Some questions to get conservatives thinking

 I've repeatedly warned conservatives that, if defining who is or isn't a conservative and what is or isn't conservatism is left to socialists, liberals and reactionaries, we will become irrelevant to politics and policy-making. Historian Robert Saunders, in criticising Roger Scruton's call for defunding of university departments lacking in intellectual diversity, set this out in a Twitter thread:

In its early years, Thatcherism teemed with ideas. The party became a magnet for historians, philosophers and economists - some converts from the radical Left - who hammered out their ideas in think tanks, discussion groups and Scruton's own journal, The Salisbury Review

Saunders asks whether the current reaction from conservatives to left-wing dominance of academia - ban it, stop it, take its money away - simply covers over the paucity of conservative thinking, especially in or near to the Conservative Party itself. Saunders isn't a conservative so my warning is relevant but his (admitted a tad jaundiced) analysis of David Cameron is very telling:

From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it.

This is, without question, the defining characteristic of many modern politicians - Cameron is not unique in being spectacularly bright but incredibly shallow, just look at Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar and, of course, the godfather of 'image is everything' political positioning, Tony Blair.

A while ago - when slightly angry voices on the right of politics were saying that Cameron was a 'conservative in name only' or similar, I wrote that this was far from the truth, he is absolutely a conservative:

But for Cameron – and we see this in his enthusiasm for “social action” – such an obligation to act nobly is essential to conservatism. We are defined by what we do rather than what we support. Passing laws to help the poor in Africa or to care for communities in England is not sufficient; we must act ourselves to help society. A central tenet of Cameron’s conservatism is the idea of “giving back” – we are fortunate so it behoves us to put some of that fortune back into society.

The second concept is the idea of administration. Some people see the purpose of securing political power as the way to effect change, to direct the forces of government so as to improve mankind. In Cameron’s conservatism this is not the case; the purpose of power is administration – the running of good government.

The problem is that this outlook - action and managerialism - doesn't leave a great deal of space for thought and rather focuses our preference on doers rather than thinkers - Rory Stewart rather than Jesse Norman. As Blair once put it "what matters is what works" and, in most cases, "what works" is defined as what wins us elections rather than a genuinely technocratic evidence-based polity. Our modern government looks technocratic but is far more concerned with what might be called "feels" than with substantive thinking about policy.

An illustration of this came from Will Tanner (who runs the brand new Tory think tank, Onward) in response to Liz Truss MP's suggestion that we need to reform planning and build a million new homes on what is now 'green belt' around London:

You've got to admire @trussliz' chutzpah, but our 10,000 sample megapoll last month suggested allowing development on the Green Belt would be the most unpopular housing pledge the Conservatives could take into an election, even with young people

Truss responds with a very telling comment:

We've got to move away from focus-group paralysis and deliver what will improve people's opportunities and life chances. We have to start making arguments again and not just follow.

Tanner's comment is in line with the Conservative Party of Cameron - no thinking ("how do we craft a planning system that protects, enhances even, the beauty, heritage and environment of England while allowing the housing development we need") just 'we can't do that, it isn't popular'. You don't have to agree with Truss's argument about housing development to see that setting policy by opinion poll denies the requirement to think seriously about the sort of places we want in our society. It is also a little ironic to see a politician slapping down a think-tank chief for not doing any actual thinking.

As to that conservative thinking, it is out there but not quite where you'd expect to find it. Firstly, the sort of issues that really bother people are now far less about economics than they are about sociology:

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

So if you want to get some substance about family, community, identity and the loss of institutions, you're better off reading US sociologist Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" or Dutch geographer Harm de Blij's "The Power of Place" than dabbing your eyes at reactionary paeans to a lost bucolic England or thudding your way through "The Road to Serfdom". And taking a look at non-conservative voices at the fringes of what's usually called 'populism' like Ben Cobley, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin.

The questions - challenges we could call them - that emerge include:

1. How do we restore trust to society - in things like marriage, education, justice, business and finance as well as government?

2. How, in an age of individualism, LGBT rights, gay marriage and identity wars, do we rebuild families as the central building block of society?

3. How do we balance the undoubted power of free markets and new technology in promoting betterment with the human desire to sustain community?

4. How do we promote local autonomy in a world filled with outcries about 'postcode lotteries'?

5. How does personal responsibility square with the popular idea that our agency is compromised by modern marketing methods?

6. Is there still a concept of duty - to family, friends, neighbourhood and nation?

7. Can we meet the aspiration for security without compromising civil liberties, and where is the boundary beyond which acceptable social control become autocracy?

8. What are the institutions we need to meet the aspirations for secure families and strong communities?

Too much of our thinking is, as Lizz Truss noted, dominated by opinion polling and focus groups resulting in policy-making that, to use an ad man's term, "just films the brief" - we get lists of initiatives each crafted so as to ping a positive in polling or research but these lists are, taken as a whole, unsatisfying. From tweaks, up or down, to taxes through grants or incentives to tinkering bits of regulatory change, what we have doesn't present any sort of picture of what we want tomorrow's families, communities and neighbourhoods to look like - they are bereft of a vision and wholly without the sort of mission Disraeli set us, 'improve the condition of the working man'.

You don't need university departments, think tanks or learned societies to consider what a 21st century conservatism might look like and there's no point in (given the left wing bias of academia) trying to push water uphill - so feel free to take those eight questions above, add to them if you like, and start thinking about what kind of place you want to live in and how we get there.


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Government's deal with the public is broken - education, effort and achievement no longer guarantees you a real stake in society

I've felt for a while that the deal that successive governments did with the public - get educated, work hard, raise a family and you will be rewarded with a real, cash stake in society - has broken. And nowhere is this clearer than in our housing markets:

“Young people,” wrote Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century, “do not degenerate; this only occurs only after grown men have become corrupt.” By endorsing policies that restrict suburban development and home ownership, planners, investors, and the media are asking the next generation to accept conditions that their predecessors would never have tolerated.

This, says geographer Joel Kotkin, is a new feudalism where, despite the trappings of a good life and the promises of equality, we become little better than the peons of powerful oligarchies. For some, being part of the team is fine, the bread and circuses work - as Kotkin puts it, the oligarchs preferred solution is "...to have the state provide housing subsidies as well as unconditional cash stipends to keep the peasants from rising against their betters."

