Folk memory and voting behaviour - why protest votes aren't all you might think

My Dad lived for the last part of his life on the Isle of Sheppey, so I always take a look at elections results there. Here's the result for the ward he lived in from last week:

There were three contested seats in Sheppey Central ward.

• Elliott Matthew Jayes, Swale Independents, 1019 votes
• Peter John MacDonald, Conservative, 488 votes
• Pete Neal, Conservative, 461 votes
• Trudi Louise Nicholls, Conservative, 325 votes
• Chris Shipley, Green Party, 383 votes
• Paul David Steele, Labour, 339 votes
• Mad Mike Young, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party, 330 votes

Elliot Matthew Jayes, Swale Independents, Peter John MacDonald, Conservative, and Pete Neal, Conservative were elected to Sheppey Central.

One suspects that, had the Swale Independents stood a full slate of candidates they'd have won all three seats (and a surprisingly good performance from Official MRLP - Sheppey is a hotbed of political luncacy). On the face of it, given the seat was held by the Conservatives, this was a shock result - matched by ten other independent gains across Swale. But maybe not - here's the 2007 result:

And in 2008, Independents won a further seven seats on Swale District Council. In this part of the world, there's a tradition of the alternative to a conservative being a local independent - my Dad was wont to say that, just maybe, we should have more independent councillors.

We saw last Thursday the same effect across North Yorkshire where the most popular chosen vehicle to kick Conservatives with was a vote for Independents. Elsewhere in the country the popular choice was voting Liberal Democrat but, again, the local folk memory determined where this would happen - almost always where the Lib Dems have, at some point, controlled or been in leadership on the local council. Here are some of that party's big wins this year:

Winchester (Lib Dem control 1995-2004 & 2010-2011)
North Norfolk (Lib Dem control 2003-2011)
Bath & NE Somerset (Lib Dem minority leadership 1995-2011)
Hinckley & Bosworth (Lib Dem control 2007-2015)
North Devon (Lib Dem control 1991-2007)
Chelmsford (Lib Dem control 1988-1991, 1995-1999)
Vale of White Horse (Lib Dem control 1995-2011)
Mole Valley (Lib Dem control 1994-1995)

Nearly everywhere we look the local folk memory would have predicted whether Independents or Liberal Democrats would be the choice of disgruntled voters. Elsewhere the results seem a lot more stable (they probably aren't) with it being harder to gauge who gets the protest - in remain voting areas without a folk memory of Lib Dem or Independent voting the protest is as likely to go to the Greens whereas in more leave inclined areas it's UKIP or similar (in places like Bradford South there's a less savoury folk memory in voting - the BNP).

So the great Liberal Democrat performance in many regards reflects a recovery from what might be called the 'Clegg Collapse' of 2011 when the party lost 690 seats. There are some results from last Thursday - Cotswold, for example - where the Lib Dems are building new strength (in very strong remain voting areas as a rule) but mostly we've seen the public's desire to punish the Conservatives without voting Labour reflected in wins dependent on the folk memory of past strength. In a weird old way, it's a reminder that we're all pretty conservative in our voting behaviour!

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If you want to save old-fashioned community in your Home Counties town, you'll have to build more houses.

Offcumdens we call them up here in Yorkshire. Grockles is the preferred term down in the West Country. And I'm absolutely sure there's a suitably perjorative term in Welsh. Stewart Dakers, in his anonymous Home Counties town, says this:

And there are hundreds more Glorias, Regs, Janes and Charlies, the lifeblood of community, all priced out by the ballooning property market inflated by metropolitan demand. Their replacements from central London haven’t the time or the inclination to commit to civic duties,- and besides, their friends live in Notting Hill.

It's a familiar litany, one captured in Steve Knightley's song 'Country Life':

And the red brick cottage where I was born
Is the empty shell of a holiday home
Most of the year there's no-one there
The village is dead and they don't care
Now we live on the edge of town
Haven't been back since the pub closed down
One man's family pays the price
For another man's vision of country life

I've a load of sympathy for people looking on as rural England declines - either emptying entirely as folk leave, the pubs shuts, the shops goes and the school is closed or else backfilling with wealthy retirees and city second-homers. For Stewart Dakers' home counties place, the future should be better than places too far from the big city to make a commute practical. The first clue to this failure comes in the article:

This is not gentrification, but rather social cleansing on a grand scale, and it won’t end well. As that pub-goer foretold all those years ago, able, qualified and dedicated job-holders are being displaced. Ten years ago it was bin men and classroom assistants pushed to the periphery of Home Counties life; now it’s teachers, nurses, physiotherapists. Anyone on an average wage is increasingly unable to afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their workplace, meaning our suburban utopias will soon become dystopias of understaffed services.

I know it's all a bit polemical but it hints at the problem - people, including very rich people, want to live in Stewart's Home Counties Idyll. And we've decided that we're not going to make that easy by stopping anyone building new homes there. The 'social cleansing' is pretty much the direct consequence of high demand for the few available homes. Add to this that the local council can't build new houses for rent because national government won't let them borrow and that that same lack of land stops housing associations or even groups of local worthies from building homes for those vital key workers like bin men, teachers and so forth.

Home Counties folk can cry as much as they want about how immigrants from some other place are destroying their nice community (how familiar the language used sounds to us folk in places like Bradford) when they have the capacity to get off their backsides, walk down to the council and tell them to draw up a local plan that makes the necessary land for that much needed housing available. It's a bit different deeper into rural England where the problem is no families, no amenities and dead places in beautiful landscapes, but in Surrey, Sussex and Hertfordshire those local people have every incentive - and the means - to get the homes built.

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Postcode lotteries (or why England is the most centralised large country in the world)

I don't know about you, but the term 'postcode lottery' makes my blood boil. We hear it all the time with its implication that everything should be the same everywhere or else things aren't fair. I get emails lobbying me to propose changes (usually expensive changes) because "it's a postcode lottery".

Here's a typical example:

'Our extensive new report highlights the bizarre situation where charity shops from the same chain, delivering exactly the same services and performing in exactly the same way, can get a completely different package of support in terms of rate relief and waste disposal charges simply because they are located on different sides of an authority boundary,’ said Robin Osterley, the chief executive of the Charity Retail Association.

Yes folks, these charities aren't getting the same deal from every local council because different councils exercise their discretion differently on business rates and waste collections. And therefore something should be done (by implication to make everywhere the same, to remove Council discretion).

