The Problem with the UKIP

In response to my piece on the politics of climate change DK lamented that I would not join the UKIP. The main reason I will not do so is that I don't think we should leave the EU. However, I will leave more details on why I am not in favour of leaving the EU till another day as I'd rather focus this post on the reason why, even if I did support leaving the EU, I wouldn't support the UKIP as a way to advance that agenda.

If you are in Germany it would make sense to vote for the UKIP. After the election a coalition would be formed and at that stage you could triangulate the right wing coalition closer to your position. In the UK it doesn't quite work that way, instead, a vote for the UKIP can only work as a vague threat to irrationally hurt the Conservatives even if that means the, more pro-EU, Labour party gets in. This is likely to do as much harm as good for the Better Off Out case within the Conservative party as it removes euronihilists from the debate and upsets the broad mass of loyal Conservative members which causes them to think more negatively of those who wish to leave the EU.

Moderation between the parties goes on in both electoral systems but in Germany that moderation is supposed to happen after the election, when everyone has voted for their parties and the politicians get together to form the policies of a coalition, whereas in Britain it happens in the debate within and outside the parties before the election. The resulting compromise is resolved into manifestos and the parties then offer, at least theoretically, coherent sets of policy to the electorate. I think the British system is preferable as it means that when people vote they know what they're voting for. This should allow for far greater accountability as that manifesto can more effectively form a benchmark against which governments can be judged. Also, it encourages the public to understand that their politicians will have to moderate between different views and leads to a less polarised and angry politics.

I'm not telling those who support leaving the EU they should put up and shut up but that forming a new party is not the way to change the debate. Set up pressure groups, write articles, make your case and change the existing parties. The Conservative Party is not Cameron, it is not the parliamentary party but it is a coalition of members of a broadly conservative disposition. If you think the case for leaving the EU is so strong surely it must be possible to convince these people? If you do not think this is possible then either you need to improve your case or your cause is a hopeless one.

Anthony Lane for the New Yorker on Casino Royale

It sounds like Casino Royale is aiming to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for Batman; make it edgy again. This is probably for the best as Bond films were starting to look a little stale even if the box office numbers remained solid. We'll see how audiences respond to an edgy Bond, there isn't as clear a case for change as there was for Batman but it should restore some artistic credibility which is a risk but offers the possibility of a more glittering future than that of new episodes in a series whose formula was set some time ago.

Anthony Lane's review, which I found via the American Scene, is a good one if you want to get excited about the film.

Soumaya Ghannoushi on the BNP and MI5

Large secions of Soumaya Ghannoushi's piece over at Comment is Free do not really need rebutting as they are simply statements of the blatantly obvious like "hating people of a certain religion is somewhat similar to hating people of a certain faith". This does not mean that it warrants similar regulation of things like speech as there is a far greater danger of stifling legitimate criticism of religion. Other parts of this article do warrant a response.

"We are witnessing the emergence of a new type of hatred, where religion and culture overlap with race and ethnicity. The climate generated by the war on terror - stoked further by the inflammatory speech on Friday of the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller - has allowed the far-right to redirect its poison of exclusionism from specific racial minorities to specific religio-racial minorities: from the black and Asian, to the Muslim black and Asian."

Nick Griffin has been trying this line for some time. What has made it slightly more effective isn't MI5s statements of a couple of days ago but the fact that we have had terrorist attacks and others convicted of plotting to carry out far worse attacks. Blaming the messenger in Manningham-Buller is utterly backward. Instead, blame the terrorists who have made the BNPs rhetoric sound plausible to more of an otherwise relatively tolerant people.

"With the tragic events of 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings, the threat of violent groups such as al-Qaida, and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, an explosive political climate was born. In this context, a dangerous language emerged, one that moves smoothly from race to religion, from terrorism to Islam, from al-Qaida to Muslims. The dominance of this discourse is such that it is no longer necessary to explicitly link these terms together. It is sufficient to invoke fanaticism, violence and extremism for Islam and Muslims to spring to mind. Today we have slid further towards the explicit and direct association of Islam and Muslims with all that is "wicked", "vicious" and dangerous."

Pretending that there isn't a violent threat isn't going to cure this. It would have an effect similar to Napoleon's pretending the army advancing on his right at Waterloo was that of a subordinate when it was actually the Prussians; in the short term that's fine but when people find out they tend to be angry. When attacks happen it is better that people do not think the possibility of them was hidden from them by an elite which thinks it knows best. Far better to have a frank debate with the truth of the threat out in the open.

"On the day that Griffin was cleared, Manningham-Buller delivered a public speech on the terror threat. Instead of the secrecy and discretion we are accustomed to from the intelligence services, the head of MI5 seemed to metamorphose into a politician. We cannot undermine the seriousness of the threat, but these statements are certain to be exploited by numerous media and political players. The MI5 director general insisted she knew of 30 major terror plots. If that is the case, why haven't the plotters been arrested, and why did she give credence to patently unreliable surveys suggesting 100,000 British Muslims supported last year's London bombings?"

Police work involves gathering evidence and then making a conviction. Of course MI5 could just drag them off the street but I doubt that "Liberty" would be impressed; they might not come to Ghannoushi's demo.

As for the surveys being "patently unreliable", why? Because they are inconvenient?

This article was a classic example of a Guardianista using the BNP as an excuse to clamp down on legitimate debate and the frank discussion of important issues.

Sometimes the French redeem themselves so spectacularly...

It's often easy, as a conservative, to get a little dismissive of the French with their combination of preening pretension to leadership in global politics combined with small minded protectionism and a fear of economic change which is slowly killing their nation's strength. However, despite all this, they have moments of such utter brilliance you have to forgive them. The wine, food and general taste go without saying. However, they also have moments like this from 1978:



A reminder that the French, at their best, get the spirit of the West better than anyone. Utterly reckless with a taste for quality (the car is a Ferrari) and an artistic flourish at the end. This video builds over time so definitely don't stop watching till you're at least half way through when it stops using relatively open roads and becomes truly hair raising. For more details on the story behind this video take a look at the post I've lifted it from over at A Very British Dude.

The Politics of Climate Change

As may be becoming clear I am feeling increasingly convinced of the case that curbing our emissions in order to stop or reduce climate change is a bad idea. It would appear that I now have a side in the climate change debate; responding to the well evidenced, but still uncertain in scale and nature, trend that man is contributing to a global warming by adapting to it rather than attempting to control it.

However, choosing a side presents new questions because it would appear my side is losing. There is now no mainstream voice in UK politics which stands in opposition to the consensus behind Kyoto-plus. This should clearly be a cause for the Conservatives if any party, however, those who blame the Tory position on Cameron have missed the point. I was struck by this when I saw Iain Duncan Smith in the 18 Doughty Street commentary on their interview with John Howard. When Howard's rejection of Kyoto came up Duncan Smith simply wrote the difference off as a consequence of European versus Australian norms. There is no mainstream voice within the Conservative party willing to challenge the green agenda openly and, as such, Cameron's commitment to a Kyoto-plus solution to climate change is essentially unchallenged. If we had a different leader we would not have a different policy on this although we might talk about it a lot less.

This lack of political opposition to the Kyoto-plus climate agenda is a result of public opinion. Iain Dale reports a Times survey of top business leaders which found 81% in favour of fighting the threat of climate change with taxation. If the current skeptics of climate change are not succeeding in convincing even those enterprisers at the head of business then they have no hope of convincing the broader population. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that even those who are not in favour of green taxation rarely get particularly angry about it. As a result the environment, as I predicted earlier in his leadership, has functioned as a very effective dog-whistle for Mr. Cameron, building his reputation for being nice and acceptable to the middle class, while costing him little in broader terms. This means that environmentalism is an even stronger political case than the raw numbers imply.

Of course, the strong form of environmentalism as advanced by people like Monbiot cannot win, people will not give up the horizons the 20th century has opened to them, but that does not preclude a costly, Kyoto-plus, solution which appears to be where the current consensus is taking us. That our fiercest enemies are more angry at current policy than we are does not necessarily indicate a victory; that Respect polls poorly does not mean that we have won the fight against statism.

I think that the current strategies deployed by skeptics of Kyoto and other attempts to avoid global warming tend to follow one, or several, of three strategies which are intellectually useful but cannot win the public debate:

Firstly, hey oppose climate change curbing schemes as a violation of free trade, free market or other principles and argue that these, while they may help climate change will be more broadly harmful. Frum, in a recent post on the stem cell debate in the US, highlighted why this is ineffective when he wrote about how the right tends to lose when it pitches principles against visibly suffering or otherwise emotive people.

