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).
Friday, October 12, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
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:
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
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:
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.
"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.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Friday, October 05, 2007
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.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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?
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?
Thursday, September 27, 2007
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.
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:
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.
"• 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.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
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.
Monday, September 24, 2007
The Islamist by Ed Husain
I read The Islamist this Saturday. I'm now somewhat dissapointed with myself for waiting that long. It's a superb exposé of the Islamist movement's development. How British Islamism planted the seeds of terror not just in the UK but internationally. How a British establishment asleep on the job failed to confront them.
I'd recommend it to anyone trying to work out what's happened and where we go from here.
I'd recommend it to anyone trying to work out what's happened and where we go from here.
War with Iran
Gracchi suggests that surgical airstrikes against Iran are unlikely to prove particularly... surgical.
I agree with that conclusion but I'm not sure about his evidence. He argues that US bombing of Cambodia targetted at Vietcong bases did not prove very accurate in the seventies. That hardly tells you much about what's possible today. Very little of what was done in the first and second Gulf Wars was possible in the seventies.
However, while our capacity for surgical strikes has certainly grown it still isn't possible to to to war and reliably avoid significant damage to a country's infrastructure and civilian casualties. Even if the hardware makes it theoretically possible mistakes are going to be made and there are going to be targets that aren't neatly separate from civilian populations. There is still very much the possibility of strengthening hardliners. War is still cruel.
That war is cruel does not mean that it is not sometimes necessary. There seem, to me, to be three ways in which Iran is making itself a very real threat to our troops, our interests, our allies and ourselves. None of these are humiliating but inconsequential affairs like the hostage crisis or remote possibilities like a nuclear strike on another Middle Eastern state. I'm talking about concrete ways that Iran is making itself a dangerous and destructive enemy:
1) Killing our troops
The Iranians have been murdering our soldiers in serious numbers. Many of the bombs most effective at killing coalition troops in armoured vehicles are, it is absolutely clear, coming from Iran. Many, from all I've seen at least dozens, of our troops would still be alive were Iran not arming insurgents against our troops trying to create a stable Iraq.
If Iran were so directly responsible for deaths on our streets we would already be at war. Soldiers trying to maintain the peace in Iraq and Afghanistan are less visible and their deaths in combat less unexpected but there is little reason we should regard their murder with such passivity.
2) Fighting a slow, proxy war of annihilation against Israel
Hizbollah and Hamas have been slowly set up to challenge Israel from two directions - South Lebanon and Gaza. Both states are being rapidly Talebanised, to borrow Gideon Rachman's phrase, and turned into platforms for a war of attrition against an Israeli state with huge firepower but a small population.
Israel is our ally and deserves to survive. The long war that Hamas and Hizbollah are setting themselves up for will be hugely destructive and a humanitarian disaster. In its fight for survival Israel will kill a lot of people, and may unfairly become the party that takes the blame. We should not leave an ally in that position.
3) Building up a nuclear programme that will remove a lot of our options
I'm not going to base my case in this post on the possibility of Iran using its nuclear weapons. I don't think that the Iranian leadership are crazy enough, or likely to be replaced by anyone crazy enough, to see their society entirely destroyed. I would caution though, that even if the odds are low it is a truly grave risk to take. In particular, those who usually profess to believe in a precautionary principle should apply it to the possibility of Tel Aviv being destroyed as well as global warming.
For this post, though, let's stick with what's probable. What an Iranian nuclear programme would probably do is remove our ability to deter Iran from doing awful things like those discussed in 1) and 2). So long as the nuclear programme is ongoing we have to control Iran within a strictly limited timeframe.
All this makes Iran our enemy and, I think, justifies us taking serious action against the regime in Tehran. Any pressure would have implications in terms of hearts and minds but at this stage it seems far more important that we limit the extent of the threat emanating from Iran. We have to ensure our basic strategic interests are safeguarded.
If we accept that action needs to be taken the next question is what form that action should take. I'm not convinced that diplomacy is likely to be enough. This isn't like the hostage crisis sideshow where Iran had no fundamental interest at stake.
I can see two options:
1) Shut down the petroleum supplies
This was an idea Gingrich had during the hostages crisis. Iran has already had riots over fuel shortages. It has just one refinery and imports the rest. A combination of a blockade and bombing their refinery would quickly render the Iranian economy utterly unable to operate. They would then face the choice of conceding or facing utter economic ruin. That might shift their interests such that they climb down.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, we don't know how effective it would be. The record of economic sanctions is mixed at best and it may not be possible to stop overland supply of Iran. Second, it would necessarily be skewed towards impacting ordinary Iranians compared to other plausible strategies.
2) War
I don't think there is much justification for invasion. We've seen the scale of the challenge that accompanies any taking of cities in Iraq. While I would expect lessons to be learn (they might not be) it wasn't entirely post-war mistakes that made reconstruction hard. Rebuilding a nation following a brutal regime and war just isn't easy. There are too many groups with little interest in co-operation.
Equally, I don't think that surgical strikes at Iran's nuclear facilities would be enough. We don't know we can destroy them and it gives Iran little disincentive not to try again.
If one were to go to war I think the most plausible strategy would be similar to that followed during the Kosovan war. Essentially, bomb the Iranians until they concede. With no ticking bomb about to go off we can keep destroying regime and infrastructure targets until they concede - something significant enough that it is a clear defeat that undermines their credibility, perhaps giving up the components of their nuclear programme. That strategy would also maximise the relevance of our strengths (airpower) while minimising our weaknesses (low tolerance for casualties).
Losing what control we have over Iran's future behaviour should be of concern to all, even if you are unwilling to reflect that concern to the degree of considering military action. It's worth thinking about the hard choices we should be facing.
I agree with that conclusion but I'm not sure about his evidence. He argues that US bombing of Cambodia targetted at Vietcong bases did not prove very accurate in the seventies. That hardly tells you much about what's possible today. Very little of what was done in the first and second Gulf Wars was possible in the seventies.
However, while our capacity for surgical strikes has certainly grown it still isn't possible to to to war and reliably avoid significant damage to a country's infrastructure and civilian casualties. Even if the hardware makes it theoretically possible mistakes are going to be made and there are going to be targets that aren't neatly separate from civilian populations. There is still very much the possibility of strengthening hardliners. War is still cruel.
That war is cruel does not mean that it is not sometimes necessary. There seem, to me, to be three ways in which Iran is making itself a very real threat to our troops, our interests, our allies and ourselves. None of these are humiliating but inconsequential affairs like the hostage crisis or remote possibilities like a nuclear strike on another Middle Eastern state. I'm talking about concrete ways that Iran is making itself a dangerous and destructive enemy:
1) Killing our troops
The Iranians have been murdering our soldiers in serious numbers. Many of the bombs most effective at killing coalition troops in armoured vehicles are, it is absolutely clear, coming from Iran. Many, from all I've seen at least dozens, of our troops would still be alive were Iran not arming insurgents against our troops trying to create a stable Iraq.
If Iran were so directly responsible for deaths on our streets we would already be at war. Soldiers trying to maintain the peace in Iraq and Afghanistan are less visible and their deaths in combat less unexpected but there is little reason we should regard their murder with such passivity.
2) Fighting a slow, proxy war of annihilation against Israel
Hizbollah and Hamas have been slowly set up to challenge Israel from two directions - South Lebanon and Gaza. Both states are being rapidly Talebanised, to borrow Gideon Rachman's phrase, and turned into platforms for a war of attrition against an Israeli state with huge firepower but a small population.
Israel is our ally and deserves to survive. The long war that Hamas and Hizbollah are setting themselves up for will be hugely destructive and a humanitarian disaster. In its fight for survival Israel will kill a lot of people, and may unfairly become the party that takes the blame. We should not leave an ally in that position.
