The planning system is a big reason for Britain's sluggish economy - reform it

This can't be said to often - we have a dysfunctional planning system that sits right at the heart of our economy's sclerosis and underperformance. If you want places to grow and succeed you need to sort out the planning system, especially for housing.

From Sam Bowman and Stian Westlake:

The undersupply of housing, whose root cause is a dysfunctional land use planning system, is the UK’s biggest problem. It slows productivity growth by preventing people from moving to get better jobs, forces them to spend more on housing costs than they need to, and to have fewer children than they would like, at a later age than they would like. It creates a brain drain from deprived parts of the country, because only the most talented people can afford to move to prosperous cities, exacerbating regional inequality, and means that many of the income gains from the slower productivity growth we do get accrue to existing landowners in the form of higher rents and housing costs, instead of higher living standards for everyone.

Despite this, every political party is proposing housing policies that at best change none of the fundamentals and at worst will completely destroy the last vestiges of a functioning housing market. The Labour Party talks about rent controls, right-to-buy for private rentals and more vaguely about building lots of council houses. While the latter might help a little, it doesn't address the real issue which is that younger people in productive cities cannot afford to buy a house - or, for that matter, a converted airing cupboard pretending to be a studio flat. Labour's policies would see the complete collapse of the private rented market, a massive increase in homelessness and no increase in the rate of build for market housing and they remain completely wedded to a 'plan and provide' approach that simply doesn't work however much you tinker with it.

For the Conservatives, wedded as we are to the ideas of classical liberal economics, it ought to be simple - make lots more land available in places like Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire for people to build homes on. Instead we're either (and Bowman & Westlake fall into this trap) proposing massive densification as the solution - huge blocks of flats near to suburban railway stations - or else using false incentives like Help to Buy. Think-tanks like Onward have engaged in massive contortions to come up with housing policies that don't change the fundamentals of our planning system - indeed while they mention planning they hide behind opinion polling showing planning reform is unpopular to ignore the damage it is doing.

There are 118 golf courses in Surrey each of which could provide between 2,000 and 3,000 homes at suburban densities - just having 98 courses would allow for 60,000 new homes. We can then consider redundant airfields and other previously developed land as well as stopping the ridiculous block on what got called 'garden grabbing' where houses on huge single plots (something there's plenty of in the Home Counties) get redeveloped at more normal suburban densities of 20-25 homes per acre. To achieve this you don't need to scrap the 'green belt' you just change the rules to mean that previously-developed land (including those golf courses, gardens and airfields) falls outside those green belt protections unless there are exceptional reasons otherwise.

The second change to planning would be to alter the basis on which assessments of housing need are made. These "objective assessments of housing need" (OANs) are a core reason for our delivery problems. Supposedly these assessments are made on the basis of projected population growth adjusted to acknowledge economic factors (these are always upwards - nowhere admits to their local economy shrinking). The problem is that OANs point to a precise number for housing need - 43,500 for Bradford - and planners therefore identify and allocate a similarly precise acreage of land on which those homes will be built. In areas with growing demand, all of this will be developed meaning that there is no market for development land and the constrained supply - just the bits the planners have shaded in - results in higher land prices than would be the case if, for example, planners identifed land to meet twice the OAN housing number.

Finally we need to review the basis for green belt policy. If we hold to the five reasons set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) there is no reason why the scale of Britain's green belts cannot be substantially reduced while still preventing the merging of communities, discouraging unmanaged sprawl, protecting the environment and encouraging the re-use of previously-developed land. We also need to get away from the foolish and expensive obsession with building new towns and new villages rather than extending the towns and villages we already have. Existing places already have the physical and social infrastructure of highways, hospitals, schools, water, sewage treatment and things like pubs, post offices, shops and parks. These existing places are also linked into existing rail, bus and urban transit networks.

I recall listening to the Leader of Lincolnshire County Council explaining how the main barrier to delivering some of the county's big sites was that the service undertakers (electricity, gas, water, etc.) didn't have the resource or investment finance to get the new towns 'wired up'. If, instead of this, the focus was on smaller urban extensions most of these problems would be managed more easily.

The UK's housing policy is a mess and this is entirely the consequence of policy-makers ignoring the simple fact that it is the planning system that causes most of the problem. This isn't to say we shouldn't have more social housing or that there aren't arguments for reforms to how the private rental sector operates but most of Britain's housing problem is people who want what their parents had - a nice house and garden is a decent suburb connected to 'town' where they can raise a family.