In global warming you have a big emotive threat promising many losers along with current threats to big cuddly polar bears set against harms to rich, industrial "polluters". This disparity could be compensated for if, when people wrote describing the harms of taxing energy-intensive industries, they took care to point out that the people who will wind up paying most for a tax on carbon will be Northern manufacturing employees whose jobs dissapear to parts of the world where energy is not similarly taxed. A tax on emissions necessarily acts to kick the parts of the UK economy which are down and this will have human consequences.

Secondly, many attack the science behind IPCC or other reports and the science behind climate change; the classic example of this is Bjorn Lomborg. This is an important contribution to the intellectual debate over climate science but is a poor strategy for winning the public debate over the proper policy response. As the public, quite sensibly, has a limited patience with climate science they will make the decision based on the heuristics available to them such as the availability heuristic (discussed on this blog before). As this is a big public issue it is widely covered in the media and this frequency convinces people it must be true.

Finally, there is the argument that there really is nothing we can do. This is quite an easy argument to make as it is made for the skeptic by the alarmists daily in the pages of the Guardian. All that is needed is to take these arguments to their logical conclusion. The reason that it is less effective in the public debate than this would suggest is that it requires an admission of helplessness which is electoral poison. Admissions of uncertainty or a lack of omnipotence never look good when matched against even a slight possibility of success.

The problems skeptics have in this debate are similar to those I experienced trying to argue against the minimum wage at LSE. Arguing that the minimum wage is illiberal achieved little to no effect, liberalism is, sadly, dead in the populace at large even if it is still the language of the elite. Equally, arguing the ineffectiveness of the minimum wage makes little to no difference; point out that the minimum wage will make someone's situation worse and they'll just tell you how bad their situation is as if that was a rebuttal. What I found effective was a third option: discussing negative income tax style policies as support for those in work. This is a distinctly right wing response and takes better account of economic incentives. Offering this meant that I was no longer arguing 'against' the poor and the emotive advantage of the left was lost to them.

For the climate change debate there would seem to be three important alternatives that the skeptics can promote:

The first is to emphasise the market driven reduction in carbon intensity. A lot of Franklin's arguments about how it could be profitable to reduce emissions highlight why energy intensity has been falling and should continue to at quite a rate, this wasn't helpful to his case but it can be taken as an unintentional part of the human response to global warming that does not involve artificially increasing the cost of energy.

The second is to focus on specifically adapting to some of the concrete harms of climate change, for example flooding and malaria. In Britain this will probably add up to putting extra investment into our coastal defences, the policy of conceding to erosion in certain areas probably needs to be reconsidered. However, in the Third World, where the consequences will be more severe, it is a solid case for international aid to assist with the adaptation, both through assisting with the establishment of superior coastal defences and through both existing methods to combat malaria, DDT, and new ones, the vaccine that GSK and the Gates Foundation are working on.

The third is to think about some of the more outlandish solutions Lawson highlighted. Mechanisms to respond if some of the scenarios envisioned by those predicting a climate change apocalypse. This would be a genuine precautionary principle for an event that we shouldn't expect but which could spring at us. While many of these schemes lack plausibility they share that with the threat they are designed to offset; the match is good.

These strategies offer a genuine right wing response to climate change. They should be the focus of any campaign to unsettle the use of climate change as a tool to drive an agenda fundamentally hostile to liberty and human progress towards an ideal of overcoming the restraints biology and our surroundings have placed upon us.

Another Hiatus for Debating

I'm judging at the Oxford IV this weekend. Normal service will be resumed, hopefully with an enlightening post about the politics of climate change, on Saturday night or Sunday morning depending on when I can find my way back to London.

Ekklesia's Ugly Pacifism

Ekklesia's logic in arguing for the white poppy is desperately weak. The red poppy is no call for war, remembrance day is not a paen to how effective war is but simply a reminder of those who have suffered and died in our name. If you think we were not right to fight the Great War then surely that suffering could be just as worthy of remembrance and empathy?

Ekklesia's comparing themselves to the "No More War Movement" of the twenties who asked the Royal British Legion to print No More War on the actual poppies is significant. The Royal British Legion did not reject the No More War slogan because it is pacifist, I doubt they would print "War Solves Problems" on the poppy either, but because it politiscises a non-political event. Similarly, the problem people have with the white poppy isn't that it is pacifist but that it is hijacking a non-political remembering of those that have suffered, the wearing of poppies on Remembrance Day, to a political cause, the pacifist movement. This is cynical and unprincipled. If pacifists want to "raise awareness" they are, of course, welcome to but there is no need to make this a competitor to or dilution of the red poppy movement.

While I'm discussing this I should note that I consider pacifism a bad principle. If pacifism is nothing more than arguing that war is often costly then it adds nothing to old utilitarianism. If it is to mean something deeper then it has to mean that even if the calculation were that a war would cost ten thousand lives and not going to war would cost ten thousand and one peace would still be preferable. Of course, there is uncertainty but this goes both ways. The idea that war is morally worse relies upon a special kind of moral cowardice, that death over a longer period or that we are only passively responsible for is preferable because it endangers our righteousness less.

The Terrorist Threat

Reuters Alertnet reports that the Director General of MI5 is tracking at least thirty terrorist plots. Five major plots have been foiled since 7/7. I think it is now moving beyond doubt that the frontline in the War on Terror in the West proper is not the US but here. There is no large homegrown population of discontented Muslims in the US like there is here and that means that the threat has to come from abroad. We are not so lucky and that changes the scale of that danger.

It would appear that our intelligence services are doing a good job. However, it would also seem likely that, sooner or later, another major attack will get through.

Yesterday evening I attended an LSESU Question Time society discussion at which the topic of a rumoured government request for universities to watch for radicalism came up. Sajjad Khan opposed this as asking people to spy on each other and then threw in a few other examples of similar government requests such as Reid's call for parents to watch their children. There was an almost pathetic myopia to what Khan was saying. Here were ministers trying to plot the moderate course of, not asking people to spy on each other - that implies something more, but just to keep an eye out for anything suspicious which is pretty standard practice when facing a violent threat. If Khan's condemnation contributes to an atmosphere that people feel they are "spying" for the government if they report something suspicious that might inadvertently allow something horrible to happen. If something horrible happens it seems likely Khan will wind up remembering the kind of moderate measures that Labour ministers are asking for now with real nostalgia.

Also, I asked the speakers whether they thought that, if a book with contents similar to the Satanic Verses were to emerge today it would be published and should be legal that it be published. Khan's response was no and, after some meandering, no claiming that this was analagous to libel and incitement to hatred legislation. His calls for liberalism lost what little credibility they might have had.

Update: Reading the full story in the Sun it is considerably stronger even than the description I sourced from Reuters.

A wonderfully simple analysis of the US mid terms

There is something sensible about this analysis from Kevin Drum (via The American Scene):

. . . I want to add one more thing so simple-minded that I'm almost embarrassed to mention it. Here it is: if you pursue popular policies, you win. If you pursue unpopular policies, you lose. Ideology is secondary.

In George Bush's first term, Republicans passed tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, campaign finance reform, Sarbanes-Oxley, a Medicare prescription drug plan, went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, and appointed a bunch of conservative judges. Liberals may not have liked all of this stuff, but all of it polled pretty well. They were popular policies.

In Bush's second term, Republicans pursued Social Security privatization, made a spectacle over Terri Schiavo, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned. In addition, they passed a bankruptcy bill and an energy bill that didn't win them any points with rank-and-file voters, fought over immigration legislation, and refused to even allow a vote on widely supported measures like a minimum wage increase. This did not exactly reflect the popular will.

It isn't exactly intellectual hence, perhaps, why it has been so little remarked on in the wider post election discussion but this description makes a lot of sense.

Interest Rates

Interest rates have risen to 5%. I think pretty much everyone saw this coming; certainly very little has happened to the pound. I remain convinced, however, that the case for interest rises is still moderate. Today statistics were released suggesting that the trade deficit is narrowing (bar some concerns about the numbers); this does not suggest an overheating economy.

The US Elections

I'm quite aware of a US election sized hole in this blog's coverage. Essentially I don't think anyone has a convincing generalisation of what went on in the US elections yet. Everyone is using the election as crutch for the exact same views they had before the election and none of these "another piece in the jigsaw" analyses seem much more convincing than the others.

