Wednesday 31 December 2014

Are Labour's grassroots just a little bit racist?

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It seems an age ago when I shared a session on Keighley's Ramadan radio with the then leader of Bradford's Labour group, Ian Greenwood. These occasions are pleasant and conversational rather than the confrontation we usually get on mainstream radio and one topic that came up was the number of candidates selected by the parties from ethnic minorities. After a little bit of to and fro Ian and I agreed that the real measure of success wasn't us selecting candidates from the Pakistani community to contest wards with a majority Pakistani population but would be us selecting non-white candidates in overwhelmingly white wards such as Tong or Ilkley.

Understand, dear reader, that this is not about positive discrimination - adopting an 'all-ethnic' shortlist in the manner of Labour's 'all-women' shortlists. Not only is this approach inequitable but it promotes division and discord. Instead I wanted decisions to be made on merit - because the person, regardless or gender, ethnicity, religion or age is the best person to be the candidate.

So I was struck by the observations from David Lammy MP on an analysis showing how few people from ethnic minorities Labour has selected for winnable seats:

Just one non-white candidate has been selected so far in the 34 seats where a sitting Labour MP is stepping down in the general election in May – the constituencies which should provide the best opportunities for the party to get new prospects elected.

By contrast, five Conservative associations among the 32 in constituencies where a sitting MP is retiring have chosen minority candidates.

And that pattern in Conservative 'safe' seats isn't new - the last election saw Nadhim Zahari, Priti Patel, Sajid Javed, Adam Afriye, Sam Gymiah, Kwasi Kwarteng, Helen Grant and Shailesh Vara elected in such seats. In contrast, Labour's non-white MPs (like David Lammy) are overwhelmingly elected to represent inner-city areas with large, even majority, non-white populations. The comparison with those Tory MPs would be Labour selected black or Asian candidates in places like Barnsley Central, Neath or Leeds East.

The Conservatives, during a period when we have be routinely accused of racism by Labour, have quietly changed our attitude to non-white candidates. This perhaps reflects that the core middle-class support within the party is no longer exclusive and sees no issue with a person's race, gender (the shortlist for the safe seat of Banbury is all female without the need for imposition) or sexuality. Don't get me wrong, we've still a fair smattering of folk who aren't so keen but they are a smaller and smaller minority of the Conservative membership.

Meanwhile Labour (or at least David Lammy) agonises about the problem and inevitably discrimination is suggested:

He warned: “The party is in danger of looking incredibly complacent. Britain’s ethnic minorities have traditionally voted Labour but Parliament is a long, long way from reflecting the nation as a whole.

“If we are failing to select enough on a regional basis over a period of time, we ought to think about black and minority shortlists, with at least one on the list.”

Mr Lammy urged party leaders to push ethnic-minority candidates if any Labour MPs stood down before May.

If the only way to get ethnic-minority candidates is to rig the game in their favour, then Labour really does have a problem. Either those bright and brainy non-white candidates are all in the Conservative Party or else Labour's grassroots are - I hesitate to say this - just a little racist.

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Tuesday 30 December 2014

Why no-one should vote Green - from the lips of their party leader...

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You see folks Greens are selfish. Offensively selfish. They think poor Indians and Africans should stay in grinding poverty. They really do - here's the party leader:

“The world is sodden with stuff, it cannot have more stuff,” said Ms Bennett. Yet they do not appear to have considered what that would mean for billions of the world’s poorest people, almost none of whom live in Britain. When Bagehot suggested to her that there was a problem with this, Ms Bennett said he was worrying too much: to be poor in India wasn’t so bad as to be on benefits in Britain, she suggested, “because at least everyone else there is poor too”.

So no you shouldn't vote Green if you believe in a better, fairer, healthier world. You should vote Green if you think that because you're alright those far-flung, better-tanned people can starve.

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Secret courts protect social workers not children...

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There may be a case for having secret courts - I can't right now think of what that case might be but someone made it and we have them. And if we are talking about being offended, then we should be offended by the government hiding behind children in order that we can't know what they are doing or saying.

A grandmother was hauled out of a comedy show and arrested on the orders of a family court judge – simply for hugging her granddaughter.

Kathleen Danby, 72, was sentenced in her absence to three months in jail by the secretive Court of Protection in April after a judge heard she embraced the vulnerable girl, 19, against the wishes of social services.

So, without any right to a defence or any warning an elderly woman has been sentenced to time in jail. I'm not concerned here with the merits or otherwise of the case but with the wrong that is imprisoning someone without their knowledge or them being able to defend themselves.

It seems to me that these cases - filled with people old and young who can't be named 'for legal reasons' - are an offence to justice. And the only beneficiaries from the secrecy are the social workers. The reason why secret courts exist is to allow social workers and other local authority staff to prosecute their actions free from scrutiny. As a local councillor - in theory a 'corporate parent' to these children social workers are 'protecting' through the secret court system - I am unable to challenge the work of those who, in theory, work for us 90 Bradford councillors.

The secrecy, protectiveness and evasiveness of social workers involved in these cases results in many people mistrusting - even fearing - social services. People make jokes that involve the social worker as some sort of bogeyman, a child snatcher who will drag little Johnny off kicking and screaming at the drop of a hat. And when you read reports such as the one above, it's easy to see how the prejudice of social workers and the courts destroys lives and wrecks families. It may all be for the best but we don't know and what little seeps out from the secret courts doesn't inspire confidence that they act in the interests of children rather than the interests of social workers and local councils.

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Monday 29 December 2014

In which Zoe Williams (inadvertently) makes the case for voluntarism...

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OK perhaps that wasn't uber-statist Zoe's intention but her (or maybe The Guardian sub's) opening statement in a piece about tax is spot on:

Good policy can’t be devised on the basis that reasonable people must be coerced or conned into paying for our services

Sadly Zoe then goes on to gibber about how big companies don't pay enough tax and how she doesn't mind taxes just  "...the people who raise it, the people who spend it, and the way it is discussed". We get the usual Guardian caricature of the Tory (in the currently favoured figure of George Osborne) and a slightly ill-informed canter through some late 20th century political history.

But the statement is still there. If we are to have a system where some things are done collectively then there needs to be a system for people to share the cost of those things. Indeed Zoe describes the problem precisely:

It is impossible to devise good tax policy on the basis that reasonable people don’t want to pay it and have to be either coerced or conned into doing so. Deduction at source turns into the mug’s option while tax avoidance becomes the natural course of the prudent person. It is often said that HMRC doesn’t have the staffing levels to deal with avoidance as it currently stands, and that’s true – but actually the resources don’t exist in the world to police an activity that nobody believes is wrong in the first place.

So the question here is left hanging about like some bloke on the corner trying to look nonchalant because his date's 20 minutes late. So let's ask it a different way - can we have a system where people are happy to pay taxes? Zoe tries to make a moral argument - tax is an 'investment'. Now this is not only utter nonsense but fails to make the point, which is that tax is a payment for services recieved. And we coerce (i.e. make it illegal on pain of imprisonment not to pay the tax) because of the free rider problem.

Indeed it is that free rider problem - people getting the goods or services without paying - that is the biggest hurdle for voluntarism, for the idea that we can have collective action and the collective provision of public goods without the superstructure of the state. The answer, of course, lies in either preventing the non-payer from using said public goods (something that proved impossible when public goods were built with private finance by private investors) or else by making the charge low enough and the benefit great enough for it not to be worth nearly everyone's while avoiding the cost.

The problem with our current system is that many taxpayers look at how the money (or some of the money) gets spent and don't like it. This is the same whether the anger is directed at the government buying Trident nuclear missiles or at this:

The state will then proceed to piss this money – that I have earned – up the wall on various fake charities, foreign aid, quangos and an over-bloated third sector. These parasites will use this money to lobby the government to restrict further my liberties to live my life as I see fit  and campaign for the state to steal even more of my money.

We know that most people, regardless of political position, find the tax system unfair or excessive. And we know that European high-tax societies have a problem with tax dodging. Not just by high profile multinational corporations but by millions of ordinary workers:

 ...the latest estimates showed about 30 million people in the EU performed work that was not declared for tax. "Around half of all construction workers in Germany undertake shadow work; and over 80% of all Danes find shadow work acceptable – at least in some circumstances."

Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the British economy is outside the tax system either because it is illegal (prostitution, drugs, smuggling and so forth) or because people prefer to be paid in cash. The assumption that Zoe and her sort make is that simpler and lower taxes wouldn't generate enough to sustain the system so therefore we should all grow to love tax.

The things that the Guardian reader thinks important - pensions, a welfare syste, high quality healthcare for everyone and a sense of social justice - are not things that need to be provided by a central state through the imposition of coercive taxation. Indeed all such systems do is create a different sort of free rider - millions of people who receive more in benefits from the state than they pay in taxes to that state.

Voluntary collective action, for all its problems with governance and with free riders, doesn't receive the attention is receives. Prior to the creation of national state systems of health, welfare and education such voluntarism did provide such services to nearly everyone, it's a myth that there was no health provision for the poor prior to the NHS, no elementary schooling prior to the Forster Act, or no provision for welfare prior to Lloyd George's Old Age Pensions Act. These things existed and provided for nearly everyone.

I'm not sure you could run an entire nation on the basis of such voluntarism but I do think that such institutions - friendly societies, mutual finance, worker and customer co-ops and the like - are diminished by government and that private investment will (as the turnpikes and railways show) be forthcoming even where the return on capital is compromised by the free rider problem. If there is a business benefit to building a railway from London to Birmingham, businesses will finance it even where the return takes the form of a positive externality rather than cash dividends.

So here's to Zoe Williams for inadvertently making the case for replacing much of what government does with voluntary, collective and collaborative action funded by the willing and benefiting everyone.

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There is no evidence linking sports sponsorship with children drinking

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A few days ago "...a group of medical leaders, public health campaigners and health charities" wrote to The Guardian calling for the banning of sports sponsorship by drinks companies:

Our children deserve a better future and we must take the opportunity to give it to them. Self-regulation of alcohol advertising isn’t working when it allows drink brands to dominate sporting events that attract children as well as adults, creating automatic associations between alcohol brands and sport that are cumulative, unconscious and built up over years. Evidence shows that exposure to alcohol advertising leads young people to drink more, and to drink at an earlier age.

The lead signatory of the letter was Professor Sir Ian Gilmore perhaps the UK's leading temperance campaigner and a man who has never knowingly missed the opportunity to exaggerate, embellish and invent statistics to promote his mission to limit, perhaps to prohibit, drinking. And our natural instinct to protect children is a high value trump card to the likes of Sir Ian.


So - given that drinks brands have been advertising their brands on the shirts of football, rugby and cricket teams for a couple of decades, we'd expect there to be more teenage boozers drinking more alcohol. The problem is that this isn't true (pdf see page 122):

Thirty two per cent of young people reported having had an alcoholic drink. This represents a significant drop-off from LSYPE1, when 55 per cent of young people reported having tried alcohol. This fall appears to have taken place across almost all groups of young people.

This comes from a detailed longitudinal study by the Department for Education which makes it pretty reliable as evidence. So over the period when drinks brands have been sponsoring high level sport the consumption of alcohol by children and young people has fallen by around 40%. This suggests that Sir Ian and his pals have absolutely no evidence to support their argument. Not that this makes any difference to them using the argument.

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Sunday 28 December 2014

Thoughts on NHS finances - and why some doctors don't like privatisation

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I've felt for a long while that there is something of a problem with the distribution of money within 'Our NHS' (this is, I understand, the official and approved title of the august organisation). Some of this is down to the pseudo-market created and elaborated upon by governments since the 1980s - the idea that instead of people making choices in a free system we use a proxy of commissioning. But another problem is that the money flows to the producer of healthcare (primarily doctors and senior administrators) rather than to benefit the consumers of healthcare (patients and their families).

This isn't to say that doctors should be paid less. I'm sure, like me, you're pretty cool about the way in which the high status and high income associated with medicine attracts the very brightest young people. Not because they are especially caring or sharing but because medicine offers the best rewards.


So it's clear that becoming a doctor is, at least partly, driven by the prospect of that high status and high income. And, like you dear reader, I have no problem with this (any more than I have a problem with the best and brightest being incentivised to go into other important work by that same high status and high income offer) but it carries a risk where the level of that remuneration is under the control - wholly or partly - of the particular high status, high income group.

And this, quite simply, is the problem with putting doctors in charge of the NHS. It remains in this groups interest to maintain, indeed enhance, the status and income of the group. Again I'm not making doctors out to be ghastly mercenary exploiters merely suggesting that they will always behave as any group behaves - in their own interests. Much of the time this is not a problem - the high status, high income stuff means we get better doctors clearly something that us patients desire. But the problem comes when the choice is between specific care and the remuneration of doctors.

Over the past year I've sat on Bradford's Health and Wellbeing Board and have tried to get my head around the way in which the budgets for health operate. We read about different parts of the NHS system 'making a loss' or 'overspending' but never ask how this is so given the nature of the system. I recall having a conversation with a senior council officer about this problem. Essentially the pseudo-market requires 'commissioners' to guess how much of a given type of health care is going to be needed. Obviously, for elective care this can be rationed - once we've used up the 100 knee operations the next patient has to wait until the next period for his op.

For non-elective healthcare the problem is that the commissioner has to contract for enough geriatric care, cancer treatment and emergency heart operations to meet the actual need. And this mean commissioning more rather than less. So every time - up to the number commissioned - a patient arrives at the hospital there's a big 'kerching' sound. The problem comes when the commissioners guess is wrong - either too many or too few patients access the service. If too many the commissioning body (currently 'clinical commissioning groups') has an overspend and if too few the hospital makes a loss because it has set on doctors, nurses, beds and so forth to meet the commissioner's guess.

If you're a doctor in a hospital - typically these days a Foundation Trust - then you want the hospital to do more very predictable and controllable elective surgery so as to protect from the financial unpredictability of emergency medicine. But if you're a doctor in general practice you want more of those knee operations and hip replacements for the money you've got to spend on them. And using general hospitals for this work therefore makes less sense - far better to pay efficient specialist (often private) organisations to do the elective surgery. You may call this 'privatisation' but it is clearly intended under the pseudo-market that more of this commissioning will be used - good news for patients wanting hip replacements, great news for the surgeons who do those hip operations and pretty good news for GP-led commissioning groups.

But if you're an oncologist working in a general hospital (or for that matter a doctor in accident and emergency) this 'privatisation' is bad news because it means less money coming into your hospital but little or no change in the numbers of patients. To add insult to injury those surgeons doing the elective surgery are earning fatter wages for doing (however efficiently) a repeated and routine operation. The hospital doctor (assuming he doesn't have a lucrative private practice) looks at the world, sees his peers getting fatter pay packets for a nine-to-five job in the private sector and wonders what he did wrong.

The responses to this disgruntlement vary. Some doctors swallow their pride and switch to the private sector, others focus on specialisation in the anticipation of building a private practice and a third lot get all political and oppose 'privatisation'. Even though the evidence seems to suggest that we get slightly better health outcomes from a mixed economy in healthcare. And it is absolutely in the interests of those hospital doctors to oppose privatisation because under the pseudo-market the big bucks are rewarding efficiency rather than skills or expertise. Because the private sector saves the commissioners money, the owners of those businesses are prepared to pay lots of money to doctors (and other health professionals) who can allow them to remove more cataracts, do more hernia operations and fix more knees.

All of which brings us back to those incentives. If we're right and the high status, high income thing matters then perhaps we should worry about a system that rewards doctors performing routine operations efficiently rather than doctors who manage more complicated care such as treating cancers. But the answer here isn't necessarily to simply oppose 'privatisation' but to create a market in those skills needed to provide complex surgery and multi-faceted care.

Much of our debate about healthcare is useless. Instead of asking how we will meet the demand created by an ageing population while continuing to innovate what we do is shout pathetic slogans at each other and make gushing pledges of loyalty to 'Our NHS'. It seems to me that the current financial system within the NHS privileges some doctors but not others and similarly rewards cost efficiency in medicine better than it does innovation and skill.

