Tuesday 30 April 2013

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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More lies about advertising - this time from the Children's Food Trust

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The Children's Food Trust are back again with their proposals for advertising bans and controls. And, since it's the enemy of choice, the attack on advertising is couched in terms of a criticism of self-regulation.

“The ASA has proved itself unwilling and unable to fulfil this role,” he added.

“In industry after industry – from MPs’ expenses, to phone-hacking, to banks, and now in online marketing – self-regulation has proven to be a failed model. More of the same is not what is needed to protect children’s health or to give parents more help in making healthy choices for their family.”

The problem, we're told, is that the self-regulation of advertising (remember that broadcast advertising isn't self-regulated but regulated by statute) under the aegis of the Committee of Advertising Practice has allowed advertisers of food products to use online advertising. This, of course, means that some of the adverts are seen by children.

What struck me about the reports from the Trust is that the main evidence it presents (about four or five websites) simply doesn't indicate anything different from what is allowable in broadcast advertising already. However, they also demonstrate the scale of parental irresponsibility when it comes to Internet use:

Social networking websites, like Facebook, are especially popular amongst children and young people, 28 per cent of 8–11 year olds and 75 per cent of 12–15 year olds have an active social networking site profile. One third of 8–12 year olds have a profile on sites that require users to register as being aged 13 or over.

So let's be clear about this - Rowntree, Krave, Cheesestrings and Nesquik are advertising in media that have a 13 age minimum. But because irresponsible parents allow their under-13 children to use those sites those advertisers should be banned from doing so?

Yet again we are seeing the use of poor quality research - with no peer review and no robust methodology - to justify arguments for advertising bans. Controls proposed solely because some parents can't say 'no' to their children. Meaning that children see advertising that they would not see on a commercial children's TV channel - advertising that complies with the agree codes of practice. Indeed, because the websites all show TV advertisements, these are codes of practice subject to statutory regulation.

But I guess that blaming advertising gets a better headline than blaming parents for letting their ten year olds go on Facebook (where an advert for Sugar Puffs is probably the least of worries).

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Sunday 28 April 2013

Paul Krugman on cheap labour...

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The trendy left's favourite economist has this to say about cheap labour:

These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help–foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something still awful but nonetheless significantly better.

This is absolutely right. Capitalism - neoliberalism if you prefer - is what gets us out of poverty and keeps us out of poverty.

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Saturday 27 April 2013

Possible predatory open-access publishing and public health...

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A couple of days ago I wrote about a piece of research published in a journal called "Food & Public Health" and written by authors including one Dr Ricardo Costa from Coventry University. I commented:

Nothing in the research suggests that Jamie, Nigella and Delia are making us all obese with their glorious culinary temptations. The authors however make a huge leap from these temptations to suggest that these wicked TV chefs are affecting our food preparation habits (again without any evidence) and that they are, as a result:


...a likely hidden contributing factor to Britain’s obesity epidemic and its associated public health issues.
Yesterday, while talking with Cullingworth's resident academic publishing guru, I mentioned that "Food & Public Health" was an open access publication. Kathryn's response was to wonder whether this journal - an its publisher - was on Jeffrey Beall's list of  "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". I'd never heard of this list but it's a consequence of the open access publishing model:

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. 

Beale (who is an American academic librarian) provides a comprehensive list of the criteria he uses to determine whether the publisher or journal is included on his list.

"Food & Public Health" is published by Scientific & Academic Publishing, a publisher that is included on Jeff Beall's list. To indicate part of the problem check out the guidance to authors on review:

You may suggest information of some particularly qualified reviewers who have had experience in the subject of the submitted manuscript, but who are not affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor.

So in effect you can certainly influence - and maybe even pick who'll review your paper. But it gets better:

You may also submit a list of reviewers to be excluded. 

So any academic who might disagree can be excluded from the review process - hard to see how this is open and transparent publishing. Letting authors direct or influence review is, quite simply, a recipe for bad science, ideological capture of academic disciplines and the exclusion of challenge. Precisely the problem we see with public health.

What we can't determine from the publisher website is the publication fee - remember that in an open access academic publishing model the cost of publishing shifts from user (or user's institution) to author (or author's institution). The typical open access charge is $3000 to publish an article so we can assume that Dr Costa - or Coventry University or the Heart of England NHS Foundation trust - paid a charge of this sort to have the article published.

What some predatory open access publishers do (although we don't know this is the case for Scientific & Academic Publishing) is, in effect, spam academics to get material for publishing. This takes advantage of pressures to publish, especially for academics in less well-known institutions. Worse still, the journalist (say at the Independent) probably can't distinguish between this sort of predatory publishing process and processes of higher quality. With the result that ideological and weak articles such as Dr Costa's get the same credence as articles in established subscription publications - to that journalist it's all "academic publishing".

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Friday 26 April 2013

Government is bad for your health and worse for your liberty.

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And that means not allowing governments to censor what we say:

Google said in a blog post: "As we've gathered and released more data over time, it's become increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown.

"In more places than ever, we've been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services."

The biggest offender is not one of the obviously oppressive nations but a country with a democratically elected left-wing leader - Brazil.

Government is bad for your health and worse for your liberty.

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Proof of the creative value of boozing...



The Very Stuff of Creativity!


The Drum, fearless as ever in its search for the truth, set out to discover whether the great creative myth - that alcohol sets the design juices flowing - was true. And it seems that we were right back in 1990 - getting a little sloshed helps with the creative process:

The team that drank alcohol came up with better ideas. And more of them.

There were some interesting findings of a less intended nature (and not just that drunk people can't draw straight lines) such as:

Most of our guinea pigs attended as part of a creative team. We expected that they’d automatically pair off with their partner and get to work. But that wasn’t the case.

Instead, both groups immediately started working in large group brainstorms. I thought creatives hated brainstorms! But we left them to it, expecting them to peel off into their creative teams at some point.

They didn’t.