Over at the Corner they had a buzzing, but at times rather sad, argument with most arguing that the solution was more conservatism. At least one Democrat is arguing that this shows the Republicans can only win with a big government platform. The European coverage is emphasising Iraq.

Jonah Goldberg, again on the Corner, summarises the situation well with a quote from a 1986 National Review editorial:

"Elections are the Rorschach blots of punditry. No matter how enigmatic their contours, everyone sees in them his own preoccupations."

Israel vs. France

What the world really, really doesn't need right now is for the following to happen: An Israeli plane buzzes a French UN position in the Lebanon. The French troops are working under new rules of engagement which encourage them to treat Lebanon as their turf which the Israelis have no right to infringe upon. The French shoot down the Israeli plane.

The Israelis are utterly incensed, see this as a part of a general European quasi-conspiracy to side with the Palestinians and undermine their ability to defend themselves. The pilot becomes a national martyr and symbol of the fact that Israel can't rely on the West. By contrast, the French get just as angry that peacekeepers they see as attempting to protect Israel from Hizbollah attacks have been forced into this position by Israel's provocative actions.

This hasn't happened but this BBC report suggests it well could.

What the West, and by extension the world, really needs right now, with the credibility of our power as a deterrent hurt by Iraq, is a demonstration of unity. What it doesn't need is for a mid-ranking member of, what should be, a combined front of the Western powers getting in a spat with the American client in an important region. It would appear there has been some, long overdue, thawing in Franco-Israeli relations with a French minister acknowledging the security success of the Israeli wall. Both the French and the Israelis need to show some restraint and avoid making a collosal mess.

Ancestor Worship vs. Utilitarianism

This article is gives the lie to the left's claims to be the empathic side of the ideological divide.

"A genealogist speaking to the Times at the weekend commented: "It is not just about collecting names. It is about understanding who you are, and how you came to be who you are today. It is about knowing yourself." Superficially that doesn't mean much - in the furthest reaches of the nature/nurture debate, nobody has ever suggested one's distant second cousin could be anything more than a curiosity. And yet that tells you all you need to know about the kind of person who family-trees for a hobby - who thinks that's time well spent, getting to "know yourself, understand who you are". If therapy is for people with more money than sense, genealogy is for those with more time than either."

Part of how people understand their lives is by comparison with others, those around them and those who have gone before. Sure, the details you get through geneolocial research aren't great but still it gives some context to our existence. While this is "pointless" in the ugly, utilitarian, sense it is, to go back to Socratic first principles, an entirely legitimate part of the examination of our lives which makes them worth living.

The left claims to be the emphathic side of the political divide. It "feels" for its many designated victims, it describes its enemies as cold Darth Vader parodies. However, for all this the left doesn't really seem to like homo sapiens too much. No real harm is identified in this article; instead the author just wants to vent her rage at how damned irrational we are for our desire to understand where we come from rather than serving the almighty utilitarian calculus.

Why Peter Franklin is wrong on Nigel Lawson; Green Articles That Can't Rebut Lawson #2

Peter Franklin's response to Lawson misses rather a lot of points:

"Given Nigel Lawson’s record on economic stability, I’m pretty disinclined to accept his judgement on climate stability.

[...]

Twenty years ago Nigel Lawson decided that the best thing for Britain would be to shadow the Deutschmark. Twenty years later he is urging us to shadow the Chinese rate of carbon emissions. He is as wrong now as he was then."

"Some years ago Churchill decided that the best thing for Britain would be to return to the Gold Standard at the pre-war level. Now he is urging us to fight on against Nazi Germany. He is as wrong now as he was then". Plenty of politicians capable of sound judgement have fallen under the spell of fixed exchange rates and a strong pound. This is just lazy ad hominem.

"This is just wrong. The bulk of the carbon savings that we need to make will come from greater energy efficiency, not from changes in the way we generate energy. By saving energy we will also save money. And with energy prices on the rise there is more money to be saved than ever."

Lawson made these points. He pointed out that Stern was wrong to assume that energy intensity would rise where most, sensible people, expect it to fall and this would mean the human contribution to climate change would be less than Stern expects. As such, greater energy efficiency can be expected but this is a part of Lawson's case and not a rebuttal to it.

"Energy efficiency and economic progress go hand in hand. The more primitive a society the more energy inefficient it is. Just think about the sheer wastefulness of an open fire, where most of the heat escapes uselessly into the atmosphere. To take a more contemporary example, Chinese homes and factories waste a lot more energy than their western counterparts."

Again, this supports Lawson's case. If economic progress leads, in the end, to greater efficiency, the Kuznets curve, this strengthens the case that we should not risk economic growth in attempting to combat climate change.

"And yet even in the most advanced economies opportunities to save energy go unclaimed. For instance, Britain has millions of homes where proper loft insulation would pay for itself in a couple of years and go on saving substantial amounts of energy, money and carbon year after year. So why do so many people fail to insulate their homes properly? It’s because, contrary to simplistic economic theories, people don’t always act in an economically rational way. Sometimes they need a prod in the right direction."

There are costs to getting loft insulation put in beyond the capital cost of getting it installed. People are busy, it's an interruption to their lives, they might have to miss work to be at home and watch over the building work. There are opportunity costs to spending time improving your home's energy efficiency as well as the straight financial cost. As the money savings are often fairly small amounts it is a mistaken assertion that people are being irrational. In order to see a significant rise in energy efficiency improvements you will need the economic incentives to change and that is, apparently, what Franklin doesn't want to do.

"That’s why I’m opposed to most forms of environmental taxation, which tends to be a blunt instrument that rarely achieves its ostensibly environmental purpose. What we need are sophisticated policy tools designed for a particular purpose and used for no other (such as the raising of tax revenues). For instance we could have a system of energy efficiency credits, which enterprises could earn by implementing various energy efficiency solutions such as insulating a given number of homes or selling a given number of energy efficiency light bulbs. Polluters such as power stations would have to buy a given number of certificates. A market would then operate, generating profits for those supplying the most attractive energy efficiency solutions at the lowest cost. The polluters would have to pay the cost of kick starting the market, but, in aggregate, money would be saved and put to a better use than wasting energy."

This is still an energy tax, it will still hit unavoidably energy intensive industries, force them to relocate to places like China and thereby do, at best, nothing to help the climate change situation.

The difference is that you then have a plan to spend the money on subsidising technologies or investments that you like. Unfortunately, government is rubbish at choosing technologies in this way. It would probably give loads of the money to wind farms, certain forms of biofuel, electric cars or any of the other phony green solutions which turn out to be a lot less efficient than they first appeared but do well through government support. If you genuinely want to save money I would trust to the efficiency of the market far sooner than that of government; saving money is what the market does best.

"Ah yes, the old 2% argument i.e. Britain is only responsible for 2% of humanity’s carbon emissions so what difference can we make?

The first thing to understand is that the purveyors of this argument are either deliberately or ignorantly blurring the distinction between the stock and flow of carbon emissions. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are already at a level unprecedented in human history thanks to an industrial history that goes back a lot further in the developed world than the developing world. Thus Britain has contributed 6% not 2% of the accumulated problem to date, with other developed nations contributing almost all of the rest.

So while China and the other developing giants are making a growing contribution to the future problem, there is strong moral case for the West to get the ball rolling in terms of a solution. There’s a strong practical case too – because there’s an awful lot of money to be made here."

I have no problem with understanding the difference between stocks and flows but that makes little difference to this debate. Lawson did acknowledge that this was largely a developed country created problem and cited this as the reason we had a moral responsibility help poor countries, in the most effective way possible, by helping them adapt to changing climate conditions.

However, this clearly makes no difference to the debate over whether we can stop climate change because our historical contribution to climate change has happened; it is a sunk cost and hence needs to be ignored. The important thing for now is that changes in Britain's emission levels are going to make next to no difference compared to the vast rises in emissions coming out of the developing world, and particularly China. Just like Lawson said the idea of our "getting the ball rolling" and the rest of the world gleefully following is at the CND end of the foolishness spectrum.

"For one thing, the developing giants are desperate to escape their dependency on fossil fuel imports, which is why Brazil is already leading the world in ethanol fuelled cars. The giants also have an appalling problem with the local pollution caused by fossil fuel use – just asks the organisers of the Beijing Olympics. As mentioned above, the developing world has even more to gain from energy efficiency than we have; and the micro-generation of energy could allow whole regions to leapfrog the expensive requirement for centralised energy networks in the same way that mobile phones are enabling them to dispense with fixed line telephony."