Currently about 80% of the NHS budget is spent in the acute sector - mostly by general hospitals and mostly on paying the staff of those hospitals. The problem is that the people spending this money (by doing whatever medical thing it is they do) in the hospitals have little say over how it is distributed with the result that there are places filled with sexy medical gizmos and gadgets while other places are making do with old - even jerry built - equipment and too few staff.

I'll be honest here and say that I don't know the answer. However, I also feel - with some good evidential support - that further liberalisation and a slightly less pseudo pseudo-market remains the right way to go. Not because I want to 'sell off the NHS to the highest bidder' but because we need to find a better way than central planning to manage the flow of money through the health system. I also feel that the commissioning of places rather than people sits right at the heart of the problem - we buy services from a big Foundation Trust not from a doctor or group of doctors. Yet it's the doctors' expertise that is central to the health care us patients demand.

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Saturday 27 December 2014

The consumer society is the good society...

We're forever being told - nay lectured - by well-off folk who write books (not to mention politicians, pundits and a whole crowd of their fans) that consumerism and the consumer society is a terrible thing. Multi-millionaires like Naomi Klein pop up with yet another ignorant and ill-informed (but delightfully written) book about the evils of said society - how it tempts us to consume, how this will destroy the planet and how wise folk like Naomi will lead us to a better place.

This is all utter nonsense - we are not here on earth to dress in sackcloth and ashes or to flagellate ourselves for the sin of wanting (evening buying) some high-priced branded goods that the priests say we don't need. Such folk tell us that being a little chubby is a sin because it is a waste of earth's resources. Nonsense squared - we are here to consume, that's why we work. And deliberately constraining our consumption (especially when we're paying over the odds for something that folk in poorer places pay a fraction of that price for) is not our purpose - indeed it is irresponsible self-denial.

So - although I'm not Ayn Rand's biggest fan - this comment about Christmas is spot on:

The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

As a summation of why Christmas is great and why we love it, this takes some beating. So consume my friends, live you life, party, celebrate and share the wonders of human achievement - goods and services created for us to enjoy more for less and a better life.

Credit to Alex Tabarrok here for the link.

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Enjoy the rest of Christmas. And a bumper 2015 filled with the joy of consuming the things we humans create.

Friday 26 December 2014

Booze, cake and public health lies - welcome to Boxing Day news

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Firstly a happy Christmas.

It's Boxing Day and the papers are out. Filled with cut and pasted press releases put together by journalists either grumpy for having to work on Christmas or grumpy because they hate Christmas anyway.

Plus a tradition. Letters and statements from important sounding doctors - this year (in a sign of the shift in our establishment's locus) in the Guardian. In this letter an assortment of public health quacks leavened with the occasional real doctor complain about booze companies sponsoring sport. Mostly because, they say, it's 'fuelling' under age drinking.

This is, of course, nonsense. We have the most boringly abstemious generation of young people since the thirties and levels of alcohol consumption have fallen by a fifth over the past decade. But it is a sign that the quacks are pretty media savvy - picking a day of hangovers and tummy aches to send their letter about boozing. Plus of course it's also a big day of sport - football, racing and so forth are a major feature of Boxing Day. Thus the doctors are guaranteed a front page splash and loads of frowns media coverage that follows such a splash.

At the same time the boss of the NHS (who isn't accountable to you but is selected by the same quacks and fussbuckets who signed that letter to the Guardian) continues with his mission about obesity. The latest NHS Obesity Plan is filled with a feast of fussbucketry - from bossing firms into 'incentives' for their staff losing weight through to the usual collection of controls, regulations and taxes. All underwritten by a big lie - that somehow this 'obesity crisis' is causing the financial problems of the NHS. In the most blatant fib, the NHS boss claims that obesity will 'bankrupt the NHS', a statement that is complete nonsense and that boss knows so.

So, running screaming from the news feeds, we arrive on Facebook. And lo, we see adverts nudging us to sign up to Dry January. Adverts paid for with our taxes (in these days of austerity the one area seemingly exempt from cuts is public health - nurses can be sacked, doctor vacancies left unfilled and cleaning contracts cut to the bone but the money spent on nannying the hell out of us is blissfully squandered by a legion of public health quacks and their hangers on).

The most depressing part of all this isn't that public health quacks lie. They do this so routinely, peddling myths and fictions designed to fit their ideology, that another lie simply rests on the silt of past fibs clogging up out discussion of health. What really saddens is that these people seem unable to see a party without deeming it unhealthy, are incapable of recognising that pleasure is essential to
good health, and wander around our festivals like the man with the sandwich board proclaiming the imminence of doom.

Most of us, most of the time, get on with our pretty healthy lives (indeed the real health problem isn't that we're fat but that we're old). And on a few occasions during the year - birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Easter, summer bank holidays - such folk have a blow out and eat, drink and party. This isn't a problem but a boon, a signal that having a damn good time is a central feature of our civilisation. That a bunch of sad men want to stop us having that pleasure isn't progress but rather a step back into a dull, controlled and hypocritical past.

So my friends, ignore everything these lying quacks tell you, enjoy your life, eat, drink, make love and experience the pleasures nature's bounty provides. And stick two fingers up at Dry January, at doctors who want to report you for being a pound or two overweight, and at the legion of po-faced pundits who pollute our media with their New Puritan lies.

It's your life. Enjoy it.

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Monday 22 December 2014

"Yet in thy dark streets shineth, The everlasting Light." - thoughts on crime and streetlighting.

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It's the longest night of the year (or pretty close to it) so what better choice of subject for a Labour Party press release than the practice of councils - as a cost and carbon saving measure - turning off or dimming street lighting. Unsurprisingly the Labour chap doesn't like this:

Labour’s shadow communities secretary, Hilary Benn, warned that ‘significant areas’ of the country were being ‘plunged into darkness as a result of David Cameron and Eric Pickles’ policies’. ‘Streetlights ensure that people are safe on our roads and feel safe walking home, especially at this time of the year when the nights have drawn in,’...

And I'm guessing that you will probably have a similar response after all as Roger Ekirch, author of 'The City Dark' observed:

...humans have long feared the dark, and...crime was the original impetus for widespread street lighting on the planet. 

The cloaked figure skulking in the shadows, of the thief using the cover of darkness for his crimes and the frisson of terror as we scoot past the entrance to the dark alley on the walk home - these are what comes to mind when we consider the dark. Nighttime is when evil does its thing, the domain of the robber, the murderer and the thief. So Hilary Benn, by appealing to this instinct is playing good politics.

The problem is that it's just not as simple as this - the link between the dark and actual crime (as opposed to actual fear of crime) really isn't a clear cut as Benn's comments make it out.

...some research indicates that an increase in number and brightness of streetlights actually increases the occurrence of crime, noting that street lighting allows perpetrators to monitor their own actions without the use of flashlights or other lighting devices that would make them visible to others. A case has also been made that offenders need lighting to detect potential targets and low-risk situations.

Indeed there is a catalogue of evidence suggesting that additional lighting has at best a marginal effect on levels of crime, that most crime takes place during daylight hours or where there is good artificial lighting, and that there is a point (accepting some crime reduction benefit) when lighting makes no difference.  After all there is some logic - assuming your typical criminal can't see in the dark - to the observation that ne'er-do-wells need light just as much as us law-abiding folk.

None of this is to suggest that turning off the lights is always a good idea or that the installation of better lighting (such as the LED lights we now have in parts of Cullingworth) isn't a consideration. However, we should look carefully at the extent to which we are lighting up isolated stretches of road throughout the night when only a very few cars and no pedestrians are making use of the lights. Rather than indulging in a typical piece of modern politics - a shouty press release designed to scare people rather than cast illumination on the issue - maybe we should be discussing how to reduce the waste (and it is a waste) of lighting up large parts of the country merely on the off-chance that somebody might pass by.

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Sunday 21 December 2014

Ah! Global warming

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Or not as the case may be:

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.

