Tuesday 31 May 2016

Public health warnings as social engineering - the case of 'Himalayan Viagra'


****

The Chinese government public health authorities have issues warnings about the safety of cordyceps sinensis (better known across Asia by its traditional Tibetan name, yartsa gunbu, which literally translates as "summer grass, winter worm).

...a handful of noted research scientists wonder why there’s been such little scrutiny of the research backing a public health warning from China’s State Food and Drug Administration (CFDA). Citing unsafe levels of cancer-causing arsenic in the fungus, the February 2016 announcement triggered a moratorium on pilot programs designed to expand the organism’s commercial development and distribution.

Connoisseurs of public health research with see a familiar litany of bad science in these announcements - selective research, ignoring studies that challenge the official position and a barrage of popular publicity directed at the offending product. And some suggest the reason for the government's concern is political, more about social engineering than public health. Gathering yartsa gunbu - 'Himalayan Viagra' - is a lucrative business:

According to one yartsa gunbu dealer who asked to remain anonymous, a family with good harvesters stand to make as much as 1,000,000 yuan (about $150,000) within the two month harvest window.

A lucrative business entirely controlled by ethnic Tibetans. And the Chinese government might prefer these people not to control a $1billion business selling weird fungus products to gullible Chinese consumers. So long as Tibetan families with the knowledge of where and how to gather yartsa gunbu are able to live in traditional communities rather than the government's preferred urban environment some suggest there will remain a call for independence.

Or else it could just be another example of a few studies providing the justification for out of control health authorities to ban, limit, control and regulate. The good news it that, so far it ain't working:

Whether any political motivations are driving the Chinese government’s claim to public health concerns about the fungus is yet to be seen. But Professor Tsim, who continues evaluating soil samples, says any regulatory action on the fungus inevitably affects the livelihood of Tibetans. The CFDA announcement has yet to impact Hong Kong prices, he said, and one eBay seller recently posted the fungus for about $78,000 per pound.

....

Monday 30 May 2016

This could be the London or the Home Counties


****

The obsession of London's politicians with their 'green belt' really is a crying shame. But, as this quote from Joel Kotkin tells us, it's not a problem unique to the Home Counties:

To meet the needs of its increasingly diverse population, and particularly the next generation, California needs to reform its regulations to more fully reflect the needs and preferences of its citizens. Once the home of the peculiarly optimistic “California Dream”, our state is in danger of becoming a place good for the wealthy and well-established but offering little to the vast majority of its citizens who wish to live affordably and comfortably in this most blessed of states.

When you have to pay half a million pounds to buy an ex-council flat in Stockwell there is something wrong. Seriously wrong. And anyone who tells you the planning system - the means by which we decide which chunks of land can have houses built upon them - is not the main reason is simply deluded.

....

Why we can't buy Ghanaian chocolate bars


****

I was quite struck by this article about a woman making artisan chocolate in Ghana:

Ruth had come over to meet potential trade buyers and told me her story. Chocolate was for her currently a cottage industry, using her garage as a factory and employing her mother to grind beans obtained from a nearby farm. To my mind, it was a chocolate equivalent to a micro-brewery, converting local crops for local consumption. Surprisingly, she is the first independent business to make artisan chocolate in Ghana.

It's a reminder - as the writer makes clear - that Africa is a very different place from the myth presented by NGOs like Oxfam or Save the Children with their images of starving children, subsistence agriculture and wicked foreign investors. Instead, we've a glimpse of an increasingly urban society filled with enterprising people like Ruth. It also tells us that the traditional source of funding - the bank loan - can be difficult for traders like Ruth to secure.

But before we get to tied up in feeling sorry for Ruth and her mum, let's remember she has the resources to travel to London to pitch to trade buyers at an exhibition promoting hundreds of Ghanaian businesses to buyers in the UK. The writer suggests - because he's from a cuddly social enterprise background - the sort of crowd-funding approach to financing Ruth's business that Hotel Chocolat and Brewdog has used. Make an offer - whether it's a cash return or free chocolate doesn't really matter - to potential small investors.

And it struck me that, regardless of the way in which investors are rewarded for their investment, this is a very good way of financing a business - the business-owner transfers the risk to the investor. And it's true that crowdfunding can be an effective means for many initiatives - Bradford's Drunken Film Festival for example - but wouldn't a better route for nascent small businesses like Ruth's being the issue and sale of share capital? Either through 'Dragon's Den' style angel investors or other routes to equity markets.

The other problem for a Ghanaian chocolate business is, of course, the way in which the developed world protects its chocolate business:

Cocoa producing countries limit themselves to mainly exporting beans -rather than manufactured cocoa, or chocolate products- mostly because of tariff escalation. The EU has a bound rate of 0 percent for cocoa beans, but a 7.7 percent, and 15 percent ad valorem duty on cocoa powder and chocolate crumb containing cocoa butter respectively;
Similarly, Japan applies a bound rate of 0 percent for un-processed cocoa beans, but charges a 10 percent tax for cocoa paste wholly or partly defatted, and a 29.8 percent duty on cocoa powder containing added sugar;
The US has no ad valorem on cocoa beans, but imposes a duty of 0.52 cents/Kg for cocoa powder -with no added sugar- and tariffs could go up to 52.8 cents/Kg for imported chocolate products containing cocoa butter.

Maybe that's for another day but it's a reminder that, for all our heart-on-sleeve keening about Africa, we consistently make it more difficult for businesses from places like Ghana to do business - other than on our strict and expensive terms - here in the developed world. To start with Ruth will get some protection if she focuses on small consignments but the tariffs will kick in the minute she's exporting for resale rather than individual consumption.


The best thing - other than investing - the the developed world can do is stop placing barriers between producers and manufacturers in places like Africa and the markets they needs to succeed in Europe, North America and Japan.

....

Wednesday 25 May 2016

Local protectionism is no way to raise economic growth in poor places - a critique of inclusive growth


****

The RSA, that trendiest of slightly left wing think tanks, has launched a thing called the 'Inclusive Growth Commission':

Chaired by former BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders and building on the success of the RSA’s City Growth Commission, the Commission will seek to devise new models for place-based growth, which enable the widest range of people to participate fully in, and benefit from, the growth of their local area.

The core of the Commission's argument is:

Public services and welfare remain fragmented; economic and social policies often seem to pull in opposite directions. Although growth is happening and unemployment falling, large sections of the population are not benefiting. Big wealth gaps and large numbers of economically inactive people have negative impacts on local economies, life chances and social cohesion. Costs to the state remain high, growth is low and prosperity the privilege of a few.

