Saturday 30 July 2016

"It's better for health if everyone loses a pound or two" - introducing Bradford's evidence free obesity strategy


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The presentation from Bradford's public health officers began with an observation that, while obesity is a problem there was very little evidence showing which, if any, of the assorted interventions, actually made any difference. About twenty minutes later, having reviewed the full gamut of interventions without even providing even contested or limited evidence to support them, the presentation concluded with the argument that we had to do all these things (even the ones like new taxes, bans and so forth that we had no power to introduce). I guess the alternative is that we all become vast semi-mobile lard buckets for whom the only hope is very expensive bariatric surgery.

The problem is that what evidence we did actually see didn't support the officers doom and gloom. Once you'd got away from the conflation of overweight with obesity (done solely to make the problem an all-population problem rather than one for just a part of the population) we discovered the following:

1. Rates of obesity among children in Bradford had fallen for 5 year olds but remained static for 11 year olds.

2. There is a direct connection between rates of multiple deprivation - poverty in layman's terms - and levels of obesity (rates at 11 in wealthy Wharfedale were 8% whereas in poor Manningham hit 30%)

3. Although this was denied, there seems to be an acceleration in overweight in children from the Asian community from 5 years to 11 years.

It is clear to any but the ideologically blind that this requires a targeted approach for obesity combined with efforts to reduce levels of poverty. Bradford spends over £2 million on obesity interventions (that's just the council) but we've no idea whether any of these interventions are making any difference and we refuse to target the actually obese. The sheer stupidity of the policy was summed up by the strategy's 'clinical lead' (he's a GP) who, in dismissing my suggestion that we might target our efforts and actually look at the evidence, made the sweeping observation:

"I fundamentally disagree with Cllr Cooke's argument. It's better for health if everyone loses a pound or two."

The limited evidence we actually received was ignored in favour of signalling that we are "doing something" about obesity. This is despite that "something" being a strategy based on things like planning controls over fast food takeaways, fussing about portion sizes in restaurants and promoting inadequate dinners for primary school children. None of which ideas has any evidence demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing rates of obesity.

Put bluntly, we will (well not me but a majority of the Health & Wellbeing Board) agree to waste over £2 million of public money every year just to indulge an ideological, all-population approach to obesity that isn't justified by the data or supported by evidence. And if this is repeated across England that probably means over £200 million of your and my taxes spend to indulge the ignorant ideological vanity of public health. Why its not a scandal defeats me.

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Friday 29 July 2016

Quote of the day - how much do rock stars make?


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From Ben Reeve Lewis on the Landlord Law Blog (his Friday Newsround is worth following - always witty and interesting):

Many moons ago, in a previous life as a professional musician my band were managed by Jim Beech, whose other clients were Chris Rea and Queen.

Back then money from records basically came in two forms, mechanicals and royalties. Mechanicals is for records sold and royalties for stuff played on radio and TV.

Royalties by far outstrip mechanicals by a country mile. Both were paid quarterly per territory and there were 84 territories in total.

I once saw a mechanicals cheque on the office desk for just one Queen album, one quarter, in one territory, Argentina, which was for £224,000.

Multiply that by 84 territories 4 times a year, add the quarterly royalty cheques to that and then times it by the number of albums you have out, not including merchandise.

My calculator just blew up.

And remember this is (I'm sure Ben won't mind me mentioning) about 40 years ago when £224,000 really was £224,000!

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Thursday 28 July 2016

Hey pleb, are you voting the right way?



There has been a whole pile of stuff written about how the poor deluded and misinformed - even ignorant - voters make the wrong choices. Much of this relates to the rather splendid decision of the British electorate to ignore the views of the great and good in voting to leave the European Union.

I was quite taken by Brendan O'Neill talking about the NME in a Spectator blog:

The rebels have become the squares, the youths have become the authoritarians, and the spirit of rock’n’roll no longer lives in the middle-class music scene or leftish activist circles, but in the hearts and minds of the little people.

The very location of this blog - given its subject - shows a world upside down. A former Marxist writing in the establishment's political journal about how the New Musical Express, the edgiest of music magazines from my youth, has sold out on the spirit of punk. But it's worse than this - we're in a world where the errors of voters need correcting, where the choices of plebs need nudging, directing, managing in order that they concur with the opinions of a self-appointed clique of educated, metropolitan sophisticates.

Here's O'Neill again:

What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying ‘No’ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels.

Today I went to a meeting of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority where we received and discussed a report on the implications of Brexit. The report wasn't very good (it described 'long term' in its response to Brexit plan as January 2017-January 2018 - seriously) but it wasn't this that made my eyes widen. Rather it was the idea that, had we only communicated better - EU flags on pens were mentioned - then it would have all been different. Talk was of how we could, in the future, 'communicate' the poor, ignorant voters into voting the right way.

Bear in mind that these were, in all but one case, senior Labour councillors talking - the tribunes of the people spoke and told us that the people, bless 'em, didn't know what they were doing. The poor dears simply weren't aware of all the wonders that the EU had brought them (as they struggled to pay for the mortgage, find a reliable job, get the children off to a decent start, build up a nest egg for retirement).

It seems that everywhere people like this think democracy is rubbish. At least when people make decisions you don't like. I remember one of those same Labour leaders sternly suggesting that a balanced representation on votes cast meant 'they'd have representation, you know" - she meant UKIP but, like Voldemort, couldn't quite name the evil thing.

And this snobbish, 'voters should be shown how to vote properly' view isn't limited to the UK. Here's Tyler Cowan from Marginal Revolution:

It might have been a better situation when the elites, acting with some joint collective force, directed more of their energies to shaming the less elite voters than to shaming each other.

You've got this haven't you, darlings? This undoubtedly elite commenter writing on a blog with tens of thousands of readers thinks we should try to make ordinary working class voters ashamed of not voting the same way as their betters. It's little better than the squire visiting his workers to make sure they understood why they should vote for his son as the MP.

Instead of bribing, shaming or nudging perhaps the answer lies in actually sitting down and listening to these voters. Finding out what bothers them, understanding why they think government is run for the elites and that it is too far away, too complicated and too secretive for them to stand a chance of liking what is does - or, more importantly, what it represents.

If you start with the premise that the plebs have voted the wrong way, then you've already lost the argument. It you think attacking them, embarrassing them or shaming them is the way forward, you've lost that argument. And if you think the answer is for the great and good to decide everything then you're no democrat but a nannying authoritarian.

Two-thirds of Wakefield's voters chose to leave the EU. They didn't do this because they're 'left behind', 'excluded', 'ignorant', 'racist' or any of those other interpretations of "plebs, you voted the wrong way". They voted to leave because the EU was - and still is - an elite project run by and for the elite. A means - somewhat like too much international aid - of channelling cash from the productive in successful places to an unproductive elite in less successful places. A system where posh students get subsidised gap years paid for with the taxes of low paid workers and where grand European-funded offices filled with patronising middle-class development workers fail to make any difference to the communities they're supposed to be helping.

