Tuesday 27 October 2015

Want a Northern Powerhouse? Then don't ignore success!

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The think tank IPPR North has issued a report rather grandly entitled 'State of the North; Four tests for the Northern Powerhouse'. And, like many people writing about regional economics and economic development, IPPR North assumes that the solution rests with some sort of governmental activism:

If the northern powerhouse is to be successful, economic powers must be devolved to allow northern businesses and policymakers to develop an economic model that supports more productive, resilient and sustainable growth: jobs that pay well, prosperity that is shared, and opportunities for all. This does not mean simply adopting the ‘London model’ in northern cities, which would be unlikely to build the prosperity that the North needs – and indeed would be likely to lead to widening inequalities. Instead, it means finding a more equitable balance between productivity, employment rates and wages. Evidence suggests that raising productivity and employment simultaneously can be challenging, and that in most situations the two are antagonistic.

It all sounds good doesn't it? But IPPR North isn't specific about which 'economic powers' need devolving. We are presented with a barrage of graphs, a narrative heavy on statistics but no help as to what needs to be handed over to cities or regions. In talking about 'economic powers' is IPPR North won't be referring to trade policy, monetary policy or the tax treatment of companies. Perhaps IPPR North are thinking about planning rules - you know being able to put an end to the NIMBYism delaying the economic benefits or fracking in Lancashire and North Yorkshire. Or maybe it's taking over central government investment in science and technology - even when the evidence for that helping economic growth is pretty mixed.

So having asked for devolved 'economic powers' without specifying which powers we're talking about, IPPR North then go on to talk about education and skills. Again we get an avalanche of graphs and statistics showing that gap between the North and the South. But again, amidst calls for 'policy' to change, IPPR North gives no hints as to what should change except to point at better performance in London from early years through to higher skills.

Yet in amongst all this IPPR North repeatedly reject what they call the 'London Model' (although they don't actually describe this model). This does, if it's evidence-based policy-making we're after, seem a little counter-intuitive. After all the entire 'State of the North' report is given over to describing the scale of the gap between us in northern England and the more economically successful South. And the reason for that southern success is pretty simple - London. What IPPR North are saying is 'look there's a really successful place there, we need to be as successful as them but we're not going to do what they did to be successful':

The North’s economy clearly does need to grow in order to generate the wealth and jobs that its citizens need. However, focusing on economic growth in isolation, or in any way adopting the ‘London model’ in northern cities, is unlikely to lead to the kind of inclusive and sustainable prosperity that the North should aim for.

The suggestion here is that London focused on 'economic growth in isolation' - again without describing what this might actually mean - and that there is, somewhere, a different model for economic success. Sadly, IPPR North don't introduce us to the things that might be included in this magical economic development model other than that it involves city mayors to 'run' it alongside a sort of corporate hi-jack by business interests.

If we want that Northern Powerhouse, want to meet the economic aspirations of people in the north then we need to focus on economic growth. Firstly because that economic growth will lead to new employment. Then because when everyone who wants a job has a job, wages will rise. And then, because there is still demand for labour, people will move to the north. With the result that the consumer economy is bigger and can sustain the high added-value tertiary services that make the big difference in London and other successful cities. None of this - bar infrastructure investment - really needs government. Indeed there's a pretty strong case that the size of government in the north is part of the problem not part of the solution.

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Monday 26 October 2015

Bernard Jenkin MP. Nannying fussbucket and monumental numpty.

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This MP really did say this:

‘I think Osborne should carry on with the cuts but ameliorate the introduction for those worst affected. It would show he is listening and compassionate If he needs the extra revenue and cannot find other short-term savings, he should be considering the Sugar Tax.’

He really did. And it proves without doubt that the man is an unthinking numpty. Not just because I don't like the idea of a sugar tax but because Mr Jenkin is proposing to mitigate the impact of a change in welfare benefits on the poorest by introducing a tax that will disproportionately affect the poorest. Including a whole load of people who, right now, aren't affected at all by the changes in tax credits. And, unless it's set at a seriously punitive, tobacco duty sort of level that sugar tax won't raise anything like enough. As I said, nannying fussbucket and complete numpty.

