Tuesday 29 September 2015

Why we're so agitated about 'gentrification' (and how London needs a 'Green Belt' review)

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As one of the self-important semi-rioters attacking the Cereal Killer cafe put it:

While I understand people’s annoyance at property damage please put it into the context of the violence of poverty, hunger and homelessness many thousands of Londoners are being subjected to. The cereal cafe was back open on Sunday morning while the destruction caused by gentrification continues - as will the fight back.

A veritable avalanche of concerned articles now tumble into the UK press - following in the footsteps of the same words about different places: Berlin, Sydney, Seattle and San Francisco. For some the criticism centres on the wealth of new arrivals or else on the mundane daily lives of those new residents - on the Google Bus.

But always and everywhere the thing that drives the attack on 'gentrification' is the cost of living in these cities and, in particular, the cost of housing. Even when people try to make it out to be more complicated by saying its "a complex, layered suite of intersecting measures" they end up talking about housing:

Given crippling student debt, rental costs that even those on “average salaries” can’t afford and the hyper-gentrification of previously affordable urban areas, even middle-class people have a right to be angry at an urban capitalism that is pricing them (and their children) out of the city.

So, given that it's housing that's the problem, perhaps we should ask why this is the case. Not my coming up with instant fixes like rent caps or rationing but by looking at the underlying reasons, which boils down to supply and demand. And especially supply:

By rationing land, urban containment policy drives up the price of housing and has been associated with an unprecedented loss of housing affordability in a number of metropolitan areas in the United States and elsewhere. Urban containment policy has also been associated with greater housing market volatility. This is a particular concern given the role of the 2000s US housing bubble and bust in precipitating the Great Financial Crisis that resulted in a reduction of international economic output.

And this exactly describes the situation in London. Elsewhere in England this doesn't apply - population densities for the London boroughs are, almost without exception, higher than anywhere else (even a place like Portsmouth that's constrained by its geography). For inner London these densities are three times greater than in Manchester or Bristol. There is little reason to change or review 'Green Belts' around Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - other than the understandable preference for people to live in or near those 'Green Belts' - but for London, ending the policy of urban containment and densification is absolutely essential if problems with affordability and price volatility are to be avoided. Moreover, because London is so critical to the UK economy these decisions should not be left merely to the Mayor of London (or a collection of borough and district council leaders).

The consequence of failing to do something to address this problem isn't just more unpleasant rioters but a threat to the golden goose that is London's economy. Without a workforce able to access your jobs, the businesses will look elsewhere. We might hope this is Leeds, Manchester or Cardiff but it's just as likely to be Brussels, Frankfurt or Milan. Maybe even Cape Town, Djakarta or Lagos.

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Monday 28 September 2015

There isn't as much tax dodging as you think...

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At least according to those lovely number-crunchers at 'Full Fact':

While HMRC estimates the total tax gap at £34bn, only £7.2bn of this is attributed to tax avoidance and evasion.

All this makes a fiscal strategy founded on reducing tax dodging pretty unsustainable - given that the current deficit is nearly twenty times that number. Mind you, it doesn't mean that folk don't try to pretend that there's oodles of cash out there in tax that should have been paid (by evil multinationals, bloated plutocrats and the sleazier sort of alternative comedian - all Tory scum of course).

The only remaining target isn't those wicked capitalists (or rather the ones who work in banks or run big companies with Swiss HQs) but the informal economy - about £5.9bn according to HMRC. Now this is a tricky area for two reasons - firstly, unlike the bankers and plutocrats, a lot of the people in this 'hidden' economy really are criminals and secondly another huge chunk of this economic activity is ordinary folk paying the milkman, plumber or cleaner in cash. And if that payment suddenly gets a whole lot bigger because of taxes we're going to do less of it.

All told there's not only less tax dodging than the typical leftie believes but action to get at the taxes alters people's behaviour. Which means we might not get more taxes even if we tighten up or change the rules:

The savings attributed to anti-avoidance measures usually come with a warning attached: all of the costings produced by the Treasury for the policies announced in the last Autumn Statement were given a ‘medium’ to ‘very high’ uncertainty rating by the OBR (with the largest savings also being those that were most uncertain).

The reason for this is that those looking to avoid tax may change their behaviour in response to a change in the law, or may find alternative avoidance schemes before legislation can catch up. This means that the tax currently avoided through these schemes is not necessarily the same as what would be recovered if they were closed – the participants may simply move their money elsewhere.

Given that 'Corbynomics' is, to a large part, dependent on this new stream of income. And if it isn't there the result is austerity - not the austerity of public sector budget cuts but the austerity of higher taxes, crippled private business and recession. A recession these people want to then escape by printing loads of money to throw at a problem they've created by lying about tax dodging and pretending that there's really a sustainable alternative to reformed welfare and a smaller public sector.




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Sunday 27 September 2015

The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is his values not just his policies

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So what is my problem with Jeremy Corbyn asks the wise man? Why, when I normally eschew personal criticism, do I focus so much on Corbyn's image and rhetoric rather than the substance of his policies?

I thought I'd try and explain that it's a matter of values. Rather than posting this picture and article, I'll explain that Corbyn's personal values embrace violence, reject personal freedom, oppose choice and reject individual responsibility.

Vicariously enjoying violence is not an unusual trait in politicians (from right and left) and especially male politicians. Whether it's the image of "a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other", Mussolini's fetishing of uniforms or John McDonnell's 'colourful use of language', politicians like violence. We're forever "attacking", "fighting for", and proposing "wars against".

What is especially galling about Corbyn is that, while embracing Sinn Fein/PIRA and assorted violent men from the middle east, he claims that this revelling in violent politics is done for the cause of 'peace', to 'stop war'. Such posturing is excusable in a 20 year-old student activist but demonstrates a sad lack of maturity in a 65 year-old professional politician aspiring to national leadership. Yet Corbyn has shown - right up to today - that his values embrace political violence and make no distinction between this and legitimate acts of self-defence by recognised nation states.

