Sinclair's Musings

In defence of the tabloid press

2008-11-10T18:26:00.002Z

Paul Dacre's speech to the Society of Editors is a powerful defence of tabloid journalism, and the freedoms it depends on. Worth reading in full, I'd say.

How meaningful is a target of an 80% cut by 2050?

2008-10-16T16:58:00.000+01:00

By 2050 Ed Miliband will be more than eighty years old and no longer in government. The new 80% target for greenhouse gas emission cuts is therefore not a standard that he will be judged by. It is just a way of striking a pose, and an absurd one. Since the Government came to power, and despite massive burdens being heaped on individuals and businesses, emissions have not fallen but increased by 1.6%.

The economy is in crisis with shares around the world still tumbling amid fears of a recession. Within Ed Miliband's own sphere of responsibility, Britain faces an energy crisis (PDF), with a huge gulf in capacity that will lead to blackouts unless urgent steps are taken. That the Government are still fiddling with meaningless targets while the economy burns shows how utterly broken our sytem of government is.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Happiness

2008-10-13T13:49:00.000+01:00

We might have expected fuzzy concepts like 'happiness economics', and the idea that economic growth is overrated, would be dropped as the economic crisis bites and more tangible concerns return to the foreground of British politics. However, the BBC asks whether "with so many political certainties being shredded, perhaps there has never been a better time to take a long, hard look at what we want from our leaders."

The truth is that politicians can't deliver happiness. Even the smartest of academics don't really understand it. While some believe that it can be measured through surveys, which apparently correlate to certain activities in the brain, a study for the Institute of Economic Affairs highlighted how the results of those surveys don't just fail to correlate with income but also a range of other supposed social goods from longevity to gender equality to public spending and even rates of depresssion. They conclude that happiness data over time is "an extremely insensitive measure of welfare". This is because people are asked to rank their happiness in categories (from 'not happy' to 'very happy') that encourage an answer relative to other people around them and put an upper bound on each person's rating of their happiness while income is an absolute figure and can rise without limit.

If happiness can't even be measured reliably then trying to replace GDP with some measure of it is clearly a mistake. Politicians and bureaucrats will embrace all manner of measures to make us happier with no way of assessing results or understanding what really works. Dubious schemes will be supported with vast amounts of taxpayers' money, which it will be easy to justify taking on the grounds that people's money doesn't make them happy.

Of course, happiness isn't just a matter of what you are paid. However, money is the raw material that allows us to make all sorts of choices, including those that make us happy. The IEA study highlights the fact that more reliable, longitudinal data on happiness (that compares different people rather than different times) suggests that people are generally happier if they enjoy a stable family life, for example, and a comfortable income makes that easier.

In the end, the BBC's premise that we should think again about what we ask of our political leaders is a sensible one. However, instead of giving politicians an even broader mandate to try and make us wealthy or happy we should recognise that prosperity and happiness are things we have to build for ourselves. The ordinary taxpayer can use the money in their pocket to pursue wealth or happiness more effectively than politicians can on their behalf. We should stop asking politicians for more than any leader can deliver.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change

2008-10-05T14:03:00.003+01:00

While Peter Mandelson's reappointment is clearly the political story of the reshuffle I think the more interesting change, in policy terms, is the creation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change (or DE&CC). The dynamics of that department could play a huge role in how our energy policy develops over the coming years.

I think that the short term consequences are pretty clear. This will bring administrative chaos and reduce the chances of urgent action to get Britain through the capacity crunch without the lights going out. There is necessarily a lack of clarity following a change like this. What priorities will the new boss have? Who is responsible for what? Where is my desk?

The Government have spent ten years in the belief that Britain can be securely powered by a combination of gas and renewables. At this stage action needs to be taken quickly to reform policies that are leading us into dangerous over-reliance on a single fuel that is becoming increasingly difficult to source. In the medium term (i.e. as soon as possible) we need new nuclear plants but right now we need new coal. These are genuine tough decisions - the vague rhetoric we've had from the Government so far does not constitute a sufficient response.

It sounded like John Hutton was starting to understand the scale of the problem; that a senior politician was finally getting past the complacency Campbell Dunford has identified. Now we have to hope that Ed Miliband will see the light as well and the chaos of the reorganisation won't delay something actually getting done for too long.

In the medium term it will be interesting to see which one of the department's two priorities wins out in the numerous situations where green policies - and financing the £100 billion bill - are not conducive to providing an affordable and secure energy supply. The ex-DEFRA climate change bureaucracy is, I think, probably larger. In that respect, it will have the advantage. More bureaucrats means more people with their pet schemes to push, more staff who are really interested in climate change policy and find energy rather boring.

On the other hand, the reason why Ministers love working on climate change is that the outcomes are all decades and centuries in the future so there is no real accountability. By contrast, people will notice if the lights go out. While politicians can try and blame the energy companies, or hope they're in a different job by the time poor choices lead to economic disaster, there is a much greater chance that the public will notice when political leaders let them down in energy policy than with climate change.

We'll see how it all plays out. Hopefully this week's announcement won't be another step on the road to serious power cuts.

The food miles myth

2008-10-03T09:11:00.001+01:00

At the Conservative and Labour conferences I spoke at events on the subject of food miles. The idea that consumers should pay great attention to the distance food has travelled from the producer to their plate. Food miles are one of those concepts that can sound important to some politicians and campaigners, who lack the experience and longevity in their posts to get to grips with the detail of issues like the environmental impacts of agriculture, as they make the complex issue of the externalities associated with producing food seem incredibly simple. In reality, things are more complex.

A study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, at Carnegie Mellon University, describes how transport produces just a small portion of total emissions in producing agricultural goods. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Other factors - from whether plants are grown in a heated greenhouse or under the sun to the amount of mechanisation needed - are far more important.

That is why Dr. Adrian Williams, of Cranfield University, described the concept of food miles as "unhelpful and stupid". Counting food miles will often mean getting your analysis of the environmental impacts of different products wrong. Air-freighted green beans from Kenya actually account for the emission of less carbon dioxide than British beans. Roses produced in the Netherlands and transported to Britain cause 35,000 kg of carbon emissions per 12,000 stems, against 600 kg of carbon emissions per 12,000 stems of Kenyan roses. The carbon footprint of NZ milk solids, lamb and apples (PDF) sold in the UK is up to four times lower than that of their locally produced equivalent, even if transport emissions are included.

The food miles myth endangers the livelihoods of many in the poor world. For example, according to the Kenyan High Commission in London, (PDF) the Kenyan horticultural industry supports around 135,000 Kenyans directly and many hundreds of thousands more indirectly, and the produce supplied to the UK alone generates at least £100m per year for Kenya. Organisations like Greenpeace that try to endorse the concept of food miles and fair trade at the same time are contradicting themselves.

It also hurts British consumers. Ordinary people are already struggling with rising food prices. These increases are, to a large extent, driven by hideously ineffective biofuel subsidies that have driven prices up by 75% according to the World Bank, costing $960 to $1,700 per tonne of CO2 saved according to the OECD. Consumers should not be asked to bear a further burden by ruling out the most cost-effective way of producing many foodstuffs (i.e. producing them abroad) which will further push up the price of food. Consumers health might also be put at risk if there is a smaller range of acceptable fruits and vegetables in many months where UK production is limited by our climate and consumption drops.

People who take food miles seriously risk hurting the interests of ordinary people here and in the Third World to little environmental end.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Moby Dick

2008-09-23T20:39:00.002+01:00

This, via Ross Douthat, is truly terrifying:

"The writers revere Melville's original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab's obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale's decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab's Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn't your grandfather's 'Moby Dick,' " Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.""

At some point, someone will need to make this speech

2008-09-20T23:15:00.000+01:00

Reagan made this speech in 1981, not long after becoming President. It strikes the right balance between confronting the challenges facing his new government and striking a tone of optimism about the possibility of doing so successfully. It is neither airy waffle nor dismal and dispiriting.

"A few days ago I was presented with a report I'd asked for, a comprehensive audit, if you will, of our economic condition. You won't like it. I didn't like it. But we have to face the truth and then go to work to turn things around. And make no mistake about it, we can turn them around.

I'm not going to subject you to the jumble of charts, figures, and economic jargon of that audit, but rather will try to explain where we are, how we got there, and how we can get back."

In recent years spending, taxes and regulation have all increased and the money has been wasted on unreformed public services, long standing weaknesses in our transport infrastructure have not been addressed and we face an energy capacity crunch. All that left us chronically vulnerable with structural deficits and ongoing economic weakness outside the remarkably resilient financial services industry. A downturn in that industry has left us in huge trouble, the only major economy the OECD expects to see go into a recession this year, and likely to face a mushrooming deficit.

Curbing the rapid growth of public spending, the most important step to start addressing our long term economic problems, is going to mean treading on some toes. There will be many vested interests attached to our big state and overcoming them will require having the public on board. Making the scale of the challenge clear to the public but, at the same time, having a clear resolution to do something about the situation could earn a politician a lot of respect.

Things you learn from watching the stats on a viral

2008-09-20T17:31:00.002+01:00

One of the sites that has linked to the Brown Calculator is TheGrumble.Com. A generalist site for people with some gripe about the modern world?

No. A BBS for picture framers. Its full title is The Picture Framers Grumble.

Try the Brown Calculator

2008-09-19T09:20:00.002+01:00

We've been busy at the TPA:

The calculator is attached to a report which goes through area after area showing that Gordon Brown's economic record has been utterly dismal. It should illustrate the context to the economic gloom and the OECD's prediction that Britain is the only major economy that will experience a recession this year. Brown hasn't been the unlucky victim of international conditions but the author of his own demise.

Sharia shows its face in Britain

2008-09-14T23:34:00.000+01:00

The Sunday Times reports that Sharia courts are now in effect and their judgements are being enacted in British law. This is utter injustice:

"Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.

The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.

In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations."

These are not the fuzzy sort of judgements that apologists for the Archbishop promised would be the only ones Sharia courts could make. These are women being denied a fair share in inheritances or not having their complaints of domestic abuse followed up (after they have been pressured into accepting that they are not victims of a crime deserving of punishment). Even if their choice to use these courts was free they are signing away their legal rights as these judgements become binding and are enforced by conventional courts.

We have now created a situation where British Muslim women have to choose between their British rights or their Muslim ones. Anyone who has read the vital "Crimes of the community" (PDF) report by the Centre for Social Cohesion will know that such a choice is often far from free.

Equality before the law is dead. We might step in if some troublesome soul won't take no for an answer but otherwise many Britons now live by a different legal code to the rest of us. Such an important principle didn't die because the British public stopped caring about it or were too apathetic to make their voices heard. They reacted with utter fury at the suggestion that Sharia should be admitted as a part of British law. I'm not aware of any party manifesto ever having proposed integrating Sharia into the British legal system or even of any significant politician endorsing the idea in public.

It just sort of happened. Just like the recognition of polygamous marriages or countless other surrenders of our values that the British people never endorsed. It came about thanks to a combination of a lack of proper scrutiny of laws, this clearly isn't what the Arbitration Act was intended for, and a feeble establishment desperate for the false sense of security that can be had by appeasing those demanding Sharia.

We need a democratic revival or Britain's most cherished values are at risk.

Everything we hold dear!

2008-09-10T09:55:00.002+01:00

Conjure up three images that sum up Middle Britain. I can't think of a better three than these:

The Volvo estate, the tidy lawn and the Labrador. I'll grant that not all of the British middle class owns a Volvo, lawn and Labrador but they still play a vital role in making Middle England what it is. For as long as we've been able to afford it we've been buying them (or substitutes). Others have their ethnic dress or their culinary traditions, we have dogs and the gardens and cars needed to hold them.

Volvo estates are some of the hardest hit cars in the Government's Vehicle Excise Duty hike, Labradors are being turfed out of bed and breakfasts thanks to ludicrous EU food safety regulation and now Government reports are attacking our right to have gardens with lawns.

Our very identity is under attack.

A question of priorities

2008-09-07T23:45:00.002+01:00

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins operations this week. It has drawn criticism from Sir David King:

"The project has drawn more down-to-Earth criticisms too. Sir David King, the government's former chief science adviser, believes it diverts top scientists away from tackling the more pressing issues of the time, such as climate change and how to decarbonise the economy. In total Britain has contributed more than £500m towards the LHC project."

Okay, let's compare what we're spending and what we're getting for our money with the LHC and just one of the Government's flagship policies aimed at 'decarbonising the economy'.

Our spending on the LHC has been around £500 million over more than ten years, making up around 10% of the programme's total budget. For that money we make a vital contribution to this project:

"Beneath the rural tranquillity of the Geneva countryside, where ramshackle sheds dot the wide-open fields, scientists are getting ready for a trip into the unknown. Here, under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, lies the biggest, most complex machine humans have ever built, and on Wednesday they will finally get to turn it on.
For Cern, the European nuclear research organisation, it will mark the end of a lengthy wait and the beginning of a new era of physics. Over the next 20 years or so, the $9bn (£5bn) machine will direct its formidable power towards some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe.
The machine will search for extra dimensions, which could be curled up into microscopic loops. It might produce "dark matter", the unknown substance that stretches through space like an invisible skeleton. And it will almost certainly discover the elusive Higgs boson, which helps explain the origin of mass, and is better known by its wince-inducing monicker, the God particle.
At least that is the hope. For the machine to work a dizzying number of electronic circuits, computer-controlled valves, airtight seals and superconducting magnets must all work in concert.
The machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and when working at full tilt it will drive two beams of particles in opposite directions around a 17 mile (27km) ring at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Every second each of the beams will complete 11,245 laps of the machine.
At four points around the ring the beams will be steered into head-on collisions, causing the particles to slam into one another with enough energy to recreate in a microcosm the violent fireball conditions that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang. Giant detectors, one of which is so enormous it sits in a cavern that could accommodate the nave of Westminster Abbey, will then scrutinise the shower of subatomic debris in the hope of finding something no one has ever seen before."

Absolutely remarkable. Up there with the Apollo programme and Concorde as one of the greatest technological achievements of mankind. Something that stands a good chance of providing vital insights into the nature of the universe and making possible huge technological advances.

By contrast, we spend around £1 billion every year on the Renewables Obligation (RO). A substantial burden on ordinary families paying their electricity bills. In return, we get unreliable windmills that contribute little to providing the generating capacity we need or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as the quantity of power produced is so small and unreliable and back up capacity needs to get turned on and off, reducing its efficiency. The main effect of the RO is to turn ordinary people's money into bumper profits for the renewable energy companies.

Of course, this is just one part of the package of measures designed to reduce emissions. However, as a scheme which offers as expensive and poor value as the RO has been put in place the idea that greenhouse gas reduction policies are suffering because they aren't getting sufficient priority compared to the LHC seems somewhat absurd.

In terms of value for money, I'd take the Large Hadron Collider over the Renewables Obligation any day of the week.

I want you to know, trees, that we care

2008-09-07T23:35:00.003+01:00

I think we can add these people to those who have had abortions, been sterilised or even turned vegan in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the 'driven insane by environmentalism' corner. From David Thompson, via DK.

http://view.break.com/565864 - Watch more free videos

The energy crisis

2008-09-07T14:04:00.000+01:00

The Renewable Energy Foundation are one of the most important organisations in politics today. Their work sets out the scale of the challenge for energy policy clearly, no one has any excuse not to appreciate the trouble we're in. How a decade of believing in the fantasy that a combination of gas and renewables can reliably deliver the power we need has created a serious danger of the lights going out. A good introduction is an article (PDF) by their Director of Policy and Research, John Constable for Power UK.

Their Chief Executive, Campbell Dunford, has put out a response to Gordon Brown's speech to the CBI which sums up the political situation well:

"Campbell Dunford, a former international energy banker, now Chief Executive of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said:

“There are two parallel debates here. On the one hand the energy experts tearing their hair out with anxiety, and on the other the bland Westminster discussion typified by the Prime Minister’s empty and trivial gestures. This must change. Only courageous leadership can prepare us for the gathering storm. Will Mr Cameron speak up and confront the realities, or will the realities get there first?”

Why is it that the term “middle class” has such different meanings in the US and the UK?

2008-09-07T00:17:00.000+01:00

Alexander Belenky, writing today at Comment is Free about struggling Americans watching TV programmes about the pampered rich, uses the term “have-nots” and “middle class” pretty much interchangeably. The alternative to “middle class” in the American discourse is invariably “rich”. Both left and right appeal to the middle class as their economic and cultural heartland, respectively. The caricature is that the middle class are bitterly clinging to god and guns and struggling to maintain a comfortable lifestyle while the rich, arugula-munching (that pretentious leaf, generally known as ‘rocket’ here in the UK, is a big deal in American politics) coastal elite enjoy greater incomes and are increasingly secular in their outlook.

By contrast, here when people attack Radio 4 for being too middle class they are arguing that it appeals to well-off Home Counties families who own Labradors, fill the best schools and quietly sidestep the social problems that afflict the troubled cities. When someone suggests that a political party is trying to appeal to the middle classes, they are suggesting that it wants to help the well-off. The alternative to being middle class is generally expected to be becoming part of the downtrodden poor underclass. The exceptions to this dichotomy are the numerically tiny but politically powerful urban elite – the closest analogy to America’s arugula class.

I think what the two middle classes have in common is that both the American and British middle classes are thought of as the backbones of their respective countries. The unassuming middle class in both countries gets on with things while the underclass is debilitated by social and economic ills. Also, in both countries the middle class are seen as culturally sensible or old-fashioned (depending on your perspective) compared with the urban/coastal elites.

Are the robust families that are the backbone of American society really poorer than their British counterparts?

The Renewables Stealth Tax

2008-09-06T19:37:00.004+01:00

The Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO) was introduced by the Conservatives to subsidise nuclear power. It was replaced by the Renewables Obligation (RO), which excludes nuclear power but buries windmills and other renewables in money. The Renewables Obligation, in particular, is rather complicated (I've got in trouble before trying to calculate its value) so the Government couldn't effect a neat transition from the NFFO to the RO. As part of the transition the Government have wound up making a bit of a profit out of some old NFFO contracts.

The Guardian smell a scandal and reported the story today, with condemnation of the windfall from the Conservatives:

"Last night Charles Hendry, the Conservative shadow energy minister, accused the government of using the scheme as a "stealth tax" and warned it would further damage public confidence in environmental measures."

I think this rather misses the point. The fact that the Government are putting some of the revenue into the general pot doesn't really affect whether it is a stealth tax at all.

The Renewables Obligation imposes a levy on electricity companies who have to buy Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) for a certain percentage of the power they generate. It is a tax and a pretty hefty one. It it worth just short of a billion at the moment, more than the Climate Change Levy. It's just that the revenue is hypothecated and placed straight in the pockets of renewable energy companies.

The sums involved are staggering. For comparison, in the United States the Energy Information Administration have revealed the subsidies provided to different types of power: About 25 pence per MWh for coal and about 14 pence per MWh for gas. Renewables are treated far more generously and receive around £13 per MWh.

At the last online, business to business, auction by e-ROC the average ROC price was £53.27. A renewable energy company will get one ROC for every MWh they produce. That £53 is a truly massive subsidy and isn't the only financial advantage renewables are given. They also get exemptions under the Emissions Trading Scheme and the Climate Change Levy.

All this costs ordinary people a fortune. Climate change policies constitute 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 21% of the average business electricity bill. How many people know that they're paying that much? That the Government could cut electricity bills significantly overnight if they scrapped these policies?

Is the shocking stealth tax the relatively small amount that the Government are creaming off, where there is at least a small chance it will be spent on something worthwhile, or the huge amounts being pocketed by renewable companies?

Google Chrome

2008-09-06T00:13:00.002+01:00

I installed it earlier and it is pretty cool. Firefox always frustated me, it just seemed clumsy and not quite formed. I reverted to Internet Explorer. Explorer does some funny things, though. It could never quite handle Google Mail reliably.

Google Chrome has a neat, sparse interface and so far it seems to run more cleanly than either of the major browsers. Good stuff.

Nationalising mortgage lending

2008-09-05T23:03:00.004+01:00

A few days back Chris Dillow asked whether mortgages should be nationalised. After all, innovations in the market haven't exactly turned out well.

I think the missing component in his analysis is risk. This means, in extremis, what happens when your state goes all Northern Rock?

