Is terrorism more driven by identity than extremist ideology?

How do you define, in the context of free speech, extremism? Is extremism a belief, opinion or world view beyond arbitrarily defined societal norms or merely an exaggerated response or attachment to a given ideological position? The general view is that extremism is the former:

“Extremism is the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and respect and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs. We also regard calls for the death of members of our armed forces as extremist.”

This comes from the UK government's counter extremism strategy, a document that gives rise to the much-criticised Prevent strategy which "...explicitly makes a causal link between ideology, extremist thought, and extremist actions." The criticism of Prevent has, in the main, been that it appears to (unfairly) target Muslim communities but there is a strong defence for the Home Office here since, not only are the majority of UK terrorist incidents associated with Islamist extremism but the proportion of Muslims identified through the programme has been falling:

The published figures also suggest the Home Office has developed more sophisticated methods of categorising risk. This has implications for improving relations with British Muslim communities. Previously, the Home Office relied on four categories of concern: “Islamist extremism”, “right-wing extremism”, “other extremism” and “unspecified”. Now a new category has been created: “mixed, unstable, or unclear ideology”. This increased willingness to consider disparate or uncertain motivations coincides with a reduction in the proportion of Islamic extremism referrals – down from 61% in 2016-17 to 44% in 2017-18 – and offers the grounds for tentative optimism.

The problem with Prevent (and other anti-extremism strategies) is, however, rather deeper than just the perception from one or other community that they're being targeted. The programme assumes that extremism is the result of radicalisation - “grooming and exploitation by terrorists” as the UK's security minister, Ben Wallace put it. The problem, as conflict expert, Dr Mike Martin observes is:

This understanding of the role of belonging should be considered alongside the facts that an overwhelming majority of those with extremist thoughts, far more than 99%, do not commit violent actions. What’s more, extremist thought, even were it adequately definable in a society that values free speech, is a very poor predictor of violent action. Defining extremism in this way lumps the supposed thinkers of extremism together with those targeted by the government for their criminal activity – actors of extremism.

Martin goes on to suggest that, because we have terrorism cause and effect in the wrong order (terrorists use extremist ideology to justify their violence rather than the ideology being the reason for that violence - this applies as much to animal rights violence as it does to Muslim terrorism) the Prevent strategy, far from reducing terrorism actually risks creating terrorists:

By seeking to find and punish those who harbour extremist thought, the actions of the government cause people to question their place in British society, when they might not have done so before. In short, it creates or exacerbates a crisis of belonging, even where one might not have existed.

I'm not entirely convinced by Martin's argument but it is (unlike the Prevent strategy) grounded in some good science and should be given due consideration. We need also to consider why it is that the government is so specific about some extremism ("right-wing" and "Muslim" but not "left-wing" or "vegan") as if only some ideologies are linked to terrorism. Which is odd given the long history of left-wing violence and the current spate of attacks founded on veganism or animal rights.

Two things strike me about Prevent's weakness (and Dr Martin's argument) - first that radicalisation may not create terrorism but it does provide a home for terrorism, and second that the boundary between terrorist and non-terrorist crime is very blurred especially when we come to individual acts of violence such as the murder of Jo Cox MP. For the first issue, however, we cannot be selective about ideology - it's perfectly possible to see how, in the current febrile Brexit environment, how pro-EU "extremists" could commit acts of violence (the doorstepping of Jacob Rees-Mogg gets ever closer to this, for example). Which brings us to the free speech question - who is defining what we mean by extreme. Is having a FBPE hashtag extremist?

In the second instance - when is violence classed as terrorism - we have to start with some sort of political or politio-religious rationale for the violence. So the man who murdered Jo Cox, because he appeared to have a political motive, is a terrorist whereas the man who killed Andy Pennington, aide to then Cheltenham MP, Nigel Jones, was not a terrorist because his motive was personal rather than ideological. The question Dr Martin poses is whether our distinction between these two murders is artificial. Jo Cox's murderer used extremist ideology to rationalise his act of murder leading to us seeking out radicalisation (literature, websites, far right organisation) as the problem rather than more personal motives.

I'll finish with Dr Martin's conclusion because it speaks to this very problem, to the personal rather than to the organised exploitation of people through radicalisation:

Globalisation, and particularly immigration, has detached people from the groups they once belonged to: their families, their ethnicities, and their nations. The modern world can be a profoundly lonely place. If individuals feel that they don’t belong, they are more likely to reach out for extreme ideas that will fill that vacuum, offering them a sense of identity.

It seems that our sense of identity - and the feeling that this identity is being denied or excluded - has more to do with terrorism than ideology or the promotion of ideology.

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Historical revisionism - ideology trumps scholarship

A depressing article about his dissertation from Jack Morgan Jones. I accept it's a one-sided piece but it sets out how a simple proposal to look at something that fascinates the author became a piece of boilerplate leftist nonsense. The idea of students having real autonomy in study is undermined, the article is worth a read for that alone, but worse it shines a light on leftist revisionism:

I meet with my dissertation supervisor for the first time. She insists that the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s was not totalitarian, and that using totalitarianism as an analytical framework has long since been dismantled by revisionist scholarship.

That's right folks, all those years you've been labouring under the misconception that Finer's definition of totalitarianism applied (in spades) to the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Jack goes on:

My supervisor seems peculiarly determined to render it obsolete. She firmly advises me against making totalitarianism the focus of my dissertation. She makes her case with emphatic certainty—the scholarship on this matter, she tells me, is settled. She is so dismissive that I begin to feel foolish for having even proposed it.

