whether what I say will 'offend' because the choice to be offended is not in my control. Moreover, Mondal want certain protected groups to have a monopoly in the use of law to police that offence. It is commonplace to see someone who isn't actually 'offended' by some speech arguing that the speech is 'offensive'. In effect no speech is protected and what we understand as free speech ceases to exist.

The result of this is that things that needed to be said don't get said for fear of someone badging what is said offensive. And this has enormous and damaging consequences for our society. Free speech is important, too important to be defined by whether or not someone is offended by that speech.

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Tuesday 28 October 2014

Why everyone is right about immigration...

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City-AM published a piece of mapping showing - or purporting to show - the lack of relationship between high levels of immigration and UKIP voting habits.

The results are similar across England and Wales, with Ukip's key messages on Europe and immigration hitting hardest in the areas with the fewest immigrants. 

Now I could quibble with the conclusions made about the map since the Boston area clearly shows some of the highest proportions of residents with a non-British nationality and UKIP is pretty strong there - it's one of the places where they've a better than evens chance of winning in next year's general election.

But this isn't the point I want to make. Rather I want to argue that only relatively small numbers of immigrants are needed to alter people's perceptions of immigration. So we'll start with this statement from the article accompanying the maps:

Ukip's first elected MP, Douglas Carswell, represents the coastal seat of Clacton, where residents with a non-British nationality make up between one and three per cent of the population.

Clacton's electorate is 67,447 - is 1-3% of these people are not UK citizens that's 1349 adults, Add in children and we've between two and three thousand immigrants in Clacton. I'm going to guess that these immigrants are concentrated in the parts of the constituency with low cost housing, often (and this is especially true of seaside towns) close to the centre of town. There'll be a shop saying 'Polski Sklep' or similar that caters for the community. One of the pubs in town will become a gathering place and there'll be a collection of lurid and overblown stories about crime or violence. Someone, somewhere will say the town is being 'swamped' by 'these people'.

So while folk like me who say that immigration is far less of a problem than people make out are right, it's also true that these perceptions - the impact of immigrants on how people see a place - are true. People do see that their town has changed, and don't always see that change as being for the best. And we shouldn't dismiss such botheration as 'xenophobia' or 'racism' or those who express concerns as narrow-minded little Englanders (or whatever chosen pejorative us who know better have selected).

If there is a solution then it lies in getting to know the immigrant, in breaking out from the 'Parallel Lives' situation that described Bradford after the riots of 2001. Now I think a good deal of the onus here is on the immigrant to respect local culture, mores and rules - it is completely unreasonable for us to be expected to change the way we talk, act or otherwise behave so as to accommodate immigrants. But this also means that one of those old customs - being a good and welcoming host - applies. And this is down to us who already live here.

Three years ago I wrote about the village where I live:

Friday night, Cullingworth Conservative Club and it's quite busy. There are a few blokes who've chosen to watch the rugby here rather than at home as well as the usual Friday night collection. Some people are playing dominoes in the corner, others are playing snooker and the rest are sitting or standing to talk and drink.

All very typical of that English culture which presents such a barrier to those from different cultures we might say. But let me invite you to take a little closer look - and to discover why the separate development theory of multiculturalism was wrong.

Stood, pint in hand, with the rugby watchers is Manu - newsagent, Parish Councillor, avid Bradford City fan. Across the lounge sits another middle-aged Asian lady with her friend - her white, bottle-blonde friend. Occasional side conversations are held between her and others passing by - some older, some younger. Friendly exchanges about shared experiences in village, mutual acquaintances and other such matters of moment.

Among the domino players is Pete - Chinese takeaway owner and former ping-pong player. Pete's also on the club committee and, while his accent's a bit impenetrable after a few lager & blackcurrants, he's as much part of the Club and the village as anyone else.

I'm pretty sure that, if I put my head round the corner past the one-armed bandit, there'll be a selection of the Brown clan - mostly third or fourth generation in the village and varying in colour from dark brown to a good sun tan. And sitting with them will be friends and neighbours, girlfriends and boyfriends - also native to the village but with a paler hue.

And there will be others less noticeable among the crowd. People whose parents arrived after the war from Eastern Europe, for example. Beyond the Club, there's a Muslim lady who's our GP, there's 'Smiler' who owns the general store and many others who - like me - aren't from the village. Yet we seem to get along alright. There aren't all that many fights - and these won't usually result from racism.

This is the sort of world we should aspire to and it isn't served by wanting to stop all immigration now nor is it helped by telling anyone who expresses worries about immigration that they're thick xenophobic racists.

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Monday 27 October 2014

In which the left remind us they hold the electorate in contempt (if they vote the wrong way)


I've no time for UKIP at all. Not only are their policies confused, swaying from gung ho libertarianism to proposing frightening degrees of state control, but the Party's strategy is entirely defined by Nigel Farage's desire to damage the Conservative Party. I find UKIP's approach almost as opportunistic as the old Liberal Democrats - chap down the pub complains about the smoking ban and UKIP want to scrap it. And when he moves on to not liking gay people getting hitched UKIP bounce onto that bandwagon.

