Wednesday 29 April 2015

Quote of the day...on political careerism

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Chris Deerin, writing about Britain's two best politicians (his are Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson) rather sums up our problem with political entitlement:

Our politics has a crisis of leadership. The traditional route to eminence – private education or the tonier state establishments, PPE at one of the big two, spad, MP, junior minister, Cabinet – has produced a generation of entitled, charisma-free, playbook-driven drones. Look at the front bench of the Labour Party and pick out a single individual with whom you’d like to have a drink, who appeals on a basic, human level, who doesn’t strike you as a bit, well, weird. So much for the People’s Party.

It hardly needs saying that the Tories are equally odd. Thatcher’s party of meritocracy, with its focus on the responsible strivers of the working and middle class, has fallen back into the uncalloused hands of gilded scions of privilege. The front bench reeks of money.

Now I feel Chris, in his urge to create a journalistic dichotomy, has rather ignored some of the more interesting front-benchers (Sajid Javed and Rachel Reeve stand out, for example) but his observation has resonance. And it's true that Chris's best politicians are mighty impressive.

However, the problem still lingers. Out campaigning I'm chatting to a lovely student helping out. Bright, intelligent, studying law. "Planning on being a lawyer?" I ask. "No," comes the reply, "I want to work in politics." I let this ride rather than screaming and telling the student to get a proper job, do the politics as a volunteer, stand for council. But I know that a career is there for the ambitious.

So dear friends - especially the young ones who have the choice, remember what P J O'Rourke said about Daniel Patrick Moynihan (as careerist a US politician as you could find):

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.

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Tuesday 28 April 2015

The simulated city...

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Super article by Richard Reep in New Geography contrasting the traditional US downtown with what he calls the 'simulated city', the world of the theme park, the beachfront and the management entertainment environment:

It is a city where your expectations as an urban connoisseur are completely fulfilled; decrepitude, blight, and eyesores are disallowed. Even better, a simulated city’s employees are rigorously trained to be cheerful and bright. No homeless people lounge on park benches, and there’s no visible crime, since there is no apparent indigence, want, or fear. Although it would not be turned away, the riskiest tranche of society seems to shun the simulated city. Its design reflects mainstream success, and discourages subversion, by having no alleys, no trashy areas, and no low income community adjacent to it.

This is the city as a playground - safe, sanitised and filled with everything good and nothing bad. But, just like the real city, patrolled, regulated and rules-bound. The down side is that these simulated cities are only for those willing to pay - in cash and effort.

Fascinating.

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Monday 27 April 2015

In Praise of Idiots Redux




Michael White, that most Guardianista of Guardianistas, has had a pop at the electorate:

But millions more, not just the poor and demoralised, will forget, shrug or even boast “I never vote” before turning back to something that seems more important: football, golf, Spotify, Britain’s Got Talent. They don’t bother to engage, let alone to make the connections between what happens to them and the difficult policy choices that bring it about, good or bad.

This, in the intense minority sport of being a Guardian reader is a terrible sin. Only topped by thinking The Sun is a rather better written newspaper and certainly a better read. The electorate shouldn't be going about their lives as normal (or as normal as us politicians allow them to live). No those electors should be "engaged".

I beg to differ. Indeed back in 2009 I wrote this piece in praise of idiots (the word deriving from those ancient Athenians who chose not to engage in politics):

Now the good left-wing liberals at the Guardian think this grumpiness, this disengagement, this disinterest is a problem. And that’s where I disagree – the core consideration is the extent to which we are able to live as Greek idiots. Quietly, privately, without bothering our neighbours with our problems – and when such people want change they will get up from their armchairs, walk away from the telly and vote. The idea that not being bothered with voting most of the time makes them bad people is a misplaced idea – they are the good folk.

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.

Above all today’s idiots want to be left alone to live their lives as they choose. For me that’s the essence of politics – I praise these idiots and applaud their apathy. 

And yes, I do think people should vote. Yes I think people should take the trouble to understand what's being offered to them by politicians. But I also think this obsession with 'engagement' and 'participation' is misplaced - if people want to be engaged they will get out from those armchairs. A year or so before I wrote that piece, over 400 residents of Denholme had crammed themselves into the Blue Room of the Mechanics Institute. They did this because something was happening that mattered to them - Bradford Council working with developers was planning to dump the city's rubbish in a hole just outside the village. They didn't want this to happen (and it didn't).

The wealthier we get - collectively and individually - the less important politics becomes and the more important it is that politicians are humble enough to recognise this fact. When we consider something to be fundamental or existential then we are engaged - look at the turnouts in the Scottish referendum last year. But even though this current election is unusual and hard to call (as the pundits put it), the result will be a government. And that government will change some things and tinker with other things but for most people the worst outcome will be mild irritation. There'll still be a school down the road, a hospital in the city and policemen driving around. Buses and trains will still run. The supermarket will still be open.

There's an image in Asterix in Britain of an Ancient Briton stood on his (prized) lawn with a spear pointed at the Roman soldier. "My garden is smaller than your Rome but my pilum is harder than your sternum" says the Briton as the soldier orders him out of the way. Until that tipping point is reached, people - in the tradition of those Greek idiots - will look to family, friends, colleagues and neighbours long before they consider politicians and the antics we get up to.

Here's to those idiots. And Down with The Guardian.

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Sunday 26 April 2015

Are we building the wrong sort of housing?



Whatever we think of the Coalition government's benefit reforms, one thing they have revealed is how short we are of one-bedroom property. Both the limit on housing benefit for under 35s and the 'spare room supplement' have acted to remind us that the fastest growing household type is the single person. Later marriage, single parenthood, divorce and longevity all mean more people living on their own. Single person households now make up 28% of UK households.

So why is it then that the house-building businesses want to build family housing? At the recent examination in public of Bradford's 'core strategy' the sessions on Wharfedale and Airedale were stuffed with developers arguing for more housing - 3-, 4- and 5-bed family homes - on greenfield sites in those valleys. There was no clamour for apartments or smaller units more suited to single people and especially the single elderly.

This might be a problem. Here's some thoughts from the USA (where the cities are increasingly filled with single households - 71% in Washington DC, 57% in New York):

The rise of singles calls in particular for more micro housing: apartments the size of studios or even smaller, and "accessory dwelling units" (think in-law cottages or garage apartments) that might be built in the back yard of existing homes. It also calls for a different model of housing where, for instance, four singles might share a communal living space adjacent to their separate units instead of each having their own living room.

The problem over there - and increasingly over here too - is that the regulatory environment (not just planning although that's the main culprit) makes it very difficult to build anything other than family housing. If we are to meet housing needs therefore, we need to escape from the current objective assessment of need methodologies since they are not taking sufficient note of that need's demographics. Just as importantly, changing our strategy to focus on hidden households (most of which are single people) means that the need to take vast slabs of open country for house-building is reduced.

None of this removes the need for planning reform but it demonstrates that the current system is designed to meet the housing needs of traditional families whereas demography tells us we need to move in a different direction. To return to Wharfedale, those family homes the developers are keen to build will sell - filling up with people moving out from Leeds and Bradford. And the housebuilders wedded to a 'buy-build-sell' development model will continue to prefer high land values sitting on their balance sheets (it reduces the competition and prevent new market entry). But inside the cities the homes those people moving to Wharfedale leave behind present a problem - feeding a private rental market but finding those unwanted family homes ever more difficult to rent.