Fascinating stuff and yet again a reminder that the disinhibiting nature of alcohol is a boon and a blessing to mankind whatever the fussbuckets may say!

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Thursday 25 April 2013

Jamie, Nigella, Delia...you're making us fat!




Or so says Dr Ricardo Costa, senior lecturer in nannying fussbucketry at the University of Coventry (do these places spring up overnight - until today I didn't know Coventry had a University).

The study, published in the Food and Public Health journal, found that many celebrity chef recipes in cookbooks contained “undesirable levels” of saturated fatty acids (SFA), sugars and salt which are linked to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Note the detail here and the words - "undesirable", "linked to" aren't really any justification for the headline: TV Chefs are "adding to obesity" and are typical New Puritan weasel words. After all I don't need any evidence at all to "link" something to something else and this is precisely what Dr Costa has done. The research simply runs a load of recipes from celebrity chefs through a computer model and publishes the results:

Food preparation recipes (n=904), covering a wide range of meal types, from 26 dominant British based Celebrity Chefs were randomly sampled from literature and web sources. Recipes were blindly analysed through dietary analysis software by three trained dietetic researchers (CV 6.9%). The nutritional value of each recipe was compared against national healthy eating benchmark guidelines using a healthy eating index (HEI).

Nothing in the research suggests that Jamie, Nigella and Delia are making us all obese with their glorious culinary temptations. The authors however make a huge leap from these temptations to suggest that these wicked TV chefs are affecting our food preparation habits (again without any evidence) and that they are, as a result:

...a likely hidden contributing factor to Britain’s obesity epidemic and its associated public health issues. 

Again we see the loaded words of public health - using epidemic to describe rising rates of obesity is bad in a newspaper article but, in a scientific paper such misuse is inexcusable. Even if obesity rates are rising (and they aren't) it will never be an epidemic because getting fat isn't contagious - I won't catch obesity off you, not even a little bit. And "hidden contributing factor", which I assume means "we haven't got any evidence to support this statement so we'll say it's hidden".

The profile of obesity suggests that Dr Costa and his colleagues are talking nonsense. Obesity is disproportionately an issue for women from lower social classes and middle-aged men. At a guess these aren't the front of the house when Jamie scooters round Italy or the Hairy Bikers talk about vegetables. I may be wrong, of course, but my contention has precisely the same amount of scientific value as Dr Costa's - essentially none.

All this is a reminder that much of 'dietetics' is simply fancy calorie counting based on a set of willfully misrepresented half-truths about salt, sugar and fat. Obesity is a consequence of eating too much and exercising too little and has precisely nothing at all to do with the recipes presented by Lorraine or Antonio on our tellies.

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Wednesday 24 April 2013

Austerity and government spending

Austerity is back in the news. Not that it ever went away, I guess. But it's back, the IMF has told us that we're too austere (thereby contradicting what it said the previous time and the time before that) and the masses hordes of pseudo-economics experts has leapt on the collected words of a few luminaries to say that the government needs to do something different.

They are, however, studiously vague about what that "something different" might look like. One day it sounds like printing loads of lovely pounds and scattering them like confetti across the nation. Later the same folk suggest - in the manner of business snuggling up to government - that we should "invest in infrastructure" with that freshly created and unearned cash.

Mostly though the cries of pain around "austerity" are about government spending rather than economic growth. Sometimes this is wrapped up in barely understood, quasi-Keynesian comments about aggregate demand thereby providing cover for a message that tries to tell us that the answer lies in borrowing more money to spend on (variously) higher benefits, new trains, tunnels under London, "boosting the housing market" and any number of special appeals from health and welfare lobbyists.

The central argument is that the problem is that we (consumers) aren't spending enough. Which is a bit rich when the government insists on taking round-a-bout half of all we earn so it can squander it inefficiently on heaven knows what. Plus of course the rest of the government's strategy - cheered on by the austerity worriers - is to inflate our way out of debt. For sure, we pretend that the high inflation of the past four years has been brought about by special factors but the truth is that the Bank of England, charged with controlling inflation, has been allowed to ignore its responsibilities by allowing that inflation to run well above the target level month in and month out.

Since the government hasn't really cut spending then we have to ask where the austerity comes from? It's a real fact that there are people out there who are more-or-less destitute - the latest reports from those food banks (for all their selective nature) tell us this is so. But are those people destitute because of government spending cuts - spending cuts that, in aggregate, haven't happened? Or are they destitute for some other reason - policy, regulatory or just plain bad luck?

It seems to me that, by focusing on the misguided view that the cure to economic problems lies with government (and central bank) action, we condemn many people to a much deeper 'austerity' that would have been the case had we focused instead on the things that do make people better off, that do end recession and that do prevent "austerity".

Growth comes from adding value - taking or doing things that make lives better, that allow us more time or that give us access to things we didn't have before. It doesn't come from taking money off Fred and giving it to Susan. It doesn't come from regulation, from controls or from the deranged view that a few suited masters in the Treasury can "run the economy". Every day I see exciting, creative people doing things to make the world better and brighter - sometimes just because they care but mostly because they can turn that value into money and that money into nice cars, foreign holidays, fancy clothes and a big house.

That's what will end austerity not government spending.

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Tuesday 23 April 2013

The digital police state - not so far away at all

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You, of course, have nothing to fear. You are an honest citizen and Judge Dredd isn't going to swoop down and exercise summary judgement over any infringement. Or so you think and you call for more CCTV cameras, for DNA databases, for biometrics on passports, for speed cameras and for in-car tracking devices. And the government smiles benignly as it rushes to comply with your desire for security - protection from terrorists they say or 'responding to anti-social behaviour'. Sometimes it's even simpler - the government tells you as it licks its chops that these measures will be ever so convenient for you as you go about your life.

We have constructed much of the infrastructure for control and it is but a short step to tie all this together:

….everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now.