3) Building up a nuclear programme that will remove a lot of our options
I'm not going to base my case in this post on the possibility of Iran using its nuclear weapons. I don't think that the Iranian leadership are crazy enough, or likely to be replaced by anyone crazy enough, to see their society entirely destroyed. I would caution though, that even if the odds are low it is a truly grave risk to take. In particular, those who usually profess to believe in a precautionary principle should apply it to the possibility of Tel Aviv being destroyed as well as global warming.
For this post, though, let's stick with what's probable. What an Iranian nuclear programme would probably do is remove our ability to deter Iran from doing awful things like those discussed in 1) and 2). So long as the nuclear programme is ongoing we have to control Iran within a strictly limited timeframe.
All this makes Iran our enemy and, I think, justifies us taking serious action against the regime in Tehran. Any pressure would have implications in terms of hearts and minds but at this stage it seems far more important that we limit the extent of the threat emanating from Iran. We have to ensure our basic strategic interests are safeguarded.
If we accept that action needs to be taken the next question is what form that action should take. I'm not convinced that diplomacy is likely to be enough. This isn't like the hostage crisis sideshow where Iran had no fundamental interest at stake.
I can see two options:
1) Shut down the petroleum supplies
This was an idea Gingrich had during the hostages crisis. Iran has already had riots over fuel shortages. It has just one refinery and imports the rest. A combination of a blockade and bombing their refinery would quickly render the Iranian economy utterly unable to operate. They would then face the choice of conceding or facing utter economic ruin. That might shift their interests such that they climb down.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, we don't know how effective it would be. The record of economic sanctions is mixed at best and it may not be possible to stop overland supply of Iran. Second, it would necessarily be skewed towards impacting ordinary Iranians compared to other plausible strategies.
2) War
I don't think there is much justification for invasion. We've seen the scale of the challenge that accompanies any taking of cities in Iraq. While I would expect lessons to be learn (they might not be) it wasn't entirely post-war mistakes that made reconstruction hard. Rebuilding a nation following a brutal regime and war just isn't easy. There are too many groups with little interest in co-operation.
Equally, I don't think that surgical strikes at Iran's nuclear facilities would be enough. We don't know we can destroy them and it gives Iran little disincentive not to try again.
If one were to go to war I think the most plausible strategy would be similar to that followed during the Kosovan war. Essentially, bomb the Iranians until they concede. With no ticking bomb about to go off we can keep destroying regime and infrastructure targets until they concede - something significant enough that it is a clear defeat that undermines their credibility, perhaps giving up the components of their nuclear programme. That strategy would also maximise the relevance of our strengths (airpower) while minimising our weaknesses (low tolerance for casualties).
Losing what control we have over Iran's future behaviour should be of concern to all, even if you are unwilling to reflect that concern to the degree of considering military action. It's worth thinking about the hard choices we should be facing.
Technical Difficulties
I'm afraid that the Internet router at my flat comprehensively broke down on Saturday afternoon. Should be back in business within the next couple of days.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Legal threats to the blogosphere
We're all Bloggerheads now.
Mr. Eugenides and Chicken Yoghurt have the most comprehensive accounts I've found of the silencing of Bloggerheads. Many of us have had our differences with Tim Ireland at one point or another, Iain Dale in particular deserves credit for putting them aside, but that doesn't matter now.
There are broader issues at stake. There is a growing threat to free speech from a combination of legal and, in other cases, even violent threats and too few people with the spine to resist them. It's a big issue that can only be addressed by a collective refusal to be cowed.
Right here and right now we can make a start and stand up to Usmanov's legal intimidation.
Ironically this whole thing might actually make me track down Craig Murray's book and find out what this swine Usmanov has been up to.
Mr. Eugenides and Chicken Yoghurt have the most comprehensive accounts I've found of the silencing of Bloggerheads. Many of us have had our differences with Tim Ireland at one point or another, Iain Dale in particular deserves credit for putting them aside, but that doesn't matter now.
There are broader issues at stake. There is a growing threat to free speech from a combination of legal and, in other cases, even violent threats and too few people with the spine to resist them. It's a big issue that can only be addressed by a collective refusal to be cowed.
Right here and right now we can make a start and stand up to Usmanov's legal intimidation.
Ironically this whole thing might actually make me track down Craig Murray's book and find out what this swine Usmanov has been up to.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Liberal Democrat Environmental Policy
"The Lib Dems this morning defended their environment policy. They said that the policy of making the UK carbon neutral is practical and achievable. Menzies Campbell, an expert in the historical climate, told the conference: "With these policies the Liberal Democrats have become the first major British party to map out the route to a carbon neutral Britain." Critics have suggested that replacing fossil fuel technologies on the scale required with current technologies is an idea "that sounds more like the demented ravings of Swampy than a policy from a serious political party" but Campbell insisted "I remember, I think we all remember, that while incomes might have been a lot lower, and the chances of living beyond 50 not so great, there was a real sense of community in the 17th century."
For all the idiotic "hammer the rich" gaffes there isn't much new coming out of the Lib Dems on the fiscal policy front. The policy they've voted on at their conference is the same as the report the TPA covered a little while back.
I think the new environmental policy (PDF) was formed in a blind panic at the prospect of Gummer-Goldsmith claiming the title of craziest views expressed by a mainstream political party on the environment. The Lib Dems were looking for a way to trump the Quality of Life group and, after the "kill all the motorists" strategy tested poorly with focus groups, hit on making the UK carbon neutral. It's utterly insane.
Their mechanism is heavy on incredibly ultra-draconian regulation. They set up a legal requirement for major sources of emissions to fall to zero (all renewables or biofuel). With the difference in price between fossil fuel and renewable power that kind of change could utterly destroy our standard of living.
They then want to have countries that do sign up to a new Kyoto form a trading block and exclude the nations that won't play along. Combine the cost of making a colossal mess of the global trading system with ending fossil fuel use and the costs could be staggering, catastrophic. Despite this the cost is ignored entirely. Just like Gummer-Goldsmith this report doesn't do cost/benefit analysis. Everything is 'essential'.
Other green material on their website is hilarious out of touch. In this video Menzies Campbell tells us that they want to cut tax on "going to work" and replace the revenue with tax on "pollution" and then literally the next second it cuts to what they do want to tax, filling up the car. That's how people go to work!
Even if they wanted people to switch and no longer use their cars to commute it would take decades to upgrade public transport enough that it could accomodate millions of extra passengers on busy commuter routes during the rush hour. A partial switch from taxing "being at work" to taxing "going to work". Doesn't sound quite as profound now does it?
Were the Liberal Democrats anything more than an empty protest vote the impractical nonsense that is this report would have been torn to pieces by now. That it hasn't been shows how irrelevant they have become.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Drained
I feel utterly drained at the moment. I'm not sure why. Not physically tired but just emotionally empty apart from an unpleasant sense of loathing.
The condition has persisted since some time over the weekend and it's horrible. I can't explain it at all. Had the feeling arrived today I'd have blamed the weather but yesterday was all glorious sunshine. Nothing stressful or unpleasant has happened. Work continues to go well. My creative faculties don't appear to have suffered. Very strange.
Ah well, hopefully it will clear soon and I'll be full of beans again. I'll have to take blogging a little easy till that happens or I might have something of a swearblogger episode.
The condition has persisted since some time over the weekend and it's horrible. I can't explain it at all. Had the feeling arrived today I'd have blamed the weather but yesterday was all glorious sunshine. Nothing stressful or unpleasant has happened. Work continues to go well. My creative faculties don't appear to have suffered. Very strange.
