Extremism in the LSE Students' Union

The Jewish Chronicle report an absolute scandal that I've been following at the London School of Economics Students' Union. The following letter from the Students' Union General Secretary, Fadhil Bakeer Markar, and Mature & Part Time Students Officer, Ziyaad Lunat, was sent to every fresher:

The rhetoric is deeply inflammatory and partisan. From the statement that "800 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli Occupation Force" to "our fellow Palestinians", to the idea that Israel denies the right to education and "Israeli policies of segregation, isolation and persecution of the Palestinian population" the letter would be more at home in some Islamist newsletter than being sent to every LSE fresher.

This is particularly shocking as the letterhead suggests it has been paid for with students' union resources which means that it has been funded largely through the university's block grant and, therefore, partly by the taxpayer.

Also, the LSE is a very international university and, although I can't find statistics, I know that Israeli students do attend. This kind of massively biased language coming from Students' Union officers who are supposed to be looking after students' interests could contribute to creating a real climate of fear. We've all grown accustomed to students saying crazy things but the manner in which this extremism was expressed makes it worrying in the way a lone crank sounding off is not.

I hope and believe that the extremists in charge of the Students' Union are not representative of the broad community of students. Unfortunately all of us with a connection to the school are demeaned by the hatred of a few.

Why first-time buyers have felt the increase in stamp duty

Sometimes an important step in understanding the social impacts of a tax is to understand what it is best compared to. Council tax is a classic as it doesn't look nearly as painful when compared with average incomes as it does with pensioner incomes. Stamp duty is another. In politics it is easy to understand stamp duty as 1 per cent or 3 per cent of the value of a home which makes it sound relatively mild. However, far more relevant is the comparison with the deposit which shows how painful the tax can be for first time buyers.

The average first time buyer pays a deposit of £28130 and stamp duty of £1500. That means that stamp duty is fully 5 per cent of the average first time buyers deposit. It gets worse in London where an average first time buyer deposit of £53136 is accompanied by a £7500 stamp duty bill. In London stamp duty is on average 14 per cent of the deposit thanks to the average home qualifying for the 3 per cent slab rate. Those numbers, now looking quite significant, reflect the actual comparison people make when buying a new home and illustrate why Stamp Duty can make difficult purchases much harder.

(data here)

Primary school democracy

Last night's Panorama dissapointed me. They showed the Why Democracy? film that was so excellent after newsnight last week, my initial thoughts are in this post, during the programme but in a massively cut-down form that lost a lot of the spirit of the original film. To see the entire thing in its full glory go here.

Power, Productivity and Office Linebackers

Learning by doing, the idea that people get better at a job after they've done it for longer, is somewhat of a conundrum in that it is both useful to theory and almost self-evidently exists but has proven so empirically challenging that it has not gone far in the literature without running into trouble.

The scale of learning by doing is important because it can, theoretically, provide a competitive advantage to incumbent firms that have more experienced and learned employees. If learning by doing provides a competititive advantage for some firms then it can create a path dependency which would form a barrier to entry and be anti-competitive. If, on the other hand, it exists but not on a scale sufficient to provide a significant competitive advantage or is impossible for firms to capture by holding onto more experienced employees then all it will do is act as a slight and rather inconsequential delay to the introduction of new technologies.

The problem for economists and economic historians seeking to answer this question is that it is fiendishly difficult to do so. A classic example of how this has been studied in the past is a study by David in 1973 which examined improvements in productivity in the Lawrence Mill, no.2 in 1830s Massachusetts. This mill managed a superb increase in productivity without commensurate changes in capital or labour and David attributes this to learning by doing. However, Lazonick and Brush responded in 1985 suggesting that the most important factor driving productivity increases and decreases may really have been changes in the amount of effort put into production as companies became more or less powerful with new, more or less transient, workers and, hence, more or less able to squeeze harder work out of their employees.

Maybe this explanation is too technical. This viral ad I found via 18DoughtyStreet explains it very well:



In my experience, this is one of the most pleasant results of an academic education. I saw the ad on 18DoughtyStreet and it set me thinking about the broader implications of the process of control the programme was satirising. The great joy I have taken from my academic training is that constant stream of thoughts and ideas provoked by everyday experiences and stories. I love it and hope it isn't a habit I lose over time.

Anyway, back to learning by doing: Whether it is power that explains gains in productivity isn't really what is crucial to the learning by doing debate. There could be a host of reasons why productivity growth was more or less than that expected by a simple analysis of the amount of capital and labour in the plant. There are a thousand factors that David might not have thought of that might be the 'real' explanation of the productivity gains in the No. 2 Mill. Thompson, in 2001, examined another classic case of learning by doing, the Liberty Ship programme during the Second World War when the US rapidly expanded production of merchant ships. He includes measures for capital deepening and changes in quality but still accepts that there may be other factors he has not thought of in the residual that he wishes to identify as caused by learning by doing.

