London is turning into California (unfortunately it's the politics not the weather)

 

I don’t make predictions often, but I do recognise that what’s happening elsewhere might presage changes that could happen here in the UK. For reasons of language and its domination of popular culture (plus the growing impact of social media on elite opinion), the United States might present us with something of that future.

We used to think that we were somehow above the culture war politics of the USA and the slightly bizarre national significance of issues like abortion, guns and saying prayers in schools. Of course, we shouldn’t dismiss such concerns, but next to economic or broader social issues – health, crime, jobs, pay, taxes – they should fall further down the list of concerns. Part of the problem here is that the people who control the agenda for political debate see abortion, guns and prayers as important and personal whereas the problems of working class life (can I feed the kids, is there a job to be had, oh shit my husband just got laid off, can I afford to buy that) are outside the lives and experience of those agenda setters.

The UK’s agenda setting class (or “people with blue ticks on Twitter” as I like to call them) take their line from their equivalent in the USA and that counterpart class doesn’t live in Texas, Oklahoma or Alabama, it lives in New York, Chicago or, most often, California. This California:

…61.5 percent of our voters choose Hillary Clinton for president; we made Kamala Harris the first Indian-American (and second African-American woman) to be elected a United States senator; we reaffirmed overwhelming Democratic majorities in state politics; and we voted to legalize marijuana, ease parole for nonviolent criminals, raise taxes on cigarettes, extend income-tax increases on the wealthiest few, boost school spending, restore bilingual education, encourage the reversal of the Supreme Court’s noxious Citizens United ruling and ban single-use plastic bags.

California, the wonderful progressive paradise. A progressive paradise where the biggest losers are black and Hispanic residents, most of California’s middle- and working-class:

Since 1990, Los Angeles’s black share of the population has dropped in half. In San Francisco, blacks constitute barely 5 percent of the population, down from 13 percent four decades ago. As a recent University of California at Berkeley poll indicates, 58 percent of African-Americans express interest in leaving the state—more than any ethnic group—while 45 percent of Asians and Latinos are also considering moving out.

On any measure of equality you care to choose, California comes out badly: it has some of America’s worst schools, the gap between rich and poor is widest, the numbers of homeless people is highest, and the levels of job and business creation are shamefully low. On any objective measure California is failing. Yet the people who preside over this failure continue to enjoy power, indeed the control of California by the progressive wing of the Democrats is a solid as the racist wing of that Party’s control was in Georgia or Alabama in the 1950s.

My prediction is that, if you want to see the future for London (and its satellites – Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge) then look to California. Watch as politicians appeal to their elite neighbours with cycling schemes, junk food bans, sugar taxes and planning controls all coupled with a patronising indulgence of identity politics – Black Lives Matter, LGBT++ Pride, quotas for women, cosplaying as Muslims or Sikhs, frowning concerns about “hate speech”, and almost daily warnings about the “far right”.

Meanwhile every lobby that arrives at city hall’s doorstep is indulged with promises of protections and controls (especially if there’s a useful contribution to the mayor’s re-election or the MP’s campaign fund). Portentous statements about the housing crisis will be followed by attacks on efforts to reform planning. Virtue-signalling about refugees won’t stop the same people then making sure those refugees are dumped as far away from their nice central London life as possible. National government is lambasted for homelessness or the lack of jobs while ‘public space protection orders’ move on the street sleepers and licencing rules or advertising regulations clobber small businesses.

Right now, London is about 50% non-white and, for all the problems that go with this diversity, can be proud of this. But most of those non-white people are the folk doing the lower paid jobs – cleaning, driving, clerking, guarding – and they really can’t afford to live in the city. Places like Brixton that used to be dominated by the black working-class are now filled with youthful sorts – fully signed up to California’s progressive, righteous agenda until (just like in San Francisco or Los Angeles) it comes to working-class jobs and housing. Want a new housing development or new industry and you can’t move for wealthy white actors, tech company owners and journalists with a thousand reasons why those homes and that industry have to be somewhere else.

My prediction is that London will become more like California, and especially urban California. Some of this will seem great and it will certainly sound progressive, but it will be accompanied by the steady sound of people leaving. And, just like with San Francisco, the people who leave will increasingly be black people as they head for places where the cost of living gets a little closer to the money available.

Only four of London’s 32 Boroughs have a non-white leader and the Labour leaders in inner city boroughs are all white middle-class professionals (mostly male). Such leaderships will take the black votes in their area for granted and will play the “we care” card by accusing opponents (and the national government) of racism without doing much to change the real life problems of those black communities – high crime rates, expensive housing, lousy bus services, dirty streets. Their councils will tell people – black people – they smoke too much, drink too often and eat the wrong food while doing nothing much to provide affordable homes let alone a route into home ownership and a real stake in their city. Then raise a flag on Haile Selassie’s birthday as if that helps anyone.