Politicians and bureacrats are further from playing with their own money than company directors. Beyond that, they have the taxpayers' pocketbook to play with which makes it less likely a crisis will be restricted to a small one when they are unable to finance attempts to buy themselves out of trouble. Of course, it would be possible to try and set up the institutions to prevent this happening, by creating artificial little state mortgage companies or giving the power to councils perhaps, but those sorts of walls are always made of paper and collapse under the weight of political pressure.

The root of the current problems in the mortgage market is that those managing it bought their own hype that they had got so good at managing financial risk that they could lend incredibly aggresively. They were massively over confident. This is a problem that the public sector is entirely vulnerable to. The Great Leap Forward is, perhaps, the apogee of lunatic belief that you have cracked some secret and can now ignore basic precautions against disaster.

It seems likely to me that nationalising mortgage lending would lead to fewer minor crises but more frequent complete catastrophes.

Some more reasons to dislike wind power

2008-09-05T20:29:00.002+01:00

1. EU Referendum welcomes a BBC report which goes some way towards acknowledging that Denmark's wind power experiment shouldn't be replicated, particularly in the UK where we aren't connected into other countries and, therefore, able to sell off excess wind energy (at a massive loss) like the Danes do. Alas, it won't be possible for us to emulate their expensive and surprisingly high emission (primarily because they banned nuclear they emit more greenhouse gas per ton of oil equivalent) energy.

2. Some great facts in this video, via Iain Murray:

It is a good video. It sets out how utterly impractical the idea of generating all our power from wind is (the numbers are from the States but I think it scales pretty well). Funnily enough, though, it actually chooses the standard most favourable to wind, the amount of power produced.

Unfortunately, we don't just need power, we need it when we want it. Unless we're willing to accept the lights going out on a cold, still evening (and there are lots of those, see page 13 of this PDF). In that regard wind is nearly completely useless. So, unless you outsource the need to produce reliable power to other countries (like Denmark) or are prepared to accept the massive cost and reduction in efficiency that comes with maintaining huge quantities of back up power

Increasing the stamp duty threshold

2008-09-02T23:13:00.004+01:00

Well, it's here. The incredible economic package that is going to turn around the Government's electoral fortunes.

There are measures to help out some families facing repossession but the headline policy is that for a year the stamp duty threshold has been raised from £125,000 to £175,000. Stamp duty works on a slab basis so all this is meaningless for any home purchase outside that band (i.e. most homes in London and the South East). Putting this plan into action will cost around £600 million.

It won't do much to help the property market. There are too many other, much more important, variables at play. As Chris Dillow has shown Lamont's stamp duty holiday didn't do much for the market in 1992.

There is no particular reason why the Government should want to prop up house prices anyway. High prices that kept young people off the ladder were hardly a great social boon.

Does that mean pushing the threshold up is a bad idea?

Not really. This will, at a fairly low cost in the grand scheme of things, be a considerable boon to a lot of young families on the early rungs of the housing ladder. They will be able to keep £1,750 of their own money that the Government would otherwise have purloined. People in that situation often have a great many financial strains: taking care of a growing family or just furnishing their new home. £1,750 would make their lives significantly easier and helping them out is a legitimate social objective.

Nick Robinson asks "who pays?"

Well, at last year's budget public spending was increased by around £30 billion. There is a problem with the deficit but to ask "who pays?" about a puny little £0.6 billion tax cut when a spending rise that is around fifty times as large has been pushed through each year for the last five years clearly completely misses the point.

Some of that increased spending would be hard to avoid in an economic downturn, such as benefits, and inflation obviously pushes up spending as well. The main cause of increases in spending, though, is the decisions made in the various budgets and spending reviews. Those are the decisions that ate up economic growth and the proceeds of tax rises year after year and created the current deficits. Not the few shoddy tax cuts we've enjoyed. The Government can easily fund this tax cut if they stop growing public spending so quickly.

In the end, the problem with these tax cuts isn't that they won't do much to help the housing market or that they can't be funded. It's that this pissant tax cut doesn't even approach the kind of scale that would be needed to make a dent after a decade of rising taxes. That's the proper criticism of the proposal advanced today.

The National Consumer Council on supermarkets

2008-09-01T20:51:00.004+01:00

The new National Consumer Council (NCC) report on supermarkets has a fatal contradiction at its heart.

It spends a lot of time discussing the amount of information offered to consumers. The NCC want more and clearer labelling setting out the amount of salt, sugar, fat and other unhealthy things in each product. That is a reasonable thing to lobby for and if you look at the report cards you'll see that most of the supermarkets are making progress in the area - either in their colour codes on the front or in the GDAs on the back.

The negative headline on the report comes from their other priority, which is that supermarkets should stop making unhealthy products generally alluring. For that reason, they are opposed to promotions for unhealthy products and stores that stock sweets at the counter. Many of the shops are doing worse on that measure. They keep having the temerity to offer me half price Coke and offer sweets at the till.

That is where the contradiction appears. If you think that labelling is important then you are assuming that people are good at making decisions about the kind of food they eat. That they care about their health and, if properly informed, know how to eat healthily. Or, you think that people should be free to decide for themselves how important healthy eating is to them. That's why you value giving them information, it allows them to make as much use of their remarkable ability to decide for themselves as possible.

By contrast, if you think that having sweets at the counter, or offering people discounts, will cause them to want things they shouldn't, and we should intervene to stop that happening, then you don't really respect their ability to decide for themselves at all. You think they're simpletons who can't possibly decide for themselves or are so pathetically vulnerable to pester power that they will be terrorised unless you hide the jelly babies in the corner. When Sainsburys take a pound off the price of my Coke they make me worse off.

The report tries to take both positions.

Despite this report being a mish-mash of contradictions and dismal, patronising paternalism I paid for it, so did you. It's a quango. Just like the equally awful energywatch. Why can't these bodies be scrapped? If anyone really wants this bilge to be produced they can fund it themselves

The Daily Mash calls the report just right:

"BRITAIN'S supermarkets were last night accused of stocking the products their customers want to buy.

The National Consumer Council claimed the stores are deliberately selling a range of items that are not only competitively priced but tasted lovely.

"Meanwhile they go around filling their fruit and veg aisles with thousands of deadly scorpions. Probably."

A spokesman for Asda said: "The National Consumer Council seems to have confused us with something that is not a business."

Beware the renewable energy fairy tale

2008-08-30T12:19:00.004+01:00

Jeremy Leggett has an article up on Comment is Free urging people to "Beware the bear trap". Essentially, his case is that we need to pile on the renewable capacity in order to prevent Russia being able to use its fossil fuel resources as a weapon against us.

The first thing to note is that, while Western Europe is in an unenviable position relying on Russia for its gas, the Russian position isn't quite as strong as it looks. Each time oil and gas resources are used as a weapon they lose their impact. By making it clear that supplies aren't reliable you encourage your customer to put more effort into seeking alternatives or other sources of supply.

There is no doubt that recent Kremlin bolshiness has strengthened the case for Western Europe to revive its nuclear industry, for example, which could well mean threats to the gas supply are less potent next time around. We can only hope that there is someone in the European political elite with the basic strategic vision needed. Business, at least, will probably put more effort into exploiting alternative sources of hydrocarbons like Canadian tar sands.

The major problem with Leggett's article is that he sees renewables as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. In reality, one of the reasons why Britain is in such trouble is that over the last ten years we've had a Government with a fondness for airy, unrealistic fantasies that renewables can provide a substantial portion of the electricity we need. Our energy policy has been based, for a decade, on the ludicrous idea that a combination of gas and renewable energy can provide the stable, affordable and secure capacity we need.

While renewables can provide power, albeit often at great cost, their unreliability means they can't provide significant capacity when you need it (peak load capacity). The situation is stated pretty clearly in this REF report (PDF, pg. 94). As such, their contribution to energy security is negligible. If Russia were to cut off the gas all the wind power in the world would do pretty much nothing stop the lights going out on a cold evening. Other renewables have, at present, a limited ability to provide remotely affordable power. Unless unreliable or exceptionally expensive electricity is felt to be acceptable renewables can't deliver energy security.

So long as politicians listen to people like Jeremy Leggett, and his renewable energy fairy tales, serious solutions like Enhanced Oil Recovery in the North Sea and building coal and nuclear capacity won't get the attention they deserve. By the time we wake up, it might be too late.

The Burden of Green Taxes

2008-08-28T23:02:00.002+01:00

Well, the reason this blog has been silenced over the last week and a bit is that I've been working hard on the green taxes report that we released today. The press release, full report (PDF) and database, with values for different local authority areas, can be found at the TaxPayers' Alliance website. I also wrote up the report, with some context, for CentreRight.Com.

The response to the study has generally been incredibly positive. However, there have been a few challenges on the blogs and on the media. I've responded to Friends of the Earth and the Treasury at the TPA website and to some critiques on CentreRight.Com on that website.

Lack of posts

2008-08-27T20:23:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been very busy. Hopefully, it will become clear why tomorrow.

I was an anaerobic digester once...

2008-08-19T21:07:00.004+01:00

Great post at EU Referendum on the anaerobic digesters that are going to eat our waste. They aren't addressing a shortage of landfill sites and the Government are proudly subsidising a technology when it was EU regulations that killed its development in the private sector:

"Read my lips: there is no shortage of landfill sites. There is a shortage of landfill capacity, which is a wholly different thing. And that is entirely because of the EU's landfill directive which imposes severe constraints on the use of landfill as a waste disposal option.

We actually dealt with this issue in an earlier piece, where we relied on another blogger who had done the maths, demonstrating unequivocally that landfill sites are actually being generated faster than we could fill them.

That lack of knowledge also pervades the rest of his story. He writes uncritically of the government being "so confident that anaerobic digesters offer a realistic means of dealing with food waste that earlier this year it offered £10 million in grants to encourage the construction of further demonstrator plants. Plans for at least 60 are under way in Britain."

This we dealt with in a story last January when I set out a dire tale about how private enterprises had embraced anaerobic digesters as an admirable solution to organic waste disposal, only to have the economics of their systems wrecked by the dead hand of the Environment Agency.

The EA insisted on classifying these systems as "scheduled processes" – under an EU directive – and then charging exorbitant "authorisation" and "subsistence" fees which, with the stultifying and time-consuming bureaucracy involved, ensured that few digesters were installed. Those that were quickly became disused simply because, under the burden of regulation, they were too expensive to operate.

So, now that the government has effectively priced the system out of the market, it is offering public money – our money – to encourage the use of a well-tried and working technology that it, itself, has hamstrung."

Gingrich on business vs. the bureaucracy

2008-08-17T20:43:00.001+01:00

Are cities limited?

2008-08-17T19:29:00.001+01:00

The recent instalment (PDF) of the Policy Exchange 'Cities Unlimited' series has provoked quite a reaction. There has been predictable fury from Northerners who don't take kindly to being told that we should accept their cities' decline. Southerners don't exactly see further expansion of the towns in their densely populated region as much of a reward for their economic success. Some of them rather dislike the idea of a deluge of Northerners. Those two reactions left little doubt about what the political response would be and sure enough both Conservative and Labour politicians have condemned the report in colourful terms.

Cities Unlimited deserves a more thoughtful reception. None of the 'rebuttals' offered by various politicians and commentators really stand up to scrutiny.

Some cite new investments as a sign that cities are regenerating. If they read the report they would see that the central case the authors are making is that investments haven't translated into lasting economic progress. An example they cite is the billions of pounds of Nissan investment in Sunderland. Citing more investments without showing those translating into increased prosperity, best measured through value added per person is pretty meaningless. All you're doing is strengthening the report's case that the cities have received substantial investment but failed to translate that into sustained greater incomes.

Others have pointed to an improving employment record in some areas, which creates more questions for the apologists for recent Northern economic performance than it answers. Why has a strong employment record not translated into higher incomes? An obvious answer would be that the employment is all being created in low value occupations, perhaps because the workforce in these cities doesn't contain enough high skilled workers. Unemployment figures are also easily distorted by the switch to incapacity benefit and employment figures by large scale immigration.

Challenging the report by arguing that regeneration policy has been a brilliant success isn't going to work. The empirical case in the report is solid. We've been spending a fortune for years and the income gap between the regions is expanding rather than contracting. There isn't really any way of talking around that.

To put all this in perspective, there is another case of a region that, over more than fifty years, failed to catch up with a richer rival's 25% greater income per head, with the gap actually widening to 27%. Eddie Hunt in 1986 studied historical pay for agricultural workers in different parts of Britain (the study is behind the academic firewall, I'm afraid). Agricultural pay isn't a perfect proxy but should give us a reasonable idea of general incomes in those areas as agriculture had to match levels of pay in other industries in order to attract workers. In 1976-1770 Buckinghamshire was 23% richer than Lancashire. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, by 1794-1795, Lancashire overtook its Southern rival and between 1833 -1845 and 1898 the gap in incomes between poor Buckinghamshire and rich Lancashire actually rose by 4 s. 2 d.

Clearly something has changed the economic fortunes of the two counties not once, but twice. It certainly wasn't regeneration spending. First, Buckinghamshire lost its old lead with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and Lancashire was richer for the best part of two hundred years. After that, we know that Buckinghamshire joined in the success of the South East of England in the twentieth century while Lancashire became one of the poorer areas whose problems Cities Unlimited is addressing.
The report puts those changes down to economic geography. The period of Lancashire's success coincided with the importance particularly of coal and ports that could bring in cotton. Buckinghamshire now does well thanks to, particularly, its proximity to London.

The report establishes pretty conclusively that current policy isn't effectively addressing regional inequalities. Its case that some areas of the country have failed to replace the old staple industries is also clearly correct. The argument that new policies cannot be more effective in turning these areas around is, I think, less convincing. I don't think that the fortunes of areas are determined by the geographical hand they are dealt to the extent the report suggests.

Eastern Europe lost its old economic raison d'etre in the early nineties as the Eastern bloc fell to pieces and its manufacturing base collapsed. Estonia's success would, I think, be hard to predict from its geography. Equally, Ireland's economic geography hasn't fundamentally changed recently to turn it from a perennial no-hoper to the Celtic tiger. In both Eastern Europe and Ireland it isn't economic geography that has changed but policy. In particular, market reforms in Eastern Europe including the flat tax and cuts in corporate tax in Ireland (Benjamin Powell, for CATO, sets out how it wasn't EU subsidies that made Ireland rich). In 1993 GDP per capita in Britain was 28% higher than in Ireland, today the situation is reversed and Ireland enjoys a GDP per capita 20% higher than we do in Britain.

Those two examples suggest that it is eminently possible for policy reforms to turn regions around, even those like Eastern Europe with few obvious geographical advantages. In order for us to accept the Policy Exchange report's analysis that some regions decline is essentially irreversible we need to ask whether it is plausible that new policies can create a radical turnaround.

David B Smith, in a paper (PDF) for the Economic Research Council, sets out the status quo: Many of Britain's poorer regions can hardly be considered market economies. Public spending is 58% of the North East's GDP, against 31% in the South East. 24% of the workforce in the North East works in the public sector against 18% in the South East. Thanks to the black market it is thought that the state only controlled about 75% of the economy in the Soviet Union. In terms of the importance of public spending, Sunderland has more in common with the Soviet Union than Kent.

Other government policies also weigh more heavily on poorer regions. If you scaled the £5.35 minimum wage in 2006 to median earnings it would be £4.78 in the North East and £6.90 in London. This means that the minimum wage will have far more of an effect on employment in poorer areas. Italy's Mezzorgiorno and East Germany have had similar problems as labour market regulations and non-wage labour costs that richer regions can sustain do far greater harm in poorer areas.

Entrepreneurial activity is directed towards politics rather than capitalist enterprise. As David B Smith says, the high government spending regions "seem to produce large numbers of political entrepreneurs, who live off and lobby for a large state, but few of the traditional wealth creating kind".

Welfare dependency has nasty effects on people. Psychology has found it encourages the pursuit of instant gratification. This plays into high levels of drug and alcohol abuse in populations with large numbers of people on benefits. That might be one reason for the large number of incapacity benefit claimants in struggling towns.

Private sector employers have to compete with the public sector for staff. Centralised pay bargaining means that in poorer areas private sector firms struggle to compete with public sector salaries funded by the rich South.

Beyond that, the relatively high burden of personal and corporate taxes makes the North a more expensive place to do business. In particular, our corporate taxes are now above the average in the OECD. This stops the South, with its many advantages, fulfilling its full economic potential. Worse, it could clearly have a crippling effect on the North that more often competes with developing countries, which tend to have lower corporate tax rates.

The essence of the Policy Exchange report is that regeneration efforts have failed to resuscitate the economy in many old Industrial towns. That regeneration policy is premised on the idea that the market economy is failing, and needs help from the state. If we accept the reality of the situation, that a combination of massive state intervention and taxes that discourage private investment has left an economy that is more public than private sector, then we might start from a very different premise.

Cities Unlimited suggests that some Northern towns now don't have a raison d'etre. I disagree. There are plenty of ingenious people in even the most struggling towns and they'll find something to do, some reason to be. The problem is that the massive Southern subsidy, combined with taxes and regulations that choke business enterprises, channels the ingenuity of the North's brightest into lobbying for greater funds from the government. That is now the North's economic raison d'etre. A mind blogging array of government bodies has the ability to disperse lucrative grants and chasing them can be far more lucrative than plugging away at building a business. William Baumol wrote that the growth miracle of capitalism was founded on channelling entrepreneurship to productive ends, to enterprising activity that would make us all better off. An array of taxes, regulations and subsidies may have ended that in the North, is it any wonder that the region's economic performance has been poor?

If we want to see real improvements then we need to change that. Fiscal decentralisation, as the report recommends, could encourage regional self-reliance and, if done properly, allow enterprising towns to slash taxes and show others the way. You could scrap the RDAs (PDF) and cut 4% off the small business rate. That would do a lot of enterprising souls some good and make setting up a new firm seem like a significantly better idea. You could make phased, pre-announced cuts of 2% to the 12.5% corporate tax rate (PDF) they have in Ireland. The economic effects across the country would be incredible, boosting incomes, investment and, over time, even corporate tax revenue. The boost to competitiveness would be particularly welcome in poorer parts of the country. It would be a swine to get past the unions but ending centralised pay bargaining would save lives in the South and make it easier for the private sector to compete for workers in the North.

All those policies would create more room for the private sector to grow in the North. They would increase the rewards to enterprising souls who decided to found businesses instead of trying to seize on the taxpayers' chequebook. They might make it possible for the North to join the long list of regions from around the world that have turned their fortunes around and gone on to become incredible success stories.

The steady increase in population in the South and decrease in the North causes a series of strains. Political institutions can't keep up and various services wind up under or over resourced in different parts of the country. There is additional pressure on the countryside in an increasingly densely populated South of England which can only be partially alleviated by some of the sensible steps Cities Unlimited recommends, such as allowing industrial land to be used to build residential property.

No one wants to give up on turning around the decline of old Industrial cities if we don't have to. While the authors of Cities Unlimited have done a good job of illustrating the weaknesses of current regional policy, I'm not convinced that there aren't better policies that could see the Northern cities prosperous again.

Is Chris Dillow Chinese?

2008-08-13T00:09:00.002+01:00

From David Brooks' column in the New York Times:

"This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank,the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts."

Brooks goes on to describe how there is a continuum and we Brits are right at the individualist end with the Americans.

It sounds like we are culturally hard wired to what Chris would, I think, describe as an egoist way of understanding the world; the belief that our individual choices, actions and qualities are a crucial determinant of group success. Previously he has described how he would like his epitaph to read "he made no difference." This might make sense to someone from a more collectivist culture. Brooks describes how "[people in collectivist societies] tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts."

By contrast, Anglos are apparently disposed to want to make all the difference, and believe that they can do so effectively.

All this creates a conundrum for someone like Chris who combines a taste for liberal policy with a dislike of the kind of egoism that we are predisposed towards. Individualistic (egoistic) countries aren't just generally more prosperous, they also "tend to put rights and privacy first". If it is our sense of self-importance that makes us more protective of individual rights then are our inflated egos worth the various social ills Chris blames them for?

Illness

2008-08-12T19:04:00.002+01:00

I've currently got a horrible cold and my head hurts. Blogging is unlikely until that condition improves.

