Saturday 31 May 2014

Driverless cars. Or why we shouldn't waste our money on high speed rail.

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I know I'm a bit grumpy sometimes but I still take the view that the essential limitation of public transport is that is takes you from one place where you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be. Unless you're a trainspotter. And the bigger the distance travelled the further those unwanted start and finish points are from where we want to be. The high speed railway may whizz us from Manchester to London in a breath but for 99% of travellers they don't want to go to Euston station which means an onwards journey, one that could take as long as the journey in the lovely fast train.

The plus side of public transport is that you don't have to drive the train, plane or bus and can sit back and admire the view (or, if you'd rather, get on with writing your novel, catching up with TV or even doing some work). So travel is less stressful, at least until you need to lug your bag across three platforms and up two sets of escalators and then cram yourself onto an overcrowded tube train filled with people who appear to be considering murdering you for having a large bag. And let's not imagine trying to get a bus!

The solution - where the technical investment should go - must be in combining the door-to-door advantage of the private car with the relaxation of good public transport. And this means that, instead of billions on a limited fixed rail system connecting a half-a-dozen places to London, we should be looking at driverless cars. Because these do solve those problems and hold out the opportunity for long distance road travel to be significantly more efficient.

Here's Sam Bowman speculating (not unreasonably) about the opportunity:

Instead of spending 90 minutes driving in and out of work each day, commuters will be able to catch up with a newspaper and a cup of coffee while their car drives for them. Or by working remotely for those 90 minutes, a 9 to 5 employee could increase their daily earnings by 20 per cent.

Coordinating with each other remotely, driverless cars will be able to avoid other traffic, maybe ending congestion entirely. Cars are parked for 98 per cent of their lives: to exploit that, driverless car owners could turn their vehicles into taxis while they’re at work, drastically reducing costs for everyone. Eat your heart out, Uber.

One third of transportation costs are labour costs, which will be eliminated entirely, and driverless lorries will be able to travel non-stop, making goods transportation much cheaper. Driverless freight transport may eventually outcompete rail on time and price entirely, especially if driverless-only highways are built that allow for much faster speeds, making railroads entirely redundant.

We're still a fair distance from this world (and we can add local 'pod' systems such as that proposed for Milton Keynes to the mix) but it is clear that investment - brainpower and cash - is going into the driverless car. And that it makes the £30 billion plus proposed for HS2 seem like a completely misplaced investment.

The problem we have is that the public transport lobby has become a combination of vested interest (rail and bus operators want more money going into railways and bus systems) and misplaced environmentalism. Over half our national transport budget is being spent on subsidising inefficient transport systems and even the capital investment is misdirected - for example, Leeds are planning to spend £250 million putting a bus on a string.

The solutions have to be how we make more efficient use of road space - automation leads to safer travel and to significant improvements in fuel efficiency (what we could call the 'peloton principle') - rather than, as is the case now, responding to congestion by seeking to reduce use. Driverless systems also solve another problem - they are good (by travelling in peleton) for long distances yet still provide the flexibility to allow for door-to-door travel.

Given that we aren't expecting to see HS2 built for at least 15 years, it seems a better bet to line up behind private investment in road transport to get systems that respond to real need rather than narrowly-focused arguments about rail capacity.

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Friday 30 May 2014

What would a world without planning be like?

Now I'm not sure about the planning regulations in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe these days but, as you wend past the slopes overlooking the Danube from Slovakia and Hungary, it is striking that the hillside is dotted with houses - mostly fairly modern looking and all different in style (other than in an enthusiasm for capturing the view). I'm also guessing that the typical western town planner would characterise this development as sprawl and, supported by enthusiastic environmentalists, would seek to prevent people simply buying a plot of land and building a house on that plot of land.

So rather than the rather attractive smattering of houses seen in the picture above we might get a glorious green hillside free from untidy housing. A situation described here in California:

The reason for all of this ostensibly is to preserve open space. This is a worthy goal when kept in perspective. But in California, NO open space is considered immediately acceptable for development. 

The consequence of this approach is dense, unhealthy urban concentration. We sneer at the old Eastern European apartment blocks ('Stalinist Baroque' as one Hungarian tour guide dubbed it) but fail to realise that our planning policies lead to the same conclusions. Indeed, in the article from which the quotation above is taken, the author shows two aerial photographs at the same scale - one of Soweto in South Africa showing the crammed consequences of racist housing policies and the other of a Sacramento suburb showing how the 'build absolutely nothing anywhere' approach to open space creates almost identically crammed housing.

But in some ways the Californian place is worse since, not only is the housing crammed and over-dense but many working-class Americans couldn't aspire to buying the property because it is too expensive. The Soweto properties have the merit of affordability whereas the Sacramento shacks are selling at $250,000 each. With the result that, to house the poor, governments end up building stuff like this:


Now it may be that this is exactly what the poor want! Except that, when Slovaks and Hungarians get a bit of money they buy a plot of land and build a house on it. Suggesting that the poor don't want to live in high density housing estates - they live in these places because it's what they can afford. Or rather what the government, through its control of development, allows them to afford.

We are slightly terrified (and living in the protected 'green belt' as I do, I understand this terror) of a relaxed planning environment. What we don't do is ask the logical question - what would a world free of planning controls be like? Would it be a 'development free-for-all' as rapacious housebuilders concrete over every last inch of green field in the pursuit of profit? Or would the absence of planning simply change the model - since development land would be less scarce might we get better space standards and improved build quality? Given lower land prices would there be more individual properties built - a bit like that Slovakian bank of the Danube?

What disappoints me in this debate is that the study of these matters at universities seems incapable of speculating about a world free from planning. Instead, the more typical response - especially in the UK - is to call for a more 'plan-led' system topped up with generous dollops of taxpayer cash to fill in the cracks created by that 'plan-led' system. I guess I should accept that someone who studies 'planning' is likely to be a fan of planning but, given the manifest failings of the system (and of endless attempts to improve it), asking what would happen if it weren't there would be a useful academic exercise.

Above all else, asking this question allows us to consider whether our current system helps create some of our manifest social problems by, in effect, concentrating poverty. This allows people (who should know better) to claim a neighbourhood effect in health and poverty rather than seeing that our dysfunctional planning systems (not just in land use but in housing, in health and in employment) might create the problem. Put in simple terms, people aren't poor because they live in Easterhouse. People live in Easterhouse because they are poor. Even with a less extreme example - look at any good-sized English town - you'll see the same effect with the less well-off concentrated in one part of town and living in poorer quality housing.