The scholarship is settled! So much for the spirit of enquiry, the joy of research - 1930s Russia wasn't totalitarian! I'm guessing Jack's supervisor and her pals see the Soviet Union of Stalin, with its gulags, state sponsored starvation, pogroms, murders, intrusive secret police and atmosphere of fear, as some sort of cuddly bear that we've all misunderstood. Seems to me that ideology is trumping scholarship here.

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Telling stories to public health...

Helped run a story-telling session for public health folk yesterday - my contribution included a direct challenge to their narrative - or rather to the narrative most people see through the media and from government. It's clear that there is still a debate within the public health business as to what we mean by "wider determinants of health" - on one side are those saying this is about economic circumstances, education and housing, while others see it as being factors in the social environment (advertising and marketing, fast food restaurants, capitalism).

Anyway, here's the challenge:

Public health has become an ideology of control rather than a set of policies intended to eliminate, mitigate or reduce environmental impacts on health.

I coined the term nannying fussbucketry to describe this ideology of control - its elements are:

Shooting the messenger - advertising, marketing creates an environment where people are lured into sin. This is despite there being very limited evidence supporting the idea that advertising and marketing act to increase overall consumption (aggregate demand) or consumption of a given product category.

Taxing the poor - taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, sugar and so forth fall most heavily on the least well-off. I can afford to carry on buying bottles of wine because nine or ten quid is not a hardship to me. Poor people - regardless of whether their lifestyle is 'harmful' - may no longer be able to afford

Inflating and conflating statistics - the entire case for minimum unit pricing is built on the idea that elasticity of demand is the same for heavy drinkers as it is for light drinkers (hint - if you think about this for a second, it's clearly nonsense). Every round in the obesity campaign begins with a picture of a very fat person - morbidly obese 40+ BMI - and then talks about how 2/3rds of people are 'obese or overweight'. Overweight - BMI 25-30 - is not a health risk and we shouldn't treat it the same as actual obesity (something that hasn't increased in ten years)

Targeting the whole population - even though most people are not unhealthy, not eating an bad diet, not overweight, not drinking excessively, not smoking. This means we're essentially ignoring the people who really do need help and support - smokers, alcoholics and the morbidly obese. And the whole population approach doesn't work - UK alcohol consumption has fallen by approaching a fifth but there has been no corresponding drop in alcohol-related hospital admissions.

It's for the children - campaigns like the latest 'cover your eyes' stuff from Jamie Oliver present children as agents of their own obesity when children are not, in the main, purchasers of the family's groceries. The attack on fast food restaurants - with its undercurrents of outright snobbery - is another example where there simply isn't any reliable evidence linking eating fast food to obesity. Worse 'it's for the children' is frequently used as cover for limits, price hikes and bans affecting only adults.

All of this is done within a narrative of 'we know better what is good for you'. Despite there being no such thing as an unhealthy food - just unhealthy diets - we demonise sugar, fat and salt as if they are the reason we are fat (consumption of all three sinful ingredients has fallen since the 1970s while average weight has risen and CHD has plummeted). While PHE has been positive about vaping, most public health functions at a local level remain hesitant to promote it as an aid to quitting - we still have vaping bans in public places that have zero health justification, just because it's easier. And public health continues - despite a mountain of evidence - to ignore the fact that moderate drinking, to levels well above current recommended levels, has a positive impact on mortality risk, up to 20% lower than in people who have never consumed alcohol.

You have become, for the people you most want to reach (the remaining smokers, the very fat and the very drunk), the little girl who shouts fire all the time. They've stopped listening to you because all you offer is a wagging finger - a wagging middle-class finger - of judgement about their lifestyle.

Let me give you a couple of little pen portraits - not real people but their circumstance reflect reality:

Mary - lives in a council flat, single mum, two young kids, smokes, drinks and is very overweight. She knows she should quit, should eat less and perhaps not get drunk but her life is shit and doing those things isn't going to make it better.

Stanley - old man, single, lives on state pension. Likes to watch the racing on a Saturday afternoon TV. Buys two or three cans of beer from the shelf with the cheap and damaged goods - all he can afford. That's all he drinks in a week. Minimum unit pricing means he won't be able to afford that any more. You've not made him healthier, you've just made him less happy.

I hope this left something for people to think about.

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Public health is a faith-based ideology not a science

And I accept that you may be happy with your faith in the tenets of the public health folk. To explain, we'll start with this from the Director of Public Health in Sheffield, GregFell:

"The fundamental point is that obesity is a complex systems problem, and the location of fast food outlets can’t be causally disaggregated from all the other factors."

This is a statement of faith, in a belief that the reasons for the increase in obesity from, say, 1980 to 2000 was a consequence of something called an "obesogenic environment" rather than by, for example, changes in human behaviour consequential on increased wealth and improved technology.

The public health position - as captured by Fell in another blog posting can be summarised:

"spot on – stop asking ‘does it work?’ and instead ask ‘how does it contribute?’”

"Complex systems adapt in response to interventions so we shouldn’t necessarily expect changes to distal outcomes."

The premise here is that the 'system' is too complicated for us to understand it - we must act on faith rather than evidence in deciding what is the right thing to do. And individual elements of the system can't be seen as in any way discrete because to do this denies the interconnectedness that is central to the public health faith.

So we persist with ineffective smoking cessation interventions because it is the "right thing to do" and because such interventions "contribute" (and in doing so ignore successful market-based development of effective substitutes). We continue "Tier One" activities despite the almost complete absence of evidence of their effectiveness because using the "wrong evidence paradigm might lead us to do the wrong thing". Now forgive me if I don't fully understand what Fell means by an "evidence paradigm" - the term is used to distinguish between RCT (randomised control trials) evidence and the process of trial and error as well as a welcome shift from the old model of medical imperialism where the doctors diagnosis and conclusion was all the patient received to a model where the evidence on which those decisions are based being shared with the patient. None of this is about doing something you think is "right" despite there being no evidence to support this belief (or worse, as Chris Snowdon observes, actual evidence to say that it doesn't work).