The middling sort of black person, hard-working, a decent education and something of a career isn’t staying but is looking for a job and a home elsewhere – in North Kent or South Essex, in Swindon or the few remaining affordable parts of the South Coast. Some will commute back into London to work in hospitals, drive trains or administer insurance claims but many will find, especially in these post-pandemic work-from-home times, that they can make a fine, happy family life somewhere other than London.

The result is that London becomes a place dominated by the guilty rich and the once young doing trendy well-paid jobs that let them eat out a lot while living in a pokey little flat they can barely afford. Plus people – mostly black people - stuck in overcrowded, badly managed social housing who clean up after the rich and the young, ferry them about town in cabs and tubes, serve them breakfasts, and man the bar doors to keep them safe. If you want what London once was – diverse, full of opportunity and affordable – then it needs a different sort of leadership, one less taken by Californian culture wars and more bothered with building homes, controlling crime and encouraging small business. One less fussed by how you get to work than with the work being able to make ends meet. And one that puts the interests of London’s workers ahead of London’s elite. I don’t, sadly, think London will be getting any of this any time soon.

 And the same for New York - big cities are finished.

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Blue Tick Tyranny - how modern government, media and administration is a rennaissance court.

A lot of people are bemused at how the brutal killing by police of a black man in a faraway US city has resulted in a worldwide outpouring of protest badged as 'black lives matter'. It's not that people are unsympathetic but rather that the protests seem to have taken on a life of their own, spreading beyond the spontaneous reaction to the killing to attacks on the police, the destruction of statues and the silencing of old comedy shows. Why, these people ask, did this happen? Most people aren't like that, they proclaim, ordinary and decent people will prevail won't they?

The problem is, and this is shown every single day, that ordinary and decent people aren't the ones in charge. For sure we all get a chance to vote once every few years and we elect a load of politicians who we hope reflect our feelings, views and opinions. We did this in December and elected the current government - I guess that, after further efforts to prevent it, the headline policy of leaving the EU will happen. But on everything else forget ordinary and decent people - social media will determine policy overwhelmingly through the dominant influencer that is Twitter.

But, I hear you say, Twitter isn't representative of people's views, most people don't use Twitter. And this is true, what passes for debate on Twitter doesn't reflect what ordinary and decent people think or say, but this doesn't matter because the people who who make the decisions, are on Twitter and do treat it as if it reflects what people think and say. Or rather the only people who matter - those blue-ticked people and institutions who dominate the medium.

It's telling that, when the supposed evils of social media (fake news, mobs and such like) are talked about by our policy-makers - all, of course, blue-ticked ones on Twitter - it is always Facebook that's in the crosshairs of regulators, Facebook that's encouraging the wrong sort of news, Facebook that targets advertising, and Facebook that is abusing privacy. Never Twitter.

There's a reason (blue-ticked celebrities aside): the ordinary and decent people who "don't think that" and aren't on Twitter, those folk are on Facebook. If you want to reach lots of people in that mass media way we used to use telly for, the best way is using Facebook. And the government, the media and those blue-ticked Twitter policy-makers hate it. Most of all they hate it because, unlike Twitter (which they love), Facebook is democratic, inclusive and makes it hard to crush your opponents through sheer weight of abuse. Facebook provides a place for community groups, for shared interests, for swapping, buying and selling. The great and good with their Twitter blue ticks cannot control this place so they disparage it, sideline it and return to the cesspool of Twitter.

As we've noted already you and me, ordinary and decent people, are not in charge. Even those we elect to hold those policy-makers to account aren't in charge. Those blue-ticked people and institutions (plus thousands who aspire to this exulted status) are in charge and they do not think like you and me. Or rather they are trapped in a world where you have to negotiate round the risks of being accused. Those doing the accusing will, of course, not be ordinary and decent people but other blue-ticked agenda-setters, each with their weaponised following - a sort of online snarling pack - ready to pile into the accused and bring them down. Usually the blue-ticked person then stands back benignly exclaiming shock or distress but "you know, people are angry".

The best way to understand what's happening is to see our political system as a rennaissance court rather than any kind of democracy. All those blue-ticked people are the courtiers and do what courtiers always did, cluster round the powerful barons hoping for advantage and preferment. The advantage comes in the form of jobs, appointments, selections and endorsements meaning that these people control the institutions that adminster the ever more complicated rules and regulations governing our society. And the game is not to have the institution (anything from the Royal Society of Arts through to a local council parks department or a little town museum) improve things for ordinary and decent people but rather for it to promote the interests of sponsoring baronries while not causing offence to other powerful groups or people.

This means that the people appointed to run (and therefore the outlook and ideology of those they set on to help them run) big institutions reflect the dominant ideology of other people within the court not the wider population. And this dominant ideology, if it merits such a grand description for a thing this cynical, is to avoid the risk of being pulled down by a media and social media mob. Therefore the leadership of institutions, at every level of society, falls back on safety first by, for example, endorsing the dominant 'woke' ideology around race and gender. Since falling foul of this idelogy will result in the institution (and the individuals running the institution) being socially excluded and damaged, many of the leaders promote and endorse ever more extreme versions of this "wokeness" so as to secure additional safety from the mob.

