Thursday 31 October 2013

It's Hallowe'en so we get some nonsense about rural crime from the Country Land & Business Association...

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We're always that October and November are peak months for burglary - lots of stuff about the clocks going back and the nights drawing in. However, this applies everywhere not just in that mystic place "the countryside" - however the Country Land & Business Association thinks otherwise:

Again sadly, rural areas present the greatest opportunity for thieves. Isolated houses and buildings, less lighting, fewer witnesses and the ease of being able to watch the owner’s movements all add up to a very attractive target for thieves. 

Except this simply isn't true. Rates of house burglary are much lower in rural areas compared to urban areas. To help understand this here are the country's top "burglary hotspots":

LS23, Bramley, Gamble Hill, Moorside, Rodley and Swinnow
BD12, Low Moor, Oakenshaw and Wyke in Bradford
N12, North Finchley
M30, Eccles
RM3, Harold Wood, Harold Hill, Noak Hill in Romford
SW12, Balham, Clapham South, Hyde Farm in London
LS18, Horsforth in Leeds
UB3, Hayes, Harlington in Middlesex
SE22, East Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Loughborough Junction, Herne Hill
LS28, Calverley, Farsley, Pudsey, Stanningley.

There you go - Inner London, Leeds and Bradford (and some place where they make pastry cakes with currants in). Not a rural place in sight.

In the Skipton & Ripon constituency (as rural as it gets really) there were 548 burglaries over the past year - that's 45.7 per month. In October and November last year there were 41 and 36 respectively - below the average.

By comparison in Leeds West (which contains the place on top of that burglary hotspot list) that average is 125.6 per month (1507 burglaries) nearly triple the rate in "the countryside". Again October and November at 104 and 109 respectively are below the average.

I also suspect that, if we were to exclude the two towns of Skipton and Ripon, the remaining countryside would have very little crime at all.

I've no problem with good advice about security - locking doors, putting tools away, marking property and so forth - but it simply isn't true that crime is going to rise "when the clocks go back" (it might but it might not) and it certainly isn't true that rural areas are targeted by thieves.

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Immigration checks in housing - or how to create some more rich criminals

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There are proposals afoot to make landlords check the immigration status of new tenants:

Private landlords will be required to check the immigration status of new tenants under government proposals being launched in a consultation today.
The government also plans to introduce proportionate penalties for those who make a single honest mistake, and much heavier penalties, up to £3,000 per tenant, for rogue landlords who repeatedly and deliberately break the law.

Just as requiring employers to conduct these sort of checks creates a cash-in-hand economy within immigrant communities, expecting the same of landlords will result in this:

‘UKALA (letting agents) is deeply concerned that the Bill’s requirements will further restrict access to housing for people from outside of the UK, or with non-standard requirements. Many areas of the UK have very competitive lettings markets and it is entirely conceivable that landlords will instruct agents to favour those tenants they perceive as ‘low risk’.

So where do those high risk tenants go? Here, from Ben Reeve Lewis is an indication:

A couple of weeks back a landlord came to me with a quandary. He had let his 3 bed, Deptford flat @ £1,600 per month to two guys. They have been there 2 years and never missed a penny in rent, so he doesn’t have a problem.

Total received? £38,400 and very nice too.

He decided to visit the property for a genial chat and catch up with his model tenants, only to find 11 other people living there. I went with him on a return visit for a chat and ascertained that each sub-tenant paid £350 per month to the landlord’s official tenants, giving a grand total income to them of £92,400

Deduct his lawful rent payments and his tenants had made, from the sub tenancy £54,400 in two years.

Add people renting out sheds and garages - even inaccessible basements - and you have a proposal that will do nothing to reduce immigration but will make life more miserable for thousands of those ordinary hard-working families (the ones who've travelled half way across the world to do the hard work). And lucrative for criminals.

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Wednesday 30 October 2013

Questioning the location of Macclesfield: the curse of fact checking

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It was one of those Sunday lunchtime family discussions, the ones that gradually descend into pointless row. And for reasons lost in the mist of time the question of Macclesfield's location arose.

"Macclesfield's in Cheshire."

"No, Macclesfield's in Greater Manchester."

For a minute or two the discussion continues in this vein. I stomp from the room pick up the atlas, find the relevant page and point to the map.

"There you are! Macclesfield is definitely in Cheshire."

A momentary hiatus in the discussion.

"No, the boundaries have changed since that map was published. Macclesfield is now in Greater Manchester."

The discussion continued, now escalated into a row about people who don't believe things even when they're up to the elbow in a spear wound.

Today, in our political discourse we have become obsessed with facts. Or rather with a thing called "fact checking". Rather than engage with reasoned argument we resort to Google and crawl all over the offending comments seeking an error.

At one level this is yah boo - "you've got a date wrong so everything else you say has to be wrong". Or worse still minor grammar errors or a misspelling are fingered - "you can't even write English, why should I believe anything you say."

