So you want to be a NIMBY? Cough up then...

So you want to protect that precious view? Right now what NIMBYs do is put pressure on politicians to stop developers building in that view. Perhaps the answer is that the NIMBYs should cough up?

Last week, The New York Times published a story about the residents of a 12-story loft building in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood who, faced with the prospect of a new condo building that would block their view of the Empire State Building, decided to bargain rather than litigate.

The building's inhabitants offered to buy the air rights from their neighborhood developer for $11 million. Residents on the upper floors paid up to $1 million, people on the lower floors paid less, and those on the bottom floor paid nothing at all. People who didn't have the cash to pay their full share relied on loans from their neighbors.

In return, developer Gary Barnett ceded his right to build anything other than a three- or four-story structure on his property.

It's long been true that the only way to save a view is to own that view and full marks to these New Yorkers for stepping up to the mark.

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Crime and gentrification...

We were all utterly shocked to discover that, for the first part of 2018, the rate of murder in London was worst than that once Capital of Crime, New York City:

London police investigated more murders than their New York counterparts did over the last two months, statistics show, as the British capital’s mayor vowed to fight a “violent scourge” on the streets.

Now, setting aside that New York is probably still worse than London despite its impressive decline in crime, there might be a reason for this - gentrification or, if you prefer it "positive income sorting":

These metros are expensive because they have restricted their supply of new housing even as they continue to generate strong demand for it. As a result, homebuyers and renters in these metros compete with each other over a smaller housing stock, bidding up prices, and pushing out those who are the least financially able. The high cost of housing also deters potential in-migrants, especially if their incomes are low, which drives up the income levels of those who are ultimately observed moving in. Of course, homeowners and certain fortunate renters can stay put in their homes for a long time, even when they can no longer afford them at current prices, so positive income sorting can be a slow process.

That's from housing economist, Issi Romem in an article that's nothing to do with crime. But it seems to me that, as places become wealthier and more exclusive at scale the sort of people who are more likely to commit crime (young, male, less well-educated, lower social class) simply aren't there to commit the crime. What Romem found, however, was that cities with more socially fair housing policies maintained a balance (the income and social class of in-migrants matched that of out-migrants), which is perhaps great for a wide range of other social factors but less good for crime rates. It's a thought.

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Is this the new suburbia? And should we worry?

From City Lab comes an article about Urby who build high density apartments in New York suburbs (Staten Island, Jersey City, Stamford):

Barry says that at least 80 percent of Urby tenants are under 39, don't have children, and expect to stay for perhaps three years or so; he calls them “starter apartments.”

I get everything that Urby are doing - it's straight out of the New Urbanist playbook with densely packed accommodation near transport hubs meaning less parking. Assumptions about modern living argue for less storage or common storage (bike rooms and so forth) and, because there are a lot of single people, planned for entertainment:

...Urby employs a cultural director with a nightclub and hospitality background and deputies to organize activities for residents. There might be stump-the-chef or other paid event in the kitchen, standup comedy in the cafe, and flower arranging in a workshop room. “It’s a boost,” Barry says, “to help people in this demographic connect to each other—and make them feel more emotionally connected to the brand."

What we see here is an interesting shift in how we (or some of us) live. People leave home and live in shared student accommodation while at college. There next move is to the new style shared living (or, as we're already seeing in London, Manchester and Leeds as well as in many US cities to a world where student apartments become 'student and young worker' apartments) and then to something slightly more private like this suburban Urby development. Note that people are still single or at least haven't committed to a family and are 'under 39' - these are career-focused thirtysomethings we're talking about.

The question here is what happens next. Urby don't tell us where their former tenants move onto - is it family units of some sorts or are they simply earning more so can afford a slightly more swank address? More to the point is this where we're heading for suburbia in big cities? A sort of slightly more funky version of the crammed urban towers of downtown living. Millennials living in what sounds like a younger version of elderly retirement living.

I've said before that housing design in inner urban places is persistently anti-child built without thought to the young and where space for kids to roam simply doesn't exist. Yes we can build playgrounds, tidy little places tucked into corner spaces where the very young can be watched at play but the old suburb with gardens, greens and recreation grounds is lost, cities simply aren't great places for ten-year-olds. Yet every planner talks now about ways to cram more and more into less and less space. People's worlds are becoming directed and organised even down to what happens in free time.