But it's not the bloke in the pub's fault that UKIP act as an echo chamber for his prejudices, he's just doing what he has always done - sounding off about the ills of the world. And some of what he says is right - the smoking ban killed thousands of pubs along with the jobs of people who worked in those pubs, the EU is an undemocratic and unaccountable nightmare we'd be better off without and there are too many jobsworths at the Council.

But disagreeing with that bloke isn't a justification for being rude about him, for treating him with contempt. Yet this - and the poster above reminds us - is exactly how the left think we should campaign against UKIP. By calling the people who vote for that party "thick". Now I know this is the default view that the typical Guardian reader has of the working class or lower middle class voter, perhaps it reflects a deep disappointment that some of those voters no longer dutifully vote Labour as they're supposed to do (this may reflect the fact that the Labour candidate they're given - middle class, university educated, full of fancy words - doesn't hold or respect those voters' values). But it displays an utterly appalling arrogance.

If the left really want to respond to UKIP (rather than hope enough damage is done to the Conservatives that Ed Miliband gets to be PM on the votes of a third of the electorate) then they need to start listening to what the bloke in the pub is saying. Responding to his concerns about immigration, trying to understand why he's bothered about gay marriage and discussing what's wrong with the EU. Calling him thick is to guarantee that he'll carry right on voting UKIP. Why on earth should he vote for someone who thinks he's an idiot and isn't prepared to listen to what he's saying?

These are ordinary voters who are worried about things they see around them. They aren't stupid, they're not thick and they deserve our respect. If the left can't do that it deserves to be wiped out.

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Sunday 26 October 2014

In defence of anonymity...

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Writing at Conservative Home, Charlie Elphicke the MP for Dover and Deal has called for the banning of anonymity on social media:

We should target the anonymity hate-tweeters use to harass people online. At the moment it’s just too easy to set up a bogus account and viciously stab at people from behind the curtain. Ensuring people can’t set up anonymous accounts would mean hate-tweeters would be forced to be responsible for the hate they spew.

Elphicke goes on somewhat egregiously to suggest that wanting to ban anonymity isn't a free speech issue arguing this point by creating a new definition of free speech that no-one had used until he dreamt it up:

There are some who will claim this undermines the principle of free speech. They are wrong. It’s an insult to all those who fought for our right to speak out. Free speech is not there to protect people who spread hate while hiding their identity.  The whole point of free speech is the right to speak freely in your own name.  There is also a big difference between the privacy of surfing the internet and claiming “privacy” in aid of anonymity to launch attacks on people. There should be no hiding place for the trolls.

Unlike Mr Elphicke I think this is absolutely a free speech issue and the right to speak anonymously - whether offline or online - is an essential element of that liberty that, in the MP's words people "fought for". And there are very good reasons why we should allow anonymity. Here's one:

A blogger who used the user name, "Miut3" was kidnapped and killed in Reynosa Tamaulipas. She was a "Tuitera" with the over 41k followers on her popular twitter page, that sent out situations of risk, and narco news tweets.

This women - a 'citizen journalist' in a place where the mainstream media and government is coerced by violent criminals - used anonymity to protect herself and to allow the brave resistance to the Mexican borderland's dysfunctional society. If the price of allowing this woman and others like her to challenge and question criminal conspiracy, corruption and murder is that some people use anonymity to post abuse then it's a price I'll take.

Now I can hear Mr Elphicke saying that the UK isn't Mexico and that things are different here. But imagine some other situations - perhaps someone wants to expose wrongdoing within their industry. Do you think that posting under their own name would enhance their career prospects? People simply won't take the risk.

Look at the great blogs exposing some of the management problems in the police - closed down because the blogger got identified. We'd be worse as a society without blogs like Night Jack. And there are tweeters and bloggers who use anonymity to catalogue their struggles with drug addiction or alcoholism safe knowing that anonymity protects their life from intrusion and attack.

Look also at the lengths to which public authorities will pursue bloggers who challenge and criticise them - local councils such as Bexley, South Tyneside, Carmathen and Barnet have all expended council taxpayers money pursuing bloggers (with differing degrees of success). Anonymity facilitates challenge and criticism and this is one of the reasons why public authorities are so keen to see it stopped.

It isn't pleasant to be abused online anymore than it's pleasant to be abused in the street, the pub or at work. But most of the time we walk away, a little upset maybe but not otherwise harmed. The same applies online - switch off the computer, go and make yourself a cup of tea and read a book or watch the telly. The abusers will soon go away if they don't get a response. And don't - unless you're a troll yourself - play the silly game of broadcasting on Twitter, Facebook or your blog that you're being 'trolled'. All that does is make you even more of a target - you've responded so the trolls know they'll get a rise from you.


So I say to Charlie Elphicke, get a thicker skin, stop claiming it's all "for the children" when it's not and read and remember the final tweet from Miut3 - posted by her murderers:

Friends and Family, my real name is Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, I am a doctor, now my life has met it's end.

