Wednesday 26 August 2015

Driverless vehicles make railways (and our fast cars) obsolete



Every time such things as the "Northern Powerhouse" are mentioned the punditry, politicians and media immediately start agitating for billions to be invested in railways. This is despite the fact that railways account for only 3% of journeys in the UK while over 80% of journeys take place on roads. I've always suspected this is something of a 'boys' toys' response - we were brought up with train sets, Thomas the Tank Engine and Ivor. We like railways.

Consider this then:

"By combining ride sharing with car sharing—particularly in a city such as New York—MIT research has shown that it would be possible to take every passenger to his or her destination at the time they need to be there, with 80 percent fewer cars."

Or:

"An OECD study modelling the use of self-driving cars in Lisbon found that shared “taxibots” could reduce the number of cars needed by 80-90%. Similarly, research by Dan Fagnant of the University of Utah, drawing on traffic data for Austin, Texas, found that an autonomous taxi with dynamic ride-sharing could replace ten private vehicles. This is consistent with the finding that one extra car in a car-sharing service typically takes 9-13 cars off the road. Self-driving vehicles could, in short, reduce urban vehicle numbers by as much as 90%."

No new trains, no trams, no trolley buses, no bus lanes - just the realisation that automated cars ('driverless' as we call them) represent the real future of mass transportation. Not only will this, combined with emissionless or very low emission engines, reduce the negative environmental impact of road transport but we'll also see a dramatic drop in road casualties.

The reality is that investment on rail transport is not going to achieve payback ahead of the driverless car revolution - those billions now promised in new rolling stock, new stations and new lines are not needed. Cities need to be investing in the infrastructure required for driverless cars and to start planning for a city that doesn't need large parts of its land set aside to parking cars. This could mean more urban green space, the release of urban centre land for new housing and increased capacity on existing highways.

A world where we don't drive other than in controlled environments like race tracks seems strange in a culture seemingly dominated by the car but this is the likeliest result of driverless vehicles. For most of us the car (however much we drool over Ferrari and Aston Martin) is a practical and prosaic thing used to get us about the place. A very expensive practical and prosaic thing too. A world with vastly fewer road accidents, where we have no need to own a large lump of metal and plastic that sits doing nothing most of the time, and where the air is cleaner and the city greener - this is the world we should prepare for now.

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Tuesday 25 August 2015

Sorry but smoking doesn't harm Gedling Council's reputation



Gedling Borough Council (it's in Nottinghamshire and Labour-controlled, since you ask) is proposing the further demonisation and stigmatising of its employees - the ones that smoke that is:

"Whilst at work, and so far as is reasonably practicable, employees who smoke in accordance with this policy should do so with their Gedling Borough Council uniform covered as not doing so may create a negative impression of the council when viewed by the public."

Since when did smoking give a negative impression of the Council? Since officious HR managers and self-righteous councillors started treating smokers like pariahs. Ever since the smoking ban in 2007 (and long before that in many councils) smokers have clustered round the doors, on windswept pavements and corners. I'm guessing this looks untidy to those officious managers and is accompanied by moans from other employees about smoking breaks (like those other workers don't use up Council time talking about their holidays, making tea or playing solitaire on the phone).

What this policy is about is the isolation of smokers - it is but a short step away from a man with a bell parading in front of them crying "unclean, unclean". No health purpose is served and it isn't about the Council's image - it's simply nannying fussbucketry, rules for the sake of rules. A much better approach would be to provide a shelter for staff that smoke perhaps with somewhere to sit away from the doorways where smokers currently clump. But that would be thoughtful and considerate - why would the Council want to treat smokers that way, they're smelly scum aren't they?
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Sunday 23 August 2015

Authenticity and the British curry house - the case for immigrant chefs


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I am, as you all know, not particularly bothered by migration. If I wish to be free to travel where ever, I guess I should allow that same freedom for others. So what follows isn't about the immigration but rather an attempt to get under the existential angst of the British curry house. It seems they might be dying out:

It's often been said that Tikka Masala is the British national dish.

But it might not be for much longer, as figures show two curry houses are closing in Britain each week due to a shortage of chefs.

This crisis is due in part to the retirement of the original wave of immigrants in the 1970s who set up curry houses.

The problem is that the children of South Asian immigrants - perhaps especially the children of those running the takeaways and curry restaurants - really have little interest in working very long hours serving cheap curries to often ungrateful (indeed regularly drunk) customers. They've watched as the older generation worked itself into an early grave, putting up with racism, ignorance and aggression so as to make a half decent living.

The same story went for the traditional (if that's the right word) Chinese takeaway - every town had one but the sons and daughters of the Hong Kong immigrants were just as uninterested in working a 60 hours week of late nights as the sons and daughters of Bangladeshi or Pakistani curry house proprietors. The way in which the business - along with a new generation of Chinese food sellers - has been sustained has been through immigration.

And this is precisely how the Bangladesh Caterers Association frame the problem - they can't recruit people to train here in the UK so need to go to Bangladesh to find the chefs needed to keep the restaurants and takeaways going. All this is happening in a fast food and restaurant market that is changing rapidly - not just with the success of new franchise chains like Nandos but with a new bunch of immigrants from the middle east, from Poland, from Africa and from Southern Europe. Where curry and Chinese had the world to themselves they now compete with Kurds running cafes, polish takeaways and Moroccan/Spanish fusion. Add in Vietnamese, Korean and Greek and there's a real pressure on those existing takeaways and curry houses.

Regardless of the immigration question (and I'd let the chefs in), it strikes me that relying on a stream of new chefs from the other side of the world isn't the most sustainable business model - the Bangladesh Caterers Association might be right about the difficulties in recruiting and training curry chefs here in the UK but this could say more about the job and the conditions than it does about the supply of potential chefs. Indeed, while I'm sure that the mainstream catering business has a good number of immigrant chefs, it's still the case that plenty of British-born people enter into the cheffing business. A business model based on selling cheap takeaway food will struggle where there's upward pressure on wages.

The truth is that, given the proliferation of other takeaways and cheap restaurants (not to mention the street food explosion), there perhaps needs to be a shakeout in the curry house business. The best probably have little to worry about but if a third of the UK's 12,000 or so curry houses closed would it really be a cultural disaster? I can't speak for anywhere other than Bradford but my observation is that, while the 'curry after a night on the lash' market is still there it's far less important than a more regular market including an important market for family dining. And this changes the sort of restaurants - we're less keen on tatty flock wallpaper and cheap photos of the Taj Mahal preferring places that meet the clean, sharp and smart image of other restaurants. But one thing we still demand is authenticity.