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Saturday 25 April 2015

In praise of the (election) workers


The last few leaflets
At the start of this seemingly interminable election campaign I was delivering 'In Touch' leaflets in Denholme. In that peculiarly Yorkshire spring precipitation that can't decide whether it's rain, snow, sleet or hail. I'd listened earlier to assorted pundits, journalists and such like holding forth about the issues in the election and social media was cluttered with gangs of smiling campaigners waving placards.

And I thought that the image of the election campaign given us by the media is pretty unrealistic. A more accurate picture of election campaigning would show me in a wind-cheater, scarfed up and shivering a little as I plod up Hillcrest Road delivering my own personal little message. And thousands of others doing likewise everywhere across the country. Not just the ones in those Twitter pics waving banners but loads of others who are delivering a few leaflets because they support the cause, because the candidate is a friend, because someone asked and they thought 'why not'.

So when you're feeling a little cynical about politics and politicians think instead about the lady delivering my leaflets up Wilsden Hill, a beautiful, almost unique collection of old agricultural buildings, workers cottages and great views. Or about the old man who delivers them round your way. Politicians (well nearly all of them - I can name a few that don't) recognise the importance of these people, listen to them and understand that they do it for a whole host of reasons.

Yesterday, as the temperature dropped and the clouds gathered in preparation for today's rain, I was delivering my leaflet in Harden. At one house a couple were sat in their summerhouse drinking tea - taking a mid-afternoon break as they put it - and we had a brief conversation. Mostly about the fact (which they hadn't appreciated) that there are local council elections on the same day as the general election but also about my lack of 'minions'. I didn't go on to explain that what 'minions' I have are, in truth, volunteers and mostly elderly. These are the people who help me campaign every year and their number and capability diminishes with each passing year.

When I was first elected - 1995 by just fifteen votes - things were very different. Across the four villages of Bingley Rural we ran a full polling day campaign having canvassed more than half the ward. Every polling station (bar two with only 150 electors each) was manned from 8am through to 8pm, numbers were collected and crossed off. And we knocked up and pulled out - even down to one colleague baby-sitting while someone went to vote and another driving someone to vote as she'd had one or two too many to drink. I remind everyone that this is why I was elected on that day.

On 7th May the same applies - there will be MPs and councillors elected because of those men and women who plodded up damp drives, gashed their fingers on rusty gates, fought the evil that is the English letterbox and braved 'beware of the dog' signs. For sure, all the nice comfortable warm folk clicking on things in their living rooms will have helped too but the real slog done by the party workers come rain or shine is the reason why safe seats stay as safe seats, why marginals are held against the swing and why people we didn't think will get elected get elected.

There are too few of these people - we couldn't muster the numbers to run a full, old-fashioned polling day campaign these days - and the national party headquarters, filled with young folk who've never done one of those campaigns, are not interested in finding more. Yet those people who do that delivering, canvassing, writing addresses, sticking on stamps and bashing in poster stakes are the political party - without them it's just a badge or a brand sustained by large donations or, worse, through state funding.

So, before all the different political leaders, campaign managers and political strategists start taking credit (or blame) for the election result, let's celebrate those ordinary election workers who delivered, rang, stuffed and knocked. They are better and more important than all the David Axelrod and Lynton Crosby sorts that litter our political scene. Well done - whatever party it's for- and thank you.

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Friday 24 April 2015

Housing: 'managed sprawl' rather than rent controls and public subsidy

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For decades the UK had rent controls. Mostly we didn't call it fixing rents, we called it 'council housing' and we subsidised those rents. Some councils deliberately - for specific and ideological reasons - ran a low rent policy building up huge gaps between the rents that council tenants were paying and the level of market rents (in a dwindling stock of private rented property). As with all price fixing the result of this was a distorted market - local councils couldn't afford to build new homes because the rental income wasn't sufficient to justify borrowing, there was no private rented sector worth mentioning and home ownership was seen as the gold standard.

With right-to-buy the council housing business changed overnight. Tenants who were in work took the discounts and bought their homes. And largely carried on living in those homes. Capital constraints on councils and tight housing revenue accounts meant that new council houses became ever more like hen's teeth especially given central government's preference for housing associations and other 'third sector' housing providers. The result was that council housing - more correctly called 'social housing' by this time - was ever more residualised, increasingly filled with the least well-off and those most reliant on benefits.

By 1997 the seeds for our housing 'crisis' were in place as house building (specifically in places with economic, job and population growth) had slowed as a result of a sclerotic planning system, a rented sector that didn't generate surplus for reinvestment and a development sector wedded to levering high land values rather than efficient construction. The result of this was the explosion in house values - between 1997 and 2010 these values nearly tripled - and these homes became less affordable. Without access to social housing, workers began to rent - between 2001 and 2011 the number of people renting in the private sector nearly doubled as the market met the housing need of people who couldn't afford to buy and failed to qualify for social housing.

We now have the situation where, particularly in London, the scale of the private rental sector is such that regulatory intervention - a re-tightening of the regulations liberalised in the 1980s - is being discussed. Much of the debate relates to quality and to preventing the abuse of vulnerable tenants by unscrupulous landlords. There's a secondary part of the debate that asks whether the type of tenancy (the private sector is dominated by short-term tenancies) merits reform to give people renting a little more security. These are pretty sensible debates with arguments on both sides but where there's a real desire to improve standards within an important housing sector.

But there's a growing call for government - local or national - to intervene in the setting of rents, to implement rent controls:

We need to start getting serious about how to address the housing crisis in London, because it’s not just those on minimum wage or housing benefit that are struggling to afford to live here. Teachers, civil servants, retailers and service workers essential to the running of our city are all threatened by the crisis. Though not a silver bullet that will singlehandedly solve the crisis, we should think about how rent controls – done sensibly – can be part of a comprehensive plan to ensure that all Londoners can afford a home in our city.

And such proposals, especially wrapped in Harvard-educated management-speak as David Lammy does here, are something of a temptation. It seems so simple. Yet when we step away from the moderate, reasonable argument the truth remains - limiting rents must always mean limiting the market income which will always mean that there is less supply. And London has enough of a supply problem resulting from decades of indecision on housing and the continued - and wonderful - success of the city as a driver of economic growth.

To help us understand this, we need only look at the USA where big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC and San Francisco have a long history of rent controls as a housing policy tool:

But rent control mainly makes housing expensive by taking units off the market via high occupancy rates and low turnover. Tenants who don’t want to lose their good deal stay in their apartments. This means that newcomers—or anyone not lucky enough to have a rent-controlled unit (including prospective homebuyers)—must compete for a more limited stock of market-rate units. If New York City abolished rent regulations today, it would double the number of available market-rate units, meaning housing costs would be shared more equitably across the population. As things stand now, many people pay more, because so many others pay less.

The evidence is that, far from rent controls acting to reduce housing costs, the effect is to make the housing market even more static than it was already. In New York - and we'll be familiar with this approach in the UK - the preferred tool now is to require that developers of (overpriced because of rent-controls elsewhere in the market) new homes make a proportion of those homes 'affordable'. The problem is that, even without enforced affordable provision, the regulatory cost of building in the city - and London isn't so very different - is verging on prohibitive.

The affordability problem remains a challenge -  as the American Planning Association  discussed recently in Seattle:

The shortfall of affordable housing arguably would take 50 years to fill at the current rate of production in San Francisco—the very frustration expressed by Rahaim. It might take 25 years in New York City. But betting it all on increasing supply is fraught, too. It’s expensive to build in the city, and costlier still to build increased height and density without considering the needed infrastructure to support those kinds of environments.

