Sunday 30 November 2014

Reducing landfill is a good thing to do - not some sort of EU green conspiracy

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There's a common line from those who dislike either or both of climate change policies and the EU that the encouragement of recycling and strategies to reduce the use of landfill are just another of those idiotic greeny-greeny nonsenses. We've read this from Christopher Booker, on the EU Referendum blog and now from James Delingpole in the Daily Mail:

Every year Britain produces about 70 million cubic metres of municipal waste, while it has more than 819 million cubic metres available for landfill — a figure that increases by 114 million cubic metres a year as more quarries and gravel pits are dug.

By far the most attractive and safe option would be to have these gaping holes filled with rubbish and covered over or reclaimed, so the landscape looks almost as it did before.

This would have knock-on benefits for the aggregates industry, which could offset its costs — as it did in the old days — with waste disposal.

It would release local councils from layer upon layer of regulatory bureaucracy. No longer would we have to waste time pointlessly sifting our rubbish. And it would, of course, bring an almost immediate end to fly-tipping.

This, after all, was the system that worked perfectly well for us before our politicians and the EU stuck their oars in. If only we had the will and the courage of our convictions, it could work just as well for us now.

My instant reaction (one that most Cullingworth residents would share) is 'there speaks a man who doesn't have two landfill sites in his village' but to explain the problem let's describe landfill and consider what we mean by 'municipal waste'.

Modern landfill can be described as finding a big enough hole in the ground, putting a very big plastic bag (a sophisticated, highly-engineered plastic bag to be sure but still a plastic bag) into the hole rather like you do with the bin in your kitchen, filling it up with rubbish until you can't get any more in and then covering it over. And then we wait thirty to fifty years with out fingers crossed hoping that big plastic bag doesn't split.

Then there's the stuff we put in the landfill. 'Domestic' waste they call it and it's all that stuff you put in your general waste bin. So there's fairly benign stuff like food scraps, paper and plastic. And a cocktail of nasty unpleasant chemicals - the bits of bleach you don't rinse out from the bottle, the heavy metals in the spent AA batteries, the residual contents of aerosols, shampoos and a bewildering variety of pharmaceuticals. Domestic waste is truly filthy stuff - poisonous, corrosive and polluting. As it rots is produces a very dangerous leachate - the big plastic bag is all that stops this leachate from polluting water supplies and contaminating land. Do you really think the best way to deal with this waste is to but it in a big plastic bag on the hill above Cullingworth?

Now Delingpole is right to criticise the EU's waste licensing regimes, to question how the ramping up of landfill charges contributes to illegal dumping and to condemn the nonsensical manner in which recyclers are prevented from exporting recovered goods or materials. But this doesn't change the fact that landfill isn't the best way to deal with hazardous waste. Nearly all of that 70 million cubic metres of trash local councils collect is pretty dangerous stuff. Simply dumping it into holes in the ground without pre-treatment or the reduction of pollution risk is a recipe for blighting communities. And the best way to reduce those risks is to promote recycling.

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Saturday 29 November 2014

Multiplication and economic growth....

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Tim Worstall reminds us that there's something of a problem with the Keynesian multiplier:

And if we look closer at this, and we find that the relationship is actually only one to one, then we’ve a disproof of the central Keynesian contention. Which is that a rise in government spending (when in recession, when there’s unused assets lying around) increases GDP by more than the increase in government spending. We were certainly in recession, government spending certainly changed, but if GDP only changed by the amount of spending change then that’s a disproof, not a proof, of the central Keynesian claim. 

But the myth is widespread - if you look at the work of many in the field of local and regional economics, the idea of the multiplier is absolutely central to the presumed effectiveness of the policies they propose. Now I appreciate that Worstall is making a different point (essentially the arithmetic is just arithmetic never scientific proof - the biggest problem with much of macroeconomics) but we still need to remind ourselves that the multiplier is something of a myth. It's a myth when it's observed that government spending increases GDP by the amount of government spending (i.e. there is no multiplier) and just as much a myth when it's used to justify some sort of localist quasi-protectionism or that government procurement contributes to economic growth.

My concern is that this approach to public spending results in more expensive local services (the only reason for the quasi-protectionism is that non-local supplier may be cheaper) without any real evidence - other than arithmetic - that there is any economic benefit to deliberately making prices higher. Indeed, most of the time in economics we'd rather prefer prices to be stable and not determined by the arbitrary (or protectionist) choices of government.

The same applies for the local high street. Because supermarkets are more efficient, their prices are (mostly) lower than the prices in the precious independents on the high street. If we regulate and tax so as to penalise supermarkets for being more efficient all we do is to make prices higher for the consumer. And because such price rises fall most painfully on the poorest, such regulation and taxation is highly regressive (rather like duty on booze and fags - but that's another story). All those trendy folk talking about 'resilience' and 'sustainable high streets' are, when you boil it down, calling for the prices of basic everyday goods to be higher so the greengrocer on the high street isn't undercut by the supermarket.

Thus, to return to the multiplier, any benefits that might come from money circulating more in the local community are more than absorbed by the higher prices. And this is before we consider the opportunity costs of government spending. We simply can't presume that simply spending the money has more economic impact than either lower borrowing or lower taxes (or both). As has been observed:

"From where to people find the means to purchase consumption goods, other than production?"

Even if we accept that there is some local impact, it is limited by several factors (ones that NEF ignore in their LM3 model). Since the biggest cost for most businesses is wages, we have to start by noting that around 40% of that cost go straight back to the government in tax. And, after this, other significant costs - utilities, fuel, transport - aren't retained within the local community either. If our assessment is on consumers then we should note that their biggest costs (tax, rent or mortgage, utilities and transport) aren't retained locally. What the advocates of local multipliers are arguing is that the economy will be transformed by the redirection of part of the cost of groceries - in reality this is an utterly insignificant effect even assuming inefficiencies haven't wiped out any gain.

At the heart of all this work is a keen urge for the public sector to feel it is contributing - by its very existence - to economic growth and not just on a pound for pound basis (which isn't really growth) but as a stimulus to the economy. The problem is that, between protectionism and opportunity cost, any benefits that might arise from the multiplier are lost - and this assumes there are such benefits in the first place.

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Thursday 27 November 2014

Devolution and the price of fish...

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Yesterday along with fellow Conservatives from West Yorkshire (well, a couple of them) I headed to London to talk with the Treasury about devolution to West Yorkshire. We went there with the desire to explore the political, possible and practical knowing that our opposite numbers in Labour had already submitted some suggestions - I commented on the secrecy surrounding these proposals the other day.