At another level the correcting of facts is more relevant  - what we might call the 'Location of Macclesfield' question. This might be an understandable confusion between 'income' and 'earnings', a mix-up over two numbers (say illegal immigrants and asylum seekers) or using out-of-date information such as an earlier rate for minimum wage or some or other benefit.

Now it may be the case that one of other of these errors invalidates the argument being made (Macclesfield is in Greater Manchester) but the simple identification of the error isn't enough. You have to demonstrate that, with this error corrected, the argument no longer stands (Macclesfield is in Cheshire). If the argument still stands then the corrected error is just that, a corrected error and not a deal breaker.

"Proving" that someone is wrong by pointing out errors in their facts is great fun if you're the sort of person who doesn't mind getting into a stupid row about the location of Macclesfield ("guilty as charged m'lud") but, as the basis for political discourse it's only a marginal improvement on "I'm right and you're wrong". Sadly, in this data-rich age it is easier to crawl over something looking for what might be errors of fact than it is to engage with the actual argument being made.

Finally, we should remember that facts are selected. We don't use all the facts in this game, just the facts that suit our argument (and, more to the point, the other person's errors that suit our argument). The result is unedifying, often rude and seldom gets us closer to the basis for disagreement. It may well be the case that poverty has risen in the USA. Or indeed it may not be the case that this is so. What I know is that we can engage in a spat about facts without getting any closer to answering the actual question!

And Macclesfield is in Cheshire!

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Tuesday 29 October 2013

The case for school choice...

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Some - mostly from the wealthy left-wing commentariat - seem not to get this simple truth:

Why is this important? Because it indicates that school choice leads to more integrated communities. The British system, which Fiona Millar & Co seem so keen on, entrenches inequality by increasing house prices around good state schools and decreasing them around worse ones. The rich live with the rich, and the poor with the poor. School choice has the potential to break this pattern of social segregation. And this is precisely what recent American research suggests: with more choice decoupled from residence, house prices and average incomes decrease around more sought-after schools and increase around less sought-after ones. In other words, we see an equalisation among communities – school choice reduces residential segregation.

I guess Fiona Millar and her ilk don't want to mix with hoi polloi?

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Quote of the day: on press (un)freedom

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From Nick Cohen:

...you could see the mess liberal England has made of the very principles it is meant to defend. We now have more than 100 journalists and newspaper sources under arrest for allegedly breaking the existing law. The coercive arm of the state, has taken advantage of the climate of liberal hysteria to tell any public servant, who thinks of speaking to the press, that they will end up in the dock. Now thanks to Leveson and virtually every power-grabbing MP in Parliament, we are going to have state-sponsored press regulation as well. 

I never dreamt that we'd see parliament acting to muzzle the press - either to prevent celebrities being revealed as fans of buying blow jobs, cocaine or spanking or, perhaps more importantly, stopping journalists from exposing how our "security" services routinely run a coach and horses through the idea of democratic accountability.

As I've said before: welcome again to the new fascism.

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Monday 28 October 2013

Brandon Lewis gets it right on fast food!

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We have a new hero:

Britain’s struggling high streets need fast food restaurants which are ‘massively important’ to millions of shoppers, a Tory minister has claimed.

Brandon Lewis, the new high streets minister, said it would be ‘wholly wrong’ for the Government to try to ban junk food from town centres.




Absolutely right. Brandon even used some old fashioned insults to describe proposals to ban or otherwise prevent fast food shops on high streets - "socialist" he called them.

Fast food simply isn't the problem (and never has been). Most people don't live on McDonalds or KFC for the simple fact they can't afford to - if they're obese it's because of what they've got in the fridge and in the cupboards at home.

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What Bradford Council said about Kings Science Academy in September...

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Risks and weaknesses in financial systems, such as procurement authorisations, payroll and credit card payments were identified by EFA Audit - the governing body has since appointed key personnel, including the appointment of an RO (Responsible Officer), and is in the process of stabilising procedures to enable effective financial management.*

It seems to me that, if there were real problems in current financial management at the school, they would have been mentioned? More to the point, the school was seeking the Council's help and advice and, had Cllr Berry been doing something other than trying to get selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate, he might have noticed! It's clear that the school had some financial management problems that have been addressed - there is no suggestion of wrongdoing.

To suggest that the school isn't accountable - as Cllr Berry did more than once through his Twitter account - is a complete misrepresentation of the situation at the school. And - more to the point - the Council appears to have known about the position all along!

*Quote is from a governance audit conducted by the Council in September.

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Microclusters: a more targeted economic development model?

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Aaron Renn gets the concept of 'clusters' bang on here:

If you look at the list of target industries for any given city or state, you usually find several from the same list of five common items: high technology, life sciences (under various names), green tech, advanced manufacturing, logistics. Take a few from this list, and add a legacy industry if there’s one or two where you are already particularly strong, and there you have it.

The problem is, as Aaron points out, that everybody is chasing the same clusters using the same strategies. And this means that most of the time the winners in the 'cluster battle' are those with a broad economic base, more businesses and greater variety. In the UK that's London and the South East.