But the answer does lie in making land available linked to good transport links. It won't make London's housing as cheap as housing in Barnsley but there is a need to open up the possibility of what we might term 'managed sprawl' - allowing the expansion of cities so as to release some of the pressure on the inner boroughs.

In a broader view, a more regional approach, with polycentric, high-density centers supported by transit, has the advantage of breaking out of the borders of the super-hot markets.

Right now our housing debate lacks balance - too much stress is given to managing price within a sclerotic, dysfunctional housing market rather than on reduced the things that slow down that market, add cost and prevent affordable development.

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Thursday 23 April 2015

England, my England...




It is St George's Day. England's Day.

So, dear readers, it's perhaps time to ask again what it means to be English. Are we echoing some distant past of mythical purity where only those like me who can trace ancestry in England back into the mists of time are allowed to be English:

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

We can hark back to some Saxon ancestry but that doesn't define what it means to be English except in some unhelpfully narrow ethno-cultural manner. And Englishness can't be defined (and Kipling doesn't suggest this is so either) by those genetic roots but rather it comes from the layers of history bringing us to where we are today - a beautiful country filled with creative people. People who should be proud of that English heritage but who have lost the words and the song to make that so:

And everyone stares at a great big screen
Overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens
Australian soap, American rap
Estuary English, baseball caps

And we learn be ashamed of all we walk
Of the way we look, at the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we come from?
I've lost St. George in the Union Jack
That's my flag too and I want it back

The English seem at times so diverse that these traditions are without meaning. We stress - rightly - our sponge-like absorbtion of other cultures, each time with our own sweet twist. We eat curry, pizza, kebabs and hamburgers washed down with lager, white wine and coca-cola. And don't see these things as diminishing our English identity.

For many years that English identity - for reasons of power and politics - was buried in the idea of Britain. We were brought up to believe ourselves - speech, leeks and kilts aside - essentially the same as the Scots and Welsh. Missing the truth that those Scots and Welsh didn't see it that way - for them Britishness and Englishness were so entwined as to oppress their real identity. Now the English are learning that the Britishness of our establishment meant the same subversion of identity - a subversion made worse by those who took English to mean white and Saxon.

England is built on the lives and contribution of millions. Not kings and prime ministers but ordinary men and women. When we look out across the moors of Northern England we should recall the men who shaped that landscape. As we view the civilised farmland, the kempt landscape, of Surrey we should remember the people whose work shaped that place. And as we stand in some city street perhaps take a moment to consider the folk who built that place - the cathedral, the shops, the streets and the parks. And as we do this consider again William Henry's words:

WHAT have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?

For we - all of us regardless of race or faith or hisory - are England. All of us. And the future of England is for us to choose, to place another layer on the work of "the mere uncounted folk" who built the England we enjoy. Today is St George's Day - our day and the day of all those ordinary men and women who made this wonderful place. A place as close to heaven on earth as you'll find.

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Wednesday 22 April 2015

My Nine-point Manifesto...

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I know pompous of me. But here is the sort of agenda we need - my manifesto as it were:

1. An education system that gives a more equal chance to children of similar intelligence
2. A welfare system that encourages and rewards work, discourages idleness and comforts misfortune
3. Health care that is built around people’s needs, is flexible and treats us like humans rather than numbers
4. A tax system that doesn’t take money from the poor to give to the relatively well-off
5. A system of public finances that gives priority to the needs of all and the concerns of the poor, sick and unlucky rather than the pastimes of the well off
6. A housing system which doesn’t feature people on £50,000 plus living in subsidised housing while others sleep in boxes under bridges
7. Scrapping an international trading system where our goods are freely traded while poor countries goods are barred by tariffs and import controls
8. International relations founded on conversation rather than the aggressive, post-colonial exporting of “democracy” to places without any effective, functioning government of any sort
9. Guarantees and protection for free speech and free assembly, a place where the balance between liberty and security tips strongly towards freedom

To do all this I suspect we'd need to leave the EU, spread power and decision-making far wider and trust people more than we do at present. But these are ambitions - government is a difficult business at any level and it's the day-to-day choices that matter, 'events' as Macmillan called it, more than the grand policies or vast pages of law.

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So cut the basic rate of income tax?

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Tax cuts stimulate employment best when they benefit the lowest paid most. Or rather as is pointed out here, the bottom 90% of taxpayers. So while I absolutely support taking the poorest out of tax altogether - indeed I would support an ambition that no-one below median income should pay income tax - a basic rate cut would be a real boost for growth and jobs;

Variation in the income distribution across U.S. states and federal tax changes generate variation in regional tax shocks that I exploit to test for heterogeneous effects. I find that the positive relationship between tax cuts and employment growth is largely driven by tax cuts for lower-income groups and that the effect of tax cuts for the top 10% on employment growth is small.

But then we knew tax cuts were a good thing didn't we?

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Monday 20 April 2015

A reminder why we have an international aid budget

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I get the anger at there being cuts at home while the budget for international aid has been protected. And, for the record, I don't support the mandated 0.7%, the de facto hypothecation of the budget or the preference for bilateral deals. But having an international aid budget isn't simply a case of us rich folk being nice to poor people in Africa. Investing in those places - helping them develop - is absolutely in our interests.

As we've been reminded:

Whether it was the Mediterranean's deadliest refugee drowning in decades remains to be seen. But it was certainly terrible, and its political effects could spread far. One of the survivors of a refugee boat that capsized late on the night of April 18th in the waters between Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa said that at least 700 people had been on board. Just 28 have been rescued so far. That would make it by far the worst maritime disaster in the Mediterranean since the second world war.

A great deal has been made of the decision by the EU (and individual states including Britain) to end "planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean" because it was believed that fishing refugees from out of the sea only encouraged more of them to attempt the risky crossing. I do not support this policy - it is quite simply inhumane. I remember the suggestion - I think from P J O'Rourke - that instead of turning these folk away, we should be on the beach with a towel and a passport. We keep saying how we want risk-takers and people with get up and go - isn't that the very definition of these refugees?

The solution, if that's the right word, is for there to be less reason to leave Africa in the first place. And while war and the depredations of lousy government are part of the story, economic opportunity is central - just like us, these Africans are seeking to better their lives and are taking enormous risks in doing so.

And this is why we have an aid budget. It's also why that aid is better directed through multilateral agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund than through cosy bilateral deals or, worst of all, through the agency of well-meaning but wrong-headed NGOs. Right now our aid programmes are a mixture of anti-globalist nonsense, the subsidising of rural poverty and a few strong infrastructure programmes (mostly around health and education). It's not the size of the budget but its direction that is the problem - we need investment that comes with strings, with a bit of that Washington Consensus that the left are so touchy about but which has been the single biggest reason for reductions in world poverty.

So long as the gap between opportunities here and opportunities there exists people will try to arbitrage the gap - some will be ordinary economic migrants, students and the like. But there's big money to be made smuggling people across borders and, as the Americans have found, it's almost impossible to stop people crossing those borders. So investing in those countries so they have the infrastructure needed for development makes every kind of sense if we want to prevent out richer places being a huge magnet for the billion or so folk out there who'd like a better life.

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Saturday 18 April 2015

Life on the farm...


Catstones Moor from Tan House, Wilsden on a cold April day
From where I lie
The sheep can safely graze
The farm breasts through the haze
And all is still
From where I lie
A magpie skirts the vale
Reminder now of this o'er-deepening dale
And all is still

The old tractor splutters and coughs into the little farmyard, its days work done. Another day in its thirty years of lifting, shifting, towing and spreading on the sparse fields of a Yorkshire hill farm. The engine is stilled and the driver - the tenant of that hill farm - clambers down from the tractor's cab.

