Thursday 31 March 2016

Banking, tobacco and textiles - why no outcry when those jobs went?

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I was in Bingley this morning to catch a train. Nothing unusual here but it got me to thinking about steel and jobs and such. Mostly because slap bang in the middle of Bingley is the site of the former Bradford & Bingley Building Society HQ. The thousand or so jobs that went at the two B&BBS locations in Bingley are a reminder that the fallout from the financial crisis was real for many people - we're told the banks were bailed out but that probably doesn't wash much with all those folk who lost their jobs round where I live.

Indeed as I meander round my ward, I come across the evidence of past jobs - I live in a converted mill that once employed hundreds of people and was still a working mill (of sorts) up to the 1980s. The Pennine Fibres mill in Denholme is gone and is now transforming into another estate of family homes and the same goes for the woodyards, the circlips companies and the machining workshops. Thousands of jobs have gone from Bingley Rural since the 1970s - some because there isn't call for what they make, others because someone somewhere else in the world can make it cheaper and others because, like Bradford & Bingley, the folk in charge of the business crashed it into the financial wall.

I can look elsewhere in the country and see jobs destroyed by the malice of government - the cigarette plants in Nottingham, Bristol and Northern Ireland, the businesses that made cigarette vending machines in the Black Country, and the jobs making packaging in Bradford. Thousands of men and women, in the parlance over the press, thrown on the scrap heap by the actual decision of government.

So what is so special about steel. Why are we treating the closure of a couple of steel plants as some sort of existential threat, as a sort of emasculation of the nation? How come those banking jobs in Bingley, the livelihoods of women making cigarettes in Ballymena and the work of merchandisers filling up vending machines across the country - how come they don't elicit the same outcry?

Of course we're bothered about those steel jobs. It's a terrible thing to see a great industry - part of the fabric of places like Redcar and Port Talbot - struggling like this. But do people think that the building society wasn't important to the fabric of Bingley? That it's death didn't cause huge damage to the town and its surroundings? Yet Gordon Brown didn't chair emergency cabinet meetings to consider support for Bingley. No minister's foreign trip was cut short so he could be grilled about the closure and no special fund was set up to regenerate the town.

So forgive me when I'm less than ecstatic at the calls for protectionist barriers, illegal government procurement rules, state subsidy and nationalisation. Literally millions of jobs have gone from our economy over the past few decades yet we have the highest rate of employment ever. And granting special privileges to one particular industry for reasons of either sympathy or economic nationalism is both wrong and an insult to those millions of workers who lost their jobs in businesses neither the Labour Party nor the press gave a fig for.

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Wednesday 30 March 2016

A reminder that prohibition doesn't work

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In a beautiful example of 'baptists and bootleggers', Scott Beyer tells the tale of drinks laws in two US states - Louisiana and Oklahoma. The former has among the most liberal and the latter the most illiberal with controls over distribution, pricing and the manner of sale plus stonking levels of tax on booze. And the result:

Another rationale may be public safety; officials want to limit the availability and appeal of alcohol, so that it isn’t abused. The only problem is that this doesn’t work, any better than 1920s Prohibition did. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oklahoma is in the upper third of states for its intensity of binge drinking, with Louisiana surprisingly in the middle of the pack. And the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility found that in 2012, Oklahoma had the sixth most drunk driving of any state, while Louisiana was outside the top 10. Updated data shows that Oklahoma still has a higher drunk-driving fatality rate than the national average.

Prohibition doesn't work. Not that our public health friends and their allies among the bootleggers give a toss about all that - high taxes mean more nannying fussbuckets on the public purse as well as more opportunities for smugglers, counterfeiters and assorted other criminal riff-raff to cash in.

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Tuesday 29 March 2016

A slightly ad hominem note on ad hominem

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* RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

You know, Alinsky was wrong. Not at the tactical level - a glimpse at US politics tells us attack advertising works - but at every other level. No I'm not making some sort of moral judgement, I'm a politician for heaven's sake and prattling about morality is best avoided. No, Alinsky is wrong because your supposed enemy might be your actual friend. Plus, of course, what's sauce for goose is sauce for the gander.

A week or so ago, I had an exchange on Twitter. It could be described as friendly fire since most folk would place us on the same side. I was pretty disappointed by the way in which the interchange went.

It starts with me suggesting (in response to a tweet) that perhaps Iain Duncan Smith's resignation wasn't all displacement activity intended to stop the media talking about #Brexit. Indeed, while IDS's long-standing scepticism about our EU membership may indeed have been one factor, all the evidence suggests that he'd finally had enough - and being outside the cabinet gives a load more scope to campaign on issues that concern a politician.

This was the response:

"Says a Tory who likes nothing better than superficial party politics - saves having to deal with the real issues."

Not even the faintest effort to engage with the argument. Going from a moderately friendly exchange to a straight up ad hominem without even stopping for breath. So I wasted ten minutes or so trundling through the particular Twitter account and came onto a revelation - it is mostly ad hominem. You know, this person's a liar, that person is stupid, another is ignorant. A dribble of the snarky, snide and downright nasty interspersed with patronising know-everything links to the account's well-established blog.

It rather explains why the blog in question, for all it's good work, for all the years it has been plugging away at the EU question, has to keep wittering on with 'read my book' it's better than that one you're talking about. It may well be better but if your approach is to attack anyone who asks even the most harmless of questions or raises the mildest of criticism then don't expect people to flock to your banner when battle is drawn.

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Sunday 27 March 2016

Socialism. A glimpse of its evil.