The only study that might get around this is one by Leunig, an academic from the LSE who authored a housing policy misunderstood by Iain Dale. He found data sufficiently detailed that it would allow him to study the production of individual workers as they gained more experience and, hence, avoid using a big, aggregate "everything else" residual as his measure of learning by doing. Unfortunately he has studied an industry, cotton spinning, with high labour turnover and piece rates that mean firms could not take a competitive advantage from learning by doing. We live in hope that a similar study can be attempted on an industry, like British shipbuilding up to the First World War, that does appear to have suceeded through learning by doing.

I think the difficulty robustly empirically answering this simple question should give us all pause when we are tempted to make too definitive statements about the lessons of history. There are thousands of similarly complicated questions (Was market irrationality the cause of the 1920s crash? Are patents crucial to innovation?) that people like to assume are settled. History is so complex and controversial that it should rarely be used to end debate (the "look what happened when..." argument is used too confidently, too often). One example of why the argument from historical analogy can be wrong is highlighted by the Lucas Critique. Only when we combine experience with coherent logic as to why that experience came to pass can we really claim to have a decent understanding of what is going on in the world and what might happen in the future if we change policy.

Show some respect!

This really angers me:



First, these statues are really old, I don't think that a non-expert can really have a good idea of what will damage them. For the Terracotta warriors to have survived two thousand two hundred years only to be damaged in a self-righteous berk's publicity stunt would be a real tragedy.



Fortunately, it appears Martin Wyness, serial eco-protestor, hasn't damaged them but he has still shown a massive disrespect to these artefacts by using them for his stupid little demonstration. Relics of earlier ages like these should be shown respect as they represent a vanishingly rare link to the past. Particularly in China where so much was destroyed in the great cultural tragedy of the Cultural Revolution. I also think that, when the pictures of this reaches China, the resemblance of the masks placed on the warriors to Asians during the SARS crisis will be considered rather offensive. I feel embarassed to belong to the same nationality as Martin Wyness the eco-idiot.



The last time I felt a similar anger was when the May Day protestors defaced the Cenotaph. Giving Churchill a mohican is one thing, he'd have seen the funny side. Defacing a war memorial to more honourable men who died in the defence of our nation is something else entirely. Both the Terracotta Warriors and the Cenotaph have such meaning that any infringement upon them for political purposes requires a person to be utterly small-minded, crass and self-obsessed. Protesting against Chinese CO2 emissions is, I think, misguided but is definitely entirely legitimate. Doing so in this way is disgusting.

Menzies Campbell

I didn't and don't agree with Menzies Campbell a lot. However, you can still feel for someone facing the sad fate of a political career ending not just in failure but in humiliation.

The closest comparison I can see is Iain Duncan Smith. Both of them fell as quiet men who just couldn't make it as leaders in the brash game of modern politics. That could be a reason to be optimistic for Menzies personally: It would be impressive if he can engineer a similar renaissance as a powerful advancer of a particular cause.

A lot of people are talking about his age. I don't think it was his age itself that did it. Michael Howard never faced the same ridicule and would not today (watch him arguing on TV) despite them both having been born in 1941. The problem was the same one faced by IDS. He just didn't have the charisma to lead. People will rationalise that charisma in many ways: Menzies it too old, IDS was too bald. Neither flaw was really the fatal one.

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Al Gore's all too predictable receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize has made the Devil very angry. Me too.

For the Nobel committee to be lauding him as some kind of hero for 'spreading the word' just days after a British judge (and I've heard no one say the judge is wrong) looks at his film and says that crucial parts of Gore's narrative don't stand up to scrutiny completely destroys any credibility the prize might have had left. While the central idea that the climate is changing and influenced by humans wasn't challenged that really isn't the issue at stake. Al Gore's film wasn't remarkable for advancing that theory but for the host of alarmist prophecies that he wrapped around it. Those have been condemned in the strongest terms I can think of since the creationists got slammed a few years ago.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been a bit of a joke since Yasser Arafat won it but the prize has also been awarded to a lot of very decent and courageous people. They don't deserve to have their achievement devalued by the prize becoming the "Nobel doing-things-that-lefties-quite-like Prize".

The shocking story of hospital infections

I've written a detailed post for the TaxPayers' Alliance blog setting out the scale, nature and causes of the scandal of hospital infections. The scale and sheer awfulness of the failure, both in Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust and the rest of the health service, is staggering. The cause is political management and the ongoing failure to put British healthcare under the proper control of patients.

More on Inheritance Tax

There have been an absolute storm of responses to my article on Inheritance Tax both in the comments and over at Gracchi's blog. I'll bring a range of the arguments together here. If I've misrepresented any of them I'm sure their authors will correct me. In order to keep this post from reaching book length I've had to boil a few arguments down.

"It doesn't affect that many people"

Gracchi quotes the "only 6% pay" statistic that far too many supporters of inheritance tax put far too much faith in. How can we reconcile that with the Scottish Widow's estimate earlier this year that 37% of households are wealthy enough to be eligible to pay Inheritance.

