Friday 31 July 2015

The lesson we should take from Calais - prohibition doesn't work

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We have banned them from entering the country. We have built walls and fences. We have deployed cameras. And armed police abound. Yet still they come:

Around 4,000 people have stormed fences and desperately tried to clamber on trains bound for Kent in the past three days - a deadly gamble that has allowed at least 150 to get to Britain but also claimed the lives of nine people.

Migrants have said that watching their friends die will not stop them trying to get to the UK with one saying: 'It's England or death'.

We can make all sorts of assumptions about the situation, about why these (mostly) men are swarming around the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, clambering onto and into trucks, and taking the most extreme risks to get to England. What is abundantly clear is that building fences, throwing up walls and arming the cops is not enough to keep them out. Let's also get straight that sending in troops won't keep them out either.

It won't win me any friends saying this but so long as our strategy for preventing refugees and migrants from entering the UK is a barrier - our contribution to managing the wider problem of the world's population displacement - we will see repeated examples of what's going on in and around Calais. Just as we know from booze and drugs, prohibition is ineffective and difficult to enforce.

Let's assume for a minute that all the migrants wanting to come to the UK are going to ask for asylum when they arrive. Do we not have a process for determining whether a claim for asylum is genuine? Complete with an appeal system, special courts and hostels? Wouldn't it be better to use that, now pretty well tested, approach to managing the process? After all we know it's working:

The man is the first individual confirmed to have been repatriated through a new removals programme that seeks to take advantage of recent legal judgments and changes to UK immigration policy, which mean that Somalis seeking asylum must successfully prove that they face a specific threat, rather than simply being at risk from indiscriminate violence.

There's a huge international problem that we are choosing to squeeze into one localised symptom of displacement created by a wrong-headed refusal to adopt a sensible approach when faced with ignorant, borderline racist nonsense in the tabloid newspapers. If we were looking to process migrants, establish those with a case and deport the rest - putting resource into a practical response rather than fences or guns - we might have a chance of getting a grip. So long as our response is prohibition the cost of containment will keep rising as migrants seek - and find - new ways round the barrier.

It isn't for reasons of humanitarianism that we need to change our policy around entry, it's for the simple and practical reason that the current approach - de facto prohibition - isn't working. We urgently need a system that allows the existing process dealing with migration and asylum to operate properly rather than spending ever larger sums grandstanding over camps around Calais.

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Thursday 30 July 2015

Gentrification should be welcomed by cities not treated as a curse


One of the single most important challenges facing Bristol and cities like it as they grow their economies is how to do development without doing gentrification. I set out from the start that I believe gentrification to be a social ill.

To appreciate just how stupid this statement is, you have first to note that the man who said it was very nearly elected executive mayor of Bristol. Marvin Rees was the Labour candidate in 2012 and fancies another go at getting elected next year. And Marvin believes that 'maginalised communities' must be protected from

...the focus on a high tech economy in which the highly educated are uniquely placed to exploit the opportunities and rising property prices and rents so that historically poor areas become increasingly unaffordable to their long established lower income traditional communities and their children.

This suggests that Marvin feels ordinary working-class Bristol folk won't be able to get good jobs in that exciting new Bristol that economic growth creates - they're excluded, as Marvin puts it, from "...the city of street art, the Shaun the Sheep tour, festivals, balloons, bridges, Brunel, the hipster and the Tesco riot." What a depressing vision for a city - you can't invest in buying a house, opening a coffee shop or brewing craft beer because that might exclude 'traditional communities'.

We see a lot of this anti-growth rhetoric wrapped up in a package dubbed 'opposing gentrification'. And resisting the blandishments of people like Marvin Rees is essential if cities are to reduce deprivation, create opportunity and develop into places where people want to live rather than places people want to escape. Marvin needs to ask himself a question about those traditional communities he cites - St Pauls, Easton and Southville. Do people growing up there who succeed stay there or do they leave for a place, often not far away, that they think is better?

I recall an old colleague who was born and brought up in Chapeltown, a part of Leeds as noted for its riots as for its culture. This colleague, Robert was his name, insisted that he would stay in Chapeltown: "these kids need a role model who isn't a gangster or a drug dealer". Some while later I ran into Robert again and he had succeeded - thriving business, got married, child on the way and living in Harrogate. So much for staying in Chapeltown.

Without gentrification this is what happens - the best from those 'traditional communities' move away as success makes that possible and the gap they leave is filled by a new generation of poor people. As my colleague Robert noted, the roles models for youngsters - other than pop stars, boxers and footballers - consist of criminals, gangsters and wheeler-dealers. In a gentrified neighbourhood there's a whole load of people - many from pretty ordinary backgrounds - who provide examples of success without negatives.

It is madness to want to preserve poor communities out of some misplaced sense of social solidarity yet this is precisely what people like Marvin Rees want, this captures the lack of aspiration and rejection of opportunity that results in places remained stagnant, dying slowly from neglect. It is a recipe for ossifying the social deprivation gleefully described by Marvin in his article. Places like Bristol - in truth most every place - needs those bohemian sorts, hipsters and the like if they are to succeed:

It gets down to what I call "the eye" - certain people have it. "The eye" in this regard is really about intuition and it allows you to spot things and live well without very much money. When my wife and I were building our first brand, Red or Dead, in the early 1980s, we opened a shop on Neal Street – now a buzzing part of fashionable London, but then it had no fashion shops and was a rather dowdy area stocked full of white good repair shops. We took a risk and acted outside of the mainstream. Our approach allowed us to spot a place where city investment and mainstream money wouldn't go. And it worked. We grew our business by spotting Neal Street equivalents in half a dozen UK cities and another dozen locations around the world.

Politicians and activists - most green sorts and the 'progressive left' - want to exclude people like Wayne Hemingway from their cities or else to corral them into specific regeneration areas thereby killing the initiative and innovation they bring. Let's not get this wrong, gentrification isn't the be all and end all - if we want kids from St Pauls to succeed we need great schools, good training and a wide variety of what they used to call 'jobs with opportunities'. But attacking success in the strange belief that its investment, excitement and choice excludes people can only result in less growth, less development and a poorer place.

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Sunday 26 July 2015

At least with Pete Seeger you could enjoy the music - Jeremy Corbyn and the politics of protest



There's a bit in Pete Seeger's version of 'We Shall Overcome' where, talking ahead of the next verse, Seeger talks about learning lessons from 'the young people':

"The most important verse is the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama. And the young people taught everybody else a lesson to all us older people who had learned to take it easy, lead their lives and get along - leave things as they were - the young people taught us all a lesson, we are not afraid."

Watching Labour leadership contender, Jeremy Corbyn undergoing a gentle, chatty Sunday morning interrogation from Andrew Marr, I was struck by the manner in which Corbyn returned again and again to 'young people'. Not just in talking about student fees, welfare or employment but as a central aspect of his campaign. Observations like this:

‘The entryism I see is lots of young people who have hitherto not been very excited by politics coming in for the first time and saying ‘yeah, we can have a discussion, we can talk about our debts and our housing problems.’

Now I don't have the age profile (or indeed any demographics at all) of the new members and supporters piling into the Labour Party so as to vote in the forthcoming leadership election. And I suspect that Corbyn doesn't have a great deal more information. Nevertheless it is central to his politics that young people are the drivers of change - the heart of the 'social movement' he refers to repeatedly.

Pete Seeger and that whole American folk and protest revival of the 1950s and 1960s may seem a little naff to many today but Corbyn's politics uses the same slightly folksy rhetoric, the same disconnected slogans intended to cheer the audience and draw on the instinct we all have for compassion. So, faced with a serious question about national debt or economic growth, Corbyn summons up a series of statements - about tax dodging companies, high rates of tax and an 'overemphasis on orthodox economics' - that touch on the subject but don't actually address the question. This is followed by a glib conclusion - something like '..but tax isn't the real issue here, the big question is what sort of society we want'. You can almost hear Pete Seeger and Joan Baez tuning up ready to launch into 'We Shall Overcome' or 'Joe Hill'.