As Ed Ring concludes in his article about Californian planning control:

The victims are the underprivileged, the immigrants, the minority communities, retirees who collect Social Security, low wage earners and the disappearing middle class. Anyone who aspires to improve their circumstances can move to Houston and buy a home with relative ease, but in California, they have to struggle for shelter, endlessly, needlessly – contained and allegedly environmentally correct.

Now ask the same question about London?
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Thursday 29 May 2014

Public health - might some truth be getting though at last?

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One swallow doesn't make a summer. But there are two current news items that suggest that the truth is gradually seeping through to one or two bits of the public health world.

Firstly there's a letter from fifty odd doctors, researchers and public health folk urging the WHO not to regulate e-cigs out of existence. As one pointed out:

"If the WHO gets its way and extinguishes e-cigarettes, it will not only have passed up what is clearly one of the biggest public health innovations of the last three decades that could potentially save millions of lives, but it will have abrogated its own responsibility under its own charter to empower consumers to take control of their own health, something which they are already doing themselves in their millions." 

Progress (although it didn't stop the BBC running a ghastly phone-in essentially to plug some egregiously misleading documentary it's planning to air on tobacco - at the presenter said to one smoker who called: "that's basically the tobacco industry line" as that chap explained why he wanted leaving alone).

And then the radio headlines were filled with news that we aren't drinking quite so much:

Between 2005 and 2012 the percentage who drank alcohol in the week before being interviewed fell from 72% to 64% for men, and from 57% to 52% for women.

The survey also shows that the percentage of men who drank alcohol on at least five days in the week declined from 22% to 14%.

The percentage of women who drank frequently fell from 13% to 9%.

This was all part of a slightly scaremongering report (so typical of health fascists to wrap up good health news in scary stories about girls drinking) but Radio 5 Live ran a couple of substantial items focused on the core fact - on average, we drink a hell of a lot less than we did ten years ago and the latest cohort of teenagers are the more abstemious since the 1950s.

It may be a false dawn - yesterday I was told by one of Bradford's public health consultants that 'hazardous' drinking would increase in Bradford without 'further intervention. This - as I pointed out - is simply untrue yet these people carry on with the misinformation. Still, though it's a long way to go, I am reassured that some of the truth might just leak into the public health debate for a change.

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The 'sharing economy' is wrong because it stops rent-seeking by governments

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This is the conclusion of one Dean Baker writing in the house journal of government planners and regulators (The Guardian):

"...the downside of the sharing economy has gotten much less attention. Most cities and states both tax and regulate hotels, and the tourists who stay in hotels are usually an important source of tax revenue (since governments have long recognized that a modest hotel tax is not likely to discourage most visitors not provoke the ire of constituents). Bit many of Airbnb's customers are not paying the taxes required under the law."

See what this man is saying? The rents that local government is able to claim from having regulatory authority, rents that go to pay for well-paid officials and the funding of critical (i.e. re-election sensitive) projects, are undermined by the fact that people have found a way to stay in a private flat or use a private car rather than an expensive taxi.

This 'sharing economy' isn't just disrupting the industries concerned - hotels and taxis - but threatens a crucial revenue for the city governments. You can understand how these interested parties might wish to regulate - so as to protect their shared interests. But it's a step further to suggest as Mr Baker does that such disruption is a bad thing (offers no 'net benefit' to the economy) simply because the new model falls outside existing regulatory regimes. And more to the point, that it is very difficult given the nature of mobile technology models, to find a way - should of an outright ban - to prevent this disruption.

Mr Baker is the director of a think tank - a "progressive" think tank no less. So I guess it's no surprise that the liberating application of technology - freeing us just a little from the rent-seeking of governments and their partner industries - is a problem to Mr Baker.  After all his think tank depends on these city governments and their client big business to provide its very comfortable Washington DC living. It is a case of the rent seeker protecting the rent seeker!

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Wednesday 28 May 2014

Send a letter to the Prime Minister for me...

http://noprimeminister.org.uk/index.html


There's a chance that the Government, in its desire to assuage some Lib Dems and obsession with indulging Labour's health fascist tendencies, will include the introduction of standardised packaging for cigarettes in the forthcoming Queen's Speech.

Campaigners - some of the 425,000 plus who wrote previously to oppose this policy - are urging people to write to the Prime Minister - you can get details of the campaign at Hands Off Our Packs.

The reasons why? Well here they are:

1. There is no evidence supporting the contention that standardised packaging reduces either the uptake of smoking or overall consumption. Indeed, in the year since the introduction of plain packs in Australia rates of smoking have increased

2. There is clear evidence to show that standardised packing increases both the counterfeiting of cigarettes and the smuggling of tobacco. The beneficiaries of the policy are criminals not the public

3. The policy will lead to job losses in places like Bradford - the jobs designing, planning and managing a multiplicity of different packaging designs will be gone, replaced with a simple print job

So do write urging the Prime Minister not to introduce this egregious - and pointless - policy.

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Merit, opportunity and the reduction of poverty in Bradford

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Yesterday I was at a 'development session' for Bradford's Health and Well-being Board and getting a bit irritated by the interminable mission creep (not to mention bucketloads of nannying fussbucketry). I appreciate that we have to 'tick everyone's box' in drawing up a five year strategy but there seems an almost wilful blindness to the big challenges facing Bradford's health economy. The first of these is a challenge everywhere - the rising cost of healthcare is outstripping society's ability to pay - but the second, while not unique to Bradford, is more specific. It is poverty.

And I say this in capital letters with flourishes and knobs on - the main reason for Bradford's poor health outcomes is poverty. It's not drinking. It's not smoking. It's not a big south Asian population. It's not obesity. It not illegal drug use. It's not road safety. It's not air quality. It is quite simply that being poor, always and everywhere, leads to a shorter and less healthy life.

Then I was corrected. Oh no, it's not poverty but something called "health inequality". Mostly, it seems because we have a strategy on combating "health inequality" but no strategy for reducing poverty. And this raises a very important issue by exposing again the conflation of poverty and inequality. With the result that we attend too much to enviously looking at how much richer, happier and healthier the residents of Burley-in-Wharfedale are compared with their counterparts in Barkerend.

What we should be doing is attending to the fact that people in Barkerend are poor not to the gap between their circumstances and the circumstances in Ilkley. But the conceit of the left (and of too many public services planners and managers) is the view that inequality and poverty are either inextricably linked or essentially the same thing. With the consequence that policy becomes about withdrawing from universal services in wealthy areas rather than the intelligent direction of resources to the alleviation of - with the end of eliminating - poverty.