The pragmatic evidence about public health leads us to reject the main thrust of this faith's adherents:

The evidence on smoking cessation tells us that reductions in smoking rates are consequential on three things - public education, price and substitutes. Advertising bans, cessation programmes, bans in public places, standardised packaging - all the rigmarole of modern anti-smoking - simply aren't making a difference

Alcohol consumption is for 90% of drinkers almost entirely benign (and arguably health positive) so reducing the whole population's consumption does not reduce harm. Again public education, price and substitutes matter more that warnings, packaging, advertising restrictions and intrusive licensing

The rise in obesity is not a consequence of that "obesogenic environment" (or, if you prefer, "complex system") but rather the result of reduced levels of every day physical activity resulting from the largely beneficial introduction of new technologies (there's a clue in the term 'labour-saving device'). Average calorie intake has fallen while average weight (and weight/height ratio) has risen - this change is not the result of a social shift from cooking and eating our own food to getting someone else to do the cooking for us

You are, of course, welcome to disagree with what I say here but I'm confident there is evidence supporting my position. This means that, if I'm to change my view, you need to produce evidence that falsifies my argument that much of what we're doing in public health is purposeless fussbucketry based on blind faith in the view that public health problems (drinking, smoking, burgers) are caused by problems in the social environment. And therefore that any intervention in that social environment must 'contribute' to reducing its negative impact even if we can find no evidence to support this belief.

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There is no such thing as neoliberalism. It's just the left's favourite straw bogeyman.

****

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. At least not as an ideology that determines the policies of governments across the globe. Trust me on this - there really isn't a thing called neoliberalism. Except in the febrile minds of people who think sociology is a science, go on marches against capitalism and join organisations with names like 'Cuba Solidarity'.

I know you don't believe me - after all there's all this guffle on Wikipedia to turn to:

Neoliberalism (or sometimes neo-liberalism)[1] is a term which has been used since the 1950s,[2] but became more prevalent in its current meaning in the 1970s and 80s by scholars in a wide variety of social sciences[3] and critics[4] primarily in reference to the resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism.[5] Its advocates support extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Neoliberalism is famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.[7] The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of financialization, with the financial crisis of 2007–08 one of the ultimate results.[13][14][15][16][17]

That's a reference dense chunk of the on-line encyclopedia. But trust me folks, there simply isn't an ideology out there called 'neoliberalism' - it's just a tag applied by people, typically but not exclusively socialists, who oppose free markets, free trade and globalisation. The whole and enormous body of academic 'knowledge' around neoliberalism is, in essence, a colossal straw man constructed from the prejudices of left-wing academics with its framework filled in by the echo chamber of socialist punditry. It is the bogeyman that left-wing mums and dads use to scare their children. It is the scary monster that keeps young socialists from straying. It is a myth.

You still don't believe me? Let's look a little further. If I search on-line a little I can find a bewildering array of socialist organisations - socialist doctors, socialist lawyers, socialist economists (an oxymoron if ever one existed), socialist christians, socialist scientists. People place themselves in a spectrum of socialism - my geography lecturer at university proudly described himself as a 'radical Marxist geographer (whatever that may actually mean). As an ideology, socialism is very well embedded in our culture. Indeed, in academic humanities and social sciences (HSS), socialism in its various guises is the dominant orthodoxy - being anything other than left wing in these HSS disciplines is almost unheard of.

Apply the same test to neoliberalism - supposedly the dominant ideology of our times - and there is nothing. There aren't any Neoliberal Societies at universities, there is no Neoliberal Lawyers Association, no neoliberal doctors groups, not even any neoliberal economist clubs. As ideologies go neoliberalism is spectacularly unsuccessful - no-one identifies with the belief, there is no body of writing promoting the creed, and there are no organisations basing their political message around neoliberalism. There is no such thing as neoliberalism - it's simply a collation of things left wing people dislike or disagree with, a convenient set of 'attitudes' as one tweeter proclaimed.

Here's an example of how the users of the term neoliberalism are confused:



So the gist of this argument - it's from Alex Andreou - is that climate change deniers and opponents of the European Union are neoliberals. And that the essence of neoliberalism is opposed to taxation, to international co-operation and state intervention. Indeed that neoliberals are ideologically wedded to greed and short-termism. OK I've got that - neoliberalism is about rent-seeking and protectionism.

Or is it? Here's some more neoliberals:

They are single-minded about the irreversible transformation of society, ruthless about the means, and in denial about the fallout. Osborne – smirking, clever, cynical, "the smiler with the knife" – wields the chopper with zeal. Cameron – relaxed, plausible, charming, confident, a silver-spooned patrician, "a smooth man" – fronts the coalition TV show.

Neither of these men are opposed to the EU or deniers of climate change and the need for action. Yet they are neoliberals - they support international co-operation, oppose protectionism and support free trade (more-or-less). Yet despite this they are neoliberals. And the only reason they are described as such is because they are also opposed to the ideas of the regressive left - economic stasis, state direction of the economy, isolationism and an over-powerful government.

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. Not once it's definition is so vague that it can encompass radical libertarians like the Koch brothers as well as populist protectionists like Nigel Farage. If Don Boudreaux, doyen of academic libertarians, is a neoliberal there is no way in which Hillary Clinton can be a neo-liberal. This is the core of the problem - neoliberalism is not a recognisable ideology:

What Boas and Gans-Morse found, based on a content analysis of 148 journal articles published from 1990 to 2004, was that the term is often undefined. It is employed unevenly across ideological divides; it is used to characterise an excessively broad variety of phenomena.

