Sunday 28 June 2015

"The days of the traditional cigarette are numbered" - but only if we let vaping succeed

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The e-cig - vaping - is a game changer. Here's the the senior tobacco analyst at Euromonitor:

“Up until now there has been no direct competition for cigarettes in a meaningful sense, and nicotine replacement therapies were certainly not providing that,” said Mr MacGuill. “The days of the traditional cigarette are numbered – the only question is how long that process will take – and e-cigarettes have the potential to drastically shorten the shelf life of traditional tobacco products.”

See that statement - the end of the cigarette is coming and not because of traditional tobacco control and prohibition tactics but because someone's created an effective, safe and pleasant way to get a hit of nicotine.

And it's no surprise that those whose livelihoods depend on the cigarette - the public health industry, academics in assorted centres for tobacco research as such like, plus Big Tobacco itself - are bothered. Vaping has pushed aside the ineffective (and unpleasant - I speak from experience here) nicotine replacement products like gum, spray and patches.

Let's hope that those dumb politicians don't let the pharmaceutical industry and its lackeys - keen to protect their lucrative market - don't prevent vaping achieving what it promises: the death of the cigarette.
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At what point does smuggling negate the health gain from tobacco duty rises?





Until just a few years ago the words 'illegal tobacco' seldom, if ever appeared in the press and media. It's not that the smuggling of tobacco didn't take place (how many folk brought home from overseas a couple of hundred fags for Uncle George or Grandma) or even that there weren't sufficient examples to make police, trading standards and customs keen on sending out press releases when arrests were made.

Now is different. The 'illegal cigarettes' story is a mainstay of the local press (maybe only topped by cannabis factories and 'nuisance' motorcycles) and a regular item on the agenda of local councils:

During the past month, officers from trading standards gathered almost 100,000 cigarettes and 37kg of hand-rolling tobacco, worth more than £40,000, from retailers in operations that also targeted premises in Leeds, Kirklees and Wakefield.

The seizures included counterfeit, non-duty paid and incorrectly-labelled cigarettes and tobacco. Since April 2014, West Yorkshire Trading Standards has seized almost 700,000 cigarettes and 300kg of hand-rolling tobacco.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council officers have seized 14,000 counterfeit cigarettes and 5kg of hand-rolling tobacco in a joint operation with Staffordshire Police.

The operation focused on the sale of illicit tobacco at nine premises in Hanley, Tunstall and Cobridge.

A BRADFORD shopkeeper has been prosecuted for a second time for selling illegal cigarettes and counterfeit tobacco.

Hemen Ahmed Hussain, of Chislehurst Place, Little Horton, was given a 150-hour community order by magistrates for possessing 2,500 cigarettes and 3.2kg of hand-rolling tobacco with an intent to supply.

The goods were seized by officers from West Yorkshire Trading Standards (WYTS) following a visit to Baz's off-licence in Southfield Lane, Little Horton, in September last year.

A Salford couple have been jailed after smuggling 25 tonnes of fake tobacco in a fraud costing the taxpayer almost £4m.

Feng Gao and his partner Mingshu Yang shipped boxloads of illicit hand rolling tobacco into the country.

The criminal duo, of St Heliers Drive, Salford, concealed the illegal tobacco in false soles and shelves as they shipped shoes and furniture to the North West.

The reason for this explosion in illicit tobacco sales is pretty simple - in the UK up to 88% of the recommended retail price for cigarettes is tax. And this means that avoiding paying this duty is a very profitable business. A year or so ago the Daily Mirror published a list of Britain's top twenty tax dodgers - nine of this were wanted for smuggling cigarettes, a fact that tells us just how profitable the dodging of cigarette duty is these days. And with each price escalation the more attractive smuggling gets as a business proposition for the unscrupulous, corrupt and criminal.

As it stands (and it rather depends where you look for data - the tobacco companies have higher estimates than HMRC which has higher guesses than the tobacco control industry) smuggled tobacco represents somewhere between 10% and 20% of total UK consumption. I'm going to plump for the figures used by LACORS (Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services) who put the figure at 17%. And local government recognises that the smuggling problem is significant:

Increased smuggling leads to the wide availability of cheap cigarettes to the poorest people thereby maintaining high smoking rates among disadvantaged groups; and contributing significantly to widening health inequalities

The question here is whether the regulatory and enforcement agencies - police, trading standards, customs - are able to keep on top of a growing problem. And whether the duty escalator, for all its good intentions, is now having the unintended outcome of promoting criminality while, in effect, reducing the price of tobacco in our poorest communities. Moreover, the unregulated distribution of tobacco means that it sits in the same car boot or dingy flat as illegal drugs and counterfeit booze.

There has to come a point at which the gain from increasing the price is lost - it becomes so prohibitive that most people turn to illegal and smuggled product. And if this happens then the use of price as a tobacco control tool is broken. Indeed for deprived communities this is perhaps already the case meaning that, for the poorest smokers the high price is de facto a ban so they turn to illegal supply. And if the supply of illegal drugs is any sort of guide then the steady trickle of press releases from local agencies about illegal tobacco stands to become a flood as those agencies replace shouting about small victories while knowing that they are losing the battle against the smuggler and street distributor.

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Saturday 27 June 2015

Roads are much more important than railways - public investment should reflect this fact. It doesn't.

A bit of Britain's most important transport network
No matter how desperate the banana republic, the international airport is always a shimmering palace of perfume and croissants. It is only when you get out onto the dirt roads that you realise where you are.

The government seems determined to take the same approach to our own transport system: all the money gets sucked into vanity projects while transport used by the rest of us remains creaking.