This is ridiculously naive. The main way, as Lawson highlighted, that China and India are getting away from fossil fuel imports is building coal power plants to make use of their plentiful reserves of that fossil fuel. China's pollution problem is a matter of having industrial plant sited too near, or in, major cities and is a legacy of a planned economy and has nothing to do with CO2, which is not an element in the clean/dirty air equation.

It may be that new technology will allow the developing world to avoid having as carbon intensive a development as we have. However, this again helps the case of those arguing against action to curb climate change as this technological development will make far more of a difference to the climate change outcome and does not demand the economic sacrifice of hurting energy intensive industry.

"We in the West have the expertise, the intellectual freedom and the capital to develop these solutions, but the developing giants have got the deepest need and the fastest growing markets. If you want proof, look to the investment community which is well ahead of the politicians. The hard-headed money men are convinced by the climate change science and they can see the business opportunities. As one of them said to me the other day, “we know this is going to be a massive area for capital formation because it bloody well has to be.”

So the question facing western governments is whether to give their economies a prod in this direction or whether to subsidise the dinosaur industries of the past by allowing them to pollute without paying."

To complete my fisk I should respond to the argument we are allowing the dinosaur industries to pollute without paying. Fortunately, Lawson has already done so. If we tax these industries they will not cease to exist or use energy; they will move.

More importantly, this last couple of paragraphs really sum up this article's central weaknesses. The problem is even unwittingly acknowledged "look to the investment community which is well ahead of the politicians". Exactly. So why are you trying to use the government to pick winners by manipulating the tax system towards favoured technologies and investments instead of trusting those investors to see what is efficient?

The argument that the market cannot be trusted to look after the environment makes some sense when the argument is that it can be uneconomical to do what is right for the planet. This is what Stern was arguing and Lawson was responding to. However, the argument that it is economical to do what is right for the planet but the market is just too useless to make it happen requires an extraordinary lack of faith in free markets and generous faith in government initiative and foresight for someone who claims to be a conservative. It requires us to believe that over the mass of small investment or technological decisions that will determine our society's energy usage the government knows better than individual decision makers. Hayek responded to the fallacy of state planning's efficiency some time ago and I don't think I really need to go over it again now.

18 Doughty Street Covering the US Elections

I received this press release in my e-mail from 18DS:

Doughty Street American mid term elections special

From 8:00pm until LATE

18 Doughty Street the UK's first live Internet TV station will be broadcasting live coverage and unrivalled analysis of the US mid term elections from 8:00pm until late tonight, the first time the station has extended coverage from its normal 8:00pm to Midnight slot.

Will the Iraq war have seriously damaged the Republicans? Will the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives. What are the implications for the race for the White House? Will George W Bush become a lame duck President?

A heavyweight panel of experts in US politics have been lined up including Simon Burns MP, and representatives from both the Republicans and Democrats abroad.

Make sure you visit www.18doughtystreet.com from 8:00pm for live streaming.

Good luck to them. I'm distinctly unimpressed by the Republicans at the moment but I'm still thrilled that 18DS might mean that we'll finally get coverage in the UK in which they aren't portrayed as lovechildren of Satan and Al Capone.

Student Politics at LSE and Yale

Over at the AFF magazine there is a brilliant article on Yale student politics by James Kirchick. If you have time go and read it as it is a wonderfully written piece and the picture it builds of Yale politics is both amusing and important to the wider point I am about to make. Note carefully that this is not written by a right winger but by an American liberal and yet his conclusion is clearly that the right wing student politicians are far more intellectually engaged in the debate on campus.

I saw this for myself at LSE. LSE is probably the most political campus in the UK with elections turning Houghton Street into a genuine battleground with everyone attempting to force leaflets advertising their candidate onto the poor, confused, international, or otherwise apolitical, students. The LSE Student's Union is the only one to maintain a weekly general meeting for the discussion of motions. The Union General Meeting (UGM) has a somewhat anarchic style with near constant heckling and a barrage of paper greeting any speaker who the masses consider disagreeable or who cannot hold the audience's interest. However, just as at Yale, there is a clear divide in the way that the right and left approach student politics.

Of course, it is first necessary to remember that the politically active will be a minority of students, even at a university like LSE, and the description that follows is of the divisions within that minority. Plenty of LSE students find the whole business of student politics vaguely unsettling and spend their time studying or drinking like the students of any other university. However, the politically active are important for mainstream politics and an interesting subculture; it is worth looking at the differences between the left and right wings of that subculture.

Left wingers are, essentially, already behaving as politicians. They take the business of student politics exceptionally seriously; passing motions to condemn this and that, running protests at real world injustices, real and imaginary, and working incredibly hard to secure elected positions. They also work at the other elements of creating a politics in miniature within the student's union: turning on each other, cementing alliances and making enemies.

By contrast, the main extra-curricular focus of the politically active right wingers at LSE was intellectual. The debate society was always right leaning, the Hayek society was, and is, a buzz of discussion even if much of its output was at the amusing end of the libertarian spectrum, the constant stream of arguments within the right maintained a degree of intellectual sophistication which none of my left wing friends could claim for their own social networks; they would discuss how rather than why.

Engagement with the UGM or electoral student politics was treated as something of a game with the "score" each year being the number of major left wingers we could deny office through spurious alliances with the Athletics Union or some international student group or the number of motions we could defeat through sheer force of rhetoric. Always the odds were heavily stacked against us but every year we managed, through a unity and verve our opponents could not match, a few enjoyable symbolic victories. Making, for just a few months, the student newspaper's editorials shift to the right was my great trophy, for example, along with playing my part in a significant conversion to the right wing. In the end, most students are left wing and we were always going to lose but, in the knowledge that in mainstream politics this is not the case, it was great fun to play at guerilla warfare politics.

I think there are two reasons why right wingers tend to be more interested in intellectual engagement at university:

1. Left wing politics proper genuinely starts at, or even before, university. The mainstream left is increasingly concerned with empowering a series of victim groups, whether unions, ethnic minorities or feminists who are seen as constituting an effective counterbalance to capitalist power. Students are one of these groups and are seen as an important political force in lobbying for their own interests, such as stopping tuition fees, or weighing in on national debates through demonstrations and other activism. By contrast, the right does not have the same legacy of class politics, Disraeli's aspiration to represent one nation feeds into a modern dislike of interest politics, and tends to eschew activism. As such, it is more important to right wingers that they become intellectually equipped for the national debate than that they become part of a student movement.

2. Left wingers don't need to engage with people they disagree with. Thanks to the sheer weight of numbers on their side a left wing student can probably go their entire university career without meeting an outspoken right winger beyond, perhaps, a lonely voice in a student newspaper column. By contrast, a right winger will constantly be meeting left wingers who, if they like him/her, will try to make them a convert and, if they dislike her/him will attack them in shrill tones as a deeply evil underminer of the common student good. Some right wingers wilt under this pressure and retreat to the shelter of "I'm not very political" but plenty don't and become very good at defending their beliefs. In order to become this good at defending themselves it is necessary to have thought through their assumptions and approach to the world very carefully; nothing makes this self-examination necessary for a campus left winger.

I don't know how important the disparity I've identified will be. It could be that my year at the LSE was exceptional, I've had some rather dismal reports of the LSE right this year, but the report from Yale suggests that it is indicative of a broader pattern. Equally, it could be that this will not translate to adult politics. However, it would seem to make university a far better training ground for future right wing politicians than future left wing ones.

Children of Men

This film is superb. It is close to the end of its run even in London, I believe, so get out to see it soon or watch out for it on DVD. In America I think it will be showing over Christmas.

This film gets four big things really right.

1. The action is superb. There is a brutal threat to the gunfights and a reality to Clive Owen's character's inability to be a real superhero that makes the action sequences of this film incredibly affecting. The phrase "on the edge of my seat" isn't one I really understood till I left this film and realised I had actually been perched, almost unable to sit down, on the edge of my seat through large sections of the it.

2. None of the characters are inhuman. While truly awful things are done they are all clearly the work of humans. The villains range from revolutionaries fatally compromised by the struggle to the agents of a state centre trying in vain to hold under impossible pressure. References to brutalities of today seem to be understood in their perspective of the response of a state desperately trying to maintain order and losing its sense of decency in the process rather than cast as the actions of pantomime villains. This gives the film the tang of reality which Star Wars in London moral operas like V for Vendetta cannot dream of.

"No one is a villain in his own story"

Harry Turtledove's observation is reflected in this film to great effect.