As reported here - being a brief summary of the article here.

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So Nell, you hate Christmas do you? Bah, humbug!


Every year, somewhere in the torrent of Christmas-related guffle that the media pour into our consciousness, there is the Grinch piece, the 'I'm going to tell you how much I hate Christmas' article. Such articles are as much part of our preparation for Christmas as the 'we've lost sight of the true meaning' rants and the avalanche of charity appeals each more tragic than the next.

We need people who write stuff like this:

Christmas is the stick with which millions of us beat ourselves into brandy-soaked agony for being poor, single, childless, lonely, or simply bad at being jolly. It’s one thing to be single, skint and surrounded by dysfunctional relatives, but it’s quite another when the entire capitalist world is telling you that this is the most magical time of the year. We seem to have lost the script to a pantomime we never even believed in. We have ruined Christmas, without even trying.

Indeed this article (being as it's in the Guardian and all that) fills a specific sub-sector of the 'I hate Christmas' genre - the 'I hate Christmas because of all the advertising, commercialism and evil capitalist exploitation' piece. You see folks, we really don't have any choice in the matter as the glamour of capitalism's seasonal fairies has enchanted us - we are led astray by the glitter of fairy dust. Now is not the time to deal with the ignorance of this view - suffice it to say that it's nonsense.

However, it's necessary for us to have these sorts of writings just so people like me can tell the authors (in this case one Nell Frizzell) to stop being pathetic, grumpy old kill-joys and get down with the spirit of the time. To remind them of this:

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.” 

For this is the message of the Nell Frizzells of our world - like Ebeneezer Scrooge they see Christmas as 'just a day':

...if we really do want to spread comfort and joy this year, we should accept it for what it is; a day. Just a day. Whatever Roy Wood says.

You see our Nell sees Christmas as an intrusion into her misery and her celebration of the misery of others. The sad thing is that (and I've no issue with Nell sitting in the corner with her pet lip, arms crossed and definitely not getting involved in anything that seems even the slightest bit like festivity) what the 'I hate Christmas' brigade don't appreciate is that, if we didn't have Christmas, we'd have to invent it or something pretty much like it. And the very reason for that is that very gloom, misery and despondency that surrounds so many of us - especially in the dank, dreary darkness of winter. The thing Nell evokes in her sorry tale of Christmas past and Christmas present.

More to the point (and it's a very important point) Christmas is still the very antithesis of that supposed selfish capitalism. Even ignoring the God bit, Christmas is a time when we give presents, send blessings and share stuff with our neighbours. Most of the year we don't sing songs with other people (I'll be carolling at The George in Cullingworth tomorrow - beer and song, what could be better), we don't make a specific effort to consider our fellow men near and far, and we don't make an effort to recognise the bonds of family and friendship that hold our society together.

It is people like Nell Frizzell who are the selfish ones (and let me stress that I'm not saying they can't be selfish, just that their selfishness is sad and pathetic) with their self-righteous, posing rejection of Christmas. Po-faced and preachy, Nell refuses to play - no gifts for friends, no smile, no games. Just nonsense about capitalism.  Nell doesn't even plan to replace expensive largess with making a cheaper, personal effort to join in the spirit of sharing - nope, Nell plans to do nothing, to sit there pretending she's a better person because she's opted out of Christmas. Well she's wrong and there's only one thing to say to such people...

Bah, Humbug!

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Saturday 20 December 2014

The curse of bureaucracy...

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And a reminder that large parts of the USA are far removed from being that traditional descriptor, "land of the free". This is New York City|:

Mr. Brotter, 55, is an expediter, an imprecise term that is used to describe the men and women whose workdays are spent queuing up at the Manhattan branch of the New York City Department of Buildings to file the documents and pull the permits that allow construction projects — your kitchen renovation and the high-rise next door — to go forward. 

There are over 8,300 people who do the same job as Mr Brotter - getting paid to stand in a queue to see a bureaucrat so you can build your extension, install a new kitchen or get a new block of flats built. And this just adds to the cost of getting stuff done in  New York. As, Aaron Renn observed in citing this example:

Particularly when you are trying to build lower rent buildings, all of the fixed costs you have to incur to built anything (land, permits, expediters, etc.) have to be recovered and amortized across the units. When you have a hyper-complex development environment, these fixed costs raise the minimum viable rent threshold and thus push the cost of construction towards the higher end of the market that is already being served.

Put simply, the more hoops you make developers jump through, the more expensive the rents - and this is bad news if you want to meet housing demand in a magnet city like New York of London. And no the solution isn't to use taxpayers cash to subsidise a chosen few developers, the solution is to have fewer rules and fewer charges.

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Fascinating Yellow Bus stat....

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Makes you think this:

"School bus carriers operate the largest mass transportation fleet in the country. Each day, 480,000 yellow school buses travel the nation’s roads. Compare that to transit, with 140,000 total vehicles, 96,000 of which are buses; to the motor coach industry, with 35,000 buses; to commercial airlines, with 7,400 airplanes; and to rail, with 1,200 passenger cars. In fact, our school bus fleet is 2.5 times the size of all other forms of mass transportation combined."
And there's loads more about America's yellow bus fleet here.

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Thursday 18 December 2014

Blair's 'modernisation' of local government has been a disaster...

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The Association of Public Sector Excellence (APSE) - which for connoisseurs of local government used to be the Association of Direct Labour Organisations (ADLO) - has published findings from a survey of councillors that asked about the 'modernisation' of 2000 that introduced the leader and cabinet system of administration:

Almost two-thirds of decision-making councillors believe the modernisation agenda for local authorities – which heralded the introduction of cabinet systems of governance – has been a success. Just 37% of backbench members agreed.

Two out of three non-executive councillors felt the changes had marginalised their role with 43% believing they could personally help to improve local services compared to 87% of executive elected members.

In simple terms people with front bench jobs believe the system is just great and that they can really influence what's going on but the rest of the councillors feel left out. This is a reminder that Blair's modernisation of local government was half-baked and ineffective. It began with lots of typical Blairite stuff about the committee system being a 19th century system unsuited to the challenges of decision-making in modern local government and ended up (because Labour councillors successfully lobbied to prevent the imposition of directly-elected mayors) with the rather undemocratic and opaque system of cabinet administration.

So the situation we now have is one where most councillors (Executives and/or Cabinets typically contain fewer than ten members) are no longer involved in the decision-making that their residents actually elect them to do. Once every four years there's a vote to choose a leader and this person hand picks the chosen few who will make the decisions. The rest of the council languish on mostly purposeless scrutiny committees or toil away on regulatory panels deciding planning permissions, licences and so forth - knowing that their decisions are subject (quite rightly) to challenge and external inspection.

The findings from APSE's survey shouldn't come as a surprise - any conversation with backbench councillors will reveal a genuine frustration about being able to influence the system. Instead we're fobbed off with a ludicrous role of 'community leader' - in the view of senior officers and council leadership, a role that tasks councillors with the job of communicating their better's decisions to hoi polloi. All this is made worse by the continuation of the system of 'special responsibility allowances' - extra payments to councillors who chair committees, run panels or do some other task deemed over-and-above the normal job of being a councillor.

APSE chicken out of proposing any substantial change - preferring instead to suggest stroking backbenchers and sympathising with their grumbles:

‘This study shows there is a need to find a way to better recognise the contribution of councillors who may be focused on serving their communities but feel disconnected from decision-making.’

So rather than change the system so councillors actually are involved in decision-making, we cobble together some form of words that says all the stuff we do is just as important. Except, of course, we know that it isn't as important. Being able to explain to a resident whose bin has vanished that the Council charges for a replacement is not the same as being able to make a decision about whether or not such a charge is warranted.

Perhaps we need to consider whether we should complete Blair's botched modernisation - I'd support elected mayors but even without them the current system clearly has too many local councillors - or else to go back to a system where all the councillors we elect are actually involved in doing the thing we elect them to do. That is to make decisions on our behalf about the administration of the local council and its services.