And the biggest vanity project of all is Britain's rail network. The truth of the matter is that most of the public seldom if ever use a train - they are expensive compared to buses, inconvenient and crowded. But more to the point we prefer - and will continue preferring - to use the car. Just 2.4 million people - overwhelmingly in London - commute to work by train or tram. This is just over 9% of commuter journeys and compares to the two-thirds of journeys to work on the roads (by car, bus or motor cycle - adding in walking and cycling gets us to eight out of ten commuter journeys on the roads). Nearly half the population (45% in 2009/10) simply didn't use a train at all for any reason.

Yet whenever we talk about transport investment, we talk about trains. Billions is promised for new railways like HS2, for ever shinier stations, and for the polishing of existing (and admittedly creaky) networks. The need for rail investment is always hogging the headlines while the scandal that is our underinvestment in looking after the network of roads and pavements that carries 90% of journeys barely gets a mention. In 2012 the government invested £7.5 billion in the road network split roughly 50/50 between the strategic network and local roads. This compares to around £13 billion spent on railways (split between subsidising fares to the tune of £3.8 billion and the rail investment programme).

So Ross Clark is right, government in the UK is starving the everyday transport network - our roads - of funding while promising ever shinier new rail infrastructure (best part of £20 million on a new entrance into Leeds station being a fine example). Here in Bradford we need around £11 million a year to sustain our road network but are only spending about £6 million each year. With the result that the standard of the roads deteriorates year on year - the government responds by bunging one off funding for fixing potholes at councils when what is really needed is an adequate capital budget that would allow the proper maintenance of the road over a 25 year cycle.

The problem is that building grand railway schemes is popular with rail users. And rail users are mostly in London where the decision-making is done:

In 2009/10, 59 per cent of all rail journeys started or finished in London. The South East and the East of England were the regions with the next highest number of journeys but 65 per cent of journeys in the South East and 75 per cent in the East of England were to or from London.

And those train users - even in London - are more likely to be in their twenties or thirties and more likely to be in well-paid professional employment. The profile of rail users doesn't reflect the national demographic profile but the very different profile of London commuters (and higher income London commuters at that).

So we have a transport system that provides just 2% of journeys, costs the taxpayer over £13 billion a year, has incredibly low levels of customer satisfaction, is unreliable and still requires some other form of transport for people to complete their journey. How exactly is this the transport system of the 21st century? And why does it suck up so much of the attention (and investment) while the much more important road system isn't provided with the cash to even maintain it to a safe standard let alone improve it?
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People working in the voluntary sector still don't get 'Big Society'

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I’ve lost count of the number of government initiatives and funding regimes that I’ve seen during my time in the voluntary sector.

And that's it really. The reason why the idea of a 'Big Society' isn't understood by those who earn their living working in the voluntary sector. For them - and this is borne out by any conversation with any of them - it's all about 'government initiatives and funding regimes'. I know they'll talk the talk about citizen engagement and 'helping people to help themselves' but their daily effort is more often directed to those 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' (and to moaning about how they aren't big enough or specific enough or properly targeted).

'Big Society' isn't about those funding regimes. It's about real voluntary action, about people doing things because they love the place they live and want to make it a better place. Or people helping poor people because they think those people merit help. And the involvement ranges from baking a cake for a fundraisers right through to running - entirely voluntarily - big organisations. At no point is it about getting a wage, recovering expenses, let alone having a career. The voluntary sector professional simply cannot get his or her head around the idea that someone might just do it because they want to do it - without payment, without needing their 'professional' input.

Now these voluntary sector professionals (metaphorically sucking their teeth) will then - in that uniquely patronising manner of such folk - explain that all this is fine in a place like Cullingworth, filled as it is with all that lovely social capital. But out there in those deprived areas (so often celebrated by people - I still inwardly cringe remembering the former leader of Bradford Council who wallowed in "I represent one of the 100 most deprived wards in the country" as if this was a good thing) there isn't any of this social capital so those voluntary sector professionals have to go in there and help. Give the community a great big cuddly hug and tell them it will all be alright once the right 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' are identified.

'Big Society' isn't about programmes or grand schemes, it's not about offices filled with paid workers (although all of these can and do play their part). It's about the bloke who, instead of moaning to all and sundry about the trough that isn't planted up, blags some compost and a few bedding plants and does it himself. Or the woman who pops in to see if the old lady next door wants a lift into town to do some shopping. A thousand different, small and simple acts of caring make up the big society. Some of them end up growing into fantastic nationally-significant voluntary efforts but most remain as simple and easy acts of kindness done just because it's the right thing to do.

It's this initiative - the real voluntary sector - that makes up the 'Big Society' which is why those making a career out of those 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' are blind to the idea. If people did those simple things - had permission to care - then a lot of the stuff the 'voluntary sector' employs people to do wouldn't be needed. And, rather than paid professionals using volunteers we'd have volunteers making use of paid professionals.

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Thursday 25 June 2015

Quote of the day - from ASH on vaping and renormalising smoking

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This just about sums up the evidence on vaping and renormalising smoking - the biggest stick used to beat up on vapers:

"There are people in the public health community who are obsessed by e-cigarettes. This idea that it renormalizes smoking is absolute bullshit. There is no evidence so far that it is a gateway into smoking for young people."

And this quote isn't from a pro-vaping lobby group but from Deborah Arnott, Chief Executive of Action on Smoking and Health - ASH - the granddaddy of anti-smoking groups.