Elsewhere though people are looking for different answers - some see them in a cuddly green socialism that doesn't rock the oligarchs' boat too much but attaches faith-like to heterodox theories of government and economics as the basic for a planned utopia. Despite over 100 years of socialism's consistent failure its appeal persists. The oligarchs don't fear these middle class socialists because they know they can control them - America's tech billionaires are the main funders for progressive causes and for Democrat candidates, they also control the flow of political communication (the main reason why Mark Zuckerberg is such an enthusiast for online media regulation), no democrat will win a presidential election without this support.

Outside the wealthy halls of the dense urban centres, there's a different story with people in red baseball caps, yellow hi-vis jackets and check shirts asking - often angrily - why they are excluded from the society the urban elites have created. As I've commented before, the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's 'Starman Jones' captures the sentiment:

"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."

A high speed train swooshing through Max Jones' world - not stopping just barrelling through carrying the rich and beautiful between the oases of urban wonder. And people who can leave the places inbetween do just that, decanting from Barnsley and Telford, South Bend and Flint to cram into overpriced and tiny rented apartments while working for the businesses those oligarchs own. For the rest, all the get is patronising articles about "the left behind" and kindly curated glimpses into the world of the city.

What we have isn't sustainable, the great cities of the west are parasites, humanity's dead end:

Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up.

At the heart of all this is the idea that to maximise utility, we need denser cities and to get denser cities you have to stop people building suburbs. We know active regulatory intervention is needed by the city fathers because, left to their own devices, people will chose to live in suburbs, will prefer a family home with a garden, and will opt for comfort, safety and good schools over the excitement of a city's nights. What we're doing by stopping this happening is making such a life - once available to near all in society - something only the rich and powerful can afford.


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Conservatives - what sort of society do you want? Some thoughts.

If the Conservative Party in the UK wants to thrive in the future it needs - as I've said before - to start thinking about sociology:

Because social issues now matter more than economic ones, for more people, there is a realignment coming at some point. The offer that the two parties give to the electorate will shift from being rival answers to how to cut (and bake) the pie. It will shift to a contest over which conception of society – diverse versus ordered – wins out. The precise mechanics of how this will happen are uncertain, but that it will happen just reflects the fact that one’s position on the social cleavage now matters to people.

The British political system makes this "realignment" difficult - or at least unlikely to happen in the convenient, media-friendly manner of a new political party or parties. The by-election result in Newport West, even if we apply the usual caveats about such things, show that the chances of another party - left, right or centre - superseding the two main political parties is small.

This doesn't mean, however, that the shift from economy to society as the main focus of public concern won't have a profound effect on our politics. And it does mean that conservatives need to begin to think about the sort of society they want to build while recognising that economic truths remain economic truths and can't be wished away.

When people accuse some conservatives of wanting "to go back to the 1950s", they fail to realise the significance of what this might mean in an actual policy platform. Nobody wants to go back to the real 1950s and lose the central heating, the cars, the mobile phones and the computers (or for that matter to get back the racism, sexism and homophobia) but people would like some things we have less of now that were normal in the 1950s.

What isn't to be liked about a crime rate that's less than a fifth of the rates today? Don't we like the idea of a job for life? And stable communities where people trust each other? When people hark back to better days long ago, these are sorts of things they think about. All of them are about the social environment, about the kind of people we are and the sorts of communities we live in. None of these things are incompatible with free markets, with social mobility or with economic growth. But they are less achievable in the centralised, one-size-fits-all, government by spreadsheet that we have right now.

When the spreadsheet wranglers talk about localism, they think of grand regional mayors wielding (quite vague) "powers" not district councils. And the focus of these mayors isn't community, family or neighbourhood but economic growth, regional competitiveness and the levering of central government decisions into local benefit. It is an entirely utilitarian focus on what Deirdre McCloskey called "Max U" - prudence only - and doesn't respond to those societal concerns about what people can see around their homes and in their lives.

Conservatives (with or without the big 'C') need to start framing their ideas about community and this means getting to grip with housing, with the manner in which the welfare system fails the poorest, with crime and justice. Conservatives need to start talking about buses rather than trains, about care workers rather than tech grandees, and about the environment we live in rather than the abstract finger-wagging of climate change. Above all we need to challenge the idea that everywhere is the same and can be treated the same - the managerialist ideology that has dominated our public administration for three decades. If it is our school, our hospital, our police service then this needs to be reflected in the way people relate to it.

I observed once that, at least in Bradford, the police appear to have retreated to huge, anonymous barracks that look more like something escaped from a Kafka-esque state than a local police service in a democracy. The convenience for operations management of such arrangements has outweighed the idea that the police are citizens in uniform protecting the place where they live.

The same assessment can be done for the NHS, where huge institutions with nameless, faceless appointed boards have replaced community hospitals, where (even in a comfortable place like Cullingworth) the doctors travel in from altogether grander, posher places to do their doctoring, and where the diktats of a distant bureaucracy determine what happens even if it is a really stupid thing to do in some places.

I might be wrong in thinking that the answer lies in a real localism, in actual, practical devolution of control over much of government to local communities. But I do think that, as the pathetic debacle of trying to leave the EU has shown, the current system we have has become so detached from normal society that its prescriptions - prepared by those men and women with spreadsheets - are at best annoying to and at worst actively damaging the neighbourhoods and communities that make up our nation.

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Modern cities - creations of humanity's selfishness

Joel Kotkin writes about the sex recession and, in doing so, provides this striking statistic:

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, this had expanding to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry.

Kotkin points to technology and a millennial generation who find personal interaction troubling or stressful ("...a survey of American millennials found 65 percent don’t feel comfortable engaging with someone face-to-face, and 80 percent prefer conversing digitally...").

Some of the outcomes from this de-sexed society are probably a good thing - fewer teenage pregnancies, for example - but it does give us another example of the prurience of modern youth culture, a puritanism embraced with enthusiasm by a generation of helicopter mums and judgemental fussbuckets.

