Are you a real liberal? Welcome to the dark side.

To all you despondent liberals, Labour centrists, Tory modernisers, remainers, social justice warriors, social justice worriers, and everyone out there fretful about Brexit, depressed by Donald Trump, and scared of the alt-right, here is my festive message: get off the ground, you wusses. Put down your gingerbread lattes, and put up your dukes.                                       

So starts Matthew d'Ancona's  festive call to arms for what he - or at least the Guardian sub-editor - terms 'liberals'. Here, in a simple list is the Guardian's record of the good. If you are not in that list then you're on the side of evil.

If you think the vote to leave the EU was brilliant, liberating and something to be celebrated then you're in the same camp as people who believe there's a secret Muslim plan to attack the West by flooding us with refugees.

Or you might be someone who supports free speech believing a modicum of offence is a small price to pay for the power that comes with being able to speak our minds without being locked up. You're now on the same side of the line as people who think violent public abuse of minorities is acceptable in a decent society.             

Perhaps you're one of those innocent folk who think that individual humans have a right to choose. These 'liberals' have you right there with Fascists who want to ban public acts of faith, religious dress and introduce some sort of Test & Corporation Act to ensure we comply with a largely mythical 'Judeo-Christian' basis for our law or culture.

Maybe you think equality is a damn good thing. Something that should be protected in law. But that this doesn't expend to quotas of women, LGBT, ethnicity or disablement. Or to allowing self-appointed guardians of 'equal rights' to police our language or no platform those who offend against their narrow, excluding and divisive definition of diversity. Welcome to the dark side.

If you think our public debate is, in its original soviet sense, politically correct then watch out. Your belief that you should be allowed to say what you think, feel or know is true regardless of whether it offends the received and acceptable wisdom of the great and good - this is the target. Argument will be closed down, insults will be thrown and plain speaking condemned as the 'liberals' shut off debate and any challenge to their worldview.

Speaking personally, I think immigration is mostly a good thing, support open international trade, dislike regulation aimed at industrial protection and want a world where free individuals can engage in free exchange without the interference of the state. I dislike Donald Trump, think Nigel Farage is a twit and consider fascism to be just another statist abhorrence. I hate proposals from all sides in parliament to muzzle the press, snoop on our lives and - in the name of security or fighting terrorism - create a surveillance state Stalin would have killed to create.

But I also think gender quotas to be against the interests of women. That our approach to equalities defines people by their membership of a group rather than by their individuality. And that high taxes on income are a moral offence. Oh, and government in all its forms is too big, does too much that is dumb and fails on the things - such as health and care - that it claims are central to its purpose. I believe that it is no business of government to regulate how much sugar, salt, booze, fat or beef I consume, that the smoking ban in pubs was a bad idea, and that advertising is a force for good in a consumerist world.

I think you can believe what you damn well like - from the earth being flat through to the Queen being a lizard - but that you can't impose your beliefs on me or have them go unchallenged. So, yes, I'm happy to listen to sceptical arguments about climate change, to let people say that maybe we shouldn't get quite so knickered up about a marginal change in world temperatures. And I think that trying to silence or sideline these voices is quite simply the worst way to conduct any sort of debate about a massively important area of policy.

I could go on further. How our planning policies are a joke. Why the NHS is unsustainable without major and substantial change. How the idea of anti-social behaviour allows us to criminalise behaviour that is simply annoying. And that choice in education matters just as much as choice anywhere else - we don't have it and should get it. Vouchers would be a start.

You get my point? I'm properly right wing. The worse nightmare of the 'liberal'. Why? Because, unlike them, I actually am a liberal. I really do believe in liberty, choice, freedom and personal responsibility. If you think likewise then don't make the mistake a previous generation of liberals made. Don't make common cause with the anti-freedom centre left. Don't allow them to force you into their camp, to go along with their soft authoritarianism, just because you don't want to be in the same space as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and the "alt-right" racists.

Stand your ground and make the case for a free country. Again and again until they're bored with you telling them that they - the fake liberals - are as much the problem as the Trumps and Farages of this world, quite literally a force of reaction to those 'liberals' and their controlling, authoritarian world-view.

Welcome to the dark side.

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2016: Year of the Remainer

Before 2016 Remainers didn't exist. There was a generally held view that anyone who had applied any thought to the matter was completely content with the UK's membership of the European Union. The problem was that David Cameron, against expectations won the 2015 general election and found himself obliged - mandated even - to hold a referendum on whether we stayed in the EU. It was a triumph for a small band of politicians, writers and campaigners who had argued for a long while that membership of the EU was bad for Britain - not just UKIP leader Nigel Farage (for all his grandiose claims) but politicians like Bill Cash, Iain Duncan Smith, Kate Hoey and Phil Davies as well as writers like Richard North with his EU Referendum blog.

And I don't need to remind you that on 23 June 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU. This was done against an avalanche of insistence by the great and good, from Barak Obama to Eddie Izzard, that leaving so was a really bad idea. The following day there was a cry of pain from the ranks of that great and good - how could people have disregarded all their expert advice and voted to leave?

The Remainer was born.

Over the coming weeks thousands of anxious, fretful articles were written about why people voted to leave. Numbers were crunched, opinions were pronounced and a received wisdom was established. People voted to leave because they were either conned by the leave campaign or else were a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Little Englander morons who probably shouldn't be allowed near sharp objects let alone a voting booth. The word xenophobia tripped from the tongues of Guardian columnists, FT bloggers and Economist writers.

Now it's true that most of those who voted to remain didn't take part in this catalogue of angst-ridden self-indulgence prefering to take the view that there'd been a referendum, the people had voted to leave and now the government should get on with the job of implementing that decision (however much they might have disagreed with it). But among the remain voters were the Remainers, a bunch of people who were so traumatised by the result that they visited a shock onto British politics.

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

Such people are the centre of British politics, those with the greatest amount vested in the current system and the most to lose from a short-term economic downturn. We're talking about moderate and thoughtful folk who assess facts, consider evidence and produce thoughtful analysis. And after 23 June 2016 a bunch of these folk suddenly got angry. So angry they were prepared to reject the ideas and principles of democracy so as to overturn the referendum vote. Court cases were crowd-sourced, marches were held and on-line petitions were launched - all with the express intention (if not always the stated purpose) of delaying, obstructing and ideally stopping the decision of the people being implemented.

People who had been moderate and considered in their politics suddenly became radicalised anti-democrats. People who a few months previously would have questioned our balance between the rule of law and civil liberties suddenly became champions of the former and questioning of the latter. A new and dangerous group of extremists were born, one that was prepared to reject democracy in order to stay as a member of the European Union.

Of course these Remainers don't see themselves this way and still use moderate, assured and confident language but their purpose is to obstruct the vote of 23 June 2016 being implemented. A few weeks ago some of these Remainers condescended to pay Bradford a visit. Calling themselves Common Ground this group say they're all about reaching out to leave voters, finding things we share. But peel back the cover of fine words and we have an anti-democracy campaign dedicated to overturning the decision of 23 June 2016 - you only need check out the group's 'network' to understand this as its purpose.