The Coming Energy Crisis

2008-08-10T16:25:00.003+01:00

I've written before about the coming capacity crunch, the strong chance that between now and 2015 we will struggle and possibly fail to keep the lights on. Christopher Booker addresses the subject with force today in the Telegraph:

"After years of dereliction, when only a crash programme of measures could keep our lights on and our economy functioning, our policy has become so skewed by blinkered environmentalism and diktats from the EU that we are fast heading for the worst of all worlds - a near-total dependence on foreign sources of energy which will not only be astronomically expensive but which can in no way be guaranteed to supply all the electricity we need."

Read the rest of the article. If you want to learn more this article from John Constable is a good place to start, along with the REF's 2006 briefing in response to the energy review. EU Referendum and City Unslicker are also writing a lot on the issue.

More on South Ossetia

2008-08-09T20:57:00.006+01:00

Alex Massie takes a rather dubious position on the crisis in the Caucasus.

"Russia may have provoked this crisis, and one may be properly critical of, indeed deplore, many aspects of recent Russian policy in the Caucasus or the Ukraine, but the immediate responsibility for this crisis must be borne by Tbilisi."

On that logic you could hold Britain responsible for the 1939 outbreak of war with Germany after they invaded Poland. You might even hold us responsible for the Falklands. In both cases there were massive provocations, including the invasion of our sovereignty, but we were the ones who turned it into a war.

Edward Lucas, in the Times, characterises the current situation like this, and Alex doesn't appear to disagree:

"In short, it looks more and more as though Georgia has fallen in to its enemies' trap. The script went like this: first mount unbearable provocations, then wait for a response, and finally reply with overwhelming military force and diplomatic humiliation."

Svante Cornell, in the Guardian, provides a more detailed description:

"In recent years, the Kremlin had escalated its interference in Georgia's territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia - bombing Georgian territory twice last year, illegally extending Russian citizenship to residents there, and appointing Russian
security officers to their self-declared governments. South Ossetia's government in particular is practically under Moscow's direct control, with little if any ability to act independently.
But this flare-up is a direct consequence of Russia's deliberate and recent efforts to engage its small neighbor in military conflict. In April, Russia's President Vladimir Putin signed a decree effectively beginning to treat Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of the Russian Federation. This land grab was a particularly galling move because Russia is in charge of both the peacekeeping operations in the conflict zones, and the negotiations over their political resolution. The mediator had now clearly become a direct party to the conflict.
Moscow then sent paratroopers, heavy weapons and other troops into Abkhazia. Although these measures constituted military occupation of Georgian territory, Georgia failed to respond militarily. Instead, with European aspirations in mind, Georgian leaders listened to western calls for restraint, and put their faith in half-hearted western diplomatic initiatives."

Of course, the immediate responsibility still lies with Georgia...

Also, there is this:

"As I say, there's plenty to dislike about recent Russian policy, but one thing might also be worth remembering: the Osettians (and the Abkhazians) want to be Russian, not Georgian. This may seem daft or incomprehensible to many people, but there it is anyway and one might think it something worth mentioning from time to time even if, clearly, it's also an inconvenient truth."

Russia isn't really looking to make them independent or a part of Russia. Keeping South Ossetia as a permanent thorn in Georgia's side, creating a permanent confrontation that prevents their neighbour saying no to Russia's "influence" is the objective. No side in this conflict is really fighting for South Ossetians' self-determination. Given the chaotic ethnic mix of many countries in that region, particularly Russia, it's questionable how such a principle could really function anyway.

The boot on Georgia's neck

2008-08-09T16:08:00.001+01:00

Georgia is part of that grand sphere the Kremlin feels it has a right to control. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are the mechanism to exert that control. The two Georgian regions are being maintained in a permanent state of limbo, nominally still a part of Georgia but effectively controlled by a combination of militant separatists and the Russian military. That permanent instability makes it incredibly difficult for Georgia to engage independently with the outside world as Western nations with perilously little spine left are scared off engaging.

There have been steady attacks on Georgia from separatists, from the Washington Post:

“Georgia, meanwhile, said that its troops entered the South Ossetian "capital" in response to escalating attacks, which have been intensifying for a week -- and have been taking place for years, really -- as well as the Russian aerial bombardment of Georgian territory.”

The majority of Russian passport holders that we keep hearing about are no accident, from the Wall Street Journal:

“Russia in recent years has also granted citizenship to the separatists. That looks like premeditation now: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged yesterday to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located.”

It is hard to imagine how Georgia can come out of this current conflict well. The separatists will probably become even more secure in South Ossetia. Our vacillation has created an ugly situation that we will struggle to rescue. Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post concludes:

"In any case, the time to deal with this conflict is not now but was two, or even four, years ago. For a very long time it has been clear that there was a security vacuum in the Caucasus; that this vacuum was dangerous; that war was likely; that Georgia, an eager ally of the United States, would not emerge well from a confrontation; and that a successful invasion of Georgia, a country with U.S. troops on its soil, would reflect badly on the West. Cowardice, weakness, lack of ideas and, above all, the distraction of other events prevented any deeper engagement. And now it may be too late."

However, Georgia's cause is not one we should abandon, from the Washington Post:

“The principles at stake, including sovereignty and territorial integrity, apply well beyond the Caucasus. To abandon Georgia and its fragile democratic Rose Revolution would send a terrible signal to other former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics that to Moscow's dismay have achieved or are working toward democracy and fully independent foreign policies. The West has made that sort of mistake before and must not do so again."

Thomas Sowell on capitalism

2008-08-05T19:22:00.002+01:00

This, via The Corner, is a great quote:

"Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain cabrohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrevelant standards."

White Diamond

2008-08-04T19:08:00.003+01:00

This marketing campaign is infuriating. The TV version invites us to enjoy the "delicate fragrance of white diamond and lotus flower."

Diamonds don't have a fragrance!

Public service oddities: Shall I compare thee to a Water Framework Directive? Edition

2008-08-02T22:23:00.007+01:00

The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee released a report (PDF) in 2002-03 on the Water Framework Directive. Clearly water policy bores them a little, on page five they've introduced the Directive with some inspiring quotes:

"Among these treasures of our land is water - fast becoming our most valuable, most prized, most critical resource."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."

W. H. Auden

('First Things First', 1957)

"Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can an man; but will they come when you do call for them?"

William Shakespeare

(Henry IV Pt. 1 Act III Scene I)

That burst of enthusiasm out of the way they get back to EU water safety law.

Don't impose a windfall tax on energy companies

2008-08-01T17:22:00.000+01:00

I've written a post for the TPA blog making the case against a windfall tax. Chris Dillow does the same, from a more left wing perspective, over at his blog, Stumbling and Mumbling. A windfall tax would hurt the incentive to invest in really important energy infrastructure and is an awful, awful idea.

Crime and cognitive biases

2008-07-31T21:55:00.004+01:00

In the course of my day at work I go through a lot of statistics for one reason or another. This one surprised me, from the police recorded crime statistics (XLS):

...

...

In 2007/08 the police recorded 1,899 incidents of rape of a child under the age of 13.

That's far higher than I would have expected, the high hundreds at most. At work, I asked around and everyone else was equally shocked. The number is particularly high when you bear in mind that it is recorded crime and, as we are talking about a sexual offence, almost certainly a severe underestimate.

Now, a common theory for why the public see crime as such a serious issue is that they overestimate its prevalence because of sensationalist news reporting. We see the reports and assume they represent a broader pattern, fall victim to the distortions of the availability heuristic.

If an entire office of people with plenty of exposure to the right-wing press could make the opposite error about a crime that is clearly, in a horrible way, sensational doesn't that raise some broader questions about that hypothesis?

energywatch

2008-07-31T21:29:00.001+01:00

I've written a post on energywatch and energy prices for CentreRight.

First, do no harm

2008-07-30T11:37:00.000+01:00

In recent months there has been a lot of discussion about how the Government might help people facing high energy prices. The unions, politicians and various campaigners have called for a crackdown on energy companies they accuse of profiteering.

Yesterday, the Renewable Energy foundation revealed that the Government's own environmental policies are a major component of the price of energy:

Climate change policies make up around 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 3% of the average domestic gas bill.

Climate change policies also make up 21% of the average business electricity bill and 4% of the average business gas bill (i).

By 2020 the burden of green policies will have risen to 18% of the average domestic electricity bill and 55% of the average business electricity bill(ii).

Despite this massive cost the regulations are projected to achieve very little. The Renewables Obligation is expected to cut emissions by just 1.6% at an incredible cost of £400 per tonne of carbon emissions saved.

Most of these climate change policies, from the Renewables Obligation to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, have been introduced since the current Government came to power. They have been major drivers of the rises in energy prices. While politicians single out energy companies for criticism they keep quiet about their own complicity in rising prices.

With Ofgem confident that our energy market is reasonably competitive isn't hounding electricity companies just a crude attempt to displace popular resentment of high prices? If the Government were really committed to bringing down prices it could easily do so by scrapping some of these ineffective climate change regulations.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Unframed Window

2008-07-29T11:28:00.002+01:00

Charles Laurence, a friend from LSE, has set up a new blog called Unframed Window. He's a smart guy and the blog has an easy, thoughtful tone so far. Well worth a read.

One of his first posts is about the quality of Obama's oratory. Charles isn't impressed. I also felt a bit let down when I first watched an Obama speech at length and then saw his faltering performances in Q & As.

It might well be a difference in the style each nation expects. Obama is a superb example of the preacher-like style of American political speech. That style is forged as a way to deliver an uninterrupted speech heavy on moral content. By contrast, Britons are used to political rhetoric forged in active debate whether in parliament and the courts or in university sparring. That makes British political speech lighter footed and sharper but often less weighty.

An article on the politics of environmentalism at The American

2008-07-28T13:45:00.003+01:00

An article I wrote with Chris Pope, from the American Enterprise Institute, is up at The American (along with a fun graphic). Here's an excerpt:

"With less than two years remaining until the next general election, Britain’s Conservative Party has surged to an historic 22-point opinion-poll lead over the incumbent Labour Party. This turnabout has followed an energetic campaign by the Tory leader, David Cameron, to wrench the party out of its ideological comfort zone and overhaul its public image. Cameron has indeed handled many issues deftly. However, his initial attempt to spark a bidding war over climate alarmism backfired enormously, and it should serve as a warning to other Western political parties that are trying to burnish their green credentials."

AA Gill on Burn Up

2008-07-27T14:49:00.003+01:00

My review was focussed on the battiness of the actual message. AA Gill, in the Times, takes on the shoddy quality of the writing. Good stuff:

"Imagine writing this: “It is my belief we are standing on the very edge of history.” Having written it, what would a normal, sensitive, moderately intelligent person do? Well, 99% of us wouldpush the delete button with a faint shiver or tear up the piece of paper so that the young and impressionable couldn’t read it. We understand that it’s utter bilge, but, you see, that’s why we’re not scriptwriters. It takes a very special person to write that sentence and think: “Yes, high five, nice job, really profound! What shall I do next?”

Burn Up

2008-07-26T18:45:00.000+01:00

Stephen Garrett, a spokesman for Kudos Film and Television who made Burn Up, was quoted in the BBC press release for the show describing it as "a potent cocktail of fiction and fact that we hope will enlighten as much as it will entertain". This programme can't be assessed just as harmless fiction. It is political propaganda and should be understood as such.

Methane

I'm no scientist but I know enough to be pretty confident this film isn't going to enlighten anyone. It dresses up the speculative fringe of climate science as the absolute truth. "Runaway climate change is upon us", apparently, if everyone doesn't sign up to 'Kyoto 2'. The only character in the film who is a scientist, an academic from Oxford, tells us that is because methane deposits are going to be released unless we meet a 5 to 10 year deadline for curbs in emissions.

Let's see what the Met Office's Hadley Centre, definitely part of the alarmist scientific 'consensus' says about possible releases of methane:

"Substantial quantities of methane are emitted naturally from wetlands, and this emission is expected to change as wetlands change. Changing rainfall patterns will cause some wetland areas to increase in extent, others to decrease, and increases in temperature will act to increase emissions from wetlands. One version of the Hadley Centre climate model includes a description of wetland methane, and this predicts an increase in natural wetland emissions by the end of the century equivalent to the amount of man-made emissions projected for that time, thus leading to a more rapid rise in methane concentrations, and hence warming.

On the other hand, the chemical reactions in the atmosphere which destroy methane are expected to become more efficient in future, largely as a result of increased water vapour. This will act as a negative feedback on methane amounts.

Methane is also stored in permafrost, and it is likely that some of this will be released as surface warming extends into the permafrost and begins to melt it.

Finally, huge amounts of methane are locked up in methane hydrates methane clathrates) in the oceans. They are currently at high enough pressures and temperatures to make them very stable. However, penetration of greenhouse effect heating into the oceans may destabilise them and allow some of the methane to escape into the atmosphere. The potential for this to happen is very poorly understood. There is concern that this may be another positive feedback not yet included in models, although there is little evidence for this from the behaviour of methane during the large temperature swings between ice ages and interglacials, and in particular over the last 50,000 years."

This bears no relation at all to the 'science' in Burn Up. There is no suggestion here that we face an imminent threat of runaway clmate change. Apocalyptic methane releases don't appear to have occured in previous, natural warmings. Most people watching Burn Up won't know how speculative the film's vision of imminent, methane-driven climate catastrophe is. No character in the film questions the idea.

Burn Up isn't really trying to enlighten people but, like Al Gore's film, to create an emotional reaction. To scare people so that rational and measured debate over policy can safely be avoided, so that proper scrutiny of policy can be written off as irresponsible and immoral.

Eskimos

In the first part of Burn Up, in particular, the Inuit are crucial to the story. A campaigner for their cause protests to the film's central character, Tom - head of Arrow Oil, and then, having lost in a legal case suing Arrow for climate change-related harms to the Inuit people, burns herself to death on the court's steps.

This is brutal stuff and , of course, climate change could create challenges for a people whose way of life is so intimately related to particular conditions. However, just a little research confirms that the film utterly distorts the true nature of the problems facing the Inuit.

There is little sign that the destruction of the Artic habitat is really taking place on anything like the scale that is being suggested. Polar bear numbers are still robust, this is from the Telegraph:

"A survey of the animals' numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has
revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind's
interference in the environment.

In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the
polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100
today.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more
bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years
studying the animals.

His findings back the claims of Inuit hunters who have long claimed
that they were seeing more bears."

Their numbers wouldn't be as strong if the number of seals was in serious decline. Life in the Arctic appears to be in solid shape at the moment.

I know Wikipedia isn't the most reliable of sources on this particular issue but it is probably correct when it suggests that the major problems facing the Inuit are those faced by many North American aboriginal peoples:

"Inuit communities in Canada continue to suffer under crushing unemployment, overcrowded housing, substance abuse, crime, violence and suicide. The problems Inuit face in the 21st century should not be underestimated. However, many Inuit are upbeat about the future. Arguably, their situation is better than it has been since the 14th century."

That is what makes all this focus on climate change so dangerous for peoples like the Inuit. They have huge social problems and it would be far too easy to forget the genuine issues in a mad rush to co-opt them into a grand narrative around global warming.

Hurricanes

Once again, the idea that the number of hurricanes and other natural disasters is massively on the increase was brought up. It can't be repeated enough that increases in insurance industry claims are not necessarily a sign of increased damage but, more often, a sign of increased development (meaning there is more valuable stuff to be damaged) and increased take-up of insurance (the stuff damaged is more likely to be insured).

I've written before about the actual data on hurricanes and how the best indicators we have are that we are currently seeing particularly low levels of hurricane activity. Beyond that, Indur Goklany, in the excellent Civil Society Report on Climate Change (PDF), shows that deaths from natural disasters have massively declined over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Figure 6, on page 48, really says it all (the low numbers pre-1920 are almost certainly the result of poor data).

More prosperous, more technologically advanced and more democratic societies are better able, and have more of an incentive, to help those facing a natural disaster and they do a very good job. We do not have increasing difficulty coping with natural disasters and the best way to help the poor world enjoy the security we do is to promote the institutions that can deliver a prosperous and democratic society.

Anti-Americanism

This film was shot through with anti-Americanism. The evil characters are portrayed wearing cowboy hats, getting teary eyed over faith healing TV and doing all the other things snobbish Europeans like to laugh at.

Their democratic process is portrayed as an utter joke. A Senate hearing falls to pieces in a flurry of sordid ad hominem. Their political parties have been bought by the oil firms. None of this reflects reality but it is a comforting way for Burn Up to write American resistance to the Kyoto-plus agenda off as venal. At the same time the programme potrays we British heroically promising to wreck our economy to satisfy the green agenda - at one point we even promise to send so much money to China that country will profit from restricting emissions.

Conspiracy theories

There are a breathtaking number of conspiracy theories in this film. The Department of Defense have a study that they're covering up which shows the harms of climate change and plans to take water from the Mexicans. The Saudis are concealing the fact they've pretty much run out of oil. Americans are killing anyone, even on the streets of London or in a hotel at the centre of a major international conference, who might let out the Saudi secret to prevent an oil shock.

However, the mother of all conspiracy theories is only revealed at the end. Apparently the reason the Americans aren't acting on climate change actually isn't an attachment to economic prosperity or even petty venality. Instead, they're hoping that climate change will kill all the poor people and then that will leave the Americans in a stronger geopolitical position. While it will hurt them they'll be the last ones standing.

Just when you think the Americans can't get any more evil it turns out they're actively plotting ecopocalypse! This is absolutely mad.

Ad hominem

The scientist is testifying before the Senate and is silenced by one of the Senators bringing up old, and false, accusations of sexual misconduct. This is a really perverse reversal of the reality that, while the greens are free to speak their minds, there are serious attempts to silence sceptics.

The charge that a scientist or other has, at some point, received funding from fossil fuel companies is just a lazy ad hominem. Most academic researchers get funding from all manner of sources and some of that, at some point, coming from industry doesn't imply they've been bought. However, that lazy ad hominem is used by Monbiot and countless others to try and prevent 'deniers' being heard. Burn Up reverses the situation and has the alarmists as the victims of mindless ad hominem.

Renewables

There is never any question that renewables might not be able to effectively replace fossil fuels. Of course, within the craziness of this story that makes some kind of sense. People don't want renewables to work because then we wouldn't need to wreck the planet. Real world considerations such as providing an affordable and reliable supply of power aren't nearly melodramatic enough to fit in this silly story.

The creepy bits

From the polar bear, with "Extinct" written on it sitting incongruously in the middle of climate negotiations to the bizarrely precise "cut emissions by 90%" banner a protestor is holding. This film is trying to get a lot of messages across without ever openly confronting the audience with them.

At the start, the father can't drive to work because it is "Environment Week" and the kids have taken his keys. Isn't the idea of the children imposing the state's new moral code like that a bit Orwellian?

Conclusion

Burn Up is pure alarmist propaganda. If the Greens have such a strong case why do they have such a need to continually resort to such wild distortion?

Advertising on my blog

2008-07-26T11:18:00.002+01:00

Quick tip, if you're trying to sell trainers, posting comments on this blog, in Chinese, isn't the way to do it.

Newsnight Review is shockingly bad

2008-07-25T23:11:00.003+01:00

Their discussion of The Dark Knight was full of massive spoilers. Anyone who has seen the programme before going to the cinema will be able to see large chunks of the film coming and have at least one, tense scene ruined.

Their treatment of the themes in the film was shallow. The film is evoking götterdämmerung and the idiot that Newsnight have got on can't see anything deeper than a small minded political allegory.

There was no serious discussion of the visual quality of the film, the pacing, the acting or the plot.

Isn't the point of the BBC supposed to be that they can do things like this well?

The Dark Knight

2008-07-25T20:30:00.002+01:00

I went to see The Dark Knight at the BFI IMAX last night. It is utterly exceptional, so good I'm not sure I've recovered yet.

There is so much superb acting. Christian Bale is brilliant, holding the huge film together as a towering central presence. Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent is charismatic and convincing and makes a difficult transition very convincingly as tragedy overtakes him. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine make what might have been mundane scenes clever and emotive.

Heath Ledger's performance is utterly incredible. He is portraying absolute chaos. Veering between merely unstable and genuinely terrifying. His character is never made human, remains a force of nature. Despite having no more technology than could be obtained at a hardware store there is no question in your mind that the Joker is utterly capable of destroying Gotham City and Batman. Utterly deserving of the Oscar.

The story dynamic is great. Slowly layering tension upon tension. The battle between chaos and law and order becomes an epic confrontation. Every moment of the film becomes a blow in that battle and has a deeper significance for it. The film addresses deep questions seriously and without talking down to the audience.