Staffing has always been a dilemma for restaurants offering culturally-specific cuisine. It's not that only a Bangladeshi can cook a biryani but that the customer is looking for authenticity - eating a curry cooked by a Polish woman and served by a Latvian waiter feels wrong even if the food is great. And this means that, if we want our rogan josh served by a slightly surly young Asian and our pasta carbonara from a tight-trousered Italian holding an outsized pepper pot, we have a allow people to come to Britain to meet this need (given we know that there aren't enough British-born Asians or Italians to satisfy our demand for authenticity).

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Tuesday 18 August 2015

Why has diabetes increased? The answer may be economics rather than lifestyle

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Over the last couple of days we've seen reports that the numbers of diagnoses for diabetes in the UK has risen by 60% over the last decade.

The number of people living with diabetes has soared by nearly 60% in the past decade, Diabetes UK warns.

The charity said more than 3.3 million people have some form of the condition, up from 2.1 million in 2005.

There's no disputing the accuracy of these figures or indeed the impact of the increase on the NHS (although claims it will 'bankrupt' the service are stretching the point a little). And we obviously need to know what it is that's causing the increase so as to try and prevent or mitigate those causes.

The most common 'cause' fingered in the reports is "lifestyle":

Martin McShane, national medical director for long term conditions at NHS England, said: “These figures are a stark warning and reveal the increasing cost of diabetes to the NHS. Evidence is piling up that added sugar and excess calories are causing avoidable increases in obesity and diabetes.

“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, it’s time to get serious about lifestyle change. Prevention is better than treatment for individual health as well as the health of the NHS.”

And let's be clear here about lifestyle. There's a well established link between morbid obesity and type-2 diabetes (which makes up 90% of the increase):

The relationship between obesity and diabetes is of such interdependence that the term 'diabesity' has been coined. The passage from obesity to diabetes is made by a progressive defect in insulin secretion coupled with a progressive rise in insulin resistance. Both insulin resistance and defective insulin secretion appear very prematurely in obese patients, and both worsen similarly towards diabetes.

So if there has been a significant increase in obesity, we would expect a comparable increase in type-2 diabetes. The problem is that this dramatic increase in diabetes has come during a period when the UK's rates of obesity were pretty stable (perhaps rising slightly):


If obesity is the main cause of new diabetes cases, this graph suggests that the increase should have been significantly less than 60%. So we have to look for another cause - perhaps it's something specific in the diet - sugar is the usual culprit here (mostly because diabetes is all about blood sugars and stuff like that so it stands to reason, doesn't it). Listening to a radio report on the story, I heard the interviewer ask something like "but it's not every kind of sugar is it, there are good sugars like the ones in fruit" - receiving a response all about 'five-a-day' rather than an accurate answer explaining how there's a link between fructose and type-2 diabetes (fructose being the dominant sugar in fruit).

It's worth therefore looking at whether sugar makes up more or less of our calories than it did a decade age - if there has been a substantial increase in sugar as an element in our diet and especially fructose then we might be able to point at that as a reason for the huge increase:

So here are some facts about the consumption of "non-milk extrinsic sugars" (this is all the added sugar as well as honey) in the UK. The figures come from the National Nutrition and Diet Survey (NNDS) conducted by the Government to provide a nationally representative snapshot of the nutritional intake and status of the UK population.

In 2000/01 NMES consumption in daily grammes was:

Male: 79
Female: 51

In 2008-20011 the average is:

Male: 70
Female: 50.1

So our sugar consumption has fallen. And this includes ALL forms of added sugar - the scary hidden stuff in processed food and the spoonful of lovely honey you stir into your hot toddy. Other than for women over 65 every category of consumption has fallen - with the biggest fall being among children.

We still eat a lot of sugar but there's no indication that it can be blamed directly for the increase in diabetes and especially type-2 diabetes. Despite all the shouting about diet and obesity, all the damnation of 'lifestyle', we're not really any closer to understanding why the last decade has seen such a big increase in diabetes. There is, however, one other thing that changed in 2004:

The new GP contract has been quoted as the most radical change to health care since the advent of the NHS in 1948. A major component of the contract is the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF). This offers a scoring system for achievement of health-care targets which is linked to financial rewards.

Put more simply - from 2004 family doctors were given a direct financial incentive to diagnose conditions that were within health-care targets and this included diabetes. Prior to 2004 few GPs ran routine diabetes tests - afterwards, with a direct financial incentive, loads more cases were identified. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not suggesting the incentive was a bad thing (it did mean lots more people got their diabetes treated who didn't before) but that it was perhaps the main reason why we saw a steady increase in diagnoses for diabetes.

Finally there's the matter of demographics - or to put it another way, how we're living longer:



You can see (perhaps) the impact of the rapid increase in obesity during the 1990s but look at the prevelance in the over-65s. Combine an incentive for GPs with an ageing population more likely to be visiting those GPs and we can see the source of our 60% rise. And this means that, rather than shouting about lifestyle, we should be celebrating just how well we've done in identifying diabetics - the task is to get that diabetes managed so as to avoid the expensive clinical interventions that are the big drivers of cost.

But then shouting about fat people and blaming sugar is much easier isn't it!

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Monday 17 August 2015

Nannying fussbucketry of the day - cutting your nose off to spite your face

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Rory Stewart is a government minister in the environment department. Presented with the opportunity to take some cash off tobacco companies to help clean up litter, he plays the nannying fussbucket card:

In January, Kris Hopkins, then a local government minister, said he wanted tobacco companies to "make a contribution to put right the wrongs as a consequence of their product". The companies offered to fund measures to help clean the country's streets last month, but the offer was rejected by Rory Stewart, a junior environment minister. In a letter to the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, Mr Stewart said that a tie-up risked undermining councils’ work in promoting public health. Mr Stewart said it was "for local authorities to decide whether they wish to work with the tobacco industry", but added that councils should take their own legal advice before accepting the support. He said: "Since April 1 2013, local authorities have had responsibility for improving the health of their local populations and for public health services. The Government's view is that where a local authority enters into a partnership with a tobacco company, this fundamentally undermines the authority's statutory duty to promote public health." 

How stupid is this?

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Sunday 16 August 2015

Some of us have known for years that the far left is extremely unpleasant

"If you don't vote for Corbyn, you're a TORY SCUM""

I've paid more attention to the Labour leadership contest than perhaps I should. Not because it's unimportant but because (given I've no vote in the matter) it isn't something I can influence. Still it's a fascinating episode in our political history - we're watching one of the UK's dominant parties split into two factions that are, to be mild, aren't getting on together very well.