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Sunday 25 October 2015

Divestment doesn't work (but then we knew that)

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The economists Harrison Hong and Marcin Kacperczyk found that sin stocks outperform other stocks by 2.5 per cent per year. This has even resulted in a niche industry: for instance, the Barrier Fund, formerly known as the Vice Fund, is a “sin-vestor” mutual fund that exclusively invests in companies that are significantly involved in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or defense. It has beaten the S. & P. 500 by an average of nearly two percentage points per year since 2002. By divesting from unethical companies, “ethical” investors may effectively transfer money to opportunists like the Barrier Fund, who will likely spend it less responsibly than their “ethical” counterparts.

It's not just that those sin stocks outperform the market but that divestment campaigns actually contribute to this outperformance. As we discovered in Bradford last week, this doesn't stop self-appointed campaigners virtue-signalling by proposing (at no loss to themselves of course) pension funds pull out from those "sin stocks".

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Inconvenient truths - public funding of science doesn't promote economic growth

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I'm in favour of science. Mostly for the "cor, wow" factor and because what scientists do at the far boundaries of our knowledge is fantastic. I'm even in favour of some of our taxes being spent on that science. But not because it helps in any way towards the growth in our economy.

In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

When I did my masters degree, I looked at this stuff and the evidence is pretty clear - investment in research and development by firms is very effective in drive economic growth whereas there's no link between said growth and investment in research and development by governments or government agencies. Rather than the preferred university-led approach to research we need to look at firm-led approaches. Here's what I found:

There is evidence to suggest that university-led innovation strategies focusing on collaboration and the spinning off of businesses from HEIs leads to a misplaced focus on scientific research rather than business growth (Jones 1995, Frenz & Oughton 2005). Perhaps the most effective way to generate effective innovation at the level of the firm (where it has a direct impact on economic performance) is to reduce the barriers to innovation. The biggest of these barriers is cost and econometric models suggest that reducing innovation costs is more effective that investing in R&D or building innovation networks and systems (Martin 1999).

It won't happen, of course, because the system is controlled by universities and the friends of universities.

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Friday 23 October 2015

So you thought the World Health Organisation was accountable to governments? Think again.



Does the man on the left have too much influence over international health policy?

Today's egregious piece of nannying fussbucketry is about the health risks associated with eating processed meats like sausages and bacon:

The World Health Organisation is reportedly planning to declare that bacon, sausages and other processed meat cause cancer.

Red meat is also expected to be listed as being “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

A source told The Daily Mail that the announcements were expected to be made on Monday with processed meat put in the same category as cigarettes, alcohol and asbestos.

Truth be told, the WHO isn't really doing this at all merely repeating again that there is some evidence linking the heavy consumption of these foods to bowel cancers. The problem is that, as we're finding out with sugar and found out with salt, the health establishments in western countries use the WHO as the source for 'evidence' to substantiate decisions around all-population health interventions (erroneously called 'public health').

For once, I'm not going to raise questions about the validity of the research on which the WHO bases its argument (although the reporting in the Daily Mail, Independent and other media is utterly misleading and appalling). Instead I want to talk about the World Health Organisation itself.

The WHO was set up in 1948 and describes its primary role as to "direct and coordinate international health within the United Nations’ system". To do this the WHO employs over 7000 people working in 150 country offices, in 6 regional offices and at their headquarters in Geneva. The organisation's recently approved budget is $4,385 million which is spent across the following areas: health systems, promoting health through the life-course, noncommunicable diseases, communicable diseases, corporate services, preparedness, surveillance and response. Although most of the spend is still on communicable diseases, disaster response and preparedness, there has been a gradual shift towards a focus on 'non-communicable' diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes. This reflects success (not much of which is down to the WHO) in reducing levels of communicable disease.

Now you'd have thought that this $4.4 billion budget comes from the members of the WHO - the 194 countries who subscribe to the organisation. However, you'd be wrong. While a lot of money does come from members (which is means tested to reflect differentials in national wealth), the biggest part of the WHO's income comes in the form of 'voluntary' contributions.