That is academic speak for neoliberalism is an empty slogan.

So next time you read some cheerful left-wing pundit and, about half way through their measured and considered analysis of some or other issue, the word 'neoliberal' crops up - maybe something like: "this is a result of neoliberal economics..." - remember that there is no such thing as neoliberalism, nobody self-identifies as a neoliberal, it is just a convenient way to describe something that the left-wing pundit dislikes. A convenient set of "attitudes" those left wing folk attribute to entrepreneurs, to conservative politicians, to directors of international institutions and to bankers.

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. It is just the left's favourite straw bogeyman.

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"It's not an ideology, dear, it's a mental illness": On the medicalisation of brainwashing

We all sort of know about brainwashing - it features in dystopic SF movies and is the sort of thing that dodgy religious cults get up to. It sits in the same box as 'gay cures' and the scarier end of drug-abuse therapy - something that's probably causing more mental health damage that any good (assuming there was good in the first place).

Watch out as the use of these techniques become medicalised - because 'extremism' and 'fundamentalism' are not matters of agency but involuntary consequences of socialisation or 'brainwashing':

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

Read through what this researcher is saying. Read it carefully. It's not pretty is it? Dr Taylor goes on:

She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

OK you say - this is about saving people who have been brainwashed by the cult (perhaps up to and including paying £3 to join the Labour Party so as to vote for Jeremy Corbyn). But it's a good thing - we'll be treating the ill you see:

"I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

This is a recipe for a state-determined definition of 'normal' with anyone holding views that are outside the norm and defined as 'harmful' categorized as mentally ill. This is the medicalisation of brainwashing with the intention of treating the ill-effects of the wrong kind of ideology or belief.

On a much larger and potentially more fruitful scale is the recognition that the entire domain of religious beliefs, political convictions, patriotic nationalist fervor are in themselves powerful platforms for nurturing "Us vs Them" paranoid delusional fantasies which work out destructively in a 9/11 attack or a Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction.

Frightening eh?

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More politics should be local - if we want people to understand it and take part

Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute has written - taking this piece from Ezra Klein as his text - about ideology, ignorance and information. Sam observes:

The vast majority of the public is shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, with the informational ‘elite’ also happening to be the more closed-minded. The alternative to closed-mindedness may simply be to be extremely uninformed.

I find this interesting because, as I am deeply embedded in an ideological system, I see the degree to which this lack of information dominates. Our debates are couched in terms of what will appeal to the voter (or a section of the voter audience) regardless of whether the position is backed by facts. We even - as evidenced by the Government's response to a Home Office report on drugs - lay claim to being evidence-based when we aren't, usually through a process of circular reasoning and appeals to our preferred 'experts'.

Because modern government is complicated, modern politics is also complicated (and, as Sam says, the world is complicated too - but then it always was). And since most people are not interested in politics, most people are ignorant of the 'truth' about the "basic facts" that inform political debate. The individual's typical engagement with politics is either half-hearted (turning out to vote) or driven by a specific and urgent threat to his interests or in response to something that has damaged him personally.  As Tip O'Neill put it, all politics is local - and there's nothing more local than our own garden gate or our own family.

We choose to be shocked that people don't know how many immigrants there are, how much money we spend on foreign aid and how much it costs us to be a member of the European Union. Yet why should we expect the ordinary voter to know these facts when they are of no significance or interest to them in their daily lives? Indeed, those people can respond with a different set of facts that are just as important (to the individual voter) that we wouldn't reasonably expect the political elite to know - vital information like when the school parents evening is, how much money is there to pay for Christmas or buy a family holiday and where the local farmer plans to build a new barn.

Now the voters know there's a link between the everyday things that fill their lives - work, family, friends, the neighbourhood - and those grand questions debated on the Sunday morning politics shows they don't watch. But they struggle to see that link. They see little connection between the electing of politicians and the bins getting emptied or there being a village school.

However, this is better than the reverse situation - the typical politician or pundit makes no effort to connect the grand and sweeping debate about the economy, immigration and the welfare state to the specific concerns of those ordinary voters. We pretend to understand the link, to see the connection between the decisions the DWP, Home Office or Treasury make and the everyday lives of the people. But in truth there is no link, we are constantly shocked by the sub-optimal (I'm being kind here) outcomes of the decisions taken under our political system, yet fail to realise that it is our technocratic preference for 'evidence-based' politics that creates this problem.

Since we are talking about politics rather than ideological choices, I'll put to one side Sam's suggestion "... that less cognitively-demanding ways of making decisions, like markets, may be even more valuable than we realise", and talk instead about Tip O'Neill's dictum - all politics is local. This means that, if we want to make politics more comprehensible, we need to frame the discussion at the level of people's interests - at the local level. To be parochial, the precise numbers or type of immigrants matters little to people in Cullingworth but the fact of immigration does. And people want to debate the issue on the basis of how it affects them not in the manner of pundits on Newsnight bashing each other over the head with competing statistics.

The solution to our dilemma about information, if not to immigration, is to make more of our politics local, to devolve more decision-making down to the local level and to conduct debate and discussions about political issues within that local context. Tip O'Neill was a Boston Democrat in a state dominated by the Democrats but he knew that, not only was politics contested within his party at the local level, but there was always the possibility of a Republican winning if those locals thought he was the better man. And for all that O'Neill was a national figure, he still returned to the place that elected him - what happened there, what was said to him there, how his voters behaved informed his politics.