It seems an entirely noble idea to look more closely at how, to borrow a phrase, the proceeds of growth can be shared. The focus - entirely right for a geographer like me - is place-based, stressing the uniqueness of a particular town or city and seeking development solutions that resonate with that locality. The problem is that the RSA, like many other such organisations, has taken as its text the idea that inequality is the cause of poverty in places like Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford.

The worry I have with this place-based model, especially when coming from a centrist, 'government is good' ideology, is that we fall easily into the ideas about resilience, the local multiplier and social models of business. Here's Neil McInroy from the Centre for Local Economic Studies (CLES):

Overall, the plans to build a more inclusive growth model faces a choice. On the one hand the commission can add a stronger social face to an economy which works for the few, not the many. In this, they will reveal some of the problems of growth and this will prompt some policy changes. However, will the commission’s recommendations alter the longstanding frame to local economic activity – where productivity and growth has a pre-eminent position and is viewed as having much higher importance than that of inequality and poverty?

McInroy sets out a 'critique' based on his organisation's position - alongside the New Economics Foundation, Transition Towns and the New Weather Institute - as advocates of what I call local protectionism. For McInroy there is a dominant regional growth model - agglomeration - that needs to be challenged if we are to get an inclusive economy. Essentially in the critique the place-based model means that growth has to be spread across a region rather than being focused on city centres and 'growth hubs'. McInroy will point to the success of Manchester city centre and then to the fact that, despite this success, the metropolitan area of Manchester still contains many of England's poorest places.

It also has losers – city region peripheries, smaller towns and the low skilled. We must look at areas beyond city centres to outer boroughs. We must focus much more on local supply chains and ensure investment to local small businesses is on an equal footing to global corporates and global investors.

In here we have the problem - that reference to 'local supply chains' will be familiar to anyone reading the output of CLES, NEF and NWI. It refers to the view that local supply chains keep more money within the community than supply chains based on the national economy. The idea of the local or regional multiplier is central to this assertion - NEF make a good living from plugging their LM3 model to all and sundry (despite it having no real theoretical basis or any robust empirical support). The problem is that the local multiplier is something of a myth - the impact of excluding national supply chains is, in effect, the same as any act of protectionism. So any gain from having the money circulate within the community for longer is lost in that community having to pay higher prices.

The second element here is the persistence of the view that welfare payments somehow contribute to a local economy. It's true that the very poor places in Manchester and Liverpool receive large amounts of the money we redistribute (giving the lie to those who say there is no dispersal, no 'trickle down') but it is also true that, however valid that welfare payment might be, it still carries an opportunity cost. If the money wasn't raised in taxes it would have been used in another way - perhaps on consumption, maybe invested.

No-one disputes the objective - we'd like more of those people dependent on benefits not to be dependent on benefits. I'm guessing that's what the RSA mean by inclusive growth. The issue is how we go about this - do we run the risk of a slower rate of growth by insisting that large sums are redistributed in some way. If we reject the idea of agglomeration as a driver of growth, then we have to put something in its place. The problem is that the alternatives on offer from the likes of McInroy will act only to futher damage local economies by raising prices and decoupling them from the more successful national economy.

In the end local economies thrive because government does not direct them - the vanity of the RSA position and the stupidity of the CLES outlook is that there is some magical role for local or regional government in delivering both economic growth and a less unequal society. For me the reduction of actual poverty is more important than endlessly fretting over measures of inequality (or 'relative poverty' as folk like to call it) and this is brought about by government not obstructing the drivers of growth. It implies lower taxes when often poorer places have high taxes. It demands less regulation and intervention when the preference of big city governments is to intervene more. And it requires that we connect poor places to the rich places making it possible for people to travel - economically and physically - from the former to the latter.

....

Tuesday 24 May 2016

Ted Cantle and Chuka Umunna are wrong - Britain is not getting more segregated



For many people in Bradford the 7th July 2001 is a date that brings back dreadful memories. Forget about the declining textile industry, the struggles of our city centre and our poor education system for a second - the one event that most damaged our city's image and reputation happened on that day. A small section of the City's population, in one relatively small part of the city rioted, looted, wrecked the livelihoods of local businesses and turned Bradford into a byword for segregation and racial tension.

And it was a small part of the city - from Westgate and White Abbey Road up to Carlisle Road, along Oak Lane and a part of Manningham Lane. I could walk you round the sites of that violent day, show you where the pubs and car showrooms were burned out, point to the shop that before that day was one of Bradford's oldest Polish delis and show you the spot where burning cars scarred the surface of the roads. That walk would take - with stops to reflect on this damage - perhaps an hour. Yet ask someone from elsewhere about our city and, chances are, that something referring back to that day will come up - perhaps a reference to our large Asian community, to crime, or drugs, racism or segregation. Even today, as the recent anti-semitism row shows, we allow the vocal presence of a large minority community - Asian Muslims - to dominate the discourse about Bradford.

There were two major reports commissioned into the riots, their causes and their consequences - one from Sir Herman Ouseley (Community Pride, not Prejudice) and one from Ted Cantle (which had a wider remit by looking at events on the same day in Oldham and Burnley). Cantle coined the term 'parallel lives' to describe communities in these places and, since Bradford was the biggest and most high profile of these riot-torn places, his characterisation of our city as a place divided became the basis for how elsewhere viewed Bradford.

From Cantle's work came the idea of 'community cohesion', a sort of catch-all phrase to cover working to reduce 'tensions' alongside the old concept of 'community development' and ideas around race, faith and integration. The premise of 'cohesion' is that it is an antonym of 'segregation' - cohesive communities are where different cultures not just share a place but live together in a place. Some people chose to see this agenda as a rejection of multiculturalism, arguing that integration is essential to cohesion whereas others took Cantle's argument as a case for embedding that multicultural agenda further into schools, workplaces and the wider 'community'.

When Bradford Council's Executive first sat down to consider the response to the riots - in a terrible irony on the afternoon of 11th September 2001 - we knew that our decisions would be subject to central government scrutiny and intervention, not least because we were then a Conservative-led authority under a Labour government. The Council's leadership (or which I was then a member) was not happy with either the Ouseley report - commissioned before the riots - or Cantle's 'parallel lives' report. We felt, and still feel, that the description of Bradford was limited, failed to acknowledge the wider city and ignored reasons for riot that were not about segregation at all but more to do with drugs, crime and racist policing.

This is a long context for a response to Ted Cantle's comments yesterday in The Guardian that suggest somehow segregation today is worse than it was back in 2001:

Speaking to the Guardian 15 years after he called for action to reduce polarisation following violent riots across northern England, in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley, Cantle said he was alarmed by the direction the country had headed since then.

“There is more mixing in some parts of our society. But there is also undoubtedly more segregation in residential areas, more segregation in schools and more segregation in workplaces,” he said. “That is driving more prejudice, intolerance, mistrust in communities.”