As an outsider I can only observe that the moderate wing of the Labour Party is experiencing what those of us who really are Tories have experienced for decades - a seemingly unstoppable tirade of, often childish and seldom intelligent, abuse. Those chants of "Tory scum, here we come" still echo and we smile as we watch uncompromising left-wingers applying the term 'Tory' to anyone who is slightly to the right of Dennis Skinner - I'm sure that none of us ever expected people like Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock to attract that epithet.

At the moment the focus is on the fact that these abusive left-wingers are 'Corbyn supporters' making their relentless offence on Labour's mainstream part of that campaign, a sort of pressure on MPs, councillors and others seen as representatives of the Party. The message is consistent - you're not properly committed to 'change' or 'progressive politics' unless you publicly come out in support of Jeremy Corbyn. And this cavalcade of baseless personal attack is accompanied by those very same supporters posting Corbyn's repeated claim that he "doesn't do abuse". Truth is that Corbyn doesn't have to do personal attacks, character assassination and trolling of Labour members who don't support him because he has an army of unpleasant folk who will do that work for him.

And these extremists don't just stop at abuse they extend this to a direct threat:

She revealed that one Labour councillor, who she declined to name, had been threatened with deselection for supporting her. “You cannot have people being threatened because they have different views or support different candidates. That is unacceptable,” she said.

When someone as dependably left-of-centre as Karl Turner gets this treatment you know that the Party has a problem. And it's a problem that won't go away once the leadership question is settled - too much insult, vitriol and threat has been thrown about (overwhelmingly by the hard left supporters of Corbyn) for the wounds to heal easily. Are those Corbyn supporters currently directing abuse at a councillor who has come out in support of another leadership candidate going to turn out in the rain to deliver his leaflets, knock on doors and make the case for someone they think is a Tory?

The sad fact in all this is that, as a real Tory for forty years, I understand entirely how the left behaves - the lunatic fringe is violent, vulgar, aggressive, judgemental and bigoted and the rest of the left smile benignly at all this as they secretly punch the air at this sort of quote:

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Those same Labour supporters who downloaded 'The Witch is Dead" when Margaret Thatcher died are now getting upset because some more-left-wing-than-thou comrades as spewing the same insulted in their direction. The left indulges its aggressive, violent bigots but now the campaign is inside the Labour Party those same people who used to polish their anti-Tory credentials by quoting Nye Bevan or Clement Attlee find themselves attacked as 'Tories'. As I wrote a while back:

You see Nye Bevan was wrong. Comprehensively wrong about almost everything. But this did not matter as this man could wallow in ignorance and bigotry, could opt for the insult above the evidence and could paint his opponents as evil. And his Party loved him for it. Loved him for his insults, for his uncompromising hatred of not just the Conservative Party but of Conservatives.

Men like Bevan set the tone for the manner in which Socialists debate - not just the 'lower then vermin' gibe but the genesis for "Tory scum, here we come". All this ferocious insult mixed in with hyperbolic predictions of gloom and despondency - or what the layman might term "outright lies".

The aggression, the insults, the damning caricatures - all these things cover up the fact that the far left's agenda is an agenda of despair and, as we know from Russia, from Cuba, from Venezuela, from any number of African countries, a recipe for poverty, economic chaos and oppression. The far left sanctifies racist murderers like Che Guevara, idolises terrorist apologists like Sinn Fein, and defines its position on the basis of hating Conservatives. And proposes state confiscation of private property accompanied by the economics of the madhouse - price controls, protectionism, high taxes on investment and the effective hounding out of anyone brave enough to try and create new value or new wealth.

Those Labour moderates with their head in their hands dreading the prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn leadership need to remember that it is their indulging of the nasty, bigoted far left that made it possible. Whether its laughing at Dennis Skinner's snippy little comments or hosting Cuba solidarity events, the moderate left failed to remove the nasty cancer of extreme socialism. Now those moderates see the far left for what it is - extremely unpleasant. As a Tory, I've known this for forty years. Welcome to the club.

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Friday 14 August 2015

Vexatious vexillology






The Snail. Its coat of arms shows the contrada’s colors – red, yellow and turquoise, with a snail on a white shield. Underneath, there’s a tile motif in red and yellow. It’s allied with the Porcupine, the Panther and the Forest, while its enemy is the Tortoise – their rivalry is probably the most ancient and deep rooted! 

Flags are a source of great debate dispute and disagreement. We proudly wave them, bury dead soldiers draped in them, and engage in complicated occult examination of what they symbolise. For some people another's flag is a source of offence - the "Butcher's Apron", a bloodied rag or a statement of oppression. People burn them, states pass laws preventing this and supreme courts spend hours discussing whether this is allowed or whether flag-burning is an act of free expression. In Northern Ireland a whole industry grew up around the matter of flags (and associated parades).

Flags embody a history, they are not merely a decorative banner available for successful athletes to drape round their shoulders as they do their lap of honour. And the colours or style of the flag isn't the issue but rather the importance of the banner to the place and the moment. It's true that flags grew up as a feudal statement, they were waved by kings, dukes and barons to signal their presence (and self-importance):

It is generally accepted that the banner and the pennon were both derived from the gonfanon, the war cloth, which was originally a flag fixed laterally to the staff. The gonfanon was in origin a lance flag, but already in the Bayeaux Tapestry some are larger and more ornate than others. It was natural for size to be indicative of the rank of the bearer. Hence in the 13th Century, after the development of that system of personal devices which we term armoury or heraldry, the larger flag, the banner, was the privilege of the barons and greater knights while other knights carried pennons, The significant point about the banner and the pennon is that they were personal flags: they identified not a military unit, but the baron or the knight as an individuals.

Some of these associations still remain - not just the pomp of heraldry or the cherishing of coats of arms but in the way footballers kiss the badge on their shirt to demonstrate their allegiance to the team (and in the importance of those symbols of the team - badges, banners, songs and slogans - to the fans).

So just as the flag was a means of identifying friends and allies, it was equally a way to see the enemy - armies weren't uniformed so the flags, colours and pennons were the essential identifier. As feudalism matured and the modern state began to emerge, the flags were adopted by those cities as symbols of their independent identity. With the birth of revolutionary governments - born as secular states from violent uprising - the importance of the flag became more pronounced. Citizens of the United State salute the flag - not as an act of worship but as a celebration of liberty. But this sanctification of the flag makes it an easy target for those who wish to oppose the USA.