No-one voted the wrong way and the great and good need to get this into their thick skulls. People had a choice - a contested choice - and opted, in sufficient numbers to win, for the one that said Leave. To understand this you don't need to insult those voters or pretend that poor communication was the problem. What you need to do is realise that the EU is the biggest of all the elite projects - patronising, self-serving, suited, shiny-officed, out of touch, nannying, hectoring, bossy.

The problem is that all those people who benefited from the EU - and their friends, fellow travellers and useful idiots - think the answer to the problem is more bossiness, more nudging, more lectures and a mission to make anyone voting ashamed of voting their conscience, their feelings and their thoughts. It seems the elite still think the plebs are voting the wrong way and that this should be stopped.

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Monday 25 July 2016

Social Justice - a new authoritarianism


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I got to thinking about social justice. Partly this was because I'm doing a debate on Wednesday with someone who comes billed as a 'Social Justice Campaigner' and partly because it's a term I see used again and again but which seems to avoid clarity or definition. On the one hand we can point to a right wing version as typified by the Centre for Social Justice:

By combining hands-on experience, public involvement, academic rigour and effective political engagement, the CSJ has been able to work from a foundation that has sparked radical public policy change. Since 2004 we have set out over 800 ideas – published across more than 20 research themes – that would make a transformative difference in people’s lives. Many of these recommendations have influenced the political process significantly, revolutionising a tired debate about poverty and social justice. These include: radical welfare reform through Universal Credit; early years intervention programmes; political commitments to prevent family breakdown; pioneering education reforms; efforts to improve the rehabilitation of offenders and drug addicts; action on street gangs; and support for people with unmanageable debts.

I see this as having the same relationship to Conservatism as Methodism appears to have to English protestantism - at least in so far as I understand these things. Indeed, the CSJ does come across as drawing on a Christian conservative tradition that might be associated with 19th century 'muscular Christians', with G K Chesterton or, more recently, with Pope John Paul II. I'm being careful here because the mixing of religion and politics is always tricky. What is clear from the CSJ position on social justice is that it is about poverty and exclusion rather than inequality per se.

The other hand contains the left wing world of our social justice campaigner - the one I'm seeing on Wednesday is from this organisation:

JUST is a groundbreaking initiative set up by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in 2003 to promote racial justice in West Yorkshire. Since its establishment JUST has become a leading voice in the North promoting racial justice, civil liberties and human rights. The fall-out from the 2001 Northern Uprisings and the introduction of draconian legislation following the 7/7 London bombings has resulted in civil liberties and human rights increasingly becoming an integral part of our work in the region.

In an era where the Community Cohesion and Prevent agendas have become the key paradigms of government policy and the Race and Institutional Racism agendas have been rolled back by the State, the adverse impact on Black and minority ethnic people has been unprecedented.

BME people continue to be over-represented in poverty, discrimination, NEETS, criminal justice, stop and search, education, poor health and other poor quality of life outcomes. Instead of investment in resources and funding to address the generational and historic systemic and structural discrimination that BME people experience, the government’s ‘war on terror’ has ‘criminalised’ BME and particularly Muslim people and its community cohesion policy has put the burden of good race relation on visible minorities.

We're in a very different place here from the CSJ. Instead of the focus on poverty we have an emphasis on inequality - the view that government and other institutions are contributors to the lack of justice faced, in this case, by BME communities. And we can encounter the same language from others advocating for LGBT, for women's rights and even for religious minorities (this is hinted at with JUST West Yorkshire saying "...particularly Muslim people....").

The question here is whether we have two entirely different definitions of social justice or whether there is a common theme between the anti-poverty positioning of the CSJ and the minority rights approach of JUST West Yorkshire. I did trawl through the philosophical underpinnings of the idea - from John Rawls backwards (always best to work backwards with philosophy) to Locke and Hobbes via Rousseau. As usual with philosophy it's about a penetrable as six-inch thick steel plate but the themes of poverty and equality (or equity) were common as was this idea of a 'social contract'. Indeed this latter concept seems to me quite the central consideration.

The problem is that this social contract is every bit as nebulous as the idea of social justice. Not only is the contract not written down but there seems to be some confusion as to whether it applies to all of humanity or merely to parts of humanity. Is the social contract something sitting at the level of the neighbourhood (say Cullingworth), region or nation? And is the General Will that Rousseau talks about essentially a vocalisation of that social contract? Finally, who interprets or enforces the social contract and how do we know that reflects the General Will?

I'm saying all this, not because I want to answer all those questions (I'm not sure we can), but rather because we need to understand that, if social justice is the enforcement of Rousseau's social contract, it can only be done through authoritarian means and through the preference for communal rights over individual rights. To do this someone - or some organisation - has to become the arbiter of what is or isn't a breach of that social contract or, in other words, is contrary to social justice.

Sometimes all this is pretty straightforward because there is no conflict between individual and communal rights - for example in arguing that it's wrong to exclude someone from employment on the basis of skin colour, gender or sexual preference. But where personal views (and our right to express them) are concerned we can only enforce social justice by denying individual rights. Thus the 'social justice right' may wish to prevent (or actively discourage) 'non-traditional' family arrangements and the 'social justice left' may want to stop the expression of support for such a traditionalist position. Both positions deny people a right - either to live in a non-traditional family or to express opposition to that idea.

The problem is that both sides invoke (at least implicitly) the idea of the social contract in defence of their position. Yet the positions are - for essentially the same reason on each side - mutually exclusive. The left says excluding the non-traditional is unfair or unequal while the right says that the non-traditional arrangements promote poverty and therefore inequality. Social justice cannot be delivered unless one or other position is rejected.

For the right this means championing stable communities, families (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and often the fear of god. Hard work, community involvement and self-sacrifice in the interest of future generations are held as essential virtues - the social contract is an unwritten commitment to the whole community and that community is local, limited and seeks to be resilient. Social justice is served where everyone is part of secure, supportive and strong communities.

The problem is that this leads to social stasis, to paternalism and to the exclusion of people who reject (or have a different idea of) the essential community virtues. Plus, of course, someone has to define and enforce those virtues, to be the authority.

In the case of the left social justice is served by rejecting homogeneity, placing equality as the primary virtue and ensuring that no actions or speech undermines this primacy. The result is - or aims to be - a homogeneity between communities rather than within communities. Anything that questions the primacy of equality as the social contract's purpose cannot be permitted. Moreover the meaning of equality becomes fluid - it is determined by authority rather than by the reality of access to opportunity. As a result individual rights become secondary as communal rights come to dominate society. It is acceptable to 'no platform' a speaker if it is feared their words might contest the enforcement of the social contract - in ensuring social justice.

