Friday 31 January 2014

'They don't have right to tells us what we can feed our son' - more school-based health fascism

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Schools are getting ever more assertive about the contents of lunchboxes but this particular piece of health fascism from Colnbrook C of E Primary School near Slough rather takes the biscuit:

A six-year-old boy who went to school with a bag of Mini Cheddars in his packed lunch has been suspended for four days after teachers said it contravened its healthy eating policy.

That's right folks, this school deprived a six-year-old of four days education because his mum put some snack biscuits in his lunchbox.

And the school's excuse, you wonder?

'We cannot talk about individual circumstances, but there is one family who are not prepared to support the policy.

'We are in discussions with them about how we move it forward. We have excluded [the pupil] for four days due to lack of support for the policy.

'It is to avoid putting the children in a difficult situation. If the policy is not being abided by, then that potentially harms that pupil.'

We get the classic line of refusing to comment 'on individual cases' and a reiteration of the ghastly fascism of this food policy. The scale of ignorance about nutrition and belief that the school can railroad over parental choice in such a cavalier manner makes this an exceptional piece of crass nannying fussbucketry.

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My new heroes - some Warwick University students

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Who chose not to be bullied and to further their education:

A group of history undergraduates at Warwick are causing controversy by organising their own student-led lectures while their tutors go on strike.

It doesn't matter whether or not you support the reasons for the strike, these students show initiative, creativity and leadership. They have every right to take this action, just as the lecturers have every right to go on strike. And it sticks a couple of fingers up at the bullying nature of trade unions when it comes to what they deem to be 'strike-breaking'. 

And the response of the union is, as ever, to threaten:


“Further escalation of the dispute, including a ban on marking, will unfortunately lead to greater disruption. We urge students to contact their vice-chancellor or principal and ask them to lobby the national employers’ negotiating body, UCEA, to urgently reopen negotiations.”

The message seems to be: "do what we say students or we'll stop you from getting the education you're paying for".

Well done to those students for standing up and making clear that they are the customer here - as one student put it:

"This is an argument between the staff and governing body, not the students and it is not right that we are jeopardised. It is unfortunate that the education system seems to be neglecting its primary aim in the face of monetary conflicts."

Well said and quite understandable given £9,000 in fees!

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Thursday 30 January 2014

Why the default political action should be to do nothing...

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“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

Dostoevsky (from The Idiot)

One of my very earliest pieces on this blog was to write in praise of idiots, to explain and celebrate the growth of apathy:

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

The point I was trying to make was that these people were quietly getting on with their lives and the actions of politicians and bureaucrats served mostly to impede that quietly getting along. And that it is wrong to tell such folk that somehow they are bad citizens for not bothering to attend the village hall on voting day.

The thing with politics today - or rather our dominant political ideology - is that it believes there are always things that government can do to "fix" the problems of society. There is a belief - bordering on hubris - that if only the right levers are pulled, the right taxes levied, the proper regulations in place and the appropriate leadership employed, if only these things are done then everything will suddenly be better.

The problem is that we really haven't the first idea what we're doing. I listened today to a public health person telling us that inequality creates inequality - it took him longer to say it but this was the gist of his philosophising. There was no logic to this man's argument (although it contained enough buzzwords to get the audience nodding and making little grunts of assent) but it referenced the greatest societal sin of modern thinking - inequality.

The problem is that there isn't any consistent or robust evidence saying that inequality is the problem let alone ways of solving the "problem" of inequality that don't involve throwing the baby out with the bath water. To help us understand this, here's Michael Huemer from the University of Colorado:

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies – almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

Except, of course, that every day one or other (often self-interested or self-serving) agitator pops up on the radio, TV or in the newspapers explaining, usually with carefully selected facts and figures, that this is terrible and that something must be done. The relevant minister, QUANGO boss or council leader is dragged blinking into the studio to explain just why they hadn't done something and when they plan on doing that particular something.

The problem is that - as Huemer describes - the experts prescribing the 'somethings' that must be done really aren't very good:

Unfortunately, when it comes to descriptive social theory, even the experts’ knowledge is unimpressive, as demonstrated recently by the social psychologist Phillip Tetlock. Tetlock conducted a fifteen-year study in which he collected tens of thousands of predictions from hundreds of political experts concerning matters within their areas of expertise (for example, would the economy slide into recession, would the Soviet Union survive, who would win the next Presidential election, and so on). Tetlock’s finding, in brief, was that the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time.

So when the latest policy wonk (from right, left or centre, it doesn't matter) sounds off on the Today programme or pontificates on Newsnight bear this failure in mind, head for your kitchen cupboard and take an appropriate (not too much because those 'experts' say it's bad for you) amount of salt with the wonk's opinion.

So what should we be doing if there isn't some sort of social scientific unified theory of everything? The answer is perhaps two-fold:

1. A great deal less than we do at present - as my idiots know, people just getting on with their lives and not interfering too much in the lives of others is as good a solution as any other.

2. Simpler, more understandable things done locally - those same idiots also want to understand things and the best way to do this is for those things to be discussed in a manner they understand and at a scale they appreciate.

This approach may be a little bit untidy. It may lead to folk popping up on radio, telly and in the papers talking about "postcode lotteries" or "place inequalities" but it has the merit of allowing nearly everyone the chance to be involved. Just as importantly that essential principle - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - applies. And most of society's problems are more a consequence of us trying to fix things than of things needing to be fixed.

In the end our default political action should be to do nothing. Sadly the imperative of today's politics demands that this default political action is something. The result is failure and misery not a better society.

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Wednesday 29 January 2014

Ideology, ideology, ideology!


At first the term "ideology" referred to the study of ideas and their origins. Over time this has transmogrified into our modern, familiar - I might say comfortable - definition:

...a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

It is for this reason that ideology is important yet it has become something of a pejorative term - I recall someone upset by my thoughts on public health sending a screaming tweet: "Ideology, ideology, ideology" it said, as if I would be upset by my observations being basis on a more-or-less coherent set of thoughts.

We have arrived at the point where, in the minds of too many, there are two distinct positions in any debate or discussion - "ideology" and "evidence-based" - where the latter is deemed to be superior. The problem I have is that, without a premise for your proposal, prescription or policy, any amount of evidence won't necessarily tell you that it's the right (or wrong) thing to do.

We're told - repeatedly - that alcohol can be damaging to our health. I'm guessing that nearly all adults and most children are aware of the risks (although not necessarily how to assess or quantify those risk) involved in drinking. Let's assume that some evidence is presented showing that, if we increase the price of drink, then consumption will fall and fewer people will damage their health as a result. Indeed, since there's lots of evidence that increasing price reduces consumption, we could apply the evidence to any activity or product that has negative social consequences.