It does seem at times that this dense city living is a dead end despite its appeal and the manifest wealth of these places. But if the cramped world of modern apartment living is now spreading to suburbia, should we be bothered? Isn't the whole point of the suburb that it gave space, openness and the chance for a family to grow while still being reachable from the centre of the city. If suburbs become indistinguishable from the city then the world those ten-year-olds once enjoyed becomes only available to the wealthiest in the big city and those who opt for a less fancy, less well-paid life somewhere else. On balance we should be bothered - it shouldn't be a choice between a good rewrding job and the chance to raise a family. Right now it seems that it is.

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Rents and the death of the high street

Aaron Renn reports on the arrival of a mustard shop in New York's Upper West Side:

Maille is a supermarket brand of dijon mustard. It’s a product of Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch food and consumer products giant. You may not know Unilever, but you know their brands, including Hellman’s, Dove, Lipton, and even Ben and Jerry’s.

This particular location provides mustard tastings, and sells dijon in a variety of flavors not typically available. I believe they also have some vinegars. I was once needed some dijon and purchased a jar of their regular flavor for $7 – which is $3 more it sells for at the grocery store a few blocks away. They apparently charge as much as $99 for a jar of black truffle mustard.

Shortly before this description Aaron had noted the departure of his local (Upper West Side) Starbucks following a rent hike to $140,555 per month. As he points out you've to sell a whole lot of coffee just to cover a $1.7m rent.

So why the mustard shop? And how is it that Unilever (fresh from scrapping with Tesco over Marmite) feel able to justify forking out something similar for a shop round the corner from that defunct Starbucks? The answer to this question is central to how we see tomorrow's high street. I've written before about the shop as part of a brand marketing strategy:

Just as Diageo wants high net worth customers in the Johnny Walker House, the future high street success wants high spending, high end customers - the every day buyer can shop from his computer and have it delivered or collect from the Post Office. In town retailing becomes an event, an orchestrated, animated marketing promotion. The customers walking into you shop are there because you've invited them - to a product launch, an anniversary, a preview. They're dressed up to party not slouching round the shops in jeans and an old t-shirt.

What Aaron Renn is saying, however, is that because the cost for the mustard shop rent is coming out of Unilever's marketing budget, it's a drop in the ocean. Moreover, that rent isn't set against sales (even though you can pay $99 for some truffle mushroom) but against the objectives set by the brand managers - measures of equity, voice and share are just as important as sales. After all the supermarket's more likely to buy the product (and maybe pay a little more for the product) if it's the mustard with the flash shop in the posh Upper West Side.

The effect of this is to push up rents and to push out actual retailers. With ever more sophisticated home or click-and-collect delivery systems the ability of real retailers to compete is diminished. The high street as we know it is already pretty ragged but what this tells us is that the future of town centres - even in wealthy places - is as a billboard rather than a shopping centre.

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Why London dominates (or how the London problem isn't really a London problem)

Aaron Renn picks up on how tech superstar, Peter Thiel sort of accidently exposed the truth about Chicago (in Chicago):

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

The problem for Thiel was that he said this while speaking at an event in Chicago. No surprise, it didn’t go over well. An enquiring questioner wanted to know, “Who comes to Chicago if first-rate people go to New York or Silicon Valley?”

Now leaving aside the responses from miffed Chicago fans (the city that is not the band) Renn raises and explores an interesting point about the USA. Here he borrows from Charles Murray to make his point:

[I]t is difficult to hold a nationally influential job in politics, public policy, finance, business, academia, information technology, or the media and not live in the areas surrounding New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. In a few cases, it can be done by living in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, or Houston—and Bentonville, Arkansas—but not many other places.

For those not up on US billionaires, Bentonville in the HQ of Walmart.

Transfer this observation out of the USA and we have the elements of a thesis about why London dominates the UK - indeed, why London is so dominant in Europe. It seems likely that, just as Peter Thiel says, smart people head to one or two places - Renn reports that a quarter of HPY (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) graduates live in or around New York. I've no data for the UK but does anyone want to bet against Oxbridge graduates overwhelmingly living in and around London? We know it's true of tertiary education in general:

Given that most persons aged 30–34 will have completed their tertiary education prior to the age of 30, this indicator may be used to assess the attractiveness (or ‘pull effects’) of regions with respect to the employment opportunities they offer graduates. Map 5 shows tertiary educational attainment by NUTS level 2 region for 2015: the darkest shade of orange highlights those regions where at least half of the population aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level of education. By far the highest share was recorded in one of the two capital city regions of the United Kingdom — Inner London - West — where more than four fifths (80.8 %) of the population aged 30–34 possessed a tertiary level of educational attainment. The second, third and fourth highest shares were also recorded in the United Kingdom, namely in: Outer London - South (69.3 %), the other capital city region of Inner London - East (68.2 %), and North Eastern Scotland (66.1 %); note that all four regions in Scotland recorded shares above 50%.