All this makes sense because leaders have the interests of the the institution (plus, of course, their own advancement) at heart. But it means that those who actively promote the ideology are given more power and influence than their numbers might otherwise merit. So, while it is true that Twitter doesn't represent the "real world", it does absolutely represent the court of people who actually run everything in our society and their fear of that mob - got up by their courtly competition - pulling them down by accusing them of sins against the prevailing ideology.

If you think of our political, media and bureaucratic system as that rennaissance court with Twitter as the vicious gossip between competing groups and factions then you'll understand that you and I don't run things, our voting makes little difference, and only by changing the prevailing ideology can you change the policies and priorities of the institutions that affect our lives.

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The Conservative Party is not neoliberal (and this is a good thing)

 There's a common view among ultra-liberals and those folk who, in an act of ironic etymological colonialism, call themselves 'neoliberals' that economic utilitarianism is the only creed worth following. Everything is subservient to maximising the utility we (as a collective) obtain from the use of resources while at the same time an absolutist adherence to individual licence becomes the sole justification for social policy. What's worse is some of these people believe - god alone knows why - that a political party calling itself conservative should sign up to this essentially extremist agenda.

This isn't to say that individual choice, open markets and free trade aren't good things - ideas and institutions that any good conservative would want to sustain. Rather it's to observe that not everything about people's lives is determined by economics, for all that economists want us to believe so. When people hesitate and ask, "is that right?", "have we thought through what that might mean?" or, more simply, "I don't like that idea?" they represent the essence - the doubting essence - of conservatism. For all that we recognise how the enlightenment's ideas led to betterment, we also see how ultra-liberalism is pulling down institutions - family, democracy, community - that we value and support.

Ultra-liberalism doesn't have real answers to the fragmentation - atomisation is the trendy word - of society, the growth in family dysfunction, and the loss of trust and faith among the general population. All it offers is either an almost feudal idea that what's good for the rich and powerful must, by definition, be good for the poor and powerless. Those of a left-wing persuasion then point to how free markets (they say) create this dysfunction and that our response must be to stop all that freedom, at least so far as economic choice is concerned (I appreciate that these left-inclined people don't quite put it that way).

What we've seen however is that, as the left's preference for identity politics (and the creation of new social sins derived from that politics) spreads, ultra-liberals - wedded as they are to an absolutist viewpoint on personal licence - make common cause with the left in promoting policies crafted from this 'intersectionality' because licentious selfishness appeals to their world view. And, living in a mostly urban, economically advantaged world, such selfishness accords well with their liberalism. What they don't see - because they seldom look beyond their world - is the damage these attacks on collective and communal elements of society do to less entitled or successful people and places.

Since the left has largely given up on family and community as the basis for society - preferring the bizarre world of intersectional top trumps - we are left with a Conservative Party that, after decades of pretending it was liberal (even neoliberal), has emerged blinking into the sunlight of its original purpose. And, while keeping with the idea of free exchange, free speech and good business, conservatives need to start struggling with the challenges that liberals simply don't have answers to:

Both white working-class and black inner-city neighbourhoods lack the civic institutions that allow for upward mobility.

...had the poor followed the success sequence, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by more than 70 percent.

“Youths who grow up with both biological parents earn more income, work more hours each week, and are more likely to be married themselves as adults, compared to children raised in single-parent families.”

...not only does controlling for family make-up pretty much eliminate differences between races but that the single best thing to reduce social pathologies like depression, alcoholism, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence is to cut the rates of child abuse. And child abuse is dramatically higher where children are born outside marriage.

And, yes, part of the response to these questions is to understand the importance of employment and the employer in helping to provide the social capital that is needed. This might mean keeping a steel works or a car factory going for a while longer through subsidy if the alternative is tearing down the institution that helps sustain the local community. To rule such choices out as "mercantilism" is the act of rich and successful liberals rubbing the noses of ignorant provincials in the dirt of their supposed failure.

The same goes for policies that undermine the idea of marriage such as no fault divorce, civil partnership, ending tax or benefit privileges - these all seem fine to the wealthy liberal because it doesn't really seem to affect things much (they do but the other advantages of wealth and power cover this up). The pointlessness of the liberal attack on marriage is captured by the bit at the end of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' - up to then a joyous appreciation of these rights of passage - where the Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell characters agree not to get married for reasons that aren't abundantly clear in the movie.

Public authorities talk a lot about community but, more often than not, they mean a particular view of community as a target for support or else a definition based on that familiar game of equalities top trumps - the gay community, the black community, the Muslim community as so forth. The reality of community, at least if one mixes it with the idea of neighbourhood, is that it isn't about these differences or even the fragments of society thrown up by intersectionality when we apply it to localities. Community is, quite literally, about shared experience, the things we do together.