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As arguments for EU membership go, portraying Britain as a pot of cold baked beans isn't a good one

It takes a particular sort of mindset - that famously self-hating mindset of the English intellectual middle classes - to produce a visual metaphor like this one



This, we're told is Brexit. On the one hand a wonderful collection of foods from across Europe. on the other, cold baked beans. Now I understand the motivation of those who produced this, trapped as they are in the mythology of British food - we don't produce anything edible and that without Europe we'd, well, be stuck eating baked beans. This feeds the "Europe Good, Britain Bad" message that excites a certain type of enthusiast for the UK staying in the EU. And it acts to wind up people like me, a moderate eurosceptic, by displaying Britain as an austere, dreary, uncultured place made better by access to the goodness of Europe.

It's better, think this group of fanatics, to trash the thousands of great British foods so as to make a cheap point about Brexit. At the core of this, however, is the dislike of Britain - especially the English part of Britain - that the intellectual middle class has cultivated. Over there, you know, the roads are better, trains smoother, food better, drinks classier and women prettier. The clothes are better, the language cooler and, let me tell you, there's this little place just off the Rue St Martin that serves divine little pastries and coffee, you don't get that sort of place in England.

Forget about the possible damage done to Britain by Brexit, let's consider instead the actual damage done to Britain, to its image and standing in the world, by generations of smug intellectuals telling us we're a dull, grey little island with nothing to offer (while making sure Jolyon and Miranda get to go to our brilliant public schools, then to the best universities in the world and to live in London, the world's greatest city).

Much of the attacks on people who voted to leave the EU is couched in these terms. Any enthusiasm for things British - let alone English, that really is beyond the pale - is dismissed as the ignorant babbling of stupid people. Snarky little comments are made about how these are uneducated provincial people who wouldn't understand about the sophisticated stuff you only get in grand European capitals. We're all fat ignorant thickos who should just follow the lead of the shiny clever Europeans - a lead that has trashed Greece's economy, is destroying Italy and created a migrant crisis while blaming it on everywhere and everyone else.

I don't know about you but I'm proud of my culture. Not is a "remember the Empire" way but in seeing the bit of the world where I live as a fine place not as cold baked beans. I re-read Roy Porter's 'Enlightenment' recently and was reminded that Britain was, more than almost anywhere, the place where the ideas that shaped modern, liberal Europe were born. And not just the coffee shops of London but the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith and Hume, Birmingham's Lunar Men and the practical, creative engineers of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I'm proud of this contribution to a better world.

I'm proud of British food - we've escaped from the idea that it is uniquely bad (it never was but those middle class intellectuals with their creamy French cooking thought it so) and now have as rich and varied a choice of great local food and drinks as anywhere in Europe. Hundreds of different cheeses, better meat than Europe, great beer, some of the best sparkling wines, and shops and markets filled with fresh local produce. But I also love those sneered at working class dishes - parmo, rag pudding, fish and chips, the sausage roll and the steak pasty. Nowhere else has food like this and they are the poorer for not having it.

And yes I like morris dancing, village galas, home made jam and cake, folk songs and vintage tractors. When you fly back into Britain you look down and see that it really is a green and pleasant land, the best mapped, most networked, most accessible green and pleasant land in the world. For the cost of some decent boots, an OS map and a packed lunch you can spend a day tramping over hill an dale, along the rivers and canals enjoying nature in a landscaped shaped by generations of Brits.

So I will continue to get angry at those who belittle my country, who dismiss it as a small island of not much consequence. There's an argument about trade and our relations with those European neighbours - let's have it. But let's not make that argument about British culture, let's not dismiss that culture, our traditions and history as a pot of cold baked beans.

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British and American suburbs are very different - we should remember this when doing housing policy.

 I am, as you know, a fan of suburbs. The best suburbs combine the attributes of the city - walkability, access to public transport (but not to the exclusion of cars), a variety of house styles and tenures build reasonably densely all combined with a sense of openness and access to clean, fresh air and even the countryside.

So it worries me when people write about housing development and, in doing so, repeat this sort of line:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Firstly this isn't true. Or rather it is in some places because that's all we're building. This quotation comes from Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher B. Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz - pretty much champions of dense, high-rise city development. My problem is that it's quoted in a piece about British housing issues. Plus is completely ignores what Americans say when they're asked about the place they want to live and the houses they prefer - and what they actually do when able to choose.

But first let's remember that British suburbs look and feel very different from American suburbs. You'll all be familiar with what American suburbs look like from just about every second thriller or romantic comedy - low rise, often single-storey, family homes built on large plots that feature huge garages, lawns and not much else. Often there's no pavement (as we Brits call it correctly) and the road space is wide.