Ah well, hopefully it will clear soon and I'll be full of beans again. I'll have to take blogging a little easy till that happens or I might have something of a swearblogger episode.
Shoot 'Em Up
I saw this on Saturday and it's hysterical. There aren't any deeper messages worth lingering on. There's just brilliantly over the top action.
Few action films have managed one carrot-based kill, this one has two. It actually takes the Bugs Bunny surrealism and just plays with it.
Don't take it too seriously and enjoy.
Zac Goldsmith responds to his critics
Goldsmith’s response to his critics has more than a whiff of desperation. He starts out by separating bans and regulations in an attempt to portray the report as containing little of either:
“Reports that we want to ban Plasma screens are wrong. We want to encourage plasmas that are less wasteful. Nor are we proposing to ban the standby. We want to have an automatic switch-off mechanism fitted so that appliances switch off after a set period of time.”
The stand-by button as it exists now is a mechanism designed to allow someone to turn their TV, radio or other electronic device on using the remote control. If you make it so that the stand-by turns off after a certain amount of time the point is rather lost. When you go to turn your TV on with the remote you’ll find you can’t. The stand-by button is banned.
While it might not seem like too great an inconvenience to have to get up and turn the TV on the old-fashioned way the stand-by button doesn’t make much of a difference to global warming either. A quick calculation suggests that even if all of the power used by devices on stand-by was saved (and under Goldsmith’s recommendations it wouldn’t be – some people would just leave the TV on more, others would use the temporary stand-by he proposes to allow) the saving would be equivalent to less than two days of Chinese emissions growth. Banning stand-by buttons won’t save the planet; it’s just one more little inconvenience that the Quality of Life report seeks to foist on ordinary Britons.
Equally, while the Quality of Life group would allow Plasma TVs if they were sufficiently efficient it would ban most of the ones currently on sale. Perhaps this shouldn’t be understood as a ban but if not it should definitely be thought of as a regulation.
Goldsmith then goes on to highlight some regulations that he would like to end. The problem is that his report takes away some regulations with one hand at the same time as adding a whole load more with the other. For example, the bans discussed above, other regulations such as a ban on below-cost selling by supermarkets and the cigarette style warnings of a particular size and prominence on car adverts. Reading the report it is absolutely clear that a big net increase in regulation is planned that would offset any cut in regulatory costs as advanced by, among others, the Competitiveness report.
“Aviation: We are categorically NOT proposing to tax holidays. We are ONLY targeting domestic, short-haul, commuter flights to destinations easily reached by train, and within the same sort of time frame. Much of the proceeds will be used to improve the rail alternatives.”
Goldsmith might regard them as passé but many people do enjoy holidays within the UK.
Also, the proposals are to charge VAT on domestic flights. This would include flights from London to Scotland that would take a long time if replaced by train journeys. The proposed taxes are also not hypothecated. An aspiration to spend the money on reducing the costs of going by train is pretty meaningless when all of the revenue from new or higher green taxes have already been committed by the Conservative leadership to a ‘Families Fund’.
Goldsmith does not mention in his response proposed further increases in tax on holidays, with stepped increases in the reformed Air Passenger duty, and on waste either through council tax or variable charging, a big increase in Landfill Tax.
Goldsmith does little to clear up the fog of confusion surrounding proposed changes to planning law by seemingly contradicting himself:
“We are saying that because of the VAT relief, we would require homeowners to upgrade the energy performance of their homes.
[…]
It has been reported that we would require people to fit their homes with efficient appliances if they want to improve their home. This is plain wrong.”
He then talks about proposed charges for supermarket parking and argues that this is a decision for local government. That may be the case but it’s still one of the report’s recommendations! Just because it is for local government to implement is no reason it shouldn't be subject to proper criticism.
Finally, he argues that the report did not advocate the government adopting a Happy Planet Index. This is a bit tendentious. The report endorses the Happy Planet Index and recommends that a measure sounding very similar be developed. While there may not be a direct recommendation to adopt the Index the report clearly wants the anti-growth thinking behind it to be placed at the heart of government decision making. That is what has really alarmed people; the idea that the Conservative party might adopt this report’s disdain for economic growth.
This is the heart of the problem with Goldsmith’s defence of his report. He does not address the most serious criticism of it coming from the press. From the Sun’s response:
“Goldsmith and his sidekick, failed Tory minister John Gummer, devote about 30 pages to why Britain’s economic success isn’t everything.
Try telling that to the millions who rely on a booming British economy for their job and their livelihood.
Who have ambitions for a bigger house, more luxurious car and a better foreign holiday for them and their kids.
Any report which includes a chapter entitled “The Darker Side Of Wealth” has no place on any self-respecting Tory’s bookshelf.”
Or, the Express:
“Billionaire's son Mr Goldsmith and former Cabinet minister Mr Gummer have, on behalf of David Cameron, declared war on economic growth. One ludicrous extract claims: "Beyond a certain point – a point which the UK reached some time ago – ever increasing material gain can become not a gift but a burden. As people, it makes us less happy."
So they have identified what they consider to be Gordon Brown's Achilles heel: incredibly, they believe his greatest sin is to have made the British people too well-off. Presumably they would like the Conservatives to fight the next election on a platform of reversing these sinister "material gains".”
As part of our response to the Quality of Life group report the TaxPayers’ Alliance set out the intellectual case against the anti-growth agenda this report is based upon. Reinforcing the impression that Conservatives are the selfish wealthy who don’t care about improving the lives of ordinary Britons is also politically disastrous.
Two weeks ago the TaxPayers’ Alliance published a report establishing that green taxes are already too high and a poll showing that the public are extremely sceptical about the motives of politicians proposing green taxes. The Conservatives should leave this report's recommendations well alone.
Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
MoveOn.Org
Often I find the neo-con attacks on 'defeatist' Democrats a little cringeworthy. However, after MoveOn.Org took out this ad in the New York Times to attack General Patreus they clearly deserved a decent rhetorical kick:
A larger PDF can be found here.
A larger PDF can be found here.
Accusing a serving officer of treachery just for disagreeing with you is absolutely shameful. It is entirely fair for Democrats and the broader American left to question whether the progress that Patreus has shown is significant or sufficient to justify remaining in Iraq. It is absolutely legitimate to question his account of the facts. However, neither of those disagreements requires or in any way justifies an accusation of treachery and making one against an officer with an impeccable service history is a disgusting thing to do. Fortunately, Red State have formulated a superb response:
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Quality of Life report and the Common Agricultural Policy
Part of me wonders whether the media reaction to the Conservative Quality of Life report has missed the most globally important part of its thinking. The report breaks with traditional Conservative opposition to the Common Agricultural Policy. It recommends a refined green-CAP.
This is colossally important. The CAP impoverishes Third World farmers, increases domestic food prices and, perhaps most importantly, constitutes a massive stumbling block for every WTO round. The opportunity cost to the CAP, which prevents us completing big deals for free trade, to the developing world is truly alarming. The Australian Productivity Commission found the total benefits from the Doha round at $260 billion, a lot of that takes the form of a better standard of living for some of the poorest people on Earth. When these agreements are stalled, limited or prevented entirely by the CAP millions suffer.
The British position on the CAP matters. While we haven't gotten very far in putting an end to it, largely because we haven't been able to swing the Germans yet - we can, Britain can make a big difference to the policy's chances of survival and scale if it does. To undermine Britain's position against the CAP on pretty tenuous green grounds (there have to be less costly ways of protecting hedgerows) would be deeply tragic. If a Conservative government were to give up on challenging for the CAP's abolition they would deserve real historical infamy.