It's partly a result of rising house prices and the Treasury counting the number of estates rather than the number of households (not very sensible when you're trying to work out how many people are affected). The important question, though, is: which 6%? For an answer look to Lord Lipsey in the Guardian who, in a piece attacking the Inheritance Tax, acknowledged that it is paid only by the "unwise or the unlucky". This isn't, as Lipsey tries to argue in the article, because of unfair exceptions. If exempting businesses and farms is unfair then a fair Inheritance Tax is one that bankrupts countless family businesses.

It will always be relatively easy to avoid Inheritance Tax if you know what you're doing and if death doesn't take you by surprise. The rich are more likely to have expensive advice to avoid the tax both because they are more likely to be able to afford it and their large inheritance tax bill is more likely to justify the cost of lawyers and accoutants that make an effective avoidance strategy possible.

Inheritance Tax may only affect 6% of people but they are not necessarily those most able to pay and, for the small amount of revenue it raises, it causes too many of those 6% too much distress as well as having broader social effects.

"You only want to cut Inheritance Tax to look after the class interests of the middle class" and "if you were in the Rawlsian Original Position you wouldn't want to cut Inheritance Tax"

Look at the results of a major YouGov poll commissioned by the TaxPayers' Alliance (I don't think the full breakdowns are online - I'll try and put them up tomorrow). Particularly reliable thanks to a large, 2162 strong, sample. 65% of the total sample think that the Inheritance Tax is unfair. In the North - where much fewer homes qualify for Inheritance Tax than in the South and London - that number falls to 64%. In both cases the number who think the tax is fair is 10%. There's almost no difference in opinion on Inheritance tax at all between groups with very different chances of having to pay it.

If you want to move off a regional measure look at the socio-economic breakdown. Among the C2DE group 63% think the tax is unfair against only 9% who think it is fair. This is not a tax that people only oppose because they think they are likely to have to pay it. By the Rawlsian logic Northerners and the poor should be even more supportive of Inheritance Tax than someone in the Original Position; they are less likely to have to pay Inheritance Tax than an average Briton.

There is no evidence that opposition to the Inheritance Tax is based upon class interest or selfishness. Can the Left please drop this tired ad hominem?

The results of the TPA poll are backed up by the massive increase in support for the Conservatives following the announcement of their proposal for inheritance tax cuts. If only the very rich 6% pay this tax and people only support it because they are selfish then why, exactly, was a Conservative proposal to abolish the tax so popular among at least some of the other 94%?

"The Inheritance Tax strengthens social mobility by breaking up concentrations of wealth"

This argument really troubles me. To make it you have to have simplified the concept of social mobility so much that it simply becomes "how often do people change status". That is clearly not always a good. If a company director becomes a chronic alcoholic, loses everything and winds up in the gutter there has been a social movement. Is the human suffering somewhat offset by the increase in 'social mobility'?

Apart from petty vindictiveness I can see no reason to support downward social mobility. Instead I support making it possible for people from poor backgrounds to improve their lot in life: Upwards social mobility.

Upwards social mobility is on the decline but the Inheritance Tax doesn't help. To create the conditions for the poor to create a better life for themselves you need to do all you can to encourage good schools, strong families and economic opportunity. The economic opportunity is there, the schools need reform more than money and you don't create the conditions for a resurgence of strong families by placing a particular penalty in the tax system on an expression of the intergenerational bond.

"Without Inheritance Tax you'll get an aristocracy"

I can see two potential problems with aristocracy:

1) They monopolise political power by being the only ones with votes.

2) They create barriers to entry that prevent others getting wealthy.

Neither of these problems seem particularly relevant today. The abolition of Inheritance Tax wouldn't be followed by a restriction of the franchise. Barriers to upward mobility are created by failures of public services and social decline rather than some kind of social stigma against the climber among the business community.

If aristocrats are just people with inherited wealth then I fail to see the problem. Unless you believe in the socialist dogma, proved wrong long ago, that a nation's prosperity is a fixed pie, and the wealth of one is the poverty of another, dynastic wealth shouldn't be a worry.

"Instead of cutting Inheritance Tax you should go for a tax cut everyone will benefit from"

As the Inheritance Tax doesn't raise a lot of money it makes little difference to the possibility of other tax cuts compared to whether or not you control government spending and tackle government waste (academics at the European Central Bank estimate we waste 16% of government revenue by spending less efficiently than more astute nations). If you do have to prioritise, though, I think you need to consider efficiency in a broad sense: which tax raises the least revenue for the amount of social and economic disruption it causes?

If such an index were constructed I think Inheritance Tax would be near the top of the list. While it doesn't affect everyone those it does affect suffer enough that it is not at all worth the paltry amount the exchequer receives. VAT and Income Tax make a lot of people a little worse off and raise enough that you can only make very marginal changes for the money that gets rid of Inheritance Tax. Inheritance Tax affects a smaller group of people directly but it often causes a huge amount of heartache and disruption for them. It also sends political signals that hurt the willingness to save and family values that we should all want to protect.

