Monday 30 November 2015

Shooting the sugar plum fairy. Why advertising isn't to blame.



The headlines from the report into childhood obesity published today will be all about taxing fizzy drinks. A pretty daft idea that targets just one source of sugar on the basis that in one place, Mexico, a 'soda tax' managed to reduce consumption by about 6%. There's no evidence that this tax reduced obesity, which was the main reason for introducing the tax in the first place.

Others will explain better than I can why all this is pretty daft. Not least because childhood obesity is falling in the UK - as the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) reported recently. More to the point, the problem with all this is that there's precious little evidence supporting a link between being overweight or mildly 'obese' and mortality:

There is now extensive and convincing evidence that the greatest life expectancy is experienced by those who are classified as “Overweight”. In addition, there is no reliable evidence that there is any reduced expectancy even in those who are mildly obese (5). It is true that those who are seriously obese do have an increased mortality but the picture changes when the effect of physical fitness is incorporated.

I suspect there's little or no chance of the current government introducing a tax on fizzy drinks - the prime minister has ruled it out more than once and the dissenters to the proposal from the health select committee report were both Conservatives - here's Andrew Percy:

Andrew Percy, the Tory MP for Brigg and Goole who sits on the health committee told the paper Oliver’s suggestion is “patronising nonsense”.

“This is a classic nanny state reaction and it won’t work.

“Slapping 10p or 20p on a can of sugary drink won’t make people change their behaviour.”

However the committee's report makes a whole load of other proposals that target advertising and marketing activity - that shoot the messenger.

Promotional and marketing techniques for specific products or brands have the aim of achieving one main goal—increases in sales. This is achieved through old (eg TV advertising, programme sponsorship, cinema, radio and billboards) and new methods (eg social media, advergames and internet pop-ups), which are designed to influence our food choices by, for example, overriding our established eating habits, and taking advantage of others such as our desire to reduce costs. The intent can be to encourage us to switch between brands or products; or there may be an additional consequence of getting us to buy and consume more.

Now this argument - from Public Health England and unsupported by evidence - flies in the face of everything that we know about advertising, choice and the way communications shape our preferences and decisions. Firstly, it just isn't true that advertising's purpose is to increase sales (I'm taking this to mean increasing the size of the market - to sell more sweets or fizzy drinks rather than more of the advertisers sweets or fizzy drinks). Here's the most well know study into the effects of advertising:

This paper is concerned with testing for causation, using the Granger definition, in a bivariate time-series context. It is argued that a sound and natural approach to such tests must rely primarily on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of models relating the original (non-prewhitened) series of interest. A specific technique of this sort is presented and employed to investigate the relation between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption spending. The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence suggesting that consumption may cause advertising is presented.

In simple terms, advertising doesn't create new demand and there's some suggestion that the reverse is true. Indeed advertising effects on demand are persistently weak:

Advertising effects appear to be so weak as to give little, if any, support for the Galbraithian view that advertisers exert powerful, manipulative effects upon the allocation of consumers' expenditure between products.

As a marketing professional this is pretty depressing - we've all watched Mad Men and read Vince Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' and kidded ourselves that advertising somehow created the consumerist world we live in. The prosaic truth is that, as we knew in our hearts (and those famed ad men of the '50s and '60s knew), advertising is a mirror held up to society and merely reflects the changes in our fads, fancies, preferences and choices. Don't get me wrong, advertising works but not in the way people who aren't marketers think it works.

And if you think about this for a second, it becomes clear. The advertiser has absolutely no interest in promoting his competitors' products, which is what he would be doing if what PHE says were true. And the effects - or objectives - are no different if it's cars, chicken or chocolate we're advertising. Or indeed if the audience is children or grown-ups (although there's some evidence showing children are more believing of ads this still only makes them choose one brand of breakfast cereal instead of another).

The most depressing part of all this - apart from the wholly unjustified attack on sugar as a macronutrient - is that the select committee conducted a review of and recommends regulations affecting advertising and marketing without taking evidence from any marketers. Yet again - as we saw with tobacco, with alcohol and with financial services - the messenger is machine-gunned by MPs who start off with no knowledge of marketing and finish with no knowledge of marketing.

In nearly every circumstance, brand advertising doesn't create new demand. Yet we see again the lie that banning or restricting its use will somehow reduce demand. This simply won't happen. The committee is just shooting the sugar plum fairy.

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Sunday 29 November 2015

So most academic research is pointless?

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This was really striking:

In his new book “Higher Education in America,” former Harvard president Derek Bok notes that 98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two.

We are conducting research because the system says you must research. We are publishing - and supporting a vibrant academic publishing industry - simply because we're measuring performance on that basis.

We privilege academics as specially clever people but the reality is that many of them spend their time doing things that serve no real purpose, conducting research that no-one (bar the journal editor and the academic's mum) will read about.

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Saturday 28 November 2015

Politics is run by bullies.



Politics is managed by bullies...everywhere. It is its biggest problem. It isn't solved by hanging one man out to dry. Here's John McTernan - pundit and former Labour spinner - celebrating violent bullying as a management tactic:

"A Cabinet minister who served in both the Blair and Brown governments retells his first encounter with Labour whips. Newly elected, he was walking through the corridors of the House when he was accosted by one. He was pushed against the wall, his testicles grabbed and twisted sharply – and painfully. “Son, you’ve done nothing to annoy me. Yet. Just think what I’ll do if you cross me.” That is how you manage backbenchers."

This is why that poor kid was bullied and why the bullying was covered up. Because it's normal, everyday practice in politics. If cabinet ministers, senior spin doctors and the like make light of bullying as a tactic of course folk lower down will emulate them.

The entire culture of our politics - just look at Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It - is centred on ad hominem, on using the personal to control the political. Having spent best part of my working life in this environment, I utterly hate it and the detestable, shallow people who rise to positions of power and influence through being bullies, through trampling over the bodies of their colleagues and opponents.

This is the culture that gave us a Standards Board used by bullies to control what others said, the culture that resulted in Prime Ministers so mistrustful of colleagues as to be almost paralysed in their actions, a culture where the most minor of mistakes is used to crush the enemy (remembering that for the bully the enemy is anyone between them and power).

So dance on the political grave of Grant Shapps, call him a 'thug' or whatever (despite there being precious little to support such contention). I don't know the man, have never met him - I just know his resignation doesn't solve the problem. That he's just a scapegoat just as Damian McBride was a scapegoat, just as were any number of folk we don't know who were shoved aside by the bullies clambering to the top of the political pile.

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Friday 27 November 2015

There's a case for looking at how we tax housing but it's not the reason for the supply problem

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That housing is taxed differently and, for most housing, doesn't get clobbered with capital gains taxes does make housing a more attractive proposition. Perhaps reducing capital gains taxes to a sensible level and applying them to all capital sales might work?

But this conclusion is wrong:

The biggest distortion to the housing market is our tax system. This not only increases demand for housing as an asset but it also encourages owners to be less flexible about allowing developments which might affect their wealth. We suspect that this is the root cause of much of the supply problem which needs to be addressed if we are to deal with the longer-term housing challenges.

