"There is little money, and they are desperate" - much of British farming isn't viable, you don't change this with regulation or protectionism

And yes, I have a beef with the intensive end of my industry, with its beak-clipping, tail-docking, permanent ‘in-housing’, zero-grazing, nitrogen-spewing, Frankenstein cattle-making, prophylactic antibiotic-dosing ways. Raising of livestock in this fashion is not farming, because it abjures any sense of husbandry. It is senseless, inhumane Fordian food-production of ‘units’. Also, the produce from such factory systems, be it milk, meat or eggs, is tasteless, in every sense. I do, however, have sympathy for the managers — not farmers — of these agri-factories. There is little money, and they are desperate.

Reading John Lewis-Stempel's moving piece about farming, I was struck by the last sentence of this little tirade. Lewis-Stempel started his article with a description of shooting a dying sheep and how this started him thinking that we need to change how we farm if livestock farming is to survive. I don't have to share Lewis-Stempel's view of intensive farming to get that, for a lot of UK farmers, it's not a business in any meaningful sense of that word - especially sheep farming.

I remember on a walk near Dent in what is now Cumbria us following the path through a small farmyard where we met a man shearing sheep. Like you do we stopped for a chat and discovered he was doing his own shearing because the cost of employing a professional shearing team meant he'd lose money on every fleece. Even doing the job himself wasn't a guarantee of a return.

This was a man who probably works harder than near everyone you know, hard physical labour in an unforgiving environment to get us products - wool, lamb chops - that we all take for granted (and probably when we look at the cost of that Pure English Wool jumper, is a cause for a little whistle at the price). The average sheep farmer earns about £6,000 a year - way below the minimum wage - from the actual business of rearing, shearing and slaughtering sheep. The whole industry in the UK is only sustained because of working tax credits and government farm support. And since the last round of CAP reforms most of that farm support goes to the landowner - most sheep farmers are tenants.

I wrote a little piece called 'Life on the Farm' inspired by seeing the hill farmers I used to represent as a councillor, mostly old men, none of them rich and all into their seventies working the sorts of hours most of us would consider exploitation - all for a pittance:

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We like to blame a bunch of faceless things for this problem - the government, the supermarkets, international trade, the EU, banks - but the painful truth is that the real problem is us whistling as we see the price. As with so much else we look at the ticket on the shelf or the tag on the hanger and make no connection to the costs involved in getting that product into our hands. So the result - mostly beneficial but sometimes problematic - is intensification, industrialisation and a farming industry that bears no resemblance to the ruddy-faced, bucolic image presented by Countryfile or the collection of celebrity farmers sustained well enough by their media income that the loss making hill farm doesn't matter.

The question of farming and farm standards has, as these things do, arisen in the context of us leaving the EU (with its preference for subsidising landowners over supporting farmers) and entering into a new world of international trade agreements with strange places like the USA. And the chosen battleground of those who didn't want to leave the EU is factory farming - an interesting choice of battle given how much of that industrial livestock production goes on in the EU:

Denmark is a mere 16.5 thousand square miles and produces between 25 to 28 million pigs each year from about 5000 pig farms. For the most part they are kept in what the EU euphemistically calls ‘zero hectare’ farms. Denmark is not alone in this; in France, despite having the largest landmass in the EU, the proportion of pig meat produced by zero hectare farms increased from 31% in 2004 to 64% in 2016, while the proportion of chicken meat rose from 11% to 28% between 2004 and 2016.

According to Eurostat, the number of zero hectare farms in the EU grew by 31%, from 164 000 to 214 000 between 2013 and 2016. At a zero hectare farm, animals are kept indoors and are fed with harvested fodder, or a concentrated diet of grain, soy, and other supplements because according to the EU; ‘farms raising granivores (pigs and poultry) do not necessarily need agricultural land’

Yet we are told by trendy London restaurant PRs, by those media-friendly hobby farmers, and of course by the protectionist National Farmers Union, that free trade with the USA in agriculture would mean indulging a host of really bad practices that undermine the standards of UK production. Forgive me if I call bullshit on this one (unless that is the hobby farmers and restaurant PRs want to abolish UK factory farming). Britain produces about 70% of the chicken it eats (nearly 900 million birds since you ask) - I watch the wagons roll into my village every day, their plastic crates rammed with those birds, ready for slaughtering in our little factory:

UK Chicken farms still abide by EU farming regulations. 90% of UK chickens will be raised at the UK’s minimum standard of 19 birds per square meter, the UK Red Tractor Standard. However ‘extensive indoor (barn-reared)’, the lower of the three higher welfare production standards, is only slightly better at 15 birds per square metre. That is three rows of five birds in every square metre. This maybe fine when they are chicks but when fully grown they would be still be unable to turn around. There is no maximum number of birds in a ‘barn raised’ shed and there is no requirement for the birds to spend any time outside the shed. But as they can be slaughtered after eight weeks, this overcrowding may not be for very long.

So when people decry US standards on the back of a single documentary and a petition, they ignore the reality of the 'high' UK standards since that would mean confronting those painful truths about our farming set out by Lewis-Stempel in his article. And we aren't going to do this, however much folk like Lewis-Stempel wax lyrical about "Medievalist ethical carnivorism". Partly such views represent the growing conservative bucolia, a postmodernist rejection of city life - more for its whizziness than from disposing of its economic power, but mostly it's a convenient tool for the protectionist to secure support for limits, bans, tariffs and restrictions.

As Lewis-Stempel concluded, "(t)here is little money, and they are desperate." But is this a justification for imposing an idealist and elitist view of farming ("Medievalist ethical carnivorism") on consumers? An approach that, while making little difference to those of us with the means to afford expensive meat, condemns many to a largely meat-free life - not from choice but by the economic cost of protectionism. So far the government has resisted the imposition of essentially arbitrary limitations to choice but the widespread support for protectionism ("we care for animals", "the climate", "environmental protection", "British farmers") still threatens to impose less choice and more cost on the majority of consumers.

If Lewis-Stempel wants to produce wool and lamb in accordance with a somewhat rose-tinted view of how medieval peasants produced these things then that's fine (is that the sound of ironic peasant laughter I hear echoing down the years at the idea that they ate less meat from choice rather than poverty). Make the case, create a market - if you find enough people who'll pay for your myth-made lamb steaks then great. But don't seek to impose these changes on the rest of us, don't seek to regulate cheap food out of existences and stop indulging the NFU and its protectionist mission to enrich its members at the cost of British consumers.