The main reason, however, probably isn't culture change but rather the consequences of economic circumstances. For sure, employers like kidults - university educated millennial sorts who probably aren't going to do anything inconvenient like settling down to have a family - but the circumstance of people's lives also matters - people can't afford the risks of sex (also known as children). Here's Kotkin again:

High property prices and rents associated with dense cities correlate closely with low marriage and fertility rates. The places where child-bearing has plunged towards historic lows, are generally those with the highest house costs — including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

This utilitarian urban culture represents, as I've said before, a dead end for humanity. Cities and the life of dense urban civilisation is anti-child. Such places are designed to entertain young adults (a definition now extending to adults into their 40s) rather than the old-fashioned purpose of our presence on the planet - having a family. The environmental argument about population provides cover for such indulgence - having a family is portrayed as more selfish than living an essentially unattached life in one of civilisation's urban wonderlands.

Perhaps, in thinking about our society, we'll one day wake up and realise that two generations of anti-family public policies did not represent a liberation but, instead, were a period of spectacular selfishness on behalf of humanity.

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Cities, housing and the new serfdom

I am more and more convinced that cities and the fandom surrounding urban densification is the biggest threat to a fair, equal, open and decent society. Yet even the YIMBY movement seems to be trapped in the idea that we should cram more and more people into a tiny part of our land area leaving overprotected rural areas affordable only those fortunate to inherit, rich enough to buy or trapped in a marginal life renting one of the vanishing numbers of such properties outside the city.

The problem is that the idea of cramming more units into already dense places (and central London is, by almost any standards bar urban Spain, very population dense) simply doesn't resolve the affordability problem. Here's an illustration from California:

Dense housing is about three to seven times more expensive to build. Combined with the very high cost of land zoned for high-density development, market prices inevitably end up beyond the means of nearly all Californians. New publicly subsidized “affordable” apartments in one dense Bay Area development are estimated to cost upwards of $700,000 to build—more than the cost of two-thirds of all homes in California, according to our analysis of American Community Survey data for 2016.

The beginning of understanding our housing problems comes when we ask what kind of homes people want rather than asking how many 'units' we can shoehorn into the limited land supply local councils allow for building.

The suburban house is the idealization of the immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.

And it's not just the immigrant into California - such as the man who the above comment, Edgardo Contini  - who want to live in suburbia, it's most families everywhere. Not because they're selfish ingrates who want to spoil the environment driving their cars but because they want space, openness, light, air and land, all the things they can't get in the confining, claustrophobic inner city. It's something like this from geographer Anne Snyder :

“There is a growing craving for life to be lived offline, for human contact to be enjoyed with real handshakes, real meals around real tables, and real care for neighbors, knowing that in a pinch that neighbor will watch out for you in turn.”

Cities are exciting places filled with experience - everyone should perhaps have a go at living in one. For some, it is everything but for most there comes a point where the thrill of having the buzzing cultural brilliance of the city at their fingertips begins to pall - it's too ephemeral, insubstantial and, while great for grown-ups, no place to raise a family. Yet so many people are trapped - great jobs, fantastic social life, but no way to have a stake, to put down roots, to join a real neighbourhood. And this didn't use to be the case, in times past (and not really all that long ago either) people could have those great years in the city and then follow them with great years raising a family in a welcoming, neighbourly suburb. So you aren't going to have a family (or, rather, you keep putting it off):

Recent Harvard econometric research associated bloated house price increases with a reduction in birth rates among households that do not already own a home of their own. Similarly, high housing prices were cited as a cause to delay having children in a recent Bankrate.com survey. In places where housing prices remain around historic levels, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, Orlando, and Houston, birth rates are much higher.

Maybe you think us not having children is a good thing (over 70% of Inner London households are childless) but I've a feeling it's short-sighted, requiring the city to suck in more migrants from elsewhere just to sustain its appetites. And who is going to look after you when you need it? Cities are creating a society that sees short-term economic advance and personal utilitarian gratification as the only good. Community can be replaced by service contracts, neighbourhood by professional networks or 'corporate internal communities', and real social capital by the ephemera of social events.

“Zero” is also the most common response when people are asked how many confidants they have, the GSS data show. And adult men seem to be especially bad at keeping and cultivating friendships.

Our home is at the heart of all this and what matters here is that it's our home not some rented flat on a rolling short term lease. Yet so much of the debate about housing is stuck in an obsession with numbers rather than a discussion about needs or wants - all coloured by a cod environmentalism exploited by those who benefit from land values artificially inflated through the deliberate restriction of supply by government (a restriction eagerly supported by politicians with their cant about our "precious green belt"). And it gets worse - urban containment, densification and its consequential gentrification results in poverty:

High rents are leaving many at the brink of poverty. Adjusted for housing costs, California has the largest share of its citizens living in poverty—well above the rate for such historically poor states as Mississippi. And homelessness has surged in the priciest places, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City, which account for about 4 percent of the national population but 25 percent of its homeless population.

Our housing policies (and please let's not pretend the the UK's problems are so very much different from California's) are making us poorer, less happy, more dependent, tied to work and the work environment - a new bunch of serfs, highly educated with what seem great jobs, but with no stake in society beyond delivering the production business and government desires - serfs. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin conclude (and you should too):

The shift to an ever more unequal, congested, and feudal society is not inevitable. We have the capacity to expand housing opportunities for future generations. There is no reason that we need to surrender the universal aspiration that for so long has defined our society.

Build suburbs.

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The left is everywhere but prefers preaching to listening

I could start by adding "..and nowhere" to the headline because that pretty much summarises the issue here. The left's ideas are meant to be universal and absolute - no political postcode lottery is permitted - such that cultural variation is suspect. And conservatism is all about the nuance of that cultural variation. The comment, 'the left is everywhere' comes from this Russ Roberts commentary about Jordan Peterson:

I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of a smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.

Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic. In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone’s cup of tea. By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Or that gender is a social construct.

This is the gist of the left's incomprehension. Our trendy lefties cannot understand a conservatism that, while it's pro-market, is deeply suspicious of capitalism - or at least the grand capitalism of banks and big business. There's an incredulity at people who think the first duty of government isn't to promote equality but is rather to protect the community and culture of the people that government serves. As Roberts says, who find that "radical egalitarian agenda" not their cup of tea.

The cultural ubiquity of this position can be set out even more starkly:

And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism.

