Monday 30 September 2013

No Bradford doesn't have a housing crisis...

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Nor is it worsening. Yet we keep being told this:


Bradford has an affordable-homes crisis which is worsening year-by-year, the National Housing Federation has warned.

The federation, which represents housing associations, says a rising number of people are being priced out of a property market where the average house price is £142,000 but average annual earnings are £18,500.

Ah, the NHF again. So let's deal with the issue - firstly it's not simply about house price, it's about rents, but let's start with those prices.

According to those nice folk at Zoopla the current average price for houses sold in Bradford is £118,940 which is a slight rise (less than 3%) on the previous year. But if we look at the 'affordable' bit of the market - terraced properties and flats - we find that the average is below £100,000.  Still too much for those on Bradford's average earnings but only two-thirds of the NHF figure.

Which brings us to rents. Again looking at Zoopla we find an average rent of £486 per month - not super cheap but hardly at crisis levels. And again the average for terraced properties is at or around £400 per month.

Moreover, I'm prepared to bet that there are parts of the city where rents are lower still - indeed little different from social rent levels - and we know that you can buy a property (about 60 are on the T& A website right now) at £50,000 or less.

No-one's saying we don;t need to build more houses or even that there aren't problems wrought by a combination of a growing population and low wages. But there isn't a crisis. Not even a little one.

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Sunday 29 September 2013

The authentic voice of Britain's left...

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The gang surrounded me beside a Costa coffee shop demanded to know, again, who I was with. ‘If you don’t put you f**king camera way, we’ll smash it off your face’. ‘Go and f**k off back to your conference, you p**k’ after I managed to escape to the Premier Inn.

I’m not the only one to have a negative experience with the marchers. The Times‘ Tim Montgomerie was spat at, while activist Mahyar Tousi was racially abused while walking down a street.

And these people think themselves morally righteous?They're just thugs.

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The housing crisis that isn't...

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Today there will be much hand-wringing from 'experts' on housing about 'Help to Buy', mostly from people resident in or near London, living in houses worth (theoretically) a great deal more than they paid for them and earning good money. Squeals of concern will be directed at using government loans to help people get onto the 'housing ladder'. There will be so many bubbles it will be like the Boleyn Ground after a win!

It is interesting to note that these squeals weren't directed - for the same reasons - at Ed Miliband's egregious proposal to seize land from people who have chosen not to build houses on it (presumably because that would be uneconomic). And then use government borrowing to subsidise RSLs and councils building "affordable housing".

However that's not the point I'm making here - the point is that we're told by London-dwelling 'experts' that there is a housing crisis (sadly some daft Bradford-based councillors seem to believe the same thing) and, to coin a phrase, 'something must be done'. So - understandably - politicians respond, the propose to do something.

The problem is, however, that there isn't really a housing crisis at all. There's an employment crisis. Here's exhibit one:





Those are three of 59 properties listed at £50,000 or less in Bradford by the local paper. And we could repeat the same story for a host of other cities and towns across the North of England. Yet, in London - even in multiplied deprived East London - you won't find a two bedroomed property for under £200,000 (and that will be somewhere where you daren't go out at night and need three locks on the door). For interest £200,000 will get you a four bedroom detatched house in Bradford.

If housing is so important, so central to everything, why are people leaving Bradford, Liverpool and Hull to take their chances in London (not to mention those trooping there from Romania and points east)? The answer is simple - there aren't any jobs. Or more specifically there are fewer jobs than there are people to take those jobs. As a result more and more people flock to London (and to a lesser extent regional cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham) because they believe there's a better chance of a job.

We - by which I mean all us folk who sound off about these things, pundits, sort-of-economists, folk who sell mortgages - have chosen to describe this as a housing crisis. And indeed it manifests itself as such - you only have to read Ben Reeves-Lewis on the Landlord Law blog to get this picture. But it is a problem of employment - the dysfunction created by the success of London rather than by the failure of the North.

The challenge facing London - and ipso facto, the UK government given how important London is to the economy - is to provide housing that falls within reasonable aspiration of affordability. And there are three ways to do this - ship people who aren't contributing economically (the young, the old, the unemployed) to places like Bradford, scrap the planning and building controls that hold back development or subsidise housing.

So it really shouldn't surprise people that the government - and all three main political parties - support subsidy since the other options aren't politically acceptable. So let's get used to the bubble - it really is the only choice facing the government (assuming that 'something must be done').

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Saturday 28 September 2013

A lesson in money and marketing...

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This only works because it runs close to illegality. It's not the edginess (although that helps), it's that others won't play:

The manager at the McDonald’s on Northwest Yeon Avenue glanced at the money in the customer’s hand, a $2 bill that looked as if its edges had been dipped in blood. He grew tense, shook his head and turned away.

“Oh, no,” he says. “We’re not allowed to accept those.”

So where do you go? The bar won't take the bills, the bank won't take the bills - so it's back to the strip club that dipped them in red ink:

But despite these warnings, Casa Diablo keeps doling out the blood-red money. A WW reporter last week was still able to get a stack of the $2 bills from the bar.

Of course, the marketing would still work if the authorities smiled and let the bills circulate. But right now Casa Diablo are getting a double hit - promo from the red bills and a captured audience.

The strip club is simply gaming official sensitivity. More power to its elbow.

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Minimum pricing by stealth...

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The campaign against minimum pricing for alcohol - a unwarranted and unjustified impost on the less well of - seems to have been success, at least for the time being. Or so says the Wine and Spirits Trade Association: 

Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said. 

Crack open the bubbly folks, good cheer for all - including the poorest in the land - we can toast a successful campaign.

Or can we? Here's something from Alcohol Concerns 'Guide to Alcohol for Councillors':

Consider introducing a by-law to establish local or regional minimum pricing which is being looked at by local authorities in the north West.