The first part might be true except that most of us buy houses because we want to use them and the capital gain is nice. The second part is rubbish. Owners are not in charge of the development process (other than by ganging together to stop development) plus there's precious little link between new development and house prices at the very local level - i.e. those 100 new homes round the corner won't affect the value of your house by much, if at all.

The reason for the supply problem is because we don't provide enough land for housing in places where people want to live. And this is entirely down to the planning system. Not the housing delivery and development management part of that system but the local plan bit - this allocates the land. We can fiddle around with the taxation of housing until the cows come home but the supply problem remains if we don't have enough land available to build houses.

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Thursday 26 November 2015

In which a Guardian writer bemoans the lack of slums...



Or so it seems:

In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to assert “we are here” and “this is also our city”. Or, as the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it, “Estamos presentes”: we are present, we are not asking for money, we are just letting you know that this is also our city.

It is in cities to a large extent where the powerless have left their imprint – cultural, economic, social: mostly in their own neighbourhoods, but eventually these can spread to a vaster urban zone as “ethnic” food, music, therapies and more.

All of this cannot happen in a business park, regardless of its density – they are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. Nor can this happen in the world’s increasingly militarised plantations and mines. It is only in cities where that possibility of gaining complexity in one’s powerlessness can happen – because nothing can fully control such a diversity of people and engagements.

OK, our writer - one Saskia Sassen - doesn't actually use the word 'slum' here because that would load a whole lot of negatives onto her narrative. This narrative is filled with the popular "everything is being bought up by huge corporations" line - as if the buildings in London, New York and Berlin were all owned by collectives, co-ops and interesting old couples who've lived there since the place was built. There's also a slightly worrying 'and lots of the money is Chinese' as if this is necessarily a problem (a decade or so ago the bad foreigners with funny names were Japanese).

Now the point about slums is that they allow people to do those capitalist things away form the gaze of the authorities occupying expensive real estate in the city proper. And our writer is perhaps right to be concerned about the squeezing out of these places:

"Arrival cities are known around the world by many names," Saunders writes: "slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighbourhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing two million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world."

But Sassen is also wrong because the arrival of those grand developers, the imposition of those gigantic regeneration schemes, and the suborning of public space to private use doesn't stop those migrants coming. They still fill up the cracks, occupy what space can be found that's too marginal, contested or contaminated to attract those rich foreigners with funny names and their millions. And Sassen seems overly bothered by the location of public buildings filled with regulators and controllers - as if these people are either the friend of the slum-dweller or their places of work truly public spaces.

In The Arrival City, Doug Saunders talks about Istanbul - not the old city of tourists and old architecture but the far suburbia where the rural migrants settled illegally and built the fastest growing, most dynamic communities of Turkey. And this is the pattern in all our cities - the success of those at the margin makes the success of the city, a success achieved in the teeth of government opposition, eviction, regulation and distrust.

But they stay in the city. I remember selling a magnificent hand-stitched quilt to a middle-aged Jewish lady in Mill Hill. She and her husband were rich, living in a multi-million pound house in a desirable North London suburb. Asking the woman why she wanted the quilt she told me that she 'wanted an heirloom, our families came here with nothing and we want our families to have something'. Those families didn't come to Mill Hill, they came to London's East End and lived in a couple of cramped rooms from where they made their way in the world.

We look at slums and see squalor, dirt and disorganisation. The leaders of these places speak of poverty, exclusion and prejudice. But those new arrivals aren't staying in those slums - the best summation of what drives them is this quotation from Marco Rubio, one of the men seeking the Republican nomination in next year's US Presidential election:

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 isn't a defence of slums, just an observation that, for many of those who live in urban poverty, their life is better than the one they left behind. And they also know their children's lives will be better too. I guess only a conservative would really understand this though.

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Wednesday 25 November 2015

The real story is health spending not spending on the elderly.

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This graph is doing the rounds, usually attached to arguments about how favoured the old are under the present government.

Right now spending on 'older people' (which I assume means the state pension and assorted other welfare payments directed to retired folk) has got back to the position it was relative to other spending back in 1997. We can also note that, despite falling unemployment and endless stories about the evil DWP, the rest of welfare spending has barely budged as a proportion of total spending. And there's a reason perhaps for old people getting more of the budget - there's a whole lot more of them than there used to be:

I'm not defending the 'triple lock' or other decisions made by government over the past several years merely observing that the increased number of older people inevitably means a bigger bill for old age pensions.

To return to that graph from the Resolution Foundation again, the real change that shows isn't the up and down in terms of funding for old or young but the acceleration in health spending as a proportion of total spending. Now this is, in part, another consequence of those older people - something like three-quarters of NHS spending is on the over 65s (for the simple fact that they need the health care while younger folk mostly don't) - but it is also shows that health spending is the real priority of government. And reminds us that the efficient and effective use of that growing resource represents the dominant challenge for any UK government. Shouting about how old folk are getting a better deal isn't the issue here - getting to grips with the health budget is.

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Tuesday 24 November 2015

Nice thought but I don't think cause and effect is established here...


Some stress-busting green space




The Bradford Telegraph & Argus reports some 'ground-breaking' research into the link between green spaces and depression in pregnancy:

The key finding revealed that while 33.5 per cent of women reported at least one severe depressive symptom during pregnancy, those living in the greenest areas of Bradford were around 20 per cent less likely to report feeling depressed.

Programme manager, Rosie McEachan, said: "This is a really important finding, as it means we can make changes at an environment level which will have a larger benefit for our communities in most need.

"Efforts should be made to increase the availability of green space at a policy level and utilisation of green space at an individual level."

The problem with this is that the mums living in Bradford's greenest areas are (I guessing here) probably older, richer, healthier and better-educated. Not that these eliminate ante-natal depression of course but I suspect that a young single mum-to-be in inner city Bradford is far more likely to suffer from depression than her counterpart up the valley. Which isn't to say that green spaces aren't important but that those demographics are likely to be much more important.

Still a nice thought.

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Monday 23 November 2015

How climate change and anti-nuclear fanatics are making energy a luxury good

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Germany. That place we're supposed to emulate. Land of eco-friendly cities, anti-nuclear protests, pacifism and campaigns against gentrification. The world's fourth largest economy. Migrant-welcoming manufacturing giant. The place where fans still stand at football matches, where there aren't speed limits on the motorways and where beer is drunk from litre steins (except in Cologne where it comes in tiny glasses and is mostly froth). Yeah, Germany.

Home of the world's most expensive electricity. The country where energy is almost a luxury good:

When Stefan Becker of the Berlin office of the Catholic charity Caritas makes a house call, he likes to bring along a few energy-saving bulbs. Many residents still use old light bulbs, which consume a lot of electricity but are cheaper than newer bulbs. "People here have to decide between spending money on an expensive energy-saving bulb or a hot meal," says Becker. In other words, saving energy is well and good -- but only if people can afford it.

A family Becker recently visited is a case in point. They live in a dark, ground-floor apartment in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood. On a sunny summer day, the two children inside had to keep the lights on -- which drives up the electricity bill, even if the family is using energy-saving bulbs.

