The View from Cullingworth

How the EU wastes your money... (a further installment)

2012-02-02T18:45:00.000Z

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In this case it's climate change nonsense combining with food fascism:

Our project will demonstrate the tool to define country-specific sustainable diets across the EU. Recognising the contribution of the food system to GHG emissions, the project will determine the composition of sustainable diets across the EU as an important contribution towards stabilising GHG concentration at a level that prevents global warming above 2 degrees celsius. The project will establish the viability of EU-wide introduction of the Plate by testing and evaluating the tool three pilot EU Member States - Sweden, Spain and France

There's a nice 51,750 Euro budget for this nonsense! Off you go folks and bid! The project is managed by those nice friendly people at the WWF:

WWF has recognised that the current food system has substantial impacts on the environment. As part of the One Planet Food programme we are looking at both production and consumption, and are working on seafood, soy, palm oil, meat and dairy, water and agriculture. We are aware that the current dietary habits of the developed countries are unsustainable and as more and more people start moving towards the developed world’s high livestock product diet the impact on the natural world will be magnified and will accelerate habitat destruction and climate change. This will be compounded by the growing concern around food prices since the 2008 and 2011 price spikes and global food security.

This is utter rubbish of course but that doesn't stop our European overlords and their favoured lobby friends like WWF from squandering our money on research of this kind. But right now, the European economy is crashing and burning, millions are out of work, businesses are folding and social services are under pressure.

There is no case for the research when we're flush with money - right now it's an insult.

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The "housing crisis" that isn't...

2012-02-02T16:36:00.000Z

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I'm pretty sure it will be all over the airwaves and will generate acres of printed commentary in such places as the Guardian - the National Housing Federation (NHF), lobbyists for the social housing sector, are scaring us about the "worst housing crisis in a generation" (whatever that may mean). Here's the stuff about Bradford:

Figures released yesterday by the National Housing Federation showed 20,800 people in the district are languishing on the waiting list.

Frightening figures there - how will we ever provide for this enormous demand?

It's not a simple as this because Bradford doesn't have a housing waiting list, we have what's called a "choice-based lettings system". And that system has over 20,000 people registered with it. But not all of them are actually looking for houses right now:

...the figures represent the number of people registered with the choice-based letting system operated by Incommunities* – not the number of people actively bidding. This figure was around 6,100 in June last year, according to Incommunities’ figures.

So there are actually only 6000 people looking for a council house in Bradford right now - still quite a lot but nowhere near the scale of "housing crisis". The churn rate in social housing means that Bradford has at least 2000 social properties coming onto the rental market each year and, as the article points out, we anticipate 400 or so new social lets each year for the next few years. Given that not all the people in that 6000 are in what we'd call "housing need" (they are in a house adequate to their needs but would like a different, bigger, better located one) the idea that Bradford cannot provide right now for those looking for social lets is probably nonsense.

This doesn't stop the NHF lobbying away for more government cash to be hosed in the direction of its members so they can build houses. Since the mid-1980s this has been the development model in the social rented sector - housing associations get loads of grant with which they lever extra borrowing and then jump up and down on planners to require developers to provide "affordable housing". And, quite rightly, the current government has set about shifting the model from funding by government grant to funding through rents.

Wise observers will note that this doesn't end government support - higher rents mean higher housing benefits payments - but it means that the social housing sector has to start to be more business-like in its development strategies. Sadly, the NHF is using these changes to make out that there is a massive housing crisis that can only be solved by huge increases in cash grants for housing associations and local councils.

Not only is there not a housing crisis, there isn't the prospect of a housing crisis - at least in Bradford.

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*Incommunities is the housing trust to which the Council transferred its housing stock about ten years ago

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A new front opens in the denormalisation of drinking...

2012-02-02T09:47:00.000Z

One or two people thought I was exaggerating recently when I made this comment in a post about CAMRA:

Only teetotallers will be recruited by the NHS and having alcohol in their private cars will lead to some workers being sacked.

It's starting already:

Public listed companies should have to outline their policy on their staff's alcohol use as an explicit requirement, according to Alcohol Concern.

And there's already a handy business - sucking up to government and the prohibitionists - primed to take full advantage of employers who want to dictate the alcohol use of those who work for them:

Research carried out by BreathScan, an alcohol-screening supplier, showed that only 22% of FTSE 250 companies have clear alcohol awareness policies. BreathScan looked at published materials such as annual reports and websites for each company, as well as contacting their HR departments to ask whether or not they had an alcohol policy.

And what exactly is "alcohol-screening" you may ask:

Combining leading science innovations and clever design, we provide people the means to effect simple, precise, low-cost alcohol screening and the thinking, programmes and products to encourage broader, positive changes in attitudes to responsible alcohol consumption.

Which is code for selling Breathalyzer kits to businesses and, to justify this, the firm repeats all the familiar lies about rising consumption of alcohol (it's actually falling), about the cost of drinking to business and the "no safe level" of drinking myth.

The message here isn't that firms should be aware of drinking - nothing new there for businesses where workers operate machinery or drive - but that drinking should be actively discouraged. And that firms should police the drinking habits of their employees.

How long before the NHS stops employing drinkers?

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Indoctrination (also known as Citizenship Education)

2012-02-01T22:31:00.000Z

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From tonight's e-mail - what they're teaching our children:

With so much talk about economic crisis and reforming capitalism this is the topic chosen for a series of debates on:

- whether Karl Marx was right about the demise of capitalism
- whether economic management should be left to experts, minimising the role of politicians (as in Italy and Greece recently)
- whether communism should be ditched forever as an alternative because it can't be democratic

The competitors (aged from Year 10 to 13) will have already submitted an outline of their argument. You will respond to their arguments on the day and help prepare them for a final debate (Reformed Capitalism or A Radical Alternative?) as the culmination of the afternoon.

I guess I'll have to go - make sure they get some perspective and perhaps a little sense!

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Denormalising food - sugar this time...

2012-02-01T21:06:00.000Z

Some (very tasty) death on a plate

And off we go again - these people just won't let up! We're stronger, fitter, longer-lived and happier than ever yet they want to scare everybody into changing their diet and governments into draconian, offensive controls. Welcome to another denormalisation crowd - the sugar police:

...should we establish a drinking age for sugary sodas? According to UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, the answer is emphatically yes. He says that added sweeteners have health effects comparable to alcohol and tobacco, and should be regulated accordingly. In a comment piece for the journal Nature, Lustig and his colleagues argue that the state should selectively block access to sugar, using some pretty stiff rules.

Got that folks - sugar must be controlled because it's killing us! And what does this nannying fussbucket propose?

...establishing taxes on "sweetened fizzy drinks (soda), other sugar-sweetened beverages (for example, juice, sports drinks and chocolate milk) and sugared cereal." In addition, they advocate that we reduce the availability of sugar, particularly to children. This restriction would make it more difficult for vending machines to sell sweet drinks and sugary snacks in schools and in workplaces, building on already existing regulations that have removed sodas from some schools.

But this is just for starters - there's a main course:

States could apply zoning ordinances to control the number of fast-food outlets and convenience stores in low-income communities, and especially around schools, while providing incentives for the establishment of grocery stores and farmer's markets. Another option would be to limit sales during school operation, or to designate an age limit (such as 17) for the purchase of drinks with added sugar, particularly soda.

Well the planning control is already something UK local councils are introducing for fast-food - it's only a short step to the wrong kind of convenience stores (the ones that sell stuff people want to buy, for example).

And there's a handy "Big Sugar" to blame when people carry on eating the evil stuff:

We recognize that societal intervention to reduce the supply and demand for sugar faces an uphill political battle against a powerful sugar lobby, and will require active engagement from all stakeholders.

Just like the ever more draconian smoking controls, just like the campaigns against "cheap" alcohol and just like the moralising lectures about gambling and borrowing, this is simply an attack on a lifestyle people choose. It really is none of these unpleasant nannies' business whether people choose to eat sugar - death on a plate - rather than the carefully knitted organic lentils on offer at the Church of Public Health.

And, finally, don't think filling up on fruit is a solution - guess who the biggest baddest sugar is according to Mr Lustig?

If international bodies are truly concerned about public health, they must consider limiting fructose...

Naturally occurring, beneficial and energy-packed fructose is right in there with the denormalisation!

All you people who cheered at the smoking ban while scoffing on iced doughnuts. Who argue for minimum alcohol pricing while sucking Pepsi through a straw. All you athletes with your sugar-loaded energy drinks and health freaks with your fruit smoothies.

You're next...

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The BBC - making the case for benefits reform (without meaning to)!

2012-02-01T20:14:00.000Z

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The words are the regular BBC, soft soap, tear-jerking, sob story:

The family receive a total of £30,284.80 a year in benefits - well over the £26,000 cap proposed by the government. But, says Raymond, "If these proposals go through we will take a massive hit to our finances - and it's not as if we could move into a smaller or cheaper premises.

"I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

Oh dear, this is terrible - how can the wicked coalition government inflict such suffering on this poor family!