But then Corbyn also fails to recognise the idea of individual freedom:

Corbyn says that he supports the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s (“Yes, I do”) , which prohibited flying pickets and solidarity strike action.

This includes the reintroduction of the closed shop - the acme of collectivist systems - and (back to his relationship with violence) the sort of intimidation we saw all too often prior to the protections granted by those union laws.

Increasingly, those branded “scabs” by the strikers were targeted both at work and at home: windows were smashed, paint thrown at doors, some were even assaulted in the street. One who defied the pickets to go into Hawthorn coke works told The Northern Echo: “The more intimidation I get, the more determined I will be to stand up to them.”.

The message - one Corbyn still endorses - is that if you reject the 'collective will', you will be intimidated, pressured and attacked for that decision. If, and it seems they are, these are Jeremy Corbyn's values and the values of his sort of Labour Party I feel entirely justified in criticising.

And Corbyn's collectivism leads to him also rejecting choice and responsibility:

... Corbyn was one of first MPs to call for a smoking ban (in 1989). He has demanded ‘education and regulation’ — including bans on adverts — to try to wean British kids off junk food. He sees mankind as a pox on the planet (humans are ‘obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised’, said a parliamentary motion he signed).

This viewpoint - that we are blowing around in the hurricane of international capitalism incapable of making real choices or controlling our lives - is a common one on the left (and not so left) but when it is wedded to collectivist groupthink and the celebrating of political violence it forms a value system verging on the evil. And I know that is a strong word but if you think violence in the prosecution of political ends is fine, reject the idea of humans as individuals with free will and promote the idea that we are all victims of a shadowy entity called 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' then I struggle to think of a better word.

It doesn't matter how soft spoken you are, how nice your allotment is or which football team you can exchange banter about, if your values reject freedom and rejoice in violence I will have a problem with you. I hope - for the sake of the Labour Party and British democracy - that Corbyn's values, expressed again and again through his four decades as an activist and MP, turn out to be just words. But until this is demonstrated, I shall condemn those values and the man who espouses them.

But to return to the Brighton bomb. I have friends who were there that day. And while I understand the need to find peace and sustain that peace, I cannot find it in my heart to excuse murdering people in a political cause or people who acted as useful idiots and cheerleaders for those undertaking that political violence.

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Saturday 26 September 2015

The NHS is not meeting its commitment to the military




For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;

So it was when Kipling wrote those words. So it had been for centuries before. And so it is today. For all our talk of respecting the military, of the Military Covenant and of remembrance, too many still see the soldier as a brute, as something other than a reliable trustworthy human. And too many of those fearful folk are working in our public services:

Aircraft engineer Mark Prendeville was relocated twice by hospital staff who said his uniform “might upset people” because “we have all kinds of different cultures coming in”.

Sgt Prendeville was taken to the Accident and Emergency unit of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, Kent after chemicals from a fire extinguisher got in to his eyes during a training exercise at RAF Manston.

According to his father, the 38-year-old, who has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, was “dumbfounded” to be told on two different occasions to stand out of the view of other patients. He was wearing a camouflage combat uniform.

I don't know what possessed the hospital in question but there is no doubt at all that its behaviour - not just the behaviour of a particular member of staff - was utterly wrong. This is a public service and that service is covered by the Military Covenant which says:





There's not much room for discussion here and it's not enough for an anonymous spokesperson to be wheeled out giving a massaged set of weasel words:

"This employee was acting in good faith because previously, there had been an altercation between a member of the public and a different member of the armed forces in uniform."

The hospital trust is "absolutely clear that members of Her Majesty's armed forces, whether in uniform or not, should not be treated any differently to any other person,” the spokesman added. 


This is the sort of formulaic, boilerplate response used by the NHS and other public bodies when their anti-servicemen tendencies are revealed. It's not just that the hospital was disrespectful but that it ignored its commitment as a public body, a commitment set out in those words above. A commitment meant to stop those words of Kipling being true.


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Thursday 24 September 2015

Hurrah! The High Street is saved! The man from Savills says so!



The man at Savill's who sells retail property thinks the high street is fine:

There is now a clear consensus that the rise of online retail is not killing the UK high street. In fact, in some cases, the internet is helping to promote the need for retail space as the boundaries between online and bricks and mortar become increasingly blurred.

Now the blog in question is pretty dreadful. It presents some half-baked statistics, carefully selected to suggest that all is just hunky-dory on the High Street. Stuff about the growth in click-and-collect (think about this - why should I go five miles to the high street to collect when there's a convenient shop on the corner) and something called 'O2O' - 'online-to-offline'.

This is, at best, wishful thinking and at worst actively misleading. I don't know which because Sean Gillies, the man from Savills in question, doesn't provide us with any evidence. I mean real evidence about rents, voids and vacancies not vague statements like:

It has also been reported that some retailers have found that opening a new store has resulted in an increase in online sales

Reported where? By whom? And on the basis of what evidence? Not this evidence I guess:

Without doubt this is due to both the challenge of the internet and the convenience of out-of-town locations for click-and-collect as they offer plentiful, accessible parking that is free of charge. Despite this, it is good news that the vacancy rate has increased only slightly, to 10.4 per cent; although the number of retail leases that are due to expire over this year suggests that this could rise further over the coming months - particularly as consumers are now demanding discounts, which squeeze margins and adversely impact profitability and long term business sustainability.

Now it's true that retail space in the better high streets now appeals to the growing market for the shop as a brand marketing tool but this does little or nothing for less appealing locations lacking in the right demographic.

I know Savills have shops to rent but when their head of retail pushes a retail recovery on such flimsy evidence we really should question the credence given to its opinion.