This document - riddled with misinformation and inaccuracies (including the shocking lie that alcohol problems are getting worse when they aren't) - is being sent out across the land to Councillors. And if ever there were a bunch of people tempted by the New Puritan message it's Councillors - we love a nice ban, a new control or a new power.

So my cavalier friends the game has shifted - now you need to get hold of your local councillor and make the case for alcohol. The case about thousands of jobs, hundreds of businesses and the pleasure of the millions who elect us councillors.

Otherwise you'll get minimum pricing by stealth.

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Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said.
Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584393/minimum-alcohol-pricing-off-the-uk-policy-agenda-says-wsta-chief#mcY3BLie5v2UP4JC.99
Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said.
Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584393/minimum-alcohol-pricing-off-the-uk-policy-agenda-says-wsta-chief#mcY3BLie5v2UP4JC.99

Friday 27 September 2013

Quote of the day...

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If people in Asia work harder than us, study harder than us, achieve better educational standards than us, are less burdened by chronic public debt than us and have more successful global companies than us – why does Ed Miliband assume they will be at ‘the bottom’, to be vilified and patronised to win empty applause at a Labour conference?

Apart from the on message last sentence, this is a great article from Jeremy Browne.

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The grey goo society...

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I had planned to explain how giving free membership of the Conservative Party to trade unionists isn't the brightest of bright ideas but then I read this:

I arrive back in the UK today to a strange dystopia – a world of the outraged. Syria? Bank debt? Taxation? No, the insidious creeping grey goo of the professionally offended. 

And I realised that we've replaced society's spine with jelly and mandated a sense-of-humour by-pass. I know Old Holborn is a "vile Internet troll" but he's absolutely right that it is grotesque to see Alistair Campbell - the man who lied so British soldiers could go and kill (and be killed by) Iraqis - being upset about a bad taste halloween outfit (aren't halloween outfits supposed to be bad taste, or have I missed something here) because he once had a mental health problem.

Lots of people haven't got jobs, soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, innocent folk are being slaughtered in Syria and most ordinary folk still struggle to pay their way. And what does the BBC, The Guardian and every second pundit - self-appointed or otherwise - choose as the big issue of the day? A fancy dress outfit. Is that really so massively important or should we simply say to ASDA; "that was a bit off" and move on.

Again and again these trivial little spats fill our airwaves - whether it's from the perspective of the Daily Mail's crypto-fascist control-freakery or the BBC's political correctness on steroids. As I've said before our national debate (in so far as it merits such a grand description) is now so taken up with the trivial that it is indistinguishable from a soap opera - to endless chitter about who's in and who's up, we can add a game of manufactured outrage that pushes the news agenda even further from the things that actually matter to people.

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Thursday 26 September 2013

On anti-smoking laws...the task of public health is done

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From The Heresiac:

The pattern revealed by the graph does, however, show something significant about anti-smoking laws.  They aren't really aimed at discouraging smoking, or protecting the health of non-smokers, or even at punishing smokers (as some pro-smoking dissidents like to think).  Rather, they are a form of bandwagon-jumping.  Measures such as "plain packaging" are seized upon by politicians seeking to prove themselves "relevant" and up-to-date, in much the same way that they pounce upon passing moral panics or promote ideas that seem popular with focus groups.  The long-term decline in smoking is a social trend for which politicians would like to claim credit.  Introducing "tough" measures that can scarcely fail - because their aim has already been achieved - and which can claim to be both morally virtuous and medically justified is almost too tempting.

An insightful comment. I don't entirely agree - part of the motivation is sustaining the business of anti-smoking - but the gist is spot on, that anti-smoking is about laying claim to something that results from a social trend rather than from government action. And the job - making sure we know the dangers of smoking and providing help for quitters - is done.

We might also consider that there is a degree of frantic worry as the public health interventions seem to have stalled:







We spend millions on anti-smoking, thousands of jobs are involved and...well it has stopped working. So these people seek out new bogie-men to blame, new ways to 'denormalise' smoking and new strategies (requiring more public funding) to deal with the 'biggest preventable cause of death'.

Nobody smoking now - or taking up smoking - doesn't know the health risks. Nobody. The task of public health is done. If people choose not to take note of the warnings that's their business in the same way that the freeclimber knows he might fall off that sheer cliff and the cave diver knows the high chance of drowning.

By all means provide support to people who want to stop. But let's accept that some people prefer the fleeting joy of a fag and accept that it means a high chance of ill-health, a shorter life.

In the end that's their choice, their business.

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So much for democracy - National Housing Federation wants councillors removed from planning decisions

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I'm not a fan of David Orr, boss of the National Housing Federation. Not only is this old Labour hack wedding to the old model where government hands over cash to his members to subsidise house-building but he says stupid things like this:

‘My proposition is that we should enhance the local authority councillor’s role in thinking strategically about place-shaping and plan-making, but remove them completely from the day-to-day operational delivery of those plans – then leave it to officers to be accountable to the councillors'

The problem is that the business applauds this example of allowing professionals to push aside the population. It also illustrates that developers - and their lackeys - do not want to talk to communities about their concerns, their worries and their needs. Instead they want to ram their preferred solution down the throats of those communities.

People elect councillors precisely so they can make decisions - the choices - about things like housing. And maybe this means that sometimes those councillors make decisions the 'professionals' don't like. Decisions like this one:


More than 250 campaigners, many waving placards, attended the Shipley Planning Panel meeting at Bingley Arts Centre yesterday.

The audience cheered and stamped their feet as councillors voted six to one against proposals by developers Redrow and Bellway to build on the site at Sty Lane, Micklethwaite.

This was a decision - recommended by those professionals - that was upheld at appeal, confirmed by the secretary of state and upheld again in the high court. With David Orr's scheme it wouldn't have been made.