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From an article about that socialist paradise, Cuba:

Look, part of me gets it. I appreciate good art direction just as much as anyone else, and I see that Cuba looks like a beautifully destroyed photo op. But it’s not your photo op. The old cars are not kitschy; they are not a choice. It’s all they have. The old buildings are not preserved; their balconies are falling and killing people all the time. The very, very young girls prostituting themselves are not doing it because they can’t get enough of old Canadian men, but because it pays more than being a doctor does. Hospitals for regular Cuban citizens are not what Michael Moore showed you in Sicko. (That was a Communist hospital for members of the Party and for tourists, and I, for one, think Moore fell for their North Korea–like propaganda show pretty hard.) There are no janitors in the hospitals because it pays more money to steal janitorial supplies and sell them on the street than it does to actually have a job there. Therefore, the halls and rooms are covered in blood, urine, and feces, and you need to bring your own sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, and mattresses when you are admitted. Doctors have to reuse needles on patients. My mom’s aunt had a stroke and the doctor’s course of treatment was to “put her feet up and let the blood rush back to her head.” That was it.

This is a country where you can earn more money driving tourists from the airport to their hotels than you can as a doctor, where no-one can afford to live on the wages from their 'official' jobs, where the illegal black market dominates lives, and where to stay alive you have to break the law dozens of times a day. It's just like every other socialist place except with good looking people and plenty of sunshine.

I make no apologies for saying socialism is evil. Atheists are wont to point at religions, to describe the murder and destruction done in the name of those religions. But, for sheer murderous impact, for utter brutalism, for pillage and murder, for bringing out the very worse in humanity there are two texts that have, in a blink of an eye besides the Qu'ran and the Bible, visited more death and sorrow on the world - The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

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Saturday 26 March 2016

If the British left want an earthly paradise they should look at home.






We all have - and the left especially has - a desire to seek out earthly utopias where the things we think important are revealed and our ideology is justified. For socialists the list is long - from the Soviet Union in the 1930s through Cuba and Nicaragua to Venezuela in recent times. There have been detours through Sweden and Denmark and occasional enthusiasm for Canada or San Francisco. It's all a bit futile:

But the left has always – and perhaps has always had to – cast its net rather wider when looking for shining examples and sources of optimism, revolutionary or otherwise. Sadly, however, the sheer variety of countries in which it has invested its hopes, as well as the sometimes wilful naivety that helped nurture them in the first place, has seen those very same hopes dashed time and time again.

And those hope will always be dashed or at least so long as the left is excited by the idea of being 'anti-market' rather than just 'pro-poor'. It is odd that the chasm in politics left by the enduring legacy of Soviet-style central planning has never been properly filled - even centrist social democrats can't help but tinker with prices, with subsidies, with protectionism and with market fixing. So those social democrat ideas of lifting the poor from poverty, of creating a fair and equal society are crushed because the left simply choose the wrong policies.

The left tend to assume that the heroes of the 'right' are those authoritarians they despise (while enthusing about similar despots who lay claim to leftiness). Yet, if we're to seek for places that capture the idea of neo-liberalism best, that demonstrate how markets work for everyone, we aren't going to find it with authoritarian nationalists. It's more like this:

But Hong Kong too was once a basket case. "Devastated by Japanese occupation, the British colony's population had declined from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 by 1945. Then, after the 1949 communist victory on the mainland, a million refugees arrived. Most of them were penniless."

Hong Kong owes its current prosperity to John (later Sir John) Cowperthwaite, a young official sent out to push the colony's economy toward recovery, which he did by reducing or abolishing taxes. "Even now, Hong Kong has no sales tax; no VAT; no taxes on capital gains, interest income or earnings outside Hong Kong; no import or export duties; and a top personal income-tax rate of 15 per cent.

"During Cowperthwaite's tenure, Hong Kong's exports grew by an average of 13.8 per cent a year, industrial wages doubled and the number of households in extreme poverty shrank from half to 16 per cent."

Indeed those of us who believe in neo-liberalism, who think that open markets, free trade and free enterprise are the route out of poverty - we have loads of examples of how what we believe in works. Whether it's Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan or Malta, Chile or Ghana, we can point to example after example of places where adopting the core ideas of laissez-faire led to economic growth and a better life for nearly everyone in those places. With the finest example being Britain itself - the place that started it all off.

So why is it that socialists have stopped being bothered by who owns things and become obsessed with how things are bought and sold. Why is it that the left want us all poorer from protectionism, corrupted by fixed markets and left with shortages or gluts from price-fixing? Whether it's energy prices, rents or, in Venezuela's case, loo paper, how is it that despite two hundred years of solid evidence telling them they're wrong, left-wing governments continue to think they can buck the market?

And why does the left support protectionism. OK it's not the old fashioned approach - the import substitution strategies that near bankrupted Brazil and Argentina or the tariff barriers that fooled European basic industries into believing they were competitive. Rather it's a new approach - we get a local or regional protectionism based on the deluded idea that small businesses are more efficient, greener and resilient - here's one of it's leading advocates David Boyle:

The prevailing economics of regeneration is based on the idea of comparative advantage. Places need to specialise, otherwise – heaven forfend – everywhere will have to build their own radios or cars or anything else.

Or so the old-world economists mutter when you suggest that ‘comparative advantage’ might be taken too far.

Because when it is, what you get is too few winners and far too many losers, places that are simply swept aside in the narrowly efficient new world, where only one place builds radios. Or grows carrots.

The problem is of course that Boyle is simply talking nonsense - as that well-known right-wing economist, Paul Krugman observed:

At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world.

And alongside this we get a set of 'ethical' protections - barriers based on environmental standards, health standards or worker 'rights' that serve to make both poor countries and rich countries poorer. Cries go up for 'anti-dumping' measures that merely serve to make the steel or paper or wool or whatever more expensive thereby reducing economic growth and damaging future prosperity.

Protectionism - whether it's called 'resilience', 'local purchase preference' or anything else - is wrong and benefits a few at the cost to the many:

Many people have argued over the years that U.S. prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sprang in large part from the high-tariff policies in place during those times. Apart from the economic nonsense this claim exhibits, it is akin to claiming proudly that the great economic success of the mafia in the twentieth century sprang in large part from the organization’s “taxes” (demands for protection money) laid on members of the public.

Yet this economic nationalism is now a core feature of the left's economic policies alongside all sorts of market-fixing ideas - rent caps, energy tariffs, regulatory barriers to entry, de facto guild systems and a strange belief that places can be both part of and separate from the global economy.