And don't pretend that this digital police state will be in China or Saudi Arabia, it's as likely to be right here in Britain. They'll say you have "rights" but they'll also know that surveillance brings power that mere rights do not protect. And those rights will be shoved aside for 'security', for 'community safety', all lovingly enforced by the authorities and a a legion of 'concerned citizens'.

I hope I am wrong and that this isn't the path we're set on. But I am right to fear what that path means.

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Health fascism meets equalities mongering - a battle royale!

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In the USA, as 'Obamacare' rolls out, a new battle is taking place as the desire of the health fascists to charge smokers more meets the desire to provide healthcare for all:

But city officials in the District of Columbia recently decided to charge them the same rate as nonsmokers, joining Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts. California is considering following suit.

Those places argue that the purpose of the health law is to insure all Americans and that includes smokers, who are disproportionately old, poor or minorities all populations that the bill is trying to make sure get coverage.

Oh dear, immovable object and irresistible force! Some folk aren't happy but most of those planning the new systems see no value at all in charging smokers more for the new insurance schemes:

Timothy S. Jost, a health policy analyst at Washington and Lee University School of Law, said charging a 50 percent smoking surcharge on premiums doesn’t make sense mathematically.

“Smokers die younger, but I have seen no evidence that they cost 50 percent more than nonsmokers,” he wrote in an email.

In truth, when it comes to lifetime healthcare costs, those smokers are probably a good sight less costly than that super healthy non-smoker. For sure, the smoker costs more now, but he's going to die young which means he won't be filling up the wards for new knees, hips and shoulders or consuming his body weight in heart drugs for 20 years.

But one has to smile while the health fascists encounter truth - and that other left liberal obsession of positive discrimination for "minorities" of one sort of another!

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A St George's Day toast to CAMRA

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What I hear you say? To that supine bunch who've been suckered into backing the New Puritan, prohibitionist, anti-alcohol campaigns - ostensibly in order to "save the pub"?

It seems the members have given the CAMRA bosses a slap:

First, motion 8, proposed by the Liverpool branches, was passed, apparently without any speakers against.
8. This Conference requires that the Campaign should actively challenge the health lobby’s anti-alcohol statements to give a more balanced view.
Then, after what reportedly was a very lively debate, Motion 19 was passed by 276 votes to 201.
19. This Conference agrees that CAMRA is on the wrong side of the argument over minimum pricing. It instructs the National Executive to withdraw its support for this measure with immediate effect.
Progress indeed - perhaps we'll see all these articles, press releases and statements removed from CAMRA's website?

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Monday 22 April 2013

Astaroth and the children of rock stars...


He is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appeareth in the Form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hold the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present, and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desired, and the reason of his own fall. He can make men wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences. He ruleth 40 Legions of Spirits.


Such is the temptation of the devil - he drips away at the minds of weak people. And none are weaker, it seems, than the Daily Mail journalist:

Crowley, who was born into an upper-class British family in 1875, styled himself as 'the Great Beast 666'. He was an unabashed occultist who, prior to his death in 1947, revelled in his infamy as 'the wickedest man in the world'.

His form of worship involved sadomasochistic sex rituals with men and women, spells which he claimed could raise malevolent gods and the use of hard drugs, including opium, cocaine, heroin and mescaline.

To be honest - as the hat tells us - Crowley was rather more of a libertine than he was ever an adherent of some evil faith. Indeed the motto of the Ordo Templi Orientis - "do what thou wilt" - rather makes this clear! These organisations barely merit the term religion or cult and the 'beliefs' are syncretic making connections between ancient myths, christian iconography and supposed gnostic insight. And for many these secret (or rather secretive) groups fascinate with their combination of the slightly naughty with an esoteric justification for such naughtiness.

It has always seemed to me that Aleister Crowley, for all the occultist guru status laid on him by modern ODO followers, was chiefly interested in such mish-mash religiosity because it excused his rampant (and not especially choosy) sex drive. Terms like the "wickedest man in the world" were more or less self-penned - Crowley revelled in the symbols, candles and drugs far more than in any sincere belief in the strictures of the ODO scriptures, many of which he wrote himself anyway.

Such decadence and libertinism appeals to a certain sort of person - perhaps the wayward child of rockstars or someone similarly blessed with the means to pursue a debauched lifestyle without recourse to doing any real work. After all, Crowley was just such a person and so, it seems is Peaches Geldof:

Given her own dabbling in heroin and casual sex, particularly during a rootless period when she lived in Los Angeles a few years ago, it is perhaps natural that the troubled offspring of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates should be attracted to such a liberal school of thought.

It seems to me that the Order in question appeals precisely because of the heroin and casual sex rather than because of some supposed "satanic" ritual. But - as the Daily Mail find - there's always one person who is prepared to believe that these are evil sectarians who do human sacrifice:

A former FBI agent, Ted Gundersen, who investigated Satanic circles in LA, found that Crowley’s teachings about 'raising demons to do one’s bidding' suggested human sacrifice, preferably of 'an intelligent young boy'.

This is placing altogether too much credence on the ravings of a drugged up libertine - a creative and clever drugged up libertine but still a drugged up libertine. And we shouldn't be surprised that the secret club purporting to descend from Crowley's little clique appeals to modern day drugged up libertines, should we?

Finally though we need to be clear - the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Golden Dawn or any of the other cranky pseudo-masonic clubs associated with Aleister Crowley are not devil worshippers. Mad, bad and dangerous to know maybe but not satanists.

And as ODO's UK leader points out:

...his is the only religion that sends people a letter of congratulations when they decide to leave

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Sunday 21 April 2013

In which an ex-central banker inadvertently explains what's wrong...

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John Gieve, opining in the Financial Times, manages to capture what's wrong in his headline:


Who is in charge of the British economy?