This is colossally important. The CAP impoverishes Third World farmers, increases domestic food prices and, perhaps most importantly, constitutes a massive stumbling block for every WTO round. The opportunity cost to the CAP, which prevents us completing big deals for free trade, to the developing world is truly alarming. The Australian Productivity Commission found the total benefits from the Doha round at $260 billion, a lot of that takes the form of a better standard of living for some of the poorest people on Earth. When these agreements are stalled, limited or prevented entirely by the CAP millions suffer.
The British position on the CAP matters. While we haven't gotten very far in putting an end to it, largely because we haven't been able to swing the Germans yet - we can, Britain can make a big difference to the policy's chances of survival and scale if it does. To undermine Britain's position against the CAP on pretty tenuous green grounds (there have to be less costly ways of protecting hedgerows) would be deeply tragic. If a Conservative government were to give up on challenging for the CAP's abolition they would deserve real historical infamy.
Flying Monkey Watch #4
There is a truly bizarre political debate going on in India:
The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this week which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram.
The report was withdrawn after huge protests by opposition parties.
The report was presented to the Supreme Court on Wednesday in connection with a case against a proposed shipping canal project between India and Sri Lanka.
Hindu hardliners say the project will destroy what they say is a bridge built by Ram and his army of monkeys.
I don't think the monkey army could fly but the existence of an army of monkeys has to make producing an army of flying monkeys a more plausible objective. The organisational challenge has been overcome. Continue the research...
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Food Security
Where did food security come from? The Quality of Life report discusses it a fair bit.
I'm pretty sure food security hasn't been a serious issue since the Second World War. Food is quite absurdly cheap, we haven't had any threats to supply that I can think of since the war.
Far more of the food we consume is produced domestically than was the case before the First World War, when we imported a far higher percentage. Despite far greater reliance on foreign supplies the massive disruption of war and submarine attacks on merchant shipping did not force people to go hungry in the two world wars.
Even if you are concerned about food security nowadays without the prospect of enemy naval power, and none of our enemies have significant navies, home production does not offer much of an advantage in food production terms. The best strategy to ensure food security is to have as many different sources of supply as possible so that if one supplier is forced to stop, perhaps due to ecological change, you can buy from elsewhere.
That makes the policies recommended on food security grounds, most of which were aimed at increasing local production - primarily intended to reduce food miles, a particularly bad idea. The more you limit the geographic scope of food production the more you risk events, whether political, environmental or whatever, endangering a regular supply of food.
Painting false synergies between security and environmentalist policy was a weakness in other parts of the Quality of Life report as well. The idea that improving energy security and cutting emissions go hand in hand is untrue for the United Kingdom right now. The best way of improving energy security would be to massively slash taxes on North Sea Oil. That would increase the incentive to explore North Sea Oil and would cause us to rely significantly less on foreign sources. Might not help much with cutting international emissions though.
I'm pretty sure food security hasn't been a serious issue since the Second World War. Food is quite absurdly cheap, we haven't had any threats to supply that I can think of since the war.
Far more of the food we consume is produced domestically than was the case before the First World War, when we imported a far higher percentage. Despite far greater reliance on foreign supplies the massive disruption of war and submarine attacks on merchant shipping did not force people to go hungry in the two world wars.
Even if you are concerned about food security nowadays without the prospect of enemy naval power, and none of our enemies have significant navies, home production does not offer much of an advantage in food production terms. The best strategy to ensure food security is to have as many different sources of supply as possible so that if one supplier is forced to stop, perhaps due to ecological change, you can buy from elsewhere.
That makes the policies recommended on food security grounds, most of which were aimed at increasing local production - primarily intended to reduce food miles, a particularly bad idea. The more you limit the geographic scope of food production the more you risk events, whether political, environmental or whatever, endangering a regular supply of food.
Painting false synergies between security and environmentalist policy was a weakness in other parts of the Quality of Life report as well. The idea that improving energy security and cutting emissions go hand in hand is untrue for the United Kingdom right now. The best way of improving energy security would be to massively slash taxes on North Sea Oil. That would increase the incentive to explore North Sea Oil and would cause us to rely significantly less on foreign sources. Might not help much with cutting international emissions though.
TaxPayers' Alliance response to the Quality of Life Policy Group
The TaxPayers' Alliance response to the report is here (PDF). We're far from impressed. I'll post some more esoteric thoughts on it later.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Southern League
A while I ago I posted on one of this blog's regular topics, regional income inequalities, and Vino asked whether I thought a Southern League could arise, a major political lobby protesting that vast transfers of income (8% of the South's GDP) are going elsewhere and calling for Southern fiscal autonomy. A movement analagous to the Italian Northern League. I didn't really have an answer beyond a vague inclination that such gripes were channelled into a resentment of the more obviously unfair Barnett formula and Scotland's special treatment.
I've been thinking about the question of a Southern League occasionally since. You see, a major problem for the UKIP is that most people put the EU pretty far down their list of priorities, they don't care enough to abandon the traditional parties. By contrast with a Southern League you could promise to combine big tax cuts with increases in spending on most public priorities, more police for example. You could constantly replay the man in Ann Widdecombe's tv programme telling the employed that if they don't like subsidising his laziness and copious procreation they can "take a long jump [off a short cliff]". It could be a brutally effective populist campaign.
Despite that it seems utterly implausible that such a movement will emerge on any serious scale. I can see two plausible reasons why the subsidy to the North troubles people so much less than the subsidy to Scotland (significantly more English now support Scottish independence than Scots according to this poll from late last year):
1) The Scottish subsidy is more unfair as it is not based upon Scotland being particularly poor, this causes it to anger people more. At first this might seem like the obvious explanation but when you consider David B Smith's very convincing argument that the subsidy actually keeps the North poor it becomes less so. I'd think that after a few decades of the subsidy failing to create a serious improvement people the difference between two poorly justified subsidies would start to fade and the subsidy to the North would face serious opposition.
2) English nationalism. I think that the greater willingness to accept subsidies to Northern England might be more evidence that English national feeling is increasingly for England rather than Britain. North and South, for all the 'Northern monkey' and 'southern furry' jokes, are not thought of as a 'them' and 'us'; the question of who gets what is therefore a far less emotive subject. In a way this is troubling as it constitutes further evidence that the Union is under huge strain but there is a very definite positive side.
The Union, and British identity, has been dealt a savage blow by a poorly thought-through and unequal devolution. It's good to know that the older English identity has not been wounded in the process but has stepped back into the limelight to provide an object for the English people's common loyalty and a flag for them to rally around and justify continuing to support each other. While I do think we need to end suffocatingly high levels of public spending in the North I would want us to do that because it is the right thing for the Northern economy rather than because each region is out for itself. I'm glad we still want to look out for each other; that could be an important instinct in troubled times to come.
I've been thinking about the question of a Southern League occasionally since. You see, a major problem for the UKIP is that most people put the EU pretty far down their list of priorities, they don't care enough to abandon the traditional parties. By contrast with a Southern League you could promise to combine big tax cuts with increases in spending on most public priorities, more police for example. You could constantly replay the man in Ann Widdecombe's tv programme telling the employed that if they don't like subsidising his laziness and copious procreation they can "take a long jump [off a short cliff]". It could be a brutally effective populist campaign.
Despite that it seems utterly implausible that such a movement will emerge on any serious scale. I can see two plausible reasons why the subsidy to the North troubles people so much less than the subsidy to Scotland (significantly more English now support Scottish independence than Scots according to this poll from late last year):
1) The Scottish subsidy is more unfair as it is not based upon Scotland being particularly poor, this causes it to anger people more. At first this might seem like the obvious explanation but when you consider David B Smith's very convincing argument that the subsidy actually keeps the North poor it becomes less so. I'd think that after a few decades of the subsidy failing to create a serious improvement people the difference between two poorly justified subsidies would start to fade and the subsidy to the North would face serious opposition.