Rest assured dear reader that the conversations we had down in London didn't come to any conclusions - we aren't about to rush through some secret deal for devolution. But there were some interesting aspects to the discussion.

Firstly, while there's an appetite for devolution in West Yorkshire and in London, there's a bit of a bother about the changes not being seen somehow as a 'new tier of government'. This echoes a familiar observation - "if the answer to your question is more politicians, then you're asking the wrong question!" But the reality of course is that there is already a 'sub-regional' tier of government, it's just that you don't notice it much. We have the new and shiny 'combined authority' that has swept together what used to be the 'public transport authority' with some limited powers around regeneration and planning. This adds to some other West Yorkshire government bodies - the police authority (now with its 'Police and Crime Commissioner'), the fire and civil defence authority and West Yorkshire Joint Services.

At the moment the democratic cost of these bodies (i.e. how much cash it takes to have politicians sitting on committees and boards) is somewhere near £700,000 - to say that setting up a new body (or mayor or whatever) is creating a new tier of government is incorrect. If we replaced all that West Yorkshire stuff with a single body it probably wouldn't cost that much - even before we take account of all the other duplicated bureaucracy.

Secondly, however much we might be twitchy about elected mayors, the ability of a Boris with a big mandate and big boots to bully central government can't be underestimated. This isn't to say that a West Yorkshire mayor would carry the oomph of Boris but it is to explain that the big mandate matters nearly as much as the personality. For sure there are political considerations (we did talk about these) but the fact remains that a high profile individual elected by 2.5 million has much more impact that an indirectly elected council leader - even one with the grand title of 'Chair of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority'.

The deal presented as a revelation in Greater Manchester is something of a fudge - you get a mayor but that person's chained down by the regions council leaders making it hard to deliver real direction (especially if the City's residents decide to elect an independent or Conservative while all but one or two of the leaders are Labour). Even with the most likely outcome - a Labour mayor leading a 'cabinet' of mostly Labour leaders - the 'boot down the doors of Whitehall' factor is limited by local political consideration. And the mayor and cabinet's actions aren't subject to effective, independent scrutiny but rather to scrutiny by councillors appointed by those same leaders who sit on the mayor's cabinet.

Finally, the deals on offer aren't about - nor do they resolve - England's democratic deficit. For all that groups like Centre for Cities want to pretend that city and city-region devolution answers this problem, it remains the case that the devolution offer is limited (it doesn't include education and health beyond some administrative changes, for example). And the deals don't make much difference to the dilemma of financing capital infrastructure investment. What is offered is the chance to strengthen the delivery of current transport, regeneration and housing investment plus the ability to get plans drawn up, give them political backing and thwack them down on the Treasury table saying 'this is what we want funding'.

There's a long way to go - the best we can expect this side of a general election is some proposals. And the wider devolution debate - the one about England - moves on (unresolved so far). If we do move to a West Yorkshire (or perhaps a wider West Riding) model, I'm sure it will involve an elected mayor. The real question isn't this one but the rest of the governance - do we need a directly elected assembly as London has or will some sort of appointed system via existing local councils be good enough to hold a powerful mayor to account?

A long way to go yet but I know one thing - saying 'no, we don't want that sort of thing' really doesn't help the argument. The price of fish is simple - do you want a mayor plus elected assembly, a mayor plus appointed combined authority or nothing (and the joy of watching mayors from Manchester, Merseyside, Sheffield and Newcastle thwacking down their schemes and sucking up the infrastructure funding). Interesting times!

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Tuesday 25 November 2014

I was right. Plain packaging doesn't reduce tobacco consumption.

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In March 2011 I wrote this:

My main concerns in all this – leaving aside the issue of personal rights – is that, if the aims are twofold: first to increase rates of smoking cessation and second to reduce rates of smoking adoption, then we are barking up the wrong tree. By way of illustration, between 2003 and 2005 all forms of tobacco advertising in the UK were banned. If the arguments for a ban were correct – less tobacco use and fewer tobacco users – we would have expected the rate of tobacco consumption to accelerate. However, the ban (like the smoking ban in public spaces) had no discernible impact on the long-standing decline in use.

In simple terms introducing plain packaging for cigarettes simply won't work (if the aim is to reduce tobacco consumption or smoking adoption). And it seems I was right:

Ronald Coase famously argued that if you tortured the data long enough they would confess. In this paper we have tortured the data, but there has been no confession. At best, we can determine the plain packaging policy introduced in December 2012 has not reduced household expenditure of tobacco once we control for price effects, or the long-term decline of tobacco expenditure, or even the latent attributes of the data.

To the contrary, we are able to find a suggestion that household expenditure of tobacco has, ceteris paribus, increased. In our forecasting exercise the actual data come close to breaking through the 80 per cent confidence interval. While we do not want to over-emphasise these results, we do conclude that any evidence to suggest that the plain packaging policy has reduced household expenditure on tobacco is simply lacking.

Now I'm sure the tobacco control folk will redouble their efforts - despite being completely wrong. But I hope one or two of them consider whether some different strategies might be more effective in reducing the consumption of tobacco and the adoption of smoking.

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Are we passed peak car?

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From Aaron Renn in New Geography comes this graph:

This is the the USA - we're told it's much more of a car culture than the UK - and shows a steady decline in car use since 2005. Renn makes the important observation that this graph undermines a central green policy argument - what he calls Say's Law for roads:

...supply of lanes creates its own demand by drivers to fill them. Hence building more roads to reduce congestion is pointless. But if we’ve really reached peak car, maybe we really can build our way out of congestion after all.

Renn points out that projections of growth in car use haven't been matched by actual use growth since at least 1999. Whether all this applies in the UK is moot but the National Traffic Survey suggests that car use is declining - the survey reports that since the mid-'90s trips by private modes of transport fell by 14%. The graph doesn't show the same steep decline but there is no doubt that travel habits are changing. And, as Renn points out this has significant implications for transport policy.

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Quote of the day: Advice on anti-terrorism from James Thurber

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The moral from The Very Proper Gander:

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

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Sunday 23 November 2014

Time to move parliament out of London

Bradford's Goitside - where better for a relocated Parliament Building!

I've said before that one way to rebalance the nation is to move the politicians (and their assorted hangers on) out of London. Ideally - and there is no bias here at all - to Bradford.

We now have that opportunity:

The historic Palace of Westminster is in such poor condition that MPs and peers may have to move out for five years while works are carried out.

The Parliament building is falling down. Time to make that radical choice and move MPs somewhere else - away from the expensive world of London. Instead of spending £3 billion tarting up an old building that doesn't meet modern needs, sell that building and use the cash to build a new one in the North of England.