You'll also know that, while there are some similarities, British suburbia doesn't look much like this. I was brought up in Beckenham which is pretty much an archetypal suburb and while there were some larger houses (and a few very large houses) most of it consists of three-bed semis or, in the older Edwardian parts, solid three-bed terraces.

Even in today's new build suburban housing, the style, size and spacing is completely different from just about anything you'll see built in US suburbia (and not just because we use more brick or stone and less wood). Yet the writings of US anti-suburb urbanists are taken as applicable to this completely different environment.

The development of Britain's suburbs did not sprawl out in an uncontrolled manner, nibbling away willy-nilly at the edge of the countryside. They were, from late Victorian times onwards set out in planned environments - visit the Cator Estates is South London to see how this worked before the first world war and any number of places from Shirley near Croydon to Pudsey in Leeds to see the product of the 1930s housing development boom. These suburban developments were connected to existing communities - helps sustain and expand the services those places provided and allowing for immediate access to public transport networks - and laid out to encompass open space, schools and those rows of local shops we all grew up knowing. The idea that these places weren't 'walkable' is manifest nonsense yet again and again we're peddled this myth that only crowed, dense "mixed-use family housing" can provide for this perfection of urban pedestrianism.

Finally can we just say 'no, not true' to this nonsense:

...because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents

Whenever people are surveyed about their preferences, most plump for that familiar family home with a garden - ideally near good schools and not so far from a good link to the city. Perhaps with a good park nearby, a decent pub and some local facilities (post office, chemist, doctors). It remains the case that suburbia - the English sort of suburbia - represent best compromise between urban living and some sort of bucolic countryside idyll.

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Why I'm proud to be British - and why you should be too

There was one of those polls - not sure of its provenance or how its sample was constructed - that asked what things made people most proud to be British. The poll included assorted military victories (the Armada, Napoleon, WW2), having an Empire, the Magna Carta, Suffragettes and gay rights. Oh, plus the NHS.

Here's the result - unsurprisingly (and significantly) biased towards the more recent:





Now I'm not really convinced that creating the NHS is such a stellar achievement - it's notable that pretty much everywhere else in the world hasn't copied our system. Even the places with government services more-or-less designed by UK bureaucrats after WW2. But it does remind me of the extent to which the NHS is the most sacred of our sacred cows.

The thing, however, that bothers me isn't how the vote turned out but rather the huge - enormous and glaring - omission from the list. Not inventions or inventors - although we've plenty of those. Not social systems like the welfare state, for all their value and importance. Not sporting achievements (including inventing most of the sports we don't achieve in very much). Not education or research or literature (shouldn't Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Tolkien be on that list?) or music or art.

No. The thing that should make us Britons most proud is the thing that allows us to pay for the NHS. That supports our great education system. That provides for the welfare state. That funds our wonderful culture. The thing we've exported all around the world and which pays for other places health, welfare, culture and education. This thing also means most people - firstly in Britain, then in the USA and across Europe then Japan, now in China, India and a hundred other places - are no longer living in abject poverty scratting a meagre and short life from subsistence farming. This is what the British did first and that changed the world completely - for the better.

We call it free market capitalism and it is brilliant.

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Why nationalising the water industry is a stupid idea

Firstly here's Sky News' business editor:

The nadir came when, during the drought of 1976, millions of people in Yorkshire, Wales, the Midlands, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall had their household water supply cut off due to shortages and were forced instead to queue in the street for water from standpipes.

Privatisation enabled investment. More than £130bn has been ploughed into the industry since 1989 - a sum unimaginable under state ownership - and standards have shot up.

There have been plenty of long, hot summers since but, thanks to investment in new reservoirs and pipes, households have not had to endure their supply being cut off as they did in 1976.

That's the deal folks. Some people made some profits and in exchange we got £130bn invested in our water supplies, sewerage, clean beaches, unpolluted rivers and a pile of other services. That's £130bn that the government didn't have to borrow and you didn't have to pay taxes for.

Next, let's look at what happens when government runs the water supply:

According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality was not treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, in violation of federal law. The river water was found to be 19 times more corrosive than water from Detroit, which was from Lake Huron, according to a study by Virginia Tech.

Since the water wasn't properly treated, lead from aging service lines to homes began leaching into the Flint water supply after the city tapped into the Flint River as its main water source.

Health effects of lead exposure in children include impaired cognition, behavioral disorders, hearing problems and delayed puberty. In pregnant women, lead is associated with reduced fetal growth. In everyone, lead consumption can affect the heart, kidneys and nerves. Although there are medications that may reduce the amount of lead in the blood, treatments for the adverse health effects of lead have yet to be developed.

Nationalising Britain's water services is a really stupid idea.