There's a reason for much of this - national media and politics. I remember Anne Widdecombe explaining how, regardless of devolution, the national media expected a minister to appear on TV to explain why something or other was a postcode lottery (or failing, or underfunded, or inefficient). So long as this is the case, national government will tell local government what it has to do and how to do it while probably not providing 100% of the necessary resources.

I guess this explains comedian Geoff Norcott's observation (following his appearance on Question Time) that the politicians on the panel end up answering incredibly minor concerns ('dog poo in the paddling pool') that would be better addressed to the Parish Council.

My modest proposal - for when, by acclaim, you make me God Emperor for a week - is that we should ban the term 'postcode lottery' because it is helping destroy flexibility, creativity and innovation by local councils. Not that councils are all that good at this stuff (although we are massively better at it that national government) but, if councils have more discretion, people would be a lot closer to the people - elected people - making decisions about their lives.

And while we're about this business (and I'm still God Emperor) I would stop MPs having huge well-funded constituency offices full of people that go around doing things that really should be done by local councillors - and, yes, I'd devolve the benefits system, immigration administration and much else too. Frankly, we elect MPs to go down to London because we've got better things to do with our lives and, anyway, can't all fit into that fancy faux-gothic pile they've got to work in. And when those MPs have all got there, maybe they can stop fussing about postcode lotteries and let local councils get on with their job of running local services.

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The case for Devo (Akron, Ohio version) - can we get satisfaction?

Aaron Renn headlines his commentary "Their Problems are not Your Problems" by which he means that basing our economic policies on the needs of superstar cities (New York, London, San Francisco and so on) rather ignores what's going on elsewhere. Renn cites an article by David Zipper:

If you live in a place like San Francisco or New York where urban tech startups (and, ahem, national media) are concentrated, these conflicts seem to be reshaping cities throughout the country. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that’s hardly the case. With fewer than twenty new homes built in a city of 200,000 last year, Akron recently abated property taxes for new housing as a way to prop up the construction market. Many of Akron’s leaders would love to have the problem of excessive housing demand that Airbnb has allegedly created.

There are probably more places more like Akron than like San Francisco yet our discussion about public policy is still dominated by the problems of the latter (housing costs, transport investment, disruption and the gig economy, etc.) except for vague references to other places being 'left behind' with their people being unsuited to the shiny and exciting new economy being forged in the Superstar Cities. And when (as Trump did by unpicking some of the energy greenery policies promoted by his predecessor) policies do lean towards a place like Akron, they are attacked by politicians based in those superstar cities.

Right now in the UK we're in the throes of another somewhat occult but rather important debate linked to our planning system. The national government is consulting on a standardised methodology for the 'objective assessment of (housing) need' or OAN. For the layman this is the way in which the planners (backed up by lucrative consultancies selling macroeconomic models) decide on the number of houses that need building in a given 'local planning authority' or LPA. The reason for this new system is pretty straightforward - without a great big stick lots of those LPAs won't be allocating anything close to the amounts of land needed to meet housing need in their area. We're solving a problem for San Francisco (or London) rather than a problem for Akron (or Burnley if you'd rather).

The case for devolution - appropriate because the splendid 1970s semi-punk band, Devo came from Akron - is very clear when you realise the extent to which near every policy in England is determined by the needs of London and a few other over-heating places. It's not just the obvious stuff about housing and transport but also things like health systems, benefits and policing that get policies designed for London, Cambridge and Brighton rather than Bradford, Oldham and Stoke. Despite this case, the English programme of devolution is ridiculous consisting as it does of 'coalitions of the willing' competing through 'asks' for the few crumbs of power central government is prepared to give up.

I guess this brings us to the real deal in devolution - taxes, benefits and regulation. There's a debate in the UK about returning business rates to local councils (note this is the cash not the ability to set the rate) but no-one has raised the question as to whether local councils should get other taxes devolved - stamp duty, for example - or whether things such as planning and licensing policies should be locally determined rather than constrained within a tightly drawn national framework. Akron could zero property taxes to incentivise development but such an option isn't available to Burnley. In the 1960s, Singapore could use corporation taxes and investment exemptions as a way to attract business investment - Leeds and Manchester can't. We talk about the 'Celtic Tiger' but fail to notice that it was low taxes and business-friendly regulation that made those big tech companies head to Ireland (the EU noticed as they're busy trying to clobber the Emerald Isle for having the audacity to be creative in order to develop its economy). None of these policies are available to the North of England (even the bits with Heseltine's mayors) - we don't even get to decide which roads get improved first, we just get a promise of a meeting with the national agency responsible. Same goes for flood defences, for health services and for education investment.

For the North of England - or for it's constituent regions - the case for devo rests with the fact that, without real devolved powers, policy will always be determined by the demands of England's superstar city, London. And, right now, the devo deals on offer involve elected mayors with limited (now officially termed "soft") power and not much else. It may be that the Two Andys will transform Birmingham and Manchester by sheer force of personality but I suspect that real devolved power - even what Wales has got would do, we needn't go full Scots - would be a deal more effective as a way of transforming the economy and society of England's provinces.

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Hows about we try some of that there local democracy? It used to work quite well.

A while ago I wrote about the move to ban local councils from charging for Park Runs following the decision of a town council to do just that:

And, of course, you all think it absolutely right that politicians in London ban Councils from deciding on things like what they can and cannot charge people or organisations for doing. Don't get me wrong here, I don't particularly think Councils should charge for park runs (although please note that crown green bowlers, cricketers and football players are charged to use facilities in public parks) but I do think that if we are to go to the trouble of electing local councillors to make decisions we should actually let them make those decisions. And, yes, that might include charging for a park run. If you don't like the decision you get the chance to vote out the people who made that decision. This is how the representative democracy lark works.

This process - whereby decisions made by local authorities are over-turned because national politicians see some votes to grab or are badgered by national media and other national politicians into stopping the local council from doing what its democratically elected councillors have decided they will do.

This isn't just a British problem (although we are, among larger countries, one of the very worst offenders) - here's Joel Kotkin in New Geography about the USA:

This follows a historical trend over the past century. Ever since the Great Depression, and even before, governmental power has been shifting inexorably from the local governments to regional, state and, of course, federal jurisdictions. In 1910, the federal level accounted for 30.8 percent of all government spending, with state governments comprising 7.7 percent and the local level more than 61 percent. More than 100 years later, not only had the federal share exploded to nearly 60 percent, but, far less recognized, the state share had nearly doubled, while that of local governments has fallen to barely 25 percent, a nearly 60 percent drop. Much of what is done at the local level today is at the behest, and often with funding derived from, the statehouse or Washington.