Finally the left seem to believe, again despite all the evidence telling us they're wrong, that somehow if we just taxed the rich a little more then there'd be enough money for all their grand schemes. Books filled with reams of statistics tell us that enormous sums languish in supposed 'tax havens' waiting for us to apply the right rules so that lovely lolly ends up in the government's coffers rather than Scrooge McDuck's Caribbean vault.

Again this is just stupid. As if that cash is sitting in piles in some bank - it's not, it's funding businesses, supporting pension funds and a whole host of other useful things. If the government takes a load of it to spend on welfare benefits, doctors wages and what not then it's not available to provide that investment. This might be all fine and hunky dory but it isn't costless - there will be a negative effect on growth, on employment and on interest rates as a result of whacking that big tax on those rich folk's off-shore hoards. Plus, of course, we can only spend it once.

There is no utopia. There is no ideal model of government despite all the efforts of clever men to create one. We don't have the knowledge or capacity to do a better job - in nearly every case - than the market does in allocating scarce resources. So by all means promote socialised forms of ownership. By all means argue for high taxes so as to enable more income redistribution. And by all means argue for greater transparency and openness in markets. But don't lie to people and tell them that you've found a magic system that's better than those markets.

If the left want their earthly paradise they shouldn't need to look beyond Britain. Take the long view and consider how much richer we are than 20, 30, 50 or a 100 years ago. Not just the elite but everyone from the monarch down to the cleaning lady with a severely disabled son. For sure, it's a pretty flawed paradise and one that could be improved but it's as good as anywhere on earth in almost every aspect of life. And capitalism, free markets, free trade and free enterprise are a pretty big part of why that's the case.

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Friday 25 March 2016

A curious finding on entrepreneurship and high-growth start-ups...

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From an article by Richard Florida drawing on MIT research into US entrepreneurship and growth:

New startups are four times more likely than the average startup to grow if they are a corporation, two and a half times more likely if they have a short name, and five times more likely if they have trademarks. Furthermore, firms that apply for patents are 35 times more likely to grow. And, curiously, eponymously named firms are a whopping 70 percent less likely to grow.

I don't want to over-analyse this information - it could be reflective of the choices made by the better entrepreneurs (defined as those who succeed in scaling their business). Certainly the findings suggest that businesses approaching the task with a professional attitude - incorporation, trademarks, patents and so forth - are those more likely to succeed, which you think about it makes a lot of sense.

The rest of the article is an interesting one about the distribution of entrepreneurship - essentially the good stuff is concentrated in a few areas:

No surprise, entrepreneurial activity is highly clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, between New York and Boston, and in parts of Texas.

Interesting stuff for my fellow economic geography buffs.

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Thursday 24 March 2016

Vegetarian propaganda dressed up as science - welcome to joyless food academia



There is an especially joyless tendency in the world of food academia. This is a world where food is made into a problem - causing cancer and other disease, 'promoting' obesity or destroying the planet. And the main reason for this destruction of any pleasure in food rests with a particular sort of vegetarian - often vegan - activist academic:

"We do not expect everybody to become vegan," said lead author Marco Springmann of the Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Food.

But if they did, they'd live longer and help reduce the changes that are skewing the climate.

"What we eat greatly influences our personal health and the global environment," Springmann said.

Got that folks? You don't have to be vegan but if you want to live longer and save the planet into the bargain then you jolly well ought to be. And the reasons are set out in Dr Springmann's well-funded research:

If everyone ate less meat and other animal products and followed guidelines already recommended for healthy eating—more fruit, vegetables, and whole grains and less meat, salt, and sugar—it would reduce global mortality by up to 10 percent and reduce food-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 29 and 70 percent, based on predictions for the year 2050, write Marco Springmann and colleagues in their paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Not, leaving aside that I'm always dubious about research that has very broad ranges ('between 29 and 70 percent') and memorable round numbers ('up to 10 percent'), we need to get into the truth of what Dr Springmann is saying about the economics of food production to understand why he is pulling a whole load of vegan-approved artificial wool over our eyes. The first of this is what we count as part of the contribution from livestock farming - the veggie activists claim anything up to 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gases from livestock farming making it a bigger contributor than the world's entire transport system.

A more measured figure is:

Recent estimates by the United States Environmental Protection Agency [EPA, Hockstad, Weitz (2009). Inventory of U.S. greenhouse gases and sinks: 1990–2007. Environmental Protection Agency] and the California Energy Commission [CEC—California Energy Commission (2005). Inventory of California Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990 to 2002 Update] on the impacts of livestock on climate change in the United States and California have arrived at much different GHG estimates associated with direct livestock emissions (enteric fermentation and manure), totaling at less than 3% of total anthropogenic GHG and much smaller indirect emissions compared to the global assessment.

The problem is that things such as deforestation are being included in the calculation as is the use of nitrogen fertiliser to produce cattle feed when we know that the alternative crop would also use said fertiliser - unless we plant trees (an approach that is possible given farming intensification but not with the extensive organic methods preferred by our veggie academic activists). Indeed levels of fertiliser use in arable farming are significantly higher - up to four times greater - than for livestock farming which suggests that levels of Nitrous Oxide would rise under a shift to a diet based on vegetable proteins.

We're told that, of the greenhouse gases produced by agriculture (Nitrous Oxide, Methane and Carbon Dioxide), Nitrous Oxide is by far the most significant in terms of impact:



So the slightly glib assumption that reducing livestock numbers would reduce emissions is, at the very least, open to question as is the oft-repeated statement about the degree to which livestock is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.

Which, I guess, brings us to health and our veggie academic activists who are terribly imprecise with their 'up to 10%':

For their study, the Oxford scientists “used specific food groups” Springmann told Civil Eats. “Each additional serving of fruit and vegetables reduces chances of heart disease and diabetes,” he explained. “Add more meat and you go in the other direction. It’s almost linear,” he said. Such data, Springmann explained, is found in so many studies that it’s now “basically an agreed fact” that high fat, meat-heavy diets are associated with poor health outcomes.