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A comment on energy policy...

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We're still being peddled the myth that, in the medium term at least, promoting renewable energy will result in lower bills. It may be the case that in fifty years technology and ubiquity will make those renewable sources produce cheaper energy than burning fossil fuels (or running nuclear reactors) but right now they are significantly more expensive.

It may well be that it's right to prioritise renewables development - there's still a strong argument for this (although I am less convinced by it these days) given the scale of climate change's down side risks. But this means that for the sake of "the planet", this generation has to put up with higher bills in the hope that this will bring forward the technology and ubiquity of renewable energy needed.

In simple terms - although to listen to Ed Miliband and Ed Davey let alone the greens you wouldn't believe this - we have a choice between "decarbonising" energy production and lower prices. Pretending otherwise is both dangerous and deluded.

So folks your choice is between cheap energy and the planet! You can start fracking, stop the closure of coal fired power stations, scrap the green levy and abolish cross-subsidy of renewables - and get lower fuel bills for voters. Or you can carry on as we are and see those fuel bills rise.

I know which choice I'd make right now.

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Wednesday 25 September 2013

Bradford Council's latest nannying nonsense - the "salt pot amnesty"

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Not content with trying to - incorrectly - blame takeaways for obesity, Bradford Council has leaped into action over salt:

Takeaway owners in Bradford are being urged to help save lives by joining in a salt pot amnesty.

The district’s Good Food Team want to see as many as possible standard 17-hole salt pots exchanged for five-hole ones to reduce how much comes out. 

We know - we've known for ages - that the huge campaign against salt isn't merely pointless it borders on the dangerous:

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.

Yet useful idiot councillors like Bradford's ubiquitous Val Slater are rolled out to peddle the lie about salt consumption.  The truth - the facts if you like - is that there has been a remarkably stable level of salt intake in the UK during a period when heart attacks and heart disease incidence has fallen:

Deaths from heart attacks have halved since 2002 and no one is quite sure why. Similar changes have occurred in countries around the world but the death rate in England, especially, has fallen further and faster than almost anywhere.

Nothing to do with salt. Nothing at all. This jolly scheme isn't the worst bit of nannying nonsense but I'm absolutely sure it won't save a single life. Not one.

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Tuesday 24 September 2013

...and these people might be in government?

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Save us.

Helen Goodman, Labour's shadow minister for media reform, reached further back into history to illustrate her point, comparing the internet to a lawless 13th Century forest.

"It would be quite wrong if we were to preserve a special place within the law, where the net could be outside the law. The net today should not be like the forest in the 13th Century.

"Robin Hood and the outlaws - they were called that because they were outside the law - that was not a sustainable position in the 13th Century and it's not a sustainable position now."

Leave aside the ignorant definition of "outlaw", where exactly is the "net" outside the law? Nowhere - all the laws on libel, hate speech and so forth apply.

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On the stupidity of socialism...and price fixing

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I gather Ed Miliband wishes to fix energy prices "while the oligopoly is sort out" or some such. And reintroduce socialism. Here's why this is stupid:

Flights out of Venezuela to anywhere are 100% sold out, months in advance. Yet many planes are flying half-empty. Why? The official exchange rate is 6.3 bolivars per dollar but the black market rate is more like 42 bolivars to the dollar. Few people are allowed to convert bolivars to dollars at the official rate but there is an exception for people with a valid airline ticket. As a result people with an airline ticket can convert bolivars to dollars at the official rate and then sell the dollars at the much higher black market rate.

Socialism was stupid when the Russians did it. Stupid when the Cubans did it. Stupid when Labour tried in in the 1970s. Oh, and always corrupt - the elite do fine (look at that Venezuelan story - the latest from the country where toilet paper is impounded, its production nationalised because the boss can't wipe his arse). It's the poor that suffer - they get the queues, the black outs, the rationing.

That is socialism. It is evil. And stupid.

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Monday 23 September 2013

How the UN works...

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In this case to undermine free speech:

When, in March 2008, I attempted to challenge this falsehood in the Council by pointing out the incompatibility of the Cairo Declaration with the UDHR, I was silenced on a point of order by the Pakistani delegate who said: ‘it is insulting to our faith to discuss the Sharia in this Council’. Sadly the president agreed, banning from that point on any ‘judgmental statements regarding any system of law’. In June 2008, the Egypt delegate brought Council proceedings to a halt for almost an hour when he insisted that no reference could be made to Islam, Sharia law or fatwas. Faced with a vote that could have overturned his decision to let the speaker continue, the president backed down, and when the meeting resumed he told the Council that ‘we do not need to discuss religion in this Council, nor shall we’. Islam had won a free pass and is now officially absolved of any responsibility for any human rights abuse carried out in its name.

Why do we tolerate this corrupting and shocking organaisation?

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Simon Jenkins proposes the stupidest response to terrorism ever...

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I'm not joking. Simon Jenkins - usually a fairly thoughtful journalist was clearly drugged or drunk when he wrote this:

The slaughter of Christians in Peshawar this weekend showed that wherever crowds gather they are vulnerable to any group with a brainwashed youth and a bomb. It might be sensible to discourage like-minded crowds from gathering in one place, be they co-religionists or party faithful or merely the wealthy.

I am at a loss for words. And Jenkins then makes is worse by saying we shouldn't build shopping malls because they might be a terrorist target. I'm assuming that Simon would also close football stadiums, large hotels, nightclubs, markets, mosques and beaches?

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Sunday 22 September 2013

Politics is broken...


Finer defined politics as the means whereby dispute is resolved. As such it encompasses all the decisions that happen outside circumstances of exchange (i.e. within the market). And there have, across time, been many means employed to undertake political decision-making - from 'my axe is sharper than yours do as I say or I'll split your head' through consensual (and sometimes less than consensual) family decisions to the ever more byzantine machinations of the democratic process.