As a result, and because Remainers are not really interested in actually understanding why people voted to leave, our visitors went away with their prejudices reinforced. All this - and similar visits to other places that voted to leave - presents a picture of the leaver world as being dour, run down, left behind and divided. And we can infer that this contrasts with the golden city on the hill that is the Remainer's world.

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy. If the voters were to choose people reflecting their vote in June 2016 this would, of course, be a terrible thing indeed.

I repeat again that the Remainers are but a minority of those who voted to stay in the EU - perhaps a quarter maybe a third - but they represent an angry, self-serving, bigoted and undemocratic force that is the worst outcome of 2016. The political objective of 2017 should, in part, be to expose these people again and again as authoritarian, controlling and anti-democratic.

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Fake news, filter bubbles and the failure of the BBC

A couple of days ago The Times splashed its front page with a story about a leaked 'Cabinet Office Memo'. You all saw the story, either in its original Times incarnation or else the retread from The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News or the BBC. The content of the memo and the argument it informs is not relevent to what I'm going to say but rather the provenance of the memo. The argument is merely the victim of the news story.

Within a few hours of The Times splashing its story, there were doubts about its veracity. Was there really a government memo or has there been some sort of creative interpretation of something else. The government helpfully told us there was no such memo but then whoever believes anything a government tells us?

In the end the story was shown as a more-or-less complete fiction. Rather than a memo produced by a government department to advise the Cabinet, we had instead a polemic created on the authors' initiative as a pitch for consultancy business. The 'truth' presented in that Times story turned out to be quite a lot less than actual truth. Fleetingly one wonders how a great newspaper can make such a cock-up even to the point of asking whether it's not a cock-up but essentially a commissioned leak designed to embarrass the government - a sort of Brexit version of the Zinoviev letter?

Oddly - or maybe not oddly at all - alongside this example of misleading news reporting there has been a story about how 'fake news' was responsible (I exaggerate but only slightly) for Donald Trump winning the US Presidential election:

In particular, there are those who argue that Facebook fueled Trump’s rise by circulating a host of fake news stories about political topics, and these stories helped tip the scale in his favor.

Coupled with the filtering algorithm used by Facebook all this fake news resulted in a 'post-truth' election result. Others, including Facebook itself, have kicked back at this argument by pointing out that most (like 99%) of the content on Facebook isn't fake news. What's odd - to me at least - is that very few people have pointed out that Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's content is user-generated, unmoderated, unedited and therefore essentially untrustworthy. But bluntly the problem isn't fake news on Facebook it's the selective presentation of news, even false news, by trustworthy media.

And this problem - what I might call the "mainstream media filter" if that didn't sound too much like the wilder fringes of left and right wing blogging - is why here in the UK, we were all so utterly shocked and surprised at Donald Trump's election. Every news story on every channel told us that there was absolutely no chance at all of Donald Trump winning. When I went to the excellent Bradford Politics in the Pub everyone, panel and audience, believed that Donald trump was toast.

Why is this? Partly it's about the failure of opinion polling - US polling has hit the same wall as polls in the UK, but I don't think this explains all that failure. It's easy for us to lean back, smile and say. "I know I was wrong but so was everyone else - look at the polls". You'd have thought that, after the 2015 election and the EU referendum, us Brits would have developed a healthy scepticism about predictions based on opinion polling?

No, the reason for us getting it so comprehensively wrong (and looking at the US popular vote, those national polls weren't so wrong any way) is that the media we trust - BBC and other broadcasters, broadsheets newspapers - created a narrative that failed entirely to reflect the actual debate in the US election. We got an easy-to-swallow caricature of Donald Trump - racist, sexist, homophobic, bonkers - set against an equally shallow picture of Hillary Clinton. The election was light and dark, good and evil, saint versus sinner - there was no way Americans would vote for a man as bad as Trump especially as it would mean we wouldn't have the first female US president.

Watching events before and after the election - especially on the BBC - we can see the shift from smug certainty to incredulity and incomprehension. The BBC's narrative - indeed the narrative of almost the entire UK press corps - collapsed under the shallowness of its analysis, the prejudice of its presumptions and the degree of its ignorance about the USA and its demographics. It's not just that some of the anti-Trump stuff might just be crying wolf but that we'd not spotted that a whole lot of people in the USA actually looked at Trump's agenda and concluded they'd have a go with that.

After all, Trump's message out there was about jobs, immigration, patriotism, ending corruption and giving a voice to the voiceless. It's true this is a deceptive agenda - the economic policies will make America poorer not greater and in a land of immigrants attacking immigration seems dumb and just a bit racist - but when the counter is shrill attacks on the candidate's character rather than a debate about the issues, should we be so surprised when a whole bunch of people gave Hillary the proverbial finger?

So when the BBC and others point at Facebook, accusing the social medium of spreading fake news and creating filter bubbles, perhaps they need to examine the massive beam in their own eye - after all Facebook doesn't pretend to be a news medium, the BBC does. And, if we've learned anything over the last two years it's that the voting behaviour (and, I don't doubt, the opinions and attitudes) of a lot of folk simply doesn't fit the liberal* narrative that our national media promotes. Whether there's anything that can be (or indeed should be) done is a matter for debate but one thing is certain, the search for different news sources on-line suggests that a lot of people out there have rejected that liberal world view and are seeking alternative news sources.

The growth of fake news - as well as polemical sites like Vox or Breitbart and conspiracy sites like Infowars or the UK's own Canary - reflects the utter failure of the main news organisations and, in the UK, especially the BBC. I watched an interview by a BBC reporter of a man from 'Gays for Trump' (this might not have been the exact name of the group but it describes it precisely). The reporter may have been tired - it was the morning after Trump's election - but what came across was utter contempt for the young man being interviewed: how dare he challenge the narrative of trump as gay-hating (he isn't) and appear as a pleasant, personable bloke rather than the cartoon version of the Trump supporter as a one-toothed, baseball-capped, wall-eyed, racist redneck!

Next year, we have elections in France. They're pretty important, not least because Marine Le Pen leads in the polls and the BBC and others will be building themselves up into a funk at the possibility of her election. What we might hope for is a slightly better narrative from the BBC and other national media, one that actually reflects the debate rather than "oh my god, no, please, not Le Pen, not a fascist, fascists are bad" repeated over and over again. It may be true that the French run-off system makes it very difficult for Le Pen to win (we saw this in Austria where they very nearly elected an old Green communist in preference to the Freedom Party candidate for president) but we deserve something of a better analysis that we've had in the last three campaigns the BBC has covered.

The selective nature of BBC news-making, the prejudice of mainstream sources and the inability of London-based reporters to appreciate a fundamental cultural difference between city and country, capital and provinces - these things have created a filter bubble around the BBC, other broadcasters and the main broadsheet newspapers that is far more damaging than 'fake news' sites on Facebook. Just as social science academia needs to actively recruit conservatives, so do the main media outlets, newspapers and broadcasters - not as superstar columnists or presenters but in the bones of the organisation as programme planners, producers, directors and researchers.