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Saturday 22 November 2014

We have Mr Potter's "discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class" - and the left don't like it!




There was a time when the mass of the population – you can call this the ‘working class’ if you like – looked like the crowd at one of those football games from the 1930s. Packed shoulder to shoulder, dressed the same, thin, pinched and unhealthy. Back in those days and through into the 1950s, those ordinary people stayed in the narrow confines of their regular lives – most worked in manual jobs, skilled or unskilled, and their pleasures were limited by the narrowness of their income. Football (as today’s fans keeps telling us) was cheap and the men topped this up with thin beer and stodgy food.

And during this time those men were uncomplaining – we had few if any riots, public drunkenness was rare and levels of crime were low. But looking at those men and women in old photographs, we see that their lives were hard and, by today’s standards, short. Most working class men didn’t live long past retirement age and there were plenty of premature deaths from disease, illness and injury. Despite this hard life, most ordinary men were accepting of their lot. Yes they voted Labour, electing one of their own sort into parliament, but that Labour Party – for all the radicalism of the Attlee government – didn’t want to change the structure of the economy other than to replace private ownership with state ownership.

Then something happened. The success of the economy plus the effectiveness of union campaigns saw wages rise. Those ordinary men – and increasingly the women too – began to cast off the cheap drab and to make a cultural contribution. Some of this – the music of the early sixties, for example – is overplayed as working class culture. The big bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were management not workers but, along with other changes, this music gave the ordinary population a justification to party. And from that time in the sixties right through to the millennium that’s just what we did – we went on a great binge.

We drank more alcohol trying out new drinks like wines and lagers, we ate out more as we embraced the burger, the pizza and lumps of chicken daubed in a secret mix of spices and breadcrumbs. And while we did this, the elite – those who had run everything and liked the old supine working class – grumbled about taste and the bad choices of other people (by which they meant those workers eating burgers and drinking lager). This was the change cursed by Mr. Potter, the scheming old banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said:


A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.


We still see echoes of this when – just as that old rentier Potter did – left wing writers like Michael Rosen rail against debt. Borrowing money is fine for the likes of us, say folks like Rosen, but the ordinary people should be stopped from taking on debt because it’s bad for them:


Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system.


The working class must be thrifty, must live within its means and mustn’t take on the trappings of their betters let alone put anything at risk in aspiring for a better future.

So we binged. And while we binged we all carrying on getting richer and piling up wealth. The wealth once held by landlords – state and private - and wealthy capitalists began to spread through society. We bought houses and saved money in pension schemes while enjoying cars, foreign holidays, meals out and central heating. Our lives were immeasurably better that the lives of those men shuffling to work a ten-hour shift and those women spending  80 hours a week feeding him and stopping the house filling up with soot.

From out of this change – this great binge – came a real working class culture. Not the make-believe one idolised by wealthy writers, that sort of Mike Leigh homage to a crap life so typical of how those who have present the culture of those who haven’t. And bits of that culture came as something of a shock to the left – they discovered that the working class is patriotic and that it will display that patriotism with enthusiasm. 

After years of sneering at the idea of loving one’s country, the left couldn’t somehow understand how ‘their people’ still sang the songs and flew the flags, celebrating Britain and, worst of all, England. These left wing folk still struggle – I listened to a Guardian journalist on the radio talking about singing by England fans. This man wanted us to stop singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Great Escape’ because he was uncomfortable with ‘what they symbolised’.

The cultural elite don’t like this – not just because of the nationalism but because, like draping your house in flags, it all seems just a bit tacky. When we visit my parents at Christmas, we have a little drive round to look at the Christmas decorations – not the state-sponsored and approved ones on the high street but the fantastic displays of kitsch plastic reindeer, flashing lights, gnomes and Santa people put on their homes. North Kent is great for this sort of display and the Isle of Sheppey – as a sort of distillation of everything North Kent – is best. But that cultural elite doesn’t like this sort of display and reserves sort of its best sneering to describe brash Christmas decoration:


“And what can I see from my office in Carnaby Street? I can see a giant, pneumatic, puce-coloured reindeer with white spots suspended from tension wires in space.”


This is from Stephen Bayley described as “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators.” For which you can read arrogant snob. It is a short step from this to a very wealthy Islington MP tweeting, slightly sneeringly, a photograph of a house draped in England flags. A tweet that got that MP into trouble (although, for the record, her resigning was one of the dafter – if admirable – decisions in recent UK politics). It has though brought out the worst is the left as they set about defending Emily Thornberry:


“I thought that hanging flags with a red cross on a white background out of you house windows was telling the world that you aspired to be a right-wing thug who hated everything from abroad (except lager and curry) and wished that a bunch of ex-National Front neo-Nazis ran the government of Little England.”


This, as much as Ed Miliband’s laboured efforts to look cool and trendy, is Labour’s problem. The people who run the Labour Party – at every level – simply don’t relate to the bloke who flies a big England flag on his house or indeed to that man's neighbour who, as we speak, is putting up Christmas lights, an inflatable snowman and a great big sleigh. The same is true for my party but we’ve an excuse – for much of our recent history, we simply haven’t tried to represent the ordinary worker. I think this needs to change because it’s absolutely plain that the left with its patronising, snobbish and judgemental attitude to people who fly the flag, eat burgers, give their kids a bar of chocolate and like X-Factor has nothing to offer those people. Right now the void – a voice for people with kitsch Christmas displays, great big England flags, white vans, tattoos – is being filled by UKIP, a bunch of people who think the modern world is crap and wish to return to some mythical Elysian past.

This view is the very opposite of aspiration, of the thing that George Bailey offered the ordinary folk of Bedford Falls. Rather than offer people opportunity, choice and a better tomorrow – the things that allowed us to change from a supine, shuffling working class to a brash, in-your-face flag-waving populace – what people are being sold is a comfort blanket, a message of ‘hold onto this and it will all be fine’. Instead of a world of new exciting things to do, see and play with we’re promised safety, security and the oversight of our behaviour by our betters. I don’t think this is what people want and I’m absolutely sure that, whatever people do want, it isn’t snobbish, patronising judgement of their lives, choices and pleasures.

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Friday 21 November 2014

What are schools for? Nannying fussbucketry it seems!

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You and I (like I guess most people) take the view that schools are there to educate children. And by this we mean things like teach them to read, read write and add up, give them a grasp of geography and history, and generally provide them with the tools to get on in the world. It seems that this now extends to 'healthy-eating' and the suppression of enterprise:

A 15 year old schoolboy has been threatened with suspension making £14,000 selling sweets to pals in the playground.