On one level politics is about how much lies within the market and how much is retained (or captured) by those with the biggest club. Partly this debate is about whether the process of exchange is 'fair' - the concept of market failure - and partly the debate concerns who is in charge, who exercises the decision-making powers. Of course, the more we delegate executive power to individuals (presidents, prime ministers, mayors and so forth) the more important the question of 'who' becomes compared to the question of 'what'.

The truth of this is revealed in Damian McBride's memoir. This is not to indulge in a kind of tribal schadenfreude but to observe that, given the nature of power in the Labour party and the winner takes all system of representative democracy, who was the boss mattered more than what the boss did. We may also observe that this principle - the triumph of person over policy - is indulged every day by the media, by opinion polling and by the political parties.

The reason 'In the thick of it' hit the spot for so many wasn't simply that it was well-written and contained a lot of swearing but that it described the shallow pettiness of politics. We see a swarm of vicious courtiers buzzing round the grand figures of politics - party leaders, pundits and pretenders. These courtiers are served by purveyors of tittle-tattle - the newspaper diarists, bloggers and columnists who report on who said what to who, dishing up lurid tales of sex, drugs and character assassination while purporting to serve some high purpose of transparency or open government.

This is not a healthy political system but one crippled by the gout of self-importance and sycophancy. But each of these courtiers' acts - their tales, their spin, their manipulation - results in a flurry of measurement. Opinion polls arrive daily, not just with answers to the 'who would you vote for' question but with an ever more personalised analysis of the 'leaders' - are they too posh, in touch or out of touch, competent or incompetent. Each 'policy' announcement is aimed at these polls rather than at making the right choice - want to 'defend' the welfare state then you must toss red meat about immigration into the pot to appease those who see people on welfare as scroungers.

What makes this worse is that because politics has been torn to shreds by the soap opera of leadership, we have delegated decision-making to people who are not elected. In local government it is - in all but a few places - the powerful chief executive who decides. And nationally, we have set up a well-paid mandarinate to which we have handed all the decisions that really affect most people going about their regular daily lives. Politicians have given up control over so many decisions to a self-serving cabal of professionals and lawyers - unaccountable, unchallenged and convinced that removing politics from political decisions is the right thing.

Nothing will change. Or at least the change will not be a consequence of us voting, electing and cheering on our team in the political game. If there is change it will be because people choose exchange as the means rather than politics. Instead of waiting on some benign bureaucrat to hand a script to the latest political leader to read out, people will simply set up ways to share and exchange, to provide the things they need (and want) unencumbered by the need to engage in a political bidding war.

Bureaucrats - and the politicians and commentators they promote - will resist the development of exchange as a means of choice-making. It does not serve their interests - for some politicians the results will be false markets, the outsourcing of services, while for others it will be to say 'everything within the state and nothing without the state'. I hope that the power of choice will defeat these people and that the ghastly, selfish and bullying world of politics becomes an ever more irrelevant sideshow as people make their own decisions about their own lives and their own families.

I hope. Because politics is broken.

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Saturday 21 September 2013

A local take on arresting boozers...

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West Yorkshire Police plan on finding the time to tweet all the alcohol-related incidents over a 12 hour period - clearly they're at a loose end.

However, they've reported the number of arrests for drunk and disorderly:

"In the twelve months leading to August 2013 there have been a total of 3071 arrests for those who are drunk and disorderly."

Which is eight a day. Across West Yorkshire's two million or so population that's hardly an epidemic of drunks.

The campaign - called 'In Focus' (compelte with its own hashtag, #infocus) is part of ACPO's 'let's go on about drinking rather than address the real problems facing police forces in England' campaign.

All a little sad really.

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How the police waste resources...and then blame the public

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Shock, horror, scandal! One drunk takes 17 - yes, folks one seven, seventeen - coppers to respond. Now leaving aside that I don't believe a word of it, what a waste of resources. This is today's instalment of Chief Constable Adrian Lee's tinpot fascist campaign against people having a good time.

Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway? What this report tells us is that policing in England is a bureaucratic mess and that, under the leadership of men like Mr Lee, the service couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Apparently police resources would be better deployed elsewhere:

And those resources would be put to much better use in local communities rather than being called into town centres every weekend to deal with people who wouldn't cause problems if they hadn't consumed so much alcohol

I've really no idea what those "resources" would be doing in "local communities" at midnight on a Friday other that sitting about drinking tea or pointlessly patrolling empty streets. I guess they could use the time to keep up with the paperwork that people like Mr Lee create for them?

Drunken assault is anti-social. But then so is much of the rest of the things police deal with - burglary to feed a drug habit is anti-social, shoplifting is anti-social. In truth all crime is anti-social, the police spend most of their time dealing with people who, for whatever reason, cause problems. It's why we have them, it's what we pay Mr Lee and others to do.

It seems however that, in Mr Lee's world, the problem is with the public not the incompetence of police systems.

Oh and while we're about this - there is no such thing as "24 hour drinking" but since the liberalising of licensing laws alcohol consumption has fallen. Every single year and the biggest fall is amongst the young - the very people Mr Lee blames for the police's bureaucratic uselessness.

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Friday 20 September 2013

Yes, London does have a housing problem...

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Someone is asking £300,000 for a shed in Forest Hill. Yes folks, Forest Hill - hardly the leafiest of suburbs (although Hornimans Museum is fabulous):

SUPER-STYLED self-contained detached mini house in a rather excellent spot. Design junkies will love this wood-clad home; it’s a mini-house that would suit a young couple perfectly, having huge advantages over similarly priced apartments in the area. Since this is detached, you can turn your music up. You have your own garden – it wraps around the property from the front, along one side and to the rear.