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Friday 24 October 2014

Values? The one that really matters is freedom...

Queueing for bread - socialist values in action

This is a pretty typical framing of a left wing values statement - from Julian Dobson:

And that brings us back to values. Do we want a society that turns competitiveness into a totem, blames individuals for social problems and judges success on earnings and rates of return? Or are we looking for something more inclusive and creative, places that recognise the value generated by people’s imagination and relationships and passion for the common good? 

And the typical slightly green, middle-class leftie will feel a little shudder of affirmation through the bones at this statement. Absolutely, our lefty might say, this statement clearly separates the uncaring, individualist from the caring, sharing collectivist. They might add little mutterings about 'trickle down' or 'profits' before smiling again as the high plateau of collaborative, cooperative glory comes into view.

The problem with all this is that it is a delusion, a deliberate self-deception. All this enthusiasts for ending the dark and evil neo-liberal world and ignorant of its central truth - that far more than the state-directed, protectionist systems our caring lefties aspire to create, free market systems are absolutely about inclusion, creativity, passion value generation, imagination and mutual benefit. The secret lies in that magic word 'free' and it is all that freedom that gave us the wealth to ponder such matters as 'values'.

Once the matter of values was something for priests and philosophers. Most ordinary people - and this still stands for a great deal of today's world - were way too busy keeping body and soul together to bother about what it all meant. Then something happened. It wasn't a planned economy, it was a spark of liberty that set us free. And we became free because the trap of subsistence was removed, we could lift our head up from the daily drudge and think about those values, about what we thought the world should be like.

And the match that ignited those flames of freedom wasn't a law, it was capitalism, the liberal enlightenment that opened up trade and allowed business to innovate, to create and to transform - in just a few decades - the entire world.When the likes of Julian Dobson paint free markets in negative terms, when they demonise the idea of choice by talking about competition as a negative, and when they dismiss individual material success as somehow distasteful or exploitative, what these people do is build a mighty man of straw, a grand lie.

This lie is essential to socialism - without that mighty straw man representing capitalism's sins the logic of the left collapses into the terrible reality of a place where people queue for seven hours to buy some flour and some milk. This, rather than sunlit uplands, is the consequence of that focus on the "common good" - for there is no common good other than that determined by the interactions, transactions and exchanges of the people. And the best way to get those mutual benefits isn't through committees, co-operatives and regulations but through free exchanges in a free market. That is why the left must make a demon of liberty because they can't admit that free choice, free exchange and free speech is the best road to a good society, to a place where those values they prattle on about are met for everyone.

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More nonsense about urban farming...

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Urban farming, some believe, is the solution to all our problems. Rather than shifting food from distant locations to the urban communities where we live, we farm the corners, roundabouts and gardens and cultivate diused land so as to feed ourselves. It's all terribly jolly and green, typified by the Incredible Edible programme in Todmorden. I love it, the randomness, the cheeky nature of swooping on a little patch of urban green and seeding it with herbs is great.

However, when people start taking this stuff seriously they start talking nonsense. Here's a report from some professors at Sheffield University:

THE COUNTRY may only have 100 harvests left because of intensive over farming unless drastic action is taken, according to university scientists

They say the problem has depleted the soil of the nutrients needed to grow crops and suggest converting parts of the UK’s towns and cities into new farmyards.

Scientists from Sheffield University warn that a lack of bio-diversity is causing a dramatic fall in the country ‘s wildlife populations.

A study by Dr Jill Edmondson has also found that soils under Britain’s allotments are significantly healthier than soils that have been intensively farmed.

Now I'm going to take the scientists' information at face value - it really isn't surprising that the soil in allotments, lovingly and intensively managed by the hobby horticulturalist, is better than the soil on the typical commercial farm. But that really doesn't make it either sensible of viable to replace the production from farmland with production from gardens or allotments. More significantly, yields from commercial farming as vastly higher than yields from hobby farming. Despite stagnant yields in some crops, there's not much evidence to suggest that the dire predictions from the Sheffield University team will come to pass.

However there's another important point to be made here which is about land use and land values. We know that urban and rural land values are massively different. According to Savills the average value for farmland in Great Britain is £9,750 per acre whereas residential development land can be values at £900,000 per acre of higher. Quite obviously there is no way in which the value of the land for other uses (housing, parkland, highway, commercial or industrial) can be substituted for agricultural use and for the farmer to be able to recover his outlay from the profits generated by growing stuff.

As one comment on urban agriculture put it:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

The right response is to work on either protecting biodiversity and soil quality in intensive agriculture or at opening up more land (not just in the UK, America and Europe but in Africa and Asia) to productive agricultural uses. Suggesting that Sheffield's twee Love Square - or any similar sort of project - is any kind of solution to food supply challenges is arrant nonsense. But it's so much more fun to play at farmer in our spare time and to prattle on about urban food production.