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Politicians are terrified - that's why they're so keen on regulating the web

Politicians are terrified. Really they are and it explain a great deal about today's politics. And also why those politicians are so keen to regulate content online:

We’ve all been watching this develop for years now: the internet is being slow-choked, not by rapacious ISPs forcing users to pay for “fast lanes,” but by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who want to have a bigger role in what we’re allowed to do and say online.

"You're really publishers," say those politicians to platforms filled with user generated content. This is, until heavy hints changed things, a complete fiction. A publisher controls - from start to finish - the content of the publication, nothing arrives in front of the reader's eyes or the listener's ears without having been subject to editorial control. So when I post a Tweet, I'm the publisher not Twitter.

And this is why politicians are so scared. They thought they knew where they were with the media - it was limited, they knew the editors and journalists, saw them most days, took them out for dinner, even shagged them. Now it's not like that- there are literally millions of micro-publishers all with the potential power to take one of those politicians down. The game has changed, power has shifted and the politicians want it shifting back.

As some folk point out, some of the big tech oligarchs - Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook - are keen to work with politicians in a ghastly Faustian pact to allow regulatory control but not enough to really damage the tech businesses, just enough to make it really hard for new competitors to challenge the market position of Facebook and Apple. But then, especially in the USA (Europe essentially has no tech industry worth mentioning unless you like legacy corporate IT architecture), these tech moguls are political players - their money, their platforms, their influence will be a big part in who challenges Trump.

Plenty of justifications are rolled out for regulation - trolls, children, fake news, anonymity, racism, misogyny and homophobia. But these things, for all their shock factor, are convenient handholds for the politicians to latch onto in justifying regulation intended to sustain the current political structures, to protect existing politicians, and to make it harder for challenger ideas to get purchase and exercise influence.

I don't think the bureaucrats, legacy media, and establishment politicians will win this - at least in the long run, but the push for regulation will damage the economy, will restrict free speech and will make it harder to do what the web has done best, speak truth to power. You all should resist.

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The housing problem summed up...

This is from Wendell Cox at New Geography (and Demographia):

Middle-income households are increasingly unable to afford middle-income housing, because their prices have been driven up by excessive regulation. More households are added to the queue for subsidized housing, as they can no longer afford the market rate housing that has increased so much in price. With this demand, induced by excessive regulation, its governments typically have long waiting lists for subsidized housing. It is not surprising that homelessness is increasing in this environment. When people must pay more for housing relative to their incomes, they have less for other goods and services. This explains how California, home to some of the world’s greatest wealth, is also home to the highest poverty rate among the 50 states when housing costs are considered.

Cox is writing about the USA but, as the evidence shows, other places - Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK - are just as bad:



The answer is to build more houses that people want to live in - not pokey flats in tower blocks, not 'micro-homes', not 21st century council houses but family homes with gardens, y'know: suburbs.

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Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

...almost none is a disaster. Here's the House of Lords on Artificial Intelligence:

“These principles do come to life a little bit when you think about the Cambridge Analytica situation,” he told the Guardian. “Whether or not the data analytics they carried out was actually using AI … It gives an example of where it’s important that we do have strong intelligibility of what the hell is going on with our data.”

The HoL (or one of its committees) has published a call for regulation of AI because of scary foreign monopolies:

In a wide-ranging report, the committee has identified a number of threats that mismanagement of AI could bring to Britain. One concern is of the creation of “data monopolies”, large multinational companies – generally American or Chinese, with Facebook, Google and Tencent all named as examples – with such a grip on the collection of data that they can build better AI than anyone else, enhancing their grip on the data sources and creating a virtuous cycle that renders smaller companies and nations unable to compete.

It's not at all clear as to whether the committee's concern is data collection and use (for which we have the new GDPR regulations and the Information Commissioner) or artificial intelligence. They produce a vague set of 'principles' (including one lifted straight from 'I Robot' - one wonders whether they read the book) and then present the standard response of fussbuckets:

“Of course, if in due course people are not observing these ethical principles and the regulator thinks that their powers are inadequate, then there may be a time down the track that we need to rethink this.”

Ah. "Nice AI you have there, would like to see it damaged"!

Judging from the principles, the nonsense about Cambridge Analytica and the threat of unspecified regulation, what we have here is the classic approach of the ignorant - "I've never tried it but I don't like it" - combined with regulatory authority - "we don't know what it does so we'd better stop it just in case". And if you don't think they're ignorant, suck on this...

“We want there to be an open market in AI, basically, and if all that happens is we get five or six major AI systems and you have to belong to one of them in order to survive in the modern world, well, that would be something that we don’t want to see.”

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Everything wrong with planning in one paragraph...

This is California but don't let's pretend it's any better here in England:

Mandatory parking requirements, sidewalks, curb cuts, fire lanes, on site stormwater management, handicapped accessibility, draught tolerant native plantings… It’s a very long list that totaled $340,000 worth of work. They only paid $245,000 for the entire property. And that’s before they even started bringing the building itself up to code for their intended use. Guess what? They decided not to open the bakery or brewery. Big surprise.

Sanphillippo goes on to cite example after examle of how planning and regulatory codes stop things from happening - leaving unused buildings slowly rotting in valueless environments because fancy urban experts wandered round pretending that there's some magical value in those buildings that aren't being used, won't get used and will stay empty unless you get creative and flexible.

I'm in Bradford. This is half our problem.

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Grenfell Tower: some writings

These are a set of sensibly written and essentially non-partisan pieces on the Grenfell disaster. I feel it's necessary to do this so we get away from wanting everybody's head on a stick before we've got to grips with what actually happened. This matters to me because I'm on the board of a housing association with 30 or so high rise blocks.

Airlines show safety and profit go hand in hand. Let's not learn the wrong lessons from Grenfell.

"The aviation industry may be highly competitive but it is also tightly regulated and permeated by a culture that views safety as paramount. Such is the sector’s success that a report last year found that the number of annual fatalities almost halved over two decades while the number of global flight hours more than doubled"

Grenfell Tower fire: Should this cladding be allowed?

From the technical editor of Building Magazine - so may be better informed than some commentary.

The terrible and sudden spread of the fire at the west London tower this week has raised questions about whether ACM cladding should be permitted on high-rise residential towers

Is Grenfell Tower a monument to the death of the ethos of public service?