2) English nationalism. I think that the greater willingness to accept subsidies to Northern England might be more evidence that English national feeling is increasingly for England rather than Britain. North and South, for all the 'Northern monkey' and 'southern furry' jokes, are not thought of as a 'them' and 'us'; the question of who gets what is therefore a far less emotive subject. In a way this is troubling as it constitutes further evidence that the Union is under huge strain but there is a very definite positive side.
The Union, and British identity, has been dealt a savage blow by a poorly thought-through and unequal devolution. It's good to know that the older English identity has not been wounded in the process but has stepped back into the limelight to provide an object for the English people's common loyalty and a flag for them to rally around and justify continuing to support each other. While I do think we need to end suffocatingly high levels of public spending in the North I would want us to do that because it is the right thing for the Northern economy rather than because each region is out for itself. I'm glad we still want to look out for each other; that could be an important instinct in troubled times to come.
More reasons to worry about Pakistan
This, from CNN, is very significant:
While the British Pakistani population are almost certainly more sensible the pool from which new Pakistani immigrants are drawn is a pretty similar population to this poll's sample. Unlike, for example, Iranians in America Pakistani immigrants to Britain are drawn from all sectors of society. The importing of radical ideologies from Pakistan was a key trend uncovered by Panorama last year. This poll shows the extent of the problem and why it is so important we start thinking more urgently about effective strategies for integration and immigration control.
"Interviews were conducted August 18-29, face-to-face with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces across the nation. Households were randomly selected. According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating."
While the British Pakistani population are almost certainly more sensible the pool from which new Pakistani immigrants are drawn is a pretty similar population to this poll's sample. Unlike, for example, Iranians in America Pakistani immigrants to Britain are drawn from all sectors of society. The importing of radical ideologies from Pakistan was a key trend uncovered by Panorama last year. This poll shows the extent of the problem and why it is so important we start thinking more urgently about effective strategies for integration and immigration control.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Trends and Troubles in Pakistan
Current, rather bizarre, manoevring in Pakistani politics, with ex-Prime Ministers arriving and being re-deported in a matter of hours, might suggest some kind of high-stakes, top-level politics. A struggle between different leaders hoping to control the future of Pakistan. My impression is that the high-profile struggles over leadership are a lot less important than underlying trends that will, eventually, make all this Machiavellian scheming appear rather trivial.
The struggle for power in Pakistan is not as life or death as it looks. It is essentially between a political class tied up with the feudal system and hopelessly corrupt and a military leadership which has not delivered the progress to justify itself as a Chinese-style "just let us get on with it" dictatorship. None of the Pakistanis I speak to think there is much chance of a revolution, the military is too strong, but if other military leaders feel Musharraf does not have the popularity they will replace him and probably bring the democrats back to rebuild the state's legitimacy. Little of substance will change and the military will remain in the wings ready to take over if things screw up again. Like Turkey but without the Turkish army's sense of purpose. The Pakistani military prefers suspect projects like the nuclear programme and the Taleban to being a high-minded guardian of secularism.
The real change will come from the bottom up. Divide Pakistan (and this is a gross simplification, it's a complex country) into two areas. The central areas dominated by the big cities and the borders. In the borders what Gideon Rachman called Talebanisation continues apace. I have spoken to Pakistanis who suggest this might not be as bad as it sounds. The alternative is regular, venal feudalism and the authorities just need to stamp on the more violent, Al Qaeda linked elements. I think that signs of the majority being threatened into radicalism suggest storms brewing; it's a pattern we've seen elsewhere from Algeria to Palestine. There is also the ongoing struggle with Baluchistan's independence movement and the border with Afghanistan which seriously stretch military resources. This will mean that if the radicalisation of the borders turns into something dangerous, suicide bombings suggest it might, it will be very hard for the Pakistani state to do anything about it. If the state loses control an opportunity will open for a new force to come in, deliver its own form of order and claim a dangerous authority like the Taleban did in Afghanistan.
The other trend is in the cities. Again Islamist parties are doing well. They are credited with clearing up corruption where they are able to which has, for example, allowed Karachi to enjoy a quiet boom. However, the confidence I hear when I talk to Pakistanis about this: that if the Islamists go too far there will be a popular backlash seems overly optimistic to me. Getting rid of Islamists is harder than it sounds.
I worry about what is happening to Pakistan. You should too. The rise of Islamism in Pakistan is deeply connected to the rise of radical Islam in Britain. A collapse in Pakistan's cohesion could lead to a wave of immigration and radicalisation of Britain's Muslim community. Pakistan's problems should very much concern us.
The struggle for power in Pakistan is not as life or death as it looks. It is essentially between a political class tied up with the feudal system and hopelessly corrupt and a military leadership which has not delivered the progress to justify itself as a Chinese-style "just let us get on with it" dictatorship. None of the Pakistanis I speak to think there is much chance of a revolution, the military is too strong, but if other military leaders feel Musharraf does not have the popularity they will replace him and probably bring the democrats back to rebuild the state's legitimacy. Little of substance will change and the military will remain in the wings ready to take over if things screw up again. Like Turkey but without the Turkish army's sense of purpose. The Pakistani military prefers suspect projects like the nuclear programme and the Taleban to being a high-minded guardian of secularism.
The real change will come from the bottom up. Divide Pakistan (and this is a gross simplification, it's a complex country) into two areas. The central areas dominated by the big cities and the borders. In the borders what Gideon Rachman called Talebanisation continues apace. I have spoken to Pakistanis who suggest this might not be as bad as it sounds. The alternative is regular, venal feudalism and the authorities just need to stamp on the more violent, Al Qaeda linked elements. I think that signs of the majority being threatened into radicalism suggest storms brewing; it's a pattern we've seen elsewhere from Algeria to Palestine. There is also the ongoing struggle with Baluchistan's independence movement and the border with Afghanistan which seriously stretch military resources. This will mean that if the radicalisation of the borders turns into something dangerous, suicide bombings suggest it might, it will be very hard for the Pakistani state to do anything about it. If the state loses control an opportunity will open for a new force to come in, deliver its own form of order and claim a dangerous authority like the Taleban did in Afghanistan.
The other trend is in the cities. Again Islamist parties are doing well. They are credited with clearing up corruption where they are able to which has, for example, allowed Karachi to enjoy a quiet boom. However, the confidence I hear when I talk to Pakistanis about this: that if the Islamists go too far there will be a popular backlash seems overly optimistic to me. Getting rid of Islamists is harder than it sounds.
I worry about what is happening to Pakistan. You should too. The rise of Islamism in Pakistan is deeply connected to the rise of radical Islam in Britain. A collapse in Pakistan's cohesion could lead to a wave of immigration and radicalisation of Britain's Muslim community. Pakistan's problems should very much concern us.
"Nicholas Stern's authoritative report"
British politicians finds Nicholas Stern's report terribly convenient. It has been torn to pieces by some of the most respected climate-change economists, Tol and Nordhaus are two examples that are discussed in my green tax report. It is exceptionally pessimistic compared to the rest of the literature and clearly has a host of problems but Stern's report continues to have a huge appeal to those looking to cast themselves as green saviours or find an excuse for new taxes.
Mendelsohn, another very reputable climate-change economist, contributes a broad examination of the problems in Stern's report. Well worth reading.
Mendelsohn, another very reputable climate-change economist, contributes a broad examination of the problems in Stern's report. Well worth reading.
BBC bias at its worst
This is absolutely shocking:
"The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks."