Hardly a day passes without some further argument support intensification and densification within urban communities. It's as if that science fiction image of cities captured in biodomes, self-sufficient and shiny but surrounded by wilderness, has become the real ambition of the green movement. What they miss is that the image was always a convenient plot structure rather than a painting of a real future, a way for the writer to explore the logical conclusions - good and bad - of urban living.

The sad part of this green myth-making is the seriousness with which some folk treat it - they seem unconnected to economic reality as they pretend their sweet world of sustainable towns peopled by walking, cycling allotment owners is anything but a greenwashed version of subsistance agriculture - the very form of poverty that we escaped from by moving to cities and creating the modern capitalist society.

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Thursday 23 October 2014

Modern urbanism defined - build places people don't want to live in and call it 'sustainable development'

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I can understand dense urban development when there's not a lot of spare land and values are very high. But sometimes it just reveals the ideology of urbanists to be unpleasantly directing and controlling. Here's an example - the relocation of the Swedish town of Kiruna:

“Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move – or else face certain destruction. It’s an existential predicament.”

So Kiruna (familiar to us 'A' level geography students as the best example of a town that simply wouldn't be there were it not for an essential natural resource - iron ore) needs to move. But the proposed replacement is a classic example of what you get when trendy architects meet 'sustainable development' and state control:

The current town is a sprawling suburban network of winding streets, home to detached houses with gardens. White’s plan incorporates a much higher-density arrangement of multistorey apartment blocks around shared courtyards, lining straight axial boulevards, down which the icy winds will surge.

It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to “reinvent itself” into a model of sustainable development, attracting young people who wouldn’t have stayed in the town before, with new cultural facilities and “visionary” things such as a cable car bobbing above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents seem unlikely to be able to afford.

Kiruna is in the middle of nowhere - quite literally. It only exists because of the reserves of magnetite and, if you don't want to stay and dig the stuff up, you're going to head south pretty sharpish. Why on earth would young people stay in a small town where it's dark for half the year when they can go to Stockholm?

There was no need at all to build this sort of trendy version of 'Stalinist Baroque' - the authorities could have simply parcelled up and handed out building plots to residents. But that would have been too free, open and democratic for the urbanists. They'd much prefer some choice and living room but will be getting the high rise, high rent apartments the state dictates. This is the sort of world the fans of garden cities and sustainable living want. It's not what people want.  But what do we get?

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Jay Rayner, millionaire food snob, tells poor families their food is too cheap...

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It has become something of a trend - millionaire cultural lefties popping up to tell poor folk that they are paying too much for stuff. The other day it was Vivienne Westwood railing about capitalism while charging over a grand for a handbag. Now it's 'masterchef judge' Jay Rayner - the doyenne of Guardian-reading food snobs - who is telling the poor they should pay more for their dinner:

Families need to pay more for food and have become 'far too used to paying too little', Masterchef judge Jay Rayner told MPs today.

The food critic and author told a parliamentary committee that food was too cheap to support British farmers.

He said: 'We pay too little. We're far too used to paying too little. And the only way we have at our disposal, I think, to secure a robust food supply is by investing in British farming and that does mean consumers pay more and look for that label.'

Rayner even explained that food poverty was nothing to do with real poverty:

'Yes, we do need to pay more for food but if you focus on a thing called food poverty then you're not going to be looking at the bigger picture involving the whole population.'

So we're to have more expensive food because British farmers can't compete with farmers somewhere else in producing the cheap food that people want to buy. And Rayner - who has no qualifications on this matter besides having a famous mum and a cushy job being paid by newspapers and magazines to eat overpriced restaurant food - latches on the familiar set of supposed concerns - the size of the supermarkets, the concept of 'food security' and some sort of wibble about sustainability.

Food security is simply protectionism rebadged - we invent scary stories about how somehow we'll not be able to feed ourselves because of all that cheap food made somewhere else in the world and use those stories to justify trade barriers, protectionism and subsidy. Then, because the Asians and Africans who could produce all that fabulous cheap food don't due to protectionism, all Jay Rayner's pals on the Guardian and Channel 4 wangle trips to see the poor black people and to explain why evil western capitalism has condemned them to an eternal struggle against absolute poverty.

Let's be clear. Cheap food is a good thing. There is nothing at all that is wrong with you and me not having to pay as much to put food on the table. It is gross and immoral for rich people like Jay Rayner to say to poor people that they should have less food because they'd rather protect a few uneconomic farmers. Rayner has never had to make the choice between putting the heating on or having a meal - yet he wants to force that choice onto still more people. And Rayner isn't scratting on a Zambian farm hoping that the rains don't fail so he can feed his family - the other sort of uneconomic agriculture that the protectionism he espouses acts to sustain.

Rather than Rayner's snobbery and environmental protectionism, we should embrace the opportunity of cheap food - break down the barriers, encourage mass production and deliver nore people the wonderful benefits that come from cheap, abundent food in fantastic variety that we (mostly) enjoy in the UK. Above all can we stop saying - on clothes, on food, on energy - that making it more expensive is a good idea. It really, really isn't.