Anyone taking a reasonably long view of English local government will recognise this trend with local councils increasingly mere agents of central government enacting programmes and projects deriving from the legislative and fiscal decisions of national government. The drive to standardisation through inspection regimes and the tendency to go on about 'postcode lotteries' provides the justification for this change. Very little that Bradford Council does is not directed, regulated and funded by central government meaning that, when that central government changes its spending priorities or reduces spending the thick end of the impact is felt by the council.

I believe this is, for all of standardisation's superficial appeal, bad government. Not only does is assume that circumstances are the same everywhere but it kills administrative innovation by constraining the freedom of action for local councils. It may be true that we'd all like everybody everywhere to receive the same incredibly high quality of service but the reality of modern government is that quite the reverse is true - the lack of flexibility and independence at the local level results in sclerotic, unresponsive public services that become inward-looking and producer-oriented. Faced with radical alternative approaches the producer-dominated local government (and agencies with related vested interests) appeal to national government and national bureaucracy to prevent any threat to the current system.

This problem has got mixed up with the arguments about regional devolution (an excellent idea being very badly delivered because of national government's control of investment finance and insistence on city-regions rather than existing political geography). The thrust of localism is that government is better when politicians focus on making what they see out their front door better rather than on designing grand schemes and systems to run everything, everywhere according to rules laid down by clever folk in a London office.

And let's remember that the check on this system - we call it democracy where I come from - is that folk get a regular chance to replace the politicians if they mess up. I happen to think this a rather better approach to government than the current system where those local councillors can simply blame central government for everything that has gone wrong.

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How migration caused the North-South divide

Yorkshire Day perhaps isn't the best day to share these findings but they tell a different story from the one we're usually told. I also appreciate, since I live here, that whatever they say all the best and brightest live in Yorkshire.

The thing is, however, that some clever folk at the London School of Economics (Gregory Clark, UC Davis and Neil Cummins) have looked at whether the North's relative economic underperformance is about "bad geography" or "bad people". And I hate to be the bringer of bad news but these folks at LSA have analysed surnames, probate records, MPs, doctors and other measures of social status like going to Oxford and discovered that the North's relative problem is down to the best and brightest in every generation heading South. Not just recently but more-or-less since records began (for the purposes of this research that is about 1840).




Our researchers conclude:

The poorer economic and social outcomes in the north of England have two possible sources. The first source is negative economic shocks in the early twentieth century that blighted the traditional industries of the north, and disadvantaged thereafter those born in the north in terms of employment opportunities, education and health. The second source is the selective outmigration of those with greater social status from the north to the south. In this paper we present good evidence in favor of the second interpretation, both using surname evidence and data on individual families.

Holders of surnames concentrated in the north in the 1840s were not disadvantaged in recent years in terms of education, occupation, political power, or wealth compared to the holders of surnames concentrated in the south in the 1840s. Since they are even now disproportionately located in the north any geographic disadvantage of that area would have reduced their social status. Further holders of northern surnames dying in the south were wealthier than holders of southern surnames dying in the south. And in sign that migration to the north was of less advantaged southerners, holders of southern surnames dying in the north were no richer that northern surname holders dying in the north. These northern surnames dying in the north were an adversely selected group, so the southern migrants must also be adversely selected.

To put it more simply: since about 1870 there has been a net out-migration from the North of England to the South of England and most of the migrants are, for want of a better term, the 'best and brightest'. The often noted regional inequality isn't down to the actions of government but rather to the choices of people.

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London Habits - thoughts on the intellectuals' loathing of England

I give you a toast, ladies and gentlemen.
I give you a toast, ladies and gentlemen.
May this fair dear land we love so well
In dignity and freedom dwell.
Though worlds may change and go awry
While there is still one voice to cry
There'll always be an England

We know that there's a sort of intellectual that loathes England and the English, even while relishing the pleasures and treasures of the nation. George Orwell wrote about such people over seventy years ago and little has changed. What has happened is that many of these people have become essentially rootless, believing that they belong to some global patria - Harm de Blij's 'Flat Earthers' living in David Goodhart's 'Anywhere'.

What I don't understand is why the English members of that Laputan patria are so offended by the idea of England and Englishness. Not even the the football hooliganism bit of Englishness that causes us pain but the unchanging places of England's countryside, the market towns, cricket and the village pub. They've even found a name for it - Deep England:

Forget Little Englanders – Deep Englanders believe that life was better before the evils of industrialisation, foreign competition and, you know, immigration

Name: Deep England.

Born: In the good old days.

Appearance: A glass of warm ale, a sun-dappled larch on the village green, the thwack of leather on willow, a cheeky wink from the milkman.

To most of us this is just...well...England.  But the anonymously authored Guardian piece continues in this vein before concluding with telling us what we should say about this:

“Deep England is regressive and harmful for the population at large.”

You see my friends, those traditions of ours - village cricket, beer, church bells, morris dancing - along with the idea that you don't need to change something if it isn't broken, they are harmful. These are - our Guardian writer asserts - places that voted to leave the EU filled with terrible English people. England is a terrible place and we must stay in the EU so as to prevent England.

We have a rise in self-loathing bigotry among a class of mostly London-dwelling folk who aspire to be one of those 'Flat Earthers' living in 'Anywhere'. It hurts these England-deniers when they're reminded their near neighbours rather like where they live and also pretty much like the way it is right now. The 'Flat Earthers' pretend - contrary to the actual evidence from these places - that the folk living there are unfriendly, unwelcoming, suspicious of anyone who looks a little different.

These 'Flat Earthers' have developed an image of their enemy, a bigoted stereotype of the thick, fat, flushed Englishman - the corrupted image of Skegness's Jolly Fisherman adorning the front of these self-loathers house journal, New European sums up their ignorance and prejudice completely.



Look beyond the caricature here with it's UKIP scarf and spot instead at the discarded ice-cream cone, the litter on the beach and the brown sea. This is how the 'Flat Earthers' see the world outside their bubble - loud, lewd, dirty, common. What they don't see it that their world is closing in. The faces of the people outside that world are now pressed up against the bubble of 'Anywhere'. And the 'Flat Earthers' are scared. Scared of those ordinary folk who've suddenly realised they're just as important as the great and good in London.