The point isn't what the evidence says but whether we should enact some policy on the basis of that evidence - is it right to make booze more expensive for everyone because a small number abuse alcohol? This isn't a decision you can make on the basis of evidence, it can only be made on the basis of ideology - a premise that says all population intervention in personal choice is justified on health grounds. The evidence says the decision - putting up the price of beer - will have a positive impact on health but the decision to restrict choice (for that is what a price intervention is) is ideological.

As of course would be the opposite decision - not increasing price because personal choice trumps public health.

Ideology matters.

Our public administration has adopted an ideology that needs, in the interests of democracy and freedom, to be challenged. Yet whenever a challenge to the premise (essentially that government intervention is always justified) is made, the response isn't to present a logical rationale for that ideology but to gather together "evidence" showing how government intervention is a good thing. "What matters is what works", as Tony Blair would have put it.

The result of this outlook - a sort of anti-ideology ideology - is a sterile debate conducted on the basis of fact-checking, appeals to (evidence-supplying) authority and attacks on the critic for basing his argument on 'ideology'. The irony of this is that debates between, say, Marxists and libertarians are more honest and interesting than the faux-debate that dominates much of our current political discourse.

Take a look at the debate over Scottish independence. The Scottish government under its Scottish Nationalist Party leadership has produced a vast tomes setting out the "evidence" for independence with the emphasis on the economic case. And those opposed to independence have, likewise, set out their case for retaining the United Kingdom.

However, the argument isn't about the economy at all. Nor is it about the welfare state or the army or nuclear bombs or any of the other aspects of the debate. The argument is ideological - should Scotland be independent or not. And the voters will, in the main, make their decision to for 'yes' or 'no' on the basis of this ideological debate. Or rather on the basis of an ideological debate that simply hasn't happened because we've forgotten how to lift politics out from the banal and pragmatic and into the realm of ideas.

Accusing someone of "ideology, ideology, ideology" isn't an insult, that base of ideas allows us to make policy choices where the evidence doesn't direct us to a choice - the world of macroeconomics is filled with such choices, for example. And ideology provides the basis for these choices, big and important choices that affect everyone's lives, to be debated and discussed.

Ideology really does matter and we should use it more often.

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Tuesday 28 January 2014

Making homelessness a crime - welcome to Labour run Newham

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Newham Council - unless something has changed recently every one of its councillors and its elected mayor are Labour - has some of the most reactionary housing policies anywhere in England. It's Newham that has pioneered landlord registration described by Ben Reeve-Lewis as the "hair-trigger blunderbuss that blasts anyone unfortunate enough to walk through the door scheme."

However they've topped this brutal (an damaging) approach to managing the private rental sector with a full frontal assault on people who end up sleeping rough:

Newham Council has served anti-social behaviour warnings on 28 people who were found sleeping rough in and around the shopping mall in Stratford.

That's right - if you've nowhere to sleep in Newham they'll give you an ASBO, treat you like a criminal. Even this evil Tory thinks this is the worst sort of stigmatising of the poor and unfortunate. Yet the Labour councillor in charge had this to say:


“Residents do not regard sleeping, drinking, urinating or taking drugs on the streets and using threatening or violent behaviour as an acceptable way of life. We will not tolerate it and will take action wherever we are able to reduce anti-social behaviour and crime linked to rough sleeping."

I shudder to think of what the left-wing hordes would have to say had this been a Tory councillor! In truth the whole exercise is part of that potemkin village strategy loved by councils (and councillors) - move all society's flotsam and jetsam away from all the nice shiny bits of the borough where they make it untidy. It's all as one with stopping people enjoying a quiet drink on a park bench, of clearing the streets after 9pm and of hounding buskers, peddlers and others of the unwashed away from anywhere they might be seen.

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Quote of the day...

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Absolutely:

I am free not to be offended by a cartoon I did not draw. If my prospective constituents do not like me not being offended, they are free not to vote for me. Other Muslims are free to be offended, and the rest of the country is free to ignore them. I will choose my policies based on my conscience. As such, I will continue to defend my prophet from those on the far right and Muslim extremes who present only a rigid, angry and irrational interpretation of my faith.

We need more to challenge intolerance of free speech in this manner.

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A golden thread of music - remembering Pete Seeger


When I think about it for a minute, Pete Seeger is perhaps as important a part of my musical education as anyone else. Mostly this is because of the songs my Dad used to sing - "Blue Tailed Fly", "Home on the Range", "If I had a Hammer" and other songs so familiar to us all. I didn't know these songs were sung by Pete Seeger, or indeed that he'd written a few of them himself.

What mattered about these songs wasn't the message, although I guess that mattered to Pete Seeger, but the simplicity and accessibility of the music. These were songs designed for what we once called "community singing" rather than for standing gawping at the performer's brilliance or virtuosity. For sure, you could sit and watch someone sing "Where have all the Flowers Gone" but just as equally you can sit with some friends, perhaps with a drink, and sing that same song, probably with lousy harmonies and a collection of bum notes. And it doesn't matter as the simple value of the music stays the same.

Seeger's magic, the way he engaged with the audience, was to write songs we think are traditional, songs we can all sing. And the songs were always anthemic with choruses that reverberated and repeated in our minds:

"When will they ever learn,
When will they ever learn."

Or

"For defence you need common sense
Bring them home, bring them home/
hey don't have the right armaments
Bring them home, bring them home." 

As a Conservative, I understand the connection Seeger made to the traditions of American music - for all that he was a life-long socialist activist. Not just saving and singing the old songs (some of them straight from the English folk book) but using the style and metre of that music to create new songs, new music.

This is the point of folk music. Not some pretentious heart-on-sleeve activism, not musical wonderment, not complicated trills and thrill. Just good tunes played and sung by good people. And presented in a way that, when we're driving in our car, ironing, sitting on the porch or round a table with friends, we too can sing those songs, can take that golden thread back into our roots through music our ancestors would have recognised as their music too.

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Monday 27 January 2014

The choir sang...

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It was a choir of primary school children and was like so many of these choirs - nearly all girls, in this case with one slightly sheepish bespectacled boy, and singing those primary school songs that are both banal and also uplifting. On this occasion there was a supplement of older people sharing the singing, giving it a little gravitas (and a little more bass).

Through my mind went a simple thought - "how do you explain to an eight year old child, regardless of background or origin, about the event they were singing for?"

The event was Bradford Council's Holocaust Memorial Day. We were recalling, in the comfortable surroundings of City Hall's banqueting chamber, how six million Jews and thousands of others deemed "sub-human" were first herded into ghettos, then into camps and lastly into ovens. It started with just the numbers - numbing numbers - before you get to appreciate that these were real people. Living, breathing, walking the streets, doing business, laughing, playing and working. Some of those people's families were in the room with us.