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Wednesday 22 October 2014

Twenty years serving Bingley Rural - a pleasure and I've done all right I hope


I've been the councillor for Bingley Rural for approaching twenty years. Come next year's elections it will be twenty years. And in that time I've helped, mostly in small ways, loads of people in the villages (at first four but, since 2004, five) with their issues. A lot of the time I get stuff sorted, grease the cogs of local government and allow people to get back to living their lives. Sometimes I fail, the problem isn't - or can't be - solved and this is as frustrating for me as it it for the people who've asked for my help.

When I look back, I remember the things that didn't work out - whether it's getting a beer garden approved for The George or trying to help a resident get permission for a hay store so she could better care for her motley collection of retired horses. And the bigger stuff like the planning permission at Crack Lane in Wilsden - a load of houses on a site that floods all the time and can only be accessed via the narrowest and steepest of rural roads. A planning consent rammed through by a Council seemingly obsessed with delivering on some sort of fictional housing need - macho planning at its worst.

Then I think about the things that aren't so straightforward - the traffic calming schemes that everyone wants until they're in place when everyone hates them. We really have to find a better way - the schemes going in today simply don't fit the bill. As one resident explained - he doesn't drive through Harden because his wife's bad back is exacerbated by the sleeping policemen in the village. Yet council officers are ever more defensive when challenged - pointing to "national guidance" and "good practice" to justify jarring, rattling physical speed controls. I'm minded not to support any more of these until this problem is sorted - the current schemes simply aren't right.

I was once asked - quite late in the evening when I was less than sober and in The Fleece in Cullingworth - "what have you done for me?" I stumbled over my answer but wish, in a classic piece of l'esprit d'escalier, that I'd responded with "what have you asked me to do for you?" But in the spirit of a genuine response here's a few of the big things I've help happen in Bingley Rural.

Parkside School - back in 1999 when Labour was doing its best to utterly ruin Bradford's education there was a schools reorganisation that abolished the middle school system the City had had since the 1960s. Had we not campaigned for a secondary school at Parkside, children from Cullingworth and Denholme would have been bused into Bradford or Keighley for school.

Manywells tip - the tip getting its permission was before I first joined the council but the efforts we've put in to stop the tip polluting the village and surrounding countryside have paid off. In time what was a smelly, fly-infested and bird-ridden rubbish dump will become a grassed and wooded hill above the village.

Buck Park Quarry - most of the credit goes to Denholme Residents Action Group (DRAG) but I've helped them through the long struggle to stop landfill at Buck Park. From the first application when, sat behind Cllr Harrison, I was muttering (as loud as possible) "refuse it David, refuse it" - it was turned down, the council didn't turn up at the public enquiry and the developer's failure to comply with conditions finally killed the idea of dumping putrid and toxic waste in Denholme

Cornerstones, Cottingley - I forget how many millions the development was but that probably doesn't matter. Again someone else, Cllr Baroness Eaton, had a bigger role but we bashed enough council heads together to get a fantastic community facility, a new church and a new medical centre for the village. I was talking to Irene, the chair or trustees recently and she reminisced about walking with Prince Charles (a long story) through the estate talking about what was needed. And we have what was need now.

Cullingworth Primary School - I was a governor at Cullingworth Primary during the incredibly protracted negotiations to get the land for the new primary in the village. I remember meeting with Philip Robinson, the Council Chief Executive at the time and him describing the land transaction as the most complicated and fraught he'd handled in 30 years as a council officer.

St Ives Country Park - Great place, isn't it? Well the refurbishment, the adventure playground, the new trails - these were a priority when I was Executive Member with the culture and regeneration portfolio. We now have a fantastic free facility for local people and visitors alike

Cullingworth Village Hall - just a month ago the planning committee agree to set aside £410,000 of s106 funding for a new village hall for Cullingworth. Again most of the credit is down to the Village Hall Renewal Committee but I helped - it is my pet scheme after all.

This is what Councillors do. It's not about debating the great issues of the day in the Council chambers or playing endless games of petty politics or in-party backstabbing. It's not the grand stuff but the every day things that bother ordinary people.

I think I've done all right. Perhaps my friends and neighbours in Bingley Rural will keep me on for another four years next May?

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Tuesday 21 October 2014

Is it feminist to say rape is a male problem?

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We debated child sexual abuse at Bradford's full council meeting this evening. The debate was, as these things always are, something of a mixed bag. There's no doubt that we're all genuinely concerned about the problem - both the historic abuse and the real truth of continuing abuse in our city today.

I spoke and gave over part of my speech to the vexed matter of misogyny. After all 90% of the cases we're dealing with here involve the raping and repeated sexual abuse of teenaged girls. And I made the observation that this is about a culture that sees women as either distant and mysterious princesses or else as sluts, slaves and servants of male desire. In prosaic terms too many men see women as either wives or whores.

