No Professor Lang, Brexit won't lead to food riots...

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Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City University thinks Brexit could lead to food riots:

But given that the WTO rules are “the lowest common denominator” and the Codex Alimentarius is determined in meetings that are “dominated by big business and lobbies [making] the EU look like the most democratic organisation in the world”, this is far from ideal. The result would be food riots, says professor Lang.

Yes folks, this eminent food 'expert' thinks there'll be food shortages, huge price hikes and general chaos because we'll be outside the CAP and subject to the 'common external tariff'. Here's a sample:

The immediate impact of the decision to quit the 28-member state bloc looks like rising food prices in a country that produces and grows less than 60% of the food it eats and is particularly reliant on imports from the EU for fruit and vegetables.

Speaking to FoodNavigator yesterday, Tim Lang predicted it could take five to 10 years for the UK to become food self-sufficient in food products, if that extreme scenario ever arose. And in the meantime? “People will pay more for food. The British people have voted to raise the food prices," he said simply.

Now, given that Prof. Lang and his pals have been agitating for more expensive food for ages, you'd have thought they'd have loved all this but let's take them at their word. Do they really think those Spanish tomato growers, Italian orange farmers and French wheat barons are suddenly going to whack up the price of the stuff they're selling into one of their biggest markets? Or - as Professor Lang seems to hint - stop selling to us entirely. For a Professor of Food Policy this seems incredibly ill-informed on the basics of trade.

There might be an impact on prices if the pound falls against the Euro. But set against that the UK having better access to non-EU markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa - all of which grow the same crops as those Spaniards, Italians and French farmers - and it might be that us having more choice will actually drive prices down for the fruit and vegetables Professor Lang is so bothered about.

We have no need at all - none - to become self-sufficient in food because leaving the EU increases the security of our food supplies by taking us outside the anti-trade restrictions of the CAP and other EU controls. That a Professor of Food Policy doesn't see this should worry us. But then it's Tim Lang and he's nearly always wrong.

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On referendum results - should politicians do their jobs or shout at the storm?

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Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

The rules, broadly speaking, of direct democracy are that if one side gets 50% plus one that view prevails. Now I appreciate that there are rooms filled with learned political science and constitutional law stuff that discuss precisely what we might mean by 50% plus one, but the core principle remains.

In May there were elections to the Welsh Assembly - hard fought by all the political parties on issues relevant to Wales. We see democracy in action - representative democracy which has slightly different rules - and we think it good.

Remember this:

Just 721 votes separated the 'Yes' and 'No' camps in that referendum. Now if we accept the principle of direct democracy (and I know there are good arguments questioning referendums in representative democracies) then the right response is exactly the response we took over that Welsh result - accept that the people have spoken and make it work.

That is what the public elect us politicians to do - interpret the people's wishes and act on their behalf in deciding policy. The thing about referendums is that - whether we like it or not - people's wishes are clear (at least in terms of democracy). Shouting at the democratic choice of the people as if you were King Lear raging at the storm might make you feel a bit better but it does not serve the will of the people. So can we - politicians that is, the self-righteous commentariat seem to be beyond help - just do our job. Look at the options that Brexit presents, debate those options and arrive at a view - contested or otherwise - about which direction to choose in response to what the people have said.

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If London is a truly world city then Brexit shouldn't matter...

So goes the cry from London's mayor - what's happening is bad news for London, for the jobs of Londoners and the prospects for the city. And all this, as urbanist Aaron Renn points out, rather questions the idea of a world city:

Yet most of the London establishment – and 60% of Londoners themselves in the vote – strongly supported the Remain option. They warned of disaster for London if it lost access to the EU single market.

This more or less demolishes the arguments for the city-state. If London, the world’s ultimate global city, can’t thrive without access to a continental scale de facto state in the EU, there’s little prospect anyone else can either.

It’s telling that so many city leaders hate their state or national governments, but love supra-national governments like the EU. The shows that their real desire isn’t to go it alone in the marketplace, but to create replacement governance structures that are more amenable to their way of thinking, that constitutionally enshrine their preferences, and are insulated from democratic accountability.

For all the talk of London being the 'world's capital city' and so forth, what we see here is a great fear that maybe, just maybe, this isn't true. Renn goes on:

...if London can’t recover from the inevitable turbulence around Brexit, this would show that not only do cities need to be part of states, they need to be part of very large and powerful ones.

We don't know the answer to this question - at least not yet. London is without question a great city, perhaps the greatest city in the world, but does that status - in finance, in law, in the arts, in advertising - require that privileged market access or is the truth that the big hinterland needs London a darn sight more than London needs that single market.

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I wish I was clever...

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I wish I was as clever as those people who write about how thick other people are. It must be fab being so super brainy. Every day you see this but the writers merely display their arrogance. For sure they want us to be in awe of their intellectual majesty - ho ho ho we're supposed to respond as we smile at the daring criticism of whoever it is our genius has decided makes two planks of wood look like a proto-Einstein.

If only I had the supreme confidence to declare a cabinet minister a "thicko" despite never having met that person, had a conversation with them or looked at their skills, experience or knowledge. It is a joy to behold that arrogant confidence in another's stupidity - even one who went to Cambridge and had a 20 year business career before getting to parliament.

I am not so confidently clever, I doubt my beliefs every day. When someone challenges my thoughts or comments a shudder of that doubt runs through my body.

But then I like doubt. My arm is elbow deep in that spear wound. Doubt is what keeps us from torturing people because god said so. Doubt is what makes us hesitate, makes us ask whether the other person might be right, makes us check. Makes us listen.

Over the past years I've changed my mind about a lot of things - climate change, gay rights, Europe, immigration, community, even god. But my mind is still not made up. So keep telling me I'm wrong - just as I'll challenge what you say. Just try not to to call people stupid, dumb, thick, ignorant, immoral - that's not helpful, kind or - much of the time - accurate. And it will never change anyone's mind about anything.

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Mushroom wars, Nepalese style.

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This sort of thing:

A villager was shot dead in Nepal and three others were injured in clashes over a rare and valuable fungus coveted for its reputed aphrodisiac qualities, an official said.

Mugu district chief Keshab Raj Sharma said a gang of 10 to 12 looters was shooting "indiscriminately" on Wednesday night, and added that locals claimed the gang had stolen their harvest.

But when the mushroom in question sells for up to $78,000 per pound....