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Wednesday 23 September 2015

Ad-blockers may be convenient but they're not ethical - or unethical for that matter

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It had to happen didn't it. I mean the extension of the long war against commercial communication - advertising to you and I - into some sort of moral/ethical dimension. With the assumption that advertising is, by dint of its very existence and purpose, 'unethical'.

A new ad-blocking tool out today ensures that everyone can consume their favorite content while remaining on solid moral footing. The Ethical Ad Blocker Chrome extension, developed by internet artist Darius Kazemi, will block any webpage that contains ads, replacing it with a crude text page telling users to check out a list of auto-generating websites and non-profit organizations that give stuff away for free.

And the 'crude text page' says this:






Now it looks like Darius Kazemi is making a point that stuff really ain't for free but the reader might not get this. I'm sure most won't understand how looking at sites paid for through advertising without looking at the ads might be unethical.  Now I've no objection to ad blockers - lots of people use them, mostly because they find advertising annoying and intrusive rather than because they want to kid themselves they're living in some cool, hipster, 'no logo' ethical wonderland.

We know there is a free rider problem with ad blockers (by getting the content without advertising you are, in effect, avoiding the fee for using that content) but this is a problem for the advertising business rather than something essentially unethical. And it is the case that some websites - especially news websites - are simply overloaded with advertising making the reader experience unpleasant.

Advertising - and we're celebrating (if that's the right word) 60 years of UK TV ads - is a central part of our culture. I consider that protecting rights to advertise is no different in its essence to protecting individual rights to speak. Of course, just as with speech, I don't have to listen to the adverts and I'm entitled to tune them out (consider how you read a newspaper or magazine to appreciate this 'tuning out'). And we retain the power to punish liars, cheats and con-men.

There is a great deal of ignorance about advertising - from the misplaced idea that advertising increases aggregate demand through to the persistent belief that there is a thing called 'subliminal advertising' that makes us buy stuff we don't want to buy. Plus of course that Nancy Klein rubbish about 'no logo' designed to make wealthy westerners feel righteous while suggesting that none of the world's problems are their fault - rather we get to blame 'corporations' (and particularly the ones we don't work for who own big shiny brands).

It's perfectly possible for an advert to be unethical - it might misinform, mislead or exploit - but this doesn't make advertising unethical. The 'Dark Patterns' site discusses practices that are, at best, sharp and, worst, deeply exploitative (as an aside very few of these practices that have only developed since the web became widespread - but then web marketing is mostly just direct marketing on steriods) reminding us that the process of selling is fraught. And that we should pay attention when we're spending our money.

Advertising is essential. Not just because it pays for news, entertainment and so forth (there are, after all, other models here) but because without it we have no information about what we're buying. We are faced with product choice - unless, of course, your anti-ad stance leads us to Soviet-style empty shelves - but no information allowing us to make that choice. Without advertising our modern world simply doesn't work.

The problem (not the free rider thing this time) advertisers face is how to get information to you when you are a reluctant recipient of that information. Partly because, as you keep saying, too much of the advertising isn't relevant. So advertisers take two approaches - either they seek out new media to get their message, a general message, across or else they try to target that message to the consumers they know are interested in that information. Good practice in the first case leads to the ubiquity of styles, symbols and images linked to a given product - it's brand. And those brands are very much part of the wallpaper of western society: instantly recognisable, friendly and comfortable.

In the second case, good practice focuses on how well we target, screen and interact with the consumer. The idea is that we don't want to talk to people who don't want to buy our product so we try to screen them out. The problem is that there are a load of techniques we know raise response (if you want to learn about these read 'The Solid Gold Mailbox') and some are exploitative, even unethical. And while there are advertising rules plus a self-regulatory body, it still rests with us as consumers to pay attention when we respond to something.

The free rider problem on-the web (which this ethical ad blocker highlights) is a problem for the businesses that operate on the web - if there's no revenue who pays for those achingly cool loft offices and provides the pay allowing the workers in those offices to buy extravagantly priced beard grooming products or designer water. Long-term it's a problem for user - for you and me - because, as we all know, nothing much comes for free. If we beat down advertising the result ('be careful what you wish for') is likely to be less choice, more expensive products and an infinitely duller world.

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Tuesday 22 September 2015

So why are the poor more likely to be obese?


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We're most often told it's fast food. But this ain't so:

New data, released by the Centers for Disease Control, show that America’s love for fast food is surprisingly income blind. Well-off kids, poor kids, and all those in between tend to get about the same percentage of their calories from fast food, according to a survey of more than 5,000 people. More precisely, though, it’s the poorest kids that tend to get the smallest share of their daily energy intake from Big Macs, Whoppers, Chicken McNuggets, and french fries.

More evidence that planning controls (and bans) are futile since they simply don't address the problem. And if you think about it for a second, fast food is always less accessible to poorer people for the simple reason that it's a lot more expensive than buying food at the supermarket and cooking it yourself (OK sticking it in a microwave until it goes 'ping').

The answer lies in pleasure. Poverty is a (literally in too many cases) depressing state and when we're down we seek pleasure. Us rich folk have access to a much bigger choice of pleasures than poor folk. And those poor folk opt for cheap pleasures - TV, sex, fags, booze, drugs and - most commonly - the endless choice of cheap food in our shops.

The answer doesn't lie in making food more expensive but in actions to reduce poverty and present better opportunities to the poor. Those health fascists who argue for making food more expensive on public health grounds are simply making poverty worse meaning that more people will self-medicate their dreary life with cake.

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Sunday 20 September 2015

Quote of the day - on conservatives in academia

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From Jonathan Haidt's review on political diversity (or rather its absence) in social psychology:

Conservative graduate students and assistant professors are behaving rationally when they keep their political identities hidden, and when they avoid voicing the dissenting opinions that could be of such great benefit to the field. Moderate and libertarian students may be suffering the same fate.