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The problem with English intellectuals? They don't like the English

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box.

Nothing much has changed since George Orwell made this observation in his essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" over seventy years ago. What Orwell observed was a distaste, verging on the pathological, for everything that characterises English culture. French food, Italian art, German philosophy, Scottish courage, Irish wit, Spanish football even Russian gloom - these are the good things. There is nothing English that can be shown as fine or noble - the English are uniquely vile.

The usual approach here is to take something the puts the English in a bad light - football hooliganism, vertical drinking and the pub crawl, kiss-me-quick hats and seaside slot machines - and make out that this is not only typical but problematic. This is followed by references to empire, colonialism and racism as if England didn't exist before the 19th century. The English are lost man-children who will only be saved by the nobility of what Deirdre McCloskey calls the clerisy:

The referendum vote does not deserve to be respected because, as an outgrowth of English narcissism, it is itself disrespectful of others, of our allies, partners, neighbours, friends, and, in many cases, even relatives. Like resentful ruffians uprooting the new trees in the park and trashing the new play area, 17 million English, the lager louts of Europe, voted for Brexit in an act of geopolitical vandalism.

So speaks one of those self-loathing English academics, Professor Nicholas Boyle. Leaving aside the accuracy of his numbers (and the manner in which he dismisses Wales as an English "appendage"), the entire tone here is that, somehow, the English are not fitted for polite society:

Hag-ridden by their unassimilated imperial past, by their failure of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the English refuse to think of themselves as a nation in the same sense as Scotland or Ireland and have constructed a constitution for their United Kingdom which denies the obvious.

The pretention of this statement - comparing the German experience (a Prussian identity slapped on top of urbane, civilised small states then saved by Prussia being occupied by the Russians for 45 years) to England's is a delight but contains as much truth as would a comparison between England and that other great empire, China. It is what lies underneath Boyle's anti-English narrative that matters - only by having a polity, a government, a parliament can a place secure an identity. Englishness is a problem because it is expressed as a cultural rather than a political phenomenon.

And, as Orwell observed, intellectuals like Boyle hate English culture. They hate the beer, the food, the banter, the good and bad behaviour, the loudness and the humour. For all that such people dismiss us as Little Englanders - that classic term of sneering, intellectual crypto-racism - they want to make England small.

"...the reality that a nation with three-quarters of one per cent of the world’s population cannot claim significant, let alone exceptional, global status, and cannot survive on its own."

Given Boyle's anger at England and the English derived from how we impacted the world through empire, it's bizarre to then say that somehow England is small and insignificant. And pig-ignorant to suggest that a nation culturally-attuned to looking to the whole world as its market will ever be 'on its own'.

The problem for Boyle and his sort is that they see the English as dull, stupid and incapable - they have given up on us. I disagree and see this sneering and dismissive arrogance as little different from the sort of analysis that sees the Scots as tight, the Jews greedy, the French rude and the Germans boring. England is a great place filled with brilliant people and maybe Boyle should start there rather than with hating the English?

England is huge. It's not just the fifty million people. Nor is it the wealth and power of our industry and commerce. It isn't the guns, bombs, ships and tanks of the World's best armed forces. It's not even the best universities and finest schools on the planet. Or the traditions of art, theatre, music and song. England is huge because of what its ordinary men and women will do tomorrow - innovative, creative, inspiring, adventurous, challenging and spirited. Anyone who calls England 'little' has given up on those men and women - the old ones long gone in Kipling's charm, the ones here now doing great things in a small way, and the ones still to come who will take England's greatness even further.

To say that my country is small, to use that sneering put down 'Little Englander', is to deny our history. It shows a disrespect of those people - ordinary men and women - who built the finest place on earth for us to enjoy. Worse, it insults the English and the idea of England - an idea that is made by the people who call this place home.

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King Mongkut and the saving of Thailand's independence and monarchy.

Doesn't look anything like Yul Brunner

David Bassett who taught me South East Asian history at Hull in the early 1980s hated the musical The King and I. Dr Bassett was a mild mannered chap but when we began to look at how Thailand retained its monarchy and its independence, his hackles rose a little and he engaged in a gentle rant about the film's historical inaccuracy and, in particular, its portrayal of Thailand's saviour King Mongkut. The real problem is that the accounts of Anna Leonowens exaggerate her influence on both the King and on his son.

But that's a different story to the one I want to relate. For Mongkut did save Thailand and Thailand's monarchy. And on the day we hear of King Bhumipol's death, it's perhaps worth reflecting on the manner of that salvation. For when the Thais look at their closest neighbours - in Indo-China and in Burma - they see once proud nations that were cast into colonial slavery under the French and British. Moreover they can look more recently at the tragedies of independence for those places - at the impoverishment of Burma under Ne Win's lunatic Burmese Way to Socialism, at the millions dead and displaced by nearly thirty years of war in Vietnam and at the suicidal genocide Pol Pot visited on the Khmer.

