Does requiring affordable housing reduce supply?

Planning authorities in the UK generally require that a proportion of housing on developments over a certain size is set aside as 'affordable' or else that a commuted sum is paid to the planning authority in order that they may provide affordable housing elsewhere. The definition of affordable here doesn't matter except to note that it is housing at below market prices (either for rent or sale). There is little political objection to this principle other than its degree and in the impact it might have on the viability of development.

The objectives of such policies are firstly to ensure that there is an adequate stock of affordable and social housing so as to meet need, and secondly that communities are 'integrated' (meaning that we don't repeat the errors of the past by building isolated or separate social housing 'ghettoes'). And the use of planning obligations seems to make sense as it ensures delivery.

However, these excellent policies may contain a problem by reducing supply of new housing across all tenures and housing types. In the USA these policies are called 'Inclusionary Zoning' (or IZ) - so named to set them as different from exclusionary zoning that it used to prevent the development of low cost housing - and a couple of US economists, Tom Means and Edward Stringham, have shown how these policies might not be the solution they're cracked up to be:

“Between 1980 and 1990,” they write, “cities imposing below-market housing mandates end up with 9 percent higher prices and 8 percent fewer homes overall. Between 1990 and 2000 cities imposing below market housing mandates end up with 20 percent higher prices and 7 percent fewer homes overall.”

Put simply the imposition of requirements to provide affordable housing on a development site (or else pay a commuted sum) seem to result in less housing being built and, unsurprisingly, house prices being higher. Now it may be that the UK's housing market will behave differently - the problem is that most research into affordable housing here is either funded by affordable housing providers or else focuses on affordable housing supply rather than supply in general.

Like most policies around housing the real issue is hidden in a thicket of detailed studies. We need below-market prices for housing because housing is expensive. Housing is expensive because the land on which the houses are built is expensive. The high land price is a consequence of there being a limited supply of said land. And the limited supply is (to a considerable extent) a matter of policy choice:

The reason, after all, that housing is expensive in places like New York, San Francisco, DC, and other IZ-friendly (not to mention rent-controlled) locales is that zoning regulations prevent supply from keeping pace with population growth. In response, public officials have pursued demand-side solutions to this fundamentally supply-side problem, through a massive subsidy apparatus that includes rent-control, public housing, Section 8, tax credits, and now inclusionary zoning. Combined, these measures are band aids for a mortal wound, since they ignore the underlying cause of why hot urban housing markets remain expensive. And sometimes, by discouraging construction, these measures worsen the problem.

Translated into English this tells us that, where you have pressured housing markets (something that is true in London but not in Bradford), the answer lies in more supply of land and allowing higher densities rather than regulating or subsidising housing. Almost everyone who looks at the problem realises pretty early on that the barrier to our supply problem in housing isn't finance, isn't government funding and isn't the market. The problem is the planning system.

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Who is 'us'?

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Nigel Farage, in that inimitable manner of his, has been on about Muslims. And in doing so dear old Nigel has framed it in these terms:

..there are some Muslims in Britain who comprise ‘a fifth column living in our country who hate us and want to kill us’.

My question in all of this is to ask who Nigel means by 'us'? We sort of know, or think we know - it's clearly not intended to mean Muslims so might mean everyone who isn't a Muslim. The problem is that we struggle to determine who 'us' might be - at least when we get to the point of actually sorting out the sheep from the goats, us from them.

Firstly there's no doubt that there are a bunch of people who hate me for what I am (or choose to be) - some hate my Englishness, others hate my catholicism, and another bunch hate me for being a Tory. Amidst all this hatred there's a few who hate me for rejecting the idea that there is one god whose prophet is Mohammed. A minority of these hate-filled people entertain the idea of violence as a means of projecting their hatred

But that doesn't get any nearer to the vexed question of who Nigel means by 'us'. It's all mixed up in judgements about language, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual preference and political opinion. Which perhaps means that, while Nigel thinks I'm part of 'us', I don't think I am because it would mean accepting his world view by suggesting that my Black, Pakistani and Jewish friends are somehow 'them' - tolerated rather than welcomed in my place.

What we see here is the irony of the left's groupthink - ironic both because the left focuses closely on defining characteristics (and society's attitude to those characteristics) and also since I'm talking about Nigel Farage who isn't 'of the left', at least in conventional terms. If we define people as members of a particular group (or groups) then we allow for the sort of comment that Nigel Farage makes by allowing for the existence of 'us' and 'them'. If, on the other hand, we define people as individuals who have a particular set of characteristics - some innate, some acquired, some a matter of choice or belief - then the idea of 'us' ceases to have relevence other than as a practical pronoun.

The political use of the word 'us' is exploitative of people's desire to belong. Nigel Farage uses it to suggest that Muslims living in Britain are not 'us' because a few of those Muslims hate some non-Muslims and may want to be violent towards those people. And we therefore have to reject all Muslims because we can't on first assessment tell whether this is a Muslim who will chat to us about cricket, laugh at our jokes and discuss business, or a Muslim who is only a switch away from blowing us all up.

But, on this logic, I should reject other groups that might hate me too. How do I know that the person with the Twitter account proclaiming their hatred of Tories isn't planning violence against me - perhaps a terrorist attack on the Conservative Club? I've watched the antics of anti-austerity campaigners and reckon they're pretty violent at times - how is this different from what Nigel Farage is saying about Muslims? Clearly such people aren't 'us'.

We could go on here - citing how some people hate (and therefore might be violent towards) a host of different groups from gays and lesbians through an assortment of races or religions, to the supporters of the wrong football club. There is no 'us' if it is defined by membership of a group not, in one way or another, hated. But the word is convenient and deniable - membership of 'us' is fluid and flexible subject to interpretation and amendment. Confronted by a challenge, I've no doubt that Nigel Farage would absolutely deny that 'us' didn't include Muslims even though the logic of his criticism tells us this must be the case.

I am quite comfortable with 'us' existing - my support for West Ham places me in a group where 'us' is fellow supporters and 'them' is everyone else. And the same goes for a load of other things - from my politics through to my group of close friends or family. But where we make the mistake is in framing political debate in terms of 'us' and 'them' - I'm guessing this isn't a new thing but it is, despite the opinions of right wing nationalists like Nigel Farage, very much associated with the left of politics, with the idea of collectivity and with the primacy of the group in their idea of society.

In the end there should be no 'us' in politics where that word is used to define others as an enemy, as unwanted or as dangerously different. Nor should there be an 'us' that means one group of people being unfairly privileged by government simply because of their membership of that group. And there should not be an 'us' where the politician campaigns on the basis of group interest - 'vote for me, I'm the Muslim/Black/Working Class candidate'.

You and I are not defined by our membership of a given group or groups - for sure such membership might inform what we think important but imposing this 'us-ness' on people is essentially divisive however well meant it might be. We know it's divisive because we see Nigel Farage do it with Muslims and are outraged. But Farage's use of 'us' is absolutely the same as the 'us' that determines the multiple manifestos at the recent election (for young people, for the disabled, for England, for Scotland, for ethnic minorities, for LGBT people). Are people really defined by age, gender, sexual preference and ability or by the specifics of their own lives, loves, interests and opinions? Surely it's the latter - I do hope so.

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Everything that's wrong with lottery funding - in one quotation

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The quote is from a chap called Henry Kippin who works for an organisation called Collaborate CIC (who do something very important around" creative thinking, policy development, and a ‘shared space’ for insight, debate and problem-solving"). It's in the house magazine of professional urban nonsense, New Start:

A proactive navigating of sector boundaries has precipitated more creative, iterative and diffuse ways of reaching scale – blending public funding with social finance and a more proactive role for the private sector. Far from protecting a sense of safe isolation, funders celebrate confident interdependence and regularly take collective risks on path-breaking initiatives to build social capacity and resilience. The impact on funding beneficiaries feels profound; offering the possibility of new routes to impact, and an alternative to the increasingly fraught relationship between social action and the local state.