The present system lacks open-ness, is not especially democratic and produces a lot of councillors who feel like spare parts. Going back to the committee system would give those councillors a real role to play (and allow for them to develop genuine knowledge on a given area of service -something the cabinet portfolio system precludes). Alternatively we should reduce the number of councillors significantly, pay them all the same regardless of position, and eliminate the disconnection between front- and back-benches.

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Tuesday 16 December 2014

We know what happens when a developed nation has no immigration

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We know the answer to this because of Japan - here's a report in New Geography:

Japan’s working-age population (15-64) peaked in 1995, while the United States’ has grown 21% since then. The projections for Japan are alarming: its working-age population will drop from 79 million today to less than 52 million in 2050, according to the Stanford Institute on Longevity.

Since hitting a peak of 128 million in 2010, Japan’s overall population has dropped three years in a row. These trends all but guarantee the long-term decline of the Japanese economy and its society.

Bear in mind that Japan's population is 127 million today - it will fall but the precise figures are hard to predict because of longevity. The New Geography article sets out some of the consequences:

...by 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will have more people over 80 than under 15, according to U.N. projections. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of whom almost 40% will be 65 or older.

Put simply Japan can't afford to do this. It can barely afford the cost of health and care today. And this is the reason why Japan's economy is struggling. Moreover, it points to the reason why the UK, Germany and the USA stand an outside chance of affording health and social care costs at least for the time being. We have had relatively open borders allowing us to maintain the size of our working age populations - without this immigration we would be facing the same time bomb as Japan faces.

It's not just a fiscal time bomb it's a social one too:

Japan’s grim demography is also leading to tragic ends for some elderly. With fewer children to take care of elderly parents, there has been a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi, or “lonely deaths” among the aged, unmarried, and childless. Given the current trends, this can only become more commonplace over time.

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Poking, sneering, moralising and despising - the defining character of Fabianism

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Let's get one thing out of the way. I'm not sure I agree with limiting child benefit to two children but there does need to be a debate about said benefit and whether it is the best way to support children and especially children who live in what we've defined as poverty. After all a significant chunk of child benefit is paid to mothers who have no need for it (again this isn't to say the benefit isn't welcome but that no-one will lack for basics by its absence).

So I understand Iain Duncan Smith's point:

The work and pensions secretary hinted the move was being examined by his party despite previously being vetoed by Downing Street over fears it could alienate parents.

Asked about the idea on the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme, Duncan Smith said it could also “help behavioural change” in what appeared to be a suggestion that it could discourage people struggling with their finances from having more children.

Leaving aside that the Guardian is putting words into IDS's mouth, this idea probably has significant support amongst the population.  There is a widespread view (that I don't share) that having more than two children is somehow irresponsible and that child benefit provides either a reward or an incentive for such foolishness.

However, to describe what IDS has said as 'eugenics' is stretching the point well past breaking point. Yet - in a typical piece of bravado nonsense - this is what Polly Toynbee does:

Some themes deep in the heart of Toryism just never go away. Up they pop, over and over. Control the lower orders, stop them breeding, check their spending, castigate their lifestyles. Poking, sneering, moralising and despising is hardwired within Tory DNA.

The problem with this is that these days most of the proposals for controlling the lower orders come from the left-wing establishment, from the sort of people Polly approves of.

It was a Labour government that introduced the Anti-Social Behaviour Order as a way to criminalise things that aren't criminal. It is use to enforce a sterile environment that, in effect, permits the police supported by the magistracy to arrest anyone for any reason.

It is great figures from the left - H G Wells, J M Keynes and, most recently, Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough who have been advocates of enforced population control, of eugenics. It is the people that Polly has dinner with who enthused about communist China's one child policy and socialist India's bribes for vasectomies.

It is the left with their moralising about debt and lending that wants to check the spending of the working class. It left-wing writers like Naomi Klein who put about the patronising lie that ordinary people are manipulated by corporations into something called 'over-consumption'.

And it's the left - including the last Labour government - who led the charge against people's lifestyles. Banning smoking in the pub, whacking a duty escalator on beer (while exempting wine and champagne), imposing planning restrictions on fast food takeaways and trying to ban gambling. It's the left that want taxes on fizzy drinks, bans on added sugar and salt, restrictions on portion sizes, the ending of multibuy offers and a host of other nannying interventions in people's lifestyle choices.

My party is not immune from these problems - you only have to look at Tracy Crouch and Sarah Wollaston to see this - but despising the worker is not 'hard wired' into Tory DNA. It people like Polly Toynbee who patronise and exploit ordinary people so as to prosecute their disturbed and disturbing political opinions. Political opinions we can trace back to that great Fabian socialist, H G Wells:

...the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge - and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable.

And that equally renowned Fabian socialist, G B Shaw:

...If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"

Or the ever so progressive Margaret Sanger:

 "... Degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; ... that the vicious circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison. All these things the Eugenist sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable"

Eugenics was always a ghastly creed. But is was a creed - along with directing and controlling the lives of workers - that was at the very heart of Polly's Fabian socialism.

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Seems that nutritionists and basic economics don't mix...

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Whatever we may think of proposals for a 'sugar tax' (I think it a thoroughly bad idea) this observation from a 'top nutritionist' takes the biscuit for ignorance of economics:

“If you make things that are desirable more expensive, this has no impact on purchasing,” Dr Carrie Ruxton told FoodManufacture.co.uk. “Similarly, if you make things like fruit cheaper, that doesn’t incentivise people either.”

I'm guessing that the study of nutrition doesn't include any economics. There are, I'm told, exceptional circumstances where making something more expensive doesn't affect demand but generally speaking making stuff more expensive means less of it is bought. Dr Ruxton (who has a PhD studying the relationship between children’s eating habits, socio-economic status and growth) clearly thinks that the laws of supply and demand don't apply.

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Monday 15 December 2014

Things that just aren't true...

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Planning has played a transformational role in improving the quality of life of all of our communities. In the past, planning has proved itself capable of dealing with overcrowding, poor quality housing and public realm, creating jobs, improving infrastructure and most importantly, securing greater social equity.

OK the author of this staggering piece of nonsense is the boss of the Town & Country Planning Association. But really!

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Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' remains a work of utter bigotry - and the BBC should know this...

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When there was an earlier brouhaha about Hilary Mantel's deliberately egregious story, 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' I wrote how it revealed more about Mantel's bigotry than about the character of Maggie:

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

The kerfuffle has return as the BBC chose this (to be fair the Thatcher story is just one in a series of short pieces) for broadcast as 'Book at Bedtime'. Again, in and of itself, there's no problem with this except that the BBC will have known exactly what the response would be. This is the 'official' response (I gather):

“Book at Bedtime offers the best of modern and classic literature and, in doing so, presents a wide range of perspectives from around the world. The work of Hilary Mantel – a double Booker prize-winning author – is of significant interest to the public and we will not shy away from the controversial subject matter that features in one of the four stories read across the week.”

Here we see 'Booker prize-winning author' being used in the same manner that the tern 'Nobel prize winning scientist' is sometimes used. Mantel didn't win (and isn't going to win) the Booker prize for 'The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher' - any more that Sir Paul Judge got his nobel prize for stuff about climate change - yet the fact of her winning said prize for a different book is presented as some sort of defence by the BBC.

The BBC chose this book in order to provoke. It really is as simple as that - rather than any one of a thousand other books of great merit (including some by celebrated winners of book prizes) that could have been chosen, they chose this rather second-rate story; a thing of shallow stereotype, bias and bigotry rather than something bringing insight or understanding.

If, dear reader, you can suspend disbelief for a paragraph or two imagine this. I'm an award-winning writer and I write a brief polemic masquerading as literature about a conversation between a lawyer and a politician, a conversation leading to the execution of Nelson Mandela for terrorism. And a conversation that is sympathetic to those who held - or hold - the view that Mandela was indeed a terrorist. Do you think that any newspaper would publish such a story in full? And would there be any chance of it being chosen - from all the literature available - for broadcast on a national broadcaster's flagship speech radio channel?

This wouldn't happen. Yet we're told by the BBC that:

"...our audience is sophisticated enough to accept a broad range of viewpoints, and we are loth to censor or avoid significant works of literature because they might be controversial.”