Planet Property has some pictures.

H/T to Ben Reeves again
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Well blow me down! Straw houses!


Approval has been given to the first affordable straw homes in England. These straw houses will be built by Hastoe Housing Association, in High Ongar, Essex.

And, quite rightly, the homes are subject to tests including:

According to tests by the University of Bath, the buildings can withstand wind of up 120mph.

Presumably the University employed the Big Bad Wolf!

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Wednesday 18 September 2013

The drunk tank (or how people need to do business planning before proposing business solutions)

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I resisted the temptation to post a video of Fairytale of New York. After all it opens with these words:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me,
Won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

So our top coppers - or at least one of them - wants to introduce these things to deal with the 'scourge' of binge drinking:

So why don’t we take them to a drunk cell owned by a commercial company and get the commercial company to look after them during the night until they are sober? 

Thus cries Adrian Lee, Chief Constable of Northamptonshire (and ACPO spokesman on drink - a sort of nannying fussbucket's nannying fussbucket).

Leaving aside the fussbucketry of this proposal, it seems to me that there are insufficient drunks - or at least drunks that the cops arrest - to sustain a private market in drying them out overnight. Even at £400 a throw.

Let's start with the stats:

More than 31,000 people were given a fixed penalty for the offence last year, although it is not known how many of those would have been so drunk that they had to be held in a cell overnight. 

Assuming that half of these people were incapacitated, that's 15,500 drunks headed for the drunk tank to while away the time singing old Irish songs (or whatever).  There are 42 police forces in England and Wales (I've not included the transport police, nuclear police, MoD police and City of London). That's 370 per year on average per authority - which is about one per day.  Even if all those 31,000 had to be held over night it's still only two a day - at £400 a pop that's not a viable business.

This proposal achieved its aim - it got Mr Lee a headline. The sad thing is that, admidst all the debate about the sense or ethics of the idea, nobody thought to ask whether it was actually viable as a business. I'm guessing you might make it work in Central London and perhaps in one or two big cities (Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester) where the numbers are greater.

Unless, of course, Mr Lee is planning for a time when we arrest people for drinking!

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More from David Attenborough, eugenicist

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Today, David Attenborough has returned to his neo-malthusian, crypto-fascism. Essentially he's saying we should let those dark folk in Africa (or wherever) starve to death:

Raising the example of Ethiopia, Sir David said that the famine there was down to there being “too many people for too little piece of land”.

Speaking ahead of his new series David Attenborough's Rise of Animals, he suggested that humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming, “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy”.

Yes folks, this is our sainted bunnyhugger-in-chief speaking here. You lap up his gorgeous programmes about animals and give him the air to say it's OK simply to let poor people starve to death.

Leave aside Attenborough's ignorance of what caused the Ethiopian famine, this attitude - wrapped up in pseudo-science as it is - needs to be challenged. And perhaps Attenborough should be called out for the unpleasant human being that he has become?

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Tuesday 17 September 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Forget HS2 - this is tomorrow's transport!

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Trains are old technology - even the fast ones. They run on fixed lines from one fixed place to another fixed place. They are expensive to build, the track is expensive and they are expensive to run.

Here's the future....




Subsidising union officials - time for Bradford Council to stop

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New stats show cutting back on trade union facility time will save £400,000-a-year of taxpayers’ money.

This is at the Department for Communities and Local Government. We know that Bradford spends £500,000 of local taxpayers hard earned cash on full time union officials yet bleat and mithers about "the cuts".

Time to take that cut and stop paying the wages of full-time union activists.

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Saturday 14 September 2013

The politics of trivia and the triumph of gossip

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The little frisson of silliness that was a stray tweet from a Newsnight editor about Rachel Reeves reminds us that the trivial is more important than the substantive in politics. As Marbury reminds us:

It's a tiny, trivial thing, a bit of fluff. It should have been brushed off with a joke: a little self-deprecation, or a punchy retort. It should have been forgotten about within 24 hours. But no. Syria burns, the British economy makes its joyless progress, the Royal Mail is privatised. Meanwhile, here is one of the most senior members of the Labour Party's front bench whining on about her hurt feelings on the front page of a national newspaper, four days after this non-event, ensuring that this nothingy story - this story about her, and her magnificently sensitive ego - runs across the weekend. Yes, here is a serious person. Here is a person ready for government.

I didn't see the offending programme. Indeed probably 99% of the British public didn't see the offending programme (and many of those who did will have been half asleep anyway). So why the sensitivity? Or is this a case of using faux offence to get onto the front page of the Guardian, to milk the sensibilities of that sympathetic audience?

All this - much as is the case with opinion polls of councillors asking whether they like their party leader - is simply the dumbing down of politics, continuing its transition from a serious business to something akin to a second rate soap opera. Rather than discussions of the things that matter - war, wealth and health - we get endless dissection of the minutiae of politics, which politician is up, which one down, who said what to whom and what effect something someone said will have on elections, polls or the opinion of party members.

We are treat to 'star' interviewers who are more important than their guests. And who resort of interruption, endless 'when did you stop beating your wife' questions and snide asides rather than doing the real job of the interviewer. This is followed by the intonations of some bloke stood outside Number 10 and who is treated like some shaman or soothsayer - an expert rather than just another journalist. A man who doesn't talk about the issues but in a bizarre post-modern way, of the effect some decision, event or argument might have on how the prime minister (or some other leader) is perceived at some unspecified future election or poll.

We are in the age of the trivial and politicians have figured this out. Hence Rachel reeves being 'oh so upset' about a mildly critical comment from a BBC producer. This is a story in the way that the Labour Party's policies on banking, finance or pig farming simply aren't.