The three regions in Europe with the highest concentrations of graduates are all in London which seems to repeat what we've seen from the USA where New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco dominate. And it means that the UK, by defining its regional achievement through comparison with London, has created an economic development problem. The city's success creates a virtuous circle - the clever, ambitious people are in London doing clever ambitious things meaning that clever ambitious people from elsewhere in the UK - perhaps even in Europe - head to London because that's where clever, ambitious people go to be clever and ambitious. With the obvious result that, the occasional Bentonville or Omaha proving the rule, places elsewhere have to make do with less clever, less ambitious people and as a consequence slower economic growth.

The European data on tertiary education tells us that this supercharged agglomeration effect is pretty consistent - everywhere capital cities and places with a lot of research infrastructure suck up the graduates leaving other places with less of the talent needed to achieve that aim of 'closing the gap' between successful places and less successful places. The problem with London, New York and San Francisco (and, no doubt, were we to look: Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai) is that their agglomeration effect sucks the brightest and most able from places that, of themselves, are seen as relatively successful. Clever and ambitious Parisians head to London, just as the brightest in Chicago switch to San Francisco, Washington or New York.

For London - regardless of Brexit - this process is likely to continue and, in doing so, for the problems of London (expensive housing, the occasional late train, crime, air pollution and so forth) inevitably become the problems of the UK. Planning policies are adapted to fit London's housing crisis, health policies to reflect the worries of a thirty- and forty-something population, and transport policies designed for the needs of big city commuters. The dominance of London - The London Problem - doesn't just skew the UK's economy but it also profoundly influences the complete range of national government policies. That London Problem isn't really a London problem but results in a national policy programme suited to the clever and ambitious who have - because that's where the opportunities are - headed to London.

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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.

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The curse of bureaucracy...

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And a reminder that large parts of the USA are far removed from being that traditional descriptor, "land of the free". This is New York City|:

Mr. Brotter, 55, is an expediter, an imprecise term that is used to describe the men and women whose workdays are spent queuing up at the Manhattan branch of the New York City Department of Buildings to file the documents and pull the permits that allow construction projects — your kitchen renovation and the high-rise next door — to go forward. 

There are over 8,300 people who do the same job as Mr Brotter - getting paid to stand in a queue to see a bureaucrat so you can build your extension, install a new kitchen or get a new block of flats built. And this just adds to the cost of getting stuff done in  New York. As, Aaron Renn observed in citing this example:

Particularly when you are trying to build lower rent buildings, all of the fixed costs you have to incur to built anything (land, permits, expediters, etc.) have to be recovered and amortized across the units. When you have a hyper-complex development environment, these fixed costs raise the minimum viable rent threshold and thus push the cost of construction towards the higher end of the market that is already being served.

Put simply, the more hoops you make developers jump through, the more expensive the rents - and this is bad news if you want to meet housing demand in a magnet city like New York of London. And no the solution isn't to use taxpayers cash to subsidise a chosen few developers, the solution is to have fewer rules and fewer charges.

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Does 'Gangs of New York' shed some light on Bradford politics?

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You remember the film 'Gangs of New York'? What I hadn't fully appreciated was that the film wasn't just about the battles between Irish immigrants and 'nativists' in New York during the Civil War but was set at the birth of 'boss rule' in US cities - in New York's case, Tammany Hall:

Gangs of New York (Gangs) takes place in New York City during the Civil War. Its plot concerns the war between Irish and nativist gangs for control of lower Manhattan. Both lose, leading to the rise of Tammany Hall, whose innovative manner of conflict resolution laid the foundation for modern New York. The ward heelers replace the warlords and the rigid identities of immigrant and nativist are dissolved. That’s how New York was tamed.

So writes Steve Eide in New geography and he reminds us that Boss Tweed's 'innovative manner of conflict resolution' involved thievery on a grand scale. Eide goes on to look at a couple of other films that shone a creative light on boss rule in US cities. Both the good (that people living in poverty can use the machine to rise to positions of power and influence) and the bad (murder, extortion, vote-rigging and graft). At the heart of this system was the means by which immigrant communities - and in America's case this meant the Irish - secured power and influence.