Some of those people, dragged from their homes, crammed onto trains and sent on a hideous journey...some of them were children, eight year old children like the boys and girls singing for us. We had no images to grasp the enormity of that fact, to appreciate the truth of a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. A slaughter of such proportion that we can barely grasp its scale - how many people work where you work? Fifty? A hundred? Have you been to a premier league football game with thirty, forty, perhaps fifty thousand others? I was at Knebworth in an audience of 200,000 plus in 1979.

Imagine all those people dead and the same number again starved and emaciated almost to the point of death. Close your eyes and picture it, picture the horror. And then multiply it by ten times. Men, women and children dead, strewn across the land before your eyes. As far as you can see. Not because they were bad or wrong, violent or criminal. Dead because of what they are - Jewish.

We'd like for the world to remember. At this event we bore witness to that memory. We lit candles.

But it seems to me that the world has forgotten. We read almost daily of atrocities. Of Christians - men, women, children - killed because they are Christians. Of people blown to shreds because they chose the nightclub instead of church, temple or mosque. Of women cut down for wearing the wrong clothes. Of girls shot for going to school.

And the words of hate are still spread. The lies that led to the murder of the Jews, those Russian forgeries that led to pogrom, are still placed before the credulous public as if they are fact. The blood libel is still repeated and the allegation of christian cannibalism still used to frighten the ignorant. Great art, wisdom and science is pushed aside, declared as apostasy. And the works of faith - Bible, Koran, Torah - are sneered at, their adherents dismissed as the ignorant.

We spend our time categorising and recategorising humans. Placing us all in little boxes labelled "sexual preference", "race", "religion", "social class", "physical ability", "education", "gender"...and so on forever. In doing this we do just what those who hate want us to do - place metaphorical stars and triangles on each of us. And where does it get us? It gets us to a world where a veritable dictionary of the taboo exists - page after page of things we cannot say, words we cannot use. And it gets us to the point where these "protected characteristics" are seen by government as defining who you are - "Jewish, female, heterosexual, older, middle-class, employed" or "White British, male, gay, disabled, unemployed, working class".

These are not descriptions of people but labels on boxes, it tells me nothing about that woman, about what makes her laugh or cry, how she dresses, does she drink white wine or like a gin and tonic? A thousand and more little things that make her different all trapped inside a box with a label. A box with a label about which we can use only the approved descriptions, the ones that aren't in that dictionary of the taboo.

Holocaust Memorial Day recalls a time when the label on one of those boxes became a death sentence. Surely our aim should be to start treating people as simply people, to stop putting each one into a convenient box? A box that those who hate can point at and condemn.

The choir sang hopeful, uplifting songs. Songs about journeys, arrival and where we're going. Let's hope those children arrive in a place where what you are doesn't matter but who you are does,

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Sunday 26 January 2014

Science doesn't support EU proposed restrictions on e-cigs

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The New Scientist reports that:

Fifteen prominent scientists who have investigated the health consequences of electronic cigarettes have accused European Union regulators of misinterpreting their results. The scientists say the EU aim is to draft an unjustifiably burdensome new law to regulate e-cigarettes.

These scientists - including several cited in the EU's justification for stricter controls - argue that:

...regulation must be built on robust science. The cited errors relate to the strength of nicotine solutions allowed, the doses needed to match the nicotine "hit" from real cigarettes, an overstatement of the known dangers from nicotine and unwarranted assumptions that e-cigarettes will become "gateway products", tempting non-smokers and young people to try real cigarettes.

Of course the usual suspects are still wriggling with the BMA calling for more studies to find out things we already know (e.g. nicotine content, safety, health risks of nicotine). Nothing changes - although it's notable that the New Scientist gives the issue such coverage.

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Saturday 25 January 2014

Nannying fussbucketry makes people fat!

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Is the obesity "epidemic" the fussbuckets love talking about made worse by their stigmatising being overweight? Just might be:

Exposure to weight-stigmatizing news articles caused self-perceived overweight women, but not women who did not perceive themselves as overweight, to consume more calories and feel less capable of controlling their eating than exposure to non-stigmatizing articles. Weight-stigmatizing articles also increased concerns about being a target of stigma among both self-perceived overweight and non-overweight women. Findings suggest that social messages targeted at combating obesity may have paradoxical and undesired effects.

A period of silence from those nannying nutritionists and sugar fascists is in order!

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Housing affordability and the consequences of containment

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Let's begin with a graph:


And then let's ask a question - why is this the case? Why are those places so expensive? Perhaps:

...as urban containment policies have been implemented in some metropolitan areas, house prices have escalated well above the increase in household incomes. This is exactly the effect that economics predicts to occur where the supply of a good or service is rationed, all things being equal. 

The result is something of a trap. Containment policies become popular (and the bigger that multiple gets the more popular they become) leading to a preference for 'densification' strategies. However, as we have seen with proposals for downtown Hollywood, such policies are predicated on a growth in high net worth, childless young professionals when the population growth is in lower income families.

The problem - according to Alain Bertaud of the Stern School of Business at New York University and former principal planner of the World Bank - is resolvable if planners reprioritise:

...if planners abandoned abstracts and unmeasurable objectives like smart growth, liveability and sustainability to focus on what really matters –  mobility and affordability – we could see a rapidly improving situation in many cities.  I am not implying that planners should not be concerned with urban environmental issues.  To the contrary, those issues are extremely important, but they should be considered a constraint to be solved not an end in itself.

Even in a policy framework of contained cities, the mission creep of modern planning contributes to unaffordability and this could be altered with a more focused policy.

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Friday 24 January 2014

Larry Summers embraces the New Fascism

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“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Benito Mussolini


There's been a deal of comment about a little spat between Larry Summers (who is I discover a top American lefty economist chap) and George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer. The debate between the two can be summed up as "hey you, yah boo, I'm right and you're wrong." Except it wasn't as witty or intelligent as that. It came across as a rather pompous version of an exchange on Question Time (and just as edifying).

However, I was curious about Mr Summers opinions and what he supposes we should be doing differently. Essentially the gist is here:

"It’s tragic that we are bequeathing to our children a deficit in the form of massive deferred maintenance on our infrastructure. If at a moment when we can borrow money for 30 years in the 3pc range, in a currency we print ourselves and the construction unemployment rate is in double digits, if that is not the moment to fix Kennedy airport, when will that moment ever come?"