Of course, our neoliberal left will be adamant that they care deeply about economic inequality, they'll point to tweets, to conferences attended, to the presence of M. Piketty's book on their coffee table. But then we look at their priorities and see a different thing entirely - the excitement is over the gender pay gap for TV presenters, the 'trans agenda', and abusive language on social media.

It is a bizarre irony that someone as selfish, grandiloquent and preening as Donald Trump seems to grasp the real worries of the working class and, for want of a better word, lower middle class better than today's left. Concerns about the loss of social infrastructure like pubs, clubs, societies and local shops. Worries about jobs, businesses and the future opportunities for young people. And a sense that nobody is really interested in their local community, culture or lived experience - except, that is, for lecturing them about making the wrong lifestyle choices or sneering about what they like to eat, listen to, read or watch. This isn't to say that Trump's policies are the right ones but that he, at least, makes the effort to try and understand.

Neoliberalism is, in economic terms, brilliant - the billion people lifted out of absolute poverty over the past 30 years are a testament to this - but, while this has been happening, there's a set of people who don't see their lives getting better, watch their community hollowing out and wonder whether anyone is really interested in their lives and their neighbourhood. As Roberts observes, to see these people, hear them, understand them, our essentially metropolitan left has to go somewhere they wouldn't normally go - a tired English seaside town, a church in America's 'bible belt', a Yorkshire pit village, a French small town or an Italian village bar.

And when this metropolitan left arrive they have to do something else, they have to set aside the urge to lecture, to explain, to know better and start to listen. If they don't do this the result we get from the visit sounds like this:

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

OK, this is written by a Conservative (I really object to those CINO, RINO sneers from the, mostly reactionary rather than conservative, alt-right - Matthew Parris is a conservative) but it rather sums up the dismissal that these distant, slightly tatty places get from the great and good when they call in. The same goes for France where arrivistes get a prickly response from locals for wanting some sort of (largely imagined) lost past to return:

Hours had passed on a sunny Friday in the center of town, yet on some streets we saw almost no one. “You see clearly that we are on a street that is dying,” Mr. Jourdain said on Rue Emile Grand as we concluded our tour. “There are whole buildings where there isn’t a soul.”

I called City Hall for a meeting with the mayor, a member of France’s center-right party, but was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from her spokeswoman. I was put off with the promise of a phone call the following week, and when I finally reached the mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, she argued that urban “devitalization” has had a “relatively moderate impact.” She also angrily condemned Mr. Jourdain.

“He is an extraterrestrial,” she said, “who came here to get talked about.”

There is no comprehension here, simply a refusal to sit and listen. It is the pattern again and again, in place after place. Journalist or researcher arrives in town, talks to a couple of people, takes some pictures and then rushes back to somewhere with better coffee bars and trendier restaurants to write a piece explaining how the community they visited is tired, left-behind, struggling, dowdy, depressed (select the descriptors of your choice). Sometimes these writers or researchers are good enough to speak to a few actual locals but mostly this gets boiled down to a few grumpy quotes - even better if the locals say something a bit racist, sexist or homophobic.

The places we're talking about here aren't rich places but they're also not really poor places. The people who live in these places are conservative and it hurts them to be told they're "going nowhere" and we should look instead at the shiny city with its overpriced apartments, fancy restaurants, crowded roads and unfriendly neighbours. Nothing is offered to people in Clacton or Albi except the strong suggestion that somehow the people in the big city are better than them - be more like East London, more like Paris. Presumably without the racism and knife crime.

The biggest challenge facing western democracies isn't populism, it isn't robots, it's not flying cars or food security or climate change or the rise of China. No, the challenge is stopping the city from strangling our societies and cultures. Part of this is to start trying to work out how we make Clacton and places like Clacton something other than "all our yesterdays". And sitting at the centre are the people, the ones who think that "radical egalitarian agenda" has gone too far, the ones who want politicians to worry as much about neighbourhood, community and place as they do about transphobia, the gender pay gap and high speed railways.

We started with the trendy left being everywhere and nowhere, like butterflies flitting across a cultural herbaceous border. Set against this isn't just "somewhere" but the idea that society starts with family, friends, neighbour and community. And that this society needs looking after. This isn't about everything being the same, nor is it about community developers - assorted left-inclined missionaries of social action - arriving in a place getting everything sorted. No, it's about rebuilding the structures of place - community, neighbourhood, families - and the institutions they need to succeed.

Many conservatives (and Conservatives) have forgotten this essential part of what we believe, preferring instead a sort of technocratic fix based on regulation and grand institutions. Not that such things are unimportant but without strong local institutions - family, neighbourhood, community - strong national institutions will not succeed. Hospitals in "Our NHS" work (most of the time) despite the stupifying bureaucracy of the NHS because they are local institutions - our hospitals, our clinics, our health centres. And the same goes for schools, policing and much else that makes society work - when the ties to local community are strongest, the institution is most effective. The national, even supranational, urge for homogeneity that neoliberalism and social democracy force on communities excludes people from any sense of owning those institutions, prevents initiative and slowly stifles the local ties, the idea that we should love where we live, that make community work.

Although there's a grumpiness (and bemusement) at that 'radical egalitarian agenda' it perhaps covers over a deeper malaise in society, the seeming alliance between the uncaring utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the controlling 'gentleman in Whitehall knows best' approach of social democracy. Everything is so far away, out of our control, and more bothered with things that aren't important to us and ours. It's not that people far from the places of power - Westminster, Brussels, Washington, Paris - are ignorant but rather that they've stopped listening as so little is about them or their lived experiences. The left is everywhere, except in the lives and communities of people just over the hill from the shiny city, quiet places with good people who would like a little care and attention for a change.

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Human House Cats - the world under UBI

Some UBI proponents are convinced that incentive effects will go away. People who are less stressed about meeting their basic needs will actually be more productive, proponents argue, because they will have the financial freedom to experiment with different career options. And one might find anecdotal cases where that could be true.

But for the vast majority, a UBI will create legions of human house cats. Living on a UBI might not be all that uncomfortable if you can afford a room, ramen noodles, and an Xbox to while away the hours.

And, like house cats, they'll be great until they shred society's sofas, chap in its flower beds, leave part chewed dead animals in the hall, and wail all night because they fancy the bird opposite. I guess too, that the wealthy elite will probably want to have them neutered - that might be the deal: food, drink, warmth and entertainment in exchange for the chop.