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Understanding the Conservative dilemma...

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Here are two of the ward level voting breakdowns* for the Shipley constituency:

Wharfedale       Remain 4539 (60%)   Leave 3068

Bingley Rural     Remain 4190 (42%)   Leave 5776

Two wards both, broadly speaking, safe Conservative wards. About five or six miles apart yet showing almost perfectly opposite results. What we have to do now is ask how we bridge this gap - to over-simplify, deal with the very different outlook and expectations from AB voters in Wharfedale and C1C2 voters in Bingley Rural.

This isn't really about Brexit but rather it's about a stew of economic, cultural and social issues. For me (but representing Bingley Rural as I do, I'm biased) the priority should be reconnecting with the disgruntled C1C2 voters - what the Americans would call the 'middle class' - who live in places like Bingley Rural. A lot of the talk is about the 'traditional' working class but, for the Conservative Party, we need a leader who my neighbours, quite literally, believe has got their back.

So when we talk about security it shouldn't be only about the unlikely terrorist attack but rather about not being burgled, not mown down by idiot drivers and feeling it's safe to go for a drink in town. When we talk about the economy, it's not just about stock markets, banks and business leaders flitting across the globe but about opportunities for young people to get on in the world, about small business and the taxes we all pay too much of. And when we talk about services it's those boring old basics - good schools, access to the doctor, getting the bins emptied and the potholes fixed.

There's something else though. People want their culture to be respected. That what they enjoy is respected and appreciated. Hardly a day passes without some public school educated comedian taking the piss out of the dreary, dull and uninspiring lives of those middling sorts. We get sneery remarks about suburbia, selectively misleading guff about how 'millennials' are being robbed blind by old people, or yet another fact-free attack on drinking, vaping, smoking or fast food. Is it any surprise when these people turn round to media and political sorts and give them the finger. Is it any surprise that, if you spend months on end telling people they're racist xenophobic bigots, they don't exactly flock to buy your political message.

In the end this isn't about agreeing with racism, pandering to the worst sort of anti-immigrant nonsense or signing up to the sort of crypto-fascist autarky that now passes for UKIP's policy platform. Rather it's about respecting what people say, understanding the concerns that underlie those words and having a conversation with these people about what we can do to help them, about what they expect from government, and what realistically government can do to meet those expectations.

*The figures carry a caveat in that the postal votes were distributed evenly across the 30 Bradford wards - we suspect this slightly skews the leave votes.
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The two referendum campaigns.

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I got a call from the woman who runs Denholme Elders, a support group for older people in this village perched on top of the South Pennines. They'd been discussing what they wanted to do and had decided they wanted someone to talk to them about the forthcoming EU referendum - could I oblige.

I obliged and set out to give as balanced a presentation about the issues, for and against, as I could. I think I did a passing fair job and I got a little confirmation after about three-quarters of an hour when one gentleman said something like "OK Simon but how are you going to vote?"

It was an interesting hour where some, shall we say, pretty robust views were expressed in that 'do you really think I give a damn' manner that anyone working with the elderly will know. What was striking was that these old people weren't thinking selfishly about their circumstances but rather were asking questions about the sort of country their children and grandchildren would live in. They asked about jobs, welfare benefits, crime and immigration. And they were pretty universally appalled by the lack of seriousness and substance in the rhetoric of the two national campaigns.

Anyone whose sole appraisal of this referendum campaign is through the slogans of Vote Leave or Stronger In - as well as the writings of a host of media experts, bloggers and pundits - would despair at what has become of British politics. An avalanche of half-truths, insults, personal attacks and patronising condescension - plus a sort of proxy war over who succeeds David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party - has buried the real debate. And, as I saw in Denholme, there is a real debate.

During the first (and slightly quieter) part of the campaign, we had local elections here in Bradford. This meant that we spoke with perhaps a thousand people. A good number of these pushed aside our plea to talk about why they needed a Conservative councillor to ask about the referendum. Some had made their mind up but most hadn't and wanted to explore the issues. This wasn't from a 'please tell me how to vote' perspective but rather a conversation, the sort of engagement you'd have with friends or colleagues.

I've enjoyed this aspect of the referendum because most people know they've been entrusted with a very significant decision and are taking that responsibility seriously. Even last night one person was saying 'I'm voting out but I really want to hear the in case one more time to be sure.' This sort of engagement is in marked contrast to the scaremongering, divisive national campaigns - no-one's falling out, they're just trying to decide what they'll do on Thursday.

For me, after a lifetime in politics - I joined the Conservative Party in 1976 - it is affirmation of two things. Firstly that, given the responsiblity, people can and do take political decision-making seriously and can be trusted. And secondly that our current system, dominated by a London-based media and London-based politicians, does not deserve those people's trust and support. It's not just the familiar 'Westminster bubble' line but something more profound, it's a complete disconnection from the real lives, worries, loves and concerns of those people. Except when they can patronise them as some sort of victim, as vulnerable, or as people these caring politicians can do things do - most often in the form of telling them to stop something (eating burgers, vaping, smoking, drinking, telling jokes).

I saw a tweet - I think is was from the writer and journalist, Gaby Hinsliff - talking about the bitterness of the referendum campaign and the likely bitterness of the aftermath. And this is true, if your world is the world of the London media and London politics. Out here in the sticks people will simply get up on Friday morning and go to work, take the dog for a walk, look after the grandchildren, pop to the shops - do the sort of things they'd do on any other Friday morning. There might be a little disappointment if their vote was for the losing side or pleasure if for the winning option. But there'll be no bitterness - except maybe a sense that our national politics was shown to be nasty, selfish, short-term and consescendingly righteous.

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Federalism is the positive case for EU membership - which is why no-one's making it

There's a positive case for the UK's membership of the European Union. Not the scattering of seemingly random words - cooperation, unity, stronger and so on and on - but a genuine case for us tying ourselves to 27 (and growing) other nations. But no-one - or at least no-one in the Remain campaign - is making that positive case.

There's a reason for this and its because of what that positive case is about. If we're better off as a member of the EU then we must also be better off if that union is stronger. And the way to make the EU stronger is to gradually diminish the nations that make up the union. This means a commitment to federalism as a future polity for Europe - something that the UK has always shied away from. It means, for all its problems, making the decision to join the Euro because being outsid8e that single currency undermines the operation of the union. And it means accepting that taxes paid by the English, Swedes, Dutch and Germans will be used to pay Greek pensioners, to invest in Romanian infrastructure and to support the Spanish welfare system.