I remember a boss of mine talking about visiting his soon-to-be wife's parents out in the sticks somewhere (Hampshire if I recall correctly). They'd had a lovely day, a pleasant evening, nice food, company and some wine. After everyone had gone to bed, Tom (my boss) was creeping along to his fiancees bedroom for a cuddle, only to hear his putative mother-in-law call out in a loud voice, "and we're not having any of those London habits here."

None of us provincials and suburbanites think everything is perfect or even that leaving the EU is some sort of panacea to society's ills. Rather, we would like to be seen as people rather than something to be either sneered at or patronised. Above all, as English men and women, we think our country is great, has done great things, and is worth preserving as a place rather than a mere brand in a nebulous, purposeless 'Anywhere'.

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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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Immigration is a success. Integration is a disaster.

Immigration is a success. Britain is a richer place with a stronger economy because of immigration. We have kept the wheels from falling off our health and care system, maintained the provision of cheap fruit and vegetables, slaughtered a lot of chickens and built the world's greatest financial sector on the back of immigration.

Immigrants are more likely to be working, less likely to be claiming benefits, contribute more in tax than they take out and bring a bewildering variety of new experiences to our great nation. Immigration is not the cause of NHS crises, the lack of school places or the shortage of housing - short-term policy-making and a daft planning system are far more to blame for all this. And compared to similarly poor communities, immigrants commit less crime.

So why is immigration such a problem? How did migrants and refugees arriving in the UK cause such an outcry and, in part, contribute to the decision to leave the EU? Are the British incorrigibly racist? Is it the result of the drip drip of nasty bigotry from dubious newspapers? Or is there some other reason such as lousy public policy?

Let's begin with a couple of myths. Firstly, "it was the media that did it".

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.

Now I don't want to get sucked into the vortex of the Brexit debate but the gist here - from LSE economist John Van Reenan - is that the driving force for Britain's 'anti-foreigner sentiment' was that 'rabidly right-wing press'. This is pretty much received wisdom amongst the intelligentsia but is just baldly stated, no evidence is presented to substantiate the argument that the British people - and the English working classes in particular - have been led by their ignorant noses by a corrupt and Fascist press working hand in glove with those 'unscrupulous liars and political zealots'.

This just isn't true. Not that the press is innocent or perfect, it's a long way from that, but that Van Reenan has cause and effect in the wrong order. The Sun, Daily Mail and Express are commercial enterprises - they exist to make money for those who own them. This means they deliver what they think the public wants, they are like the advertisers they depend on for income - mirrors of society not the creators of society's mores or values.

The second myth is that the problem comes from the values of immigrants - most specifically that these are in some way not compatible with nebulous and vague 'British values'. We talk about honesty, decency, respect for the law, family and so forth as if these ideas only exist as values in the UK, that somehow immigrants - Muslims in particular - don't share these essentially fundamental views about behaviour. Now, while I'm happy for core values to be part of what we teach children and young people, I don't see that you can isolate a particular set of values and say they are in some way exclusive to Britain.

To suggest that, for example, Islam doesn't contain these values is to misunderstand that faith entirely. For sure different emphases are evident - more stress on justice than on rights for example - but these are nuances within those values not a different set of values. It's true, however, that these higher order values are a damn sight easier to elevate when we are economically successful and secure. And it is here, at least in part that the problem with immigration starts. Just as there is a tendency (not always without reason) for immigrants to see their status as a factor in their poverty, there's also a feeling among the poor communities where migrants arrive that these new arrivals contribute to the poverty of those already there. The lump of labour idea may be false but it is emotionally appealing.

So if it isn't media manipulation or differences in values and only partly economics, what is the reason for the rise in what Van Reenan calls 'anti-foreigner sentiment'? It seems to me that the problem is one of culture combined with a terrible failure of public policy. In economic terms immigration is brilliant and, for us successful folk with good jobs and good incomes, something of a boon but in cultural terms immigration over the past thirty years has been a disaster. We have left established communities across Britain - and particularly in England - with the feeling that, at best, their culture is something to be sneered at and, at worst, that it's based on bigoted, racist, Little Englander attitudes that have no place in the modern world.

In simple terms the adoption in the 1980s of a policy based on multiculturalism led to a complete failure of integration and sowed the seeds of today's 'anti-foreigner sentiment'. And once the feeling that the great and good considered immigrant cultures to be superior had established, it was a short step to concerns about immigrants taking jobs, stealing our women and generally ruining everything that's good about England. Public policy seemed to say that bangra was more important than brass bands, that Christmas should be turned into 'Season's Greetings', and the last night of the proms was a slightly sleazy exercise in jingoism. Strategies to 'celebrate diversity' featured every kind of imported culture and none of the home grown stuff. Integration failed because public policy deemed it unnecessary.

Nobody is suggesting here that English culture - and specifically English working-class culture - is somehow superior to cultures from elsewhere, merely that it ours and it deserves more prominence as the culture of the people who already live here. We tend to think that "when in Rome" refers to abiding by local laws but, while this is true, it goes a lot further - it's about respecting the mores, values and culture of the people you've come to live amongst. Multiculturalism, for all that it was well-meant, resulted in some immigrant groups feeling that this no longer applied.

None of this is to suggest that racism and xenophobia doesn't exist. Rather it is to say that multiculturalism is a failed policy that has contributed more to our current attitude to immigration than the media, populist politicians or misunderstandings about values. To go back to where we started, in economic terms immigration is a success, The problem is that in cultural terms we've allowed it to be a disaster. And unless we begin to give a greater prominence to indigenous culture and especially the culture of those some sneeringly refer to as 'the left behind', we will continue to face these problems.

Immigration is a success. We are all richer for people coming here and contributing to Britain's economy. We should direct our efforts to integration rather than pretending that closing the borders will solve the problem. Back in June I listened to some people express their concerns about immigration. Except, as I pointed out, their concerns weren't about immigrants but about people who were born here, for whom Bradford is just as much home. This makes it all our problem and not one solved by immigration control. It's multiculturalism that has failed us not immigration.

....

The electoral register is the most accurate source for adult population data

Right now the electoral registers are probably the most accurate estimate of the UK's adult population. There are two reasons for this - one a credit to the Coalition government and the other to the insistence on data sharing by local authority chief executives. What disappoints me is that opposition parties at Westminster continue to present the idea that there is somehow a better estimation of adult population available for the drawing of constituency boundaries.

Let's look firstly at the the new electoral registers based on a process of individual registration.This new system was introduced for various reasons including the persistence of register stuffing (that is registering people to an address who aren't living there or in some cases don't even exist), inaccuracies such as dead and gone way folk (nixies as we call then in direct marketing) staying on the register, and a whole load of people who for various reasons weren't registered at all.