Here in Cullingworth we're one of those pale, stale, white places the liberals sneer at but, scratch the surface a bit and that isn't quite so true - as I wrote nearly ten years ago, the village is filled with people who're, some more obviously than others, not from round here. It works, people get along, jokes are made, experiences are shared and stuff gets done - from grander schemes like building a new village hall down to the mundane everyday stuff like getting a decent set of Christmas lights (and putting them up in the teeth of council bureaucracy) or organising the annual gala.

When JRF came to the neighbouring village of Denholme to look at loneliness, one of their findings was damning of the manner in which public authorities behave - people believed that they needed permission to care and, in the words of the lead researcher, 'regulation kills kindness'. As I wrote back then:

That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

This isn't about not wanting rules but rather than those pubic authorities have decided that people - and the communities in which they live - cannot be trusted. Even worse, these same authorities further believe that those communities (and I guess the people who live in them) need development. Either because they are poor or else because there's some intangible social something missing. Government is not interested in community except as a vehicle for implementing the strictures that liberal technocracy has decided are good for them.

In the end neoliberalism - ultra-liberalism, liberaltarianism as Tyler Cowan recently dubbed it - ends up devouring its own illogicality. It wants free speech (bot not THAT free speech), is wants choice (but not THAT choice) and it wants family, community and the institutions providing that community's essential social capital to operate according to a set of rules that really don't suit society. And, as Cowan sort of accepts in that recent article on "State Capacity Libertarianism" it doesn't really work.

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Writing on Con Home - why we don't need fewer councillors

Something of a rant but with the serious point that elected people, especially councillors, are the way we hold the unelected people to account:

But far from us needing fewer politicians, we need more. Rather than taking the decision-making further away from ordinary residents with unitary councils, regional mayors, and combined authorities, we should, as Conservatives, be wanting to get more decisions made right down in the communities where those ordinary residents live, by people they know and can speak with. Right now, our system of local democracy doesn’t function well, and the lack of real accountability is a big reason for this.

Whole piece on the always excellent Conservative Home.

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Conservatism - the home for grown up libertarians

 Although you can't, of course, use the actual word 'conservatism':

Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either. Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with. Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree.

This (and the rest of Tyler Cowan's article) describes what I'd call 'institutional conservatism' - if you want to maintain an effective system not only should it be allowed to evolve but it needs to be well managed. What's happened is that essentially liberal-minded people have realised, as Cowan comments, how "...it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems...". Cowan cites climate change (where a common libertarian response is simply to deny it) but, more importantly in my view, we should look at how the sociological evidence around social infrastructure, communities and families all leads away from a hyper-liberal approach and towards conservatism.

What's important here is that, unlike (almost all) the left, we need to begin with recognising that markets and capitalism remain an essential part of the solution to problems such as climate change but also need what Cowan calls 'state capacity' to ensure social outcomes - from good public transport and nuclear power through to welfare and health safety nets - are secured.

My instincts are impeccably liberal and I don't consider that government should be the first choice for delivering any service but it seems clear that the social damage done by ultra-liberalism requires intervention - from the growth of loneliness and the collapse of the working class family through to violent crime and class bias in educational outcomes there's a case for government to act in the interests of the working person rather than simply to follow the liberal, utility maximising imperative.

I've long thought that, to oversimplify, economics is liberal while sociology is conservative (and the academy for both of them is filled with socialists). And that the division in national priorities flickers between an emphasis on community, family, security - the conservative instinct - and one on growth, progress, wealth - the liberal preference. Moreover, conservatism is the only practical politics able, at its best, to marry these imperatives in a lasting manner. Sadly conservatives, especially in the USA, have become bogeymen to intellectuals - self-interested plutocrats or rednecks with bad teeth and guns. The former is conservatism as the merely the rich preserving their interests while the latter is a modern urban snobbery about those less well-educated folk outside the city.

Rampant liberalism, the 'Thatcherism' that great lady never believed in that young men with cash and good suits brashly proclaim, has damaged the idea of conservatism as much as has the endemic infections of reaction, racism and small-mindedness. Even if burning fifty quid notes in front of the homeless is a bit of a myth, the sentiment - that the poor are solely responsible for their poverty and for getting out of that poverty - remains too common. Just like absolutist approaches to individual choice (witness the trans ID debate), this hyper-liberal idea is a corruption of decency, moderation and good sense. Plus it denies duty, responsibility and community as central parts of our worlds.

So if you've read Tyler Cowan's "state capacity libertarianism" and find its argument persuasive, I'd like to welcome you to conservatism, to a world of compromise, consensus and good government. Then you can join in making better policy for the families and communities that make up the societies in which we live - get them better lives, safer communities and (as Tom T Hall would say) more money.