Budding businessman Tommie Rose, has made a fortune by selling chocolate, crisps and fizzy drinks to pupils at Buile Hill High School, Salford. He buys them in bulk and sells them at competitive prices, even employing two mates to help run his business, paying them £5.50 a day. He says the money will go towards his University tuition fees.
Nobody is hurt by Tommie's initiative - the school decided it wouldn't sell sweets, fizzy drinks or crisps and he stepped into the gap left by this decision. Tommie's fellow pupils get a service, he makes some money and everyone's happy. Except for Tommie's po-faced headteacher:
"We admire this pupil’s entrepreneurship but school is not the place to set-up a black market of fizzy drinks, sweets and chocolates. We have extremely high standards and with our healthy eating policy we don’t allow isotonic drinks, fizzy drinks and large amounts of sweets for the good of our children. Our high standards are set out to pupils and their parents at the start of the school year."
Firstly it's not a 'black market' and secondly when did schools take it upon themselves to acts as dietary policemen? This phrase "for the good of our children" is so typical of the self-serving indulgence of the nannying fussbucket. It's fine if the school wants to stop selling such good itself (although it's clearly missing a trick) but utterly wrong of them to then police the provision made by individual initiative to fill the demand for those products.

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Thursday 20 November 2014

West Yorkshire's political leaders don't want to tell you about their plans for devolution

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I'm a member of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority's Overview & Scrutiny Committee and this morning (through the post rather than by electronic means) I received a document that you good folk don't even know exists. It's entitled:

Northern Devolution: West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership Joint Response

You don't know about this document or the proposals it contains because, for reasons that entirely escape me, the covering letter accompanying the report is headed:

Private and Confidential - Not for Public Circulation

I'm assuming that the proposals are marked as confidential because of the words 'negotiating document'. This is the pitch from our politicians up here in Yorkshire to those politicians down there in London. Now it's true that Calderdale Council at least had a debate about devolution but other than this there has been no public discussion of the issues involved - what the geography should be, what powers might be devolved, what it means for the broader issue of England's democratic deficit and how any devolved arrangements should be governed.

What we have here is a summation of the problems we face with politics and why so many people are so fed up with us politicians. These are proposals for a very substantial change to government in West Yorkshire yet it hasn't be subject to consultation, let alone any recognisable process to secure a democratic mandate. The proposals are significant but have been agreed by a small group of Councillors meeting in secret plus a few select business folk who have been appointed (by those same councillors) to the board of the local economic partnership.

You the public are not to be trusted with any role or say in this matter. These leaders want to determine the governance themselves (in which case it will be a cosy secondary body that isn't directly elected or noticeably accountable) and through this to secure control of several billion pounds a year of public funding in West Yorkshire. All done in secret.

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Tuesday 18 November 2014

Stopping men from debating abortion is an act of oppression not liberation...

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So abortion is a contested area. But do people really think they can shut down debate because:

The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups. Debating abortion as if its a topic to be mulled over and hypothesised on ignores the fact that this is not an abstract, academic issue.

Nobody, not a single soul, thinks abortion isn't intensely real for women faced with the choice. But to prevent half the population from discussing the subject because they don't have a uterus is an act of oppression not liberation. Yet this is precisely what Niamh McIntyre and her friends did - they shut down a debate because the protagonists, for and against abortion were both men.

The truth was that the debate wasn't about Niamh's uterus - it is utterly selfish of her to believe it was. And, if she didn't want to hear two men debate abortion, she could have read a book, gone to the pub, had a swim, played chess or a myriad of other choices. What she chose - preventing others from speaking - was the act of suppression, the very thing feminists are supposed to contest.

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Health fascists - unelected, unaccountable, interfering and after the food on your plate

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A great long list of 'experts' has written to the World Health Organisation (you know the folk who hold their meetings in secret in Moscow and talk more about e-cigs than epidemics) urging them to adopt the tobacco template for food:

The governance of food production and distribution cannot be left to economic interests alone. To achieve the necessary dietary improvements and to secure good population health, a set of policy options for healthy diets are required. This includes governments taking regulatory approaches to the operation of the market through, for example, restrictions on marketing to children, health claims, compositional limits on the saturated fat, added sugar and sodium content of food, removal of artificial trans fats, interpretative front-of-pack labelling, restaurant calorie labelling, fiscal measures and financial incentives, and public health impact assessments in trade and investment policies.


The authors of this letter - adherents to the church of public health in its fundamentalist form - believe that you and I cannot make the right choice. Or rather that the world is filled with gormless sheep who respond thoughtlessly to advertising - you dear reader are one of these, a victim of Big Food.

We'll leave aside that there is little or no evidence showing these actions will actually make a difference or indeed the fact that levels of obesity (in the UK at least) are falling not rising. Instead we'll are about the moral justification for such control. The argument is that better health requires those "necessary dietary improvements" and that people will not eat a good diet unless the government forces such a diet on them by force. And don't think that just because you're some sort of trendy foodie grazing on organic beefburgers and awesome street food - those things are just a loaded with fats, salt and sugar as McDonalds, Dominos and Mr Kipling's cakes.

Wrapped up as protecting our health, these people are proposing a controlled, licensed diet for us to eat. This would be regulated by government and dictated by the priests of the Church of Public Health. Restaurants will be closed, businesses will be broken, web sites will be blocked and children will be brainwashed with half-truths about nutrition. Self-righteous folk will imply that being slightly overweight is a waste of food and campaigners will start to define giving your child a chocolate bar or crisps as a treat as some sort of abuse.

And you know there's a much bigger problem.  There are still some 400 million or more people in the world who don't have enough to eat. It's that problem the WHO should be concerned with rather than the fast less significant issue of people in the UK, Europe and North America being a bit chubbier than they used to be. But the Church of Public Health isn't interested in third world starvation, malnutrition and disease but in controlling the lives of people in the developed world, in attacking 'consumerism' and in pretending that marketing is the problem when it isn't.

This health fascism has to end. Not because there aren't problems with obesity, diabetes and such but because it really is a matter of personal choice. Inform and educate by all means but stop with this idea that Big Food is somehow manipulating us into a diet that makes us fat. It isn't - we choose to eat that stuff because we like it. And the food industry makes that stuff because we like to eat it. We are consumers with real choice not hapless victims of Big Food's evil marketing wiles.

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A familiar description - for Democrat read Labour...

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From Joel Kotkin:

As will become even more obvious in the lame duck years, the political obsessions of the Obama Democrats largely mirror those of the cities: climate change, gay marriage, feminism, amnesty for the undocumented, and racial redress. These may sometimes be worthy causes, but they don’t address basic issues that effect suburbanites, such as stagnant middle class wages, poor roads, high housing prices, or underperforming schools. None of these concerns elicit much passion among the party’s true believers.