Superficially the evidence for Cantle's argument is strong and is set out in the article - a growing number of electoral wards with a non-white majority, schools with a majority minority intake and 'segregated' workplaces. I fear that this tells us only part of the story, problematises race and provides justification for the race or culture based special pleading that is such a driver of division. There is another, more positive story. Here from the Centre for the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at Manchester University:

Inner London has experienced a decrease in segregation for most ethnic groups, with an increase of 3% or less for the White British, Caribbean and African groups. The White British group saw their greatest increase in segregation in inner London, although this was very small at 3%. Outer London’s decreasing segregation is particularly notable for the Bangladeshi (-12%), Chinese (-11%) and Mixed (-8%) groups. Segregation has decreased in metropolitan districts for all ethnic groups except White British. The White British and Other White groups saw marginal increases in segregation in other large cities. For all other ethnic groups, segregation decreased in these urban districts, in particular for the African group, with a decrease of 20%. The picture is one of decreased residential segregation in urban areas. An important mechanism for this change is dispersal from major cities to suburban and rural areas, in particular by families.

What we have here is a very different picture from that presented by Cantle and others - rather than seeing the colour of people living in a place as a mark of division, we see the same process of dispersal from immigrant communities we saw for previous generations of immigrants. People from Indian, Bengali and Pakistani heritage, as more of them succeed in life, molve away from the dense urban places of their arrival (or, for many, birth) in the same way that the children of poor East End Jews moved outwards to Golders Green, Hendon and Mill Hill. These Jewish families did not lose their faith or culture but their otherness was diminished by the things they shared with their new neighbours. There is no reason to suppose that the same dispersal for Hindu or Muslim, Asian and Black communities will not result in greater rather than less cohesion.

The reason for those statistics and for the frightening agenda apparent from Chuka Umunna is that the past couple of decades have seen the most concentrated influx of immigrants to the UK in our history. Whatever we think about this fact - The Guardian reports 1.2 million into London alone (although these are defined as not "white-British" so could be white European I guess) - if we define the lack of cohesion by simply counting how many black people there are in a given place then we fall into company with racists. Moreover, we define people by the box they tick on an ethnic monitoring form (a pox on these things) rather than on what they actually think, do or say.

The South Asian population of Bingley Rural - the ward I represent - was 482 in 2011 (it has likely risen a little since then - so maybe 600) and was 164 in 2001. In a small way this illustrates this dispersal. This is around 3% of the population, yet we elected a resident of Pakistani heritage as a councillor this May. If I were to be blunt, I doubt this would have been possible in 2001. Of course there is racism, I met people who said they wouldn't vote for Naveed because of his race and faith but overwhelmingly people seemed to see beyond that fact to the person underneath.

The Guardian article - indeed much of what I read in the press about the affect or impact of immigration - fails to touch on the truth about integration. Just as people don't judge me as a Roman Catholic or my wife as Jewish (although we've some problems with this), we are beginning to stop judging people by their skin colour. We've a way to go with Islam - we still make assumptions about a woman in a headscarf, for example - but even there the extent of our experience and witness of what most Muslims are like is beginning to change how we view that faith.

The way in which Ted Cantle frames his argument - focusing on numbers and concentration rather than actual evidence of segregation - doesn't reflect the reality of immigration, integration and dispersal. There's nothing new about recent arrivals clustering together - this takes advantage of family links, community and faith institutions, and provides the necessary social capital to support the new community in a foreign environment. But every example of a new community has seen that concentration diminish as they become established. This isn't to say that there won't be continuing concentrations - Indians in Harrow, Jews in Alwoodley, Pakistanis in Heaton - but these places are no longer inward-looking ghettos but just places where a lot of the residents happen to be Jews, Hindus or Muslims.

....

Sunday 22 May 2016

Socialism. A terrible and popular stone age creed.


****

It is a continuing shock to me that every time socialism is shown to be destructive a new generation of socialists emerge like the worst sort of zombie apocalypse. It seems we're programmed to like this ideology - it's our stone age sensibility that makes us support a creed that serves mostly to take us back to that stone age:

According to Professors John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California, Santa Barbara, human minds evolved in the so-called “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. “The key to understanding how the modern mind works,” Cosmides writes, “is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern [humans] – they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”

With the result that:

...humans are, by nature, envious, resentful and unable to comprehend, let alone appreciate, a sophisticated economic system that has evolved in spite of, not because of, our best efforts.

We're wired to think the economy is a zero-sum game, a thing of 'them' and 'us' and we resent hierarchy as well as being envious of those who have more, are stronger or seem more powerful. This is the core emotional content of socialism and explains why so many reject - despite the evidence of its success - the idea that self-interest drives innovation, invention and growth in a world unlimited in the scope of its creativity.

Socialism is a terrible ideology founded in envy and too often resulting in the very opposite of what its adherents profess to want. Yet so long as our brains respond with envy, resentment and incomprehension there will be socialists. Part of me feels we should be training these negative reactions out of people - but that would be brainwashing so probably not the best of ideas!

....

Friday 20 May 2016

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. It's just the left's favourite straw bogeyman.


****

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. At least not as an ideology that determines the policies of governments across the globe. Trust me on this - there really isn't a thing called neoliberalism. Except in the febrile minds of people who think sociology is a science, go on marches against capitalism and join organisations with names like 'Cuba Solidarity'.

I know you don't believe me - after all there's all this guffle on Wikipedia to turn to:

Neoliberalism (or sometimes neo-liberalism)[1] is a term which has been used since the 1950s,[2] but became more prevalent in its current meaning in the 1970s and 80s by scholars in a wide variety of social sciences[3] and critics[4] primarily in reference to the resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism.[5] Its advocates support extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Neoliberalism is famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.[7] The implementation of neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of financialization, with the financial crisis of 2007–08 one of the ultimate results.[13][14][15][16][17]

That's a reference dense chunk of the on-line encyclopedia. But trust me folks, there simply isn't an ideology out there called 'neoliberalism' - it's just a tag applied by people, typically but not exclusively socialists, who oppose free markets, free trade and globalisation. The whole and enormous body of academic 'knowledge' around neoliberalism is, in essence, a colossal straw man constructed from the prejudices of left-wing academics with its framework filled in by the echo chamber of socialist punditry. It is the bogeyman that left-wing mums and dads use to scare their children. It is the scary monster that keeps young socialists from straying. It is a myth.