Tessa Shepperson at Landlord Law Blog knows here stuff - this is a little polemical but raises some interesting points such as one that is a warning for Tenant Management Organisations:

There seems to be a general tenancy nowadays, in all fields, for people to disrespect knowledge and experience and assume that people with no knowledge and no experience can – with advice – do as good a job as the experts.

Tenants are just tenants, they aren't buildings management experts.

To blame “Evil Tories” is to miss the point spectacularly…

In which we learn that regulation of privately rented properties is quite a bit stricter than that of state housing:

A programme of inspections takes place to tackle high-risk HMOs to ensure that means of escape and adequate fire safety measures are in place and to identify unlicensed HMOs.

There is an overlapping fire safety responsibility between the Council and the London Fire Brigade (LFB). Owners are required to carry out a fire risk assessment and make an emergency plan. The fire risk assessment is a systematic examination of the premises to identify the hazards from fire which must be recorded.

The Grenfell High-Rise Fire: A Litany of Failures?

From Wendell Cox in New Geography - so a US perspective:

Worse, in a larger sense, the Grenfell fire may turn out to be one of the world's great planning disasters.

And from blogger Tim Newman:

I have no idea what the philosophy was in the Grenfell Tower, but it should have been to get everyone out ASAP in the event of a fire: you hear the alarm, everyone evacuates, the firemen turn up to see what’s what. From what I’m hearing, people believed they should stay in their apartments because the flats were designed to contain fires, or something like that. Even if they were designed to contain fires, you should still evacuate. Yes, it’s a pain in the arse standing in the carpark in your pyjamas at 1am, but it’s better than burning to death.

Suggests there's a need to review fire safety advice (staying put is pretty standard advice)

Or another well-informed blogger, Raedwald:

Around 6am, 5am UK time, last Wednesday morning I started watching Grenfell Tower burning. It was clear from the footage that the fire progressed on the outside of the building. "Cladding" I said to my plumber. A bit of digging about found the portfolio pics on the website of Studio E architects, of Tooley Street; they confirmed that an aluminium sandwich panel was specified.

There's still a way to go on this disaster. One thing that needs some urgent attention is the lack of preparedness from the Council. This echoes for us in Bradford since the Council completely failed in its response to serious flooding on Boxing Day 2015 - less serious for sure but a failure nonetheless. Is this pretty standard for Councils? Are we not ready for disaster - whether its a big fire, a flood, an outbreak of disease or a hurricane?

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You can't have different rules for trendy social enterprises - however noble their mission

About four years ago a chap called Adam Smith set up the Real Junk Food Project:

We are a revolutionary concept designed to challenge and highlight the issues of food waste while creating inclusive environments where everyone is welcome. Consisting of cafés, outside catering, events, Sharehouse’s and Fuel For School, we use the Pay As You Feel Concept to utilise surplus food, educate the general public and campaign against global issues that food waste creates.

We intercept surplus food from a wide range of places including supermarkets, restaurants, wholesalers, food banks, food photographers and using common sense and decades of experience make a judgement on whether the food is fit for human consumption.

In a world where the default response of the environmentally-concerned is to shout at government and organise meetings, Adam Smith stands out as one of those people who just went and did something. Rather than ask government to spend taxpayers money he and his colleagues walked head-on towards the regulations and management practices that encourage food waste. This is both admirable and innovative and has my support.

There is, however, a problem because Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers (“FIC”) confirms that:

...it remains an offence to place food with an expired ‘use by’ date on the market and if such food is discovered then it must automatically be deemed unsafe. This is not a rebuttable presumption.

Yesterday the news broke that the Real Junk Food Project was under investigation by West Yorkshire Trading Standards:

West Yorkshire Trading Standards (WYTSS) said it found more than 400 items past their use-by date at the RJFP warehouse on the Grangefield Estate in Pudsey.

A letter sent to RJFP states 444 items, which were a cumulative total of 6,345 days past the use-by dates, were discovered.

The regulations, at least as I see them, seem pretty unequivocal and WYTSS had little choice but to conduct an investigation indeed failing to do so might be seen as failing in its duty. And WYTSS is clearly not singling out the Real Junk Food Project - here is a successful prosecution from May 2017:

A supermarket owner has been ordered to pay more than £20,000 in fines and costs for selling items of food up to nearly 50 days over their use-by date.

Trading Standards made a routine visit to Shimla Superstore Ltd, in Clayton Road, Bradford, on September 13 last year and discovered 88 items available for sale past their use-by date.

Of these, five items of a turkey product with olives were 48 days out of date.

When added together, the total number of days past the use-by date for all 88 items was 1,769.

It is clear that trading standards cannot make a distinction between a project such as the Real Junk Food Project set up with noble motives and a straightforward food retailer. This doesn't mean that RJFP doesn't have a defence - Adam Smith is, as he says, an experienced chef - but does ask the question as to whether the absolute nature of the regulation in question needs challenge.

If we are to improve the efficiency in which we use food resources (there's a debate to be had about this but, for now, let's assume this is a great idea and that efficiency is defined by how little is thrown away) then the way in which food safety regulations are applied probably needs questioning. At the heart of all this is where responsibility rests - with the consumer or with the manufacturer. In essence this is the same debate as that about raw milk cheese - if you go to, for example, to The Courtyard Dairy at Settle, they'll ask you whether you're OK with cheese made from unpasteurised milk as this provides them cover since the consumer is accepting the risk (as far as I know this wouldn't work in Scotland).

Others will doubtless pour over the laws involved here and quite rightly so. There will be calls for changes to the regulations (England's regulations on raw milk are, for example, far less stringent than those in Scotland) although, so long as we're members of the EU, this is a slow, torturous and contested process. But in the end, regulatory agencies such as trading standards and the Food Standards Agency cannot have regard to the mission of the organisation breaching the regulations regarding, in this case, the sale or use of products passed their 'use by' date.

What I hope is that this debate questions the manner in which 'use by' dates are applied by food manufacturers. There is a petition raised which again lifts the debate from the mundane pages of council committee reports or the shock-horror of local paper reporting but we have to accept that in a complex food distribution system and a dynamic market regulations exist to protect consumers. And that this applies just as much to trendy social enterprises as it does to huge supermarket chains. The regulations we have didn't arise to promote food waste (I'm sure food manufacturers and retailers would prefer more scope and less waste) but were introduced to protect consumers from the health risks associated with old, poorly-stored and/or damaged food.