What we know - from the discussion of climate change, from the manner in which some people are given sainthood and from the presentation of the arts in general - is that the BBC will only entertain controversial views if they either attack the BBC's cultural enemires or conform to the rather snide and certainly bigoted world view of the bien pensant left.

The BBC knew exactly what is was doing when it chose this book. That is exactly why it made that choice. And exactly why the decision reveals the corporation's bigotry.

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Friday 12 December 2014

Who won Nigel or Russell? The x-factorisation of politics

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Like most of the British population I didn't watch the Nigel Farage and Russell Brand show on last night's BBC Question Time. I have now watched the popular clip of a bloke in the audience asserting that if Brand was so keen on changing things maybe he might consider standing for parliament. And I've also read selections from the avalanche of commentary about this occasion.

However, I remain - politcally at least - depressed about the whole thing. Not because of the opinions that Nigel and Russell express - I like people to have opinions, even wrong ones. My sense of gloom stems from the nature of the programme and the way in which our national (and state-owned) broadcaster presents politics. Question Time is the BBC's flagship political debate show, yet they run it as if it was part of their light entertainment offering. Which is why getting Farage and Brand on the same show was important - not because they offer thoughtful and considered analysis of complex questions but because they have a 'brand' (pun entirely intended).

And the media entirely buy into this x-factorisation of political debate - the reporting of Question Time isn't about what anyone said except where it's couched in terms of who 'won' between the two personalities. In the Metro, that throwaway newspaper we read on the train the report even ends with a vote!

Won what exactly? The argument - surely the point of the show isn't to have a winner but rather to allow politicians (and people who aren't politicians but have something to say - like Brand, I guess) a place to respond to questions from an audience. Indeed there were five panellists not just the two - or should I call them contestants?

Even the questions selected last night played to this artificial contest - starting with the 'petty, adversarial nature of politics' (a deliciously ironic question given the petty and adversarial nature of this edition of Question Time) we then ran through privatising the NHS, immigration and grammar schools. A set of question designed to provide some entertaining exchanges between our two protagonists.

Yesterday was a particularly stark example of how politics is treated as a branch of entertainment but we shouldn't think that it is unusual. Indeed the majority of political discussion that we see is either so brief - a two or three minute interview on the Today programme or Newsnight or else structured so as to guarantee contest and confrontation - even when people are crammed onto a too small sofa. The result is that nearly all of political debate is conducted on the basis of sound bite, posture and slogan, which rather explains why a jack-the-lad comedian like Russell Brand finds it so easy - there isn't much different between his political exposition and his stand-up.

On one level I guess this doesn't really matter - we get the politicians and the political debate we deserve. But we should consider what we are losing. In the dumbed down, lights-flashing, show biz world of today's politics there isn't any place for nuance, for looking at the actual evidence (other than trite 'fact-checking') or for trying to explain complicated systems, situations or proposals. And there is no time given for developing ideas, exploring options or properly examining proposals. I know this stuff happens because I do it every day as a councillor but the politics we're presented with by the media is almost entirely one of personalities, of who's up and who's down, gossip, tittle-tattle and the machine-gunning of listeners with carefully crafted slogans.

Which is why I don't watch BBC Question Time, seldom see Newsnight and can only manage very brief snatches of the Today Programme - all they offer is argument without substance, snarky interviewers and the constant idea that all these interactions must somehow have a winner and a loser. The political parties - and the gossip-mongers of the media - pour over the utterings of every politician looking for the clumsy phrase, the hesitation or the words than might offend some group or other. We're routinely presented with allegations of sexism and racism constructed on the flimsiest of grounds. Why? Because it's another win for the opposition or for one or other newspaper or website.

This game - slogans, soundbites and poses mixed with back-biting and character assassination - makes politics seem like, as Paul Begala observed, show business for the ugly. It doesn't matter much whether the actual policies actually work, that can be glossed over. What matters is who wins and who loses. Not just at the election (at least that's a real contest) but in every engagement and encounter. We pull down the opponent - focus on their silly face, their school or their resemblance to Parker from Thunderbirds - rather than engage with what they are saying.

Whatever the truth, it really is pretty sad that the presentation of politics has reached this point - a sort of x-factor for the political anorak rather than a way of helping the public understand what politicians are actually proposing. Perhaps Russell Brand and Nigel Farage - inconsistent, flash blokes from the edges of London with the gift of the gab and a degree of likeability - really do represent the future of politics. After all they don't offer positive policies, just lists of things they don't want and people they don't like.

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Thursday 11 December 2014

Big state, small state...on Simon Wren-Lewis's ideological obsession with big government

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Sometime the careful manufacture of a straw man is a useful tool to present an argument. Indeed, the thing with a hypothesised model as the basis for criticism - even if the real world is different - is that it allows people to marshall the strengths and understand the weaknesses of their ideology.

But this is a story about the other sort of straw man. The more common one constructed in order to provide sustenance for a given position regardless of the actual truth. Perhaps the most common straw man out there is the argument against any reform of the National Health Service on the basis that the only alternative is a "US-style health system". No-one proposes such a change but the opponents of the changes that are proposed always used this straw man to frame their argument.

However, for shockingly bad straw men, this blog post from Simon Wren-Lewis is a masterpiece. The core facts are (sort of, arguably) correct but are carefully placed alongside other facts to which they do not directly relate. All this to make this point about big government:

Perhaps it reflects the power of an ideology that its protagonists want to see no evil. Perhaps it is because those hurt by austerity somehow do not count. But the claim that Osborne’s cuts have been such a success that they will cause a “deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand” is simply delusional. These are fantasy ideas from those living in an imaginary world, while in reality the policies they support do serious harm.

To  arrive at this position (and I've no quarrel with people thinking big government is just grand - it's just not a viewpoint I share) Wren-Lewis has had to strangle the evidence. Because the ideological bias is revealed - the protagonists of a small state are "evil" - it is clear that this was the starting point for the construction of the straw man rather than a more considered assessment (something we'd expect from an Oxford academic but don't get here) of the arguments for and against reducing the size of government.

So let's look at Wren-Lewis's arguments:

The first one relates to the idea - widely held but wholly inaccurate - that there is no longer any constituency still arguing, on principle, for a big state. I find this odd since the majority of our public policy discourse and especially that driven by Wren-Lewis's colleagues in academia demands ever more regulation, control and direction from government.  Perhaps if he had a conversation with some sociologists this might clear up his weird belief that support for a big state "...lost all its influence with Margaret Thatcher and New Labour, and it has also lost its influence in the rest of Europe." In historical terms the state remains large - reducing the government portion of GDP to 35% from its current level approaching 50% is an argument about the size of government but doesn't fundamentally challenge the central welfarist argument of modern government - a position supported (to differing degrees) by left, centre-left and centre-right.

Wren-Lewis next claims that 'small state people' (he manages to use the preferred term of abuse 'neoliberal' as well but 'small state people' is wonderfully patronising) are not as good as him because - he claims - not to have any "fixed ideological position" about whether the state should be large or small. Whereas, of course, the sad little state people are attached to their ideology. The problem is that Wren-Lewis doth protest too much - he is absolutely wedded to the idea of big government and to the view that government actions determine the direction of the economy not the aggregated choices of private individuals. It is true that, if (for whatever reason - call it ideology if you must) government sets out to reduce its size then this will have the short term effect Wren-Lewis describes. But this is essentially an argument for the big government macroeconomy that created the very financial crisis Wren-Lewis wants to blame on 'private sector activity'. The idea that the choices of big governments had no role in wrecking the economy a decade ago is a wholly indefensible position more revealing of Wren-Lewis's ideological preferences than any assessment of the facts.

Before his final piece of ideological legerdemain, Wren-Lewis arrives at the debate over whether the reductions in government spending have had a social cost. Which he presents via this little rant about food banks:

The number of food banks in the UK has grown massively over the last five years. The Trussell Trust estimate that more than half of their clients were receiving food because of benefit delays, sanctions, and financial difficulties relating to the bedroom tax and abolition of council tax relief.