This conceit - and its associated false dichotomy - is exemplified by this profile of Simon Willis who runs the Labour-supporting think tank, The Young Foundation:

"Let's say that we had a vigorous debate," he says. "The most important point Young made is that the opposite of inequality is not equality, it's fraternity … it's community and cooperation."

There we have our essential error about inequality. To say that the opposite of inequality is something other than equality is a deceit. It may be that fraternity, community and cooperation are more prevalent in a more equal society but it does not follow that equality leads to these things - nor do I see any supporting evidence. It also repeats the myth - a myth exposed time and time again only to be warmed over and reissued - that your riches are the cause of my poverty. But this time it is worse - Willis argues that the problem is 'meritocrats' because:

"They mistakenly think all their power and money and success is down to their own individual brilliance and hard work."

Again a familiar argument. Except that I've never met a successful person who didn't credit his or her success to a whole host of exogenous factors - from schools and parents through great colleagues to sheer good fortune.  Moreover we should consider what the alternative to meritocracy might be - presumably this is the 'fraternity' Willis alludes to as the opposite of equality. But isn't that a pretty stagnant society, a sort of land of 'meh'.

So I return to my earlier point. It is poverty that should challenge us not inequality. In the short-term part of the response to poverty is redistribution but over a longer period we need to alter the opportunities available to poor people, to allow them to play the meritocratic game along with everyone else. And these solutions are educational and economic - put bluntly better schools and better jobs. To say, as Willis is saying, that meritocracy is a problem is to deny the poor opportunity. Or rather to replace the chance to be independent, self-reliant and achieving with a sort of commune-like fraternal society.

This is just the intelligent articulation of the problem with community development - the idea that we can 'work with' communities from outside and that growing vegetables on roundabouts is somehow a substitute for education, skills and jobs. This is the world of the cuddly left where hugging the poor and saying 'there, there' is seen as a satisfactory response to the fact that they failed at school and haven't got a job. Or worse still giving them a hug and saying their problems are all the fault of those rich people in Ilkley (or bankers, or big business).

So back to Bradford and its health challenges. To make a difference we have to do a couple of things well - target interventions where they work best and recognise that improving the economic lot of people in Holme Wood or Barkerend is the best way to improve their health. For the targeting it's not about nannying because we know nannying doesn't work. Instead it's about real improvements - warmer homes, fewer chances to trip and fall, more pedestrianised areas, support for self-employment, training in today's skills and better outcomes at school. But this wouldn't suit The Young Foundation because what we're saying to those people is that they have skill, talent - genius even - and that we're going to release it, to allow them to achieve. Not from entitlement but from merit.

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Sorry but 'homophobia' isn't a weasel word...

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I don't do political correctness, we make too much of language and we beat up on people for the mildest of infractions. But.

There's always a but...

Roger Helmer, UKIP's candidate in the forthcoming Newark by-election and an MEP for the East Midlands thinks 'homophobia' is a weasel word. And maybe it's a lazy construction, an invented word. Perhaps we could think up some better construction to describe hating gay folk because they're gay.

But it's the word - however recently invented - that we've got. So when some poor teenager gets beaten up at school because they think he's 'gay'?

That's homophobia.

And when some lads shout 'pervert' at Mary and her girlfriend as they go about their everyday business?

That's homophobia.

Or there's the weird people who think being gay can be cured. As if we should want a cure?

That's homophobia.

I don't think that gay people want special privileges or advantage - just to get on with living their lives without the likes of Roger Helmer making out that they're 'odd'. And saying they can't have the things we have because they're 'odd'.

Homophobia isn't a weasel word, it describes how some people - the ones Roger Helmer is an apologist for - want to treat gay folk as weirdos and perverts.

It's one of the many reasons why - for all my Euroscepticism - I could never support UKIP.

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Monday 26 May 2014

Searching for a new liberal party....

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I'm a Tory so I guess it's none of my business but it worries me a little that there is no genuinely liberal voice in UK politics. Perhaps the collapse of the party that colonised liberalism with a sort of tepid social democracy presents an opportunity to rediscover a genuinely liberal voice in British politics.

First here's the always on the money Graeme Archer on the subject of yesterday's Liberal Democrat annihilation:

Take away every elected Tory, and Toryism would continue, and sooner or later find a way to be represented in parliament again. Ditto Labour. But take away every elected Lib Dem, and what are you left with? The vacant contradiction at the heart of the "LibDem" construct: neither properly liberal, nor effectively social democrat. Just nothing.

Yet liberalism is a real thing - the Dutch show this with not one but two liberal parties (as I understand it one is quite crunchy and classical liberal whereas the other is more cuddly and lentil-eating). The problem is that the Liberal Democrats simply aren't liberal - indeed their political position was for me summed up by their leader on Bradford Council when she said - indeed says repeatedly - 'we're not liberal, we're liberal democrats'.

Now while Graeme suggests that all the real liberals were absorbed into the Conservative Party (certainly the economic liberal were but there's a strong case to be made for all the inheritors of Gladstonian liberalism to be in my party - even down to the nannying fussbuckets since Gladstone was certainly one of those) this means that whiggish tendencies have to fight their corner with proper conservatives of one sort or another.

Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats are doing a lot of soul-searching. Some of this is pretty unedifying - I watched some activist laying into Danny Alexander during the BBC's Euro elections programming. It wasn't about policy but an extended moan about going into coalition and how it didn't work out. But elsewhere the debate is more real with 'social liberals' like Tim Farron in one camp and economic liberals like David Laws in the other. For the former their policy prescriptions are almost indistinguishable - a penchant for localism aside - from those of the Labour Party whereas the Conservatives would welcome Laws or Jeremy Browne with open arms.

What is lacking here is a real liberal challenge to current economic orthodoxies or setting out policies that actually sit with the views of the private sector, middle class, metropolitan population. These policies could have the following components:

1. An international focus. For the Liberal Democrats at the moment this is done through blind adherence to the European 'project' despite all its manifest illiberalism, protectionism and preference for dirigisme over economic freedom. Rejecting this model means rejecting the EU and arguing for a unilateral approach to free trade - looking beyond a stagnating and inward-looking Europe to emerging nations and the old 'anglosphere'.

2. A preference for local over national. Partly from its base in local government and partly out of conviction, the Liberal Democrats have always supported the idea of 'localism'. But for this to work, you have to accept inconsistencies - the 'postcode lottery' beloved of the media. In return you get more accountability, a drive to improve, and more creativity in the design and delivery of government services.

3. Emphasising markets rather than planning. This isn't saying 'no planning' but it is expressing a belief that markets are, ceteris paribus, better at allocating scarce resources than planners. Such an emphasis might lead to new solutions to the challenges of pensions and caring for the elderly - getting away from the tax and provide approach to look at insurance systems for example.