This fact hasn't stopped councils, hospitals, universities, pub chains and a host of other places from banning the use of e-cigs:

While the university recognizes that these may be useful aids to those wishing to give up smoking, it has taken the view that e-cigarettes could undermine the policy of banning smoking in the work place as it gives the impression of normalising smoking in the work place. (Head of health and safety in the human resources division at Manchester Metropolitan University, Chris Bolam)

The Trust has taken the decision to not include e-cigarettes as part of our approach to support abstaining. The decision has been taken as there is currently insufficient evidence about their impact on health or risks associated with their usage. (Guys & St Thomas Hospital)

We do not allow the use of electronic cigarettes either. They are difficult for you the Managers to police and it would be the Managers as well as the Brewery who would be fined if persons were caught smoking the real thing (Humprey Smith, Director, Sam Smiths Brewery)

I could continue with hundreds of other pathetic, mealy-mouthed excuses for banning e-cigs - organisations from Alton Towers and Weatherspoons through to the Association of Conservative Clubs and Starbucks have all taken the decision to stop you vaping on their premises. Mostly the excuses given are one (or more than one of the following):

1. The WHO (or BMA or some other bunch of fussbuckets) has said we 'don't know enough about the health risks'

2. It looks like smoking and someone might light up a real cigarette meaning we get fined for breaking the smoking ban

3. It looks like smoking which makes smoking look normal and we have children as customers

The comment from ASH's boss should give the lie to all of these excuses. What would be good would be for some of these public health sorts to start telling premises that they should allow vaping inside rather than hiding behind the supposedly blazing row in their profession.

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Tuesday 23 June 2015

Dominique Strauss-Kahn - the French Jimmy Savile

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The Spectator makes an entirely inaccurate comparison to the trial of Jeremy Thorpe (a man who was charged - and acquited - with trying to murder the man who blackmailed him over a homosexual affair) - the truth is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, urbane, charming, politically-connected and powerful is the French Jimmy Savile:

Back in Paris, a young female journalist accused him of attempted rape during a magazine interview. When this case too was dropped on the grounds of insufficient evidence, the pimping investigation began. A parallel charge of gang rape, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years, was withdrawn in 2012. But in preparation for the pimping trial, two examining magistrates spent four years transcribing hundreds of pages of text messages and emails. During the three-week trial, an extraordinary picture of DSK’s downtime emerged. Hours were passed in the company of a Belgian pimp called ‘Dodo la Saumure’, proprietor of ‘le Dodo Sex Klub’. Afternoons were spent arranging meetings on the Belgian frontier, or in Madrid, or in Washington, where expensive locations were hired and his friends including a Lille CID inspector flew in with what DSK called ‘the equipment’ (young prostitutes).

This is an unrepentant goat. Yet it seems French socialists rather fancy him as their presidential candidate. I guess we're supposed to respect Gallic worldliness but all I see is an entirely corrupt culture - sexist, exploitative and oppressive. For all our prurience and hypocrisy, I rather prefer our willingness to call out politicians for unpleasant sexual behaviour and especially the sort we see here - were I some sort of feminist, something of a celebration of 'rape culture'.

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Monday 22 June 2015

Three errors in Laudato Si' - and why it's ideas are bad for the poor

Goit Stock - a bit of that wonderful nature we love
All the pomp, power and might of the Catholic Church has been used to promote a social and economic agenda centred on an environmentalism that is sweetly bucolic and profoundly anti-development. I'm not qualified to comment on the theology in the latest Papal Enclyclical letter - Laudato Si' on "care for our common home"  - but it steps beyond that theology when it addresses matters of demonstrable fact. The Pope, and the Church he leads, promotes ideas are not in the interests of the poor nor especially helpful in addressing the challenges of a changing environment.

Before we look at three errors in Laudato Si', let's remember that, at the heart of the matter is the idea of 'climate change'. This is not - whatever its advocates want to tell us - settled science. There is enough challenge to the basic 'greenhouse' argument of climate change's causes to merit scepticism. And there is sufficient inconsistency in the empirical record for doubt to be a valid response to the doomladen predictions of some who believe in both climate change itself and also in the idea that man's actions are causing that climate change. These statements aren't a 'denial' of climate change but rather an honest reflection on the debate as seen by one curious layman. We should recall, moreover, that the Catholic Church is not (and would not claim to be) a scientific institution so, in the matter of climate science and environmentalism, is no better qualified to express opinion than I am. Nevertheless, the jury is out on climate change and there remains a very strong case, given this, for preparedness in the face of its possible effects.

My concern doesn't lie, therefore, with the Catholic Church's diagnosis (although I might take issue with some of this) but rather with the consequences of the anti-growth programmes that are more-or-less explicitly endorsed in Laudato Si'.

Pope Francis begins his Encyclical with St Francis of Assisi:

He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast. He loved, and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, his openheartedness. He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.

Anyone brought up in the Catholic tradition will know of St Francis's love for the natural world, his rejection of earthly wealth in favour of simplicity and his concern for the poor. So this Saint perhaps represents the ideal patron for an encyclical about the natural world - 'our common home' as the Pope describes it. The idea of stewardship - this is the only world we've got let's not ruin it for our children - flows beautifully from St Francis's preaching to the birds and flowers.

The problem I have is that the Pope, for all his unquestioned concern for the poor and excluded, fails to see that his environmentalism is largely against the interests of those poor people in that it wants to reduce growth in the world's economy so as to better preserve the resources of the Earth. In the developed world there might be a case for less growth (and this is exactly what we have today, largely accompanied by cries about 'austerity') but the idea that less growth is in the interest of the poor - whether in Buenos Aires' slums or the Sahel's isolated farms - is quite simply wrong.

Let us look at three of the Pope's errors in this regard:

Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths. People take sick, for example, from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating.

The error here isn't in the concern about pollution or even that this pollution disproportionately affects the world's poor but rather in the assumption that a developed economy is more polluting that a less developed economy. Using the example of fuel for cooking and heating we can observe that most of us living in developed economies do not breathe in choking, carcinogenic fumes every day from the simple process of feeding and warming ourselves (other than from a barbeque in the garden). This is not true in the poorer parts of the world contributing to over a million deaths a year from respiratory diseases. Even worse the use of 'biomass' for fuel is not very sustainable - something the Pope recognises when talking about paper:

We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them.