Right now a growing part of the population - radicalised by Brexit (to use the sort of divisive language the BBC valorises) - is more and more distrustful of our national news media and especially the one they pay for, the BBC. We know The Guardian and its ilk are biased but we now know that this increasingly applies to the BBC - the liberal media filter bubble just means that people at the BBC haven't recognised just how they're no longer meeting the public service remit given them in their charter. The incomprehension we saw in May 2015 became wilder in June 2016 and frantic in November 2016 - the UK's national media didn't see any of this coming because it was looking in the wrong places. Mostly its own navel. This is the problem not fake news stories on Facebook.

*Please note that where used the word 'liberal' is meant in its perjorative American meaning not its sane, noble and decent English meaning
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Article 50 Case: Incompetence, lies and the importance of free speech

I may have been misunderstood. Not because of anything I said but because of how some people decided they knew what I'd said or because they knew what I really meant. The starting point was that, following the High Court decision about invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, I was angry. Indeed, I was as angry as I had ever been about something political.

Now if people had noted what I said, they'd have spotted how my anger wasn't directed at those three judges (however much I might think their decision egregious) but rather at the Government. After all they'd proposed and got support for (overwhelming support as it happens) a proposal to have a referendum on our membership of the European Union - something that had been in the manifesto that government stood on in May 2015:

That’s why, after the election, we will negotiate a new settlement for Britain in Europe, and then ask the British people whether they want to stay in the EU on this reformed basis or leave. David Cameron has committed that he will only lead a government that offers an in-out referendum. We will hold that in-out referendum before the end of 2017 and respect the outcome.

So my expectation was that the result of the referendum (and whether you like it or not, we voted to leave) would be implemented. The Government even wrote to us all telling us just that:



All pretty unequivocal. It seems, however, that this isn't really the case, at least as far as those three judges are concerned. Not only was the Government incompetent in proposing a referendum bill that didn't do what it said in the manifesto, they then compounded this by issuing a false statement that this was so. Put simply the Government led by David Cameron was either incompetent or it lied (maybe even both). I feel entirely justified in being as angry with this as I was with Tony Blair's government when it sent young men to die in Iraq on the basis of what turns out to have been a lie. Just as subsequent enquiry revealed Blair's duplicity, the three judges last week revealed the incompetence (or lies or both) of David Cameron's government.

Although I may not be angry with the judges, I do have a great deal of sympathy for the many people - including those writing the front page headlines in some newspapers - who were explosively cross with the decision and those who made it. And I find the reaction of too many, especially lawyers clucking round their superiors, to these headlines deeply concerning. All this stuff about the headlines "intimidating" the judges (by writing in a newspaper - how spineless are they?) and wanting some sort of unspecified action from the Government to deal with the offending editors simply represents an attack on press freedom and free speech. Do we really think a headline in the Daily Mail is going to destroy the independence of the judiciary, however unpleasant and intemperate that headline might be?

The thing with free speech is that it's loud, messy and often pretty unpleasant (trust me on this - I get that same bile directed at me as those judges got). But no part of our state's institutions should be immune from robust criticism - even when that criticism is ill-informed or ignorant. It is disturbing that the Bar Council and a parade of "Important Legal People" think judges should be privileged by newspapers being punished in some way if they dare to criticise. The law - just like other institutions - needs broad public support. If the law's leadership is too thin skinned to make good decisions because a newspaper might have a go at those decision, then perhaps we need to get better leaders?

If the law is excluded from exposure to free speech because of 'judicial independence' then we have a problem. Law in all its forms - and the decisions lawyers and judges make - is central to our lives. If we're not permitted to challenge those laws, those lawyers and those judges then our liberty is compromised. The law becomes vainglorious, privileged and its practitioners untouchable. In a nation that values freedom and the idea of democracy, this cannot be so.

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It's not a conspiracy, Donald Trump really is losing

Speaking as a marketing and market research professional, I could get offended by this sort of stuff:

It is not "wishful thinking" to distrust the polls. Nor is there a "natural tightening up" of the polls as election day approaches. The entire polling industry is an exercise in attempted manipulation of public opinion. That's why there is so much media attention focused on it.

Yes folks this is the "the polls are fixed" line we see from Corbynistas in the UK. Unsurprisingly this is from the World of Trump, a strange place filled with paranoia about the actions, motives and capabilities of anyone who questions - let alone presents evidence contradicting - the weird-haired one's march to supreme power.

The truth - there's no getting away from it - is that Donald Trump is crashing and burning. OK so there are glints and glimmers of hope as the odd poll shows Trump within the margin of error - this is like the Brexit polling but not in the way The Donald's fans want to believe. Polling in the run up to the EU Referendum didn't show a lead, let alone a big lead, to Remain but rather that it was 'too close to call' or a narrow lead for Leave. What Trump enthusiasts are doing is the same as Remain - believing their own propaganda.

So no, the polls ain't fixed. The voting machines ain't fixed. The 'mainstream media' isn't in secret cahoots with the Pentagon. The problem is that Donald Trump - the classic 'Republican in Name Only' - is an absolutely appalling candidate only made remotely credible by the happenstance of Hillary Clinton being an almost equally appalling candidate. What is sad here is that the fall out from Trump's candidacy will be the crippling of America's conservatives - embracing a warmed over, pig-ignorant version of 'know-nothing' nativism and mixing it with the gung-ho stupidity of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives closes off any chance at all of Republicans ever getting back any support among the urban middle-class let alone the Hispanic Americans so carefully cultivated by Reagan and Bush father and son.

There's no winning, however, with this sort of viewpoint:

The Podesta email doesn’t merely prove that the poll-doubters are right to be dubious about their credibility, but demonstrates, once more, that the conspiracy theory of history is the only one that can properly account for historical events.

For the record, I'm a firm and dedicated supporter of the 'Cock-up Theory of History':

Brazilian economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira suggests that the relevant variable in this case is incompetence. Incompetence is an independent explanatory variable; it cannot be explained in rational or historical terms.

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Hard or soft, eggs is eggs...the Brexit question

Except of course, just like your egg, there's not a clear line between hard and soft, a big range from barely cooked at all (very runny) to something you could use as a weapon (very hard). And everyone has an opinion - from grand economists and lawyers through to the last taxi driver you spoke with and the lady at the Co-op.

This is Simon's guide to making this decision. It's not definitive but it has the merits of being brief and information light.

1. You can make the egg harder, you can't make it softer. If a harder Brexit means removing ourselves from more of the entanglements we have with the EU then going back when we realise such a removal wasn't the best idea is more difficult.