Instead of this positive case, because it isn't likely to be popular, we have an entirely negative case for retaining our EU membership. A case based on short term issues, on the selfishness of now. We're told to vote Remain because there might be a recession after we leave. We're told taxes might have to rise in the short-term. We're given threats about public service cuts - again an issue about now not our future. Nothing in the case being made to remain in the EU talks of a future ten years hence let alone twenty or thirty years ahead. Yet that is the decision we're taking. A decision Remain want us to make on the basis of what it will be like in 2017 not what Britain might be in 2037.

I don't support the idea of a federal Europe because the inevitable remoteness of such a government plays into the hands of separatists, nationalists and the emerging nativist right. But I'm prepared to listen to someone who thinks differently and can set out a cogent case for a stronger, more united Europe. That no-one dares make this case gives the lie to Remain's arguments about Britain being 'stronger in' - so long as the federal direction of the EU is denied by its advocates, the UK will remain marginal to the central decision-making of the EU.

If we accept Remain's argument then the UK is left as a semi-detached member of the EU, paying a huge price for the limited benefit of access to the single market. Unless, of course, Remain aren't telling the truth about the EU's future and Britain will subsume its remaining independence in working for a federal Europe, will join the Euro and will see Ken Clarke's prediction of Westminster's place that little bit nearer.

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Why we don't need an Evidence Information Service (but do need better access to evidence)

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Whenever I think about evidence-based policy making and the use of data by government, my mind turns to an article by Dr Vince-Wayne Mitchell:

Demographic segmentation variables are cheap and easy to measure, while psychographic variables are more expensive and harder to measure, but can provide more insight into consumers’ psychology. Suggests that a prima facie case exists for the suitability of astrology as a segmentation variable with the potential to combine the measurement advantages of demographics with the psychological insights of psychographics and to create segments which are measurable, substantial, exhaustive, stable over time, and relatively accessible. Tests the premise empirically using results from a Government data set, the British General Household Survey. The analyses show that astrology does have a significant, and sometimes predictable, effect on behavior in the leisure, tobacco, and drinks markets. Discusses managerial implications of the results in terms of market segmentation and promotion.

Dr Mitchell is a very highly regarded researcher in consumer behavious and marketing and I've no idea whether he believes in horoscopes or not. But what these results tell us is that we should treat the findings of research studies with a degree of caution. Just because it's badged as science doesn't mean that it's right or that there isn't some other research telling us something entirely different, even opposite. Indeed we know that sometimes supposedly evidence-based policy is anything but:

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

We see this problem repeated time and time again - governments enact legislation that draws on the scientific evidence, on the environment (diesel cars), in health (vaping), in criminal justice (tagging), and farming (agricultural protection) only for the results to be either sub-optimal or else for evidence to arise showing the policy to be plain daft. In part this is because evidence isn't definitive - in the case of fat, there were a different set of scientists who government ignored saying we should look instead at carbohydrates and sugar. And the same is true on vaping - the experts used by the World Health Organisation and European Union to support severe restrictions on vaping and the sale of vaping products are countered by another set of experts with a very different position who argue that vaping should be encouraged by public health not controlled.

The problem here is that these experts move from being producers of evidence to recommenders of policy. After all, when researchers write up their findings for publication they will be expected by the journal (and probably their funders) to comment on the implications of their findings as well as to describe limitations and the areas where further research should focus. The findings, however, don't necessarily tell us what the policy should be - we may discover, for example, links between high levels of sugar consumption and type-2 diabetes but this doesn't mean we have to introduce a soda tax. Other policy solutions - or none -  are available and just as valid.

This brings me to the proposal set out by Chambers et al in The Guardian, for a new Evidence Information Service:

Our idea is to create a hub for connecting a broad network (hive-mind) of UK scientists and researchers with the political community. At present, the knowledge and expertise of more than 150,000 UK scientists and academics is being underutilised. To ensure the smartest possible democracy we need to create the largest active network of engaged scientists and researchers in the world, and then we need to use it.

Superficially this seems a great idea - make it easy for politicians (and a slightly sinister grouping entitled "policy-makers", who presumably aren't necessarily politicians) to connect with the academic and research body of knowledge. The authors go on to observe that there's an imbalance in the information available - ministers have more policy-making resource than a back bench MP or opposition spokesperson. And, as the leader of an opposition group on a large metropolitan council, I can confirm that this is true. The question is whether creating this Evidence Information Service really improves the way in which policies are decided?

I think not. Indeed, I think there are genuine risks in the proposal were it to be implemented.

Firstly, the connection made for the policy-maker isn't a connection to the evidence but is a connection "with specialist experts in that field". Now it may be that these experts simply hand across their evidence to the policy-maker who goes off to craft his policy on painting bus lanes green or whatever. Or it could be that the policy-maker asks the researcher what his or her policy prescription is rather than just for evidence. It's also likely that confirmation bias kicks in - a left wing policy-maker might seek out or prefer evidence from a sympathetic source while ignoring evidence from a source that seems counter to that policy-maker's ideology (this, of course, applies to conservative policy-makers equally).

The second problem is that the proposed Evidence Information System creates valorised and non-valorised evidence. So evidence provided by the new system is 'good' evidence whereas evidence from outside that system is not to be trusted. And because the Evidence Information System is entirely about institutional researchers (academics, in effect) the value of independent research and evidence from outside that sphere is undermined. By way of example, the proposed new system excludes commercially procured research, good quality journalism (including blogs and websites), many think tanks and opinion polling. There is an assumption that only those "150,000 UK scientists and academics" are a valid source of evidence for policy-making.

Next we have the problem of ideology. By this I don't mean socialism vs neoliberalism but rather than policy-decisions are informed by ideological issues. To use vaping as an illustration, we can see two distinct ideological positions within public health and tobacco control. To simplify a little these are essentially Harm Reduction and Gradual Prohibition. This divide applies throughout, to policy-makers and to researchers. No amount of evidence showing how vaping reduces harm will persuade someone ideologically committed to Gradual Prohibition as the purpose of tobacco control. We can pull across this issue into any area of public policy - we encouraged diesel engines because they had lower carbon emissions but now pay a price as those engines have a negative impact on urban air quality and health. In the proposed Evidence Information System there is no safeguard, no means of knowing whether research is ideologically-framed (or more likely, how that research is ideologically-framed). And we can't assume that researchers - especially in social science fields - don't fall foul of confirmation bias or ideological preference.