"The reason is that Leonard must have some incentive to do what he is doing, or he wouldn't be doing it. He wants to give his life meaning when none seems possible, so he continues on his revenge mission, and as well he wants the satisfaction of avenging his wife."

He won't take satisfaction from avenging his wife. He won't remember, won't have the slightest inkling that she has been avenged. That tragedy is central to the story.

He definitely does take meaning from his struggle to avenge his wife just like I'm sure many parents take meaning from knowing that they are going to provide for their children once they are gone. Parents will place quite a value on the estate that gives them such meaning. Taxing inheritance therefore taxes their interests and is a tax on the dead who earned their wealth rather than on the children who inherit it unless you want to argue that income tax is a tax on unearned wealth if the income would otherwise be spent providing for children.

The same TPA poll I quoted earlier also confirms that the elderly are deeply opposed to the Inheritance Tax. 67% of the old think this tax is unfair (11% think it is fair). Apparently they do care what happens after they die.

"[Matt] thinks that it is wrong to tax a virtue- well again I think he is wrong- hard work is a virtue and income tax takes 40% of people's income above a freshhold and more people are taxed via income tax than inheritance tax, would Matt abolish income [tax?]"

This is a ludicrous Reductio ad Absurdum. I think that taxing virtue is a bad thing. As such I think that both taxing hard work and taxing leaving money to your children is a bad thing. However, I am willing to sacrifice that principle at times in order to fund essential services. I accept Income Tax as it appears to make an important contribution to funding services which I think is worth the sacrifice of taxing a virtue. By contrast, Inheritance Tax makes very little contribution to funding services so is not worth the sacrifice of discouraging good behaviour (saving and looking after your children).

The BBC at its best

I was going to write up responses to the various people who have addressed my post on Inheritance Tax but I've been distracted by an absolutely marvelous evening on BBC2. First Newsnight and then a programme for the Storyville "Why Democracy?" series about a Chinese primary school class democratically electing its class monitor. I've had my fair share of disagreements with the BBC over the years but tonight it has been superb.

Newsnight was at its ferocious best. Three interesting stories covered incredibly effectively:

Gordon Brown is in trouble and the new politics both leaders promised is nowhere to be seen. This section was notable for a brilliant moment from Michael Howard. Discussing the Prime Minister's fortunes with Roy Hattersley he suggests, in the most calm and lawyerly manner imaginable, that the problem for Brown is that he's too much like Roy Hattersley. Magnificent.

Al Gore's documentary got a deserved roasting. A Friends of the Earth speaker defending the documentary looked like an absolute fool trying to excuse Gore's alarmism. The Times has the nine errors that the judge found. These aren't minor, marginal errors but huge flaws in key parts of Gore's evidence. A couple of examples:

"Error one

Al Gore: A sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”.

The judge’s finding: “This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s ”wake-up call“. It was common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - “but only after, and over, millennia.”

Error six

Gore: The drying up of Lake Chad was used in the film as a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming, said the judge.

Judge: “It is generally accepted that the evidence remains insufficient to establish such an attribution. It is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability.”

This is a massive blow to the credibility of climate change alarmists.

After Dispatches exposed extremism in Britain's mosques the police decided to investigate the programme rather than the mosques. They accussed the makers of distorting the words of the speakers at the mosque. Newsnight explained that all programmes are edited, particularly undercover programmes, and played the clips with their context.

The expanded clips make it pretty clear that Dispatches wasn't distorting at all. Corin Taylor, for the TaxPayers' Alliance, revealed how the police spent thousands investigating despite having received no complaints. This is essential viewing and shows the danger the multi-cultural desire to accomodate with radical Islam can pose to principles like free speech if it is not tempered by a commitment to Western values we should absolutely not be prepared to compromise on.

Next, came an absolute corker of a programme from the "Why Democracy?" series. It featured a primary school class in China electing their class monitor. They had an election with three candidates (a nervous but talented girl and two boys) advisers and speechwriters (their parents), activists (hand picked friends) and a pool of floating voters to chase. At one point one of the candidates had his supporters shout a rival down but they quickly felt bad, tearfully apologised and she was encouraged to have another go. At the end the winner shook the losers' hands and gave his closest competitor a hug. Despite that good spirit the election was fiercely competitive. There was even a clear divide of principle between a relatively democratic and a relatively authoritarian candidate - the two boys.

There was a pessimistic touch to the programme's conclusion as the more authoritarian candidate triumphed by buying his classmates a colourful card for an upcoming holiday but I didn't come away feeling pessimistic. The democracy that the children formed was rough, ready and imperfect. The school itself was clearly exceptional. But the children had demonstrated what has been clear to me for some time: the Chinese can be democrats. Even after decades of Communism the people of the world's most populous nation can show the spirit required for rule by popular mandate to work. Inspiring stuff.