2. The softest of soft eggs is still a cooked egg. The public voted to leave the EU - to put the egg into the boiling water. So barely cooked at all - the EEA option or similar - is still leaving the EU. And if we want it harder, we can always boil it a little more

So the logic here is to start soft - to step across the line that says "EU membership". This changes little (which is why some Brexit Ultras are opposed) but it has the merits of only ruling out things that are directly related to EU membership such as joining the Euro. Everything else remains available - from the 'semi-detached' situation inherent in being an EEA member through to the hardest of hard scenarios where our trade is determined by WTO rules alone and we have whopping great tariffs on imports (this is a really dumb idea and is why John Redwood shouldn't be allowed anywhere near trade policy).

What depresses me most is the persistence of Remain Absolutists who want to overturn the referendum result because "the people are stupid and lawyers are clever" (I summarise their position here but this is close enough - you can replace lawyers with academics, Guardian writers, bloggers, pundits or blokes who used to work at a bank). It would be rather more helpful if such folk accepted the result - ended the dreadful sophistry about it being 'advisory' - and argued for an initially soft Brexit achieved by stepping across that line.
... .

Paul Krugman on the Pound (and how Brexit voters mightn't be so dumb after all)

Krugman knows his apples (or is it onions) on trade - it's what he got his Nobel Prize for after all. So this little comment on Brexit and the Pound is interesting:

Pre-Brexit, Britain was obviously experiencing a version of the so-called Dutch disease. In its traditional form, this referred to the way natural resource exports crowd out manufacturing by keeping the currency strong. In the UK case, the City’s financial exports play the same role. So their weakening helps British manufacturing – and, maybe, the incomes of people who live far from the City and still depend directly or indirectly on manufacturing for their incomes. It’s not completely incidental that these were the parts of England (not Scotland!) that voted for Brexit.

Rather questions the automatic presumption that people in Barnsley and Boston voting for Brexit were voting against their interests.

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Megacities and the Dick Whittington Principle - agglomeration versus central place

The world's most powerful drivers of change - economic, social, cultural and political - are large cities. We don't have to like all this change - Mike Bloomberg's fussbucketry being a case in point - to appreciate that this dynamic is very real. I'm not saying that everything is invented and every innovation takes place in developed world megacities but the evidence does suggest that disproportionately this is the nature of modern development.

I noted this a short while ago in observing that the 'London Problem' isn't really a problem just of London - it started with this Peter Thiel quote:

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The same, of course, goes for London - let's call it the Dick Whittington Principle where ambitious, clever people go to where there are lots of other ambitious and clever people because they're more likely to succeed. This Dick Whittington Principle is at the heart of the idea in economic geography of 'agglomeration' where a critical mass of people (or resource availability) drive innovation and through this economic growth. The result is the idea that we need to use attractors for those people - given that, these days, most growth is driven by people not by the availability of other resources. These attractors include universities and research institutes, high technology businesses and cultural industries.

Now this approach produces problems - it runs counter to the idea that growth needs to be inclusive and results in some places being, as it were, left behind. It is this concern that sits behind the RSA's 'inclusive growth' work and the alternative economic models promoted by advocates of new localist approaches such as this from New Start Magazine:

But this agglomeration model – the dominant local economic model for UK cities – creates as many losers as winners and is an outdated approach to city economies that are currently experiencing huge social, technological and environmental change. This dominant model favours city centre economies, skilled workers and high-end jobs. It starts with the physical – buildings and infrastructure – rather than the needs of people. It encourages people to move or commute to areas of opportunity rather than creating jobs close to the neighbourhoods in which they live.

The result, so these people argue, is illustrated by a place such as Greater Manchester where a successful centre in Manchester and Salford contrasts with slightly tatty and declining mill or mining towns like Oldham, Rochdale and Wigan. The success of the city centre simply isn't delivering growth on the periphery of the Greater Manchester urban agglomeration. This same pattern will be seen in West Yorkshire, in Birmingham and on Tyneside.

This displacement - a sort of negative hysteresis - doesn't just create problems for economies but also underlies social disconnection. Although the debate about the 'left behind' and populist politics is a little overblown, the spatial distribution of support for such campaigns is hard to dispute.

The issue, however, is that whether we adopt the leftist approach of New Start or the sort of populist approach of Trump, Farage or Le Pen, the solutions on offer result - assuming we accept agglomeration theory - in a sub-optimal outcome. We get lower rates of growth because we want to equalise that growth across every community - preventing (if we can) Dick Whittington from going to London doesn't just mean Dick has less opportunity but, by not bringing together others like Dick, society as a whole is poorer.

Here is what the populists are sadly getting wrong: While cities and rural areas are — and have long been — politically competitive, they are in fact economically complementary.

This thesis - that rural areas (and suburbs for that matter) need cities and vice versa - draws on another central idea of economic geography: central place theory. Here's the basics:

The German geographer Walter Christaller introduced central-place theory in his book entitled Central Places in Southern Germany (1933). The primary purpose of a settlement or market town, according to central-place theory, is the provision of goods and services for the surrounding market area. Such towns are centrally located and may be called central places.

Now leaving aside that Christaller was quite an enthusiastic Nazi, we can see that the central ideas of his work remain perhaps the dominant thesis in modern spatial planning. Anyone close to the UK's local plan process will be familiar with concepts like 'settlement hierarchy' and 'rural service centre' that draw directly from European location theories. It is perhaps time, in economies dominated by services, to start questioning the use of central place theories based on economies dominated by trade in goods. And rather than trying to shoehorn agglomeration theory into the same box as central place theory, we should be seeing them as competing views of modern regional development.

The presumptions that underpin the European single market (and other customs unions) are that central place ideas are correct. By granting the megacities (and Europe really has only one - London) a place on the top of a classic hierarchy of settlements with each dependent on the settlements below, we acknowledge that removing barriers to trade in (primarily) goods results in more economic growth.

If, however, agglomeration theory is correct then this requirement carries less weight. The megacity - London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo - is divorced from its hinterland. It may be convenient to trade with that hinterland but it is neither necessary or contributing to the success of the megacity. In this model, London's success isn't connected at all to its position at the top of a settlement hierarchy but rather to its capture of the modern world's most important resource - ambitious, clever people. As a global city, Europe needs London but London doesn't need Europe.

It's probably more nuanced than this and the question of what happens in the rest of England remains but, from the perspective of economic geography, the answer to agglomeration or central place gives you the answer to that other question: will Brexit work? And partly this is about the theories in question and their relevance but it's also about policy choices. Regardless of trade deals the UK government has to work out how to capture as much of the modern economy's key resource - human innovation - so as to ensure we get the greatest benefit from agglomeration.

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We should charge ramblers for using country paths (or reintroduce wolves)

I was going to write about 'rewilding' - you know the idea that the supposed dominant activity in Great Britain's uplands (farming) is now redundant and only sustained to provide a cover for the real dominant activity (outdoor leisure). So we get rid of the sheep farmers and replace them with nothing except a restocked wilderness. And what an appealing idea as those woods and beasts return - beavers, pine marten, otters, lynx and wild boar (maybe even wolves).