I'm pretty sure that Henry knew what he meant when he wrote that paragraph - it's a picture of the 'social funding' environment in 2025 if we all do what Collaborate thinks we should do. The problem is - and I know you've spotted it - that the prediction does actually say anything of substance. Roughly translated it says that 'social funders' (that's the lottery, charitable trusts and other formal philanthropy) will be most effective if they work in partnership with the public sector in their funding decisions. You could call it 'collaboration' but in truth its the alignment of private initiative with the policies and priorities of the state.

Such an arrangement suits the public sector and, since that is the pond in which they swim, also meets the needs of those who work for the big social funders. But for that social funding to be most effective it should be challenging the state - investing in things that government can't or won't do. This isn't about plugging perceived gaps in provision but rather is a route to new ideas and new activities. What Henry and his pals are proposing isn't a beautiful collaborative future but rather the de facto nationalisation of social funding - the further submission of charity to to objectives of big government.

Right now most of the social funding out there goes to a very limited pool of recipients. Funding is most likely to go to organisations with full time workers where the focus is on capacity, social infrastructure and campaigning rather than on what most of us normal folk think of as charity. Most of the social action taking place today isn't being done by these organisations but rather by a host of little groups doing things they think important. Nine out of ten charities and community groups don't employ anyone yet to read what organisations like Collaborate say you'd think this was the exception not the norm.

If social funders want to make a real difference they need to change what they do and how the fund. Not by getting more cuddly with the state or even holding hands with private business, but by widening their net and supporting the small battalions of volunteers that really do make a difference in all our communities. Sadly though, people like Henry with their jargon-ridden wibble will win the day meaning that the distance between real voluntary work and the activity of the "third sector" gets ever larger.

Thousands of organisations simply don't bother approaching those big social funders. Not because they don't need support and aren't doing great work. Rather it's because they take one look at the information provided by the funder and decide they have no chance of getting support. "No point in us applying for funding, they never give money to organisations like us round here" - I've heard this dozens of times and, however much Henry and his pals want to say it ain't so, I know it's the truth.

So if Henry wants to change things - wants a better future for 'social funding' - he should start arguing that support should be directed to real social action being done by ordinary people in every community rather than for some sort of grand unified theory of collaborative funding that's really just code for doing what the government wants.

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Professor Tim Lang. Not just a food fascist but completely wrong about every aspect of food policy.

The sort of food Tim Lang disapproves of..

Quite a few years ago I want down to the Borough Market to a conference about markets - the foodie sort of market not the economics sort of market (although the former is a subset of the latter). I was speaking about what we were doing in Bradford, trying to use markets as a driver of regeneration. And apart from meeting Thomasina Miers and sitting on a panel with Will Alsop, this was my first experience of Tim Lang.

Professor Lang (as he might have been back then but I don't recall) is a certain sort of foodie's favourite academic. The kind of academic who provides a rationale for those who don't like cheap food, abhor supermarkets, hate McDonalds and prattle on endlessly about urban growing, 'independents' and food deserts. All this means that the professor gets plenty of space to promote his views. And, as I found all those years ago, Tim Lang's views are deeply and profoundly unpleasant yet somehow they appeal to a constituency of middle-class, urban greens.

I've written about Lang's obsessions a couple of times before but they can be summed up quite quickly - we eat too much meat which is destroying the planet, we eat to much cheap carbohydrates which is destroying the planet, and we eat too much processed food which is destroying the planet. Onto this main meal of climate change wibble Lang sprinkles a liberal covering of health warnings mixed up with a sort of militant semi-vegetarianism. At the heart of Lang's argument is the belief that food is too cheap.

Which bring us to the news about Tesco reducing the sugar content of its soft drinks (I'm guessing by substituting it with some sort of artificial sweetener). And unsurprisingly Prof Lang has weighed into the argument:

But not even mighty Tesco can sort out obesity. That would require a re-engineering of the entire food system which works hard to over-produce food, and flood markets with ever-cheaper salty, fatty, sugary non-food foods. We’d also need to build exercise into daily living, and curtail out of town supermarkets which can only be reached by gas-guzzling obesity-inducing car culture.

Here we have the distillation of the trendy foodie greenie left's position on food. Who cares whether we make food more expensive so the poorest in our society find it harder to feed their families. Who gives a monkey's about the idea of choice. And let's pretend we're going to save the planet by producing our food in a less efficient, more resource intensive manner - a sort of Sally does Subsistence Farming approach to the food economy. I love farmers markets, trendy delis and artisan baking to bits. And I'm rich enough to be able to indulge myself on the produce these folk are selling me.

Anyway Prof Lang has got himself even more hyped up over the matter of sugar - despite the fact that in the UK sugar consumption has fallen - presenting it as the core element in the food culture he dislikes:

Sugar is put into a vast range of food and drinks today, as is salt. Hence these two ingredients being targeted by public health advocates. They symbolise the world’s uptake of ever more processed, factory-made, instant satisfaction non-food foods and snacks, and the rise of the “permanently eating” culture among those populations who have access and can afford such products.

Note the last part of this quotation - "can afford such products". This is of course the man who, like many of his Guardian reading fans, thinks the solution lies in more expensive food:

Observers of food policy certainly believe that cheap food is a problem or, as Professor Tim Lang of City University tells it, that too much of the true cost of food is born not by the consumer or the retailer. The environmental and health damage caused by modern food production and its transport, as well as by excessive consumption, entails vast costs, often picked up by people far away from Tesco's catchments. But it is the supermarkets' eternal price wars – their one-track marketing philosophy where "value" trumps all other qualities in food – that have driven prices so low.

That's a Guardian editorial - an endorsement for the idea that the poor, the working classes the left purports to love, should be made to pay more for their food. Yet what these people fail to appreciate is that much of our food waste isn't about markets or the policies of supermarkets but is a consequence of regulation, agricultural policies and the failures in food education - all things that are down to government not markets.

But there's a bigger point here about the environment. Nearly all (about 83%) of the carbon emissions in the food chain are generated by the production process. This is the case regardless of the actual production process - it applies just as much to free range poultry as it does to factory-farmed chickens. However - and this really is important - the fewer imputs to food production the less it damages the environment. And this means that large scale agriculture and food processing is less carbon intensive than the small scale production systems that Prof Lang and his fans promote:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Us trendy foodies don't want this to be so. We want high welfare, grass-fed, free-range, rare breed meat to be less damaging to the environment than the products of machine agriculture but the terrible truth is that it's not Big Food that's destroying the planet but an unholy alliance of us trendies with out resilient local economies and the subsistence farmers who're chopping down and burning all the forests. Think about it for a minute and it becomes clear. Imagine the big industrial coffee plant where they squeeze every last bit of coffee flavour out of those beans while trying to minimise the cost of doing so and compare this to your home roasted , home ground beans. Per cup of coffee who's generating the most carbon dioxide? You are of course - Big Food (and the bigger the better) is where we should be going if we want to reduce carbon emissions and stop damaging climate change.

And the really great thing here is that, not only do we reduce damage to the environment by intensifying food production but we are also able to produce the food a whole lot cheaper. This means we can feed more folk and free up money and time for those folk to spend on other things than where the next meals coming from. All this means less resource use, more economic growth, healthier people and a boost to the world's happiness as fewer folk are scratting at the soil from dawn to dusk so as to keep body and soul together.

Prof Tim Lang and all the folk pushing his green version of food fascism are not just wrong, they're dangerously wrong. These people want to make poor people poorer simply because they've decided they don't like the choices such folk have made. And in doing so they not only reduce economic growth but also increase the damage being done to the planet by the production of food.

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Quote of the day - why public transport doesn't reduce car use

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We're constantly told by transport planners that active interventions in transport systems are all about model shift - a posh term for getting people to use something other than their own car. But the problem is that there's precious little evidence showing these interventions (other than pricing interventions such as the London congestion charge) make any difference to behaviour. We prioritise the wrong set of folk.