I had thought to draw the philosophical line forward down a different route to Giovanni Gentile's transition from Actualism to Fascism where the question of who interprets the General Will was answered though the idea of 'the leader'. The problem, however, is that this takes us - implicit authoritarianism aside - away from the modern position where leadership is more complex. Rather than a single identified leader, we have a sort of groupthink - a hive mind perhaps - that provides the basis on which the General Will is decided and the social contract upheld. Because this collective has market power, authorities bow to the pressure it asserts and exclude those who fail to conform with the perceived General Will.

In the end social justice is really something desired and doesn't need to be defined. The politician who proclaims he is fighting for social justice secures approval by seeming to support some sort of community betterment. The reality is that, whether from right or left, social justice is illiberal and excluding - either by enforcing an intra-communal conformity (the right) or by insisting on an inter-communal conformity (the left). The biggest loss here is, for me, individuality and the accompanying rights to speak, act and live freely.

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Sunday 24 July 2016

Why it's good to admit to being wrong every now and then...


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I used to work with a chap - forget his name, it was along time ago before I came to Bradford - who, when I'd point out a mistake in his stats or similar, would smile and say: "I may occasionally be in error but I'm never wrong." To be fair this was said with a smile while the mistake was corrected - I always liked him for that.

It was quite a while after this that I discovered Rousseau's idea of the General Will and, importantly, that my colleague's quote was more or less a description of how (paradoxically) the General Will is intrinsically right. Now the problem with this collectivist take on will is, as I'm sure folk have already noticed, that we need to have a way of knowing what that General Will is actually saying.

We can point to democracy as a means of determining what the General Will is saying except that, as us Brits have just discovered, democracy doesn't do this - is 52/48 a statement of General Will to Leave the EU or merely the result of a democratic contest? So, if we can't use voting to determine General Will (and the recent referendum reminds us of this fact) how do we decide? Or maybe the General Will - even badged as 'Common Good' or 'Common Purpose' - really doesn't exist?

For Actualists and latterly Fascists, the answer was simple, the General Will was embodied in the leader and his advisors (in themselves the leaders of the state's 'corporations' - army, business, organised labour, academia and so forth). But we're still stuck with the idea that somebody or some thing is the embodiment of that General Will - meaning, of course, that that person or body is intrinsically right. As the wags might say: "I may have my faults but being wrong isn't one of them!"

It seems to me that, in our sophisticated Western liberal democracies, this General Will has been embodied in a technocratic elite - a sort of Platonic administration by expert. Political decisions are sub-contracted to a process overseen by these experts - at the end of the process the politicians (defined here as the people we elect to represent us) do little other than rubber stamp the conclusions of the experts since these are 'scientific' or 'evidence-based'.

If we take the debate about standardised packaging for cigarettes as an example, we can see that the General Will was embodied in a small number of government bodies, academic departments and lobby groups rather than in the mass of response to the Department of Health's consultation on the proposal:

In total, 665,989 campaign responses were received from 24 separate campaigns. Around two-thirds of campaign responses received were from people who are opposed to the introduction of standardised packaging (total of 427,888 responses) and one-third of campaign responses received were from people who are in support (238,101 responses)...

The problem is that the opposition wasn't from those suitably (in the government's view) qualified to comment and they chose to assess only 'detailed' responses which, surprise surprise, split 53/43 in favour of standardised packaging. It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with the proposal for standardised packaging of cigarettes - the process of confirming the proposal post-consultation ignored the majority of responses because they were insufficiently 'detailed'.

The problem we have here is that there's a reluctance to admit that - regardless of how well 'evidenced' a policy might be, sometimes they are simply wrong. Indeed we know there's evidence of this with the standardised packaging policy:

“From a statistical perspective, none of these changes were different from zero. Over the timeframe of the analysis, the data does not demonstrate that there has been a change in smoking prevalence following the introduction of plain packaging.”

They also insert this important warning: “It is not possible to assign a causal relationship between the changes in the noticeabilty of health warnings or smoking prevalence and the introduction of plain packaging, as there have been a number of other confounding factors that have occurred before and during the period of this analysis.”

All this is merely illustrative of the problem with 'evidence' in making public policy. It's not just that we can't prove the counterfactual (what would have happened if we'd not made the policy decision) but also that appraising whether or not something works in social policy is really difficult - because of those confounding factors implicit in the second paragraph of the quotation above. Again this isn't an argument against the organised and systematic appraisal of public policy but rather a call for something different.

Put bluntly, it would be good for those experts to admit they were wrong every now and then rather than perform tortuous contortions aimed at explaining why, despite all the data (confounded or not) they really aren't wrong.

There is nothing weak about admitting a mistake - of fessing up and saying: "folks, I got that wrong!" Yet it seems that too many of us are constitutionally incapable of making that admission. We make predictions - often sweepingly on the basis of 'I'm an expert and I say' rather than actual research or analysis - and when they turn out wrong, the best we can do is sit quietly in the corner hoping no-one calls us out on our error. Some of the 'experts' are more brazen - denying that was what they predicted, shouting about how you've misunderstood what they said, and insisting that someone else is twisting their words to mean something different.

It's because of this - plus the patronising arrogance us clever folk use too much of the time - that polling tells us that much of the population simply doesn't trust what we're saying. Coupled with shouty and aggressive appeals to authority, we shove aside deductive reasoning and intelligent (if naive) questioning in favour of findings from a focus group of experts or determined by our partisan google searches. Treating the mass of the population as semi-sentient may seem right - what, after all, to those sheep know, they have to be led - but that mass of people doesn't forget and, given the chance, will stick two fingers up at you.

Truth is there isn't any General Will - or Common Purpose for that matter - but rather a moving collection of shared interests that never involve every person. Government - however hard you bash the social policy thing - is a pretty poor way of managing these shared interests. And the futher that government is from the things that actually matter to the folk who (in George Bailey's words) do all the living, working and dying round here, the less effective it becomes.

So my friends, make an effort - admit it when you get something wrong, a prediction doesn't turn out quite as you thought or a policy you backed is a failure. It will be a catharsis for you and will get you a damn sight more respect than trying to pretend you weren't wrong. And, of course, feel free to call me out on this too.

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Saturday 23 July 2016

Why Africa will leave us behind later this century


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We're still building railways - nineteenth century technology albeit jazzed up with improved kit. Africa - on top of sophisticated mobile telephony (and banking) - will have this:

Norman Foster is often hailed as the inventor of the modern-day terminal-style airport with his design of London’s Stansted. And now, his new plan is to build the world’s smallest airport. For drones. The dynamic, futuristic technology of drones is still mostly associated with the military. But the endless opportunities of the speedy and compact air vehicles are quickly being discovered as their use is expanding in commercial, scientific, recreational and other applications. It is estimated that over a million civilian units were sold in 2015.

Who needs expensive multi-lane highways when, for a fraction of the cost, you can zip in the goods, medicines, and people needed to make the place tick on a drone? And then watch the produce of formerly remote - now connected - places fly off to serve the world. Brilliant.

In the (currently) rich world we're stuck with a creaking and high maintenance transport network because, in a world of drones, autonomous cars and driver less buses, we've convinced ourselves that the answer is spending all the spare cash on high speed trains.