Tim Worstall has touched on this issue a few times in talking about Denmark:

We'd want their taxation system as well: the national income tax is 3.76% and the top national rate is 15%. True, total income taxes are high but the rest is levied by the commune, a political unit as small as 10,000 people. At that scale, taxation is subject to the Bjorn's Beer Effect. If you know that it's Bjorn who levies your taxes, Bjorn who spends your taxes and also know where Bjorn has his Friday night beer, then he's going to spend your money wisely. Otherwise he can't go out for a beer on Friday, can he?

And I would add that people talk to Bjorn - not about those grand matters beloved of our ideological punditry but about the wall that's falling down, how granny didn't get seen by the doctor quickly enough and about the smell from the chicken factory. Moreover, the people talking to Bjorn know he can do something to fix their problem. Here in Cullingworth, while I can sort some stuff out for folk, much of what bugs them is decided a long way away by people they don't know who more-or-less speak a different language. And those decisions taken a long way away mean I can speed up granny's appointment or stop the smell from the chicken factory.

If we want a more comprehensible politics we need to get the decision-making (and the money) down to that local level where people really can influence how those decisions are made. This isn't about educating stupid voters or bashing our foreheads at their utter idiocy - the default reaction of our punditry - but about a politics that matters to the voter by actually touching on the reality of their lives. But I guess the pull of those Sunday morning politics shows will win - politics will carry on being incomprehensible, still be irrelevant to the lives of the typical voter. For all the talk of localism and devolution, politics will remain something played with by fine folk a long way away from the voter and those fine folk will continue to think the voter stupid because he doesn't know some statistics or gets a fact wrong.

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Finding a New England

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!

A couple of days ago, I made the case that the only sustainable solution to the 'West Lothian Question' is an English Parliament based in Bradford. However, there are several challenges to this being achieved, not least the Left's continuing fear - even hatred - of the idea of England. It is this that lies underneath Labour's opposition to any resolution of what we should really call the 'English Question' far more than naked political calculation or the national ambitions of Scottish MPs on Labour's front bench.

Don't get me wrong here, all those Labour MPs will cheer on English national sports teams - especially when this is needed for the purposes of getting votes. But those same MPs are from a generation brought up to believe the myth of a white supremacist, flag of St George waving idea of English identity. A myth that was - for all that racists and fascists still try to claim it a truth - blown to smithereens, for me and millions of other Englishmen, by the sight of Ian Wright's celebration of England scoring. We'd been told that the idea of England was racist, something not for black or brown people, and suddenly that wasn't so.

Yet the left still hates England, is still ready to see the red cross on a white background as a symbol of something to be hidden away, something shocking. The left point to the lunatic fringes of the racist right, to the EDL, and say 'that is England'. But it isn't and it never has been, England was never about the hooligan or marches or flags as symbols of race. Indeed the English were never a race - I remember my dad talking about a school friend with a name like Seamus O'Toole who would gleefully thump anyone who tried to tell him he wasn't English.

Today, as the flag and the idea of England is reclaimed by decent folk, the left has discovered a new problem. England is capitalist, we genuinely are that thing Napoleon thought was an insult but isn't - a nation of shopkeepers. More than that, we have taken that idea of self-reliance, independence, trade and the mutual benefit from exchange and made ourselves rich. Indeed the criticism of England is almost a cry of envy - how dare you make yourself rich by providing consumers with the things they want. And I know that we're not the only capitalists - everywhere is in the game of creating wealth, after all - but we are a nation that thinks capitalism is a damn fine idea, something to celebrate.

But to make this work we need a new England. Not a changed England but a rediscovery of some bits of that idea of capitalism we lost sight of along the way. We need reminding that capitalism isn't about the fix, is not a thing of exploitation, isn't some plaything for masters of the universe. We need to realise that capitalism is about trade and exchange, it works because I get more value from that thing you have than you do - and I will pay for that added value. So capitalism isn't about banks, it's not about macroeconomic and it's not about international oil companies. It's about hand carved shepherd's crooks, it's about craft ale, it's about barbers, bookmakers and the boozer. A million and one things that make our lives happier, healthier and more fun.

The left simply doesn't understand this and fears that a new England would reject its controlling, dictatorial and depressing philosophies. So bogeymen are invented to try and destroy English identity - stuff about racism or the rise of UKIP - in the hope that we don't create that new England. This is why rather than an English Parliament, Labour and the Liberal Democrats will try to push for regional government or a confused devolution of some powers to some local councils (but not to all of them).

At the head of this piece is a quotation from Kipling's 'Charm' - reading it brings lump to my throat because it's not about government but about England. Just as all those other things we cherish in England - church bells, the pub, afternoon tea, football on a Saturday afternoon - have little to do with government. Yet all those things are affected - and some are threatened - by government, by the left's petty little programmes of control, by their unchanging belief that they know better than you do.

To win the argument, England needs more than 'fairness', we need to form an ideological basis for home rule just as Scottish Nationalists created the idea of Scotland as a 'progressive' nation, we need to make the case for England as a conservative nation, as a place where those values of community, self-reliance, decency and looking out for the neighbours are held to our hearts. Not as justifications for government but as the values that all of us try to live our lives by. I could sell that in Cullingworth.

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Speaking up for better schools in Bradford...so Labour's education chief attacks him

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The Principal of Bradford successful family of academies has said some wise things about education in the city - he does so from the position of being in charge of some of the best schools in the District:

Every school should become an independent academy, says a Bradford principal, because Council schools cannot match their results.

Nick Weller, head of the five Dixons academies in the city, said local authorities lacked “democratic accountability” and should not oversee schools. Instead, they should all be run by academy chains, which had proved – in Bradford and elsewhere – that they could turn around failing schools more quickly.