You still don't believe me? Let's look a little further. If I search on-line a little I can find a bewildering array of socialist organisations - socialist doctors, socialist lawyers, socialist economists (an oxymoron if ever one existed), socialist christians, socialist scientists. People place themselves in a spectrum of socialism - my geography lecturer at university proudly described himself as a 'radical Marxist geographer (whatever that may actually mean). As an ideology, socialism is very well embedded in our culture. Indeed, in academic humanities and social sciences (HSS), socialism in its various guises is the dominant orthodoxy - being anything other than left wing in these HSS disciplines is almost unheard of.

Apply the same test to neoliberalism - supposedly the dominant ideology of our times - and there is nothing. There aren't any Neoliberal Societies at universities, there is no Neoliberal Lawyers Association, no neoliberal doctors groups, not even any neoliberal economist clubs. As ideologies go neoliberalism is spectacularly unsuccessful - no-one identifies with the belief, there is no body of writing promoting the creed, and there are no organisations basing their political message around neoliberalism. There is no such thing as neoliberalism - it's simply a collation of things left wing people dislike or disagree with, a convenient set of 'attitudes' as one tweeter proclaimed.

Here's an example of how the users of the term neoliberalism are confused:



So the gist of this argument - it's from Alex Andreou - is that climate change deniers and opponents of the European Union are neoliberals. And that the essence of neoliberalism is opposed to taxation, to international co-operation and state intervention. Indeed that neoliberals are ideologically wedded to greed and short-termism. OK I've got that - neoliberalism is about rent-seeking and protectionism.

Or is it? Here's some more neoliberals:

They are single-minded about the irreversible transformation of society, ruthless about the means, and in denial about the fallout. Osborne – smirking, clever, cynical, "the smiler with the knife" – wields the chopper with zeal. Cameron – relaxed, plausible, charming, confident, a silver-spooned patrician, "a smooth man" – fronts the coalition TV show.

Neither of these men are opposed to the EU or deniers of climate change and the need for action. Yet they are neoliberals - they support international co-operation, oppose protectionism and support free trade (more-or-less). Yet despite this they are neoliberals. And the only reason they are described as such is because they are also opposed to the ideas of the regressive left - economic stasis, state direction of the economy, isolationism and an over-powerful government.

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. Not once it's definition is so vague that it can encompass radical libertarians like the Koch brothers as well as populist protectionists like Nigel Farage. If Don Boudreaux, doyen of academic libertarians, is a neoliberal there is no way in which Hillary Clinton can be a neo-liberal. This is the core of the problem - neoliberalism is not a recognisable ideology:

What Boas and Gans-Morse found, based on a content analysis of 148 journal articles published from 1990 to 2004, was that the term is often undefined. It is employed unevenly across ideological divides; it is used to characterise an excessively broad variety of phenomena.

That is academic speak for neoliberalism is an empty slogan.

So next time you read some cheerful left-wing pundit and, about half way through their measured and considered analysis of some or other issue, the word 'neoliberal' crops up - maybe something like: "this is a result of neoliberal economics..." - remember that there is no such thing as neoliberalism, nobody self-identifies as a neoliberal, it is just a convenient way to describe something that the left-wing pundit dislikes. A convenient set of "attitudes" those left wing folk attribute to entrepreneurs, to conservative politicians, to directors of international institutions and to bankers.

There is no such thing as neoliberalism. It is just the left's favourite straw bogeyman.

....

Wednesday 18 May 2016

The myth of the obesogenic environment


****

The full article is gated but the abstract is unequivocal about the findings:

The prevalence of obesity has doubled over the last 25 years. We estimate the effects of multiple socio-environmental factors (e.g., physical demands at work, restaurants, food prices, cigarette smoking, food stamps, and urban sprawl) on obesity using NLSY data. Then we use the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition technique to approximate the contribution of each socio-environmental factor to the increase during this time. Many socio-environmental factors significantly affect weight, but none are able to explain a large portion of the obesity increase. Decreases in cigarette smoking consistently explains about 2–4 % of the increase in obesity and BMI. Food stamp receipt also consistently affects the measures of weight, but the small decrease in food stamp program participation during the period we examine actually dampened the increases in obesity and BMI. Collectively, the socio-environmental factors we examine never explain more than about 6.5 % of the weight increases.

So can we now shut up about banning advertising, refusing permission for fast-food shops near schools and a host of other irrelevances. The rise in obesity is down to a more sedantry lifestyle and that our energy intake hasn't declined as fast as our metabolic need for that energy.

....

Tuesday 17 May 2016

Absolutely right - we shouldn't ever forget this...


****

...Corbyn was a member of the board of Labour Briefing, a fringe magazine for diehard leftists that unequivocally supported the IRA’s bombing campaign. Corbyn organised the magazine’s mailing-list and was a regular speaker at its events. In December 1984, the magazine“reaffirmed its support for, and solidarity with, the Irish republican movement” noting that its “overwhelming priority as active members of the British labour movement is to fight for and secure an unconditional British withdrawal”. Only “an unconditional British withdrawal, including the disarming of the RUC and UDR, will allow for peace in Ireland. Labour briefing stands for peace, but we are not pacifists”. Moreover, “It certainly appears to be the case that the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it”.

The current leader of the Labour Party supported the bombing of civilian targets by the IRA. it really is as bad as that and we should never stop telling the world the truth of his support for murderers.

....

Our friendly ex-BBC trot, Paul Mason makes the case for leaving the EU - as only an anti-democrat can


****

Paul Mason is a trot. OK so he has wrapped it all up in a mish-mash of pseudo-academic wibble but he is a trot, a good old-fashioned anti-democratic, pro-direct action loony leftie. And, in keeping with all those other dyed-in-the-wool left wing folk, Paul doesn't like the European Union much.

But Paul hates something else even more. Paul hates the possibility that the British electorate will vote for a party and a party leadership that he doesn't like. This cannot be allowed to happen so, regardless of its corruption, opacity, secrecy and lack of democracy, we should be voting to stay in the EU. Here's Paul's case:

Now here’s the practical reason to ignore it. In two words: Boris Johnson. The conservative right could have conducted the leave campaign on the issues of democracy, rule of law and UK sovereignty, leaving the economics to the outcome of a subsequent election. Instead, Johnson and the Tory right are seeking a mandate via the referendum for a return to full-blown Thatcherism: less employment regulation, lower wages, fewer constraints on business. If Britain votes Brexit, then Johnson and Gove stand ready to seize control of the Tory party and turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island.

So there you have it. We should stay in the EU because its unaccountable and undemocratic structures (and Paul describes them so) will stop the will of the British people being acted on by the government that people have elected. This is the absolute essence of the case against leaving the EU. Leave aside the scary stuff about security, economics and so forth, the case from the left - moderate as well as extremist - is that leaving will inevitably dilute workers rights, environmental actions and minimum wages. Paul and his chums have nothing but sneering contempt for the British electorate for daring to reject their idiotic creed so they argue for remaining within an organisation so undemocratic that it prevents the will of an elected government from prevailing.