Now there's a bit of a problem here because we're all living a whole lot longer despite this 'high fat, high meat' diet of ours with some of the highest level of longevity being in the very Western nations that are singled out for vegetarian opprobrium. Indeed the problem is that every one of the world's most long-lived societies has above average consumption of meat. We shouldn't be surprised about this because the thing all these countries share is being relatively rich.

It's true that there's a well-established correlation linking eating red meat and processed meats with bowel cancer. But the increased risk is so small that it simply wouldn't show up in overall mortality statistics:

We know that, out of every 1000 people in the UK, about 61 will develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives. Those who eat the lowest amount of processed meat are likely to have a lower lifetime risk than the rest of the population (about 56 cases per 1000 low meat-eaters).

If this is correct, the WCRF’s analysis suggests that, among 1000 people who eat the most processed meat, you’d expect 66 to develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives – 10 more than the group who eat the least processed meat.

The 'scientists' go on to link meat with diabetes, stroke, heart disease as well as the bowel cancer. The problem, as with every claim of this sort is that, while there's plenty of evidence showing high meat diets correlate with diabetes, this evidence show the increased risk is tiny alongside other risk factors such as being obese. And, as we know, the main factor in the increased incidence of diabetes is mostly down to how we define having the condition and longevity plus incentivising medical professionals to diagnose the condition in the first place.

In the case of stroke and heart disease, the problem is that these problems have been declining pretty consistently for several decades despite an increased consumption of meat. The rate of decline may indeed be faster for vegetarians but there simply isn't a case for saying that a million more early deaths would be avoided if everyone became a vegan. Which isn't really a surprise at all since there's plenty of evidence telling us vegans are less healthy:

Vegetarians have twice as many allergies as big meat-eaters do (30.6% to 16.7%) and they showed 166% higher cancer rates (4.8% to 1.8%). Moreover the scientists found that vegans had a 150% higher rate of heart attacks (1.5% to 0.6%). In total the scientists looked at 18 different chronic illnesses. Compared to the big meat-eaters, vegetarians were hit harder in 14 of the 18 illnesses (78%) which included asthma, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis
The truth in all this is that we are able - through the careful selection and manipulation of statistics - to show how almost any individual element of diet is either good for us or bad for us. And this results in the sort of crank science presented in this argument (in the case of Springmann et al supplemented by some equally dodgy climate change science and batty economics).

Our food system is not destroying the planet nor is it making us ill. Agriculture and the food industry it supports is, in fact, responsible for the amazing achievement of feeding over 7 billion people using a declining proportion of the world's land and with ever greater efficiency. And as for diet, the right advice is to eat a properly balanced diet - with or without meat. More to the point - and there's plenty of evidence that this too leads to a longer life - enjoy the gathering, preparation and consumption of all the foods nature and human ingenuity provides.

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Wednesday 23 March 2016

Disappointment. Or how Bradford Council gave up the fight over the Royal Photography Society collection.

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Yesterday Bradford Council met and, amongst some other stuff, debated what has gone on with the National Media Museum through a motion I proposed asking the Council to, in effect, keep up the pressure on assorted London-based government agencies and ministers over the transfer of the Royal Photography Society collection from Bradford to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Our motion was amended by the Council's Portfolio Holder for (amongst other things) culture, Susan Hinchcliffe, and this amendment was passed.

In the end the debate was a little ill-tempered - not because of my speech but because of Cllr Hinchcliffe's attempt to turn it into a piece of party political yah boo. In summary I argued that the anger in Bradford - and elsewhere - over the manner of the Science Museum Group's decision needs channelling to the wider subject of how it is assumed that any new national institution has to be in London. And that it's our duty as the ninety people elected to represent the half million Bradford residents to lead the charge - however quixotic that charge might be. Oh, and that there are a lot of pretty angry folk out there.

Cllr Hinchcliffe saw things differently. She said she had acted - mostly by writing a letter and having a meeting. The museum was saved. Visitor numbers were up. And who wants a bunch of silly photographs anyway when we'll have lots of lovely sciencey stuff. Then came the crass party politics - apparently I hadn't done anything really and 'the Tories' probably had an ulterior motive about doing down the Council. Bear in mind that this ridiculous attack came after I'd praised one of Bradford's Labour MPs for her efforts and criticised the Secretary of State for Culture for describing the National Media Museum as a 'satellite'.

The result of all this - plus the tribal nature of voting on Council - means that the Council has made an expression of regret at the Science Museum's decision, committed itself to support the museum's new focus and undertaken to write a stern letter to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport saying how jolly bad it is that so much arts funding goes to London. The idea of a cross-party campaign to persuade the V&A to base a new centre for art in photography here in Bradford was lost. And it was lost because of a crass piece of party politics - plus a huge piece of self-justification - by Cllr Hinchcliffe.

Perhaps I was a little bit naive in believing that the Council - which sort of knew about the possible RPS decision a year ago - would commit itself to a campaign that set it at loggerheads with the Science Museum Group. But I still think I was right to make the noise I made - as Councillors we're not elected to act as local agents for national government, even the cuddly bits like the national museum groups. Yet this is how Bradford Council seems to want to behave.

I am, as they say, disappointed.

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Tuesday 22 March 2016

No we're not at war





Like many people, I vividly remember the Birmingham pub bombings. And, since I was only 13 and we didn't own a TV, it took quite something for a news story to get my attention. As the caption above shows, it was one of the very worst terrorist incidents in England - topped only by the London bombings of 2005.

We weren't at war with the IRA. They were criminal terrorists who acted from a political motive and they wanted to be at war with the British government. They weren't.

So I am reminded of that wise choice when I hear this sort of comment:

Prime Minister Manuel Valls, speaking after a crisis meeting called by the French president, says “we are at war. We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”

However terrible an act it may be - and this is a truly terrible act - these are still acts of criminal terrorism not acts of war. Yet we know - for this has been so for every terror group from the Black Hand Gang through the IRA, PLO and Baader-Meinhoff to today's Islamists - that the terrorists want us to believe we are at war. This legitimises their particular struggle, allows them political protection and validates the deicison to become a terrorist.