In recent times we've seen various eruptions of anger, offence and self-righteous bleating around different flags - most notably the persistence of the flag (or one of the flags to be precise) of the Confederate States. But the acme of vexatious vexillology remains Northern Ireland birthplace of the 1954 Flags and Emblems Display Act and where the agreement dragged by John Major and Tony Blair from the bigots in Sinn Fein and the DUP included a reference to those flags and symbols. The Agreement recognised the:

“...sensitivity of the use of symbols and emblems for public purposes, and the need in particular in creating new institutions to ensure that such symbols and emblems are used in a manner which promotes mutual respect rather than division”

So the debate about flags became a core debate in Ulster politics featuring such things as the Flags (Northern Ireland) Order 2000 and statements like this:

“While it is legitimate for organizations and individuals to seek to celebrate cultural or sporting events in the public space, this needs to be time limited. If left on public display after a reasonable time, they cease to be an expression of celebration and can become a threatening attempt to mark territory”

All this reminds us that - however attached we are to that flag we love - these things are divisive. Sometimes this is deliberate and planned such as the recent 'online petition' from Scottish Nationalists over the union flag appearing on driving licences but often it is genuine. In my city of Bradford we have a flags policy that came about because of disputes about requests to fly flags to mark some event, anniversary or other occasion. Even then, there's the possibility of dispute as we discovered during the recent Israeli operations in Gaza - the Council flew the Palestinian flag (in the square not from City Hall) but refused a request to fly the Israeli flag. And across the year we have a cycle of flags flown - from the Pakistan flag on that nation's independence day through to the Welsh dragon on St David's Day.

All this takes us to the latest flag-related matter - or rather an absence of flag matter:

Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford says not having a union jack on Great Britain's World Championships kit is a "terrible choice".

The Briton, 28, tweeted a picture of his vest for the championships in Beijing, showing a British Athletics logo instead of the union jack flag.

Scot Eilish McColgan replied by saying "it looks like you're representing British Athletics instead of GB".

Rutherford agreed with the steeplechase star and said the change was "stupid".

Coming at a time of rampant Scottish nationalism (despite the majority of Scots voting to stay in the union) some will see the exclusion of the Union Flag as an act of cowardice while other will see the corporate nature of international professional sport as being at fault. Indeed the response from British athletics shows this (and that they miss the point entirely):

‘We discussed it with a number of people and athletes who thought it was a good idea. Remember England football have the three lions, England rugby the red rose, everyone has a distinctive logo except us. It’s not about rejecting the Union Jack — that’s why it’s still on the shorts and socks. And of course red, white and blue are still on the kit too.’

Referencing England rugby and England football is, to be kind, not exactly helpful to the debate! The point the athletes are making is that the flag symbolises what they are competing for at the world championships - when they set out as athletes their daydream will have been to run, throw or jump for their country.

It won't come as a surprise however that others have leapt into this discussion, taking issue with Greg Rutherford over the kit (and the flag):

Look at it, if you can bear to. With its cluttered burst of both right-angled and diagonal radiating lines, the British flag is heavy and overbearing, forceful and strident. On a battlefield it would make sense. Sure, this virulent standard served to rally regiments at the Battle of Waterloo. But today? At sporting events? It looks crap. Instead of suggesting unity, its sharp-angled divisions imply fragmentation. In fact, the relentless dynamism of its design evokes the shock and shatter of a cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Discussing the aesthetics of the Union Flag is a fine matter (and yes there are some better looking flags) but that completely misses the point - our association and attraction to that flag isn't about its looks but about what it means to us. It is the symbol of our place, our nation. It is the banner under which millions of our ancestors fought and it is a representation of what we stand for as a nation and of our history. It is true that some are vexed by its presence but that remains, in part at least, the purpose of the flag - it symbolises a successful, free and united nation. And some people - whether quasi-republicans like the author of that last quote or chip-balancing Scots separatists - simply don't like this fact.

The quote at the top is from a tourist guide to Siena and is one of that city's contrade. What is reflects is that the use of symbols to mark a place is ancient and not a bad thing. The bad thing is when people want to take down those symbols because they've decided they are offended by them. For a long time - thankfully no longer - England's Cross of St George was banished as a racist symbol only to be seen waved by the violent and extreme. While there are still people who don't understand how we've recovered England's flag (and we've sport to thank for that), it is welcome that we can now fly it with pride and enthusiasm.

When flags and symbols are pushed aside - or worse still banned or abandoned - we succumb to those who see the flag as a problem or worse see the contest of symbols as a matter of little victories against the enemy. Those athletes heading to Beijing will be representing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - it's welcome that they are proud of this fact and that they want to display the symbol of that pride, the Union Flag.

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Thursday 13 August 2015

Bradford Council's anti-business planning policy in action - health fascism edition


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Last year Bradford Council introduced - despite being told by their own Director of Public Health that it was pointless - a draconian planning policy banning new fast food outlets near schools and other places where children gather (churches, mosques, parks, play groups and so forth). The intention of the policy is to reduce levels of childhood obesity.

Yesterday the Deputy Leader of Bradford Council was crowing about the "success" of the policy:

"It is good to see that this new policy is working in blocking takeaways in these areas, as the purpose of this policy is to protect the health of young people in the district.

"When we consulted on the policy, comments were positive, especially from health professionals who recognise the obesity issue in Bradford."

In simple terms the policy bans new takeaways within 400m of schools (and all those other places) - which, if you know Bradford, means every single high street across the district. Except the City Centre because the politicians excluded it from the ban.

The article lists six proposals for new businesses that have fallen foul of the policy. That's six fewer businesses in Bradford each of which might have generated two or three jobs in a city with very high rates of unemployment. All to deliver an unquantifiable objective - there is absolutely no way for Bradford Council to know whether or not stopping these businesses from operating is reducing levels of childhood obesity.

The only quantifiable outcome of the policy is fewer businesses and fewer jobs. So when Cllr Slater says it's not "anti-business" she is lying.
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Monday 10 August 2015

In which a planner (inadvertently) shows us why lefties shouldn't be allowed to run cities



A town planning chap donned his cloak of leftiness and set about playing Cities: Skylines with the intention of testing "an alternative economic model which challenges the assumption that growth is only good". It didn't end well:

Whole districts are abandoned, public services have been shut down, employment has collapsed and the budget is crippled by Greek magnitudes of debt. There is also no democracy, or I would have been voted out of office long before the lights went out. “Where has everybody gone? #ghosttown” peeps my timeline. I had tried to break the rules of the game, and ended up with a broken city.