4. Prioritising personal choice over social prescription. Bits of the social liberal agenda fit in well here - support for same sex marriage and more open immigration, for example. But this must be joined by wider personal choice issues and by rejecting the nanny state approach to public health. Plus, of course, things like free schools and home education.

The four broad principles provide the basis for a different agenda - one that is prepared to explore currency choice, drugs liberalisation and devolved city government. It would be very distinct from the dominant centre-right, conservative approach that focuses on getting the right governance and the right people in charge - making the state model work rather than reforming it through devolution, markets or a combination of the two.

Perhaps after it has searched its soul the Liberal Democrat Party will emerge renewed and ready to embrace a genuinely liberal policy agenda but somehow I doubt this. Rather we will see the Liberal Democrats squirm about trying to triangulate a slightly more left-wing agenda in a last ditch attempt to survive. And because the Party's last few redoubts - Sutton, Eastleigh, Colchester, Orkney & Shetland - will hold out along with a smattering of hard-working councillors across the country, the Party will believe it has the means to rise again. Meaning that my hope for a real liberal party would be dashed!

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Sunday 25 May 2014

So Fairtrade may be making some Africans poorer?

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One of the things about studying development in poor places is that you quickly realise that it isn't as straightforward as the aid charities would like to have you think. We are given a picture of poor farmers scraping a meagre living - either through subsistence alone or commodity crops such as cocoa, coffee and bananas. However, as I recall from studying both Latin America and South East Asia, the reality on the ground is much more complicated. Indeed, the very poorest people in these places, the ones who were going to get done in first when the drought and famine arrives, are what we'd call 'landlass labourers'.

So part of me is pleased to have my ancient geography lectures confirmed by a comprehensive study - this time in Africa:

...wage employment in areas producing agricultural export commodities is widespread. FTEPR survey results from the short questionnaire addressed to a very large proportion (in some cases 100 per cent of the sub-site populations) show that a large percentage of people had experience of working for wages specifically on farms and processing stations producing the commodities that were the focus of the research.

The people who own the farms on which these labourers toil are not the poorest. Yet the focus of development efforts is directed at these owners and, in particular, through Fairtrade at the small and medium sized commodity growers. These findings come from the Fair Trade, Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) unit at London's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) and they remind us that, as we should know, the most vulnerable in any society are those without wealth. And in Africa wealth means land.

What FTEPR go on to describe is perhaps more worrying still for policy-making and suggests that the western narrative on development and poverty in Africa is mistaken:

This research was unable to find any evidence that Fairtrade has made a positive difference to the wages and working conditions of those employed in the production of the commodities produced for Fairtrade certified export in the areas where the research has been conducted. This is the case for ‘smallholder’ crops like coffee – where Fairtrade standards have been based on the erroneous assumption that the vast majority of production is based on family labour – and for ‘hired labour organization’ commodities like the cut flowers produced in factory-style greenhouse conditions in Ethiopia. In some cases, indeed, the data suggest that those employed in areas where there are Fairtrade producer organisations are significantly worse paid, and treated, than those employed for wages in the production of the same commodities in areas without any Fairtrade certified institutions (including in areas characterised by smallholder production).


This challenge to Fairtrade is serious. We are not talking here of some right-wing think tank but a highly respected institution presenting findings that suggest Fairtrade, far from being a way to address poverty, could merely be enriching the relatively wealthy smallholder at the expense of increasing poverty among the landless peasants employed to harvest that smallholding. And the research also challenges the presumption that the Fairtrade governance model is beneficial - concluding that Fairtrade organisations (and the retailers that exploit the branding) overclaim the beneficial impact of the model, that the co-operative model is unequal in that it favours the larger producers within the co-operative, and that policy-makers need to shift their focus away from producers and towards those who are employed by those producers.

As someone who has been critical of Fairtrade for some while, I guess I ought to be happy that a major piece of research confirms its weakness. However, such an enormous amount of good will has been invested in Fairtrade products by a lot of good people - it will be very hard for them to come to terms with the fact that, while the model has benefited some people, it may be creating a bigger divide between the family farmer and the landless worker. It will be interesting to see the response of the Fairtrade organisations to the work - they've faced criticisms before but never from such a comprehensive review or in such a critical form.

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Saturday 24 May 2014

A logical reponse to the obesity "epidemic"

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I know, I know - there is no obesity epidemic. But assuming for a second that the nannying fussbuckets and health fascists are right the cause is simple - food is too cheap.

...the authors say widespread availability of inexpensive food appears to have the strongest link to obesity. They write: “Americans are spending a smaller share of their income (or corresponding amount of effort) on food than any other society in history or anywhere else in the world, yet get more for it.” In the 1930s, Americans spent one-quarter of their disposable income on food. By the 1950s, that figure had dropped to one-fifth. The most recent data show the share of disposable income spent on food is now under one-tenth.

The figures won't be much different for the UK, perhaps a little higher. There is no doubt that, despite the efforts of the food producers to fix the system in their favour through protectionism, our food is as cheap as it has ever been. And we know that making things more expensive is a great way to reduce consumption - works for booze and fags, will work for food too. As Tim Worstall points out:

...if we really want to solve the obesity crisis (I don’t, it’s not one of the things that worries me but there are those out there) then we’re going to have to make food more expensive again. And that of course means taxing it. And taxing it viciously as well. Just to get back to the relative prices of the 1950s (when Americans were already markedly larger than the rest of the world) would imply a 100% tax on food, to get to the 30s would mean a 200% one.

Instead we get proposals for advertising bans, for stopping countline displays and for taxes on specific ingredients (sugar, fat, salt). Plus planning controls, hassling and hounding food retailers and the demonising of perfectly healthy fast food products.

Of course we don't need to do anything at all. But the tip-pot little fascists who think we should have their answer - make food more expensive. But they wouldn't dare would they!

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When local isn't local - Bradford's UKIP story

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This isn't a post about policies. It's not a post about whether Ukip are good, bad or the spawn of Beelzebub. Nor is it a post-mortem on this year's local council elections in Bradford. Elections that saw Labour (just) take overall control of the Council.

It's an observation on the nature of local campaigning and the exploitation - without the offer of solution - of people's worries and concerns.

In Bingley Rural and the Worth Valley the massed troops of Ukip's 'People's Army' are few in number. Judging by attendance at the count, they are no better served for activists than Conservatives or Labour. In truth there are probably fewer.

Yet they managed to deliver four different pieces of literature to some parts of Bingley Rural, similar numbers of different leaflets in Worth Valley, and have the time to fold, stuff and mail up to two personalised letters for some residents. Trust me, dear reader, I know how much time and effort this takes.