And to make his point, Mr Weller describes how the Dixons approach has transformed one of Bradford's worst performing secondaries:

 “For 15 years it had been on the slide and had been in special measures for the longest time of any school in the country – from 2002 all the way through to 2006. It was a very, very different school. There’s no evidence that a local authority would have that impact.” 

The City's education leadership should be sitting down with Mr Weller, talking about how to spread the success and achievement of his schools. Instead Ralph Berry, the children's services insider Labour has put in charge, chooses the approach of insult:

Mr Weller has a puritanical, ideological streak on this one. 

Seems Ralph's membership of 'The Blob' is now assured!
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On the ideology of public health

Building London's sewers - real public health work

I know I rant and rave about them, complaining about their outlook, attitudes and policies. I've called them health fascists, nannying fussbuckets and the Church of Public Health. And I don't regret a word if it.

However, being a kindly sort, I thought I'd have a bash at understanding what we mean by 'public health'. Not just for the entertainment but rather to set out why the approach and strategy - how millions in public funding is spent - might be improved.

We recognise that public health begins with us recognising that there are environmental factors that affect the health of populations. The classic example is John Snow and the Broad Street Pump but there are many other examples where interventions in the environment improved health - clean water, sewage systems, the clean air acts and the whole system of driver training and road safety. We should also note that, while the medical profession was involved in identifying the problem, its solution was largely in the hands of different professions, not least the often criticised environmental health officer.

Within public health budgets these interventions are still important - responding to epidemics and disease outbreaks, vaccination and inoculation and pollution control. But the profession made a significant shift away from public health being about environmental intervention to improve people's lives. Instead of clean air, clean water and inoculation against disease, we got this as a definition:

The science and art of promoting and protecting health and well-being, preventing ill-health and prolonging life through the organised efforts of society.

This comes from the Faculty of Public Health and represents a significant change from the idea of public health being about interventions where either an all-population or environmental justification exists.  We've gone from using science and statistics to understand how cholera can be prevented to using price intervention to try and alter the behaviour of alcoholic. And the starting point for this shift was smoking - or rather the long campaign against smoking.

I won't revisit the history of anti-smoking - if you want to know more read Chris Snowdon's 'A History of Anti-smoking' - but the decision to target smoking allowed public health people to link environment and personal choice. And, at the beginning of the campaign, smoking was more-or-less an all population problem - most people smoked. In this campaign (and it was, up to five or six years ago, very successful) the crucial moment wasn't Professor Doll linking smoking to lung cancer but the acceptance that passive smoking was a health problem. There may be some question over this belief but there can be no doubt that eliminating passive smoking provided the substantiation for other public health interventions in lifestyle choices.

Running in parallel with this idea of societal harm from the cumulative impact of lifestyle choices (typically drinking, smoking and overeating) was another idea - the passive consumer. Popular books such as Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' presented us as victims of marketing, led by the nose into excessive consumption, at the mercy of manipulative corporations. This idea's inception goes back to what TV viewers should see as the 'Golden Age' of advertising when discredited theories such as 'subliminal advertising' were proposed. However, it was another age of excess - from the mid-1980s for about ten years - that spawned the idea of consumption as sinful and the consumer as victim.

By portraying the individual as a hapless addict, some public health thinkers were able to justify extending public health interventions into those individuals' personal choices. Both because those choices affected wider society (such as by costing publicly-funded health services more) and because the individuals weren't making real choices but were merely responding to an 'intoxogenic' or 'obesogenic' environment.

To complete the picture (again Chris Snowdon has the definitive review here) we need to add an older tradition - moral disapproval. We know that the temperance movement has considerable influence within public health and this more considered moralising is compounded by the more hypocritical sensationalism in popular media.

These three factors - environment as a factor in personal choice, the passive consumer and a sense of moral offence - combine to create the platform on which today's public health policies are constructed and support for them from politicians and media is obtained. And it presupposes the significance of government in health:

...recognises the key role of the state, linked to a concern for the underlying socio-economic and wider determinants of health, as well as disease

So, when Bradford Council considers its new role as a public health authority, it brings its broader ideology into the discussion.  Onto the prevailing ideology of state-directed opposition to certain choice behaviours is latched the idea of 'health inequality'. At present nothing has changed, public health remains unchanged in Bradford. But, at some point, the imperative of inequality will mean that the idea of public health addressing environmental (and all-population) issues is further blurred as resource is targeted to those places suffering 'health inequality'.

My concern with all this mission creep is that the ideal of public health becomes lost. It seems evident that anti-smoking campaigns have stalled as campaigners focus their efforts on denormalisation rather than on the reduction of harm. And, with the apparent success (in political not health terms, I might add) of these approaches, other areas adopt the denormalisation palette rather than approaches aimed at reducing harm or preventing harm from occurring in the first place.

Also this focus on choice and lifestyle overlooks some important public health issues - reducing excess winter death in the elderly population, improving air quality in cities, extending vaccination programmes - in favour of media-friendly campaigns around smoking, drinking or fast food. We enlist other parts of the local authority into these campaigns - trading standards, planning, licensing - pulling them away from their own public safety and regulatory responsibilities.

My polemic - the stuff about nannying fussbucketry and health fascism - is a reaction to all this. And it reflects a real desire to get public health back to its roots - concerned with the real environment in which people live, with preventing the spread of disease and ill-health and with promoting well-being. None of these require the condemnation of lifestyle choices let alone their denormalisation.

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Ideology, ideology, ideology!