I asked a while back why there are so few right-wing sociologists (effectively none - although there are a couple of libertarian sorts). It's good to see some real academic confirmation of this as a problem, that having some colleagues who don't automatically blame society's ills on capitalism or neo-liberalism might be a good thing.

Nothing will change though. Most universities will remain hostile places for anyone who wants to explore society from a conservative perspective.

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Saturday 19 September 2015

Are we allowed to call Corbyn's economic programme Fascist? For that what it looks like.

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We start here with the observable premise that 'Corbynomics' is not an approach founded in Soviet Communism - there is nothing in the programme that proposes the collectiviastion of industry, the management of the economy through non-market means or a focus on production as a proxy for economic growth (even to the point of that production becoming value-destroying rather than value-creating).

Instead the programme of 'Corbynomics' focuses on state-determined priorities, the rejection of 'excess profit' and the use of a sovereign currency to allow the increase in the money supply (or printing money as some describe it). In its essentials the approach takes the view that those who 'have' should make larger sacrifices in the wider interests of society - that austerity should be targeted at the rich.

A central element of all this - sitting alongside the printing of money - is the idea that money only exists so that governments, the state, can collect taxes. In this worldview the only money we are entitled to is that which government permits us to have after it has taken the taxes needed to undertake the work of the state (or, if you subscribe to the MMT fallacy, to prevent the production of money creating inflation).

Here's Richard Murphy, self-described creator of 'Corbynomics':

I would suggest that we don’t as such pay taxes. The funds that they represent are, I suggest, in fact the property of the state. After all, if we give the state the power to define what we can own, how we can own it and what we can do with it – and we do – then I would argue that we also give the state the right to say that some part of what we earn or own is actually its rightful property and that we have no choice but pay that tax owed as the quid pro quo of the benefit we enjoy from living in community.
The essential idea here is that the government is better equipped than individuals or markets to make the right choices in the interests of the community. And this is pretty much an idea that was first developed and actioned in Italy. In rejecting 'Bolshevism' and accepting profit as a 'necessary incentive', the Italians developed an economic strategy that was centred on the idea of directing private enterprise rather than taking it over:

...private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. (Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism 1935)

With this in mind the Italian state not only created huge corporate conglomerates with horrendously complicated governance but engaged in a series of grand campaigns focused on security of supply in food, in basic industry and in finance. The result of this is familiar in that joke about Mussolini getting the trains to run on time (he didn't) and in wonderful but pointless achievements such as draining the Pontine Marshes.

So looking at 'Corbynomics' we see the same appeal - that the state is greater than the sum of its parts, that only courageous leaders can direct investment so as to deliver economic, social and environmental betterment in equal part, and that the interests of business is subservient to the state's objectives. Or, as Mussolini aptly summarised:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Because the state already, at root, owns everything there is no need to bother with such things as nationalisation. Instead the state uses instruments already available to it - taxes and the production of money - to direct business and industry in the direction that the state's leaders have determined. In doing this the state, rather than adopting the crude ownership model of classic socialism, chooses instead to take 'strategic stakes' in industry via a National Investment Bank and to adopt via this route the power to appoint to boards of directors.

The problem is that this sort of approach becomes ever more centralised in those courageous leaders of the state, increasingly exposed to corruption and so sclerotic as to act as a drag on the economy:

“...a never‑ending stream of officials passed through Mussolini’s office each day to receive his orders, though he had no means of checking that his orders were carried out. Officials generally pretended to obey and took no action at all. His chief preoccupation was to make sure newspapers reported that he had given orders on every conceivable topic including sports. There was a jungle of overlapping bureaucracies where Mussolini’s orders were constantly being lost or purposely mislaid. Any fascist party official could issue an order purporting to come from Mussolini, as its authenticity was hard to check. By trying to control everything, he ended up controlling very little.”

Now people have observed that modern technology makes totalitarianism easier. But, under 'Corbynomics' - with state-directed investment and high corporate taxes constraining private investment - we still see a situation where investment decisions are made by non-risk-taking experts rather than by risk-taking entrepreneurs. We have to trust that those experts will make the 'right' or 'best' decision, even though they do not have all the information and are not truly accountable for that decision. This problem is compounded because the progenitors of 'Corbynomics' insist that its objectives encompass social and environmental factors as equal 'partners' with considerations of economic betterment.

The ideas of 'Corbynomics' are not a direct parallel with the core doctrines of Fascism (at least as set out by Mussolini and philosophers like Gentile). However, they hail from the same birthplace, from the idea of a brave and activist state. Indeed, if we are to search out the closest equivalent to Richard Murphy's 'Courageous State' and the ideas that sit in the heart of 'Corbynomics', the best place to look is at Mussolini's renewed dictatorship after 1925. This was the triumph of Il Duce's activist government - praised by Sidney & Beatrice Webb, lauded by H G Wells and G B Shaw, endorsed by FDR, and approved of by Winston Churchill.  But I guess we're not allowed to call it Fascism?

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Thursday 17 September 2015

Why political leaders are in the front row - and should sing anthems, say prayers and dress smartly

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So you're an atheist republican elected to lead a major UK political party. Nothing wrong with that - plenty of republicans and even more atheists out there. But there's a problem because we still live in a country where god and the monarch are revered - and constitutionally important. Not only this but the innate conservatism of most folk means that they'd quite like it to stay that way.

This problem is compounded because this is politics. We might not like the fact that such seemingly unimportant things like singing the national anthem, wearing a red poppy in early November and attending church services are given a great emphasis. But so long as this is the case - and, as we've seen, this is so - the politician has to have regard to these matters in considering his or her actions.

We can all recognise that the newly elected leader might choose to stick by his principles as an atheist republican. And we can even respect the integrity of a politician who accepts the inevitable criticism from elements of the essentially conservative majority but still sticks to those principles. But this still misses the point - the point is about why that leader is in the front row at events where anthems are sung, god is invoked and poppies are worn.