The line of reasoning in the opening quote* suggests the primary purpose of transit is reducing auto travel, rather than serving people who want to or must use transit. In other words, building transit is good because it reduces traffic congestion (and almost no one argues building roads is good because it reduces transit crowding).

That is at best a secondary benefit, a benefit which could be achieved must more simply and less expensively through the use of prices as we do with almost all other scarce goods in society, even necessities like water.

We should therefore be investing in transit systems so as to benefit the people who for reasons of economics or circumstance have no choice other than to use those systems. The trendy urbanist vision of a car-free city filled with sleek trams, funky buses and kids cycling to schools is - as I know you all suspected - something of an utopian pipe dream. The truth is that we need public transport for the old, the young, the less well of and those unable, for whatever reason, to use a car.

(*the opening quote in the article is: “Every person who is riding transit is one less person in the car in front of us.”)

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A sugar tax won't make anyone thinner - just poor people poorer

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The other day a Conservative minister I'd never heard of told an audience that he supported a tax on sugar. George Freeman had this to say:

“I think that where there is a commercial product which confers costs on all of us as a society, as in sugar, and where we can clearly show that the use of that leads to huge pressures on social costs, then we could be looking at recouping some of that through taxation.

“Companies should know that if you insist on selling those products, we will tax them.”

Now there are some profoundly unconservative things in this statement - the idea that me getting fat "confers costs on all of us in society" is pretty dodgy from the Party of the individual and individual rights not to mention the idea of 'social costs'. However, my concern is that, even if you accept the validity of taxing things that are bad for society, a tax on sugar is going for the wrong bogeyman.

The first thing of course is to observe that the obesity crisis (or epidemic, if you prefer a different scaremongering line) is not a consequence of our sugar consumption. Not even a little bit. I know this because, while we've been getting fatter, our sugar consumption has been falling. And not just the consumption of the evil white stuff but 'non-milk extrinsic sugars' - that's all the sugar added to food plus honey. Even more importantly - in the UK, at least - our average total calorie intake has also fallen.

UK calorie intake. Source National Diet & Nutrition Survey

You'll notice that the amount of everything consumed (except female consumption of alcohol) has dropped in the ten years from 2000/01. So we can say with a considerable degree of confidence that any increase in obesity over that period is not down to what we eat and absolutely that it isn't down to sugar. The only health condition that is directly linked to sugar is dental caries - and we know that good oral hygiene (brushing your teeth regularly, using a mouthwash and so forth) eliminates most of that risk. Taxing everyone because some people don't look after their teeth strikes me as a largely futile exercise and deeply unconservative.

The next thing is to ask whether a sugar tax (and I can only assume that this means a tax on 'non-milk extrinsic sugars' rather than just sucrose) will be sufficient to change behaviour so suddenly pounds are shed from our waists and the obesity 'crisis' is solved. Certainly the evidence from other taxes is mixed - to work the tax has to be sufficiently high to actually make a difference to behaviour and, as the Danes discovered, won't work if it's easily avoidable.

So let's assume that George Freeman gets his ignorant way and a sugar tax is imposed. The impact will be to increase the price of products containing sugars - I'm guessing no distinction will be made between sugars naturally present in the product (like the fructose on your orange juice) and sugars added to the product (like the honey in those sugar puffs). If you wander round your supermarket idly reading product descriptions, you'll find that sugars crop up - in one form or another - is many processed foods. So the impact of a sugar tax will be to increase the price of a whole host of products - from the obvious chocolate, honey and jam through to pizza, ketchup and meat pies.

Now it might be that the impact will be for manufacturers to reduce the amount of sugar but that might present some challenges - the sugar's not there by accident. So what happens is that the tax (as taxes usually are) gets lumped on the price and is paid by us consumers as our purchases ping across the checkout scanner. And, assuming that the sugar tax is low, all this will mean is that everyone carries on much as before - buying the stuff they want and getting fatter or thinner depending on how much we stuff in our mouths. Except, that is, for the poorest folk who will discover that the £1.39 pizza is now a £1.49 pizza making it just a little harder to feed the family.

Unless you set the sugar tax at a rate that really changes behaviour - read this as poor people not being able to afford food - the result will be negligible. A sugar tax really won't make anyone thinner. It will just make the poor a little bit poorer.
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Why do public authorities have such a problem with motorcycles?

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I've noted before that West Yorkshire police's press office dedicates a huge proportion of its press office resource to sending out press releases attacking motorcyclists. It's not just that the popular portrayal of motorcycling and motor cyclists is almost entirely negative but that this form of transport is almost entirely ignored - except as a line in the accident statistics - by transport planners.

The Leeds branch of the Motorcycle Action Group (I so want to call it the Leeds Chapter) staged a protest that called for a greater recognition of motorcycling and, specifically, for bikes to be allow to use bus lanes.

Scores of bikers have taken part in a "demo ride" calling for rights to ride in Leeds's bus lanes.

Organised by Leeds Motorcycle Action Group (MAG), the ride started from Squires Cafe, near Sherburn in Elmet, and finished at a pub outside Leeds.

The group is campaigning for all motorcycles, scooters and mopeds to be allowed to use the city's bus lanes.

The response from Leeds City Council (interestingly this isn't the body responsible for transport planning but we can't expect the BBC to actually know this - it's one of the reasons we need a metro mayor) is typical council-speak about 'harnessing' the views of motorcyclists. Probably because the planners have absolutely no intention of doing what Leeds MAG suggest - recognising that motorcycling has a real role to play in urban transport and especially the relief of congestion. These planners are wedded to trains and buses (including in Leeds having a bus on a string), plus pedal cycles their new favourite means of transport, and see motorised private transport as a bad thing, the main problem from which we all must be modally shifted.

The consultation - being conducted as we speak (I bet you didn't know, did you) by the Combined Authority - completely fails to mention motor cycles and only mentions cars as a problem. I attended a meeting of the Authority's Scrutiny Committee where a presentation about the new strategic transport plan - a good 40 minute long presentation - didn't mention the word 'car' once, let alone refer to motorcycles. Why is it these planners have such tunnel vision? And why do they hate motorcycles so much?

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A reminder why the left is losing...

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Perhaps not everywhere and not in every intellectual argument. But the left is losing - perhaps for the first time in fifty years - the cultural battle. And it's losing because too many of its adherents are nasty.

I am not saying that the political Right is immune from petty name-calling and self-importance. However, looking at my social media accounts alone, I lost count of the number of times I saw the words “moron” and “scum” used in reference to Conservative or Lib Dem voters. I didn’t see anything of the sort emanating from the political centre or the Right.

There has been a lot of talk of late of “shy Tories” being responsible for the electoral outcome. Is it any wonder that people had to be shy about their voting intentions when any admission of Tory solidarity would have resulted in the social media version of public stoning?

Enormous effort is invested in explaining how anyone not suitably "progressive" is motivated by evil, self-interest, greed, arrogance and a lack of compassion. All accompanied by that preening prattle about "values", "morals" and "ethics".

Out in the big bad world there are a lot of ordinary folk. People with jobs, mortgages, children to feed and school, and the regular trickle of painful bills to pay. The left - the Labour Party in the UK - offers nothing to these people except lectures about values, judgemental sermons on behaviour and the sanctifying of people those ordinary folk view as exploiters of our compassion and good nature.

The Labour Party will continue to lose support - and fans - until it offers something to these workers, stops demonising profit, ceases portraying the private sector as a bad place peopled by sharks or thieves and above all packs in with insulting those who disagree with them. We're not morons, we're not scum and were not without care or compassion. Today - and the Labour Party better get used to this - we are the party of workers, of those people with regular private sector jobs, mortgages and a desire for a better life.
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Booze, early death and bad reporting

My local paper, the Telegraph & Argus is generally pretty good but every now and then - especially on health matters - it produces some utterly shocking journalism. And today on the subject of early death it produced a corker.

The writer, Rob Lowson presents a more-or-less straightforward report on the last data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) on the matter of premature death. The HSCIC has totted up the gap between the age people die and the "potential" life expectancy - these figures show that Bradford is bottom of the pile in Yorkshire.