For some this is a mission of rescue. Here's uber-townie Nick Cohen in an article that manages to combine warnings about both Brexit and climate change - something of an achievement:

Rewilding the fells is not just townies forcing their naive fantasies on the countryside. It is a hard-headed policy: in a tiny way, it will help offset global warming; more tangibly, it will slow the floodwaters climate change is bringing. It will also be popular. If you doubt me, look at how many go to see the new beaver colonies in Scotland or the wetlands in East Anglia and Somerset. Or listen to the sympathetic hearings plans to reintroduce lynx to the Kielder Forest receive. Look even at the seeds on sale in supermarkets and notice how popular the wildflowers we once dismissed as weeds have become.

Now I've no doubt that it will be popular - after all we have millions of folk who like nothing better than a walk in our countryside. Indeed Nick Cohen waxes lyrical about his childhood holidays tramping the Lakeland fells (where I might well have passed him on similar childhood rambles). Cohen also notes that the money in farming subsidy is, in effect, a payment to look after the features of the fells - walls, paths, cairns, stiles - plus the signposts we all need so we don't get lost.

The problem is that the National Trust isn't going to buy up millions of acres of upland sheep pasture because most of it isn't for sale or likely to be for sale any time soon. It's true that upland sheep farming is uneconomic and unsustainable - farms are barely viable even with subsidy and welfare benefits. But the rewilding described by Cohen and others is expensive - the restocking with animals isn't simply catch and release but a complicated process of breeding, assessment and habitat preparation. This works on a small scale where charities and paying customers can make it work but to achieve a substantive change on the scale that really would mean a 'rewilded' uplands only comes from the willingness of national government to stump up the millions needed to buy the land and develop the programmes needed to recreate a wilderness not seen for several thousand years.

And there's a reason for all this. The millions of us who take to the by-ways, hills and woods of Great Britain every weekend aren't willing to pay directly for the privilege of using the countryside. We'll fork out plenty of money for fine boots, expensive rainwear, camelbacks, rucksacks, walking poles - all the paraphernalia of country pursuits, but we'll then moan about a £2.50 parking charge. And when this is pointed out - in the context of local councils having less money to support footpath maintenance and such - we're told this is 'scoffing'.

It's time we looked at ways to capture the value people get from our countryside - not through council tax (or any other tax) but through the people using the countryside for leisure and pleasure paying for that privilege. We expect fishermen to buy a licence, when folk use a gym they pay, cricketers and footballers pay to play their sports, and even elderly badminton players fork out for the village hall. How about we start thinking about people paying to use all those paths, styles, bridges and steps that are maintained mostly for free by farmers and other landowners. Currently the fishing rod licence is £27 for a full year (with concessions for the retired and for children). Hardly an imposition for someone prepared to pay over £100 for a pair or boots or an anorak.

It's a thought.

Or we could reintroduce wolves?
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Abolishing the Corn Laws again - the case against 'food security'

It's not every day that you read an article saying that it was a mistake to repeal the Corn Laws:

The situation created by the British vote to leave the European Union is momentous for UK food. It is on a par with the Repeal of the Corn Laws of 1846 when Britain decided its Empire could feed it, not its own farmers.

The point about the Corn Laws was that they existed for the sole reason of keeping grain prices high so as to sustain marginal British agriculture. With the expected effect of making food prices higher:

The high price caused the cost of food to increase and consequently depressed the domestic market for manufactured goods because people spent the bulk of their earnings on food rather than commodities. The Corn Laws also caused great distress among the working classes in the towns. These people were unable to grow their own food and had to pay the high prices in order to stay alive.

By opening British farmers up to competition, the repeal of the Corn Laws resulted in cheaper grain and, therefore, cheaper bread (and beer). We forget, however, that the main justification for the corn laws wasn't landowner self-interest but the belief (at the end of a long war and a series of poor harvests) that what we'd now call food security was more important than open trade. At the heart of the food security concept is the idea of self-sufficiency.

My concern is that the security of food might get lost in the debacle. The UK must not let that happen. Food stocks are low in a just-in-time economy, an estimated three to five days’ worth. The UK doesn’t feed itself. It has dropped to 61% self-sufficiency, Defra reported last month.

Now leaving aside how the UK being self-sufficient in food is compatible with membership of the EU, let's ask instead what the consequence of self-sufficiency might be - here Professor Lang's article is helpful. The consequence - a policy aim in the professor's world - will be more expensive food:

Part of the challenge now is the UK’s love of cheap food. This was the legacy of the Repeal of the Corn Laws which sought cheap food for workers. Cheapness as efficiency is still central to the neoliberal project today, as Michael Gove stated in the referendum campaign. But in food, cheapness encourages waste and makes us fat. Good diets are too expensive for the poor.

Again, we'll ignore that Professor Lang also tells us in his article that Brexit will make food more expensive, and ask instead whether there is any practical basis for deliberately making food more expensive (for there surely isn't any moral basis). We'll note the negative impact on the economy from people spending more of their income on food - a huge and unnecessary opportunity cost. The main - probably the only - case is a health one:

The researchers found that healthier diet patterns—for example, diets rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, and nuts—cost significantly more than unhealthy diets (for example, those rich in processed foods, meats, and refined grains). On average, a day’s worth of the most healthy diet patterns cost about $1.50 more per day than the least healthy ones.

The problem here is that we have to accept the premise - Diet X is healthier than Diet Y - and to agree that there is a reason for government to intervene in food pricing (for example by making grain more expensive). And to understand just how much more expensive. Plus of course, we have to agree with the researchers that the price differential is so substantial remembering that these are extreme measures - the 'most unhealthy' diet set against the 'most healthy' diet.

So instead we get food policy planning that uses the idea of 'food security', on the assumption that there is a genuine threat to the supply of food meaning that, in the worst case, we get food riots. Indeed, Professor Lang thinks these are on the way because of Brexit:

But given that the WTO rules are “the lowest common denominator” and the Codex Alimentarius is determined in meetings that are “dominated by big business and lobbies [making] the EU look like the most democratic organisation in the world”, this is far from ideal. The result would be food riots, says professor Lang.

The agricultural sector is very keen (especially the bit that actually owns the land) to get this idea of food security high up on the agenda when food is discussed. It is the biggest justification for the continuance of agricultural subsidy post-Brexit and for the sorts of high-tariff models loved by the EU, USA and Japan. We should be resisting such a model (subsidy plus tariffs) since - as we can see from the corn laws experience - the result is more expensive food acting as a drag on the economy to the benefit of a tiny proportion of the UK's population. Smaller even than you think:

Each year we’re seeing a further concentration of benefits in the hands of fewer,
larger landowners, who seem to use their subsidy cheques to buy up more land and more subsidy ­entitlements,” Jack Thurston, the co-founder of farmsubsidy.org, told the Scotsman. “Most people think farm subsidies are there to help the small guy but we’re seeing it’s quite the reverse. The bigger you are, the better your land, the more public aid you get,” he said.