Defence spending

Did you hear Alistair Darling announce that he would be increasing defence spending to look after the armed forces working so hard and risking so much on our behalf?

It's true in nominal terms, it's true in real terms, it doesn't appear to be true in terms of a percentage of GDP. With a huge commitment in Afghanistan and new global threats the share of our GDP we spend on the armed forces is still in decline.

The relevant numbers can be seen in Table 1.3 and Table B3:

2007-08: £32.6 billion / £1,404 billion = 2.32%
2010-11: £36.9 billion / £1,630 billion = 2.26%

In strategic terms we are still trying to increase the size of the Cold War dividend. Unless we expect big efficiency savings this isn't sensible behaviour for a nation with big foreign commitments and underequipped armed forces.

Memento and the Inheritance Tax

To describe my central disagreement with those who support the continuation of the Inheritance Tax I think it helps to borrow a quote from one of the best films of the last decade, Memento:

"I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different."

Leonard Shelby, the film's hero, takes pretty much no utility from his vengeance. He is almost immediately dead to the consequences of his actions. However, he still wishes to do right by those he loves. Whatever we think about his seeking vengeance who would quibble with the idea that when we close our eyes the world is still there?

I don't think it is too much of a leap from what happens to Leonard when he forgets whatever he has done to ourselves when we die. Our eyes have been closed but the world is still there. The interests of the dead continue to exist after they have died and should be respected. Inheritance Tax is not a tax on the unearned wealth of the person inheriting any more than income tax is a tax on unearned wealth if the income is to be spent on providing for children. It is a tax on the dead who earned that wealth while living.

Inheritance Tax is a particularly egregious attack on the interests of those who die because it strikes not only at the financial security they wish to provide for those left behind but also at the home that they all shared. The family home is a crucial part of the stability that many people, when considering their own deaths, would want their family to be able to maintain for as long as they felt it necessary. A tax bill of tens of thousands of pounds that forces them into a hasty sale of their home and the fresh trauma of relocation is an alarming prospect to anyone considering the fate of those they care about.

The idea of a tax on the interests of the dead isn't some abstract, academic ethical argument. I think it underlies massive popular hostility to the Inheritance Tax. It is why the arguments of Labour politicians and many left-wing intellectuals continually fail to move the public on this issue. The same utilitarian minds that conceived of happiness economics cannot reconcile themselves to the idea that people care so much about something that will bring them no personal happiness. This is an issue where conservative principles are much more in touch with the intuitive understanding of ordinary people. They don't think that around half of one percent of government revenue - 16% of which the European Central Bank believe is wasted - is worth the price of their family facing additional hardship when they are first unable to look after them directly. Pretty understandable really.

In the end, even if you don't share the outlook of those who consider the world after they have died so important isn't the instinct still noble? Isn't caring so much about something you'll never see humanity at its best? For so little revenue, so little benefit to those public spending is supposed to help, is it worth taking a swipe at this supreme expression of the familial bond?

I don't think so.

Unity on Marriage

Unity's post attacking the IDS-Cameron position on marriage consists of four arguments and one little aside about the Conservative Party.

Argument no. 1: LATs are benefit fraudsters and don't deserve to be rewarded.
Argument no. 2: The success of lesbian families undermines the importance to children of a father.
Argument no. 3: Selection bias is the cause of marriages being more stable than cohabitation.
Argument no. 4: Not all married couples have children.

Aside: The Conservatives are trying to pretend that they're a modern party but they're too old.

I hope if I've mischaracterised or misunderstood any of these arguments Unity will correct me but his was quite a long post so I've had to boil it down a little. I'll try to reintroduce some of the complexity in his ideas as we go along.

I'll deal with the aside first:

"Oh, and as a snarky aside, does anyone else think that Cameron’s efforts to put himself and the Tory Party across as young, fresh and modern were made to appear rather hollow every time the TV coverage - I did catch odd bits of it - cut away to from the speaker to show them addressing an audience that looked for all the world like a Darby and Joan club outing to an Old-Time Music Hall Show? That’s the trouble with Tory conferences, no matter how hard they try to project an image of modernity it all falls flat because most of the rank and file make the auditorium look like god’s waiting room."

I haven't seen enough of the other conferences to be able to make a comparison but Matthew Parris has. While he is a Conservative I think his days of blind partisan loyalty are over, if such loyalty ever really existed, and this analysis can be trusted in the absence of another estimate:

"Mind you, it’s not just me: these Tories really are getting younger. I conduct an informal grey-heads count at all three party conferences these days, and this year the oldest conference was indisputably the Liberal Democrats. Either the Tories are getting younger or the ones we used to see are now so ancient that they’ve stopped coming; but there’s no doubt that the Conservative representatives of 2007, if not in the first flush of youth, are at least young enough to find it worth tinting their roots."