For once I'm not going to set off on a rant explaining how the age at which people are dying now is not a very good guide to the age at which people who are living will die. This should be utterly obvious to anyone looking at this data, so obvious that I can only assume that it suits the purposes of public health folk to pretend that current mortality rates are somehow an indicator of future mortality rates (or indeed a thing they call "health inequality").

Instead let's look at Rob's words - he explains the data and how it's calculated, explains the conditions that contribute (coronary heart disease, respiratory problems, cancers) and quotes - at some length - Bradford Council's Director of Public Health who talks about what the Council is doing and urges a degree of personal responsibility:

"Our campaigns also highlight the importance of individuals taking responsibility for their own health by making positive lifestyle choices like exercising regularly, drinking in moderation, eating a healthy diet, and stopping smoking."

Nothing here at all that suggests those lifestyle choices are the reason for the gap - indeed the Council's approach is to stress reducing poverty and improving environmental conditions such as warmer homes and cleaner air. It's all pretty fair and concludes with something of a success story - the reduction in rates of infant mortality in Bradford (which were among the UK's highest and merited the focus of public health efforts).

Given all this, I have no idea why the newspaper chose to illustrate the article with a photograph of a beer engine and a couple of guys drinking pints. A photograph with the caption - wholly unrelated to the article - "excessive drinking is one factor in Bradford's high early death rate". A bald statement based on no evidence and almost certainly not the main - or even a significant - problem. Bradford has one of the highest rates of abstention in the UK (23% of adults) and has rates of heavy drinking significantly below the English average (6.24% as compared to 6.75%). Just to complete the picture the city also has lower rates of alcohol-related violent crime that the English average.

It is lazy, sloppy newspaper reporting to pick on one factor - one unimportant factor - to illustrate a balanced report on Bradford's mortality statistics. And even worse to do so by picking on beer served in a public house as the source of the problem.

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In defence of pussy cats (not that they need it)

Writing in the Telegraph, Andrew Brown launches an attack on the pussy cat. Or more precisely on the owners of pussy cats.

What cats do, as everyone knows but some prefer not to think about, is kill wild birds – millions every year, according to the RSPB.

Here are these two birds bringing up their families in our garden, feeding their bleating chicks, and along comes the domestic cat, a ruthless hunter introduced by humans to mess up the natural order of things.

“Belling the cat” (that is, hanging a bell around the animal’s neck, as in Aesop’s fable) ought to be the minimum cat owners do.

At least that would warn birds of their presence. I would go further – cat owners should stop their pets reproducing indiscriminately. It would also be better if cats were kept indoors at night.

If you own a cat, what it gets up to it is your responsibility. If your pet goes out and slaughters millions of birds and chicks, it is your business.

This bloke has a serious problem with your pussy cat. And all because he's noticed that a couple of local cats have been stalking the long-tailed tits nesting in his garden. Our writer is terribly excited about the fact that these birds are nesting there but less excited about the other perfectly natural thing going on - the cat stalking the nesting birds.

Now one thing is true, domestic cats kill a lot of birds every year - about 55 million according to the RSPB. And in the scale of things this seems an awful lot of predation. However, the reality is that predation by cats isn't responsible for any decline in bird populations. Here's the RSPB again:

Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season

We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations.

Yet this doesn't stop people like Andrew Brown writing their pig-ignorant rants about predation by cats. So here's a little more information. Firstly there have been significant declines in some bird species with farmland species the worst affected. However when we look at the main garden species - blackbirds, blues tits, great tits, wrens, robins and chaffinches - there hasn't been any decline in the period from 1970 to 2012. Indeed some species such as the long tailed tit (yes, the bird Andrew Brown is so agitated about) have seen what DEFRA describe as 'weak increase'. Put simply the birds that cats are most likely to predate aren't the species in decline.

There are about 7.9 million domestic cats in the UK (according to the Pet Food Manufacturers Association who I guess make a study of these things) which means that the average mog catches about seven birds a year. Just taking one species, the blackbird. There are about 5 million breeding pairs in the UK and, in a typical year, a pair of blackbirds with raise two or three broods - four if there's a mild autumn - with each brood comprising 3-5 chicks. That's around 60 million blackbird chicks every year. Repeat this calculation for blue tits, dunnocks, wrens, robins and that lovely long-tailed tit and we have literally hundreds of millions of chicks born every year.

Declines in bird populations are not down to cats. Mostly the declines are down to changes in habitat, modern farming practice and competition from other birds. Andrew Brown may, in his ever so urban and squeamish way, not like to see those little chicks munched up by next door's tom cat but it's a long step to get to blaming that cat for bird population declines that either aren't happening or else are down to fertilisers, hedge-removal and marshland drainage.

Cats have been part of human living for a very long time:

All domestic cats, the authors declared, descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris, which literally means "cat of the woods." Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and some of the study authors speculate that the process began up to 12,000 years ago.

And during that time those cats have done a sterling job of everyday pest control while also providing the playfulness and cuteness that makes them such an Internet sensation. It seems however that some people have a problem with cats. But instead of using their newspaper column to tell fibs about these wonderful creatures, such people should just come clean and say "I don't like cats". We understand this position (weird though it seems to us mog fans) and it's so much most honourable than trying to argue cat owners are bad people who don't care about wildlife.
 ....

Celebrating soft loo paper conservatives - a critique of the "Good Right"

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During the recent election there were - as the opinion polls seemed reluctant to shift in the Conservative Party's favour - voices that criticised the campaign strategy and messaging. Most notably Tim Mongomerie who railed against the narrow focus of the campaign and argued that the simple messaging on the economy, welfare and taxes was missing the real concerns of British people.

The reduction of politics to a few simplified messages - repeated endlessly can work in a campaign against a weak opponent but it can't be a governing philosophy.

The problem is that the circumstance of that messaging - the relentless 'long term economic plan' and the idea of rewarding 'hard work' - is absolutely within the context of a campaign. And the first rule of campaigns is that you have to win them. Having a great message, slick organisation and support amongst the great and good is pretty useless if the other side wins - if you're not sure about this ask Neil Kinnock.

I suspect that Tim Montgomerie, in crafting his critique, did so at least in part as an exercise in what us marketers call positioning. At the time it didn't look like the Conservatives were going to win the election - the polling showed the main parties neck and neck, the insurgency of UKIP was damaging the Tories and it looked like the limpet-like nature of the Liberal Democrats would see them holding a load of seats the poll ratings said they should lose. So Montgomerie's critique positioned his "Good Right" argument away from the core of the campaign, away from that simple messaging and the drumming repetition of a choice few slogans.

And I guess that, with Montgomerie and others proved wrong about the election results, it's quite understandable for the architect of that Conservative overall majority to have a celebratory dig at those who criticised his campaign. A campaign that was a vindication for the argument that winning an election is about making people's choice simpler - a binary choice. In this case between 'competence and chaos', between Cameron and Miliband, between a Conservative government and one led by Labour. It may be the case that such things as Montgomerie's 'Good Right' proposes are a sound basis for a future Conservative agenda (although I'd note that if it's just "extending home ownership, cutting taxes for the low-paid, renewing the infrastructure of the north and building world class public services" then we've just elected a government on an agenda to do just that) but getting all wonkish about policy is a sure fire way to lose an election - especially when it involves the sort of crass segmentation beloved of the Labour party.

I have something of a problem with Montgomerie's 'Good Right'. Firstly it's because it implies that the regular sort of right isn't good - that if we question above average rises in minimum wages as bad for job creation or challenge the idea that luxury goods taxes are a good idea then we are bad people. But mostly the problem with the 'Good Right' is that it sees the solution solely through the prism of progressive government intervention positioning the party as a sort of blue rinsed version of Blair's New Deal. And, with its ringfencing of revenues, and centralised "needs-based assessments" to move money to deserving places, it owes more to modern technocratic government than to any moral argument for Conservative ideas.