It is always dangerous to draw parallels in history - times are very different to 19th century New York, Boston or Chicago. But I sense that communities make a choice - between trade and politics - in the search for power. In New York and Boston this meant that the Irish dominated politics while the economies became the domain of Jews and the older protestant community. And this didn't matter to those in power - for sure there were strong words about prejudice, arguments that more should be done for one or other minority, but these were less important than using ethnic loyalty and the politics of community to sustain control.

So it's worth - for the sake of analysis - making the parallel with the biraderi ('kinship') structures within Pakistani, and especially Mirpuri, social systems. As Parveen Akhtar has observed these structures brought about:

...a system of patronage whereby local politicians of all political parties (but especially the Labour Party) built links with community leaders in the Pakistani community, who became their gateway to the Pakistani vote. (Labour's former deputy leader Roy Hattersley, who long held the Sparkbrook constituency in Birmingham, once remarked that whenever he saw a Pakistani name on a ballot-paper he knew the vote was his). The local leaders were given minor positions of power and help in figuring out the political system, so that they could stand for council seats or influential roles as subaltern aides.

Today it is almost certainly true that the majority of Labour votes in Bradford come from the City's Pakistani community. And, just as with Tammany Hall politics in the USA, this leaves the party vulnerable to two challenges - the insurgent candidate who captures the passion of the poor immigrants and the switching of middle-class second generation immigrant voters away from candidates seen as marking the old system.

George Galloway was that first candidate:

Much of the alienation and marginalisation from mainstream electoral politics felt by the young can be traced back to the way the biraderi system became a means of political exclusion. This generational evolution helps explain why young British Pakistanis in an area like Bradford West were drawn to vote for George Galloway.

It is ironic that, in America's boss system the idea of 'perfuming the ticket' existed - an approach, however dodgy, that would have guarded against Galloway-esque insurgency:

Wise bosses were highly sensitive to public opinion. They sometimes had to run candidates who were just distant enough from the machine to be considered graft-free. This practice was known as “perfuming the ticket.”

The second problem - that men from the core community (who speak with a thick accent and are better known as fixers than creators) have less and less in common with the growing part of the community that is educated, more affluent and consequently feels less oppressed. The Eide argued resulted in the old boss system collapsing as the educated switched support to people more like them and less like their grandparents.

Akhtar feels that the biraderi system no longer holds so much sway, that Galloway's victory changed all that. However, a glance at Bradford's politics suggests that these relationships - the biraderi system - remains very influential within the Pakistani community. It's not just that the councillors elected in 2012 on George Galloway's coat-tails have deserted him but that it's reported their connections with Labour councillors through the kinship systems mean it's a matter of time before most of them find a comfortable seat on the Labour benches - the ticket, suitably perfumed, resulted in rebels, but not too rebellious a bunch of rebels.

Earlier this week I was on Sunrise Radio in Bradford for a question time session. And, during a period off air, the matter of birideri came up - two fellow panellists, both Asians, saw it as a barrier but disagreed as to whether the solution lay in mainstream politics (a Bradford version of Tammany Hall) or something more disruptive, springlike - to borrow George Galloway's designation. For me perhaps the answer lies in the passage of time. After all New York, Boston and Chicago are less plagued by the politics of group, ethnicity, clan and family than they were and, in part, this is because people from the poor, immigrant communities were given a role in the politics of the city. I just hope we do it with less corruption, less deception and more open-ness than was the case with American cities.

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See folks...repression and prohibition don't work...

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From an article about scrounging fags in New York:

Although smokers are an ostracized lot, New York smoking rates are, it turns out, on the rise. There are more than 1 million smokers in the city, according the New York Department of Health, up two points from 14 percent in 2010. So, you might think smokers would have an easier time avoiding these situations. But the fact is there are simply more smokers to bother.

Nearly a decade of Bloomberg-induced health fascism and smoking rates have risen? Perhaps a new approach is needed from public health (and I don't mean escalating smoking control to 'shoot smokers on sight').

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h/t Dick Puddlecote

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Building the future - from mushrooms!

The future of building is revealed - and it involves mushrooms:

Typically “fungus” and “building” are not words people like to hear together. While we were busy scrubbing the black mold off our bathtubs, David Benjamin, head of the New York architectural firm The Living, was designing the Hy-Fi, a 40-foot-tall circular fungal tower, and potential precursor for more eco-friendly skyscrapers.