Rather than have a money deficit, we have instead an 'infrastructure deficit'. Which supposes two things - we actually need that infrastructure and, more importantly, government borrowing is the only way to provide it. At the heart of this argument is a belief (which has nothing at all to do with macroeconomics but is absolutely an ideological position) that, in Isabella Kaminska's words:

...the only productive use of capital is increasingly through government spending.

This ideological position - the conviction that the only good investment is through government - is a core tenet of what I call the 'New Fascism'. This is a philosophy that adopts the same assumptions about society as Mussolini and his colleagues did in designing the Fascist state - for draining the Pontine Marshes read floating airports, high speed railways and freeways rammed through previously attractive small towns.

If (and this is a big question) it is right to raise government borrowing, why does Summers surmise that spending it without return on expensive and unproductive infrastructure programmes is better than cutting taxes on businesses and consumers? If businesses have more money will they not invest that money? And will that investment not generate a return - a real one - unlike those grand projects Larry likes?

And if we cut taxes for consumers won't they spend that money buying the things that the businesses are making? Perhaps on houses, maybe on cars? Isn't that a rather more efficient approach to stimulus that tying loads of borrowed cash up in incompetent government procurement programmes?

The truth is that Larry Summers is a New Fascist - wanting a planned, directed, controlled, state-led system rather than an untidy, exciting and people-led system.

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Thursday 23 January 2014

The motives of politicians

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It is common for us to question the motivation of those who hold a different view. We are too seldom prepared to accept honest or honourable reasons - whether ideological or practical - for that person to wish to do something we would not do.

And the more passionate our commitment to the cause, the more we are unable to accept that someone simply doesn't agree with us or that this disagreement is principled not cynical or driven by some sort of base motive.

So it is with public service reform. I have read some of the thousands of comments, tweets, facebook posts and carefully crafted infographics that impugn the decisions of government. Rather than, for example, accepting that private sector options in delivering health are used because people believe it will lead to better health outcomes, we get the accusation that ministers do it because of personal gain.

And rather than see that reforming welfare helps make work pay and can improve peoples lives, we're told that those proposing change are uncaring or, worse, are motivated by 'hatred of the poor'. Instead of seeing the point (you're not obliged to agree with it) that the prospect of a life on welfare is something to be discouraged, we're fed stories of how changes are proposed to "punish" the poor or the sick.

There may be the occasional person whose motives are questionable but I don't believe the motives of current ministers are anything but decent and honourable. At least not in policy decisions. Nor for that matter do I think that the motives of ministers in Gordon Brown's government - a tragic train crash of ignominious failure - were anything but decent and honourable. I just think they were wrong.

Too much of our discourse is conducted on the basis of trying to destroy the reputation of decent men and women trying to do what they think is the right thing to do. We poke around at where they went to school, at who they are married to, at their friends and at things they might have done twenty or thirty years ago at university. We make sweeping statements - "Tories don't care", "Labour hates business" - as the basis for our arguments without realising how petty, how shallow and, frankly, how nasty it makes us seem.

You're welcome to point out when I have done this - I'm sure I have - and to suggest on this basis that I am a hypocrite. But in the end, if we are to have a politics that people think worthy of respect, we need to try and deal with policy choices on the assumption that the reasons for doing them are decent and not motivated by venality, greed or base political advantage.

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Wednesday 22 January 2014

I'm a Conservative, for nearly all of you I'm on your side

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My Conservative colleague Nicky Morgan (she's never met me but I guess we're on the same side) thinks us Tories "hate" too much:

The minister said that people are frustrated “with hearing politicians talk about who we hated - we're anti this, we're anti-that, we don't like them, we don't want them here, we don't want them doing this”.

“We never say actually we are on the side of these people, we want this to happen and we think this is great,” she added. 

I thought for a few seconds about my sort of Conservatism - the right-wing sort that we're told Nicky is having a pop at - and concluded that my colleague both misunderstands and also spectacularly misses the point.

The truth is that we don't hate at all - it's what makes us so much better than the left. They love to judge, to condemn and, yes folks, to hate.

Nor are us right-wing Conservatives simply anti this or anti that. We're in favour of allowing ordinary people to go about their ordinary lives, living, loving and laughing without idiot, fussbucket politicians egging on interfering jobsworth bureaucrats to get in the way of that living, loving and laughing.

We're on the side of everyone who just wants to get on with their lives. That's the ones who aspire to wealth and success as well as the ones who want to coast along through their time just enjoying life. Which, if you think about it is nearly everyone.

There are a few we don't like. The ones who think they know better and who want to ram that knowing better down our throats. We're not keen on them.

And the ones who think everyone else owes them a living and that we should sacrifice living, loving and laughing to allow this to happen. Not fans of them either.

Then there are the ones who believe that only state-approved methods of living, loving and laughing should be allowed with everything else taxed to the hilt, controlled, regulated and often banned. We hate all that.

We don't want to fuss and bother over your choices and your lifestyle. We don't want to indulge in some sort of whiggish obsession with a mythical 'aspiring class'. We don't want more rules just to appease busybodies and fussbuckets.

Above all we want to say to you all that it's your life, go and live it. Enjoy it, make the most of it, do as many of the things you want to do. Throw parties. Drink. Smoke. Skydive. Ski. Set off fireworks. Build sandcastles. Eat fish and chips at the end of the pier. Sing. Dance. Write novels. Create new games. Embroider cushion covers. Climb mountains. Study beetles. A million and more ways to live a life.

And our job as politicians? It's to help you have the best chance to do all the things you'd like to do.

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Tuesday 21 January 2014

Oxfam are wrong (again)

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Oxfam are wrong.

OK this isn't a surprise since we're talking about a large, wealthy, powerful organisation that dedicates itself to keeping poor people poor (although they don't quite put it that way).

Oxfam are wrong:

Working For the Few, published ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, details the pernicious impact that widening inequality is having in both developed and developing countries, helping the richest undermine democratic processes and drive policies that promote their interests at the expense of everyone else. 

It all sounds good and caring. It reads like the good folk at Oxfam really do have the interests of "the world's poorest" at heart. The problem is that it's not inequality that's the problem, at least not in getting "the world's poorest" out of abject poverty.

I know this. And it's why Oxfam are wrong:


There you go Oxfam. While all those rich folk have been piling up the cash, billions of people who used to be really, really poor stopped being really really poor. OK, they're not as rich as us yet but far fewer of them - freed from the death sentence that is subsistence farming - are starving to death because they are too poor.

I know it's hard to admit. I know that Oxfam's world view doesn't allow for the idea that it's capitalism and free markets that get people out of poverty.

But it's true. We know it's true. Forty years of that awful 'neoliberalism' stuff shows us that it's true.