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If we can't charge for park runs, what is the point of a local council?

Yesterday lots of people were running around smiling because of an announcement from the Government:

Councils in England will be banned from charging people to take part in weekend fun runs under rules being proposed by the government.

Free events, organised by the Parkrun group to encourage fitness, attract thousands of runners on 5km courses (3 miles) in parks across the country.

A parish council near Bristol last year proposed charging entrants £1 each, citing the cost of upkeep of paths.

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

Except it doesn't really. I thought through the things we do as a local council - care for the elderly, look after the disabled, protect children, fix the roads, collect your rubbish, pick up the litter you drop, provide parks and hundreds of other services large and small. In every case the degree of genuine local control gets less and less each passing year. Our care services are determined by central government means tests, our children's services by national legislation and the threat of intervention, highways maintenance by centrally determined capital programmes, waste management by onerous EU regulations and, now it seems, Government wants to decide through legislation what we can and cannot do with the parks we manage.

Councils do a pretty good job - amidst a load of criticism - in administering the services we're asked to administer. And local councillors mostly do a great job (especially the Conservative ones) of helping people negotiate the nonsense of bureaucracy. We also provide a reality check on the innate daftness of government administrators. But these days our decision making is more and more limited to how we administer services within central government rules and trying to keep going the small number of non-statutory services such as allowing people to organise running round the park on a Sunday morning.

The park run case is about a council making a tricky decision about its budget. And then seeing a national organisation lobby central government to take away that council's right to make that tricky decision. So tell me, what is the point of a local council?

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Embracing disruption - why our approach to housing and transport regulation has to change

On the face of it, it's a good news story. Clever architects in Alabama have reimagined the house so it can be built for just $20,000. They're only small, not really so very different from that icon of American living space, the trailer, but these houses do represent some sort of progress.

Until of course you speak to a city planner, a banker, an insurance company. Then there's a problem:

"The most daunting problems aren't brick and mortar problems, they're these network and system problems that are threaded together and all intersect in the built environment," he says. "We're able to attack all these problems simultaneously—when we see a lever over here and wiggle it, we can very clearly see the implication it has on other systems down the road."

The barrier to, in this case, housing affordability isn't the prosaic task of building a home but rather the collection of systems, regulations, controls and vested interests that have grown up in our sophisticated societies. All of those systems of control exist for a good reason - in the case of housing they make sure that what's built is safe, doesn't harm neighbours, protects heritage and has regard to the environment. Looking at building codes (or regulations as us Brits calls them - for once using a longer word than US bureaucrats) each element, whether it's about wiring, pipes or the depth of foundations was purposive, put there to ensure safety or quality. The problem is that these codes are (because to work they have to be) inflexible - if it says something has to be 3-5mm then it has to be 3-5mm even if technology now means it only has to be 1-1.5mm.

"They're built more like airplanes than houses, which allows us to have them far exceed structural requirements. ... We're using material much more efficiently. But the problem is your local code official doesn't understand that. They look at the documents, and the house is immediately denied a permit simply because the code officials didn't understand it."

The issue here - and it's a significant one given the current rate of technological change, much of it disruptive - is that regulatory reform is a slow and painful process filled with all sorts of obstacles. It took the UK government three years to conduct a review of housing standards that didn't even touch the core of building regulations (although it did prevent local councils dreaming up their own 'tougher' regulations especially around environmental standards).

None of this is to suggest that regulation isn't a good idea but rather to recognise that technological change moves faster than regulatory reform and that often the barriers to that reform are as much about protecting the current systems (and those who profit from them) as they are about ensuring safety and environmental protection. Although I've been talking about housebuilding, the same issues apply to other targets of technological disruption such as taxis, hotels and retail distribution - the regulatory environment is captured by the business and their public sector 'clients'.

Here's an example from Barcelona:

Like other big tourist destinations around the world (for example Berlin and San Francisco), Barcelona is struggling to cope with the influx of millions of tourists each year, many of them staying in short-term rental accommodation, which the local authorities say causes community strife, encourages speculation, and prices locals out of the city by driving up housing costs and limiting the supply of homes for rent.

Pretty straightforward - the city government in the Catalan capital is acting to prevent that community strive and guard against unaffordability. It isn't anything to do with collecting taxes or protecting the interests of existing providers. After all there's a housing shortage in Barcelona?

Barcelona has 283,155 vacant homes, 11% of the total, and 311,653 rented homes, 17.8%, while the defaults on leases have grown by 22.7% compared to the previous study, to stand at an average of 12,897 euros.

So, while rents in Barcelona are sky high and they're clamping down on Airbnb, there are quarter of a million empty homes. This isn't to have a go at Barcelona but rather to illustrate how protecting systems (precisely what that city's left wing mayor says she isn't doing) results in protection of existing interests - in this case hotel owners and landlords of high-priced city centre property.

Our problem is that what we already have in place - in its widest sense, infrastructure - is either vulnerable to digital disruption or else prevents that disruption taking place. And because the regulatory systems track that infrastructure and are difficult to change, other places without such constraints (or with autocratic governments) are able to move more quickly. Worse still, and this is very evident in housing and transport, those profiting from the existing system - or persuaded by politicians that its loss will harm them as we've seen in Barcelona - agitate for extending regulations to capture or prevent disruptive technology.

The new technologies - all that disruptive digital stuff especially - will eventually succeed because they meet consumer demand for things such as cheaper travel and accommodation. What's missing from our regulatory response is a preference for embracing that disruption. Instead, we seek out reasons not to allow a $20,000 house, a cheaper and safer form of taxi or a flexible low-cost means to stay in otherwise unaffordable places. And, as those empty homes in expensive Barcelona attest, our housing markets are crying out for disruption. All our zoning, building codes and planning rules act to prevent this change - making the land, the materials and the labour more expensive and forcing us to spend further billions in incentives and subsidy to stop the whole thing falling over again.

In Bradford we've acres of inner city 'development' land that's mostly just sitting there mouldering. We know there's demand - one local organisation had over 200 enquiries for a handful of new build properties for sale (but no buyers as once you've paid for the land and built the house the price is too high) - but the way we build and the cost of land makes it uneconomic. New approaches such as that $20,000 Alabama house or the prospect of 3D printed homes could work on this land if we purchased it and cleared it - perhaps that would be a better use of Community Infrastructure Levy and affordable housing commuted sums that sticking it into the existing system of housing development.