Becker wants to prevent his clients from having their electricity shut off for not paying their bill. After sending out a few warning notices, the power company typically sends someone to the apartment to shut off the power -- leaving the customers with no functioning refrigerator, stove or bathroom fan. Unless they happen to have a camping stove, they can't even boil water for a cup of tea. It's like living in the Stone Age.

This situation is entirely the result of a combination of climate change fanaticism and anti-nuclear panic which means that German energy supply system is both inefficient and also obscenely expensive:

This year, German consumers will be forced to pay €20 billion ($26 billion) for electricity from solar, wind and biogas plants -- electricity with a market price of just over €3 billion. Even the figure of €20 billion is disputable if you include all the unintended costs and collateral damage associated with the project. Solar panels and wind turbines at times generate huge amounts of electricity, and sometimes none at all. Depending on the weather and the time of day, the country can face absurd states of energy surplus or deficit.

If there is too much power coming from the grid, wind turbines have to be shut down. Nevertheless, consumers are still paying for the "phantom electricity" the turbines are theoretically generating. Occasionally, Germany has to pay fees to dump already subsidized green energy, creating what experts refer to as "negative electricity prices."

Over the coming week or so, the climate change fanatics will be shifting into top gear - trying to persuade us all to change to the German model. A torrent of articles, news reports and documentaries will pour onto an unsuspecting public. These will talk of 'zero-carbon emissions', of the urgency of the challenge, of melting ice and dying polar bears, and will conclude with exhortations to change our wicked, sinful ways and embrace greenery.

Who cares if this means poor folk are living hand to mouth in damp flats they can't afford to heat of light. Who cares if steel mills close and aluminium smelters fold. Who's bothered if the lights are dimmed because the power supply is unreliable. We'll have save the planet won't we? Errr....

On the other hand, when the wind suddenly stops blowing, and in particular during the cold season, supply becomes scarce. That's when heavy oil and coal power plants have to be fired up to close the gap, which is why Germany's energy producers in 2012 actually released more climate-damaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in 2011.

Great strategy!

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Saturday 21 November 2015

Being overweight is healthy (we just think it ain't sexy)



Although I have no evidence for it, I suspect that what we define as 'normal weight' is determined less by health considerations than by the sexual aesthetics of western societies. Put simply we view slim people as more attractive ergo being slim is healthier.

Except this isn't true, the evidence - sometimes (and misleadingly) call the 'obesity paradox' - suggests that the reverse is true and being overweight is more healthy than being normal weight:

...dozens of studies have confirmed the existence of the paradox. Being overweight is now believed to help protect patients with an increasingly long list of medical problems, including pneumonia, burns, stroke, cancer, hypertension, and heart disease. Researchers who have tried to show that the paradox is based on faulty data or reasoning have largely come up short. And while scientists do not yet agree on what the paradox means for health, most accept the evidence behind it.

Despite this evidence - and there are literally hundreds of studies that confirm the 'paradox' - public health persists in conflating overweight with obesity to create a massive scare story ('two-thirds obese or overweight' or similar) that justifies whole population interventions such as sugar taxes, fast food shop bans, ad restrictions and Jamie Oliver. We have well-funded 'obesity strategies' produced by every English local council that feature a raft of activities and interventions predicated on the idea that there's something called an 'obesogenic environment' filled will temptations that make folk fat.

The evidence here suggests that, instead of making nannying interventions that demonise individual macronutrients (sugar, fat and so on), we need to focus our effort and resources on the very fat and the very thin. And on healthy behaviours:

Paul McAuley, a health education researcher at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, has been studying fitness for close to 20 years. He says most studies on weight and health fail to take it into account. “Or they ask one question about it,” he says, and don’t bother to go further. When McAuley collects data on fitness, he finds that it predicts health and longevity much more strongly than fatness.

It's time - just as with drinking - that we listened to the actual evidence on risk and harm associated with excess weight. And recognised that our definition of 'normal' weight do no match that evidence - in fact seems (if the findings that overweight people have lower mortality rates is true) to suggest that that 'normal' is actually unhealthy.

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Friday 20 November 2015

Cows aren't destroying the planet. Ignorant folk like George Monbiot are.

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George Monbiot is having a go at cows. Well, not just cows but sheep, pigs, chickens and goats as well. And probably alpaca, yaks and dromedaries too.

Raising these animals already uses three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land. A third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock: this may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price.

As usual with Monbiot, the article is replete with links to assorted stuff mostly from the more scaremongering end of the climate change community. And the premise seems superficially appealing - it does require a whole load of grass to fatten a cow and, if we're growing grass we can't be growing grain crops suitable for humans to eat. The problem with this argument is that the facts about agriculture's land use don't fit Monbiot's scare story:

Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner (2013) argue that ‘peak farm’ is already a reality, saying ‘while the ratio of arable land per unit of crop production shows improved efficiency of land use, the number of hectares of cropland has scarcely changed since 1990. Absent the 3.4 percent of arable land devoted to energy crops (Trostle 2008), absolute declines would have begun during the last decade.’

In simpler terms, improved agricultural efficiency is allowing us to feed the world's population while using less land. The main reason for this, of course, is that there is a lot less inefficient subsistence farming (the sort of farming that organisations like Oxfam spend a lot of time trying to preserve) and a lot more commercial and industrial agriculture. Moreover, in terms of resource use, this sort of intensive farming is far more environmentally friendly:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Farming - not everywhere but in too many places - is treated as if it were some sort of cultural activity rather than the means by which we feed the world's population. Monbiot talks about waste management issues associated with farming but doesn't recognise that these exist because, unlike other industries, farming has not had to capture the cost of this waste. It is not an inevitable consequence of of the business. Moreover, as those chaps at UC Davis showed, less intensive production is more polluting.

Finally can we put this greenhouse gas malarkey to bed. The cow's only source of carbon is the grass she chews. And the grass only has one source of carbon - the atmosphere. A good chunk of that carbon ends up in those fine marbled steaks we eat. So saying that a lot of the 'greenhouse gas' emissions come from cows farting might be true, but only if we believe that somehow those cows are magically creating more carbon than they consume.

As usual Monbiot is telling half-truths and peddling misinformation.

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Wednesday 18 November 2015

No Dr Pirie, you can't say that. It ain't so. Taking the Adam Smith Institute to task on the elderly.

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The Adam Smith Institute is one of the good guys. I like their consistent defence of liberty and classical liberalism. Sam Bowman, the Research Director is one of those amazingly and eclectically brainy people that challenge how we look at things.

Sometimes they get stuff badly wrong:

Popular perception of the circumstances in which pensioners live is somewhat out of accord with modern reality. The image of a woman with a blanket over her shoulders, huddled over a fire and wondering if she can afford to toss another stick onto the flames does not accord with present day reality for most pensioners. Some 86% of pensioners live in households with assets in excess of £50,000. The average income of over 65s is £15,400. A young person working on current minimum wage for a normal working week earns just under £13,000. Yet the young person is taxed while the older person is guaranteed a triple locked pension that will rise with inflation, or average earnings, or 2%, whichever is the highest. On top of this comes a winter fuel allowance, a Christmas bonus and a free bus pass.

Don't get me wrong here - I have some sympathy with the argument being made (although the 'it's all baby boomers fault' schtick is a load of nonsense). But if you're to make an argument do it in a way that doesn't open you to having your argument blown out of the water.