And this is the problem with such folksy socialism - it has a genuine appeal to many of us. I get an emotional jolt from Woody Guthrie singing 'Vigilante Man' or 'Tom Joad' and, though others may not share my enthusiasm for American folk music, many will point to song, story or images that echo that shout of pain and cry for justice. We really do care and politics like Corbyn's build on the exploitation of that compassion - coupled with a sort of poverty pornography an endless emphasis on failure that's essential to the making of political myth.

The problem - it's striking that Corbyn only ever talks of industry never business, public investment not private capital - is that we know that the solutions being offered don't work. Most importantly they work least well for the very people who Corbyn and others like him claim to care most about - the poor, sick and excluded. The economic catastrophe that follows from nationalisation, regulation, high taxation and rent or price controls - and it does without question - damages the poorest, weakest and sickest most quickly and most extensively.

Corbyn's appeal to 'young people' is an appeal to the most naive amongst the caring, to those who are most likely to join his mission to create that 'social movement'. The constant reference to student fees reminds us of that audience - these are overwhelmingly the children of the middle classes not the poor. There is a delicious irony that the taxes of an eighteen-year-old shelf stacker will, in Corbyn's world, go in part to pay for the education of a new generation of lawyers, social workers and bankers who will earn a load more in their lifetime than that shelf stacker.

There's a place - a need even - for Corbyn's politics. Protests and campaigns for justice are good and right. But the solution offered isn't one that will work - far better for that protest to stay in those songs and stories where, as these things do, it will act as a constant reminder that we should consider poverty, exclusion and the abuse of power at all times.

Turning the politics of student protest into a programme for government will result in disaster. And, by focusing on young people to the exclusion of everyone else, Corbyn seems oblivious to the real fact that most voters aren't young, aren't on welfare, aren't unemployed and aren't poor. They're just regular sorts - what Americans call the 'middle class' - going about their lives, doing the best for their children, making ends meet most of the time and squeezing as much pleasure and enjoyment from life as they can. It is these people that Corbyn wants to crush, it is their culture he wishes to destroy, it is their society he wants to change.

As a Conservative a little bit of me wants to see Jeremy Corbyn elected as Labour leader. But because I know a lot of Labour people - and like a fair few of them - I think electing a man who thinks the politics of Bolivarian socialism are a good thing would be an act of arrant stupidity, a triumph for unthinking ignorance and bigotry disguised as a caring agenda. Protest is great and it's a central part of what the left does but making it the entire purpose of the Labour Party - what Corbyn means when he says he wants a 'social movement' - sets up that party for permanent opposition rather than as a credible alternative government.

I know Labour Party members have a lousy choice but choosing the candidate who sees the party as a protest movement is just plain stupid. Jeremy Corbyn comes across as Pete Seeger without the banjo - well-meaning, caring, committed to change and - in political terms - utterly, utterly wrong. The difference is that, as least with Pete Seeger you could enjoy the music.

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Saturday 25 July 2015

On the nonsense of our obsession with children's weight

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There are children with a serious weight problem but there aren't very many of them. Unless of course you rely on a simplistic measure that takes no account of differential rates of development and which places an entirely arbitrary level for 'normal', 'overweight' and 'obese. The result of this - plus the endless bothering in the media about weight - is that children, especially girls, are worrying about their weight. Most of the time this gets blamed on skinny models and the fashion industry which means that another culprit - public health campaigns about childhood obesity - gets away without any criticism.

Here's a comment from the former head of the Food Policy and Research Unit at Bradford University (and Bingley Rural resident), Vernor Wheelock:

"Verner Wheelock, former head of the University of Bradford’s Food Policy and Research Unit who now runs a food training and consultancy service in Skipton, believes the BMI (Body Mass Index) system of measuring body fat based on weight in relation to height is a 'nonsense.'

He says some people with a higher life expectancy are in the overweight category and says it is even more difficult to calculate when it comes to children because they're still growing and there are some muscular children with a higher BMI. "When officials get hold of them they say they have to lose weight, but it's nonsense," says Verner,

He believes there is too much obsession with weight and that many people are given the wrong dietary advice."

What sort of barking mad world do we live in where one day children are being told they shouldn't worry about not looking like a supermodel (and anyway they're unhealthily skinny) and thew next that their BMI places than as overweight meaning they should lose weight. All this is against a background where, as Dr Wheelock points out some overweight people - in particular older people - have a higher life expectancy that people with a 'normal' weight.

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Tuesday 21 July 2015

How left wing academics are killing the business school



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For many years business schools and management faculties were the bastions of sanity in academia. Places where such concerns as robust research methods, consistency and applied knowledge were more important that ideology or the revolution. Business schools were, so to speak, the engineers or social science - sensible places producing graduates who could actually contribute something to the world once they left the groves of academe.

Sadly this is now under threat. A thing called 'critical management studies' has grown like a sort of parasitical maggot within the body of the business school:

As an umbrella research orientation CMS embraces various theoretical traditions including anarchism, critical theory, feminism, Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, representing a pluralistic, multidisciplinary movement. Having been associated mainly with business/management schools in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia earlier, CMS as a research approach has presence all over the world and is not confined to management/business schools. This suggests that CMS is an approach to doing research rather than a school or tradition, and there is no particular 'right' way of doing CMS.

I am reluctant to do anything more than just peek at this hideous growth upon an otherwise sensible part of our higher education system. But that peek reveals the usual - and more-or-less incomprehensible - left wing wibble. We encounter a world focused on 'alternatives to growth driven neo-liberal capitalism', on 'critical performativity' (whatever that might be), and on 'challenging the...power structures in the university workspace'.

And in doing this work, such ordinary stuff as scientific method and detached, dispassionate research are to be dismissed:

We do not believe that good social science is always detached, objective and quantitative in its approach. Nor do we think it should routinely borrow from the natural sciences in its investigations. Instead we favour the use of a wide range of methods in attempting to understand and unpick management and organisations. This is why the School of Management at the University of Leicester houses the largest body of heterodox researchers across the core disciplines of accounting and finance, marketing and organisation studies in the world.

We are now beginning to churn out from university management schools the same deluded, evidence-light, ideological research (I call it research because I'm kind) has we've seen for generations from sociology and social studies departments. This isn't to say that left wing views have no place in the study of business and management but rather to observe that the application of that ideology seems to trump any reasoned or rational consideration of the things being taught and studied.

What we see here is the continued debasement of academia as the unchallenged hegemony of 'progressive' delusions gradually infects the whole body of research. To be fair there's a way to go before the UK's business schools are so corrupted by the sort of ideological non-research those unfortunate students at Leicester are suffering. But, just as there is no space for any challenge to this progressive hegemony across much of the social sciences, it seems that it will be only a matter of time before the BSc in management becomes just as uselessly impractical as the typical BA in Sociology or Social Policy is today.

The most frightening thing about the progressive left isn't just that it is out of touch with reality but that its academics reject structured, quantitative research methods (mostly because - as I was told by my research methods lecturer - 'maths is hard') in favour of the recycling of shared opinions and the gradual translation, without any real evidence, of those opinions into a 'research' corpus. Worse, if organisations are recruiting new managers infected by this 'business is bad' ideology, then instead of new and improving techniques in business adminsitration we will see the corruption of our businesses from within.
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Monday 20 July 2015

If we want to protect the environment, we need to fall in love with the car again

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New Start magazine is home to the most predictable and dated of approaches to regeneration. A bunch of folk wrapped in the New Economic Foundation, Green Party, Agenda 21 line of anti-development, anti-car, anti-freedom beliefs that simply don't reflect the reality of either regeneration or the thrust of transport technology. Here's a classic of the genre from the misnamed Campaign for Better Transport:

We know our reliance on cars is bad for us – bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the economy. Yet the way we plan and build continues as if it were still the 1950s and the car a watchword for freedom.