Lastly we need to get some idea as to what we mean by evidence (knowing from the start that this is a very contested idea). On the one hand we have data which is just that, a great pile of information that, if we're not careful, throws up evidence along the lines of the Mitchell research I opened with. Without some form of analysis, data is pretty useless but which is the better route - giving policy-makers the tools to interrogate the data or getting that interrogation mediated by (possibly biased, perhaps ideological) academic researchers? We then have - especially since it is social science research that will dominate policy-maker enquiry - the issue of 'soft' evidence. Is a qualitative study gathering the views of 50 teachers on in-class discipline more or less valid than a big analysis of Ofsted reports in 1000 primary schools? And what about discussion, op-ed and speculation, where do these fit in - they're important to academia but do they form part of the evidence base?

I applaud the attempt to get better data, information and evidence in front of those who design, decide and implement public policy but don't think that an Evidence Information System as described is the way to proceed. If the issue is asymmetric access to evidence surely the answer is to get more open data and better (easier to use perhaps) tools for using that data. I also worry that the Evidence Information System would create a different asymmetry in access to and use of evidence by valorising only academic evidence. Finally, governments can and do lean too heavily on evidence in decision-making often, as anyone familiar with England's Local Plan process would attest, to the point of sclerosis or even stasis.

Policy-making will always be a balance between having enough evidence and the need to act. It has always been something of a cop out to say, "we need more evidence", when you actually need to do something. And the interest of voters will always trump evidence in the minds of people who are elected by those voters - this is why there's no comprehensive review of London's 'green belt' and why Australia scrapped its carbon tax. Finally, we need to remember that - remember the diesel engines issue - different policy area conflict and the policy decision is not simply a matter of looking at one set of evidence but rather at a series of sets that can point to radically different decisions.

There's a good case for better connections between researchers and the real world - not just politicians but business people, writers, charities and schools - but this proposal doesn't achieve this outcome and would create a service with limited access. Far better would be to negotiate a public library license with publishers making all that evidence - and the search tools needed to use it - available in every community and for every person.

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It's not for the left to decide what is freedom

Freedom... we're talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother's interrogation
Freedom to live your own life...

A chunk of lyrics from Tom Robinson's 'Power in the Darkness', a song that became a sort of anthem for Rock Against Racism and the birth - or was it a rebirth - for Britain's cultural left. And, you know, I can't disagree with a word in that mantra, that statement of freedoms. As a child of '70s South London the events and culture of Rock Against Racism couldn't be avoided - at school badges sprouted, the radio echoed to a different set of musical sounds, there was a strut about Brixton, West Norwood and Crystal Palace that hadn't been there before.

Yesterday I went to the opening at Bradford's Impressions Gallery of an exhibition of Syd Shelton's photographs of the Rock Against Racism days along with my friend and former colleague, Huw Jones, who sort of famously features in the exhibition as (in his words) the 'token white' in the world's only Asian punk band - Alien Kulture. Now bear in mind that I'm a Tory, indeed I joined the Conservative Party as a teenager in 1976 almost in the teeth of this anti-establishment rock and roll sentiment. Even now, in an audience of now older Rock Against Racism aficionados I'm pretty much an exception. So Sid Shelton can - albeit a little hesitantly - include the Conservative Party in the parade of today's wrongness and racism.

All of which takes me to those lyrics and why they matter to me. Too often we forget that freedom - free speech and free choice - is central to our idea of civilisation. Indeed we trap ourselves in mealy-mouthed justifications of restrictions of speech or choice, always for good reasons never simply to oppress. It's not just concepts like 'hate speech', safe spaces or no platform but also the idea of preventing imports, the demonising of free enterprise and the banning of others' pleasures because we deem them unpleasant, unhealthy or unsightly.

Speech is central to this and we live in a society where the desire to prevent other voices is at risk of being institutionalised. Just as back in the 1970s the voices of black and Asian minorities weren't heard (and still fight for space), today there's a voicelessness about what some call the 'traditional working class'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of racism out there (and that 'traditional working class' is no averse to a bit of it) but there's also a sense of a new excluded group - that 'traditional working class'.

In its slightly clunky sociologist way, The Guardian has spotted this problem. Here's Lisa McKenzie (whose from the same Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining communities where my grandfather started life) talking about the issues:

Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it. Consequently they have stopped listening to politicians and to Westminster and they are doing what every politician fears: they are using their own experiences in judging what is working for and against them.

In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the “stupid”, “ignorant”, and “racist” working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime.

This analysis - reflecting the patronising, dismissive, even uncomfortable response of us middle-class professionals (regardless of our politics) to that traditional working class - cuts close to the bone of the issue. We don't talk about why boys from a white working class background do worst at school and are least likely to go to university, we don't look at how angry many of these pretty ordinary Britons feel left behind and we don't ask the impact of ignoring their culture in favour of a mish-mash of the elite's Britishness with assorted imported cultures. The idea of Englishness is seen as a problem - we are perhaps the only place where many observers see flying the national flag as an act of racist provocation or, in some ways worse, being ignorant and common.

As many readers will know, I have pretty liberal views on immigration but even I can see why many ordinary people are agitated by it. Yes some of the ways in which it's discussed can sound racist but get underneath that and you'll find a real set of concerns that have little to do with a fear of foreigners - frets about homes and schools, worries over jobs, the loss of community facilities like the pub and the post office, isolation, bad policing and a sort of feeling that lots is being done for some other people and nothing for you and yours.

Although Rock Against Racism started with the thoughts of mostly white middle class musicians, anger at the racism of the music establishment, it opened the door to a bunch of working class performers and, in the Ska revival, the first black-white musical fusion (as opposed to appropriation) since the height of the jazz era. It's right that we recall what happened back then but we also need to heed the words from Power in the Darkness and raise the banners of freedom again. Not just in the continuing opposition to racism but in liberating ordinary people from the oppression of the modern state with its nannying, its obsession with supposed anti-social behaviour, its demonising of pleasure and its desire to police your speech, your movement and your choices.