That money comes from two separate sources of funding: assessed contributions from WHO’s 194 member states (means tested) and voluntary contributions from member states and non-government funders such as foundations, investment banks, multi-national corporations, and non-government organisations.

Back in 2011, 80% of the WHO's income came from those voluntary contributions with the single largest contributor in that category being the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF):

Just one foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (yes Bill Gates, the man who gave the world Microsoft and his wife) donated most of that – slightly more than $446m in fact. That’s more than any other donor except the United States and 24 times more money than Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa combined

And these voluntary contributions aren't freely available to the WHO, they come with strings attached - how that $446m gets spent is determined by Bill and Melinda not by the WHO.

On one level this isn't a problem because the WHO gets extra money to spend on its great work improving the health of millions. But on another level it is a problem. The WHO is, as a UN agency, granted authority and influence over public policy decisions. In most cases this isn't direct - the WHO has no regulatory authority - but things such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control show how the organisation can lead on international, regional and national policy. As vapers discovered when directing their campaign to the European Union, that body was able to use the FCTC's statements on e-cigs as the basis for decision-making.

This means that private organisations like BMGF and Bloomberg Philanthropies, by providing much of the WHO's funding while exercising control over how that money is used, are more influential than the majority of national governments. And because these are philanthropic institutions there is little control or regulation of that influence (unlike for corporations or groups of corporations). The truth is that the WHO is more accountable to Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg than it is to its recognised governance structures, let alone national member governments or the public in general.

The WHO - like other UN agencies - has a veneer of democratic accountability covering over its effective control through collaboration between private foundations and the organisation's management. You might have thought the WHO was accountable to governments, but you'd be wrong.

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Thursday 22 October 2015

How technology means you don't need a public transport authority

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As is common these days, this discovery comes from Africa - matatu are privately-owned mini-buses that provide much of the service in cities like Nairobi:

Based on the gathered data, a first comprehensive Matatu map was released in 2014. Recently the Digital Matatus group joined forces with Google to bring the Matatu system to Google Maps. Just like checking subway times in New York, residents of Nairobi can now simply see the Matatu system on the map and plan a trip, use a Matatu smartphone app, or use the printed version of the map. The benefits of the new system are more efficient travel and even the possibility of using safer routes during the nights.

Much better than a load of councillors sitting in Leeds talking about bus routes in my humble opinion!

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Wednesday 21 October 2015

Urban planning is bad for the poor

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Here's the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand:

"Poor regulation of housing has the largest proportionate effect on the lowest quartile of housing costs and rents. So when we're having the debate about whether there is sufficient land available, we have to recognise that the people who lose the most from getting that decision wrong – and who stand the most to gain from fixing those decisions – are those on the lowest incomes."

Housing costs are becoming a larger proportion of incomes – and that matters the most at the bottom end of incomes among people who have few choices. The new supply of lower-priced, affordable housing has dried up. There are parts of Auckland where no new houses are entering the market priced at the affordable end of the market. It is not surprising to see prices and rents rising disproportionately at the bottom end given this lack of supply."

Bear in mind here that Auckland is one of the ten most unaffordable housing markets in the world. What the DPM is saying is that planning has lost its way. Once we had urban planning in order to try and include the externalities to development but now:

"For those among you who are economists, I would go so far as to say that while the justification for planning is to deal with externalities, what has actually happened is that planning in New Zealand has become the externality.

It has become a welfare-reducing activity.

And as with other externalities, such as pollution, the Government has a role to intervene, working with councils to manage the externality."

I suspect this might be right.

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"New economics" really is nonsense isn't it?

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From that point on the summit developed a powerful sweeping narrative. We heard about how happiness and equality are new measures for economic performance. The growing force of the co-operative movement in the UK. About emerging technologies that will to allow us to organise differently and even create money without the need for interest on debt. All this can be done despite the old economic power structures. With little change to the current system we can use our influence as investors via our pension funds to call major corporations to task.

Seriously guys, seriously?


