Mongol

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unity on copayment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does copayment for drugs like Avastin constitute an irrational choice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ad hominems

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

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

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

Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

A new Ministry of Defence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Private companies to take over hospitals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Wikio rankings

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

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

A new laptop

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

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

In the news today...

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

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

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

No connection at all.

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

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

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

Sinclair Road

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

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

It contains the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Opening up the NHS?

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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



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

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

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

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

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

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

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

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

Glorious Isolation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted from CentreRight.com.

The decline of the traditional family - the sixties or Thatcher?

I've written a response to a post by Unity addressing that subject. Unfortunately it is a bit too heavy on the graphics to easily copy over here so you should go to CentreRight.com to read my argument.

Taking responsibility

Great post by Pub Philosopher:

"But there is another similarity between both these tragic stories. Khyra's and Victoria's fathers were not living with their daughters and were out of the UK when they died, yet they displayed their grief for all to see and launched tirades of criticism at the British state for its failure to look after their children.

[...]

Much of this disproportionate response resulted from a mind-set which assumed that the state must take all the blame for Victoria Climbie's death. Anyone who suggested that, perhaps, her father should bear even a little of the responsibility for entrusting his daughter to inappropriate carers was drowned out in the chorus of "something must be done".

[...]

I'm not saying Birmingham's social workers are blame free. They should have asked questions when the child had been away from school for so long. If they were unaware of this, then that is a system failure too.

But Mr Zaire has some cheek to blame just about everyone else when, it appears, he had very little involvement with his children. "

Re: Overclass values created the underclass

Tim links to a blog by Melanie Phillips who attacks the Guardianista crowd. She accuses them of being responsible for many of today's social problems through an attack on the social institutions that are often called "traditional values".

If you haven't read it before, Theodore Dalrymple's The Frivolity of Evil, a piece for City Journal, is a superb introduction to this subject and one of the best articles I've ever read. The effects on the 'underclass' of the dangerous combination of the welfare state and the moral equivalence that pervades our culture and institutions is a subject Dalrymple has spent a huge amount of time discussing and if you want to read more his archive at City Journal is well worth a browse.

I think Phillips is wrong on one point. She suggests that "the supercilious overclass" has "the money to get itself out of trouble". It does have the money, education and other advantages to largely avoid the kinds of problems that afflict the underclass. That doesn't mean that it has got out of trouble. Allan Bloom's landmark book The Closing of the American Mind sets out the harm that relativism - emerging out of a frivolous nihilism - has done to the Western elite. It is a hard book to sum up within a single post but here's what I wrote when I first discussed it on my own blog:

"Bloom's masterpiece is hard to precis. It begins discussing his students and how relativism has closed their minds; how a doctrine of 'openness' has perversely undermined serious dialogue between different opinions and cultures. It then goes on a tour of Western philosophical thought illustrating the struggles that brought us to where we are now. My understanding of his critique is that we have lapsed into nihilism without taking the condition seriously. We cannot take seriously old visions of the good life and have broken the processes and destroyed the environments in which new visions might flourish. He sees this as a broad problem for Western civilisation but sees the crucial centre of the problem in the decline of liberal education within the Universities.

[...]

Dalrymple's work is excellent but if you only read Dalrymple and look at the problems of the poor it is as if you are studying an oceanic earthquake by measuring coastal waves and understanding the misery of those they make homeless. You need to understand the problem at its source. The source of the awful problems Dalrymple describes is in the elite and their intellectual decline. A philosophical decline in the West. Hopefully Bloom can provide a valuable first step in understanding that source of our problems."

That's pretty inadequate but this is a hard subject to get your head around. It is worth the time though as it is the thread that connects so many problems the modern Right should aim to confront. A relativist distaste for morals, nations and individual free will can be found at the root of a host of less esoteric problems.

The class card

This article by Nick Cohen has an interesting explanation of why Labour's attempt to play the class card backfired so badly in Crewe & Nantwich.

Of course, in some sense it is easy to explain why the "toff bashing" went poorly. It was done badly. They didn't have enough else to say, Edward Timpson isn't a "toff" in any meaningful sense and Tamsin Dunwoody is part of a political dynasty. However, it does seem to have been particularly ineffective and it might be worth thinking about whether there is a broader weakness in appeals to class.

My normal thesis is that the British people never respond the way class warriors expect them to and just don't think in classes. Ever since the First World War nationalism has proved itself just one group loyalty among many more potent than class. When Prescott said that Labour are "always better fighting class" he was clearly wrong. They got hammered by Thatcher when it was socialists versus capitalists in the eighties, the supposedly post-class Blair did far better. Marx was just wrong, at least in Britain and probably elsewhere, and class really isn't a good way of understanding political struggle.