Look again - the BBC provide a handy guide to the families expenditure - which includes:

Sky TV subscription - £15 per week
Mobile phones (plural) - £32 per week

...and a weekly shopping bill including 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. That's nearly £100 a week on booze and fags alone! And I'm guessing these aren't essentials to life?

After the cap is introduced this family will lose £82.40 per week. Seems to me that just cutting down on booze and fags plus moving to freeview telly would go most of the way to closing that gap - no need to turn the heating off or starve the kids, is there!

Bring on the welfare reform - if this is typical (and the BBC suggests that it is) there's plenty of room for savings without kids going without food or grandma dying of cold.

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Lord, save us from "researchers"!

2012-02-01T15:05:00.000Z

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We will all be addidcted - to the demon interwebs with their social networks!

Resisting the urge to check social networking sites for updates is more difficult than turning down a drink, according to a study of people's everyday desires.

Something must be done before the economy grinds to a complete halt while everyone alive checks their tweets and amends their status!

This is the sort of research that, you know, gives research a bad name. And the main finding about daytime desires:

The survey of 250 people found that sleep and sex were the two things people most longed for during the day...

So we're all regular and normal after all!

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More on our dysfunctional labour markets...

2012-02-01T14:46:00.000Z

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Highest rates of unemployment for a couple of decades and this:

...XpertHR's annual survey of graduate recruitment found that many employers faced barriers when trying to recruit graduates, with poor-quality applicants cited as the biggest problem. Four-fifths (80%) of those surveyed said they faced difficulties recruiting graduates due to a lack of skills, knowledge or the attitudes of the candidates.

Perhaps more worryingly, the second biggest problem employers faced when filling graduate roles was candidates accepting job offers then withdrawing from them, which more than two-fifths (44%) of organisations said they had encountered.

The findings are similar to last week's survey from the Association of Graduate Recruiters, which found that one-third of employers had failed to meet their targets on recruitment in 2010-11 because of a lack of candidates with the right skills.

Something isn't right is it?

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Good time to have an offie in Ormskirk!

2012-01-31T14:59:00.000Z

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Frank Field - who some in my party seem to like for reasons that almost entirely escape me - has been bouncing with glee at the prospect of a minimum price for alcohol in Merseyside:

Former welfare minister and poverty tsar Frank Field told the ECHO today: “Increasingly in many of our constituencies alcohol is a bigger social problem than drugs – particularly amongst young people.”

The Birkenhead MP added: “It is outrageous that big supermarket chains exploit the situation, selling alcohol below cost to draw in customers and increase their profits.”

I won't bother with trying to set the facts straight for Frank - like most New Puritans (and boy is Frank one of them) the facts are as nothing beside the rhetoric of "it's for the children" and "it costs the NHS". However, like the proposals a while back from the Manchester Diocese of the Church of Public Health, this is just stupid:

Merseyside is set to lead the way by introducing a minimum alcohol price tag.

The proposed 50p per unit cost is intended to stop supermarkets selling cheap booze as loss-leaders fuelling binge drinking amongst local youngsters.

Look, it's pretty simple. According to good old Google Maps it is 14.4 miles from the centre of Liverpool to Ormskirk - a journey taking 28 minutes. So you get in your car and you drive there and go back to Liverpool with your cheap booze. Or maybe the bloke up the road fills his van up with said booze and sells it on to you. Or your cousin Steve in Skelmersdale brings load over when he visits.

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Remembering and the prism of prejudice

2012-01-31T11:33:00.000Z

Mum's Garden

Do we really remember stuff or do we rather see glimpses of the past through a prism of our prejudice? Sometimes that crystal is kindly, showing the past as a wondrous, carefree time filled with pleasure. Other times – other people – see the past as dark, scary, a place of evil ghosts and terror.

In one respect we can nail down the past – there are events and occurrences, things that happened. The day you started school, the time you broke your arm, family marriages, births and deaths. Are these the past or are they simply a framework on which we hang reminiscence?

Throughout my upbringing, we were told (with varying degrees of assurance) that our surname – Cooke – was Irish. Nothing wrong with that and the name is certainly is a good Irish name and we were brought up Roman Catholic too.

Yet when someone actually looks at the family history, it turns out that my father’s family has very little Irish connection and that the surname – originally without what we liked to called the ‘superior’ E – takes us back to the Isle of Wight. Turns out there’s a great deal more Irish in my Mum’s (Anglican) family than in my Dad’s (RC) family.

Reminiscence, in this case, had trumped history. The truth – the framework of facts – had been broken by the weight of that remembering. History was replaced by myth – in this case harmless but such myth-making might be dangerous.

There is a fine tradition of family biography. We are rightly fascinated by where we came from and how it made us what we are. But there’s a dark side to this – what I’d call the search for excuse rather than explanation. Too often this involves reminiscence cloaked in darkness, painting of the personal past as a terrible time.

We do this dark remembering because we believe it cathartic – let it all out, says the therapist. But does that person stop for a second and consider how such reminiscence might hurt others? Do we examine the truth or merely state that our recollection – however dark – is a true recollection? And, in our reminiscence, do we condemn others as wrongdoers so as to set ourselves as victims?

I suppose that it doesn’t matter much really if we are discussing the distant past (although the damage of myth is plain to see in Ireland, the Balkans and many other places of conflict) but what if our reminiscence – the myth-making – is about the living? We cannot let indulgent catharsis come ahead of truth and our remembering is not truth. Yet too often we are tempted to tell others of our remembering.

For me, if we remember only bad things – and blame our current predicament or the struggles of our lives on those things – then we are little better than the things we criticise. We choose to hurt others as a means of explaining our personal position.

We want that remembering to justify what we think today. And so we do it through that prism of prejudice.

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Dying for a drink (or not as the case may be)!

2012-01-30T10:31:00.000Z

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While it seems relatively quiet so far, we can expect that "alcohol-related deaths have risen" will become the preferred argument of temperance campaigners, nannying fussbuckets and the Church of Public Health:

Alcohol related deaths in the UK have increased slightly between 2009 and 2010, according to official figures. The number of deaths linked to drinking has gone from 8,664 to 8,790 - a rise of 126. The Office for National Statistics said the increase was due to more deaths in men.

So should we be "doing something" about this scourge? Well, the official figures (and accompanying narrative) are quite helpful. Firstly the ONS point out that whatever the current strategy* looks like, it seems to be working:

GLF data also show that alcohol consumption for both males and females tended to increase until 2000–02 and declined thereafter (data available to 2009, 2010 data on alcohol consumption will be available in March 2011 in the GLF (ONS, 2011b)).

So we are drinking less but more of us are dying from drink. Again the statisticians helpfully explain this:

However, despite an apparent decrease in alcohol consumption, it is likely that it will take a number of years for any resulting reduction in alcohol-related deaths to become apparent as diseases associated with excessive alcohol consumption are often slow to develop. For example, Alcoholic Liver Disease, the most prevalent of all alcohol-related causes of death included in this bulletin, responsible for approximately 64 per cent of all alcohol-related deaths in 2010, takes approximately ten years to develop.

So we should start to see a decline in alcohol-related deaths from around 2012. Obviously, this remains to be seen but in no way can this very slight increase in 2010 (after a fall in 2009) be set as a argument for draconian intervention - minimum pricing and so forth.

*You know that strategy - 24-hour drinking, liberalised licensing, a grown-up attitude to drinking? The one that the prohibitionists and Daily Mail want to stop!
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Boards of Directors need a Devil's Advocate

2012-01-29T11:56:00.000Z

In 1587 the Promoter of the Faith was established by the Vatican:

His duty requires him to prepare in writing all possible arguments, even at times seemingly slight, against the raising of any one to the honours of the altar. The interest and honour of the Church are concerned in preventing any one from receiving those honours whose death is not juridically proved to have been "precious in the sight of God"

The post quickly became known as Avocatus Diaboli – the Devil’s Advocate – and continued until John Paul II abolished the requirement in canonisation and beatification. Nevertheless, the idea of formal challenge to reward seems to me a good one – it doesn’t eliminate error but it sets out, in a written form, objections to that reward prepared by an impartial source.

When we look at reward – whether the payment of bonus or the granting of honours – we often comment at the seeming absence of things we like to call “checks and balances”. And, although these comments are sometimes spiteful and motivated by other considerations than the wider public good, there is a real need for such challenge.

We are watching such a slow motion challenge in the matter of Stephen Hester’s bonus (and saw a similar public castigation in the discussion of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood) where each and every politician is fighting over a tiny scrap of moral high ground. Now there are some important considerations here:

"The contract says that he should be considered for bonus in good faith. That decision is taken by the board. Yes, shareholders have a role in that. UKFI, as the government's shareholder, takes a very active interest. But we are not the only shareholder in that company … The board is required to act in the interests of all its shareholders and the board takes this decision."

To not even consider a bonus payment for Stephen Hester would be a breach of his contract but equally, the firm is under no requirement to pay that bonus. It seems to me that this makes such a payment subject to discussion – negotiation even. And those who decide on the payment (or non-payment) would benefit from a written statement explaining all the reasons large and small, petty and momentous, for not paying that bonus. From a non-partisan source.