All parties are ageing. My understanding is that fewer young people support the Conservatives but that within the 0.001% of each party's support that are activists (and might go to conference) the Conservatives actually have, if anything, more relatively young people. Look at university Conservative Associations - they're usually pretty large compared to the other major parties.

On 'Living Apart Together' Unity misrepresents Cameron. When he cited that particular phenomenon it wasn't an attempt to excuse the 'LATs'. Instead, the LATs are practical examples that suggest something is going wrong in the benefits system for some people (even if there is a mistake in Frank Field's particular calculations). You don't have to think that it is morally acceptable to cheat on benefits to think that a system where cheaters cheat by pretending to live apart must be poorly constructed.

The existence of the LATs suggests that a combination of the benefits system and potential punishment for benefit fraud (plus, for a precious few, a good old fashioned respect for the law) will be incentivising others to genuinely live apart. The 'reward' Cameron talks about isn't for those committing benefit fraud but for couples that honestly stay together. The hope is that such a reward would encourage others to behave that way.

Next Unity moves on to attack Iain Duncan Smith's report and its emphasis on marriage. I do agree with Unity that the Social Justice reports gets civil partnerships wrong and I don't think that they undermine heterosexual marriage. It seems quite possible they do exactly the opposite.

However, I don't think the success of lesbian couples is nearly as important to an analysis of marriage as Unity makes it out to be. The number of lesbian couples bringing up children is, I would expect, pretty small and those doing so probably have a lot else going for them. I am glad that they can do well but they are too small and unrepresentative a group to take meaningful lessons from that can be applied to the rest of society.

In particular, my simple knowledge of these things suggests that one of the lesbians will often take on a more masculine role within the family which may decrease the importance of the lack of an actual man. Single mothers cannot take both gender roles. Another, probably more important, difference could be that the children in a lesbian family will more often have a father who has not deserted and is still ready and able to play a helpful part in the child's life. A lesbian family is less likely to have been caused by a deserting father than a single parent family. Finally, for a lesbian couple to look after a child is still sufficiently rare that lesbians doing so will have known, when they decided to become lesbian parents, that they were taking on an exceptional challenge. This raises a selection bias of the sort that Unity makes much of later in his piece.

The success of lesbian families is not sufficient evidence to undermine the importance of a male presence in the family and even if it was absent fathers would still be a big problem. Absent fathers - the lack of a stable heterosexual relationship - are in most cases inseperable from single parent families. These face very real problems that Unity acknowledges.

Finally, Unity discusses selection bias and makes the case that it is the main cause of the superior stability of married families. The "social/behavioural changes over the last forty years" that he posits as another factor to explain's marriage's success alongside selection bias only seem relevant in that they might make the selection bias stronger over time if people are increasingly getting married because of genuine, rather than socially forced, commitment. As marriages were, in fact, more durable during the days of the 'shotgun wedding' it certainly doesn't suggest that marriage only encourages stability if it takes place for the right reasons.

Unity doesn't have any real evidence that "in reality most, if not all of the seeming statistical advantages of marriage over cohabitation, in terms of longevity of relationship and likelihood of a couple staying together, can be accounted for by self selection effects and social/behavioural changes over the last forty years."

The closest he comes is an Austrian example:

"Recognising’ marriage in the tax system through an additional tax allowance, effectively a financial incentive to marry, may well induce more couples to marry in the short term but over the medium to long term it is likely to prove counter-productive in the sense that any increase in the number getting married will be offset by a rise in the divorce rate. This is exactly what happened in Austria during the 1970s and early 80s, when the Austrian government responded to concerns about the country’s declining marriage rate by introducing a a modest cash incentive payable to couples entering their first marriage to assist with setting up home together.

This did have the effect of increasing, in the short term, the number of marriages - although only sufficiently to slow the overall decline in the marriage rate and not cause the trend to turn upwards, both on the introduction of the incentive and in the final few months (in 1982) between the announcement that it would be withdrawn and its actual withdrawal, as people married to take advantage on the financial incentive on offer. In between these two ’spikes’, the net effect of the incentive settled on the lowest age group (16-20), where the incentive was perceived to give rise to the greatest benefit by those taking up the government’s offer.

This would be all well and good were it not for the fact that the effect of propelling couples into marriage in order to obtain the incentive offered by the government led, predictably, to a significant rise in the divorce rate, especially amongst those marrying while under the age of 20 during the period in which the incentive was in effect."

It seems interesting but, just like the successful lesbian families, Unity builds a house of cards around it. That more marriages will lead to more divorces is almost a truism - "how many?" is the important question. Most under twenty relationships do not last very long. Did those who got married in response to the subsidy stay together longer, on average, than they would have without the subsidy? If we cannot work that out we cannot say anything about whether getting married has made their relationships more stable or not.

The problems with the Austrian system would seem to be due to a poor policy design. An ongoing tax credit like IDS has proposed seems more sensible than a lump sum subsidy. That will be there to encourage people to stay married, at the margin, as well as to encourage them to get married in the first place. It will also have less attraction to under twenties who are not starting a family and whose relationships we have less of a stake in as a society.