I can't think of a single better reason for leaving the EU.

....

Monday 16 May 2016

Smoking cessation: it stopped being about health years ago


****

In 2003 Hon Lik registered the patent for the first modern electronic cigarette since when millions of people across the world have stopped or significantly reduced their consumption of regular old-fashioned cancer-sticks. There is no doubt - really, there is no doubt - that this is one of the biggest public health boons ever. Instead of people having their lives cut short by using combustible cigarettes to get a hit of nicotine, they'll mostly be using a delivery system that's pretty near harmless - as harmless as getting a caffeine hit by pouring hot water over coffee beans.

The smoking cessation business (or most of it - there are a few notable exceptions) has spent almost every waking hour and bucket loads of research cash since Hon Lik registered that patent trying to discredit the electronic cigarette and the practice of vaping. Urged on by the pharmaceuticals industry and tacitly back by Big Tobacco these so-call smoking cessation folk have acted to protect their business interests - funding, jobs, research grants - rather than accept that vaping disrupted smoking by making it possible to enjoy the lift from nicotine without the health costs of smoking.

And these people refuse to accept the reality and are still throwing money at research into new smoking cessation devices:

Chemists at the University of Bristol have been awarded £930,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking.

Professor Tim Gallagher, in collaboration with Professor Adrian Mulholland (School of Chemistry) and Dr Richard Sessions (School of Biochemistry), will use a combination of synthetic chemistry, computational modelling, structural biology and pharmacology to develop potential new smoking cessation agents.

I'm sure the science here is fascinating but do we really need to spend nearly £1 million of taxpayers money (especially in these tough times for public funding) on researching "potential new aids to help smokers stop smoking". That's 'potential' aids not actual aids that can be put on the market for smokers to use. What we'll have instead is some quite interesting chemistry (all those ligands and that partial agonism) but little practical health value. And all this at a time when there's a pretty damned effective aid to quitting that the same government funding this research wants to limit, stop from being effectively promoted and placed in the "we rather disapprove of this sort of thing" category of consumer goods.

As I say, smoking cessation stopped being about health years ago. Now it's more about preserving the jobs of smoking cessation advisors and the funding of researchers. The minute there was a breakthrough disruptive technology - one produced without government research funding and promoted successfully through a free market - the smoking cessation funding should have gone and the research investment directed into other areas of public health challenge. But the public health isn't about health at all really, is it?

....

Sunday 15 May 2016

Care about the planet? Well stop saying local is better then.


****

One of the most common myths of the modern trendy progressive world is that which say 'local' is always better - for the economy, for the planet and for society. If only we 'transitioned' our places into being locally-focused, resilient communities filled with independent shops, urban gardens and local food networks say the advocates - with comments like this ever so common:

The same goes for agriculture, textiles, and many other sectors where returning to local, human-scaled enterprise will lead to less worker exploitation and environmental damage while producing better, healthier products. Nonindustrial practices may be more labor-intensive, but they’re also better for us all. For those of us used to white-collar jobs, the idea of growing vegetables or making clothes may seem like a big step backward toward more menial labor. But consider for a moment the sorts of activities the wealthiest Americans or most satisfied retirees engage in enthusiastically: brewing craft beers, knitting, and gardening. If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts.

This quote is from a book called Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and was quoted - as an example of progressive ignorance - by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek. What bothers me most isn't the stuff about the local multiplier that are used to justify resilience - we know that's pretty much nonsense - or even the truth that this sort of local protectionism only makes us poorer. No, what bothers me is that the idiot progressives promoting transition towns and putting up these 'back to the land' arguments are completely wrong about its environmental impact.

It simply isn't true that this return to pre-industrial production has less environmental impact than modern intensive agriculture or mass-production of the clothes and tools we need. We know that extensive agriculture uses more inputs than intensive agriculture, which is a pretty wasteful start, but we also know that this sort of farming is more polluting and has a bigger impact on wildlife and the local environment. Yet the 'Greens' and their progressive fellow travellers persist with their myth-making and in denying that the same benefits come from agricultural intensification as come from any other improvement in our efficiency in using resources - it makes us richer, it puts less strain on the planet and it allows time for those pleasant pastimes like home brew beer and allotment gardening.

....

Saturday 14 May 2016

The inevitable and renewed attack on drinking - the temperance campaign rejuvenated by new booze guideline

****

It was inevitable. As certain as anything could be. As soon as the ink was dry on the Chief Medical Officer's shocking new guidelines on safe drinking there would some research outlining the terrible dark truth about all our boozy habits. A report based entirely on us exceeding those new guidelines - 14 units a week, less than a pint a day. A report based on guidelines that reject the evidence about alcohol and health, that could have been written by some po-faced nineteenth century temperance campaigner.

Us blokes are heading for oblivion and an early grave. We're in denial:

Experts are calling for health warnings on all alcoholic drinks after data showed millions of middle-aged men drink above government guidelines and do not believe it does them any harm.

You know something, we (and I'm definitely one of these denying middle-aged men) don't give a toss about your guidelines. We think they are stupid nannying nonsense. If we look a little further into the truth of those guidelines, what we find is that they are a complete load of unevidenced twaddle produced by the anti-booze lobby. But most blokes don't get this far, they look at what they drink and decide that, you know, it's fine and it isn't going to make any noticeable difference to their life.

If we were to start living the life the nannying fussbuckets, New Puritans, health fascists, prohibitionists and public health campaigners would have us live, we'd be giving up a whole load of entirely innocent pleasure. To absolutely no benefit whatsoever. None. Zilch. There is absolutely no scientific basis for the new guidelines so we can - and should - go on drinking the same way as we did before the nannies announced we were all headed for an early, alcoholic grave for enjoying a pint of two most days.

What makes me most cross is that the government repeats this lie - and it is a lie, a complete fiction, a load of utter bollocks, misleading, without any scientific basis, incorrect, misleading, fictional:

“Drinking any level of alcohol regularly carries a health risk for anyone, but if men and women limit their intake to no more than 14 units a week it keeps the risk of illness like cancer and liver disease low."

This is why we should sack the entirety of Public Health England, the Chief Medical Officer and most of the egregious profession of public health. The reason Jeremy Hunt should go as secretary of state isn't because of the doctors' strike but because he has allowed these lies, this crass fiction to be endorsed by government.

.....