The cluster strategies of Yorkshire Forward and the other northern Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) failed to deliver on their general clusters (which, of course, were drawn straight from Aaron's list). However, the concept of 'microclusters' - much more specific business ecosystems - may make more sense for driving economic development:

One way to stand out is a concept I’ve called “microclusters”. That is, rather than simply saying “We’re high tech”, you have some specialty within the broader tech industry where you can be a real national leader.

Indeed the idea of 'high technology' applies to almost every industry so being the place at the forefront in a specific element of on-line business (e.g. encryption or, in the example Aaaron cites, Internet marketing technology) means a more genuine 'cluster' that just having a clutch of businesses that are vaguely connected by the tag: "high tech".

I don't think these 'microclusters' will respond to planning - given the variety of start-up businesses - but they should benefit from inward investment and place marketing. In Bradford -  people are welcome to add to this list - we've two (possibly three) microclusters: the South Asian food business (both running restaurants and also making/distributing meals or ingredients) and blinging up cars. These are growing, have a local economic base as well as a wider appeal and draw on Bradford's distinct advantages.

Perhaps this gives us a different way of thinking about - and perhaps supporting the development of - local economies? What I do know is that it's a better bet than the 'cluster theory' that dominated the economic development strategies of the RDAs - that definitely failed.

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Saturday 26 October 2013

MIT's 'Places in the Making': I really think this is important...

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...or at least as important as any piece of academic pampleteering:

Public places play a key role in building community and placemaking can empower local communities to create a sense of "belonging" through place. A new report by a DUSP research team, led by Susan Silberberg, examines the interactions between placemaking, community participation, and the expanding ways communities are collaborating to make great public places.

It's not all perfect - there's still too much that suggests grand magicians will wave wands to create great places - but the general thrust is right. As Project for Public Spaces said (OK, gushed):

Places in the Making highlights the importance of people in defining place, a critical aspect that is all too often forgotten by those in architecture, planning, and other related disciplines. “The intense focus on place has caused us to miss the opportunity to discuss community, process, and the act of making,” the paper asserts. “The importance of the Placemaking process itself is a key factor that has often been overlooked in working toward many of these noble goals. As illustrated by the ten cases highlighted here, the most successful Placemaking initiatives transcend the ‘place’ to forefront the ‘making.’”

This is the antithesis of the 'field of dreams' regeneration model beloved of those planners and urban designers - great places are more about the people in them than they are about the architecture, the swishness of the 'shopping experience' or the presence of the great institutions (public funded natch) of art.

I fear that too many people - those regeneration experts and so forth that litter local councils - won't read this or worse will read it and misunderstand. This is what happened in Bradford when we got an anti-development masterplan - instead of going with the idea of removing stuff and making spaces we tried instead to translate it into a 'shiny regeneration' strategy, a grand city plan.

As Bradford pays consultants a few more tens of thousands extracted from the council taxes of local folk to produce another grand 'city plan', perhaps we should hesitate and ask whether we're headed in the wrong direction again. And rather than have lots of great plans to spoil the city again, we should read this research from MIT, take down the Alsop plan that's gathering a thick layer of dust and try again to create of city for people - to remind ourselves that:

...many of the best, most authentic and enduring destinations in a city, the places that keep locals and tourists coming back again and again and that anchor quality, local jobs,  were born out of a series of incremental, locally-based improvements. One by one, these interventions built places that were more than the sum of their parts.

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Friday 25 October 2013

Using Christmas clubs is rational behaviour

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Over in the USA they have these things called 'layaway' schemes and Alex Tabarrok thinks it odd that people use them:

Layaway plans are immensely popular, a fact I find deeply puzzling much like the popularity of Justin Bieber, Snooki, and homeopathy makes me question the rationality of my fellow human beings.

The typical layaway plan requires a deposit of 10-15% of the price of the good, say a new TV. If the consumer pays the balance over the following 10-12 weeks (i.e. by Christmas) they can pickup the good. If the consumer doesn’t pay the balance they get a refund of payments made less a service fee.


I suspect that there is some important factors that Alex overlooks here - for many people such schemes are entirely sensible and their use absolutely rational. Alex talks of how Walmart and such won't run out of what people want so that's not a motivation for pre-order but fails to realise the problems of living on a limited income.

For a number of years, Park Food Group - Britain's biggest Christmas hamper company - was a client. We put together direct marketing and agent recruitment programmes. As the Account Planner my job was to try and understand who might buy these hampers (or rather who might act as an agent persuading others to buy) and the reasons why such purchases are made.

In simple terms the incentive is that, on their own, many people in the target market for hampers and Christmas clubs (and indeed for Alex's layaway plans) simply do not trust themselves to save. There are too many pressures in year that lead inevitably to a little dipping into the jar with the Christmas fund meaning that the fund, come Christmas, is depleted and insufficient.

What hamper businesses do is provide an agent to make sure you save (they pop round every week, have a cup of tea and collect the £3.36 or whatever) and a pot you can't access - so no dipping in to pay for school uniform, birthday presents or a treat taking the kids to the zoo. This is what people are buying, not certainty but rather the assurance that someone is helping them make sure they have a great Christmas.