I won't say much more as I don't want to spoil it. Watch this film. More than once.

Public service oddities: Accounts Owl edition

2008-07-22T19:41:00.003+01:00

I really don't think that council accounts are read by anyone who doesn't have some fixed, and normally quite dull, purpose in mind. Despite that Shropshire County Council have clearly decided they need to make their accounts (PDF) more accessible, more user friendly. How? With an owl and what I think is a weasel discussing them.

Brilliant.

Coal power, clean or not, is now essential

2008-07-22T18:43:00.001+01:00

This quote, from Peter Huber, should be printed on a placard and used to beat some sense into people who just will not accept the realities of energy policy:

"If you're 40 or older, you're going to spend the rest of your life powered by carbon or uranium. Take your pick. Forget about "none of the above" or "less of both." For the next several decades at least, alternative energy sources aren't serious choices; they are pork barrels, delusions, demonstration plants and daydreams."

Of course, it isn't quite as simple as that. New technology might deliver something new more quickly and allow us a third option. That's one of those possibilities that you can take small steps to encourage but definitely shouldn't plan on. If some marvellous new renewable, or fusion, quickly becomes able to reliably and affordably provide substantial quantities of power then take that as a bonus. In the meantime, we need to make sure we can keep a secure and reliable supply of energy available.

This excellent article by John Constable, from the Renewable Energy Foundation, sets out how the Government have been enjoying energy daydreams for ten years and have left the future of UK electricity dark, dirty and and costly.

The green movement have encouraged the Government in their delusional belief that growth in renewables could stop Britain becoming dangerously dependent on gas. To see the greens protesting at the building of coal power plants, when they did so much to block cleaner options such as nuclear power, is infuriating. Yes, carbon capture and storage (CCS) might not be installed on an industrial scale for some time but the dichotomy can't be coal power plants and CCS or letting the lights go out half way through the next government's term.

With supplies of gas unstable Britain needs a more diverse mix of fuels. 10 years of delay mean that the only way of doing that is now to build coal power plants.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

Vote Sinclair's Musings

2008-07-21T22:57:00.002+01:00

I need ego puff points. It will make life feel worthwhile if I do well in Total Politics' survey of the most popular blogs. I care almost as much as Wat Tyler.

Vote by naming your top ten blogs in an e-mail to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com. You need to name ten or your vote won't be counted, and they've all got to be from this massive great list or your vote won't be counted. I reckon those two rules will mean most people will give up and the rest will unintentionally spoil their ballots. Good times!

Public service oddities: I Am Carbon Man! edition

2008-07-21T20:43:00.007+01:00

It's been a while since I've written an entry for my little Public Service Oddities series. The series where I share the bizarre little things that public sector organisations choose to share with people reading their corporate documents or looking at their websites. The older entries can be found here, here, here and here.

I have an absolute winner from the East of England Development Agency, the bureaucracy given a pot of money by the Government to help perk up the East of England's economy. These agencies aren't just pointless, particularly in already successful regions like the East of England; they also tend to creep their mission massively. They fund the redevelopment of zoos and open international offices.

Now, predictably, they're getting involved in fighting climate change. EEDA have chosen a rather... unorthodox strategy. This actually has some corporate sponsorship, Anglian Water and E.On are paying their Greengeld, but be under no doubt that it is primarily an EEDA project:

That's right. They're dressing up locals as carbon heros. We're all going to die! Award small community grants and put on fancy dress!

It gets worse. Some of them aren't quite in the shape for a superhero costume:

Wow. I really hope the guy on the right isn't a model.

"I have ridden the mighty moon worm!"

2008-07-21T19:48:00.002+01:00

A reader at David Frum's blog sends in a brilliant dissection of Gore's claim that "enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year". The whole, glorious triumph of arithmetic is worth reading but here's the conclusion if you've got no time:

"To summarize, yes, we only need a small fraction of energy theoretically available in "renewable" forms. But we also can only convert a small fraction of that energy into usable forms. And it is far from immediately obvious that the latter fraction is greater (let alone a lot greater) than the former. Before we even start complaining about costs (not that we should not - the laws of economics are just as unrepealable as the laws of physics), we need to realize that there is just no huge untapped (and almost bottomless) pool of readily available renewable energy for us to play with (which apparently exists in Al Gore's imagination).

Of course, there's still another question: where
to get power at night?"

On the subject of green crazy, the A Green New Deal report, via Tim Worstall, looks truly wacky. I'll try and find some time to go through it in detail.

Pierre Manent and Direct Democracy

2008-07-21T00:04:00.002+01:00

Pierre Manent is a pretty important figure in France. Wikipedia describes him as "a key figure of the contemporary French political philosophy [whose] work has helped the rediscovery of the French Liberal tradition." As such, this interview is fascinating:

"With the European Union we seem to have reached an ulterior stage of democracy, liberated from its old glittering finery, mutated into pure governance, and not connected to any people, to any territory, to any particular mores. With the May 29, 2005 referendum, we were able to see the fracture between official political action and the real feelings of European citizens, who have the feeling that they are being carried away in a movement that no one can control."

[...]

"True, but the American system, because it is still truly national and representative, is capable of correcting, however brutally, its direction. If Americans vote for President Bush and the Republican Party it is because, rightly or wrongly, they believe those candidates are better able than the Democrats to confront the challenges of the times. Not that the United States enjoys moral and social health in every test it is put to, but their political system reacts to the fluctuations of American opinion and to the vision, accurate or erroneous, that Americans have of what is good for the United States."

[...]

"The problem in Europe, particularly in France, is that our politics, though obviously bad, are not correctible, whatever the orientation of the electorate. Even though opinion is hostile to the indefinite extension of the European Union, even though the citizens of two founding countries voted against the constitutional treaty, everything proceeds as before and it is being suggested that the treaty will slip in through the window."

The whole interview is interesting but these sections, in particular, illustrate that some influential old European conservatives share the concern common among British conservatives; that popular democracy will die by drowning in a supranational and bureaucratic mush.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

A green surge?

2008-07-19T19:15:00.003+01:00

From PoliticalBetting.Com:

"The other striking feature is the massive growth in Green Party support - from 2% to 5% - which must attract questions as to what has prompted this."

Is it possible that Clegg's shift right, combined with an utterly discredited Labour Government, is leaving genuinely left wing voters with little idea where to go? The Green Party might be an answer for some of them.

Al Gore loses his mind

2008-07-18T13:07:00.004+01:00

We already knew Al Gore was wrong. That pretty much everything that made his film distinctive and emotionally compelling couldn't be justified by the evidence.

Now, it appears he's lost touch with reality entirely. He has challenged Americans to entirely end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity within a decade (without an expansion of nuclear power). This is utter insanity. The research of the excellent Renewable Energy Foundation shows pretty conclusively that large scale renewable energy is currently unrealistic. Wind power is far too unreliable and has a nasty tendency to cut out when you need it most. Other technologies just cost too much per KWh to be remotely practical as a large part of our energy mix.

Of course, that's not to say that massive adoption of renewable power won't happen. It is possible, though unlikely within a decade, that new technological developments will achieve something remarkable. Perhaps solar power really will become too cheap to meter. There are steps that can be taken to encourage technological advance in that direction. Jim Manzi, writing in the National Review, proposed prizes that could encourage technological advance at low cost and without too much risk of interest group capture.

However, to start trying to tax people into avoiding fossil fuels now, when there isn't a practical alternative, will just push up the cost of energy. It would cost ordinary families, and particularly the poor and vulnerable elderly, a fortune and do lasting damage to industry. To try and force a switch away from fossil fuels on the timescale and scale Gore is proposing would be insanity.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

The OECD reveals the inefficiency of biofuel subsidies

2008-07-17T14:30:00.004+01:00

A leaked World Bank report has alread alerted us to the fact that biofuels have pushed up food prices by 75 per cent. Now, the direct financial cost of biofuel subsidies is becoming clearer. Yesterday, the OECD released a study on biofuels showing just how expensive and ineffective the subsidies are.

Government support for the industry in the US, Canada and the EU was $11 billion in 2006 and is expected to rise to $25 billion by 2015. All that will achieve is a 0.8 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from transport fuel by 2015. What's really incredible is the cost per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions saved, between $950 and $1,700. These costs can quite easily be compared with the benefits.

The benefits of saving a tonne of carbon dioxide are referred to as the "social cost" of a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions. For more information on this concept see Box 1.1 in this report (PDF). We last surveyed the major academic and official estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions for the report The Economic and Political Case Against Higher Fuel Duty (PDF). Nordhaus, who the Economist has called the father of climate change economics, puts the social cost at $7 per tonne. The IPCC and Tol, another respected climate economist, studied dozens of academic estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions and the averages they reported, at $12 and $6 respectively, were in the same ballpark as Nordhaus's estimate. Finally, the estimate reported in the Stern Review was $85 per tonne. Stern's result is very different to that obtained by Nordhaus, Tol and the IPCC for reasons discussed in Box 1.3 of this report (PDF).

If we compare the cost of subsidising biofuels with what we gain by saving a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions the results are pretty stark:

The costs of subsidising biofuels are between 11.3 and 229.7 times the social cost of just burning fossil fuels and not worrying about carbon dioxide emissions. Biofuel subsidies are a waste of money and should be abandoned.

There may be a day when technological advance delivers efficient biofuels. Just as there may be a day when wind and solar plants can deliver power at a low cost, reliably and in the quantities required to make a big contribution to our energy needs. At the moment, neither biofuels nor renewables are anywhere near efficient enough to replace fossil fuels. Pretending otherwise and throwing huge amounts of subsidy at technologies that just aren't ready for the big time is a ruinously bad idea.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

The case for a voluntary subscription funded BBC

2008-07-16T22:00:00.003+01:00

Brilliant article by David Elstein over at Liberal Conspiracy making the case for a voluntary subscription funded BBC. Worth reading the whole thing but here are some good bits:

"There is a social cost to this process, as well as a financial cost. A large proportion of those prosecuted are single parents on low incomes, for whom the licence fee is a considerable burden. To add to this burden the court-imposed fines is effectively to criminalise poverty. Almost no-one now goes to jail for failing to pay the evasion fine, but the victims of the system are often dragged back to court soon after a conviction, having fallen behind again and now finding themselves on the enforcers’ radar.

[...]

As it happens, there is an abundance of evidence that very few people would choose to do without the BBC, at a given price. Moreover, a series of studies has shown that a large proportion of the population would willingly pay more for the BBC than the current level of the licence fee, strongly suggesting that if the BBC introduced a series of channel packages, from, say, just BBC One through to the full array of current channels plus HD options and perhaps a sports channel, take-up of one or other of these choices would be nearly universal, and BBC income would rise, rather than fall, especially as each TV set would need its own smart card, allowing the cost of the cheapest package for a single TV to be as low as £5 per month.

The paradox of the present situation is that people too poor or too unwilling to pay for the BBC are forced to subsidise those who value it well above the level of the licence fee, mostly because that level is a much lower proportion of their net income than it is for the poorest. A tax-based licence fee removes that inequity, but a layered consumer proposition which is entirely voluntary gives the BBC a much stronger connection with its viewers and listeners, real accountability for the first time, and the opportunity to continue developing new services that will appeal to subscribers.

[...]

First, there is a well-established public demand for high quality products: without it, publications like The Economist and the Financial Times could not exist, along with a huge array of other magazines.

Secondly, the research that has been done shows that the present balance of BBC output would deliver enough subscribers to maintain the present quality of service: and as the BBC is non-profit-making and publicly owned, there should be no pressure to dilute in order to maximize revenue."

If this policy were proposed it could do well electorally. TaxPayers' Alliance polling (PPT) suggests that the license fee is considered the second most unfair tax (after council tax) and is particularly disliked by the working class.

The turnaround in Iraq

2008-07-16T17:17:00.002+01:00

The sheer scale of the turnaround in Iraq is incredible. Michael Yon has the statistics in a Power Point presentation (PPT) that shows a remarkable decline in incidents and casualties. Predictions about the future in such a dangerous part of the world are always fraught with risk but Yon is a sober reporter so this carries some weight:

"The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What's left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it's time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won."
Frederick Kagan, who proposed the 'surge' at the American Enteprise Institute; John McCain, who supported the strategy when it was desperately unpopular, and most of all David Petraeus, who led the operation, and the soldiers risking their lives on the ground deserve all the credit in the world.

Politicians don't build nuclear power plants, builders do

2008-07-14T10:17:00.001+01:00

Today we learned that:

"Ministers are to build eight new nuclear power stations across England, the Daily Telegraph can disclose."

I'm pretty confident that even if the entire 135-strong payroll vote (PDF) is mobilised that won't quite be enough to get eight nuclear power stations built. Beyond the obvious labour shortages I'm not sure that ministers' careers in the unions, journalism or the law have left them with the expertise to produce a functioning nuclear power plant.

Of course, in reality ministers are only providing planning permission but the underlying attitude, that things get done when ministers command that they be done, is dangerous. An attitude which expects Government to take action and interfere from the top in the day-to-day delivery of services is responsible for so much poor performance in the public services.

Energy policy, over the last decade, has been an utter disaster. John Constable, of the Renewable Energy Foundation, in an article for Power UK, Is the future of UK electricity dark, dirty and costly? (PDF), highlights how bad the situation has become. He suggests another approach, where ministers are far less interventionist:

This disingenuous inteventionism has combined with complacency towards the flaws in the electricity market system (BETTA) and resulted in a decade during which many billions of pounds of assets have been written down, the nuclear industry almost bankrupted, and an imprudent over-commitment to gas generation compounded.

In my view the only way of ensuring rapid remedial action is for government to actually rather than apparently withdraw from the system, so liberating energy market participants to respond commercially to the situation as it now stands. This opinion is not informed by doctrinal libertarian affection for the free market but rather a practical recognition that no government or any single market participant can gather and assimilate sufficient information to design and realise a satisfactory outcome. Only the intellectual action of the market in aggregate, and through competition, has a reasonable chance of producing an optimal result.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

60, 80, -1.6

2008-07-13T22:48:00.001+01:00

There was a surreal quality watching Hillary Benn being interviewed on the Politics Show this morning. The host was quizzing him on the Climate Change Bill, and the commitment to cut emissions by 60% from 1990 levels. She was asking why the Government weren't going further, and targetting an 80% reduction. What exactly a 60%, not to mention 80%, cut means in the real world was entirely ignored.

To the right is the pattern of UK carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 so far. Between 1990 and about 1993-94 there are significant cuts. This is almost certainly connected to the recession at the time. Carbon dioxide emissions are so intimately connected to economic growth that recessions often lead to reductions. The collapse of Eastern Europe's manufacturing base probably brought emissions down more than any other global phenomenon of the past few decades. We may see emissions reductions right now, when the data comes through in a couple of years time, connected to the current slowdown. The early nineties reduction was also, more importantly, driven by the shift to gas, something that can only be done once and might need to reversed if gas imports are imperilled. One more reason why ensuring energy security and cutting emissions don't necessarily go together.

We haven't cut emissions since 1995. Since 1997 emissions have actually increased by 1.6%. All this fuss over targets, whether binding or not, is pretty meaningless. The actual policies that have been put in place over the last ten years have increased the price of electricity (Ofgem estimate (PDF) that they make up 8% of the average household energy bill), pushed up the cost of motoring, increased the price of family holidays and otherwise cost taxpayers a fortune. Petrol prices have almost doubled since 1995 and, at the same time, emissions have kept on rising suggesting that the elasticities involved are incredibly low.

Despite all of the innumerable policy initiatives and market incentives to reduce energy use emissions have gone up over the last ten years. Clearly, there is some deeper difficulty to cutting emissions that the greens have not acknowledged. People really do need and/or value the activities that create emissions. Emissions probably will fall if fuel prices stay as high as they are but it'll be slow and steady. There is something deeply decadent in coming up with target after target while ignoring that basic issue.

Not to mention the G8's pride in setting targets without the developing economies. Even if the developed economies were to completely decarbonise then, to make a 50% global cut by 2050 from present levels the developing economies would need to make 46% cuts to their 2050 emissions. If the developed economies can only get a two thirds cut by 2050 (very, very ambitious as the graph above shows) then the developing world would need to cut their 2050 emissions by 74% (all these facts are from a White House Council on Environment Quality presentation). This would mean huge sacrifices in economic growth.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that these targets do not represent anything but meaningless moral preening.

On another note, over on my personal blog I discuss why the idea that an oil-money conspiracy is keeping the green 'truth' from the people is so deeply wrong.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com

Why “Big” Oil companies aren't the ones fighting eco-socialism

2008-07-13T17:20:00.015+01:00

If there is one message that emerges loud and clear from environmentalist propaganda, whether Al Gore’s rhetoric, green protests or dramatisations like Burn Up, it is a clear idea of the enemy: Rich, slick oil executives who supposedly fund some vast conspiracy to prevent the emerge of a brave, green new world. They form a handy target for a movement that is deeply anti-capitalist. They’re often American, wealthy and clearly have some measure of power; fine bogeymen for the modern age.

There is no vast conspiracy to prevent the public accepting the green agenda. There are millions upon millions of pounds being spent in the UK alone attempting to convince the public that it should be a priority to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The Government’s Act on CO2 programme alone has cost £5.5 million in the last year. Government departments and NGOs run countless other programmes with large staffs and sizeable budgets. By contrast, I’m not sure there is anyone working full-time in the UK to argue the case against radical carbon dioxide emission cuts. A cursory examination of their advertising shows that Exxon Mobil, BP and the other energy majors are not working to combat the idea that we should take aggressive action to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, they’re kowtowing to the greens.

There is, simply, a free-rider problem which means corporations will rarely resist significant political pressure. The benefits from fighting green alarmism are diluted across such a range of firms and interests while the costs, in terms of green opprobrium, are not. Exxon Mobil initially funded sceptical scientists to a certain degree but the amounts were small compared to the budgets the green movement are playing with and that effort is now largely over. Firms respond rationally and don’t defend the broad social benefits of, for example, affordable energy.

Beyond that “Big Oil” isn’t going to be the big loser – in absolute terms – if green policies are put in place. The crucial measure here is reserves. Green policies won’t bring down prices right now so current production isn’t the crucial variable. Reserves are the crucial measure of the potential impact of green policies, were they to be successful in reducing demand for hydrocarbon fuels, on a firm. On that score the Western oil companies are minnows. Measured by reserves, Exxon Mobil is the 14th largest firm, BP 17th largest and Shell 20th. The lion’s share of world reserves are held by nationalised companies, with Saudi Aramco at the top of the list. These are the firms who will really lose out if hydrocarbon demand falls.

Of course, the argument that comes up at this stage is that we have to cut hydrocarbon demand in order to stop Iran, Saudi Arabia and other unpleasant regimes enjoying buoyant revenues that allow them to spend on weapons, promoting radical Islam and other unpleasantness. This is an argument which receives far too little scrutiny. You don’t need to ask too many questions to see that it is full of holes. The argument relies on the idea that people are less dangerous when they’re poor; that poverty actively makes people less likely to engage in terrorism.

While I don’t subscribe to the argument that terrorism is some kind of cry for help from the world’s poor neither do I think that it is dependent on serious wealth. In a world where a state as poor as North Korea can develop nuclear weapons poverty is clearly little bar to an ability to inflict terrible carnage. Our enemies must be resisted and defeated and our potential enemies persuaded. Reducing our use of oil will do little to help and if we impoverish ourselves in the process it will make things more difficult.

Of course, all this assumes that green policies will succeed in significantly reducing hydrocarbon demand. In the meantime, the main effect of green policies, if they hope to have a significant effect, has to be higher energy prices. The real impact here won’t be on energy companies, who can generally pass such costs on, but on a broad range of Britons. Particularly the vulnerable elderly trying to heat their homes; manufacturing industries trying to compete with foreign industries that are less efficient but have lower energy costs; motorists in suburban and rural areas who need their cars to get around.

These aren’t the favoured rhetorical targets of the green movement. They’re rather harder to demonise. However, they, and not the Western oil executives portrayed in countless green caricatures, are the real losers when green policies push up energy prices.

Iranzilla

2008-07-11T22:46:00.002+01:00

Absolutely bloody brilliant. Via the Wired blog. The story that inspired it is here.