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Young people are neoliberals - they just don't realise it yet so let's help them.

It seems to me that the real issue young people have is feeling excluded from the benefits of our capitalist, neoliberal society not that capitalist, neoliberal society itself. And this seems a reasonable gripe to me. Here's a tweet from lefty journalist John Elledge:




This - perhaps not all that considered - comment tells us a great deal. Mostly that the real irritation of the emerging graduate generation is that they feel unable to afford investment assets like houses. For me this is one of the essential failures of UK government over the last thirty years - the idea of a property owning democracy was ignored as we got ever more excited about the seemingly endless rise in house prices.

Some people want to blame all this on my generation - the boomers - who took advantage of cheap asset prices in the 1970s and 1980s and rode the bubble to the point where the house my Dad bought for £3,250 in 1963 in now 'worth' over £400,000 (Dad sold the house in 1975 for about £14,000). I am absolutely with all those people who feel that they're outside this bubblicious world - not just the young or poor but a whole load of people from 'Up North' who've not seen anything like the gains those 'Down South' have seen.

Add to this that we told young people that the way to get into this bubble world was to get a good degree (in fact any old degree as Blair's enthusiasm for book-learning led to the numbers going to university getting up towards half of 18 and 19 year olds). And because these degrees were the gateway to a world of wealth and power, we told young people they could have a load of (cheap) borrowing that they'd spend half their life paying off so as to get the degree.

Young people don't want to be socialists, they want the entrance fee to our neoliberal world of valuable assets, to that property-owning democracy we were all promised. And this is why they've dumped the capitalists, the people who they think are stopping them from joining the glorious free market rat race. "Have free university tuition". "Here's a subsidised mortgage". "How about a big pay rise". "Or a higher minimum wage". "Free child care". "Discounted rail travel"...

It doesn't matter how much others ask where all this cash is coming from, people aren't listening. Or rather they see those telephone number house prices and say, "y'all can afford to pay for this stuff, get on with it". And Labour offered them everything they were asking for and some things they weren't - no questions asked. Is it any surprise that folk who are outside that wealth bubble flocked to this banner?

Young people - and plenty of the not-so-young - want to know when it's their turn to play the free market, asset-owning, property-speculating game. They don't want socialism, they want what their parents and grandparents had - the chance to have a real cash stake in their society, the thing that Margaret Thatcher promised to my generation (and largely delivered). This isn't about nationalisation for all that people tell you the government should run stuff (they always have done by the way even at the height of Maggie's pomp). No, it's about us renewing the promise we made to the post-war generation and to late boomers like me - play your part, work hard, be a good citizen and we'll make sure you can have that real cash stake in Britain.

Right now we're still telling people to play their part, to work hard, to borrow to fund education and to be a good citizen but government has reneged on its side of the bargain, that cash stake in Britain. And the single-minded focus of any new government should be to renew that offer and make it work. Those young people really aren't baby ideologues desperate for some sort of socialist New Jerusalem. They're just like you and I were 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago - bothered about our own futures, the things we care about, in that thing Adam Smith saw as the driver of a better, richer society: self-interest.

So let's start offering people that chance. Let's free up the planning system so more houses get built were people want to live. Let's revisit the idea of tax relief or other support that backs individual, personal investment in our society. Let's liberate the innovative instincts of property and finance people to meet the aspirations of today's ambitious young people - 21st century capitalists, budding neoliberals every one. And let's do this knowing that the alternative, Labour's market-fixing, price-controlling, 'magic money tree' programme carries in it the seeds of disaster, the crash that socialism always brings.

I'm with you if you want to bash at those folk farming grants and corporate welfare. I'm on your side if you want to try and stop well-funded lobbyists getting government to fix a market or a system to suit their clients. I'm right there if what you want is to stop rent-seekers freeloading on free health, welfare and education. And I agree with you when you say people should pay the taxes they owe - on the nail not just after a long-winded and expensive investigation.

But this isn't about socialism just about getting a free market that works for all of us. It's about setting economic liberty - the idea that, more than anything else, is responsible for the health and wealth nearly all of us enjoy today (even if we can't afford a house) - at the heart of government policy. The more we try to control the market the less liberty we have and the more power we hand to the commissioners, the lobbyists and the corporations protected by the government fix.

What we all want is a real stake in the nation we're a part of - not just a vague notion of citizenship but a real sense of being a part of the place, of having roots. And that means renewing that promise made by Harold MacMillan in the 1950s, by Ted Heath in 1970 and by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 - Britain isn't just land and institutions but its people, all of them. And all of them should have the chance to take a real, solid, tangible stake in their nation.

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2017: Another year of human progress beckons. Let's celebrate!

Another year crawls coughing and spluttering from the ashes of its predecessor. Blinking in the watery light of a January morning, 2017, like many of its inhabitants, groans with the hangover from supervising the final death throes of the "Year of Horrors" that was 2016. Everywhere the perkier of those denizens, perhaps those most inured to hard drinking, started the annual task of churning out comments and predictions about the year ahead.

I've never been one for making predictions - I'm usually wrong - so instead I'll celebrate things we already have that are wonderful. We are, ignore all the doom and gloom, truly a blessed generation and we don't remind ourselves of this fact often enough. It's not just that there are fewer poor people in the world that ever in human history but that the things those no longer poor folk can have include stuff that were the stuff of science fiction just a decade or two ago.

I lost my phone in Lisbon during 2016 (on 23 June as it happens) and for various reasons had to get a cheap smart phone as a stop gap before my new and shiny Samsung was available. For less than £20 I had the sort of computing power that, as a student, had occupied a whole floor of a building in Hull. And with that bargain computing I could make phone calls, send letters, research the information I need for work plus things undreamed of back in the 1980s like social media and text messaging.

We've also found that the electricity these things need to run - much less as it happens that in times past - is now increasingly coming from renewal sources. And the fossil fuel sources we still use - fracked natural gas especially - are also far less contributory to climate change. If the EU would stop being dumb about importing cheaper solar panels from the Far East (more protectionist nonsense I'm afraid) maybe we'd move even faster towards a sustainable energy market without having to do so by making poorer people's fuel more expensive.