Instead we have the quite hideous spectacle of politicians clambering over each other to be the one who rams the knife into the quivering corpse of Stephen Hester’s bonus. Plaintiff cries of “fair” are heard as the strange birds flock, each one looking for the headline rather than for the future success of RBS.

So let’s instead require one Director to set out the argument against discretionary rewards to his peers. Not to decide on those payments but to make the case for those who will make that decision. And that case should be formal, written and subject to external audit. A Devil’s Advocate for the Board!

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Friday Fungus: More about mushrooms and depression

2012-01-27T14:45:00.000Z

A while ago I reported on the ongoing research showing that Psilocybe mushrooms have a beneficial impact on depressive conditions:

...the immediate effects of psilocybin are not as important for clinical benefit as the longer-term effects. That's because psilocybin increases the expression of genes and signalling proteins associated with nerve growth and connectivity, he says: "We think that the antidepressant effects of psilocybin may be due to a possible increase of factors that activate long-term neuroplasticity."

Now more evidence is coming to light about these beneficial effects:

Far from expanding your mind, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms induces widespread decreases in brain activity, researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Psilocybin has been revered for centuries for its ability to induce mystical experiences, and has potential therapeutic value for various psychiatric conditions. The drug is known to activate serotonin receptors, but how this produces its effects is little understood.

And this reduction in brain activity is what helps with depression:

Depression involves hyperactivity in the mPFC (medial prefrontal cortex), leading to the pessimistic outlook and pathological brooding characteristic of the condition, so mPFC deactivation could alleviate those symptoms.

Which all rather begs a question! Why, when these mushrooms have killed no-one, cause no long-term health problems and may even be beneficial, did the UK government make possession of them a criminal offence in 2005?

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Heart attacks - and why there are fewer of them...

2012-01-26T18:19:00.000Z

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A great deal of this represents a triumph for awareness and medical intervention - in the UK, the NHS done good! But there are some interesting side issues that should matter a lot to public health folk:

For the last 70 years we have been in the grip of a heart disease epidemic that began in the 1940s, rose to a peak in the 1970s and then began to fall. All Western countries were affected and all followed broadly the same pattern.

And two things public health people liked to finger for this epidemic - fat and smoking - seem to be less to blame than we thought. On fat:

Total fat consumption in the UK has changed little – down from 40 per cent of average calories in the 1980s to 38 per cent today (though there has been a bigger reduction in the most harmful type, saturated fat).

In 2000, a pan-European study by the World Health Organisation was unable to show a convincing link between heart disease levels and fat consumption in the 21 countries studied.

And smoking:

Smoking, meanwhile, makes blood more likely to clot and is a known cause of heart attacks. But smoking peaked in the 1940s and then began to decline, just as the heart disease epidemic was taking off.

The truth seems to be that those endless nannying public health campaigns are, at best, a very minor part of this change:

The Oxford researchers conclude that just under half the decline in heart attack death rates in England over the last decade is due to better hospital treatment; the rest is due to changes in lifestyle and the widespread use of pills to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.

Do you think BHF and the like will admit they were wrong about smoking and fat? Somehow I doubt it!

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More on the need for benefits reform...

2012-01-26T10:10:00.000Z

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Some readers may be familiar with Debbie Purdy the 'right-to-die' campaigner but she's been in the news again. This time the campaigning lady was in the Magistrates' Court for non-payment of Council Tax. And, while there she said this:

...benefits officials told her on five occasions that she would get more money if her musician husband Omar Puente stopped working.

“It is outrageous. The benefits system is supposed to be a safety net, not a hangman’s noose,” she said.

The couple’s benefits were recently reviewed and officials told them if her husband was unemployed they would get further benefits such as free council tax, free prescriptions and help with paying the interest on their mortgage.

Tell me again about having a system that rewards working?

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In which CAMRA join the "we hate drinkers" brigade (plus of course smokers)

2012-01-25T21:47:00.000Z

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I'm not a member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), never have been and have no intention of becoming one. Not because CAMRA didn't do a great job back in the 1970s and 1980s rescuing us from dire, barely drinkable ales but because they have become an organisation with no point other than to place the imprimateur of their brand on pubs. And to campaign alongside the prohibitionists, temperance advocates and assorted nannying fussbuckets against the ordinary drinker.

So it is great news that The George Hotel in Cullingworth was named "Pub of the Season" by Bradford CAMRA - not bad going after less than a year since the folk at Old Spot Brewery (more specifically, Chris and Jo) took over. I can recommend a visit should you find yourself in Cullingworth.

The bad news is that the other thing CAMRA have stamped their approval on is a report written by lefty think-tank IPPR into why so many pubs closed. Apparently it isn't anything to do with the smoking ban at all because (wait for it):

Our brief analysis of why pub closure rates differ between parliamentary constituencies indicates that there is a weak positive correlation between closure rates and smoking rates in England. However, this may be hiding other explanatory variables: for example, it may be simply because smoking rates are higher in more deprived communities.

Now the denizens of pubs pre-ban will know a couple of things - in wet-led pubs in urban areas around three-quarters or more of regulars were smokers. And, as we've all noticed, it's these pubs that have closed. The big food-oriented pubs with large gardens on the edge of town or in country villages haven't closed in the same numbers (although I noticed that The Triangle at Triangle - perhaps the only village named after a trademark - is boarded up).

Instead of this, the IPPR/CAMRA wants us to believe that the main reason for people stopping going to the pub is that booze is too cheap in supermarkets. Indeed, IPPR/CAMRA go on to say - without evidence or foundation - that:

The supermarkets are able to use their market power to ensure that increased duty is not passed on by their suppliers.

They can also afford to sell alcohol at below cost and as a loss leader to entice customers through their doors and spend on other products.

I'm pretty sure that both these statements are untrue. Even the prohibitionists don't think these statements are true, for heaven's sake!

And tell me, do you really believe that that nice Mr Smith who used to come in, sit on the stool at the end of the snug bar and smoke his pipe isn't coming in because he's buying 38p cans of watery lager from the Co-op? No, he's sat in his living room watching the telly, drinking a glass of bottled ale and smoking his pipe. And he's not coming into the pub again (except once a month with the local history club) because he can't smoke that pipe.

And CAMRA along with the idiots at Greene King and the nutters at Diageo have fallen hook, line and sinker for the nannying fussbuckets' agenda. Introduce a minimum price per unit for alcohol (just 40p say the bearded ale-suppers) and it will all be fine! Except it won't.

That 40p will soon be 50p. Then 60p and in no time £1. And the prohibitionists, nannying fussbuckets and adherents to the Church of Public Health will still scream about the terrible damage alcohol is wreaking on society.

So we'll get advertising restrictions and advertising bans. We'll get licensing restrictions and regulatory controls. High alcohol content beers will be banned. Warning labels will be placed on alcohol products - getting more and more extreme with each new iteration.

Soon universities and colleges will close their bars. Some will ban alcohol on campus. Only teetotallers will be recruited by the NHS and having alcohol in their private cars will lead to some workers being sacked.

And still the prohibitionists will scream about the evils of drink. We'll still get haggard doctors frowningly explaining how even one sip of booze could lead to alcoholism, liver disease and cancer.

This is not what CAMRA want - this is an organisation supposed to be an advocate for a healthy, mature and quality approach to boozing. Yet they are lining up with the ghastly people whose aim is to "denormalise" drinking, to make it something that normal people don't do - to kill the very think that CAMRA campaign for.

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In which I agree with Cllr Greenwood...

2012-01-25T11:57:00.000Z

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The nannying fussbuckets have been badgering at the West Yorkshire Pension Fund:

Health campaigners have criticised West Yorkshire Pension Fund after research found it has £125 million invested in the tobacco industry.

Apparently this is unethical because these health campaigners don't approve of the investment. However, Cllr Greenwood, as Chairman of the Fund responded correctly:

“Decisions should be taken entirely on commercial grounds.”

Hallelujah! Perhaps the anti-smoking fanatics will go away now (but somehow I doubt it)

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More unintended consequences: killing off the Royal Mail

2012-01-25T11:45:00.000Z

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One of those little regulatory changes (from last year’s Budget as it happens) that rather sneaks up on us arrives on 2^nd April this year. The Government has extended to application of VAT to cover “bulk mail” and related services:

Changes to VAT law and the way in which our services are regulated have affected the VAT status of a number of our products. A limited range of our services became subject to VAT through 2011, and this will extend to all bulk mail services from April 2012.

Now the government suggests that, because businesses are VAT registered they’ll be able to reclaim this and it won’t be noticed. But think for a second of the big users of bulk mail:

Local government – all those Council Tax bills and other official bulk communications such as electoral registration forms
Utilities – water, gas, electricity are all subject to a lower VAT rate or exempt
Financial services – no VAT is charged on banking, insurance or related services (now there’s a blessing)
Charities – direct mail is a central tool for charities to raise funds and keep their supporters informed
Publishing – magazines, journals and so forth again carry no VAT

Now I don’t know about you but it seems to me that the big loser in all this will be the Royal Mail. The 20% increase in mailing costs will accelerate the move to paperless billing and statements for utilities, banking and other businesses. It may even prompt local government to look at the mail they send – perhaps consolidating or moving to electronic means.