That leader is not, in those circumstances, an individual holding to principles but rather a symbol - in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, a symbol of nine million or so Labour voters. And I reckon that most of those Labour voters are neither republicans nor particularly atheistic. Indeed, they are probably pretty conservative in these matters.

So it is important that civic and political leaders remember that, when they stand at the cenotaph or at a service of remembrance, celebration or memorial they are not themselves. In laying wreathes the leaders of political parties recall the millions of Labour, Liberal and Conservative supporters who played their part in liberating Europe from tyranny. And they do this on behalf of the millions of Labour, Liberal and Conservative supporters not as David, Tim or Jeremy.

So political supporters should put on a good suit, stand straight, say the prayers and sing the anthems. Because it's not them it's those supporters doing that.

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Monday 14 September 2015

Quote of the Day: On sugar-free baking...

Not remotely sugar-free cake
I gather that, on the Great British Bake Off they've been indulging the politically correct idea of baking without sugar. That is without the stuff that you buy in bags not without sweetness.

Here is Miss Whiplash a cake blogger writing about this indulgence:

What is not in question, however, is that there is any difference at all, from the point of view of "health" (meaning, in this case, how it acts in and with your body) between sugar from-a-bag (as prohibited in the episode in question), sugar in honey, sugar from syrups/nectars and, indeed, sugar from fruit (or anywhere else). Substituting one of these things into your cake may make it taste better (and will almost certainly make it different), but will not make it any more or less acceptable from a physiological point of view to anyone - there is nobody for whom this cake will be a more "better" thing, unless they happen simply to like the taste (or have some kind of ethical reason for not eating sugar-from-a-bag, perhaps). It is a pointless (if not actually fruitless...) exercise. 

There's a whole lot more on her blog. The point is important - this sort of anti-sugar message is misleading, unhelpful and, as Miss Whiplash points out as a T1 diabetic, potentially harmful. For me the most important point she makes is about how cutting out the sugar really misses the point:

Anyway, the point is that this cake would still be chock full of other carbohydrates (most commonly flour) which would, on eating, be turned to glucose extremely swiftly in the body, which would raise blood sugar levels almost as much as if it had been full of sugar in the first place. 

 And Miss Whiplash's 'sugar-from-a-bag-free' cake sounds good too!

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Saturday 12 September 2015

The Labour Party may be dead. All the noise and flag-waving means we haven't yet noticed.


The Labour Party



Part of me wants to crack open the champagne, let off party poppers and party the night away - after all I'm a Conservative. The rest is just a little more circumspect. The Labour Party - one of Britain's two great parties - has taken collective leave of its senses and set itself on the path to oblivion. And so long as it proceeds zombie-like to lurch across the land there's no room for a sensible, intelligent left-of-centre opposition to the current Conservative majority government.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this. Maybe Jeremy Corbyn will show himself to be a pragmatic, responsive politician able to bridge the gap between the worried public sector workers and students who've elected him and the bedrock of labour support. But Corbyn's record over a lifetime of political activism doesn't indicate that this is very likely. We're going to get opposition based solely on the politics of protest and the championing of the Left's unique sense of moral entitlement.

Corbyn is the man who signed a motion that said this:

"Humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and [we look] forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out, thus giving nature the opportunity to start again"

More than the fraternising with terrorists and murders, more than the knee-jerk anti-Americanism, more than the hugging of communist dictators in attractive and warm South American countries this little quote sums us the utter childishness of Corbyn's politics. For this man it's not a serious business of try to manage a complex system of government so as to better the lives of ordinary folk, rather its a long march to an infantile socialist paradise. And we know the cost of these marches - they take us tramping to penury and oppression than striding, as if in some Soviet poster, into a future of freedom and wealth.

Strong opposition isn't about taking to the streets. It's not about direct action or strikes or signing endless petitions calling for something or other to happen or not happen. Strong opposition isn't about unyielding adherence to a line even when it's clear that line means nothing and does nothing to get closer to government. Good opposition is about holding the government to account - debating and questioning its policies, amending and adapting its bills, and above all setting out a credible and believable agenda for government.

However much I try, I can see none of this good opposition in Jeremy Corbyn. All we see is posture, flag-waving, an echo chamber of left-wing indulgence, and the complete refusal to engage even slightly with the concerns of the British public. This may seem like a revolution to starry-eyed students and like revenge to a bunch of old trots and useful idiots but it's actually a stake rammed through the heart of the Labour Party.

And for all my smiles at the prospect of another ten years of Tory government, I can't help but feel sorry for those good people on the centre-left of British politics who've seen their Party taken away from them by the very forces of reaction that tried to destroy it thirty years ago. As a very good friend posted:

I am taking a break from Facebook. After 34 years as an active labour member and 36 years as a labour supporter and voter I can't watch an old friend commit political suicide.

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Friday 11 September 2015

The case for immigration...

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Here's a projection on Japan's population:

Japan's agency responsible for projecting population, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a stunning reduction of population to only 42.9 million residents in 2110. For every three Japanese residents today, there will be one in 2110 according to the National Institute of Population. If this projection is realized, Japan's population would drop to a level not seen since the middle 1890s.

The National Institute of Population projects a population loss to 97.0 million residents by 2050, for an annual population loss rate of 0.7 percent from 2015. By 2100, the population would fall to 49.6 million, for an annual loss rate of 1.3 percent. Over the 95 years from 2015, the annual population loss rate would accelerate from 0.4 percent annually to nearly 1.5 percent.

Now I know there's some folk who rather want humanity to die out (Jeremy Corbyn, for example) but Japan really does face a crisis because for much of the time between now and 2110 that country will be sustaining an ever bigger population of very old people with a smaller and smaller population of active working age people. This is essentially unsustainable. Unless, of course, you're like the UK and the USA and think immigration is rather a good idea.