When I was a student there was a group of Conservatives who wanted our manifesto for election to the student union council to be about services to students rather than the more regular fare of undergraduate politics. We dismissed this group as 'soft loo paper conservatives' - more bothered with such things as the opening hours of the canteen, the stocking of the bars and the provision of discounted dry-cleaning than with the grand affairs of the day (and the latest excuse for a boycott, a sit-in or a lecture strike).

Looking back I see that this group - the soft loo paper Tories - were far more in tune with real conservatism than the rest of us. After all the purpose of government shouldn't be grand sweeping (upsetting) change but the good administration of the services people want government to provide. And we do this knowing that, left to their own devices, people are pretty much able to run their own lives without agents of government to guide them in their choices. Even better - and unlike government - those people will be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial helping make their world richer, happier and more fun.

It seems to me that Lynton Crosby's simple message that Conservatives know what they're doing and can carry on getting the economy fixed while reducing the welfare burden and maintaining health funding is merely that 'soft loo paper' argument writ large. We don't need to set out a precise and detailed blueprint for the government's agenda merely to demonstrate competence and provide a direction that sees service quality improving (and hopefully the price of those services dropping).

Finally if there's a need to demonstrate how the right is morally justified - to promote a 'Good Right' - then it should lie in making the case for free enterprise, challenging the demonising of profit and arguing that property rights underpin our civilisation. Gathering a collection of centrist interventions and badging them as "good" completely ignores the moral basis for lower taxes, the case for decentralising decision-making, the rightness of private initiative in every aspect of life, and the wrongness of the left's nationalising of compassion. If as Tim Montgomerie suggests we need a 'governing philosophy' then let's not make it a sort of half-cooked social democracy, let's make it conservatism.

A while back I wrote this - by way of a felt conservatism:

In Bingley Rural – five villages in the South Pennines – there aren’t many millionaires. The roads aren’t cluttered with flash cars, we don’t have fancy wine bars or posh boutiques, the merchant banker is most definitely a foreign beast – but we are pretty conservative. We like the place as it is, we like the features of the villages, the pubs, the farm shops, the butcher, we enjoy the company of neighbours and friends and we want to work. We love the setting and the country around us.

What we ask of our government is pretty simple – protection from crime, good schools and skilled doctors, helping keep the place clean, maintaining the roads, pavements and parks, providing support – when needed – to those in need and preserving the good things about the places. We don’t ask for lectures about “climate change”, about drinking and smoking, what kind of car we drive or holiday we take.

When I knock on doors and talk to local folk, they don’t ask me about the carbon footprint of Easyjet or the need to ban booze advertising. People don’t mention ‘gross national happiness’ or the equalities agenda. What they ask is why the pubs are going bust, how expensive basic staples – food and fuel - have got, how they never see a copper and why their son can’t afford a house in the village.

Simple, easy-to-understand things concerned with the place we live, with keeping it nice, with making it better – conservative things.

Soft loo paper.

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Sorry Jamie but schools don't have the time to indulge your fussbucketry

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Hardly a day passes without one or other lobby group calling for their particular passion to be a compulsory subject in schools - the latest is Jamie Oliver's 'food revolution' which demands that loads of limited teaching time is given over to this chef's particular brand of nannying fussbucketry:

FOOD REVOLUTION DAY IS FIGHTING TO PUT COMPULSORY PRACTICAL FOOD EDUCATION ON THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM.

With diet-related diseases rising at an alarming rate, it has never been more important to educate children about food, where it comes from and how it affects their bodies.

On the face of things teaching children how to cook (I assume this is what Jamie means by 'practical food education') is a great idea - cookery is a really useful life skill. But here's the problem - we get between five and six hours for five days a week across 30 weeks in the year of teaching time. That's a maximum of 900 hours a year in which to teach children how to read and write, add and subtract, read a map, know the basics of history, understand science, learn the rudiments of a foreign language or two, understand culture and religion, experience great literature and a thousand other really important things. And the real figure for teaching time in the UK is much lower - 635 hours/year in primary and 715 hours/year in secondary.

And then lobbyists pop up and say that every child should be taught how to code, manage family accounts, know about STIs, play sport, paint and draw, learn to dance, act, sing, understand the electoral system, know about the courts, grow vegetables, build a table, mend a car and now cook. All fantastic and useful skills. It's hard to argue with any of them.

Except that there isn't the time. I'm not a teacher but I'm prepared to bet that all the zillions of things that might be taught at school have to be whittled down to the ones that really matter. And because most of us aren't ill from overeating (or eating the "wrong" food) lecturing the hell out of kids about diet - often using inaccurate or even downright incorrect information - really isn't a priority. At least not alongside reading, writing, maths, science, geography and history.

The truth of course is that obesity isn't rising - it has more-or-less flatlined over the past decade. More to the point though (and Jamie misinforms us with a ridiculous claim about 'diet-related disease') we are better fed, live longer lives and suffer far fewer diet-related conditions than past generations. It's true that there are too many morbidly obese people but hectoring kids with green peppers isn't going to change this one jot.

Whatever the truth or fiction here (and Jamie's campaign is mostly the latter) the one incontrovertible fact is that, if schools are made to put 'food eduction' into the curriculum, it will be at the expense of something else - learning french perhaps, maybe geography, or cutting back even more on physical exercise. As parents we want schools to give our children the skills and aspiration to succeed in a challenging world. And being rude about McDonalds and waving tomatoes around doesn't meet that need.

So I won't be signing Jamie's petition.

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The case for democracy under devolution is simple...

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I wrote this under the ancien regime - it still applies:

So, dear readers, you need to stop with the 'we don't need more politicians' nonsense and understand that unless you elect people directly to make decisions on your behalf, you make it harder to hold the decision-makers to account. And you need to tell your councillor and your MP that devolution is all fine and dandy, an absolutely spiffing idea, but only if the spending of that public money is subject to your accountability through the tried and tested method of having the chance to vote the bastards out if you don't like them.

You've a choice between devolution managed by bureaucrasts and government appointees or devolution under the control of people you elect. Having a mayor and assembly works for London - I've no doubt it will work for Yorkshire too.

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The most striking thing about these figures is how low they are...

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Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has revealed the findings from a 'freedom of information' request relating to the number of offences recorded at individual licenced premises in the city. Now we should note that the approved narrative when discussing crime and drinking is to use terms like 'drink-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour' accompanied by a load and judgemental implied 'tut'.

So how much crime is there - of any sort - recorded at Bradford's busy city centre pubs and clubs? The answer - although the newspaper doesn't report it quite this way - is close to bugger all. The worst venue - a busy bar/nightclub - witnessed a staggering 23 offences during the year to 26 March 2015. That is less than one a fortnight. Given the bewildering array of possible offences (at times it seems the police can arrest anyone for anything) available to the enforcement authorities we should, rather than tutting about crime, be celebrating just how incredible safe Bradford's night life has become.

The truth is that, with violent crime at the lowest levels since the 1970s and consumption of alcohol (whatever the health fascists want to pretend) at similarly low levels, going out on a evening in a place like Bradford is pretty safe. Of course this isn't the same as saying it's pleasant but that's an aesthetic judgement not a matter of personal security - there will be plenty of swearing, oodles of testosterone and plenty of drunkenness but what there won't be is that violent crime the police and other assorted nannying fussbuckets want you to believe is inevitable wherever people (and especially young people) gather to party.

We should be celebrating - with a large drink, of course - the fact that licensing reform and the promotion of sensible drinking has resulted in a turnaround in the safety of our town centres. Instead newspapers in search of a cheap headline, scaremongering politicians and assorted fussbuckets still present it as if our town centres are places of untrammelled behaviour, dangerous places of utter chaos. This is complete nonsense. But I guess that's always sold newspapers!

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How the Conservatives became the workers' party.

There are 79 seats in the "south east region" and all but five of them are held by Conservatives. While we've been talking about Scotland, London and the North, the Conservative Party has consolidated its control of the growing part of Britain. The Labour Party is vanishing across the South and has been for decades - the decline was briefly stemmed by the Blair landslide but is now returned. And Labour offers nothing to the aspiring private sector workers who live in those blue seats.