And so on in this vein. Each illustration of the car's evil is ticked - 'clone towns', 'subtopia', 'car-dependent ghettoes', 'foorball pitch sized car parks', 'retail parks'. And the glorious alternatives to economic growth are celebrated - 'improved public health', 'revitalised town centres' and 'tackling carbon emissions'. Plus of course the desire that planning rules should be changed "so economic growth is no longer allowed to trump essential considerations like environment and health". As if planning rules do anything at all but limit economic growth - it's what they're designed to do.

My problem with this - and all the stuff about "strong public transport links with discounted ticket prices, the establishment of cycling routes and initiatives such as free bike workshops all contributing" - is that it completely fails to recognise the direction of transport technology. All the most innovative and green developments in transport are about roads and transport on roads - from smart road surfaces and electric vehicles through to flexible urban pods and lorry peletons the future of transport lies with clean green vehicles using a new generation of roads not with 19th century technologies like trains, trams, bicycles and trolley buses.

Technology is making roads dramatically safer and allowing greater capacity while the development of hybrid engines and more efficient transmission systems is making vehicle significantly less polluting. New materials reduce the carbon emissions in manufacture and make recycling or waste reduction easier. In time vehicles become smaller as technology eliminates collisions allowing for more flexible parking systems.

The problem is that we have a planning system that sees roads as a problem and cars as a curse rather than seeing these systems as a more flexible, safer. reliable and sustainable solution that railway tracks or other systems dedicated to single uses. Most public transport solutions (with the honourable exception of electric buses) rely on this exclusivity - from bus lanes and tram lines to swathes of countryside ripped up to accommodate high speed rail. It really is time we set aside this obsession with old technology and began to support investment in the exciting technologies of tomorrow - technologies based on the shared space that is the highway.

If we want a sustainable transport future then the answer lies in working with technologies that make roads more flexible, safer and faster. We need to embrace the idea of increased road capacity and smoother traffic flow that smart road technologies will bring. Above all we need to remember that the car still is a watchword for freedom, is still the preferred means of transport for the majority, and that driverless technologies open up that freedom to people who right now can't access the car. We need to fall in love with the car again.



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Sunday 19 July 2015

There is no evidence - none at all - to justify this lastest sugar 'target'


Except, of course, that reducing the amount of sugar might be consequential on reducing total calorific intake. More to the point this selection of one 'macronutrient' as the culprit for rising levels of obesity is pretty lousy science - as if it's not possible to eschew nasty 'added sugar' and get properly fat!

"There's no medical evidence that reducing sugar consumption below 10 per cent to five per cent carries any additional health benefit - absolutely no evidence at all.

"The current average consumption of sugar is around 12-13 per cent. Getting to 10 per cent is a reasonable target and I think we should put some real effort behind achieving that first, but to come up with a new target that is miles away from what is achievable is entirely foolish - no population in the world can do that.

"Even vegetarians from India consume eight per cent of their calories from sugar and they have less heart disease and less diabetes than anyone in the world."

So says Professor Mike Lean, chair of Human Nutrition at Glasgow University's School of Medicine who I'm guessing knows a thing or two about this stuff. Now Professor Lean does say that the government has been too soft on the food industry - he may have a point but surely most of the blame (assuming that's the game we're in) rests with us as consumers.

Nevertheless, blaming sugar for obesity simply doesn't stack up for the very simple reason that we're eating a lot less of it. Here's a line from a research proposal:

Furthermore, there has been a paradoxical decline in sugars consumption in the UK and elsewhere over the past 3 or so decades and yet rates of obesity have continued to increase.

Sadly the proposers still wants to discover whether "individuals with a high consumption of dietary sugars, and in particular free sugars are more susceptible to weight gain than low consumers" rather than accepting the distinct lack of any direct causal link between sugar and obesity. In the end the truth about obesity is pretty straightforward - firstly people are obese because they consume more calories that they use over a long period of time, and secondly that most of the people labelled 'overweight or obese' are not in any way at greater risk of being ill.

Much of the debate around obesity has been a extended effort to find a demon - something or someone to blame for us being fat other than our own overeating and underexercising. The food industry, advertising, takeaways, fizzy drinks, saturated fats and sugars all get a pasting from 'public health' sorts worried about obesity. The truth is that it's a whole lot more complicated than all that but still in the end boils down to us sticking fewer calories in our gobs than we use. And we can achieve this in two ways - eating less and moving more.

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Saturday 18 July 2015

If we're to serve tomorrow's economy we need to invest more in roads and less in rail



Since 2001 rail travel in the UK has increased by over 50% (and has more than doubled since rail privatisation in the 1990s). I'm guessing that people see this as a cause for celebration and a recognition that 'heavy' rail is part of the nation's long term transport solutions. And this celebration is reflected in the investment programme for those railways, in proposals for brand new railways and in political rows about this investment.

However there's a problem. Currently rail journeys account for just 3% of total journeys (slightly more than this as a percentage of journey miles) and we are repeatedly told - hence the investment programme - that the rail network is over capacity. Let's assume that the investment programme succeeds and rail capacity is increased thereby allowing another doubling in rail journeys (this is a big requirement that the planned investment isn't going to meet) - rail would then constitute 6% of journeys made in the UK and the system would be uncomfortably crammed to the gunnels.

Given that the billions of planned rail investment dwarfs every other planned investment by the UK government, you would assume that it would go a long way towards resolving the nation's transport challenges. Between the investment in the current network and High Speed 2, the UK's rail investment programme amounts to approaching £80bn. This compares to the road investment programme of (and I'm being kind here) less than £30bn over the same period. The UK plans to invest more than twice the amount in rail than on the road network, yet there are 20 times as many journeys by road as there are by rail. Roughly speaking we're planning to spend £40 on every rail traveller for each £1 we spend on a road traveller.

The result of this imbalance in investment is that the UK's roads are not up to scratch. Local authorities have trimmed on highway maintenance (in Bradford we underspend by 30-40% each year on highway maintenance) and have little or no capital available to deliver improvement schemes let alone new road schemes. The national investment programme - the £15bn announced in 2014 that is slightly enhanced by decisions in the July 2015 budget - barely scratches the surface of improvements needed in the strategic road network. Yet a decision to delay one small part of the rail investment programme is treated as a major political faux pas whereas the consistent and lamentable underinvestment in our roads doesn't merit media coverage let alone the sort of outcry we get from train fans.

MP after MP, from every side of the house, lines up to berate ministers, including the prime minister, about rail investment. But questions about roads are few and far between despite most of those MPs' constituents making more use of them than they do of railways. When road schemes are asked about the response is that there isn't the funds, that other schemes have higher priority or that the decision is delegated to one or other agency.

For decades we operated under a sort of 'field of dreams' myth about road investment - 'build it and they will come' was the mantra. Or rather the reverse of this - building roads increases traffic volumes ergo if we don't build roads people will shift to other forms of transport thereby saving the planet (or something along these lines):

In transportation, this well-established response is known in various contexts as the Downs-Thomson Paradox, The Pigou-Knight-Downs Paradox or the Lewis-Mogridge Position: a new road may provide motorists with some level of respite from congestion in the short term, but almost all of the benefit from the road will be lost due to increased demand in the longer term.

The problem is that, wherever we look now, this paradox appears to be weakened - in the UK traffic volumes fell for three consecutive years (something that hadn't happened before) during the downturn and, since 2010 have been essentially stable. This is a situation mirrored in the USA where there has been a significant decline in vehicle miles - the population adjusted estimate is that traffic volumes have fallen back to the level they were back in 1994. This picture - dubbed 'peak car' - reflects the logical cap to car ownership rises driven by declining household size, suburban growth and women entering the workforce (as well as increased earnings relative to the price of cars). The consequence is that we should reconsider the various induced demand models for road development:

In a world of peak car, where traffic levels are flat to declining on a per capita basis, induced demand no longer holds court, certainly not to the level claimed by those who believe it’s pointless to build roads. In fact, what peak car means is that while speculative projects may be dubious, there may be good reasons now to build projects designed to alleviate already exiting congestion.