3. The grand counterfactual is done very well. Britain seems plausible as a last outpost of society while the rest dissolves in war and nuclear terrorism. The island nation trying to preserve a veneer of order and civility, personified in the arts minister cousin of the main character, suggests an understanding of British, and human nature, on the part of the film maker that impresses me.

The diminishment of the value of life that the film shows as a result of the childlessness pandemic wasn't what I expected. I went into the film expecting the prediction that, apparently, the novel delivered: that an increased scarcity of human life would lead people to want to live forever. Instead the despair of a futureless society has led people to see no value in the life they have now and the counterfactual is shown as a violent and suicidal one. After seeing this I think it is actually an inspired understanding and seems more plausible than the idea of a struggle to live forever. Life shorn of its purpose does seem pointless watching the film which perhaps embodies this aphorism quite well:

"If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how."

-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

It is the lack of purpose and future which makes the present in this film so grim. That is, perhaps, a lesson which a myopic society like ours, so focussed on pleasure as happiness, really needs.

4. The personal story is genuinely emotional. The key story dynamic is that of the male patriarchal instinct; Clive Owen's character defending the mother and child. As such, the least sympathetic character is a man who ignores this for money and the hero is a man whose main distinction is an utter trustworthiness. If this wasn't what the makers were getting at then I apologise for my conservatism, but it seems timely to point out that, while feminism was right to condemn the abuse and repression that came with patriarchal society, the "women and children first" code is still something deeply heroic.

Also, the depiction of the personal need for contact with children was very affecting. The scene where a child's crying cuts through the noise of automatic weapons firing encapsulated this brilliantly. I think it did a great job of highlighting the role children play, the child restoring that sense of hope so tragically absent the rest of the film. This might have worked better if things like the use of pets as substitutes for children had been made more explicit but I'm not sure it would have made for a better film.

This film was brilliant. If you haven't seen it make time. I'm sure I'll work out the faults at some point but for now I am, as is probably obvious, in utter awe at the achievement.

Green Articles That Can't Rebut Lawson #1

This article by Madeleine Bunting for Comment is Free made me want to break something. It's so infuriatingly self-righteous, spends no time discussing the reality of the situation, whether a precautionary principle is justified in the case of global warming etc. and all its time using an assumed existential threat to argue for an answer the author had clearly started from, "the market economy sucks", and worked backwards.

In fact, the subtitle "intoxicated with an idea of individual freedom that was little more than greedy egotism" is such a thoughtless assault on the West and the ideal of human liberty that I really should have stopped reading there.

Fortunately, this article provided a fine test for my new rule for green articles 'they're only important if they are a reasoned response to Lawson's speech to the CPS'. This article did not provide a reasoned response to Lawson and it is clearly not important. As such, I don't need to spend an hour fisking this below par article in detail; the rule works!

Mr. Eugenides in fine form

I have to congratulate Mr. Eugenides on the fine run of form he's on at the moment.

First, a well deserved written kick to Barry "punched another MP for not voting the party line" Sheerman.

"I take from that two things; first, that if he thought it could be banned, he'd ban it; and second, he knows that his intervention is going to make the square root of fuck-all difference, but decided he'd get his name in the papers anyway. Well fuck you, Sheerman, you complete cunt. I hope your neighbour's bonfire burns down your house tonight with you in it, and I can raise a glass of cold bubbly to the playful gods of Irony while you end your days in agonising pain on a trolley in a hospital corridor because your nearest NHS burns unit has closed down, with butt-ugly nurses munching on pizza as they ignore your screams."

Second, a response to the Saddam verdict that made me laugh.

I don't think Martine Martin gets the 5th of November...

Martine Martin has a post discussing Guy Fawkes featuring this remarkable section:

And that's why I'll always celebrate the 5th November, even if Guy Fawkes was really nothing more than a terrorist; because the spirit to fight back against corruption amongst the ruling elite, no matter what the cost, still exists in all of us. We only need look at the proliferation of blogs holding the government to account for proof of that.

The "celebration" of the 5th of November isn't a celebration of Guy Fawkes. Why do you think it is traditional to burn an effigy of him? It's an English Protestant hate-in against Catholics who tried to blow up their monarch and parliament from back when we were a rather more bolshy people.

In the, truly atrocious, film Ms. Martin appears to be such a fan of the Guy Fawkes wannabee succeeds in blowing up parliament with his bomb on the tube (classy) and then his faceless horde overwhelms the evil regime. The real Guy Fawkes failed to blow up parliament, was hung, drawn and quartered and the English responded with a celebration of his failure and brutal death. Real life is so much more sound than the movies.

In fact, I'm going to quote Wikipedia at length with the full rhyme, the beginning of which Martin quotes so approvingly:

"The night is closely associated with the popular rhyme:

Remember remember the 5th of November,
The Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.

The full rhyme, rarely used, continues:

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

The following verses, though originally part of the rhyme, are usually left out of modern day recitations for the inflammatory anti-Catholic remarks:

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.

Hip hip huzzah!
Hip hip huzzah!"

The truth of what Guy Fawkes night means is brutal, ethnic and far from anti-establishment; a reminder of a less polished age. It also pisses off the Health and Safety bores which makes it pretty much the perfect Tory day. A day to indulge your inner Saxon, get drunk and break something; savage.

Ofcom

Iain Dale is right to like Ofcom's attitude to regulation. He is missing the biggest example of them getting it right and making the rare choice as a regulator to accept some things don't need regulating in ending regulation of BT's retail broadband pricing.

Unfortunately, they fail in their most democratically important function of interpreting the bias restrictions on TV journalism. Apparently Fox News accussing the BBC of "frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism" in a flagged opinion piece is unnaceptable, the US news service runs on Sky and has seen three investigations for bias, while the BBC's torrent of bias continues unabated. Nice.

Honeytraps

When bored I like to check the referrers to this blog using SiteMeter; it tells me when people link here and makes me smile. After I posted about the Spiegel article on sex and taboos in the Muslim world I got a flurry of readers who had used the google "blogsearch" facility to look for articles about "sex". I got a similar flood after I wrote an article about the British film industry which namechecked a few too many stars.

The content of the "sex" post may not quite have been what they were looking for. It contained a large quote about different countries searching for "sex" through Google and the connection to repression. I hope that didn't spoil their fun. At least I didn't get anyone searching for "man boy love".

If the Google Trends service is accurate then: hello my Pakistani friends!

In fact, they're probably searching in Urdu. The highest scoring English speaking city was Birmingham. Hello my Brummie friends!

Lawson on Climate Change

I've been reading Lawson's speech responding to the Stern report on climate change. It's trully brilliant. In fact, I'm now rather sorry I've taken my sweet time in getting around to reading it.

I have always been in the somewhat rare position of being rather ambivalent about climate change. I am conscious that I, and most people commenting, have relatively little to go on in deciding between the competing claims of different climate scientists. However, Lawson's report does a great job of explaining why these scientific differences, along with plain old uncertainties, do not need to be crucial to the public policy decision with regards to climate change.

This is fortunate because it would seem that the big difficulty with climate change is that it was the first decision we were trying to make with science as the main guide to our thinking. There have been many times we've relied on economics or philosophy but never before had we asked natural scientists to be the guides to our public decision making. It would appear they're bad at it; all the attention makes them giddy and evangelistic. Thankfully, Lawson has moved us back to the safer ground of economics and morals.

One more thing. I think the big problem that many conservatives have with Cameron's focus on the environment isn't so much the policy itself, they've reconciled themselves to more obvious intellectual gaffes (opposing top up fees) and there is a pleasant side effect to reducing oil demand in strategic terms, but the fact that they perceive Cameron to be avoiding the argument. His response at conference to the climate change skeptics was that he wasn't going to stop talking about it; as if his critics were throwing a tantrum rather than presenting a reasoned case. Were he a little more diplomatic, or less diplomatic but defended his position instead of restating it, he might find the party more forgiving.

SPIEGEL Magazine on Sex and Taboos in the Muslim World

If ever a reminder were needed that repression does not lead to more moral people it can be found in this SPIEGEL Magazine article about sex and taboos in the Muslim world. Awful stories of the brutality which can exist in the darker corners of all societies but which tends to be vastly more common in those where more healthy outlets do not exist are an easy rebuttal to the idea that the repression of women is part of protecting them. However, I think this paragraph is, perhaps, at least as interesting:

"The Internet is a refuge for hidden desires, even though it offers only virtual relief. Google Trends, a new service offered by the search engine, provides a way to demonstrate how difficult it is to banish forbidden yearnings from the heads of Muslims. By entering the term "sex" into Google Trends, one obtains a ranked list of cities, countries and languages in which the term was entered most frequently. According to Google Trends, the Pakistanis search for "sex" most often, followed by the Egyptians. Iran and Morocco are in fourth and fifth, Indonesia is in seventh and Saudi Arabia in eighth place. The top city for "sex" searches is Cairo. When the terms "boy sex" or "man boy sex" are entered (many Internet filters catch the word "gay"), Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the first four countries listed."