Most Conservatives I know have greeted the election result with what amounts to an unbelieving sigh of relief. We'll be pinching ourselves repeatedly for the coming few weeks as we realise that it wasn't a happy dream but reality - we really do have a Conservative government with an overall majority. All that effort was, for once, absolutely worth it.

Perhaps understandably given their unexpected defeat, the Labour Party's cheerleaders in the London media have started to chew over the reasons for that inexplicable loss. The anguish in their analysis is palpable and not helped by Peter Mandelson pointing out that Tony Blair was right when he said that with a traditional Labour manifesto you get a traditional result.

While all this is going on a few hundred idiots decided that daubing vulgar signs with "Tory Scum" and "Fuck Austerity" was the way to respond, a decision made worse by one of their number choosing to fight austerity by vandalising a war memorial on the 70th Anniversary of VE Day. This may feel like sticking it to the man but many many people will look on, nod and feel absolutely assured that voting Conservative - often for the very first time - was the right choice.

The analysis we have seen so far is, as is often the case at this stage, more a case of 'how dare these people not vote for us' combined with the desire to pin the entire blame on Ed Miliband and his core vote strategy. It's true that this was always a vanity campaign in which the Labour establishment gathered in a echo chamber and persuaded itself that there's a 'natural progressive' majority, that all those nice Liberal Democrats would vote for Labour this time, and that Ed merely had to sit still until polling day to collect the keys to Number 10.

I suspect that, in their quieter moments, many Labour people understand the Party's problem. They can pick up the map and look at how Labour has shrunk back to what we might (a little cruelly) call 'Rust Belt England'. One image doing the rounds compares Labour's seats to an old map of England and Wales' coalfields - an image used to suggest, rather daftly, that somehow all the Party has left is the eternally loyal miners. The real picture is very different because that old working class isn't the main source of Labour's votes any more.

We know, for example, that most members of Unite (the union) probably didn't vote Labour last Thursday and I'd speculate that those Unite members working in the private sector overwhelmingly rejected Labour's message. You'll remember during the campaign that Ed Miliband had a difficult encounter with one of these skilled workers.  We also know that perhaps as much as half of Labour's vote in England is from ethnic minorities - look at where Labour gained seats (London, Bradford, Dewsbury, Birmingham) and look at the Party's remaining handful of seats in the South (Luton, Slough, Bristol). This is as much of a problem for the Conservatives but Labour's working class vote is now increasingly a working class BME vote.

However, Labour isn't run by these people, it's run by its absolute core constituency - public sector workers. When I look across the chamber of Bradford Council, I see fewer and fewer working class faces (and those that are working class are Asian). Instead the faces I see are those of well-educated, middle-class public sector and 'third' sector workers. The very same sorts of faces we saw time and time again on Thursday waiting to hear election results. There's nothing wrong with this except that it gives the Party a very skewed view of the issues and perpetuates a romantic myth of manual labour as a noble calling.

The truth is that the working class don't hew coal from the living rock, pour hot steel or bash metal into shape. We have machines that do that stuff for us these days. Today's working class answers telephone calls, serves you in shops and restaurants, processes transactions and drives delivery vans (often white ones). And there are still skilled manual trades - mostly self-employed. These people look at the Labour Party and see privileged public sector workers with higher wages and better pensions earned doing fewer hours. Labour polled just 15% amonst tradesmen.

Last week those working class people looked at Britain and decided that, however caring and compassionate Labour's message might appear, they would vote to make sure that the slow improvement in their standard of living would continue. And if this means a little more tightening of the funding screw in government then so be it - these aren't wealthy people just middling sorts with mortgages, fuel bills and taxes to pay every month. The Conservatives won because they talked directly to these people instead of creating a false bogeyman of austerity or accusing them of self-interest (and worse).

For me the most telling comment - one we will hear again and again in the next few years - was this;

Grant Shapps, the party chairman, will stand alongside Sir John Major, the former champion of the "classless society", to announce that the Tories are now determined to show they want to spread – and not defend – privilege.

Speaking at the new Conservative campaign headquarters, the Tory chairman will say: "The Conservatives are the Workers' party and we are on your side."

The problem for Labour is that this is pretty nearly true. Unless Labour reaches out to the private sector and people working in the private, stops treating profits and business as evils, and embraces its role in delivering public services it will continue to fail in meeting its mission as a party of labour.

For my party, we have returned again to our mission - the objective set for us by Disraeli all those years ago: to improve the condition of the worker. Long may it stay that way.

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Victory (and a comment on the election result elsewhere)!

So there we are - safely returned as the Conservative councillor for Bingley Rural. With over 5,000 votes which is pretty humbling. Kathryn and I had eaten in The George (Cullingworth's excellent pub) and left for the start of our marathon counting process with well-wishes and assurances of confidence in my success ringing in our ears. Some 32 hours later (that's right thirty-two hours) the result above emerged. Lots of people's hard work rewarded.

Elsewhere in Bradford we'd already seen Labour's 'grip on the City' strengthened (as the local paper put it) with its candidates winning in Bradford West and Bradford East. And in doing so ridding the city of two divisive and bigoted MPs - George Galloway and David Ward. The defeat of Galloway was a national spectacle - as the first rumours came from the vote tallies at the count, Twitter began to celebrate the ousting of Britain's most divisive politician and holder of records for blocking people on social media.

So when, while awaiting the final couple of results from Keighley, George Grant who'd flown the Tory flag in the contest with Galloway invited us to a drink at Bradford Brewery it was impossible to refuse. After all this new Bradford institution had been the scene - virtually - of one great battle in the campaign to run George Galloway out of Bradford. A battle that, when the history is written (if anyone bothers), brought hundreds of new people to the fight.

We dashed through the torrential rain to join George Grant and arrived to witness (one loutish drunk aside) a scene of unusual Bradford unity as left and right wing folk of all races and creed cheered the defeat of a man who had tried to bring sectarian politics to Bradford. It was a good night.

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All over bar the voting...thoughts on an election campaign

A Denholme doorstep...

It rained today. I mean really rained. Torrents of cold water pouring down onto the Pennine village of Denholme. And we got wet - "I've never know rain like it" was one slightly exaggerated comment. We plodded on from house to house, talking about the main road through the village, the housing development just starting in the derelict (and unsightly) former mill site, and the work of the library that the community saved when Bradford Council wanted to close it down.

We heard about national politics too, about immigration and jobs, about the NHS and about the lack of trust in politicians. As always we listened, tried to get the message across about an improving economy and how we'd protected the health service from the worst of the cuts. Nowhere did we find antipathy - one man abruptly told us he wasn't voting indeed that he'd never voted and would never vote again. And there was the usual smattering, unsurprising in such dire weather, of people too busy or too tired to engage with a damp canvasser on the doorstep - "not interested", "not now I'm on my way out".

There were worries. The woman who invited me in to shelter in her porch so she could tell me how terrified she was at the prospect of a Labour government. Or the ambulanceman who, putting aside his worry about cuts to his service, said that we couldn't risk the economic recovery so he'd be voting Conservative. Time and time again the message came back - "we can't risk it", "Labour might tip the economy back", "I don't know what will happen if we get Miliband in charge".

And there were the waverers, the don't knows. the not sures and those not voting. Each one with a different concern - maybe immigration and Europe, perhaps something personal about social care but most often a real bemusement about the pitch being made to them. I know I can't change someone's mind on their front step in the pouring rain but I make the points - economic recovery, referendum on EU membership, investment in health - and hope that my little contribution (and the fact I've turned up on their doorstep) might tip them from don't know or not sure into voting Conservative.

Many of you will have watched this election through the prism of the media - debates, interviews, stunts, gimmicks, more manifesto launches than ever before (there seems to be one for every minority and every special interest these days), and the constant bickering of talking heads. You'll have laughed at the gaffes, spluttered in righteous indignation, argued with the TV and the radio. Some might have stepped a little further - attended a local hustings, rung a phone in, clicked on one of the avalanche of petitions that pointlessly clutter up our email in-boxes.