One hidden effect of this change will be that some businesses – and especially those unable to claim back the VAT – will stop using targeted direct mail preferring to use cheaper mass leafleting. Meaning that rather than a personalised, specific appeal, we will receive general literature targeted using geodemographic profiling rather than real information.

That and it will cost local government a load of money that might have been spent on front-line services.

And, without a doubt, hammer another nail or two into the coffin of the Royal Mail.

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A further comment about Bradford and free schools (and Katherine Birbalsingh)

2012-01-24T21:24:00.000Z

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This evening Bradford Council debated free schools. Or rather a motion the Conservative Group submitted on school places. We firmly believe that the opportunities presented by Michael Gove’s liberalisation provide a solution – a blessed breath of fresh air – to the challenge facing Bradford’s education.

On one level the debate was polite, considered and informed – statistics about Bradford’s need for new school places were set before the Council and options for responding to the challenge were examined. But underlying all this was an unspoken disagreement. One captured by Ralph Berry, Labour’s Education Portfolio Holder repeatedly saying, as if to convince himself:

“I am not an ideologue. I am NOT an ideologue...”

In our motion we had innocently suggested that, rather than dealing merely with what turned up as a result of the free schools idea, Bradford Council might actively seek to promote new schools, might seek out the very best managers and leaders in education. For Cllr Berry this was too much and he started burbling about “Birbalsingh” and the “IT Free School”. I think he believes we all read the Guardian like he does!

Now Cllr Berry isn’t a teacher, he’s never led a school. He’s a social worker come Labour Councillor who too often blurs the ground between these two roles to the extent that we are unsure whether he is making a political point or expressing a professional opinion. Ralph knows his stuff! He can wax lyrical in fluent educationalist jargon and the gist of this is that he believes people like Katherine Birbalsingh to be tantamount to devils.

The only route to educational salvation is through the goodly direction of a local education authority. Without the Council, what would happen? Who would decide who goes to which school and how the buses run!

So back to what Cllr Berry called “Birbalsingh’s IT Free school”. I was curious since I’d seen reports on Ms Birbalsingh’s intention to set up a free school but knew little of her intentions. So here’s what she says;

The Michaela Community School combines tradition and innovation. It attempts to give inner-city youth a taste of the private sector, where knowledge is taught, benchmarking is common, and high expectations of behaviour and dress are the norm. But the Michaela Community School also recognises it is in the inner city. So there will be an extended day where children will be required to complete their homework, where there will be classes analysing media culture, something that is extremely destructive to our inner-city youth.

Not a mention of IT! But the truth about what Ralph doesn’t like is in that phrase “a taste of the private sector”. For the Cllr Berrys of this world the private sector in education – the world’s best schools – is simply not to be considered as a model for children’s education. And those schools focus on what we might call “traditional” subjects – you know, the one’s you and I learned when we were at school. English, Maths, Sciences, Geography, History and modern language or two. The essence of a ‘liberal arts’ education.

The sort of education that people are prepared to pay thousands of pounds each year to buy – delivered free to ordinary children from an inner city community. What could be a problem with that? Indeed, in Bradford, the idea of free schools has been grasped. Here’s the list (there may be more):

Dixons City Free Primary
Dixons City Free Secondary
One in a Million Free School
Kings Science Academy
Rainbow Primary
Bradford Girl’s Grammar School
Bradford Christian School
Netherleigh & Rossefield School
Bradford District Free School

The Council should wake up and take note of these innovations – this is the future of education in the City, these are the challenges to years of underperformance by the existing schools. And this is a faster, more assured and more effective way of meeting the future needs of the City than the bureaucratic, hand-wringing, jargon-loaded system Cllr Berry (and the Council’s professional leadership) promote.

We should note that, despite panels, boards, meetings, strategies, press briefings and hours of expensive officer time, these creative and innovative schools are the only ones addressing Bradford’s need for new school places – places in good schools.

So to answer Cllr Berry’s ignorant assertion – yes, I’d be delighted if a successful, effective and exciting educational leader like Katherine Birbalsingh came to Bradford to set up a school.

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It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking

2012-01-23T19:12:00.000Z

Today the government published its Public HealthFramework setting out the purpose and objectives of this part of health spending. I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time boring you to death with what it contains. Suffice it to say that the devil will be in how the details are interpreted by the public health practitioners on the ground (we can expect still more of the ill-informed campaigns about booze, fags and burgers).

Nevertheless, here’s a flavour:

The whole system will be refocused around achieving positive health outcomes for the population and reducing inequalities in health, rather than focused on process targets, and will not be used to performance manage local areas. This Public Health Outcomes Framework sets the context for the system, from local to national level. The framework will set out the broad range of opportunities to improve and protect health across the life course and to reduce inequalities in health that still persist.

Now that’s clear, I’d like to talk about the “public health problem” that is drinking. And to ask – notwithstanding the liberal argument that it’s none of the government’s business – what the best strategy is to reducing the overall harm caused by alcohol. Currently the medical and public health professions argue for draconian measures:

Effective, evidenced-based public health measures do not include nudging people into healthy behaviours or getting NHS staff to lecture patients on healthy lifestyles. They include measures such as raising taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and sugary drinks, reducing junk food and drink advertising to children, and restricting hours on sale of alcoholic drinks.

Yet, as the government acknowledge, such an approach hasn’t worked in Finland:

“We are working in a very, very cynical environment at the moment where nobody believes we can do anything on alcohol consumption unless we price it out of the market. Finland would suggest that doesn’t work.”

So, instead of looking at these aggressive fiscal and regulatory measures, we should perhaps consider whether liberalisation might work. There is some evidence that society’s attitude to drinking is an important factor in its impact:

We, as a culture, set the rules. When they're broken it's not solely the fault of a drink or even five. It's the underlying message accompanying the way that we drink. That's something I believe we can change by recognizing drinking as a meaningful activity and by addressing problem drinking, which involves a more complete assessment, with culturally relevant programs and not with fruitless pleas to "drink less."

When the last Labour government liberalised licensing regulations (in 2003), there was an outcry from the grumpier tabloids. We were told that “24-hour drinking” would result in chaos as crime rose, disease spread and hospitals filled up with fighting drunken youth. So what’s the truth of this liberalisation?

Using the original method of conversion to units for comparability with earlier years, in 2006, men drank an average of 14.9 units a week (equivalent to about seven and a half pints of beer), around 2.3 units less than they were drinking in 1998. Average weekly consumption among women increased from 6.5 units in 1998 to 7.6 units in 2002 but had decreased to 6.3 units in 2006

OK, so I won’t (unlike too many public health people) make a causal link here but, since the liberalisation of alcohol licensing, consumption has fallen steadily and continues to fall. Far from the changes resulting in an epidemic of binge-drinking, we have seen an increase in more responsible, moderate attitudes to drinking. And the biggest fall (according to the ONS and NHS) in consumption has been among 18-24 year old men.

It seems that greater awareness of the risks associated with drinking and a society that sees drinking in moderation as a good, sociable thing to do, results in alcohol becoming less of a problem. Yet we still hear – almost without cease – how alcohol is a scourge. Here’s an American take – but it could be the UK:

The CDC tells us that binge drinking is a "bigger problem than previously thought," suggesting that it can (and often does) result in risky behavior, leading to violence, suicide, spread of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, car crashes, and alcohol dependence. They also insinuate that binge drinking causes crime. By their measure, binge drinkers rack up over 223 billion dollars annually.

Yet most drinkers – including plenty who binge – don’t do any of these things. They don’t start fights, spread disease, kill themselves, get the girlfriend pregnant or wind up in hospital. They go home, go to bed and get up the following day to continue their otherwise normal lives. The liberalisation of licensing was a boon to these folk.

It meant they didn’t get tempted to buy three drinks at ten to eleven and drink them before getting turfed out at twenty past. It allowed them to finish their conversations, savour the last part of the wine or maybe a whisky and then make their way home with the gentle buzz of a good night.

The people who want us to be monitored, questioned, lectured, nagged – “denormalised” to use the chosen term – are those who want to spoil the pleasure of a drink for the outside chance of there being one or two fewer chronic alcoholics. It won’t work, it will spoil people’s pleasure and it is an act of bitter prejudice against something that has been part of human culture since we first stepped out from the African forests millions of years ago.

It isn’t the drinkers we should worry about but the warped folk who hate drinking – they are the ones who should be stopped. Banned maybe?

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Haggle! A comment on behavioural pricing.

2012-01-23T11:23:00.001Z

When you buy some Euros or Dollars for your trip abroad, you probably do a little research. You check out on-line financial information aggregators, you’ll look at your own bank and maybe some well know high street finance brands. And you’ll pick the one offering the lowest rate and buy your currency.

It will never have crossed your mind to haggle. You simply take the price you’re offered – it’s the best rate after all! Well you should haggle and if you do the chances are you‘ll get a better rate.