What I object to in all this is that Tom Robinson's presentation of freedom deliberately excludes the right in politics. Millions of ordinary people who will all put their marker down as supporters of freedom and choice are told by the left that their idea of freedom has no place because that freedom includes expropriation of assets, the belittling of wealth and success, and the sustaining of the state as an agent of oppression through advocating punitive taxation.

I'll stand side-by-side with anyone opposing racism, supporting gay rights or making the case for free speech. But when people want to deny the freedom to succeed, to limit the availability of pleasure and to attack the choice that's central to our consumer society then I'll be on the other side of the barricade defending liberty from attack. And when - as we see from the middle-class left time and again - you're dismissive, rude or condemning of the words some ordinary Briton expresses, when you seek to close down what they say because it offends you, then you have become the enemy of freedom. An enemy of the ideals Tom Robinson set out in those lyrics I quoted.

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It shouldn't need saying but....

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Here are some words from my colleague, Zaf Ali in a message going out to people in his Keighley Central ward about the forthcoming referendum:

Having said that (Zaf is supporting Leave), I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not force, intimidate, harass and pressurise, bully, advocate and pester any one as to how they cast their vote. It's entirely up to each individual to look at both sides' arguments and debate through media, TV and newspaper - then decide yourself.

Can I echo those words. Too often we've seen unacceptable pressure - verging on intimidation - on voters to support one or other candidate in an election. I don't need to repeat the allegations made every year here in Bradford for people to understand that there's a better way of politics. It's fine to vote for someone because he's your friend, your brother. But it's not OK to put undue pressures on women or the young - indeed on anyone - to vote for that friend or that friend's side in an election.

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The EU's courtiers can't see the truth - their project is rotten to its core

The greatest of political scientists, S. E. Finer, wrote about how all polities have a court. And that those courts featured those closest to the king, those aspiring to get close to the king and those who formed a rival court. The threats to these courts are of two different types - ones that determine who is king and who are the courtiers closest to the king and ones that create a different order, that replace the king with a different king.

So when we analyse the European Union - important right now because we have to decide whether to be part of it - we should remember that it is a political thing not an economic thing and that many of the people seeking to influence your decision are, in one way or another, courtiers. We should also remember that those courtiers have no interest in there being a change of king because their career trajectory clings to the current rulers. To be more precise the courtiers adhere to the current system rather than to the specific people who form the central court of the European Union.

Tim Worstall describes the outlook in a comment on Visegrad 4 ( or rather some sort of conference thing in Prague recently under the aegis of the Visegrad 4 grouping):

The interesting bit was how scary it was in fact. The groupthink is strong in this arena. There is no questioning of the goal, even if it’s not clearly delineated. That ever closer union is just assumed: how to bring it about being the only difference anyone has. I was the only truly eurosceptic person there and I wasn’t on the panel discussing eurosceptics for example (Frances is reasonable on this subject where I am not).

At one stage I pointed out that fiscal union simply was not going to happen. Europeans just are not going to allow 15-20% of GDP to be distributed through Brussels, which is what would be needed for the automatic stabilisers to operate properly so that the eurozone comes even close to being an optimal currency area. To do that really does mean German taxes paying Greek pensions.

It. Will. Not. Happen.

Not this century at least.

Everyone was shocked: how could you say such a thing? And anyway, we need to work out how to make this happen not think of why it cannot.

What’s scary about this is that these are the people (the varied policy wonks, political aides and so on who made up the audience) who are actually deciding policy within that EU bureaucracy. and they’re simply off with the fairies.

Now Tim is an economist of sorts rather than a political scientist. This isn't to say that he doesn't understand how political systems work but rather that his answer (in this case about the Euro) is couched in terms of the economic consequences of one or other choice. Yet Tim has noticed that the European Union's court - the body round which these policy wonks, aides, advisors and so forth are clustered - is not making decisions based on the economic rightness or otherwise of that decision. Even were the careful deconstruction of the Eurozone to be the right policy, there is no way in which these courtiers could countenance that policy choice being pursued. This would be politically unacceptable.

The reason for this situation - why, in Tim's terms, the assorted folk at this summit are 'away with the fairies' - is that their personal interest, career and future income is tied to the interests of the EU's central court. To challenge the fundamental policy premise of that polity - to point out that Brussels is naked - would be to threaten those interests, that career and the good income to be gained from clustering round the EU's court. So what the courtiers offer is the classic response of such people when faced with an existential threat - reform. We're told that the EU can be reformed, which means that a different set of courtiers sit at the centre of a slightly reconfigured court (with the gamble from the courtiers proposing 'reform' that they will be closer to that centre - and a little richer, a tad more powerful - than at present).

Everything that these courtiers do is Laputan in its distance from the real world of the people who those courtiers like to pretend are the real drivers of their world. For all the talk of elections, voting and democracy, the world of our courtiers is - for the most part - unchanging. This goes some way, perhaps to explaining why there is so much fret about neo-reactionary trends in European politics - it's not just that the Free Democrats, National Front, AfD or UKIP are right wing but rather that they position themselves away from the comfort of the EU's court. This trend is a threat to the EU and therefore incomprehensible, frightening and to be stopped at all costs.

So when those courtiers tell us we're 'blind' or wave their arms and exclaim in exasperation 'wake up, wake up', what they're doing is telling us we should come in from the cold, join their cosy world. We should accept the core ideology of the EU court - 'ever closer union' and so forth - and work with them on 'reform'. At one time I'd have been inclined to take this offer - the EU was a positive force in the world (or so we thought) - but having been close enough to what it does, I know differently. Far from buying the old lie about economic benefit, I now realise it is a political project that seeks the end of those things I value as important. It is only superficially democratic, specifically supranational and founded in List's old ideas of state directed, corporate capitalism (the same ideas borrowed by Mussolini in trying to hammer some sort of intellectual structure onto Fascism).

In one respect it is quite sweet that so many very clever people cluster around the EU's court. Like every other bunch of courtiers throughout history, these people mostly believe (when they've finished chasing consultancy contracts, speaking engagements, advisor positions and policy jobs) that there really is no alternative to the world in which they live, they develop a sort of strabimus with one eye gazing into their narrow little world while the other swivels frantically searching for ever grander ideas of union, collaboration and co-operation. We're told these people are the bright ones, the 'experts', yet they are - quite literally - ignorant of the lives, loves, aspirations and hopes of the people who are supposed to be their bosses.