Out there on the doorstep it feels very different. For sure we meet the engaged and involved, the questioning, and the angry. But mostly we meet people who make clear that, however important the election might be to us politicians, they have things in their lives that are much more important. Like the man in Cottingley who said, "yes I'll be voting but I've not had time to think about it yet". Next to running his business, ferrying children around and fixing the cracked pane of glass in the conservatory, my plea for his vote is unimportant.

I've not watched much of the TV campaign and my consumption of the newspaper campaign comes courtesy of Twitter so I can't say who did well and who didn't. But I think that the two main parties have adopted very different strategies - Labour segmenting like mad and targeting bespoke messages to target groups of voters and the Conservatives preferring the bash, bash, bash of a repeated message. The marketer in me is curious as to which will be more effective - my direct marketing bias tells me Labour's approach, cynical and exploitative, owes more to Readers' Digest than David Ogilvie. And I know this works.

But I also know that the repeated message and the bestseller syndrome works as well - some of you are now bored with 'hard-working families', 'long term economic plan' and 'don't let Labour ruin it again' but these messages are just starting to get through to people like the man in Cottingley I mentioned above.

Back on those doorsteps what we get fed back to us are the messages that have filtered through - the real 'cut through' not the belief that getting something trending on Twitter is any sort of engagement with that electorate. So we hear those concerns that have reached people - immigration, health, the economy, the competence of Miliband and the threat to our unity from having separatists dictating government policy. No-one mentioned Miliband's 'pledge slab' or Cameron's slip up, no-one talked about bacon sarnies or Bullingdon boys, and no-one said a thing about the inundation of opinion polling that we've seen during this election.

I don't know what will happen tomorrow - other than that millions of men and women will exercise their franchise. I know what I hope for and I see those polls and their accompanying analysis - your guess is probably as good as mine so I won't be making any predictions. But on the dozens of occasions when people have asked me what's going to happen - usually in the context of not wanting a Miliband/SNP cuddle-up - I've answered along these lines:

"All I can do is put my cross in the right box and tell everyone I meet to do likewise."

That right box - for a load of reasons - is the Conservative box. Some of those reasons are negative - not wanting Labour to ruin the economy yet again while screwing us over for a load more taxes being a really important one. But most are positive - offering lower taxes, better managed services, the sort of real compassion we need rather than Labour's 'hug the poor but do nothing much to help them' attitude, and a chance to have a substantive debate and a real say on the UK's most important relationship, that with our European friends and neighbours.

There are lots of things that I don't like about the last five years - the nannying fussbucketry, the creeping erosion of civil liberties and the enthusiasm for grand projects like HS2 stand out - but anyone who thinks a Labour-led government would be any better in this regard needs their head examining. Add in the fascism of the SNP with their named person laws, minimum unit pricing and banning of songs and you get the recipe for the most illiberal government in the UK's history.

So put your cross in the right box tomorrow. Vote Conservative.

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Why you should vote (and why libertarian non-voters are wrong)

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Before the last general election I wrote a piece about why you should vote and concluded:

So why vote? The answer is simple and it’s the answer your granny used to give. You vote because it’s the right thing to do and because, however insignificant it might be, voting is often the only chance you’ve got of getting something changed. People really did chuck themselves under horses, people really did get killed, people really did strike, march and protest so as to get that right to pick up a stubby pencil and mark a cross in a box once in a while. Don’t get me wrong, if you choose not to bother it doesn’t make you a bad person – you’re not really letting down your suffragette great grandma or the great uncle killed on D-day.

So go and vote it’s your chance to do something. And do it loudly, proudly and knowing that it’s the most significantly insignificant act you can undertake.

I realise that this is probably insufficient as a proper philosophical analysis of voting. But I find the libertarian argument for not voting to be founded on a profound misunderstanding of voting's purpose. Here's Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute (quoted by Chris Snowdon from the Institute of Economic Affairs):

‘If your aim is to affect policy, voting is irrational. If you want to act ethically, voting is irrelevant. Mathematically, the chances of a single vote actually determining the outcome of an election in a meaningful way (that will affect policy outcomes) is infinitesimally small.’

And I guess that, if the purpose of voting was to influence policy, Sam might have a point. But, as we all should know, voting's purpose is the election of a person not a policy. In a representative democracy we use voting to choose someone to go off to parliament because all sixty odd million of us can't fit into the building. Technology will probably make this obsolete (for a description of the problems this might entail go and read Norman Spinrad's 'The World Between') but right now that's not an option. Now if Sam's not bothered who represents him then there's no point in voting - he can make the rational decision not to fuss himself with the minor inconvenience of toddling along to the polling station. But if Sam is bothered then casting his insignificant vote is the only way in which he can influence that choice.

To return to influencing policy, there is a modicum of smugness about the director of an influential think tank talking about how voting doesn't affect policy. After all that director has the means and the capacity to influence policy by virtue of being in charge of a think tank. And the same would go for the chief executive of some large organisation able to invest its PR pounds in lobbying. But spare a thought for Mr Crowther in Cullingworth who doesn't have a think tank and doesn't have the funds to lobby government officials about policy. Voting is one of the very few ways in which that man can have a say on things that matter to him.

Finally there's Eamonn Butler's argument (also cited by Chris Snowdon) that writing a message to the candidates on a ballot paper is better than actually using said ballot for its intended purpose. This is an observation made my someone who has clearly never been anywhere near the counting of votes at an election. As a candidate my access to that ballot would be for a fleeting second while we review spoilt ballots - the returning officer will point out that the writing means the person could be identified and therefore the ballot is invalid before moving on to the ballor with a neat drawing of a penis carefully inscribed in the Tory candidate's box (which is incidently a valid vote for that candidate). Eamonn's message will not be read - he would have wasted his time.

Voting is an insignificant act but not one without purpose or point and collectively those insignificant acts can be significant (Sam and his friends not turning up may result in a government that bans right wing think tanks). There may be a case for alternatives - lotteries, policy panels, military dictatorship and so forth - but, in practical terms, we have to engage with the system we have in place. Because that's an election the result will be determined by those who turn up and vote not by those who don't.

So go and vote folks!

For those interested in creative approaches to marking the ballot here is the current Electoral Commission Guidance on doubtful ballots (pdf|)

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Why Australia doesn't have California's problems with water - free markets

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Lots of angry lefties tweet that slightly crass quote about water rights from the boss of Nestlé. They do this because they care about people having the water they need, something we can all agree with. However, the transfer of this concern from rhetoric into public policy is a problem. Quite simply because, as Californians have discovered, the supply of water is a really big deal. And it's down to the weather (you can all argue the toss about whether it's climate change or not if you like but that won't change a thing):

California has a history of droughts lasting as long as 200 years.  You can dam every canyon in California and line the coast with desalination plants, and you won’t solve the water shortage in a 200-year drought, or even a ten-year drought.  Under the current allocation and pricing system, California will simply consume every new drop of water produced. We will have a water shortage all the same. 

So the question is what to do to ensure that the need for water in the Sunshine State is met. And most solutions offered are either stupid (ban the extraction of water for bottling) or totalitarian (rationing the supply of water). The right approach is (and this is why the Nestlé chap has a point) about ownership of the source and pricing.

By way of contrast, Australia - just as dry and drought-prone as California - doesn't have the same supply problems:

Water markets equipped Australia to endure the 1995-2009 Millennium Drought. This was the worst Australian drought since European settlement. Total water stored declined to just 27 percent of capacity. Yet water trading allowed Australian cities to avoid the most severe water restrictions. It protected agricultural businesses, and it ensured that the country’s endangered habitats and species received adequate water.