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Friday 22 July 2016

Why Remain lost (redux)


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Can I start firstly by saying this is a marketing view not a political one (although inevitably there'll be some politics). And secondly that Remain lost the referendum, Leave didn't win it. The campaign to stay in the European Union went from a secure opinion poll lead at the start of 2016 to losing the referendum six months later. At the outset of the campaign - which really started back in January not at the official campaign launch - Remain (or Stronger In) held all the cards. The campaign could count on the support of the three mainstream party leaders, most of the established names in politics, business, academia and science. Plus a reliable stream of celebrities happy to smile at the camera and proclaim "Stronger In".

The 'Stronger In' message - immigration aside - should also have been a winner. Thousands of foot soldiers to be recruited from the direct beneficiaries of EU members, from organisations receiving grants, from the ranks of universities. Big business, local government and the 'third sector' could be relied on to do the right thing in getting that message across.

So what went wrong? Well before some analysis from cleverer marketers than me, I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes (or qualitative analysis if you prefer).

Here in Cullingworth, the Village Hall decided to hold a referendum debate - they'd sounded out some folk in the village who all seemed keen and got a time and date (the venue, of course, would be the hall). A call to the local MP provided a Leave speaker pretty quickly and the Hall then contacted Stronger In - firing an email off to the address on that organisation's website. Nothing. No response at all. The good folk from the Hall chased - still nothing. I messaged the chief executive of the campaign, the Stronger In press office and another In twitter account. No response. Eventually, on the eve of the event, we got a limp phone message: "have you got a speaker?"

As it happened, other avenues had got us a speaker (thank you to Richard Corbett MEP for stepping up). But had we not used those avenues the event wouldn't have happened. The Stronger In campaign had failed at the very first hurdle of any campaign - not responding to enquiries. And, while Will Straw and the Stronger In press office were having a fun spat on Twitter with the much better organised (if smaller and poorer) Leave campaign, they also failed to respond to a request - from a non-partisan organisation - for campaign help.

The second anecdote is about public perception of what the vote was about. I'm sat in the sitting room of some local members - we were actually there to talk about the May local elections - and the referendum, perhaps inevitably, came up. Now these members are both elderly - 70s maybe even 80s - and they spoke about their doubts. Not selfishly but from the perspective of their children and grandchildren - "this is about twenty, thirty, forty years in the future - what sort of Britain we want for them" was the driver of their doubt. Now I don't know how this couple voted but I do know that the Stronger In campaign completely missed their perspective - the public campaign (where it was coherent) was entirely about the next few years.

I picked up this time perception time and time again but the Remain campaign stayed trapped in its short-termism - there was no message that answered my members' question: "what would a Stronger In Britain be like in twenty, thirty or forty years". Other than a sort of grandfatherly (at best) "it won't be good, you know - I wouldn't do it". And this short-termism continues after the Brexit vote - West Yorkshire Combined Authority in a report on 'Brexit implications' described 'long term' as 2017-2018.

I commented before on how the advertising folk - and Remain had access to all the top agencies, a deep well of marketing knowledge - saw the campaign as a shambles, without any positive message and focused more on personalities than on that message. Well here's another comment - focused more on tactical communications issues - from Mike Hind:

It was almost as if Remain actively wanted to exclude you if you read the Daily Express. Tepid offerings of business information and hesitant requests to support them if you’d “like to” hardly spoke of a passion to mobilise people who are generally more turned on by a direct call to arms. It didn’t work for me — and I was a financial contributor to the campaign. A despairing one.

Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.

As I started out saying - Stronger In, or Remain, began the campaign with all the advantages, all the expertise and the basis of an effective organisation. And blew it. On the evening of polling day - a few minutes after the polls had shut, the BBC interviewed Ed Miliband. It doesn't matter what the MP for Doncaster North said in the interview, it matters where it was conducted - from London. Miliband wasn't where he would have been most effective - in his constituency where he's known, influential and probably liked.

The problem now is that those who campaigned to remain a member of the EU are compounding their error. They're still preferring to paint Leave voters as thick, ill-educated, oafish bigots rather than begin the job of listening to those people. Analyses of voting that confirm this view are shared. Bad news of any sort is leapt on and spread around - whether its reports of xenophobic attacks (do note that West Yorkshire police say there's no post-referendum increase in such attacks) or some snippet of economic news, mostly opinion or anecdote, that confirms the Remain campaign's predictions of short-term doom and gloom.

Right now there's a peace to win. And it won't be won by portraying half the nation as stupid, bigoted, ignorant and selfish. It will be won by presenting the case most of us support - Britain as an outward-looking, co-operative, creative nation that's up for trade, intellectual exchange and, yes, sensibly managed immigration.

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Thursday 21 July 2016

So the Chinese are buying up Sheffield. Tell me economic nationalists where's the outcry?


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You'll all recall the outcry - much of it pig-ignorant - over the sale of ARM Holdings to a Japanese company. Between people blaming Brexit and a veritiable torrent of slightly leftish economic nationalism we were told that this was a terrible foreign take over. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't (I lean towards the latter - after all I'd be cheering on a British business buying a Japanese company why not the reverse).

What I don't understand it the selective nature of this economic nationalism. I've not picked up anything like the same sort of negative response to this:

In the biggest Chinese investment outside London, Sheffield city council announced that an initial £220m would pay for four or five city centre projects over the next three years and create “hundreds if not thousands” of jobs in south Yorkshire.

The partnership is between Sheffield city council and Sichuan Guodong Construction Group, one of the biggest firms in China’s south-western Sichuan province.

What, dear reader, is the difference between a massive Chinese conglomerate buying up big chunks of Sheffield city centre and the (admittedly larger) inward investment deal that was the ARM takeover? Or for that matter the perennial whining and whimpering about foreign investment in London property? I mean, if you're going to be an economic nationalist - adopt the daft Will Hutton view of industry - then, for heaven's sake, be a consistent economic nationalist.

What we have here is a massive Chinese investment in UK property - celebrated by The Guardian. Just the sort of thing the same paper was railing against a short while ago:

Foreign buyers now own close to 10% of the UK’s housing stock, he claims, and, unchecked, will gobble up much more, increasingly in Manchester, Edinburgh and other regional cities. With the global financial elite numbering at least 15 million, “increasing housing supply can never bring down prices, no matter how much public land and green belt is turned into flats, because the demand for investment returns is almost infinite.”

Thes epeople really do need to make their minds up. Just because this is a snuggly deal between a Labour Council and a big Chinese corporation (with all the lack of accountability that goes with this sort of deal) doesn't make it special or better - it's just as much foreigners buying up British assets as the ARM deal or a thousand other mergers, property investments and stock purchases. All in all a reminder that economic nationalism is stupid.

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Tuesday 19 July 2016

Brexit means we're leaving the EU - it really is that simple


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"But what does Brexit mean?"