At first the term "ideology" referred to the study of ideas and their origins. Over time this has transmogrified into our modern, familiar - I might say comfortable - definition:

...a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

It is for this reason that ideology is important yet it has become something of a pejorative term - I recall someone upset by my thoughts on public health sending a screaming tweet: "Ideology, ideology, ideology" it said, as if I would be upset by my observations being basis on a more-or-less coherent set of thoughts.

We have arrived at the point where, in the minds of too many, there are two distinct positions in any debate or discussion - "ideology" and "evidence-based" - where the latter is deemed to be superior. The problem I have is that, without a premise for your proposal, prescription or policy, any amount of evidence won't necessarily tell you that it's the right (or wrong) thing to do.

We're told - repeatedly - that alcohol can be damaging to our health. I'm guessing that nearly all adults and most children are aware of the risks (although not necessarily how to assess or quantify those risk) involved in drinking. Let's assume that some evidence is presented showing that, if we increase the price of drink, then consumption will fall and fewer people will damage their health as a result. Indeed, since there's lots of evidence that increasing price reduces consumption, we could apply the evidence to any activity or product that has negative social consequences.

The point isn't what the evidence says but whether we should enact some policy on the basis of that evidence - is it right to make booze more expensive for everyone because a small number abuse alcohol? This isn't a decision you can make on the basis of evidence, it can only be made on the basis of ideology - a premise that says all population intervention in personal choice is justified on health grounds. The evidence says the decision - putting up the price of beer - will have a positive impact on health but the decision to restrict choice (for that is what a price intervention is) is ideological.

As of course would be the opposite decision - not increasing price because personal choice trumps public health.

Ideology matters.

Our public administration has adopted an ideology that needs, in the interests of democracy and freedom, to be challenged. Yet whenever a challenge to the premise (essentially that government intervention is always justified) is made, the response isn't to present a logical rationale for that ideology but to gather together "evidence" showing how government intervention is a good thing. "What matters is what works", as Tony Blair would have put it.

The result of this outlook - a sort of anti-ideology ideology - is a sterile debate conducted on the basis of fact-checking, appeals to (evidence-supplying) authority and attacks on the critic for basing his argument on 'ideology'. The irony of this is that debates between, say, Marxists and libertarians are more honest and interesting than the faux-debate that dominates much of our current political discourse.

Take a look at the debate over Scottish independence. The Scottish government under its Scottish Nationalist Party leadership has produced a vast tomes setting out the "evidence" for independence with the emphasis on the economic case. And those opposed to independence have, likewise, set out their case for retaining the United Kingdom.

However, the argument isn't about the economy at all. Nor is it about the welfare state or the army or nuclear bombs or any of the other aspects of the debate. The argument is ideological - should Scotland be independent or not. And the voters will, in the main, make their decision to for 'yes' or 'no' on the basis of this ideological debate. Or rather on the basis of an ideological debate that simply hasn't happened because we've forgotten how to lift politics out from the banal and pragmatic and into the realm of ideas.

Accusing someone of "ideology, ideology, ideology" isn't an insult, that base of ideas allows us to make policy choices where the evidence doesn't direct us to a choice - the world of macroeconomics is filled with such choices, for example. And ideology provides the basis for these choices, big and important choices that affect everyone's lives, to be debated and discussed.

Ideology really does matter and we should use it more often.

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Is it ideology or bureaucracy? On the failings of social work.

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Douglas Carswell points out the cruel truth about the Daniel Pelka case:

The boxes were ticked. Training was complied with. Meetings were held. Meanwhile a little boy went hungry and his injuries grew worse. Officialdom's culture of compliance produced only inertia and incompetence. This should make us alarmed and very, very angry.

The suggestion here is that bureaucracy - Kafka's castle - was to blame for the lack of intervention. But why when:

Since the 2007 killing of Baby P, there has been a huge surge in the number of youngsters being removed from their families by social workers.

The children’s court advisory service dealt with 10,199 cases between April 2011 and March 2012 – a near-doubling of the numbers in just four years. 

It is almost impossible to believe that, in this world of heightened awareness, authorities didn't think to intervene, merely to jot down details of the child's distress in their notes.

With each case we see the same explanations and excuses, the same sophistry as social workers fail to explain why they pursue some parents to the ends of the earth - parents who are less of a threat than were the parents of this poor child.

And why are councillors - me included - so complacent or reluctant to ask the hard questions of our social services management?  Can we really be content, given that we haven't asked the questions, that everything is fine? Or are we nibbling at out nails muttering "there but for the grace of god"?

The problem isn't simply bureaucracy - that is just a reflection of the problem. The real concern is the ideology of social work, the faux non-judgemental approach, the obsession with 'cultural sensitivities' and the view (unsupported by evidence) that there are no demographic or social factors that influence child abuse or neglect. This isn't true and social workers - as well as the ideologues who define social work practice - know it isn't true.

Like so many areas ruled by experts, social work (and the parasitic growths of lawyers and such that attach to the business) has become impenetrable - the verbiage of the profession excludes anyone seeking to understand, the sophistry of the professionals' defence is iron clad in its certainty and the elimination of challenge is now so sophisticated that it is impossible for us charged with being "corporate parents" to exercise that role in any way beyond the guided tweeness allowed by social workers.

Right now we take too many children into care yet allow children like Daniel Pelka to remain in terrible circumstances. Right now social services leaders prefer to blame the problem on government, "the cuts" or "austerity" rather than explore why they are failing.And when those unfortunates arrive in care, we fail them again  - as a momentary glance at educational performance, crime and the tragedy of grooming would tell us.

Perhaps we need to start behaving like parents - interfering, judging, worrying, badgering and annoying. Getting in the face of those we care fore - not because we don't like them but because that's what parental love is about.