However, as consumers we are trapped like rabbits in the headlights – we believe too often that the price we’re given is the price we’ll pay. Which means that the seller can play differential or discriminatory pricing games with us. And behavioural pricing is just the latest in a long line:

What if when you bought a new Mac book, the price was higher because your tweets constantly referenced your love and devotion for Apple? What if Orbitz used the fact that your Facebook Likes include “Party Rocking in Miami” to charge you more for a flight to Miami?

This is called online behavioral pricing. It’s a consumer’s worst nightmare as it uses the traces of your online identity to maximize prices on the products and services you want most. It’s also an ecommerce merchant’s dream.

Now I guess that some folk will see a problem with this practice – I can hear the calls for “price transparency” linked to cries that the government must act to stop innocent consumers getting ripped-off by wicked marketers playing with their “data”. And the response will look like this:

The Labour leader says that the Government must take a more positive approach to stop British consumers from being exploited by “predatory” companies.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he says a tough new consumer watchdog should be created to limit pension fees, car parking charges and airline levies.

The kind government will take away that consumer “nightmare”. And, of course, we’ll all pay more. People who plan their travel well-ahead will pay higher rail fares because it’s not ‘fair’ that the latecomers pay more. You won’t be able to pay a premium rate to jump the queues at Alton Towers because some mums can’t (or won’t) pay that extra. Everywhere we look prices will be higher, choice will be poorer and all because we were suckered into believing we are being "ripped off".

The alternative is for us to learn how to haggle (unless like me you’re fortunate enough to be married to someone who gets a thrill out of a little haggling). Why should we take the price that Apple thinks we should pay? Right now they’re using the information available to them as a means of setting a price maximum – they’ve no interest in setting this below their price minimum. Therefore, we should set about finding out what that latter figure might be – they’ll sell the new Mac Book to us at that lower price for sure!

And when you’ve found that price, pick up the phone, speak to the merchant and say you’ll buy it for a little bit less! We don’t need Ed Miliband’s “tough new consumer watchdog”, we don’t need to be frightened away from on-line markets by scary “consumer’s worst nightmare” stories, we simply need to start with the idea that the price we’re given is the starting point not the end.

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Advertising isn't the cause of dodgy boob jobs - why ban it?

2012-01-22T20:54:00.001Z

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Apparently the boob job industry is a pretty big one. And we have a scandal as thousands of women were given what turned out to be faulty implants. It would appear that (as is often the case) the fault isn't self-obsessed women and greedy doctors but advertising:

The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), which represents the top plastic surgeons, is urging ministers to impose the advertising ban as part of a crackdown on the multi-million pound cosmetic surgery industry.

You see folks, BAAPS (an acronym of which Peter Simple would have been proud) don't advertise! Oh no, these men are more discrete. And advertising is queering their pitch:

Fazel Fatah, consultant plastic surgeon and BAAPS president, said: "In no other area of surgery would one encounter Christmas vouchers and two-for-one offers.

"No other kind of surgery is advertised. You don't see adverts for metal hip replacements or gall bladder operations. Advertising in cosmetic surgery feeds into the worries and insecurities in a group of vulnerable people."

So rather than working gently through the euphemisms of the the medical profession's market-fix on cosmetic surgery, women are buying from bright and shiny advertising. The problem is that the fault doesn't lie with the advertising, it lies with the doctors (and trust me, folks, the men doing the operations on those "dodgy" clinics are doctors) who prefer making cash to selling a safe product.

However, Fazel Fatah really isn't any different - rather than have an open accessible market for what is (in all but a few cases) a luxury, this surgeon wants a world where cosmetic surgery isn't advertised. One wonders why given that Mr Fatah works for a profit-making cosmetic surgery business?

Is it because such controls reduce access to the market and allow the 40% of cosmetic surgeons who belong to BAAPS to charge higher prices, prevent new entrants to a lucrative market and corner the market for medical rather than aesthetic work?

Advertising isn't the problem - even tacky post-divorce promotions or two for the price of one offers. The problem is that some people thought it OK to offer lower quality products and no-one was checking on this or ensuring the customer had the information she needs.

But then that wouldn't suit Mr Fatah's business now would it?

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Who are the undeserving rich?

2012-01-21T22:04:00.001Z

In today's Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne returns to his well-rehearsed subject of the rich and the poor. Or more precisely the evils of those Mr Oborne defines as the "overclass":

Senior bankers, private equity moguls and hedge fund managers appear cut off from the rest of us. They often pay little or no tax, increasingly live in heavily guarded enclaves, and some have little or no real allegiance to Britain. The sources of their wealth are often mysterious, and appear unrelated to merit. These feral rich pose, in their way, every bit as much of a danger to society as the rioters who stole and pillaged London streets last August.

Nothing new in this argument - it is a familiar traditionalist conservative viewpoint that sits with the idea of "one nation" and the concept of duty. Indeed, part of Mr Oborne's revulsion at the "feral rich" is their very internationalism, their independence:

Among both the very rich – the “overclass” – and the very poor – the “underclass” – the idea of responsibility, duty, patriotism and neighbourliness has been destroyed.

The men who Mr Oborne demands are reined in have no desire for the state, we might almost observe that their wealth enables them to break free from the state. And Mr Oborne dislikes this. It cannot be allowed since it is tearing away at the fabric of society. And such sentiment echoes past views on the wealthy - or more particularly on the need to make a distinction between the rich we approve of and the rich we disapprove of:

...it is right that men and women who have made a fortune through ingenuity and hard work – such as writer JK Rowling and inventor Sir James Dyson, for example – should be allowed to retain their wealth. The question is how to create a set of rules which achieves that aim while penalising the greedy and rapacious.

You see here how Mr Oborne has framed the argument? Somewhere we require a means of making some sort of moral judgement between the deserving and undeserving rich. So smiling actresses, trendy musicians, slightly wacky inventors and tieless entrepreneurs might be allowed their riches but others - carefully ill-defined here - who are merely "greedy and rapacious" must have their riches seized for it is the proceeds of "bad" capitalism.

So who is included in Mr Oborne's parade of sinners? Is it just those whose sources of wealth "are often mysterious, and appear unrelated to merit"? And how in all this do we define whether riches are deserved - presumably the scrapping of the national lottery is an imperative in Mr Oborne's New Britain. What better definition of unmerited wealth is there than winning £40 million from a £1 stake?

We are grasping at straws - almost floundering - here. While we can appreciate why Mr Oborne is so cross about the "feral rich", he fails to answer the big question - who is undeserving of their riches? Now, it seems to me that the solution to Mr Oborne's problem isn't to indulge in some form of moral distinction but to recognise that the problem with capitalism lies not in the wonder of free markets but in their corruption by the choices of government.

The undeserving rich are those whose wealth derives from exploiting regulation and government rather than from creativity, enterprise and innovation. In alluding to crony capitalism, Mr Oborne hits the nail on the head - this is at the core of the problem. Many business sectors - aerospace, pharmaceuticals, transport, construction and, of course, finance - have worked hand-in-glove with government to create wealth for the owners of those businesses. Legislation and regulation is used to protect the interests of existing operations, to favour the state's interests over the innovator and to allow many businesses to become little more than rent-seekers dependent on the political class.

And the political class is likewise dependent on these rent-seeking businesses - for politics is a poorly paid business. You need only look at the immense wealth accumulated by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair so see how crony capitalism works for the political class.

I fear, however, that Mr Oborne's arguments will be taken as an incentive to regulate and control. To set rules - probably unenforceable rules - about the remuneration of company directors and the payment of bonuses. Speeches will be made announcing endless crack downs on "abuse" with a new collection of regulatory bodies set up to police this system. Each of these will have a board of well-padded felines and a chief executive earning half-a-million. Politicians will announce that something has been done!

And the rich will remain as they are today - free from the state. Not individually free from the moral imperative of duty or any responsibility for others but free from the state. For my part I see this as a growing up process - we should aim for a place where everyone is able to live like the financier Mr Oborne describes:

"The only time that I use the state,” one financier worth an estimated £500 million confided in me recently, “is when my driver drives on public roads from the City to my country estate."

Is this not a good thing? If we are wealthy enough to no longer to require the soft cushions of the welfare state surely that is something to be celebrated, not something worthy of condemnation?

.

The solution to Mr Oborne's challenge is fewer rules, less government and more free markets. Somehow, I suspect we'll actually get more intervention, more regulation and less free markets. And we'll be poorer for it (unless we have the right connections, of course!)

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Some thoughts on toll bridges and copyright

2012-01-19T18:01:00.000Z

Driving home from City Hall this afternoon I listened to a sweet little interview with a woman who had bought a toll bridge.

Grahame Penny and Maggie Taylor paid £403,000 for the Whitney-on-Wye bridge between Hereford and Hay-on-Wye. The crossing, which comes with a two-bedroom cottage and 1.1 acres, was built in 1779 and was granted exemption from tax by an Act of Parliament as it was privately funded. It brings in around £2,000 per week but the couple will have to pay for annual maintenance and any staff costs.

It seemed to me that this little property might help us to understand the debate that carries on about copyright and intellectual property. But more of that in a minute – firstly we need to understand that ‘property’ is not a thing but a ‘right’. The access to my house is across land in the ownership of others but that access is my property – I do not own the land but own the right to cross that land so as to reach my house. I cannot parcel up that right but I can, should I wish, sell it - which is what Bradford Council does with the right to fish in Chellow Dene reservoirs.

Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor own a bridge across the Wye and are permitted by law to charge you for the use of that bridge. When you drive up and hand over the necessary 80 pence, you are permitted – you have bought the right – to cross the bridge. Just once – if you come along tomorrow, you will have to pay again to have the right to cross the bridge.

Similarly, when I go to the cinema I buy a ticket allowing me to watch a particular film once and once only. If I want to watch that film again, I have to pay again just as I do with the toll bridge. And the same applies to a host of other rights to make use of another’s property – railway tickets, amusement parks, football matches and theatrical performances all spring to mind in this regard. Indeed, we even have to pay to use the lavatory.

All of these are examples where the right to use a particular “resource” is granted to the purchaser on a limited basis – most usually one use but it could be unlimited uses for a given period of time or a pre-determined number of uses. Copyright operates under the same principle – when you buy something ‘created’ by someone else it could be for your exclusive use or more typically for your use alone. Just as your 80p gets you one trip across Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor’s bridge, the money you hand over for an e-book to go on your kindle give you the use of that work and no-one else.

Without this protection, how are we to prevent you taking that e-book and selling it yourself? Not just to Mrs Smith next door but to thousands of others – all of whom might have bought the book. Even worse, you may choose to simply give the e-book away to anyone who wants it completely destroying the opportunity for the creator to benefit from his efforts. And it doesn’t really matter whether the creator is a multi-billion dollar film studio or a penniless writer in a damp flat.

If the creator chooses to let you use his work on this basis that is his right. But to suggest that he should have his right curtailed because “information wants to be free” is to create a circumstance where a man cannot profit from his own creativity. There is a case for debating what is covered by copyright – is a musical performance copyright or merely the music itself, for example – but the concept is absolutely central to the success of service economies.

The problem is not one of principle – copyright remains important – but of enforcement. Put simply, the on-line world makes it more and more difficult to police copyright effectively. And, as we have seen with the music industry, this pressure results in a dramatic change in business model. It is safe to bet that the same problem will be faced by the book publishing industry (the journal publishing business started its change and began its debate some twenty years ago) and the film industry.

And the main impact of this will be to make the published, copyright-compliant product much cheaper. Which is as it should be – instead of paying several thousand pounds for a subscription to the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the library now pays the same price for access to over 100 journals in that publishers portfolio. And the same will apply with music, books and films.

But this is not about getting rid of copyright, it is about the business models needed in an environment where the comprehensive policing of copyright simply isn’t an option.

However, we still have to remember that the more free riders, the less likely people are to create. To return to our toll bridge, Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor face competition from free bridges elsewhere on the river but that isn’t an argument for removing their rights. So why should that fact that the web has led to an increase in free riders mean that copyright owners should lose their rights?

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Scary Quote of the Day...

2012-01-18T21:21:00.000Z

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Judith Schilling is the "publications manager" for the European Commission's London Office and says:

“We will never succeed in convincing people about the value of being a member of the European Union if we do not start early enough with the young people before they form prejudices and are misinformed by other sources.”

Perhaps "propaganda manager" would be a more apt job title?

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Boris Island is a really stupid idea and would be an obscene waste of money

2012-01-18T20:46:00.000Z

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OK so I’ve a little interest in the subject – my parents live on Sheppey and my sister lives in Rochester (or is it Strood – these places blend into one glorious Medway mush). Why on Earth are we even considering spending something like £50 billion on building an airport in the Thames estuary?

Apparently it’s because Brazilians would just love it!

Last year, Mr Johnson published a report claiming that an airport in the Thames Estuary would lead to billions of pounds of investment from countries such as Brazil and China. It stated that the additional hub airport would radically increase foreign direct investment into Britain from fast – growing developing countries.

So let’s have a think about this then. London needs new airport capacity – I’m not one of the greeny-greeny, lentil-knitters who think air travel is an unalloyed evil. But why on earth don’t you put it at Heathrow? You know, where there’s already an airport, where the public transport and road networks exist and where the big airlines want to go?

Surely, if we want to increase capacity we should do so at the most economics rate – so here’s the comparison:

Building Boris Island: £50 billion

Building a third runway at Heathrow: £8 billion

The idea of a floating airport in the Thames estuary is beyond stupid, it would be (rather like High Speed 2) a scandalous waste of public money. And comparing the situation in London to massively land-poor places like Hong Kong or Singapore is utterly misleading.

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Is there really a curry crisis?

2012-01-17T21:20:00.000Z

All right, it's in Keighley!

This is Bradford, Britain’s undisputed curry capital and home to a bewildering range of restaurants serving Asian food. From Prasad’s exceptional vegetarian food through a range of decent quality mid-market curry houses to the classic providers of the mucky curry – the Sweet Centre on Lumb Lane, the Kashmir, the Karachi and the International all within a spit of each other and close to the University for that critical student market.

Yet some people suggest that the business is struggling:

Analyst Peter Backman, of Horizons FS, says that while the restaurant industry has just stopped growing, the Indian restaurant sector is doing even worse, with profits falling. Pat Chapman, founder of the Curry Club, and author of the Good Curry Guide, notes, "You just instinctively know they are struggling", while Backman adds that he is "increasingly gloomy" about the sector's outlook for the next few years, believing Indian restaurants will "continue to lose share to the rest of the eating out market" if the recession continues.

I’m going to take these guys at their word – after all they’re the experts in these matters. The problems, we’re told, are three-fold:

The Indian restaurant business hasn’t innovated – everywhere we go there’s the same menu, a seemingly endless list of variations on rogan josh, CTM and balti this and that.
The children of the industry don’t want to work there preferring other jobs with shorter hours and earlier nights
The government’s immigration policies mean that the tradition of importing chefs from the sub-continent has broken down and there simply aren’t the chefs to fill the hole

It seems to me that there’s another part of the restaurant business that might provide a lesson for the curry house – the Italian. Just as you’re hard pushed to find a High street without an Indian, every place has its share of Italian restaurants. And these restaurants, on the whole, target exactly the same mid-market customers as do the curry houses. Moreover, the Italian developed a consistent offer (usually presented on a menu slightly bigger than a broadsheet newspaper) with a set of familiar dishes that crop up time and time again.

The secret wasn’t exceptional food but consistency, reliability, friendliness and value. And the good ones thrived and survived. Even in a place like Bradford where the curry house is king there are plenty of Italian restaurants. I don’t doubt that, in these tough times, these restaurants are struggling and that some may go to the wall.

For Bradford – curry central (although unlike most other places Bradford’s curry restaurants are mostly Kashmiri-run rather than Bengali-run) means even more of a challenge for restaurants. And the cannier restaurateurs have stopped trying to cram another sleekly-designed place onto Leeds Road. Instead they look to nearby towns – Omar Khan has opened a new restaurant in Skipton and Shipley’s Aagrah has places at Pudsey, on the A64 near York and at Thornbury.

As to innovation there is some – Jaldi Jaldi, Mumtaz’s fast food chain is interesting and creative, for example – but not in the menu. We are stuck with a false search for authenticity:

Ranjit Mathrani, the chief executive of Masala World, which employs 5,000 people and, among others, owns London's Veerasawamy, the country's oldest surviving Indian restaurant, claims the chef shortage has brought the group's expansion up short as surely as the recession.

The company, he points out, could not use "curry college" chefs, because they only allow chefs to cook dishes from their home regions, he says, so they can offer their customers authentic Indian food.

The proper answer to Ranjit’s problem is to remind him that the curry we eat in Britain is the result of an evolution in the dishes brought here from South Asia. What we need is for some more adventurous chefs and a willingness to cut the classic Asian menu down from its choice of fifty or sixty different main courses.

Perhaps a new generation of home grown chefs – needed because we can’t import them from Mirpur or Sylhet any more – will begin to change the menus again. Or maybe the best Asian family restaurants will take the Italian route and eschew innovation in favour of getting the basics right. And, in the end, success will come to the places that set out an offer people like at a price they can afford with service that makes you feel at home.

There isn't a crisis but a little home grown creativity might not go amiss!

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All business conducted within the law is good business...

2012-01-16T11:38:00.000Z

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What is it about politicians wanting to pass moral judgement about business? Today it’s Nick Clegg’s turn:

The Deputy Prime Minister will launch today a campaign for a “well-rewarded workforce”, saying that businesses owned by their staff are more dynamic and have higher morale.

He wants to encourage companies to follow the model of John Lewis, the department store group which is owned by its employees and distributes its profits between them.

Mr Clegg’s call for “responsible capitalism” will come as City firms are preparing to pay executives billions of pounds in bonuses, despite pledges from politicians to curb excessive pay and growing hardship among ordinary families.

Those words – “responsible capitalism” – echo the sentiment of interventionist politicians down the years. From Heath’s “unacceptable face of capitalism” to Miliband’s crass distinction between ‘producers’ and ‘predators’, we find politicians seek political capital from the making of moral distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ businesses.