Remarkably, in an end-of-drought survey, over 90 percent of Australian farmers reported that water markets were important to their businesses’ survival. There are many lessons for California here. A key one is that the tension between water users is completely the creation of policy. There is no need for the tensions between the agricultural industry and California’s cities, between growers and endangered fish, between Hillsborough and Westborough, between neighbors. Water markets can balance competing uses in a way that benefits all.

To work, markets need something to trade. The basis for trade in a functioning water market is exclusive access to a share of water from a specific body. Australian water laws provide this. California’s water laws do not.

Sadly the article concludes that politicians in California are unlikely to be liberalising water markets. Just goes to show how stupid us politicians are really.

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Why farmers won't be voting Labour...

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I've commented before how without EU subsidy and the benefits system we wouldn't have much of a farming business - or at least the sort of farming business us townies like to gawp at on Countryfile. Yes there are some rich farms with million pound plus incomes but the average farm income (that's farm income not farmer income remember) isn't anything close to that.

Still Labour politicians think farmers are nasty people who want to kill badgers and chase vermin like faxes off their land - so they're fair game for policy attack. And it's right between the eyes of some of the country's lowest earners:

The thing that is far more likely to sway farmers is a new Labour policy that has received scant publicity. This is the policy to remove the agricultural exemption from business rates for farm land and buildings and, effectively to tax farms in the UK as if they were out of town shopping centres. If implemented, this policy would have the immediate effect of reducing the average farming income in Britain from £46,635 (in 2012/13) to £40,137 overnight. That is a drop of 14%. It would affect some of the poorest workers in the country who are least able to afford it.

The Labour Party is happy to celebrate townies trampling all over someone else's land without a by-your-leave, to treat the farmed countryside as if it's some sort of playground for urban public sector workers with £200 boots and £500 anoraks. And to screw over the farmer.

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Campaign hustings and the hierarchy of equalities

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Back in 2001 I stood for parliament in the lovely constituency of Keighley and Ilkley. I didn't win but then not many Conservatives did win that year. During the course of the campaign the candidates were invited to a hustings organised by the two largest mosques in the town. This meeting, held at Victoria Hall, was segregated with women in a separate room adjacent to the main hall which was full of men - plus Anne Cryer the Labour candidate. I recall a slight discomfort at this blatant segregation but, having been involved in Bradford politics, I'd been along to many a meeting where the audience was entirely male. Added to this was a slight annoyance that Mrs Cryer could go and speak directly to the women whereas I was not permitted to do so.

I say this by way of context for talking about the Labour rally in Birmingham and about wider issues relating to campaigns in the UK's Muslim communities. In one respect the audience pictured represents progress - a decade ago it is likely that such a meeting would have had no women present (unless one or more of the candidates addressing the event was female) - but from another perspective it reveals that context is everything in political campaigns. And the context here is that Labour's success in inner city Birmingham depends, to a large extent, on the Muslim vote which means that people who would usually be quick to pounce on misogyny can wave away criticism of gender segregation because of the 'cultural' context.

Imagine what would be the response had one of those Labour candidates, instead of sitting like bored lumps on the platform, had confronted the organiser and insisted that the de facto segregation end, made the point of sitting with those women or invited men to intermingle. It may not be such an issue once the challenge is laid down - I went to the launch of a Conservative campaign in Bradford East where men and women sat intermixed (until it came to eating when they were separate again which I didn't understand).

The unconfronted truth here is that, for all the efforts of some women, too many Muslim men remain deeply uncomfortable with the reality of women's equality. I recall speech after speech from Imran Hussein, Bradford's current Council Deputy Leader, where he shouted that 'we' (by which he mean the Council leadership I guess) take equalities seriously - 'it's not just a tick box exercise' he would exclaim. Yet the truth is that, when Imran speaks of equalities, he has a hierarchy of sensitivity that has race and faith at the top and gender, disability, age and sexual preference lower down the pecking order.

This isn't because Imran is a sexist homophobe - I know him well enough to be sure he isn't - but because the realities of politics in Bradford makes some equalities issues more 'in your face' than others.

When Bradford's Corporate Scrutiny Committee looked at the Council's 'Equalities Action Plan' the most striking thing about the report was that it didn't mention LGBT issues except in the list of protected characteristics under the Equalities Act. Which isn't to say that the Council does nothing about these matters but rather that the dominant equalities issues - the priorities for our Labour politicians - relate to race and faith because this is where they are being challenged (indeed this sense of racial and religious victimhood, and especially the latter, is the absolute essence of George Galloway's pitch to voters).

None of this is to suggest that prejudice against Muslims doesn't exist - I don't know a single Muslim who hasn't experienced such attitudes - but it is to say that, if we believe sexism and homophobia to be a problem, we need to confront these too. And if such attitudes are too common in the Muslim community then it behooves politicians who position themselves as champions of equalities to challenge those prejudices - especially when they have the privilege to be from that community.

The irony here is that three of the world's biggest Muslim countries - Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia - have elected women as leaders, so there is clearly no essential obstacle to female participation. I suspect it just takes a little bit of guts to tell event organisers that there won't be any segregation. This doesn't end deeply rooted sexist views about the role of men and women within a given community - we've had fifty years of women's liberation campaigns in the UK and we still see examples of cringeworthy sexism almost daily - but it does begin to question the acceptance of gender segregation and entrenched homophobia within institutions within those communities.

And the place to start for us politicians is with those things we absolutely control - our own events, meetings and campaigns.

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How to save The Union - if we want to

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I was going to tell you all why you should vote Conservative. You should of course - not just because the prospect of a Labour government is terrifying but because the Conservative Party appears to be the only party that actually understands the situation of our public administration.

However, I'm going to write instead about The Union. Partly because there are now strong voices wanting to destroy that union and partly because the entire debate is couched in terms of Scottish nationalism rather than in terms of what the union means. The prospect of the Labour Party losing all its seats in Scotland this coming Thursday is real and reflects the inevitable conclusion of the process of unbalanced devolution begun by Tony Blair.

The Union is important. Not for touching historical reasons or for babble about shared heritage but because we are stronger collectively - the benefits Scotland and Wales get from working with a much larger England vastly outweigh the downsides of that relationship. And England gains too from the shared arrangement. So muttering nonsense about 'throwing money over Hadrian's Wall' as a cheap way to garner a few English votes is not the way forward.

If we think the Union important then we have to start talking about England. Not about chopping the country up into a bunch of meaningless chunks that, Yorkshire aside, have no meaning beyond administrative convenience. And not by saying that the issue of English devolution is resolved either by 'English Votes for English Laws' or through giving Leeds City Region control over further education funding. For a system of devolution to work it needs to be seen as fair by all sides and to be balanced.

Right now, without a settlement that meets these conditions, the break up of the Union is inevitable. That bloc of maybe fifty Scottish National Party MPs will make the gradual erosion of 'Westminster' influence in Scotland their mission. And if they have the balance of power they will get what they want. Indeed they will get what they want despite half their fellow Scots opposing independence.

We do not save the union by shouting ever more loudly about how important it is. We don't save the union by painting Nicola Sturgeon as the 'bogiewoman'. And we don't save the union by allowing Scottish nationalists - and pompous Guardian opinionators - to describe the same nationalism in England as a bad thing simply because it's English.

Nor should we allow people to say that England is too big for devolution. It's true that England contains most of the UK's population. But it's not true to say that allowing an English parliament to make decisions about the government of England is somehow unbalanced next to the much smaller devolved governments in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The answer, for me, is very straightforward. We've a choice between the break up of the union and the creation of a four nation federal system with a UK government responsible solely for defence, international relations, borders and trade paid for via a precept on taxes set by the four national parliaments. Everything else - health, education, welfare - would fall to the four national parliaments. And if those parliaments chose to devolve further to local governments that would be just fine.

Sadly we are not going to do this but instead will either create an endless row over Scottish MPs voting on English matters or else pretend that devolution to occult groups of English local council leaders meeting in secret is somehow equivalent to Scotland having a parliament elected by the people of Scotland. And the end will be Scotland departing to the sound of a loud raspberry from English voters who, a decade ago, would have been adamant that the union was not negotiable.

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