The Credit Crunch didn't just float over from the States

2008-07-09T23:25:00.002+01:00

John Redwood makes the point very well:

"The third is the soundbite “The UK is well placed to ride out this international storm”. The BBC dutifully puts into bulletins that the Credit Crunch was made in the USA, and this is an international problem. They should instead ask some of the following questions:

1. Wasn’t Northern Rock a British collapse, based on the UK mortgage market?
2. Didn’t nationalisation of the Rock remove the most aggressive large mortgage lender from the market, intensifying the mortgage squeeze?
3. Isn’t the boom-bust in UK property prices and housebuilding a UK phenomenon brought about by British monetary policy?
4. Isn’t the UK government in a bad position, having borrowed and spent too much in the good years and now unable to reflate the economy with tax cuts?
5. Didn’t the UK government use off balance sheet vehicles and creative credit devices itself on a large scale, fuelling the credit boom of recent years?
6. Hasn’t UK competitiveness declined significantly in recent years, making UK adjustment more painful?
7. Why did the UK fail to add more to non fossil fuel electricity capacity during the good times, to ease shortages now?
8. Why does the UK impose some of the highest taxes on oil products, and increase them during a period of sharp upward movements in oil prices, exacerbating the squeeze?
9. Why did the government increase North Sea oil taxes, putting companies off from more exploration and enhanced recovery?

If they asked some of these, they might see that repeating uncritically the notion that this is entirely a US or international problem is just not the case. The UK dimension to this crisis reveals serious flaws in the conduct of policy in recent years."

Recession

2008-07-08T23:01:00.002+01:00

There is plenty to discuss about the possibility, raised by the British Chambers of Commerce, that we are heading for recession. Regardless of whether we pass the two quarters of negative growth test it is clear we're facing a nasty downturn.

Many of the problems that social conservatives such as Theodore Dalrymple have been drawing attention to for some time are going to become a lot more critical. This, from the best essay written in my lifetime that I've ever read, makes that point:

"Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves—another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself."

Strong families and strong communities are most important in hard times. They provide resilience and hold people together. With good times coming to an end we'll see how we can hope when they are so thoroughly atrophied.

Burn Up

2008-07-08T22:34:00.007+01:00

This feels like some kind of horrible joke:

"Burn Up is a nail-biting two-part thriller for BBC Two from the pen of multi-award-winning writer Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty). It's a powerful story of love, commitment and divided loyalty… a thriller in which the stakes couldn't be higher.

[...]

This topical thriller sees oil executives, environmental activists and politicians collide in the battle between economic success and ecological responsibility.

[...]

Neve Campbell plays his colleague Holly, whose covert collaboration with environmentalists puts her in great jeopardy, and Bradley Whitford plays Tom's best friend Mack, a charismatic yet unscrupulous oil industry lobbyist.

Burn Up follows the trio's lives and loves as they hurtle towards a global climate change summit."

Somehow, I think a fair portrayal of the global debate over climate change policy is a bit unlikely. Will the debate over what to do be cast as anything other than a black and white moral issue largely ignoring the human cost of pushing up the price of energy? Will the programme reflect the fact that 'green' campaigners are far better resourced than sceptics? Will anyone opposing climate change alarmism have any motive that isn't purely mercenary?

After Live Earth and the planned Planet Relief no one can seriously argue that, on this issue at least, the BBC's political approach is anything but that of a left-wing pressure group. One funded, at vast expense, by the taxpayer.

Update: Here's the trailer from, I think, Canada (looking less classy than the one the BBC ran before Newsnight):

Apparently, they can't find a network interested in the States. Given how desperately bad it looks that's hardly a surprise. The BBC wouldn't let some minor issue like quality get in the way of their crusade though, would they?

Formatting in Blogger

2008-07-08T22:26:00.003+01:00

Blogger is becoming incredibly frustrating. When I add a picture or indent a paragraph it mucks up all the line spacing. Paragraphs don't wrap round pictures properly. This has all been going on for some time. What's going on? Is this fixable or do I just need to put up with it short of getting so frustrated I switch to another platform?

The academy and the outside world

2008-07-08T20:21:00.007+01:00

Gracchi writes an interesting post describing how the academy used to interact more with the outsiders.

There are clearly two halves to this equation. The academy's influence on the outside world and outsiders' influence on the academy. I'm going to consider these separately as I'm not sure that they have waxed and waned simultaneously.

Input from the academy in the outside world

I'm not sure that scientists and academics really do have less influence on the world than they used to. Gracchi's main example here is Sir Alan Sugar:

"Sir Alan Sugar's derision for academics on the Apprentice is well known- the worrying thing is that such a bigot is advising the Prime Minister of the day."

I think Sir Alan's words could be heard from the mouth of practical entrepreneurs troughout the ages. What distinguishes contemporary business is how rare that attitude has become. Alan Sugar is retiring and one of the last of his kind; the poorly educated practical businessman is a dying breed. As more senior managers have been to university they are increasingly comfortable making use of academic expertise.

Few manufacturing companies are run without scientific expertise, either internal or bought from outside in some way. The basic methods of the social sciences are used in all kinds of businesses to varying degrees of sophistication. In the political world we're always looking to enlist science to our various sides. Even in debates like abortion where science doesn't really have a lot to offer.

I'm not saying the academics have it all their way, they never have and shouldn't, but they've probably got more of a voice now than they ever have.

The outside world's input in the academy

It's here where I do think there has been a decline. Gracchi cites Machiavelli, Gibbon, Le Carre and Cicero. You could just as easily cite examples from the natural sciences such as Priestley or even Einstein. Amateurs have made serious contributions to academic thought. It's hard to think of many examples of such amateur scientists today.

I think this change is driven by a rise in the amount of commitment, effort and particularly resources that are necessary to engage with the academic debate. The bar to serious academic investigation has risen over time for a number of reasons:

1) The onward march of empiricism. An ever increasing tendency to try and quantify everything means that there is a need to assemble and analyse data. This requires a set of specialist skills that most people don't have.

Even if you do possess those skills, or have the time to learn, it also requires access to data and software. While there are enough sources of free data for an amateur to do some great work they are at a serious disadvantage (even supranational organisations like the OECD charge for many of their sources) and the software used to perform sophisticated analyses can cost thousands of pounds.

2) The academic firewall. The best way to get involved in the academic debate is to read journals. Unless you have access to a university library or can focus on a few key publications this is practically impossible. You would have to buy so many to get a good grasp of most important subjects that the cost would quickly run to hundreds of pounds. Unfortunately, the charge for most journals operates quite effectively as a cover charge keeping out the amateur.

3) The increasingly narrow focus to academic research. I think there has been a movement towards research in narrower areas. Few academics are looking at the 'big picture' these days and most choose a small area in which to try and shed some light. I have one friend who has just completed a PhD studying religion in Cromwell's army, another who is studying the campaigning methods of a single American Senator. This all has to be rather bewildering for an outsider.

It isn't good for any institution, even one as fine as the university, to operate without outside input. Outsiders can bring fresh ideas and new perspectives that improve everyone's work.

In America, in particular, there is something of a solution. In the social sciences think tanks support work at, or near, academic standards. Research and development units at the corporations and in the military undertake significant research at the applied end of the natural sciences (Microsoft's work on quantum computing and the development of the Internet at DARPA shows how advanced this can get). Outside organisations replace amateurs as external influences on universities.

In Britain we are less fortunate. A smaller portion of our GDP is spent by British firms on research and development but the biggest divide is in the think tanks. Anthony Browne, head of Policy Exchange, wrote an interesting article for the Spectator setting out the sheer difference in scale. I was in Washington recently and noticed much the same thing. He focusses on their influence, longevity and scale but I've always been struck by the intellectual depth of their work. This article, by Donald Kagan (who I believe is also responsible for the idea of the 'surge') is a great example. Whether or not you agree with it that short piece is an incredible example of the kind of work the American think tanks sponsor. British think tanks don't have the resources to produce the same sort of output.

All this creates a problem. We have lost amateur intellectuals without enough of a replacement. British intellectual life is definitely poorer for that loss.

Two towns in Pakistan

2008-07-07T22:43:00.003+01:00

It is so utterly tragic that these two stories can be in the headlines at the same time:

"Pakistani police say at least one person has died after a string of bombs exploded Monday in the southern city of Karachi.At least 25 others were injured when six small bombs were detonated within an hour of each other in neighborhoods dominated by ethnic Pashtuns."
--

"A banquet fit for a 'martyr', this is how one of the July 7 suicide bombers was remembered today.

On the third anniversary of the terror attacks which killed 52 people and injured many more, the family of Shehzad Tanweer held a party to ‘celebrate his life’ and ‘remember him as a martyr’."

Donpaskini gets angry at the cost of crime report

2008-07-07T21:25:00.005+01:00

Donpaskini is angry about the Cost of Crime report.

Before I refute his actual claim I need to deal with his accusation that I'm lying. Essentially he believes that I'm pretending the report's empirical evidence concerning the problem of crime justifies my recommendations when there is no clear link. Even if he were right then my error would be a non sequitur, not a dishonesty; a fallacy, not a lie. I just thought I should clear that up. Throwing accusations of dishonesty around without justification is unfortunate.

Now, to his main accusation. He describes my logic as the following:

Stage 1: Data analysis using government figures about costs of
different crimes, broken down by region to derive a cost per head of crimes in
that area

Stage 2: (Mumble, mumble)

Stage 3: Therefore we need to cut bureaucracy and elect local police
chiefs, just as the Conservative Party want

It's pretty simple really. Our report is designed to illustrate the seriousness of the problem and how it varies between areas, so that forces can better be held to account. It does that with Stage 1 alone.

However, we can't leave it there. If we write a report that identifies a serious problem we are rightly going to be expected to have some ideas about a solution. I was asked, in every radio interview, something along the lines of "so, what do you think can be done to get this cost down". Having answers, however tentative, to that question in the report makes it more effective. It makes our analysis more positive and helpful.

It's really nothing more than that. Not all interesting empirical reports provide a neat case for one solution to a problem or another. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be accompanied by policy ideas.

Politicians should stop blaming the people for high food prices

2008-07-07T15:07:00.006+01:00

Wasted food isn't to blame for high food prices, so why is Gordon Brown intervening in the kitchen?

Ordinary people do waste food. The efforts of environmentalists have made things worse by discouraging the use of packaging that prevents spoilage. A large part of the problem is simply that people are more likely to buy their food in a large weekly shop (due to long-term societal changes such as the increase in the number of women working) and have to estimate how much they'll need. They'll err on the side of having enough when food isn't that expensive, and another trip to the shops is an inconvenience, and food will be wasted.

However, with prices rising people will be more cautious and wastage should decrease. It isn't a significant problem that needs a political solution. Neither is it the cause of the current rapid rises in global food prices. The reason why Gordon Brown has suddenly decided this is an issue he should address isn't that he seriously thinks a sudden outbreak of wastefulness is making a major contribution to rising food prices. He's trying to send a message to hard-pressed families grappling with high food prices that he isn't to blame; it's their fault. If this doesn't work he'll probably move on to attack the supermarkets.

Brown is hoping that he can create enough of a distraction for voters to miss that it is the politicians who are the real problem. Here are five ways, among others, politicians contribute to high food prices:

Biofuels. A leaked World Bank report suggests that biofuels have increased food prices by up to 75%. The United States is the biggest offender with its huge corn ethanol subsidies but our Government has just introduced the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation which will mean Britons are forced to burn large amounts of what could otherwise be food in their cars, driving up prices.

The Common Agricultural Policy. High import tariffs keep out foreign competition and push up prices.

Motoring taxes. Transporting food for production or to market is more costly when petrol prices are high. Taxes constitute two thirds of the price of petrol and, therefore, have a significant impact on the cost of bringing food from the field to the plate.

Excessive food safety regulations. Christopher Booker and Richard North, in their recent book, describe how many companies involved in producing food have been crippled by excessive or unjustified regulation. This reduces competition and will push up prices.

Energy taxes and regulations. At various stages in the process producing many foodstuffs uses substantial amounts of energy. Government regulations, such as the Renewables Obligation, increase the price of energy and therefore further drive up the cost of food. Ofgem estimate that green regulations make up 8% of the average household electricity bill and they will make a substantial contribution to industrial energy costs as well.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Lord Phillips

2008-07-06T01:38:00.004+01:00

Who are these grey men? These tired souls who occupy such senior positions in our establishment with nothing but relativist defeat in their hearts.

I seem to have my stages of grief all out of order. The Archbishop's call for Sharia drove me to rage. The Lord Chief Justice's comments are merely depressing. He has endorsed Williams' post-backpedal position that Sharia should be used as a form of mediation for financial and marital disputes. He makes many of the mistakes I described in my initial response to the Archbishop; giving heart to Islamists and failing to understand that offering 'Muslim' and British options to British Muslim women is, for far too many, not to offer a free choice at all.

The cost of crime

2008-07-04T15:43:00.004+01:00

Today a new report I've written titled The Cost of Crime (PDF) has been released. It uses Home Office studies of the national cost of crime, and their estimates of the average cost per incident, along with crime statistics provided by police forces in response to Freedom of Information requests (unfortunately...).

It follows on from a paper (PDF) released during the mayoral race with calculations for the London boroughs but expands coverage to the entire country. The results are shown on a map to the right (darker = worse, blue = no usable response). The clearest pattern is that urban areas suffer the worst cost of crime.

I think the link between various behaviours (likelihood of driving to work is another example) and population density is both obvious and underappreciated. Greens trying to get people out of cars would, if they looked at the numbers, quickly have to conclude that the obvious solution is to move everyone into cities. Yet, that isn't exactly a proposal you'll hear a lot of.

The cost of recorded crime, £275 per person, discovered by our study is high enough that the even the low crime areas, like Surrey at £194 should clearly be aiming to cut crime rates; particularly when you remember that recorded crime is thought to be just a fraction of total crime. Direct, democratic control of police forces needs to be put in place so that the police can spend their time fighting crime rather than trying to satisfy the bureaucracy. For more on the subject either read the report or see this video produced for Friction TV:

John Redwood, coal and co-operatives

2008-07-02T10:35:00.004+01:00

I had a bit of a debate with Chris Dillow (a lot of my posts at the moment seem to involve responding to Chris, this might continue while Comment is Free is on an even weaker than usual streak) a while back about large firms, co-operatives and the divide between them. There are two points he made that I meant to respond to:

"It is true that big firms are typically publically quoted. But this is because they have huge capital requirements which can only be met by external shareholders. But these are only a minority of all firms."

Absolutely. My argument is that the questions of whether a firm should be owned by workers and whether they should be run by managers have more than one right answer. Big firms with senior managers are not inherently irrational and the products of egos and ideologies, as Chris has sometimes implied.

Also:

"And what Matthew hasn't done is successfully controvert the idea that public services - schools and hospitals - should become some type of co-operative organizations."

That's the last thing I'd want to do. Schools, in particular, seem fine candidates to be operated as co-operatives (with a relatively low capital requirement). I don't think I'm the only right-winger who is quite willing to endorse the co-operative model when it seems successful, here's John Redwood writing today on the coal industry:

"Some looked nostalgically back to the age of the nationalised industry, without any great belief that the present Labour government would want to revisit that approach. It is curious how nationalisation still has a grip on their hearts, when the nationalised industry under governments of both parties so let down the mining communities. The 1970s Labour government was in the business of closing mines and sacking miners, just as the subsequent Conservative government was. Each of those governments did so on the advice and at the command of the nationalised industry, which systematically failed to make mining economic enough to sustain a decent sized industry in the UK.

The miners of Tower Colliery proved the Coal Board wrong when they took over their mine and worked it profitably when the Coal Board management had wanted to close it on the grounds that it was uneconomic. Why would we want to go back to management like that? Isn’t the future a more mechanised, safer industry where those who mine the coal share in the profits?"

The question of how a firm should be organised, not to mention why they exist in the first place, is interesting and the answer varies with circumstances. Firms are organised in different ways in response to differing technologies, resource endowments, capital requirements, labour markets, consumer tastes and government regulations - among other things. The best instincts of an economic liberal scream at them to love the sheer variety of it all.

James McGrath

2008-07-01T20:17:00.005+01:00

I think Sunny Hundal and Chris Dillow have this wrong. Racists do tell people to go home, and they are being racist when they do so, but that does not mean that everyone who says "well, leave then" is being racist.

Chris argues that only certain groups (and the implication is, certain races) are ever told that they should leave:

"When Melanie Phillips bemoans Britain’s moral decay, no-one replies: “well go to Israel then”. And this would be a foul thing to say."

I can come up with another example: sensible lefties wouldn't tell Milton Friedman, in exasperated tones, to just move to Hong Kong.

Chris draws the implication that the divide is a racist one:

"In applying the meme so selectively, the impression is created that some people are less than full members of society - that their ties to the country are weak, and that they wouldn’t be missed if they left. This is certainly inegalitarian."

I don't think the divide is always based on race. Here are a couple of groups that I have definitely heard told "if you don't like it, just leave":

The rich. I have definitely heard lefties say, when it is argued that businesses and the wealthy may move abroad in the face of higher taxes, that they should just leave. The Toynbee Tendency.
Commies. Plenty of middle class, white Socialists were told "why don't you just move to Russia" by enthusiastic conservatives.

It isn't a divide based on race but whether the person's complaint is felt to be legitimate. While - as Chris Dillow says - a politician should want to appeal to all their constituents sometimes someone just seems a little too unreasonable. Now, applying that to entire races and writing them off as you have no interest in reconciling them with your country and beliefs could be described as racist but McGrath definitely isn't doing that. See the context:

"McGrath was far from politically correct, David-Cameron-new-cuddly-Conservative Party, when I pointed out to him a critical comment of Voice columnist Darcus Howe that the election of “Boris Johnson, a right-wing Conservative, might just trigger off a mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants back to our homelands”.

He retorted: “Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.” McGrath dismissed influential race commentator Howe as ‘shrill’."

He isn't writing off any actual ethnic group at all. The people he has no desire to appeal to aren't actual Carribean migrants but the hypothetical group summoned up by Darcus Howe who can no longer stand to live in London for no reason other than the election of a right-wing Conservative. It isn't him who has conjured up the idea that non-whites and right-wingers just can't get along but Howe.

McGrath isn't writing off ethnic minorities - he's simply exasperated by Darcus Howe's suggestion that ethnic minorities write off right-wingers. He isn't a racist, wasn't saying anything racist and shouldn't have been fired.

The conspiracy to coerce British Muslim women

2008-06-30T21:07:00.002+01:00

This article (via DK), from the Telegraph, is based on warnings from the spokesman on forced marriages for the Association of Chief Police Officers and is absolutely horrifying. It sets out the range of ways in which unfortunate women, normally of Pakistani descent, are trapped by their families, communities and the public services that should protect them into relationships that at best they do not want and at worst are incredibly abusive.

Recently the Washington Post ran an incredible article about the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's attempts to prevent British citizens essentially being abducted into marriages in Pakistan. It alerted me to the scale of a problem that I had always assumed was far rarer:

"The Forced Marriage Unit operates out of an office on the edge of Trafalgar Square in London and rescues hundreds of women every year. Many of the 4,000 calls it receives each year involve cases in the United Kingdom, but the
unit has diplomats in embassies around the world on standby for overseas rescues.

[...]

The teenage girl sat in Salimi's office, wearing a black niqab that covered everything but her sad brown eyes.

"I don't want to hide; I want to be free, open," she said in a pronounced Scottish accent. She said she usually wears jeans.

Lowering her niqab enough to reveal her long, dark hair and pretty earrings, she said she is scared of her family. Her brothers, she said, had already beaten up one of her friends because of her, and she believed they would kill her for shaming the family.

"My father would shoot me before letting me go," she said. "My parents say things are screwed up in the U.K., so they want me to marry a guy from here, who doesn't drink and smoke."

"My boyfriend is even a Muslim and from Pakistan, but they don't accept him," she continued. "I am British, but I am Pakistani, too. But why shouldn't I get to decide whom I marry?"

She looked tired, and she bent over several times complaining of stomach cramps. The pressure of recent days had been too much.

"I have left everyone, everything," she said. "I have not been a bad person to anyone. I don't know why this happened to me."

4,000 (reported) cases a year from a relatively small population is a huge issue. The threat of violence and the huge social sanctions within their community attached to resisting and going to the police must make this incredibly difficult to police and mean that many (quite possibly most) cases are not reported at all. If we assume that the estimate that there are 1.6 million Muslims in the UK is accurate, that half of those are women and the problem is underreported by half (that is almost certainly a massive underestimate of the number of unreported cases) then there is 1 case for every 100 Muslim women every year; an astonishingly high rate.