"Tabarrok's Layaway Plan" simply doesn't offer this assurance and therefore does not offer the actual product ('making sure you save') that people think they need.

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Layaway plans are immensely popular, a fact I find deeply puzzling much like the popularity of Justin Bieber, Snooki, and homeopathy makes me question the rationality of my fellow human beings.
The typical layaway plan requires a deposit of 10-15% of the price of the good, say a new TV. If the consumer pays the balance over the following 10-12 weeks (i.e. by Christmas) they can pickup the good. If the consumer doesn’t pay the balance they get a refund of payments made less a service fee.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/10/stayaway-from-layaway.html#sthash.eTIAonk2.dpuf

Thursday 24 October 2013

Do mutuals scale?

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Charles Moore (among many) comments:

More attention should be paid to the failure of the Co-op Bank. It suggests that an ‘ethical’ motivation does not guarantee that the interests of the customer will be well served.

This may well be true, indeed the 'ethical' argument was always more of a positioning statement than something inherent to mutual organisation models.

My question is more fundamental given the problems with the Co-op (and the banking disaster has taken attention away from its underperformance as a retailer and aggressive behaviour as an undertaker) - can mutuals scale up to be large national organisations and maintain business effectiveness?

It seems to me that the problem is one of accountability - the leaders of large mutual organisations (especially those that are consumer mutuals rather than worker mutuals) are not as accountable to their members as joint stock companies are to shareholders. The business cannot go to its 'owners' for more cash and those owners either cannot or do not act to replace the management when it fails (such as by arriving cap in hand asking for the money to clear up mistakes).

Cullingworth Conservative Club is a mutual organisation - it works because having about 800 members who live in the village and use the club means that the leadership is accountable. A national mutual - the Co-op or one of the big building societies - has a leadership that isn't subject to this attention or scrutiny, that isn't really accountable. Perhaps here lie some of the problems?

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Prince of Bureaucrats calls for guided democracy...

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I'm told that Gus O'Donnell is a terribly clever man. I'm sure this is the case but he clearly has lost all grip on the concept of democracy:

Would-be MPs should be forced to meet "pre-qualification criteria" before being allowed to stand, a former cabinet secretary has suggested.

Lord O'Donnell - once the UK's most senior civil servant - said the idea could make Parliament more effective.

Government policies would also be vetted by former ministers, accountants and ex-civil servants under Lord O'Donnell's proposals.

I wanted to take this apart bit by bit. But is so completely and utterly stupid - unless, of course, the Prince of Bureaucrats has converted to Sukarno's concept of 'guided democracy':

He proposed a government based on the four main parties plus a national council representing not merely political parties but functional groups—urban workers, rural farmers, intelligentsia, national entrepreneurs, religious organizations, armed services, youth organizations, women’s organizations, etc.—through which, under presidential guidance, a national consensus could express itself.

Of course, there was a much earlier form of this idea invented by an Italian called Benito!

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In which Bradford's Labour councillors vote against free speech...

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The strange party that is Respect put a motion to Bradford Council calling for the English Defence League (EDL) to be banned. For sure they used a posh word - 'proscribed' - but what they wanted was them banned because they hold some unpleasant and rather racist views. Apparently this makes them terrorists (I understand that Respect are loony lefties and probably believe in collective guilt but this was an argument I just didn't get) so we can ban them under our rather egregious terrorism laws.

The Conservative Group considered this and decided that we would respond with a simple statement of principle:

"Council affirms its support for free speech"

We took the view that this would remind people of how democracy is important and that free speech is central to democracy. Put simply, without free speech democracy is a sham. We also pointed out that banning things - OK, 'proscribing' - is a great way to get publicity (Cllr Glen Miller our group leader managed to get 'Life of Brian', Robin Thicke and 'Spycatcher' into his speech).

Affirming our support for free speech would allow the police and others to manage (or overmanage as sometimes happens) the risks of disorder and to deal with crimes such as inciting violence. The last thing we needed was a headline saying 'Council calls for EDL to be banned'.

However, we lost the vote - Bradford's Labour Councillors chose to oppose free speech so their own mealy-mouthed piece of fence sitting got passed!

I had to smile! I always knew socialists didn't believe in free speech. And now I have it confirmed!

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Wednesday 23 October 2013

Butter or "We knew this anyway"

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We are getting to the point where the misplaced emphasis on saturated fats as the guilty complex molecules has to end. Obesity, heart disease and much else really isn't driven by these essential little darlings:

Four decades of medical wisdom that cutting down on saturated fats reduces our risk of heart disease may be wrong, a top cardiologist has said. Fatty foods that have not been processed – such as butter, cheese, eggs and yoghurt – can even be good for the heart, and repeated advice that we should cut our fat intake may have actually increased risks of heart disease...

Some of us have been saying this for quite a while of course!