I care little about the motivations of criminal murderers except in so far as those motivations allow us to catch them and bring them to justice. Just because someone lays claim to religious or political justification for their acts of murder doesn't change the fact that they remain murdering terrorists to be dealt with through the criminal justice system not the rules of war.
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Sunday 20 March 2016

Endless war...

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As Joe Haldeman wrote:

“The 1143-year-long war had begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate."

So while you can't stop fighting just because you've decised to stop fighting, you can (while the fighting's going on) address yourself to the communication. Or not as this reminder of how limited many spies and spooks are in their thinking:

There may be no end to the war against terrorism that the US is leading, according to former CIA employee Paul R.Pillar. And one of the main reasons would be a misinterpretation of the notion of “terrorism”.

Now this might be true if we take the broadest definition of terrorism but that's not what Pillar is on about. He's speaking specifically about Sunni Islam as if it is inevitable that this particular faith will continue to churn out terrorists so long as it's around. Especially given that, for most of Sunni Islam's history, it hasn't been churning out said terrorists.

So we need to develop two sorts of communication - firstly one with Sunni Islam that doesn't start from the premise that this set of beliefs is culpable in the creation of terrorism, that somehow the prosecution of terror is inherent to Islam. And secondly one with the very small number of Sunni Muslims who are attracted, for whatever reason, by the violent Islamism of Daesh.

There really aren't very many terrorists of any sort but we really don't need very many to have a disproportionate impact on people's feelings of security, on attitudes to Islam and on the policies of governments in the West. The sort of situation that leads to this kind of story:

The National Crime Agency (NCA), which was critical in the operation to arrest the suspects in that case, had reportedly been given new orders amid fears of a Paris-style attack involving terrorists returning from Syria using heavy weaponry.

The unnamed minister was quoted as saying: “We used to plan for three simultaneous attacks but Paris has shown that you need to be ready for more than that.

“We are ready if someone tries with seven, eight, nine, ten.”

This manages to reinforce our worries about terrorism, show a 'tough' government response and suggest that the culprits in these putative attacks will be Muslims. None of this is to suggest that government shouldn't be prepared but rather that the strategy seems incomplete without recognising that Islam is - whether we like it or not - a significant religion in the UK and that nearly all its adherents are not terrorists or ever likely to be terrorists.

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Thursday 17 March 2016

Sucker Taxes - how we're fooled into believing a tax is good for us



Let's get one thing out of the way. The new impost on fizzy drinks isn't a public health measure it's a tax raising measure. Not a single pound from a single child will be shed because of this new tax. But HM Treasury will have £500m to splurge on a whole load of nannying interferences dubbed 'school sport'. There'll be - if there isn't one already - a new national agency, School Sport England, created to spend the money. It will have a well paid chief executive and some flash offices somewhere in either central London or a shiny regenerated city centre like Bristol, Brighton or Norwich. And it will have a chairman who used to be a (sort of) well known runner, swimmer or rower.

The 'sugar tax' as this measure has been dubbed (at least the Mexicans got their description right by calling theirs a soda tax) will join a load of other measures - from stamp duty through to insurance levies - that are, in as far as this applies to any tax, popular. Over the past couple of years, a coalition of public health agitators have banged on about sugar creating the belief in the public mind that, compared to other ingredients, 'sugar' (and especially that product of chthonic cunning, 'hidden sugar') is peculiarly bad for us. Add to this a campaign by Jamie Oliver of egregious misinformation and weapons-grade hypocrisy and the result is that the public will accept the imposition of a tax on sugar - or rather a specific tax on the special kind of bad sugar that only appears in cheap fizzy pop.

The wedge has been rammed into a crack - one created essentially by the lies of public health campaigners and self-serving celebrities like Jamie Oliver - in the food business. We can now expect an avalanche of further proposals - advertising bans, health warnings, taxes on confectionery, duties on table sugars, the banning of free sugar in cafes and coffee shops, and the further deappetising of school dinners to the point where they're little more than tasteless pap with half a flavourless apple on the side. In the same way that fast food takeaways, for no evidential reason, are being banned near schools, we will see planning controls extended to sweet shops, bakers, cake shops and ice cream vans.

And none of these measures, not a single one, will result in any child losing any weight. But they will result in a new industry funded by taxes on the bad things, and more opportunities to nanny the pleasure out of being a child. Once sugar in food has been taxed to the hilt and given that the illusory 'obesity crisis' will still be with us, public health campaigners and assorted nannies will move on to another ingredient. It might be fat. It might be grains. Maybe red meat. Sausages. Bacon. Cheese.

They'll churn out hundreds of poorly researched, badly referenced, scientifically inaccurate articles for the sort of journals that used to publish real science but now realise that propagating illusory health scares is a better business than science. Newspapers, magazines, TV shows and the new industry funded by the sugar tax will leap on this crappy pseudo-science to push for more taxes, bans, controls and limitations.And the taxman will rub his hands with ill-concealed glee as the public is suckered again into believing paying more taxes on everyday ingredients is good for their health - or rather good for the health of the children.

These are the sucker taxes of tomorrow - measure after measure sold to us as a public health benefit but, when stripped to essentials, nothing of the sort. Just taxes. Just new ways of extracting money from the public to squander on the deranged priorities of the Church of Public Health, its acolytes and useful idiots in the media or celebrity-land. This sugar tax is an object lesson in Colbert's law - we are the goose and we're letting the taxman pluck a load of feathers. Worse still we think this is good for us!

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Wednesday 16 March 2016

So how socialist was Fascism?