Plus of course, Ukip took advantage of the Yorkshire wide free delivery available to all political parties for the European elections.

I'm saying all this because the reality, of course, is that Ukip didn't deliver all those leaflets. They - quite legally and legitimately - paid private delivery companies to do it for them. Lots of nice, hard-working people (quite a few of them from assorted parts of Eastern Europe) earning a few quid an hour tromping along the streets delivering. I followed one such deliverer while getting out the leaflets in Cullingworth for Bingley Rural's now re-elected Cllr Ellis and my Worth Valley colleagues met similar in Oxenhope.

Nothing wrong (assuming the election expenses allowed are not exceeded) with all this of course. But think how much it costs. And compare this to how most of those wicked 'mainstream party' local candidates get their literature out. We do it the old fashioned way - either ourselves by plodding up and down dropping each leaflet in a letterbox or by asking other local residents very nicely whether they'd mind delivering a hundred or so leaflets for us. For all the criticisms of us, the reality at the local level is that our campaigning is absolutely local and dependent on the availability of volunteers to do the leg work.

If we replace legs with money (which is what Ukip did in Bingley Rural and Worth Valley) the nature of local politics changes. In the simplest of terms it stops being local. For sure, you need to have a local candidate and ten electors. But that's it - the rest is done centrally using targeted leaflets, mailings and so forth. And the message is no longer one about campaigns for a new village hall or the options for traffic calming along a dangerous stretch of highway. Instead it becomes a more general appeal based on national or international issues - a negative camapaign, anonymous and exploitative.

This might be the future of local elections especially if the numbers of activists dwindle. But, if it is that future, we will be poorer for it and will expose ourselves to the buying of elections. The good news is that, for this time at least, Ukip's attempt to buy its way into Bradford politics failed - all that effort and just one seat. Nevertheless, there will be a future attempt by Ukip - or some other party - to do likewise.

One thing I do know is that my election address next year will include the words - "written in Cullingworth, printed in Bradford and delivered to you by volunteers from your village."

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Thursday 22 May 2014

Anti-smoking campaigns aren't working...

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As Chris Snowdon reports:

...seven years of essentially static smoking rates from 2006 to 2013, at a time when graphic health warnings, display bans, plain packaging and banning smoking in pubs, in cars and outdoors were all introduced with great fanfare.

Yet we're told that 'something must be done' and a new generation of controls and restrictions are brought in to try and make life for the smoker intolerable. It is the only high profile public strategy - 'denormalise' smoking through bans, hiding the fags away, plain packs, endless price hikes and ever more draconian limits to where you can actually smoke.

At some point someone has to cotton onto the fact that it simply isn't working and to adopt a genuine harm reduction approach rather than the callous, inhuman 'quit-or-die' strategy of the health fascists.

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Wednesday 21 May 2014

Why I've voted Conservative today and so should you.


I'm guessing that won't come as a surprise to anyone given what you all know about me! But there's a story.

If you'd have asked me a while back about the European Parliament elections, I'd have whispered (in a strictly deniable way, of course) that like a lot of Conservatives there was a pretty high chance of me voting for Ukip. Simply because we wanted to make the point that the EU - and especially its purposeless and expensive 'parliament' - isn't in Britain's interests.

However, in the course of the campaign I've come to realise a few things - and these are the reasons why you should vote Conservative today.

1. Whatever we think of the parliament and its purpose, there's a job to do in Brussels (and peripatetically Strasbourg). There are constituents to represent, cases to argue that affect real people and their real lives. I saw this first hand with the attempt by a Labour MEP to ram through a de facto ban on e-cigs. And it was Conservative (and some Lib Dem) MEPs that took up the vapers' cause with some success.

2. The case for leaving isn't about Bulgarian chicken slaughterers or Romanian cleaners. Nor is it about border controls, Muslims or the shape of bananas. We need to leave because the revolutionary idea of European co-operation has evaporated and, as Kafka said, "left behind the slime of a new bureaucracy". However, people who support our continued membership are not traitors corruptly taking the Commission's silver to prosecute their personal interests - they're just folk with a different (and I think wrong) view on the European Union

3. It is a fact that, if you want out, the only game in town is to vote Conservative. No other party with a prospect of government proposes an 'In/Out' referendum. I know the Greens and Ukip offer such a choice but the truth is that neither party - and Nigel Farage acknowledges this - will be in government this side of hell freezing over.

I know lots of you want to have a kick at the government, to make the point about power to people in Westminster. And I guess if you do so not much harm will have been done. However you will have elected people who want the Europe debate to be about how "Britain is full up", who want to make people coming here for work unwelcome and who will make cheap capital (and as we found with Geoffrey Bloom, cheap laughs) from attacking gay rights and women working.

So I urge you to make two positive crosses  - a vote for Conservatives in the European Parliament and a vote for a Conservative to represent you on Bradford Council.

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We need change but won't get it with a protest vote

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In today's Daily Telegraph, Alistair Heath explores some of the reasons for the dissatisfaction being expressed by Europe's voters. Building on a recently published book - The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (which I haven't read so can't really comment) - Heath argues that government is overmighty, that it does too much and much of this badly, and that this stands as a barrier to economic progress. I broadly agree with Heath's analysis but am struck by the fact that the logical place for these ideas to be translated into action - centre-right political parties - are as much of a barrier as the 'progressive' parties of the centre-left.

Across Europe an odd collection of political parties will take advantage of this failure by the centre-right parties. They'll range from the studiously considered anti-Euro, Alternative für Deutschland through the slightly manic MoVimento Cinque Stelle of Italian comedian, Beppe Grillo to varying degrees of nationalist parties ending with the openly Nazi, Golden Dawn in Greece. Plus of course, our dear friends in Ukip. These are the parties of dystopia.

All of these parties adopt - as do one or two left-wing parties in Spain and Greece - a 'plague on all your houses' positioning. The endless repetition of 'LibLabCon' by Ukip supporters is intended to capture the essential sameness of centrist parties. And nowhere is this sameness most starkly displayed than in the European Parliament where the policies, outlook and programmes of the two big blocs - the EPP and Socialists - are almost impossible to untangle.

The problem is that these insurgent political parties simply do not offer any coherent vision of a better government. By way of parallel, here's a quote from Neal Stephenson, the SF writer on how dystopian fiction is cheaper:



...it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch.