How ironic.

LBJ shows Vernon Robinson how it's done

The famous 'daisy' ad from LBJ highlights that even Vernon Robinson's efforts from the current election can't match up to the best in a proud history of intense US campaign ads.



The difference is that as opposed to the ridiculous character attack from Vernon Robinson LBJ was at least addressing an important issue which deserved to be taken seriously. Still, painting your opponent as a crackpot who can't be trusted with his finger on the trigger is a bit low.

Venezuelan 'fair trade'

Ken Livingstone is off to Venezuela to secure a deal for cheap fuel for Londoners. That incredibly rich London is being offered subsidised oil from rather poor Venezuela does not appear to alarm the lizard loving fool. After all, it's a win-win solution: London gets cheap oil, Chavez gets to grandstand wasting oil revenues. The only losers are the Venezuelans but they're not going to cause trouble while the sun is shining and the oil money is flowing. Good times...

The Minimum Wage Trap

Iain Dale has YouTube footage of a Channel 4 report on a Labour cameraman who feels hard done by because he wasn't paid for his time as a volunteer which felt work-like. I hate to piss on a worthy bit of sniping at the Labour party but isn't this making a collosal mountain out of a rather insignificant molehill?

Every major organisation, every political party, every think tank and every media outlet takes crowds of unpaid interns/volunteers. The distinction of being "instructed" is clearly bogus; most interns do desperately basic jobs which are very similar to what they would get paid for in agency work.

The reality is that this is a non-problem created by the minimum wage. If I were offered the chance to do the job this Labour guy has I'd borrow my sister's camera and be thrilled (doing the same for Tories would be even better). The CV building effect means that it is also a pretty good idea. However, Channel 4 is right that this is criminalised as one of the Labour ministers inadvertently highlights when discussing the need to clamp down on unpaid "work".

In the end, the problem is the minimum wage. I've always thought it a shame that whereas at the beginning of the century successful opposition to the minimum wage opposed it as an illiberal measure now it can only be successfully opposed through the grubby utilitarian logic of the harms to business. I think it says something about how far liberalism has been corrupted into libertinism that only causes concerning sex are now considered liberal ones.

This debate over internships is where the illiberalism of a measure which says that someone who wants to work for free and someone who wants to employ them cannot make such a contract becomes apparent.

The LSE campaigners are big on the issue of the Living Wage at the moment. I'll write something up about that soon as I'm aware the main focus of the minimum wage isn't on low earners who are happy about that status but it is important to remember that not all people on low wages are being exploited.

John Derbyshire on Religion

The Derb has a brilliant post up on his religion and opinions on religion. I've had many discussions with people where I'm worried I've either come across theophobic or philic depending on the person I was talking with but I think this article comes pretty close to my personal view of its effects:

"In the end, I think I’ve now arrived at this position: An individual might be made better by faith, or worse. Overall, taking society at large, I think it averages out to zero."

On the societal effects of religion:

"Religion is first and foremost a social phenomenon. That religious module in our brains is a sub-module of the social one, or is very closely allied to it. To deny it expression is just as foolish, just as counter-productive, as to deny expression to any other fundamental social feature of human nature — sexuality, or aggression, or the power urge, or cheating."

The trick, if you want a reasonably happy and stable society, is to corral human nature into useful, non-socially-destructive styles of expression: sexuality into marriage, or at least some kind of formal and constrained bonding; aggression into sport or military training; the power urge into consensual politics; cheating into conjuring, drama, and games like poker. (I don’t mean you should cheat at poker, only that you need some powers of deception to play poker well.) Any aspect of human nature can get out of hand, as we see with these Muslim fanatics that are making such nuisances of themselves nowadays. That doesn’t mean the aspect is bad, just that some society has done a bad job of corraling it.

"So I guess my answer is something like: If a society accommodates the people’s religious impulses well, it’s a good thing, and if not, not."

Ross Douthat has remarked on this already and is, I think, somewhat mistaken about what is happening in Europe. He believes that Europe has done the impossible and denied the religious instinct en masse but this is not what I see happening in Europe.

My personal understanding of when religion becomes harmful is when you decide that your religious outcome depends upon the views of others. The key problem with Islamic extremism is that it takes Danish cartoons or Muslim apostates as a genuinely dangerous affront to their own beliefs; the confidence to see the views others hold of your religion as immaterial to your own spirituality is an important challenge for institutional religion.

This is also why I find some, but not all, evangelicals a little disturbing. Those evangelicals who purely think they have something wonderful to share with others I tend to find very pleasant people but those who have even a vague notion that the sin of others is corrupting to themselves or otherwise harmful to their own chances at a blissful eternity can be unpleasant.

In this sense I think what is going on in Europe is quite healthy. The numbers actually proclaiming themselves atheists is not making any serious advance. Instead people are either heading towards a view of God which is very personal or into a broader spirituality which is best caricatured as an intellectually fuzzy compatriot to Taoism or Buddhism as a spirituality not centred on a deity. This actually seems a pretty feasible replacement for Christianity to me and the only plausible argument I've heard against it is that it leaves us somehow vulnerable to alternative, non-Christian, doctrines in our midst like Islam or totalitarianism but this thesis never seems convincing. Why is "soft" religion easier to replace with extremism than "hard" religion?

The other thing I would want to note about Derbyshire's argument that religion is inescapable is that it does not mean God is necessarily alive in a Nietzschean sense. What is dead, both in Europe and most of America I think, is the fear of God; which I do not think is biologically predetermined. This means that we will need to form something new and means the questions of last man/overman etc. cannot be avoided. Religion in the modern sense is just as nihilistic as atheism.

As to my own religious beliefs, I've laid them out in more detail before. Essentially, I think the question of whether God exists is ethically unimportant. I think that if you don't believe in God the truth tends to nihilism but if you do a nihilistic conclusion is equally inescapable if you ask the question "why do what God tells you?"

The only way belief can create morality is through fear of punishment and I do not want that to be the basis of my own approach to the world. As such, I consider myself a committed agnostic; I do not want to know. What I've taken from Nietzsche is that nihilism can either give you the dismal future of a meaningless life (the last man) or allow you to create your own meaning (the overman); I hope my life is a clumsy attempt at the latter.

Michael J. Fox on Stem Cell Research

Stem Cell Research is an important issue and, thankfully "dead to God" Britain is on entirely the right side of it. Even if you view a foetus as a person this is more akin to dissection (using a corpse to benefit science) or organ donation (using a corpse to save lives). The best argument I've heard for why pro-lifers might still want to attack stem cell research (beyond a blind hatred of anything connected with abortion) is that it creates a demand for abortions. However, with such a massively constrained market is seems unlikely that demand will much influence supply so they are really just rationalising using this issue as a pawn in the great game of the abortion debate. By contrast if, like me and plenty of others, you support the status quo on abortion the Republican stem cell position looks infuriatingly narrow minded.

Because of this it is a brilliant issue for Democrats, as Frum argues here (his argument that there is no likelihood of cure is less impressive than his political analysis... the Democratic party didn't invent stem cell research), they finally have a moral issue with an emotive and articulate spokesperson in which they clearly trump the Republicans. They were winning the elections anyway but purely on the basis of Republican incompetence. I think it works even better because the Republicans who may oppose abortion and dislike stem cell research on those grounds have the logic I've given above in the back of their minds so most, I think, will struggle to get really worked up about the issue.

Also, Rush Limbaugh's attempt to respond to Fox has to be one of the least effective political moves ever. It gave a platform for Fox to get on the news and do this:



Rush Limbaugh comes across hackish and unpleasant. Fox comes across reasonable and principled.

Adam Smith on the £20 note

The Times reports that Adam Smith is to become the new face on the £20 note. This is one of those ideas that, when you hear it, you wonder why no one came up with it before. If there is anyone who deserves to be on the face of a banknote, anywhere in the world, it is Smith. While I don't want to get into Greatest Briton debates (although in those debates he clearly deserved to be up there alongside Newton and Darwin) his creation of economics makes him a fine candidate for a banknote in particular.