What scares these courtiers is that a unruly rabble of people they've been told to dislike (and, as with all revolutions, some will actually be dislikeable) will pull down their comfortable castle and expose it to the light of truth and reality. There is a world beyond the EU. We can have a different king. There is - as there always is, whatever Maggie said - an alternative.

The argument for the EU is presented to us as an economic one - we'll be better off as a member, as art of a process of papering over genuine differences with euro-pap. What you should remember is that this is a political project. As Michael Portillo put it:

It has created hardship, unemployment and division on a dangerous scale. It is the result of an ideology; and the ideologues who pursue the goal of union do not count the cost in human misery. Why should they, since it is paid by others? Europe’s political elite is so self-satisfied with its self-proclaimed virtue in uniting Europe that it never doubts itself nor tolerates those who point out the damage that it does and its sheer incompetence.

The EU's courtiers don't see the truth - their project is rotten, dying and it it risks, as we've seen in Greece, pulling down the lives of ordinary people to satisfy its hubris.

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Why we're having a referendum...

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The bien pensant European centre-left and those still clinging to this dysfunctional Frankenstein's Monster have concluded - after little thought and much bias - that the UK's referendum on membership of the EU is really some sort of Tory Party power play. We'll get to the internal Conservative Party matters in a bit, but first let's go back a few years so as to better understand the reasons for needing (and I mean that we need this debate and referendum) the EU vote.

In 1999 I gave a speech to an audience of Conservative members from Keighley and Ilkley constituency. This was an important occasion, for me and perhaps for them, as it was the selection meeting for that constituency's parliamentary candidate. I'd spoken and was responding to questions. One such question was about the Euro, whether we should join, and if we should have a referendum on whether we should join that single currency. This was a huge issue back then, one that resulted in an equally huge u-turn as Gordon Brown persuaded Tony Blair that signing up - even committing to joining - would be a huge political mistake.

My answer to the question was to say that the UK wouldn't join the Euro and that, if I were a betting man, my money would be on the next referendum being about membership of the whole union not just the single currency. And this would be because leaving the EU would become ever more problematic for the effectiveness of the political system and the smooth running of government. So long as the divide was purely within the Conservative Party (plus a few on the loonier fringes of the extreme left) then there was no problem. Once the divide because real - ordinary people making political choices on the matter of EU membership in large enough numbers to skew elections - then the boil had to be lanced.

When I made that observation, I concluded that I had no idea how I would vote in that election. I meant what I said (it was also tactically sensible to sit on the fence at the meeting in question) but it represented a big shift for me from an essentially pro-EU position. What I had noticed was how people had moved from a grumbly acquiescence of the EU to a more active dislike. The British had never been huge fans of our membership but had seen it as one of those necessary things - a sort of zimmer frame for our sick economy.

By 1999, we'd had eight years of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) but it was still essentially an irrelevance, an irritation - the Farage coup had taken place and UKIP had three MEPs as a result of the shift to proportional representation in the European Parliament elections of that year but nobody saw this as a problem or a threat. We were wrong - that growing annoyance with the EU, fuelled by that organisation's gauche clunkiness and publicity for some of the dafter policies (bent bananas, straight cucumbers, et al), plus the UKIP MEPs provided an escape valve for those anti-EU, anti-federalist (mostly Tory) voters.

There's a line - again from those clever centre-lefties - that UKIP is just a problem for the Tories. Yet we've seen it's support grow to the stage where, in the 2015 General Election, over 4 million people voted for Farage's party. Some of this support is part of that populist, neo-reactionary tide sweeping across Europe (and, it seems, the USA) but its core are those people - former voters from all the main parties - who want the UK to say thank-you and goodbye to the European Union.

At first it was the Conservatives who were shocked but then, as UKIP made in-roads in places where Tories fear to tread, the Labour Party woke up to a real threat from this anti-EU, inconsistent populist rabble. The shape of British politics was being changed again - as it was when pro-EEC Labour MPs created the SDP - by the curse of our membership of the EU. In simple terms, the way to solve this - the only way, there was no choice - was to hold a referendum on our continuing membership of the EU. Once this was done, the two big parties could internalise the UKIP issues around immigration, culture and political correctness. So long as the Europe issue was there, this could not happen.

It's true that the referendum decision came in part as a result of internal Conservative Party issues but far more important was the need to win the 2015 General Election. A pledge to hold a referendum not only held the Conservative Party together but also minimised the defections to UKIP from Tory-inclined voters in key marginal seats. As a bonus, such a strategy - given Labour and Liberal Democrat opposition to a referendum - encouraged voters to shift (respectively) to UKIP and the Conservatives.

The reason we are having a referendum is that there are between four and ten million voters out there who want a referendum and are prepared to vote accordingly. With polling in 2015 suggesting a comfortable majority for staying in the EU, it was seen as a pretty safe bet and a central plank in the Conservative election win of that year. The conduct of the campaign has not been pretty, with David Cameron's unrelated decision to say he wouldn't fight another election as leader creating a sort of proxy leadership scrap egged on by Westminster bubble residents and pundits.

If we had not had a referendum then the core issue for those neo-reactionary populists would remain a putrid swelling on our politics. And it would not just be the Conservatives paying a price for this - Labour recognises the threat from UKIP but fails to realise that lancing the EU membership boil is the way to reduce that poison. The Conservative decision to have a referendum - however wrapped in cynicism and tactical politics it might have been - shows, yet again, that Tories are more in touch with the ordinary voter, and especially the ordinary voter a long way from London, than Labour. We want a politics that isn't driven by racism, cultural separatism, machismo and protectionism, and to get this we have to have that referendum.

In some ways the result doesn't matter - for the record, I've voted to leave - what matters is that after the vote we've either fulfilled UKIP's stated aim by voting to leave or decided we don't want to leave. In either case we can tell Nigel Farage and UKIP to shut up and go away. The boil will have been lanced.

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Why rail-led modal shift is a myth - and we need different thinking on transport

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The data is from Australia but it won't be any different in the UK:

In 2013–14, there were 178.5 billion passenger kilometres travelled on capital city roads in Australia and 12.6 billion passenger kilometres travelled on urban rail networks. I’ve written before that this share is unlikely to change for the simple fact that only around 10% of metropolitan wide jobs are based in central business districts of our major cities. Agreed, it’s an important 10% for public transport because PT best serves a highly centralized workforce as you find in CBDs. Commuter rail in particular relies on a ‘hub and spoke’ model, mainly designed to ferry people from into and out of CBDs.