What these parties do is paint the worst picture possible - a world of unwashed foreigners arriving to take our jobs, of corrupt officials and venal businessmen. If some truth exists in these pictures (and it does) then that acts to substantiate the argument - that the 'established' parties and 'mainstream' media are culpable. The problem is that, while the need to destroy is clear in these insurgent parties' agendas, what comes after isn't. There'll be grand, sweeping statements about 'getting our country back' or 'protecting jobs' but there is no coherent programme for government. And certainly no indication that the 'fourth revolution' described by Heath will be set in train by putting these parties into parliament, let alone government.

The task for centre-right parties is to understand that they must stop being 'conservative' and start being 'radical' - there's a few people in the UK's Conservative Party who recognise this but they are stifled by the majority who opt for a safe,'lowest-common-denominator' approach. And the centre-left cannot get all smug here - it offers nothing new or different, Green politics aside. There are little glimmers of a future post-fourth revolution world - the idea of localism, 'Big Society', free schools and digital government. But these haven't yet described what has to change in the wider economy or started to challenge a welfare system designed for a very different world.

Until this vision is articulated better we will be at risk of two things - voters protesting by electing the parties of dystopia and government (and millions of government employees) putting its interests before those of the people it serves. And unless the vision is articulated and right-wing politicians are brave enough to promote its positive message, we will remain trapped in a world of big government run badly and in the interests of government not the people.

We will vent our anger at the beast by voting in protest - just as many will do tomorrow across Europe. But it will change nothing. Oh, there'll be some tweaks to policies but the main message will be business as usual. Worse still the odder opinions of the parties of dystopia will make it easy to dismiss them as nutters, racists and opportunists - the process of change will be associated with the mad or the bad and the change won't happen. In a strange way, allowing people to vent their rage by electing Ukip MEPs - members of a parliament with no powers and no sovereignty - rather suits those who want to protect big, badly run government. It doesn't affect what actually happens at all but gives people the grand illusion that they've stuck it to the man!

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it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/dystopian-science-fiction-is-cheaper.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.VKRMKfJN.dpuf
it is much easier and cheaper to take the existing visual environment and degrade it than it is to create a new vision of the future from whole cloth. That’s why New York keeps getting destroyed in movies: it’s relatively easy to take an iconic structure like the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty and knock it over than it is to design a future environment from scratch. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/dystopian-science-fiction-is-cheaper.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.VKRMKfJN.dpuf

Tuesday 20 May 2014

On the proper use of public health funding...

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Public health funding is about improving environmental factors - things like making homes warmer, reducing air pollution and preventing trips and falls. Here's a good example of how the funding can be used:


A ‘Boiler on Prescription’ scheme to demonstrate the impact energy efficiency improvements can have on ill health has been launched by social business Gentoo Group.

The Sunderland pilot will create a framework for GPs to prescribe a range of free home improvements to help those who have medical conditions exacerbated by cold, damp homes.

This sort of spending isn't nannying but targeted, specific and intended to get the greatest impact from the funding. It's a shame that we're spending hundreds of millions on nannying fussbucketry really.

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Two-and-a-half pints of lager...






"Sorry sir, that's all I can serve you."

"What d'ya mean? I'm not driving, I can have a third pint!"

"Sorry, just a half. Otherwise you're drinking dangerously."

This is the world of the temperance fanatics, nannying fussbuckets and health fascists, a world where two-and-a-half pints of premium lager is 'binge drinking':



Drinking six units of alcohol on one single occasion at least monthly amounts to “heavy episodic drinking”, according to a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has said 16% of the world’s population are now binge drinkers.

This is barking. Not only is there no evidence to support describing this as 'dangerous' but it completely undermines genuine efforts to promote a healthy attitude to drinking. But no-one faces up to these fussbuckets, says to them - 'sorry mate but that's plain stupid, now shut up and go away'.

This is a world where sitting down is bad for you, where you can't enjoy sitting in the sunshine and where using a harmless product like an e-cig is deemed bad simple because it looks like harmful smoking. And yet hardly a day passes by without another call for ad restrictions, price hikes, sales control, mandated packaging and outright bans - on salt, sugar, fats, fast food, cigars, lemonade, alcohol in any form, tanning beds, bacon and even fruit juice.

All the things people like - especially the things that working class people like - are to be controlled. We are to live a purposeful, sober, salad-filled life for the good of our health. Indeed government will mandate the times you can drink, the places you can smoke (are there many left) and the size of the portions you eat.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. Remember that the next time someone links 'binge drinking' to ten-year-old photographs of a girls lying pissed on a bench - two-and-a-half pints of lager, three glasses of white wine, two large vodka and cokes. That's the limit of the fun you're allowed on a Friday night if you aren't to fall foul of the health police.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. It's a bloody joke.

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Monday 19 May 2014

Today's health fascism starts with the international not the local

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Two things strike me about this report - the first is that it was entirely predictable once some idiot decided plain packs for cigarettes was a good idea:

Food packaging should include pictures of the damage obesity can cause health, similar to those on cigarette packets, campaigners said today.

Experts have urged governments across the world to tackle the obesity epidemic by regulating the food industry along the same lines as the tobacco industry.

Despite there being precious little evidence showing this works, the health fascists are all over the idea of getting stuck into the food business - advertising bans, sugar taxes, regulating salt content, banning trans fats and mandating scary images on packaging.

However, my second observation is rather more significant - the groups promoting health fascism no longer target national governments. Instead they focus on less publicised, more malleable international agencies and especially the World Health Organisation.

The CI and WOF will officially launch their recommendations for a Global Convention to protect and promote healthy diets at the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week.

They will call on governments to commit to a raft of policy measures designed to help people make healthier lifestyle choices.

The aim of this programme is to get changes through the back door - they want, through the auspices of the WHO, to have a 'framework convention' that is similar to those on tobacco products. This allows them, and their allies, to begin the process of browbeating national governments into implementing the raft of regulations proposed in their reports. Just as with tobacco, we'll be told there's a 'treaty obligation' (there is nothing of the sort) which means we have to move towards tighter regulation. And, of course, thise will reduce obesity (it won't, of course).

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UKIP's cynical focus on immigration is handing victory in any in/out referendum to pro-Europeans

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We were discussing anti-social behaviour at a Bradford Council scrutiny meeting. I forget whether this was in the context of us reviewing policies and strategies around alcohol and drugs or merely the periodic receiving of crime statistics from West Yorkshire police. Now, my views on these matters are pretty well-known - the idea of 'anti-social behaviour' was created to provide a means to criminalise behaviour that hitherto wasn't criminal and police crime statistics are a work of fiction.

Given that this is multicultural Bradford, matters related to ethnic minorities arose - from recollection on the back of a remark from a police officer that Roma families liked to gather together outside and drink. And that this caused a problem for the, largely South Asian, communities into which they had moved. This view was endorsed by the Committee chairman - a Labour councillor - in a set of remarks littered with "they" and "these people".