None of this is to say that it’s a bad idea to reward employees with shares – this cements their interest in the firm’s success and acts as a spur to profitability. But it is a matter for the owners of businesses not a concern of government – granting some sort of “right” to demand that the company gives shares to employees is a pretty gross intervention in those businesses however much we might think it a good idea.

It is simply not the role of politicians – however well-qualified we make think we are – to pass moral judgements about capitalism. I can respect someone who believes that capitalism is immoral – they are wrong but honestly wrong – but the person who says that some capitalism is bad and some capitalism is good is trying to have his cake and eat it.

For my part, I believe that capitalism is inherently moral since it is the only form of economic organisation that reflects the primacy of individual choice and preference. All other forms – those imposed by governments in a futile search for man’s perfectibility – are immoral since they require that some people are told “no you can’t make that choice”.

And when we look at the distinction made between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ business, it has more to do with the effectiveness of the different firms’ public relations than a real understanding of the morality or otherwise of that business. We like John Lewis because it does nice advertising and runs Waitrose (where the supermarket-hating commentariat prefer to shop) – if Provident Financial adopted the same ownership approach would we suddenly approve of selling expensive loans to poor people?

People start businesses with the intention of making themselves some money not as some noble social project. If people didn’t do this all the lovely stuff we take for granted – you know, the schools and hospitals – wouldn’t be there. If smart young people didn’t work eighty-hour weeks on trading desks the City of London wouldn’t be the world’s biggest financial centre producing £100 billion and more in added value.

If we start pretending that business isn’t about earning a living, if we begin to force our prejudices onto business owners, we set off down a road to a less wealthy, less creative, innovation-free society. Rather than condemning the city trader for his money, we should celebrate the fact that an ordinary guy from Dagenham or Sidcup can make that kind of cash and enjoy the good life that goes with it. It is wrong to make some moral distinction between the hedge fund manager and the artisan baker, to pretend that one is ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’.

All business conducted within the law is good business and the only irresponsible businesses should be businesses that fail.

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It's all Peppa Pig's fault isn't it?

2012-01-15T12:19:00.000Z

Fruit & Veg shop in Radda in Chianti - featuring porcini, of course!

It seem that, in the European "eat up your greens now dear" league, us Brits are languishing near the bottom (or so the European Commission - green scoffers all - tell us):

Britons are not eating enough fruit and vegetables despite nutritional advice being widely available, a study suggests. A review of eating habits in 19 EU countries put the UK in 14th place*.

And, we're told that this is a problem - not eating up our greens puts us at risk:

The EUFIC said that high intakes of fruit and vegetables were associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.

Apparently the Poles are top (not surprising as the Polish diet does seem to consist largely of cabbage and potato). Which means that they're living longer of course? It would seem not - the average Briton (even with all those Glaswegians keeling over at 55) lives just over 79 years whereas the average Pole only makes it to his or her 76th year.

What about heart attacks then - eating up our greens means we don't get these doesn't it?

According to the latest WHO data published in April 2011 Coronary Heart Disease Deaths in Poland reached 79,036 or 26.93% of total deaths. The age adjusted Death Rate is 122.40 per 100,000 of population ranks Poland #78 in the world

..and the UK? The same source gives our age adjusted death rate as 68.8 per 100,000. More to the point, that is better that three of the four top green scoffers in Europe (Germany and Austria being the other two).

Maybe eating greens is good for us (certainly a diet without fruit and veg would be unbearably dull) but blandly reporting data - it seems pretty dodgy data - on eating greens seems to miss the point. Our life expectancy is rising, our rates of coronary heart disease are falling and yet we don't eat as much green stuff as places with a cultural predilection for cabbage.

Any way it's all Peppa Pig's fault isn't it?

*Most football supporters would prefer to characterise this position in the league as "mid-table" unless, of course, it is the team they hate, in which case it is "risking relegation".

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The Web is Addictive! Something must be done...

2012-01-13T18:23:00.000Z

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The web is corrupting people's minds - and some are addicted to the Internet:

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests.

We need the following clearly*:

Guidelines for recommended maximum exposure to the Internet
An age restriction preventing harm to children
Taxes on Internet access to begin the process of denormalisation
Public health campaigns highlighting the risk of Internet use
Work towards a minimum price for Internet access

We must act now to save lives!

*I take this from the public health response to tsimilar problems with alcohol, tobacco and other things that affect people's brains. Something must be done!

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Friday Fungus: unwanted immigrants - a comment on death cap mushrooms

2012-01-13T14:19:00.001Z

It would seem to me that, besides knowing which mushrooms are tasty, knowing which ones will kill you is pretty important. And mushrooms can kill you:

Lui Jun was a hardworking 38-year-old Chinese chef who made a fatal error of mistaking the toxic "death cap" mushrooms for a common edible variety used in Chinese cooking.

This was in Australia which raises an interesting point – Australia has thousands of native fungus species but the Death Cap (Amanita phalliodes) isn’t one of them. Like cane toads, rats and rabbits this particular killer arrived with the white man:

Amanita phalloides, commonly called the Death Cap, is a strikingly beautiful mushroom and the number one cause of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. Originally found only in Europe, it has proved to be highly adaptable to new lands and new mycorrhizal hosts.

It is our love of the good old oak tree that causes the problem – when we took oaks to North America and Australia, we carried with them traces on the Death Cap. And in California, the death cap loved its new home:

If we can assume (and trace through the literature and herbaria) that its earliest arrival in Central California was around 1938, it is remarkable to think that in a little over seven decades, Amanita phalloides can be found throughout California, from the Sierra foothills to the Channel Islands, wherever live oak is found. Death Caps have recently been documented growing with pine in Marin County (pine is its preferred host on the East Coast of North America) and with Tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus) in Mendocino County, and may be expanding their California tree hosts.

So – to avoid the tragic fate of those Chinese chefs, you need to know how to spot a Death Cap:

The defining features of this gorgeous mushroom are: the sacklike white volva around its base; the white ring; the white gills; the white spore print; and the smooth (rather than lined) cap margin. Cap color is not the best thing to rely on in identification, since it is fairly variable. Older specimens have a distinctive, foul smell to them, but smell is never a very objective determiner.

These mushrooms are usually (but not always) associated with oaks – but always in mixed or deciduous woodland:

Cap 6-15cm across, convex then flattened; variable in color but usually greenish or yellowish with an olivaceous disc and paler margin; also, paler and almost white caps do occur occasionally; smooth, slightly sticky when wet, with faint, radiating fibers often giving it a streaked appearance; occasionally white patches of volval remnants can be seen on cap. Gills free, close, broad; white. Stem 60-140 x 10-20mm, solid, sometimes becoming hollow, tapering slightly toward the top; white, sometimes flushed with cap color; smooth to slightly scaly; the ball-shaped basal bulb is encased in a large, white, lobed, saclike volva. Veil partial veil leaves skirt-like ring hanging near the top of the stem. Flesh firm, thicker on disc; white to pale yellowish green beneath cap cuticle. Odor sickly sweet becoming disagreeable. Spores broadly ellipsoid to subglobose, amyloid, 8-10.5 x 7-9µ. Deposit white. Habitat singly or in small groups on the ground in mixed coniferous and deciduous woods.

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Nice place Cullingworth....

2012-01-12T14:52:00.001Z

Taken today - a view from near the former Wilsden Station (Harecroft) across Hewenden Reservoir towards East Manywells. Glorious!

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This is what they push to help you stop smoking...

2012-01-12T08:35:00.001Z

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...and it's pretty scary:

Varenicline, meanwhile, already carries warnings, as a result of Health Canada advisories issued in 2008, 2009 and 2010, concerning potential serious neuropsychiatric adverse events such as depression, agitation, hostility, behavior changes, suicidal ideation and suicide.

All that plus:

The meta-analysis of data from 14 double-blind randomized clinical trials found that people taking varenicline had a 72% higher risk of adverse heart-related events than those on placebo.

So when your Doctor tries to prescribe you Champix (what Pfizer call this drug in the UK), ask him or her whether they really think it's safe.

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...reminding us why the City of London is so important to Britain

2012-01-11T17:14:00.000Z

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From Mr Peston:

Talking to bankers and lawyers, there is growing optimism that the City of London will join Hong Kong as an offshore centre where the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), can be traded - and that an announcement on all this may not be far off.

If that were to happen, it would be quite a big deal - and would be the culmination of talks between the UK Treasury and the Chinese authorities that are said to have made significant progress on this issue last autumn.

More export earnings for London showing yet again how important it is to our economy:

One City figure close to the talks told me he thought there would be a billion pounds of extra business and significant new jobs created almost overnight.

Stick that in your pipe, Occupy London and the other 'banker bashers'.

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The Mafia would like to thank health campaigners and social activists for making them even richer!