Indeed, for a time these were the obsessions of my party too. We do seem to be shifting slowly back to core economic issues though and not before time. There are still some such as those fussing about with pseudo-devolution to new urban constructions in Manchester, Merseyside or West Yorkshire who have yet to get the message. And it is a reminder that while the Conservatives remain strong in rural Britain, we have neglected suburbia and those places that were always reliably Tory up to Labour's 1997 landslide. These places aren't interested in those metropolitan obsessions and don't get how imposing a super-mayor (even if you call him a 'Manchester Boris') will improve their lot one iota.

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Sunday 16 November 2014

Tiptoeing back to the old conservatism...

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For a while, from the time Auberon Waugh called Maggie's 'mad period' in the late 1980s through to just a few years ago, the Conservative Party lost its purpose. We became captivated (as did Tony Blair, but that's a different story) with billionaires, millionaires, celebrities and the shiny lights of the big city. The real purpose of the party - set out at its founding by Benjamin Disraeli - was never the celebration of laissez faire, it wasn't some sort of whiggamore wet dream, yet this was what we got. We forgot that the purpose of the party is to better the condition of the working man.

Now I'm as keen on classical liberalism as the next man, the enlightenment settlement made for a better world in every way and capitalism is responsible for most of that betterment. But too many in the Conservative Party confused the idea of free choice, free assembly and free markets with a different thing called 'business'. We placed the businessman on a shiny pedestal, we wrapped public services in the language (if not the ethos) of business and we pretended that somehow better governance came from getting those business people into authority in government.

And the ordinary working man - the folk the party was founded to serve - watched as well-meaning policy was captured by the business class. There are, quite simply, too many business people who owe their wealth to tenders and contracts issued by government. There are too many cosy deals, consultants and  contracts that serve the interests of those commissioned and those commissioning rather better than they deliver for the receivers of service. The left chooses - out or either ignorance or misinformation - to call this 'privatisation'. Yet that same left is guilty of using 'in-sourcing' - bringing in well-paid outsiders and experts to manage public services.

On Saturday morning - because our ward surgery was quiet - I has a good chinwag with Baroness Eaton. We bemoaned some of the party's problems and agreed that, regardless of the actual policy solution set out, the current leadership too often start in the wrong place - with a sort of technocratic, elitist mindset rather than asking what the policy will do to meet our party's purpose.

All so gloomy. Made worse by there being no political party offering a positive, hopeful future to that ordinary worker. Rather we have UKIP's populist and exploitative agenda - forming a giant echo chamber for the anger, irritation and annoyance of those regular folk. The task for the Conservatives is to remember where we came from, what we're about. We aren't the party of the mill owner and mine boss - or their 21st century equivalent. We need to break the view - described by Charles Moore a day or two ago - that the Conservatives aren't the workers' friend. And this means finding policies that talk to those workers concerns.

Not the shouty, anti-everything policies that UKIP (and the raggedy bits of the left) promote but ones that link what we know about how free choice, enterprise and initiative raises everyone with the everyday worries of those ordinary folk - the cost of housing, the electricity bill, the need for a mortgage to fill up the car and the lack of a pay rise since we don't know when. Add to this a sense that those running the place - not just politicians but lawyers, doctors, social worker, policemen and legions of civil servants - are doing so in their interest not yours and mine.

Now I know most of these people aren't like that but I also know that unless we change the framing of policies we will ossify as the party of an elite. To change that frame we have to do three things - ask how every policy choice with affect ordinary folk, change the language using less of the 'save the planet' or 'change the world' nonsense, and set the policy platform exclusively on those who feel left out by what passes for economic recovery.

We make much of Adam Smith (and we should) but we can we remember that he supported progressive taxation, considered high degrees of inequality an outrage and warned us that giving business interests too much influence in government is a recipe for tyranny. It should be our task to work for a system that rewards enterprise but does so through the benefits of exchange not the machinations of government. And a system that offers the worker protection, support and a route to a better life.

The old conservatism - the one those maligned ragged trousered philanthropists espoused - served working people well. The new conservatism, all wrapped around with whiggish business interests and unwarranted moral judgement, serves those people less well. So let's tiptoe back to the old ideas of community, aspiration, opportunity and independence in a welcoming society. And away from the 'we know better' metro-liberal sanctimony that too often leads our policy thinking.

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Saturday 15 November 2014

Why do people believe the king's job is to ban things?

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There are a great many things that I dislike. These include men and women who seem to bathe in perfume, scented candles, air 'fresheners' and people who drive at 40 mph in a 60 limit without good reason. I'm pretty sure you have your own list of peeves and hates.

So let me ask you a question. If you were king for a day would you ban some or all of those things you hate? This is after all your chance to make the point and stamp out those horrid and intrusive things you loathe! It is a temptation that people find irresistible - here's lefty news presenter, Jon Snow in the Guardian:

It is midnight, the chimes of Big Ben ring in the ears of the Westminster workers setting up the pedestrian-only zone that extends from Lambeth Bridge to Trafalgar Square and from the Houses of Parliament to Buckingham Palace. As king, I shall join my people on foot and bicycle for the duration of my 24-hour ban on private cars in central London. Delivery trucks have until 7am to make their deliveries, and only then by prior permission.

Faced with all the good and positive things a king could do, time and time again people asked to speculate about the opportunity fall back on banning stuff. In the twee little Guardian series, we've had the banning of Coca-Cola and open plan offices, the execution of morris dancers, the branding of 'trolls' and prohibiting the use of cars. Now I know it's the Guardian and I should expect officious intervention but what a bunch of hideous snobby fascists.

Why do they start with the assumption that the king's job is to stop people doing something? Why the preference for bans and prohibitions? Why nothing positive and sustaining? Instead of banning stuff these lefties could have used the king's powers to help a few folk - maybe remove some trade barriers, perhaps unravel a little red tape, drop some fees or charges imposed by previous kings and maybe get rid of one or two of the more egregious bans.

Not that The Guardian will be asking me but when I'm king for the day I shall get rid of one law for every hour. I'll ask people what laws they want rid of and take the best suggestions for the chop. Other than this I'll have some champagne, go for a walk and have a damn good banquet with some of the most interesting folk out there. This is the job of the king - not banning stuff.

Banning stuff is for fascist and communist dictators not kings. Kings are way cooler than that.

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Friday 14 November 2014

Is this the option of laissez faire planning? And will any planning authority take it?