So, as I wrote last year when Oxfam published their "get into the papers ahead of Davos" report:

Sit back, put a smile on you face - punch the air with joy. You and me - capitalists both - have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world - they've done that, they've lifted those people out of poverty.

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Monday 20 January 2014

It was foul murder - how Labour killed the pub...

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Murder most foul, as in the best it is.
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

The modern Labour Party, for all its supposed "working class roots" rather dislikes the pleasures of Britain's actual working classes. And nothing illustrates this better than their direct, premeditated assault on the pub.

Here's Peter Oborne (getting it spot on for a change):

Some people believe Labour’s defining legacy is Iraq. Others think it is the hunting ban. But the issue which has affected most people and which has damaged the fabric and appearance of British community more than anything else is the loss of the local pub.

And Labour didn't kill the pub from neglect, the act was deliberate - the smoking ban and the duty escalator were introduced in the face of the industry telling Labour that this would kill the pub. And the first pubs to go were the proper locals - 'wet led' and used by people who walked there for a drink, a chat and a fag with their friends.

The Labour Government did this deliberately - they could have stuck with the manifesto promise and protected pubs from their righteous legislation. Instead they forced a ban through that has closed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pubs and clubs. Places where, for generations, working class men and women had gone to enjoy the small pleasures their lives could afford - a smoke, a drink and good company. Gone forever, killed off by Labour.

It was foul murder.

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Maths and social science...

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The research methods lecture for my MSc sticks in my mind. Not just because I have a curiosity about different research methods and their rationale but also because the lecturer told us not to worry about maths, indeed that she wasn't any good at maths.

Sadly, the results of such wilful ignorance look like this:

"Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist. Typically you'll have a couple of people in the department who understand it. Most psychologists are not capable of organising a quantitative study. A lot of people can get a PhD in psychology without having those things at their fingertips. And that's the stuff you're meant to know. Losada's maths were of the kind you're not meant to encounter in psychology. The maths you need to understand the Losada system is hard but the maths you need to understand that this cannot possibly be true is relatively straightforward."

In the social sciences (and this is psychology among the most maths rich of these disciplines) the use of maths appears almost discouraged - we're told about qualitative research, how it gives greater insight and understand than mere number crunching. And, when someone comes up with a complicated quantitative explanation of everything ("The Spirit Level" springs to mind as a good example here) the legions of non-mathematicians leap upon the research with glee and excitement. Sadly, what they can't do is explain the maths.

It is a deceptive idea that we can call something 'science' - even with the qualifier 'social' - and then pretend that it can be studied without a reasonable degree of competence in maths and with research methods based on experiment, empirical study and data analysis. This isn't to dismiss qualitative studies - I used to be Planning Director in an ad agency, I love a nice focus group - but to say that, for all their value, such methods simply aren't science.

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Sunday 19 January 2014

Extortion, theft and fairness - the idea of taxation

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"Abracadabra, thus we learn the more you create, the less you earn. The less you earn, the more you're given,
the less you lead, the more you're driven,
the more destroyed, the more they feed,
the more you pay, the more they need,
the more you earn, the less you keep,
And now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to take,
if the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake."


There is no moral basis for taxation. It is, as the dictionary says:

...that part of the revenues of a state which is obtained by the compulsory dues and charges upon its subjects

This is an imposition that many argue is straightforwardly theft. Here is Rothbard:

For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.

Now it is also the case that the state, having extracted its income from us through compulsion, then spends that money for the betterment of society. Even the robber barons perched in their Rhineland castles didn't extract money with menaces from river traffic solely for personal gain. They provided services in their demesne (most importantly security and protection from other robbers).

In our modern democracy we even have the ability, through the ballot, to decide just how much we will take in taxation - we act, some would say, as if we are a club where the rules (including those about tax) are set through the political process. In this context the existence of taxation is axiomatic - the debate isn't whether we should have tax but the scale, nature and system of that taxation. We do not ask often enough whether taxation is necessary, appropriate or right.

The main argument justifying tax is based on how the tax is used not on the fact of the tax:

Unlike protection rackets taxation gives us something in return, namely public goods which benefit all citizens. Studies have shown that it is unlikely for people to organize to provide public goods by themselves (see the free rider problem), and thus it is in everyone’s best interests for the government to provide these goods and to support them with mandatory taxation.

The problem here is that this argument takes us no nearer a philosophical justification for taxation. A further concept - the 'free rider' - is introduced but that fact seems to be something of a red herring. After all, unless your tax system is a simple poll tax, there are plenty of free riders - taxing people does not, in and of itself, eliminate this problem.

Nor can we use the idea of 'public goods' to justify taxation - this is the 'roads, who will build the roads' argument that we know is false. The roads - the precursors of the freeways and motorways of today - were built with private finance on a voluntary basis despite that 'free rider' problem. Nor can we make this argument for health, housing, welfare or indeed most of the things provided through taxation by the modern state. All of these things can (and have been in history or are somewhere in the world today) be provided on a private, voluntary basis.

It seems to me that the crucial issue - if you reject Rothbard's simple 'tax is theft' argument - isn't some sort of theological discussion of how progressive tax is or isn't but the degree of consent to taxation. And there are two ways to assess this - firstly to look at the extent to which people avoid or evade taxes and secondly to consider whether people consider themselves to be overtaxed. A further question might be the extent to which taxation undermines the taxpayers ability to make personal choices - are we taking too much to fund 'collective' decision-making leaving to little to fund 'market' decision-making.

There is a lively debate about the extent to which taxes are avoided - we've read the attacks on businesses like Vodaphone and Amazon around their tax affairs and we've witnessed ministers and shadow ministers outbidding eachother to have a go a 'tax-dodgers'. And stories like this are legion:

The inability of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to properly curb aggressive tax avoidance schemes is costing the UK billions of pounds, a report suggests. The National Audit Office said HMRC was dealing with a backlog of 41,000 cases involving individuals and small companies, with up to £10.2bn at stake. 

Add to this attacks on paying traders in cash, the rise in duty avoidance ('smuggling' and illegal production) for alcohol, cigarettes and other products, and the tightening of rules around gifts, trusts and charities. We have a situation where the proportion of society operating outside the tax system (wholly or partly) has risen:

...the latest estimates showed about 30 million people in the EU performed work that was not declared for tax. "Around half of all construction workers in Germany undertake shadow work; and over 80% of all Danes find shadow work acceptable – at least in some circumstances."

In the UK at least 13% of the economy is outside the tax system - this is some £308bn. We have to add legitimate avoidance of tax by business and individuals into this equation. All of which suggests that the degree of consent to be taxed must be questioned.