Our road networks are pretty resilient. Despite decades of underinvestment in maintenance the network remains in place and functional (if a little bumpy). However, if we are to deliver on the demands of a new economy, turn round the economic performance of the North and meet the needs of technological change, we have to look again at transport investment priorities. Placing a bigger stress on roads makes sense both because they are the dominant mode of transport for UK residents and also because those roads will prove central to future transport technologies:

A pair of trucks convoying 10 meters apart on Interstate 80 just outside Reno, Nevada, might seem like an unusual sight—not to mention unsafe. But the two trucks doing this a couple of weeks ago were actually demonstrating a system that could make trucking safer and much more efficient.

While the driver in front drove his truck normally, the truck behind him was partly operated by a computer—and it stuck to its leader like glue. When instructed to do so, the computer controlled the gas and brakes to pull to within 10 meters (roughly three car lengths) of the truck ahead. The computer then kept the two trucks paired at this precise distance, as if linked by some invisible cable, until the system was disengaged. If the truck in front stopped suddenly, the one behind could have reacted instantaneously to avoid a collision.

It's time for a rethink on transport priorities and begin to invest in the infrastructure we need for tomorrow's economy - that infrastructure is roads.
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Friday 17 July 2015

Friday Fungus: wild mushrooms and the tragedy of the commons



You've got dressed up, hired a cab and are safely seated in that special restaurant for your special occasion. Scanning down the menu your eyes fall on a "mosaic of chicken, wild mushrooms and pistachio nuts - an elegant combination of woody, autumnal flavours packed into a chunky terrine". If you're me, you leap as the prospect of wild mushrooms and place the order for your starter. What you don't do is ask how those wild mushrooms arrived at a posh restaurant in Ilkley. Perhaps it's time to start asking - for the sake of our woodlands and for the sake of us continuing to enjoy the fabulous flavours of those wild mushrooms blessing our palettes.

We're familiar with the tragedy of the commons (although it is often misrepresented):

...each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himself, “Should I add another animal to my herd?” Because the herdsman owned his animals, the gain of so doing would come solely to him. But the loss incurred by overloading the pasture would be “commonized” among all the herdsmen. Because the privatized gain would exceed his share of the commonized loss, a self-seeking herdsman would add another animal to his herd. And another. And reasoning in the same way, so would all the other herdsmen. Ultimately, the common property would be ruined.

So it is with wild foraging for mushrooms.

The New Forest Association (NFA) says there's growing anger over "commercial gangs" invading and filching fungi to flog to posh hotels and restaurants in back-door deals.

Experts have warned the gangs could even kill because pickers who don't know the different species are likely to take deadly toadstools and other poisonous fungi in mistake for edible and safe mushrooms.

Forestry Commission bosses have now vowed to "disrupt" commercial pickers plundering this autumn's crop - but campaigners are demanding an outright ban.

This same story is repeated across our woodlands - from Epping Forest to Ogden Water you'll see evidence of large scale mushroom gathering. How else did you think all those wild mushrooms arrived in all those restaurants? And the easy result of authorities is to introduce a ban:

Authorities in London's Epping Forest have been stopping and searching walkers in an attempt to catch foragers who are stripping the woodland of fungi.

Forest keepers are trying to crack down on the harmful practice after gangs of foragers descended on the woodland in vans to cart away hauls of mushrooms which are then sold to restaurants.

The plants can fetch up to £50 per kilo as the trend for foraged food in upmarket restaurants in London and around the country has sent demand soaring.

The problem is that, as we know too well, a ban would simply drive up the price and make it worth the while to carry on foraging (the downside risk is probably pretty small). Even if we banned restaurants from selling wild mushrooms - imagine the foodie cries of pain - there's still be a market at the restaurant backdoor at an even higher price.

Instead of banning foraging would it not be more sensible (and lucrative) for places like Epping Forest and the New Forest to auction off the rights to crop the mushrooms? Trust me, if you've forked out thousands of quid for something you'll be making really sure people don't arrive and steal it from you. The owners of the rights would back up the local keepers and wardens to stop the poaching of fungi - we'd have an industry interested in a sustainable product rather than a collection of uncontrolled exploiters of common rights.

Despite this, I'll bet you that the choices of authorities will be the ban not the licence.
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Wednesday 15 July 2015

Offering folk stuff to buy isn't enough for a place to work - you have to entertain them too!

Retailing as entertainment
The long-term transformative effects of ICT cannot yet be fully appraised in part because technology uptake is rapid and unpredictable. Nevertheless, in one aspect – urban design – a synergy has emerged between bricks-and-mortar merchants and planners, in reaction to virtualization. Their complementary efforts, when successful, imbue commercial space with interaction-based vitality. The human instinct for sociability further supports these efforts, evidence that there is no substitute for many of the benefits cities offer. Lives are arguably better in proximity, a point supported by decades of agglomeration and anthropological research. The challenge for planners, therefore, is to create space for meaningful experiences inimitable in the virtual realm.

OK it's a little bit wordy (as we'd expect from an American academic) but the point being made is central to the business of regeneration and the future direction of 'place-making'. The critical issue is that the 'field of dreams' approach that tended to dominate town centre development no longer applies - just because I build a shopping centre doesn't guarantee that people will flock to its hallowed halls. If all I offer is stuff to buy, the consumer has the choice of sitting on her step with a smartphone flipping through a vaster and more exciting range of stuff to buy.

Pay a visit to a recently developed shopping mall - say the Trinity in Leeds, for example - and check out the shopping. Isn't the most striking thing just how little of this there actually is in the new mall? There are dozens of places to eat and drink, there's a cinema, and there are shops - run by brands like Apple, Bose and Superdry - that are as much as branding and market positioning as they are about actually selling you stuff. We were in the Bose shop getting a demonstration of their TV (unsurprisingly the sound quality was beyond awesome although this didn't make up for its lack of smartness) and, in chatting to the sales assistant, we discovered that she wasn't incentivised to sell us stuff. No commission, no sales bonus - because the shop was there to promote and position the Bose brand.

If we want places to succeed then there has to be a reason for people to visit them - if what they offer can be perfectly replicated on-line (or, in some cases, imperfectly) then the chances are that people will access the offer through the web rather than by visiting some place. What places need to do is threefold.

1. Offer those things - chiefly around 'human sociability' - that can't be done on-line (even if they can). 'Live' music is only really live music if you're there - yes someone could stream it live to the smart TV in your lounge but is that the same? I would argue it isn't - we want the live because of the whole experience, the beer, the slight crush of the crowded venue, the sense of sharing a great experience with others. The ability to say 'I was there'. Just having a bar or foodstop isn't good enough - it needs a purpose beyond that mundane fact, a presence that can't be replicated with a bottle of wine from the supermarket and some home cooking.

2. Connect with the on-line world. We went to the Prado in Madrid and, unplanned, bought an offer to guide us round from a smartly dressed gentleman. He showed us 10 - just ten - pictures from the thousands in the gallery. And these pictures taking us from the middle ages to the 21st century told us a story of art down those ages. We could have hired one of those clunky electronic gadgets as a guide but wouldn't it be more interesting if a little smartphone app could replicate the sort of offer that gentleman made for us?

3. Focus on the occasion, the event and the demonstration rather than just the sale. It's true that the value of the place comes in part from the value that consumers invest in that place - and much of this is, inevitably, a cash value. But, as Apple, Bose and many other brands have shown, the value of a public presence needn't be about selling you some stuff. Rather it's about showing you what that stuff can do, reminding you that the stuff in question is popular (why else would there be a big shop fill with other people looking at that stuff), and reinforcing your decision to buy it.