What must make things so much harder, and is so disgraceful, is that some women are being placed in this situation by doctors who breach their confidence:

"Cmdr Allen, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "GPs will tell fathers their daughter has seen them and is on the pill. That can get a girl killed."

Then, when they brave shunning and a threat of violence from their families and communities to try and escape, they then have to fear the police returning them to their tormentors:

"Shahien Taj, director of the Cardiff-based women's group The Henna Foundation, said: "Recently I had a case in Birmingham of a woman who said she can't trust the police because nine times she had run away and nine times the police returned her to her family where she got abused. Fortunately ACPO are now addressing this kind of problem openly and trying to do something about it."

And, the Job Centre using their National Insurance number and other data to help family track them across the country:

"Cmdr Allen also told The Sunday Telegraph that Job Centre workers have accessed the National Insurance details of women who flee violent husbands, tracing where they collect benefits and passing the details on to their families so they can be found and forced back to their marital home."

As if we needed more reason to distrust the argument that "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide" with respect to big government databases.

The final result is:

"Cmdr Allen said: "We have too many areas where people don't believe this is an issue for them. But we are seeing situations across the country where victims, who are at extreme risk, are being moved to another part of the country, away from their home towns, by their families. "We also are talking here about bounty hunters and professional killers being used to track down relatives and these people are going to be killed. This is about child protection, human rights and young people having their lives destroyed and all too often being murdered because they dared to love with their heart."

I'm sorry I haven't added much to these stories but they seemed worth sharing even if I didn't have much to contribute.

What is a nation state good for?

2008-06-27T16:34:00.004+01:00

Chris Dillow asks a good question.

After all, most sensible Britons are localists now. Confident that significant amounts of power currently in the hands of the central state should be handed back to individuals or local communities. On the other hand, the tranzis want to remove substantial amounts of authority for 'bigger' problems out to supranational institutions (a mistake, in my view, but that's beside the point of this post). For what activity is the nation state suited? Are we just clinging to them out of status quo bias?

My answer would be that nation states are the best ultimate guarantor of individual rights.

Nation states are better at that task than local communities. The relatively dense social networks of local communities - while an asset in other areas - make them too easy to bias and sway unfairly. By contrast, as nation states are bigger even if one dense social network does take over (a family, for example) there is more likely to be a sufficient number of other people who can control them. Even when Britain was ruled by an aristocracy they were kept in significant check by the knowledge that there was a great mass of Britons out there who could only be pushed so far. A genuine tyranny of the majority usually involves too many people to really hold together.

Nation states are also better at defending rights than supranational organisations. Those organisations lack legitimacy as they lack history and have, instead, been superimposed on better established communities. A nation state's legitimacy is rooted in its history and, usually, a common stand against some adversity (wars build nations as well as destroying them). Supranational institutions never have that as they are superimposed and never command enough loyalty to take a serious common stand against serious adversity.

While people do appeal to the European Court if they think there is a slim chance they'll get the 'right' answer no Briton really expects that the EU is where they should appeal for help if they are being mistreated. Most important rights cases are decided by British courts. When there is a supranational input (such as the ECHR) it is resented and enjoys little popular support. By contrast, despite China having a much larger population and the current regime being even less democratic than the EU Beijing is still where a Chinese person with a grievance will take his or her petition. This has carried on through decades of Communism to the astonishment of outsiders. That means that China is a legitimate authority where the EU is not, even if China is currently run in an undemocratic way.

What that purpose means is that a nation state should be bigger than any one local community but seen as a natural authority to appeal to if your rights are infringed. Of course, that means nations can fail, in light of my definition of their purpose, for two reasons:

1) They become captured by a certain group within the nation who fail to respect the rights of other citizens.

2) They are not seen as a legitimate authority to appeal to if your rights are infringed.

It also means that those who bash nationalism out of a cosmopolitan sense of superiority are playing with fire. If I'm right, and nations are the best guarantors of rights, undermining nationalism risks creating a very dangerous world.

Bob Ayling

2008-06-26T17:10:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure if I have a clear answer to the question of whether Heathrow should expand. There is a reasonable case to be made that Heathrow itself might not be the ideal place to expand. However, I have no sympathy whatsoever for hysterical and joyless campaigns against flying itself and am well convinced that more capacity in the region is necessary. As such, the proper question is whether you have a feasible alternative in mind. Vague speculation about new airports in Kent just isn't good enough. No responsible conservative should make the same mistake Labour made over energy and road building; using green politics as an excuse for failing to confront difficult questions until a crisis is at hand.

The coalition opposing the new runway is an uncomfortable one. It is split between those wanting new airport capacity elsewhere so they do not have to face aircraft noise and those who want to inconvenience people into taking fewer flights. If the Conservatives oppose the runway they will have to, if they form a government, dissapoint one of the two groups who will either resent poor service and delays at the airport or accuse them of green heresy. Opposing the third runway without a clear alternative, set out in advance, is risky.

What really worries me is the possibility that the party is taking Bob Ayling's opinion on the matter seriously:

"The Conservatives have moved more firmly against a third runway after the former BA chief, Bob Ayling, came out against the big increase in transfer passenger[s] for causing "Heathrow hassle"."

The man responsible for the disastrous 'dirty tricks' campaign against Virgin, the ethnic tailfins which infuriated British and North American customers alike and a failed merger with American Airlines. He was then forced to resign as head of the company running Millenium Dome because of a poor performance controlling costs. He's the private sector's answer to Sir John Gieve.

The great fashion divide and Thorstein Veblen

2008-06-25T00:02:00.004+01:00

Each day my computer starts up and MSN tells me what's really important. Today, I'm getting "30 skills every man should master", "Wimbledon fashion" and "Boy falls into wolf enclosure" among others.

Yesterday (a few hours ago), one of the pieces highlighted Sadie Nicholas, writing in the Daily Mail, arguing that there is a North-South fashion divide and that Northerners dress more glamorously. Her evidence is largely anecdotal and it's all pretty complex but her article, roughly, boils down to these two paragraphs:

"And the key differences between women in the North and their fellow fashion lovers in the South-East?

'In London,' says Justine, 'women will dress down their Louboutin heels with skinny jeans or leggings and less-is-more hair and make-up, which they see as being very cool.

'In Liverpool, that would be criminal: the girls here make sure the rest of their outfit is as glam as the shoes themselves.

[...]

My own view is that Northerners are finally asserting themselves when it comes to what they wear. We love glamour and we're no longer afraid to flaunt it."

Funnily enough, I've recently come across a theory that can explain this, a refinement of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Here is Virginia Postrel, setting out that the 'bling' phenomenon isn't illusory - despite being poorer African Americans do spend more of their income on clothes, cars and jewelry - and explaining why.

"On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

[...]

"So the researchers went back to Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption. Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. “The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote. Along these lines, the economists hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove."

There we go, an explanation!

Northerners are, on average, significantly poorer than Southerners, particularly Londoners, and people generalise and assume they all "get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work".

The signal that dressing glamorously sends is, therefore, more valuable to Northerners.

Why I do not want Obama to win

2008-06-24T00:49:00.004+01:00

Douglas Carswell writes that he wants Obama to win. I find the idea horrifying and think that McCain would make a far better President. I'll try to set out why by going through Obama's positives, as set out by Douglas and, earlier, Dan Hannan and then briefly discussing McCain's negatives before describing what I see as the big divide between Obama and McCain.

Arguments for Obama

Douglas argues that Obama's refusal of public money to fund his campaign should count heavily in his favour:

"Does Obama believe in small government? As with McCain, I really don't know. But I do know that last week he became the first Presidential candidate since Nixon to refuse public money to fund his campaign.

Instead of relying on State handouts, Obama's campaign will be funded by millions of people each giving small on-line donations. In the primaries alone, the $133 million spent came via 1.5 million web donors. That's less than $100 each.

Sounds pretty Edmund Burke.com to me."

I think that the motive this implies just isn't there. Obama originally committed to take public funding and accept limitations on his fundraising but changed his mind when his campaign proved better able to raise funds than expected. We shouldn't - as some Republicans are - get in a hissy fit about his u-turn, to expect him to hobble his campaign out of some sense of chivalry would be silly, but it is clearly not an act of Burkean principle. McCain is dreadful on campaign finance reform but his differences with Obama are only as old as Obama's fundraising success. As such, I don't see how this can be a critical issue unless you think, and I guess Douglas does, that there aren't significant other issues that make McCain the better candidate.

Dan Hannan's suggestion that electing Obama would be a great idea because it will repair America's reputation is unrealistic. America's friends are dismayed by foreign policy incompetence and there is little sign that Obama will improve things on that front. America's enemies take their hatred of the country rather too seriously to be convinced by the election of a black man. Those Europeans impressed by Obama's election will return to their anti-American ways the first time he makes a decision that doesn't fit their tranzi agenda (if he doesn't make such a decision we have bigger problems). There is also the rather unfortunate likelihood that if Obama is elected it will probably be with a white majority voting against him (the Republicans usually have a majority among whites) which will be prime fodder for the US bashing BBC and America's domestic race industry.

The problems with McCain

McCain's support for the EPP is lamentable and foolish. American right wingers have long assumed that a more united Europe, and a more united European right, will make both easier to rally as allies for the United States. Only now are they realising their error; that submerging proud nations in transnationalist, supranational slush makes them weaker in themselves and as allies. Fortunately, the EPP is one issue on which the American President doesn't really have much influence. The question doesn't come up for Obama so a comparison is hard to draw. McCain's soundness on the UN suggests that his instincts are in the right place on the tranzi institutions, even if his judgement is out on the EU. I don't think that the issue can be critical to our assessment of McCain as a Presidential candidate.

McCain has been on the left of the Republican Party on a host of issues such as tax cuts but, with our current binary choice, that is pretty irrelevant. As the debate stands right now he is the one defending the Bush tax cuts and calling for a ten per cent cut in corporate tax rates. That ten per cent corporate tax cut would do great things for America's competitiveness and might even finally convince our politicians that the time has come for serious tax cuts. To describe McCain as "high tax and spend" in that context is bizarre. In fact, I think that the corporate tax cut proposal already puts sufficient clear blue water between McCain and Obama to justify supporting the Republican.

The big difference between McCain and Obama

I'll largely leave aside foreign policy as I don't want to talk past Douglas. Suffice it to say that I think McCain's suggestion Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term has an awful plausibility to it. On a broad range of domestic policy issues Obama has proven himself a friend of protectionist, big state special interests while McCain has shown admirable economically liberal principle. Of course, the big example is the attack on NAFTA but here are a few you might not have heard of:

Agriculture subsidies

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, summed up a new bill ramping up agriculture subsidies: "The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest." The bill was so bad, such pure pork, that it attracted bipartisan scorn in the press; the New York Times called it "disgraceful" and the Wall Street Journal called it a "scam". Despite that the bill passed with Obama's support. By contrast, Brooks sets out how "John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: “It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it." Quite right.

Class action reform

This may seem like a minor issue but it matters a lot in the States where their class action system is wide open to abuse. Ted Frank, at the American Enterprise Institute, sets out the problem and Obama's dismal response:

"CAFA came about because trial lawyers had been abusing the class action mechanism by filing dozens of class actions in different states seeking to certify a nationwide class. In a game of "heads I win, tails don't count," if the trial lawyers lost in one jurisdiction, they would merely proceed with an identical lawsuit in a more favorable jurisdiction until they found a judge receptive enough to sign on to the most meritless of lawsuits.

As a consequence, the notoriously plaintiff-friendly Madison County, Illinois, ended up with hundreds of lawsuits seeking to dictate consumer law nationwide, and defendants were forced into countless extortionate settlements.

CAFA simply undid this upside-down federalism by establishing that lawsuits alleging a nationwide class belonged in a single federal court rather than the most favorable magnet jurisdiction in state court that trial lawyers could find.

This is entirely sensible good-government legislation, which is why the bill passed by such a large margin. But the bill passed in the form it did in spite of Obama's efforts, not because of them.

While CAFA was under consideration, Senators Ted Kennedy, D-MA, Mark Pryor, D-AR and Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, proposed amendments that would have eviscerated CAFA; Senator Feinstein's proposed amendment likely ran afoul of constitutional due process requirements set forth by the Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision in 1985. Each amendment failed by large bipartisan majorities, supported only by Democrats; each time, Obama voted with the trial lawyer lobby.

These votes were not outliers. Obama also voted to filibuster medical malpractice reform and to kill an asbestos reform bill in 2006, each time providing a critical vote for a minority of senators that blocked tort reforms from achieving a three-fifths supermajority. That is hardly reaching across the aisle, much less showing a willingness to flout a Democratic special interest."

The U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Here's one "change" presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently believes in: higher prices. Witness his letter last week urging President George W. Bush not to submit the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement to Congress for ratification.

Mr. Obama's objection, as stated in his letter, is that the deal "would give Korean exports essentially unfettered access to the U.S. market and would eliminate our best opportunity for obtaining genuinely reciprocal market access in one of the world's largest economies." In other words, ordinary American consumers would get too good a deal.

For an idea of how good, look at automobiles, about which Mr. Obama professes particular concern. The free-trade agreement would eliminate America's 2.5% tariff on most Korean car imports. Even better, it would phase out the 25% tariff on pick-ups and light trucks. Overall, the Korean trade deal would boost the U.S. economy by $10 billion to $12 billion.

Mr. Obama thinks this benefit to U.S. consumers isn't worth the risk that South Korea might not live up to its promise to eliminate its own 8% tariff on U.S. autos and cut its bewildering array of nontariff barriers, such as arcane safety standards. This despite the fact that the deal includes enforcement provisions if Korea backtracks.

On the record so far, Mr. Obama is the most protectionist U.S. presidential candidate in decades."

Conclusion

In the end, economic hard times reveal two kinds of politicians. On the one hand there are those who will offer the fools gold of endless subsidies and protections from foreign competition to buy the support of particular communities and industries. The subsidies distort the economy and hurt the chances of a genuine, lasting recovery while protectionism makes most people significantly worse off. On the other side there are those, Margaret Thatcher being the most brilliant example, who make the case for real reforms that can improve the long term prospects of the economy.

In the coming US election Obama is the protectionist throwing subsidies at interest groups, McCain is the reformer promising aggresive action to curb wasteful and distorting subsidies while cutting corporate tax rates. With that choice, I'll support McCain without hesitation.

Re: The Wisdom of Crowds

2008-06-24T00:38:00.001+01:00

Two points on Peter and Peter's debate on whether the Observer poll suggests that crowds are wise. First, on the philosophical debate, Peter Franklin says:

"I'm concerned that the wisdom of crowds meme, like some crowds, is getting out of control. Obviously, anyone who believes in democracy has to have trust in his or her fellow citizens; but surely, as Conservatives, we should also expect a degree of trust in those who, by virtue of merit, can speak with authority in certain fields of human endeavour." [emphasis mine]

Why? That sounds like pretty much the opposite of what we should believe as conservatives. Whether it is Burke calling for caution to those who would set our private stock of reason above age old traditions, Hayek describing the importance of dispersed information or the religious among us who prefer age old moral wisdom to contemporary theory. Sometimes we might need to set conservatism to one side but it is not an ideology that should ever imply trusting experts and their 'authority'.

While science has a good record of delivering technological advances and pushing the boundaries of the human experience that does not mean that the opinions of scientists should always be taken at face value. A fascinating report for the International Policy Network by Professor Jim Chin shows how the prevalence of AIDS was massively overstated by UNAIDS, leading to poor targetting of the response; a mistake they are only now, in the face of overwhelming evidence, accepting. UNAIDS had a noble goal, trying to increase the resources available to combat AIDS, and their bias was probably not conscious but their errors clearly demonstrate how science can be distorted once it is enlisted to a political movement like environmentalism. Of course, that doesn't mean we should discount scientific opinion, just that we cannot concede our judgement on such important matters to scientists alone.

One final point, I thought Mori's poll was desperately shoddy. The proper question to test whether the public think the sceptics are a significant group isn't really whether they believe that "many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change". That humans are making no contribution isn't the position of most scientific sceptics. Also, the "still" is leading. If you asked some variant of whether "many [or most] scientific experts argue that the amount of climate change we should expect human activities to cause will not be enough to constitute a 'crisis'" that might be more meaningful.

Sign the petition to abandon the Constitution

2008-06-17T17:25:00.002+01:00

Neil O'Brien and Richard North have set up a petition calling on the government to, after the one country given a vote rejected the treaty, abandon the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. Sign it, get everyone you know to sign it.

Just because this Labour government have ignored the people's clear wishes on this matter so many times already doesn't mean we should stop making our opinion heard, loud and clear. The best way I've ever heard political campaigning summed up is Chris DeMuth's think tank slogan: "No one knows when the Berlin Wall will come down." There is always room for surprises in politics.

Besides, even if we can't stop this treaty we can make the process as painful as possible and, perhaps, turn a few politicos off the idea of further ceding power to undemocratic EU institutions.

Caroline Lucas and international capitalism

2008-06-17T13:51:00.003+01:00

Tim Worstall's blog is invariably excellent but this post is great even by his high standards.

Is wave power worth £15 billion?

2008-06-17T13:26:00.001+01:00

The Independent on Sunday reports that David Cameron is to propose greater use of wave power:

"Mr Cameron will say: "Britain's coastline is over 1,000 miles long and has some of the highest tidal ranges in the world. Tapping into this free, continually renewed energy source could, according to some research, provide us with up to 20 per cent of our electricity supplies."

While we aren't charged for waves tapping their power has very significant costs. It is possible to perform a back of the envelope calculation to work out just how much it would cost to shift 20 per cent of our electricity generation from coal, gas and nuclear to wave.

Energy consultancy PB Power estimate (PPT, pg. 20) that wave power costs around 19p per KWh more than conventional sources. Multiplying that by 20% of our 405,884 GWh of electricity generation each year (PDF, pg. 126) suggests that in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, such a switch would have cost £15.4 billion. That's around 1.2% of GDP, a bit under half the defence budget or a crossrail every year. An absolute fortune.

Now, that cost is necessarily a rough estimate - here are some of the factors that might push the cost higher or lower:

If we're building that much capacity the technology would likely develop and become more efficient, we would get better practiced at deploying it. This might mean costs would be lower than expected.

Public projects tend to wind up more expensive than the government expect, the official term for this is 'optimism bias'. We studied the problem in our report Beyond the Dome: Government projects £23 billion over budget (PDF) and found projects, on average, net over budget by one third. This might mean costs would be higher than expected.

A major UK investment in wave power, a relatively small industry at present, would constitute a huge upward demand shock and, as supply would take time to respond, push up prices for the equipment needed to tap wave power. Again, this might mean costs would be higher than expected.

Generating a substantial portion of the UK's total electricity needs from wave power would probably not be possible without moving to suboptimal sites. Parts of the coast where it is difficult to install the equipment or wave power is weak would have to be used once the best locations were taken up. This is another factor which might make wave power even more expensive if it were implemented on a large scale.

If present policies for subsidising renewable power are maintained then it won't just be the cost itself but who is paying it that we will need to worry about. The Renewables Obligation, the main source of subsidy for renewables, increases the price of energy which means that the people who suffer most are the poor elderly who spend a large portion of their income keeping their homes warm.

While many sources of power can, theoretically, provide a large portion of the UK's power needs no renewable has yet proven an ability to supply a large portion of our demand for electricity at an affordable price.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Copayment ban to be scrapped

2008-06-14T15:00:00.003+01:00

It looks like we are going to see the end of restrictions on copayment (via Tim Worstall). That is absolutely brilliant news, for reasons I've set out at length before. It's a real shame that it has taken this long, and comes too late for some patients. However, all credit to Doctors for Reform who have fought the issue very effectively. This section from the Telegraph article suggests their work was key:

"But in recent weeks they are understood to have been persuaded that the NHS already contains “top ups”, particularly in dentistry and in some hospitals, where patients can pay for private rooms."

Such a change of heart may well have something to do with this research (PDF).

Might the Westminster village have the politics of 42 days detention wrong?

2008-06-14T12:42:00.002+01:00

Most of SW1 thinks David Davis' resignation over the issue of 42 days detention was a huge political mistake. The Government's position is popular with the public and Davis has shifted the debate to one of the few areas where Brown is in tune with ordinary people. The Conservatives won't be allowed near government if they aren't seen to take the nation's security seriously.