There was a time when brand ownership was what matters to food businesses because brands allowed a premium price to the consumer. Today - if the coffee business is anything to go by - the brand is no longer the thing, it's capacity and production efficiency that matters more. Food businesses are now delivering their margins more by reducing production costs rather than through the costly malarkey of brand marketing. This renews the wonderful thing that is cheap food, something brought to you by great farmers, fantastic manufacturers and brilliant supermarketers. It is a cause for celebration that we spend just 11% of our household incomes on food and drink (13% if you include booze and fags) and the trends - especially if Brexit opens up international food markets - will carry on downwards to the benefit of everyone.

Because we no longer spend all that cash on food, we've been able to buy stuff we otherwise wouldn't have had the money for - such as over 20% of our income on leisure, pleasure, recreation, culture, hotels and restaurants. Not only do we have more leisure time but we've also got the cash to enjoy that time better. And to top it all we're living longer and healthier lives than ever before - a trend that's set to continue. Whereas a previous generation retired at 60 or 65 and died ten or twelve years later, today's retirees can expect - even with a raised retirement age - to live passed 80 in an active independent life (and some can look to living a great deal longer).

For sure this longevity presents a challenge - not least to our creaking and badly run health service - but it shows why the cult of the young that dominated media and politics for so long is no longer such a deal. Those 55 year old baby boomers (like me) can look forward to an average of 30 years more life so don't tell us that we've nothing invested in that Brexit decision. And with reducing rates of dementia and heart disease joining rapidly rising cancer survival rates whose to say thirty years doesn't become 35 or even forty!

Meanwhile, society is getting better. Crime rates have shown a recent rise but the really bad ones like murder are as low as they've been since the '70s. Other supposed crises seem less so - child obesity rates at five and eleven are at the lowest they've been since 2000 and this might represent a switch in what was a seemingly intractable problem. Vaping has resulted in an acceleration in smoking's decline - would be even faster in public health folk would get with the programme and accept that the markets and a consumer product has achieved what they couldn't.

Elsewhere the frantic panic about 'hate crime' seems misplaced too. If our primary schools are any guide, the UK is a really tolerant and non-racist place - out of 4.5 million children aged five to eleven there were just 420 racist 'incidents' in 2014-15 which is about one incident for each 10,000 children. And this came after a long campaign to make schools report incidents rather than just using their own discipline and correction. In Bradford - as multi-ethnic a place as you get - the Council and police had to put on extra resources to encourage the reporting of 'hate crime' And in a couple of months they managed just eight reports of such crimes from a population of half-a-million. We really aren't a racist nation - nor indeed are we especially sexist, homophobic or disablist either - at least if reports of hate crime are anything to go by.

The world's not perfect and mankind isn't perfect but let's get ourselves some perspective in 2017. Not everything's going to go well - some people will suffer personal loss or tragedy, celebrities who played a big part in our lives will die and the wrong side might win an election. But on the fundamentals and the direction of travel for technology, leisure, health and security the world's getting better year by year. There's no reason not to think this will continue on 2017. So look up, smile and enjoy the bounty that human genius has brought you.

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Academic bias against conservative ideas is bad for society

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And it's not just because conservative-minded folk have got better things to do than be sociology professors. There's a real bias against conservatism:

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

The heart of the problem is that, in a business entirely dominated by a left-wing - "progressive" - mindset, there is an inherent bias against any conservative outlook and especially a socially conservative outlook. As the article I quote above makes clear this is rationalised by those progressive academics belief in the wrongness of conservatism - “Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” as we're told by one academic.

This ignorant outlook - and that is the only way to describe such a viewpoint - presents a huge problem by presenting students studying humanities, social sciences and arts subject with an ideologically one-eyed perspective. The result is a cohort of graduates who are unable to grasp that social conservatism is not simply gay-bashing, racism and making women clean behind the fridge. So when these students meet people who make choices to behave in a socially-conservative way they are bemused and muddled.

Just as importantly, the left wing domination of universities means that there is no real political discourse within academia, no argument and little challenge to the orthodoxies of socialism. The presentation of conservative, classical liberal or libertarian approaches to the study of society is done in the manner of a freak show - "here we have some people who are very strange and think some odd things, aren't they funny and don't we know better."

Even worse, the academics presenting a bias outlook simply don't consider that they are biased or ideological. Here's macroeconomist, Simon Wren-Lewis:

I think I’m like the majority of people in not having any fixed ideological position about whether the state should be large or small. The state is clearly good at doing some things, and bad at doing others. In between there is a large and diverse set of activities which may or may not be better achieved through state direction or control, and they really need to be looked at item by item on their merits.

What Wren-Lewis failed to spot was that his criticism of 'small state people' was entirely ideological - he is completely blind to this since he cannot encompass the idea that there is any intellectual credibility to conservative or liberal ideas. It is this bias that damages our intellectual discourse, leads to research that seeks out evidence to reinforce ideology, and results in lazy peer-review and junk science.

Our understanding of society is contested but much of academia seems unable to allow that contest to take place. It is pretty near impossible for someone writing from a right-of-centre perspective to get published in leading journals, unless they already have a secure position. It is equally impossible for that right-of-centre writer to secure the academic positions necessary to allow their view to be even considered worthy of examination or publication.

I don't see this as a threat to conservatism - most people discover conservative ideas when they get their first paycheck and see how much money the government has taken, when their children arrive at school to be faced with sand play and cuddles rather than reading, writing and arithmetic, or when they arrive home to face broken glass and gaps where electrical goods used to sit. Socialism may be lovely when we're young and want to change the world but life's realities are unremittingly conservative. It's a big shame that the people studying our lives seem not to think this.


The result is that a combination of bias, ignorance and ideological prescription results in policy proposals and strategies that miss entirely the real lived experience of the ordinary people those policies are aimed at. The 'experts' drawing up policies are unable to see that things such as personal responsibility and choice might be worth considering before we get to regulations, bans, taxes, controls and the creation of new agencies to 'address' whatever the latest problem might be. And those experts might like to forget the psychology of Heinz Kiosk and remember that we aren't all guilty.


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Do public health scare stories lag behind people's actual behaviour?