Thailand - Siam - avoided this tragedy because it remained independent. And the members of Thailand's parliament stood for nine minutes in silence today because Mongkut saved the monarchy too. Far from the bumbling, lovestruck man of the film, Mongkut was an intelligent, wise, hard-working and effective monarch. Not the first or last victim of American historical revisionism but undoubtedly one of the more egregious cases of rewriting what happened to make it seem down to a Yankee.

In 1855 Mongkut - or rather his ministers led by (my favourite Thai of all) Somdet Chao Phraya Borom Maha Si Suriyawongse - signed a treaty with the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring. Because we're western-centric, we usually refer to this as the Bowring Treaty:

Bowring Treaty, (1855), agreement between Siam (Thailand) and Britain that achieved commercial and political aims that earlier British missions had failed to gain and opened up Siam to Western influence and trade.

The treaty lifted many restrictions imposed by Thai kings on foreign trade. It set a 3 percent duty on all imports and permitted British subjects to trade in all Thai ports, to own land near Bangkok, and to move freely about the country.

Again we should appreciate that Mongkut and his advisors knew what was happening elsewhere - in China, in Vietnam and even in India. The Siamese negotiating position was not strong and Mongkut knew he had to arrange some sort of deal or see what had been done to the stronger and richer kingdom of Burma happen to his kingdom. Siam had some leverage from playing the British, French and Dutch off against each other but in the end a deal was concluded with Britain rather than with the corporate interests representing France and the Dutch. Sir John Bowring was an envoy of another monarch allowing Si Suryawong to get him in front of Mongkut so as to conclude the deal:

There shall henceforward be perpetual peace and friendship between Their Majesties the First and Second Kings of Siam and their successors, and Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and her successors. All British subjects coming to Siam shall receive from the Siamese Government full protection and assistance to enable them to reside in Siam in all security, and trade with every facility, free from oppression or injury on the part of the Siamese; and all Siamese subjects going to an English country shall receive from the British Government the same complete protection and assistance that shall be granted to British subjects by the Government of Siam.

For all that came afterwards, this moment in modern Thai history was central. In principle Siam was the equal of Britain (although everyone involved knew this was something of a conceit) and had kept its freedom at the cost of ending the Royal monopoly of trade, removing tariffs and allowing British - and subsequently through further treaties, American - merchants to operate freely within the kingdom.

So today I know Thailand will, while mourning the passing of King Bhumipol, nod to history and to the time when an earlier wise king secured peace and independence by signing a trade deal with the world's most powerful nation. Thailand is a great country because of Mongkut - it's a shame our view of him is of a bald, buffoon in a 1950s Hollywood musical. Dr Bassett was right, he deserves - and Thailand deserves - much better.

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The Tale of Peter Who Thought Things Weren't Made In Britain

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The alarm rings and our economic nationalist awakes - we'll call him Peter. Rising from slumbering in his Silentnight bed (made in Barnoldswick in that bit of Lancashire that used to be Yorkshire), Peter stumbles across the room to the shower to conduct his morning ablutions.

Peter's a traditional sort of chap and likes good old-fashioned soap - Imperial Leather (made by Cussons in Manchester). It's the day of the week for hair washing and Peter lathers up with Head & Shoulders (from those nice Proctor & Gamble folk in Newcastle) and then shaves with products developed in Reading for Gillette.

His ablutions complete, Peter dresses in clothes nicely washed and pressed by his attentive wife. She uses an Ebac machine (made in Newton Aycliffe up in County Durham) and the washing powder is made by Unilever in the delightfully named Port Sunlight on Merseyside (as is the conditioner that makes everything soft and pleasantly odoured).

Coming downstairs Peter smiles as he ponders today's incisive commentary - a paen to a lost past of British manufacturing. But first it's breakfast - coffee (from Kenco at Banbury in Oxfordshire) with milk and sugar (from British Sugar's plant in Bury St Edmunds), a bowl of cornflakes (made by Kellogg's at Trafford Park) all followed by toast (Warburton's bread from Bolton) with butter (Country Life fresh from Nuneaton) and Baxter's jam (made by the eponymous family business in Moray).

Before leaving the house, Peter sits in the living room (on a sofa made by DFS in Leeds) and flicks through the papers, tutting all the while at the demise of Great Britain as a manufacturing nation. Slipping on his Church's brogues (from Northampton of course) he walks down the garden path and gets into his shiny Jaguar (made at Castle Bromwich in the lovely city of Birmingham) to drive into town.