On the other hand, Tim, and many others, have made the point that at every opportunity the public seem to be noisily expressing their support for the former Shadow Home Secretary. If there is a silent majority it is keeping very quiet indeed.

What polling evidence we have suggests that SW1 is right. A YouGov poll suggests that 69% of the public support the proposal. That's a mountain of opinion, I can't see anything much wrong with the poll and YouGov are by far the most reliable UK pollster.

However, that might not be the end of the story. After all, when the question is asked by YouGov it is rightly and necessarily removed from its political context. I doubt people have a particularly strong opinion on 42 days in particular - they just, quite understandably, want to see the Government strengthen policy to combat terrorism. They would give a positive answer to a broad range of tough security policies.

The issue is that the debate hasn't, and won't, remain that abstract. The choice voters are actually presented with is a debate between a Government they loathe and utterly distrust and a Conservative Party that is not just popular right now but is generally better trusted on security issues. Just as the Conservative brand used to taint a broad range of policies the public now distrust a Government they long to be rid of. While other narratives will be presented, when voters see a Conservative ex-SAS man resigning on a point of principle in order to defend "Ancient" "British" "liberties" squaring off against a grubby government their earlier opinion on 42 days might quickly go out of the window. They'll see the Government, rather than the Conservatives, as the ones not taking security "seriously".

Whether or not this is actually happening or SW1 is right and a silent majority resent Davis' opposition to 42 says will be difficult to ascertain. Headling voting intention poll numbers won't necessarily tell us anything while the Tory lead is so huge; Labour are down to their loyalists now. Movements of a few percentage points in the Government's favour could be the result of some traditional Labour voters returning to the fold as the furore over the 10p rate dies down, ready to abandon ship again when the V.E.D. changes kick in, rather than the 42 days debate.

I think that the only thing that we can say with much certainty about the politics of 42 days is that the Conservatives will have to establish that their opposition is to this measure in particular, and that they have robust plans of their own to defend Britain against our enemies.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

Baby steps towards educational freedom

2008-06-13T10:12:00.000+01:00

The Times reports that successful schools are going to be given the right to expand a little. This will mean more places in successful schools and a bit more pressure on poor performing schools to up their game. Unfortunately, schools have only been allowed an extremely limited amount of new freedom.

Expansion is still severely limited. Being allowed "up to 26 extra pupils a year above their official limit" does not leave a lot of room to grow.

More than that, this only allows schools freedom in one direction. The Government have now gone some way towards accepting the principle that the right response to a shortage places at the best schools is to ensure their are more such places, instead of dreaming up new ways of rationing quality education. Why are they restricting educational freedom to the expansion of existing schools?

There are good reasons to think that the best schools are small ones. By only allowing good schools to expand we might put them in the unfortunate conundrum of either staying small and not offering opportunities to more children or expanding and risking their standards. A better solution might be for new schools to be established. Beyond that, why are we assuming that the best providers of new school places are necessarily existing schools?

What if a business can run a great school effectively, or a co-operative of teachers, or an existing school wants to support a new institution in some kind of franchise arrangement? A successful innovation system would encourage a diversity of providers and real innovation in the way schools are run. Swedish-style school reforms can put power over the education system in the hands of parents and allow any organisation to set up a new school and respond to parental demand.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

The 42 days detention without trial debate

2008-06-11T21:32:00.001+01:00

David Davis was absolutely superb today. Completely in command of his speech and extremely well prepared for the questions. I found him very convincing and, to my mind, he had the case for 42 days detention thoroughly beat. I think the Conservatives were on the right side and I'm glad that they had exactly the right man for the job making their case.

What made it even better was that he clearly wasn't out to strike poses. He constantly reminded his own side to take their opponents' arguments seriously instead of heckling. He gave no quarter in the debate but engaged with those supporting the Government position without rancour. I don't want to be a mushy hippy - making Barney the purple dinosaur's speech at the next Bloomberg Nonpartisanship Symposium - but, when you're arguing against a position supported by a heavy majority of the public for the very credible reason that they want to strengthen the fight against terrorism, it pays to be respectful.

It is a real shame that the blogs can't do the same. Those commenting on the PMQs live blog screamed in incoherent rage that Tim had betrayed the tribe. Apparently independent thinking cannot be allowed when it might aid the enemy - how liberal!

Now it's the DUP who are getting it. I think we should be more careful. If they have decided this on the basis of a bribe then that is a bit shoddy. The dead hand of the state is already weighing more than heavily enough in Northern Ireland. A little more subsidy isn't worth deciding such an important issue over. However, the £200 million is currently nothing more than rumour and coincidence. Fiscal decisions relevant to Northern Ireland are made all the time and siding with the Government now would be a questionable strategy for a rent-seeker. It is hardly necessary to contruct a conspiracy theory to explain why they voted for this measure. They've been on the front lines in an earlier War on Terror, at huge personal risk, for a very long time.

If those insulting them and putting their support for 42 days detention without trial down to venality are wrong they risk pissing off some good members of the conservative coalition to little end.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

The Stockholm Network: Carbon Scenarios

2008-06-10T11:32:00.001+01:00

Yesterday evening I went to see the presentation of the Stockholm Network research project Carbon Scenarios (PDF). I was, to put it mildly, horrified.

I’ll do a thematic summary, instead of a blow-by-blow as it’ll make things easier. First, a word on the speakers:

Everyone on the panel was a part of the process that created the report. No one spoke for moderate policies, or against targeting cuts in emissions. There was no significant disagreement between the speakers and no suggestion they were merely given a platform by the Stockholm Network. They were all presenting the report they worked on, as a group.

Helen Disney, the Stockholm Network CEO, chaired the event.

Paul Domjan, Energy Fellow at the Stockholm Network, was clearly the main guy behind the research project.

Hardin Tibbs, Dr. James Keirstead and Dr. Swenja Surminski all seemed to be pretty harmless and largely kept their views to themselves except on narrow methodological issues. Surminski was the only one to suggest that the alarmism might be a bit overblown; she cautioned Mark Lynas and Oliver Tickell, when they started ranting about fire and brimstone in response to a question from me about cost/benefit analysis, that they might put the public off. Those two were the off the deep-end alarmists.

The step change policy

They argue that a “step change”, with vastly more commitment to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, provides for the best plausible climate change policy. They set out a few ingredients of such a policy:

Global limits to hydrocarbon extraction. The limit should be applied as close to the source as possible to make the scheme easier to monitor and administer. The permits should be auctioned by a Climate Security Task Force under the United Nations Environment Programme.

Use the proceeds from the auction to fund a series of things:

Compensating some countries for lost income under the scheme.

Supporting adaptation.

Supporting technology transfer – e.g. alternative power sources.

This is extremely worrying in a number of ways. It is clearly alarmist. The kind of dramatic, short-term carbon cutting regime that invariably fails any serious cost-benefit analysis.

As it is a cap and trade scheme it takes no account of the opportunity costs associated with massive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. If cutting carbon dioxide emissions by the amount required will completely decimate the economy – far more than can be justified in order to cut emissions – the economy will be left to go hang as the emissions have been capped. There is none of the flexibility allowed by other policies to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Beyond that, it invests huge economic power in a supranational organisation with little democratic accountability. The UN Environment Programme would have a huge amount of money (it could quite plausibly be trillions of dollars) to distribute under this plan – it would make the EU’s structural funds (never cleared by the Court of Auditors) look impoverished. That is an economic power that has never been vested in a supranational body before. Given the record of the UN and EU in descending into a pit of sleaze and mismanagement at every opportunity there is little reason to think that money would be spent well.

The UNEP is given all this money because of “the importance of wealth transfer”. A question they never quite answer is quite who the money is being transferred from, and who it is being transferred to. The answer is from the relatively poor in the rich and poor worlds, as they consume the most energy as a share of their income, to corrupt governments who demand a bribe to stay in the system and anyone who can sell their ‘project’ to the UNEP. This is a massive opportunity for special interests and the corrupt and, with little accountability at the supranational level, they’ll take it.

“It’s the consensus”

I skimmed Carbon Scenarios at the start looking for $, € and £. That’s normally the quickest way of finding the estimates that should mark any serious policy proposal. Unfortunately, the only currency I found was in the section setting out the potential safety valve on an American cap and trade policy - $15-$25/tonne apparently. There simply wasn’t any analysis of the costs and benefits of the different plans, except the extent to which they reduced emissions. Culling ninety percent of the human population would count as a ‘success’ under this report’s analysis as it would certainly reduce emissions sufficiently.

I had a lot of questions when the various speakers finished (it was tempting to start with, “do you really want to return to the Stone Age?”). Unfortunately, I was only going to be able to ask one so I went with the safest, most mainstream, one I could. Did they think their policy would fail to pass cost/benefit analysis as other severe policies to cut emissions do under mainstream analyses like that provided by the man the Economist called "the father of climate change economics" Nordhaus?

Domjan, the Stockholm Network’s Energy Fellow, was the first to respond. He basically said that they didn’t want to rehearse the scientific debate (fair enough) and that all the governments had settled on a 90% chance of avoiding more than 3oC in warming so that was the consensus we all had to accept. The problem with that stance is that it defines out of the debate huge swathes of entirely mainstream and respectable opinion; positions that are gaining ground as people prove unwilling to pay ever higher prices for energy. It makes a mockery of their pretence to be trying to start a serious policy debate.

The precautionary principle

Next was Mark Lynas, who cited some of the more extreme predictions out there and stated that it was simply unethical to risk those consequences. He argued that cost/benefit analysis wasn’t appropriate with potential harms that serious. That is, basically, the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle is utterly destructive to both economic liberalism and basic common sense. It can justify anything if you start treating remote possibilities, effectively, as certainties.

Finally, Oliver Tickell repeated Lynas’ alarmism and then added that we can’t rely on the predictions that make a cost/benefit analysis possible. He cited the change in oil prices since last year as evidence that we can’t rely on economic modelling. Unwittingly, he was undermining the entire case put forward by the report. All of their predictions of emissions under different policies and, as a result, all of their predictions about how much the planet might warm are utterly dependent upon economic models. Tickell was so utterly clueless he didn’t realise that, by attacking the reliability of economic modelling, he was attacking the basic foundations of his own side’s arguments. By contrast, while sceptics take economics seriously they are properly cautious about the long-term reliability of both economic and climate modelling.

Domjan nodded on through all this. Does the Stockholm Network’s Energy Fellow really believe in the precautionary principle? Would he apply it in other areas like EU chemicals regulation?

Conclusions

The policy aspirations of the Stockholm Network’s Carbon Scenarios report would be a nightmare. Such policies would mean vast increases in energy costs. If technology cannot deliver emissions reductions at the pace they expect their policies could lead to an economic catastrophe. Huge amounts of money would be channelled from poor people dependent on affordable energy to maintain a decent standard of living to dubious projects and corrupt bureaucracies. It is justified on the basis of every kind of woolly thinking and alarmism that the environmentalist movement has to offer and now public opinion, and increasingly political parties, are moving away from.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

The Tories and the Union Modernisation Fund

2008-06-09T17:40:00.001+01:00

Richard Balfe's call for the Conservatives to maintain the Union Modernisation Fund is utter foolishness:

"When the Government set up the multimillion-pound modernisation fund three years ago for unions to draw upon, the Tories criticised the fund as a payback to the Labour Party’s main source of funding. But they are now debating whether to continue with the fund if they form the next government.

To approve the fund would be departure from the days when Margaret Thatcher was leader and the Conservative Party was partly defined by its antagonism towards the unions. And by forging a relationship with the unions, it could ultimately threaten Labour’s exclusive ties."

This is a bad idea on a number of grounds:

1) Political abuse of taxpayers' money - directing taxpayers' money to secure political advantages is disreputable and erodes public trust in politics. Whether it is the Labour party channelling money to their donors or the Conservatives using the same fund to try and break Labour and the unions apart.

2) Building up structural problems in the public finances - Our report (PDF) on a looming winter of discontent set out how, in the last year, public sector staff have gone on strike 100 times as much as those in the private sector. The unions are holding government to ransom in the knowledge that, playing with other people's money and with little accountability, politicians will often fold in the face of a strike.

Over the medium to long-term this is reducing flexibility and increasing wages in the public sector which will push up costs, make reform more difficult and reduce the chances of taxpayers getting good value for money.

3) Bad politics - In the long term any political party that hopes to advance free-market policies and secure value for taxpayers' money will often clash with unions attached to centralised, big government organisation of the pubic services and after big pay increases for their members. If the Conservatives are really attached to ushering in a post-bureaucratic age and shrinking the state they are likely, sadly, to have to do so in spite of the unions. Maintaining Labour's bung to the unions won't change that.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Britain, America and YouGov

2008-06-08T00:54:00.001+01:00

It is well worth looking into the details (PDF) of the YouGov poll on British and American attitudes that was written up for the Economist. Even the more obvious results are quite interesting. Here are the best headline figures I've found:

The British public are a lot more sensible on environmental policy than the politicians. There is a majority against increasing taxes on petrol, air flights and increasing taxes to subsidise renewable power. However, there is a plurality in favour of nuclear power. If only the public were in charge, if only the demos really ruled Britain!

Britain is a lot less religious than the United States. Democrats are more religious than Conservatives. 53% of Americans see religion as an important part of their lives against just 21% of Britons. 80% of Americans believe there is a God against 39% of Britons (I didn't know Britain had an atheist/agnostic majority). We wouldn't care if the Prime Minister were an atheist, Americans would care if the President were one. Only 30% of Americans think that the theory of evolution is the correct explanation for the origins of life on Earth. It is clear that religion is pretty much spent as a moral force in Britain but I'm not sure we quite take that seriously enough. I don't think, as some American conservatives suggest, that you can't be conservative without being religious. I'm conservative and not religious so clearly it is possible. However, that doesn't mean the death of God isn't a rather big issue, that it creates a new and extremely open contest of values. Perhaps we all need to read some Nietzsche?

Republicans are still stronger than the Conservatives in underlying support. Anyone observing American politics at the moment will have seen that the Republicans are getting completely hammered. By contrast, the Conservatives are on top of the world with massive poll leads. However, 29% of Americans identify themselves as 'Republicans' against 27% of Britons who see themselves as 'Conservatives', both Labour and the Democrats enjoy 34%. This might suggest that, while the Conservative brand has been decontaminated that has yet to feed through into an expansion of the Conservative 'base'. Perhaps that only ever happens slowly?

Americans want their parties to come together and compromise, we don't. 39% of Britons want the two principal parties to come together and compromise against 69% of Americans. Clearly all the agreement in the major British parties over things like fiscal policy actually pisses voters off. By contrast, Americans really are sick of apparent bickering.

We value experience, Americans value character. In Britain 50% think experience is the most important quality in a Prime Minister against 39% who cite character. In American the result is reversed with 63% thinking character is most important. What causes this difference? Is it the lower number of religious people in Britain?

Britons want TV, rather than the church, to teach kids right and wrong. We are significantly less likely to think that religious leaders should teach kids right and wrong but more likely to think TV and movie makers should. People in both countries place the most responsibility on parents.

Britons trust public officials less than Americans do. Apparently our supposedly neutral Civil Service does not engender more public trust than the more politiscised American system. 53% do not trust public officials (civil servants/administrators) much or at all, though they are somewhat more trusted than politicians.

We trust big business leaders more. My understanding was that, unfortunately, the Left's 'fat cat' attack of the nineties worked really well. Business leaders aren't exactly the most popular of people but they're trusted more in Britain than in the States and more than national politicians. They are also admired by 46% of the population, against just 18% who are clear that they do not admire them. The exception is a question on 'excess profits' which more Britons think major companies make.

We are a lot more hostile to immigration and multi-culturalism than Americans. Immigration is the number one issue, with 60% placing it in the top three issues facing Britain today against just 40% of Americans who see it as a top issue. 49% of Britons disagree with the pro-immigration argument that immigration has boosted the economy against just 26% who agree. I do wonder how long the Conservatives can keep up their relatively quiet position on this issue. I'm not saying we should return to talking about nothing else but it is dangerous for such public concern to not be reflected in the political discourse.

We take the UN seriously. 26% of Britons think we should only go to war if the UN approves. Sigh.

We are a lot more pro-free trade. This isn't particularly a surprise but its always nice to see. A majority of Britons think it is a good thing, despite concerns about globalisation.

In both countries three quarters of the population support the death penalty for murderers. This surprised me. I thought that in Britain there now wasn't a majority in either direction.

Mongol

2008-06-07T19:39:00.003+01:00

Genghis Khan is a fascinating character. I first really read his story in the book Genghis Khan by John Man. His impression on history is hard to underestimate. He united a nomadic people and led them to conquer half the world. Despite his empire fragmenting and declining after his death he left behind a Chinese dynasty - no small matter - and a legend for the Mongolian people that lasts to this day.

Thankfully, Mongol doesn't shy away from embracing the legend. It is always tempting for biopics like this to engage in a quixotic attempt to get at the 'real' hero behind the legend. With the passage of centuries having obscured the tracks a historian would need to follow, they can rarely find an adequate replacement for the myth.

In this film the Mongol god provides almost tangible support for Temudjin. Those moments where something truly incredible happens are genuinely ecstatic. If I describe them now I might spoil it but the film conveys a quiet awe that really sucked me in and made miracles seem really miraculous.

The star, a Japanese actor called Tadanobu Asano, handles the challenging role of Genghis Khan with authority, though Temudjin's stern silent act leaves him with only a limited range of visible emotions to play with. The supporting cast are excellent, particularly Honglei Sun, playing Temudjin's blood brother and later adversary, Jamukha. The love story, showing Temudjin's marriage to Borte, has to share the film with Temudjin's rise to become Genghis Khan so never has the space to develop and carry the film as the makers, perhaps, intended it to but it functions well enough to make Temudjin more than just a shouting conqueror.

The photography is spectacular. Behind every scene the steppe is invariably stretching into the distance looking gorgeous and lending a powerful sense of the epic to proceedings. That is fortunate because, except in a limited number of action set pieces, the pace is quite slow. Those action scenes have an incredible kinetic kick but they are too rare for this to really be an action junkie's movie - if you go looking to just cheer on grand battles there won't be enough there.

Instead, sit back and enjoy a luxurious recreation of an incredible legend.

Unity on copayment

2008-06-05T23:17:00.004+01:00

Unity has written one of his trademark ‘if you can make it to the end’ posts on the subject of copayment for healthcare. He basically argues that patients choosing to copay place a significant additional burden on the NHS in return for an uncertain and temporary stay of execution and that Doctors for Reform are a biased group whose agendas the Times should have paid more attention to.

I think he is deeply mistaken at nearly every stage. I’ll try to keep my response concise.

Are patients who wish to copay demanding additional resources from the NHS?

“So that’s the deal that Mills and Hirst are demanding here. They want the NHS to put up £6,000 per month in treatments, which they would have [to] have longside the Avastin for it to have any effect, to enable them to pay out a further £4,000 a month for drug that may or may not extend their lives by a bit, although by how much (on average) no one actually knows for sure although the best guess seems to be a few months, as this 2006 article from the New York Times indicates.”

The logic here is stretched. Look at it the other way. If they have Avastin Mills and Hirst will have a better chance of increasing the number of months they will remain alive if the NHS offers them its standard treatments. That means that they demand continuing treatment instead of accepting palliative care and death. This is an additional demand on the NHS.

If someone has a less severe form of cancer then treatment is more likely to be successful. At a certain cut-off point they are either worth treating or they are not worth treating. One patient could demand more treatment because he is more healthy. Non-smokers, on average, may demand more treatment because they are more likely to demand the expensive care associated with long-term conditions like Alzheimers.

What Mills and Hirst have done is, by buying outside drugs, moved themselves into a category where treatments, made generally available within the NHS, offer them the prospect of additional months of life. If the decision is made on clinical grounds alone then clearly using those treatments universally available, free of charge, in the NHS could be seen to be in their interest. It is an option that the NHS, if all concerns for the full implications of copayment – which I’ll discuss later – were left aside, would offer them.

Mills, Hirst and the others who wish to copay aren’t demanding special treatment. They’re just asking for the same heuristic to be applied to them as to everyone else.

Does copayment for drugs like Avastin constitute an irrational choice?

Unity makes a few arguments on this subject. First, he notes that Avastin does not ‘cure’ cancer:

“Neither of these drugs is a ‘cure’ for cancer, indeed neither one of them will even put the cancers they target into remission. Their sole and only purpose is to delay the spread of secondary cancers that will, inevitably, lead to the death of the patient no matter what.”