In a multitude of comments, each coloured by the particular preference or prejudice of its author, this is the cry. It's not enough to say you want to Brexit, you have to set out all the precise constitutional, legal, economic, political, cultural and moral details of that Brexit. If you don't do so it isn't Brexit and we can carry on pretending that, on 23 June 2016, the British electorate didn't vote to leave the European Union.

Worse still you can get your lawyer friends to cobble together an argument that might - just might - mean that the referendum result can be ignored in favour of what you'd probably call 'wiser counsel'. And then get surprised when ordinary voters wonder what the hell you're on about and which bit of the word 'democracy' you fail to understand.

Some have a cannier approach - rather than trying to use legal legerdemain to try and get round the fact that people voted a way you didn't like, they set about a process of getting a second referendum so as to get the right result. That result being, of course, one they agree with - that overturns the mistaken decision of those 'excluded' and 'insular' voters last June. We're familiar with this disdain for European electorates - our lords and masters have rammed through second referendums in Ireland and Denmark and, in the case of France, simply ignored the referendum result completely.

In summary Brexit means we're leaving the European Union whether or not you are happy about that. As the Prime Minister said - "Brexit means Brexit".

What was this I heard you say? "What do you mean by 'Brexit means Brexit' then?"

Really? You've not worked this out then? It's simple - the people voted to leave the European Union and, therefore, the government is morally (if not strictly legally) bound to take us out of that Union. That's it - people didn't vote to do anything else and it's for the government to propose, parliament to debate and the application of politics to decide just what the details of leaving might be.

But that doesn't include an option where we ignore the wishes of the electorate and remain a member of the European Union.

In the future all things are possible but right now our government has to set out a timetable and process for leaving the EU. I'm pretty confident that is what it will do and I'm also pretty confident that the government will seek the support of parliament for that timetable and process. And that parliament - if it has any respect for the idea of democracy - will endorse a timetable and process for us to leave the European Union. Probably one pretty close to that set down by the Prime Minister and her government.

I appreciate that there remain a bunch of folk who hate the result of June's referendum. And they've every right to argue for us to stay in (or, in some future scenario, rejoin) the European Union. But right now the right - as in moral, ethical, democratic - thing to do is set about doing what the electorate asked for. That is to leave the European Union.

Now, as a consequence of this, the UK government might have less open borders - "an end to free movement" as its advocates put it. But that's not what we voted for - we voted to leave the EU. Other things may happen as a result of us leaving - we might see more state intervention in industry. We might see an upsurge in the sort of economic nationalism that people like Will Hutton have been advocating for years. And we might see some new regulations and the ending of some old regulations.

The point isn't that these changes are or aren't made but that they will be made by British governments through the UK parliament. And when it becomes clear that ending all but "high skilled" immigration is a bonkers idea, a future UK government can open the borders up again. And the same goes for trade deals, for tariffs, for regulations on the shape of bananas and for much else besides - the final decision, while moderated by treaty and international negotiation, will be made be people we can boot out if they get it wrong.

All Brexit means is that we're no longer a member of the European Union subject to the obligations in the various treaties that form that Union. That's it. Nothing else. Indeed all the other stuff people are talking about - the assorted bogeymen and doom-laden dystopia set out by disappointed Remain voters included - represent the consequence of choices that can, and will, be made by the UK government.

So instead of crying salty tears into your schooner of achingly trendy craft lager try accepting that Brexit means Brexit and moving on to argue for a post-EU Britain that follows the sorts of policy you think right. You might not get those policies - democracy is a pain - but if your policy is to plan to say "I told you so" on a loop tape then you will definitely be disappointed. We're leaving the EU - what matters is making that decision a great one not in either insulting those who made that choice or else sitting with your bottom lip out and arms crossed sulking because your side lost.

....

Monday 18 July 2016

Don't kill free speech for the sake of sensibility.

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Somewhere - I don't know precisely as I've not been paying it all that much attention - there's a gathering calling it self "Reclaim the Internet". My Twitter timeline is filled with a steady dribble of reports from this gathering - many from Labour MPs but also photographs showing earnest folk talking about trolls, abuse and how the Internet is a horrible place stuffed with nasty people who live under bridges.

Now I've no doubt - indeed I've witnessed it - that there are plenty of thoroughly unpleasant people hiding in corners of the Internet churning out pretty vile and personal stuff. Anyone who has encountered the less intellectual parts of the 'alt-right', especially the American 'alt-right', will have enjoyed a collection of choice insults, gun-toting threats and plenty of racism. And the sort of stuff that's levelled at Jewish public figures like Luciana Berger is straight up revolting.

So I get the idea of 'reclaiming the Internet'  presumably drawing on the experience of 'reclaim the night' marches that have been a feature of feminist campaigns down the years. Indeed the use of moral suasion and solidarity to sway public opinion is pretty valuable - the fact of saying 'you're not going to stop us, this is our space too' is powerful.

What worries me is that we get - especially when there are politicians involved - a sense of 'something must be done' where that something is almost certainly some form of further constraint on free speech. It's fine for organisations - in the real world or online - to have rules and to enforce those rules (my local Conservative Club is pretty tough on bad language, for example) but when this becomes a means by which the difficult, the challenging and, yes, the unpleasant can be shut down warning bells should go off.

It's even worse if the result of these campaigns is that governments take 'something must be done' as permission for creating a policing system allowing argument to be closed down by reporting the 'abuser' to the authorities. Don't get me wrong here, there are times when this is absolutely right, but too often the opportunity is taken to close down real debate and, worse, to conduct a political attack using reporting.

The, now thankfully neutralised, 'standards' process in local government tells me that having a quasi-legal process driven by reports of supposed wrongdoing presents less scrupulous politicians with the opportunity to undermine opponents, to destroy careers simply through reporting someone to the beak. And it doesn't matter much whether the person reported actually did much wrong, the fact of the reporting is sufficient.

So when you see someone Tweeting "I've blocked and reported @pigeonpost for being a vile troll", what you are seeing is something that is an attack on @pigeonpost - by all means block and report but waving this fact around the Internet is pretty poor behaviour when it might be that the worst @pigeonpost has done is lost his or her rag (and it's not your call whether the medium's terms and conditions were breached). It's also indulging in the same trolling behaviour you're accusing @pigeonpost of using.

In the end the price of free speech is that people can be - and often are - pretty vile. This isn't just true online (as any visit to a city centre pub late on a Saturday night will tell you) but clearly causes some consternation online. So complain and protect, encourage good manners, insist that terms and conditions of social media are adhered to, but please don't use abuse as a reason for restricting speech, for giving to politicians, public officials and campaigners the tools to shut up those whose only offence is to be rude or inarticulate in their opposition to such folks' agendas.

Free speech matters. It is one of the protections - too few of them - we have from the worst of government. Governments don't like free speech and will find ways to limit it. Ways to stop you from saying what you want to say. Too often I pick up little whispers - "I know I'm not supposed to say this but..."  And yes, sometimes this is racist, sexist, anti-gay but I can challenge that, explain why it's wrong - if they can't say it and take that challenge will they not remain racist, sexist or anti-gay? And won't that speech become hidden and in doing so become more extreme by developing only with affirmation and never challenge?