From Reason here's a quote about the decline in soda (that's pop to us Brits) consumption:

"Over the last 20 years," Sanger-Katz reports, "sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent." In other words, the downward trend began more than a decade before the soda tax debates in New York state (2009), Washington state (2010), and Philadelphia (2010). Americans began drinking less soda nearly two decades before Berkeley approved a soda tax and San Francisco rejected one, both of which happened last year.

So the great debates we see about sugar loaded fizzy drinks have been presaged by a profound shift in consumer behaviour. Yet this doesn't stop the public health scare story:

It will help explain why childhood obesity rates have risen so dramatically within a generation: in the US, where a third of children are overweight or obese, the average weight of a child has risen by more than 5kg in three decades.

Put those two quotes together and you get a "just a second, are you sure?" response to one or the other. On the face of it both can't be true.

So a question - are the scare stories about diet, about drinking or other choice behaviours a reflection of behavioural changes that are already happening? The great scares about alcohol in the UK - "Binge-drinking is getting out of control in Britain" or whatever - started flooding the newspapers and airwaves during a time when alcohol consumption was falling rapidly. It's almost as if these scares simply reflect people's changing habits - almost a means of society dealing with cognitive dissonance.

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Exchange and the essence of society

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So here we all are. Sat with a mug of tea in that slightly hazy period between Christmas and the New Year. And wondering.

Some of the wondering is prosaic and practical. When will the headache fade enough to make opening the curtains worthwhile? Where are the car keys? Are we going to go shop or try and scrape together another creative culinary masterpiece from amongst the festive leftovers?

Perhaps the wondering is more romantic - love found or lost, good stuff remembered or, better still anticipated. The prospect of more party, of the New Year's celebrations.

Or maybe the fading of Christmas goodwill into the reality of normality prompts something more philosophical? A little more chewing on the bones of metaphysics or picking at the carcass of 'why'.

If the last of these things, here's a question.

Humans are both social creatures and also individuals. We are very conscious of our personality and identity for they are uniquely ours. Yet we also know that this identity is as much a mirror of that around us as it is a self-contained uniqueness. So are we an element of society, of some greater whole? Or are we, as Margaret Thatcher would have it, individual men and women that create society through our joint, mutual actions?

Before you leap to the obvious in assessing this question, it's not a simple as it seems.  Nor is accepting the former idea - that society is greater than the sum of its human parts - some sort of reject of individualism or justification for government. It could be argued that government is necessary because in an imperfect world (less than compliant with the expectations of society) it serves the function of policing the imperfectly compliant.

Such a position assumes that society is created, is a deliberate act of human ingenuity rather than a consequence of humans behaving as social creatures. It also reckons that man can be made perfect
through the administration of society. but only where that administration is by mandarins, by Plato's philosopher kings.

Such an argument is commonplace in socialism (although not exclusive to left-wing beliefs). And it's counter is to say that man is not perfectable, that to attempt such a project is hubris. Society is organic and essential. It is the consequence of human exchange for mutual benefit - you can call this exchange 'collaboration', 'cooperation' or even 'trade' but it is what makes us human and what makes our human society.

When we try to make a different society, to pretend that we can make one that isn't based on exchange - on trade - we fail. It doesn't matter whether this is communism's ordered society or Ayn Rand's selfish individualism, if it denies that mutual benefit through exchange it also denies the essential nature of society.

Society is greater than the sum of its parts. Not in the way that some socialists might argue. The value - in the broadest sense of that word - we get from exchange is that 'greater sum', the advantage society gives us is the benefit of trade. If we stop free exchange we damage human society.

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Hubris, "Big Data" and the new totalitarianism

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As you know, Vince-Wayne Mitchell debunked 'Big Data' ages ago when he showed how data-mining big data sets revealed the value of horoscopes as a targeting guide. But we're still expected to believe that the ever more sophisticated manipulation of parge data sets with an ever more bewildering array of clever software tools is a good thing.

More worryingly some people believe their own hype:

“This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we've always had,” says Pentland.  “That’s a remarkable change.  It’s like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed or when education became ubiquitous, or perhaps when people began being tied together via the Internet.” 

Read that carefully folk. What he's saying is that these ever-so-clever computers will, through the magic of poking at  "Big Data" reveal how society should be organised. And we can "build social systems" that are better! I don't know about you but this is both hubris and also extremely scary. Just look at what Pentland concludes:

To be able to see the details of variations in the market and the beginnings of political revolutions, to predict them, and even control them, is definitely a case of Promethean fire. . . We’re going to reinvent what it means to have a human society.

A new totalitarianism is being born. We should worry.

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Can there be crimes against a community?

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I don’t doubt that hate is a big motivation in a great deal of violent crime – the question that concerns me is whether the attacking of a black man because he is black or a gay man because he is gay constitutes a different category of crime from, say, attacking that black man because he looked at my girlfriend or that gay man because he’s a Burnley supporter?

The argument is that a racially-motivated attack is an attack on the black “community” since the crime was, in the context of that community, ‘random’. Thus, it is argued, we are right to introduce a particular category of crime – ‘hate’ crime – that protects society from attacks on minority ‘communities’ within that wider society.

My concern with this particularism is that is formalises a form of ‘groupthink’ – the line that the appalling murder of Stephen Lawrence was “an attack on the whole black community” is often wheeled out to explain its singular significance as a crime. But is that really the case?

The argument is that any person from the black community could have been a victim that night. Any member of that community could have been stood at that bus stop. But surely the same could be said for other circumstances where someone was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Take our Burnley supporter for example – could not that same argument applied to the black man apply to the Burnley fan?

And randomness, while a concern to the community, doesn’t affect the circumstances of the crime. Remember this from 2001?

 

During the three-week killing spree last October, 10 people died and three were wounded. The victims were chosen at random, while they shopped, mowed lawns or put petrol in their cars at garages.

Randomness made the murder spree more chilling but didn’t make it a different category of murder from the drug-related shooting. Yet it was undoubtedly – in the terms of hate crime’s advocates – an attack on a community.

The core of my concern lies in the idea that there can be a crime against “the community”, that somehow a community is an entity and that people are defined by their membership (or otherwise) of that community. It has always seemed to me that, while well-meant, such an emphasis simply plays the racist’s card for him – if people are defined by the group or groups they belong to, how is that different from the racist idea of separate development?