Now I'm not going to deny that changes to welfare resulted in some hardship but the frank truth was that our system was unsustainable - even in a world where big government is OK. Wren-Lewis wants to argue that the reforms have been 'duds' - yet he knows that this is not the case. It is the old methods such as the Work Programme that evolved from Labour's New Deal schemes that are duds not the use of financial incentives to drive different choices. The problem is that the system of redistribution we have in the UK is now almost entirely paid for through borrowing (or if you prefer it the other way - because so much of the money raised in taxes goes in welfare payments there isn't enough left to provide the services we actually want government to provide so we have to borrow).

Finally Wren-Lewis arrives at his intellectually-dishonest conclusion in which he calls people on the right 'evil' and argues that the polices such people propose cause 'serious harm'. What Wren-Lewis cannot admit is that not only might that supposed harm be mitigated through some welfare-enhancing private action (those food banks, for example) but also that the policies of big government might also cause 'harm'. There are a whole series of government interventions and regulations that reduce trade, undermine enterprise and limit private choices - all of which might be described as 'harm'.

Wren-Lewis built a fine straw man. Truly magnificent in its vanity. But there's no truth in the central premise that people like Wren-Lewis are not wedded to the idea of big government in the manner that others (George Osborne in the main) are wedded to the idea of small government. And Wren-Lewis clearly demonstrates his ideological commitment to big government which means his splendid straw man collapses into a shallow polemic.

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In which their representatives remind us that teacher trade unions are bad for education

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The regional branch of Ofsted has published some mildly critical comments about Bradford's schools. And it's true that our schools are not closing the gap and that, to put it mildly, the Council's leadership on this matter are rather complacent. But - and this is important given the close links with Bradford's political leadership - the response from teacher trade unions is utterly shameless.

Firstly, here's what Ofsted suggested:

Nick Hudson, Ofsted director for North East, Yorkshire and Humber, said: “The fact that Bradford is ranked 144 out of 150 nationally is clearly a concern."

He added: "I think the answers lie in secondary schools in Bradford and secondary schools on the borders of Bradford that are performing well.

"The Council should maybe look beyond its borders to see why other schools are doing better than those in Bradford are. My advice is the Council needs to seek links with these areas." 

Helpful advice - look at nearby schools perhaps in Calderdale, Leeds and Kirklees that are doing better.

So what do the teacher union representatives have to say. First up is the NUT:

Ian Murch, Bradford spokesman for the National Union of Teachers, was sceptical of the findings. He said: "Ofsted often finds what it is looking for. There are high levels of deprivation and in some inner city schools there are a lot of children who don't speak English as a first language.

"These schools are measured to the same standards. Performance of children from some of the poorest families are measured against children from well off areas whose parents went to university." 

Of course there's no deprivation in Leeds, Halifax or Huddersfield! Yet again we see a series of excuses rather than an urgent desire to improve Bradford's education. Plus the re-run of the myth about children with English as a second language being less able - which they aren't:

Schools with large numbers of migrants and pupils from ethnic minorities gain the best GCSE results because they have a stronger work ethic, according to research.

A study by Bristol University found that schools with a diverse pupil population performed significantly better than those filled with white British children.

It emerged that the effect could be worth an extra eight GCSE grades compared with the rest of the country – the equivalent of leaving school with straight A grades rather than Bs.

So you see, Bradford's schools aren't poor because of immigrants. Too many of them are just poor schools.

On to the NAS/UWT representative who launches into a rant about resources:

"Many schools are having to cut back, and have bigger classes with fewer staff. Standards in school is a much bigger issue than Ofsted would have you believe." 

Bradford's schools receive some £75 million more in funding today than they did in 2010 with much of this going to schools with more children from deprived backgrounds. Pam Milner, the representative in question is simply making stuff up.

These responses are worse than complacency (and that's bad enough), they amount to a denial that teachers have a central role to play in delivering the improvements in standards. Yet all teacher unions have done is promote strikes and other industrial action - things that do nothing to help the children their members teach. And rather than face up to their responsibilities these representatives shift the blame onto government, parents, immigration - anything but the schools themselves.

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Quote of the day: on the Arts Council

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From Lloyd Evans in the Spectator:

The Arts Council, of course, is not an artistic organisation. It distributes bribes. And as a vassal of the state, it unconsciously mimics its political masters who have no faith in the people.

And those bribes - for all the talk of 'diversity' - are overwhelmingly directed to the grand institutions of high culture rather than towards the promotion of creativity. Probably because it's not really about art at all.

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Wednesday 10 December 2014

Of course Britain doesn't make anything any more!

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You've all heard it at some point, usually from the grumpy old bloke at the end of the bar.

"There's no manufacturing any more, no proper businesses. Britain doesn't make anything any more"

I suspect that an opinion poll would discover that most Britons share that grumpy old bloke's opinion. And in one respect they're right. We no longer have great big factories teeming with workers. The hooters that mark the start and end of shifts are no longer a feature of every community and children don't finish school on the Friday and start at the mill on Monday.

But the real truth is that Britain does make stuff - really important stuff that's tomorrow's technology. And it employs lots of people.

About one-quarter of the world’s commercial communication satellites are built in Britain and 40% of the world’s small satellites. Most of those are built by Airbus’s Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), the world leader in the field. It has launched 43 satellites since it was started by an academic at Surrey University, Sir Martin Sweeting. The whole space sector directly employs 35,000 people, and the supply-chain accounts for thousands more jobs. London-based Inmarsat is one of the world’s largest satellite operators, specialising in mobile telephony. The space sector has a turnover of about £11 billion a year.

The problem is that modern manufacturing isn't like that old manufacturing, it doesn't employ thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled people. Instead it employs technicians with in-demand skills, engineers and scientists with higher degrees. Today's manufacturing employee is more likely to drive to work in a BMW from a four-bed detached house than to walk there in dungarees carrying a lunch box. I visited one manufacturer - in Oldham, at the heart of the old manufacturing world - where three-quarters of the workforce had a degree including 54 with a PhD.

So what the grumpy bloke at the bar is bemoaning isn't the loss of manufacturing but the loss of the low-skill, low paid unionised manufacturing jobs of times past. Britain still makes stuff - a bewildering variety of stuff from satellites to sugar, from cars to coffee - but it doesn't use millions of workers to do the making. And the problem we have, especially in places like Bradford, is we produce too many people who lack the skills to do modern manufacturing. There are plenty of reasons for this but one thought expressed to me recently was interesting - worth exploring. It was that our education system was designed for that old world, for the production of industrial cannon fodder and a small elite of managers.

We sort of recognised this - Blair's misplaced call for half of young people to go to university reflects the desire to equip people with the skills modern industry needs. And while this failed, turning out too many degrees in tourism studies and too few in engineering, it was a first step in a long road to a system that really does provide for tomorrow's workforce. This isn't the sort of Ken Robinson nonsense about how schools are a bad thing but rather the need to reconsider what the consumers of education - parents and their children - demand. And, for all the cant about creativity, what people want from education is a system that helps children get the knowledge and skills allowing them access to good quality, well-paid employment.

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Sunday 7 December 2014

Quote of the day - Nigel Farage blames everyone else for his failure

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Immigration and the M4 meant Nigel couldn't get to Wales to meet his cymric faithful:

"That is nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a population that is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be."

Absolutely pathetic. Blaming immigrants for his own incompetence!

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Television sponsorship, star players and oligarchs have made English club football great again.

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I'm prompted to write by a book review in The Spectator. Not, I'm guessing the first place to turn to for any deep or insightful assessment of football. And the review doesn't disappoint:

For all the sophistication of his analysis, Goldblatt provides no convincing answer to the question of why clubs, originally rooted in their communities, still command such loyalty when few of their teams contain local lads, and some not even a majority of English ones, but transient mercenaries.

Now this is a review of a book written by a sociologist which means we can be pretty sure that the author isn't an enthusiast for capitalism raw in tooth and claw. Indeed the review quotes Goldblatt saying football is  ‘social-democratic game in a neo-liberal world’. And as we all know, dear reader, anyone who uses the term 'neo-liberal' without irony is probably to the left of most mainstream politics in the UK.