YouGov asked last year about the 'fairness' of the tax system:


Thinking about all the ways in which people pay taxation – such as income tax, VAT, Council Tax, excise duties – how fair do you think the system is for taxing people in [country] these days?

The result show that two-thirds of people saw the system as 'unfair' and this is regardless of whether respondents positioned themselves as 'left', 'centre' or 'right' politically. Again this suggests that the principle - taxation by consent - is creaking a little. However, other YouGov research suggests that - for all that we see the system as unfair - the most 'popular' choice is not to change taxes. However, a fifth of the population want to see a reduction - tax cuts with spending cuts - in the size of government.

None of this answers our question although it does suggest that a significant part of the population do not 'consent' to the current level of tax. And this part - whether through behaviour (avoiding or evading taxes) or through opinon - represents the challenge to those who see delivery via the state as the only option.

Finally there is the extent to which the individual is able to make personal choices post-tax. It it a statement of the obvious to say that high taxes - wherever and however they are levied - will reduce the amount of money available for consumers to spend in the market. And that if taxation reaches the point where this reduction is disempowering to the consumer then we can only describe this taxation as 'extortionate' - for want of a better word, as an act of theft.

The problem is where this point of consumer loss sits. For Rothbard it was simple - any taxation reduces the ability of the consumer to make choices. But we have rejected this argument because of the 'equity' obtained from the collective provision of some services (security, health, education). It is true that these things could be provided voluntarily and privately but also true that the guarantee of the state is positive in providing these services.

We also know - although in the UK this is generally not the case - that funding through taxation does not prevent the use of choice within a market as the means of distributing a public service. What using taxation does is make these services -typically health and education - available universally regardless of the means available to the consumer.

If, however, taxation to provide health, education and security results in some individuals being unable to sustain themselves without external assistance, then that taxation certainly conforms to our idea of 'extortionate' - the act of taxation is an act of theft, even if we subsequently give back some money in the form of benefits allowing the consumer to sustain himself.

But what if the result of taxation is to prevent someone having the means to pay a mortgage, have a holiday, buy a car or have a meal out every now and then? Is this level of taxation justified? Are we disempowering these consumers by making it difficult for them, even impossible, to have commonplace things (cars, holidays, a night out)? Stopping people - through taxation - from having things that most of us consider aspects of a regular life indicates, again, that the level of taxation for such individuals is 'extortionate' - an act of theft.

The UK is such a society - we tax the income of people on low wages meaning that for many (probably millions) things we consider normal are precluded and for some that sustaining a basic life is only possible through welfare support. The UK is also a place where millions of people avoid paying taxes, mostly in little ways, and where the majority believe the tax system to be unfair.

The solution does not lie in taxing wealth (although we have pretty significant proxies for such taxation in the form of business rates and council tax) not does it lie in getting companies or the rich to pay taxes. It lies in recognising that taxation lacks any moral basis - it is simply a matter of finding an equitable and effective way to deliver a set of services (security, health, education).

It seems to me that two things are needed:

1. The end to taxing people below the point at which we provide benefits or subsidy
2. Where we can create 'markets' or choice-based systems within public services, we should do so

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Saturday 18 January 2014

Seems Red Squirrels don't drive sports cars...

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Greys on the other hand...

  


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We have IVF technology why shouldn't women use it?

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The Chief Medical Officer has put on her official frown and wagged her finger at women:

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, said she was concerned about the “steady shift” towards women choosing to postpone starting a family until their late 30s and early 40s, reducing their chance of conception, and increasing their medical risks. 

To be fair to Dame Sally, this was just a warning that fertility declines with age and IVF doesn't always work (I suspect most women sort of know this). However, the result is some weapons grade fussbucketry from Lara Prendergast in the Spectator:

Like it or not, women must stop seeing fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice. It is wonderful that such treatment exists, but to see it as a ‘quick fix’ is wrong. Selling people fertility on the tube suggests we have taken a step in the wrong direction.

Why on earth not? Women live, on average, into their eighties providing more than adequate time to successfully raise a child to adulthood. And I don't think that fertility treatment represents any sort of 'quick fix' - it's intrusive, risky and the results are uncertain.

Presumably Ms Prendergast hasn't hit the point of panic - perhaps if she does she'll understand that, for most who use it, IVF treatment isn't some sort of cosy lifestyle choice but the consequence of careful discussion, stress and the failure to conceive.

So if there is technology that can help women in their 40s conceive, why on earth should judgemental fussbuckets like Ms Prendergast think it OK - without the first thought about women using these services - to suggest that somehow these women shouldn't think about having a baby. And worse to suggest they should have got pregnant when they were younger?

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Friday 17 January 2014

Robert Heinlein - America's most important libertarian writer.

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Forget Ayn Rand, ignore Robert Nozick, push aside all the cacophony of recent writing about libertarian ideas. If you want to understand American libertarianism - including the conflicts and contradictions inherent in what it says - go and read Robert Heinlein.

In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians of the late 20th Century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development of their own political thinking were Dave Nolan (the founder of the Libertarian Party) and the late Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Here's why maybe?


“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” 

Take some time out to read 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and understand Heinlein's examination of the contradictions and restrictions of modern America in the former and invocation of the US constitution as the guarantor of freedoms in the latter.

Heinlein's words are echoed in libertarian - and, in America's confused polity - conservatives politics today. Here, from 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

 “Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good."

How close this is to Reagan's famous dictum:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

I'm sure there are people who prefer to hack their way through the turgid forest of Ayn Rand's prose, to try to empathise with her soul-less, cold characters. But next to the reflections of the author in Heinlein - most of his 'political' works feature an older, wealthy man as the vehicle for that politics - Rand's work lacks impact, few read it without political purpose whereas many will have read 'Friday' or 'Doorway into Summer' just for the good read.

Heinlein doesn't analyse, he merely states those freedoms that Americans cherish- whether or not they profess to be libertarians. None of which makes Heinlein a libertarian although throughout his work, and especially his later work, he always using that knowing quasi-narrator figure as the means to play with political argument and ideas. Whether this is the survivalism (and troubling racial stereotypes) of 'Farnham's Freehold', the war fascism of 'Starship Troopers', the attack on organised religion in 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or the libertarian reworking of the War of Independence that is 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.

In the end Heinlein was a writer who played with ideas, who speculated what they might mean to society, rather than a libertarian polemicist. But his writing always contains that idea of independence, self-reliance and frontier so essential to the American psyche - he doesn't shout or lecture but adopts the stance of the old man sat on the porch dispensing the wisdom of experience and takes his reader with him.

So when people encountered libertarian ideas in Heinlein it was more homespun than the intense, finger-wagging of Ayn Rand or the turgid academia of European writers:

"Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.” 