So, in reclaiming the Internet do remember that you're reclaiming a place of free speech, filled with the jokes, opinions, stupidity and rudeness humanity churns out. It's mostly ephemeral, often thin in thought, but for many people it's the way they get to sound off, to explode with fury, to celebrate, to share joy. Don't kill this because there's a few who think it grand to swear and cuss, to issue threats and to parade their nastiness for all to experience. Don't do in free speech for the sake of sensibility.

PS There probably is a Twitter user called @pigeonpost and I'm sure they're not remotely offensive - it was just slung down as an anonymous name, hopefully no-one's upset!
....

Friday 15 July 2016

Why stopping immigration is good politics but lousy policy


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We need immigration. This shouldn't be a matter of argument or dispute, it should be a matter of fact. Without immigration our society - the civilisation too many claim is threatened by migration - withers and dies.

Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.

Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.

One of the world's oldest and greatest civilisations, Japan is slipping slowly away. Whole abandoned villages, towns populated almost exclusively by the old, shuttered businesses closed from lack of a workforce. Without new blood Japan will die - not a sudden violent shock but a gradual decline to the point where the assets and value of the nation are devoured by the old. Yet Japan still keeps one of the world's strictest immigration systems:

Abe, however, ruled out any significant change to Japan’s closed-door approach to immigration at the UN general assembly in New York in September.

“It is an issue of demography,” he said. “I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

This is the demographic equivalent of tilting at windmills or commanding the tide not to come in - yet it is actively promoted as a policy by politicians eager to exploit people's distrust of migrants, a distrust built on race, religion, culture and language:

“Look at nurses, they believe their income will be cut if we let in Filipinos and Indonesians,” said Katsuyuki Yakushiji, a sociologist at Toyo University in Tokyo. “They also say that these people can’t speak Japanese well and that could be risky. Yet, at the same time, they complain about severe overwork and say we need to add nurses.”

Familiar rhetoric to Europeans and now, tragically for an immigrant culture, in the the USA - short-term fears and self-interest are placed above the fact that there aren't enough people to do the jobs we want done. And that it's not just high skills we need but also old-fashioned labour from people willing to kill chickens, clean lavatories and help old people get in and out of bed.

It's great politics - easy pickings - to wind people up about immigration, to claim that it's damaging our culture or society. But it's lousy policy - we need those immigrants for, as Japan shows us, without them the basis of society, the social compact that forms our civilisation, slowly washes away.

....

Thursday 14 July 2016

How I might be disappointed by Brexit - and why this doesn't matter


EEA, EEA Plus, EFTA, WTO, the Norway Option, the Swiss strategy, the Canada solution - even the Liechtenstein approach. A veritable pot pourri of acronyms and discarded titles for Robert Ludlam novels - none of us really has a clue as to what the UK Outcome might be, what Brexit really means. We could even - parliamentary sovereignty being what it is - simply stay a member of the EU (although this option might do little for the electability of the politicians who take it).

In settling this matter some of us are going to be disappointed. This is because - as everyone has noticed - there's a divide in the world of the leave supporter. On the one hand we have the 'sunlit uplands' team who talk about an independent, free-trading country, a sort of giant version of Singapore. And on the other hand we have the autarchs, protectionists and nativists who want a sad, declining (and probably white) nation crouching from the nasty world behind barriers to trade, movement, investment and choice.

Now I'm a sunlit uplands sort of chap - I didn't vote to end 'free movement' but rather to leave behind a dated, tariff-based and protectionist customs union and go for free trade. As I say again and again, trade isn't something that's done by governments, it's a simple reflection of that human desire to maximise value by exchanging things with other humans. What governments have done is create barriers to trade - everything from bans and sanctions through to tariffs and regulatory constraint. All the state does is make trade more difficult and then, through tortuous negotiations, trim away some of those constrainsts to trade thereby allowing bigger, more open and more free markets.

I also don't know which of those acronyms and rejected Robert Ludlam titles is the right approach to leaving the EU. I know that the GATT rules and the WTO mean that, for most trade, the impact of us being outside the single market is negligible. But I also know that a big chunk of our economy isn't covered by those rules - not just agriculture but important sectors like finance, law and advertising where the UK is a dominant player. So it's not enough to simply sit back on WTO rules in trade if we want to make sure important export sectors perform.

I'm pretty sure too that imports - consumption - are more important than exports - production. So it's too easy to dismiss the argument that we simply have no trade barriers (beyond the physical and logistical) other than those contingent on domesitc standards set by the UK parliament. What we don't know is whether such a radical approach really does what the theorists say - reduces prices and costs allowing the glorious benefits of opportunity to drive economic growth.

Looking at what our new prime minister has done, I get a feeling that I'll be disappointed. There does seem to be an assumption that some new sort of immigration model - more restrictive, more limiting - will be imposed and that, free from EU state aid restrictions, we'll see a rash of supports and interventions that use taxpayers money to prop up inefficient industries. This sort of protectionism - in capital and labour - is politically popular with that constituency making up a sizeable portion of the leave vote and especially the provincial, suburban working class that tends to vote Labour.

So I'll be disappointed. The Brexit model chosen won't be the best one, will probably be rushed a little, and will focus more on protecting the British working class from the realities of the world's economy than on riding that economy as a route to riches. For sure, there'll be trade deals galore with each new one rammed down the throats of Remain advocates. But these will be technocratic deals - dropping a tariff here, a regulation there and a loophole over there, all washed down with state-sponsored grand deals in defence, technology and infrastructure. We won't have markedly changed from the system we enjoy - if that's the right word - within the EU (with the exception of replacing Romanian fruit pickers or Polish care workers with Indian, Chinese and African ones).

Now, dear reader, not only could I be wrong but, just as importantly, my disappointment doesn't matter (any more the does the disappointment of Faragist enthusiasts for a crypto-fascist autarky) for one simple reason. We - that's you and me as voters - can change it. If the chosen Brexit model doesn't work, we can seek a different approach. The people can elect a different bunch of politicians with different ideas to see if they can get it to work. We can have robust arguments about the options and choices available to government and then elect an administration with a fighting chance of implementing one or other of those choices. This is the real change that brexit brings - yes, I think we'll benefit economically if we get it right but next to regaining the power to choose where we go with our economy this is as nothing. So long as we remember the curse of democracy - sometimes the wrong people get elected. As democracy's blessing - we can kick those wrong people out when they screw up.

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Wednesday 13 July 2016

Is Labour a zombie brand?




You all remember Smash don't you? Without doubt one of the 1970s mega-brands. The agency getting this account with its huge ad budget and massive sales would throw one hell of a big party.