This isn’t particularly significant. A great many treatments do not prevent but merely delay death. Above the age of seventy-five mortality is not considered ‘amenable to healthcare’, for example. I don’t mean to be trite but, ultimately, everyone dies. All medical science is a stall that can, at best, delay someone’s death by a reasonable amount of time and ideally make it that another condition administers the coup de grace.

Unity then discusses various evidence that makes clear that the results of these drugs are highly uncertain. That is probably true. That uncertainty clearly makes the expected increase in longevity that the drugs deliver somewhat less valuable. However, it seems that those patients choosing to put substantial money of their own into copayment see an uncertain chance of living a few extra months as preferable to a near certainty of imminent death.

Debates over the quality of evidence used to support the approval of Cetuximab aren’t particularly relevant to this debate. Companies should be held to account for the veracity of their claims about any product through the courts, the threat of damage to their reputation and through regulation. The point of the specific rule against copayment is not to protect people from dodgy sales pitches.

So, is it rational to spend thousands of pounds to gain some uncertain extension to your life, probably just a few months, or are drug companies exploiting the vulnerable and afraid? A practice we would certainly not want to facilitate.

To answer that question I’m going to need to briefly tell the story of a man I know. I’ll leave all the details I can out, just in case. His wife had been ill for some time but suddenly what had been a chronic condition took a turn for the worse. There was no equivalent of Avastin on which he might spend his money so he did something else. He stopped working and spent a huge amount of time at her beside. This decision undoubtedly cost him tens of thousands of pounds and he wasn’t a rich man. He had to sell a small business that might have provided for his retirement. It can’t have given him with the equivalent of more than a month or so of additional time with his wife. His decision was, in every way, similar to that facing someone who can buy, or not, buy Avastin and he chose to bear an expense of tens of thousands of pounds to see more of his wife. Is that decision irrational?

Colette Mills has a family – she wanted to pay for some extra time with them. Of course, it isn’t going to be a ‘lot’ of time in the grand scheme of things and it is necessarily uncertain but that doesn’t make the decision wrong. It doesn’t seem in any way unreasonable for her to expect that we treat her like any other patient during that time and offer what treatment can give her additional months of life and allow her to make the most of the chance she has bought herself.

The ad hominems

I’m going to focus on one of the doctors that Unity discusses. Professor Karol Sikora. I know Karol as he wrote the foreword to my study Wasting Lives: A statistical analysis of NHS performance in a European context since 1981 (PDF). He struck me as a remarkably decent and deeply intelligent man, for what it’s worth

He is the Medical Director of CancerPartnersUK, former Chief of the World Health Organisation Cancer programme and a member of the steering group of Doctors for Reform. When the Times reported his opinion on the case of Colette Mills they described him as a member of the steering committee for Doctors for Reform. Unity believes they have failed to uphold proper journalistic standards by not mentioning his job at CancerPartnersUK.

Clearly the Times faced a decision over which aspect of Karol’s biography to highlight. They described him as a member of the steering group for Doctors for Reform. That hints at the fact that he has political beliefs; namely that the NHS is in serious need of reform. They could have described him as a Medical Director of CancerPartnersUK which would hint at the fact that he has a financial interest in treating people for cancer. They evidently judged that the political background was more relevant and informative. Are they wrong? I don’t think there is a definitive answer to that question. They don’t have the space the BMJ do and, therefore, can’t put a full bio in. They haven’t even chosen the most positive citation: former head of the World Health Organisation Cancer programme.

Analysis

In the end, the government themselves don’t argue that they need to refuse permission to those who wish to copay on financial grounds. They also don’t make the paternalistic (I’m not using that as a term of abuse) argument that Unity makes: that the Government need to prevent people spending their money on doubtful stalls to inevitable mortality.

Copayment is refused on the grounds it would create a ‘two-tier’ health service. If some people can pay and do better then those treated under the NHS will no longer face equal health prospects. That is the stated and, I believe, genuine reason why copayment is not allowed. I don’t think the government’s decision is right or moral and share DK’s anger.

In the end, people who are better off have all sorts of advantages within the NHS. Civitas have shown that they tend to get seen more by doctors as they are better able to play the system. Equally, there are many ways to copay that are not covered by the rules, as Doctors for Reform showed in an earlier report (PDF). The Government are not defending a genuine principle.

Beyond that, I don’t think that avoiding a ‘two-tier’ system should really be an objective. The objective should, instead, be to provide the best quality of healthcare we can up and down the income scale. The health of the poor needs particular attention but keeping the rich down isn’t the way to help them. My broader view on how we improve the health service is described in Wasting Lives.

In the name of as thin a principle as a one-tier health service, it seems illiberal to the point of brutality to tell people who want to invest extra money in medicines - that we cannot afford to provide them - that we will cut off their treatment if they buy extra treatment on the side.

A new Ministry of Defence

2008-06-04T19:52:00.004+01:00

It seems increasingly clear that we are really letting down our Armed Forces. There are good reasons to think that it takes a questionable sense of priorities to have spending on the armed forces going down as a share of public spending and GDP while we are engaged in a major armed conflict in Afghanistan and have smaller, but still significant, engagements in Iraq and other arenas. There is a reasonable case that we are simply trying to do too much with too little.

Still, to a certain extent that puts the cart before the horse. There is no sign that extra money would be well spent. Wasting new money would be both offensive in itself as the taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill are hard-pressed and would undermine the long-term case for Britain maintaining a serious military. New embarassing wastes of resources would give the British public the false impression that, for some reason, we are simply incapable for running a large and effective military.

Hardly a day seems to go by without some new and shocking story coming to light. Some new travesty too dire to be some molehill turned into a mountain by the media. Today, Mike Denham blogged on the Chinooks that have yet to see action after thirteen years and around £500 million spent. The ongoing failure of the Nimrod has cost lives and continues to hoover up money. Accomodation is alarmingly poor. The Defence of the Realm blog is full of examples of lethal procurement failures, in particular the disastrous failure to find an adequate replacement for inadequate Land Rovers. Vital equipment, particularly helicopters, is being cannibalised with only one third of the Army's vital airlift capability functional. Shortages of body armour have definitely proved lethal.

Some of this is down to a lack of resources but that lack of resources isn't purely a matter of failing to place proper importance on supporting the military. There is clearly huge waste going on, particularly in procurement. At the same time as the military falls to pieces for lack of money the Ministry of Defence has been enjoying a spectacularly expensive refurbishment with spectacularly expensive office chairs.

There isn't a simple way of fixing problems fundamentally caused by political leaders who do not understand the military. With the numbers in the services having fallen so low it is unlikely, in the continuing absence of a major war, that ex-service personnel will form a substantial portion of our political elite again. The need for civilian control of the military will necessarily mean that soldiers suffer the suspect command of politicians who don't really know what they're doing. However, the vital institution that should give them support in such debates is the Ministry of Defence. Otherwise, the military's voice is too dispersed, spread around the country and the rest of the world at its various stations. Headquarters in London should be able to do their bit to make the military's case to the politicians.

Tragically, it appears that the contemporary Ministry of Defence is doing quite the opposite. An excellent article in the first issue of Standpoint magazine, by an anonymous military officer working within the Ministry sets out how bad things have gotten:

"I am often asked why the MOD makes so many strange decisions and seems to care so little about the welfare of its personnel. People are surprised to read about expensive computer systems that fail to pay service members their proper salaries — or pay them late. Some are shocked by the apparent dumping of severely wounded personnel from Afghanistan and Iraq into civilian hospital wards, remote from their regiments and families, or the massive contracts for systems that are delivered late and don’t work properly, or the strange failure to publicise genuine successes and minor victories achieved “against the odds” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

None of these scandals — or many others less well known — would surprise anyone who knows the MOD and what it has become."

The problem is clear. The Ministry of Defence's staff aren't really a part of the military. They're just ordinary Civil Servants who would rather be in the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Your average Civil Servant can't really understand the military, let alone really appreciate its needs. Again, Standpoint's anonymous author makes the case eloquently:

"Most people still believe that the MOD is essentially a military organisation. It is not. It is an organisation dominated numerically, culturally and structurally by civil servants and consultants, many of whom are unsympathetic to its underlying purpose or even hostile to the military and its ethos. You just have to spend a few days at the MOD before you realise that the culture there is not just non-military, but anti-military."

I'm not sure the normal starting points for reforming a public service - accountability, contestability and autonomy - will work here. I don't think that the strength of hierarchy in the world's militaries is an accident or irrational. It seems quite plausible that when you want people to get into a gunfight with others out to kill them a very visible hand is an important source of confidence and trust.

The vital step would seem to be, to me, making sure that the Ministry of Defence is returned to its proper role as a military organisation. There are two ways we might do that:

Set a fixed ratio for military officers to civilian personnel and dictate that the balance is swung back to the military in the Ministry of Defence. The policy would look like a kind of hawk's cap and trade with an enforced shift in the ratio that the Department could get to however it wanted.
Change the career structure for all staff at the Ministry of Defence. Stop using generalist recruits and end the practice of maintaining the Ministry of Defence organisation as one more department of the Civil Service. If you do need to recruit civilians then use a separate recruiting process. By a process of attrition, we can move towards a Ministry of Defence that is a military organisation as staff leave for other departments or retirement.

Once the staff at the Ministry and the Army, Navy and Air Force are all really part of one team the headquarters might become rather better at supporting the troops at the sharp end. Military procurement will start to become a military matter rather than a new industrial policy. Even if the politicians are hopeless at least the military will have a powerful ally in Westminster again.

Private companies to take over hospitals

2008-06-04T13:19:00.001+01:00

"Poor managers are to be sacked without receiving large payouts and replaced by staff from profit-making companies who would be paid with public money.

The NHS will retain ownership of hospital buildings and services but the private firm will "take over" the day to day running of the hospital.

Ministers believe the proposals will drive up standards within the health service."

This is good news and provides genuine accountability for hospital managers delivering poor quality services. Ironically, the problem with this new initiative was well summed up by Alan Johnson when he set out the scheme:

"[He] admitted that too often, poor performance had been dealt with only after a serious problem had emerged, as happened with Britain's biggest superbug scandal at Maidstone."

That's the issue. It isn't good enough if the private sector can only come in once things have fallen to pieces so badly that it becomes a live scandal. Thousands of patients will have been subjected to sub-standard treatment before the 'story' breaks. The private sector will be asked to take over the most demoralised of hospitals and turn them around, which is a lot harder than building an effective organisation from the start.

Instead, private companies - and other organisations such as charities and co-operatives - should be offered a level playing field to compete with the current hospitals. That pressure will either drive improvement in current hospitals or lead to them, slowly, being replaced. Competition can improve standards before serious problems emerge.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Wikio rankings

2008-06-03T22:37:00.002+01:00

Sinclair's Musings is ranked an astonishing 23rd in the politics category of the Wikio rankings, 82nd in the overall rankings, for June. The JeunesEuropeensFrance may have helped.

I haven't had as much time to devote to Sinclair's Musings as I used to before two other blogs and the small matter of a more than full-time job intervened but I still want to maintain a space that is my own for posts not right for CentreRight or the TPA blog. The Wikio ranking is a nice vote of confidence. Thanks.

A new laptop

2008-06-03T22:07:00.003+01:00

I'm blogging on a new laptop. The old one was a huge and incredibly heavy Toshiba Qosmio. It was great when I first got it and needed a desktop replacement for gaming and didn't want to move the thing (it actually hurt me if I carried it too long). And, when it still worked. Now, the old Toshiba's optical drive has been broken for a year, it has started overheating and dying on me and the power cable has to be jiggled about just right, and I want a laptop that is actually portable.

So huzzah for the HP DV2799 special edition. Performance seems good so far, though I haven't tried anything terribly demanding (beyond running Vista). Features are rock solid with everything from fingerprint scanning to a little camera and microphone at the top and an HDMI out. The design avoids the plain, minimalist box or 'boy racer chic' dichotomy that usually limits computer design. The computer came recommended and it appears TrustedReviews have steered me right again. So far, I like it.

In the news today...

2008-06-03T21:09:00.011+01:00

...there are two stories in the news today. First, the Home Secretary is an alien out to destroy Britain:

And, the Home Secretary announces a new plan for therapy for extremists:

"Controversially, the new plan makes clear that people who fall under the influence of violent organisations will not automatically face prosecution."

No connection at all.

Just kidding! Before I get accussed of something, clearly there is a space for those who have gotten somewhat involved in terrorism to receive some treatment other than the swift, sharp deployment of the criminal justice system.

1. Huge chunks of supposedly anti-extremism spending is actually spent either trying to promote the benefits of Islam to non-Muslims or funding Muslim community activities. A classic example is the response by Whitemoor's authorities to discovering that their prison is run by Islamist gangs. The Pathfinder fund (PDF) for preventing violent extremism is another example. Nothing wrong with promoting the benefits of Islam or funding Muslim community groups but both the first is a dubious use of taxpayers' money and it would be better if community groups (I think there's a basketball programme in there somewhere) funded were ones where different communities interacted. The authorities current attempts to combat extremism the touchy-feely way are a bit suspect and that raises questions about whether this therapy will be run effectively.

2. Violent extremists respond (PDF) to political signals. Jacqui Smith hardly has something of the night about her. To send the proper signal that terrorists should, on no account, mess us about we need her to behave like a border line psychotic. There is every reason for the British Home Secretary's first, second and third thoughts when the word 'terrorist' comes up to involve 'getting 'em'. That, instead, we regard terrorism, along with sadness, as yet another pathology we want to 'treat' is worrying. By all means offer those with only a fleeting encounter with Islamist extremism treatment instead of prison but it doesn't need to be a grand plan that sends all the wrong signals.

Sinclair Road

2008-06-01T21:12:00.009+01:00

My full name is Matthew John Hayes Sinclair. The Hayes is not without meaning, it is the surname of my great, great grandfather.

Before he died my paternal grandfather wrote a book setting down his life story. My uncle had it printed and very generously gave all of my grandfather's, rather numerous, descendants a copy.

It contains the following:

"I now believe that John Samuel Sinclair never existed and was simply a fictitious person of that surname concocted by my grandmother at the time she decided to adopt the name of Sinclair, and only necessary in order to complete my father's birth certificate. In my own lifetime no one in the family has ever mentioned meeting or knowing a John Samuel Sinclair and no photograph or picture of him has ever been found. I can submit two further facts that, although circumstantial, clearly indicate that the fictitious figure of a John Samuel Sinclair was merely a subterfuge to hide the real name of my paternal grandfather.

Why did my paternal grandmother decide upon the use of the name of 'Sinclair'? A clue lies in a Burial Grant issues in consideration of a fee of Five Pounds and Five Shillings to Mrs Annie Sinclair granting exclusive rights of burial in a grave No: 4669 at Hanwell Cemetery in the county of Middlesex. This document is dated November 19th 1902; only some four years after the birth of my father and it records my grandmother Anne Darby's address at that time as being 67, Bolingbroke Road, West Kensington, London.

One has only to look at a street map of the Kensington area of London to see that Bolingbroke Road is only a stone's throw from 'Sinclair Gardens' and 'Sinclair Road'. It is easy to imagine that if that area of the city held some affection for Anne Darby she could well have decided to adopt the name as her own and passed it on to her son and his consequential heirs by falsifying the birth certificate."

He goes on to discuss how his records show that a John Samuel Hayes is likely the real father and the new name was probably designed to cover up the child's illegitimacy.

I've known about this for a while. I'm the only one of my generation to carry Hayes and the link to events more than a century ago is fascinating. It took until a few weeks ago, though, for me to have the idea of trying to find the two roads (Sinclair Gardens isn't actually a park) my family are named for.

Today myself and a friend made the trek over to West Kensington and found it:

It is an unremarkable but quite pleasant road near Kensington Olympia station most obviously notable for the cast iron shelters over some of the mini-balconies. I now have a fierce ambition to eventually own one of those houses! The only down side might be that if I ordered something delivered to Matthew Sinclair, 76 Sinclair Road it would sound like a hoax.

Further wandering yielded this. Who would have thought it. The Parish Church of St. Matthew, Sinclair Road. What are the odds!

Apologies for the break from normal service. I'm afraid a near dead laptop has made blogging a bit difficult. I'll return to politics soon enough.

Opening up the NHS?

2008-05-29T15:04:00.002+01:00

"Death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals are to be published on the internet.

[...]

Death rates are expected to be at a disproportionately high level in hospitals where fewer operations are performed and surgeons have less opportunity to improve.

The government believes publishing the figures will mean badly performing trusts will have to improve standards or halt areas of surgery where they are lagging behind."

This, from a report in the Telegraph, is great news. If patients can make an informed choice then that should put pressure on the acute trusts to up their standards. In fact, this is long overdue:

An inquiry into the deaths of children at Bristol Royal Infirmary a decade ago showed how poor practice persisted because mortality rates were not disclosed.

The effect will be limited though as - within the NHS - patients only have a limited amount of choice. While the trusts could compete with each other to a certain extent they are protected from new entrants to the market, a restriction that will severely limit the ability of patients to take advantage of this new information.

Beyond that, the structure of the NHS will restrict the ability of the trusts to respond to quasi-market pressures introduced by this new source of information. The NHS is essentially a quango of quangos. It is made up of a combination of the primary and acute trusts, strategic health authorities and a maze of central quangos. In our report, Wasting Lives: a statistical analysis of NHS performance in European context since 1981 (PDF), we set out how the central quangos control many of the most important NHS decisions:

"The NHS has a large number of local bodies, the Primary Care Trusts, NHS Trusts and Regional Strategic Health Authorities. However, these are all both legally non-departmental bodies answering to the Department of Health and effectively part of one organisation. Most have only a very limited ability to act independently:

Their decisions over which drugs to buy are expected to conform to guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

IT expenditure is mostly handled by Connecting for Health which runs the National Programme for IT , the largest single information technology project in the world.

Staff pay, the largest item of expenditure, is determined nationally by the NHS Pay Review Body.

Amounts of funding are also set nationally according to a weighted capitation formula. This became very controversial in 2006 when the Government were accused of manipulating the funding decision for political advantage."

This information will be a valuable resource for NHS patients. It would be so much more valuable if our healthcare system were liberalised more broadly.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

"Democracy, freedom, subsidiarity - federalism, the solution we've got!"

2008-05-28T23:39:00.000+01:00

They're young, lyrically imaginative and enthusiastic for the European Project!

Lipdub Europe United par les Jeunes Européens - France
Uploaded by JeunesEuropeensFrance

This gave me rage blackouts. I defy any Briton of good sense to watch it and not want to quote Nelson's advice to a midshipman aboard the Agamemnon.

P.S. If this has been posted by someone else already, and I missed it, then apologies.

Glorious Isolation

2008-05-28T21:35:00.002+01:00

Zoe Williams, at Comment is Free, is confused by our lack of friends that might support a bid for Eurovision victory:

"But still, two questions: first and most obviously, why have we got nobody to vote for us? Everybody goes on about eastern Europe and their bloc voting, but this is not some ex-communist curiosity that we in the hyper-individualised west will never understand. Everyone has chums: the Scandinavians vote for one another; Cyprus votes for Greece; and Andorra, Portugal and Spain stick together."

Well, the answer's obvious, isn't it? Humans are angry, tribal killer chimps.

Europe's other nation states aren't very stable. Most have them have had their borders redrawn endlessly and have even ceased to exist several times pretty recently. All sorts of people aren't in the nation they started out in and have tribal loyalties elsewhere. Even when no one is being conquered a land border is far more porous than a watery one. All this means that most European countries have human ties to others in their proximity.

We're just as tribal. In fact, Anglos of one kind or another have been - for some centuries - the biggest, baddest tribe on the planet. Not only do we keep our own borders steady (the last battle on our mainland was in 1746) but we also conquer the others and take their stuff. However, we generally haven't taken territory in Europe (too high maintenance) but in the rest of the world.

If it wasn't Eurovision but Worldvision (World Vision might be peeved if it were set up) then our Anglo cousins and Commonwealth buddies would be in play. We'd do fine. The best evidence available suggests that we would do extremely well, that we are the world's favourite nation.

Our relationship with continental Europe has defined our history and frog-bashing has become a dull cliche best left behind. However, there is no reason to get wound up in a fit of teenage self-consciousness just because the continentals won't vote for us at Eurovision.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.com.