However, Cohen might have a better explanation. He essentially posits a subtler understanding of class - i.e. class can have a significant effect on politics but it isn't just some lever a left-wing party can pull at will. The contemporary Labour party has no credibility attacking the ex-Bullingdon Club types as they are themselves just another tribe within the same elite:

"You will find part of the explanation the next time you read one of the 'when I was at Oxford I hated the Bullingdon Club' articles, which have taken permanent residence in the pages of the liberal press. You can guarantee that the outraged journalist or Labour politician was not at Oxford because they were working on the assembly line at Cowley. When they say 'I was at Oxford', they mean they were living in the same colleges and listening to the same tutors as Boris Johnson and David Cameron. They just moved in different social circles.

Freud's narcissism of small differences can power great hatreds and I have no doubt that the rage at the return of the Etonians is sincere. I feel it myself, while realising that these are tensions within a tiny and privileged part of British society.

[...]

Indeed not. Labour has been marching through the institutions for 11 years. With the exception of the armed forces, it has not allowed one state body to stay in the hands of natural conservatives. The Church of England, the BBC, the judiciary, the senior Civil Service, the trusts, agencies and quangos all have a pinkish hue. Even chief constables sound like Harriet Harman.

You can't run as an anti-elitist when you are part of the elite. You can only argue that you and your kind are best qualified to govern the country. Labour could make their case when Mrs Blair was gloating and Britain was booming. When hard times come, voters blame the people in power for their troubles, not 'the people on the grouse moor'. The old ruling class has been out for so long it no longer frightens voters, while Labour's jeers strike them as a cynical distraction from the enveloping economic crisis."

His casting of Thatcherism and the right-wingers who reacted with fury at attacks on grammar schools as representing a middle class, meritocratic (for better and for worse) anti-elitism within Britain's conservatives suggests that class distinctions are complex on both sides of the partisan divide. The most obvious expression of anti-elitism within the contemporary Conservative Party is, perhaps, Direct Democracy. That movement could be understood as an attempt to make elites more accountable to the popular will.

It seems plausible that the fate of the 'pink hued' elite, with values that might best be described as 'tranzi', that Cohen describes could come to dominate our politics in the coming decades.

Cross-posted from CentreRight.Com.

Emissions trading continues to dissapoint

From the European Commission Spokesman's briefing yesterday:

"Overall emissions of CO2 from businesses in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) increased by 0.68% in 2007 when adjusted for changes in the number of
installations covered, according to the information provided by Member State registries. While well below the 2.8% growth in the EU's Gross Domestic Product recorded last year, the slight increase in emissions underlines the need for the tighter emission caps that have been set for the 2008-2012 trading period."

Ignore the spin that this is well below GDP growth. It is no achievement of the ETS that emissions intensity (emissions/GDP) is falling - that has been happening across the developed world for some time.

In fact, the real picture is even worse than this suggests as the EU is, in part due to schemes like the ETS, exporting huge amounts of manufacturing activity, and therefore emissions, to the developing world. If green taxes and regulations result in a very efficient plant in Sunderland being replaced by a very dirty plant in China that is no green achievement at all.

Kissinger and Metternich

There is a fascinating article over at The Atlantic discussing the lessons Kissinger took from his own experience and history; the foundations of his realism. In particular, the Austrian Prince Clemens von Metternich's construction of a peaceful order following the Napoleonic Wars and the hideous consequences of appeasement at Munich.

It's worth reading it in full but this is a choice paragraph:

"The "most fundamental problem of politics ... is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness." The Nazis, the Jacobins, the ayatollahs, and the others who have made revolutions have all been self-righteous. Kissinger suggested that nothing is more dangerous than people convinced of their moral superiority, since they deny their political opponents that very attribute. Tyranny, a form of disorder posing as order, is the result. This was one of Edward Gibbon's arguments against early Christianity. Gibbon represented the Enlightenment in full flower, just as Metternich, Kissinger reminded us, represented its dying breath before the onset of modernism, with its righteous causes. In any event, Kissinger observed wryly, punishing the wicked is "a relatively easy matter, because it is a simple expression" of public decency, and thus not a crucial task of statesmanship."

The logic of collective action taken to a bizarre extreme

Recently I wrote, for ConservativeHome's Platform, about Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action. That landmark political text set out how minorities could impose their will on a majority in a democracy. People have an incentive to free ride on the political efforts of others and minorities find it easier to organise and motivate their members. This is one important reason why the work of the TaxPayers' Alliance is so vital. It also explains why some truly ludicrous trade deals can get through - the small number of people in industries that benefit from the tariff can organise while the broad swathes of society who benefit will struggle to.