But it's not Goldblatt's assessment that bothers me (and to be fair I haven't read his book) but the reviewer, Michael Beloff's view that television sponsorship, pampered star players and the vanity of oligarchs should be blamed for the current sad state of English football. Indeed, the truth - whatever this reviewer may say - is that English football is in a pretty good state. Unless of course you measure its success purely on the basis of how the national team performs.

Let's start with attendance - although levels have levelled off in the past couple of years, the numbers of paying customers for football matches in England rose steadily from its low point in the mid-1980s.

It's true that attendances after the last war were vastly high - we've all seen those images of packed crowds stood shoulder to shoulder. And, of course, we also know that the spread of leisure choices means that those days aren't returning. What is remarkable is that, given the range of leisure choices (and what seems like wall-to-wall TV coverage) well over a million people pay to watch football every week of the season. And this includes some 150,000 or so who stand on a cold terrace with a pie watching non-league games. The idea that a leisure industry can sustain this level of business in a very competitive market tells us that, far from English football be in some sort of trouble, it is thriving.

But - and here Beloff makes another sweeping statement - what about the players?

Like many other sports, football was invented in England; yet the balance of power has shifted elsewhere. The true superstars play in Spain, Italy or Germany.

Wow! Hard to know quite where to start with this observation - perhaps the clubs of the world cup finalists? Again Beloff couldn't be more wrong - there were eleven clubs with ten or more players at the 2014 World Cup Finals, five of them in the English premier league. And the English leagues provided 119 of the players - fully 38 more than the next highest, Italy's Serie A. Finally 22 England players play in England compared to just one of the Uruguay team. The idea that all the superstars play somewhere else really is arrant nonsense.


Thirdly Beloff suggests that the Premier League is 'uncompetitive' suggesting that the prospect of the big prizes - league champions, qualifying for the Champions League and the FA Cup - only exists for 'half-a-dozen' clubs. Here's the current top of the table - I think this proves Beloff wrong (and not just because I'm a West Ham fan):



Underlying all this argument is a common political point - that the greed of players has somehow stolen 'the people's game' away from the people. There's a sort of nostalgia in this political point, a harking back to a mythical golden age when star players lived in terraced houses and went to training on the bus. We ignore the huge profits made by wealthy club owners - made possible because of wage caps and a transfer system that was tantamount to slavery. It was a time when clubs were full of 'local lads' wearing chunky brown boots to trundle across pitches that, half the time, would be better suited to planting wheat than playing football.

In the end football - and the desire to watch exciting players gracing the hallowed turf of 'our' club - reflects the world as it is not some sort of rose-tinted, patronising image of sturdy working-class yeoman playing and watching. And the liberalising of the game - opening up the transfer system, more overseas players, better management (everywhere but Leeds United) and ending wage limits- results in the Premier League producing a spectacle that is a vast improvement on the sluggish, muddy and foul-ridden game of the 1970s and 1980s.

There's plenty to worry us about football but it really isn't the clubs, the players or the management of leagues. Nor is it support for junior and lower level football - the grassroots is thriving (although it could use more of that FA cash). And neither is it the fans (Beloff has a little bien pensant pop at racism and homophobia - presumably to tick the London metro-liberal bingo card).

No, the problem with football lies with FIFA, UEFA and the FA, with the administration of the game. Rather than pretend there was some golden age of football writers like Michael Beloff would be better served directing their criticism to the corruption and fixing, the tinkering with rules, the refusal to embrace technology and the training of referees.

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Saturday 6 December 2014

Does 'Gangs of New York' shed some light on Bradford politics?

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You remember the film 'Gangs of New York'? What I hadn't fully appreciated was that the film wasn't just about the battles between Irish immigrants and 'nativists' in New York during the Civil War but was set at the birth of 'boss rule' in US cities - in New York's case, Tammany Hall:

Gangs of New York (Gangs) takes place in New York City during the Civil War. Its plot concerns the war between Irish and nativist gangs for control of lower Manhattan. Both lose, leading to the rise of Tammany Hall, whose innovative manner of conflict resolution laid the foundation for modern New York. The ward heelers replace the warlords and the rigid identities of immigrant and nativist are dissolved. That’s how New York was tamed.

So writes Steve Eide in New geography and he reminds us that Boss Tweed's 'innovative manner of conflict resolution' involved thievery on a grand scale. Eide goes on to look at a couple of other films that shone a creative light on boss rule in US cities. Both the good (that people living in poverty can use the machine to rise to positions of power and influence) and the bad (murder, extortion, vote-rigging and graft). At the heart of this system was the means by which immigrant communities - and in America's case this meant the Irish - secured power and influence.

It is always dangerous to draw parallels in history - times are very different to 19th century New York, Boston or Chicago. But I sense that communities make a choice - between trade and politics - in the search for power. In New York and Boston this meant that the Irish dominated politics while the economies became the domain of Jews and the older protestant community. And this didn't matter to those in power - for sure there were strong words about prejudice, arguments that more should be done for one or other minority, but these were less important than using ethnic loyalty and the politics of community to sustain control.

So it's worth - for the sake of analysis - making the parallel with the biraderi ('kinship') structures within Pakistani, and especially Mirpuri, social systems. As Parveen Akhtar has observed these structures brought about:

...a system of patronage whereby local politicians of all political parties (but especially the Labour Party) built links with community leaders in the Pakistani community, who became their gateway to the Pakistani vote. (Labour's former deputy leader Roy Hattersley, who long held the Sparkbrook constituency in Birmingham, once remarked that whenever he saw a Pakistani name on a ballot-paper he knew the vote was his). The local leaders were given minor positions of power and help in figuring out the political system, so that they could stand for council seats or influential roles as subaltern aides.

Today it is almost certainly true that the majority of Labour votes in Bradford come from the City's Pakistani community. And, just as with Tammany Hall politics in the USA, this leaves the party vulnerable to two challenges - the insurgent candidate who captures the passion of the poor immigrants and the switching of middle-class second generation immigrant voters away from candidates seen as marking the old system.

George Galloway was that first candidate:

Much of the alienation and marginalisation from mainstream electoral politics felt by the young can be traced back to the way the biraderi system became a means of political exclusion. This generational evolution helps explain why young British Pakistanis in an area like Bradford West were drawn to vote for George Galloway.

It is ironic that, in America's boss system the idea of 'perfuming the ticket' existed - an approach, however dodgy, that would have guarded against Galloway-esque insurgency:

Wise bosses were highly sensitive to public opinion. They sometimes had to run candidates who were just distant enough from the machine to be considered graft-free. This practice was known as “perfuming the ticket.”

The second problem - that men from the core community (who speak with a thick accent and are better known as fixers than creators) have less and less in common with the growing part of the community that is educated, more affluent and consequently feels less oppressed. The Eide argued resulted in the old boss system collapsing as the educated switched support to people more like them and less like their grandparents.

Akhtar feels that the biraderi system no longer holds so much sway, that Galloway's victory changed all that. However, a glance at Bradford's politics suggests that these relationships - the biraderi system - remains very influential within the Pakistani community. It's not just that the councillors elected in 2012 on George Galloway's coat-tails have deserted him but that it's reported their connections with Labour councillors through the kinship systems mean it's a matter of time before most of them find a comfortable seat on the Labour benches - the ticket, suitably perfumed, resulted in rebels, but not too rebellious a bunch of rebels.

Earlier this week I was on Sunrise Radio in Bradford for a question time session. And, during a period off air, the matter of birideri came up - two fellow panellists, both Asians, saw it as a barrier but disagreed as to whether the solution lay in mainstream politics (a Bradford version of Tammany Hall) or something more disruptive, springlike - to borrow George Galloway's designation. For me perhaps the answer lies in the passage of time. After all New York, Boston and Chicago are less plagued by the politics of group, ethnicity, clan and family than they were and, in part, this is because people from the poor, immigrant communities were given a role in the politics of the city. I just hope we do it with less corruption, less deception and more open-ness than was the case with American cities.

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