Not surprisingly our gamer didn't think that the problem lay with his strategy but, as is common with idiots of a left wing bent, rather 'the rules of the game'. His conclusion was: "what we could really use is a game that helps us develop and test a compelling alternative".

So let's look at his strategy and ask whether there might be some problems - even in the real world:

Jobs are in teaching, healthcare and public service – professions that contribute meaningfully to society and directly improve the quality of our lives. All energy production is renewable. Industrial districts are zoned for agriculture and forestry. There are no offices, no shops, and no landfill sites.

Ah, problem number one - nobody is doing a job that generates value, there is no means of paying for that education, healthcare and 'public service'. And, just as importantly, nowhere for these highly valued teachers, doctors and assorted public servants to spend their high salaries (the result of their high skills of course).

But my citizens are insatiable consumers, infuriated by the boredom of a good quality of life, and it doesn’t take long for them to balk at my pious, dematerialistic policies. I get complaints that “there’s nothing to do at weekends”. The blue bar, showing demand for commercial space, fills to the top. The game lectures me: “People want places to shop and enjoy themselves.” I’m tempted to placate them with a “Statue of Shopping”.

We live to consume and our intrepid lefty gamer has failed to realise this - people want places of leisure and pleasure and, quite frankly, his carefully manicured garden city is dull as dishwater. But instead of responding to what his citizens want the response is to ram more of the same down their throat (plus something they really don't want - very high taxes):

I build high schools, fire stations and bus routes. I plant trees on every street and put public spaces in every district. The logic of the game quantifies the benefits of this public infrastructure through private interests: “Parks and plazas raise the value of land around them, making citizens happy”. It also calculates infrastructure as a liability, which starts adding zeros to the expenses column of my budget. I’m soon pushing taxes up to 14% to balance the books, but this causes people to leave town in droves, shrinking my tax base and leaving behind vacant buildings.

You've noticed another problem - not only do we have a city with no productive workers and no service industry but our brave lefty gamer has failed to notice that the built environment needs looking after and, without income, that looking after falls on his city budget. We've a very expensive city built to provide jobs for public employees but with no shops to browse round, no pubs in which to celebrate, no bowling alleys to take the kids for a birthday treat, no cafes to chill in, and no restaurants for that first date. Plus no money to pay for anything.

And (given there's no momey) it's not surprising that the place is going bust - so our gamer compounds this:

I resist, but eventually have no choice but to take out a troika of loans at unfavourable rates. I’ve now been lured into a dependence on growth to service the public debt. But with no growth forthcoming, the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and I’m forced to accept the terms of a bailout.

What this game tells us (and I'll accept that the game's model may not be a perfect description of reality) is that private business is essential to successful places, that we are consumers before we are producers, and that value is better determined by markets rather than the arbitrary opinions of lefty planners. And we rather know all this - Finn Williams, our gamer, could have created a stable and resilient city if he'd embraced the things that really make cities tick. It's not about growth over all things but rather about generating enough value to sustain the nice things we want like parks, tree-lined boulevards and creative public space. Above all people want pleasure in their consumption, they want lovely things around them and they desire the latest gizmos and gadgets. I'm sure Finn has a top-of-the-range computer, an iPhone, and a snug flat in London lined with all the stuff he loves. So why is it he wants to create a city that can't provide those things and that place?

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Sunday 9 August 2015

Vegemite - a reminder (if you needed one) that prohibition doesn't work

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OK it's Australia, home to some of the world's most intrusive fussbucketry but it's a lesson:

Australia’s government says Vegemite sales should be limited in some communities to prevent the yeast-based spread being used to make home-made alcohol.

Nigel Scullion, the indigenous affairs minister, said the spread – which is considered something of a national culinary staple – was a "precursor to misery" in communities suffering from alcohol abuse.

He said he was not proposing a ban but wanted to restrict excessive sales of high-yeast products such as Vegemite in “dry” communities – typically remote Aboriginal townships where alcohol sales are banned.

“Addiction of any type is a concern but communities, especially where alcohol is banned, must work to ensure home brewing of this type does not occur,” he said.

See what's happened here? These 'dry' communities (apparently Aussie white people think Aboriginal drink problems relate to some natural predisposition not to 200 years of oppression) do what dry communities always do - they make their own booze. And, as we all know, alcohol is very easy to make.

You see, prohibition doesn't work.

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Saturday 8 August 2015

"The bigger the number the better" - public health campaigners' cavalier attitude to evidence

An entirely gratuitous picture of cake
I've felt for a long time that single issue campaigners of various kinds - poverty, public health and so forth - have a tendency to choose statistics that maximise the scale of the problem they are campaigning about. From the perspective of campaigning as a business, this makes a lot of sense - if we can demonstrate there are huge numbers 'living in poverty' or some sort of booze or food related crisis then the need for our campaign is all the greater. And we can present the stats to compliant - and media-scared - governments who will carry on providing the funds to pay us so we can carry on campaigning.

This hyping up of a problem does however have a downside - by making the numbers ever larger and the problem greater and greater we feed scepticism and cynicism in the population. If your recommended alcohol limits boil down to a glass of dry sherry twice a week the drinking public (and that's most of us) are going to think something like "that probably a load of nonsense, isn't it", And that public will carry on behaving just as they were before.

So the campaign is sustained because government is given scary figures by the campaigners. And the unwillingness of the population to change its behaviour (because it doesn't believe those scary figures) further reinforces the view of campaigners that "something must be done".

And now we have some evidence to support this theory:

People who think they are overweight or obese are more likely to pile on the pounds than those who are unaware that they may be heavier than doctors would advise, according to research.

The researchers show that telling people that they are fat is unlikely to work because of the stress associated with the stigma of fatness. Yet the obesity industry is utterly predicated on two interpretations of statistics - firstly the conflating of 'overweight and obese' into on number and secondly the narrowing of the definition of 'normal' weight. We're repeatedly told that two thirds of more of adults are 'overweight or obese' and in doing so extend the stigma of being a bit chubby from body image alone to body image plus health. This is despite there being no evidence at all showing that being overweight is unhealthy.

"Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ (BMI > 35) are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality."