Had we just stuck with introducing a system of individual registration then it is beyond doubt that the numbers registered would have fallen and that fall would have disproportionately been among the young and the poor. But the new system didn't take that approach but instead allowed existing verified name and address data within government systems to be shared for the purpose of registration. As a result somewhere between 65% and 80% of registrations were concluded using existing information and this information, given much of it was for benefits recipients, disproportionately focused on the poor. Anyone receiving a benefit is automatically registered - that's every mum, all the registered unemployed, those receiving in-work benefits, retired people and those receiving sickness or ill health support.

We can add to this the use of council tax records, the DVLA database, MoD staff records and some higher education records. All-in-all a pretty comprehensive effort to ensure that most of the registration process didn't require expensive and time-consuming paperwork. To fill the gap, local authorities undertook a variety of different approaches including traditional mailshots, door drops, advertising campaigns and canvassing. The result is a system of registration that is over 90% accurate even before the addition of a further 2 million electors - an extra 4% on the total - during the first half of 2016 (controversially excluded from the drawing of new boundaries).

On the basis of this successful (but still not perfect) system it seems sensible to use the electoral registers as the basis for drawing up boundaries for parliamentary constituencies. Some seem to differ, arguing that we should use the "whole adult population" as the measure. The basis for drawing boundaries using a 'whole population' measure has to be the 2011 census and this is already five years out-of-date. We should also note that the census is not itself a precise identification of every person (although it strives to do this) and the data is adjusted to account for under-reporting in some areas and this data was challenged by some local authorities. Again, the census is better than 95% accurate which is good enough for most purposes but in this it isn't much better - at the point of collection - than electoral registration. Its advantage isn't a better identification of individuals at addresses but rather the richer data associated with the individuals actually identified.

And this is all out-of-date so we would need to make some adjustments to the numbers so as to be accurate. At the national level this is pretty straightforward - add and subtract births and deaths then adjust for net migration to get a pretty accurate estimate. For local authorities the first part (births and deaths) is easy but migration isn't as we've no requirement - such as is the case in Spain - for registering residency. We'd have to use proxy measures such as the council tax base, the Post Office change of address file and (irony) the electoral register. And this would still only get us a measure at the local authority level rather than the ward level data needed to draw up boundaries. None of this makes for a more accurate estimation of ward-level population than the electoral register.

There's a valid criticism arguing that those 2 million 2016 registrations should be included in the review but the effect of this would be pretty marginal unless the distribution of that 2 million is very skewed in terms of geography. It's effect would be to shift the quota range from 71-78,500 to 73.6-81,300 a result likely to further disadvantage smaller inner city seats - there's no evidence that excluding these voters would have anything other than a very marginal impact on the new seat distribution.

As a last thought, we can note that the last full review of English local council ward boundaries (2003) was on the basis of a future population projection rather than the census or electoral register. It is clear that, for many places, this was a pretty unsatisfactory measure - you only need to look at the population change in Leeds Council's Headingley ward to recognise that current population is a better basis for boundaries. And right now the most accurate source of current adult population numbers at ward level is the electoral register.

...

Diversity and the metropolitan diaspora

OK we have to accept a more-or-less economic definition of successful here (which I'm guessing will be fine for most folk) but the evidence tells us that more diverse places - that is places with lots of people who weren't born there - are more successful:

One of the most important ways for cities to get connected is through migration. Jim Russell and his collaborator Richey Piiparinen at Cleveland State University’s Center for Population Dynamics have been documenting how Cleveland has been getting more connected to the global world through this process. This includes foreign immigration but isn’t limited to that. A key part of it is the influx into places like Cleveland of people who have lived in major global cities like New York, then cycled out.

Now diversity isn't an absolute guarantor of success but within this work lies the germ of an economic development strategy that might rebalance England (bearing in mind that my country is, compared to most places, a pretty small place). This isn't about attracting skilled migrants from the other side of the world - or even from Paris - but rather to look at how you provide the opportunities for people to 'cycle out' from an increasingly expensive and intolerable London.

We've seen some of this 'cycling out' with the success of Brighton, Reading and now Bristol - all places close enough to London to allow for folk to scuttle back and forth. Other places may well begin to fit this pattern - Whitstable, Canterbury and even Margate. As London overheats the result is that innovators and creators relocate, taking the risk of a smaller pool against the certainty of greater affordability. In the USA this is now noticed - here's an article about chefs in New York:

Bret Thorn, senior editor at the trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News, agrees. “We are experiencing a serious brain drain from New York City,” he says. “Chefs leaving to move home to Cleveland (Dante Boccuzzi) and Minneapolis (Gavin Kaysen). You don’t have to put up with the exorbitant rents or deal with the general cost of doing business or the difficult community boards. You can go to Oklahoma City and have customers who are interested and will marvel at what New Yorkers might be bored with.”

We've yet to hit this point yet in England but it gets closer with each rent hike and each new regulation. Intemperate actions like the shutting down of Fabric don't help and neither does the understandable preference of local authorities for order and the interests of residents. London's fantastic - yes seriously Londoners, fantastic - public transport has helped the city keep these innovators as it's possible to move further from the expensive centre without losing connectivity.

The question for us to ask is what drives the success of these out-of-London places - why Margate and not Hastings, how come Bristol but not Leicester. Some of this is about access - good road and rail links - but this isn't the only factor. And looking at the evidence from the USA it's tracking the pioneers who go back home - the creator who decides to sell the overpriced two-bed flat in Greenwich and head back with the proceeds to Birmingham (or wherever) or the new entrepreneur who thinks success is more likely in their lower rent home town than in London.

Places like Bradford need to invest some time on their diaspora, in the connections that already exist. We moan and mither about the brain drain but simply ignore those brains once they've left. Perhaps part of the strategy is to talk to these exiles - most will have a soft spot for home (if only because of friends and family) and can be relied on to put in a good word. But maybe the big benefit comes when those people decide to take their well-gotten gains and head somewhere cheaper - if they've been loved by the home town even though they left, surely the chances of them returning are greater.

Of course, for me, the home town is London. And I can't afford it.

....

England is not little - it is the greatest place on earth

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!

Others may wish to argue otherwise but there's a case - a strong case - to describe England as the greatest nation the world has ever seen. There is no other country with borders unchanged for over 1000 years. There is no other land with a bigger contribution to science, to literature, to mankind's thought.