To make this work - and to make future transport systems work too - we need to design flexibility into regulatory systems allowing greater discretion for individual regulators. We also need to stop doubling-down on failed systems whether it's Barcelona's approach to holiday lets or Palo Alto's crazy planning system. The first question should be 'does this make most people's lives better' not 'can I find someone who doesn't like it' and to create regulations to match when the answer to that first question is 'yes'.

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Vaping in Bradford. Why the Council voted down a more liberal approach.

Last week Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors voted down a motion I submitted to Bradford Council calling for a 'vaping friendly city'. This motion set out how Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians had described vaping as "at least 95%" safer than smoking and argued that we should be more positive about e-cigarettes as an effective aid to quitting smoking. The proposed resolution was to conduct a review of current policies with a view to being more open to vaping in public places.

Now the dust has settled I thought I'd share with you the main reasons given by those voting down the motion (other than the real reason for Labour's opposition - this was a Tory motion and we don't vote for Tory motions). This is from memory but I think captures the essence of the debate - supporters of vaping will be very familiar with the arguments.

1. "But 5% of something very harmful is still harmful"

2. "People don't like the smell of vaping - and what about asthmatics?"

3. "There isn't enough evidence that vaping isn't harmful."

4. "We've got used to people not smoking in offices, this is a step backwards."

5. "The flavours smell horrible and are targeted a children."

6. "Here's an opinion piece from the British Medical Journal that says vaping doesn't help people quit

7. "There's no evidence that liberalising rules on vaping encourages people to switch"

We then got three very specific arguments.

8. "It would confuse people because our neighbouring authorities have different policies."

9. "We don't have to lead, to fly the flag, all the time, we don't have to do this."

10. "Officers in public health* are too busy to conduct a review."

*Bradford spends best part of a million quid on smoking cessation.

And finally

11. "We should be talking about more important things for the District than vaping."

It was a pretty depressing episode. I've learnt that, even with a pretty modest motion asking that officers look at our approach to vaping, the controlling Labour group will vote stuff down - "Not-Invented-Here Syndrome" I call it and this combines with a knee-jerk tribalism ("must be a bad idea if the Tories are proposing it") to make it hard to make progress.

Where we go from here I'm not sure. Putting another motion to Council won't work and I'd already tried approaching public health and the council's HR department directly (they chose not to reply). We've made - and will continue to make - the case through the press. Maybe Bradford's vapers are happy to muddle through with a mish-mash of different attitudes towards what they do. And perhaps public health (and Labour councillors) are happy to conflate smoking and vaping because it suits their disdain for what seems like a decidedly working-class habit.

In the end any change will only come through the 20,000 or so Bradford vapers putting pressure on the Council to change. Right now I've gone as far as I can take it.

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Scribblings VI: Old lags, metaphysics, arts funding, pubs and public health

Trying to keep up with assorted Scribblers is challenging and this is a selection that tries to avoid stuff about the US Presidential Elections, Brexit and the leadership of the Labour Party. Not that these things are unimportant but that they've a tendency to crowd out other stuff that's just as interesting (and maybe important).

On the latter point, this post from Anna Raccoon is definitely important - what do we do with elderly and ill (even terminally ill) prisoners?

The number of older prisoners in the UK has more than doubled in the last decade, with the greatest increases amongst those over 70. Around 40% of older prisoners are sex offenders, many of whom are in prison for the first time due to historic abuse. Longer sentences and more stringent release criteria mean that increasing numbers of ‘anticipated deaths’ in prison are predicted.

Fascinating - especially the issues with painkilling drugs (most of which are, from a different angle, narcotics).

Meanwhile the Flaxen Saxon is getting all metaphysical:

Philosophers as far back as Plato (see the allegory of the cave) have reasoned that what we perceive is not reality. With the advent of computers and especially the stupendous increase in computing power, we have to ask ourselves- are we part of a huge computer simulation? Sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? Perhaps, but there are serious professional physicists and philosophers out there who consider the concept not only plausible, but likely. And no, these folk are not inmates of a secure mental health facility, they are, in the main, tenured academics.

As I commented on the blog - all reminds me of Brian Aldiss's 'Report on Probability A'. Which rather takes us to that age old question as to whether we can, in the manner of Azimov's 'psychohistory' break everything down into equations, algorithms and metrics. As Demetrius asks in talking about arts funding:

So many of us ask for the arts to have some funding and support to ensure their survival and continuance in a difficult world. Now it seems that this can only be if extensive management is applied to the distribution and assessment of those which are being assisted.

Having just re-read Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We' (written in 1921 as a critique of Taylorism but banned by the Soviets as it applies as well to Scientific Marxism) it's clear that this breaking down of everything into numbers and measurements remains a challenge to civilisation.

Indeed there's a part of this problem displayed in the endeavours of public health to use science to promote their rather joyless ideology of wellbeing. And both Frank Davis and Paul Barnes pick up on this. First Paul on Stop Smoking Services (SSS) and e-cigs:

This is where I begin to have a niggly problem with SSS. I don’t knock the work they do, but nine times out of ten when a positive article appears in the press there is always this cessation approach – the “they can help you quit smoking” – type line. Broadly speaking that statement is true, but e-cigarettes are substantially more than just a bloody quit aid.

And Frank on 'junk food':

My conclusion is that “junk food” is perfectly good food, but “disapproved food”. It’s food that’s been labelled as “junk”, and most likely libelled as “junk”. And there is no rhyme or reason for this disapproval, much like there is no rhyme or reason for the disapproval of everything else the disapprovers disapprove.

Only approved pleasures are allowed, citizen!

But we like pubs, of course. Pubs are about community - wholesome, clean, caring community. And we should save them. Old Mudgie takes issue with this simple mantra as promoted by Greg Mulholland MP:

Now, I recognise that pubs can have a value as community resources that transcends narrow financial considerations, and that ACV listings, if properly applied, can give them a valuable stay of execution if they are threatened. I’d also support pubs being given protection from being turned into shops or offices without needing planning permission, subject to a reasonable minimum time limit of trading as pub.

But it has to be accepted that society changes and moves on over time, and that most of the current issues around planning and redevelopment are symptoms of the general decline in the demand for pubs, not its cause.

The idea - as Mulholland has promoted in Otley - that every single pub (there are over 20 in Otley) merits protection is hard to defend. Helping locals save the only village pub is a great idea but using planning and regulation as a stick to beat PubCos really won't work if the pub isn't viable in the first place.