It's very hard to disentangle with the data quite why marriage is more stable than cohabitation. There would seem to be a series of quite plausible explanations of why encouraging marriage might encourage more stable relationships. Three examples:

1) By promoting marriage you send political signals (politics isn't all about direct policy levers) that your society values commitment. You can increasingly socialise an understanding that commitment, particularly to your family, is a good thing.

2) Ending a marriage is, ceteris paribus, a bigger step than ending a cohabitation. Relationships do sometimes end for transient reasons and both partners are, in the medium term, sometimes worse off for not staying together. While some relationships do need to end it is a good thing if people err on the side of staying together.

3) There is a public commitment at marriage that can bind people together. This is a hard one to explain but, at least to me, intuitively obvious when you see people getting married. The character of their commitment does change and become something more substantial.

In the absence of data sufficient to make the decision for us my judgement is that these two goods are more than worth what IDS and Cameron aim to spend on them.

Much of any spending on a married couples allowance will go to couples without children as Unity describes. I would actually prefer a "married with dependent children" allowance to better target the group where there is the biggest public benefit to stable relationships. However, the difference isn't as important as Unity makes out. Stable relationships before people have children will make children, when they do arrive, better off and might also encourage more children - something I would take as good although it's probably not worth starting the huge debate around demographics. Equally, parents are still important to their children after they have fled the nest. Parental support becomes less essential but remains very valuable.

All in all, while I'm glad Unity is engaging with this debate I don't think he has made the emphatic case against the IDS-Cameron agenda on marriage that he thinks he has.

Once Upon a Time in the West

I just finished watching Once Upon a Time in the West.

It's a great film, full of style and pathos. An anonymous hero, 'Harmonica', and a good hearted bandit, Cheyenne, battle Frank - initially a hired gun of a railway magnate but later his own man. Jill, newly widowed ex-prostitute and owner of a piece of land that the railway can make valuable, provides an anchor for these characters to swirl around in their search for wealth or revenge.

I heard in it a lament for a wilderness lost. While the heroes and villains battle with such ferocity their world is being undone by the steady advance of the railway, and civilisation. While the railway magnate, Morton, is a cripple any of the heroes can crush beneath their feet his world is the future and that of the heroes inexorably retreating into the past.

I'm not an expert on Westerns, and it is quite possible I have misread Once Upon a Time in the West itself, but I almost wonder if you can draw broader lessons about the appeal of the Western from this analysis. They provide Americans with access to a time where theirs' was a wild and empty continent. Historical films focussing on the medieval period can provide Europeans with a similar link to a rawer past more in touch with their pagan roots. For all the glories and comforts of civilisation we need to remember when life had harder edges. If we forget there is a horrible danger that we will be left with the soul of a bureaucrat; weak and fearful.

Update: Edmund & Henry have pointed out that my final sentence wasn't right.

Blackpool

I had grown accustomed to thinking that talk of Britain's declining seaside resorts was a product of unjustified pessimism. Go to a Norfolk resort like Hunstanton or an Essex one like Frinton and you'll see no lack of visitors. I've been in Hunstanton a few times way off-season and it still seemed alive, in-season it is packed. Good, less anecdotal, evidence for this is the mushrooming value of beach huts at these resorts.

I would guess that the rising population and affluence of areas within driving distance of these resorts (the rich South of England) has been enough to offset the increasing availability of foreign holidays. There are both more people and most are combining flying to the sun with a trip in the UK. Faced with a choice between Mallorca and Norfolk consumers have chosen both.

Blackpool, which I saw for the first time over the last few days, is rather different. It is a very sad city. There are hundreds of restaurants promising "burgers, kebabs and pizza" but almost none that offer an even moderate quality meal (the Indian restaurant Jali is a superb exception). There are some beautiful buildings left but I'd say roughly 80% of Blackpool's building stock needs almost total renovation or demolition. The famous Illuminations look cheap - like a small and rather tasteless town left their Christmas lights on. There is a strip club on the sea-front. While this might be commercially successful it suggests utter desperation for an area that, if it wants to be really successful, needs to attract families. The Winter Gardens are remarkable but seem like a relic from another age without a cultural scene to sustain them. While I was there the event being advertised at the Opera House, and the most famous name I saw in all the adverts for acts in Blackpool within the next few months, was Roy Chubby Brown.

Next year the conference moves to Birmingham. Birmingham is less pretentious than Manchester but I actually find it far more interesting. It has an energy to its private sector and was, a few years ago when I last spent a lot of time there, going through a construction boom with shiny new hotels and towers all around. The renaissance is still overly concentrated in the city centre but that is a fairly natural place to begin. It felt far more like a second city to me than Manchester ever has. Replacing the faded glamour of Blackpool with the energetic bustle of central Birmingham would be a great symbolic change for the party. It also makes electoral sense given the number of marginal seats around the West Midlands.