"Al-Qaeda hopes its attacks will make Western countries treat Muslims differently in areas like the Middle East, the Balkans and Chechnya.""Al-Qaeda has been accused of being behind a series of attacks and bombings since its formation in the late 1980s."
The massive bias would be depressing but unsurprising: That Al Qaeda are behind 9/11 is "widely thought", that they are behind a series of other attacks and bombings is an accusation. However, that they hate America solely because of its involvement in the Middle East and have a genuine humanitarian concern for their fellow Muslims is asserted as fact.
What is really alarming, though, is that this is a feature from Newsround. Children's news. The public are right to regard the BBC license as one of the most unfair taxes, they shouldn't be forced to pay for their children to be brainwashed.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Atonement
I went to see Atonement on Sunday. Superb.
It's so refreshing to see a British film be so ambitious. Our film makers clearly have the capacity for ambitious work, think of Memento, Batman Begins, American Beauty or the Road to Perdition. While these films are directed by Britons and plenty of other films make plenty of use of British talent they are not 'British' in that they do not engage with the British experience and British cultural influences. There are other great British films but few real stars and they are too rare and too reliant upon easy niches like the rom-com, the plucky lad on the make and children's films. There's nothing wrong with the niches but ambitious, big-story, films have a particular function.
Like I've said before I do think there is a particular function to a strong national cinema. I think it would do wonders for our sense of ourselves as a nation. If we think back to the sense of nation that we've lost I don't think its an accident we would still return disproportionately to the era of the Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Zulu and the other films around the 1960s boom. Those films were important because they had the scale in which Britain's idea of itself could really be expressed with depth rather than superficially. If Atonement isn't a lone blip then a new British cinema could do the same.
The direction is superb. The score really drives through the action and the visuals range between touching and stunning. The scenes of Dunkirk are very memorable but I actually found some of the period scenes of England just as arresting. Every performance was solid and some were spectacular. Keira Knightley has really come into her own. Every actor playing the central character Briony did their bit to build a very well-rounded character. James McEvoy is clearly an emerging star.
It managed to do a horrors of war story without drifting into suffering porn. It managed the worthy feat of conveying in a story the tragedy of lives unlived. It asked questions about the 'what ifs' of life and explored emotional themes of regret with admirable refinement.
The real question over this film's significance isn't its quality but whether or not it forms the start of something new. Will British cinema remain Harry Potter, 'charming' romantic comedies and unemployed Northerners or will we see the growth of a genuine, ambitious mainstream national cinema again? If that happened it would be glorious.
It's so refreshing to see a British film be so ambitious. Our film makers clearly have the capacity for ambitious work, think of Memento, Batman Begins, American Beauty or the Road to Perdition. While these films are directed by Britons and plenty of other films make plenty of use of British talent they are not 'British' in that they do not engage with the British experience and British cultural influences. There are other great British films but few real stars and they are too rare and too reliant upon easy niches like the rom-com, the plucky lad on the make and children's films. There's nothing wrong with the niches but ambitious, big-story, films have a particular function.
Like I've said before I do think there is a particular function to a strong national cinema. I think it would do wonders for our sense of ourselves as a nation. If we think back to the sense of nation that we've lost I don't think its an accident we would still return disproportionately to the era of the Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Zulu and the other films around the 1960s boom. Those films were important because they had the scale in which Britain's idea of itself could really be expressed with depth rather than superficially. If Atonement isn't a lone blip then a new British cinema could do the same.
The direction is superb. The score really drives through the action and the visuals range between touching and stunning. The scenes of Dunkirk are very memorable but I actually found some of the period scenes of England just as arresting. Every performance was solid and some were spectacular. Keira Knightley has really come into her own. Every actor playing the central character Briony did their bit to build a very well-rounded character. James McEvoy is clearly an emerging star.
It managed to do a horrors of war story without drifting into suffering porn. It managed the worthy feat of conveying in a story the tragedy of lives unlived. It asked questions about the 'what ifs' of life and explored emotional themes of regret with admirable refinement.
The real question over this film's significance isn't its quality but whether or not it forms the start of something new. Will British cinema remain Harry Potter, 'charming' romantic comedies and unemployed Northerners or will we see the growth of a genuine, ambitious mainstream national cinema again? If that happened it would be glorious.
The problems with the Happy Planet Index
Informed sources think that something along the lines of the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index is going to be recommended in the Conservative Quality of Life group report this Thursday.
The purpose of the Happy Planet Index is to create a measure that captures a society’s ability to produce what we really want, long and happy lives, from what we have to work with, natural resources. To support it you have to accept two key propositions:
First, you have to accept that happiness economics properly captures true human aspirations and needs. Second, you have to accept that resource efficiency is the proper standard to hold economies by.
Both of these should be an absolute anathema to a conservative and the Conservative Party.
Happiness economics isn’t the reliable policy tool that the New Economics Foundation makes it out to be. It is based on one key observation, which Lord Layard is most famous for advancing, that average happiness doesn’t increase along with national income. As Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod pointed out in a book published by the Institute of Economic Affairs it isn’t only national income that happiness doesn’t correlate with, it’s also public spending, longevity, income equality, even levels of depression and almost any other variable you care to name. As the iea authors point out this implies that either happiness can’t be created through social policy or it isn’t a reliable measure. Either way it is toxic to the NEF’s view that improving happiness should be the primary goal of social policy. “State control with a smile”, as Corin Taylor described happiness economics in The Business, cannot be justified empirically.
Another idea that cannot be sustained is that resource efficiency is the standard economies should be held to. As the NEF suggest we do have a limited stock of natural resources, however, other resources such as human time and ingenuity are also only available in limited quantities. Both environmental and human resources have the capacity to be used in alternative ways and produce returns both now and in the future. Deciding how those resources should be used and which it is more important to use efficiently is a job the market does very well. Let’s think about that in more concrete terms, with a historical example:
At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was far more resource efficient than the United States. We used less raw cotton for each yard of cloth produced, less coal and iron ore for each tonne of steel. However, we used far more skilled labour. This was the result of us having more skilled labour, as we had been an industrial nation for longer, but less natural resource, as we did not have the big resource endowment of the US. The market prioritised resource efficiency in Britain but efficient use of skilled labour in the United States. Resource efficiency is not an unqualified good.
The Happy Planet Index is based upon assumptions that classical liberals, conservatives and the Conservatives should all be opposed to: An understanding of what people really want and need based upon the opinion of “experts” rather than preferences of those concerned and an ignorance of the capacity of market mechanisms to prioritise the efficient use of different scarce resources.
There is a simpler, more intuitive, rebuttal though. Leaving aside tiny Pacific Islands the number one ranked country in the NEF’s index is Colombia. One of the worst ranked is the United States. Where would you rather live?
The answer is obvious. Thousands risk death each year attempting to get from 38th placed Mexico to the 150th (out of 178) placed United States. This is just one way that people clearly reveal their preference for a higher standard of living. I’m sure the New Economics Foundation can blame this on some kind of false-consciousness. The reality is that it illustrates that the free-market economies and resulting high living standards that the NEF deride are people’s real priorities.
Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Channel 4 on Demand
The programme I appeared on yesterday evening, the Great Global Warming Debate, is available for free for 30 days on Channel 4 On Demand. You can get the On Demand service here. It seems to work pretty well.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Business Green blog on green taxes
This blog sounds like it is written by someone with aspirations to be an expert on green issues. Unfortunately, their attacks on our study on green taxes are utterly facile. Hopefully business isn't actually taking environmental policy advice from these people. I'll leave aside the lazy ad hominems and deal with the substantive criticisms:
These are clearly green taxes. They place a particular burden on activities that result in greenhouse gas emissions. Don't take my word for it, take the Treasury's: look at the last budget report where increases in Fuel Duty and Air Passenger Duty were included in the chapter "Protecting the environment" (PDF). While they may have other purposes, a central contention of our report is that these are in fact devices for raising the tax burden while minimising political protest, if these aren't green taxes the whole concept is utterly meaningless.