So we've a system of support (as, unintentionally, Professor Lang shows) not far removed from those 19th century corn laws. We know also that the main impact of subsidy comes in raising land values meaning that those agricultural subsidies and supports are doing little or nothing to maintain food security but represent a straight transfer of money from the taxpayer to the owners of agricultural land.

We should explore whether there is a model that works rather than promising to stay in the warm bath of subsidy after we've left the EU. Perhaps starting by asking how New Zealanders can grow onions that sell in a Kentish farm shop for the same price as locally grown onions. And why those Kiwis can produce lamb, ship it to the UK, sell it for less than British producers and make a profit:

New Zealand is the largest dairy and sheep meat exporter in the world, and a major global supplier of beef, wool, kiwifruit, apples and seafood. New Zealand-grown produce feeds over 40 million people, with 7,500 animal products and 3,800 dairy products going to 100 countries every month.

All of this without any subsidy:

New Zealand agriculture is profitable without subsidies, and that means more people staying in the business. Alone among developed countries of the world, New Zealand has virtually the same percentage of its population employed in agriculture today as it did 30 years ago, and the same number of people living in rural areas as it did in 1920. Although the transition to an unsubsidized farm economy wasn’t easy, memories of the adjustment period are fading fast and today there are few critics to be found of the country’s bold move.

So ask yourself a question. Do you want the sort of protectionist, subsidy-hungry food security that sucks up over £10 billion each and every year. Or an agricultural sector that contributes to a growing and successful economy? For me food security isn't about self-sufficiency but is about diversity and choice - we're more at risk if we've only one supplier of grain than if we've 50 suppliers. Yet the advocates of policy based on food security still argue that protectionism, trade barriers and expensive food (plus rich landowners) is the way to provide that security. The argument we thought we'd won back in 1846 when those Corn Laws were scrapped is still here today and we have to make the case for open trade in food all over again.

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Scribblings II: On pubs, smoking bans, perdigree dogs, political donations and Brexit

We're back with another dose of great writing from Martin Scriblerus bloggers. I did get called out for calling it 'scribblings' - but what else could I choose! Well here we go:

There are a lot of beer bloggers who talk about beer. Old Mudgie talks about pubs and his blog is a paean to their wonders, a wistful look at the memories of pubs gone and a poke at those who get too precious about beer. Here's he looks at why old pubs just sit empty:

Assuming the building has no future as a pub, it is going to cost money to convert it to anything else, and that will need both someone willing to take it on, and planning permission. In many cases, the owners are probably hanging on to get planning permission to demolish the building and redevelop the site for something else, typically housing.

Up and down the country, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of derelict pubs that have been in that state for years, many of which are featured on my Closed Pubs blog. Fortunately there aren’t too many in Stockport, but two exceptions are the Royal Mortar on Higher Hillgate and the Bow Garrett on Brinksway, both of which must have been closed for over ten years.

Dick Puddlecote, when not running some sort of transport business, writes passionately about the fussbuckets - charmless, judgemental folk who hate us having pleasure. Here he cites a fellow 'jewel robber' (and he calls those challenging the anti-smoking, temperance and diet fanatics) and comments that:

This is what happens when you have a colossal state-funded machine which views life solely through the lens of health. Other pleasures and benefits in consuming the products in question are completely ignored, therefore the prohibitionists simply cannot comprehend the huge social and financial damage their rancid policies are causing ...

Julia has been a loud, uncompromising and essentially conservative voice in the blogging world for a long while. Here's a typical sample of her blogging as she comments of a story about a lefty who bought a pedigree dog - first the quote from the story:

"...Colleagues and friends have accused me of abandoning my longstanding centre-left principles in favour of eugenics, arrivisme and trying to suck up to the ruling classes..."

Then...bang:

Might I suggest you find new colleagues and friends? It should be quite easy, now you have a puppy!

Brilliant!

Mark Wadsworth is best known for writing about land value tax but he's not a one-trick pony and here's a cracking post about donations to political parties (that may or may not be a good idea):

...it has been suggested that parties should either be funded out of taxation or there should be a cap on the amount each donor can give.

I don’t think either of those two are satisfactory, and would like to suggest another alternative. Legislated anonymous donations.

Anyone wishing to donate above say £500, would have to send their cheque to the Electoral Commission nominating to whom it should go. Once a year, those donations would be passed on to the relevant party aggregated and without the names of the donors.

Raedwald's another blogger who takes few prisoners and doesn't bow to political correctness. Here he compares a map of 7th century East Anglia to the devastating effect of ice caps melting on the region:

The Indie prints a map of how East Anglia could look if the giant ice sheet did melt; it's exactly the same as the historic Anglian coastline in the 7th century.

Finally -for this week - Frank Davis compares the experience of Remain voters after Independence Day with the shock smokers like Frank got on 1 July 2007 when they were banned from pubs:

But for those who voted to remain, their experience that day was probably one of shock and dismay and disbelief. They are probably feeling something very like what we smokers experienced on 1 July 2007. For they also had just been expelled from a club in which they had come to believe that they were full members – just like smokers and their pubs. They had become exiles. Their world had been turned upside down. They are probably filled with the same disbelief and rage as many smokers were on 1 July 2007.

...

Interesting stuff I found down the back of the sofa (plus a comment on grammar schools)

Trade is good.

Clearing out my pockets - here's a few things (other than lint and misformed paperclips) I found:

Big cities are bad for health (this sort of reminds us what public health really is about):

Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, points to the recent increase in the scale of densely populated urban areas, many without adequate sanitation, as turning containable illnesses like Zika and Ebola into pandemics. Dense urbanization may not have created Zika, which causes newborns to have unusually small heads, he notes, but it has accelerated its spread from a mere handful to a current tally of 1.5 million cases this year.

Tokyo doesn't have a housing crisis - because it has sensible (aka laissez faire) planning rules:

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

Ideology presented as fact - the curse of economics (here's a good example of the genre):

Is there a good economic reason why Brexit in particular should require abandoning austerity economics? I would argue that the Tory obsession with the budget deficit has had very little to do with economics for the past four or five years. Instead, it has been a political ruse with two intentions: to help win elections and to reduce the size of the state. That Britain’s macroeconomic policy was dictated by politics rather than economics was a precursor for the Brexit vote. However, austerity had already begun to reach its political sell-by date, and Brexit marks its end.

And globalisation (meaning free trade and immigration since you asked) is good for the working class:

There isn't an economy in the world — now or ever — that could have endured such massive blows without a major hit to its people. But the worst that has happened in America is stagnant wages. Remarkably, our quality of life has continued to improve.

They never tell you how fast Africa is growing (or that it's down to capitalism - also socialism was what made Africa poor):

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate the latter, it is important to recall that for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Inflationary monetary policies, price, wage and exchange rate controls, marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers, and state-owned enterprises and monopolies were commonplace.