After the meeting I did a little interview. The interviewer asked me to go over the main points of my speech. Or rather, as she hesitatingly put it, my...er...feminist speech. I repeated my belief - stated in the speech that rape in a male problem and that men have to challenge the definition of women by their role rather than by their character. If it is women who set out that challenge then it's all to easy for the man to respond with 'you're a women, you would say that'. Making light of sexual violence needs to be challenged just as we would challenge any other glorification of violence. And it must be challenged by men.

Now I don't consider this a matter of feminism but rather that the idea of treating another person as merely an object of self-gratification is pretty repulsive. But I am curious how saying rape is a male problem - women don't ask to be raped however dressed, spoken or drunk - is somehow a reflection of feminism rather than a matter of how we make a better human society. Perhaps that's what feminism is about?

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Monday 20 October 2014

There are more drunks in Blackpool than Barton-le-Clay

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Apparently it's a shocking discovery. There are huge regional variations in the incidence of liver disease:

The study uncovered a stark north-south divide, with more than four times as many male adults dying from the disease in Blackpool (58.4 per 100,000) than central Bedfordshire (13 per 100,000).

Predictably this has resulted in a call for more controls over alcohol - doubtless we'll get the familiar set of prescribed solutions: minimum unit pricing, advertising controls, bans on 'super-strength' beer and plain packaging or graphic health warnings. But look again at those figures and ask two questions.

Does it really surprise you that there are a lot more problem drinkers in Blackpool? It really doesn't surprise me and, without wishing to do down Blackpool, it is entirely in line with the town's demographics. I suspect you'll see more street drinkers in a day on Blackpool front than you will over half a year in Dunstable or Flitwick. And this is because Blackpool is where those people go. The town doesn't breed those street drinkers but it's where too many of them end up.

Secondly, we need to ask whether the rise in liver disease really is down to drinking - check out the figures:

The report, Deaths from Liver Disease – Implications for End of Life Care in England, showed that the north-west region had the highest liver disease death rate – 24 per 100,000, with 11.4 from alcohol complications. It was followed by the north-east with 21.9 and 10.1. The east of England had the lowest rate, 12.9 and 4.9, followed by the south-west, 14.3 and 6.4, and the south-east,14.8 and 5.8.

Nearly 60% of deaths from liver disease aren't due to alcohol. But whenever the statistics are quoted we get a splurge of anti-alcohol campaigning. I've noted before that there has been a rise in viral hepatitis cases and there has also been an increase in morbid obesity. And a good chunk of Blackpool's problem will be down to drug use rather than alcohol.

To put the problem in context, 0.0114% of the Blackpool population die as a result of liver disease caused by alcohol abuse. This is a big problem for those sixty or so people in Blackpool and we need to get better at dealing with this issue but it really isn't a massive public health problem.

But then, when the Guardian journalist starts with a blatant untruth there really isn't much hope is there:

The changes in pub opening hours and higher levels of alcohol consumption are directly linked to the “rapid and shocking” increase in death rates, according to Prof Julia Verne, who led the research for PHE.

Alcohol consumption has fallen by around 18% over the past decade and this decline matches (although I'm not saying it was caused by the change) the liberalising of licensing.

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Sunday 19 October 2014

A very brief comment about Rochester and Strood...

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In the 2005 general election 20, 315 people voted Labour in the Harwich constituency in north Essex. Almost all of this constituency - everything but the town of Harwich itself - now makes up the Clacton constituency so spectacularly caputured by UKIP defector Douglas Carswell. In 2010 Labour still took 25% of the vote - which if you've been to Jaywick or St Osyth shouldn't really be a surprise. Yet Labour made no effort at all to fight the recent by-election with the result that its vote sunk to less than 4,000.

It seems to me that Labour is about to repeat this approach in Rochester and Strood - a place that had a Labour MP up to 2010. And the media seems set on letting Labour get away with fighting a seat that, were this a normal by-election causes by death or resignation, the party would have had every expectation of winning or coming close to winning. The truth about Rochester and Strood is that it's not a sort of Kentish version of Buckingham or Wokingham - it's a pretty working class place and Labour is hanging its support there out to dry, handing it over on a plate to UKIP.

If I were a cynic, I'd suggest that Labour essentially giving up on contesting seats where iit had MPs in the last decade reflects their running the dangerous game of wanting UKIP to damage the Conservatives. The problem is that, across much of the South, the consequence of this approach will be that UKIP will become - for the time being at least - the main opposition to the Conservatives.  And along the Thames estuary - perhaps the few places in the south where Labour remains strong - the party will die out.

Odd really.

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Saturday 18 October 2014

Social capital and the problem with immigration - some thoughts



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Immigration is a problem. OK, you can call it a challenge, a significant policy issue or some other 'slightly-dodging-the-issue' form of words but the truth is that people – voters – are bothered about immigration. We know this because they tell us so in polling and because, if any of us have any ears, we hear it every day. Whether it’s a casual racist remark in a queue to go through security at Leeds Bradford Airport or the comments that trail behind crime reports, stories about ‘multiculturalism’ and descriptions of events at mosques.