Now I don't for a second think Cllr Malik meant ill by his remarks - he was echoing genuine community disgruntlement. It isn't clear whether this is about the behaviour - a community that doesn't drink (or at least not openly) might understandably be disapproving of public drinking - or about the arrival of a new, culturally-distinct group into a mono-cultural place. But the reality is that the arrival of people for whom drinking beer sat on a town centre bench or walking down the street is normal behaviour proved a shock (as an aside, on a recent visit to Cologne I was struck by how many young - and not-so-young - people could be seen drinking in public).

It's easy for me, sat in a village ten miles from inner city Bradford, to dismiss such stereotyping - to clamber manfully up onto the moral high ground and shout "you racist" at people like Cllr Malik. But does that help? Should we not rather respond to the concerns themselves - not, as some seem to want, by heavy-handed policing targeted at these obviously criminal gangs (I mean they drink in the street and walk about in family groups - definitely criminal behaviour there) but by being clear about the boundaries for behaviour. Spending a bit of time talking to them about what's allowed and what isn't allowed - and suggesting that they try to respect their neighbours.

It won't be easy managing the integration of these new communities into the weird place that is Bradford - there'll be fights, there'll be misunderstandings, there'll be cries of racism galore - but at some point in the future, just as happened with the past arrivals from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States, these groups will be part of the place, will be talking with Yorkshire accents and cheering on English football teams. Young men whose families are from Slovakia, from Moldova and from Romania will be seen drinking lager in curry houses and chasing girls whose Mum was from Ireland or grandfather from Pakistan.

To get there we've got to stop calling people racist at the drop of a hat, we've got to stop pretending that everyone from a place is a criminal (or indeed, not a criminal) and we've got to recognise that it's a messy process littered with ignorance, assumption and the use of political power to prefer one group above another. At the end we'll be a better place - better for Polish sausage and beer, better for Romanian wine and better for another extension to Bradford's tapestry adding these latest arrivals to Germans, Jews, Pakistanis, Poles, Indians and Africans. Plus of course the immigrants from elsewhere in these isles - from Ireland, Scotland and, in my case, London.

The European Parliament elections have seen a set of national campaigns hi-jacked by this debate - instead of a discussion about the EU, we've had a series of staged rows about immigration with loud asides alleging racism in all directions. Or rather "I'm not calling it racism because racists might not vote for me but it's a bit off colour". Perhaps the most egregious was from the Green Party who seem to think it clever or cool to blame a minor (and alleged - remember that police crime statistics are a fiction) rise in 'hate crime' on another political party.  All this does precisely nothing to help us deal with the influx of immigrants - and dear reader, they're here and they're staying.

I don't win any political friends for saying that our attitude to immigration is antediluvian but I do think that this EU election campaign, by making out that opposition to the EU is somehow about racism, hasn't helped the campaign to leave. If the only reason for getting out of the EU is that we won't have those pesky foreigners coming here any more, then we can give up on any hope of leaving - the British people aren't so intolerant. And we now know that those of us who want a free trade nation looking to sell our genius wherever it is wanted, and know that the EU stops this from happening - we'll be painted as racist authoritarians by the enthusiasts for the European project.

I recall Ted Heath telling a story from the 1976 referendum about a well-known left-wing opponent of the Common Market. This socialist grandee arrived at a televised debate to see the pro- and anti- Europe speakers, his eyes scanned across the panel and he said something like: "the camera will pan across Heath, Callaghan and a man from the CBI speaking in favour and then the other side - Powell, and Teddy Taylor. I'm not appearing with those nutters."

This sums up the problem in any referendum campaign - because UKIP has made it, for reasons of cynical political expediency, a debate about immigration plenty of people will do what that socialist grandee did and sit the campaign out. With the result that the real debate, the one about free trade, free speech and free enterprise, won't happen. And the pro-Europeans will win.

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Sunday 18 May 2014

Signalling the end of the private car?

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There's a bit of kerfuffle about the arrival of Uber in London and its disruption of the taxi business in the city - Londoners are being threatened with go-slows and blockades by black cab drivers. However in reading one person's experience on using Uber, I read his observation about the private car:

Once you start talking about systems like Uber and robot cars in the same sentences, is the longer term implication of things like Uber going to be: fewer privately owned cars? Will Uber 3.0 be the first robot car killer app?

After all the specific advantage that the private car offers over public transport is that it takes you from the place where you are now to the place you want to be. Buses, trains and trams, unless you are a trainspotter or tram fan, take you from one place you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be.

If a public system - it could be a Uber-type application, a robot car or even Milton Keyne's little pods - takes me directly to the place where I want to go then there is less need for me to spend many thousands on buying a rapidly depreciating hunk of metal with an engine. Especially in a large urban areas (and approaching three-quarters of us live in these urban areas) there are huge benefits - not just the money people save by not owning a car but the space saved by not needing to store the vehicle somewhere.

If we marry this with the reduced need for people to travel - think of how other innovations are removing the need to attend meetings and how the world of shopping is disrupted by home delivery or 'click-and-collect'. And this shift is being accompanied - especially in those big urban areas - by a shift to zero emission vehicles. A shift that is driven by wanting a healthier atmosphere rather than supposed threat of climate change. Indeed, as the evidence showing the negative health impact of poor air quality builds, we will see an accelerated shift to very low and zero-emission transport.

The private car won't disappear - people in rural areas will require a vehicle and some folk will remain in love with the idea of owning and driving a car - but we could see a future generation where not doing so is pretty much the norm. And not because of officious, interfering governments but because people decide they don't need the pain and expense of having a car.


Update: In a moment of serendipity, I found this little  snippet from Clemance Morlet on the Project for Public Spaces blog today:

In Paris, where I hail from, 60% of journeys are by foot - far beyond car trips (7%) – and 60% of Parisians do not own a car[1]. In the heart of New York City, 53%[2] of those who live and work in Manhattan never use a car, bus, subway or train in their everyday trips but instead walk, ride a bicycle or motorcycle, take a taxicab, or work at home. Not to mention the large and increasing number of tourists visiting the city (more than 50 million people yearly in 2011[3]), who widely enjoy Manhattan on foot.
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Friday 16 May 2014

A comment about wealth...

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The ONS has published the latest figures on the UK's wealth. And this has resulted in a load of, mostly ill-informed, articles either celebrating the rise in numbers of millionaires or bemoaning the alleged increase in wealth inequality.