"Some 86% of pensioners live in households with assets in excess of £50,000"

Yes. And this is a consequence of twenty or thirty years paying off a mortgage plus maybe fifty years squirrelling money away in a pension pot. Nothing to do with taking money from the young. And does Dr Pirie really think assets of just £50,000 is such a great big deal - especially since those assets, most commonly, represent the person's home and the savings they'll need to see out today's long retirement. More to the point, Dr Pirie is deliberately conflating assets with income to make his point.

"The average income of over 65s is £15,400. A young person working on current minimum wage for a normal working week earns just under £13,000. Yet the young person is taxed..."

First we've compared average income for the elderly with minimum wage for the young. Secondly most working young people are earning more than minimum wage. And while its true that the personal allowance is higher for those elderly over 77 (and they don't pay national insurance), it's not true to say that old people aren't taxed. And the basic state pension is included in that calculation.

This whole argument is out of the same box as the idea (which I'm sure the ASI would criticise) that somehow the rich have got that way at the expense of the poor. It really is nonsense - by all means say that pensioners get too much of a good deal but it's simply not the case that there's a great deal of 'redistribution from relatively poor young people to comparatively affluent older people'.


Finally most of those assets and that income will, in the end, get spent (quite rightly) on providing social care (mostly delivered by those low paid young people).

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Tuesday 17 November 2015

Misusing the idea of 'evidence' - the case of alcohol policy

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It's Alcohol Awareness Week when all the fussbuckets issue tutting press releases lecturing ordinary folk about how they're drinking too much. These are leapt on by gleeful health reporters keen to fill pages with yet another load of old toss about how what we're eating and drinking is leading us to an early grave.

So we shouldn't be surprised if two of the UK's leading centres of fussbucketry - Sterling and Sheffield Universities - have published a new report about alcohol policy. The premise of the report is this:

Alcohol policies across the four UK nations vary widely in the extent to which they are grounded in scientific evidence, with political considerations appearing to have significant bearing

Awful, I think you'll agree, awful. How very dare politicians take account of "political considerations" such as how many jobs, businesses, exports and so forth link to the drinks industry.

What concerns me here is what these people consider to be evidence. And the truth here is that we're not talking about evidence at all but rather about a report setting out a series of policy proposals loosely based on a selective interpretation of the "evidence" and wholly wedded to the lie that alcohol harm is a "whole population" problem. In simple terms the "research" simply castigates the UK government for failing to do what the researchers said the government should do - concluding their press release with a quotation accusing the government of 'ideology' which is a bit rich considering that their anti-booze position is deeply ideological.

The 'evidence' presented isn't evidence at all - not surprising since these are the sort of researchers who ignore facts like a nearly 20% decline in alcohol consumption and a similar decline in linked issues like violent crime. Nor do these researchers recognise the enormous - and consistent - body of evidence showing that moderate drinking, far from being remotely harmful, is actually healthy (indeed healthier than abstinence).

The most egregious element of this 'evidence' is that our researchers believe that engaging in 'partnerships with the alcohol industry' is a terrible sin because that industry doesn't support the researchers temperance and prohibitionist position.

It really is time we told these supposed 'scientists' to end their evidence-light, ideological attack on drinking. An attack based on prejudice and ignorance rather than any actual facts about drinking. They are wrong about pricing, wrong about marketing and advertising, wrong about the costs and benefits of alcohol to the UK, wrong about children and drinking, and wrong about the level of alcohol-related harm. And by wrong I mean they have no evidence to support their position not just that I disagree with them.

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Sunday 15 November 2015

Sorry but the language police are just a load of bullies

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It's a joke isn't it. We smile knowingly because we're in the know. Ho ho, 'grammar fascists' we chuckle, confident in our grasp of the lingo being enough to hold the line against the attacks. We're canny enough to remember not to use the words 'political correctness' when the irritation rises at yet another perfectly normal, regular word that's shoved off the agenda by the language police.

Look folks, I'm good at this stuff. I've got a vocabulary way bigger than the average person. And I know that those different words for different things mean subtly different somethings. But when you see someone saying not to use the word 'stupid' because it's offensive to those with learning disabilities a little whimper of linguistic pain escapes. Why, why oh why oh why do people want to do this stuff? What do they gain by setting themselves up to police the language? And on whose authority do they act?

I get it that we should be considered, respectful and thoughtful in our choice of language. I also understand that communication doesn't happen if everything we say is set around with caveats and qualifications. And - most importantly - I take the view that most of this righteous policing of others' language isn't about that respect and consideration. Rather it's simply bullying. They're not interested in the actual content of people's speech but in catching them out using the wrong words - 'coloured people' instead of 'people of colour', 'migrant' instead of 'refugee', any number of commonly used words that might just have some sort of connection to mental illness.

What happens is that this policing of language, this poking away at words, is used by those who do not want discussion to achieve their end - the closing down of debate. If you look at how this so-called debate happens, you'll see that there is no such thing taking place because critics are either excluded or shouted down for crimes against the latest iteration of linguistic controls. The substance of the discussion is of no consequence, this is replaced by an unremitting focus on attacking the language used by the critic. Followed by complete closing of any debate through the exclusion of that critic from debate because of:

...white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism,”

And when you cry 'free speech' in response you get some like:

...we do not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the “All Lives Matter” posters, and the “Free Speech” posters that stated that “in memoriam of the true victim of the Missouri Protests: Free Speech.”

This is not respectful but rather bullying intended simply to prevent any challenge to a prevailing orthodoxy of speech. The people who do this - whether on Twitter, on university campuses or through hectoring folk from the comfortable platform of a newspaper blog - are the worst of the righteous, smug bullies who use their ability to raise a mob as the basis for punishing the critic. And this is all done while moaning about abuse, blocking half the universe on Twitter (very publicly) and talking very loudly about trolls. Where the definition of troll in their world isn't anything beyond someone who won't bow to their bullying approach to language, to their use of that palette of the banned as a means to judge people.

But it's not enough to just ignore the critic. No, that person has to be crushed, humiliated, exposed as the evil bad person they are for daring to challenge your orthodoxy. Someone says 'perhaps we'd have fewer problems if we'd been less open to migrants' and they are blocked, their words twisted to make them 'vile racists'. And that blocking is celebrated - waved around like a bloody trophy in front of the other righteous: "look at me, I've dealt with an evil troll, look at me".

I don't think we should be rude. If I've genuinely upset someone, I'll be the first to say sorry. But most of what I've seen - the long list in that quotation above or the offence at some students making a pretty straight point about free speech - isn't folk being upset but rather bullies using others' fear of language rules to close down debate, to impose their selective, exclusive orthodoxy on others. I've lost count of the times I've been insulted during forty years of active politics - some of it just banter but a fair bit spiteful, aggressive, in-your-face insult intended to intimidate. Yet that's OK - trust me it's OK or the righteous would have done something about it except that it's mostly the same people - whereas someone making a mildly critical point about immigration, free speech or the portrayal of women in computer games gets metaphorically dragged kicking and screaming to the nearest pillory for all and sundry to abuse them for their sins against the language.