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Roads, air travel and new technology are where transport investment and subsidy should go - not trains.

 Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a comprehensive and affordable public transport system is desirable. Also that it is right to use public funds to both develop the system and to subsidise its operations. There are contrary arguments but we can probably agree that such a system would enjoy popular support. The question then becomes what does the system look like given what we know about the history of transport systems, the current arrangements and provision, and the technological direction of travel.

A couple of days ago the Labour Party proposed a massive subsidy for regulated fares (the 40% or so of rail fares where the government controls the price) - a one third cut in fares for loads of train users including many commuters. Plus free rail travel for under 16s. The reaction has been mixed - some have danced with glee (perhaps in anticipation of a cut in their annual season ticket costs) whereas others have responded with the observation that this pretty much represents a subsidy largely benefitting the better off because about half of rail commuters are in the top 20% of earners and, anyway, only about 11% of commuter journeys are on a train.

Some of the defence for this proposal suggests that, by cutting the fares, they will become affordable to commuters who aren't using the train to get to work because of the cost. This may well be true but what we don't know is how many people fit into that category and whether all we achieve is to get people to shift from one form of public transport, the bus, to another, the train. There is a further problem in this expectation since the distribution of employment doesn't allow for fixed line systems to meet the needs of workers other than in very densely populated urban areas with substantial historic investment in those fixed line systems. Even in London, the assumption that travel-to-work happens on a hub-and-spoke basis from the City and Westminster is wrong. Most employment in the city isn't in London's centre but is dispersed across the urban area. This is likely to be even more true for lower paid employment in sectors such as retail, care and hospitality.

To give some further context, the population of the North of England (the regions of North West, North East and Yorkshire) have a population not dissimilar to that of Greater London and the immediate suburban areas at its boundaries. London's population density is 15 times greater than that of the North meaning that employment is even more dispersed than in the capital. A fixed rail system alone simply cannot meet the needs of people travelling to work in the North and it's hard to argue for new fixed rail infrastructure when the same money investment in road-based public transport (and other options such a cycling, e-bikes and the like) would go so much further to meet the needs of "the many" commuters in the region.

So the logic of geography tells us that, outside densely populated urban areas, fixed rail systems are inefficient but at the same time nobody seems to be able to recognise this logic and argue for a different solution to public transport needs. But first let's - setting aside the supposed environmental gains - note that fixed rail isn't even a great solution to long-distance travel: unsubsidised air travel between UK destinations is, in many circumstances, cheaper than travelling by train.

Geography and economics tell us fixed rail is not the best way to meet our objective (a comprehensive and affordable public transport system) because existing networks are insufficient and the cost of new rail infrastructure is prohibitive - one forked high speed line linking London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester looks likely to cost at least £75 billion and won't be completed until 2035 at the earliest and probably 2040. And this eye-watering investment won't even scratch the surface of likely transport needs.

The most extensive and comprehensive transport network is our road system. This system connects your front door - as Bilbo Baggins knew - to everywhere in the country, millions of miles of lovingly (well some of the time) maintained roads available for use by pedestrians, cyclists, bikers, horse riders, ox carts, buses, taxis and the private car. The system, compared to rail, is flexible, cheap to run and able to accommodate the needs of travellers. And most of the network isn't congested. Moreover, the strategy of government (although I've a feeling that this is harder than is sounds) is to 'decarbonise' road transport over the same period it will take to build one high speed rail line.

This suggest to me that the right response to our question isn't subsidising rail travel or planning huge investments in relatively limited extensions to that network - this sounds good and probably appeals to a generation brought up on Thomas the Tank Engine while being told how bad cars were for the environment. Short of directing the whole of government infrastructure investment into railways for forty years (and probably not even then) there is no chance of rail meeting future transport needs. Any sustainable, affordable public transport system will include the current fixed rail systems - with maybe some sensible and fundable urban extensions - but most of the focus needs to be on road and air travel systems.

This conclusion seems even more sensible when you consider the technological direction of travel. There is reality of driverless vehicle or the ability for taxi and minibus systems to exploit the mobile phone but there's also the idea of drone delivery, air-taxis and improved short haul travel that could extend the capacity of our existing network by several orders of magnitude. And, while private cars will remain a significant (even dominant) part of the transport environment we will see short-term hire and carsharing become increasingly popular especially in places where off-street parking is at a premium.

Lastly we come to buses and taxis. Driverless vehicles offer (assuming we can make them work) the opportunity to reduce running costs making it more economic to run the services into more remote areas than is the case at present. Places that last saw a bus in 1935 may well see these mystic creatures again. But to make road-based transport systems work, we need both investment and, ahead of driverless, subsidy. And the subsidy should not be on fares but rather on routes, on better buses and on in-bus technology plus work in congested inner-urban areas to give buses and taxis priority. Buses are far more able to meet our objective - an affordable, comprehensive and sustainable public transport system - than are trains. Technology offers the prospect of a bigger economically-sustainable route network but there's a string case for investing ahead of this opportunity through extending the route subsidy that disappeared when Gordon Brown decided subsidising fares was better politics.