For all that he was more a contrarian - Heinlein was America's most important libertarian writer. And he liked cats.

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Wednesday 15 January 2014

Health fascism - coming to a school near you.

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I posted an example from Canada the other day. Well this is closer to home - in Essex:

Please do not put any drink other than water in your child's packed lunch box as they will not be able to drink it at school. 

And, whereas the Canadians landed parents with a fine ($5 per sin) this school simply snatches the carton of juice from the child's hands:

Carly Nunn, 26, claimed her five-year-old daughter, Teagan, had her drinks snatched by a dinner lady.

She said: "She put a straw in the carton and took one sip and it was taken off her and put in the bin.

"The next day, I put it in a bottle, but it was tipped onto the table to check the colour." 

Such a caring, encouraging and supportive environment. One parent who complained got this:

 "We spoke to the head about it and she just offered us a transfer form." 

 And why is the school behaving so badly? Other than because they are a bunch of nannying fussbuckets it appears that they want to win a prize:

In a letter to parents, headteacher Elizabeth Chaplin said the new rule was part of a campaign to win a London Healthy Schools Award. 

Awful. Indefensible. But this school is not alone.

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A couple of quotes on bankers...

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First from Eamonn Butler at the ASI:

Let us not forget that after New York, London is the world's leading services centre. The sector brings in about £60bn in tax every year, more than 10% of the government's entire budget. We need it to succeed, and retain talent – which means paying them world market rates. That's what we do with footballers – John Terry is paid £6.7m a year, Wayne Rooney is on £15.1m and Steven Gerrard picks up £7.2m and got an MBE too. But football clubs are very small businesses compared to banks. Though a world footballing brand, Manchester United's capitalization is just £2.47bn; the market capitalization of RBS is seventeen times bigger, at £41.8bn. Should we be surprised if star performers in RBS are paid seventeen times what Rooney earns? But in fact we baulk when they are paid fifteen times less.

Absolutely. And let's not talk about how much income assorted ever-so-witty TV panellists get paid for their snide remarks and jokes that were funny the first time but, after several hundred slight variations, have descended into utter boredom. When regular panellists get £30,000 or more per show on the BBC there really is no room at all for them to criticise how much bankers get paid.

Second from Ogden Nash (as I like a little balance). From a poem entitled "Bankers are just like anybody else, except richer."

Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
Which they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits
and discourage withdrawals,
And particularly because they all observe one rule which woe
betides the banker who fails to heed it,
Which is you must never lend any money to anybody unless
they don't need it.

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Tuesday 14 January 2014

Health fascism Canadian style!

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And probably coming to a school near you soon enough:

What truly nasty, exploitative, judgemental people.

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Monday 13 January 2014

Misinformation, ignorance and prejudice masquerade as a serious article about obesity.

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A friend of mine at university once described articles written by the likes of Enoch Powell or Tony Benn as superficially works of logical completeness and coherence that, on closer examination, reveals a huge leap of what can only be faith half way through the article.

This article on obesity lacks the intelligence, wit or wisdom of Enoch or Tony but it suffers the same problem. It starts like this:

McDonald’s cookies have an energy density comparable to hydrazine. Hydrazine is a rocket fuel used to manoeuvre spacecraft in orbit. It was astonishing, then, to watch a small child graze through two boxes of the desiccated biscuits in one sitting. His parents watched on, preoccupied with their own colossal meals: a noxious amalgam of meat, grease and sugar.

Now I'm not about to defend the quality of McDonald's food (although - and we'll return to this - there isn't any proven link between fast food and obesity) but we know where the author is coming from. We have a problem with obesity and, our author argues, it isn't enough to say that it's a matter of personal choice.

It's an argument - one I don't agree with but an argument nevertheless. And we do have a problem with obesity. However, the author loses me with this single line:

Over 63% of Australian adults are overweight or obese.

Note what has been done here. We were talking about obesity - being grossly and unhealthily overweight - and suggesting that perhaps the morbidly fat really do have a problem resisting food. But now all of a sudden we're talking about obese and overweight. We have, to use that piece of sociological jargon, 'problematised' being overweight by implying that it falls in to the same health category as being obese.

And, to put it bluntly, this simply isn't true. Here's the science:

Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.

This is not some little study either but:

...97 studies were retained for analysis, providing a combined sample size of more than 2.88 million individuals and more than 270,000 deaths.

Essentially the research is saying that having a BMI of between 25 and 35 doesn't represent a health problem  - overwhelmingly the people our author is talking about fall into this category.

So what is the actual scale of the problem? If we take morbid obesity as the essential measure (in the UK this is defined as a BMI over 40) then currently around 1.5% of men and 3.5% of women are morbidly obese. Now this is a lot of people - about 1.5 million - so we shouldn't ignore it as a problem but it isn't anything approach the scary 63% that our author cites. Even if we add those with a BMI between 35 and 40 the numbers only rise to 5% or so - between 3 and 4 million.

And this brings us back to fast food. Quite simply there isn't a strong connection between takeaways and obesity (which isn't to say that fat people don't eat in McDonald's but to say that's not why they're fat):

When the researchers weighed these children they found something rather interesting. Here are the average body mass index (BMI) figures for each group by frequency of visits to fast food outlets. Bear in mind that a 'healthy weight is 18.5 to 25:


Weekly visits        BMI

Every day:            17.8

4-6 times:              18.3

2-3 times:              19.6

Once:                    20.3

Less than once:     21.4
OK this is for children but it makes the point - quite remarkably showing a negative relationship between regular fast food consumption and obesity. It's whats in the fridge at home and the drawer in the office that's the problem not Burger King or the kebab shop.

Our author concludes that we are all victims of:

...the roots of overconsumption: cost of living, manipulative marketing, nutritional misinformation and – often overlooked – simple palatability.

The overconsumption point is an interesting one for, as our author should know but doesn't, overall calorie consumption has been falling. We're still fatter but it's too simple to blame advertising, fast food, offers of chocolate oranges or Big Sugar for the problem. A proper assessment would pick up these facts and ask questions about our sedentary lifestyle, about the support given to very fat people and medical interventions that are possible.

Instead Ben Brooks (an arts/law student or so his biography tells us) chooses to play silly games with the statistics - the evidence, the truth, if you prefer - in order to make his snide little prejudice against McDonalds into a public health point.

Update: some more practical evidence that it's not McDonald's but our broader food choices that matter are on view in this fascinating student project.

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Sunday 12 January 2014

How that teacher licensing might work out. A lesson from road transport...

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Dick Puddlecote usually writes about personal choice and the curse of nannying fussbucketry but every now and then he drops one in about his day job running a transport business.