It's not a joke. It's not even political correctness. It's patronising. It's divisive. It's intimidation. And it's used by bullies.

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Islamist terror is about political power not faith - which is why we must help Muslims defeat it


Eduard Steinbrück, Die Magdeburger Jungfrauen

Then was there naught but beating and burning, plundering, torture, rape and murder. Most especially was every enemy bent on securing much booty. When a marauding party entered a house, if its master had anything to give he might thereby purchase respite and protection for himself and his family till the next man, who also wanted something should come along. It was only when everything had been brought forth and there was nothing left to give that the real trouble commenced. Then, what with blows and threats of shooting, stabbing and hanging, the poor people were so terrified that if they had had anything left they would have brought it forth if it had been buried in the earth or hidden away.

In this frenzied rage, the great and splendid city that had stood like a fair princess in the land was now, in its hour of direst need and unutterable distress and woe, given over to flames, and thousands of innocent men, women and children, in the midst of a horrible din of heartrending shrieks and cries, were tortured and put to death in so cruel and shameful a manner that no words would suffice to describe, not no tears to bewail it… (from a personal account of the sacking of Magdeburg on May 20, 1631)

It's terrible. It's terrible wherever it happens. It was terrible when some young Irishmen blew up a pub in Birmingham. It was terrible when Brigate Rosso kidnapped and murdered Aldo Moro. Terrible when Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff murdered their way across German politics. It's terrible when a young woman blows herself up on a Tel Aviv bus. Or some young men do likewise on a tube train. And it was terrible when eight young Arabs machine-gunned their way across Paris last Friday.

The terror isn't simply because of the guns, the bombs, the violence. The terror is that it could be you or I sat there on the restaurant terrace, on a bus heading for a day's work, or letting our hair down at a rock concert. The effectiveness of terror is how close to home it is - and no-one knows this better than the innocent residents of middle eastern countries as suicide bombers target crowded markets, busy streets filled with outdoor cafes and even beaches.

We ask why? What possible purpose does this serve - the terrorists are facing any existential threat, this isn't a matter of kill or be killed. Yet they choose to commit foul acts of violence against the innocent to make a political point, to play a part in some deranged strategy dreamt up by persuasive maniacs (albeit persuasive maniacs safely ensconced elsewhere - it wasn't Gerry Adams who planted that bomb in the Mulberry Bush back in 1973 and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wasn't in Paris wearing a vest of explosives last Friday).

A simple and common response - we've seen it a thousand times over the past couple of days - is to say that somehow the terrible murders in Paris are a direct consequence of foreign policy decisions, that the ideology of Islamist violence would not exist had Bush and Blair not invaded Iraq, had France to taken part in air strikes against Syria. As if there is either excuse or justification in murdering people having a glass of wine at their favourite restaurant because you disagree with their government. Just as the IRA had no political justification for killing 21 people and injuring over 300 more on that day in 1973, the Islamists who rampaged through Paris had no political - let alone religious - justification for their murderous destruction.

Terrorists have agency. The decisions or actions of others do not - and never have - forced them to engage in acts of violence. The murders on Friday were a matter of choice - those men chose to arm themselves, chose to drape themselves in high explosive, chose to target unarmed people having a good night out, and chose to murder them. They were not made to do this by Tony Blair, Binyamin Netanyahu or Francois Hollande - they chose. And this choice was part of a political campaign not an act of defence or the consequence of vengeance. The leaders of ISIS want power just as all political leaders want power - but those Islamist leaders reject democracy and prefer violence as the route to that power. It's not about defending Muslims - after all most of the people killed by ISIS are Muslims - nor is it about protecting Muslim lands.

And because these terrorists have agency - they act out of choice not compulsion - the rest of us have every right to respond. And I assume this is the basis for Hollande's describing last Friday's terror as an act of war against France. That statement - just as with George Bush's 'war on terror' words after 9/11 - is one of intent. But one that - if the past fourteen years are a guide - requires us to be very clear about who the enemy in this war might be. And, in doing this, it is necessary to have the support of Muslims - those Muslims who are as shocked, scared and angry about ISIS as the rest of us. I'm not talking here about the governments of Muslim countries but about those millions of ordinary Muslims who hate ISIS just as much as many non-Muslims.

The problem is that this engagement seldom happens. To be sure, if you talk to a Muslim he or she will tell you they reject terrorism, loathe the terrorists and don't believe that the murderers are truly Muslim. But if you ask for their support for actions to defeat the terrorism - especially if that includes some form of military action - the response is 'no'. It's almost as if there's a preference for putting our head in our hands and hoping against hope that it will all end. The problem is that, as too many Muslims discover, the cost of doing nothing is abuse and hatred. You can choose to call it 'islamaphobia' but it's grounded in the belief that those who yell 'Allahu akbar' as they machine-gun innocent folk sun-bathing on a Tunisian beach are Muslims.

And so long as this situation persists, so long as young men and women decamp to Syria to join ISIS, so long as terrorists blow up innocents in a Beirut rush hour because they're the wrong sort of Muslim, many non-Muslims will still look on in horror asking how anyone could claim it's a 'religion of peace'. There's a job resisting this but that's not the only job, for unless the distinction is made between Islam and the warped creed of Islamism those non-Muslims will remain distrustful of Muslims and Islam.

At the top of this article is a description of how the army of the Catholic League destroyed Magdeburg - just one of the atrocities in Europe's last great religious war. This is, as it were, intended to make the point that we can come to live peacefully alongside those whose faith or race is different from ours. But to achieve this it's necessary to learn Europe's lesson that, so long as religion and government are one and the same, there is no chance of peace. Yesterday, writing on The Spectator blog, British Muslim doctor, Qanta Ahmed said this:

The repugnant creed of the Islamic State is certainly related to Islam – but it is also inimical to Islam. The scenes in Paris will shock Muslims world over; indeed, when we Muslims hear of gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” before committing the very acts of murder explicitly prohibited by the Koran, our repugnance is joined with a sense of desecration. To assert that this Islamism is un-Islamic is not a kneejerk response to the atrocities we saw last night, and so many times around the world. It is the only conclusion that can be drawn after serious consideration of its principles.

To win this war it's not enough to beat ISIS militarily. Nor can we win without defeating the men who would visit death on shoppers in Kenya, villagers in Nigeria and diners in Paris. And the war isn't a war against Islam but, I hope, a war to defend Islam from those who would use it - as with Christianity in 17th Century Europe - as a route to power and to the imposition of a violent totalitarian death cult. To win the war with ISIS - however it is conducted - requires Muslims everywhere to show why Islamism is a rejection of their faith. For it is - in truth - as much your war as it is ours.

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Friday 13 November 2015

Friday Fungus: On the shocking absence of mushrooms in Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves'



I'm a lot of a fan of Neal Stephenson's writing - he is among the most creative and innovative of modern SF writers. And 'Seveneves' is no exception as it tells the story of man's survival after the moon, inexplicably, blows up.