Today we see that "better politics" trumping good sense as Labour promise to cut fares for rail commuters by defunding road maintenance while the Conservatives offer a sort of Titfield Thunderbolt world by opening old rail lines closed by that cad Beeching (and both Labour and Conservative governments). Plus a sort of gentle tiptoeing round the gross extravagance of HS2 while making the right sort of environmental mooing sounds about air travel. No party's transport proposals comes close to recognising that we are on the cusp of a transport technology revolution - not just electric and driverless vehicles but the full impact of digital technology on the way people engage with transport options.

The missing bit is that the essential existing networks - road, rail, air traffic - require adequate maintenance. We've spent two decades failing to look after local roads meaning that they are less and less reliable - Bradford, for example, underfunds its highways maintenance by about 30% each year (this is pretty typical of metropolitan authorities). Looking after our systems and, where we can, upgrading them makes more sense than extending the system with new roads and railways especially if this means the maintenance cash gets cut. But I guess saying we'll spend lots on money looking after the networks we've got isn't politically sexy - even if it comes with a promise of investment in super buses, flying taxis and digital technology.

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In which I 'splain the game of intersectional top trumps

 I was going to "whitesplain" Islamophobia, "mansplain" misogyny and "straightsplain" (is this a word yet?) gay rights. But, for all the entertainment value of this, I suspect it would be more of an indulgence than a contribution to our understanding as to why the terms - which are simple tools used in argument to close down a debate by excluding someone - are a problem. "As a white man you can't..." is a common rhetorical gambit in social media (and increasingly in real live debate) and assumes that, in the matter of 'feelz', you cannot begin to understand the "lived experience" of the identity group in question unless you're from that group.

As writer James Bloodworth observes, this obsession with "language-policing and virtue-signalling, rather than purpose" represents the transformation of 'the left' into a hobby rather than a movement for social and economic change. We are also seeing, despite all the fact checking and talk of evidence-based policy, a time when feelings, empathy and emotions (or more accurately statements of these things - "I'm upset", "that is offensive", "you can't understand how...") dominate, all wrapped up into the idea of "lived experience". Instead of collecting data about the impact of single parenthood, analysing it and developing policy responses, we are encouraged to listen to stories and statements of feelings, to bow to the "lived experience" of those people.

There is a limit to all this and Bloodworth spots it:

Lived experience is clearly important, but it is not everything — as most middle-class Lefties are apt to remember when they encounter a white British person who doesn’t like immigration because of the social effects it has had on their hometown.

Here we have a classic example of how the idea of identity politics becomes a game of top trumps rather than a valid tool for sociological analysis. The poor, old white bloke nursing a pint in Wetherspoons while complaining about how "they" have spoiled his town is describing his lived experience with the same amount of emotion and story as the Somali kid over the road. We might call that bloke 'racist', 'gammon' or 'boomer' but does it make sense to include a man barely scraping by on a crappy pension in the idea of "white privilege"?

We see repeated examples of these intersectional conflicts - the Asian mums complaining about their kids being given sex education that talks about homosexuality, young white girls in care being given less priority than their non-white abusers and the whole crazy Trans vs TERF thing. Everywhere we look we see that this idea of identity as the driver of politics and policy crashing into the reality - black rappers sing homophobic lyrics, Asian taxi drivers make racist jokes about Africans, gay women say gender fluidity denies their identity as lesbians.

Policy-makers, like marketers, love a good typology, something that puts people into conveniently labelled little boxes. This makes the job a lot easier - the marketer can target by ACORN codes and the policy-maker can design policies for the contents - gay, straight, white, black, northern, coastal, old, young - of all their little boxes. Each policy has internal coherence and reflects the 'lived experience' of the particular box's contents but completely ignores that people are in multiple boxes and the policies responding to Box A may be a problem for the people in Box B and especially challenging for someone who is in both of these boxes.

So we turn it into a game of top trumps meaning that we give (usually for specious virtue-signalling reasons) greater priority to some boxes. All this means that somewhere there's a loser and, as we're coming to realise, the loser is probably that bloke with the pint in Wetherspoons. And while he's pretty sanguine most of the time, he really doesn't consider himself privileged. Nor, when he looks at his perfectly ordinary working class family, does he consider them privileged. Yet our game of top trumps means that the black daughter of a Nigerian millionaire who went to Roedean and Oxford then took a great job with an elite publishing company and lives in an awesome Chelsea flat is less privileged than a white man earning ten pounds an hour driving a fork-lift in a warehouse and living in a Wakefield council house.