The farmer is old. Too old you might say. Having got down from the tractor he stands for a few seconds seemingly oblivious to his similarly old border collie and catches his breath. The next task is to close the field gate - the man is tired and he makes his hand into a fist so as to still the shakes that get worse with each passing day. With the gate closed, the days work is done or will be so long as nothing dies, breaks or falls. Last autumn the fox got into the chicken run and killed all but a handful.

The farmer shuffles slowly to his house. A house with no central heating, a leaky roof and single glazing but where the tenant farmer can't afford to run more than one fire - so he'll stay in his coat to keep warm and anyway he's tough and can cope with a little cold. His wife died a couple of years ago, his daughter's alright as she's a nurse in Sheffield and his son's driving tipper trucks for the big quarry company. The farmer knows nobody will succeed him - as he did to his father - in the tenancy and he frets about the animals.

We idealise farming - on the telly the life's not that of an old man with Parkinson's struggling to keep enough together so as to just about make a living. Instead we see a big strong man striding across the fields talking purposefully about the jobs and tasks around the farm. Or else some presenter's plaything of a hill farm - filled with a restored farmhouse, lambs, chickens and beautiful moorland views. A million miles away from our old tenant farmer, from the reality of hill farming.

Sat in his tatty armchair sipping a mug of tea our farmer might let his mind wander to the neighbour - the farmer dragged through the courts, broken and bankrupted because he shot a dog that worried his sheep, a dog that threatened his meagre livelihood. The village a short while away is filled with suburban dog-owners who see the fields as some sort of playground where the dogs can run.

Or the farmer might think of tomorrow's tasks - the wall to fix where someone decided to liberate some stone for a little garden feature of a wall, there's maybe muck to spread, later there'll be hay to cut and gather. And there's always paperwork. Endless paperwork - from DEFRA, from the Council, from the benefits people. Plus the bank - he smiles as he remembers the local farmer who drove his muck-spreader into Keighley and treated the front of Barclay's Bank with some choice muck - and the suppliers he hopes to put off paying for a few weeks.

Farming in England's uplands is dying - quite literally. Our farmer is all too typical - it's not a business he's running, he's only kept from starving by subsidy and the benefits system. And there is no succession, no new farmers. Why should there be when no-one can make a living from running an upland farm - even with the Common Agricultural Policy. Yet we expect that farmer to provide a service to us all - keeping footpaths open, mending fences, treating and keeping the land and raising livestock. All so we can get all misty-eyed as we talk about the unique moorland environment and campaign for special designations so that place can be protected from heaven knows what.

If we want to conserve those uplands - so we can walk, cycle, ride horses across it or maybe just drive through it to a pub with a view - then we need to ask how we are going to pay for it. Because those farmers - old, tired, ill and poor - simply aren't going to be there to do all the heavy lifting of loving and caring for the place. So next time you see two old men and a lad fixing a stone wall don't just admire the skill or even appreciate the effort. Instead ask how your free enjoyment of the countryside - enshrined in law - is being paid for. Then before you get back into your new-ish motor to drive back to town, blush a little in guilt at how a poor man's money is being spent on providing you with a playground.

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So let's not talk about the 'jobs miracle', let's talk about welfare instead!

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The latest figures for employment, unemployment and jobs came out yesterday and it's fair to say that they are, without question, good figures:

UK unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate since July 2008, official figures have shown.

The number of jobless people dropped by 76,000 to 1.84 million in the three months to February, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday.

That means the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6%, in line with forecasts.

Average weekly earnings in the three months to February, excluding bonuses, rose by 1.8% compared with the same period a year earlier.

Growth was slightly lower than the rate in January. When bonuses are included, weekly earnings rose by 1.7%.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in March fell by 20,700 to 772,400, the ONS said.

Add to this record numbers of job vacancies and we should be looking forward to continuing growth in employment plus, as vacancies begin to outstrip the number unemployed, rising real wages.

The New Statesman, which I guess we can describe as part of the 'intelligent left', published an article (by Jonathan Portes) with this headline:


About that Conservative jobs miracle... 

Now you'd expect therefore that the article would discuss - perhaps with some criticism or different analysis - those figures I quote above. But in a long article packed with data not one word address that 'Conservative jobs miracle'. Instead we get Portes' usual, tightly argued position on welfare reform. Or in this case benefits paid to people who are sick and disabled. And as I read it, the jobs miracle (in Portes' view) isn't down to people coming off incapacity benefit - he doesn't provide any indication as to what might have contributed and seems more interested in the budget deficit rather than why so many people have found work.

For me the positioning of an article about welfare as an article about jobs reveals the extent to which the intelligent left is prepared to ignore good economic news and to poke about trying to find something wrong with what's happening out there. I find this all a bit sad. But then the intelligent left has always been a terribly 'glass half empty' bunch.

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Wednesday 15 April 2015

A reminder that "Big Data" analysis isn't research it's sympathetic magic


IF we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not. (from The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer)

The current obsession with 'big data' should concern us - not because the data is useless but because it makes people think in peculiar (and worrying) ways:

But with the advent of “big data” this argument has started to shift. Large data sets can throw up intriguing correlations that may be good enough for some purposes. (Who cares why price cuts are most effective on a Tuesday? If it’s Tuesday, cut the price.) Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, recently argued that economists might want to take mere correlations more seriously. He is not the first big-data enthusiast to say so.

This quote is from Tim Harford and describes what I refer to as sympathetic magic. We pile up enormous mountains of data and interrogate that data with clever computer technology (that mostly we didn't create and don't understand), find correlations and make sweeping assumptions based on the correlations we do find - as opposed to the myriad other correlations we haven't found.

So what that chap from the Bank of England is saying is that if we pull this lever here and press that button there it does seem that this result occurs. We've no idea why it occurs or even whether, given a different set of instructions to the clever computer technology, we'd get the same correlation again. Yet the economist takes the result spat out by the big data black box and declares it to be scriptural - the latest set of levers and buttons that will set the economy on the right course.

All the acolytes of that economist then produce graphs showing the results of all that wonderful (and essentially magical) data-crunching. Until such a time as a different mountain of data or a different analysis tool produces a different set of buttons and levers to press or pull. This continues in cycles as the followers of one or other school of magic contest to either create new answers or - more commonly - to argue backwards and forwards why the other school is wrong.

Back in 1990, before all this Internet lack, us direct marketers were playing with big databases - the geodemographics and psychographics economists and such folk think are new and exciting were the tools we used. We experimented with expert systems and with emerging data mining tools of one sort or another. And we discovered that the results of such analyses (prices cuts are more effective on Tuesdays or whatever) were very useful. But not as useful as we'd like them to be. Big data analysis was still no substitute for information about real purchase behaviour meaning that the database analyses were more useful as a planning tool than as a pointer to where marketing investment might work best.

Much of macroeconomics - for all the volume of learned interpretation it generates - falls into this trap. There is a great deal (too much probably) of information but what matters isn't how much data we have but the tools we use to assess that data. And these tools provide conflicting information meaning that there simply isn't a right answer - other than that something should be done to direct the economy.

None of this is to say we shouldn't analyse that data, crunch those numbers, try to understand what these Big Data runes tell us about the world. But we should do it with humility and should recognise that this is not real knowledge but rather a chimaera of knowledge - real knowledge is to know, for now at least, the causes of something:

Do Big Data help us establish ‘causation’ more accurately? No. But new and unexpected patterns might emerge that suggest how combinations of risks interact unexpectedly.