The problem is that, whatever people say, immigration really isn’t an economic problem. There really isn’t much – or indeed any – substantial research evidence showing that immigration has a negative impact on levels of employment, economic growth or other measures of economic performance. So when Jonathan Portes reports this he is right:


“The research found evidence of a positive and significant association between increases in employment of migrant workers and labour productivity. It found that recruiting from outside the UK had allowed employers to fill skilled and specialist roles and enabled some organisations to expand. Employers reported that migrants' skills are often complementary to, rather than substituting for, those of UK born employees.”


However, this really isn’t the problem (or challenge or significant policy issue) at all nor is this simply a case of people being fed misleading information by politicians and the media. A positive economic impact simply isn’t sufficient for people to accept the social changes that immigration implies. Yet much of what we might call ‘immigration-positive’ research and comment is dominated by economic considerations, arguments over statistics and accusations that opposition to immigration is essentially racist.

If we are to understand immigration and, more importantly, develop policies that respond to the genuine concerns of very many people, then we need to get a much better grip on the sociology of immigration. We need to get a better idea of how immigration affects existing communities, how those communities react to immigration and how we manage migration so as to give a greater chance of that community reaction being positive rather than negative. By focusing on the economics of migration we have missed completely the real driver behind those community concerns that some politicians exploit.

Indeed it is the need to reduce negative social impact that should drive immigration policies and controls rather than the prevailing preference for points-based systems based on a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether the ‘skills’ of the immigrant are ‘needed’. The evidence, both from polling and from qualitative studies, shows consistently that worries about immigration relate inversely to people’s exposure to immigrants. I would add that my personal view is that Britain’s current anti-immigrant feeling is substantially driven by the migration from EU accession countries being to parts of the UK that have had limited prior experience of immigration.

None of this gets us any closer to a basis for setting policy - assuming we’re going to plonk for somewhere on the continuum from totally closed borders to totally open borders. Regardless of the economic case for immigration, the potential social negatives (the cost of which may not be wholly contained in an economic model of migration) require some degree of control. And that will mean that some people will not be allowed to migrate into the UK.

And there is a good argument for striking a balance in terms of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity. I know we like to talk about how many different languages are spoken in our communities (this isn’t new – I remember the Principle of Bedford FE College saying just this in 1983) but the breakdown in social capital implicit in that heterogeneity damages both the immigrant andreceiving communities:


“People in ethnically fragmented communities have lower levels of interpersonal trust; lower levels of civic, social, and charitable engagement; less efficient provision of public goods; more sluggish economic growth; and lower levels of happiness and general satisfaction. It seems that the more diversity we experience, the lower our quality of life is.”


The risk we run with open borders is that they meet a short-term economic need but in doing so provide the seeds for more sluggish development in the communities where those ‘needed’ immigrants settle. Indeed, we should recognise that some degree of homogeneity is essential if a community is to develop the institutions, connections and structures essential to building social capital. Put more bluntly, the people within a neighbourhood have to share more than the fact of living in that neighbourhood if it is to become community rather than merely a place.

The unanswered question here is how we determine the point at which we set our migration policy. This has to be where the economic benefits of immigration exceed any negative impact on educational attainment, health or crime. Not just because those negatives carry a cost that isn’t necessarily picked up by the employers of immigrant labour (the prime beneficiaries of the economic benefit) but because poorer schools, health and community safety are reflections of a dysfunctional neighbourhood, of the breakdown in the social capital needed for the long-term.

Finally, there has to be some connection between the expectations of the current demos and the actions of government. In a democracy this should be a statement of the obvious but I fear it is not so – too often the response from public officialdom to concerns about immigration is to say ‘there, there - don’t worry’ or else to suggest that the person expressing concerns is simply a bigot. A further type of response is to flood the individual with (essentially meaningless) statistics accompanied with the implication that they are some kind of idiot.

We need to have immigration controls for the very simple reason that the public – the demos – demands that we control the arrival of culturally-distinct people into the neighbourhoods where they live. This can’t be dismissed as racism, bigotry or prejudice (although all those things may be present on occasion) but rather should be seen as articulating the collapse of social capital in many neighbours that large scale immigration brings about. People are not idiots but are reflecting concerns about the loss of community in their words and choices. And government too often fails to pick up those concerns in defining policies (locally and nationally).

I believe that immigration enhances our nations bringing new ideas, attitudes, food, drink, music and dance to pour into the English cultural melting-pot. We are a vastly better society for having welcomed generations of migrants to our shores. And I don’t want to live in a place where we push people away, where we don’t offer sanctuary and where there’s a preference for a sort of sclerotic monocultural numbness. But if we want migration to work for everyone, we’ve got to manage it, to try and mitigate how it can damage social capital and to direct our attentions to integrating all the wonderful, hard-working people who have come to make their lives in our great country.

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Friday 17 October 2014

We already have a 'progressive consumption tax'...