I'm quite excited about the future for town centres, malls and other shared places. Partly this is because the domination of public space by retail is nearing its end but mostly it's because the evidence right now is that successful places are places where the special stuff - the things that make them work - are made by the people visiting rather than for the people visiting. A new generation of entrepreneurs are creating new approaches to public fun and games - from political debates in a pub to cheese tasting and street parties.

And where there are lots of people having a good time there's the opportunity to enhance that good time by selling them the stuff they want (even if they didn't know they wanted it until just a minute of so ago). For public authorities there's a difficulty because of an instinctive discomfort with things that disrupt existing markets and existing expectations. Excuses will be used to prevent or slow the initiative of these new ideas - the street vendor or market stall undercuts the shopkeeper, selling alcohol in the street encourages anti-social behaviour and your funky flea market needs a "markets licence" for some bizarre reason.

What we know is that many of the best examples of this new place-making reflect this development. I prefer to call this consumer-led but, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of being a consumer, citizen-led works just as well:

Authentic urban transformation relies more on citizen initiative than the influence of global capital, and may be facilitated by ICT but not defined by it; this can be seen in the quiet regeneration of urban neighborhoods. Global capital may underwrite loans for acquiring properties and developing land, decisions in such neighborhoods are often made locally and in the type of fragmented manner that generates a bricolage of uses and styles. Examples in the United States include East Nashville, Kansas City’s Crossroads district, and Oakland’s foodie Temescal and KoNo districts. None displays the architectural shock-and-awe of emerging global mega-cities, but each embodies a citizen-level developmental determinism that shapes their design and atmosphere. They are literal incarnations of the unique priorities of citizens at that time and place, independent of global trends that often result in regression to an aesthetic mean.

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Sunday 12 July 2015

Government diet fascists, why not just give us a ration book and be done with it?



The government doesn't want you to eat this - you know what they can do!

The government is about to issue new guidelines on a healthy diet. And it will come as no surprise to discover that the big target in this latest round of fussbucketry is sugar:

Adults and children should be instructed by the Government to halve the amount of sugar they consume and eat almost twice as much pasta, potato and other fibrous foods, an official report is expected to say this week.

This continues the almost daily assault on sugar as a source of energy in our diet - myths about how in some way refined sugars behave differently from naturally occurring sugars when we eat them to lies about direct links between obesity and sugar. Accompanying this, we're told there will be guidance on salt, fat and much else besides. Unsurprisingly alcohol gets a swipe from these diet fascists:

Healthy snacks included a handful of unsalted nuts and raisins one day and a plain scone with low-fat spread on another. Two glasses of wine were allowed during the week and deserts consisted of fruit most days. There was space for a small chocolate mousse one day, and a spiced rice pudding on Sunday.

And it's recognised that urging people to increase dietary fibre "would push most people above the Government's targets for salt, sugar and overall energy intake" - meaning that we end up with a diet stuffed full of vegetables.

Let's predict what will happen here. Firstly all the headlines will be about sugar with the myths and lies reinforced across the media. Stories (as with this story) will be illustrated with pictures of the evil white stuff further stressing the emphasis on sugar. Nice middle-class families will cut out the sugar replacing it with other sources of energy - fruit, bread, pasta and so forth. And then get surprised when they are neither slimmer nor healthier as a result.

At the same time government agencies from local council public health departments and GPs through to schools, hospitals and prisons will start enforcing the 'guidelines' as if they are hard and fast rules. Perfectly slim and healthy children will have chocolate bars snatched from their hands by teachers, hospital food will sink to new levels of utter uselessness, and hordes of clipboard-wielding nannies will fan out across the nation trying to force every establishment serving food to 'offer healthy options', remove salt and serve less sugar. Those cafe sugar dispensers will be banned as rufty-tufty builders have to fight with a rationed dollop of sugar in an inconvenient and wasteful paper sachet.

Meanwhile the triumphant fussbuckets will - even more shrilly than now - begin to shout about the need for a sugar tax or a soda tax. MPs will be inundated with deliberate misinformation from Action on Sugar while behinds the scenes that shocking liar Simon Stevens (who runs the NHS) will agitate a ministers for "something to be done" about obesity. And that something will be a sugar tax - despite there being no link between overall sugar consumption (which has fallen) and obesity.

This 'model diet' might be presented as guidance but it will quickly (as is always the case with government guidance) become a prescription adhered to, enforced and nudged into place by the army of nannying fussbuckets in government agencies and the charities those agencies fund. They might as well be done with it, issue us ration books so we comply with their approved diet and take any vestiges of please in food and eating away from ordinary people.

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Saturday 11 July 2015

Academic qualifications are no substitute for political experience - the case of Dr Varoufakis



This post is not really about Yanis Varoufakis. OK so it is a bit - mostly because, as tyro politicians go, he is the owner of the most incredible sense of destiny (some might describe this as an ego larger than Greece). However, Dr Varoufakis is the owner of a splendid set of qualifications - degrees in economics and statistics culminating in an economics doctorate from the University of Essex. - and an established and successful academic career. Various folk have drawn a flattering comparison between Dr Varoufakis and what we might term his 'opponents' (and Dr V did spend a year or two as a consultant to a gaming company).

The question we need to ask here is whether Dr Varoufakis' undoubted academic success is in any way an indicator that he would make a successful politician or government minister? And, indeed, to ask the much wider question as to what sort of qualification, background or experience makes for a good political leader. All this is in the context of Dr Varoufakis showing himself to be a very poor political leader indeed.

My qualification in all this is that I've spent most of a lifetime - best part of 40 years - in and around the business of politics. And I am convinced that the core skills of a successful political leader cannot be captured through looking at either previous (or parallel) careers or in higher academic qualifications. Nor is owning a brain comparable to Marvin's a sufficient qualification especially since higher academic qualifications reflect a very narrow interest - a doctorate in economics reflects research in a specific and tightly-drawn field not a generalist expertise in economics itself.

Academic excellence - at the level we are talking about with Dr Varoufakis - isn't an indicator that, placed in the world of political decision-making, an individual will succeed. This is because, in the grubby world of practical politics, there isn't a right answer, nor even an answer that can be successfully modelled. The problem with academics (especially in social science subjects like economics) is that they really do believe the answer can be worked out. The truth is (as us old hands know) that the decision will be made in the end on the basis of a mix between expert briefing, electoral or political calculation and gut feel.

Dr Varoufakis went from being an academic who briefly advised a government to being a minister. This would have been OK if Greece had been in a normal situation - plenty of time to learn the ropes, to discover how the political game works - but sadly for that country, it wasn't. Indeed Greece faced a huge challenge and crisis, partly of its own making and partly a consequence of decisions made elsewhere in Europe. From the outside it seems that Dr Varoufakis strode into the meetings wrapped in his own confidence and the electoral mandate from Greece. The problem was that, as Dr V discovered quickly, his 'opponents' were not impressed with his academic achievements - to them he was a baby politician to be toyed with, confronted and taught a lesson. And the mandate of Greek voters matters to Greek politicians not their counterparts in Germany, Holland or Belgium - such politicians care about the German, Dutch and Flemish voters not voters in Athens.

It could be that the analysis from Dr Varoufakis and his colleagues was spot on. But the tactics adopted were almost guaranteed to ensure Dr V and co lost the argument. Fancy media coverage, confrontational speeches and ultimata all have their place in politics but when faced with a stony-faced and negative response to such grandstanding the proper response isn't to indulge in more of it but to start on the boring task of seeking compromise and consensus. To succeed at this you need those political skills that Dr Varoufakis so clearly lacks. The Greek government - newly elected and excited - placed huge responsibility for the national future in the hands of a man with less political experience than the average parish councillor. And his opponents ate him alive - costing Greece the chance of a decent deal and a chance to get out from under its crisis.