This is a revealing question since it assumes that Mr Gieve and his ilk were - indeed are - somehow "in charge" of the economy. Think for a second what we mean by "the economy" and the sheer hubris of this man's belief becomes apparent. The British economy consists of the choices made by nearly seventy million people and millions of business. It's the sales made by the corner shop, the decision we make about this year's holidays or whether to go to B&Q or IKEA.

Yet this ex-central banker, undaunted by the scorching of his feathers as he flies ever closer to the sun, says stuff like this:
 
...the UK is now pursuing three macroeconomic objectives – steady growth, low inflation, and a stable supply of credit – with three sets of policy instruments. In the long term, the goals are compatible. But in the medium term there may be trade-offs. A new framework should explain how and by whom those trade-offs will be made and how the three sets of policy tools will be combined to best effect.

Impressive stuff I'm sure you'll agree. But it's wrong and not just because it's barely comprehensible. It's wrong because only a deranged idiot would think he (or a claque of him and his pals) can run the economy. It is this outlook that is causing all the damage - this stupid belief that there are a set of levers in the Bank of England that if pulled in the correct order will usher in an era of growth, prosperity and prizes for all.

All the rest of us going about our lives buying, selling, sleeping, eating and dreaming, we didn't cause the problem. It was caused by people like John Gieve who, despite all the evidence, still believe they know better. They don't know better and no one is in charge of the economy (unless you're in North Korea).

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Racists and left-wing thugs can march but the Scouts can't! The world is mad.

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When the EDL came to Bradford there were 1700 police manning the barricades so to speak. Not to mention the endless hours of meetings, planning and general fussing over the occasion. Indeed, the professional leadership of the Council can't shut up telling us what a brilliant job they did!

But it seems that an entirely violence free and peaceful march through the City has maybe seen its last steps:

Scouts have held a parade in the city to celebrate St George, the patron saint of Scouting, for decades. But the police has told them it can no longer oversee the march for free, as its national guidelines had changed. 

Now let's be clear about this shall we? The decision is entirely a local decision, the scouts march along the public highway on a Sunday once a year. This is just a daft - pointless, purposeless, bureaucratic and soul-less - decision made wholly in West Yorkshire.

And it is wrong. Wrong that decent folk - men, women, boys and girls - have to pay for a couple of coppers when the protester, the union activist, the racist and the anarchist get their policing for free,

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Saturday 20 April 2013

Real international aid...

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We are supposed to pat ourselves on the back because we're handing over £11 billion or thereabouts in aid to needy countries. Much of this either props ups government budgets (and in doing so reduces any incentive to actually collect some taxes) or is spent on politically-correct environmental and education programmes. But that's as maybe - there's a much more important support going from the UK to those needy countries:

Just one in 20 households in the UK make remittances, which are transfers of cash back to countries of origin to either families or communities. Yet, even though they are small in number, with an average remittance worth £31 per week, the World Bank estimated that last year some $23.16bn was transferred in remittances from the UK.

This money goes directly to real people, it doesn't need officials to administer it or aid workers to manage it. There's no need for grand plans or strategies. And it works - the people getting remittances spend it on improving their lives. On building better homes, on buying a bicycle or paying bus fares.

This is real international aid:
 
Analysis of household survey data show that remittances have reduced poverty and resulted in better development outcomes in many low-income countries. Remittances may have reduced the share of poor people in the population by 11 percentage points in Uganda, 6 percentage points in Bangladesh and 5 percentage points in Ghana. Studies in El Salvador and Sri Lanka find that the children of remittance recipient households have a lower school drop-out rate. In Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka children in remittance recipient households have higher birth weights and better health indicators than other households.

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Friday 19 April 2013

The excitable crowd...




This is a hard post to write for I understand - more than I care to analyse - the power of words to wound and the ability of other people's lies to destroy a man. Those who wave "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" probably haven't experienced the agony - the torture - of incessant verbal abuse. Not the shouting sort but the quietly whispered version; the drip, drip, drip of nastiness, the exclusion, the endless pointing to flaws and failings.

So, yes folks, words can - and do - drive people to the point of no return. And we should respect that fact and act accordingly. But we talk here of persistent, deliberate, directed, personal attacks not the generality of criticising a place or a people. Such things do not wound, do not destroy and are designed more to irritate, to generate a response.

I recall the first time I was attacked on the basis of a stereotype - it was the north/south thing. This fellow student told me I was a rich, posh southerner who wouldn't understand real life because...well because I was from "The South". I was surprised mostly by the 'all southerners are posh' line since I'd never thought of myself as anything but perfectly ordinary, as far removed from poshness as most folk. What shocked me though was the realisation that this man saw the world through a prism of stereotyped prejudice - his 'rich posh southerner' line was little different objectively than the view of black people as good at sports but not much else.

I say all this to provide some context, to point out that there's a difference between tribal allegiance and personal feelings. There's a big difference between calling someone fat and ugly and saying that everyone from Denholme is an inbred. Both these comments are rude but only the first is personal. And those folk from Denholme revel in their slightly redneck image (although heaven knows how they got to be called Frogboilers).

Which brings me to the excitable crowd, the mobile vulgus - the mob. For it is in this monster and its exploitation by a savvy few that the real danger lies. Step back to the distinction between the personal and the general - the mob takes offence (or is directed to that fake offence) at the latter and, in doing so, uses the former to prosecute its case. In times past this resulted in some rows, maybe a fight.

Today - because the government wishes to control speech - it results in someone being arrested for being rude on Twitter.

It seems that the mob can issue any kind of threat once its dander is up - from whining, self-righteous victim-mongering to actual death threats. But the target of that mob's anger - whatever their initial words - is hounded, chased, attacked and threatened. And the men of the law - with their shiny police vehicles and politically-correct masters - do the bidding (as they ever did) of the mob.

These laws - the ones that get people arrested for joking about blowing up a snow-bound airport, making snippy comments about Olympic divers or making unpleasant remarks about people from Liverpool.

These laws are the real offence.

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Thursday 18 April 2013

So is Richard Murphy a fascist then?