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Bill Gates has responded to the Thomas Piketty wealth tax proposal by moaning that it's not fair. By which he means not fair on entrepreneurs and the like who invest their money in the betterment of the business or society:

Bill Gates frames his argument like this — if you have three wealthy people, one spending money on new businesses, one spending money on charity, and one spending money on luxury items for him or herself, the last one should be taxed more because the first two are contributing more to society.



Now I may be wrong here but Bill's idea already applies (at least in the UK where we have a value-added tax). And, even though there are fewer consumption taxes in the USA, that country gives generous tax breaks for charitable giving and exemptions for capital investment in new or existing businesses.

So, whatever we think of Piketty's policy solution (and I think it mad, bad and dangerous to know), it does have the merit of being an attempt to resolve what that economist sees as an essential challenge to our society and economy. Bill Gates proposal is one that favours 'charity' over consumption and investment over spending. And, this might be fine for very rich folk like Bill but for the rest of us it's a proposal for a tax on the pleasures of life.

So once more let's remind ourselves that we don't live to hoard resources, to invest in business or to have 'charitable' consumption put on a special pedestal. We live to consume.

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Bossiness with bite - the truth of anti-social behaviour legislation

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Isabel Hardman sums up a big problem with modern politics. Put simply:

There are plenty of irritations of everyday life that government could, if satisfying the call of ‘Something Must Be Done’ always led to good policy, deal with. For instance, legislation to force people to move all the way down a packed Tube carriage. Or a judge-led inquiry into why Topshop at Oxford Circus feels a bit like an Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Or an Act of Parliament banning January and all its horrid cold wet weather.

I could continue - adding perhaps something to enforce good escalator etiquette (entirely unknown outside London) or maybe the wearing of baseball caps back-to-front and trousers at half-mast. You, I sure, will have your own gripes and grumbles about modern life and might welcome action to deal with whatever it is that gets your goat.

But while you're thinking about this remember that successive governments have built up an idea called "anti-social behaviour", and have created the means for police and local councils to take action to "clamp down" on such behaviour. The most recent iteration of this campaign is set out here - it essentially defines almost any behaviour cops and councillors decide they don't like as anti-social behaviour. And, as you already know the purpose of anti-social behaviour (or ASB, as those in the know refer to it) legislation is to create a means whereby the police can make something that isn't a crime into a crime.

The problem with modern politics - and we caught a ghastly glimpse of this with Boris's healthy city ideas (although I note the blonde one backpedalled on banning smoking in parks) - is that we do exactly what Ms Hardman illustrates, we respond when someone (usually from a charity or a think tank but sometimes someone who has suffered one of modern life's misfortunes) cries 'something must be done'. The result is laws we don't need but that act to provide the ability for public authorities to boss us about a little more. And, it goes without saying, give those police, border guards, PCSOs, council wardens and so forth the powers to force us on pain of arrest or punishment to comply precisely with that bossiness.

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Friday Fungus: Ladybirds with STDs edition





Remember the crisis with those big, bad immigrant ladybirds? The ones that are driving the regular British ladybirds from the land, the grey squirrels of the insect world? Well they've got a problem - sexually transmitted fungal infection:


A team of Scottish scientists have called for the public’s help in mapping the spread of a sexually transmitted fungal epidemic increasingly found in the species.

The insect fungus, which is passed on primarily through mating, has been found infecting the spotted invader. 

It's not clear whether this is because the harlequin ladybirds are more rampant, more promiscuous or just most susceptible to the fungus - a chap called Laboulbeniales that leaves little yellow bristles all over the ladybird.

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Thursday 16 October 2014

A reminder - in case you needed one - that the left are the enemy of the poor

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I observed a day or two ago that the environmental policies foisted on us by assorted left-wing governments are specifically designed to make energy more expensive. And that, while the better off can take the hit, the real victims of this 'planet-saving' policy platform are to poor.

Today we are reminded, via the pages of the trendy left's house journal, that the left really do want things to be more expensive. In this case it's a classic - a multi-millionaire, anti-capitalist who makes money from selling expensive stuff to rich people says that the poor should pay more for their food and clothes:

Clothes and food should cost much more than they do in Britain to reflect their true impact on the environment, Vivienne Westwood said on Wednesday night.

Speaking at a Guardian Live event at Chelsea Old Town Hall hosted by columnist Deborah Orr, the controversial fashion designer said: “Clothes should cost a lot more than they do – they are so subsidised.

“Food should cost most more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2. The world runs on debt and that’s why nothing costs what it should.”

You see folks - you should be made poorer because rich people like Ms Westwood would then feel so much better about their impact on the environment. Now remember that all those rich socialists in Islington town houses will be fine. They'll still have fancy food on the table, nice designer clothes and a classy bottle of wine (just one glass, mind).

But the single mum with three kids in Bradford who rather liked the fact she could buy a cooked chicken for two quid will have to explain to her children why they have less too eat and why they never get new clothes just hand-me-downs. Sadly though generations of brainwashing won't lead her to tell those children what they really need to know - that the 'progressive' policies of left-wing parties, the supposed parties of the poor, have resulted in those children being poorer.

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