Arriving at his desk, Peter nurses another coffee (from Nescafe's UK factory at Tutbury in Derbyshire) and gazes out the window (a PVC unit made for Everest in Sittingborne, Kent) trying to get the right combination of words for a corruscating and telling article about how Tory government means Britain no longer makes anything. Peter breaks off for a couple of meetings across the corridor in the big room. There are biscuits (made by United Biscuits up in Carlisle) and more coffee (Nescafe again from Derbyshire) which is served on the fine table (made by Hands in High Wycombe).

Peter returns to his desk - he knows the words he'll use now:

How I miss the old names of trusted brands, and the knowledge that these things had been made for generations by my fellow countrymen.

It is a terrible thing indeed that Britain no longer makes anything except for sale in "absurdly expensive luxury shops".

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If the British left want an earthly paradise they should look at home.

We all have - and the left especially has - a desire to seek out earthly utopias where the things we think important are revealed and our ideology is justified. For socialists the list is long - from the Soviet Union in the 1930s through Cuba and Nicaragua to Venezuela in recent times. There have been detours through Sweden and Denmark and occasional enthusiasm for Canada or San Francisco. It's all a bit futile:

But the left has always – and perhaps has always had to – cast its net rather wider when looking for shining examples and sources of optimism, revolutionary or otherwise. Sadly, however, the sheer variety of countries in which it has invested its hopes, as well as the sometimes wilful naivety that helped nurture them in the first place, has seen those very same hopes dashed time and time again.

And those hope will always be dashed or at least so long as the left is excited by the idea of being 'anti-market' rather than just 'pro-poor'. It is odd that the chasm in politics left by the enduring legacy of Soviet-style central planning has never been properly filled - even centrist social democrats can't help but tinker with prices, with subsidies, with protectionism and with market fixing. So those social democrat ideas of lifting the poor from poverty, of creating a fair and equal society are crushed because the left simply choose the wrong policies.

The left tend to assume that the heroes of the 'right' are those authoritarians they despise (while enthusing about similar despots who lay claim to leftiness). Yet, if we're to seek for places that capture the idea of neo-liberalism best, that demonstrate how markets work for everyone, we aren't going to find it with authoritarian nationalists. It's more like this:

But Hong Kong too was once a basket case. "Devastated by Japanese occupation, the British colony's population had declined from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 by 1945. Then, after the 1949 communist victory on the mainland, a million refugees arrived. Most of them were penniless."

Hong Kong owes its current prosperity to John (later Sir John) Cowperthwaite, a young official sent out to push the colony's economy toward recovery, which he did by reducing or abolishing taxes. "Even now, Hong Kong has no sales tax; no VAT; no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings outside Hong Kong; no import or export duties; and a top personal income-tax rate of 15 per cent.

"During Cowperthwaite's tenure, Hong Kong's exports grew by an average of 13.8 per cent a year, industrial wages doubled and the number of households in extreme poverty shrank from half to 16 per cent."

Indeed those of us who believe in neo-liberalism, who think that open markets, free trade and free enterprise are the route out of poverty - we have loads of examples of how what we believe in works. Whether it's Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan or Malta, Chile or Ghana, we can point to example after example of places where adopting the core ideas of laissez-faire led to economic growth and a better life for nearly everyone in those places. With the finest example being Britain itself - the place that started it all off.

So why is it that socialists have stopped being bothered by who owns things and become obsessed with how things are bought and sold. Why is it that the left want us all poorer from protectionism, corrupted by fixed markets and left with shortages or gluts from price-fixing? Whether it's energy prices, rents or, in Venezuela's case, loo paper, how is it that despite two hundred years of solid evidence telling them they're wrong, left-wing governments continue to think they can buck the market?

And why does the left support protectionism. OK it's not the old fashioned approach - the import substitution strategies that near bankrupted Brazil and Argentina or the tariff barriers that fooled European basic industries into believing they were competitive. Rather it's a new approach - we get a local or regional protectionism based on the deluded idea that small businesses are more efficient, greener and resilient - here's one of it's leading advocates David Boyle:

The prevailing economics of regeneration is based on the idea of comparative advantage. Places need to specialise, otherwise – heaven forfend – everywhere will have to build their own radios or cars or anything else.

Or so the old-world economists mutter when you suggest that ‘comparative advantage’ might be taken too far.

Because when it is, what you get is too few winners and far too many losers, places that are simply swept aside in the narrowly efficient new world, where only one place builds radios. Or grows carrots.