We give more attention to whether a rich female TV presenter is paid more or less than a rich male TV presenter than we do to vulnerable white girls getting groomed, abused and raped. Government spent loads of time and money on a national enquiry into the gender pay gap accompanied by TV shows, discussions and horror stories of how a woman in media is only paid £400,000 while some bloke gets £600,000. We even got a new law. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for a full enquiry into why councils, health authorities and the police ignored the grooming, rape and abuse of vulnerable white girls.

I'm not sure where we end up with this approach to policy other than with that game of top trumps, a game that is won by people placing themselves in the most advantageous boxes. The contest for attention, cries of prejudice and wrong-doing, will be won by the articulate middle class not by more tongue-tied folk like that bloke with the pint in Wetherspoons. The debate will be about the careers of successful, university-educated people rather than how Tyler with two GCSEs and a criminal record gets into a world that isn't dominated by insecure jobs, petty crime, cheap lager and weed. Every now and again, a journalist will stray into Tyler's world (or the closely related world of our friend in Wetherspoons) and those smart, university-educated folk will be shocked for a minute or two before returning to more important things like the gender pay gap, why the media are horrid to Meghan and letting men use ladies loos.

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Silicon Snake Oil (or how data analytics didn't really win it for anyone)

'Twas ever thus....

Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to made big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo.

And right now it suits the political left - in the USA and the UK - to see that 'silicon snake oil' as some sort of darkly sinister plot to undermine democracy. The truth - despite the ever more scary stuff we see from documentaries like 'The Great Hack' - is that, just as ride-sharing disrupts taxi services and Airbnb hotels, social media disrupts the established norms of political communication, norms that said messages from political campaigns to the public are mediated through TV and newspapers.

As Micah Sifry (from who I've taken the quotation above) reminds us:

When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018

We told you so (or rather I was told way back in 1982 before all this Internet malarkey existed) - political campaigning is nearly all about finding people who say they'll support you and getting them to vote. We repeatedly told activists - 'don't waste your time trying to persuade somebody on the doorstep - if they're arguing with you they probably won't be voting for you, get a VI and skedaddle' (or words to that effect). Later on we used profiling and targeting so as to hopefully find more people who say they'll vote for us and spend less time knocking on the doors or ringing the phones of people who won't.

If you're one of those people who think some sort of sinister international cabal is responsible for manipulating thick people into voting for things you don't agree with then you are every bit as thick as those people you consider so stupid they had their minds switched 180 degrees by a Facebook ad. What's happening is that data analytics businesses like Cambridge Analytica - "all hat and no cattle" as one Ted Cruz advisor put it - are trying to exploit the fixed belief that our minds (or rather, other people's minds) are peculiarly persuadable by one particular form of communication, advertising. It's true that advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about what message their consumers want to hear but they also know that, in most markets, the money is best invested in reminding your existing customers what a fantastic choice they made. The same goes for political communications.

There's a quite pervasive idea that political communication should take place in a sort of virtual arena where every voter receives the same information. This, we're told is because targeted communications somehow corrupt democracy by giving Mary a message about animal welfare and Steve a message about hospitals especially if Steve won't see the message Mary gets and vice versa. There's a deal of discussion about 'dog whistles' and hints at sinister subliminal messages. As political parties quickly find out, they are just like consumer brands where sustaining the brand and motivating the consumer is the primary function of communication. What targeting does is to allow the party to talk to Mary about the things that are important to Mary and to connect those interests to the party's programme. But the starting point here is that Mary is more likely than not to vote for that party - if she isn't the communication is mostly wasted.

This is why Cambridge Analytica didn't win anybody anything with its psychological targeting - it's not very effective:

The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA had identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma actually backed other candidates

So next time you watch a slick TV documentary or read a long 'join-the-dots' screed in The Observer or the New York Times, remember that, for all that CA might be sinister, linked to shadowy dark money, what they sold was the data analytics version of the quack doctor's patent cure all.

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Not everyone likes greens - lessons about popular politics from Australia

Not everyone likes greens

Every place is different. We're told this - don't take what's happened in Australia or Texas or Greece as a guide to what might happen in England or Tuscany or Austria. But maybe there is something happening? Here's Tyler Cowen:

Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Cowen frames this in the context of the Australian election where "an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump" won despite every prediction saying the Australian Labor Party with its achingly 'new left' agenda (identity politics, climate change, immigration) were going to win at a canter. Cowen then touches on the Brexit Party and the emerging contests in the early stages of next years presidential elections pointing out a similar pattern. The intellectual agenda may be left wing but politics is not - and politics is what people vote about.

We could equally have seen reference to Salvini's Lega, to the Gilets Jaune in France or to a host of other manifestations of this populist 'new right' - this week's European Parliament elections could see a host (Cowen says up to 35%) of MEPs from these anti-establishment parties. Everywhere we look, we see people sticking two-fingers up at the established parties of the centre left and centre right.