There is no need for us to define social cost. The term is pretty clearly defined and in common usage in the rest of the literature. It is used as a proxy for the optimal level of taxation throughout the discipline of climate-change economics. If we reinvent the wheel each time we conduct a study we'll waste a lot of time.
There is no objective criteria which one can use to decide which social cost studies should be used. I absolutely stand by our subjective judgement. If anyone can name a study with more justification to be in our list then please let me know but till then I think our selection is pretty authoritative. The most senior academics in the field and the UN body charged with establishing the state of climate change science for the international community.
The only objective alternative is to use every peer-reviewed study. If we had done that Stern, whose estimate is an alarmist outlier, would have been diluted far more and our study would have shown green taxes to be even more excessive than it does now. The social cost estimate would have been more like that of the IPCC or Tol (who has just released a new, lower, estimate of social cost), both give an estimate lower than the average we used.
There are massive problems with Stern's methodology that we discussed in Box 1.3 of our report. These have led to his report being rejected by the most respected climate change economists. If BusinessGreen.Com want us to use that estimate alone they will need to address some of those arguments.
There are very few credible studies that think Stern's analysis was too optimistic. In the peer-reviewed literature his result is at the extremely pessimistic end of the spectrum. I'll reiterate: if we had included more studies we would have reduced our estimate of the social cost and increased our estimate of the extent that green taxes are excessive.
If this and the Lib Dem statement are the best the green movement can offer in response to our report then they are on very weak ground.
"As The Treasury has already pointed out the TPA report classifies as green taxes measures such as fuel duty, road tax and air passenger duty which the government does not recognise as purely environmental taxes."
These are clearly green taxes. They place a particular burden on activities that result in greenhouse gas emissions. Don't take my word for it, take the Treasury's: look at the last budget report where increases in Fuel Duty and Air Passenger Duty were included in the chapter "Protecting the environment" (PDF). While they may have other purposes, a central contention of our report is that these are in fact devices for raising the tax burden while minimising political protest, if these aren't green taxes the whole concept is utterly meaningless.
"Furthermore, its research offers no clear definition of "social costs". Instead it simply takes an average of four other reports into the social costs of CO2 emissions. These include the Stern Report and research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but appear to have been selected based on the undefined criteria that they are "the most widely quoted official and academic estimates of the social cost"."
There is no need for us to define social cost. The term is pretty clearly defined and in common usage in the rest of the literature. It is used as a proxy for the optimal level of taxation throughout the discipline of climate-change economics. If we reinvent the wheel each time we conduct a study we'll waste a lot of time.
There is no objective criteria which one can use to decide which social cost studies should be used. I absolutely stand by our subjective judgement. If anyone can name a study with more justification to be in our list then please let me know but till then I think our selection is pretty authoritative. The most senior academics in the field and the UN body charged with establishing the state of climate change science for the international community.
The only objective alternative is to use every peer-reviewed study. If we had done that Stern, whose estimate is an alarmist outlier, would have been diluted far more and our study would have shown green taxes to be even more excessive than it does now. The social cost estimate would have been more like that of the IPCC or Tol (who has just released a new, lower, estimate of social cost), both give an estimate lower than the average we used.
"The highest figure quoted by the TPA research, from the Stern Report, puts the social cost of the UK's CO2 emissions in 2005 at £30.5bn, while the lowest estimate from research by William Nordhaus puts it at just £2.7bn. As such if it had just focused on the Stern Report figure or perhaps added in other figures to reflect the fact that some scientists regard the Stern Report's analysis as too optimistic then the TPA's research would have found itself arguing that green taxes were far too low."
There are massive problems with Stern's methodology that we discussed in Box 1.3 of our report. These have led to his report being rejected by the most respected climate change economists. If BusinessGreen.Com want us to use that estimate alone they will need to address some of those arguments.
There are very few credible studies that think Stern's analysis was too optimistic. In the peer-reviewed literature his result is at the extremely pessimistic end of the spectrum. I'll reiterate: if we had included more studies we would have reduced our estimate of the social cost and increased our estimate of the extent that green taxes are excessive.
If this and the Lib Dem statement are the best the green movement can offer in response to our report then they are on very weak ground.
The challenge of integration examined empirically
It may not seem like news that Muslim populations are not integrating into the communities around them. This study, via Chris Dillow, still seems important. It provides statistical confirmation that we have a very serious and novel problem; that we're not just looking at the integration of other communities with rose-tinted spectacles and ascribing to Muslims problems integrating that all immigrants share. Muslim immigrants do not integrate like other communities as they spend more time here and improve their socio-economic status.
The study only looks at the UK but I'd guess its results replicate throughout Europe. It has long appeared that the scale of a country's difficulties with integrating its Muslim population varied, more than anything, with that population's size. While with previous waves of immigration some countries seemed to do better than others, Britain in particular appeared to have done well, now all countries are faring pretty much equally poorly. The understanding of why Muslims struggle to integrate that I came to the best part of a year ago is still pretty solid I think.
This is a very serious problem. It means a clash of values and perspectives within Europe that few are willing to confront. Instead everyone will avoid the problem as the continent sleepwalks towards disaster. The few solutions we do have in mind, such as seeking physical integration in the hope that social integration will follow, fail dismally according to this research.
With these kinds of social trends we should be thinking very carefully about where our multi-ethnic community is going. Unfortunately, the debate over community cohesion and integration tends to be dominated by a lot of very superficial thinking.
The study only looks at the UK but I'd guess its results replicate throughout Europe. It has long appeared that the scale of a country's difficulties with integrating its Muslim population varied, more than anything, with that population's size. While with previous waves of immigration some countries seemed to do better than others, Britain in particular appeared to have done well, now all countries are faring pretty much equally poorly. The understanding of why Muslims struggle to integrate that I came to the best part of a year ago is still pretty solid I think.
This is a very serious problem. It means a clash of values and perspectives within Europe that few are willing to confront. Instead everyone will avoid the problem as the continent sleepwalks towards disaster. The few solutions we do have in mind, such as seeking physical integration in the hope that social integration will follow, fail dismally according to this research.
With these kinds of social trends we should be thinking very carefully about where our multi-ethnic community is going. Unfortunately, the debate over community cohesion and integration tends to be dominated by a lot of very superficial thinking.
Channel 4 tonight
Barring any major suprises I should be on Channel 4 at 7.30pm in the programme "The Great Green Debate". Essentially the format is four panelists who are disproportionately green (3 to 1) trying to convert an audience which is disproportionately sceptical.
It made for an interesting dynamic. Mark Pennington, as the sceptic on the panel, was excellent. He didn't challenge the science, accepted that the weight of scientific opinion was that global warming was happening and caused by humans, but challenged the idea it should be our sole objective and that it can justify big new interventions into the capitalist economy.
The audience also did well. They more than held their own against the 'experts' who wound up beating a hasty retreat on green taxes in particular. I helped this in a sort of 'expert in the audience' role. I was asked, as a representative of the TPA, why people were cynical about green taxes. I told the programme that people are right to be cynical about green taxes; they're set too high and are just a device to raise revenue.
It made for an interesting dynamic. Mark Pennington, as the sceptic on the panel, was excellent. He didn't challenge the science, accepted that the weight of scientific opinion was that global warming was happening and caused by humans, but challenged the idea it should be our sole objective and that it can justify big new interventions into the capitalist economy.