Just as many of my colleagues on the right of politics seem obsessed with getting business leaders into politics (despite the appalling track record for such people), many on the left are captivated by academics like Dr Varoufakis. Yet the evidence for academics succeeding as politicians is just as lacking as that for businessmen. Politics is a business filled with particular skills and behaviours that aren't learnt in grad school - this isn't to say that politicians aren't brainy but that their success can't be predicted on the basis of how many higher degrees they've got or what class they achieved in their first degree. Compare the qualifications of Matteo Renzi with those of Dr Varoufakis and you begin to understand that political achievement rests on something other than those exam results.

Because you don't need anything other than a sufficiency of votes to become a politician, we seldom consider that politics is a business requiring a distinct set of skills and attributes. I spend a lot of time reminding colleagues that we are politicians and should act politically - not just because of the currency of votes but because political decision-making is very different from decision-making in business. And the same applies to negotiation, leadership and marketing - some of the skills transfer but the core business of politics is conducted in front of audiences that react differently to business audiences and which are contrary rather than co-operative.

Debate between academics can be very vigorous but, in the end, it is about the content of academic research. The same goes for business negotiation. But for politicians there is no audience that wants debate for the sake of debate and many audiences who want to pull the politician down rather than support them (we see these in both political opponents and in the media - even supposedly friendly media). The academic robustness of your case and the quality of your presentation mean nothing to the 'opponent' who wants you to fail. To succeed such opposition has to be neutralised.

The Syriza government in Greece might have been better served appointing a horny-handed old trade unionist as finance minister - a person who could get drunk with the Germans, eat with the French and hug the Belgians: an operator. And then used Dr Varoufakis' undoubted talents as a thinker about the economy to provide the bullets for that operator to fire. Instead Dr V managed to irritate bureaucrats and upset politicians making it all the more difficult for Greece to make its case for further support on Syriza's terms rather than on Angela Merkel's. I've no doubt that the main reason wasn't Dr Varoufakis' ego, lack of tie or motor bike but his almost complete lack of political experience.

Many may not like politicians and politics but when the crunch comes, we really need experienced politicians (you can call them statesmen if you want to watch them preen) to deal with the dirty business of politics. And just being clever - in book larnin' terms - is not a sufficient qualification to do that business. Dr Varoufakis is a case study of the consequences that stem from this mistake.

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Friday 10 July 2015

Friday Fungus: Terroir - or how fungi make your wine taste different


The idea of 'terroir' is well-known to wine buffs and is most commonly described as:

In a larger context, wine tasters try to define terroir as the specificity of place, which has come to include not only the soil in a region, but also the climate, the weather, the aspect of the vineyards and anything else that can possibly differentiate one piece of land from another.

The same grape grown in a different place will produce similar but distinct wine. And the wine buffs will talk about soil, climate, aspect and even the phases of the moon in trying to explain what this all means. Funnily enough they never mention mushrooms let alone fungi. Well they should:

Professor White offers a scientific, if unromantic explanation of terroir: wine character can be determined by the rate of water and nutrient uptake by the vine, and different types of soils will affect this rate — with microorganisms playing an important role in this process.

He describes how the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil form a symbiotic relationship with the vine’s roots. “The mycelium of the fungus grows within the root itself,” he says. “And some of the hyphae grow out into the surrounding soil, extending the root surface available and enhancing the uptake of water and nutrients such as phosphorus.”

The degree to which these fungi are around plus the different varieties will affect the rate of water and nutrient intake - ergo changing the flavour of the wine. And there's more because those other (and rather important to making alcohol) fungi, yeasts will vary from location to location:

“The wild yeasts that come in to the winery from the vineyard with the grapes can influence a wine’s character, particularly at the start of a spontaneous ferment,” says Paul Chambers, research manager in biosciences at the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. “And there’s mounting evidence that the complexity of microflora of each vineyard varies from region to region.”

Terroir is a romantic notion filled with the idea of a place's history, its uniqueness - the concept is part of wine's mystique. Yet the reality is that microbial variations and the different fungi knocking around the patch are the reasons for that difference rather than just soil, climate or aspect (and let's be clear that the phases of the moon stuff is nonsense).

Another way in which fungi make our lives (and the wine) wonderful!

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Thursday 9 July 2015

Why public health should be about poverty not booze, fags and burgers

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Area deprivation in 2010, as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, was by far the strongest predictor of mortality across all models, with higher deprivation linked to higher standardised mortality rates in 2011-12. To put the effects into context, using QOF year 8 models, a change in the Index of Multiple Deprivation from the median (17.25) to the 90th centile (44.88) would correspond to an all-cause standardised mortality rate increase from the median to the 82nd centile. For the condition-specific standardised mortality rate models the effect was weaker, and a change in Index of Multiple Deprivation from the median to the 90th centile would correspond to a condition-specific standardised mortality rate increase from the median to the 73rd centile.

OK the research is about how primary care affects mortality (not very much) but the results demonstrate clearly that the big deal is deprivation - or if you'd prefer, poverty. Reduce levels of poverty and you increase health outcomes across the board. This is nothing to do with the evils of booze, fags and burgers but to do with a whole complex of issues relating to being poor. Things like cold and damp housing, unemployment, mental health issues, inadequate diet and lower levels of educational attainment. Plus greater exposure (and lower resistance) to contagious diseases.

This suggests that, if the purpose of public health campaigns is to reduce mortality rates (and ill health in general) the money currently spent on what we term 'public health' is misplaced and would be better invested in economic development, education and skills training.

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Quote of the day - Keynes and Fascism



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Seems J M Keynes had a fan:

“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”

So said Benito Mussolini.

h/t Perry de Haviland 

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Tuesday 7 July 2015

Banning smoking at mental health units. A rant at Bradford's health fascists.



Bradford NHS Care Trust decided to ban smoking everywhere on its sites in Bradford.

A BLANKET ban on smoking has come into force at Lynfield Mount psychiatric hospital in Bradford.

Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust said the ban also affected all its buildings, grounds and vehicles, including the Airedale Centre for Mental Health at Airedale Hospital at Steeton, Keighley.

Nicola Lees, deputy chief executive and director of nursing at the Trust, said the decision had been taken to help patients' mental health as well as theirs and staff's physical health.

This decision has been presented uncritically in the local paper and is accompanied by almost congratulatory quotations from Public Health England.

Let's be clear about this - it is a ghastly, unnecessary and illiberal attack on the rights of mental health patients. These are vulnerable people - they're not in the Care Trust's units for fun, they're there because they want (or need - some are in a secure unit under the provisions of the Mental Health Acts) help with mental health problems. And let's also be clear that forcing them to quit smoking (and this is exactly what the Trust is doing) makes little or no contribution to resolving their mental health problems - indeed, for some, it might even make them worse.

This decision isn't a substantive contribution to bettering the health of Bradford people. Rather, it's a nasty, spiteful and thoughtless piece of tick-box public health introduced by people who care more about being seen to be righteous than they do about the well-being of mental health patients. There is no health and safety justification (it's a ban outside where passive smoking risks are zero), merely a sad conformity with the English NHS's growing attachment of health fascism.

Don't these patients have some rights left. Rights to make their own choice as adults about whether or not to smoke? It would appear not - the health fascists have won again.

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Monday 6 July 2015

Another reminder why we need to spend more money on our roads

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Even in London:

More than half of Londoners commute to work by car or other light vehicles (including car pools). Transit accounts for about a quarter of commuting, while about 10 percent of commuters walk to work. Approximately six percent usually labor mainly at or from home.

And there's a reason for this - despite the supposed dominance of commuting to central London most of the region's employment isn't in that central business district (defined as the four central boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Southwark and Lambeth plus the City of London - ought really to include Tower Hamlets and Kensington as well):

Despite its strong CBD, the London area is anything but monocentric. Approximately 85 percent of London area jobs are outside the central business district.

The commuting we hear about (very loudly on assorted social media most mornings) is primarily folk travelling in from outer London and the fringe of towns on the edge of London. Yes it's important but this transport system has taken the lion's share of UK transport investment for the past decade or so. It is tome to rebalance and start investing in the transport network everyone uses - roads.