I was glad I saw Blackpool. I spend most of my time in either central London or the Home Counties and it is important to see the depth of the challenges other parts of the country face. Still, I'd rather see Birmingham where the Brummies are working to overcome their city's problems than Blackpool that seems lost in hopelessness.

On my last night in Blackpool I was walking from the Winter Gardens to the Jali restaurant next to the Imperial hotel where most nights at the conference ended. An old man stopped me in the street and asked when the conference would be ending. I answered that it would be in the early afternoon the following day. His response, expressed in tones that weren't quite rude, "Don't vote to come here again. Nothing but an inconvenience". He might have been a lonely groucher but I'm not sure. It seems possible to me that Blackpool's residents actually resent a rare injection of money into local businesses in desperate need of custom. Become sufficiently accustomed to failure and rare moments of success can feel like a disruption.

Back from conference

I'm back from my first Conservative party conference. It was quite the experience, a fun few days. Apologies for my absence.

Greens at the Conservative conference

Green events absolutely dominate the Conservative conference fringe. Forty-two events by my count fitted into the four days.

At times there are so many green events that more than one starts at the same time. How will the earnest "Blue-Green" Tory choose between The New Economics Foundation's "Do Good Lives Have To Cost the Earth?" or IPPR's "Positive Energy: How can we harness people power to prevent climate change?" - which I assumme is a call for a giant hamster wheel in every town. Both start at 7.30pm on Sunday.

MTV are pushing the green cause in a big way starting with their a reception on Sunday evening. Blue-greens won't be able to stay out too late, though, in case they miss Vicky Pope discussing "The Latest Science of Climate Change" at 7.30 the following morning. The Energy Saving Trust, the Met Office and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) all have stalls from mid-day till 6 in the evening to explain various climate change issues.

My favourite green event titles are Christian Aid's "Climate Change - A Question of Faith", which is so absurd it defies parody, and the hilariously patronising "Storm in a Teacup: Beauty Care that's better for the Planet" being run by the Women's Environmental Network and the Soil Association.

No other cause is being promoted in such a manner. Even other issues close to the current leadership's heart like family breakdown. At what point does focussing on green issues become obsession?

Earliest Political Memory

I've been tagged by Gracchi and Jackart with this meme. It's a pretty good one so I'll play along.

Thatcher's fall was probably the first, I'd have been 6 - I felt really sorry for her. At Major's win - 8 - I can remember thinking the TV coverage was biased - the Tories didn't seem to be getting much screen time for the winning party. BBC bias has been irritating me ever since.

Institutional Carelessness

The Telegraph reports a study by the Healthcare Commission today showing a shocking series of failures in the NHS' treatment of older people:

"• Only five hospital trusts out of 23 met all of its standards on dignity in care

• 23 per cent of elderly patients said they had to share a room or bay with someone of the opposite sex

• Only 16 per cent said they had all the help they needed to eat

• 25 per cent of recorded patient safety incidents involving food and drink either caused patients harm or put them at risk

• 94 per cent of elderly patients claimed they were never asked their views of their care while in hospital."

The government response is limited to lame assurances that it takes the issue seriously and will make it a priority. While there are broader questions that we should be asking as a society about how vulnerable older people are looked after that isn't the problem here. This is another case of institutional carelessness in the NHS.

A system focussed on responding to political priorities instead of answering to patients is almost pathologically unable to think of the little things. The NHS is too large for anyone, particularly inexperienced politicians, to really understand. To get around that problem politicians use simple statistics. These can't capture intangible basics like patient dignity and care.

Institutional carelessness leads to 84% of staff failing to wash their hands even after contact with an MRSA patient and 99 out of 394 NHS trusts failing to take basic steps to tackle infections like decontaminating reusable medical equipment. This failure to ensure cleanliness kills thousands each year. Now we learn that it leads to negligence, starving patients who need help to eat, and to abuse, the Healthcare Commission found patients are being left in soiled clothes or "forced to use lavatories or bedpans in front of other people".

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the NHS is institutionally careless to the point of brutality. Reform which puts real power in the hands of patients, rather than more political targets as promised by Brown and his Ministers at the Labour party conference, should be an absolute priority.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Political Trumps

The TaxPayers' Alliance have produced Political Trumps. 54 major contemporary politicians are rated on a series of criteria: Media Skills, Integrity, Scandal Avoidance, Length of Ministerial Service, Years per Department and Private Sector Experience.

You can play Top Trumps with them, comparing ranks and trying to win the most. Or, you can play ordinary card games with them; they have the required suits and ranks.

Either way is a much more constructive use of your time than playing the real political game: Brag. Politicians with little or no management and subject experience pretend they're able to do what even the most seasoned and expert manager could not: run an organisation the size of a central government department like the NHS, with 1.3 million staff and a budget of billions. Everyone loses unless the public call them on it.

You can order yourself a set of Political Trumps here.