This is a pretty consistent finding - far from being chubby shortening our lives, the reality is that is probably extends them. If we were - given what the evidence tells us - to redefine healthy and unhealthy weights so as to direct appropriate interventions, a better definition would focus 'obesity' on people with a BMI in excess of 35. But were we to do this the numbers might fall from 'two thirds of adults and a third of children' to '5% of adults and 1% of children' - still a lot of people but not exactly a crisis. Such a change would challenge the huge sums being spent on anti-obesity campaigns and would call into question the ongoing campaigns against sugar, fat and the working class diet.

I am repeatedly told by public health folk that their work is 'evidence-based'. And they are very quick to point out studies that support their position. But when the evidence - as we see here with obesity - challenges the preferred position (and funding - Bradford spends over £2 million on its obesity team) it is simply ignored. By not fitting the narrative - 'global obesity crisis' - the pesky evidence undermines the strategies of public health and brings into question its programmes of work. This cannot be allowed.

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Thursday 6 August 2015

Quote of the day - on planning and inequality


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From Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning by
Tory Gattis for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism:

All in all, the net effect is a suffocating restriction on new housing supply even as demand increases, leading to skyrocketing home prices. This has the effect of making affluent NIMBY homeowners, who are disproportionately white and older, quite happy since their homes prices, sans new competition, are almost certain to increase. But the system works like a “Robin Hood in reverse” for younger, middle and working class families that lose out. This is a major driver of inequality - in fact, recent analysis indicates that homeownership completely accounts for the rise in inequality in recent decades. Planners have to take a hard look in the mirror and face an uncomfortable truth: whether they have been conscious of it or not, they have been direct accomplices in the rise of inequality and the decline of the middle and working class.

It really is time we recognised the cost of planning to our economy - not so as to abolish it but in order that we, and the planners, understand that planning controls are ipso facto anti-growth.

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Wednesday 5 August 2015

The Cock-up Theory of History


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Many years ago, a council colleague (and retired economics teacher) referred to the two theories of history in a council debate. The two theories are "The Conspiracy Theory" and "The Cock-up Theory" - and John Cole, the Liberal Democrat councillor concerned proclaimed his adherence to the latter.

Here - in an article in New Geography is a little more on the matter:

In economics, ‘interest’ – whether it be self-interest or interest group pressure – is the ‘safe’ explanation for outcomes that are detrimental to the public. If interest group pressure (or even populism) is behind a bad policy decision, then it is not a ‘mistake.’ Rather, it is an intentional, rational decision as described by Chicago School economist and Nobel laureate George Stigler. However, if a policy decision is the result of bad judgment, then Stigler cannot explain it. Brazilian economist Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira suggests that the relevant variable in this case is incompetence. Incompetence is an independent explanatory variable; it cannot be explained in rational or historical terms.

Simply not having much of a clue what you're doing lies at the back of the great disasters - coupled, as ever, with the vanity of great men. Problems are intentional but consequential on our incompetence, on human capacity for the cock up. The whole article is worth a read.

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"We weren't elected to make cuts!" The case for independent local government (and elected mayors)


My grandfather as Chairman of Penge UDC in its final year - 1964
A while ago I wrote asking what local councillors are for. The article was written in response to the idea of councillors being 'mini-mayors' in their wards and I concluded:

Much though I see merit in the mini-mayor idea, it is a reminder that the 2000 Local Government Act emasculated local councillors and created the situation where many ended up flapping around wondering what their role and purpose might be.

And I remain of the view that Blair and Prescott's wholesale changes to the governance of local authorities did untold damage to the idea of local representation. It is also striking that, despite the more recent Localism Act allowing councils of any size to return to the old committee system, this has only happened where political circumstances made it something one or other of the two big parties could sign up to.

As a consequence of the 2000 Act (which introduced a system designed for a directly elected mayor but, in most cases, applied without such a beast), we have a governance system at local level that excludes all but a tiny minority of councillors. Moreover, the system places leaders of councils in a special position - in effect treated as de facto executive mayors. I've witnessed this problem - and it is a problem - in discussions and debates about the creation of new sub-regional structures to harbour decentralised powers and cash from central government.

Regardless of the political balance or make-up of local authorities, it is leaders that central government wishes to deal with, leaders that sit on decision-making panels, and leaders that define the position of the particular local authority. What we have is indistinguishable - except in its lack of democratic mandate, transparency and accountability - from a directly elected mayor.

At the same time as the granting of special position to leaders, councils have been faced with the necessity of reducing their spending. This has led to much hand-wringing while the prosaic job of getting savings made without doing too much damage to front line services was undertaken - largely successfully. it is this process of reducing local spending that often gets dubbed austerity. And has resulted in a further round of worries about the role of local councillors - along the lines of "we weren't elected to make cuts!"

Despite this, it is clear that austerity has led to a further undermining of the influence of most Councillors, who now find themselves open to range of practical and more wide-ranging challenges. There are now fewer Councillors- financial pressure is leading to a ‘Councillor cull’ as Councils are merged, if not statutorily, then for all practical purposes via sharing services. They have much less financial discretion, leaving doubts about whether even statutory services can be maintained. 95% of Councils in England are now sharing a total of 383 shared service arrangements, leading to a dilution of Councillor influence. ‘Backbench’ Councillors not involved in the strategic decision making find themselves increasingly in the dark re. the details of contractual arrangements which directly impact on their wards and which may be in place for 25 years.

Once again this suggests that the role and purpose of the local councillor is worthy of review. If you take the 'community leader' model of councillor where people are elected to champion a given place (and to act as a de facto gatekeeper to the local bureaucracy) then there's a good case for having a lot more councillors. There's quite a contrast between me representing 13,500 electors in Bingley Rural and the fortunate councillor for Tamarside in Torridge District with only 1300 or so voters. The problem is that, on this ratio, Bradford would have 300 councillors which is perhaps a few too many!

As you all know, I'm not a big fan of councillors as community leaders - the sort of view that Clive Betts MP, chairman of the local government select committee, holds:

Councillors are spending less time in council chambers and more time out and about in their communities. In future, they will increasingly need to be on the frontline, working with constituents and external organisations such as GPs, schools, police, local businesses and voluntary organisations to ensure their communities make the most of all the opportunities available to them.

This is the councillor as an agent of the state rather than as a representative of the people - turning our role around from decision-making to being part of implementing decisions made by others. This negation of the councillor's representative role is, in truth, the central failing of the system created under the 2000 Act. That Act sought to deny - in most circumstances - councillors their historic role of being the representatives of a given group of electors, charged with voting of their behalf. Today, your local councillor - unless you happen to live in the leader of a council's ward - no longer has that role when it comes to most decisions that affect where you live.