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As Mr Worstall reminds us:

The Courageous State, is a call for a revival of the economics of fascism. And there is something of a difference between being concerned about fascism and actively promoting it.


I'm pretty sure Richie considers himself a radical campaigning activist.

But then so did Benito - until he seized power! And how different is Richie's 'manifesto' from this?
 
The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers;
A minimum wage;
The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions;
To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants;
Reorganisation of the railways and the transport sector;
Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance;
Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55

Or indeed, this:

A strong progressive tax on capital (envisaging a “partial expropriation” of concentrated wealth);
The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor;
Revision of all contracts for military provisions;
The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

That was the birth of fascism. As I've said before, men like Richard Murphy - knowingly or otherwise - are repeating the same errors and tilling the soil of totalitarianism.

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Tuesday 16 April 2013

A week's worth of government guidance for nannying fussbuckets everywhere!

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I get a little e-mail from GOV.UK. It's a useful little thing that helps me with the trials of being a councillor. It also reminds me of the sheer fussbucketry of government. Here's a selection of today's government guidance, information and advice:

Late Night levy - Amended supporting guidance for licensing authorities on the late night levy.

Ah yes, that's a secondary tax on us enjoying a night out.

False ID Guidance - Guide to the legislation relevant to false ID, to the types of valid ID, and to what action should be taken when presented with false ID. 

Fighting crime you think? See that bit "...the types of valid ID" - you even need two forms of ID to sign on at the doctors when you move!

Section 19 Closure Factsheet - Explains the circumstances for serving a closure notice under section 19 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001.

You mean you don't know about Section 19? This is the law that's used by police and council enforcement fussbuckets to close down pubs for whatever arbitrary reason they chose. And at whatever time.

Designated Public Place Orders Guidance - explains the powers given to local authorities in England and Wales to introduce designated public place orders (DPPOs).

DPPOs are those 'bans on public drinking' your local paper gets all excited about and your local council loves.
 
"It's not to say people can't be trusted to drink responsibly but it is about setting the right sort of tone. It's about tackling a minority of people who drink to excess and drink in a way which brings all of us difficulties."

Rubbish, it's about stopping people enjoying themselves because you disapprove.

And this is just one week's worth of government fussbucketry!

Now please don't tell me I live in a 'free' country. I'd like to but there are too many nannying fussbuckets who think it's just fine to stamp on, tax, arrest and generally get in the face of anyone who doesn't share their judgemental new puritan, disapproving, po-faced bigotry.

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Salt is good for you - season those chips!

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We've known for ages that salt - the wicked and evil thing we must remove from our diet - is, in truth, a pretty benign substance at the levels most of us consume. And we also need it in our diet.

Slowly people are beginning to realise this - here's the New York Times:

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.

Got that folks - cutting down salt consumption isn't healthy at all and may even be dangerous! But - as that same NY Times article reports - the food fascists still resist the truth:

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored.

A classic public health response - we've seen it with the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, with e-cigarettes, with meat and with being  slightly overweight - faced with evidence that they might be wrong, the nannies simply ignore it and return to their discredited misrepresentation of the facts. Nothing can stand in the way of public health 'experts' controlling and regulating our diets - they are the ghastly successors of Douglas Jay:

‘...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’
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Sunday 14 April 2013

Ban TV advertising because some folk can't say 'no' to their children.




I've been busy so haven't touched on the latest anti-advertising campaign. A campaign of moronic ignorance but given acres of airtime and page space because, of course, it's 'for the children':

Mr Kent, a journalist and broadcaster, told the BBC he had seen the effect of advertising on his six-year-old son.

"He's like most children - if I don't get to the TV before him, he's grabbed the remote and found an ad," he said.

"It's like watching kiddie crack take hold, despite all our best efforts."

And what exactly does Kent Junior do when he's found an ad? We aren't told. Now maybe said junior has a vast trust fund and can spend it himself but somehow I suspect that the child only gets stuff that Mr or Mrs Kent buys for him.

Now let us be very clear about advertising "to children" - it is very rules bound (it you don't believe this check out the rules) and, when we speak of young children, they very rarely have any purchasing power. The advertising is directed to parents not children.

However, what should really bother us is that there is precisely and exactly no evidence - as in studies that test a scientific hypothesis - to support the contention being made by people like Mr Kent - indeed their cosy little lobby group, "Leave our kids alone", even admits this on its website:

The effect of advertising on children is an emerging area of research. As with most psychological studies the results are a little less clear cut than those in the field of physics or chemistry.

An the anti-advertising crowd then go on to cite three 'studies' none of which show any causal relationship between advertising and well-being let alone between advertising and parents giving into the pestering of their children. Let's take the National Consumer Council study - "Watching, Wanting and Well-being".(pdf) Apart from concluding that advertising bans won't work:

We found that, with children watching a much wider range of programmes than those made specifically for them, attempts to ban specific types of advertising in children’s programme time will not protect much of the under-14 population.

...the study finds that children weren't struggling or suffering as a result of watching TV:

Nearly nine in ten children believe that ‘I have a number of good qualities’ and 83 per cent say ‘I feel good about myself ’. Over seven in ten say ‘I feel that I’m a person of value, at least as valuable as other people’

Moreover, they discovered that children like stuff and knew (mostly) that to get the stuff you want you need money:

Over half of the children think they would be happier if they had more money to buy things for themselves. Nearly that many think the only kind of job they want when they grow up is one that gets them lots of money.

Rather than fretting about children being 'too materialistic' we should be celebrating the fact that half of them have recognised the central - and crucial - fact about our world: if you want the good stuff you need economic success.

The truth in all this is that adverting isn't the problem. The problem is parents who give in, who let their children pester them. In truth it's these nice middle-class parents like Mr Kent who are the problem - rather than facing up to their inability to resist advertising, they choose to first blame their children and secondly blame the advertisers. For what? For their inability to say "no".