But it's not the great and good that make England great. It's the uncounted folk that Kipling invokes in his charm - ordinary people who did things. When you marvel at the green splendour of England, you're encouraged to think of nature, to dream a bucolic dream. But stop a minute. Who planted those hedgerows, built those stone walls, coppiced those woods, drained those fens? It wasn't nature, it wasn't the great and good, it was the ordinary men and women of England.

And think again when some tour guide talks about the great figures who laid out our city street, the bishops who ordered the building of cathedrals, the bearded Victorians who instructed that town halls and art galleries were constructed. Think about the unremembered artisans who carved the stones, the sturdy blokes who dug the drains and laid the footings of our towns. Consider the women who baked the bread, made the pies and served the ale.

This is England. Not some half-remembered chronology of famous men. Not an artificial thing drawn up by some ancient lords. And not a little place.

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:

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 I should embrace the insult and proudly say I'm a 'Little Englander'. Except I'm not, I'm a Big Englander, a Great Englander, a Brave Englander, a Strong Englander because England is all those things and more - big, great, brave, strong, beautiful, magical, charming...a thousand adjectives that can tell of what the English have achieved, what we're creating today, and what we'll achieve tomorrow. England is not little, it is the greatest place on earth. It is my country. And my home.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew ?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew ?
Confiscate his evening faggot under which my conies ran,
And summons him to judgment ? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

....

No, I'm not a special kind of lovely Tory - just the regular kind

****

The attitude of some of my left-wing friends to Conservatives is best compared to the old racist who when challenged about his racism - "but what about Dave, you're OK with Dave?" - replies with something like, "ah, Dave's OK but the rest of those blacks....". Here's an example:

It constantly amazes me that you'd rather wallow in Tory rapacious greed. Cos I don't think you belong there.

You see the problem with all this is that I really am a Conservative. Not a special kind of lovely Tory but the regular sort. I know hundreds of Tories and overwhelmingly they're ordinary, decent, kind, caring, helpful folk. There's no sign of any 'rapacious greed' and I've yet to be served baby at a dinner party. Now I'm prepared to speculate that it may just be that I'm not invited to the sort of dinner parties where rapacious greed is celebrated but somehow I doubt it.

So when I'm with Tories, what do we 'wallow in' if it's not 'rapacious greed'? Well from my experience, what we talk about ranges from the mundane ('lovely weather', 'did you get away for a holiday this Summer', and 'how are the children doing') to matters such as schools, crime, clean streets and green fields. If we get a little more philosophical (although being conservatives we don't like to do this too often - gets in the way of our cherished 'stupid party' positioning), we might discuss the limits of free markets, the decline of religion or the balance between a liberal arts and vocational curriculum in schools.

When we're pushed, we'll give you an answer about what conservatism means and words like independence, choice and heritage might crop up. The discussion might mention the importance of institutions and the idea of 'putting something back'. Plus of course the principle that its right that value added to society is rewarded and that we've a duty to do right by ourselves, our family and our neighbours. On the harder crunchier economics the response will be a visceral support for 'business', the centrality of property rights and a slightly equivocal relationship with the idea of markets. And we're not the biggest fans of taxes.

Now it's true that I tend towards the liberal wing of the party but that doesn't mean I don't accept the idea of personal responsibility, don't think that institutions should be changed gently (if at all) rather than torn down in a fit of nihilistic creative destruction. In the end, I've come to recognise that there's a limit to idealism and that most people I represent want practical, pragmatic things from their elected representatives - a sort of 'soft loo paper conservatism'.

So yes, I care - but then so do most conservatives, the very conservatives you'll find on the 'fair trade' stall at church or working in the local charity shop. The same conservatives who help set up car clubs to run people without transport from their village to the doctors or the hospital, who organise a lunch club for elderly neighbours, who help run the village hall, who rattle tins for a bewildering range of good causes, who cherish local history societies and get their hands dirty with the gardening club or their faces daubed for the am-dram panto.

So my left-wing friends, I'm glad you've noticed that I'm neither rapacious or greed-filled. What you need to learn now is that I'm pretty typical of conservatives in England, of the people who for the last 20 years have trusted me as one of their Conservative councillors in Bingley Rural. These people aren't rapcious or greedy either, they're just decent, honest folk who want to get on with their lives, who want to live in a safe, happy and strong community and who know that the best way to do that is to elect Conservatives.

....

How to save The Union - if we want to

****

I was going to tell you all why you should vote Conservative. You should of course - not just because the prospect of a Labour government is terrifying but because the Conservative Party appears to be the only party that actually understands the situation of our public administration.

However, I'm going to write instead about The Union. Partly because there are now strong voices wanting to destroy that union and partly because the entire debate is couched in terms of Scottish nationalism rather than in terms of what the union means. The prospect of the Labour Party losing all its seats in Scotland this coming Thursday is real and reflects the inevitable conclusion of the process of unbalanced devolution begun by Tony Blair.

The Union is important. Not for touching historical reasons or for babble about shared heritage but because we are stronger collectively - the benefits Scotland and Wales get from working with a much larger England vastly outweigh the downsides of that relationship. And England gains too from the shared arrangement. So muttering nonsense about 'throwing money over Hadrian's Wall' as a cheap way to garner a few English votes is not the way forward.

If we think the Union important then we have to start talking about England. Not about chopping the country up into a bunch of meaningless chunks that, Yorkshire aside, have no meaning beyond administrative convenience. And not by saying that the issue of English devolution is resolved either by 'English Votes for English Laws' or through giving Leeds City Region control over further education funding. For a system of devolution to work it needs to be seen as fair by all sides and to be balanced.

Right now, without a settlement that meets these conditions, the break up of the Union is inevitable. That bloc of maybe fifty Scottish National Party MPs will make the gradual erosion of 'Westminster' influence in Scotland their mission. And if they have the balance of power they will get what they want. Indeed they will get what they want despite half their fellow Scots opposing independence.

We do not save the union by shouting ever more loudly about how important it is. We don't save the union by painting Nicola Sturgeon as the 'bogiewoman'. And we don't save the union by allowing Scottish nationalists - and pompous Guardian opinionators - to describe the same nationalism in England as a bad thing simply because it's English.