Gossip has triumphed!

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Petition to save Bingley Pool

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As you probably know Bradford Council plan to close Bingley Pool. They also plan to make the decision in private session (for reasons of "confidentiality"). We're told there will be a consultation - although I doubt this will be about the closure more likely an exercise in justifying the proposals.

Bingley Civic Trust and local campaigners have launched a petition to save the pool:

Yesterday and today volunteers were in the town’s 5Rise shopping centre collecting signatures, parents have been taking more names at school gates and copies are also available in shops and the Arts Centre, with an online version on Bingley Civic Trust’s website. 

If you're in Bingley do sign up or else visit the Civic Trust website to sign up on line - click here to do so.

Remember that, if 1000 people sign it triggers a debate at full Council - a chance to make sure every Councillor considers the issues and that the decision is made openly.

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Gardens on buses...a cracking (if pointless) idea

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Over at pop-up city they've found buses with gardens on the roof. I love this!






Mad - to see more visit the Pop-up City!

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Thursday 12 September 2013

Seems I don't own the Royal Mail - but soon might have the chance to...

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Today, something that has been pretty inevitable since the 1980s will take another step towards happening - the government will agree to sell the Royal Mail. This has, perhaps inevitably, been greeted by lots of people (mostly left-wing people) talking about the evil Tories selling off something they "own". Here's a good example:


There you have it folks! Except I know that I don't own the Royal Mail, not even a little bit of it. Let me explain. I own a bit of Barclays Bank (just a tiny bit that's not worth as much as it once was). And I can sell this and will get a nice cheque, real cash money I can spend. The same goes for my car, the table in the dining room and the wine in the cellar.

But it doesn't go for the Royal Mail. When that's sold I won't see a penny of the value realised, which tells me that I have no stake in the business, I do not own it. The government owns it and the government will get all the money from selling it off (and, in the manner of governments everywhere will probably waste that money).

Once it is sold, I might get a chance of own a little bit of the business. It just might be possible for me to buy some shares, to invest a little bit of my money in the business. That - not some sort of nebulous and collectivist wibble - is what we mean by ownership.

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Wednesday 11 September 2013

Winter is coming

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‘All 65 climate-models used by IPCC to predict future impact of CO2 on climate – every last one of them – failed to foresee 17-year pause in temp rise’ 


See.

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A frightening comment on the ghastly waste that is HS2 - who runs the country?

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Here's Jackie Sadek from UK Regeneration:

The government seems to be going out on the offensive to promote HS2 today. About time really. I am a staunch supporter (of course, isn’t everyone in regeneration?) and, having visited the HS2 office within CLG in Eland House a few days ago, I can bear witness to the vast operation already under way.

Gantt charts, like you’ve never seen, plastering the walls.  And row upon row of peeps working hard at computers. An air of quiet industry and permanence abounds. Now I don’t know who really runs this country, but whoever it is, believe me, trust me, they have decided we are HAVING HS2. 

There you have it folks. Forget about votes in parliament. Never mind the role of ministers. We are having HS2! Millions are being spent planning it, developing it and make it happen.

I am inclined on these occasions to scream.

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Football and booze - New Puritans kick the messenger again

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It remains the case that, generally speaking, the purpose of advertising isn't to get new customers. Oh, I know, you don't believe this any more than the "scientists" who work in public health. But it is true. Brand advertising is about heuristics, about the choice architecture and the limited selection which consumers (existing customers) use to decide a purchase.

The problem is that advertising is an easy target for the Church of Public Health:

Researchers have called for much tighter government restrictions or even a ban on the marketing of alcohol during televised football matches, arguing that the messages are seen by and affect millions of children. Their research suggests football fans see around two references to alcoholic brands every minute when they watch a match on TV – in addition to the formal advertising during commercial breaks.

And, as a result of this avalanche of booze advertising we have seen massive increases in children getting drunk?

In 2011, 12% of pupils had drunk alcohol in the last week. This continues a decline from 26% in 2001, and is at a similar level to 2010, when 13% of pupils reported drinking in the last week.

Seems the ads aren't working!

The reported frequency of drinking continues to decline. In 2011, 7% of pupils said they usually drank at least once a week, compared with 20% in 2001.

So about one in ten secondary school children are drinking - half the number that were in 2001 - and around half that number again are drinking regularly (if once a week is 'regular'). So why do we hear this:

"Children who don't drink, who are exposed to alcohol marketing, are more likely to start drinking earlier in their lives," she said. "And children who are already drinking are more likely to drink more after exposure to alcohol marketing."

Especially since the Guardian - in the usual manner of its health reporting presents no actual evidence to support this "scientist's" contention. What we know is that there is a link between awareness of alcohol advertising and drinking but the direction of causality isn't clear. It is quite plausible for people who are drinkers to be more aware of advertising for drink than people who are non-drinkers (indeed this is what the advertising is doing). And even in these cases the effect is small:

Taken as a whole then findings reported in the available studies indicate that alcohol advertising may have small but significant effects on the beliefs, intentions and possibly behaviours of young people.

Hardly a damning description of the bleak effect of booze ads on children. And this is the problem. Just as the advertising bans for smoking haven't massively affected consumption (there was no accelerated decline in use following ad ban introduction), the call for bans on alcohol brands sponsoring football is simply a gesture - the appearance of doing something.

But given that we really don't have a problem - certainly not a whole population problem - with children drinking, this is simply "drinking is evil" translated into public policy.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013

I'd have got away with it, if it hadn't been for the newspapers!

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This is the message from Chris Huhne albeit one wrapped up in a coating of self-righteous excuse-making:

The News of the World sparked the end of my marriage, but another Murdoch title, the Sunday Times, then groomed my ex-wife until she told them about the speeding points.