The problem is of course that Boyle is simply talking nonsense - as that well-known right-wing economist, Paul Krugman observed:

At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world.

And alongside this we get a set of 'ethical' protections - barriers based on environmental standards, health standards or worker 'rights' that serve to make both poor countries and rich countries poorer. Cries go up for 'anti-dumping' measures that merely serve to make the steel or paper or wool or whatever more expensive thereby reducing economic growth and damaging future prosperity.

Protectionism - whether it's called 'resilience', 'local purchase preference' or anything else - is wrong and benefits a few at the cost to the many:

Many people have argued over the years that U.S. prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sprang in large part from the high-tariff policies in place during those times. Apart from the economic nonsense this claim exhibits, it is akin to claiming proudly that the great economic success of the mafia in the twentieth century sprang in large part from the organization’s “taxes” (demands for protection money) laid on members of the public.

Yet this economic nationalism is now a core feature of the left's economic policies alongside all sorts of market-fixing ideas - rent caps, energy tariffs, regulatory barriers to entry, de facto guild systems and a strange belief that places can be both part of and separate from the global economy.

Finally the left seem to believe, again despite all the evidence telling us they're wrong, that somehow if we just taxed the rich a little more then there'd be enough money for all their grand schemes. Books filled with reams of statistics tell us that enormous sums languish in supposed 'tax havens' waiting for us to apply the right rules so that lovely lolly ends up in the government's coffers rather than Scrooge McDuck's Caribbean vault.

Again this is just stupid. As if that cash is sitting in piles in some bank - it's not, it's funding businesses, supporting pension funds and a whole host of other useful things. If the government takes a load of it to spend on welfare benefits, doctors wages and what not then it's not available to provide that investment. This might be all fine and hunky dory but it isn't costless - there will be a negative effect on growth, on employment and on interest rates as a result of whacking that big tax on those rich folk's off-shore hoards. Plus, of course, we can only spend it once.

There is no utopia. There is no ideal model of government despite all the efforts of clever men to create one. We don't have the knowledge or capacity to do a better job - in nearly every case - than the market does in allocating scarce resources. So by all means promote socialised forms of ownership. By all means argue for high taxes so as to enable more income redistribution. And by all means argue for greater transparency and openness in markets. But don't lie to people and tell them that you've found a magic system that's better than those markets.

If the left want their earthly paradise they shouldn't need to look beyond Britain. Take the long view and consider how much richer we are than 20, 30, 50 or a 100 years ago. Not just the elite but everyone from the monarch down to the cleaning lady with a severely disabled son. For sure, it's a pretty flawed paradise and one that could be improved but it's as good as anywhere on earth in almost every aspect of life. And capitalism, free markets, free trade and free enterprise are a pretty big part of why that's the case.

....

Tennis and politics...

****

We all sat - the whole party full - cheering on Andy Murray (not that our cries will have reached Wimbledon from Bradford) as he became the first British winner of the men's singles there for 77 years. And it was brilliant as a great bonus to our celebration of Margaret Polak's 90th birthday.

Funnily enough no-one mentioned how this might affect the coming referendum on Scottish independence. Nobody made the grumpy reference to Murray supporting Scotland and whatever team is playing England. No-one sought to claim that all this sporting triumph would give David Cameron a boost in the polls. Indeed no reference to the political significance of Murray's victory was made at all.

And there's a reason for this - great those Andy's win might be, it has absolutely no political significance and no political effect at all. Not a jot.

This however doesn't stop the usual bunch of daft pundits doing just that - making ridiculous political claims on the basis of this victory:

Here's Toby Young:

However Alex Salmond tries to spin this – and pulling out the Saltire was a cheap stunt – it is a victory for the Union and not for Scottish independence. Cameron is just past the half way point in his premiership but he's now at least one set up against Ed Miliband and on course for victory.

Well no, not really, Toby. It's rather a win for a young man from Scotland who has spent most of his life seeking to be the best tennis player on the planet. It has nothing to do with the Union or Independence and his winning is not likely to make it more or less likely that the Conservatives will win the next election.

Others were in there two - ex-pat, ex-MP Louise Mensch was no surprise in all this and was joined by assorted wannabe political commentors.

The truth is that sport doesn't need politics but politics needs sport. And sport should resist!

...

Home: the idea of England

The Leeds-Liverpool Canal, Bingley

What is the answer to the question that Channel 4 put to Ed Miliband - "in what way are you English?"

Like Ed Miliband, I can give the answer that I was born in England and have lived here all my life. But that doesn't really answer the question - as Ed Miliband discovered! Nor does the talk of vague 'values' cut the mustard - Ed Miliband talked of stoicism and the term "mustn't grumble" but that is no more a definition of Englishness than saying that the Irish like a song. It's true but not sufficiently distinguishing.