Though even then some patterns are just, well, luck. Their probative value can not be assumed. Quick, give me another grant! We need more data to help us understand what Big Data are telling us!

Such is the nature of this big data thing. Yet we assume - because there is so much information - that the answers it spews out will be better, more true. To which I reply with this research:

Demographic segmentation variables are cheap and easy to measure, while psychographic variables are more expensive and harder to measure, but can provide more insight into consumers’ psychology. Suggests that a prima facie case exists for the suitability of astrology as a segmentation variable with the potential to combine the measurement advantages of demographics with the psychological insights of psychographics and to create segments which are measurable, substantial, exhaustive, stable over time, and relatively accessible. Tests the premise empirically using results from a Government data set, the British General Household Survey. The analyses show that astrology does have a significant, and sometimes predictable, effect on behavior in the leisure, tobacco, and drinks markets. 

This is Big Data analysis. Do you believe it?

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Tuesday 14 April 2015

As dog whistles go this one from George Galloway is loud!

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One of GG's lines in his Bradford West election campaign has been to suggest that the Conservative and Labour candidates against him are stooges for a sinister neo-conservative think tank called the Henry Jackson Society. Worse that this think tank is a sort of Zionist sponsored campaign that wishes to destroy Mr Galloway (or at least get him unelected).

That's the context for this:

The inference here - in a constituency where about half the electorate is Muslim - is that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu was somehow responsible for the Labour Party's selection process in Bradford West. You can read across from this is two ways - that it's all a Zionist conspiracy (doubtless Galloway's defence) or else that it's a Jewish conspiracy (which the lack of clarity in Galloway's comment allows others to claim or argue).

Lot's of people would consider this particular image rather anti-Semitic. All I'm going to say is that it's a very loud dog whistle indeed.

Update: Another similar image doing the rounds...



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Extending right-to-buy won't solve our housing problems but it is still a great idea

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Let's be clear about one thing at the outset, right-to-buy doesn't mean there are more houses and certainly doesn't mean there are fewer houses. All it does is transfer ownership to current tenants from government and wealthy subsidised owners. A right-to-buy policy isn't about resolving housing problems (such as London's undersupply) but is about sharing the nation's wealth more equitably. And if you see it in these terms, it is a policy that people will welcome - or would do if they didn't either have a direct financial interest (local councils and housing associations) or else an ideological objection to poor people owning property (socialists).

There's a devil in the detail of any right-to-buy (RTB) policy and no-one has seen those details in respect of Conservative proposals to extend RTB to housing associations. When the property involved is state-owned the issue of discount could be lost in the endless (and byzantine) debate around local government finance but this extension of the policy means that RTB applies to properties that are not directly-owned by the state. Leaving aside the issue of eminent domain (as the Yanks call it), any policy has to compensate the housing association for the loss of its asset and/or rental stream. The way to achieve this is to ensure that there is a pipeline of new property to replace transferred homes. Indeed it was the lack of this pipeline that provided the principle criticism of the 1980s RTB programme.

While we're on about 'taking other folks property' bear in mind that Shelter (in cahoots with the development industry and planners) is very keen on compulsory purchase when it suits them:

A royal commission should decide in an impartial way where new garden cities should be located, and new development bodies should have the power to compulsorily purchase any necessary land, their report recommended. This would help to stop landowners from making excessive profits and instead could share the proceeds with the local community once land is sold on to developers, garnering support for new housebuilding, they said.

There is - other than that this is big business calling for subsidy and discount - no difference between such a development approach and the concept of RTB. Yet selling homes at a discount to ordinary folk is a terrible awful policy that will do dreadful things to the housing market while purchasing loads of private land at below its market value is a thought through policy from experts. And of course those new towns and garden cities will be filled with properties rented to the less well-off by worthy corporations - managed naturally by men and women who live in lovely privately-owned barn conversions nowhere near those rows of little boxes they're renting.

Today there are a lot of housing association directors taking to the airwaves and tweeting madly about RTB. None of them point out that their concern isn't for the tenant but rather for their associations' balance sheets. Just as a lot of the objection (not all to be fair) to the so-call 'bedroom tax' was really about housing association cash flow.

Instead of defending the current status quo, we should be looking at how to secure the transfer of ownership to tenants with the financial capacity while maintaining our provision of good housing for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford such housing. I really don't see RTB as a barrier to such provision.

Update:

Indeed it seems some housing associations were keen on RTB only a year or two ago:

Mark Henderson, Home Group chief executive, said: “When the Government published its Housing Strategy at the end of 2011, improved right-to-buy opportunities for council tenants were at its heart. Home Group highlighted then that a far more seismic economic impact would be felt if the same opportunity was extended to housing association tenants providing we can replace a new property for each one sold.

“Updating the right-to-buy rules for housing association tenants not only offers individuals the same chance to become a homeowner as residents in council homes, it will give a phenomenal boost to the UK economy.”


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Monday 13 April 2015

Sorry envious lefty folks but entrepreneurs did build that infrastructure

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You'll all be familiar with the "you didn't build that" line directed at wealthy and successful entrepreneurs who have the audacity to use public roads, educated employees and safe communities in managing their business. The most commonly used example - usually in the form of this little Internet poster - is from US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

You can hear as the socially aware cheer to the rafters at Liz sticking it to the man - telling those rich, successful business people that they owe all that success to the government and should be jolly grateful that it plans to take most of it away in taxes. And it's true that all those things were done with public money (although it's entirely possible - certainly with roads - that private investment could have delivered just as well). But that's not the point, the point is that the rich and successful entrepreneur added some value that wasn't there before - here's Don Boudreaux:

The government-built road that Smith uses to earn handsome profits by serving consumers might well be absolutely essential to Smith’s success, but this fact doesn’t mean that the road’s contribution at the margin to Smith’s success is significant.  Smith’s profits depend upon what he adds to the road’s services – how Smith himself uses the road to create value for consumers.  If Smith uses the road to ship truckloads of ordinary toothpicks to market, he might earn just enough to continue in that line of work, but he’ll not earn magnificent profits.  If instead Smith uses the road to ship truckloads full of new’n'improved toothpicks – toothpicks that sell at prices only slightly above that of ordinary toothpicks but, in addition to doing what ordinary toothpicks do, also are guaranteed to prevent gum disease, cavities, bad breath, insomnia, and erectile dysfunction – then Smith profits magnificently.  Smith’s “above normal” profits (as economists call them) have nothing to do with the road (or with, say, the private efforts of entrepreneurs who are responsible for the delivery truck Smith uses) and everything to do with Smith’s own innovative efforts.
This is the entire point - the entrepreneur is successful because he gets a small part of the value he has added to society (about 3%), most of that value is enjoyed by the consumers who use the goods or services that entrepreneur creates. Having schools, hospitals, roads and policemen paid for from taxes is not a guarantee that we will get that extra bit of margin - it is entirely down the the entrepreneur, which is why such folk are so rich.

So we have benefited (collectively) from 97% of the value added by the creation of whatever wonderful innovation our entrepreneur has developed. And, since this is how the world works, a pretty juicy chunk of that 97% has gone to the government is taxes, duties, fees, levies and rents - the Elizabeth Warren argument is simply wrong. For sure, the entrepreneur didn't build those roads but the extra tax income the added value from his innovation provides made a big contribution to providing schools and hospitals as well as contributing to the next generation of infrastructure investment.