As ever with Stephenson, the writing is dense reflecting how much he's researched the ideas presented. Indeed, for non-physicists wanting to get their heads round the science and maths of orbits, the book is fantastic. But if your head doesn't want to get round Lagrange points and orbital decay the story still carries you along as a few thousand intrepid folk struggle to create a means of survival in space. And Stephenson knows his audience:

“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

So up there in space (and, as a sideline, in caves under Alaska too) the human survivors have to eat. Indeed, it's the lack of food that does for one section of the space-dwellers, turning them into cannibals. The mention of how this started is a beautifully snarky reference to the culture of blogging and social media:

“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

The main source of food Stephenson gives us up in space is algae grown hydroponically in the little spaceships (delightfully named 'arklets'). And this is fine except that it's rather limiting. It's true that algae - as plants - have the additional advantage of helping with the atmosphere but it's a lot harder to get the necessary nutrients from this source than from another option - fungi. Yet, for some reason, this option isn't even considered even though the intensive production of fungi as meat substitutes is a well established science:

Mycoprotein is made in 40 metre high fermenters which run continuously for five weeks at a time.
The fermenter is sterilised and filled with a water and glucose solution. Then a batch of fusarium venenatum, the fungi at the heart of Mycoprotein, is introduced.

Once the organism has started to grow a continuous feed of nutrients, including potassium, magnesium and phosphate as well as trace elements, are added to the solution. The pH balance, temperature, nutrient concentration and oxygen are all constantly adjusted in order to achieve the optimum growth rate.

The organism and nutrients combine to form Mycoprotein solids and these are removed continuously from the fermenter after an average residence time of five to six hours. Once removed the Mycoprotein is heated to 65°C to breakdown the nucleic acid. Water is then removed in centrifuges, leaving the Mycoprotein looking rather like pastry dough.

If you were really setting up to survive in space entirely 'off-grid', I'd expect someone to suggest the role of fungi in making that possible. There's little about the process described above that couldn't be replicated off the planet. And for all you mushroom haters - you'd get used to it!

The next consideration - admittedly one Stephenson doesn't set out in scientific detail - is how to 're-terraform' the earth after it's surface had been scorched for four thousand years. Here, again the role of fungi (and to be fair those algae) is significant:

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms.

So, if you're going to create a human-friendly environment on a planet, the starting point has to be fungi because without those fungi it's not a human-friendly environment.

None of this distracts from the book. As James Lovegrove in the FT puts it:

Seveneves is a superhuman achievement, dense, eloquent, exhaustive, exhilarating, powerful, utterly readable, and ultimately uplifting. Stephenson imagines the worst that can happen, and insists that we can make the best of it. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

I just think it would have been even better with mushrooms.

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Thursday 12 November 2015

The problem with public transport...





In many ways, the definition of public transport, is a system of travel taking you from one place you don't want to be to another place you don't want to be. Unless, of course, you're a fan of airports, railways stations and bus stops. This isn't to suggest public transport is unnecessary or unwanted, merely to observe one of its biggest weaknesses. Even in London with probably the world's most comprehensive and widespread urban system, this inconvenience is only really conquered in the two inner zones.

This issue is compounded by the nature of employment:

A telling reality for proponents of increased public transport investment is that employment remains – and in some cases is increasingly – suburban by nature. Between 8 and 9 out of 10 of all jobs in metropolitan regions are suburban by location, and when you consider that the same proportion of residents in any metropolitan location are also suburban by residence, the problem of servicing this reality through public transport is apparent.

You don't believe this? Well think about your London suburb. About all the jobs that don't involve getting on the train, bus or tube and heading into town. The people working in shops, for borough councils, primary health, hospitals - even manning those railway stations and bus depots. These people don't fit that classic commuter model and, in most places, don't match to a cost-effective mass transit system.

This is why - for all its faults and flaws - ride-sharing (using whatever model) represents a valuable contribution to reducing urban congestion. It makes little or no sense to set on a bus for the journey a particular commuter is making to get to work, except that there are perhaps ten or a dozen others making a similar journey. To kill off ride-sharing models on mostly spurious (and essentially protectionist) regulatory grounds makes absolutely no sense at all - yet that is precisely what many (if not most) city authorities and public transport regulators are doing.

For me the most telling statistic - the one that tells us those billions bunged at public transport won't solve the problem - is that over 80% of journeys are made in private cars. And when it comes to commuter journeys nearly 90% of journeys use this form of transport. There isn't the remotest prospect of us building sufficient public transport capacity to make anything but the smallest impact on the congestion those car journeys make.

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Wednesday 11 November 2015

It's time that NHS management started earning those big bucks they get paid

****

It's a couple of weeks before the latest 'comprehensive spending review' so we can all understand the explosion of shroud waving, sorry tales of budget cuts and screams of 'crisis, crisis'. Indeed I've indulged (I think rightly) in a little bit of this myself.

However, we need to think very carefully about what we mean by 'crisis' - as in 'the NHS is facing financial ruin':

By next year, hospitals’ deficits may have escalated to such a degree that the NHS could face widespread financial collapse.

Now it's true that hospitals (and the writer is Chief Executive of a hospital trust) are facing something of a problem. We saw recently that the total deficit has reached over £800m and that most of them report continuing pressures on delivery. But Christopher Smallwood, the writer here, is just scaremongering as part of a timely lobby.

The inference in these arguments is in two parts - first that hospitals are the NHS and second that the problem is a consequence of cuts to the NHS budget. Neither of these two suggestions are right - hospitals are responsible for just about half of NHS spending and expenditure on the NHS is programmed to rise (funnily enough by the £8 billion the NHS said it needed and the government promised).

The problem here is that while the Department of Health has a specific amount of cash allocated though the national budget, this doesn't apply to hospitals - NHS Providers in the jargon - which operate on a tariff system and mostly get paid according to how many operations (or whatever) they undertake. As one consultant put it to me - 'each time a new patient arrives in hospital for an elective procedure it's "kerching, kerching".

The problems with this system are many and varied but the most egregious is the widespread belief in hospital management that fewer patients means less money for the NHS. The managers (who really should know better) think that because their hospital gets less money this means that the whole system has less money. And this gives rise to one of the more pernicious criticisms of extending the choice of providers in the health system - 'cherry-picking':

Around half of all NHS-funded hospital care – about £40bn a year – is paid for through a national tariff, where hospitals are paid a set rate for each patient, depending on the treatment given. As private hospitals generally do not treat complex or emergency patients, critics claim private contractors can profit by “cherry picking” easier patients.

What you need to understand here is that we're being told (by those same people complaining of inadequate funding) that the NHS should commission more expensive provision through general hospitals because otherwise those hospitals, in some way, would be less viable. Instead of purchasing elective surgery from the lowest cost provider meeting the necessary high standards, we are commissioning from general hospitals on the false premise that the more cost-efficient approach would cost the NHS more money.

The central issue for the NHS - and one of the reasons it has failed to meet (or even tried to meet, in truth) its efficiency targets - is that the dominance of general hospitals over the system has made it nigh on impossible to develop a market of specialised providers or to shift low-risk procedures into primary care. The moment these systems start to reach the point where their impact on the system is positive (ie releases more money for other NHS activity) the result is NHS Trust deficits giving the impression that there is some sort of crisis. This may or may not be the case but so long as the hospitals' budgets assume utter market dominance, we will continue to fail in making any meaningful efficiencies in the NHS. And there'll be this gun pointed at the government's head:

The choice is stark: more money every year or a sustained decline in the standards of healthcare and a financial collapse. How much more money? Even if the efficiency gains achieved in the next five years matched those of the past five, the government would need to increase annual budgets by £2bn-£3bn a year between now and 2020 to preserve standards. But since the NHS cannot continue to raise productivity at this rate, at least £4bn a year extra will be necessary, starting in April.