The problem is that, if you have to try and explain what it means to be English - especially as a politician being interviewed - you fall into the trap that it has any rational explanation. There is not set of characteristics, values or features that define Englishness - as a moments thought would tell you. The grizzled ex-miner from Sunderland has little in common with the shiny-faced public school boy from Winchester except that both will likely tell you they're proud to be English. The farmer's wife from Devon shares little with the girl of the tube but both will say they're English.

It is in here that we might find the tricksy definition that Ed Miliband was seeking - England and Englishness is defined by its importance to us, we the English make England. Just as the neighbourhood in which we live - village, suburb, street - is important to us, just as the place we're from is important, the nation is important. We are comfortable with the idea of England and it needs no explanation. It's the sense that a little charm can make your throat tighten and your eyes moisten - not a jingoistic pride but a feeling of rightness, comfort, of being at home:

Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath.
Not the great nor well-bespoke,
But the mere uncounted folk
Of whose life and death is none
Report or lamentation.
Lay that earth upon thy heart,
And thy sickness shall depart!

For sure, England is about tradition, heritage, old ale and new cider. Absolutely, England is about the towns and the roads, the shared history pounded into those places by our ancestors. Of course England is about achievements, things built and seas sailed. But England is more than that, it is our place of comfort, our familiar, our home. It is not Britain -that is for monarchs, prime ministers, it is a thing of empires or governments and a grand thing too. England is where our boots mark the soil, it is the thing that makes our hearts sing. It is home.

....

Perhaps Britain needs a Tea Party too?

Britain’s economy stutters along in recession or near recession.

Our Government’s debt spirals out of control.

Our leaders argue over whether to spend more money we don’t have on one thing or another.

Our central bank prints billions in a frantic and desperate attempt to stem the collapse of our financial system.

Ordinary folk see more and more of their cash taken in taxes.

What little cash the Government lets us keep is eaten up by inflation

It really is a mess. And there’s precious little evidence of anyone campaigning to get things sorted out. What Britain needs is a party that believes in opposing excessive government spending and taxation. A Tea Party that believes in:


Fiscal Responsibility: Fiscal Responsibility by government honours and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labour.

Constitutionally Limited Government: As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people, in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty.


It seems we need to protest – to stand up and say to those lording themselves above us, squandering our cash on their personal prejudice and funding their petty squabbles: “that’s enough, can we have our country back now? Can we have more modest, more accountable government? Can we have our own money to spend? Can we make our own mistakes and live our own lives free from your interference?

I’ve never marched, never protested, seldom sign petitions. But I’ll protest for this. I’ll march. Might there be others?

Afghanistan: so what's changed?

I have been re-reading Meyer & Brysac’s wonderful “Tournament of Shadows” – a breathtaking gallop through the “Great Game” and the contest for central Asia between Britain and Russia. I doing so I’ve come across three quotations that say so much about our present entanglement in Afghanistan that I thought I’d share them with you:

The first is attributed to Dost Mohammed the Afghan ruler ousted by the British in the (ultimately disastrous) 1st Afghan War:

“We have men and we have rocks in plenty but we have nothing else”

So why were we there? For sure it was not to serve in any way the interests of the Afghan people. And has anything changed?

The second quote is from Sir Henry Rawlinson, warrior scholar, Tory MP and leading advocate of the “Forward School”:

“In the interests then of peace; in the interests of moral and material improvement, it may be asserted that interference in Afghanistan has now become a duty and that any moderate outlay or responsibility we may incur in restoring order in Caboul will prove in the sequel to be true economy.”

Rawlinson’s concern (and how familiar this sounds) was that Afghanistan contained “…a machinery of agitation…” ideal to act on the “…seething, fermenting festering mass of Muslim hostility in India.” Put simply we should take action in Afghanistan to protect ourselves from violence and terrorism – now where have I heard that said?

Which brings us to the third quotation which comes from Sir John Lawrence – Viceroy of India in 1863 and the advocate of what his detractors called “masterly inactivity” over the perceived threat from central Asian and Afghanistan in particular.

“I am firmly of the opinion that our proper course is not to advance our troops beyond our present border, not to send English officers into the different states of Central Asia; but to put our own house in order by giving the people of India the best government in our power, by conciliating as far a practicable, all classes and by consolidating our resources.”

So there we have it – Afghanistan contains nothing of strategic interest yet some promote the fear of the Muslim mob while others argue that good government at home will manage that problem and that involvement only begets violence and division. Nothing has changed?