Finally, there must be a difference between the manner in which the media (and us in our daily conversations) respond to crimes motivated by these hatreds and the way in which the courts deal with the crime. The young Asians who hit my son over the head with a hammer did so to get his mobile phone not because he is white. But had racism been their motivation would the actual crime have been different?

The consequences for the victim are identical in both circumstances (although the police didn’t exactly go out of their way to catch my son’s attackers), yet we’re told that attacking my son with a hammer because of his race is somehow worse that doing so to rob him. Because, in some unspecified way, it would be an attack on a “community”. Yet the community is not the victim of the crime any more than society is a ‘victim’ of the robbery.

Crime is an individual act that directly damages the life, health or property of real individuals. For us to pass laws that stretch certain (and only certain – bashing someone’s head in because they’re ginger isn’t a hate crime) motivations beyond the specific situation to apply to a wider “community”, seems to me to enshrine another piece of “groupthink” into the law. We have anthropomorphised community and this cannot – if you are a liberal – be right.

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In which George shoots the messenger (and misses)

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Back in 1957 an unemployed market researcher called Vance Packard published “The Hidden Persuaders”, a work purporting to expose the evils of advertising and, in particular, the application of psychological techniques in what he called “subliminal advertising”. Packard’s ideas are still popular even though there is almost no evidence that the methods he describes work.

However, we still see of advertising depicted as a sinister, occult science dedicated to using psychological techniques to dull the consumer’s mind and manipulate her into almost robotic purchasing behaviour. Here’s George Monbiot:

Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing sophisticated means of overcoming our defences. In public they insist that if we become informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ingenious methods of bypassing the conscious mind.

The idea of subliminal manipulation remains despite this:

The notion that subliminal directives can influence motives or actions is contradicted by a large body of research evidence and is incompatible with theoretical conceptions of perception and motivation

Or this:

Conducted a meta-analysis to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of subliminal advertising in influencing the consumer's decision between alternatives. A review of narrative reviews is provided to illustrate that sample size and effect size are seldom used as the basis for evaluating whether subliminal marketing stimuli are an effective means for influencing consumer choice behavior. The results of the meta-analysis of 23 studies indicate that there is very little effect.

In simple terms Monbiot is talking nonsense. However, it is a seemingly persuasive nonsense since he goes on to conflate subliminal methodologies (the “bypassing of the conscious mind” bit) with the concept of brand equity:

The first time we see an advertisement, we are likely to be aware of what it's telling us and what it is encouraging us to buy. From then on, we process it passively, absorbing its imagery and messages without contesting them, as we are no longer fully switched on. Brands and memes then become linked in ways our conscious minds fail to detect.

Now it’s true that brands – like many other things – are heuristics and employ the idea of mnemonics to achieve (or rather try to achieve) the situation where, when faced with a decision about a given purchase, the consumer recalls the brand. Most likely this is within a choice set rather than solus – we are likely to recall both Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola when considering purchasing a fizzy soft drink.

However, brand heuristics do not sit in isolation from other non-advertising heuristics such as personal taste, socialisation and preference.

The essence of the ‘advertising is evil’ argument cannot rest on subliminal manipulation (it doesn’t work) or the misrepresentation of brand equity leaving just the argument that advertising makes us buy more stuff:

People who watch a lot of advertisements appear to save less, spend more and use more of their time working to meet their rising material aspirations. All three outcomes can have terrible impacts on family life. They also change the character of the nation. Burdened by debt, without savings, we are less free, less resilient, less able to stand up to those who bully us.

I’m sure George Monbiot watches the BBC so isn’t in this category and fails to present a source for his contention. However, it’s pretty difficult – if you think about it for a second – to understand how you set a control group for the sort of study Monbiot refers to – there is a good longitudinal analysis by researchers at Warwick University linking advertising effects and longer working hours in the USA but this shows a general correlation between rising advertising expenditure and longer working hours which isn’t quite what George is arguing.

If there is a problem – and I’m not entirely sure that there is one – its cause does not lie with advertising but, as Monbiot spots, with values. And I do not think – actually I know – that advertising is a mirror to our values not the creator of those values. If we are to seek salvation from the sinful consumerist world, which I guess is Monbiot’s objective, the answer doesn’t lie in half-baked psychology or misplaces and misdirected attacks on the messenger.

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Things you don't often read in the Guardian...

Not being (which won't surprise you dear reader) a regular Guardian reader, I'd not seen anything by Dave Clements. And I guess I would - in my intolerance - have simply labelled him another trendy lefty public sector worker. Today though he wrote this:

With the exception of those whose livelihoods depend on it – reportedly half a million took to the streets in March – there has been a notable absence of opposition to the cuts from the wider public. The funny thing is that for all the official plaudits, nobody dare mention the apparent indifference of the supposed beneficiaries of public services. The institutions borne of the welfare state are far from “cherished”, as the leader of the opposition would have us believe. If anything, they are endured because of the lack of an alternative.

I think Dave's got it about right there - in my recent election campaign, the "cuts" were only mentioned by those facing possible redundancy (a feeling and experience I was able to understand having been in that situation up to Christmas - when possibility became reality). I was also struck by Dave's questioning of the statist norm:

It is not so much that the state is a drain on private enterprise; it is more that the political culture it gives expression to inhibits social enterprise. It crowds out – to borrow a phrase – the social action on which a healthy society is dependent. If we are to revive the public service ethos and defend public services that people need and want, we must first develop a respect for people’s autonomy and begin to recognise their capacity to run their own lives.

It seems to me that this position - rejecting the controlling Fabian state - represents the opening for a new politics where autonomy and liberty are given. A politics that embraces left and right, debates the merits of collective and individual rights and argues about the balance between personal choice and community power but does all this in the context of a much smaller state.

If more on the left embrace this option - and there are many, I don't doubt, who share Dave Clements' view - we might stumble towards a society less helpless in the face of officialdom, less dependent on the state, more grown up in its independence and less prepared to be pushed about by government, big business or their agents. We might get closer to sorting out our own problems - to that mystic place where 'Big Society' is real rather than something teetering close to being just a differentiating slogan.

I guess I can dream a little!

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