The rise of the far-right is down to the EU (prize for spotting the huge factual error in the article):

All “civilised” politicians in the founding EEC nations agreed nationalism must be overcome. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Euro communists, all the mainstream Continental political groups agreed that old-style patriotism was at best embarrassing, at worst dangerous and wicked. This meant that ordinary Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Belgians who wanted to stay French, German, etc had no-one else to vote for but extreme nationalists. Anyone wishing to oppose ever-closer union had no other home than among the xenophobic fringe parties.

It's not just technology but finance that's changing car ownership:

With the rise of companies like Uber and Lyft, it’s clear that we will need to see advances in new ownership models to support tomorrow’s transportation landscape. In fact, Uber recently received a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs to fund new car leases. Uber (and Wall Street) are also recognizing the need for more flexibility with this deal — especially at a time when Americans are making larger monthly payments than ever on their cars and taking out record-size auto loans.

The impact of Brexit on projections for housing requirements (sexy stuff I know):

In summary, the current basis for UK estimates of housing need are already predicated on a 45% drop to total net-in-migration by 2021, so for Brexit to have any downward pressure on planned housing targets in Local Plans, it would need to be assumed that Brexit resulted in European net-migration to the UK falling to virtually zero over the medium to long term. This seems unlikely.

A brilliant article - essentially a film review - on small town poverty and decline in the US mid-west (and a glimpse of why Trump):

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

Finally I can't resist a comment on grammar schools. They really aren't the answer to educational challenges but at least the Conservatives are looking at system reform rather than saying the solution is putting more money into institutions - big urban comprehensives - that are failing children.

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Trade deals are more likely to be about fruit and fungus than tariffs

Yesterday New Zealand suspended exports of Kiwi Fruit to China. Not because of some new form of vegetable-based trade war but for reasons of biosecurity:

New Zealand has suspended its lucrative kiwifruit exports to China after authorities there say that on some shipments they found a type of fungus that can cause the fruit to rot.

Kiwifruit exporter Zespri said in a statement Friday it hopes to have new pre-shipping protocols in place within days so it can resume exports.

We should note that China has a bit of a dodgy track record on using health concerns and biosecurity issues as a weapon in trade battles - most notably over the cordyceps mushrooms (the weird parasitic fungus sometimes called Himalayan Viagra) - and there's a hint of some of this activity here:

New Zealand Trade Minister Todd McClay said last month he had been made aware of reports claiming China could take retaliatory trade action if New Zealand investigated allegations of steel dumping there.

But regardless of these issues, it's important that we appreciate how sensitive biosecurity is for many agricultural products. We laugh and joke about giant poisonous spiders in banana shipments but by far the biggest problem is the spread of fungal contamination. We should remember that fruit and vegetable production is often in a cloned, genetic monoculture - the starkest example of this is those bananas (with or without spiders):

A type of Fusarium wilt appeared this year in Australia’s main banana-growing state after spreading to Asia and Africa. While the fungus has been around since the 1990s and has yet to affect top exporter Ecuador, Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. called it a potential “big nightmare.” The United Nations says the disease threatens supply, and Latin American growers are taking steps to limit the risk.

Every single banana is a clone of the same Cavandish banana plant - they are genetically identical and have no protection against Panama Disease, a fungal infection that is spread via contaminated soil. It is no joke for a multi-billion dollar industry (and don't give me any fair trade nonsense - those small plantations have worse biosecurity than big plantations) as it could be wiped out. As an aside here, it's worth noting that the EU's criminal opposition to GMOs might prevent a solution to the banana crisis that's being developed in East Africa.

To take a third example: Egypt is the world's biggest grain importer but has, until recently, consistently prevented imports with even the slightest trace of the fungus ergot. Without going into too much detail this makes it nearly impossible to import grain from anywhere with a damp climate. After a flurry of negotiations - and remember Egypt needs this grain to feed its huge urban population - a fix was found:

Egypt, which rejected several wheat cargoes this year for fungus contamination, is set to instruct officials to follow international standards that permit a small amount of the fungus known as ergot in imports.

The Cabinet on Tuesday backed allowing shipments containing 0.05 percent ergot and Agriculture Ministry spokesman Eid Hawash said an official decree ordering the quarantine office to accept that level may be issued Wednesday.

All this stuff has become - because of the Brexit vote - rather more significant for the UK. In the Egypt example, officials were applying a law (itself derived from UN FAO regulations) dating back to 2001 rather than more recent ones. And we should remember that the problem doesn't just relate to the exporting nations - in many ways imports matter just as much. The impact of grain shortages in Egypt would be higher food prices in Cairo and Alexandria - with all the dire possibilities this might bring.

If you're sad enough (like me) to have news alerts set for fungi then you'll see the concerns about spreading fungal infections - from ones killing bats or amphibians through worries like ash die-back to the concerns we see above about negative impacts on biosecurity and public health. When we talk about 'trade negotiations', we need to understand that these aren't about striking deals between one country and another (such 'deals' are just grandstanding for politicians). Negotiations are about agreeing rules that permit trade while protecting against the possible negative affects of that trade and getting consistent regulation on things like how much hallucinogenic mycotoxin it's OK to have in a bushel of wheat.

It also means that botanists - and mycologists - are as important as lawyers or economists in getting the best deals for the UK!

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UKIP, Momentum and the SNP are no more cults than the Liberal Democrats

I know it sometimes looks that way. Especially if you spend too much time paddling in the more febrile parts of social media. But politics has not become a contest between competing cults - Corbyn's success isn't cultic nor is euroscepticism or Scottish nationalism.

Although some seem to think so:

The political faithful dream of a glorious future: a Scotland free of English tutelage, an England free of the domination of Brussels, a Britain free of greed and poverty. Like the great religious dreams of the past, these causes take over lives. But all present formidable difficulties. In political as in religious cults, believers must be insulated against doubts. The most effective method is to blacken the outside world, and make alternative sources of information appear like the Devil’s seductions that tempt the godly into darkness. As Professors Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth put it in their study of political sectarianism: “There is only one truth — that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate”.

Calling the forces challenging your world view a cult is a convenient excuse for worldly wise Guardian readers safe in their well-paid publicly-funded jobs. Now it's true that these causes do take over the lives of a few people - all of the causes and their leaders have a collection of fan-children, resplendent with badges, hands tightly clutching banners, faces suffused with joy at the sight of their campaign's human manifestation. But the people turning out to a damp Corbyn rally, sitting on uncomfortable village hall chair waiting for Nigel Farage or handing out yellow and black leaflets to Glasgow commuters - these folk aren't members of a cult but really do want things to change.

Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn aren't the leaders of cults but are the fortunate beneficiaries of people's political will - admittedly not all the people (so far it seems only Farage can lay claim to success in his campaign) but enough people to challenge the certainties of managerialist and technocratic centre-ground politics. Calling supporters of Scottish nationalism, UK independence or state socialism cultists may be jolly fun on Twitter or in your column in New Statesman or The Guardian. But it simply isn't true - or at least no more true than calling Blairites a cult - or, for that matter, doing the same for the growing band of Remain refuseniks and Brexit deniers.