And - for Europe and the USA at least - the Pope is wrong about paper recycling since over 70% of paper in Europe is recycled and around two-thirds in the USA. Perhaps we could do still better but we should also remember that:

Paper is made from a natural renewable resource, wood, which has the capacity to be produced in an endless cycle. To safeguard this cycle, our forests have to be managed and harvested in a sustainable manner.

The European paper industry, whilst producing approximately 30% of the world's paper, is a responsible guardian of European forests, 33% more new trees grow in Europe than are harvested each year. According to the UN FAO, forest cover in Europe has increased by 30% since 1950. The 6,450 km² annual increase of European forest cover corresponds to a daily increase the size of 4,363 football pitches.

Deforestation is not about paper but rather about either the gathering of biomass for fuel, the clearing of land for agriculture or the replacement of forest diversity with non-food monoculture. For the first of these switching to cleaner fuels (and almost every other fuel is cleaner than burning wood on a fire) represents the right solution and the others require governments to change their attitude to unsustainable subsistence farming methods and the use of productive land to grow biofuels rather than food.

The Pope's next target is water:

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity.

Here we see the first example in Laudato Si' of the Pope's anti-market message - a message that rather condemns to poor to poverty rather than offering them a route from out of that poverty. As you drive up the M1 from Nottingham to Sheffield you pass Severn Trent Water's treatment plant at Church Wilne attached to which are large signs proclaiming "30 glasses for less than 1p" - this is the reality of a market-led and privatised water system: clean, fresh water delivered by pipe to a tap in your kitchen at less than a penny a gallon. Even better, that penny-a-gallon includes collecting all the waste water, cleaning it up and recycling it!

The contrast - in places where water is either owned in common or owned by the state -  is like this:

Every day millions of people in Africa, usually women and girls, walk miles to have access to any water at all. The length of time it takes to collect the little water they can get means that they do not have time to do anything else during the day. Children do not get the chance to have an education simply because they are too busy collecting water.

To make matters worse, the only water they have access to is from streams and ponds. That water is usually full of diseases and makes themselves and their families very sick. Adults face the decision on a daily basis between dehydration and sickness from the water they drink. Even worse, they have to face this decision for their children.

We give money so charities can install wells with a safe supply, drill boreholes and improve sanitation in urban slums. But the long term solution is the same solution we had in the UK - having the resources to build the systems that deliver water to homes, build treatment systems and ensure quality. This came about because of foresight in investment (often by local authorities) and the ability of people to pay for that water supply. It may be a 'universal human right' to have water but it's a right that's better served in the capitalist world where businesses charge us for supplying clean water than in places where such businesses don't exist.

After pollution and water, the Pope promotes his third error when he speaks of cities:

Nowadays, for example, we are conscious of the disproportionate and unruly growth of many cities, which have become unhealthy to live in, not only because of pollution caused by toxic emissions but also as a result of urban chaos, poor transportation, and visual pollution and noise. Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. Neighbourhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

We see in this observation the understandable reaction to the unsanitary, chaotic, mish-mash that is the developing world slum - self-built shacks precariously perched on hillsides, mud and waste mixed together in the tiny passages between the rows of these shacks, and thousands of people crammed into the tiniest of spaces looking out onto the shinier, cleaner and richer parts of that city. It is a painful sight to anyone who cares for the poor.

Yet people have chosen that life over another life - they have crammed themselves into these places because they think it will be better than the subsistence farm up-country where they were brought up. And cities - by virtue of their very concentration - use fewer resources than dispersed agricultural communities:

For many nations, rapid urban change over the last 50 years is associated with the achievement of independence and the removal of colonial controls on people's right to move in response to changing economic opportunities. The concentration of population in urban areas greatly reduces the unit costs of providing good quality water supplies and good quality provision for sanitation, health care, schools and other services. It also provides more possibilities for their full involvement in government. And, perhaps surprisingly, urban areas can also provide many environmental advantages including less resource use, less waste and lower levels of greenhouse gases.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the spread of disease, the safety of buildings, the exploitation of children and the provision of education but it does mean the Pope is wrong to suggest that the urbanisation of the past two centuries "has not always led to an integral development and an improvement in the quality of life". Leaving aside the sort of rejectionist bucolic dream of Thoreau (and generations of hippies since), there is no aspect of life's quality that isn't better today for the mass of humanity than was the case at almost any point in the past two centuries. And for all that wealthy westerners now dream of a rural idyll (albeit with every mod con from running water and sewage through gas and electricity to the now essential broadband) the truth is that the city, despite its crowding and chaos, is an essential element in allowing that better life.

Others (better qualified than I am) will have noted that the Pope's anti-consumption, anti-markets, anti-capitalist message - for all its compatibility with a man who took St Francis of Assisi as his guide - really does the poor no favours. We know (but need reminding time and time again) that the impact of neoliberal ideas on the world has seen the fastest decline in poverty in mankind's history - far from capitalism (for all its sins) being the problem, it is a great deal of the solution.

As so often with these grand proposals, a detailed analysis reveals them to lack the foundations needed to deliver - they are, as the parable goes, built on sand. The Pope, in setting out his Church's 'social teaching', has made too many errors of fact.

It is welcome - it is always welcome - that people, whether religious leaders or not, step back and remind us of our duty to the poorest in our world. And it is right too that we are reminded about the need to conserve and preserve the only planet we've got. But it is not right to so conflate these two concerns that the result is a 'social teaching' that neither serves the interests of the poor nor addresses the imperative of environmental stewardship. The poor stay in poverty, trapped in a back-breaking, hand-to-mouth existence that both fails them and destroys the planet's resources, while the poor old planet gets an endless round of international meetings combined with an almost childish rejection of the very market mechanisms that can both 'save the planet' and also lift the poor from out of that poverty the pope so rightly condemns.