What do you mean you've never heard of it? It's still there in the shops. You can buy it. Loads of people still do buy it - preferring to add hot water to powdered potato rather than peal, cook and mash actual potatoes. Those people do this out of ingrained habit. Smash isn't advertised, there's no big push to merchandise - it is, in essence, a zombie brand sustained only by this unthinking consistency from its customers.

There are plenty of other brands that still exist only from this sort of inertia, from their being part of our psychological geography - Yellow Pages, Spam, Kraft Cheese Slices, R White's Lemonade, Nimble. Pretty sure you will be able to add to this list - not just from nostalgia but from the fact that these zombies still fill shelves in supermarkets and gather dust in the corners of our cupboards.

Here's one comment on these zombies:

Brands are playing a ‘zero sum’ game: most of them compete in flat-lining categories, with private label sales expected to soon exceed branded product sales in Europe and other maturing markets like the US and Canada (Planet Retail). Brands are under increasing time pressure: the expiration date of brand creativity is getting shorter, with ideas being copied better and more rapidly. Brands can no longer rely on the classic Pareto rule: in any given category, 20% of customers currently represent maximally 50% of revenues. And brands struggle to connect with younger, more empowered consumer generations: what marketers consider to be important for the marketing-savvy millennials is not always thought of as such by the latter.

The world has changed, consumers have changed the way they make decisions and the media they use to inform them about what to buy. Brands aren't dead - just look at tech brands like Apple or at those with an ubiquity that transcends traditional media like McDonalds or Coca Cola. But that observer is right - most brands operate in stagnant markets and rely in the inertia of consumer habit, on the heuristics of brand equity, to sustain themselves. Unless they're actively shut down these brands slip lower and lower in people's perceptions, those brand short cuts aren't renewed - the brands die but still wander the land fooling a few that they are alive.

All this brings me to the Labour Party. Right now it seems pretty alive as it engages in another leadership tussle - as one member put it to me; "we move smoothly from one leadership crisis to the next". But the Party's position as a political organisation isn't sustained by the febrile positivity of the Corbyinista membership but rather by the inertial attachment to the Labour brand. That old joke about putting a red rosette on a donkey seems too true - people are voting Labour from habit. There is no other reason to do so. It's because they've always voted that way, their Mum voted that way and everyone round here votes Labour.

These voters have little in common with the people they're electing - the sons and daughters of former pottery workers in Stoke are electing Tristan Hunt, public school educated son of a public school educated life peer, without asking whether he really understands their lives or gets their concerns other than in a "these people are struggling, we should care for them" sort of way. And old-fashioned, conservative working class communities are electing middle class 'third sector' workers who are their polar opposite in values and outlook.

Yet the real truth about the struggle within the Labour Party is that it's a battle over this brand - over the loyalty of those voters. It's not a fight over the 'soul of the Labour Party' or any such nonsense, it's rather about two incompatible political positions - anti-market socialism and pro-market social democracy - having a fight to the death over the right to brandish that Labour rose. It doesn't occur to either camp to think whether the policies they propose are actually these brand-loyal Labour voters actually want. Do these mostly working class voters really think the gender balance in boardrooms or among BBC presenters is all that important? Or for that matter the plight of Palestinians, fair trade or solidarity with Latin American socialist dictatorships. Yet these are the issues the two competing halves of Labour seem most concerned about.

And none of this matters when the roof leaks, you've no overtime again this week, there's another red letter and your son can't get a job because he has a record for selling weed. Yet people like this - if they can be bothered at all - loyally troop to endorse the Labour brand. After all the alternative is the Tories - the party of the boss, the man in the suit and the patronising sorts with posh accents who drive big saloon cars and drink gin at the golf club.

Labour is a zombie brand. Any continued appearance of life is breathed into the corpse by habitual voting, the tribal inertia of brand loyalty. But this matters, those millions of voters who will never vote anything other than Labour really are why people are tearing the party to shreds over its brand. Whoever owns the brand - regardless of the policies they put forward - can rely on those loyal voters. If the Party splits - and it still might - the winner is the one with the brand.

....

Friday 8 July 2016

Some geography stuff - mostly not about Brexit - to read...


Free to a loving owner - the declining villages of Southern Europe

US Gun Ownership 
 
"According to the survey, which was conducted among 1,001 Americans in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting, 36 percent of U.S. adults either own a firearm personally, or live with someone who does. That's the lowest rate of gun ownership in the CBS poll going back to 1978. It's down 17 points from the highest recorded rate in 1994, and nearly 10 percentage points from 2012."

Not quite what we take from the news about guns in the USA.


 
Sluggish European economies - a long view
 
"First, in 1900, European countries were not only the world’s economic and military powers. They were also among the most populous countries in the world. By contrast today, Russia is the only country in the top 10 most populous. Then Germany is 16th and France is 20th. More importantly, some of the new demographic powers, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia, are growing at a healthy clip, as can be seen from their Total Fertility Ratios (TFR, see table) whereas European countries are growing very slowly at TFRs that will ensure stagnation or shrinkage in the sizes of their population."
Always good to see geographers taking a long view (unlike most economists) of the reasons for Europe's sluggish economy. Also reminds us why we need immigration.


Brits still think they're working class
 
"Despite a long-term decline in the size of the working class to just 25%, the proportion of the public who identify themselves as working class has remained stable over time, says the survey. Significantly, it finds that with middle class occupations who still regard themselves as working class are more likely to be socially conservative on issues such as immigration."
Some more demography - and yet again a reminder that geography is just as (perhaps more) important as economics.


How left and right miss the point about unaffordable housing
 
"But I soon discovered, after looking past the cultural distinctions, that both conferences had the same message. Speakers and attendees at each recognized, whether they were predisposed or not towards free-market ideology, that the lack of a true market in cities was causing the affordable housing crisis. That is, existing residents buy homes in destination cities, and then utilize land-use regulations and anti-growth public officials to prevent new construction. This creates artificial shortages, driving up prices and pushing out poorer demographics."
And again we're reminded that too much debate about housing simply ignores the spatial realities - that pesky geography.


Brexit doesn't mean we'll need to build fewer houses
 
"In summary, the current basis for UK estimates of housing need are already predicated on a 45% drop to total net-in-migration by 2021, so for Brexit to have any downward pressure on planned housing targets in Local Plans, it would need to be assumed that Brexit resulted in European net-migration to the UK falling to virtually zero over the medium to long term. This seems unlikely."

A reminder that not only are OAN housing numbers mostly rubbish but Brexit won't change this fact!


The slow death of Southern Europe's villages
 
"In the southern Italian medieval village of Sellia, local mayor and paediatrician Davide Zicchinella published a decree forbidding locals from falling ill and dying. While Zicchinella has admitted that he cannot fight the laws of nature, he’s hoping that his action will prompt elderly residents to take up healthier lifestyles."

The sad tale of how Southern Europe's ancient villages are, quite literally, dying as demography, migration and crap planning leave them as places filled with the old and poor.

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Thursday 7 July 2016

The triumph of fussbucketry...