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Here's a clue:

By 1938, after Italy, for all intents and purposes, had emerged from the effects of the international depression, the entitites under the control of the IRI proceeded to produce 67 percent of Italy's ferrous minerals, 77 percent of cast iron, and 45 percent of its steel. About 80 percent of all shipbuilding undertaken on thepeninsula was done under the auspices of Finmare - and Finmeccanica was producing 40 percent of all machine products. The major part of all infrastructure development was the product of the efforts of similar parastate entities. In effect, by the end of the 1930s, the economy of Fascist Italy was the most extensively state controlled in all of Europe - with the exception of the Soviet Union. (from A. James Gregor's 'Mussolini's Intellectuals")

When Mussolini said he was a socialist and that he believed in state control and state direction, these weren't idle words meant to cover up his capitalist streak. Il Duce really did believe in such a state - indeed in one where the economy was organised through "national confederations of syndical organisations" rather than through the market. There is nothing right-wing - if by right-wing you mean conservative or (in the traditional rather than American sense) liberal - about Fascism. It is just another bastard child of socialism.

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Monday 14 March 2016

Quote of the day - on teachers who blog and tweet

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A quite superb little article from Andrew Old contains this gem of a paragraph:

But, of course, there are many reasons why teachers on social media might be worth listening to. Teachers work in actual schools, not theoretical ones. Some educationalists have not tried to teach a child in decades (sometimes never) and their ideas about how it should be done are pure fantasy. Teachers don’t have to follow an ideological line. Educationalists, by contrast, have a habit of signing up to doctrinal statements like this one. Teachers on social media are often actually trying to communicate a clear message. Educationalists are often just trying to prove how clever they are, even if it means saying things that are not understood. But most of all, teachers on social media have little reason to lie about educational issues. They are speaking to other teachers about things both they, and their audiences, encounter. By contrast, educationalists don’t even unanimously agree that telling the truth is a good thing even in principle. And don’t get me started on educationalists who claim to speak for teachers, claim that criticism of them is criticism of teachers, or who insist that they should have a place in a professional body for teachers.

The whole article is a brilliant challenge to the arrogance of academia. As such, it is a delight and relevant way beyond the field of education.

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The Labour Party is now definitely on the Medusa's raft...



As metaphors for Labour's problems go the Raft of the Medusa is a good one:

On the raft, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Among the provisions were casks of wine instead of water. Fights broke out between the officers and passengers on one hand, and the sailors and soldiers on the other. On the first night adrift, 20 men were killed or committed suicide. Stormy weather threatened, and only the centre of the raft was secure. Dozens died either in fighting to get to the centre, or because they were washed overboard by the waves. Rations dwindled rapidly; by the fourth day there were only 67 left alive on the raft, and some resorted to cannibalism. On the eighth day, the fittest decided to throw the weak and wounded overboard leaving fifteen men, all of whom survived the four remaining days until their rescue on 17 July by Argus, which had accidentally encountered them.

No there we have it - Labour is devouring itself, with its members scrapping, shouting and pushing to promote - or undermine - the cause of Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys (or rather Jeremy Corbyn) while the role of Richmont, the incompetent navigator is taken by John McDonnell.

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Saturday 12 March 2016

It really is creative people - artists, innovators, entrepreneurs - that drive growth

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We've become a little obsessed by a thing called STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths. And I think this is great is what you're planning is a technocracy - don't get me wrong scientists, engineers and tech folk are great, indeed if you want your child to get on in life never - under any circumstances - let them cop out from studying these subjects, never. But, just as you shouldn't let your child give up maths and science, you shouldn't let them drop arts subjects either.

And this is why arts matter - from some top French academic economists:

Historical accounts often assert that notable individuals matter for the growth of particular cities. This column uses a new database of 1.2 million people from 2,000 cities since 800CE to show that some types of ‘notable’ individuals have made a difference. Specifically, the presence of many entrepreneurs and artists is associated with faster long-term growth, but the association does not hold for notable military, political or religious figures

And - this is a moment of View from Cullingworth prediction - arts and creative subject will be more important to future jobs than they are at present. Robots will take over and routinise jobs we pay expensively trained technicians to do today and in doing so raise productivy giving us more time and money to spend on good stuff. And the good stuff is arts, culture and creativity - that's where the future jobs are. For sure, our technical world means those creative people will need a pretty sound understand of STEM but it's the people with this understanding as well as skills or knowledge in art, language, history, architecture and music who will be the future elite. Maybe.

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Friday 11 March 2016

This is it? Seriously? Devolution should be about a whole lot more than buses and new taxes

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Some chap from IPPR North has bunged his challenge to 'metro mayors', you know the powerful folk who'll be elected once all these devolution deals are done. And Luke tells us these mayors should "shake up" their cities.

So what exactly does this shaking up involve for our Luke? Well firstly there's buses - yes folks, buses:

Mayors could connect their more deprived citizens with the jobs they need with new bus routes;

That's right, this IPPR chap puts creating new bus routes (something that existing public transport authorities can already do) as a great win for our new elected mega-mayors.

Next Luke says mayors can raise lots of new taxes - that's right, the economic underperformance of Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and Bradford is because the citizens of those cities don't pay enough tax;

To do so they will need to invest, and that means raising revenue from the right sources. Each city is different and will require a different approach. But the candidates should first look at the powers they're already set to have: workplace parking levies, congestion charges and the 2p business rate premium.

But central government should enable them to go further. Whitehall should make implementing these charges far easier, and lift the cap on the business rate premium. It should allow mayors to spend this money on whatever mix of transport investments their city needs.

Forgive me for being completely underwhelmed here and frankly a bit concerned that, given all the things that could be done, this clever bloke can only come up with more buses and more taxes.

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Stuff to read (including a brief Friday Fungus)



We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for mushrooms:

A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land


Driverless boats...oh yes!!

The world’s first flying water taxis will soon be floating passengers down the Seine river in Paris. The electric, zero-emission vehicle, called the Sea Bubble, will float 70 centimeters above water, touching only along its four “marine wings.” It is set to begin testing in Paris this summer with possible commercialization coming as early as 2017.

The Sea Bubble was invented by Alain ThĂ©bault, who holds several sailing speed world records. He is best known as one of the designers of the l’Hydroptère, a ship that was able to break 50 knots thanks to its innovative hydrofoil.