No-one denies the essentially collective nature of free markets - the idea that they are selfish, individualistic or greedy is utter nonsense - yet the cheerleaders for what we might call the 'envious left' continue to peddle the lie that somehow that billionaire entrepreneur isn't successful from his own intelligence and efforts. Worse still that our entrepreneur should face punitive taxes on income and on the return from investment for the sole reason that he has such a lot of the stuff and we don't like him for that reason.

In the end, the marginal improvements those entrepreneurs got rich from also were what made us all richer and made it possible for government to built that infrastructure so the next generation of creative business people can make the next set of marginal improvements (as well as the rest of us enjoying better roads, schools, hospitals and sundry other infrastructure).

The entrepreneurs did build that...

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Sunday 12 April 2015

Urban vertical farming is a really stupid idea...

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Yet the ability of its promoters to sucker government and other investors is striking:

These factors, however, have not prevented New Jersey’s government dreamers from subsidizing what hopes to be the world’s largest-producing vertical farm. As the New York Times noted on Tuesday, the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey, both heavily indebted, have provided $9 million in grants and tax credits to build one in the city’s Ironbound district. Further financing will come from the urban investment arm of Goldman Sachs. The farm will be built by the RBH Group on the site of a former steel plant, and operated by the company AeroFarms. Along with being viewed as a job-creation and neighborhood revitalization tool, the indoor facility will grow crops using LED bulbs and aeroponics. Perhaps in an ode to the smart set who embrace such ideas, the farm will grow two million pounds of arugula and kale.

The total project cost will be arounf $39 million to create around an acre of indoor farmland - a place where growing is promoted with expensive (to install and to run) aeroponics and lamps. Right now farmland in New Jersey is selling for around $10-15,000 per acre.

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Saturday 11 April 2015

So what exactly is wrong with Costa Coffee? Why national chains are important to the high street

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Some long while ago the New Economics Foundation wrote a report where they coined the term 'clone town':

The report shows how retail spaces once filled with a thriving mix of independent butchers, newsagents, tobacconists, pubs, bookshops, greengrocers and family owned general stores are fast being filled with faceless supermarket retailers, fast-food chains, mobile phone shops and global fashion outlets. 

The report has been remarkably influential - it combined our like for traditional high streets with something that pretended to be economic analysis. From out of this idea - an a host of subsequent reports - has come a new model for the high street where words like 'sustainable' and 'resilient' abound, and where jolly bunches of community activists and local 'independents' create delightful people-focused places. It is quite idyllic and, if you go to well-healed market towns in Oxfordshire or North Yorkshire you see the model in action.

One such place - in Devon as it happens - is Totnes. I wrote about how the local planning and development agenda has been captured by a group of green activists calling themselves Transition Town Totnes. There was even a petition to the town council setting out local concerns around this capture:

While no one in the Totnes has voted for TTT to dictate town policy, it has enormous influence over town planning policy and the future economic direction of the town. No one in the town voted for TTT to run policy, and it is quite wrong that Totnes Town Council took the unilateral decision to become give us the label of a Transition Town. In fact, if TTT continues to implement its damaging policies it will succeed in turning Totnes centre in a ghost town and make all our lives far more difficult. We want choice, not just TTT's choices.

The whole thing came to a head because Costa Coffee submitted an application to open a coffee shop in the town. There were petitions against signed we're told by 12% of the towns residents as well as by folk from nearby communities like "Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kent, Leeds, London, Manchester, Norfolk, and Surrey, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and even Morocco".

The upshot of all this was that, despite getting its permission (quite rightly since planning is concerned with the use not the ownership), Costa decided not to open up in Totnes. And, as a result, Totnes lacks that little bit extra choice and variety. However, my question is rather to enquire what it is that is so wrong with Costa Coffee that its very presence in a small Devon market town would drag that place down?

The main protagonist here is a chap call Rob Hopkins who believes that his rather peculiar idea of 'resilience' is more important than that pesky thing called choice:

"Choice" is one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie words which can surely only be a good thing, can't it? We all love "choice". It is, of course, ultimately your choice whether you buy your coffee from an independent local business or a chain such as Costa. But would opening a chain in a local economy introduce more choice, or ultimately lead to less? Would it lead to job creation, or to greater job losses, to job displacement? Would the chain support the local bakers, farmers and services that enable more money to cycle locally and give a local economy its robustness?

Here we have the essential argument of the transition town people - that businesses like Costa Coffee don't create jobs and use low cost suppliers from some place other than the 'local' economy (however defined). The idea of resilience - robustness in the quote above - is, for Rob and his pals, predicated on limiting choice through a model of local protectionism. And, of course, as with any form of protectionism, this model results in higher prices and less choice. For high income residents of these market towns such things are affordable but for the poor or unemployed the supposed resilience comes at a cost since they are less able to afford what is on display in the stores as a result of the transition town policies.

I'm not so sure that this argument is right. It rests on two beliefs - that the local multiplier is significant and that substantially more of the money spent in an independent retailer 'cycles locally' as Rob Hopkins puts it. Both of these arguments are open to challenge. Firstly the multiplier, while an important concept in economics, is challenged as a measure in local economics because of leakages and the difficulty of measurement.

There is, however, a more fundamental objection - this is that any benefits from more money staying locally are more than wiped out by the higher prices that results from excluding chain retailers. The New Economics Foundation multiplier model (LM3) doesn't take account of higher prices as it only measures spending downstream. And these higher prices represent an opportunity cost - the consumers' money isn't going into other local spending as they are having to pay those higher prices. A complete assessment would subtact this opportunity cost from the calculated benefits from the LM3 calculation.

The second objection is to the idea that substantially more money remains in the 'local economy' where it is dominated by independents. After cost-of-goods the biggest costs for a retailer are the premises and the employees. We can't assume that the rent is recycled, energy costs certainly leave the local economy as do any repayments on business loans, and there is a significant chunk of taxation (VAT and business rates in the UK). There's nothing to indicate that the employee in a Costa is less likely to spend locally but again most of that employee's costs - tax, rent, energy - leave the local economy.

Finally we need to challenge the idea that "the reweaving of local food webs, community-owned enterprises, a culture of entrepreneurship focused around community resilience" is somehow a stronger local economy than one which is linked with the wider national and international economy. When disaster strikes distributed and networked chains are better able to respond. Here's the example of Wal-Mart after Hurricane Katrina:

It is no accident that Wal-Mart had a strong, measured response in the aftermath of Katrina. Numerous local and state government and law enforcement officials credit the company with providing the first relief efforts in the devastated region, days before Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Red Cross relief operations began.

“Wal-Mart was a lifesaver here in the city of Kenner,” says Phil Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb. “They mobilized and brought food and water when others couldn’t or didn’t know how to get through. They provided anything we asked for when FEMA or no other federal or private organization did. And for that, we are deeply grateful.”

This large business with an international distribution network could respond - had there only been independents such a response simply wouldn't have occurred. And while coffee shops are less important in a disaster than grocery stores, this is a reminder that the approach to 'resilience' promoted by the Transition Towns movement is a false one - not only is it less able to respond to crisis but it is also predicated on higher prices and less choice.

There may be many reasons why Rob Hopkins and his friends don't want to drink in Costa Coffee (although beyond under-strength coffee and bad biscuits I can't think of one) but there is no reason for them to gang together so as to prevent people who might want to drink their coffee in big white cups on an off-centre saucer from doing just that. And suggesting that tourists wandering into Totnes will head to Costa rather than one of the delicious little independent cafes the town is so proud of says very little about those businesses' marketing and service offering (probably unjustifiably).