Friday 13 May 2016

Academic bias against conservative ideas is bad for society

****

And it's not just because conservative-minded folk have got better things to do than be sociology professors. There's a real bias against conservatism:

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

The heart of the problem is that, in a business entirely dominated by a left-wing - "progressive" - mindset, there is an inherent bias against any conservative outlook and especially a socially conservative outlook. As the article I quote above makes clear this is rationalised by those progressive academics belief in the wrongness of conservatism - “Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” as we're told by one academic.

This ignorant outlook - and that is the only way to describe such a viewpoint - presents a huge problem by presenting students studying humanities, social sciences and arts subject with an ideologically one-eyed perspective. The result is a cohort of graduates who are unable to grasp that social conservatism is not simply gay-bashing, racism and making women clean behind the fridge. So when these students meet people who make choices to behave in a socially-conservative way they are bemused and muddled.

Just as importantly, the left wing domination of universities means that there is no real political discourse within academia, no argument and little challenge to the orthodoxies of socialism. The presentation of conservative, classical liberal or libertarian approaches to the study of society is done in the manner of a freak show - "here we have some people who are very strange and think some odd things, aren't they funny and don't we know better."

Even worse, the academics presenting a bias outlook simply don't consider that they are biased or ideological. Here's macroeconomist, Simon Wren-Lewis:

I think I’m like the majority of people in not having any fixed ideological position about whether the state should be large or small. The state is clearly good at doing some things, and bad at doing others. In between there is a large and diverse set of activities which may or may not be better achieved through state direction or control, and they really need to be looked at item by item on their merits.

What Wren-Lewis failed to spot was that his criticism of 'small state people' was entirely ideological - he is completely blind to this since he cannot encompass the idea that there is any intellectual credibility to conservative or liberal ideas. It is this bias that damages our intellectual discourse, leads to research that seeks out evidence to reinforce ideology, and results in lazy peer-review and junk science.

Our understanding of society is contested but much of academia seems unable to allow that contest to take place. It is pretty near impossible for someone writing from a right-of-centre perspective to get published in leading journals, unless they already have a secure position. It is equally impossible for that right-of-centre writer to secure the academic positions necessary to allow their view to be even considered worthy of examination or publication.

I don't see this as a threat to conservatism - most people discover conservative ideas when they get their first paycheck and see how much money the government has taken, when their children arrive at school to be faced with sand play and cuddles rather than reading, writing and arithmetic, or when they arrive home to face broken glass and gaps where electrical goods used to sit. Socialism may be lovely when we're young and want to change the world but life's realities are unremittingly conservative. It's a big shame that the people studying our lives seem not to think this.


The result is that a combination of bias, ignorance and ideological prescription results in policy proposals and strategies that miss entirely the real lived experience of the ordinary people those policies are aimed at. The 'experts' drawing up policies are unable to see that things such as personal responsibility and choice might be worth considering before we get to regulations, bans, taxes, controls and the creation of new agencies to 'address' whatever the latest problem might be. And those experts might like to forget the psychology of Heinz Kiosk and remember that we aren't all guilty.


....

Thursday 12 May 2016

The RTPI is wrong, poor places don't create poor people


****

Planners have, inevitably, a primary focus on matters geographical - or 'place' as the trendier ones like to call it these days. So I get it when the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) rolls out a slightly whining piece about place and poverty:

Trudi Elliott, RTPI chief executive, said: ‘Many of the root causes of deprivation and social inequality are bound up in the poor quality of neighbourhoods - places that have no employment and lack community amenities, are poorly connected or simply run down.

‘Good planning is the one tool in our hands that can make places increase people's opportunities and help lift them from poverty.’

The planners go on to complain that:

...national welfare policies place too much emphasis on the individual factors behind poverty—poor education, for example—and not enough on physical environment.

The problem is that the planners are wrong. Not completely - there is some small evidence linking environmental or physical environment to poverty - but almost completely. To use a famous example, people live in Easterhouse because they're poor, they aren't poor because they live in Easterhouse. And if we look up and down the country we will find similar places - in every large conurbation - where, as the last group of poor, often immigrant people move out, they're replaced by a new group of poor, often immigrant people. My wife's uncle, the son of Russian Jews, was born - in poverty - in Whitechapel but ended his life in Alwoodley a wealthy suburb of Leeds. There aren't many Jews left in Whitechapel but the place still has poor people - Bengalis, Somalis, Roma - living there.

Even where we are speaking of the 'indigenous' UK population, the truth about poor places is that they stay that way because they are places where poor people can afford to live. Whether a place has high levels of private rental property or concentrations of social housing, their poverty is sustained by people moving into those places not by those places making people poor. When Bradford Trident (based in Little Horton and West Bowling two of Bradford's poorest places) studied what happened during its ten year regeneration programme, what it found was that people who did well - finished school, got a job, were in a settled relationship - moved out of the area. They didn't go far - half a mile or so to Wibsey or Great Horton, for example - but they moved away. And the low rent, poor quality place they left behind was occupied by another generation of poverty.

So we should guard against the argument from planners that says they can somehow fix poverty by fixing places. Over the years from 1997 billions was invested in many of the poorest places - through 'decent homes' investment, through the Single Regeneration Budget and through the neighbourhood renewal programmes. And at the end of these programmes those places were still poor places - better places for sure with better schools, better access to health care and lots of community support programmes but still places where poor people go to live. The root causes of poverty, inequality and deprivation are not rooted in places or their physical environment but rather in those individual factors - health, education, lifestyle - that the planners dismiss.

The truth is that, as JRF showed a few years ago, the poorest places in England in 1968 remain, overwhelmingly, the poorest places in England today. Despite approaching fifty years of regeneration.

....

Tuesday 10 May 2016

An idiot's guide to why we should leave the EU (Pt 3) - The Euro


****

"But that's the Euro not the EU, we're not in the Euro."

So goes the mantra from EU fans as they argue against Brexit criticisms of the EU's economic performance. And it's true that the UK isn't a member of the Euro. It's also true that the Euro is absolutely central to the future of the EU project.

But first let's remind ourselves just how bad the Euro has been for many Europeans - here's youth unemployment:





The price of Euro membership for Greeks, Spaniards, Italians and Cypriots is that their children have no job nor much prospect of a job. And remember that, as we noted above, the Euro is absolutely central to the entire EU project, it is the tool used to force integration and those young people dumped on the scrapheap are the human cost of 'ever closer union'.

So why does all this matter to the UK? After all we're not a member of the Euro and us joining is dependent on a referendum (assuming some future government doesn't amend the law mandating a poll in the case of treaty changes). It matters because, so long as we are not members of the Euro, the UK will be detached from the main EU project - we will be just as removed from critical economic decisions as we would be were we outside the EU. This isn't just about specific decisions relating to the currency itself but a host of other economic decisions - including, as we saw with Italy, the imposition of an unelected technocratic government.