Perhaps, if we're concerned about community, we need to ask about how councils, police and fire services are stopping local events unless they pay up or provide their own security (at great cost). Here's Julia:

So....what's happened here is the council get to shrug their shoulders and say 'Toree cutz, mate, innit?' Because that's easier than changing the event into something more manageable.

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The new vaping regulations are wrong. We shouldn't introduce them next month.

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I could turn this post into something of a rant about the iniquity of the EU and all its works. After all the new vaping regulations are contained in the 2015 Tobacco Products Directive (TPD for short) steered through the European Parliament by Yorkshire MEP Linda McAven and then ignorantly - quite literally as she'd no idea what she was voting on - agreed to by the UK's Public Health Minister (then Anna Soubry MP) at the Council of Ministers. In the latter case after the amendments removing some of the anti-vaping provisions of the TPD were ignored by the European Commission in its recommendations to that Council.

But given there's a debate about our membership of the EU going on out there, I'm going to hold fire on all that for another post nearer the June 23 referendum date. Instead I think that the UK Government has sufficient grounds - evidential grounds - for saying to the European Commission and our EU partners that it would be a mistake to enact the regulations. Not only does the UK Government have the independent report produced by Public Health England that demonstrated how vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking but today we also have a comprehensive report from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) building on this evidence:

The RCP report, published yesterday, acknowledged the need for proportionate regulation but said rules should not be allowed to significantly inhibit the development and use of harm-reduction products, such as e-cigarettes.

The RCP said the long-term negative effects from vaping were ‘unlikely to exceed 5% of the harm from smoking tobacco’.

The regulations under the TPD - bans on advertising, product strength limits, volume controls for e-liquids and an onerous product approval process - in effect put e-cigarettes into the same position as smoking with the result that smaller producers and many retailers of vaping products will simply close. Only the biggest producers and the e-cigarette brands owned by tobacco companies will be able to survive. Vaping is, in effect, denormalised in the same manner that public health has approached the control of smoking. It's true that vaping will still be cheaper (although the EU is discussing imposing taxes on vaping products) but it will no longer have a visible high street presence as a much safer alternative to smoking.

The Government should simply say to the EU that the evidence is that, while the TPD as a whole will benefit public health, it would be even more of a benefit if vaping was allowed to develop freely as an alternative to smoking. Indeed the Department for Health's own impact assessment says just this:

Its impact assessment (pdf) on EU rules to be enshrined in UK law also acknowledges that higher costs for e-cigarette manufactures could lead to price increases and reduction of choice for consumers, leading people to switch back to smoking, which public health experts regard as far more dangerous.

It recognises too that regulations might create new barriers for small- and medium-sized companies, a concern that comes as public health doctors warned of possible consequences from tobacco giants becoming more involved in making e-cigarettes.

The TPD effectively leaves the vaping market to be captured by large companies able to deal with the cost of approval and regulation, which amounts to capture by either or both of the pharmaceuticals industry or big tobacco companies (far be it from me to suggest that this might just explain the enormous investment from these two sectors in lobbying the EU, MEPs and Governments over the TPD). This is not in the interests of public health, small businesses trading legally now but unable to once the regulations arrive or the two-and-a-half million former smokers now getting pleasure from vaping.

I hold out little hope here. But it would be a sensible government that saw when something is wrong and changed what it is doing accordingly.

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We are reminded that unions are not in the consumer interest

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Izabella Kaminska - whose trendy lefty ignorance we've touched on before - says that the good folk who drive cabs for Uber need to unionise:

In the first instance, the Uber drivers working on these systems aim to withdraw supply en masse if rates go below their average break-even rates exposing customers to surge pricing more regularly. But the aim eventually is to gain collective bargaining power against Uber in all sorts of worker-rights disputes.

The point that Izabella is making revolves around here belief that Uber has too many (or rather allows for there to be too many) drivers or "ignoring the law of supply and demand" as she ignorantly puts it.

...Uber doesn’t really care about how many drivers are in the market at any particular time because the company is more concerned about taking a commission linked to total utilised capacity than ensuring supply and demand is ever properly matched. Nor do customers care about market imbalances since they are the temporary beneficiaries of the app’s arguably unsustainable cost structures.

The solution is for the drivers to unionise and to use this 'collective bargaining' to force Uber to place a limit on the number of drivers in any given taxi market. The argument for this this limit isn't consumer interest but a belief that somehow Uber's drivers are a special case in the 'being-exploited' stakes. And that this will happen:

The fundamental truth being ignored in the “sharing economy” is that exploited labour always wises up. That open-ended supply markets always form licensed communities to protect jobs and minimum wages. That unregulated markets inevitably self-regulate from the bottom up. And that workers always have an interest in aggregating and sharing the cost of risk and insurance between them, which is ultimately factored into the cost of service.

Or as Adam Smith put it:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”.

Indeed this is entirely what has happened in taxi markets - taxi operators and drivers, aided and abetted by local or national government, has placed expensive barriers in the way of market entry. And one of those contrivances - those conspiracies against the public - is the union. For the entire purpose of the union is to improve the lot of its members. For all the noble purposes laid claim to by unions the bare truth is that their purpose is seldom, if ever, in the interests of the consumers who use the services those union members provide or the products they produce. Indeed Izabella, in her lefty reverie concludes this too:

The core point really is that taxis can never serve customers as well as outright ownership of a private car in optionality terms — because taxis can never be perfectly supplied to meet peak rate time demand without somebody somewhere carrying the cost of off-peak idle capital. Nor can they, for that matter, ever be as cost effective as public transport.

If and when Uber drivers efficiently unionise to reduce the scale of oversupply in the market, we’ll finally understand that.

Let's leave aside the self-evident observation that this point is entirely contained in the fact that a train ride from Bingley to Leeds is less than a fiver whereas a taxi ride will costs you £40 or more. Instead let's consider what's being said here - essentially Uber, by not limiting how many drivers a market can hold, has pushed down prices. As a consumer this is excellent news - although the bus or the tube will still be cheaper, I'll take a 20% drop in fares as well as less reliance on surge pricing (because the increased demand for cabs on say New Years Eve means more drivers come out to meet that demand). If the drivers are unionised and succeed in 'reducing the scale of oversupply' the result will be a system more like the one we have.