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Krugman...Or When You Get Stuck Change the Subject

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I have just watched Paul Krugman's master class in punditry (note the use of this term rather than the term "economics" - there wasn't a great deal of economics in evidence) from yesterday evening's Newsnight. You can follow the link from the Great Man's blog .

What struck me wasn't that Krugman succeeded in putting the case against "austerity" although this was the billed intention but that whenever he reached the point where he might trip over his own argument he shifted the subject.

When confronted with the moral argument that debt means having something now rather than later - meaning of course that we, given the likely timescale for debt repayment, are taking that from future generations - Krugman chooses instead to talk about the lack of graduate job prospects. Rather than addressing the real issue raised - government debt as deferred taxation, Krugman chooses to talk about a relatively minor labour demand issue.

And then when Angela Leadsom raises supply side considerations - how to help the economy create jobs - Krugman lapses into accusations that Ms Leadsom and others are ideologically motivated and using the current crisis to shrink the size of the state. At no point in this does Krugman respond to or consider whether there are any supply side constraints. He waffles vaguely that there's no evidence of supply side constraint (in the US) and states baldly that the whole problem is a matter of demand. More seriously - from the point of debate - he accuses others of insincerity and exploitation without evidence.

On one level this was great telly - a clever pundit parading his skills and, no doubt, successfully flogging a few of his books (the real reason for his presence, of course). But, given that Krugman is billed as a "Nobel prize-winning economist" it was really disappointing that he chose political and ideological arguments as the basis for his opposition to austerity rather than economics.

Maybe that's because he doesn't have an economic leg to stand on? I wanted to understand the arguments - the economic arguments - against austerity but instead got political argument. And, whenever the challenge got close to denting that argument, Krugman either made ad hom attacks or changed the subject. We had the spectacle of two very polite 'opponents' allowing this man to attack them rather than responding to the serious points they raised. Rather disappointing really.

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Doubt and the problem of planning - a thought on conservatism

In recent times I’ve tried to explain to people that conservatism isn’t some form of brash, know-all ideological fix for mankind’s problems. Indeed, to proclaim something unquestioningly true is to deny an essential truth of conservative thinking.

Perhaps I should qualify this by pointing out that this view is an English conservatism – something of a philosophy of doubt and insecurity. Today, speaking with my wife, I observed that I no longer have the absolute certainty expressed in my youthful bedroom wall poster:

“I may have my faults but being wrong isn’t one of them!”

Who are we if, with the flimsiest of evidence and rarely evidence that is unchallenged, take it upon ourselves to claim that there is only one true path, one solution to a given problem? As conservatives we should always proceed with care and caution for we may be wrong. It is this appreciation of human fallibility that separates conservatives from liberals, socialists and other such ideologues.

This isn’t a cry for inaction but is intended to explain why change should not be imposed simply for that change’s sake and certainly not because it merely conforms to our ideological bias. The reasons why conservatives prefer the small state, opt for local over national and national over global is because we doubt that the state can really resolve mankind’s problems and challenges. This isn’t a rejection of the state but instead recognises that most of the time that old H L Mencken comment applies:

 "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

This helps explain why conservatives are doubtful of planning. It’s not an ideological objection but a practical one. To use the example of our “predict and provide” approach to housing - we employ experts to estimate how many houses we’ll need so as everyone has a roof over their head. I know just one truth about these ‘housing number’ predictions – they are always wrong. Not because the experts are inexpert but because it is impossible to make such estimates with confidence. Yet we make these informed guesses and then try to provide the houses. And the result is that (almost without exception) a wholly different number is actually built to meet the actual demand for housing.

For housing we could substitute anything else from coronary heart attacks to road accidents - the estimates of “need” are wrong and, as a result, the plans proposed tend to fail.

Now before you all assume that this is simply an argument for classical liberalism and laissez-faire social organisation (or should that be ‘un-organisation’) let’s be clear that planning for the future isn’t a bad idea. We just need to treat what the experts tell us with caution and proceed accordingly. To borrow another quotation – this time from Robert Heinlein:

 

“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.”

As conservatives our first question should be one of doubt – we should take St Thomas as our patron. When the expert – the authority – presents his solution we should begin by doubting its efficacy. We should recall that Lloyd George didn’t want to preside over the death of friendly societies – organisations he knew and loved - but, by introducing a state social insurance, he ensured their rapid demise.

England’s current polity is anti-conservative because everything it does – the core of its ideology – is rooted in action founded on planning. Our governors – the one’s who’ll be around regardless of the politicians – cannot conceive of an unplanned world. For sure, they’ll claim to admire Jane Jacobs, to support free markets and to value voluntary and local but the truth (perhaps – remember I might be wrong) is that they dislike all of these things.

Our governors want our cities tidy, ordered and regimented. They must regulate markets to make them ‘fairer’ (whatever that means). And they prefer uniformity of provision centrally-directed over local variation and variety.  This control is exercised through planning – ‘evidence’ is gathered (often ‘evidence’ prepared by the self-interested or even the down-right biased) and plans are drawn up on its basis. And when the plan fails – because the evidence was wrong – the solution is further evidence gathering followed by a new plan.

As conservatives we must begin to question – to doubt – this planning. We must start to reject planned solutions to grand problems and look instead at free action, at the local and above all at the voluntary. This, I know, isn’t a solution to those grand problems but since government has failed entirely in resolving those problems it might be a wise move to do a little less and, when we do act, to do so with care, caution and in as limited a way as possible.

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Quote of the week...

From Alexander Illarionov, chief economic advisor to President Putin (cited in this Spectator article):

"...man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 2oth century such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories. Misinformation, falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda. Because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity."

...and I worry he might be right - which is why the Greens and their useful idiots must be stopped.