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A Yorkshire tale or "We get the media we deserve. And it ain't pretty."



This morning I went to listen to the Prime Minister. And he had a lot to say - about prison reform, promoting digital government, the case for deficit reduction, payment by results and getting decision-making closer to ordinary people through devolution. It was interesting and important - it doesn't matter whether you agree with the Conservative agenda or not, what he said mattered.

As I left the venue for the PM's speech a BBC TV reporter poled up to me accompanied by a cameraman. The camera was pointed in my face and a microphone shoved at me.

"Did you listen to the Prime Minister's speech this morning," asks the reporter.

"Yes" I reply.

"Would you like to comment on something Mr Cameron said before the speech that we picked up and recorded. Something about Yorkshire people hating each other?"

"No" I reply.

This conversation was repeated (only more brusquely) with another BBC reporter - this time a local one.

Now I could at this point have a good old go at the priorities of the media - how a mild gaffe by the Prime Minister is more important to them, a sort of "ha ha ha, he he he, gotcha, you're an idiot" approach to the news. But the reality is that the media are just a mirror to society - this petty and irrelevent news-making reflects our sad pleasure in schadenfreude and childish slapstick. Instead of reporting the actual news, we prefer to either point and giggle or else (and worse) adopt a faux-outrage for the sake of political point-scoring and the indulgence of our prejudices.

The problem here is that people who disagree politically with Cameron will dollop their prejudice all over social media, will ring up phone ins and generally behave as if the Prime minister had suggested the rounding up and summary execution of every Yorkshireman (perhaps followed by raising towns to the ground and ploughing the earth with salt). It's not simply that these people have conveniently mislaid their vestigial sense of humour but that they see Cameron's comment as the most important element of the news.

It's fine for such an approach to feature in gossip-mongers like Private Eye or Guido Fawkes but the BBC is not there to peddle eavesdropped gossip but to report the things that matter. Ramming a microphone in my face is fine if you're going to ask me about the speech I've just heard but not if you just want to find someone to express the faux outrage that will make your pathetic piece of tittle-tattle into a better story.

In the end this sort of focus - taken up with self-important comments like "this shows the utter contempt that Cameron and the Tories have for the North and exposes the whole devolution agenda as a con" - shows the complete lack of any depth or substance in much of our political debate. And the fault lies with us, with our preference for ad hominem, our obsession with trying to catch people out, and our tendency to conduct political debate in the manner of two ten-year-old boys - 'my Dad's bigger than your Dad', 'we've got a bigger car and two tellies', 'you're stupid with a snotty nose', 'bogey boy, bogey boy, na na na'.

I'm not being partisan here - it's just as bad when the focus is on Ed Miliband eating a sandwich or Andy Burnham talking to a fake donor (isn't is odd how the media think it fine to use deception but are so judgemental about deception in others). Not only are we a staggeringly hypocritical society but we a in danger of becoming down right nasty - only a degree away from picking on someone because they've a runny nose or spectacles or ginger hair or a funny walk. For sure we can all have a laugh at what Cameron said and, if you like that sort of thing, at his discomfort. But it really has nothing to do with the Government's programme or with what are today's important news stories.

We get the media we deserve. Petty, insubstantial, snide, gossipy and, at times, just nasty. The media do this because it seems to be what we want. Laughing at others misfortune, ogling celebrities' divorces, manufacturing offence, and conducting debate on the basis of gotcha rather than a considered assessment of the issues and challenges facing political decision-makers. Not very pretty.

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Wednesday 9 September 2015

Refugees...the Conservative case for welcome

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This evening we're sitting in the pub retelling the old tales, things we've been told by folk in times past. And during this talk one of those post-WW2 stories was told. A story of a Pole or Ukrainian walking across Europe ahead of the Russian armies desperate to find a place of freedom. The detail doesn't matter just the remembering of the effort and sacrifice - leaving friends and family behind, hiding from Soviet troops, living off the land hoping for the occasional, unexpected act of kindness.

Scroll forward nearly 70 years and ask yourself how these young men (they were mostly young men) differ from the young men we see clutching the gunnels of a rickety boat or crowded into some railway station or other? I forget how many people were displaced by WW2 - 30, 50, perhaps 60 million? Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, Germans, Italians and Jews. People who saw their homeland destroyed by war and then, seemingly arbitrarily, moved from Poland to the Soviet Union or from Germany to Poland.

Today we look - a blink of an eye later in terms of human history - and these people (or rather their descendants) are settled, content in the new places they found. Hence the stories. And the thousands of sturdy English men and women who, when asked, will tell you of their Polish mum, Ukrainian grandad or Latvian father. And everywhere across Europe the story is the same - the descendants of those refugees are part of the place they finally landed.

Here in Bradford we still remember the struggle of the captive nations, mark the Soviet genocide of holodomor, and recall the destruction of Srebenicia. We do this because it's right and, just as importantly, because the consequence of these struggles is part of the history and tradition of the City. Just as we mark Pakistan's creation and the independence of Jamaica.

So when we ask whether we should welcome a few Syrian refugees, we should recall these tales and say 'yes, we can help'. Not just because it's the right thing to do but because so much of our city's meaning comes from people who crossed the world to be in Bradford. Those few Syrians will, I'm sure, mark another group who found welcome here and who bring a new set of stories. My hope is that a future group of Bradfordians - in 50 years time - will be sat in the pub telling tales. And one of those tales will be about a Syrian who climbed fences, crossed boundaries and walked miles just to find peace and freedom.

To turn people away because "we're full" or worse "it's not our problem" is to deny our shared humanity. And - as a Conservative, more sadly - to deny the opportunity to share the history and tradition of our land. A place without that tale of effort and sacrifice in search of freedom, choice and a better life.