Here's once such:

On the other hand, the data suggest that wealth disparity across Britain is worsening. The richest 10pc of households now own 44pc of total household wealth – an increase since the current Government came to power in 2010. The top 10pc owns about five times as much as the poorest half of the population, who between them account for just 9pc of overall wealth. 

Bear in mind that we are talking here about wealth not income, which means that this observation really doesn't matter a jot. The question we need answering is how wealth will change over time not how it is distributed right now. Indeed, if we look at the least wealthy half of the population, this will include a huge chunk of the population living in houses with whacking great mortgages, young graduates in their first jobs with student debts to pay off and school leavers with no assets and £150 of credit card debt.

All of these people probably have negative wealth, but for a lot of them, this will change. Folk will pay off their mortgages turning the homes into wealth, student debts will get paid off and that youngster will join a pension scheme. So the issue isn't whether the top 10% own 44% of total household wealth but how many currently living without wealth will become wealthier simply by the process of continuing what they're doing right now.

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Trust me, I'm a (local) politician!

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I haven't seen the details of the polling but there will be a load of grinning councillors reading this:

The poll, carried out on behalf of the Local Government Association (LGA), showed that when it comes to making decisions about local services and the local area only 9% of people trusted MPs and a meagre 6% of people trusted government ministers. However, 77% of people trusted their local Councillor to fight for the local area. This figure has risen from 71% in October, while the number of people who would not trust MPs or government ministers dropped from 16% to 8%.

And all this rather gives the lie to those who see the solution being fewer community politicians - local councillors, parish councillors and the like - and more professional, manager-like regional, national and supra-national politicians.

The reverse is what we need.

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Thursday 15 May 2014

Quote of the Day: George R R Martin again!

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On his use of Wordstar 4.0 to word-process his books:

"I actually like it, it does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else," Martin said. "I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key."

I think I'm mostly with him on this.

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Nasty politics...we expect it from the extremists but not from Labour MPs

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This lunchtime I had a brief chat with Khadim Hussein, currently Bradford's Lord Mayor. The discussion was chiefly about this:

...members of Britain First, who are led by former BNP councillor Paul Golding, visited his house in Keighley last Saturday and entered it without permission.

Although he was not there at the time, Coun Hussain said it had been a “distressing” experience for his daughters, who were forced to tell the men, who he said were “aggressive, but not abusive”, to leave. 

Cllr Hussein is a genuinely nice man, indeed his comment about Britain First's visits to mosques in Bradford were very different from the confrontational, intemperate comments of George Galloway - "the mosque is a public place" observed Cllr Hussein contrasting this with the frightening experience of ten burly political activists appearing on the doorstep of a house in Keighley.

Indeed, I'm told that Paul Golding had spoken with the Lord Mayor who had advised him to contact his office and make an appointment! Instead the Britain First bunch went off to Keighley claiming that the Lord Mayor was avoiding them.

This, we will be reminded again and again is the nasty side of politics. And my friends on the left will then point at Britain First (or the latest bunch of racist nutters than pop up) and say: "look, you right wingers are all nasty".

However such words - however unpleasantly racist folk like Britain First might be really does excuse this:





This is the photograph tweeted by Labour MP, Karl Turner to his 9,000 plus followers with the ever-so-witty words:

 Just got in to find #UKIP crap on the door mat. It's off back #Freepost #VoteLabour

That's right folks, a Labour MP suggested that the way to 'return' UKIP literature is to wrap it round a brick and presumably bung it through the candidates window? Of course Mr Turner is far too responsible to actually throw a brick through a UKIP candidate's window. But others aren't:


UKIP MEP Gerard Batten had a brick thrown through a window at his London home in the early hours of Tuesday.

Mr Batten said he suspected it was part of an attempt by political opponents to intimidate UKIP candidates ahead of next Thursday's European elections.

I'm guess that the Labour Party approve of this sort of violence - or at least one of its MPs does?

Politics is a passionate business but, while we expect exhortations to violence from the loonies of right or left, we really should see them - even wrapped in a cloak of bad humour - from politicians in a political party that might form the next government.

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Organising for the long term and a unilateral cap on donations - how to restore Conservative 'grassroots'

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We all know that the two big UK political parties are, in terms of membership, shadows of what they were in times past. At its peak the Conservative Party had over 3 million members and the Young Conservatives were perhaps the biggest political youth movement in the democratic world.

When I joined the YCs in 1976 the cracks were already showing, the membership was declining year on year, and the national party seemed uninterested in anything but the next general election (although that election did elect Margaret Thatcher so perhaps I shouldn't complain too much). However, back then the Beckenham constituency had three separate YC branches. The main Party branch that my mum was active in was called Lawrie Park 'A' - just one polling district of a larger ward.

So when we talk about the Party's grassroots, this should be what we are thinking about. Not self-appointed campaign groups that adopt the word Grassroots to make out that somehow they're in touch with the soul of the Party. Or even groups that use words like 'Mainstream' or 'Way Forward' to try and suggest their particular faction is somehow representative of the real Party.

In truth the grassroots of the Party are no longer the membership. When I talk to Conservative voters (something I do try to do as often as possible) I get no sense that they feel part of a movement, that they belong to something. Yet these people will troop out in election after election and put their cross next to the Conservative candidate. Their motivation is less tribal than was the case when the Party had those millions of members and more self-interested: they believe that the Conservatives represent them better.

The Bow Group has become the latest in a long line of folk that have had their four-pennorth on how to restore the fortunes of the Party organisation. Thankfully, the Bow Group start with absolutely rejecting state funding for political parties, and state in stark terms the scale of the problem:

...the Conservative Party should not go down the road of state-funding for political parties, but instead should take urgent measures to reconnect with its electoral base and grassroots members. 

The Group set out '11 Steps' that the Party needs to take ranging from more dialogue through rejecting 'open primaries' and electing the Party Chairman to more tactical matters such as ending the Coalition sooner rather than later. There is, from the perspective of someone with nearly 40 years active membership, much to commend in the proposals.

However, the bit that the Bow Group miss is that, to turn round the Party as an organisation, there has to be two further things done:

1. The Party needs to invest in the long term, to have people whose job it is to think about what the organisation will look like in 20 years time and to set resources aside to put professional organisers on the ground in places where the Party needs to develop.

2. The Party should announce its intention (unilaterally if agreement with Labour can't be achieved) to stop taking donations above a certain size (say £5,000) - this would provide the incentive for the leadership to look for lots of smaller donations rather than finding a couple of billionaires to hand over a few million.

I believe that these two actions would break the grip of London on the Party, would make us pay attention outside election time to the ordinary men and women who actually plod down to the polling station to vote Conservative.

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