Brilliant.

The Bristol IV 2006

I got back from the tournament late last night. We managed to turn up late after a confusion over the trains but after that, rather inauspicious, start it went well. The motions were (approximately):

1. This house would make securing an offer of a job a precondition to being released from jail.
2. This house would compensate women for a portion of their lost earnings to encourage childbirth.
3. This house would legalise beastiality.
4. This house would invite Israel to NATO.

Semi-final. This house would create a watchlist of countries from which no immigration would be allowed.
Final. This house would remove the ban on secondary picketing.

There were quite a few instances of the general thrust getting a little missed but I'm still pleased we managed to get some new ideas out there. The second motion was based on the Estonian plan for reversing the demographic decline and the motion for the semi-final was based on my thoughts on the EU and immigration. I tend to find that when I'm setting motions this blog's ideas find their way in as it is such a reflection of the topics interesting me.

The final was superb with all the teams really managing to get their teeth into the motion. The unions constitute an issue which doesn't crop up a lot in university debating so it was nice to see the teams get stuck into it. The winners (a Cambridge team) very much deserved their win with an argument centred around the necessarily political implications of secondary striking.

Momentary Absence

I'm Chief Adjudicator at the Bristol debating intervarsity and, as a result, will not have time for blogging today or tomorrow. Normal service resumed on Sunday hopefully.

Jonathan Freedland on market-led Climate Change danger

In an article for the Guardian Jonathan Freedland argues that the market itself make climate change solutions impossible. I'm not going to argue his estimate of the benefits of tackling climate change as even if you do believe it is the crucial issue his argument is still useless.

"Whose job is it to stop climate change? For a while, it's seemed like it's up to us, as individuals, to change our personal behaviour. Witness the BBC news item this week, exposing Britons' slobby habit of leaving electronic appliances on stand-by, in contrast with the conscientious, energy-efficient Germans. David Cameron's wind turbine on the roof, even his cycling, have fed the notion that greenism is now all about personal conduct."

The reason this is the case is simple. Every time someone proposes a solution other than "cut consumption" the left-greens deride it as naive. A case in point is nuclear power. As democratic governments are pathologically unable to say "have less" to their people, the same problem which led to the growth of the state through the 20th century before the left start getting high and mighty on this, this phrases the problem of global warming in terms of personal conduct.

But we should be careful: climate change is too big a problem to be solved simply by virtuous individuals hopping on a bus instead of taking the car, or disconnecting the tumble dryer, valuable though those moves are. This is one responsibility that can't be saddled solely on activists and consumers. This is a job for government.

How convenient. Given the record of government I think that you have to ask the question, is this problem too big for government? How many really big problems has government faced up to?

The only obvious example was Thatcher but as the problem being faced up to was a surplus of government itself this is hardly a fair case.

Which means governments, no less than individuals, have to rethink their behaviour. Until now, administrations here and abroad have tended to dump climate change into the laps of their environment ministries. The odd speech from the president or prime minister, to raise the issue's profile, but otherwise filed under "e" for environment.

This actually works in favour of the environmentalist movement because it means that the agenda is set by a department with a financial interest in the environment being a big problem. Other departments have to work a lot harder to justify how climate change justifies spending more in their field.

That approach is no longer, how shall we put it, sustainable. It should be obvious that climate change is not a discrete policy problem but an across-the-board threat to every aspect of our lives, if not our very survival. Confronted with a planetary emergency, it takes a special kind of bureaucratic myopia to allocate it to a single government ministry.

Given that such minor items as "health" and "education" also get a single ministry that is hardly indicative that a matter is considered of little importance.

Yesterday there were two signs that this penny has at last dropped. The first, reported in the Guardian this morning, was word of a new climate change bill, which will create a new body dedicated to following the science on global warming and setting targets on carbon emissions decade by decade. The second sign was a useful speech by Margaret Beckett. She flew to Berlin to give it (thereby adding to a carbon dioxide cloud of nearly 1,000 tonnes in 2005-2006 alone, thanks to the 6.5m air miles racked up by travelling British cabinet ministers and their entourages), but we'll put that particular inconvenient truth to one side. Significantly, this was a speech about climate change delivered not by an environment minister but by the foreign secretary. "This is not just an environmental problem," she said. "It is a defence problem. It is a problem for those who deal with economics and development, conflict prevention, agriculture, finance, housing, transport, innovation, trade and health." She's right, with economics the obvious example.

Next Monday, Sir Nicholas Stern will deliver his report on the economics of climate change, and I'm told his message will be stark. He believes that climate change represents the biggest market failure ever, bigger than the two world wars and the Depression put together. To combat it will cost a huge amount. But Stern will say that it is affordable, if only because a refusal to act will end up costing a whole lot more.

Comparing the world wars with the depression and climate change as "market failures" suggests that Stern is engaging in an exercise of rhetoric rather than economics.

Still, if global warming is inseparable from economics, it casts a similar shadow over foreign policy. John Ashton, who sits as the UK's special representative for climate change within the Foreign Office, reckons that the fires that diplomats spend their lives putting out will only proliferate as the planet heats up. He cites Darfur, where a main cause of conflict has been a shift in rainfall, pitting nomadic herders against settled pastoralists. "And there will be more Darfurs," he says, the more the climate changes. As Beckett put it yesterday: "Wars fought over limited resources - land, fresh water, fuel - are as old as history itself." And climate change threatens to reduce the supply of each one of those resources in some of the most unstable places on Earth, with Africa and the Middle East first in line.

Freedland is trying to present as novel the argument that climate change has consequences for non-environmental policy but this is blatantly obvious and true for almost all ministries. If defence screws up and we get nuked it will effect health, if health screws up we'll lack the recruits for the army that makes defence possible, etc. etc. It does not imply that global warming is unique.

More straightforward still, if we remain dependent on fossil fuels, then we remain dependent on the countries that produce them. That leaves us held to ransom by Russia for its gas, and the Gulf states for oil. Even if global warming did not matter, that would be a hard-headed, realpolitik reason to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

Still, more hearteningly, if climate change is a foreign policy problem, foreign policy can surely be part of the climate change solution. It's a truism that carbon dioxide does not recognise borders, and that any effort to tackle it will have to be supranational. Ideally, that would mean global treaties, accepted by everyone, which would see the entire human race come together to deal with a threat that is choking the planet we all share. But that's hardly likely, not when the world's biggest polluter, the US, is still led by an administration barely emerging from official denial that there is a problem at all.

That means interim action, starting with the EU. Heaven knows there are ample reasons to be sceptical about the EU, but when it comes to tackling climate change, we should fall to our knees and give thanks that such a body exists. It has more clout, over a larger area, than any single country could ever hope to wield. With its mighty €120bn budget, it can encourage the technological innovations, from alternative energies to more efficient gadgets, that might get us out of this mess. And it can regulate out of existence those that make our troubles worse.

It's budget is actually pretty measly; it is substantially smaller than the budget of the United Kingdom alone, less than a third the size, and mostly spent subsidising waste. This does not look like changing. Given that the EU doesn't contain China or the US, the two most important countries for climate change, even if it did implement an ambitious climate change policy it could not affect the most important countries.

Some diplomats are pushing for ever closer engagement with China, working urgently to perfect the technology that might capture the carbon generated by coal-fired power stations, sending it back into the earth rather than into the atmosphere. That's especially pressing in the case of China, which is building a new coal-fired station every four or five days.

The Chinese, on the other hand, don't really care. Climate change concern is a luxury of the rich world. Besides, if efficiency savings aren't good enough in the West how are they good enough in China where consumption is rising so much more quickly?

Why doesn't the EU go further, constructing a low-carbon free trade area with China, a single market for low-carbon technology? Europeans might design, say, an ultra-efficient fridge; China could build it and, with the resulting economies of scale, they could end up selling them all over the world.

We already do this. Fridges are becoming radically more efficient and are then being built in the developing world. It's called outsourcing or "economic imperialism" and anti-capitalists hate it.

All these ideas are fizzing away among those who have come to realise that no area of life is left untouched by this danger. Very smart people in government ministries across the globe are trying to think of the right blend of taxes, regulation, incentives and trading schemes that might stop the world emitting too much carbon. They acknowledge that most of the $17 trillion (£9 trillion) that will be spent in the energy sector between now and 2030 will be spent by private companies - and that, therefore, public servants are limited to prodding and pushing them, hoping they move in the right direction.