So they compare TV advertising to smoking - that'll get a headline:

The tobacco industry managed to argue for years that cigarettes don't cause harm.

That's right folks, middle-class lefties journalists who can't say no to their children have this problem because of TV advertising. It is killing them! Look at the evidence:

Proving causality is difficult, especially when it's in an area as complex and nebulous as psychology

Bother. There isn't any evidence so let's just make stuff up:

Most parents will know instinctively that their children are deeply affected by advertising. They'll also know that children now are far more materialistic than children were 20 or 40 years ago

Are they? Show us the evidence? Oh dear, there isn't any. Here we go again.

Ban everything. It's for the children.
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Thursday 11 April 2013

Bubbles!

For all the bitcoin buyers, Doris Day enthusiasts and, of course, the mighty hammers!





You never knew Doris was a Hammer did you!

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Wednesday 10 April 2013

Sinistral wiccaphobia


The witch is a central figure in European folklore. Or rather the medieval characterisation of the wise woman as evil is a feature of folklore.

Away, away, you ugly witch
Go far away and let me be
I never would kiss your ugly mouth
For all of the gifts that you could give

Temptation is placed before us - an apple, a gingerbread house or the array of gifts Alison Gross offered her victim - a shirt, a mantle and a golden cup. Sometimes we are sucked into the witches spell despite the witches ugliness. Maybe her glamour blinded us to the truth of her face. Or perhaps our greed led us into the spell.

But this is just a fairy story. A mischaracterisation of the witch. For that witch is more like to be simply someone who tells us the uncomfortable truth, who sits us down to say that we can't have all the glories of the world and that good things are the consequence of effort or good fortune never entitlement.

Some though persist with the image of the witch as an evil hag - more from their own doubts about female achievement than anything else. These sorry sinistral folk persist in hating witches, in painting them as the devil's servants and as monsters better dead.

The rest of us know different. The witch, they say, is dead. But her spirit lives on, the thought and wisdom still guides and advises. And new witches, inspired by that dead witch's achievement, will arrive, ready to spread the wisdom.

And to curse that sad sinistral wiccaphobia.

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Tuesday 9 April 2013

Socialism died in 1989 - now we must destroy its shadow

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Socialism died at the end of the 1980s. For sure, its corpse twitched and jerked for a few years but there's no doubt that it died. And that it won't be missed. Here's Dan Hodges reminding us:

She won. Hers was not a superficial victory, but a final settlement. In the 1980s the Left framed the battle with Thatcherism as a final reckoning. And they were right, it was. And it was Thatcher who emerged victorious.


In truth it wasn't just Margaret Thatcher or even her and Ronald Reagan. It was a catalogue of great men and women - Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Helmut Kohl, even Gorbachev from the evil empire.

Socialism died. The trouble is so many didn't get the news. They didn't see how free enterprise, free trade, privatisation and free capital movement - that lovely neoliberalism - was making the world a better place. Wealthier, happier, more equal - all the things those socialists claimed for their failed creed. Except for the actually working bit.

It beggars belief that intelligent people continue to delude themselves that we can plan, organise and direct all the economy. That clever men can make better choices for you and me than we can make for ourselves. Eastern Europe - all those Poles, Slovaks, Romanians and Bulgars we fear will flock to England - is poor because of socialism. It really is that simple.

The next generation has to destroy the shadow of this dead creed. Or else we will watch as other places - places we once pitied as starving basket cases - start to catch us up. Watch as we squander the inheritance of our past success on a make believe economy - one where public spending, the modern equivalent of taking in each others washing, creeps ever higher and where the chimera of borrowing-driven consumption eats away at wealth and prosperity.

If we don't slay socialism's shadow, we will all be poorer. And for some that may mean the relative poverty socialists bleat about becoming real poverty. A poverty created by the vainglory and hubris of the socialist.

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But what about global warming?

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A team of archaeologists have unearthed evidence which suggests Bingley Moor used to be as warm as the South of France.

Really. I've been on those moors. Warm isn't the word that springs to mind!

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Monday 8 April 2013

Thanks Maggie (plus an old quote of mine)

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Others will write finer prose, there will be a great deal of it too, so I will stick to two things - a one word appreciation of all that Margaret Thatcher did for Britain and a recycled quote from something I wrote in 2009.

The one word - it should be on all our lips really - is thanks.

And the quote - written following one of the periodic occasions when a Labour councillor talked of celebrating Maggie's death:

It’s nearly 20 years since the great lady left office – 12 of which years having been under a Labour Government. For most of those involved in this spat, Maggie is but a memory – even if they were born before 1990 their memories are those of a small child or those transferred across the generation from parent to child. Yes the scars of deindustrialisation, the impact on places like Barnsley of pit closure continue to inform us about the politics of such places ...but the left should look forward – to how their ideas might influence the shape of tomorrow’s world not backwards to dreams of a place that’s gone and won’t come back.

I never considered myself a “Thatcherite” – altogether too whiggish, too Gladstonian for my tastes. But those ten years transformed my country – painfully for sure but changed nonetheless – and made it possible for the small battalions to climb back out of the place they were hiding. Championing those folk is the challenge for me – and it should be something both left and right can support. We do not need big institutions, grand national organisations – we need things local, people-sized, participatory and independent of big government.


So thanks Maggie. RIP.

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Sunday 7 April 2013

Modern Money Theory - the economics of tyranny



Giuseppe Volpi would have loved Modern Money Theory. I picture him in some dystopic alternative history clattering across Rome clutching the incontrovertible proof needed to justify the corporate state. It seems that a theory that places the state - in the form of the central bank - at the heart of the economy provides just the set of tools that Volpi needed to build a corporatist utopia. No need to worry about where the money would come from to drain marshes, ensure the trains run on time and build a military machine capable of conquering Abyssinia.