Understandably, leaders (and those who aspire to that role) make common cause with the councillors who like the community leadership role to resist reforms to the system that might allow for councillors to take on that historic representative role again. These leaders will point to places and times when the councillor does have a say - on the setting of the council tax, on planning decisions, on area committees. But they never mention the restraints on those decisions - the 'Section 151 Officers Report', the 'National Planning Policy Framework', or the council's own Constitution.

None of these things are the consequence of austerity (defined in this case as cuts to local council budgets) it's just that the need to reduce spending has led to difficult decisions being made. And for many local councillors the sudden realisation that they have precious little say over any of those decisions affecting their wards.

For all its flaws and failings, local government is almost always better managed and more effective than centrally-directed government. This is what Tim Worstall called Bjorn's Beer Effect:

You’re in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

The point (and we in England need to recognise this) is that Bjorn, like his counterparts in France and Germany, is a directly-elected mayor. If UK local government is to realise the sort of autonomy and fiscal control that places eleswhere enjoy, it has to start by acknowledging its present governance is opaque, undemocratic and unaccountable. And it is the governance at fault not the quality of councillor or the complexity of the decisions that are being made. It's certainly nothing to do with austerity.

For a hundred years or so the UK - well, England really - had a local government system that worked pretty well. It had limited powers (although this being England it could always do things so long as they weren't expressly forbidden) but exercised those powers using the funds it raised locally. As a result things like water supplies, sewers, houses, museums, art galleries, parks and swimming pools were built and places - even the smallest of places - developed their own identity and sense of value.

All this changed over the years from the 1960s to today's position where local councils are lost, struggling to know whether they are a community-focused urban or rural district or a grand and powerful city region authority demanding of attention (and loads of cash from central government). We behave like the former and demand powers like the latter, we reject elected mayors in favour of powerful leaders pretending the two are somehow different, and we get together and demand loudly that Westminster gives us more attention.

If we want to make the case for decentralising our over-centralised state - 'devolution' as it's popularly called - we have to start with making the case for a system of governance better than the one imposed on us (but gleefully snatched up) by the 2000 Local Government Act. Mayors are part of that better system but so are stronger parish councils and a thorough debate about the role of the local councillor. Above all - and we know this - the great years of local government were when local councils didn't have to get either permission or cash from Whitehall to do what they felt was right.

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Monday 3 August 2015

Neoliberalism is wonderful...

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Seriously it is. The much maligned idea of open trade, international flows of money and stern fiscal control has meant that there are now fewer people in extreme poverty than in 1820 (when there were only a billion folk on the planet).

So all you lefties - get with the project.


The graph is from Max Roser.

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Sunday 2 August 2015

Why conservatives need to be more Santa Claus...


"When you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money."

American conservative thinker, Arthur C Brooks, has written a book urging us (conservatives that is) to change the manner in which we present ourselves to the world. The book - “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America.” - reopens an important argument about conservatism, one that was glibly but tellingly set out by P J O'Rourke:

I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God's heavenly country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He's cute. He's nonthreatening. He's always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who's been naughty and who's been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he's famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus

The message here is that conservatives are stern, judging, a little intolerant and rather rules bound. In reviewing Brooks' book, Greg Mankiw makes more of less the same observation:

The image problem is that conservatives too often resemble Ebenezer Scrooge. By opposing increases in the minimum wage, advocating cuts in corporate taxes, railing against excessive regulation of business and worrying about the cost of entitlement programs, they appear to care only about the rich and well-­connected.

And the answer is, to continue the O'Rourke metaphor, that conservatives should be more Santa Claus or maybe stress the other - loving and caring - aspects of God (this works better in the USA where God is a rather bigger deal than he is in British politics). The challenge still remains - conservatives are compassionate, do care, and consistently demonstrate a greater propensity for acts of compassion than 'progressives' who hide behind that Clement Attlee position:

"Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim."

This is entirely the difference between conservatives - the Good Right as Tim Montgomerie has campaigned - and 'progressives'. The latter believe it is right for the act of compassion to be nationalised, for it to become part of the state's purpose whereas conservatives see this as people rejecting their responsibility to care. I recall my Mum complaining - back in the 1980s - about the lack of volunteers and her explaining that people thought that the government or the council should provide this as paid work "because we pay our taxes".

It is this very position - the pushing aside of private acts of compassion, the corporatising of charity and the suppression of voluntary leadership - that has helped damage and atomise our society. The very things that progressives claim to support are harmed by the crowding out from an overweening state. This isn't just the £13 billion or so in government funding spent through charitable and 'voluntary' organisations but the manner in which regulation stifles that voluntary initiative. As the team from Joseph Rowntree Foundation looking at loneliness discovered, we feel we need "permission to care" and that "regulation kills kindness". At the time I wrote:

That professionals in the employ of the Council, the NHS or their satellite agencies (are) needed to allow people to look out for their neighbour. In this I saw a dead culture - one murdered by the good intentions of public agencies. That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

It isn't enough however for conservatives to challenge the progressives' corruption of care and compassion - this is too close to semantics and reminds the listener of the contested word games of political spin. We need to make that challenge but, at the same time, talk about different subjects than those we're used to talking about. In Mankiw's review of "The Conservative Heart", he reminds us of the tough love, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps aspect of conservative policy-making and comments that the typical policy agenda for conservatives seems doomed to be condemned by the left as "attempts to further enrich the already successful while gutting the social safety net for those most in need".

This might be a gross and inaccurate caricature of the conservative policy platform but it works as a critique because it's easy to cast such policies as 'uncaring' - even when (as has been the case with the American left especially) those very same policies are pursued by self-described progressives. In the UK there has been - until this year's proposals for reforming in-work benefits - a pretty consistent approach to welfare with the emphasis on wielding a stick to incentivise people into getting a job. The Labour Party's rhetoric is different but the policy programme - a combination of tightening entitlement rules, training programmes and workfare - remains essentially unchanged.

Conservatives need - and this is the point of Brooks' book - to start talking from the heart about subjects like poverty, achievement, aspiration and what various commenters call the three rules. Finish school, get and keep a job, get married and stay married:

The 2001 Census data clearly show that dropping out of high school, staying single, having children without a spouse, working only part time or not working at all substantially increase the chances of long-term poverty. Certain behaviors are a recipe for success. Among those who finish high school, get married, have children only within a marriage and go to work, the odds of long-term poverty are virtually nil.