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Urbanism and the case for devolution

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Yesterday I went public with a view I've coddled for a while. It is the answer to a question I've posed a few times - why is US and European writing on urbanism so more varied and interesting than our home grown British writing?

British writing and research on urbanism - or regeneration as it is more commonly badged - is trapped in the idea that central government distributes money. Ever more intense screeds are penned about 'multiple deprivation', 'place-based intervention' and the iniquities of how government sets policy. The industry cuddles up to ministers and lobbies for 'business-led' structures to manage the delivery of projects or developments.

Over the years since Michael Heseltine stood on a derelict site in Liverpool and Margaret Thatcher visited similar in Teeside, out regeneration models have been stuck in the same policy groove skipping a replaying the same actions and merely rebadging them as new, as thinking outside the box. In truth, with the exception of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, nothing changed - either with policy or, more importantly, on the ground.

And here is the problem - a problem that still persists in Britain today. Policy is determined by central government and the funding distributed to those who comply with that policy. There is a great deal of talk about delivery, about innovation and about transformation. But nothing much changes - these are just fine words, no parsnips are buttered.

The reason why urbanism is more exciting in the US, in Holland and in Germany is simply because the creators of policy in urban places don't have to wait on central government for either guidance or money. The situation where West Yorkshire has to crawl up the backside of the Department of Transport in order to get a little dribble of funding for a mass transit system simply wouldn't apply - the money would be raised locally and spent locally.

Across the USA new approaches and ideas are tried - and you only need to read blogs like The Urbanophile or Project for Public Spaces to see the creativity of many US cities and communities. These ideas - good and bad, effective and disastrous - are part of the debate at local level as groups campaign for and against programmes rather than, as in the UK, mostly lining up to shoot down developments.

If we want this dynamism, wish to rediscover the Victorian passion that created out great cities, we have to unshackle local government from central government's apron- and purse-strings. I'd argue that we also need directly elected mayors, fewer city councillors and more everyday activities devolved to community, town, village and parish councils - but the central need is to end the current situation.

Every time Bradford Council meets in full session we pass resolutions asking for the Chief Executive to write to one minister or another, to lobby local MPs or otherwise seek to influence central government decisions. I'm pretty sure that council meetings in Columbus, Montpelier or Freiburg aren't making these sorts of decisions. They don't need to, they have the powers to act, to get things done - there are no central government planning inspectors, no second-guessing on borrowing permissions, no bureaucracies that must agree before anything can be done.

If we want a better urbanism in Britain, we need to set local government free and allow it to innovate, create, succeed and fail. With local voters not inspectors or Whitehall bureaucrats as the arbiters of that success of failure.

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Sunday 20 October 2013

Well done 'Leeds City Council education bosses' - top nannying fussbucketry!

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Terrible I know but some children smoke. We don't want them to smoke, indeed we banned kids from smoking. But still some children smoke:

A school which let pupils as young as 11 smoke in the playground has been ordered to stop the practice.

Leeds City Council education bosses stepped in after learning children at Elmete Central School in Roundhay, Leeds, were allowed to smoke.


Absolutely right! How can this possibly be right - well done 'Leeds City Council education bosses' for stepping in to deal with this situation.

But before you start to cheer ask yourselves why a school might allow children to smoke? Perhaps this has something to do with the reason:

Elmete caters for 75 pupils with educational and behavioural issues.

These children have far bigger problems - be they a lousy home life, mental health problems or behavioural challenges - that need sorting out before we stand a chance of stopping them from smoking. And to stand a chance of getting their lives sorted out, the children need to be on the school premises. So:

It is understood cigarettes were confiscated at the start of the day but returned at break times in an attempt to stop pupils playing truant.

So I guess those kids have gone back to bunking off at lunchtime for a fag (and maybe half a bottle of cider). That's going to help! Well done 'Leeds City Council education bosses'!

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Why Jonathan Portes should shut up about migration - from someone who agrees with him...

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“These transitional places – arrival cities – are the places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice and our willingness to engage” Doug Saunders


The problem with the discussion of migration is that the public debate is characterised by adherence to unquestioned and polemical positions – either migration is a bad thing that places undue pressures on jobs, culture and public institutions or else migration contributes to economic growth and underscores the idea of a free nation.

Now those who know me will know that I’m much closer to the second of these positions. Indeed, the idea that a nation is made up of people who want to be there (rather than who just happened to have been born there) is a far healthier idea than the sort of racially or culturally determined ideas of nationhood that are preferred by many opposed to immigration.

However, the comments from Jonathan Portes – a sort of “my carefully chosen facts are the only facts” commentary reveal a deep unpleasantness in the debate (an unpleasantness more usually associated with those who say we’re full up and call for ever more draconian restrictions on migration).

The real point here is that the presence of migrants in the UK – from wherever they come – must have an impact on the home communities. Portes presents statistics showing that immigrants are more likely to be working than is the case for the population as a whole but doesn’t recognise that this is only part of the picture. And then, without presenting any facts, Portes then makes this sweeping statement:


So, once again, we are left with the conclusion that in the absence of immigration the public finances would be in an even worse state – we'd be spending somewhat less, but we'd lose even more than that on tax, both in the short and the long run, as the OBR has pointed out.


