Unity on Marriage

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

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

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

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

I'll deal with the aside first:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The closest he comes is an Austrian example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Upon a Time in the West

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

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

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

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

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

Blackpool

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back from conference

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

Greens at the Conservative conference

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

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

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

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

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

Earliest Political Memory

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

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

Institutional Carelessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Political Trumps

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

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

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

You can order yourself a set of Political Trumps here.

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.

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.

Back online

A new router has been procured. Things should now be back to normal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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...