As the winner of MoMA’s annual Young Architects Program (YAP), Benjamin will exhibit the Hy-Fi in the courtyard at MoMA’s satellite art and event space PS1 in Queens starting late June. Now in its 15th season, YAP’s theme this year is sustainability and recycling. YAP also wanted a design that would provide shade, seating, and water for attendees of MoMA PS1’s 2014 Warm Up summer music series. Benjamin prevailed with a design he claims will generate no waste, requires no energy, and is 100% organic.

We've already discovered how mushrooms can solve our waste management problems and will grow into eco-friendly cars so it should be no surprise that we will be growing buildings from the little mycological darlings:

To create the Hy-Fi, the fungus bricks will be placed at the bottom the structure, while a second kind of reflective bricks, created with a daylighting mirror film devised by 3M, will be placed at the top. The reflective bricks will focus the light down the tower to create a kind of supersized petri dish, encouraging the mycelium to grow and the bricks to solidify and bond together.

Wonderful!

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Rent-seeking at work...

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From New York:

This week, New York held an auction for individual yellow-cab medallions, the rare and wonderful permits that give drivers the right to operate a taxi and pick up street hails. Winning bidders paid as much as $965,000 for the latest batch of medallions.

That's right folks, you pay nearly a million dollars for the right to drive a cab in New York. This suggests that not only are there not enough taxis but that, as a result, the price of a taxi fare is higher.

And the winner? The City Council that has assumed the power to say whether you can take someone from A to B for a fee.

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Passive vaping and New York's health fascism

I wrote about some emerging research showing no link between passive smoking and lung cancer:

The article describes a large prospective study that "confirmed a strong association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer but found no link between the disease and secondhand smoke." 

And, in writing about this I noting that the authors were back-pedalling rapidly on the reasons for smoking bans - 'denormalising' smoking rather than protecting health.

Today, in a development that further reveals the willingness of the Church of Public Health to act without evidence, New York City Council is deciding whether to apply the same controls to e-cigarettes as apply to regular cancer sticks:

In late November, a month after banning the sale of the devices to people under 21, the City Council surprised the sector by introducing a bill that would treat electronic cigarettes like their tobacco counterparts, prohibiting use in restaurants, bars, workplaces and even parks.

There is no evidence to support the main contention of the ban's proponents - vaping looks like smoking so will act to promote the latter. Nor is there evidence that there are any significant health risks that result from vaping let alone from 'passive vaping'. But this doesn't stop New York's nanny-in-chief:

At a recent public hearing of the bill, Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley challenged the notion that e-cigs are healthier than tobacco smokes...

Dr Farley knows this is a lie, just as the tobacco controllers have known since the day they proposed smoking bans that passive smoking is at worst a very minor risk factor in lung cancer. What is even worse is that, by effectively banning vaping, New York will remove the incentive for smokers to switch to less harmful e-cigs. And that means more deaths.

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Exploring what might make Bradford's schools better...

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Bradford's schools aren't very good. And haven't got noticeably better - at least in terms of outcomes - over the past decade or so. This should concern us and we're told that there are strategies, partnerships and policies in place to turn things round. Importantly, we're told that most of Bradford's primary schools are, in Ofsted terms, 'good' or 'excellent'.

This raises an important question - if the schools are so good, why are their results so poor? Perhaps we're measuring and assessing the wrong things?

By way of a little help here's some findings from a study in New York:

In our empirical analysis, we find that input measures associated with a traditional resource-based model of education – class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no teaching certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree – are not correlated with school effectiveness in our sample. Indeed, our data suggest that increasing resource-based inputs may actually lower school effectiveness.

So it just might be there case that we are measuring the wrong things in assessing schools. Indeed, the new York study showed that the traditional observations about class size and teacher qualifications might be wrong - where there's a focus on these inputs performance is less good.

So what does make a difference? The researchers show that it's the actual teaching that matters and, more specifically, four or five particular factors:

...an index of five policies suggested by forty years of qualitative case-studies– frequent teacher feedback, data driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and a relentless focus on academic achievement – explains roughly half of the variation in school effectiveness.

 These are very familiar aspects of education to those familiar with either the systems used in the far east or (closer to home) the typical private day school. Yet, when 'leaders' from Bradford's education system are asked about what's happening they point cheerily to how good they are:

They are recognised for things like progress, leadership and management, and health and safety – not just attainment.

Yet - at least in this one study - there's no evidence that these measures of school performance are very relevant to the achievements of the pupils at that school. Perhaps we should start to increase teaching time, provide weekly reports to parents, set high standards and insist on intensive support for those who need it.

Maybe that is already happening in Bradford's schools. I hope so.