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Sunday 5 July 2015

A warning from Greece: the crisis of government


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Today the Greeks are voting in a referendum. Other wiser and more informed folk will tell you what this is all about, how you should vote (if you were Greek) and what it all means for the poor benighted Greek people. As ever with these debates this wisdom will act more to confuse than to inform since the Greeks seem faced with a choice between poverty and bankruptcy or bankruptcy and poverty.

Instead of giving my advice (for what it's worth this is a rare example where not voting is the most logical option since the outcome isn't really affected by the choice - the Greeks are screwed regardless), I'd like instead to take this particular Greek tragedy as a warning. Not a warning about bankers, business or supranational authorities without accountability but a warning about government.

The politicians are presenting what has happened in Greece as a failure of economics. The bankers, the oligarchs, the mysterious market forces are the causes. Vast libraries of articles filled with 'charts' showing this or that about the situation are penned. Every single economist (or so it seems) appears in print with a slant on the crisis. The commentary on news channels is peppered with barely understood economic jargon and assorted talking heads appear on panels soberly discussing this economic catastrophe.

They are, for all their charts and tables, wrong because the problem is a problem of misplaced trust in government. Two generations of Greeks placed their trust in government believing that the state was their friend and had their interests at heart. Even when they knew some things weren't right, they carried on believing that none of this was existential - there'd be a bad patch or two but everything would carry on (more-or-less) working.

It really did seem that the state was the Greeks' friend - especially for the growing army of people who worked for that state and who retired from working for that state at the delightfully young age of 58 on 80% of final salary. Meanwhile ordinary Greeks got schools, hospitals and free university study plus a generous benefits system - all the superstructure of the modern European state. Not only did this make Greeks happy it also provided loads of jobs for the sons and daughters of Greece:

The expansion of Greece’s huge government sector took decades to create, but its growth in recent years has been particularly striking. Public employment grew by fivefold from 1970 through 2009 — at an annual growth rate of 4 percent, according to a recent academic study by Zafiris Tzannatos and Iannis Monogios.. Over the same four decades, employment in the private sector increased by only 27 percent — an annual rate of less than 1 percent.

It might look right now that the problem is a problem of banks, business and economics but peel back the skin of the Greek crisis and you see a problem of government - unsustainable, expansive government. And what didn't go along with this expansion of government was an expansion in taxes - Greeks got their modern welfare state on the cheap. And still set about dodging the taxes they were supposed to be paying:

...the authors also make an estimate of how much tax is being evaded in Greece. The debt-to-income ratio for wage-earners in a particular profession ought to provide a guide (though not a precise one) to the debt-to-income ratio that banks are comfortable with for self-employed borrowers in the same profession. That assumption enables the authors to work out what multiples banks are applying to reported incomes in various industries; how much taxable income is not being reported; and how much tax is being evaded (see table). At an aggregate level, the authors calculate that the self-employed in 2009 dodged taxes on at least €28 billion of unreported income, enough to fill 31% of the Greek budget deficit that year.

The Greeks aren't uniquely bad - self-employed people everywhere tend to underreport income - but there does seem to have been a reluctance to enforce tax collection. Perhaps Greece's huge black market - over 25% of GDP - has something to do with all this. That and the fact that "the three most tax-dodging professions account for about half the votes among Greek MPs". All this is a country where tax rates - certainly compared to Northern Europe - are low.

The problem here is that, while we don't trust the politicians we elect to run government, we continue to trust government. Yet the evidence from Greece (and if you look closely enough, just about everywhere else) is that we shouldn't be trusting government quite as much as we do. Don't take this as an argument for getting rid of government but rather as an encouragement to individuals, families and neighbourhoods to take control of their own business rather than to sub-contract it to a government.

The saddest thing about Greece is that the people do not think they have the option of rejecting their failed government - no-one is offering a new settlement based on family and community rather than the old system of state-directed largess. So they turned to a party promising an end to the bad stuff and a return to those comfortable days of safe state jobs and early retirement. After the essentially tactical (and largely purposeless) referendum, Greeks will again face the reality of their future - poverty and bankruptcy. Fingers will be pointed at all sorts of culprits - Germans, EU bureaucrats, bankers, businessmen, politicians who used to run Greece. But no-one will spot the real culprit - an unsustainable government filled with protected and entitled employees prepared to screw over the rest of the nation so as to sustain that protection and entitlement.

So my warning is to echo those words of Ronald Reagan and to remind you that government is not your friend, does not care about your circumstance and mostly seeks to sustain itself using other peoples' money. Much of what we call 'austerity' is simply the realisation that government is too bloated, to overweaning and too self-interested. And pretty unaffordable.

The Greek crisis is a crisis of government not a crisis of banks, economics or markets. It is government that must change to save Greece. And our governments must change too if we are to avoid the same fate.

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Saturday 4 July 2015

The Adam Smith Institute's 'Green Belt' proposals are both wrong and silly

Not Green Belt but very protected
There's quite a gulf between the two extremes in the debate about housing supply - from those who say it's all down to planning through to those who tell us that the deliberate constraint of land supply has nothing to do with that lack of housing supply.

However, it is important when we engage in this debate that we understand the policies we criticise (or support). And it is on this point that the Adam Smith Institute consistently fails:

The first step is to classify Green Belt land into its three types. There is verdant land, with fields, meadows and woods – what most people think of when they think about Green Belts. There is ‘brown,’ or damaged land, including abandoned mines and quarries and former industrial buildings. Thirdly there is agricultural land, much of it given to intensive cultivation on vast fields using fertilizers and pesticides. It falls well short of being environmentally friendly.

Once the land is classified into its three types, the verdant land should be left untouched. All of the ‘brown’ land should be made available for building. In addition a one-mile deep strip of agricultural land at the inner edge of the Green Belt should be made available for house-building. In compensation, at least a mile of agricultural land beyond the outer edge of the Green Belt should be added to it as verdant Green Belt.

If you are to reform a policy it helps to understand the reasons for that policy existing - the ASI, in the example above, completely misunderstands the reason for us having a 'Green Belt'. And the way in which development on that land is constrained.

The Green Belt, according to policy, serves five purposes:

  1. to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
  2. to prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;
  3. to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
  4. to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
  5. to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.

Only one of these purposes relates to aesthetics (and the protection of settings for historic towns is very narrowly drawn). The remainder of the purposes are there for the practical and essentially conservative reason of preserving the identity of places by preventing sprawl and encouraging the recycling of redundant land within those places. There's a point at which the tightness of a 'Green Belt' results in over-dense development that really isn't sustainable or in the best interests of the economy.

The ASI wants to identify what it calls 'verdant' land in the 'Green Belt' so it can be protected. Again the ASI fails to appreciate that there are a bundle of other planning mechanisms intended to do just that. These tools range from Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and Special Landscape Areas (SLAs) through Habitat Regulation Assessments (HRAs) and Local Nature Partnerships to World Heritage Sites, Conservation Areas and Local Landscape Policy Areas (plus many others - too many to list). The existence or otherwise of a Green Belt is not relevant to any of these policies - they protect on the basis of scientific, ecological, archaeological or aesthetic reasons for resisting inappropriate development.

Furthermore, in broad terms, previously used land in the Green Belt (what the ASI chooses to call 'brown' or 'damaged' land) is developable. The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) says it's fine for:

...the partial or complete redevelopment of previously developed sites (brownfield land), whether redundant or in continuing use (excluding temporary buildings), which would not have a greater impact on the openness of the Green Belt and the purpose of including land within it than the existing development.
This isn't always popular (as we discovered during the Rochester and Strood by-election) but it demonstrates how thoughtful and sensitive development can take place within a Green Belt. Indeed, the relaxation of policy in the NPPF has already begun to deliver:

Glenigan was approached to investigate the number of new homes being approved on greenbelt sites and found that in 2013/14, 5,607 homes were granted permission. In the following year, this had reached 11,977, which also represented a five-fold increase since 2009/10.