So we move from a very specific assessment – of migration from EU accession nations – to a general observation about the economic benefits of migration. A benefit that reflects every sort of migrant – everyone from billionaire Russian oligarchs to penniless refugees from Burma. The problem is further confused by this:


But since the non-activity rate is lower in the EU migrant population as a whole (and remember many non-active EU migrants will be family members of those who are active) overall this simply confirms the conclusion found by other studies – EU migrants, like migrants in general, pay in more than they take out on average.


This simply doesn’t prove the point that Portes is making, certainly not in the short run and absolutely not in the case of migrants from Eastern Europe. Given that most of these recent immigrants are in low paid work, the amount paid in is less and many will be receiving in-work benefits (tax credits, housing benefit) and universal benefits (child benefits). So the fact of them working does not mean that they are net contributors to the system.

And beyond the discussion about the NHS, we have to provide education for children – including for many the £900 per child pupil premium - we have costs falling on social services and other exceptional costs. It is unhelpful and misleading for Portes to dismiss the short-term effect of migration on public services with what amounts to ‘pah’.

What Jonathan Portes needs to learn is that, if we are to make the case for migration as a benefit, we need to do so positively. Treating those who are concerned about migration as if they are a bunch of pseudo-racist nutcases does not help at all – rather it reinforces the view that migration benefits middle-class professionals like Portes and me, so who cares about the impact on working class communities or the worries about schools, hospitals and social services.

I headed this comment with a quote from Doug Saunders, from the preface to Arrival City, the story of how migration is transforming the world for the better. That is the message we need to get across rather than the grubby and snide use of selected facts to make what is, ultimately, a petty point.

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Progress...

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There's still quite a lot of racism out there - I see it every day often from people who would be shocked to believe they are racist. But there's no doubt that progress - by which I mean us getting away from our debilitating obsession with the idea of race - is being made. By way of example I give you this:

Mr Afriyie, the MP for Windsor, insisted that he had "no ambition" for Mr Cameron's role but warned that the Conservatives must deliver economic growth in order to stand a chance of winning the 2015 election outright.

However, he fuelled speculation about his leadership plans by saying he was working with a "large group" of Tory MPs on his own efforts to create a "Conservative Britain".

Mr Afriyie, a millionaire businessman, is reportedly being groomed to take over as party leader if the Conservatives fail to win a majority in 2015. 

Now I find this cheering. Not because I think Adam Afriyie would be a good leader of the Conservative Party but because, amidst all the silly speculation, I haven't once seen any one bothered by the fact that he's black.

Last night I went to a dinner in Bradford where Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon was the speaker. In his speech this government minister reminded us that the Conservative front bench included 'the son of a train guard, the daughter of a mill worker and the son of a bus driver'. The Party's long established working-class credentials were polished again. Of course the sub-plot (and this being Bradford an important sub-plot) was that those three working class Tories are all Muslims with a Pakistani heritage.

So we have a black man being discussed as Party leader, three Pakistanis as ministers and (just to add to the fun) a former miner as Transport Secretary.

Progress I think...

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Friday 18 October 2013

So what is a charity?



We've been used to the debate about defining a 'charity' mostly through discussion of the beneficiaries - should Eton have charitable status? Or the Royal Opera House for that matter?

However there's a different debate - sometimes it might be called the 'sockpuppet' debate - where the organisation with charitable status is, essentially, a delivery agent for the government.

Here's a good example:

The accounts show that St Andrew’s increased its income from £168.7m in 2011/12 to £178m last year. Expenditure rose from £156.2m to £161.2m and the charity increased its funds carried forward from £175.4m in 2011/12 to £192.6m last year.

The charity received donations totalling £22,000 in 2012/13, down from £30,000 in the previous year.

Note that last line. This multi-million pound 'charity' raised just £22,000 in what I would call voluntary income. And the rest?

The charity, which employs about 3,100 people and receives the majority of its income from the NHS...

And, as a result, this organisation:

... has 57 employees on salaries of more than £100,000 a year

Including a chief executive paid £653,000.

It seems to me that this is a large and successful business paying its senior people very well and I'm sure providing fantastic care for its mentally ill clients. But is this what we mean by charity?

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Thursday 17 October 2013

Sorry but state direction of the food system won't reduce waste...

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On the face of it seeking to reduce the amount of food we throw away unused is a good thing. It certainly makes sense and I'd be up for encouraging people to try and reduce the amount of grub we trash.

However, the food fascists don't quite see it this way:

For starters, food loss and wastage needs to be seen as a cross-cutting policy issue, rather than a lifestyle choice to be left in the hands of individual consumers and their consciences.

You are not to be allowed. Throwing stuff away will be banned. Action will be taken.

Now, if the article from which that quote came was from George Monbiot or some other slightly batty green obsessive then we could shove it to one side, smile and move on. But the authors are the Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Program. These are big panjandrums of the international boondoggle circuit, blokes whose words are hung upon by lesser mortals, people who can effect change.