I don't doubt that Pope Francis cares deeply for the poor but I'm afraid he is another victim of sentiment's triumph over evidence. It seems wrong that some have great wealth while other starve and it suits the sentimentalist narrative for that ownership of wealth to somehow be the cause of others' poverty. But it ain't so and it would be more exciting if, instead of simply hugging the poor, Pope Francis had sent the world the message that neoliberalism, market capitalism, property rights and freedom are the central elements in both eliminating poverty and saving the planet.

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Wednesday 10 June 2015

Public health campaigners must want smokers to die



You've all seen the news reports about the Welsh government's proposed ban on using e-cigs in enclosed public places - the same places where smoking is banned. This proposal is another small piece in the seemingly relentless barrage of misleading - downright lies in many cases - misleading messages from people who claim concern about public health. On the Welsh ban, Chris Snowdon sums it all up:
The last few years have seen an extraordinarily dishonest campaign of misinformation against e-cigarettes that is as bad as anything I have seen from the ‘public health’ lobby. There has been a concerted effort to portray e-cigarettes as a ‘gateway’ to tobacco, despite all the evidence showing that they are a gateway from tobacco. They have been accused of ‘renormalising’ smoking without a scintilla of evidence. Misleading research has led to numerous unfounded scare stories in the press. Newspaper columnists have written ridiculous articles without doing the most basic fact-checking. Senior medics have explicitly told the public that e-cigarettes are no safer than real cigarettes. At the same time, ordinary vapers who never had any intention of becoming campaigners – and, indeed, are not campaigners – have been accused of being shills for e-cigarette and/or tobacco companies for doing no more than trying to put the record straight.

I have seen this attitude live - Bradford Council enacted a ban on new fast food takeaways close to schools despite there being no evidence to support their proposed ban and despite the Director of Public Health telling the Executive that the proposals would not make any difference. And I have seen other organisations - from the Association of Conservative Clubs and Wetherspoons through to just about every transport provider - using the British Medical Association's anti-vaping position as justification for their own ban.

These organisations - many of them funded by the producers of pharmaceutical nicotine - have set about denormalising vaping, telling people who quit smoking or cut down smoking through using e-cigs that they are just as bad as the smokers and must stand outside in the rain, wind and traffic pollution. Quit or die is the message - and this means that die is the choice made, for all sorts of reasons, by the smoker.

“This is not an area in which you should wait for proof that harm has conclusively happened. We need to take action now to prevent the possibility of harm.”

Read that statement from the Welsh health minister. Read it again - he's saying that he wants the ban because there might be the possibility of harm. The possibility of harm from water vapour. This isn't a public health argument, it's a "we hate you because you're a smoker" argument. Just as the passing of rules to ban fast food is the result of a squeamish "eurggh, all that greasy, smelly food that common people eat" attitude. Plus the argument for 'minimum unit pricing' for booze - "we won't pay extra for our nice New Zealand sauvignon blanc but that smelly man in the Tesco Express will pay more for his disgusting cheap cider."

Today's public health campaigns aren't about health, they're about values. The imposition of a New Puritan attitude to pleasure - an attitude wrapped up in fake science about dopamine and addiction - where only approved pleasures are allowed. And the assertion that everything in our lives must have a purpose, no longer the glorification of god but rather the search for eternal life here on earth. The option of choosing a pleasure now knowing it may have a health consequence is not to be allowed. Above all the loud, brash, public consumption of pleasure - especially the booze, fags and burgers regular folk like to consume - is to be discouraged if not actually banned.

Vaping is a harmless pastime. Better still it's getting people to stop smoking or cut down smoking. But public health folk don't like vaping because it's not promoted by smart men from a pharma company but by a bloke with tattoos and a beer gut in a cheap shop on Yorkshire Street in Oldham.These public health people are commissioning 'smoking cessation' activities, holding meetings to discuss anti-smoking strategies - and pretending that e-cigs don't exist or worse that they're the latest evil plot from Big Tobacco.

When I started to look at public health, I believed that it was a force for good and that the people could be persuaded by evidence and the realities of life for people (especially people in our poorest communities). Sadly I've not seen this but rather an ideological commitment to undermining the freely made choices people make simply because they might be "unhealthy". And the attack on vaping encapsulates the problem - there is no evidence, no justification for the ban but they proceed with it because they disapprove of vaping.

I can only conclude, as many others have done, that public health campaigners must want smokers to die.
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Tuesday 9 June 2015

"Bloody foreigners" is a lousy case for leaving the EU - I fear this will be the core of the 'out' campaign


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European immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2000 have contributed more than £20bn to UK public finances between 2001 and 2011. Moreover, they have endowed the country with productive human capital that would have cost the UK £6.8bn in spending on education.

Over the period from 2001 to 2011, European immigrants from the EU-15 countries contributed 64% more in taxes than they received in benefits. Immigrants from the Central and East European ‘accession’ countries (the ‘A10’) contributed 12% more than they received.

There are very good reasons for leaving the European Union. And, right now, that is how I expect to vote come the referendum. This doesn't mean my mind is closed on the matter but rather that any renegotiation has to produce some really big changes for me to vote any other way. But in saying this I want to be pretty clear that my reasons for opposing the EU are not about 'sovereignty', 'nationhood', 'British values' or any of the usual tosh we see rolled out by some opponents. Nor is my opposition based on the fact that lots of great, hard-working people have come to make their home in Britain.

My opposition to the EU is for the following reasons - it makes us poorer, it is unaccountable, it restricts my liberty, and it prevent Britain from having any real influence over trade or international business. I'd also add that - as we see with Greece - the EU is undemocratic and authoritarian caring little about anything except the stability of its polity and certainly nothing for the ordinary citizen.