It's clear that, wherever we look, unions - by promoting the interests of their members - act to raise costs, limit supply or otherwise act against the consumer interest. This is the case with doctors, lawyers and local government officers just as much as it is with taxi drivers. And this is why the activities of unions need to be regulated and limited - just as is the case with any rent-seeking anti-consumer cartel.

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Health fascists - unelected, unaccountable, interfering and after the food on your plate

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A great long list of 'experts' has written to the World Health Organisation (you know the folk who hold their meetings in secret in Moscow and talk more about e-cigs than epidemics) urging them to adopt the tobacco template for food:

The governance of food production and distribution cannot be left to economic interests alone. To achieve the necessary dietary improvements and to secure good population health, a set of policy options for healthy diets are required. This includes governments taking regulatory approaches to the operation of the market through, for example, restrictions on marketing to children, health claims, compositional limits on the saturated fat, added sugar and sodium content of food, removal of artificial trans fats, interpretative front-of-pack labelling, restaurant calorie labelling, fiscal measures and financial incentives, and public health impact assessments in trade and investment policies.

The authors of this letter - adherents to the church of public health in its fundamentalist form - believe that you and I cannot make the right choice. Or rather that the world is filled with gormless sheep who respond thoughtlessly to advertising - you dear reader are one of these, a victim of Big Food.

We'll leave aside that there is little or no evidence showing these actions will actually make a difference or indeed the fact that levels of obesity (in the UK at least) are falling not rising. Instead we'll are about the moral justification for such control. The argument is that better health requires those "necessary dietary improvements" and that people will not eat a good diet unless the government forces such a diet on them by force. And don't think that just because you're some sort of trendy foodie grazing on organic beefburgers and awesome street food - those things are just a loaded with fats, salt and sugar as McDonalds, Dominos and Mr Kipling's cakes.

Wrapped up as protecting our health, these people are proposing a controlled, licensed diet for us to eat. This would be regulated by government and dictated by the priests of the Church of Public Health. Restaurants will be closed, businesses will be broken, web sites will be blocked and children will be brainwashed with half-truths about nutrition. Self-righteous folk will imply that being slightly overweight is a waste of food and campaigners will start to define giving your child a chocolate bar or crisps as a treat as some sort of abuse.

And you know there's a much bigger problem.  There are still some 400 million or more people in the world who don't have enough to eat. It's that problem the WHO should be concerned with rather than the fast less significant issue of people in the UK, Europe and North America being a bit chubbier than they used to be. But the Church of Public Health isn't interested in third world starvation, malnutrition and disease but in controlling the lives of people in the developed world, in attacking 'consumerism' and in pretending that marketing is the problem when it isn't.

This health fascism has to end. Not because there aren't problems with obesity, diabetes and such but because it really is a matter of personal choice. Inform and educate by all means but stop with this idea that Big Food is somehow manipulating us into a diet that makes us fat. It isn't - we choose to eat that stuff because we like it. And the food industry makes that stuff because we like to eat it. We are consumers with real choice not hapless victims of Big Food's evil marketing wiles.

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Hating the untidiness of whimsy - the curse of local councils

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Control, direct, order, limit, ban, manage, prevent, dictate, regulate, licence, stop.

Sadly these are the words that best define much of local government - and us local councillors. This is what we do - we stand in the way of community, cooperation, choice, innovation and initiative. And we revel in it.

In a statement the city of Leawood issued to TODAY, an official said that a property maintenance code enforcement officer had noticed the bookshelf but "thought it was placed in the yard for pick up." Several days later, the officer received complaints about it and notified the family the structure violated a city ordinance that states “no detached structure, including garages, barns, sheds, greenhouses, above ground pools, or outbuildings, shall be permitted."

And what was it that so offended the officials of this Kansas town? It was one of these:

In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share.

A nine-year-old child had set one up in his yard. A little private initiative - done with hope and a smile - to build a local community. Stamped out by the council because some busybody 'complained' and some jobsworth decided the little box of books in the garden was an illegal structure.

Don't try to tell me that your council is immune from this obsession with tidiness and the tin-pottery of control. Here in Bradford you need a licence to have a village gala. Not for safety reasons but because the Council wants to 'exercise its market charter rights'. And your council will be the same - a little ban here, a stern letter there. Whether it's the spirited citizen who's told to stop mowing the verge outside his house or the children who are stopped from their little bit of guerrilla gardening, your local officials will react to any community initiative by either wanting to stop it happening or else to bring it within their control and regulatory orbit.

But, and this is important, those intrusive officials are only doing what they know people want. Every day they encounter people who would stop someone drinking quietly on a bench, prevent a second takeaway opening on the high street and ban any number of odd but essentially harmless activities. As Scott Doyon, in writing about the Little Boy with the Little Free Library observes, we really have a problem with whimsy - and certainly independently initiated whimsy in someone's garden:

The second error is that you add value to whimsy by making it more uniform and predictable when that’s actually the exact opposite of what happens. A Little Free Library, or any other inspired creative expression, is like a flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk. You don’t make it more palatable by camouflaging it as concrete.

If we want interesting places filled with interesting people doing interesting things then we have to stop doing what people who want boring places filled with boring people doing boring things want us to do. We - and that means political and community leadership - need to stop thinking that the role of the local parish, town, village or district council is to look sternly at whether someone should be allowed a house extension, to run a fair, to open a cafe or, madly, to want a shark on the roof.

Councils are filled with people who see the busy-ness of local community as a problem, who tut and frown at folk outside a pub drinking and laughing and who think only regulations, controls, bans and licences stand between civilisation and anarchy. And who hate the untidiness of whimsy.

This, more than anything else, is the curse of local government. We are wielders of the permit and the permission not huggers of the whimsical and weird. Perhaps we could change it round! The world would be more fun I think!

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Why do authorities fear public gatherings so much?

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We were in Dent. It's lovely place and you should visit - winding cobbled streets, at least three drinking places and it's own brewery in a farm a mile or so up the road. Dent also has an annual beer and music festival, which (as chance would have it) was on this weekend.

So having wandered around the village, paid a brief visit to the festival and generally chilled after our exertions (we'd been for a pleasant walk along the valley), Kathryn and I call into one of the pubs for a drink and a sit. Up to the bar to order a couple of drinks. And to our surprise they're served to us in plastic 'glasses'.