And the change they want is to say to those managing bits of the food system - farmers, truckers, supermarket managers, market stall holders and, of course, us consumers - that the government knows better. Taxes will be raised and "invested" in preventing waste (as if those producers and distributors aren't already pretty bothered about reducing waste as it represents lost income or extra cost), conferences will be held and grand food strategies replete with ideas of 'security', 'climate change' and 'fairness' that corrupt the very idea of liberty and choice.

In the end, if I want to chuck half the food I buy away that's my loss. And frankly nothing at all to do with the UN or indeed any bit of government beyond the part that runs the bin wagons. State direction of the food system won't reduce waste, will almost certainly make food more expensive and will problem make matters worse - more starvation, more tonnes of food heading for landfill and a new army of fussbuckets sticking their unwanted fingers into a system that works pretty well.
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For starters, food loss and wastage needs to be seen as a cross-cutting policy issue, rather than a lifestyle choice to be left in the hands of individual consumers and their consciences.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-massive-costs-of-food-wastage-and-loss-by-jose-graziano-da-silva-and-achim-steiner#DKFRGYPi5AwpPVUj.99

Quote of the day: the 'offendedness sweepstakes'

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Spot on:

‘One of the many things that Rauch predicted was that if you allow something to be a perfect trump card on what people are allowed to say – in this case, it’s the claim of offence – you’re going to notice that the bar for being offended gets lower and lower. People have played the “I’m offended” trump card over and over, and it has turned into what Rauch calls an “offendedness sweepstakes”

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Wednesday 16 October 2013

Quote of the day - what addiction isn't...

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From Chris Snowdon:

As a general rule of thumb, if someone tells you that cupcakes or smartphones are "as addictive as cocaine" on the basis that they all produce dopamine in the brain, walk away. They're saying no more than that pleasurable activities stimulate the brain's pleasure centres, which is a banal tautology.

Do take note all you health reporters.

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Regenerating the North - a start...




There was a small storm when The Economist spoke of the problems facing the more peripheral Northern towns and cities:


The fate of these once-confident places is sad. That so many well-intentioned people are trying so hard to save them suggests how much affection they still claim. The coalition is trying to help in its own way, by setting up “enterprise zones” where taxes are low and broadband fast. But these kindly efforts are misguided. Governments should not try to rescue failing towns. Instead, they should support the people who live in them.


The articles pointed to places like Hull, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, once thriving places now struggling. The argument is that these places – and the word place is important in this discussion – have got beyond the fixable meaning that we need to manage their continued decline by supporting those who stay and encouraging those who leave.

In one respect this is an understandable, if depressing, conclusion – that places which have contributed so much to England’s glory should be allowed to die. But in other respects the conclusion is liberating.

The efforts aimed at regenerating the North have failed. I know we can point to grand shopping arcades, refurbished mills and many a shiny business park, things that have helped, have provided jobs and have created a sense of economic progress. But the truth is that these things are the fur coat that covers up the absence of underwear. The picture of Liverpool’s brilliant city centre, vibrant with culture, is wonderful. Yet the city still contains some of England’s poorest communities, places unbudged since the jobs went in the 1970s and 1980s.

And, before the wrath of scousers everywhere falls on me, the same picture is seen in Hull, in Teeside and, indeed, in Bradford. Faced with the pull of the South East and the attractions of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle, these communities continue to struggle. Here’s one observer:
Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle have their stunning new developments and you can tell there are people there with plenty of money just by walking around. Go a few miles up the read, though, and you will find blighted and boarded up small towns. It doesn’t matter how cheap they are, employers are avoiding them. The worse they get, the less likely firms are to relocate. The lure of cheaper property and wages only goes so far. It may tempt organisations away from the South-East but only to the larger regional capitals. Small town Britain is a step too far.
I would go a step further in this understanding – this author suggests that firms may move away from London but only to places with those ‘stunning new developments’ (and I would argue within swift travel of central London – perhaps the only sound argument for HS2). The reality is that – unless, like the BBC, politics forces the move – these firms are not relocating to Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle let alone Bradford, Liverpool or Nottingham.

And the problem is about scale. Here’s a comment about Chicago, a far bigger and more successful city than Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle:
Some may say, “Aaron, weren’t you the one who said Chicago wasn’t a global city?” To which I’d respond, I’ve always said Chicago is a global city. I only think that the global city side of Chicago is not sufficient to carry the load for this gigantic region and state. It can’t even carry just the city, though to be fair if you broke off global city Chicago into a standalone municipality of 600-800,000 like San Francisco, Boston, and DC, it would be a very different story, at the municipal level at least.
In simple terms Aaron is saying that, despite Chicago’s success (the company headquarters, commodities exchanges and cultural excellence), it is not sufficient of an economic driver to drag the wider hinterland – that old rustbelt greater Chicago – along behind. Those communities get left behind.