The EU is a protectionist ramp, something that only serves the interests of a limited number of producers rather than the mass of the population. Yet we line up enthusiastically behind its protectionism - cheering as Cornish Pasties are protected and nodding sagely at the continuation of subsidies for unsustainable upland farming. Here's an example from Tate & Lyle:

Tate & Lyle Sugars said its production has fallen from 1.1m tonnes of sugar to about 600,000 since 2009. The company said the slump began when the EU began scaling back its market regulation of beet sugar rather than the cane sugar that the firm imports.

“If we carry on down this route it puts our business and the jobs here under real threat,” said Gerald Mason, head of T&L Sugars in the UK. “We see the Government’s renegotiation as the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the last chance if you like, to keep what’s left.”

He said EU regulations are the “single biggest impact on our business”. The EU is unleashing Europe’s beet farmers in 2017 by removing a production cap, in a move that is expected to push down prices 15pc by 2020. Farmers will be subsidised to counteract this drop, while cane sugar imports continue to face tariffs of up to €339 (£246) per tonne.

We the taxpayers of Europe are paying more for our sugar than we need to do because more efficient sugar producers in places like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have a huge tariff slapped on their product so as to ensure that beet farmers in Europe are protected. Worse still us taxpayers then subsidise those beet farmers because they are making less money now the EU lets them produce more. We get taxed for the privilege of having more expensive food.

Every UK government since 1979 has promised to 'reform' the Common Agricultural Policy. And loads of tinkering with the policy has taken place since - quotas replace tariffs, one subsidy replaces another subsidy, and some farmers get paid regardless of whether they actually do any farming. And, I guess, it's not a huge deal for most of us most of the time.

But think for a second about those polices. Add to this the policy of distributing agricultural surplus in the form of food 'aid'. Plus anti-dumping rules that mean cheaper solar panels are excluded (what sort of contribution to saving the planet is this). And the negotiation of bilateral agreements that are designed to serve those protected industries at the cost of economic development in Africa and Asia. Not only does the EU make Europeans poorer but it also makes Africans and Indians poorer too (and, as an aside, more likely to take huge risks coming here on leaky boats).

Half of what the EU does is about maintaining this protection - it is the central purpose for much of its bureaucracy and the primary purpose of most lobbyists in Brussels and Strasbourg. The other half of the EU is doing what it calls "harmonisation" - making sure that our rules don't give any advantage to home producers within the single market. And the trend has always been for that harmonisation to be upwards - adding regulations in places where there are none rather than reducing regulations where there are too many.

Finally there are some very bad reasons for leaving the EU. I will repeat again that my opposition to the EU is not about migration. Indeed, if anything about the EU is worthy of celebration then it is the fact that I can go and ply my trade anywhere across 27 countries without daft restrictions and constraints (unless of course I'm a ski instructor wanting to work in France). As can people from right across the continent - including a load who come here and contribute to the success of our economy.

What worries me is that, rather than making the very strong case that Britain will be richer and happier outside the EU, we'll end up with a load of scaremongering about foreigners coming here or foreigners buying up our businesses, or foreigners making our laws, or foreigners over-ruling our courts. Were that the only argument for leaving the EU I would be voting to stay in. It isn't so I'll most likely vote to leave.

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Monday 8 June 2015

Journalists and maths - things that don't really mix. The case of the boozy MPs.






It's from the Sun so all the gory details (doubtless given the source more of the former than the latter) are behind Rupert's paywall. However the point is this:

BOOZY MPs have sparked a fierce backlash from campaigners by splashing out £11,000 in just one week in Parliament’s bars.

Terrible. All these MPs clogging up bars, sloshing back copious quantities of booze while they should be running the country (or something like that). The problem here is shown by some basic maths. There are 650 MPs which means that, to spend £11,000 in a week, the average MP spent £16.92 - just £2.42 per day. A bear in mind that there are a load of other folk who can buy beer in the House of Commons. So MPs are drinking less than a pint of beer on average (the price list is here - the cheapest beer is £2.70 for a pint) and people are having a go at them?

The 'campaigners' in question appear to be folk working for Alcohol Concern - or so it seems. Quoted in the Daily Express, Jackie Ballard (a former Liberal Democrat MP and professional nannying fussbucket) the boss of Alcohol Concern showcased another lie to make a lame point:

Jackie Ballard, head of Alcohol Concern, said: "At a time when alcohol is causing grief to individuals and costing our society £21billion a year, Parliament should be leading by example."

Seems to me that Parliament is absolutely setting an example - the level of consumption is well within the guidelines of the health fanatics and reveals that, far from being a bunch of drunks, MPs are avoiding boozing on the job. The idea that spending an average of £6.62 on the first day back represents partying "hard into night following election gains" seems to be stretching the point given that this won't even buy half a bottle of the House's house sauvignon.

This is just another example of prohibitionist campaigners taking advantage of the seeming inability of journalists to grasp simple maths. With the result that we get shock horror headlines over takings that would represent a pretty lousy night for a typical city centre boozer.

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If you don't want your view spoiling, buy the view....

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NIMBYs are fine if they're like Canadian philanthropist, Jim Hill:

Philanthropist Jim Hill is very proud of the Inglewood art gallery he founded in 2012.

So much so, that when a proposed development threatened the view from the gallery’s showpiece west-facing window, he bought the lot — and cancelled the development completely.

Which is the whole point. If you want to keep that view, you have to own that view. Otherwise someone can (and probably will) block it.

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Sunday 7 June 2015

Quote of the day - on high rise living

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In corporate centres and in central neighbourhoods for the rich and (largely) childless some great places can have, can even be defined by a profusion of Brobdingnagian scale and monumentality. But outside corporate centres, away from the nodes of wealth and high social capital we would have less confidence than them about making this equation balance. Most people, in most societies, most of the time would prefer to live in more modestly sized buildings and nearer the ground.