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Saturday 5 September 2015

Quote of the day - on 'buying local'

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It is widely held that, by some feat of magic, buying stuff at higher prices because it is 'locally-sourced' or 'independent' represents a coherent regeneration strategy. We're told that this approach builds something called 'resilience' and that the 'local multiplier' means that, as a result of this local spending, we are all richer and wealthier (as opposed the the more prosaic truth that the owners of those locally-sourcing independent business are richer and wealthier whereas us consumers are poorer and less wealthy).

Courtesy of the Samisdata blog comes the defining truth about the nonsense of this idea (at least in economic terms). A tad sarcastic but oh so accurate:

In olden times, armies would lay siege to cities to cut them off from outside trade. The strategy forced the city to “buy local” until it was so prosperous that everyone was too rich and lazy to fight. (Rocco Stanzione)

All this transition towns, localism and such like is quite simply protectionism given a different name. And the only beneficiaries of protectionism are the protected businesses. No-one else benefits.

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Thursday 3 September 2015

Members of the House of Lords are politicians - however you get them there

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A chap from You Gov wants a 'politican free House of Lords':

So the answer is clear: to make the House of Lords a politician-free zone. By all means keep the bishops, the former generals, scientists like Lord (Robert) Winston. But anyone who has stood for election, or worked in politics, should be automatically disqualified. The Lords should be chosen from leaders across all other walks of society – what is referred to in Westminster as ‘real life’ – with the express mandate of keeping the political class in check.

There are two problems with this idea. Firstly, Freddie Sayers should check the definition of politics (and therefore of politicians). Politics describes those circumstances where we require - or believe we require - a collectively agreed policy but have people advocating mutually exclusive options for that policy. It is the means by which we make that decision. So anyone involved in deciding between mutually exclusive policy options is, ipso facto, a politician. So those great and good drafted in under Freddie's scheme cease being lawyers, doctors, generals and vicars becoming in short order good old politicians.

The second problem is that we assume that members of the great and good are not attached in any way to any party political or ideological position. This is plainly nonsense for all that the great and good protest about this, laying claim to a grandness raising them above such petty distractions as party political discourse. After all, for all his eccentricity, Lord Winston sits as a Labour peer - I presume this indicates his adherence to that Party's essential ideology.

Just because you have followed some other course in life and (since this is the House of Lords) not bothered with such risky and time-consuming things like actually getting elected, doesn't mean you aren't a politician. Once you become engaged in the process of determining, administering or scrutinising public policy you become a politician - no different to those strange creatures who inhabit the House of Commons.

Finally, a comment on this part of Freddie's nutty idea:

Impossible though it may be for our MPs’ political brains to compute, a politician-free appointed chamber could actually be the most democratic solution.

Excuse me but precisely which part of being appointed to a political position by virtue of some panel of grandees constitutes democracy?

If you want a creative and different House of Lords - how about a lottery?

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How government makes disasters worse...

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Telling and pertinent article from Scott Beyer on the tenth anniversary of Katrina's destruction of New Orleans.

Theroux writes of how one company, wishing to rescue its employees via helicopter, had to finally ask Congressman Bobby Jindal, after finding nobody from FEMA, the FAA or the military to grant permission. Because of rules, non-profits like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were prevented by the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security from bringing aid, although roads were clear. And perhaps most infamously, people who tried to leave New Orleans by foot were pushed back by law enforcement, since neighboring municipalities didn’t want a barrage of evacuees. So for those hapless souls with flooded houses, the only option was to stay warehoused with 20,000 others in the Superdome, void of basic needs. It took a full week before everyone was evacuated from the stadium.

Everywhere government is more concerned with rules, order and control than with the simplest of humanitarian tasks. There's an assumption - we see this is responses to today's migrant challenges - that non-governmental responses, while well-meant, are essentially problematic unless they are at least directed and ideally commissioned by government.

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Wednesday 2 September 2015

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one" - why the cultural elite doesn't get Terry Pratchett



I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary. 
Such is the basis for Guardian writer Jonathan Jones dismissing the entirety of Terry Pratchett's writing. For me this sums up the sheer ignorance of the self-appointed literary elite. It would seem that the sin Terry Pratchett committed was the sin of being accessible. Or as I would put it, actually readable.

The literary elite are conning you into trying to read those books they hold up as paragons of genius. Books like the witty but incredibly (and indulgently) overwritten Ulysses or the dull as ditchwater eighteenth and nineteenth century novels written by women - mostly about a world entirely foreign to us in which they describe the gossip, gold-digging and backbiting of fellow women in what might as well be a fairy tale environment for all that is relevant to today's reader.

These books are hard work. I've flicked through a few of them in shops and the prose is impenetrable, elaborate and complicated. Almost designed - in a showy way - to exclude anyone who prefers crunch, pace and intelligence. Us mere mortals who think the purpose of a novel is to take us into a story, release from the bounds of the mundane and, above all, entertain us. None of the novels pushed - in that ghastly English teacher manner - by the likes of Jonathan Jones achieves that aim. Instead - and let's use Jon's world since they will be so much better than mine - the novels are designed to exclude:

Actual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.

The real problem with Terry Pratchett isn't that he's a bad writer for he was far from that, but that he committed a terrible sin - one beyond writing prose that the average 13 year old boy could access. Terry Pratchett wrote fantasy. Just as that other - now dead - target of Jonathan Jones' dismissal, Ray Bradbury, wrote science fiction. This is, of course, entirely unforgivable if you want the cultural elite to consider you a serious writer. You see, dear reader, science fiction is just (using Jon's word again) "ordinary potboilers" not proper writing.

It is my considered view that Pratchett and Bradbury are far better writers than Jane Austen. Or, to put it another way, they wrote prose that works for today's reader, set in contexts that reflect today's society and which tell a story that works as a story but where there's a message if we want to take it. Austen's books are no doubt pertinent if you want to study the social mores of Georgian England's elite but that society is so far removed from ours that it might as well be fantasy. And a boring fantasy too.