Back in England, we can see the same in Manchester and Leeds – walk out from Manchester’s city centre and you quickly arrive in places that are the flip side of ‘shiny’ Manchester. Indeed, after Liverpool, Manchester has the highest number of deprived SOAs (‘super output areas’ for the curious). And Leeds with Seacroft, Harehills and East End Park isn’t so very different.

Even these more successful cities may not generate the critical mass to bring peripheral communities along with their thriving centres and odd little bohemian enclaves. If they do, this success will be at the expense of other places further removed and most significantly those sufficiently disconnected – Teeside, East Lancashire, Hull and The Humber.

Faced then with this challenge, what do we do? Right now we’re planning for a larger population, for new jobs in ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’ industries and for more of the same (or what we believe to be the same). Except this isn’t the case. Quietly we are seeing a new focus – through ‘combined authorities’, local enterprise partnerships and city regions – on the three or four hub cities: Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and, perhaps, Liverpool.

This focus may not be enough (or does there come a point at which London is so expensive, so unattractive that people move away) to prevent continued relative decline but it does at least hold out some prospect of betterment. For us in Bradford – and for that matter, those in Oldham, Chester-le-Street and St Helens – we perhaps need to work out how to do three things:

  1. Connect our communities to the City Centres – ideally by fast train or tram rather than by bus or trolley bus. This needs to be ambitious and requires some taboos – about providing free parking at railway stations, for example – to be broken. It’s not enough to simply tidy up the current networks, we need to connect places that aren’t connected as of now
  2. Provide transforming space – just because you can get from Saltaire to Leeds inside 20 minutes doesn’t mean you have to do so every day. In these connected places (and especially the deprived communities we’re bringing into the network) let’s offer low rent studios and live-work spaces – on the proviso that those renting put something back in the form of art, music, culture or other improvement
  3. Animate and decorate – create a sense of interest and excitement. Rather than some sort of dull positioning – Bradford’s current meme, I’m told, is ‘the producer city’ – we want to be a place where things are happening. But for this to work, we’ll have to let go of control and allow stuff (some of which might be a little odd) to take place.
These aren’t a solution – we can and should expect many of our brightest to go away, to leave for London or even for New York and Hong Kong. And – whatever the planners are saying right now – many of our communities will decline in size, the inner city will hollow out a little and the suburbs will get a little more crowded. But this process presents us with opportunities to do some things differently – to build an urban golf course in Allerton or a cycle track in Barkerend, to have some more new parks and open spaces and to fill them with the wild and wacky.

Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears when faced with (and it’s not the first time) the truth about the prospects for our cities, we should accept reality and work with change instead of pretending it isn’t happening. The alternative is another generation of local politicians (and the pseudo-politicians that clutter up LEP boards and so forth) clattering back and forth to London where they abase themselves before civil servants and junior ministers holding out the cap ready for the next slug of "regeneration".

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Tuesday 15 October 2013

It should read: "The NHS must treat working-class lifestyles not killer diseases"

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Four in every five deaths in London today are due to unhealthy lifestyles, including factors such as smoking, alcohol, bad diets and a lack of exercise.


This simply isn’t true. Or rather we can’t demonstrate that this is true. Here’s the ONS on causes of death:


Around half a million people, representing less than one per cent of the total population, died in England and Wales in 2009. The vast majority of deaths occurred at older ages, with almost eight out of ten men and nearly nine out of ten women dying at age 65 or above.


It’s worth noting here that the annual number of deaths is as low as the number of deaths in the 1950s when there were significantly fewer people. So there are (per 1000 population) fewer people dying than ever before and the average age of death is higher than ever before. The chances are that it’s old age that’s killing people rather than a libertine lifestyle:


For those aged 80 years and above coronary heart disease and stroke were the leading causes of death for both men and women. For men, influenza and pneumonia appear amongst the top three leading causes of death; these illnesses also appeared as a leading cause of death for males in the youngest age-group, one to four years. For women, dementia was prominent among the leading causes of death in this oldest age group and it is notable that the total number of deaths for women aged 80 years and above exceeded the combined total of all deaths amongst females at younger ages.


So why is it that health ‘leadership’ is so keen to take on the evil choices we make rather than continue the work of getting better at managing heart conditions, better at treating cancer and better at responding to injury? Why finger lifestyle rather than the truth – that our longevity is placing an ever greater strain on health and care services?

Dr Andy Mitchell, Medical Director for NHS England is right when he says:


“London’s hospitals are at breaking point and the demand for health care will outstrip the funding available in just seven years unless we fundamentally change the way services are delivered."


But absolutely wrong when he tries to blame this problem on “...conditions that stem from what we are doing to ourselves.” 

This simply isn’t true – unless he means eating better, living healthier and surviving for longer.

The medical mafia has decided that it must correct our lifestyles. Not because a correction is needed but because that mafia has decided it disapproves of our lifestyles. Or, to be more specific, the lifestyles of people in lower socio-economic classes – you know the sort who drink beer, eat supermarket microwave burgers and drink fizzy-pop. For this health mafia the working classes really are a drain on society.

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