They do this because they've realised that working with the creative potential and dynamism of the market is far more effective than attempting to use the levers of government control. Take a look at the success of the sulfur dioxide regime in the US for an example of this at work.

But a heretical thought nags. Governments are limited in what they can do because they no longer control the key economic levers: if they did, they could act swiftly. Instead, they are left hoping that market mechanisms will work their magic and that the polluters' behaviour will change. But that can take time and time is the one commodity we don't have. As John Ashton says: "We don't set the deadlines, nature sets the deadlines." It's true that we cannot go back to the days of state ownership and the command economy. (True, too, that state-run industries polluted as badly as private ones, and were often achingly slow to change). Yet if ever there was a time when the sovereignty of the market posed a mortal danger, it is surely now.

Heretical? A call for more economic power going to the state in the Guardian? You're kidding?

As Freedland acknowledges then ignores he has spent this entire article giving an account of the costs of taking too long and has asserted that market solutions are not fast enough but has not grappled with the question of whether state run industries can move fast enough. State run industries are not an exogenous variable which we can change at will; they are slow moving, union dominated, costly and unproductive. They have enough trouble producing goods at remotely competitive rates without also modernising to increase emissions efficiency, primarily a capital investment operation, more rapidly than industrial capitalism, which is really good at capital investment.

Crazy Polls - even if they were reliable they wouldn't tell us so much...

It is important that those of us who made a point of not panicking when Mori suggested that the Conservatives had seen a serious downturn do not crow at the news that ICM suggests we are riding high (a 10% lead is high). Instead we're going to need to actually have a political debate without relying on the crutch of poll numbers.

Cameron's strategy clearly has risks. The policy groups could suggest division to the electorate, they leave the party looking temporarily shallow and policy-lite and we don't know how reconcilable their conclusions will be at the end of the process. Equally, it is plausible that the decision to deprioritise tax cuts is poorly timed.

However, it is affecting a deep change in the way that the Conservatives are perceived which is important to the party's ability to win the national debate in the future. The days of the Liberal Democrats being the prime beneficiaries of government incompetence appear to be gone. Finally, the time and effort of the policy groups should mean that the programme the Conservative opposition will be able to put to the electorate will be a stronger one.

The opinion polls cannot answer the question of whether the benefits outweigh the costs of the Cameron project; they're too short term and there are too many other factors. A better view of what is going on can be found by looking at what the policy groups are thinking or a less formal survey of changes in the media and popular response to Conservative and conservative ideas. Of course, this isn't as neat and quantitative as a voting intention percentage but it is probably more informative at this stage. Opinion polls will have their moment, but it will be closer to the election when the question of "who would you vote for if there were an election tomorrow?" isn't the kind of hypothetical question that invites a flippant answer.

Restrictions on Romanian/Bulgarian Entry

The government's response to Bulgarian and Romanian entry is so dissapointing. When we were one of three countries, along with Ireland and Sweden, to allow the earlier entrants immediate access I was genuinely proud and a little dissapointed at my own party for trying to score partisan points on the issue. Now we have reverted to the dismal European norm on this issue. Here is what the government's restrictions will not do:

1) Make much difference to the Romanian/Bulgarian impact in the job market - this only applies to unskilled workers who aren't working in food processing or agriculture.

2) Make any difference in the medium-long term - As EU members the Romanians and Bulgarians can't be denied the ability to move freely indefinitely. Why is immigration from these countries more dangerous now than in a couple of years time?

3) Make any difference to the kinds of difficulties we're having now with integrating immigrant communities - Eastern Europeans integrate easily.

Here is what the restrictions will do:

1) Make it more difficult to use the EU as a source of 'integration trouble free' immigration - as I set out in a response to the UKIP position on immigrants from Europe.

2) Upset the Romanians-Bulgarians - these nations could be our allies in Europe.

3) Be costly - in order to filter out almost no one, as set out in "what it won't do" point 1, we're going to have to maintain a system of permits which wouldn't be necessary if we treated them like proper EU members.

This is sordid, populist, democracy at its worst. If only someone credible could rise above it.

Chinese Credit Cards

General Electric and Wal Mart are launching a credit card in China. Less than 5% of the Chinese population have credit cards. They need to avoid the big, obvious, risks; getting screwed by their partners or the government or caught up in a financial crash. However, that 5% can be expected to rise massively if the Chinese economy continues to develop and becomes more of a consumer economy. General Electric getting in on that market early has to be a decent idea as reputations will matter a lot while the Chinese are still adjusting to the idea of a credit card.

This painting, which is contained in the book of contemporary Chinese paintings "China", seems oddly appropriate:



Picture via Marginal Revolution.

Estonia fights the demographic decline

The American Scene has a post on an attempt at reversing the demographic decline from the party that brought us the marvellous Estonian flat tax. Essentially it is a mother's salary which pays in relation to the salary that is being lost to parenthood.

I am somewhat of a moderate on the issue of the demographic decline. I do not agree with predictions from authors like Mark Steyn who prophesise a demographic apocalypse in Europe. These predictions always seem to satisfy the authors a little too much; like Left Behind novels they constitute the imaginary revenge of the overly moral over those enjoying life a little more. That all those beautiful Europeans enjoying themselves while Steyn fulminates are going the way of the dinosaur entertains him too much and causes him to put far too much faith in the kind of extrapolations that the right is usually justifiedly cautious about. The evidence suggests that the decline is actually far more moderate.

However, even if the decline is moderate it could still be important. Ageing populations create fiscal difficulties and declining populations affect the balance of national power (growth matters but population has an importance beyond GDP). Equally, immigration as an alternative is proving increasingly difficult to accomodate.

The Estonian plan could lead to a further decrease in the fertility rate at first. As it bases the benefit on the mother's income at the time the child is borne it encourages having children later on when their income is nearer its peak in middle age. However, the advantage is that this removes the need to choose between not incentivising anyone with a medium or high income thanks to setting the level too low or incentivise "welfare babies" from those on low incomes.

It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

4 Big reasons to be skeptical of the Lancaster University report on White/Muslim relations

The Guardian reports a University of Lancaster study into attitudes towards other races among 15 year olds in Burnley and Blackburn but then proceeds to generalise this result to the entire population of the United Kingdom by arguing that these results "turn on its head the current debate about integration".

1. It isn't "the first of its kind comparing levels of intolerance in different communities"

The same paper reported a study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project which found that white Britons had the most positive attitudes to Muslims in Europe, with 63% looking on them favourably, but that British Muslims were the most negatively disposed towards the white population in all Europe; a "significant majority viewed western populations as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral" among a litany of other crimes. These findings are in direct contradiction to the Lancaster University study if it is generalised to the entire population.

2. The sample size is pretty small

This study's results are, I believe, statistically sound enough but, when combined with a narrow geographical focus and age range, this sample size (435) makes the study a suspect candidate to make grand generalisations about 'fault' for difficulties with integration from.

3. It focusses on teenagers

This study's sample is made up of Year 10s, 15 year olds, and attempts to get at their parents attitudes through their responses to the survey. Why 15 year olds are particularly crucial to integration is unclear. Surely this means that, if we believe the Pew survey that the Muslim population are less positive about other cultures, such attitudes must build up later? Possibly from around 18 once they are in university or work. This doesn't mean that white "attitudes are more of a barrier to integration than those of Muslims".

This might be interesting if it resulted in a concrete case that faith schools were not a problem for integration. Unfortunately having a Muslim school implies having a particularly white dominated school; there are only so many Muslims to go around. This study describes the attitudes in white dominated schools as very problematic. Therefore, even by this study's own logic and results faith schools endanger integration.

4. It was conducted in Burnley and Blackburn

These areas are not remotely representative of most of Britain. In fact it is very plausible that in an area which has seen serious disturbances like Burnley's race riots white attitudes will be more confrontational and Muslim attitudes more conciliatory. After all, whites are still in a massive majority in this country and hold all the cards in open confrontation. One would expect that Muslims, even if a more radicalised population in general, would change those attitudes quite quite quickly if the white population started to look really angry; self preservation usually trumps radicalism.

This does not imply that white attitudes are more of a problem. Across the country Burnleys are being created, formerly peaceful Windsor looks like a decent candidate for the next one. When Muslim radicalisation plays its part in creating an angry white population that anger may well scare the Muslim population into wanting to engage with the white community but this hardly suggests that white attitudes are, right now, more of a problem.

Burnley is likely to be very unrepresentative and this study's authors and interpreters at the Guardian should really be more careful in their generalisations from it.