It is true that we gather with people of like mind - I follow and am followed by far more West Ham fans than you because I'm a West Ham fan. And, in amongst the banter and vigorous discussion of why we haven't got a right back, we behave very similarly to those political in-groups with particular enemies and consistent lines of comment. Indeed, that group of West Ham fans will moan about how we're always last on Match of the Day, how teams like Chelsea and Liverpool get far too much coverage, and how the football authorities have it in for us. This doesn't make us a cult any more than very similar assertions by followers of Corbyn or over-enthusiastic cybernats makes them a cult.

The real point about cults - from the Manson Family and Jonestown through to Scientology - is that they get people to two things: cut themselves off from normal society to live within the cult; and get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done ('free love', suicide, even murder). And cults are characterised by leaders who control and direct the actions of members - none of the political leaders we've mentioned fit this characterisation.

For all the adulation afforded Corbyn, Farage and Sturgeon they are not leaders of cults. Rather they are the vehicles through which the political mission is delivered - Scottish independence, leaving the EU and a socialist Labour Party. So long as these leaders deliver - or seem to deliver - success their position is assured. Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister of Scotland giving nationalists the hope that the mission is still achievable. And Corbyn looks likely to have his leadership affirmed by Labour members - a victory that, in the view of Momentum supporters, sustains that momentum towards 'socialism' (however loosely defined). If, for whatever reason, either of these positions falters does anyone think supporters won't turn to a different leader to take up the cause?

Cults are not made by confirmation bias or the clustering of people as communities of interest. Cults are deliberate creations that use ideologies - religious or political - as the vehicle for gaining and securing power for power's sake (although what is meant by power will vary). The adulation, the conspiracy theories, the aggressive defence of the mission, and a 'you're either with us or agin us' attitude that we see with political movements such as separatism are not features that define a cult even if they are things we'd superficially associate with cults.

What the solid, dependable centrists need to understand is that, very often, they fit the same pattern and description (if you don't believe me check out Liberal Democrat social media). Just because your mission is defined as 'mainstream' doesn't mean it doesn't take on those same cultic characters - clustering with like minds, aggression, adulation of leaders - that are falsely attached to separatist, far-left and right-wing causes.

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More on why Remain lost (clue - it wasn't the media)

****

It had seemed that we were getting to grips with the reasons behind the Brexit vote. Once we'd got over the cries of pain and anguish from disappointed Remain supporters, a narrative began to emerge. This narrative took us beyond the simplistic line of 'it was immigration that won it for Leave' to some more sophisticated assessments of voting patterns and behaviours. Added to this were appraisals - from outside and inside the two campaigns - of the marketing strategies and tactics used to promote Leave or Remain.

Broadly the reasons underlying the Leave vote began to crystalise - a lack of trust in authority, a conviction that Leave offered control and using a referendum vote to kick out at a system that served too many people poorly. Plus, of course (and this is still the most significant factor in Brexit), people wanted the UK to leave the European Union.

Alongside these reasons sits the failures of the Remain campaign - from tactical incompetence through to a strategy founded on the assumption that voters would trust 'experts', from whatever field, who advised to vote Remain. All this plus a torrent of scare stories that didn't work because the target voters simply didn't trust the messengers.

It seems, however, that we're not quite out of the woods and the discredited narrative of dumb leave voters not listening to 'experts' remains. We need to stress again that this narrative - like the narrative of old vs young - doesn't fit the facts regardless of how much people want it to. All it does it fit perceptions of those leave voters and act as wish-fulfilment for some (fortunately a declining few) looking back at the referendum.

Here is a particularly bad example of this wish-fulfilment from economist, John Van Reenan:

There are many other notable features of the Brexit vote – including the fact that Remain had a voting majority for those under 50 years of age and also in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is shocking that a constitutional rupture can be made based on 37 per cent of the eligible voters. We take decades debating and prevaricating on major infrastructure projects like Heathrow and Hinkley Point, yet are prepared to gamble with something even more important for our futures on a simple one-off in-out referendum.

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation. The only question is which other countries will now be swept along in this poisonous flood.

This screech of pain - rejecting democratic choice, conflating constitution with infrastructure investment and invoking Godwin's Law - builds on the only substantive point in Van Reenan's article, the role of the media. Like so many, Van Reenan falls for the simple belief that, in some way, it was the media that won it for Leave.

The problem is that there's little solid evidence to support the 'it was The Sun wot won it' line - that the media (keen to maintain perceptions of power) is central to the outcomes of political campaigning. Too few understand how the media influences our behaviour just as too few are able to appreciate how advertising doesn't increase aggregate demand. And we have seen a shift in media consumption with newspaper readership declining sharply and people relying on broadcast and online sources. Yet the sinister influence of newspapers is still stressed:

Most of the British press has been unrelentingly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant for decades. This built to a crescendo during the Brexit campaign with the most popular dailies like the Sun, Mail and Express little more than the propaganda arm of the Leave campaign.

Now this is simply a statement - Van Reenan doesn't present any evidence to support his contention and I'm guessing wasn't a regular reader of the three publications he accuses of bias (worth noting here that the Mail on Sunday supported Remain which doesn't fit his narrative well). Instead, Van Reenan attacks the BBC for doing its job - set out very clearly in the law - of providing balanced reportage during election campaigns. Even worse, we're told that the BBC - and I guess other broadcasters governed by balance and impartiality regulations - should abandon this because of an opinion poll, not a very good one, of economists.

Amidst all this, we should recall that during the referendum campaign, Leave advocates criticised the BBC (and other broadcasters like Sky News) for favouring arguments to Remain. You really can't win this one and the broadcasters will be quite happy to get flak from both sides in the referendum.

This isn't to say that media is unimportant - the public consistently tell pollsters that they trust broadcast media so what they say (or don't say) matters. But structured communications are only a part of any political campaign, the other part of campaigns - sometimes called, with that love of military metaphor so common to politics, the ground war - is just as important to the outcome. And it works like this:

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.

It was here that Remain performed badly. The reason why working-class voters tumbled out from council estates to vote Leave was more about word of mouth than mass media - conversations in hairdressers, in the pub, at work, at the garden gate, with family. Voting Leave was valorised - reinforced and confirmed by people's daily conversation. The failure of the Remain campaign was to rely on mainstream media to feed this conversation whereas Leave fed enough information to activists to provide a drip-drip of arguments, refutations, reinforcements and messages into those community conversations.

It is dispiriting that people in influential positions misunderstand communications so much - Remain felt position and authority were enough to get the campaign over the line and ignored the importance of trust and brand equity. And - if Van Reenan's article is anything to go by - some Remain supporters are still looking for others to blame rather than the abject failings of their own campaign. Saying it was the media simply doesn't wash.

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Hey pleb, are you voting the right way?

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

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

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

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

Here's O'Neill again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Remain lost (redux)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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