The audience also did well. They more than held their own against the 'experts' who wound up beating a hasty retreat on green taxes in particular. I helped this in a sort of 'expert in the audience' role. I was asked, as a representative of the TPA, why people were cynical about green taxes. I told the programme that people are right to be cynical about green taxes; they're set too high and are just a device to raise revenue.
Penn & Teller on the environmental movement
DK posted this superb episode of the Penn & Teller show "Bullshit". I don't know where he gets them from but an earlier one on smoking was also excellent and I want to see more.
This isn't the entire environmental movement, there are decent and informed people out there, but it does characterise well the ignorance, hysteria and mixed objectives of far too many - quite possibly a majority - within the green camp. Those who use the environmental movement as a new rationale for old socialist dogma; the eco-socialists. Those who mean well but sign up to campaigns without really knowing the issues. Those who, if not properly challenged, will try to pass extreme possibilities off as well established facts.
This isn't the entire environmental movement, there are decent and informed people out there, but it does characterise well the ignorance, hysteria and mixed objectives of far too many - quite possibly a majority - within the green camp. Those who use the environmental movement as a new rationale for old socialist dogma; the eco-socialists. Those who mean well but sign up to campaigns without really knowing the issues. Those who, if not properly challenged, will try to pass extreme possibilities off as well established facts.
The Liberal Democrats on green taxes
The Liberal Democrats have responded to The Case Against Further Green Taxes. They make two arguments. First, they contend that Stern is more accurate because it is based on more up to date science than the other studies. It isn't. Then they make a point that we knew would come up and did address; what about externalities to road transport other than greenhouse gas emissions?
This argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I've responded to both their charges here, take a read. This section summarises why you can't justify Fuel Duty by just adding more and more externalities:
This argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I've responded to both their charges here, take a read. This section summarises why you can't justify Fuel Duty by just adding more and more externalities:
"The second argument assumes the simplistic view that all externalities are the same and should be responded to with increased taxation. This is not the case and is not accepted in other parts of the economy. We do not place special taxes on sports classes because someone can injure themselves playing sport, and is almost certain to playing some sports like Rugby. We don’t place special taxes on nightclubs and factories on the grounds that they are noisy although this is also an externality.
For most local externalities our response has always been regulation to ensure that they do not go beyond safe levels. We do regulate road transport: we limit speeds, require that people get regular safety checks for older cars, force people to wear seatbelts, test people’s ability to drive, prosecute those who drive unsafely. All of this is designed to control casualties (we have other rules to control noise and pollution). There is no reason, beyond political victimisation, why this should not be enough for road transport while it is accepted as sufficient in other activities.
Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty are entirely unsuitable to correct for congestion. If you drive on a deserted road in the Scottish highlands during the small hours of the morning you pay exactly the same rate as someone fighting their way to work through an urban rush hour. This means that the tax doesn’t create an incentive to drive at times and in places where you do not create a cost to other drivers.
The problem of congestion could be solved by building roads. The number of drivers doesn’t change that much over time so demand for roads is limited by the number of miles they can drive. Fuel Duty and Vehicle Excise Duty could be cut massively with plenty of room in the budget to get plenty of new roads built."
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Greenpeace threaten hoodie-terrorism
This is so deeply unpleasant. The needless 'them and us' hatred of an 'enemy' guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with them. The presentation of extreme predictions as facts. The almost explicit call for violence (Greenpeace know that sceptical scientists already receive death threats).
Sick.
Monday, September 03, 2007
The Case Against Further Green Taxes
A report of mine examining the state of green taxes launched today. It sets out how we already pay far too much green tax and that these charges are not particularly effective, are economically harmful and regressive.
I'm very proud of it and the media coverage has been superb. Front page of the Metro, in the Telegraph, Sun, Financial Times and other papers and some broadcast media attention as well.
Do take a read, the full report is available at the TaxPayers' Alliance website as a PDF.
I'm very proud of it and the media coverage has been superb. Front page of the Metro, in the Telegraph, Sun, Financial Times and other papers and some broadcast media attention as well.
Do take a read, the full report is available at the TaxPayers' Alliance website as a PDF.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
The British State and Al Gore
Today the Daily Mail reports (not online) that more than 500 civil servants are going to spend an afternoon watching Al Gore's film an Inconvenient Truth. The two screenings at the West End Vue will cost £2,675. The wage bill will be £21,000 for the two-hour running time. Is there any other body on Earth with the warped mindset necessary to indoctrinate itself?
This isn't the beginning of the British public sector's love affair with Gore's film though. As a study I carried out for the TaxPayer's Alliance revealed East Hampshire Council have been showing their staff Al Gore's film too. Here's the press release for an earlier preview screening with David Miliband sounding like Al Gore's press agent:
It was announced in February that Al Gore's film is to be sent to every secondary school. This has faced a legal challenge but, unfortunately, I hear that challenge has failed:
This always seems to be justified in the same way by DEFRA. "The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of today’s report by the IPCC." That completely misses the point. Regardless of the state of the scientific debate over climate change's existence there is clearly still a debate over the scale of the problem. The estimates given in Al Gore's film of the extent of sea level rises, for example, are radically different to that given by the IPCC. Equally, Al Gore's proposed response has been dismissed by William Nordhaus - who The Economist called the '"father of climate change economics":
Al Gore's film isn't an attempt at presenting a balanced view of the current state of knowledge. It's a radical political manifesto and that our state is actively disseminating it is truly depressing.
This isn't the beginning of the British public sector's love affair with Gore's film though. As a study I carried out for the TaxPayer's Alliance revealed East Hampshire Council have been showing their staff Al Gore's film too. Here's the press release for an earlier preview screening with David Miliband sounding like Al Gore's press agent:
"Opinion formers from across England today attended a preview screening of Al Gore's new climate change film.
Speaking at a preview screening of the former US Vice-President's film, 'An Inconvenient Truth', Environment Secretary David Miliband said he wanted to give opinion formers and leaders from communities across the country the chance to see the film.
Mr Miliband said the film, which vividly portrays the threats and dire consequences of un-checked climate change, could help spread the message amongst those who can make a real contribution in tackling this threat."
It was announced in February that Al Gore's film is to be sent to every secondary school. This has faced a legal challenge but, unfortunately, I hear that challenge has failed:
"Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth will be sent to every secondary school in England, Environment Secretary David Miliband and Education Secretary Alan Johnson announced today."
This always seems to be justified in the same way by DEFRA. "The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over, as demonstrated by the publication of today’s report by the IPCC." That completely misses the point. Regardless of the state of the scientific debate over climate change's existence there is clearly still a debate over the scale of the problem. The estimates given in Al Gore's film of the extent of sea level rises, for example, are radically different to that given by the IPCC. Equally, Al Gore's proposed response has been dismissed by William Nordhaus - who The Economist called the '"father of climate change economics":
"First, the [UK Treasury’s] Stern proposal for rapid deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the future damage from global warming by $13 trillion, but at a cost of $27 trillion dollars. That’s not a good deal. For an even worse deal, the DICE-2007 model estimates that the Gore proposal would reduce climate change damages by $12 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $34 trillion. As Nordhaus notes, both proposals imply carbon taxes rising to around $300 per ton carbon in the next two decades, and to the $600-$800 per ton range by 2050. A $700 carbon tax would increase the price of coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by about 150 percent, and would impose a tax bill of $1.2 trillion on the U.S. economy."
Al Gore's film isn't an attempt at presenting a balanced view of the current state of knowledge. It's a radical political manifesto and that our state is actively disseminating it is truly depressing.
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