Got this folks. If Chris hadn't said something mildly critical of Rupert Murdoch he'd have got away with lying about speeding points while cheating on his wife (as he presented himself to voters as a proud 'family man'). The saddest thing is that a few people (mostly at the ever more egregious Guardian) will be taken in by this cant. I'm sorry folks but Chris Huhne's career ended because he cheated on his wife and lied about speeding. All the newspapers did was uncover these facts.

I'm a politician, I've had some challenging press coverage. But I consider that the press have every right to report this stuff. If we fall from grace, it's usually our fault. And almost never the fault of the press.

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Economics quote of the day...

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From the late Ronald Coase (via The Enlightened Economist):

“The problem is that economists seem willing to give advice on questions about which we know very little and on which our judgements are likely to be fallible, while what we have to say that is important and true is quite simple – so simple that little or no economics is required to understand it.” 

Ah, that macroeconomics again!

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Monday 9 September 2013

Quote of the day...on the nature of modern political reporting

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Chris Dillow stumbles onto a precise description of modern political reporting:

A lot of political reporting consists either of trivial Kremlinology - a description of a soap opera in which most "characters" are interchangeable one-dimensional cyphers - or of an unquestioning imposition of an ideology which fetishizes "strong leadership." 

Combine this with news shows - Question Time, Newsnight, The Politics Show - that are essentially entertainment rather than information and you have the essence of why we are all so ignorant of politics and so dismissive of its practitioners.

I cannot recall the last time I learnt anything (other than a reaffirmation of modern interveiwers' incorrigible rudeness) from these programmes. And they almost never contain any actual "news".

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Saturday 7 September 2013

No, no, a thousand times, no!

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So Ed Miliband is in all sorts of a mess as a couple or three trade unions kick him and his party about, demanding policy changes, fixing candidate selections and generally behaving like the people who own and control the Labour Party.

The right response is to, as the saying goes, 'grow a pair' and deal with the problem. Instead, Miliband wants you and me - taxpayers - to pay the Labour Party's bills:

Any plans for state funding have not been drawn up, but could be modelled on a blueprint by the independent Committee on Standards on Public Life, which proposed parties be recompensed for a donations cap with £23m a year of public money. 

So some youngster on low wages, just starting out in life is expected to contribute to the funding of political parties - involuntarily? Put simply this is disgusting - because political parties have given up recruiting members and organising across the country (in favour of swanky London offices, shiny-suited Oxbridge graduates and endless, shallow spin-doctoring) doesn't justify simply dipping into the tax pot.

If you want to get the "big money out of politics" then what you do is agree a donation cap. And that's it. You don't need to compensate parties, you don't need complicated, corrupting formulae and you don't need to spend other people's money on PR executives and wet behind the ears policy wonks who have never held down a real job.

We don't pay taxes to fund politics.

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Friday 6 September 2013

London does seem to have a housing problem...

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From Ben Reeve-Lewis on the Landlord Law Blog:

One of our notorious landlords, famous for cramming as many people as possible into the tiniest spaces had one of his numerous properties repossessed and bought at auction by a new owner.
Who put builders in to renovate.

As they pulled up the floorboards, they found that people had been living in a basement but there was no access point for it other than the photo you see to the side (actually below). They had been squeezing themselves through the gap.





Quite incredible!

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Regeneration, development and FoI requests...

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Southwark Council, in the spirit of openness and cooperation is refusing to comply with a Freedom of Information request about the deal done with Lend Lease to 'rescue' the Elephant & Castle regeneration scheme:

Fiona Colley, Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, went on record to say: “There is nothing I would like more than to publish this document and show the world what a fantastic deal we negotiated for the people of Elephant and Castle. However, we entered into those negotiations with Lend Lease on a confidential basis, and I am not willing to break that agreement because a handful of people wrongly think the document contains something sinister. Moreover, the ICO’s decision has huge implications for councils wanting to enter into commercial partnerships with developers across the country.

“We could find ourselves sleepwalking into a situation where developers refuse to work with councils for fear their commercially sensitive information will be forced into the public domain. That wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests, and that is why we’re appealing the ICO’s decision.” 

This is a pretty big deal - I've no issues with the Council seeking to protect commercial arrangements and it will be very interesting to see how the Courts view Southwark's argument. It seems to me (and Jackie Sadek from UK Regeneration seems to agree) that the content of contracts between private companies and public bodies should be in the public domain. I can see the need for confidentiality during a negotiation especially where there is competition for the business. But once the deal is done the contract should be published.

The alternative is that people - in this case the opposition on Southwark Council - will see bogie men, corruption and scandal where there probably isn't any. And simply saying 'the Council refuses to publish they must be hiding something' makes the point eloquently. If that Council replies with 'no we're not hiding anything' then the response is 'publish'.

....
Fiona Colley, Southwark’s cabinet member for regeneration, went on record to say: “There is nothing I would like more than to publish this document and show the world what a fantastic deal we negotiated for the people of Elephant and Castle. However, we entered into those negotiations with Lend Lease on a confidential basis, and I am not willing to break that agreement because a handful of people wrongly think the document contains something sinister. Moreover, the ICO’s decision has huge implications for councils wanting to enter into commercial partnerships with developers across the country.
“We could find ourselves sleepwalking into a situation where developers refuse to work with councils for fear their commercially sensitive information will be forced into the public domain. That wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests, and that is why we’re appealing the ICO’s decision.”
- See more at: http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/jackie-sadek/2013/09/southwarks-silence-raises-interesting-issues/#sthash.Y0ZwXeog.dpuf

Thursday 5 September 2013

This week's star nannying fussbucket - Newcastle City Council

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It had to start somewhere. And where else than in Newcastle where, it seems that that Council really doesn't like it's working-class population to enjoy a drink:

Newcastle City Council has introduced a minimum unit price condition for all new licences and applications for licence variation across the on and off-trade.