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Tuesday 20 October 2015

Protectionism lurking in the guise of 'professionalism' - the elitism we expect from the Financial Times

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Hot on the back of this particular egregious misunderstanding of trade comes a further example - one that, as we find too often, festishises the 'professional':

We argued back in July for example that the way Airbnb actually differentiates itself in the hospitality market is largely by throwing amateurs at the professional hospitality market. Which is fine, if you don’t care much for professional hospitality. But it’s not so great if you do, because the service certainly doesn’t augment the availability of professional hospitality services.

Understand this my fellow peons, this person (writing in the elite's journal of choice, the Financial Times) has a problem with you being allowed to set up a business. Bear in mind that this is the sort of attitude that led to requiring interior designers to have a college degree. In a more free world this is known as protectionism and it's a tax levied by those who have control of something on those who don't. Oh, for sure there's lots of the usual excuses about safety, about consumer protection and about the traditions of whichever service we're on about.

The quote above attacks AirBnB because the people renting rooms aren't providing "professional hospitality services". The author goes on to tell us that AirBnB doesn't work out for some providers and that "there’s more to short-term letting. than just handing over keys on changeover day". Well blow me sideways, that's a real shock! But it completely (and I suspect - this is the privileged speaking here) misses the point which is that people have the opportunity to rent out a room in their home - indeed it does so by repeatedly talking about the market as if it's a holiday cottage business. Merely - the writer goes on to do the same with both Uber and the impact of driverless cars - reminding us that what we have here is a sniffy, snobby criticism of people (ordinary, regular people in the main who never read the Financial Times) who want to make a bit of cash to supplement their income.

For the readers of the Financial Times - who are either wealthy or the employees of wealthy businesses - the idea that someone might prefer a stay that's a bit rough and ready rather than very expensive "professional hospitality services" is difficult to comprehend. But if you're a travelling student, an artist or just someone who want to see the world on a budget such accommodation is a godsend. What this writer is doing is pushing the idea - loved by the sort of big hotel chains who advertise in the FT - that somehow these low-cost, private lets are a threat to civilisation rather than something that's challenging the presumptions built into "professional hospitality services".

It's called protectionism and it makes us all poorer. And anyhow amateurs are awesome.

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Monday 19 October 2015

How free exchange and the 'sharing economy' is the best route to peace, love and understanding



Trade - sharing, mutual benefit, fun and freedom
We're in the pub and run into a couple we know from the village. With this couple is another, French, couple who are staying. That's how it's described because the couple we know let out a room in their house through AirBnB. So we chat to them (and the French couple) about the experience - it's a new thing to us and, like Uber, something that's new and a little bit different. Both couples, in their different ways, describe it as a shared experience. Not just a cheap room in a Yorkshire village but a chance to share the wonders of the South Pennines with visitors keen on a different experience.

What this part of that new sharing economy isn't is:

"...the shabby economy, the frugal "make do and mend" society where no-one will buy anything unless they absolutely have to and everyone is running down their existing assets"

The couple we know have a lovely house. They've spent a lot on improving it - not so they can rent it out but so they can enjoy living there. And, while they've a young family, a little extra brass coming in from the rentals helps. And the French couple, they got to stay pretty cheaply in Yorkshire as well as getting lots of hints and tips about what to do and where to go. Plus - as our visit to the pub showed - the visitors are welcomed into a little bit of our community.

Apparently though, all this is wrong:

Indeed the whole idea of the "sharing economy" seems to be based not on the idea of working together to produce something for mutual benefit (the cooperative principle) but on millions of people scraping a living by selling services and renting assets to each other. How does this add value to the economy over the longer term? There is no production. It is entirely consumption.

Now, leaving aside that (unless I've misread all of my economics) the whole point of production is so we can consume, it strikes me that the little example above demonstrates the complete falsity of the argument. The two couples both gained something - part financial (a cheap holiday, a rented room) and part non-financial (the pleasure of a shared experience). It's true to describe this disintermediated economy as:

It's trading.

But the idea that there is not shared experience or mutual benefit in the process of exchange is completely wrong. Let me illustrate with another story.