The rest of the article is pretty brilliant too.

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Breaking the bureaucrats' rules - a thought on urban regeneration

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The always interesting John Sanphillippo, writes in New Geography about the sale of plots on Hawaii's lava flows:

Soon after the lava cools a new kind of pioneer species arrives to colonize the rocks. Before the lava flow the land had already been carved up into farms and subdivisions which were covered over. Once the lava cooled the old lots were resurveyed and sold off at bargain prices. Lots began at $1,000. When I asked one resident about the precarious nature of the location he explained, “You pay your dollar and you take your chances.”

Sanphillippo goes on to describe how these pioneers build homes on the lava despite there being no roads, no connection to standard utilities and the ever present risk of another lava flow destroying those homes.

There’s no city water supply. No complex sewer system was installed ahead of development. There are no paved roads. No banks have financed any of these buildings. No insurance company provided coverage. There are no building codes, zoning regulations, or government inspections.

What we have is a perfect illustration of how settlement starts. The world's great cities - Rome, London, Athens, Tokyo and so on - didn't start with pre-installed services into which developers and city managers can, in the manner of Sim City, plus homes and businesses. And we know that this colonising of unused space is a feature of urbanisation the world over - we call them slums, shanty towns, favelas and a thousand other terms. We turn our nose up at them and see them as places of crime, ill-heath and poverty not as nascent places for tomorrow's growth.

Sanphillippo asks whether there's a lesson in this Hawaiian recolonisation for urban regeneration, perhaps a different route to reusing redundant land that the planned, designed, regulated and sanitised approach our city leaders prefer. Maybe instead of commissioning masterplans and procuring development agreements for brownfield land in our cities, we should parcel it up into lots and turn a blind eye to what people build on that land. Some of it would be ugly and utilitarian, little more than a place to park a caravan or a hacked about shipping container but from out of this approach might come some creativity and a real community response to the provision of homes for people who want to live and work in the city.

As Sanphillippo concludes:

These lava homes provide a glimpse into what town building used to look like and could look like again if the banks, regulators, and Upright Citizens Brigade cut people a bit more slack. I’m not counting on that, but it’s good to see obscure demonstrations of the historical pattern playing out in forgotten corners to remind us of how things were done before the days of the production home builder, the master planned community, and the seventeen volume building code.

I don't hold out much hope of this sort of thing happening but it would be great if, for once, we allowed people to just get on with it rather than make them jump through ever higher and ever more costly hoops to do any development at all.

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Thursday 4 June 2015

Does the Psychoactive Substances Bill give drug makers the wrong incentive?

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Today's news included a report on how much cocaine was identified in London's sewers:

Experts said the UK capital was slightly ahead of Amsterdam, with the EU’s drug agency putting the average daily concentration of cocaine in London’s waste water at 737mg per 1,000 people in 2014.

This was the highest level found in an analysis of more than 50 cities. However, the capital fell behind Amsterdam when taking into account weekend samples only.

I'm guessing that this is an indication of just how much cocaine - a Class A illegal drug - is consumed in the capital. Fuelling a huge and powerful criminal enterprise that sees corruption, torture and murder as legitimate tools of business.

This revelation that, despite over 100 years of illegality, cocaine use remains pretty common in our capital city should worry us. Not because the war on drugs is being lost but because the government proposes to ramp up that war with its Psychoactive Substances Bill - a blanket ban on the sale of any substances with reason of giving psychoactive pleasure.

I'm not here making a judgement about the ethics of drug use or drug control but rather a practical observation that the winners in this new clampdown won't be the kids who use drugs (they'll be using less safe and more expensive drugs now) but the criminals who supply those drugs. Nor am I suggesting that further liberalisation of existing drug restrictions is a good idea.

However, if people are going to take psychoactive substances (and they are) then surely we want a policy that keeps the harm those substances do to a minimum? So, given that the 'legal highs' everyone is so agitated about are the products of chemistry rather than horticulture, wouldn't a better bill be one that allows the production and sale of psychoactive substances so long as the risk of use in minimised - perhaps subject to approval similar to regular pharmaceuticals? Such a strategy would mean people partying would face fewer risks and suppliers - those chemists - would have an incentive to produce safer products than the market supplies right now.

The puritans out there might not approve - but then their objection is moral not medical, an objection to chemically-induced pleasure rather than a concern for the health of users - but a policy that encouraged safer supply would probably save more lives that all the bans and restrictions currently advocated by public agencies and politicians who read the Daily Mail and Guardian too much.

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Quote of the day - on equalities departments

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In an otherwise pretty standard fare article about inequalities lies this observation about Birmingham's Race Equality Unit. And bear in mind this is an article telling us the we're just as unequal as we used to be:

For example, in 1984 Birmingham City Council set up a Race Equality Unit with the aim of addressing institutional racism and improving access to council services. By 1989 the Unit had 31 staff, including race relations advisers in housing, education, and social services. The Unit’s annual report for that year shows its activities included training, monitoring uptake of services, helping different departments devise race equality schemes, improving access to services (mainly by translating information), and organising outreach events. If you were to include something about community development (helping local community groups to support disadvantaged people) these activities would all be part of the Standard Six – the half a dozen key actions that have dominated equality strategies and policies over the decades.

Put simply we've spent over thirty years mithering on about race equality and levels of black unemployment in Birmingham remain three times higher that the City's overall unemployment rate. All that investment - much of it spent on 'monitoring', on counting minorities - hasn't achieved very much at all. Except provide a well-paid employment for all those equalities monitors, trainers and strategists.

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Wednesday 3 June 2015

Brotherhood. A political story.