So it's the AGM of the Local Government Association (LGA) and, having done the regular stuff of AGMs like electing the committee and approving the accounts we get a motion. It's about public health. And it explains why the fussbuckets are triumphant.

The content of the motion itself was pretty anodyne - along the lines that public health is a jolly good thing and we need more of it. But it's when you discover just what more public health means the the hackles rise and the blood temperature lifts. For by public health they don't mean the sort of things public health should be about - air quality, clean water, immunisation and so forth - but rather they want to spend more time telling you and me that our lifestyle is wrong. More importantly these fussbuckets - we heard from a Cambridgeshire Liberal Democrat, a Hertfordshire Tory and a Boltonian Labourite - want to tell people who eschew right behaviours, mostly ignorant people from the lower classes if I'm translating the rhetoric correctly, that this won't do.

In his summation the Liberal Democrat (in that rejection of liberalism and democracy typical of the sort) frowningly commented that telling people you didn't approve of their lifestyle choices wasn't conducive to getting their vote. But of course - for those poor deluded commoners - it was essential that the error of their ways is made clear and they are nudged, bullied and pressured into the approved and incredibly boring lifestyle our abstemious councillors commend. To my shame I didn't say anything - I probably should have done - but I would have been a solitary voice in a sea of fussbucketry, a torrent of approving hands gleefully voting to nanny the hell out of ordinary folk who want to smoke, drink, vape and eat kebabs.

This is what we are contending with. Local government has always attracted the busybody, the sort of person who doesn't just think he or she knows what's good for you and I but is absolutely convinced of the utter rightness of their superiority. Fussbucketry comes easy to too many local councillors - using planning rules to ban fast food shops, imposing meat-free Mondays on bin men or spending public funds on inaccurate infographic posters lecturing us about obesity. So, having got the public health budgets from the NHS, it's inevitable that some councillors will splash this money about imposing their boring, fun-free, new puritan worldview on the poor unsuspecting public.

And the excuse? All this will save money for the NHS. As the Liberal Democrat councillors said "there are too many sick people" and most of this sickness can be 'prevented' - I'm guessing because people eat sugar, put salt on their chips, drink more than one small glass of sherry a week, and don't spend two hours jogging every day. So we should invest in 'prevention' - and let me remind you that this is 'prevention':

...it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.

Even worse prevention may be better than cure when it comes to personal health but it's the very opposite of a cure when it comes to the finances of our health system. Our success in preventing the quick, painful and relative youthful deaths of times past means that we've replaced it with gradual, less painful, and incredibly expensive slow death. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that our average life expectancy is pushing 80 and that plenty of people are leading happy, healthy and active lives into their 90s. But this doesn't save a single farthing in NHS spending and, in truth, represents the dominant reason for the financial pressures on the health system.

Despite this fussbucketry has triumphed. We can expect a new avalanche of public health initiatives aimed at nudging us - with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat - into the approved lifestyles nannying councillors have told us we should follow. For my part I concluded a while ago that public health is not other offensive and unethical but mostly a waste of money:

The truth about public health spending is that nearly all of it is wasted, is money spent on promoting an ideology of control. No lives are saved by public health's actions. No money is saved for the wider health system by the interventions of public health. No-one's wellbeing is improve by public health. Indeed for many thousands the actions of these ideologues result in a worse life. Yet in my city of Bradford over £30 million is spend on public health programmes, money that could fix the roads, could provide care for the elderly, could smarten up parks. Instead we'll spend it on nannying the hell out of the population, on promoting an unpleasant controlling ideology founded on a myth of wellbeing that has no basis in fact or substantive value to the poor masses it is being imposed upon.

Sitting in that hall and looking at those hands raising to endorse fussbucketry and the New Puritan agenda, I realised why millions of ordinary people voted to leave the EU and told pollsters that they didn't trust the experts and elites. I saw a comment (I forget where) about the referendum debate where, when some economist talked about GDP, someone cried out "that's your GDP not ours". The tale of fussbucketry is just another face of the passive aggressive oppression that is modern government - everything from trite lectures about chocolates on countlines through the confused debates about weight and body image to ignorant nonsense about why we get fat (and struggle to get thin again).

None of this will change much any time soon but it is time people affected by the moralising of professional fussbuckets started kicking back, telling the nannies that it really is absolutely none of their bloody business what we eat, drink or smoke. And that perhaps the fussbuckets might like to try having a little more fun in their life as maybe that would make them less inclined to ruin the pleasures of the rest of us. I hope so but suspect that the triumph of fussbucketry will run for a while yet.

....

Sunday 3 July 2016

Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

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Saturday 2 July 2016

The 'March for Europe' reminds us why we voted to Leave

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We voted to leave the EU on the 23 June because we wanted to live in a democracy. It really is as basic and simple as that - the EU was, and doubtless remains, utterly undemocratic. When Sukarno became leader of newly independent Indonesia after the withdrawal of the Dutch he created the concept of guided democracy where the trappings of democracy existed (elections, MPs and so forth) but the system was controlled - guided - by appointed experts.

Today some few thousand people marched through London demanding that the result of the 23 June referendum be ignored or overturned. The march included the usual bunch of ageing pop stars, alternative comedians and TV personalities accompanied by the go to demagogues of the radical left like Owen Jones. And while the official line was studious in avoiding any suggestion that the referendum should be set aside or its result ignored, this was the subtext - as one of the march's headline speakers, David Lammy MP made clear a day or two ago:

"The referendum was was an advisory, non-binding referendum. The Leave campaign's platform has already unravelled and some people wish they hadn't voted to Leave.

"Parliament now needs to decide whether we should go forward with Brexit, and there should be a vote in Parliament next week.

"Let us not destroy our economy on the basis of lies and the hubris of Boris Johnson."

You see, voters were too stupid to understand the nuanced, subtle argument that wise advocates of the EU were putting forward - just as Sukarno felt that freshly independent Indonesians needed guidance, David Lammy thinks we should just pat the electorate on the head and then say something like, "very good children, very good. Now the grown ups will show you what you should have done."

This arrogance, this assumption that people like David Lammy are better able to judge what's good for voters than those voters themselves, lies behind the leave vote. What we see is an undemocratic system, distant and incomprehensible, that rains decisions - some good, some stupid and many simply nannying and finger-wagging - onto the great unwashed horde of voters. The EU is the acme of this system - an entire government that looks as if it might be democratic but, in reality, has all the accountability and transparency of Kafka's castle:

One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity.

This was what those people were marching to support - an opaque, arrogant, unapproachable bureaucratic morass sold to us with flags, stars, bland statements of brotherhood and the judicious spreading of cash to favoured organisations. It's very likely that the government will ignore this march of the anti-democrats but while it's there it acts as a reminder why we voted to leave. We voted to get more democracy into the world of ordinary people. We voted against the guidance of the elite and in favour of a more free and more open system of government. We voted for democracy and I intend doing my damnedest to make sure we get that democracy.

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