When I look at what local government - for all its faults and failings - has delivered over the past five or six years, I am forced to assume that these same opportunities exist in the NHS. But I - like the government and the public - would like the management of the NHS to make those changes without the blunt instrument of actual cash budget cuts. So far that management has avoided anything that requires structural changes and have resisted - to cries of "no privatisation" - any substantial attempts to use the private sector to help develop a significant and innovative delivery of high quality elective surgery and treatments.

I'm prepared to defend the high salaries of NHS management but that, I think, gives me the right to tell them that they need to up their game. If we're going to pay NHS Trust bosses £200,000 or more then those bosses need to start showing the creativity, innovation and invention those big bucks are paid to secure. And the message to people like Christopher Smallwood is to stop waving shrouds and start to make the case for a dynamic, flexible and responsive system - even if it means there are fewer huge general hospitals and more small, specialised and independent providers.

....

"A spokesman says..." On NHS executive pay and accountability

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A couple of days ago our local paper contacted me following the latest batch of Taxpayers Alliance agitation about the pay of senior executives at Bradford Council. Quite right to make the challenge - this is, after all, public money. My response (given that I really don't agree with the Taxpayers Alliance on this one) was:

Councillor Simon Cooke said while he had "a lot of time for the TaxPayers' Alliance", it was time the campaign group recognised that billion-pound-turnover organisations like Bradford Council would have well-paid chief executives.

He said if the council didn't pay competitive salaries, it would lose its "very best people" to the private sector.

He said: "The argument is really marginal to the costs of the council to the taxpayer.

"They keep repeating these things time and time again. It's really not the kind of line I'm happy with at all.

"I don't think anyone who works for Bradford Council - and this is not a reflection of the quality of their work - is overpaid."

You don't have to agree with me. And remember that those big salaries are all agreed by us as councillors - we vote on them at full council meetings. It's open and transparent - if you don't like what we decide, you have the chance to elect someone else.

Today I'm reading the same story only this time its the NHS.

Figures for Bradford district showing how many NHS employees get in excess of £100,000 revealed Airedale NHS Foundation Trust has 74 including four non-clinical employees, Bradford District Care Trust has 24 employees including three in non-clinical roles, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has 220 employees including its four non-clinical Trust's board members while NHS Airedale, Wharfedale and Craven CCG has none, NHS Bradford City CCG has two non-clinical employees and finally NHS Bradford Districts CCG has two non-clinical staff.

The same applies. If we want the best quality of staff then we've to pay the sort of salaries that attract the best staff. However, there's a problem - for most of these organisations no-one was available to be accountable, to respond to the Taxpayers Alliance's criticism:

"A Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said..."

"A spokesman for Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, said..."

This concerns me - whereas criticism of Bradford Council gets substantive response from three people who are in positions to influence the decisions, for the NHS the critic is fobbed off with an anonymous 'spokesman'.

This reminds me just how the NHS is more or less unaccountable, how difficult it is to level any substantive criticism of their decision-making, and how impenetrable the system has become to anyone not granted privileged access.

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Tuesday 10 November 2015

In which we're told £40,000 is poverty wages

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Really?

Take the new legislation in which any person in social housing earning over £40,000 in London and £30,000 outside of London will be made to pay the current market rent. To bring in such a law in London will be crippling to many families and assist the mass exodus of middle and working class families from the city – ethnic, social and class cleansing.

London's median household income in 2013 was £39,100 - I'm guessing it might have risen a little since then to say £40,000. So according to this writer half of London households are struggling in abject poverty. Now, I know London's got high rents but the economy of the city would be collapsing if this argument was at all accurate.

The answer isn't to subsidise rents, of course, but to build more homes.
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Monday 9 November 2015

"It's not an ideology, dear, it's a mental illness": On the medicalisation of brainwashing


We all sort of know about brainwashing - it features in dystopic SF movies and is the sort of thing that dodgy religious cults get up to. It sits in the same box as 'gay cures' and the scarier end of drug-abuse therapy - something that's probably causing more mental health damage that any good (assuming there was good in the first place).

Watch out as the use of these techniques become medicalised - because 'extremism' and 'fundamentalism' are not matters of agency but involuntary consequences of socialisation or 'brainwashing':

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

Read through what this researcher is saying. Read it carefully. It's not pretty is it? Dr Taylor goes on:

She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

OK you say - this is about saving people who have been brainwashed by the cult (perhaps up to and including paying £3 to join the Labour Party so as to vote for Jeremy Corbyn). But it's a good thing - we'll be treating the ill you see:

"I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

This is a recipe for a state-determined definition of 'normal' with anyone holding views that are outside the norm and defined as 'harmful' categorized as mentally ill. This is the medicalisation of brainwashing with the intention of treating the ill-effects of the wrong kind of ideology or belief.

On a much larger and potentially more fruitful scale is the recognition that the entire domain of religious beliefs, political convictions, patriotic nationalist fervor are in themselves powerful platforms for nurturing "Us vs Them" paranoid delusional fantasies which work out destructively in a 9/11 attack or a Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction.

Frightening eh?

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Neoliberalism defined...

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Well sort of....

We live in a neoliberal age now where the Corporations and the Bad people and the Profit do bad things to the Society and the Good People and the Community. Rich people take money from the pockets of poor people because neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is destroying Our NHS with the profits and the privatisation and the One Per Cent. Local shops and artisan bread makers and steel manufacturers are put out of business because neoliberalism and the giant supermarkets and the GM food. George Osborne gives your money to millionaires and billionaires because neoliberalism, and wants to socially cleanse London because neoliberalism and the housing crisis. Heartless Iain Duncan Smith kills disabled people in his spare time because neoliberalism. Save Our NHS from neoliberalism, Saint Bevan [genuflect].

Britain only re-elected this hateful neoliberal Tory government with an increased majority and share of the vote because the neoliberal media confused the minds of the people with their neoliberal propaganda and made them forget just what a star-spangled awesome prime minister Ed Miliband would have been.

Just about sums it all up really.

In truth neoliberalism and capitalism are absolutely wonderful.

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Sunday 8 November 2015

Remembrance - the moment it's real



We're lined up. The great and good of Bradford that is. We've paraded to the Cenotaph, listened to the Bishop's prayer, heard the last post and stood in silence. Each of us has stepped forward to lay a wreath - most emblazoned by the badges of those we represent - the Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Mayor, political and religious leaders, police, fire, ambulance and the elderly men thinking of their fallen colleagues.

And then a woman steps forward - shuffles nervously towards the war memorial - clutching something to her breast. She's wearing a jacket with badges patched on its sleeves and the image of a young soldier on its back. The woman - perhaps fifty years old, certainly younger than me - leans down and places that thing she'd clutched so tightly. It's a photograph of a young soldier, the same soldier as the one on the back of the woman's jacket.