The ancient origins of the North-South divide:

To find a more convincing connection between modern politics and medieval monarchs, we need to go beyond mere borders and explore cultural, political and genetic links. For instance, the advocates of Yorkshire devolution trace their heritage back to medieval times – and even earlier. There’s certainly some evidence to support their longstanding connection with the region.


Mind mapping cities:

It’s the same in mapmaking, says Archie Archambault, a designer who’s making an ongoing series called “Map From the Mind.” Archambault’s maps are based solely on his own explorations and time spent with locals in a given city. “It seems kind of dishonest to make a map completely based on secondhand data,” he says. “The tradition of mapmaking is surveying and being within the parameters of the space.”

The maps he’s made won’t give you turn-by-turn directions from from point A to point B, but they will give you the gist of various cities through the eyes of locals.


Your city isn't the next silicon valley:

Still, if everywhere is the next Silicon Valley, then nowhere is the next Silicon Valley. That’s the reality, and it’s important for cities to grasp it so they can plan their economic futures properly.

“When it comes to tech, nobody can simply create the next Silicon Valley,” explains Aaron Renn, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“Just because a place has a number of startups doesn't mean it's destined to be a Silicon Valley,” Renn continued. “By all means celebrate a growing tech industry, but don't get carried away.”


People or places?

Given their fundamental territoriality, however, cities can never really be people-based entities in that sense. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, an advocate for policies that are first about people, is realistic about the choices facing local policymakers. As he put it in an article for City Journal, “No mayor ever got re-elected by making it easy for his citizens to move to Atlanta, of course, even when that might be a pretty good outcome for the movers themselves.”


The very best article on London's pillaging of Bradford's National Media Museum:

I never imagined, thirty years on, that dream would be comprehensively shattered as the status of Bradford's collection, already diminished by cuts and neglect, would be relegated to that of a retro-themed amusement arcade with the notional remit of helping kids through their science and technology GCSEs.

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A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-load-of-old-rot-fossil-of-oldest-known-land-dweller-identified#sthash.5nhL1A3A.dpuf

Wednesday 9 March 2016

ONS figures show the British are a sober lot these days



Not that you'd get this impression from the headlines that were run the other day following the (inevitable) revelation that loads of people exceed the new lower drink guidelines from our nanny state:

Around 2.5 million people in Great Britain - 9% of drinkers - consume more than the new weekly recommended limit for alcohol in a single day, latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

The 2014 data predates the new limit of 14 units of alcohol per week for men which began in January.

Although habits may start to change, experts say the figures are concerning.

Well this shouldn't be concerning because the truth in all this data is that the British are now a rather sober lot. It's not just the 20% or so of adults who are non-drinkers but facts like this one:

The ONS figures show 58% of people - 28.9 million - drink some alcohol in a typical week.

This figure is lower than a decade ago but has remained stable over the last few years.

Young people are less likely to have consumed alcohol in the last week than those who are older.

So over four in ten Britons don't have a drink in an average week and this figure is lower for the young. Far from the terrible image of binge drinking Britain, we actually live in a country where people have taken that 'drink responsibly, drink in moderation' mantra to heart.

We've known for a while that there are between one and two million people who probably do have a drink problem and probably should do something about their levels of consumption. Add to this people who on one night or another exceed 14 units - probably not to do so again for weeks or even months (remmber that wedding party don't you?) - and you've got your 2.5 million. For context - and remember that a good number, perhaps most, of these people aren't people with a drink problem - this is less than 5% of the adult population.

What we have is national policy directed at the 30 million or so drinkers rather than at fewer than 2 million problem drinkers. This is not a public health problem but a problem better dealt with through the places those problem drinkers present - their doctor's surgery, hospital accident and emergency units, police cells and specialist clinics for those that self-diagnose. There is no need for us to squander millions of taxpayers cash on nannying the hell out of the 95% of drinkers who are doing themselves and their friends or family absolutely no harm at all.

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How to save the high street - don't employ anybody

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So it seems:

Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn't have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.

"My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns," said Ilijason. "It is incredible that no one has thought of his before."

He hopes the savings of having no staff will help bring back small stores to the countryside. In recent decades, such stores have been replaced by bigger supermarkets often many miles (kilometers) away.

Of course nothing is quite as simple as this - the shelves still have to be stocked and someone has to manage that stock, deliver that stock and handle customers. But the principle - that the simple process of buying a loaf of bread and some cheese can be entirely dehumanised - still stands and means that the advantage supermarkets have over local stores is diminished.

However, it does seem to me that the big losers in this battle (perhaps not in Sweden though) aren't the big hypermarkets with 100,000 lines and sophisticated delivery systems but rather the expanding market of small convenience stores run by those same stores. I suspect that, while this system will challenge 24-hour opening, the market for crisps and baby food at three in the morning is pretty limited.

Interesting stuff though.

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Tuesday 8 March 2016

Making a 'sustainable' park - thoughts from a visit to Rome



"Towards a sustainable park" proclaims the blurb on the posters that have been carefully pinned to the solid but, one hopes, temporary fencing. Or rather it says that in Italian complete with diagrams, pictures and the mindless impenetrability of bureaucratic language.

So what is this 'sustainable park' you may very well ask? After all that word 'sustainable' is one of those weasel words so confounded by being discussed and contested that the sense and purpose of the original word is lost in a fog of verbal concern wrapped around with calls for poorly specified action.

As we arrived in the park, it was clear that is was - as your mum would say - in a rather sorry state. It wasn't just the temporary fences or the lack of grass where the grass should be but rather the impression that nothing much had happened for a very long time. Yet the park had sustained - it's probably among the world's oldest parks (the very definition of 'sustainable' one might suggest) so it's not its continued existence that is the bother for those bureaucrats but something else.

Indeed, despite its slight sad state the park was well used combining the dog-walking and children playing functions of parks with a newer purpose of providing a place for African immigrants to lounge around - taking a break from the tough job of trying to flog cheap stuff to tourists (the plaintive cry of 'selfie selfie' being the newest street call from those trying to get folk to buy a selfie stick). And there's a basketball court (or rather whatever the Italians call a 'multi-use games area') where a bunch of young men were playing volleyball as well as what might once have been a properly laid out five-a-side pitch.