Let's develop transport policies that actually respond to the challenge rather than direct investment on the basis of having had a train set as a kid.

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England is not little - it is the greatest place on earth

Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath.
Not the great nor well-bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk
Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation.
Lay that earth upon thy heart, And thy sickness shall depart!

Others may wish to argue otherwise but there's a case - a strong case - to describe England as the greatest nation the world has ever seen. There is no other country with borders unchanged for over 1000 years. There is no other land with a bigger contribution to science, to literature, to mankind's thought.

But it's not the great and good that make England great. It's the uncounted folk that Kipling invokes in his charm - ordinary people who did things. When you marvel at the green splendour of England, you're encouraged to think of nature, to dream a bucolic dream. But stop a minute. Who planted those hedgerows, built those stone walls, coppiced those woods, drained those fens? It wasn't nature, it wasn't the great and good, it was the ordinary men and women of England.

And think again when some tour guide talks about the great figures who laid out our city street, the bishops who ordered the building of cathedrals, the bearded Victorians who instructed that town halls and art galleries were constructed. Think about the unremembered artisans who carved the stones, the sturdy blokes who dug the drains and laid the footings of our towns. Consider the women who baked the bread, made the pies and served the ale.

This is England. Not some half-remembered chronology of famous men. Not an artificial thing drawn up by some ancient lords. And not a little place.

England is huge. It's not just the fifty million people. Nor is it the wealth and power of our industry and commerce. It isn't the guns, bombs, ships and tanks of the World's best armed forces. It's not even the best universities and finest schools on the planet. Or the traditions of art, theatre, music and song. England is huge because of what its ordinary men and women will do tomorrow - innovative, creative, inspiring, adventurous, challenging and spirited. Anyone who calls England 'little' has given up on those men and women - the old ones long gone in Kipling's charm, the ones here now doing great things in a small way, and the ones still to come who will take England's greatness even further.

To say that my country is small, to use that sneering put down 'Little Englander', is to deny our history. It shows a disrespect of those people - ordinary men and women - who built the finest place on earth for us to enjoy. Worse, it insults the English and the idea of England - an idea that is made by the people who call this place home:

For sure, England is about tradition, heritage, old ale and new cider. Absolutely, England is about the towns and the roads, the shared history pounded into those places by our ancestors. Of course England is about achievements, things built and seas sailed. But England is more than that, it is our place of comfort, our familiar, our home. It is not Britain -that is for monarchs, prime ministers, it is a thing of empires or governments and a grand thing too. England is where our boots mark the soil, it is the thing that makes our hearts sing. It is home.

Perhaps I should embrace the insult and proudly say I'm a 'Little Englander'. Except I'm not, I'm a Big Englander, a Great Englander, a Brave Englander, a Strong Englander because England is all those things and more - big, great, brave, strong, beautiful, magical, charming...a thousand adjectives that can tell of what the English have achieved, what we're creating today, and what we'll achieve tomorrow. England is not little, it is the greatest place on earth. It is my country. And my home.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew ?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew ?
Confiscate his evening faggot under which my conies ran,
And summons him to judgment ? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

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Bogie Boy (why bullying isn't that simple)

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I've lost count of the times I've read that Billy Bunter definition of bullying. You know the one - stealing pocket money, thuggishness and brutish disregard for the sensibilities of others. And, you know that sort of bullying is out there and real. There are people - mostly but not always men - who use their physical power to control and dominate others. So we get this:

If the word ‘bullying’ makes you think of children having their heads kicked in and their dinner money nicked, or being subjected to systematic cruelty, then think again. Self-styled anti-bullying experts have expanded definitions of bullying to include ‘teasing and name–calling’, ‘having your stuff messed about with’, ‘spreading rumours’, ‘verbal sexual commentary’, ‘homophobic taunting’, ‘graffiti’, ‘insensitive jokes’, ‘bullying gestures’ and ‘exclusion from friendship groups’ (i.e. falling out with your mates or being ignored by other kids).

Just as I've forgotten how many times I've seen the Billy Bunter line (usually accompanied with a "stand up to bullies" argument), I've seen the 'I know what it's like to be bullied because I was bullied' argument. Typically the writer describes an incident from their childhood (or maybe from their first job) where some aggresive thug is faced down after a brief (moral) struggle. This is not bullying and the person usually wasn't - like most people - bullied.

Picture this - a boy of 13 or 14 getting three buses to school. On each of those buses that boy is going to be, as the words go, 'picked on'. Not physically (unless you count flicking snot, throwing paper or chucking sweets) but verbally - 'Bogie Boy, Bogie Boy' go the chants as that balled up snot, partly sucked Spangles and chewed paper balls are fired at the lad. To avoid this he takes to walking through the park, avoiding the crowded bus and sitting as close to the driver and the exit as he can.

The problem is that boy has to go to school. And it's there that the bullying - sorry 'insensitive jokes', 'teasing and name-calling' and 'exclusion from friendship groups' - really resides. In the changing rooms the chant goes up - 'snot, snot, snot' and 'Bogie Boy, Bogie Boy'. No-one is hurt, no-one is hit, there's no harm - just boys being boys. Until Bogie Boy snaps and thrashes out at the nearest of his persecutors. This isn't the ringleader- he's fireproof because he's top of the class and good at football (and doesn't get close enough to be hit). The result is that Bogie Boy is in trouble - he's the bully, he's doing the hitting.

That 13 year-old deals with the name-calling, the little sniggers, the exclusion by cutting himself off - there's a couple of other boys who aren't bullies and that helps. He can go sailing - which means stopping playing rugby and cricket, the games he loves - because that's safe. No more going to football because - well - the same boys are there and, outside school, they're worse. No-one has bullied Bogey Boy, if by bullying you mean that Billy Bunter thing about stealing pocket money, but that boy hates school, hates his teachers (who aren't any help and see him as a problem not as someone needing help) and hates most of his classmates. There are days when he sits round the corner from school to avoid the pre-class rumpus - better to get detention for being late than get a load of 'snot, snot, snot' in those ten or fifteen minutes before registration.