Nor should we allow people to say that England is too big for devolution. It's true that England contains most of the UK's population. But it's not true to say that allowing an English parliament to make decisions about the government of England is somehow unbalanced next to the much smaller devolved governments in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The answer, for me, is very straightforward. We've a choice between the break up of the union and the creation of a four nation federal system with a UK government responsible solely for defence, international relations, borders and trade paid for via a precept on taxes set by the four national parliaments. Everything else - health, education, welfare - would fall to the four national parliaments. And if those parliaments chose to devolve further to local governments that would be just fine.

Sadly we are not going to do this but instead will either create an endless row over Scottish MPs voting on English matters or else pretend that devolution to occult groups of English local council leaders meeting in secret is somehow equivalent to Scotland having a parliament elected by the people of Scotland. And the end will be Scotland departing to the sound of a loud raspberry from English voters who, a decade ago, would have been adamant that the union was not negotiable.

...

England, my England...

It is St George's Day. England's Day.

So, dear readers, it's perhaps time to ask again what it means to be English. Are we echoing some distant past of mythical purity where only those like me who can trace ancestry in England back into the mists of time are allowed to be English:

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

We can hark back to some Saxon ancestry but that doesn't define what it means to be English except in some unhelpfully narrow ethno-cultural manner. And Englishness can't be defined (and Kipling doesn't suggest this is so either) by those genetic roots but rather it comes from the layers of history bringing us to where we are today - a beautiful country filled with creative people. People who should be proud of that English heritage but who have lost the words and the song to make that so:

And everyone stares at a great big screen
Overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens
Australian soap, American rap
Estuary English, baseball caps

And we learn be ashamed of all we walk
Of the way we look, at the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we come from?
I've lost St. George in the Union Jack
That's my flag too and I want it back

The English seem at times so diverse that these traditions are without meaning. We stress - rightly - our sponge-like absorbtion of other cultures, each time with our own sweet twist. We eat curry, pizza, kebabs and hamburgers washed down with lager, white wine and coca-cola. And don't see these things as diminishing our English identity.

For many years that English identity - for reasons of power and politics - was buried in the idea of Britain. We were brought up to believe ourselves - speech, leeks and kilts aside - essentially the same as the Scots and Welsh. Missing the truth that those Scots and Welsh didn't see it that way - for them Britishness and Englishness were so entwined as to oppress their real identity. Now the English are learning that the Britishness of our establishment meant the same subversion of identity - a subversion made worse by those who took English to mean white and Saxon.

England is built on the lives and contribution of millions. Not kings and prime ministers but ordinary men and women. When we look out across the moors of Northern England we should recall the men who shaped that landscape. As we view the civilised farmland, the kempt landscape, of Surrey we should remember the people whose work shaped that place. And as we stand in some city street perhaps take a moment to consider the folk who built that place - the cathedral, the shops, the streets and the parks. And as we do this consider again William Henry's words:

WHAT have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?

For we - all of us regardless of race or faith or hisory - are England. All of us. And the future of England is for us to choose, to place another layer on the work of "the mere uncounted folk" who built the England we enjoy. Today is St George's Day - our day and the day of all those ordinary men and women who made this wonderful place. A place as close to heaven on earth as you'll find.

....

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

....

Devolution and the price of fish...

****

Yesterday along with fellow Conservatives from West Yorkshire (well, a couple of them) I headed to London to talk with the Treasury about devolution to West Yorkshire. We went there with the desire to explore the political, possible and practical knowing that our opposite numbers in Labour had already submitted some suggestions - I commented on the secrecy surrounding these proposals the other day.

Rest assured dear reader that the conversations we had down in London didn't come to any conclusions - we aren't about to rush through some secret deal for devolution. But there were some interesting aspects to the discussion.

Firstly, while there's an appetite for devolution in West Yorkshire and in London, there's a bit of a bother about the changes not being seen somehow as a 'new tier of government'. This echoes a familiar observation - "if the answer to your question is more politicians, then you're asking the wrong question!" But the reality of course is that there is already a 'sub-regional' tier of government, it's just that you don't notice it much. We have the new and shiny 'combined authority' that has swept together what used to be the 'public transport authority' with some limited powers around regeneration and planning. This adds to some other West Yorkshire government bodies - the police authority (now with its 'Police and Crime Commissioner'), the fire and civil defence authority and West Yorkshire Joint Services.

At the moment the democratic cost of these bodies (i.e. how much cash it takes to have politicians sitting on committees and boards) is somewhere near £700,000 - to say that setting up a new body (or mayor or whatever) is creating a new tier of government is incorrect. If we replaced all that West Yorkshire stuff with a single body it probably wouldn't cost that much - even before we take account of all the other duplicated bureaucracy.

Secondly, however much we might be twitchy about elected mayors, the ability of a Boris with a big mandate and big boots to bully central government can't be underestimated. This isn't to say that a West Yorkshire mayor would carry the oomph of Boris but it is to explain that the big mandate matters nearly as much as the personality. For sure there are political considerations (we did talk about these) but the fact remains that a high profile individual elected by 2.5 million has much more impact that an indirectly elected council leader - even one with the grand title of 'Chair of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority'.

The deal presented as a revelation in Greater Manchester is something of a fudge - you get a mayor but that person's chained down by the regions council leaders making it hard to deliver real direction (especially if the City's residents decide to elect an independent or Conservative while all but one or two of the leaders are Labour). Even with the most likely outcome - a Labour mayor leading a 'cabinet' of mostly Labour leaders - the 'boot down the doors of Whitehall' factor is limited by local political consideration. And the mayor and cabinet's actions aren't subject to effective, independent scrutiny but rather to scrutiny by councillors appointed by those same leaders who sit on the mayor's cabinet.

Finally, the deals on offer aren't about - nor do they resolve - England's democratic deficit. For all that groups like Centre for Cities want to pretend that city and city-region devolution answers this problem, it remains the case that the devolution offer is limited (it doesn't include education and health beyond some administrative changes, for example). And the deals don't make much difference to the dilemma of financing capital infrastructure investment. What is offered is the chance to strengthen the delivery of current transport, regeneration and housing investment plus the ability to get plans drawn up, give them political backing and thwack them down on the Treasury table saying 'this is what we want funding'.

There's a long way to go - the best we can expect this side of a general election is some proposals. And the wider devolution debate - the one about England - moves on (unresolved so far). If we do move to a West Yorkshire (or perhaps a wider West Riding) model, I'm sure it will involve an elected mayor. The real question isn't this one but the rest of the governance - do we need a directly elected assembly as London has or will some sort of appointed system via existing local councils be good enough to hold a powerful mayor to account?