These developments are almost all small scale - the conversion of redundant farm buildings, infill within small hamlets and the building of individual buildings on previously developed sites. The numbers aren't sufficient to change the economics of housing supply but it is significant that a minor change in attitude to development rights in 'Green Belt' has had such a profound affect without any alteration to the purpose of that 'Green Belt' as defined in policy guidance.

There is a very strong case for a full review of London's 'Green Belt' but this isn't the same as saying that there shouldn't be a 'Green Belt' or that we should (or even in terms of practical geography, could) simply take "a one-mile deep strip of agricultural land at the inner edge of the Green Belt" for house-building. In policy terms this fails on several counts - it ignores other protections (e.g. habitat regulations, flood risk), it takes no account of current or planned infrastructure, and it makes no attempt to match the location of housing supply to objectively assessed housing need. Such a blunt approach to 'Green Belt' review is worse than previous ASI comments that simply called for 'Green Belts' (or indeed the whole planning system) to be scrapped.

Finally, the ASI's attack on "agricultural land, much of it given to intensive cultivation on vast fields using fertilizers and pesticides" doesn't sit at all well with that organisation's supposed support for markets - intensification is about the more efficient use of land and reduces production costs allowing for a sustainable sector (that might allow us to stop subsidising it quite so much). More to the point, the ASI's ugly agricultural landscape absolutely fits the core outcome of 'Green Belt' policies - openness.

I fully understand - and have a great deal of sympathy for - criticism of planning. But if we are to set out a reform approach, it has to be grounded in real geography, based on the purpose of the policy in question and must avoid the ASI's biggest error, an essentially arbitrary land allocation. If the ASI took the trouble to read and understand a little of England's planning policy, it might be able to create a better approach to 'Green Belt' reform. Until that time it's just wrong and looks silly.

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Friday 3 July 2015

Starving Africans show that the Common Agricultural Policy is a lousy justification for EU membership.

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Second fundamental: the Common Agricultural Policy is a sophisticated mechanism for making sure we don’t starve. Scarcity causes disputes and without food security, peace would be impossible: people do nearly anything if they are hungry enough. Europe’s complex network of subsidies means that when a harvest fails at one end of the continent no one starves because we have slack in the system and the only ‘crisis’ to speak of involves pricing. Europe subsidises its food production, which makes it more expensive than food in most of the rest of the world, but – guess what? – we can afford our expensive food due to the prosperity that our long-term political stability has given us. Moreover the percentage of our income spent on food is diminishing.

People don't buy this crap do they? The CAP makes food more expensive and, to cap it all, means that we make a major contribution to killing folk in Africa who might want to compete with our expensive and inefficient farmers. Using the CAP as a justification for EU membership is an exercise in masochism - all the CAP means is higher food prices and more poverty in developing countries.

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Thursday 2 July 2015

Schools should stop policing the diets of children - it's none of their business



Soon to be banned from your local primary school

You know when you buy the sarnie in the plastic packaging at the fast counter in the supermarket? And, rushing to your car ripping the packaging open, you grab the sarnie and bite into it expecting a tang, a flavour? Nothing, nothing at all. You remind yourself again to get a salt pot and keep it in the glove compartment for those moments when the bizarre salt-free world of mass-market sarnies hits your mouth.

Salt was the first triumph of the nannying fussbuckets. They persuaded us (and more importantly the manufacturers of the foods we buy not to mention caterers in hotels, works canteens and schools) that salt is "bad for you". Just yesterday at a dinner the request to pass the salt pot (thank heavens that pot was provided - some places have removed such evil in case it tempts us to try and improve the flavourless pap they produce) was greeted with 'ooh, salt - that's bad' and variants on this mantra. There really isn't a great deal of evidence to support this assertion but we have come to believe that it is true.

The easiest target for all this fussbucketry is children. After all we all care for the children and want them to grow up into happy and healthy adults armed with the knowledge that means they'll live to a ripe old age. And parents - or a lot of them - are perennially guilty about how they're bringing up their youngsters. Are they getting the right exercise? Is their diet balanced? Do fizzy drinks make them hyper? Are we too strict? Too lenient? Will they turn into little sugar-crazed monsters if we don't let them have the occasional sweetie? The industry that this worry generates is enormous and exploitative - selling fads and fancies to mums and dads, promoting crazy ideas, and flip-flopping from one extreme to another on every subject from discipline to diet.

Along comes the state - urged by the net mums and lifestyle columnists to set the ideal, to provide directions on how best to raise children. Parents are frightened by scaremongering articles about childhood obesity (despite the evidence of their own eyes when it comes to their own children), misinformation about sugar and a whole bunch of pseudo-scientific wibble promoted by profit-mongers like Jamie Oliver. In the USA even the president's wife got in on the act (fulfilling the traditional role of that wife as nannying worrywart to the nation) by promoting legislation that cuts out the sugar, salt and other designated 'bad food' in school dinners.

And the result of all this fussbucketry? Our children become spivs, smugglers and dodgy dealers:

During a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, chaired by Rep. Todd Rokita (R., Ind.), a school administrator told Congress of the “unintended consequences” of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

“Perhaps the most colorful example in my district is that students have been caught bringing–and even selling–salt, pepper, and sugar in school to add taste to perceived bland and tasteless cafeteria food,” said John S. Payne, the president of Blackford County School Board of Trustees in Hartford City, Indiana.

You prohibit stuff that people like and, as sure as night follows day, you get a black market in those goodies. What on earth makes people - teachers, governors, legislators - think that somehow children will behave differently. In the UK schools are now routinely implementing oppressive, insistent anti-taste campaigns wrapped up as 'healthy food policies'. A government minister, Lord Nash - caught up in this incipient food fascism - has told us that all this poking around and policing the lunchboxes of children is absolutely fine:

“There is nothing to prevent schools from having a policy of inspecting lunch boxes for food items that are prohibited under their school food policies.

“A member of staff may confiscate, keep or destroy such items found as a result of the search if it is reasonable to do so in the circumstances.

“It would be good practice for the pupil to be present during an inspection and for a second member of staff to be present if any items are to be confiscated.

“If authorities and schools are concerned about their legal position, they should seek their own legal advice.”

And we know the result of policies banning chocolate, fizzy drinks, pastries and cakes:

A young entrepreneur has been suspended from his healthy eating school for repeatedly selling sweets there.

Tommie Rose, 12, said he made up to £200 a day selling chocolate and fizzy drinks to fellow pupils at Salford's Oasis Academy.

He was warned he was breaking a healthy eating policy, but continued to trade.

Following his week's suspension, the schoolboy said he would give the rest of his stock to the army "to bring to the homeless".

He said that he got the idea from the BBC series The Apprentice, particularly the episode "where they buy stuff from shops and sell them".

Tommie said he bought the sweets and drinks in bulk from discount stores and then sold them on for a marked-up price.

In the end it is not the job of schools to police the diets of the children they teach. The secret is in that last word - teach. That is what schools are for - to provide children with the essential skills and knowledge to succeed in the modern world. This includes information about food and diet so those children can make informed choices but it isn't a justification for introducing policies that allow teachers to steal food from the lunch boxes of their pupils because in their (unqualified) opinion that food is 'unhealthy'.

Most children - 90% or more of them - are not unhealthily fat, levels of childhood obesity are not rising and may even be falling.

The data shows there was a significant increase in child and adolescent overweight and obesity rates every year during the first decade from 1994 to 2003. Overall, annual rates did not increase significantly during the second decade, 2004 to 2013.

Yet schools have taken it upon themselves to take food from perfectly healthy children who are most likely eating a balanced diet simply to comply with a policy that does precisely zero to promote the educational purpose of the school.

It really is time schools focused on their job and stopped policing the diets of children.
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