The idea that currency sovereignty provides government with the means to control the economy is, without doubt, the economics of tyranny. I know that MMT merely describes how things are rather than proposing a substantively alternative economic model. But there is no doubt that tyrants everywhere would love the ability to print whatever money is needed and use tax or borrowing to regulate how the economy responds to that new money.

And this is the problem. It isn't a matter of whether MMT works (in narrow economic terms) but the social consequences. As an approach to economic policy, MMT fails the 'dictator test' - would the policy tools help or hinder some future totalitarian leader. And there is no question at all that the model - however much it fits with the current structures of central banking and finance - would result in the obscene situation where people are taxed for reasons other than the raising of finance for government. It is the rebirth of what Finer called the "oikos" state, a polity of de facto slavery where all work is directed to the interests of the state and that state provides, according to some plan, for the needs of the people.

The advocates of MMT - good people in the main - do not appreciate that the tools they propose provide the tyrant with more control than is healthy (assuming we wish to be free). This is not to criticise a economic approach founded on the reality of our current international finance system but to question the premise - that this international finance system is desirable. Put more simply, do we wish to have a system that allows government total control - that facilitates tyranny? It seems so appealing right now - reject austerity and simply print enough money to do all those things government wishes to do. But where is the end of that?

I'm sure there are wiser heads who can have the argument about the economics of MMT but on the wider question - the matter of liberty - we should fear a system that hands to the tyrant those tools he needs for control.

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Friday 5 April 2013

Why does Bradford Council want to close its wonderful market?

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It is pleasing to see - how rare this is - a national newspaper finding wonders outside of London and the Home Counties. And even more delightful when the wonder is in Bradford:

Oastler Shopping Centre, Bradford Bradford is a melting pot of cultures and the centre’s covered market reflects that; its stalls are packed with specialist foods from all over the world. There are cured meats and cheeses from Italy, Polish delicacies, jars of sauerkraut, Caribbean products such as yam flour and palm oil, and plenty of freshly ground spices at my favourite stall, Spice World.

Yes folks that's our market - what used to be John Street market, the place where Mr Morrison had his first stall. And it is a great place, filled with difference and interest - an escape from the sterilised sameness of the supermarket and the shopping mall.

Bradford should be proud of this market - it should be on the front cover of the glossy brochures. More than any other bit of our City Centre it tells the story of the town and holds out hope for the future.

So it will come as no surprise to my readers to hear that - just as was the case with Queen's Road Market at Upton Park - the Council sees the market as a development opportunity. The "preferred option" (what a deadening phrase) is that the two City Centre markets are merged. Not on the site of John Street but in the Kirkgate Centre. The land at the top of town between John Street and Hamm Strasse would land a great big "for sale" sign - ideal, say Bradford's regeneration, bosses for a supermarket or for housing.

In the 1990s Bradford Council - for no good reason - closed down West Yorkshire's last specialist food markets, Rawson Market and James Street Fish Market. They dumped the stallholders in a temporary market (having previously promised them a new market hall) and left them to struggle and for most to close.

It seems that the Council is set on repeating the error - of closing down something good and special on the promise of something better. But 'something better' this time is just a big supermarket!

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Thursday 4 April 2013

The wrong diet - supply or demand?



The bien pensant foodies sorts like to believe there's a thing called a 'food desert' wherein poor folk reside. And in these deserts there is no healthy food - no greens, no beans, no fruit. Just stodge and junk.

For the campaigners this is all down to the evils of the market - that fresh stuff can't be afforded by those poor folk so they pile in the pie and pile on the calories. Or maybe it's not:

...people writing about food deserts make a mistake when they assume that food deserts are all about inadequate supply, instead of inadequate demand.  I suggested that food deserts might exist because people who don’t want to eat healthy will live in neighbourhoods without healthy food, not because they choose not to move elsewhere, but because companies that sell healthy food — and this goes for all types of food stores, not just supermarkets — will not make money there.

Ah, you say, this is just some bloke holding forth, where's the evidence?

The evidence goes like this:

...there is really no relationship, according to this one recent study of nearly 100,000 Californians, between the distance between your body and a full-service supermarket (or any other kind of food store), and whether or not you are obese.  Distance, which is a proxy for access (the idea of a food desert is that the nearest supermarket, which has fresh produce, is distant), is for all practical purposes a non-factor.

Yet we have whole legions of well-meaning folk running healthy food projects in poor neighbourhoods - funded mostly by our taxes. And the people who live there would rather eat pizza and chips!

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Guns, goths and the welfare state

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It is always depressing when an individual case is used to justify changes to laws, rules or policies. We know from bitter experience that those extreme cases are never a good basis for change even when our instant reaction is "something must be done".

So the presumption in the Daily Mail that the killing of six children in the deliberate burning of a house is somehow the consequence of "the welfare state" suffers from precisely this problem. It is a matter of undeniable fact that most people who benefit from the welfare state do not set fire to their children so as to protect all or part of that benefice.

So on this basis I'm prepared to accept the argument that blaming welfare for Mick Philpott is like blaming the NHS for Harold Shipman - rather overstating the point. Which isn't to say we should debate whether a family as dangerously dysfunctional as Philpott's isn't made more possible by welfare but to say that welfare didn't make Philpott a callous sociopath.

But those who share this view might like to consider a little consistency. Next time there is a murder involving guns perhaps such folk might like to consider that perhaps it's the person rather than the gun who is responsible for the murder. And that without the motive of the murderer that gun would lie there benign and unused.

And perhaps those people might also care to stop trying to parcel up 'hate' into convenient little categories - the latest being Greater Manchester Police's nonsensical categorisation of "sub-cultures" as subject to the thing called "hate crime". Are goths and emos more subject to attack than supporters of one or other football team? Or tramps? Or, indeed, any number of 'groups' that are targeted for their difference by the sad and inadequate. Again we let one tragic case guide policy-making - it won't benefit the putative victims one jot to know, as the boot slams into their head, that this crime will be categorised differently.