The 'clone towns' report was important and influential. But we have taken the wrong message away from it especially in a changing retail environment. Since 2005 we've had a massive recession tracked by the explosive growth of on-line buying. As the economy recovers it's unlikely that we will see a return to the sort of high street we saw before 2005. In some ways this is a good thing because we get to treat the town centre as a destination, as a place for events rather than as merely somewhere where we go shopping. But chain restaurants, bars and cafes are just as much part of the future mix as are a variety of creative independents.

Right now the only places that can sustain the sort of retail mix that Totnes is celebrating are either wealthy market towns, posh suburbs or places with a large visitor footfall (and the right sort of visitors). Most places are a very long way from being able to indulge in the slightly snobbish exclusivity that is implied by the Transition Towns idea - indeed many high streets and town centres are more challenged by what to do with a growing number of empty shops (not to mention proliferating betting and borrowing establishments).

Instead of the negative, Stop Costa, Stop Tesco, Stop Wetherspoons, approach places should look to the barriers to new initiatives - setting up bazaars and markets, encouraging busking and peddling, promoting street food and pop-up bars and using the public spaces as a stage for events that help attract people into the town. What we must stop doing is arguing that national businesses damage local economies when there is precious little evidence to make that claim.

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Friday 10 April 2015

Quote of the day - on road traffic accidents

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Not what we'd expect:

The twentieth century is not the only time in city evolution at which traffic accidents became a concern. Around the end of nineteenth century, when all in-city transportation was hoof and foot-dependent, accidents in cities were common.

In New York, for example, 200 persons died in accidents in the year 1900, which, when transposed, means a 75 percent higher per capita rate than today. In Chicago the rate per horse-drawn vehicle in 1916 would be almost seven times the per auto rate in 1997.

This is in an environment dominated by pedestrians where traffic speeds ranged between 3 and 9mph. Indeed (in the USA) the ratio between vehicle miles travelled (VMTs) and road traffic fatalities has declined consistently since the second world war.

Fascinating article.

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Thursday 9 April 2015

Why pubs (and publicans) matter




Many years ago I trained as an agent in the Old Bexley & Sidcup (member one Edward Heath) constituency. The full time agent, Tom Jolly, used to organise what he called 'opinion former' events - inviting certain groups to meet Heath, listen to him and have the opportunity to raise questions. There were three groups Tom focused on - doctors, vicars and publicans. This isn't a random or arbitrary selection but one driven by the belief that these three sets all speak to a lot of people and that their opinion is given more credence than that of others. The aim wasn't to have the doctors, vicars and publicans act as mouthpieces for policy but rather for them to say "Heath's OK, when I met him last week...".

Now it's true that there are a lot of pubs (although far fewer than there were before politicians started mucking around with the industry through beer orders, smoking bans and a mountainous duty on beer) and MPs can't spend all their time popping in for a pint but the figures above tell us that, for all the rhetoric about 'community pubs' some MPs aren't giving enough attention to these important businesses. Some are even falling out with them!

My ward - Bingley Rural - has 13 pubs (plus four Conservative clubs and a working man's club) and there are only three or four where I'm seen other than infrequently. But making the effort to visit is important - even if you don't have a drink. I know that Philip Davies, my teetotal MP, has visited pubs both privately to discuss their concerns and publicly to talk to regulars. Seeing pubs as a problem (all too common among some politicians not to mention the new puritans of the public health industry) is the wrong approach.

The pub industry provides lots of jobs - from highly skilled crafts through to casual bar and restaurant work - and in many places is at the forefront of improvement and regeneration. The 'craft beer revolution' has seen an explosion in both variety and quality resulting in a new generation of pubs and a different - more savour less volume - approach to drinking. Yet some MPs still rail against the 'concentration' of pubs, about 'drink fuelled' violence and on the 'chaos' in A&E departments because of the industry. They ignore the fact that 99% of drinkers go out, have a great night and go home without causing anybody any bother. And it is these people who the anti-pub brigade are attacking not the tiny minority who get into or cause trouble.

None of this is to say that pubs are never a problem but politicians - if that statistic is correct - need to change their attitude. Not by mouthing platitudes about "community pubs" but by talking to the industry about how lawmakers can help make it better, safer and more exciting that it is already.

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Wednesday 8 April 2015

You aren't disenfranchised because you live in a safe seat.

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It's a common line - you hear it all the time (especially from successful left wing sorts who've gone to live in the leafy suburbs): "my vote doesn't count because I live in a safe seat".

This is, of course, complete clap-trap. Of course your vote counts (and is counted). The problem is that your neighbours choose to vote a different way. And there are more of them than there are of you. So the candidate or party they prefer gets elected.

Bradford has 30 local council wards. And just eight of those wards have only elected councillors from one party (four Conservative, two Labour and two Liberal Democrat) since they were last redrawn in 2004. Going back further there are even fewer wards that have only ever elected councillors from a single party (Ilkley, Wharfedale/Rombalds, Tong, Bingley Rural). And yet I'm sure that many living in inner city Bradford believe that the proverbial donkey with a red rosette will always win.

So instead of moaning (here's a classic from a Lib Dem):

Confession time. I’m a political activist and I’m not currently registered to vote. I have dropped off thanks to individual voter registration and I haven’t sought to redress it.

This is something which I find reprehensible, yet I am lacking the motivation to correct it.

I live in Esher and Walton which since 1906 has only ever returned a conservative MP. The lowest majority was in the 1930s, it was 16%. Dominic Raab got 58% of the vote in 2010, a majority of around 18,000.

The rest of the post is essentially a personal attack on the MP in question but the 'activist' is complaining that there's no point in registering to vote because not only do the Tories always win but the MP doesn't see it as his personal mission to address all her political concerns.

Now while it is pretty soul-destroying at times to feel that the enemy has vastly more local fire power, democracy still matters and our vote matters. I know this because when the BNP got a thousand votes in Bingley Rural - without a great deal of effort - I wanted to understand what it was that was exercising the minds of my electorate. I didn't change my principles but I did think about how I talked and listened to my neighbours.

There's a debate to be had about electoral reform (but not too often or loudly because the voters aren't really that interested) but no-one in the UK is disenfranchised because their neighbours choose to vote a different way. And the opportunity exists - as Bradford's politics shows us - for people to break through that safe seat logic and persuade those neighbours to vote a different way. Indeed the City has two MPs who proved that to be just the case - David Ward and George Galloway.

There may be such a thing as a safe seat but no such seat, given effort and circumstance, is invulnerable. And no-one is disenfranchised.

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Tuesday 7 April 2015

Knowledge gives power (and don't ever forget it) - a comment on criticism of Michaela Community College

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Michaela Community School is one of those free schools so detested by those who prefer the conformity and straightjacket of a rigidly defined, state education system. Not for such left-wing folk is the idea that variety, difference and new ways of working are urgently needed if we are to transform our education system for the better. So the critics circle and seize on the tiniest levers to have a go at the school.

So it is with a blogger rather grandiosely called "Edsacredprofane" (his name is Peter Ford, or so the blog says). This man clutches at the motto of Michaela Community School to write a bewilderingly indulgent attack on the values of a school he has not visited and, I assume, relies on its website to frame his argument. And what an argument - littered with references to Foucault, to post-modernism and to Marx it twines itself around the schools motto to manufacture a critique of the school itself:

Of course we all have reason. The enlightenment gave us reason. The power of reason enables each individual to escape the circumstances of existence. Only to an extent. As Marx put it “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”. Knowledge is power became the byword for the enlightenment. Later thinkers such as Foucault and the post modernists challenged the theory that knowledge is power, or rather, they agreed that knowledge is power but it carried the power of those who seek to oppress us, keep us sub-servient.