2012-01-11T16:11:00.000Z

Those who advocate prohibition, ‘denormalisation’ and the state punishment of selected lifestyle sins continue their campaigns:

MPs are recommending two “drink free days”, minimum pricing and allowing licences to be removed on “health grounds”
The BMA are urging the banning of smoking in cars and restrictions on smoking in the home
Stella Creasy continues with her campaign to cap the APR that lenders can charge on loans
Other ‘campaigners’ are calling for a ‘fat tax’ such as that introduced in Denmark
And gambling is in their sights as another ‘lifestyle sin’

Setting aside whether a liberal society should indulge in these bans, controls and zealous regulation, there is a massive downside to such actions. A downside that ‘campaigners’ never mention. And it looks like this:

According to a new report by Italian anti-crime group SOS Impresa, as reported by Reuters, "Organised crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country's biggest "bank" and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms, according to a report on Tuesday."

The Italian Mafia has over 65 billion Euro in liquid assets.

You don’t get the connection with the nannying fussbuckets who want to dictate how you live your life? Let me explain – starting with:

The high tax-induced price of tobacco products in the UK has led to many smokers seeking alternative cheaper sources of cigarettes and handrolling tobacco (HRT), both legal (duty-free and crossborder shopping) and illegal (smuggling and bootlegging). The TMA estimates that in 2009 this non-UK duty paid consumption (NUKDP) accounted for 21% of the cigarettes and 58% of the HRT smoked in the UK.

And:

Seizures of contraband alcohol smuggled from France have surged to around three times their normal levels this summer, say officials. French customs officers in the Channel ports of Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer confiscated 82,000 litres of illegal spirits in the past month.

Plus:

The use of loan sharks is increasing and going to "get worse", according to experts in the South West. The Bristol-based Illegal Money Lending Team claims it is already a serious problem across the region. Spokesman Alan Evans said they were "really concerned" and that with harder times ahead "this problem will get worse". Since its launch three years ago the team has recorded a 700% increase in referrals which are still growing.

I’m sure the picture is becoming clearer – the Mafia (or for that matter any other organised crime group) gets its money from a willingness to trade in things we’ve banned, to smuggle so as to avoid taxes and to fill gaps in the market created when honest providers are forced out by legal changes.

Organised crime is the biggest beneficiary from high tobacco taxes, from strict controls on drink and from restrictions on gambling or lending. And criminals, unlike legitimate businesses, don’t care if you get hurt – so we’ll get dangerous fake cigarettes, poisonous vodka and loan repayments enforced with a baseball bat rather than a court order.

So next time you think a ban or a new tax is a good thing, consider the Mafia. Ask yourself how much money criminals will make from your proposal.

And then don’t do it.

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Which came first - the job or the immigrant?

2012-01-10T19:02:00.000Z

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In its latest piece of well-researched scaremongering, Migration Watch has been speaking of the number of jobs filled by immigrant workers - and now some government advisors suggest that immigrants have "displaced" UK workers:

The government's official advisers on migration say there is a link between immigration from outside the European Union and job losses among UK workers.

The Migration Advisory Committee said there were 23 fewer UK jobs for every 100 migrants from outside the EU.

The implication of this reporting (and it's the BBC so will have been written carefully) is that British workers are being sacked to make way for immigrant labour. This is, however you want to look at it, both a dangerous statement and utter rubbish.

The problem isn't with British workers, it's with British non-workers. Immigrant labour is (and I've heard this time and time again) more reliable, hard-working and less trouble than native British workers. But more importantly, immigrants are filling those jobs because the native British workers aren't. The jobs come before the immigrants - people don't trog across half a continent at their own expense if there isn't a pretty good prospect of work.

Here in Cullingworth there's a chicken factory. It makes a living (sometimes to the annoyance of residents) killing said birds and shipping them across the UK and Europe. All the work force are Eastern European. Yet Bradford has high rates of unemployment especially among unskilled young men. Killing chickens seems like a job they could do but, I guess, choose not to.

If those British workers took those jobs, the immigrants wouldn't come here to fill them. Rather than running scare stories about immigration, we should be asking why - during such tough times - British workers aren't taking those jobs?

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Why Islington shouldn't ban chuggers

2012-01-10T17:06:00.000Z

OK so this won’t make me any friends but Islington Council should not be allowed to do this:

The council is consulting lawyers about bringing in a by-law to stop teams of “in your face” street fundraisers who sign up long-term direct debit donors – and work for agencies that take a cut of the payments.

The move would answer the calls of residents who complain of being hassled by the collectors, often nicknamed chuggers or charity muggers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of chuggers but I don’t see any reason why the Council should be allowed to stop the practice. Let’s put it simply so those angry residents understand – if chugging didn’t work it wouldn’t happen! That means hundreds of people do engage with the brightly t-shirted youths who earn a commission from signing us up to direct debits.

And it’s an important source of income:

PFRA estimates that donors recruited through F2F make a combined donation around £10 million to charity each month (£120m a year).

We also estimate that about 17-18 per cent of all donors who are currently giving to charities through direct debits or standing orders were recruited through F2F fundraising.

The point of all this is that people have the capacity to say “no” – and if everyone gave that response the chuggers would disappear. But not everyone wants to say no, some people genuinely do want to listen to the charity’s story and end up as firm supporters.

It’s true that the chugger gets paid – would you stand in the street all day accosting passers-by without getting something in return? And, it’s also true that the first year’s payment (on average) goes to the organisation employing the chugger. But the figures don’t lie – face-to-face fundraising is now a very important source of new donors and new supporters. That and it reduces a lot of students' debts!

We shouldn’t be banning it just because a few residents moan to you about it or because, as a self-important “community leader”, you decide you don’t like it. It’s a public space in which people should be allowed to raise funds for charities – I’m guessing Islington Council won’t be banning slightly drunk blokes in Pudsey bear outfits waving plastic buckets or red nose and stocking-clad young women rattling Comic relief tins.

Or maybe they do plan such a ban? It wouldn’t surprise me from a Labour Council.

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A little contrast...

2012-01-09T16:21:00.000Z

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Yesterday, amid great fanfare, the Parliamentary Science & Technology Committee announced the latest push to 'denormalise' alcohol featuring the "have two days of booze" in a week argument. An argument that presumably applies to Mildred who has one small glass of white wine with the dinner she eats in front of the telly every evening as well as to the toothless street drinker.

Alcohol is bad - look at the drain on the economy, look at how many people (using our lunatic method of calculation for such things) are filling up casualty! So up goes the duty, the nasty nationalist, lefties in Scotland bung in a minimum price and the result is:

The investigation by HMRC uncovered the unregulated and fire hazardous industrial unit at Moscow Farm, near Great Dalby, during raids in September 2009. They seized nine thousand bottles of fake vodka, branded as Glen’s, 25,000 litres of pure denatured alcohol (enough to make around 100,000 bottles of vodka), manufacturing equipment, bottles and counterfeit packaging – labels and cardboard boxes.

Evidence showed around 165,000 bottles of the fake vodka had been distributed across the UK for sale.

Today, in contrast, £30 million in extra public funding was directed towards another cause of lifestyle-related admissions to hospital (over 250,000 of them each year) - sport. But unlike alcohol, exercise is a good thing so merits a celebratory press release:

The Centre will be truly national – promoting sport and exercise medicine – made up of three network partners around the country. The Health Secretary made the announcement today while visiting Loughborough University, one of the network partners.

The Centre will help more people to be more active, treat injuries caused by exercise and conditions associated with lack of exercise.

If the consumption of alcohol by adults was treated the same way, I'd like to bet we'd have much less of a problem.

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The City of London is Britain's great success story - let's not screw it up!

2012-01-09T11:16:00.000Z

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The Economist reports (and who am I to argue with their figures) that the City of London generates exports sales equivalent to 3% of UK GDP. That is an awful lot of money - something in the order of £40 billion.

And it means that the City really is by far our most important industry. We don't hear the Americans complaining about Hollywood or Silicon Valley, so why have we arrived at such a down on the City of London? We should be celebrating the City's success, not bashing those who work in it and generate that £40 billion in export sales.

Instead we're moaning about how much city financiers get paid and calling for intervention or regulation, some people are agitating for special taxes on the financial sector that don't apply to other transactions, and there's an eternally repeated mantra of "we should make things" rather than handle the money.

Right now between a daft attachment to a 50% top rate of tax and rhetoric about executive pay, we seem to be doing our level best to screw up the prospects for our most successful industry. This is like the Germans slapping extra regulation and taxes on machinery manufacture or the Italian introducing a product design levy.

So the financial sector (or the parts of its concerned with lending money to people buying houses) played a big part in creating the current crisis. But that's no reason for Britain to hobble its biggest export earner or to introduce policies seemingly designed to drive the future leaders of that industry to Switzerland, Hong Kong or Singapore. So the French and Germans want to clobber the City - mostly because their financial industries are pygmies beside London's - and are proceeding to do so through their de facto control of the EU.

We don't have to agree to this do we? We can use the veto and - I hope this sinks in - when it's clear that Europe proposes to use majority voting to create regulations that damage the City, we should walk away. Right now the biggest threat to recovery is the puerile attacks by politicians on our most successful industry but in the years to come the real threat is the EU and its desire for a closed, constrained, undynamic (and "low risk") financial sector.

We should put the EU - especially the leaders of France and Germany - on notice that we won't accept attacks on the City's viability as the world's biggest and richest financial centre. And if that means leaving the EU, then so be it.

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