You cannot separate decisions made to ensure that the Euro doesn't implode from decisions made to promote the EU project. The main economic decisions affecting the future of the EU are not being made through the cumbersome EU bureaucracy but through discussions between Euro participants (in particular Germany and France) and inside the European Central Bank. Unless advocates of remaining in the EU are saying we should join the Euro they are, in effect, arguing for a UK position just as detached from decision-making as that of Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. But without the flexibility and choices that those countries have.

So when EU fans argue that we won't have to join the Euro they are, in effect, trying to tell us we can have our cake and eat it (although it's a pretty foul tasting cake). We'll be at the 'top table' but outside the main driver of Europe's economic strategy, the Euro. Now I think this is great as the Euro is a disaster but I can't see there's any substantial difference between the situation of nations outside the EU but within Europe's free trade zone and nations inside the EU but outside the Euro. Except, of course, that the first group of nations aren't pretending they're influencing the EU when they aren't. The certain outcome of Brexit is to shift the UK from the latter group of countries to the former - instead of being inside the EU but outside the group of nations deciding the EU's economic direction, we'll be outside the EU and still sidelined from economic decision-making. Even better the UK will be in a position to make its own decisions about industrial support and infrastructure and to conduct its own negotiations about international trade.

Brexit frees the UK from the straitjacket of EU decisions designed just to shore up the Euro. Brexit allows us to make our own choices about economic policy. And Brexit allows for greater flexibility in trade and investment. Put simply, unless the intention is to join the Euro, there is no advantage at all (if you consider joining that train crash of a currency any sort of sensible idea) to remaining a member of the EU. Brexit is good for Britain's economy.

....

Sunday 8 May 2016

An idiot's guide to why we should leave the EU (Pt 2) - Trade




Trade. Yeah that's ever so much to do with government. All government - local, regional, national, supra-national, world - does is prevent trade. The rules and regulation, controls and restrictions, barriers and prohibitions - everything (bar geography) that prevents trade has been imposed by government. So when those fans of the EU tell you that being a member of this bureaucratic, unaccountable, undemocratic club is 'good for trade' they are lying. No government of any sort, anywhere has been 'good for trade'. It's not what governments do. Governments find reason to stop trade. And then negotiate so-called "trade agreements" to pretend that somehow government is promoting or encouraging trade.

Trade is essential and fundamental to our humanity. It's not some sort of capitalist invention but the way by which we share, by which we add to the sum of human happiness, how we add value. The idea of free exchange - I swap my surplus goat for your excess corn - is what has raised us to the condition we are in today. Absolutely nothing at all to do with government, let alone the EU.

So when the folk that like the EU tell us that it would affect Britain's trade what they're giving you is a threat. The EU - a powerful government - will stop ordinary people who make ornate left-handed widgets or provide the horoscopes of Wu from selling said goods and services in the EU. Why would that powerful government do that? Mostly because it wants to protect the interests of widget makers and horoscope vendors who've employed besuited lobbyists to buy those unaccountable EU decision-makers food and wine in expensive Brussels restaurants.

Who loses out here (assuming that there has been a fix to protect those widget-maker or horoscope-crafter interests)? The EU consumer - they're poorer for that fix, they don't have high quality English made widgets or Welsh horoscopes. Forget about the numbers that EU fans peddle - they're nonsense. Ask a sensible question - why on earth would people in France, Germany, Spain or Poland not want to carry on buying those lovely left-handed widgets and Wu-ist horoscopes? The idea that, if we left the EU, customers in Slovakia and Austria would stop buying our stuff is plainly nonsense. Yet that's what they're scaring you with.

British companies trade everywhere - America, Africa, India, China, Japan - without there being the need for an EU equivalent. Yes it's difficult (this is why the directors of international trading companies get paid so well) but that's as much about culture, language and local knowledge as it is about dealing with the endless barriers that stupid governments put in the way of doing business. These companies don't need permission from government to do that trading, they just get on with it.

Ignore the macro-economic projections - this is just sympathetic magic not real science - and look at the truth. Trade is about the exchange between individual people and their businesses not the so-called deals of governments. Those deals are about monopolies, control and power which is why the grandees of big business and the their paid servants in 'public affairs' companies spend so much of their marketing budgets on getting regulations changed.

Look instead at Singapore, at Hong Kong, at Taiwan and ask why these places - rejected places - are among the richest places in the world. Their success is down to trade - no deals, no fear-mongering about economic blocs, no fixes. Just doing good business, making and selling things that people the world over want to buy. Do you really believe that somewhere as enterprising, creative, original and intelligent as Britain can't do the same? That the only way we can succeed in trade is through a fix, through protection and through the special deal?

Trade made Britain rich. And it will maintain our riches. But only if we see it as something done between free people rather than some favour of government. The EU - just consider the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) - sees trade as something negotiated between rulers not as you or I buying things that we want from wherever in the world they're from. This isn't 'trade' it's the antithesis of trade, it's deciding where the boundaries of special interest and protectionism are placed. It makes the world poorer and the rent-seeker richer.

So when EU fans tell you it's about trade they mislead. What they mean is that the EU will make European consumers poorer so as to protect the interests of businesses who've paid - through their besuited lobbyists - to have their interests placed above yours and mine. It's not about trade. It never was about trade. It's about stopping trade, controlling trade and, in doing so, making you and I just that little bit poorer.

...

Saturday 7 May 2016

An idiot's guide to why we should leave the EU (Pt 1)


The EU at work


On Thursday someone who, for all that their politics is very different to mine, I have some regard for told me I am an idiot for wanting to leave the EU. "I didn't have you down as an idiot" were mor eor less his words. It seems this dismissive attitude dominates the case for remaining a member of the European Union. The idea that anyone who believes in exiting from the EU is somehow stupid is central to the campaign strategy for 'remain'. The 'leaving is stupid' message is presented by a parade of the world's great and good explaining why it's so important that we stay inside the warm embrace of that union.

The 'remain' campaign has roped in every leader in David Cameron's address book - from the US president and prime minister of Japan to warmed over trade union bosses and assorted (often French) international bankers. And the message is consistent - these great and good people believe, usually for entirely unspecified reasons, that the UK's interests are to stay in the EU. Such a strategy, founded on the good old logical fallacy - Appeal to Authority, is an easy one for campaigners to use. Just look at those posters and infographics showing the mugshots of all those great leaders - 'all these clever people say we should stay, how can you possibly vote to leave'.

As a result people, such as the local politician whose comment I quote, feel able to dismiss the advocates of Brexit as 'Little Englanders', as isolationists, and above all to tell them they're stupid. The hope is, of course, that people will be embarrassed by the suggestion of their stupidity and line up like good little sheep to vote remain. To stress this we're regaled with the less appealing parts of the leave argument - the crypto-racism, the islamophobia, the protectionism - and, slightly appalled by the unpleasantness of all this, people turn away from the idea of leaving the EU even if their instincts tell them it's the right thing to do.