Now I'm absolutely certain that Dent isn't part of some bizarre plastic loving cult. Indeed, I'm pretty certain that the use of plastic glasses is either a requirement of the festival's licence or else the result of many meetings and stern advice from Cumbria's constabulary. Because, as we know, folk festivals in the Cumbrian countryside are places of terror and violence - without these stipulations the festival-goers will resort to glassing eachother in the manner associated with the rougher parts of, say, Glasgow.

It seems to me that these controls - like many others prescribed in the interests of 'safety' - are rather indicative of authority's fear of public gatherings. To give another example, to hold the Cullingworth Gala now requires a licence costing £11 from the Council. It seems that authority cannot countenance any gathering of people taking place without their stamp of approval and the application of a set of pointless controls such as serving beer in plastic skiffs.

The idea that places and spaces in places like Dent and Cullingworth are for people's leisure and pleasure has been replaced with a desire from the police and local council to control, direct and, if not done properly, ban any activity. And especially any activity that might involve drinking, dancing, singing or the playing of musical instruments. Doubly so if the audience might include 'young people'. We are to be treated as infants given a set of instructions on good behaviour by the police and council jobsworths.

For sure, most of the time this isn't a problem - we can put up with booze in plastic glasses - but there is a point at which the costs imposed by officialdom start to put an end to gatherings. Dangerous gatherings like street parties and, but for a last minute intervention, Bradford's annual Boy Scout parade and service are ended because their organisers give up on jumping through hoops and paying out more money on the latest piece of over-the-top crowd management imposed by some bloke from the council.

The police and council fear that these events foment disorder, that all these people gathering together will encourage criminals and that, in some respects, gatherings are merely formalised anti-social behaviour. The authorities would much rather we sat quietly sipping something alcohol free from our plastic skiff - or better still that these inconvenient, even dangerous, events didn't happen in the first place. It's not a vain attempt to silence political dissent but rather an organised endeavour intended to limit and control our pleasure - most often in the supposed interests of 'safer communities' or 'public health'.

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Today's health fascism starts with the international not the local

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Two things strike me about this report - the first is that it was entirely predictable once some idiot decided plain packs for cigarettes was a good idea:

Food packaging should include pictures of the damage obesity can cause health, similar to those on cigarette packets, campaigners said today.

Experts have urged governments across the world to tackle the obesity epidemic by regulating the food industry along the same lines as the tobacco industry.

Despite there being precious little evidence showing this works, the health fascists are all over the idea of getting stuck into the food business - advertising bans, sugar taxes, regulating salt content, banning trans fats and mandating scary images on packaging.

However, my second observation is rather more significant - the groups promoting health fascism no longer target national governments. Instead they focus on less publicised, more malleable international agencies and especially the World Health Organisation.

The CI and WOF will officially launch their recommendations for a Global Convention to protect and promote healthy diets at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week.

They will call on governments to commit to a raft of policy measures designed to help people make healthier lifestyle choices.

The aim of this programme is to get changes through the back door - they want, through the auspices of the WHO, to have a 'framework convention' that is similar to those on tobacco products. This allows them, and their allies, to begin the process of browbeating national governments into implementing the raft of regulations proposed in their reports. Just as with tobacco, we'll be told there's a 'treaty obligation' (there is nothing of the sort) which means we have to move towards tighter regulation. And, of course, thise will reduce obesity (it won't, of course).

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On US start-ups - or rather the lack of them

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From Joel Kotkin in New Geography:

A 2010 SBA report found that federal regulations cost firms with less than 20 employees more than $10,000 a year per employee, while bigger firms paid roughly $7,500 per employee. The biggest hit to small business is environmental regulations, which cost small firms 364 more percent than large ones. Small companies spend an average $4,101 per employee on such regulations, compared with $1,294 at medium-size companies (20 to 499 employees) and $883 at the largest companies. This has come over a period when many of the key costs faced by the business-owning middle class – house prices, health insurance, utilities and college tuition – have all soared.

Make running a small business more expensive and there will be fewer small businesses. It's worth remembering that, when you talk to business people, it's almost always regulatory barriers that they cite as the source of growth problems. And, for large and established businesses, it makes good business sense to accept those regulatory costs since they prevent new entrants and increased competition.

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Advertising doesn't cause riots, make people gamble or cause revolution!

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She said she was particularly concerned about gambling advertising before the 9pm watershed and went as far as saying that "excessive marketing" had been a factor in 2011’s London riots, when looters had gone in criminal search of expensive trainer brands.

Read that very carefully. What Helen Goodman (for it is she) is saying here is that some of society's problems - in this case gambling and rioting - can be laid at the the door of advertising. This is clearly illiberal, when it comes to gambling certainly judgemental, but worst of all is utterly ignorant of advertising and marketing and what it does.

It makes me incredibly cross that people like Helen Goodman (who is a leftie but not everyone who wants bans or controls on advertising and marketing is such) simply fail to understand that commercial speech is still 'speech'. And that it is as worthy of us defending it as any other form of speech. I know that Helen probably read 'No Logo' a few years back and has signed up to the Naomi Klein school, that "brands are the work of Satan" line, but the truth is that marketing communications are a tiny proportion of all the communications we receive every day.

If someone like Helen Goodman is going to stand up and talk about advertising, to propose legislative intervention of some kind, then the least we can expect is that some effort has been made to understand the business of marketing. Let's start with whether advertising increases aggregate demand, what we might call the 'false demand' hypothesis:

“The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence that consumption may cause advertising is presented.”

Unwrapping the academic language this research says that advertising doesn't (in aggregate) cause demand and may even be caused by consumption. Funnily enough us advertising and marketing folk have known this for years - most of our advertising isn't about creating demand it's about us not losing our bit of that demand. As I wrote a while ago:

Why should I spend my client’s scarce cash on making the market bigger – promoting sausages rather than Fred’s Grand Yorkshire Sausage, The Champion on Your Plate?

This isn't to say that an advertisement has never prompted someone to buy something they haven't bought before but it is to say that there isn't a strong connection between advertising and demand growth. To illustrate this, here's a graph of US cigarette advertising against cigarette consumption:

If you can find some sort of causal link here you're a better man than I am!

If shadow ministers (or government ministers for that matter) are going to pass opinion about advertising and marketing - rather than merely court a headline - then they really should start to understand what marketing does and how advertising works. And that it's as much a part of free speech as their address to the house or my torrent of tweets.

And if Helen Goodman wants to know about the revolution - it won't be televised you know!

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