So when you read that story about a girl or boy deadened - or even worse, dead - because of bullying, don't get all puffed up with stuff about snowflakes or talk about how it's just words. Day after day, week after week, month after month - the drip, drip, drip of those words, those flicked bits of paper, those snot balls. This is bullying - incidious, persistent, comprehensive, excluding and nasty. Yet we only look at the individual incident - big boy hits small boy and takes his sarnies. Half a class spend a year creating a nasty persona - Bogie Boy - for another child and that, it seems, isn't bullying. Because nobody - except Bogie Boy - has hit anyone.

...Sarah Brennan, chief executive of a charity called YoungMinds, declares that if such ‘devastating and life-changing’ bullying isn’t dealt with, it ‘can lead to years of pain and suffering that go on long into adulthood’.

This is not 'sensationalist', this is the reality of bullying. Actual, real bullying. It's not about fights in the playground, friends falling out or the banter and braggadocio of growing up. It's about a group of people - usually young but not always - targeting a shy or weak or otherwise different person and making their life hell. It's not a mental health problem, the child doesn't need counselling, he needs those who are supposed to care - teachers, bus drivers, parents - to actually do some caring.

When Bogie Boy went to the school reunion, ten years after leaving, one of the perpetrators came up to him and apologised. "We were awful to you" he said. And then paused..."but you were a dork". Bogie Boy was grateful.

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Quote of the day: on neo-reaction

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A very telling point from someone who is, in essence, a liberal (in the real sense not the perverted US sense):

Liberalism isn’t actually an automatic emotional default for most people on this planet, so being a scold is in the longer run a losing strategy. I believe many current “democratic mainstream” thinkers genuinely do not understand how boring and unconvincing they are, as they live in bubbles filled with others of a similar bent. And while neo-reaction does not get exactly right the nature of “the golden goose” in modern America, that is a question which modern progressivism rather aggressively avoids in its attempt to view the wealthy as an essentially inexhaustible ATM.

The rest of the article is very interesting - do go and read.

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One little quote that sums up why communists are evil

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They really are and this is why - this is the Official Cuddly University Don version of communism. It is sickening, revolting...and it should both depress and anger you that the main party of Britain's left has been taken over by the disciples of men like Eric Hobsbawm:

Yes folks. It's OK if we kill millions of people to get your 'new world'. There are no good words - other than utterly evil - to describe this. Yet thousands of shiny-faced young people are still sucked in by the corrupting, depraved and evil ideas that created communism.

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A Northern Powerhouse needs collaboration, vision and planning more than it needs cash.

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

While enjoying the scale, scope and ambition of this NLA exhibition, a profound depression fell on me. We ask about the North-South divide and tend to couch our understanding of this gap in historical terms as being about what was not what will be. Yet this model and exhibition, tucked away in a corner of central London, gives the lie to this convenient belief. The North-South divide - or rather the contrast between the dynamism of London and the sluggishness of Northern cities - isn't about some past event but is about the here and now, about what London is doing today. Worse still, what an hour with the NLA model told me, the divide is fast becoming a unbridgeable chasm - what London is planning far outstrips anywhere else in the UK.

London is sprinting away from the North. Not, as too many want to believe, because the city has been favoured by successive government or because the current occupants of Downing Street are stripping the North of 'resources'. The NLA films, the projects described, the masterplans - none of these even mentioned central government funding or support. Yet, as we saw recently in the IPPR North and Centre for Cities reports on the Northern Powerhouse, the starting point for the debate about growth in the North is to argue for more central government resources. But why, other than sympathy, should government simply hand over cash to one or other Northern city? Having Andy Burnham shout about a mythical "One Billion Pound Black Hole" is great campaigning - plays to the sense of abandonment felt in some places 'up north' but it's just the politics of the begging bowl, of holding out the flat cap while intoning the old mantra, "got a bit of spare change mate?"

Back in 2005 architect and urbanist Will Alsop was commissioned to look at the development of the M62 Corridor, that strip of England from Liverpool to Hull. Although the result was a typically Alsop mish-mash of ideas (and giant teddy bears) the premise was a good one - we could have a linear city 80 miles long from coast to coast. Let's remember it's 50 miles from Heathrow to Tilbury and the government has commissioned a Thames Estuary study to look at bringing North Kent and South Essex - from Canterbury and Southend - into London's planning purview. A connected 'city' from the Wirral to Bridlington isn't all that far-fetched.

Yet the current position - Transport for the North aside - is that the government, through its devolution programmes, is simply creating the basis for future competition and resentment. I was sat at a meeting recently where person after person started what they said with smilingly snarky comments about Manchester and how the Northern Powerhouse was, in truth a Manchester Powerhouse. This chimes with Mick McCann's brilliant essay asking why the BBC hates Leeds - a reminder that those Northern divisions are as much of a barrier to our progress as core features of our cultures.

Next year Manchester and Sheffield (or rather Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire) will elect a mayor, a new shining leader who will drive forward the future development of those cities. Other places will be waiting a while longer (probably until the little devils are skating on the ice in the case of West and North Yorkshire) but the message is that we will have a set of competing places across the North - Liverpool. Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle. And those mayors will fill the early morning London trains with their cohorts - off to that London where they'll make the case for central government to spend more resources in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield or Newcastle. Not in The North - there won't be any sense of Northern Vision, no real Northern Powerhouse.

If we want a Northern Powerhouse, and I think we do, then it has to be pictured, planned, consulted on, organised and - so far as we can - funded from The North. And it's no good unless the whole resource - men and money - of England's North Country is brought to bear on that vision. We've seen this can be done for transport, we need to stretch that to the whole vision of a future economy.

A couple of days ago the Royal Institute of British Architects announced a new national centre for architecture in Liverpool. Great news for that city. Perhaps what we now need is a New Northern Architecture with the initiative and vision to build a model like the one I saw in Store Street yesterday - a model showing how private and public, local government, universities, manufacturers and housebuilders can share a detailed idea of how a future North of England will develop, will look and will work.

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Uberising home cooking...

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I guess this works in a place where you've a lot of women at home with a kitchen:

Million Kitchen is an aggregator and delivery service by Delhi-based non profit Swechha that allows women to prepare and sell home cooked food to customers within a 5-7 km radius. The app-based service gives young working people the access to fresh and simple homestyle meals as well as empowers women to earn extra money by using their cooking skills. “Every dormant kitchen is a resource lying underutilized,” says Vimlendu Jha, Founder and CEO of Million Kitchen.

I'm sure there'll be the usual guffle about exploitation and workers rights but, hey, this is excellent!

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