Looking at Australia we begin to see where the problem is for "urban cosmopolitans" - here's urbanist Ross Elliot writing in New Geography:

The denizens of trendy inner city secondhand bookshops may have been filled with confidence, but not of suburban and regional voters. Struggling with flat real wage growth and having borne the brunt of a changing employment landscape, rising electricity bills and falling confidence in their future, this was not the time to tell them it was their duty to sacrifice even more to ‘save the planet’ by paying ever higher electricity bills, or buying an electric car they can’t afford. Especially when that message comes from smug sounding public servants or wealthy, entitled inner city residents who have been the beneficiaries of economic change, as well as overseas investors, rather than its victims.

The climate change warriors organised a convoy to protest against a new coal mine at Adani in central Queensland and got a frosty welcome when they arrived with locals organising a counter protest and stores, petrol stations and restaurants refusing to serve the protestors. This was rural Australia but the same sentiments will be heard is thousands of other places - everywhere but the places inhabited by what Elliot calls "the inner urban elites of government, the bureaucracy, media and industry" - the great and the good.

Telling people who don't think they've enough money that they need to make sacrifices to 'save the planet' is lousy politics yet this is precisely the tone we hear from those who share every one of Greta Thunberg's inane utterings as if they were on golden tablets received from god. Hardly a day passes without another initiative designed to 'save the planet' or 'fight climate change' that mostly acts to add a little more mild irritation into the lives of people who are already mildly irritated. Maybe we do need to ban plastic straws but can we stop pretending it's any sort of vote winning political strategy.

Right now the mainstream of political opinion is more concerned about whether there'll be minimum wage labour from Romania to serve them in Pret, how terrible it is that a very well-paid and wealthy female news presenter is paid slightly less than her male colleague or if they'll have to fill a form in to drive a car in France. These opinion-makers are the sorts who can afford to pay a tax on flying, have the time (or staff) to fuss over recycling and are very keen to ban things that they don't use but disapprove of. And these people really do look down on the proles - here, quoted by Ross Elliot, is Elizabeth Farelly from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

For a long while people hadn't noticed that the great and good didn't like them very much - why would they when their paths seldom crossed. But, with Brexit, with the climate change agenda targeting the less well off, with an identity politics that disdains the working class, people have now noticed. And when it comes to voting those people are going to kick the inner urban elite's snobbery right in the ballot box.

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Roger Scruton, for all he calls himself conservative, is just another reactionary

What too many folk think conservatism is about

 Yet again, we are allowing people who are not conservatives to frame a definition of conservatism that is essentially reactionary. This problem is not helped, I think by reactionaries who define themselves as conservatives.

I suddenly realized I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.

Roger Scruton, beginning with this entirely reactionary statement, has become for some the acme of modern conservative thought, a definitional bulwark of resistance to those who want (by inference) to destroy 'western civilization'. I consider this definition of conservatism - as somehow peculiar to western culture - deeply troubling and, as sure as night follows day, such a definition leads to racism. Not that I think Scruton is a racist but rather that his words, the focus on a perceived superiority of that 'western civilization', valorise the idea that other races and places are somehow less good - inferior.

The reason I began with a concern I've expressed before - that non-conservatives are allowed to define conservatism - is because it gives tendentious left-wing writers like Jonathan Portes the space to create a definition of conservatism founded on reaction rather than preservation. People such as Scruton - and Enoch Powell, another reactionary who did immense damage to the conservative idea - are caught in the myth that there's a unique superiority to the thread of thinking running from what they call classical civilisation - Greece and Rome - through to a comfortable leather chair in a book-lined Oxford study.

It's not that Scruton has nothing to say or even that he should not be appointed to an unpaid public position - it's entirely clear that the New Statesman set out to get him and achieved that aim - but rather that, if the only conservative thinking we can find is from antediluvian and reactionary writers then our movement has a problem. If our ideas are defined solely by a fear of the barbarians - Muslims, Marxists, enemies of civilisation - at our gates, if we have nothing positive to say then we stop being conservatives and become mere reactionaries trapped in a sort of cultural Rorke's Drift.

The central ideas of conservatism - stability, family, community, personal responsibility, duty, a sense of place - are not peculiar to western civilisation but have been features of human society since its beginnings. Those ideas are just as familiar to people in China, Angola, Arabia or Java as they are in England or France, they are not off-shoots of 'judeo-christian' traditions (it's striking that we say this rather than 'People of the Book' because that would mean us recognising Muslims as part of the same tradition).

When we - conservatives - are asked the question 'what are you conserving', we need an answer that isn't about race, religion or culture but rather is about the things that led to the betterment of our lives. Crucially, this means that we must distance ourselves from reactionary politics so as to allow us to make common cause with others who see the truth - that it's an open society, free markets and a strong bourgeoisie that need preserving. And that, when the left define us as reactionaries, they push us into their cultural camp - opposed to choice and liberty, in favour of limits, restrictions, controls and the domination of a government elite. Where we differ from classical liberals is in believing that community, family and allegiance to place are things that need preserving too.

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