Wow! This blogger then indulges in that slightly 'man of the people' shtick that some writers love - describing how he came upon these thoughts while watching a football match at some unspecified East Lancashire ground (he also seemed slightly hung up on making a point about how people in Burnley drink a lot of benedictine - which is interesting but somewhat irrelevant to the ethos of a London free school). And he makes another irrelevant point about how 'some of the poorest' wards can be seen from the stands of that football ground - I'm guessing it's Turf Moor.

So what is the motto that has so offended Ford? It's a simple one - "knowledge is power". It would appear that our blogger doesn't really believe that knowledge is power or rather he thinks that what Michaela Community School thinks is knowledge isn't actually knowledge. Or something like that - it's all very confusing. It seems that the school has observed that it's ethos is founded on the ideas of Ed Hirsch - ideas that are altogether too prescriptive for Ford.

We then get into a Marxist analysis of the Tower of Babel (seriously this is about the motto of a school):

It seems to me that the story is unravelled not by Hirsch or even by scriptural exegetics but by Marxists who would point out that “the tower” was not so much a human project but a structure in which there is a top and a bottom. In other words a hierarchical class structure. Was that God’s point? Was God a proto Marxist?

To be fair to Ford he backs off from this slightly lunatic use of biblical metaphor to return to his main argument (knowledge isn't power). At this point he drops the post-modernist Marxism and return to the enlightenment by misusing Descartes - the point the French thinker was making was that the fact we think about ourselves proves we exist not that thinking is more important than knowledge.

It does seem that the real debate here isn't actually about Michaela's motto but rather about the ideas of Ed Hirsch and in particular the 'common core' and 'cultural literacy' ideas he promoted. And the measure of these ideas' value isn't to be found in Foucault, Marx or even the bible but in the success or otherwise of the school. Indeed there is sufficient of a positive impact from Ed Hirsch's approach to suggest that we'd do better to consider it than dismiss it (especially when the dismissal is based on seemingly random thoughts at a football match).

Indeed I suspect parents - or the ones not steeped in half-baked philosophy - would rather like the idea that Hirsch promotes:

‘Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. Breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status. The positive correlation between academic ability and socioeconomic status is only half the correlation between academic ability and the possession of general information. That is to say, being ‘smart’ is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background. Imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the gap between demographic groups through schooling’.

We send our children to school so they learn stuff. And while part of the stuff they need to learn is how to ask questions and how to challenge, a great deal of it is passing across a bunch of accepted and established facts about the world - that often maligned 'book-learning'. And parents want their children to leave school with the power to succeed - informed, knowledgeable and excited by the challenges the world throws up. Parents might just get this from Michaela Community School but I fear for the children at a school run on the principles Ford propounds:

...the essence of education is not to accumulate knowledge as a “thing in itself” but to learn how to challenge it; build upon it progressively and avoid creating new power structures even where they seem to have progressive foundations.

This approach is the very content-free, voyage of discovery approach to education that might be great for a few very bright children but for most it's a recipe for not knowing enough to ask the questions - to make those challenges that Ford thinks are important.

To understand why knowledge gives children power, we should attend a public enquiry and watch as people are given privilege simply because they are 'experts', because they have knowledge that the lay person doesn't have. In the end Michaela Community College understands this and Ford, too wrapped up in his witty cleverness, doesn't. We should wish the school - regardless of its motto - well and hope that it delivers on its mission - for if it does it will be a great school:

We believe all pupils, whatever their background, have a right to access the best that has been said and thought. This includes a variety of writers, from all parts of the world, and thinkers from all the ages. The curriculum at Michaela Community School ensures that pupils are knowledgeable enough about the world around them to transform it in the future. 
 ...

Monday 6 April 2015

Nine out of ten teachers don't think energy drinks contribute to poor pupil performance

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I've never drunk a whole one of those energy drinks. I had a sip of a Red Bull once and can safely say 'never again' - it made Coca Cola (which I detest) seem appealing. But I understand that they're popular with a lot of people (popular enough for the leading brand to splash millions on racing cars), which has - as night follows day - led to calls for action. For the children of course:

Children are using energy drinks as “legal highs”, making them hyperactive in class, teachers have warned as they called for more restrictions on the drinks.

The NASUWT teaching union is working with the drug charity Swanswell to examine the consumption of drinks such as Red Bull, Monster and Relentless. 

We have here an example of 'teachers say' as justification for a ban or other form of control. The NASUWT research is a poll of teacher opinion not an assessment of fact (nothing wrong with this of course but it does result in 'teachers say' being put on the same footing as 'a properly constructed scientific study has found'). And the worst thing about the reporting is that the researched opinion of teachers is different from what the NASUWT and their 'drugs charity' partner are saying - 87% of teachers do not hold the opinion that children are using energy drinks as "legal highs".

A survey by the NASUWT of around 3,500 teachers found that 13 per cent thought that the excess consumption of caffeine was contributing to poor pupil performance.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why children perform badly at school but most teachers don't see Red Bull as one of them. 

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Sunday 5 April 2015

No English child, not even the very poorest, lives in "Victorian condidtions"

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The airwaves have been filled with that traditional Easter refrain of teacher trade unions moaning about their lot. And amongst this has been a 'report' (I can't find it on their website so no link) from the NASUWT about child poverty. From the media reports this work is a collection of anecdotes from NASUWT members - pretty useful given that these are men and women at the 'front line' who undoubtedly are seeing examples of neglect and poverty in the children they are teaching.

But comments like this are quite simply misleading:

"Children in 2015 should not be hungry and coming to school with no socks on and no coats - some children are living in Victorian conditions - in the inner cities," said one unnamed teacher.

Now I know the term 'Victorian conditions' is simply a hyperbolic description but we really should recognise that, even for the very poorest in our society, life is vastly better than it was for the poor of England's 19th Century cities. Here's American writer Jack London (yes, the same bloke who wrote 'Call of the Wild') on East End slums:

The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot. [9-10]

London reports in detail on the slums including such practices as renting 'part of a room' and the letting of beds to three tenants for eight hours apiece. And the chances for children in these places - certainly compared to the circumstances of the children described by NASUWT members - were a different order of deprivation:

They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, over-crowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined. (from Arthur Morrison's 'A Child of the Jago')

Yet we persist in trying to suggest that child poverty in England today is in someway comparable to these conditions, to playing an exaggerated sensationalist game of poverty pornography.

Child poverty in parts of Lancashire is as bad now as it was in Victorian times, a councillor claimed today.

Coun Brian Rollo, who represents Preston’s most deprived ward Ribbleton, said “shocking” figures of up to 38 per cent of youngsters living below the poverty line show Britain has hardly moved on from the end of the 19th century.

The reality - and we should remind ourselves of this every time we discuss relative poverty - is that the 'poverty line' described by Cllr Rollo describes a level of material comfort that hardly anyone in Victorian England enjoyed. It's not just the free education, free healthcare and benefits system but the triumph of 100 years investing, innovating and creating. Radios, televisions, cars, running hot and cold water, central heating systems, an abundance of cheap food (so abundant that plenty of folk want to make it more expensive) and cheap clothing.

This isn't to deny poverty - the lack of what we see as essentials remains a problem and a challenge - but it is to say that the conditions in which the very poorest children live are vastly better than the circumstances of children in Victorian England.