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It seems a minor comment from a junior minister but this comment from Brandon Lewis is very interesting indeed:

‘Somewhere could conceivably decide that they don’t want a local plan and they will rely on the NPPF,’ Mr Lewis stated. While this would not be ‘necessarily ideal’ there would be ‘no role for the government’ if such a decision was taken, he added.

Now bearing in mind that the requirement for a local plan and the NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) are provided by two different acts of Parliament, what Lewis is saying is that a local planning authority can simply adopt the NPPF as its local plan.

At the moment local planning authorites are going through a long, painful and politically-sensitive process of preparing that local plan - here in Bradford our approved draft is almost due for submission (we approved it in December 2013 and it will go for inspection in December 2014 which indicates the bureaucratic stress in preparing these plans). Would it not have been far simpler to say "were's the national policy folks, we're going to use that to make our planning decisions."

Significantly, this approach still requires the local council to agree housing numbers (this is in the NPPF in the form of having a five year land supply for housing) or rather, it says that not having such numbers means that land-use designations (including 'green belt') carry less weight in determining applications for housing. The government may have tightened up regulations on 'green belt' - meeting established housing need no longer counts automatically as fulfilling the 'exceptional circumstances' needed for development to be permitted - but without identified land elsewhere that fits this need, adopting the NPPF as the local plan introduced a laissez faire planning system.

No-one will take this option but, as important planners keep observing, where a local planning authority hasn't adopted a local plan or got a five-year supply of houisng land identified in existing plans, the NPPF is de facto the local plan.

Mike Kiely, chair of the Planning Officers’ Society board and head of planning and building control at Croydon Council, said that there are a number of councils that ‘haven’t got a plan in place and there is no obvious prospect that they are going to any time soon’. 

Laissez faire planning may be here. Is it what we want?

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Thursday 13 November 2014

Confirmation bias - or shall we just call it sociology?

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The research was done some while ago and has been variously reported across the more left-inclined ("liberal") media. It typically has a headline something like this:

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Essentially the premise of the research is that only stupid people are 'conservative'. This is all wrapped up in the self-important language of the sociology academic but in the end it all boils down to statements like this:

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

The problem here lies in the headline above, the presumption that prejudiced views are ipso facto right-wing. Thus the researchers definition of 'social conservatism' runs something like this:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

These outlooks are then connected to a series of statements about racial prejudice and unsurprisingly the results show that the researchers' definition of 'social conservatism' links with those prejudicial statements. In the report, another psychologist makes a parallel observation:

...a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

Or rather people who say 'absolutely' to Tweet-length sweeping statements are less likely to be the brightest in the box. My concern is that the archetypal liberal perception of conservatism is, in fact, a stereotyped list of prejudices - for liberals (and I'm using this term in its American usage here) things that they dislike or disagree with are automatically 'right-wing'. As a result the researchers here have simply confirmed their own prejudice - right-wingers are nasty prejudiced folk and probably stupid.

Since 99% of sociologists and social psychologists are left of centre in their views, much of the research base in these subject is informed by the assumptions underlying that left wing position. I've wondered before why there are very few right-wing sociologists with responses varying from 'you can't be a right wing sociologist' to 'you're just dismissing the subject because you don't agree with what it finds'.

What this research sets out to show - and it will be used again and again by the left - isn't that conservatives are stupid but that because prejudice is emotionally-founded the less intelligent are more likely to use it to base their political opinions. And if you define all the prejudiced positions as 'right wing' then you confirm that those folk are prejudiced. All the researchers have done is confirm their bias, they haven't added to the body of knowledge about why some people are prejudiced.

Sadly, this left wing confirmation bias corrupts almost all of modern sociology making it almost wholly useless as a guide to understanding society.

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Wednesday 12 November 2014

Can't afford organic grub? Eat less says green socialist millionaire...

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Ah, Vivienne Westwood - revealing her green credentials again (and stuff the poor):

Dame Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer, has declared that people who can’t afford to buy organic food should "eat less" and stop getting fat.

The millionaire designer made the comments as she delivered a petition to Downing Street protesting about genetically modified food.

When a BBC Radio 5 Live interviewer suggested that "not everybody can afford to eat organic food", Dame Vivienne replied: "Eat less!"

Such a caring attitude to the less well off! But then that's millionaire socialists for you!

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Participants or customers - the people and public services

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I was prompted to thing about these two different relationships by the publication of the "Smart Cites Health and Wellbeing Discussion Draft" by some folk called the "Smart Cities - Health and Wellbeing, Leeds Task and Finish Group" who are, it seems part of the wider "Smart Cities Forum". First lets get the biggest problem out of the way.

We recommend that we rapidly explore and then build city scale facilitated networks, focused equally on well-being and health, the terms of reference for the networks being clearly established to identify and deliver the benefits of smart technology – for all parts of our community applying the concept of Solution Shops & Value added Services, within the boundaries of new institutional thinking which aligns interest. 

Now forgive me if I'm being a bit thick but this recommendation is simply gibberish. I mean what is a "city scale facilitated network" and, more to the point, what on God's earth are "Solution Shops". Now I'm sure the folk who wrote the report - and the names of the guilty are listed (including not just one but two 'Smart Cities Policy Leads' from the Department of Business, Industry and Science - and they say there's no scope for savings) - meant well in writing their jargon-ridden, barely-comprehensible 'summary' but they have revealed again that public service design is an echo chamber that completely fails in the aim of getting the wider public involved in the 'co-production' of those services.

During the subsequent interaction on Twitter, one participant provided a link to the 'Our Cities Network' and pointed out that in Rio de Janerio over 150,000 people are involved in this network. Which is fine until you appreciate that the population of greater Rio is over 13 million (and within the old city limits, some 6 million) meaning that this brilliant participation only engages between 0.1% and 0.2% of the populace.  Nearly everyone in Rio isn't part of the network, aren't part of the in-crowd who:

...(put) pressure on decision-makers, contribute their ideas and share their talents in order to build cities that are more inclusive, sustainable, creative, collective and that are always becoming better places to live.

The assumption here - and it is a common one - is that greater levels of 'participation' result in better policy-making. Those defending the 'Our Cities Network' will, I don't doubt, observe that the 0.1% participation is better than the 0.01% participation before the initiative. But is it? I'm making a guess here but probably a safe one - the members of the 'Our Cities Network' are better educated, older, wealthier and more likely to work in public service, academia or the 'creative industries' (plus those who make a living from selling things to the other members of the network). The demographic profile of those participating is completely different from that of the City as a whole. So the process of participation becomes, rather than 'co-production', an extension of the existing echo-chamber around public policy. We get policies that these middle-class people want themselves or think that poor people (who aren't in the network) might want.