Moreover, while these behaviours matter, we are also in the position to support people in achieving that exit from poverty. But what we can't do is ignore the reality of poverty and the fact that, in terms of society's expectations, there are many people who are in that condition. And in talking about poverty we need to reposition the debate as being about genuine material want not the preferred progressive line of focusing on inequality (and in describing inequality as poverty, a view which is manifestly nonsense).

What is most interesting about the Brooks manifesto is that is isn't about policy but about heart. This is where the progressive left has regularly trumped centre and right wing politics - their arguments are framed in terms of the excluded, the vulnerable and the oppressed. The programmes of the established state are characterised as failing these groups whereas a progressive state wouldn't not do so. Other than promises of more funding, however, there is little substance to the progressive programme but this doesn't matter since the appeal is based on describing how the vulnerable, excluded and oppressed are failed, not on a policy platform proposing solutions to these groups' predicament.

In the end conservative politicians need to learn how to use the anecdotes of caring and to do so consistently. Here's Marco Rubio getting the heart thing right:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

This is a message the progressive left don't understand because their targets are always wealthy and successful people like Marco Rubio - the solution they offer is to pull those people down, to extract more cash from them so as to allow people they consider vulnerable, excluded or oppressed not to have to do what Rubio's dad did.

In the end the absolutely fundamental distinction between conservatives and progressives is that the former believe everyone has within themselves the capacity to achieve. And conservatives further believe that the duty of everyone - and of the state - is to help people achieve. This isn't always what people aspire to do but it is a chance to do the essentials right - to bring up good, honest children with the right values, to contribute to the local community, and to carry on providing for self and others through your own effort. The state's role is to support this not to replace it with government.


Conservatives can get this message across but to succeed it's not enough to rely on the uselessness of the opposition or the votes of the grumpy. We need to cultivate a little more jolliness, to be prepared to simply empathise, to give a great big Santa Claus hug to those people who are struggling. This works as an entire policy programme for the left - us conservatives can do it too in the knowledge that we really do have policies that work, that help people like Marco Rubio's dad, and that offer real hope not the false hope of the handout.

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Saturday 1 August 2015

So what is beauty? A response to Res Publica.




Centrist think tank, Res Publica has put forward the idea that a 'right to beauty' should be enshrined in primary legislation:

Our report argues for a ‘community right to beauty’ to be introduced via primary legislation. The policy recommendations set out a range of new powers and incentives to support the democratic discernment of what makes a neighbourhood beautiful, and communities’ ability to independently create, shape and improve their locale.

It all sounds fabulous but, yet again, it starts from the premise of inequalities rather than any attempt to be objective about what we mean by beauty. There are several worrying questions that arise here - the democratisation of beauty (apologies for the ugly language), the presumption that access to beauty is limited or restricted, and the reminder that polished or preserved places represent the only beauty in an urban environment.

Let's start with an example. Is this beautiful?




It's OK, you don't have to answer the question - not everyone loves early 19th century industrial architecture. And if you visit the place pictured you'll see the sadness in its tattiness, the consequences of its redundancy and realise that all this is mixed into the gritty surroundings of terraces, traffic and litter.

Another example:




Easier this time - we all get that this is beautiful. A fifty foot waterfall setting in mature woodland - such scenes should be protected, cherished and celebrated.

The two pictures are about seven miles apart yet could be different countries. Indeed, I'm pretty sure than most of the people leaving near the first picture don't even know the falls exist. They are private, secret. A little piece of magic tucked away. There is no tourist sign, no 'interpretation', no urbanising of a wonderfully rural setting. But you can walk to it - for free.

The point of a democratic beauty is that it's determined by polls and majority opinion. I may consider that the serried rows of three-bed semis in the place I was raised contains a kind of beauty - a beauty of memory, of things done, with each corner revealing a little something that strikes to the soul, that reveals beauty. But the great and good do not consider this to be beauty, they tell us that nothing in the environment of the inner urban dweller is beautiful.

Our public poll is damning. It shows we are singularly failing the poor. A staggeringly high household income, more than £10, 000 above the national average (2), gives you better access to beautiful surroundings.”

Res Publica has gathered together a cross-party 'who's who' all proclaiming how important it is that people have 'access to beauty'. But this is beauty as defined by the great and the good not our own personal understanding of beauty. To return to access - what Res Publica are speaking of isn't 'access' but proximity. Their poll simply reflects the fact that places considered beautiful by a lot of people garner a premium for those wanting to live close by. To use urban examples, if you want to live overlooking The Stray in Harrogate or in Bath's Royal Crescent then you will be paying a substantial premium for such a pleasure.

But if I want to walk on The Stray, take photographs of the Royal Crescent or stand looking down on Edinburgh's Royal Mile then I can do so freely and without restriction for these are public places. The view from the summit of Whernside, the daffodils at Grasmere beloved of Wordsworth and the Windrush as it winds through West Oxfordshire - these views are for all of us, free and without restriction.

The Res Publica report presents an approach to beauty that is shallow and incomplete. It assumes that the "community" is more able to determine what is, or isn't, beautiful - guided of course by a new volume or two of planning guidance all carefully crafted by those appointed by the great and good rather than by communities (and due to be interpreted by the cold analysis of the lawyer). Think for a minute about the disagreements you've had with friends and family over choice of colours, buildings and vistas and then scale these up to the level of a community (whatever that might mean) - can a community determined definition of beauty ever really work?

This 'community right to beauty' proposal is simply a headline looking for an idea to go with it. But the idea isn't beauty at all, nor is it something excluded from existing planning controls - the idea is that we should protect places that work, promote the improvement of places that don't work, and, for new development, seek to build places rather than just buildings. None of this has anything at all to do with beauty - yet if we get it right we will have places loved, cared for and celebrated by their residents. And enjoyed by visitors.

Most of the tools needed for getting this right are in place. We do not need new legislation that creates a sterile definition of beauty in planning law. We have had community design guides for decades, we can create neighbourhood plans that make strong statements about the style of development and the provision of open space, and we have a local plan framework that incorporates conservation, listed structures and much else protecting heritage, ecology and environment. Most councils employ specialists to advise on design up to and including, for some places, a skilled city architect.

Finally beauty is a personal thing and should be respected as such. We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to persuade young people that there isn't some kind of perfection - a singular depiction of beauty - yet now we have people setting about doing just that for urban environments. And doing this because of a misplaced - indeed a stupid - belief that somehow such defined beauty is more democratic and more accessible. We don't need rules for planners and bureaucrats to stop things, we need to remember that the urban beauty we're celebrating - in Saltaire, in Bath, in York, on the canalsides of England - was built without planning legislation, without the great and good deciding what was or wasn't right.

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