Now, leaving aside the dubious legality of these proposals, this demonstrates just how little Newcastle Council understands anything other than signalling a disapproval of less well-off people affording to have a drink.

The sad thing about these proposals - and the Council gets round not having the authority to dictate prices by claiming they are 'voluntary' - is that the Council claims that this policy will help pubs. Quite how this works heaven alone knows - we could discuss the myth of "pre-loading" but no-one is listening. People in Newcastle - and everywhere else for that matter - aren't going to pubs because they can't afford it and they can smoke at home.

If the City Council as its spokesman, one Stephen Savage, claims this will help pubs why on earth is it the first Council to clobber those pubs with a late night levy.

Nope, this is government by gesture. It won't save a single life. It won't reduce the amount of booze drunk (because they can't impose the policy on supermarkets as they can afford the lawyers). All it will do is make a bit of extra margin for those signing up and piss off Geordie drinkers.

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Wednesday 4 September 2013

If you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in!

This weekend is Cullingworth's scarecrow festival. Not that this is important to you. Or maybe it is, perhaps you 'get' (as Mr Cameron would say) that place matters and how invented tradition is one of the soft things about a place that makes it magic.

And our attachment to a place matters more than you think. It's not simply some sort of pride or defencive reaction to folk who criticise, we're talking about real attachment here - about love:

We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

So what is that "softer side of place"?

It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way.

This isn't about grand civic marketing campaigns replete with logos, embassies in New York and well-resourced teams of regenerators extolling the virtues of a place. Nor is it that grumpy "you can't criticise, you don't live here, that's our job" attitude we see from defensive residents of struggling cities. We're talking about a desire to love the place we're in - and when we love something it's an active emotion, it drives us to do things. To do the placemaking equivalent of buying our place chocolate and flowers or taking it to the movies.

That's what scarecrow festivals, duck races and reinvented traditions are about. It's us - the people who love a place - showing our love by doing things to make that place smile:

Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply.

So, if you want regeneration - even if you're parachuted in from afar to deliver it - you have to fall in love, to remember those words that Steven Stills wrote:

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with

....

Are there deserts in Syria?


"It's perfectly safe, " said the man; "people cross it every day."

He had a beard so who were we to argue. And to get this far we'd passed the signs telling us about poisonous snakes, unstable dunes and not to litter on the beach. What could possibly go wrong!

"You go first," I suggested ignoring the principles of chivaly, "and I'll carry the bags across. You'll be better balanced that way."

So we set out across with each tentative step accompanied by a strange creaking sound and, from between the slats, the occasional scuttling of some beast - a beetle maybe a crab, even a mouse, We didn't look as it might be one of those poisonous snakes.

"Remind me why we're doing this," asked my companion through gritted teeth, "there is some purpose, surely?"

"Ah," I hesitated before plunging into the answer. "We're doing it because it's the only way. And we have to go over there because we're expected."

"Expected?"

"Yes expected," I explained, "we're going there because then we will have done something and those expecting us will be happy with us."

"It will make some sort of sense in the end, won't it?" asked my companion.

"Probably not."

"Huh?"

"But it won't matter because we'll have crossed over by then and the very good and sensible reasons why we shouldn't will be unimportant."

"Are there deserts in Syria?"

.....

Tuesday 3 September 2013

Why Philip Davies is right about international aid...

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Although he won't thank me for it!

If we stopped every single penny of government spending on aid (by which we mean our money going to help people in poorer countries) we would still be spending more than that much-vaunted 0.7% of GDP on aid.  And this is why:

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.

Bear in mind that the over-protected DFID budget is considerably smaller than this and you begin to understand that the whole pretence that we need to spend more on aid is just a sort of metroliberal scam. And those remittances from immigrants and refugees - getting on for £20 billion - work much harder than the generosity of governments. That 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.

Because of the last fifteen year's worth of immigration we don't need to lavish more money on aid. But instead we indulge the 'fair trade' folk, the people who knit jumpers for Oxfam and the frowning people who tell us that 'free trade' damages these poor places. And we bung more money in the aid pot, money that does little or no good in poor places but, like the immoral scam that is fair trade, pours gentle soothing honey on our middle-class guilt about having a nice house, a car and two foreign holidays. We should stop - it doesn't work. Not like those little remittances to friends and family from recent immigrants:

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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So we're not getting fatter...

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Ah yes! The "obesity pandemic", the curse of junk food and "obesogenic environments". And this:

"When we are talking about obesity, we are not just talking about something that everyone is equally susceptible to.
We are dividing up into two tribes. There is a group of the population that are now resistant to dramatic weight-increase and a susceptible portion who continue to gain.
The Government's approach to the issue needs to be more detailed if it is to be tackled successfully."

Since we know that levels of obesity really haven't shifted much over the last decade, perhaps we need to start seeing the problem as one specific to particular people and to target public health efforts to those people rather than introduce nannying all-population policies that simply 'punish' people who don't have a problem.

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Quote of the day...

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From Don Boudreaux:

To understand comparative advantage is to understand that costs, properly reckoned, are always opportunity costs

Absolutely.

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Sunday 1 September 2013

Why is it so important that everyone toes the line all the time?

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It seems sad - and Nick Robinson is perhaps the saddest journalist in this respect - that discussion of important matters, in this case lives and deaths, becomes an exercise in political tactics. Don't get me wrong, I don't support us bombing Syria (it winds them up and it doesn't work)but this is for reasons of considering the situation and the argument not some sort of Macchiavellian machination. It may be true that the Prime Minister would risk his job through another vote. And such a vote may also rip Labour asunder. But that is not the point - the point is whether such a vote would be right and timely.

 ....