The second aspect of participation is around the exploiting of data - the Smart Cities work stands and falls on the government permitting this:

We recommend the government considers changes to data legislation to enable appropriate data sharing and linkage between different government departments, health and social care bodies and statutory agencies based on more proactive and explicit consent models.

This is a long way from government acting through consent and with the willing participation of the public it serves. More to the point is raises some more questions about the use of 'Big Data' in designing public interventions. Now this isn't just about Vince-Wayne Mitchell's research into horoscopes but also reflects the fact that, just as the participation in Rio seems good but isn't, the data is not structured - there's just a lot of it. By way of illustration we have Boston's 'Street Bump' app which used a smart phone app to identify damage to road surfaces in the city - loads and loads of data all to be crunched thereby allowing the City Council to respond better. What could go wrong?

“Why?” Jake asked the audience gathered in BAM’s Harvey Theater. Why were there more potholes in rich areas? A few answers came from the crowd. Someone suggested different traffic patterns. Then the right answer came: wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.

Just because you have lots of data doesn't mean you have better information, it just means you have lots of data. The health and social care system generates lots of data. But it's data about old people and ill people and most of us aren't old or ill right now. Just as the liver doctor thinks liver disease is a massive problem because that's all he sees, the use of Big Data in health runs the risks of policy-decisions about all-population health or wellbeing issues being determined by analysing only the part of the population who are ill or old (or, indeed, ill and old).

So the use of modern technology to create 'facilitated networks' and manipulate 'Big Data' doesn't actually extend participation even if the process is designed (as with the Our Cities Network) with the specific aim of securing participation. To use a local, mundane example in Bradford - for the current consultation on budget options I was told officers were 'pleased' that 30 people had turned out to a public meeting in Bingley. It's not that I think these processes are without value but they are the city level equivalent of a focus group and should be treated as such. The problem is that people 'participating' are led to believe that their 'engagement' means they can influence the policy-decisions being considered. No focus group participant knows anything other than they get £20 of M&S vouchers in exchange for an hour or so chatting with a dozen others about something.

The real point here is that the population are not participants in public service delivery let alone 'co-producers' - they are customers and see little difference between the behaviour of the council or government department and any of the many large private businesses they buy from. We pay our local taxes and we get our bins emptied, the litter picked up and the potholes fixed. We pay taxes and receive education for our children and a health service when we're ill. We do not consider ourselves participants in the provision or delivery of these services - we are customers of those services.

If you want people to participate in creating, designing and delivering public services then you have firstly to do so at the scale of their understanding (this isn't to dismiss them but to observe that they aren't usually interested beyond securing what they need or want - and who's to argue with that). This means working as close to the individual level as you can.

Secondly people have to be in charge. Not in the 'empowering communities' manner but really in charge. The problem is that most people don't want to be 'in charge' of bins or schools or doctors any more than they want to be 'in charge' of the supermarket, the electricity board or the train company. What we want is for those services to work for us, to allow us to have what we need (and most of what we want) without us having to fuss and bother about it. And most of the time public services do just that and we are happy to carry on being a customer.

If we want to fuss about how to use smart technologies to get people better services that's great. But it isn't about getting more participation, it's about customer service, developing and extending the services we provide and behaving a lot more like Waitrose and a lot less like old-fashioned public agencies.  This means changing how we speak - dropping the management babble and academic over-elaboration, using short sentences, words with fewer syllables and phrases that folk might have a fighting chance of understanding. Imagine if the John Lewis Christmas ad was written by public sector professionals!

And we need to start treating the public as consumers - asking them (with real research using proper samples and good design not a self-selected audience in a draughty community centre) what they want and what it should look like. Rather than trying to pretend we can create some sort of on-line agora - bear in mind the demos of ancient Athens was only about 30,000 at most - we should build a relationship with the audiences we serve using the communications techniques that successful big consumer-focused businesses use.

In the end most people, in the manner of Ms Garbo, just want to be left alone. They have no interest in being 'consulted', in 'empowerment' or in 'participation'. What they want - and what we should try to give them - is high quality services that meet their needs and go some way to satisfying their wants. Emptying someone's rubbish bin or treating their bad back isn't a question of ideology but one of efficiency and effectiveness. Instead what government fusses about is variously saving the planet, reordering society, scaring the socks off people and coming up with new and innovative ways to waste the money people hand over in taxes. Instead of trying to get people participating when they really don't want to participate, we should should be doing the much simpler task of asking - through good research - what people want and setting about giving them just that.

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Tuesday 11 November 2014

The kind of Council George Galloway wants for Bradford...

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Is this:

The authority that he has built is a beacon throughout the country in educational and in other social and political achievements. There are no academies in Tower Hamlets…

I wish we in Bradford had a council like Lutfur Rahman has in Tower Hamlets.

And what is Tower Hamlets like then? Ah, yes:

Police are investing a “rotten borough” facing allegations of cronyism, corruption and religious extremism, it emerged yesterday, after Eric Pickles took direct control of Tower Hamlets council.

Eric Pickles has dispatched three commissioners to oversee spending in the east London borough after a blistering report found public buildings had been sold to allies of the mayor and hundreds of thousands of pounds had been given as grants to ineligible bodies.

Contracts were awarded without the appropriate paperwork while Lutfur Rahman, the independent elected Mayor, personally selected preferred companies, an official report found. 

Good to know, George!

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Town planning does more harm than good - which is why it's not cool



I was expecting some sort of paean to the town planners art replete with talk of garden cities and quotations from Peter Hall but this article by Tom Campbell in the Guardian surprised me with the manner in which it deconstructed the problems with town planning - and with the planner:

“Planners have become simultaneously under-respected and over-professionalised. Their training and practice too often leaves them able to communicate effectively only with other planners and professionals, working in an abstract language that alienates them from people. People are occasionally allowed into the professional planner’s world, but in highly mediated terms dictated by the profession.”

Now to be fair to the town planner this description could apply to a host of other (sometimes derided) professions - law, accountancy, health service management to name just three - but it remains the case that we don't seem to know what the role of planning is in helping create great cities. The article goes on to argue (without any supporting evidence) that planning isn't a barrier to growth and even that planning can be "positive and bold", whatever that actually might mean.

The concluding argument though is this:

If cities such as London are going to thrive from globalisation, channelling funds into affordable housing, public infrastructure and civic spaces, it is planners who must go into battle on our behalf – democratically empowered; confident in their ability to negotiate firmly with private capital.