A long way to go yet but I know one thing - saying 'no, we don't want that sort of thing' really doesn't help the argument. The price of fish is simple - do you want a mayor plus elected assembly, a mayor plus appointed combined authority or nothing (and the joy of watching mayors from Manchester, Merseyside, Sheffield and Newcastle thwacking down their schemes and sucking up the infrastructure funding). Interesting times!

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We have Mr Potter's "discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class" - and the left don't like it!

There was a time when the mass of the population – you can call this the ‘working class’ if you like – looked like the crowd at one of those football games from the 1930s. Packed shoulder to shoulder, dressed the same, thin, pinched and unhealthy. Back in those days and through into the 1950s, those ordinary people stayed in the narrow confines of their regular lives – most worked in manual jobs, skilled or unskilled, and their pleasures were limited by the narrowness of their income. Football (as today’s fans keeps telling us) was cheap and the men topped this up with thin beer and stodgy food.

And during this time those men were uncomplaining – we had few if any riots, public drunkenness was rare and levels of crime were low. But looking at those men and women in old photographs, we see that their lives were hard and, by today’s standards, short. Most working class men didn’t live long past retirement age and there were plenty of premature deaths from disease, illness and injury. Despite this hard life, most ordinary men were accepting of their lot. Yes they voted Labour, electing one of their own sort into parliament, but that Labour Party – for all the radicalism of the Attlee government – didn’t want to change the structure of the economy other than to replace private ownership with state ownership.

Then something happened. The success of the economy plus the effectiveness of union campaigns saw wages rise. Those ordinary men – and increasingly the women too – began to cast off the cheap drab and to make a cultural contribution. Some of this – the music of the early sixties, for example – is overplayed as working class culture. The big bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were management not workers but, along with other changes, this music gave the ordinary population a justification to party. And from that time in the sixties right through to the millennium that’s just what we did – we went on a great binge.

We drank more alcohol trying out new drinks like wines and lagers, we ate out more as we embraced the burger, the pizza and lumps of chicken daubed in a secret mix of spices and breadcrumbs. And while we did this, the elite – those who had run everything and liked the old supine working class – grumbled about taste and the bad choices of other people (by which they meant those workers eating burgers and drinking lager). This was the change cursed by Mr. Potter, the scheming old banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said:

A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.

We still see echoes of this when – just as that old rentier Potter did – left wing writers like Michael Rosen rail against debt. Borrowing money is fine for the likes of us, say folks like Rosen, but the ordinary people should be stopped from taking on debt because it’s bad for them:

Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system.

The working class must be thrifty, must live within its means and mustn’t take on the trappings of their betters let alone put anything at risk in aspiring for a better future.

So we binged. And while we binged we all carrying on getting richer and piling up wealth. The wealth once held by landlords – state and private - and wealthy capitalists began to spread through society. We bought houses and saved money in pension schemes while enjoying cars, foreign holidays, meals out and central heating. Our lives were immeasurably better that the lives of those men shuffling to work a ten-hour shift and those women spending  80 hours a week feeding him and stopping the house filling up with soot.

From out of this change – this great binge – came a real working class culture. Not the make-believe one idolised by wealthy writers, that sort of Mike Leigh homage to a crap life so typical of how those who have present the culture of those who haven’t. And bits of that culture came as something of a shock to the left – they discovered that the working class is patriotic and that it will display that patriotism with enthusiasm. 

After years of sneering at the idea of loving one’s country, the left couldn’t somehow understand how ‘their people’ still sang the songs and flew the flags, celebrating Britain and, worst of all, England. These left wing folk still struggle – I listened to a Guardian journalist on the radio talking about singing by England fans. This man wanted us to stop singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Great Escape’ because he was uncomfortable with ‘what they symbolised’.

The cultural elite don’t like this – not just because of the nationalism but because, like draping your house in flags, it all seems just a bit tacky. When we visit my parents at Christmas, we have a little drive round to look at the Christmas decorations – not the state-sponsored and approved ones on the high street but the fantastic displays of kitsch plastic reindeer, flashing lights, gnomes and Santa people put on their homes. North Kent is great for this sort of display and the Isle of Sheppey – as a sort of distillation of everything North Kent – is best. But that cultural elite doesn’t like this sort of display and reserves sort of its best sneering to describe brash Christmas decoration:

“And what can I see from my office in Carnaby Street? I can see a giant, pneumatic, puce-coloured reindeer with white spots suspended from tension wires in space.”

This is from Stephen Bayley described as “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators.” For which you can read arrogant snob. It is a short step from this to a very wealthy Islington MP tweeting, slightly sneeringly, a photograph of a house draped in England flags. A tweet that got that MP into trouble (although, for the record, her resigning was one of the dafter – if admirable – decisions in recent UK politics). It has though brought out the worst is the left as they set about defending Emily Thornberry:

“I thought that hanging flags with a red cross on a white background out of you house windows was telling the world that you aspired to be a right-wing thug who hated everything from abroad (except lager and curry) and wished that a bunch of ex-National Front neo-Nazis ran the government of Little England.”

This, as much as Ed Miliband’s laboured efforts to look cool and trendy, is Labour’s problem. The people who run the Labour Party – at every level – simply don’t relate to the bloke who flies a big England flag on his house or indeed to that man's neighbour who, as we speak, is putting up Christmas lights, an inflatable snowman and a great big sleigh. The same is true for my party but we’ve an excuse – for much of our recent history, we simply haven’t tried to represent the ordinary worker. I think this needs to change because it’s absolutely plain that the left with its patronising, snobbish and judgemental attitude to people who fly the flag, eat burgers, give their kids a bar of chocolate and like X-Factor has nothing to offer those people. Right now the void – a voice for people with kitsch Christmas displays, great big England flags, white vans, tattoos – is being filled by UKIP, a bunch of people who think the modern world is crap and wish to return to some mythical Elysian past.

This view is the very opposite of aspiration, of the thing that George Bailey offered the ordinary folk of Bedford Falls. Rather than offer people opportunity, choice and a better tomorrow – the things that allowed us to change from a supine, shuffling working class to a brash, in-your-face flag-waving populace – what people are being sold is a comfort blanket, a message of ‘hold onto this and it will all be fine’. Instead of a world of new exciting things to do, see and play with we’re promised safety, security and the oversight of our behaviour by our betters. I don’t think this is what people want and I’m absolutely sure that, whatever people do want, it isn’t snobbish, patronising judgement of their lives, choices and pleasures.

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