Along the sides of the slightly potholed paths are trees. Big trees - mostly stone pines, that icon of Italian treedom - and smaller trees. A multitude of trees. And it's these trees that are the problem with that sustainability. We have - as well as the conflict with regular every day uses of the park - an additional complication for this is Rome and the park is the Colle Oppio, one of the original seven hills of ancient Rome. Meaning, of course, that underneath every inch of the park lies irreplaceable ancient heritage. Those lovely trees - and most of them are lovely - have root systems that are gradually destroying that precious remainder of the lost city. The structures that remain - old bath houses, thermal springs, mosaics, monuments and homes - are unstable, quite literally crumbling away resulting in the project to do something.

And the something is - at its core - trying to get to a balance between the park as a place of play, the park as a green place in an urban environment and the park as a preservation of the past. You get a sense that each tiny piece of completed betterment has only come as a result of careful bartering between the heritage champions, the greens and the local folk who want somewhere to sit or a place for their children to play.

When people ask about political decision-making, we tend to think about new laws or grand strategy. We seldom consider that the toughest political places are these very contested places where many good things are wanted but their priority is contested - ancient ruins worth saving, trees that help the city breathe, playgrounds for toddlers to swing and gardens for us to walk. We can have all of these things but only if we accept some limitation and it falls on the political process - in its broadest meaning - to decide on those constraints, to broker agreements between trees and ruins, and to referee the disputes and disagreements. While all the time knowing that there's an imperative to get the job done, to make that sustainable park.

Right now the Colle Oppio is a mess. At some point it won't be. The challenge will be - and I hope this is the case although my Italian is far too limited to understand everything the signs say - to balance those competing needs, to make a place for tourists (Colle Oppio is 400 yards from the Colosseum), residents, workers and the inevitable flotsam of a city park.

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Monday 7 March 2016

The accountability of markets and governments - lessons from a Keighley cafe

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In positioning themselves in opposition to states, tech giants have taken on certain state-like characteristics. “If you look at Google and Microsoft, they don’t just have the power of states, they even organise themselves like states,” says Brown. “Microsoft has a foreign service that negotiates with foreign governments.” Facebook has its own internal counter-terrorism unit.

It seems that some people are getting hot and bothered about the way in which big tech firms are behaving. This is prompted, in part, by popular decisions such as Apple's refusal to crack an iPhone at the behest of the FBI. Now while some people - mostly from the populist left (the sorts who applaud at the wholesale theft of private property) - are agitated about big business taking on the sort of hegemonic role normally reserved for governments, I'm rather more interested in the extent to which this approach challenges our model of representative democracy by presenting accountability via customers and markets rather than via elections.

Democratic systems evolved because people demanded a say over the decisions affecting them - "no taxation without representation" absolutely captures the principle of democracy. But in accepting this model for government, we also accept its limits - limits beautifully captured by this little piece about a cafe in Keighley:

A STRUGGLING Keighley cafe owner has been threatened with prison if she does not hand over cash for the town’s new Business Improvement District.

BID bosses have demanded Janet Croden, who runs wartime-themed Forteas in North Street, pay £97 to a special fund for town centre promotion and improvements.

The BID, which is run by local businesses, also has the power to make Mrs Croden bankrupt or seize her property if she fails to pay up.

Mrs Croden said that last autumn when Keighley businesses were asked to vote for or against setting up the BID, she could not see how Forteas would benefit.

I'm not here arguing for or against the imposition of this additional tax on Ms Croden's cafe merely pointing out that it shows us the limitations of democracy as a system. Having voted for the additional tax, Keighley's businesses (or rather the local council on their behalf) are able to insist that all businesses pay up regardless of whether they supported the proposal.

I'm guessing that our tech progressives who believe Apple et al are too over-powerful are quite happy with Keighley's little business democracy. But what they're not asking is whether a system founded on decisions freely made in an open market makes authority (and for the sake of argument we'll say Facebook, Google and Apple are, in this context, authority) more or less accountable than is the case with a system based on representative democracy. This isn't a question about ownership but rather a question about market power and whether that is exercised by us as consumers or by the big businesses as big businesses. And, as the tech progressives make clear, the loser in all this is the state:

However, tech giants have something new: millions of loyal customers, many of whom choose to side with companies over their government. This is especially true in the dispute about privacy and encryption. In this light, Apple is protecting its citizens.

It's also true that these progressives are now likely to work with the state in attacking these large consumer-based powers - for example by scuppering free (or pretty near free) internet access for millions of poor people in India. The apparatus of government is used to prevent one of these new powers from acting positively essentially for reasons of protectionism (which is all so-called 'net neutrality' is really):

While it acknowledged some “positive effects” of differential pricing, TRAI said that “differential tariffs arguably disadvantage small content providers who may not be able to participate in such schemes.

“This may thus, create entry barriers and non-level playing field for these players, stifling innovation. In addition, TSPs may start promoting their own web sites/apps/services platforms by giving lower rates for accessing them.”

The beneficiaries here aren't India's consumers but a small group of Indians with the capability of offering ISP services. And, while the core context is the myth of net neutrality, the wider issue takes us back to government and it's capture by producer interests. What saddens me most in all of this is that those producer interests have persuaded a group of activists - I've dubbed them tech progressives - that a more expensive, industry-dominated web is better than a cheaper, consumer-focused web.

Returning to the theme we started with - is Apple more or less accountable than the US government - we can see an emerging discussion that places the exercise of consumer preference and power in direct competition to government and to a group in society who have historically seen themselves as champions of 'people power', the progressive left. It's pretty safe to say that neither the FBI nor Apple are especially accountable but Apple has one advantage - you and I don't have to be one of its customers. If you live and work in the USA, you've no choice as to whether you're the 'customer' of the US government and its agencies.

It's the difference between the Keighley cafe owner freely agreeing to pay into a marketing agreement to promote the town and her being coerced into paying because she was outvoted in a referendum.

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