Here he writes about the impact of requiring re-licensing every few years for HGV and PSV drivers:

Our experience - and we offered to pay for the courses - was that our best drivers said "enough of this shit" and quit the game. Not just any old drivers either, it was mostly the most experienced older drivers who decided that it was a ridiculous idea, and that there was no way they were letting some snotty-nosed professional training adviser tell them how to do a job they'd performed brilliantly for decades.

Dick goes on to confirm that, right across the industry, the impact of the new rules was:

...a loss of around 20% of drivers across the board.

Is there any reason to suppose that the impact of a "teacher's license" would be any different? That, far from it being the worst teachers who are weeded out, the effect will be for good teachers who can either retire or do something else (work in a private school or go to Australia to think of two examples) to leave? As Dick concludes:

Do we want kids to be trained by experienced older professionals with decades of knowledge and skills to be passed on to colleagues, or should Labour be allowed to drive them out of the job by way of death by a thousand insults to their intelligence?

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More on the New Fascism - Will Hutton and 'corporate welfare'

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Will Hutton writes about regulation. In simple terms Will accuses the government and corporate Britain of ‘defending the indefensible’. And in making his case Will covers ‘fixed-odds betting terminals’ (FOBTs), alcohol, cigarettes, sugar and flood defences arguing that:


It will not be British bookmakers who pick up the costs of addictive gambling in welfare bills and housing benefit; no drinks company will foot the NHS's bill for alcohol-related illness or police bill for crime; no sugar company the bill for obesity. House builders will cheerfully direct rainwater cheaply into the sewerage system and the water companies will then raise water charges and expect state guarantees for improving the system.


These ‘costs to society’ are not covered by the price we pay ergo the refusal of government to regulate – not simply to cover those ‘costs’ but also to control the behaviour of the gambler, sweet-eater, drinker and smoker – is a form of ‘corporate welfare’. And in making this argument Will litters his article with falsehoods and sweeping statements without foundation.

On FOBTs he quotes the entirely accurate statement from Neil Goulden of the Association of British Bookmakers that these machines are a very small part of total gambling revenue as some sort of egregious defence of these evil machines. Will then describes the political debate as if this is somehow driven by facts rather than the desire of Miliband to get a headline in the Daily Mail.

Skipping gaily from ignorance of the gambling industry, Will moves to the question of alcohol. Apparently there’s not enough regulation – the £15 billion in tax revenue for booze isn’t enough – and we should have minimum pricing. Worse still (according to an article in the British Medical Journal written by a freelance journalist) the government had the audacity to meet with the drinks industry while it was considering the regulation of that industry!

Will then states the truth about the Sheffield research into the effect of alcohol pricing on consumption:


...the higher the price, the less is consumed...


A sixteen-year-old GCSE economics student could have told Will that – it didn’t require loads of government cash bunged at Sheffield University to create a model that says “if you raise prices demand will most likely fall”. Plus, of course, Will didn’t mention that alcohol consumption has fallen over the past decade or that the idea of minimum pricing targets the less well-off (specifically) and protects the bigger alcohol consumers in higher income groups. In fact that minimum pricing for alcohol is a really stupid policy.

Will then arrives at ‘Big Sugar’, the evil masterminds behind our ‘obesity epidemic’:


Thus already the sugar industry, confronting the newly created Action on Sugar Campaign to lower the sugar content in food, is reaching for the same Goulden armament


Again Will ignores the responses to the Action on Sugar nonsense from well-known pro-obesity groups such as Diabetes UK:


"The evidence that sugar has a specific further role in causing Type 2 diabetes, other than by increasing our weight, is not clear. We look forward to the conclusions of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, which is due to report this year.”


Being morbidly obese is bad for us and people who are grossly overweight eat lots of sugar. That doesn’t mean that you or I eating sugar is a bad thing.

Moreover, just like booze, we’ve cut down – our consumption of ‘non-milk extrinsic sugars’ (that’s all the stuff that the food industry add as well as the stuff we add) has fallen steadily since the 1970s. We may eat more sugar in processed foods but we’ve stopped adding it to drinks, consuming ‘full fat’ soda (over 60% of UK market now sugar free) and spooning it liberally onto fruit, breakfast cereals and puddings.

And then Will talks about house builders and drainage – specifically ‘sustainable urban drainage systems’ (SUDS) – saying that the builders are resisting this change for reasons of profit. Will is, quite simply, making stuff up – SUDS are a standard requirement in planning – as this demonstrates:


This practice guide is complementary to Planning Policy Statement 25: Development and Flood Risk (PPS25) and provides guidelines on how to implement development and flood risk policies by the land use planning system.


The problem isn’t building the systems but looking after them – if idiots like Will get there way it places the responsibility on the builder rather than the buyer of the building and that goes straight on the price thereby making houses more expensive. The alternative - escrow funds, water charges and taxation - seems to make more sense if only Will would peer out from behind his bigotry.

What we see here from Will Hutton is an example of using half-truths and ideology to make a pretty lame anti-business point:


The deal is clear: pass on the maximum cost to the state, minimise one's own obligations including tax payments, and insist anything else will cost jobs and penalise consumers. Corporate welfare works. Bookmaker William Hill, for example, declares £293m profit on a turnover of £1.3bn, and pays a mere £48m in tax. Drinks multinational Diageo pays £66m of UK tax on its £1.75 bn of UK turnover.


The problem is that the tax is mostly paid but us consumers, by the people who get the benefit from the products and services those businesses provide. And for drinking, smoking and gambling there is an extra tax on top of the business rate, corporation tax and VAT that everyone pays. It’s legitimate to ask whether the social benefit of these businesses outweighs the social costs – the answer in each case is probably yes once we’ve taken these extra taxes into account. But to argue that wanting less new regulation is “corporate welfare” is a completely ridiculous argument based on nothing other than a dislike of big business.

If Will Hutton wants to oppose ‘corporate welfare’ I’m right with him. However, I see corporate welfare as the cosy management of government contracts in non-market systems (especially defence and health), the use of regulation to prevent market entry in energy and finance, the protection of agriculture from international competition and the privileging of professions such as law and accountancy. Just for starters.

I doubt this is what Will wants though – I suspect he likes a bit of price-fixing, a bit of winner-picking. In truth the ideology we see here is the ideology of social control – the attack on drinking and sugar is an attack on our choices as consumers wrapped up in guilt-ridden middle-class judgementalism. And the criticism of business is founded in a belief – made unpopular by Mussolini – that the state provides the leadership, creativity and capacity to transform the nation and its people.

This is more of the nanny-knows-best, ordered society ideology that Will Hutton terms 'progressive'. More of the New Fascism.

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