Still, this case from the Aplia blog, via Marginal Revolution, is exceptional:

"Advocates of trade restrictions often argue that protection will save jobs. Since we can observe price and cost increases associated with trade restrictions, we can estimate how much it costs to save each job in a protected industry. According to the NPR story, there are roughly 30,000 dry cleaners in the U.S., and on average, each pays an additional $4,000 per year due to the hanger tariff. This indicates an average annual cost of 30,000 firms x $4,000 per firm = $120 million. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission's report, U.S. employment in wire hanger manufacturing was 564 workers in 2004 and fell to 236 workers by 2006. Let's assume that employment in this sector would have fallen to zero in the absence of the tariff, and that with the tariff, employment will recover to 2004 levels. In other words, assume the tariff "saves" 564 jobs. Dividing the cost of the tariff to U.S. dry cleaners ($120 million year) by the number of jobs saved (564 jobs) indicates that each job saved costs about $212,765 per year. Keep in mind that the typical full-time worker in this sector earns about $30,000 per year. Even if we assume that industry employment doubles, the cost of the tariff is still roughly $120,000 per job."

$4,000 per dry cleaner is well above the £100 per household that I figured it would take to get people to sit up and take notice of a decision that hurt their economic position. I can see a few possible explanations for why it happened:

1) The dry cleaners pass the cost on to their customers - that means the $4,000 is spread across hundreds of customers few of whom even know they're paying let alone care enough to change their vote.

2) Enough dry cleaners benefit from this measure which prevents new entrants to the market and puts some existing firms out of business - regulatory capture.

3) This measure won't last and is just an exceptional moment of madness.

Regardless, this highlights how divorced from basic common sense political decisions can become. It isn't just in America. European trade policy is full of similar lunacies, the Common Agricultural Policy is the biggest example, and there is little accountability for most public spending. We need to decentralise and hand decisions back to individuals so that powerful special interests cannot take advantage of us.

Failed asylum seekers and the NHS

Here is an interview I gave this morning, with BBC Radio Wales, debating plans to offer NHS care to failed asylum seekers with the head of the Immigration Advisory Service.

This is one of those plans that, at first, sounds entirely humane but cannot be economically and politically sustained. It is far too vulnerable to be swamped by those who seek to abuse the system and make Britain cover their, often very expensive, treatment. That would either create huge problems for the NHS and British taxpayers or result in the asylum system itself being curbed, to the detriment of those fleeing real persecution. When the courts don't take proper account of these sorts of concerns we wind up in the kind of absurd situation we're in now with regard to Somalian pirates who the Royal Navy can't detain for fear they'll gain a legal right to live in the United Kingdom.

Big Brother is watching

Government plans for a single, massive database containing records of all public internet activity, e-mails and phone calls, reported in the Times, are alarming. This system will be massively vulnerable to abuse and would allow Government officials to snoop, far too easily, on ordinary people. It is also likely to prove exceptionally expensive.

Holding the information in place will always make it easier for a system to be abused. Anyone looking to gain access to people's very personal phonecalls, e-mail or internet records will only need to gain access to, and then search, one system instead of many. The increased convenience to the unscrupulous will be of a greater magnitude than the improvement for those meant to be in the system, who don't need to crack into each database. Government claims that it will be secure are hardly credible after endless lapses in recent years.

Beyond that, government agencies have a track record of creating powers supposedly needed to tackle serious crime and then allowing them to be used to snoop on ordinary people, for extended periods, for inadequate reasons. Tim Aker, our grassroots co-ordinator, provided one example:

"The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000 was introduced on the grounds that it would boost national security. Poole Council, being a creative sort, went well over their remit by using the powers to snoop on families. They monitored this unnamed family for three weeks, with intentions to stop them sending their children to a good school if they lived outside the catchment area."

You should fear the invasions of privacy this measure will facilitate even if you haven't done anything wrong and don't think that the Ed Balls is going to develop a penchant for the goose step any time soon. After all, it's all in the database:

Finally, this is almost certain to be wildly expensive. If you look through the projects listed in our report (PDF) on big government project overruns you'll see that many of the most troublesome, like the NHS National Programme for IT, are those that try to stitch together a lot of incompatible IT schemes. It tends to become a very complex and lengthy process as so many different organisations need to contribute. The Internet Service Providers and other companies involved have not created these systems with combining them in mind. There is every possibility this will become a wildly expensive project.

This new database will be vulnerable to abuse, encourage and enable snooping by officials and is quite likely to cost us a fortune. It should be abandoned.

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.