So you arrive in a foreign country. A 'welcome to some but not to others' arrival. You've a few words of the language remembered from the smattering of English lessons you received in your all too brief elementary education. And you've a job. A dirty, unpleasant, poorly paid and anti-social job. But a job nonetheless and a better one than you'd have had back in dusty, crowded and poverty-ridden Mirpur.

The factory helps find you a place to live and you move in - sharing the drafty, unheated and damp terraced house with a dozen other workers. All men and all recently arrived from places not so far from where you came from. You miss your wife and the two little kids but keep telling them (when you can afford to send a letter or make an incredibly expensive phone call) that it's great, that England's a good place and will provide a better life for all the family. You don't mention the hacking cough from the factory, the routine racial abuse and that the food is awful. Back home they have to believe you made the right decision.

After a year or two, you find you're helping other new arrivals - men coming from your home village - to settle in. Showing them the ropes, how Bradford works, where to shop and where to get somewhere to live that doesn't rip you off. In the factory, you help those men get adjusted, protecting them from the worst that the supervisors throw at all the immigrant workers. So when they've got the routine down all the men can, with their heads down, get on with the work.

One day the big, loud man who's something to do with the Union (the Union you were told to join by one of the white day shift workers) came into the canteen. "Hey, Mohammed, can I have a word?" the man shouts. And you have that word - he wants you to be a shop steward, to "represent your lot - you speak the language and we need you on board."

So you become a union man, you sit on the works committee, and you do what you're asked - representing the concerns of the men from Mirpur working the night shift. Not long after you - along with a lot of others - decide to bring the family over. There's a terrace to rent and you can set up - get some decent home cooking rather than the cafe food you've been eating for the past few years. The family arrives and joins the growing community - a community with a mosque, a little restaurant and the shop selling vegetables, spices and such that Imran Akhtar opened.

You've not paid much attention to politics and elections. They came and went - posters, leaflets and the loud union man sounding off about "f*****g Tories". It didn't mean much to you but you knew the union guys were angry because those Tories were running the Council and "they don't care about working men like you, Mohammed". But then, one day, the loud union man came to see you and brought another man, a man in a suit.

"Mohammed," the union man says, "your community are important to us now." It seems that, with the influx of workers, the arrival of families and the growing up of children, the Mirpuri people now had enough votes to make a difference. And the bloke in the suit - he was from the Labour Party - wants you to stand for election as a councillor. And because you want to represent the men and women in your growing community, you agree. It's not an ideological decision, you're not a socialist, but the Labour Party asked and why not?

To get elected you concentrate on your family, on the network of friends and connections from back home - the biraderi, a brotherhood, as some call it. You know that the heads of families can make sure their wives, sons, daughters, nephews and nieces vote for you - you've helped them out, now it's time for them to return the favour.

You get elected. And soon are joined by other Mirpuri councillors - all Labour - who've done the same. Different networks, different families, different biraderi but the same process and the same reason for being involved.

This story - a story repeated by every immigrant group in one way or another - is the story of how family, clan, caste and a network of historic links help determine elections in Bradford. Some want to cast those biraderi in a bad light - just as, in another time and place, the same was said about the South London 'Irish mafia', about Catholic Priests telling congregations who to vote for and about the link between the Town Hall and a certain sort of businessman. There will come a time when those links stop mattering quite so much, when elections will become more 'normal', and when it won't be a dreadful thing if a son or daughter goes against fathers and uncles in the way they vote.

But in the meantime those biraderi matter. And because they matter we should respect them, where they came from and why they are important in our politics. Ideologues might cringe at people voting for someone because they're family, friend, caste or clan but is that really a worse reason for political choice? Some would say it's more honest, honourable and gets a better politician. Whatever the right or wrong in this though, it remains a fact of immigrant life - and will be so for those new immigrant groups, Poles, Somalis, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds. They will all have their 'community leaders' because these people are essential to the integration and inclusion of their community into the life of our nation- and politics, for all its faults, is part of our nation!

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Monday 1 June 2015

Simon Stevens should be sacked as head of the NHS.

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Simon Stevens is the man in charge of the NHS and, as such he has a duty to present information to the public in a dispassionate and honest way. He has failed in this responsibility:

Parents are "poisoning" their children by giving them too much sugary food and drink and must give them water, milk and fruit instead, the head of the NHS has warned.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, said that parents must take "responsibility" or put their children at risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

He said that obesity is the "new smoking" and urged food manufacturers and supermarkets to do more to take sugar out of the food and drink they sell.

This particular polemic contains a whole set of factual errors, exaggerations and misleading statements. These include:

  • Implying that sugar is a poison. This is simply untrue (except in so far as a large enough quantity of anything is poisonous), sugars are essential to life because they are the simple compounds our cells use to provide energy.
  • Suggesting that there is a difference between different sugars - milk and fruit contain plenty of sugars (lactose and fructose) that serve exactly the same function as the sucrose in a fizzy drink
  • Saying that there is some connection between the consumption of sugar and increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. There's a connnection between morbid obesity and these conditions but that isn't caused by sugar but by us consuming too many calories for our needs - this could be sugar but is as likely to be complex carbohydrates from bread, pizza and cake.
  • Indicating that there is a link between sugar and increased rates of obesity when total sugar consumption (that is consumption of all 'non-milk extrinsic sugars') has fallen in the UK not risen
  • Repeating the line that rates of obesity are rising when they are, at worst, stable and may be falling. And failing to make clear that it is our increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is mostly responsible for the obesity problem.

So not only does Simon Stevens give bad advice (suggesting slices of apple are sugar-free) but he compounds this by repeating a series of incorrect, unevidenced and dangerous statements about diet. Plus of course scaring the wits out of perfectly good parents who just want to give their children a sweet treat now and then.

Stevens should be sacked.

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