Which rather places planners as the plucky little chaps fighting against The Man on behalf of all the little people and, in doing so, creating great places. The problem is that London, unquestionably a great city, owes none of that greatness to the planning profession. Indeed, it wouldn't be hard to argue that planning - far from promoting great places - actively stifles their development. But all this merely reflects the nature of town planning as a bureaucratic function - for all that planners talk about public engagement and involvement, they still produce a rule book for fellow planners (and for the crust of parasitic lawyers that cling to these bureaucracies like barnacles).

Most planners start their careers by doing a thing called 'development control' (sometimes in a new and, I suppose, ever-so-trendy innovation this is called 'development management'). Put simply development control is the application of that rule book and is filled with phrases like 'Policy H10.0 of the rUDP states" and "the NPPF supersedes earlier guidance meaning that PPS13 not longer applies in this instance". The activity is designed - or so it seems - to numb the brains of even the most assiduous and thoughtful local resident.

Planners start their careers with this dull listing of policies and writing of reports explaining why Mr & Mrs Jones can (or cannot) build a little bungalow on the land next to their daughter's house, why Ali Khan isn't able to sell hot food from his shop unit or why local residents will (or won't) have to put up with lorries trundling along their narrow streets. This bureaucratic process seeps into the souls of these planners and they lose sight of the reason they set out on the career - the shiny pictures in the RTPI brochure and the flash urban design images on the University Planning Department's website are all erased by processing loft conversions, applications for takeaways and variations to Condition 23 of a planning permission.

So when planners get to do policy they approach it with their souls stained by years of routine, their minds filled with acronyms, legal cases and policy reference numbers. The planner assumes their purpose is given - how could we operate without the comforting and comprehensive tome setting out local polices. So we change its names from time to time - structure plans become unitary development plans which morph into the slightly disturbing set of letters, rUDP before emerging as the rather more prosaic Local Plan. But these are all essentially the same document  - each one starts out with a glimpse of the geographer as a picture of the place being planned is painted. Geology is mentioned, a little bit of history is added plus a description worthy of Stamps Commercial Geography. All this is but a false dawn as the document then plummets into the micromanagement of everywhere and everything - nothing can be left without a policy setting out how it should be done plus rules on which those parasitic lawyers can grow.

The problem is that this micromanagement has destroyed the purpose of planning - the sweeping thoughts of Peter Hall and others about helping design places that work for everyone. Planning is never seen as either bold or positive let alone creative or innovative. Yet that is what planners wish for but are denied by the pressure to use the system as a means of control rather than as a way to empower. Look at the direction for planning - rather than being free to help create great places the planning system has been filled with controls, bans, blocks and 'you can't do that there'. It is less the triumph of the NIMBY and more a deadening system where the default position - a position wanted by too many of my fellow politicians - is 'no, we don't want that there'. We're told that a presumption in favour of 'sustainable development' is somehow a bad thing and watch as planners (supported by local councillors) invent new ways to prevent that sustainable development taking place.

Campbell is right that planning must be the servant of the people - and it isn't right now. But he is wrong to place planning in opposition to capitalism. Instead planning should seek to help that capitalism with its innovation, initiative, enterprise and excitement go in the right direction. The problem with planning is that planners have absorbed an orthodoxy, turned it into a toolkit and used it to ruin too many of our fine places. The golden age of town planning that Campbell alludes to was, in truth, the era of slum clearance, of Wardley and Poulson. That golden age was anything but golden, it was rather a bit of sparkling gold spray on a corrupting and destructive scheme to remodel (many would say ruin) places like Birmingham, Bradford and Newcastle.

I know two things - that we don't want that golden age of town planning back and that Jane Jacobs, as ever, was right when she said:

“Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.” 

Planning is necessary but it more often prevents than creates great places.

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Beaten up simply for being an old soldier. That is what we mean by extremism folks.

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Imagine the outcry, the calls for new laws and the accusations of hate crime that would accompany an attack by white skinheads on a Muslim man in religious dress returning home peacefully from the mosque. And I would be among the first to condemn such attacks, such hideous extremism damaging our society.

On Sunday evening, a former Royal Marine (and former Labour councillor as it happens) was walking through Bradford to get a taxi home after a drink with friends following Remembrance Sunday events. This man was set upon by three men simply because he was wearing the insignia of his military service and his medals. As I write he is still in hospital.

That same morning, another veteran was walking through a park in Keighley on his way to remember - he too was attacked simply because he was a veteran wearing his beret, his medals and a poppy.

We ask sometimes why we must work hard to discourage extremism. Those veterans and millions like them across the world put their lives on the line to defend us from such violent politics, from such hatred. Yet it is on our streets here in Bradford. So when I read this, I am saddened but less surprised at these attacks and the hatred they display:

A Bradford school is still not doing enough to protect its students from extremism, a new report has found.

Governors at Carlton Bolling College were sacked in July after an Ofsted report rated the school "inadequate".

Inspectors revisiting the school last month said it was "unacceptable" it had "not rectified the situation".

 The answer doesn't lie just in the schools but out in the community. The two attacks, it seems, were committed by teenagers - someone is putting the idea into the heads of these young men that it is OK to attack old men because they are veterans of our armed forces. That person needs to be found and stopped.

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Sunday 9 November 2014

Policies that work - the benefits cap...

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We were promised destitution and other horrors but...

Between April 2013 and August 2014, 51,200 households had their housing benefit capped, according to a Department for Work and Pensions statistical release yesterday. This number had dropped to 27,200 households by August 2014. Forty per cent of those no longer subject to the cap – 9,600 households – are exempt with an open Working Tax Credit.

Unpiggle the language and this is telling us that we capped the benefits and, lo, the people having that cap imposed went and got jobs. Well I never!

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Banning second homes. How can you do this?

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Practical question.

Residents in St Ives, the idyllic Cornish resort, have declared war on wealthy outsiders by proposing a ban on second homes.

The seaside town has been described as Kensington-on-Sea because so many rich Londoners flock there each summer.

But now residents are planning to block the building of any new holiday lets or second homes claiming they force local people out of the housing market.

The proposed measure is contained in a draft version of the St Ives Neighbourhood Development Plan which could be voted into local planning regulations next year.

No problem with holiday homes - different use class - but 'second homes'? I can't see how, under current planning rules, you can prevent new 'second homes'. I'm guessing there might be ways to focus on homes for specific local need, social rented property and so forth. But the minute you allow property to be built for sale on the open market, you allow for 'second' (or third or twenty-fifth) homes.

It seems that the plan is to prevent the off-set of affordable housing provision. So the second home owners have to live on the same spot as the riff-raff. But all that this will do is break up large sites - below (I think) ten properties there is no affordable housing requirement and no community infrastructure levy. I susepct these well-meaning town councillors in St Ives will live to regret their populist planning ideas.


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