It stands, that photograph, there amidst the wreaths, proud and tearfully poignant. The woman walks back into the crowds, you can see she's holding back the tears. She'd remembered her son. And we'd remembered her son. More wreaths were laid, the Royal British Legion's hymn and the National Anthem were sung and the Lord Lieutenant and Lord Mayor took the salute of the soldiers, cadets and marines who marched past.

I couldn't get that photograph and that mum out of my mind. It's for her we remember - not because we like war but because that young man in the picture and so many like him did their duty. And in doing that duty, lost their lives. Not for the government. For us. For us to think every day about how we get a world where there aren't mum's placing photographs of sons on cenotaphs. And for us to remember that, until that day comes, we need those young men who sign up to lay their lives on the line protecting us.

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Saturday 7 November 2015

If you want a healthier, wealthier, happier Europe then vote to leave. I will be.



The actual referendum is still a long way off. So far as I'm aware there's not yet a firm date so we can assume that it will be, as promised, in 2017 - probably on the same day as that year's county council elections. Despite this distance, the arguments for leaving and remaining are being rehearsed by the two sides.

As we'd expect much of the argument - from both camps - is focused on scaring people. The 'leave' camp - or at least the UKIP-inspired part of it - is playing big on borders and migration taking advantage of the current situation where hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other refugees have decamped themselves onto mainland Europe. Linked to this is the very familiar "we can win back our country" rhetoric wrapped around the £15 billion cost of our membership. These are familiar arguments that have sat in the heart of the anti-Europe case for decades. Along with frowning talk of 'sovereignty' and 'our own laws', these positions have gone as far as they can to secure a base for leaving the EU - and, as polls show, it's not enough.

For the 'remainers', the scaremongering is different. It ranges from out-and-out lies about the number of UK jobs "dependent on EU membership" and misinformation about trade through to the very effective repetition of Jim's dad's advice to his remaining children - "And always keep ahold of nurse / For fear of finding something worse". The EU - or rather the altogether friendlier 'Europe' - is established, organised, operational and secure. Outside its walls are lions just waiting to gobble up the unsuspecting independent nation. An important thread in all this is now 'security' - leaving the EU means we'd be more exposed to terrorism, cross-border crime and, the new favourite bogieman, Russia.

A political dialogue based on scaring the pants off people isn't helpful for all those people who prefer a positive debate and who want the political system to focus on how we can all become healthier, wealthier and happier. And my botheration with the European Union is that it's entire mission is now to protect the health, wealth and happiness of those who already have health, wealth and happiness. Or at least a job.

Greece and Spain have been recording the highest figures, with overall unemployment over 20 per cent and youth unemployment around 48 per cent.

In the wider, 28-country European Union, unemployment also remained unchanged for a second month in a row in August at 9.5 per cent, with more than 23 million people out of work.

We skim over those numbers. But they're saying that half of young Greeks and Spaniards don't have work - and it's not much better for Italians. Indeed, since the employment isn't evenly distributed, there are parts of these countries where there is quite literally no work at all. We can talk about 'world recession' and seek to blame international capitalism or the USA but the problem of unemployment in the EU is here to stay and is a direct consequence of policy decisions made by the EU leadership:

According to European Central Bank's own calculations, the near 11pc unemployment rate is here to stay. Even in an optimistic case, it will only fall to 9pc in 2020 when the eurozone's economic slack has been used up, according to the IMF.

Most Europeans - even most Spaniards, Italians and Greeks - will probably be OK. They'll have their health, wealth and happiness protected but the EU intends to do this at the expense of those 23 million folk without a job.

Beyond Europe's boundaries - a place the EU looks on with ever more protectionist panic - the approach is to hector, lecture and do backroom deals. Yet at the same time the EU operates its own protectionist systems - mostly at the expense of poorer nations:

The economic efficiency costs of allocating additional resources to the farm and food sectors amount to some €38 billion, with the EU15 supporting more than €34 billion in allocative efficiency costs. Although the cost of distortions in the new Member States (NMS) is smaller, they are expected to increase as direct payments are phased in. Parts of the costs suffered by the EU are compensated by an improvement in its terms of trade in the order of €17 billion, at the expense of the EU’s trading partners, especially from Latin America.

Put simply, the Common Agriculture Policy (for all that the worst aspects of this policy have been reformed) continues to distort international trade and competition in agricultural goods - and it is producing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America that pay over half the price of that distortion. Healthy, wealthy and happy farmers in France, Germany and Britain are kept that way at the cost of the health, wealth and happiness of farmers in Paraguay, Tanzania and Vietnam. Moreover, these policies don't benefit us EU 'citizens' either - we pay the other half of these costs in higher prices and higher taxes.

Indeed, the EU systematically abuses trade rules to advantage domestic producers (never consumers - always producers):

The European Union and its 27 member states generated more than a third of the policies identified by the study, and 93 percent of them discriminated against foreign competition, a slightly higher proportion than in Japan and the United States.

European and Japanese discriminatory policies were also the most "selective", with more than two-thirds specifically targeting particular firms in the domestic market.

A tally of the 10 most affected sectors in each of the seven economies revealed that - in varying concentrations - all of them used policies that either discriminated against foreign competition or selectively favored domestic firms.

And the economies that resorted most to discrimination tended to rely most on policies where the WTO rules were weakest, such as bailouts, trade finance, and investment incentives - in 84 percent of cases in the EU.

For all its talk of trade deals and such, the EU is profoundly opposed to open trade - hence the preference for such deals as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) rather than for free trade and the removal of market distorting subsidies. And remember that we - the European consumer - will pay for these distortions. For the sake of protecting inefficient basic industries, we are paying a huge price in high prices, high taxes and high unemployment.

But all this can be reformed can't it? Isn't it just this sort of problem that David Cameron is trying to get resolved with his country-hopping?

I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise but the most likely answer to these questions is simply 'no'. The institutions of the EU are wedded to slow growth, protectionism and managed trade. Without an existential threat to these institutions, there is no prospect of any change least of all any change that might lead to more transparent and open government. The European Commission is comfortable (and confident) in its protected place - access is limited for individual citizens with preferential access given to lobbyists, business organisations and NGOs. Indeed, the Commission uses its funds to develop Europe-wide lobby groups and to support campaigns to change EU regulations.

The idea that we can change this comfortable arrangement without threatening its continued existence is ridiculous. We have watched as the EU has been prepared to sacrifice the health, wealth and happiness of Greeks to protect its project - what makes anyone think they are different and that those same men won't watch you lose your job or your business so as to protect their position - their health wealth and happiness?

This is why we have to vote to leave - not for little England or national sovereignty or borders but for the sake of the health, wealth and happiness of Europeans and for our future prosperity. To do this we have to move on from the protectionism of the EU model, to focus on standards rather than barriers in trade, and to deal directly with international bodies rather than through the opacity of the European Commission. Britain leaving will force the EU to confront its vulnerability and to recognise that it no longer serves the mission of a better Europe, that it is a brake on progress not a route to the better world to which it aspires.

If you want a better future for Britons, for Europeans and for the World, voting to leave really is the only choice. Do it.

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