The word 'genius' is overused - I'm sure that like many professional writers Terry Pratchett considered himself a craftsman storyteller rather than an artist but there's no doubt that, in the position he adopted, Pratchett was close to the greatest. Writing comedy is hard - you have to be light (which is why Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake fail despite their undoubted humour) while maintaining the integrity of the story. It's no surprise that very few of the authors feted by the likes of Jonathan Jones wrote comedy - such gentleness of spirit is beyond the ken of someone planning on literary genius rather than good storytelling.

I still consider that the story is lost in so much of our literary fiction. Too much sweat is expended on getting the wonderful prose - all those well-turned phrases spilled onto the page - meaning there's little left for the dull old job of creating the wonder, excitement and escape of a great story. It's as if Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams had lost sight of their plot in the urge to tell a few more jokes. I'm just like Jonathan Jones - there's an awful lot of books I haven't read and a good lot (mostly written in the genre often called 'literary fiction') that I have no intention of ever reading. I may continue to flick through some of them in shops though. Just so I can write about them with knowledge and understanding!

Reading is, for most people, a way to leave the everyday world behind for a while. For some people this is about exploring history or philosophy, for others the pleasure comes from the joy of fine prose or livid poetry, but for most - the 'middlebrow' as Jon dismissively describes them - the joy is in a well-crafted story, a dash of adventure, a splash of humour and an escape into another brighter and sharper place. To dismiss literature that does this last job so wonderfully - and Terry Pratchett definitely does this - as something other than genius is to display selectivity. The sort of arrogant ignorance only our self-appointed cultural elite can muster.

And, since Jonathan Jones doesn't like Ray Bradbury (it's not clear whether he flicked through Bradbury's books or has actually read one) let's finish with a quotation from what I think is his greatest book, The October Country:

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

I'm sure Jonathan Jones will have flicked to that page?

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Tuesday 1 September 2015

On moving home...


We moved house on Friday. And while is was, in some respects, pretty stressful and just a tad chaotic there are some things that it didn't involve. We didn't need need permission from any sort of public authority to make the move. It was our decision, we negotiated the sales and purchases and made appropriate arrangements to box up all our stuff and shift it to the new house. Arriving at our new place, we were greeted pleasantly (except for one person and in her defence I had parked in her spot), given helpful advice and generally made welcome in our new little community.

We moved because we thought that the home we had was too big, too expensive to run and that we rather wanted to have money to spend on nice stuff rather than gas or electricity bills (not to mention the ever escalating council tax). Others have more pressing reasons to move - civil war, rape, pillage, murder, destruction, destitution, the collapse of an economy. Quite a few just lift their head up from the despair of the life they're living and tell themselves that there's something, somewhere, better.

Right now we're screaming about 'migration'. It is a confused debate flipping from rampant xenophobia to demands that tens of thousands of refugees (or migrants or asylum seekers or whatever we're calling them this week) are allowed into the UK. And that's just the Labour leadership candidates. In the wider world we witness calls for "an Australian-style points system" - the latest panacea to the problem with those people who have very good reasons to move to somewhere else than the war zone or economic catastrophe where they live right now. Or else just endless repetition of the 'we're full' mantra that is too often just a convenient fig leaf for 'we don't want those coloured folk coming over here, we've too many all ready'.

This racism is what drives the ghastly reactions to reports of how London's population is a lot less white than it was in grandma's day (and I can say this because, unlike most white Londoners, my grandma really did live in London back in those days). Why exactly does this matter? How does being a darker skin tone somehow make someone less of a Londoner - or for that matter less of a Mancunian, Scouse or Geordie? Isn't it the case that being English isn't defined by skin colour but by living and contributing to the things that make England great?

If you peel back the skin of Britain's greatness, look under the bonnet of our nation, you'll quickly find that the contribution of people who left somewhere else to make a new life here - whether through flight or that maligned (and I think pretty wonderful) idea, "economic migration". I don't need to make a list, you know the names and the peoples - from Huguenots through Irish, Jews, Spaniards and Italians through to Indians, Jamaicans, Chinese and Ukranians. No-one can say honestly that these peoples haven't contributed to the wonderful nation that is Britain, the great country that is England and the brilliant cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Bradford.

Latterly those new Britons have come from new places - Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Romania and Latvia. Is there any reason - any reason at all - why these newcomers won't make the same positive contribution as the newcomers who've arrived here from across the world in the last thousand years? Yet our debate - right across the political spectrum - seems set on trying to paint today's immigrants as a problem, as unfitted to our society, as exploiters of our goodwill and as corrupters of our fine society.

I do feel we must mind about the impact of new arrivals on a place but this is just the same as the folk in Cullingworth worried that the big new housing development means in 'won't be a village any more'. It will still be a village, a little bigger but still recognisably the place it was. For that national picture we need to do the same - the arrivals add to our nation, to some degree change our nation meaning it isn't quite what it was, but their contribution still adds and make the sustaining of our civilisation possible. It matters that we teach them the history and culture of the place - those who oppose the teaching of English history and English literature merely demonstrate the social and cultural iconoclasm that is multiculturalism.

I moved home. It was a pain but I'm now delightfully settled in the new house. Why do we want to put so many barriers in the way of others who just want to do what I've just done - move home? I hear you saying it's not that same, that somehow moving from Asmara to Penge isn't the same as moving from Basingstoke to Bromley (or as we've just done from one side of Cullingworth to the other). But how exactly is it different except in those divisions we've erected, the borders, barriers and boundaries. And in our distrust of those strangers from across the world with their funny ways, strange food and odd clothes.

I moved home and am treated as a new friend. Too many others are moving - often for the most painful and cruel reasons - and are treated as a threat, a problem, even a curse. This is wrong and diminishes us as a civilised, decent society. We should stop it.

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