By looking for simple answers - for the single culprit for a terrible crime - we fall into to the trap of seeking something other than human failing. For sure other factors are there too, but most often it's not guns or goths or the welfare state. It's an evil man.

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Wednesday 3 April 2013

A good thought...

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Imagine a news service that NEVER employed the words ‘might’, ‘could be’, ‘it is feared that’, ‘campaigners claim that’; would you really mind paying 40p a day for such a reliable trustworthy service? Boring, for sure. Way down in the ratings – and why should it even appear in the ratings? But a ‘verified Wikipedia’, a place where you could be sure that what you read had actually occurred, and here were the facts.


What? A real news service? From the BBC? Won't happen.

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The BBC's new class system - a vanity project of no value or purpose

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When you’ve been involved with direct marketing, marketing planning and profiling for as long as I have, you will know that every so often another ‘radical’. ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’ new scheme of social classification is launched. Usually this is from an advertising agency, a data management business or something called a “strategy consultancy” and is essentially a jolly good wheeze to get lots of press coverage and thereby to promote the business launching the classification.

To make this work we have to have funky names for the classes – none of that ABCDE malarkey, that’s far too boring. Instead we get value-loaded words that play on our stereotypes of certain ‘class’ groups – terms like ‘proletariat’ or ‘elite’ pop up thereby summoning up either gap-toothed ‘Shameless’ wannabes or waistcoated Bullingdon Boys. Such designations do not help in our understanding of social class and such studies do not guide our knowledge of how society changes over time.

Indeed, the BBC – who seem to think spending money on such work is what we pay a licence fee for – have fully understood the point. This creates some jolly headlines, a load of people on Twitter trill about which class they’re in and it fills in some gaps in an otherwise quiet week.

So folks, a great deal of fun has been had by everyone with the BBC’s new class system:

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups

This, says the BBC, replaces the three group system - the three group system that was replaced in the 1950s by a five group system of social class (ABCDE) and then, in the 1960s, with a six group system (ABC1C2DE). Apparently this is some sort of great advance in our understanding of social class in Britain, we are blinded by fancy on-line tools and the involvement of professorial types and told that this is so much better because it involves surveying 161,000 people!

The problem is that it’s nonsense. The size of the sample doesn’t make it better than, for example, a social classification system based on census data or one using transactional and behavioural data from millions of people. More to the point, the system encompassed information (cultural choices, for example, that more reflect affordability than class per se). Indeed, this wonderful new seven class system really doesn’t improve on the established and widely used six class system – a six class system that is used all over the world not just in the UK.

Compared to the well-known geodemographic systems – ACORN, MOSAIC, etc. – this new classification is useless. It is inflexible – fine for targeting mass market television advertising – but worse than useless if you want more precise analysis, say for retail location choices or direct marketing. For academics that system is interesting, there’s a lot of data to play with and it may contain some genuine insights. But it won’t replace the established social class classification (for all its flaws) because it largely fails to improve on that classification.

Let’s make that appraisal by matching the seven BBC classes to those traditional six socio-economic classes:

  • Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth – this is wholly indistinguishable from Socio-economic Class A
  • Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals – ah, yes, this would be Socio-economic Class B
  • The next three groups Technical Middle Class; Emergent Service Workers and Newly Affluent Workers fit less well but are essentially the old Socio-Demographic Classes C1 and C2
  • Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived Here we have Socio-economic Class D
  • Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class. That would be Socio-economic Class E

It’s not a precise comparison but it’s plain to see that this expensive piece of taxonomic research is essentially an indulgence that sheds almost no light at all on the issue of social class and how it affects the economic, social and cultural development of the nation.

Of course, it goes without saying, that the system ranks me as part of the "elite". I suspect this reinforces the system's daftness!

It really is a vanity project of no purpose and with the validity of a horoscope.

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Tuesday 2 April 2013

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State...

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Fascism is being reborn.

The headline I've chosen would be welcomed by the Owen Jones' of this world - it describes and defines what they believe. It is the very essence of Richard Murphy's 'courageous state' - a definitively fascist concept.

And the headline is a quotation - a translated quotation - from the man who created Fascism, Benito Mussolini. There was no subtlety at all to Mussolini's hatred of the Italian elite or to his belief that the institutions of society - industrial might, the strength of labour and the passion of leadership - must be directed by the state in the interests of the state.

Fascism is being reborn - here is Lyndsey Hanley writing in the Guardian:

Yet isn't the idea of 3 million people working hard and not being required to pay tax a recipe for their disenfranchisement? The Liberal Democrat segment of the coalition is most likely to see a high tax-free allowance, which goes up to £9,440 on 6 April, as a step towards the goal of a "citizen's income" – a no-strings basic payment from state to individual over and above any earned (and therefore taxable) income. A fundamental component of citizenship, however, is paying towards the ongoing work of building and maintaining resources for everyone to use. 

Everything in the state, nothing without the state.

Every day I see the dark shadows of this authoritarian creed - in the denormalising of personal choices, in the arrays of cameras pointed at everything we do, in the selection of chosen "hatreds" to condemn and in the braying offence of calling for more regulation, more control and more taxation.

As Benito said:

The Government has been compelled to levy taxes which unavoidably hit large sections of the population. The...people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the...people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.

Or perhaps this fascism sums it up:

His narrative depicts the State in a current crisis of confidence, neutered by the self-doubt of elected politicians who are taught to believe that the market knows best. This results in a weak government unable to perform its duties and uncertain of the State’s ability to work for the benefit of the citizens it represents. Yet...vision the State is not just the best but the only solution to the current financial turmoil, uniquely positioned to deliver a prosperous, sustainable, and equitable future for the greatest number.

Mussolini would have cheered Richard Murphy - and his courageous state - to the rafters. Here again is that rallying call for action against the corruption of the markets and the evil of capitalism. Here - cheered on by  the likes of Ms Hanley - is a new authoritarianism of the left, a new fascism.

And it scares me.

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