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"Get this killer off New York's streets"

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Or so says that jumped up little fascist Mike Bloomberg. And the killer in question? Ben & Jerry's!

"Heart disease is the number one killer in the nation,” said Mayor Blomberg, “and we must do everything we can to get Ben and Jerry and these other killers off our streets.”

Seems our little health nutter isn't content with trying to ban smoking in private houses, or indeed with requiring restaurants to produce a full nutritional study with every portion - he's now using New York's tax dollars to buy up ice cream at $5 a litre.

So if you're somewhere near New York how about:

In previous buybacks, enterprising individuals have even bought cheap ice cream at Walmart and sold it back to the city at a profit.

Apparently these buy-backs have no noticeable effect but are popular - not surprising since lots of New Yorkers are getting what amounts to some free cash. Presumably to spend on malt liquor, corn dogs and burgers?

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Mike Bloomberg is more of a Bonapartist than a liberal - even an American liberal

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Alan Massie in the Spectator - while explaining that Mike Bloomberg is a "liberal" (or at least not a Republican or a conservative of any sort) - reminds us that Bloomberg is the Bonaparte of nannying fussbuckets:

Hell, all this and I haven’t even mentioned Nurse Bloomberg’s War on Tobacco which is, of course, really a reminder that he’s not one of those politicians who respects other people’s property rights.

Not to mention, of course, Bloomberg's campaigns against portion sizes, fizzy drinks, the wrong sort of alcohol and much else beside.  Anyone who believes that Bloomberg is in any way admirable as a politician (and I inclde Boris Johnson on that list - his puppy dog fandom of Bloomberg is quite depressing in an otherwise splendid politician) isn't someone I'd be cheering for.

We - as conservatives and believers in freedom - should be cursing the Bloomberg approach - ban this, stop that, controls, regulations. Sadly it seems that people I thought loved freedom - like Ian Martin - would prefer a tin-pot little bonapartist like Bloomberg in charge.

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You couldn't make it up! More from Bloomberg's health fascism

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Apparently Bloomberg's Nanny State (formerly known as New York City) is banning food donations:

"In conjunction with a mayoral task force and the Health Department, the Department of Homeless Services has recently started enforcing new nutritional rules for food served at city shelters. Since DHS can't assess the nutritional content of donated food, shelters have to turn away good Samaritans," 

Totally barking mad - heaven alone knows what the justification is - or rather here it is:

DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond says the ban on food donations is consistent with Mayor Bloomberg’s emphasis on improving nutrition for all New Yorkers. A new interagency document controls what can be served at facilities — dictating serving sizes as well as salt, fat and calorie contents, plus fiber minimums and condiment recommendations. 

So New York's homeless and hungry will get Mr Bloomberg's State Approved Diet.

Tell me, is the alternative to this man so truly awful that they keep re-electing him?

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It seems protesting is bad for your health - and must be banned

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The Mayor of New York has form. He is a high priest of the Church of Public Health, a fan of the ban, an obsessor about health risks. And he has deemed protesting to be unhealthy:

Police wearing helmets and carrying shields evicted protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement early on Tuesday from the park in New York City’s financial district where they have camped since September, dismantling their tent city and arresting about 70 people.

Authorities declared that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park - which had become a sea of tents, tarps and protest signs with hundreds of demonstrators sleeping there - posed a health and safety threat. 

Another triumph for the health fascists!

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Hurricane coming? OK guys, let's get drunk!

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Maybe New Yorkers knew the hurricane was to be something of a damp squib. Perhaps we're getting a glimpse of how people will respond to the end of days - while media, government and frothing experts describe in painful detail the precise steps we must take in those final times, the population will be too drunk to care!

"It's Christmas in August," says Sherry Rader, manager of Smith & Vine. She says that hurricane hoarders are gravitating toward lower prices than average, but at a much higher volume. One Smith & Vine customer named Suzanne says she is planning to buy four bottles. "That's for three adults, if you want to do the math," she says. (The math: 1.33 bottles per adult.) She expects that cache to last her for two days.

At Henry Street Wines & Liquors, owner Dominick Tutrone says he's also been selling a great deal of wine, but he's also been nearly cleaned out of high-end bourbon, too, and he has an empty shelf to prove it. "I heard some woman comment that you don't need ice for bourbon, and it's strong and powerful, and people want to be, I guess, mellow," Tutrone says.

Look citizens - especially citizens in New York's obscene health fascist regime - this is not how you're supposed to behave, you're supposed to act responsibly, listen to your masters and behave.

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