Well I'm not stupid and I'm going to vote to leave the EU. And I'm going to do this for the very opposite of the argument from all those grandees. These people, the international elite, like things distant and obscure. They prefer government to be complicated and dominated by regulation. And they hate the idea that most of us, most of the time want to be left to muddle along with our ordinary lives free from their lectures, strictures and fussing interference. Leaving aside the foreign heads of state (who're doing a favour to another state boss - presumably in expectation of reciprocation), the people telling you you're stupid if you want to leave are the beneficiaries of the EU. Of course they want to stay in, it's their source of power, influence and money.

Assuming you're not employed by some 'European-funded' organisation (in which case your pro-EU argument is entirely down to selfish interest), you are not a beneficiary of the EU. Oh yes they pretend that millions of jobs (hint, hint, this might include your job) 'depend on the EU' but they can never actually point to all those jobs and explain how they are the result of a union run by a distant, unaccountable bureaucratic entity. They'll tell you we're at peace because of the EU - by which they mean that France and Germany haven't been at war since 1945. But what makes them think that that Kafka-esque castle of bureaucracy in Brussels is somehow responsible for that peace or that it couldn't be managed with a simple treaty?

To hear those great and good - let's call them The Beneficiaries - talk, you'd think that there is no other possible arrangement of Britain's relationship with its European neighbours that would encourage trade, promote economic growth and help protect the environment. This is just nonsense - I don't have to go into the slightly occult discussion of alternatives to know that there are perfectly practical alternatives. I can look around the world and see very successful places that have entirely different ways of co-operating with neighbouring countries. And I can go back to 1970 and see a Britain with every opportunity to succeed without joining the EEC.

So whatever choice is made about the process following a Brexit vote, it will be our choice made by our elected representatives in our interests. That doesn't mean that I'll agree with that choice or that it will all go smoothly but it does mean you and I get to sack them for getting it wrong, it means that Britain's economic destiny is once again in the hands of Britons. Right now, if we are angry enough to vote out a government that we think is failing us, there's very little that the new broom we install can do to make the changes we want. Ask the Greeks - they thought they could vote for change. Look at Italy where the EU sacked the government and imposed an unelected technocracy.

No-one is saying the Brexit is risk free. No-one is suggesting that leaving the EU is a solid gold, nailed on route to greater prosperity. No, us idiots are saying that it won't be worse than staying in but it will be our worse not a worse created by an institution we didn't elect and can't sack. Plus staying in the bureaucratic monster means travelling further down the route it has planned with more determined at meals bought by lobbyists in expensive Brussels restaurants than by the people we supposedly elect to make decisions on our behalf.

Plenty of The Beneficiaries are implying that staying in the EU is risk free, that everything will be just fine, no problems. Yet there's no discussion of what happens if (when) the Euro crashes again. There's no examination of how increasing EU legal 'competence' undermines our legal system by imposing Napoleonic systems onto English common law. And no-one mentions that the EU's sclerotic economy is a drag on Britain's more dynamic and flexible business environment.

For me this isn't about borders or migration or whether we're about to be swamped by rapey Muslims (these arguments are not only wrong and offensive but almost guaranteed to deliver a vote to remain in the EU). Nor is it about governmental sovereignty or voting systems or the dimensions of bananas. It is rather about whether or not you and I can, if we're angry enough, get up from our armchairs, turn the telly off, go down to the village hall, and vote the bastards out. It's not our country we want back, it's our rights. Or rather the most important right of all - the right to overthrow the government and stick in a new one.

...

Sunday 1 May 2016

It's not just clumsy language, the left is institutionally anti-semitic


****

If we ignore the "it's all an evil Tory conspiracy run by Murdoch" line, there are two narratives around the current problems the Labour Party faces with anti-semitism. One is that the Party isn't fundamentally anti-semitic but has a few members who have spoken or written things that constitute anti-semitism. The other is that the Party has a fundamental problem, to coin a phrase, it is institionally anti-semitic.

Chris Dillow makes the case for the first narrative:

It might be useful to distinguish between two forms of racism: verbal, and structural. Although the two often go together, they need not. For example, you’ll hear far more racist language in financial firms than in the arts industry – but you’ll also see far more ethnic minorities too. One business has more verbal racism, the other more structural racism. In this sense, Labour has a problem with verbal racism, but isn’t obviously structurally racist.

Now taken in the round, Chris is quite right here. Even its biggest critics (and I count myself as one of these) wouldn't see the Labour Party as structurally racist, indeed the Party can make a strong claim to having been instrumental in making Britain a far less racist country than it was when I was growing up. On the specific question of anti-semitism, however, I fear Chris might be wrong - the faction that has captured the Party right now, the Corbyn-Abbott-Livingstone axis does have a structural problem with anti-semitism. And at the root of this is the left's (if it's OK to describe Corbyn's faction in such terms) attitude to Israel.

It's not simply the left's 'edginess' (as Chris calls it) that's the issue here but that the adoption of unquestioning support for Palestinian rights had led them into sharing campaigns with mysogynist, homophobic and Jew-hating groups simply because those groups are opposed to Israel. And, as Jonathan Fredland observed in his plea for the left to treat Jews as they would any other minority, 93% of Jews see Israel as part of their Jewish identity. The support of Corbyn, Abbott, Livingstone and others for organisations that present an existential threat to Israel, that literally wish to destroy the world's only majority Jewish country, isn't seen as 'anti-Zionism' but as an attack on Jews and the idea of Jewishness.

The result of this is that too many from the left are simply blind to how their words and actions around Israel are deeply upsetting to many Jewish people. When Livingstone said Hitler supported Zionism what Jews heard was that the man who sought to exterminate all Jews and killed over 6 million, far from being an anti-semite was a supporter of a Jewish homeland. Livingstone and those who act as apologists for his racism in effect declared that Zionism and National Socialism had the same ends. That so many in the Labour Party fail to realise that this view is horribly anti-semitic says to me that this isn't just 'verbal racism' - the left is institutionally anti-semitic for the same reasons that the the Lawrence Enquiry found that London's police were institutionally racist.

I'll conclude by saying that, while Chris Dillow is correct about the persistence of dog-whistle politics and right that it should be challenged - the attacks on Sadiq Khan in London are appalling - this is essentially 'whataboutery'. What the left needs is to recognise is that it doesn't treat Jews in the way it treats other minorities - in the game of equalities top trumps, anti-semitism is bottom of the pile.

....