We've just moved house and were in the market for some new lights. We found what we wanted in a great new shop in Bradford called Artzi. The lights are beautiful (and Turkish - I hope that's not too 'colonialist') but weren't cheap. Anyway, Kathryn goes into haggling mode - this is the woman who haggles with on-line exchange dealers for fun - and a gentle, smiling battle ensues with the shop owner. A deal is struck and, almost together Kathryn and the shop owners exclaimed "I enjoyed that". Trading is a pleasure, the route to mutual benefit - without that mutual benefit there is no exchange. And it doesn't matter whether it's selling a fancy bit of technology, renting a villa in Morocco or hiring a cab in London, without mutual benefit there is no market.

The big thing about the 'sharing economy' is that it opens up the opportunity to trade. In that controlled world of "advanced manufacturing and high-tech services" the masses really are just consumers. In the world of Ebay, AirBnB and Compare and Share, ordinary people are both producers and consumers - the result of the disintermediation these businesses bring is an explosion in that wonderful shared experience of trading. From millions of shuffling drones in 9-5 jobs, we've suddenly the chance to add a little bit to this that's ours not the bosses'.

Over the past few weeks we've been part of that world - as we downsized our home, we've been selling some things on Ebay, giving other stuff away via Keighley Freecycle and taking several car loads to the Sue Ryder shop in Haworth and the council tip at Sugden End. And this experience has introduced us to all sorts of interesting folk - the bloke from Nottingham helping his daughter furnish her first flat, the couple in Somerset buying a bathlift so they don't have to move, and the woman who buys tatty old furniture and paints it up in fancy colours for resale. To describe all this creativity as "shabby, unproductive, stagnant, mean and distrustful" is not just wrong, its really rather rude.

What the 'world wide web', the Smartphone and the innovation of people making use of them is doing is opening up closed corners of the world, spreading the opportunity to trade and doing the thing mutual exchange does - spreading peace, love and understanding (plus a little cash). Long may it grow and succeed.
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Sunday 18 October 2015

Quote of the day - on the curse of left-wing nationalism

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The summation of what left-wing nationalism looks like.

Ironically, the Scottish government’s underperformance rests precisely on the formula that makes it dominant. Special-interest groups are indulged, populist spending protected, services left unreformed for fear of making enemies, tabloid-friendly changes embraced and an “other” (the English, represented by Westminster) fingered for every failure or disappointment. The SNP’s soft autocracy in Scotland is the thread holding together the party’s distinctive tartan of universal handouts, leftist posturing, melodramatic flag-waving and structural conservatism. It amounts to a style of government that is more akin to Argentina’s Peronists than to the reformist Scandinavian social democrats to whom SNP politicians flatteringly compare themselves.

The difficulty is that it's hard to respond - we're most of us patriots and want the very best for our nations. And the nationalists know this so respond to criticism with cries of that most heinous of crimes - not caring about our country.

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Saturday 17 October 2015

Antisemitism redux

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I think it's known as 'othering' - the process of making a group of people so different as to be unacceptable in society. It is, and always has been, something of a problem. Especially when that exclusion is on the basis of a characteristic a person can't do anything to change (ethnicity and gender are the two obvious examples here). In recent times, in part driven by events in Palestine, we have seen this 'othering' process applied to Jews. The return of anti-semitism.

For those who, like me, aren't Jewish, the problem seems small. The antics of a few idiots with unpleasant (often described as right wing views) wasn't the big deal since we could pretty much avoid these people. But then you find that it simply isn't like that. It's not a minority sport this anti-semitism, it is pretty much mainstream. Not among us right wing folk but in the polite conversation of the intelligent left.

And so my wife and I lose our moorings. We are of the Left, but are no longer welcome, unless we become “good Jews” who are not “bad, Zionist Jews”. We worry about our son. He will be confronted by Israeli Apartheid Week when he arrives on a University campus in a few years. If he is a Jew who believes that Israel has a right to be, he will be hated by many on the student Left. My son is an enthusiastic, articulate and kind boy. The realisation that he will be hated by those who will not see any of these attributes, but instead will see only one attribute – his Jewishness – chills me.

See that term 'good Jews' - those Jews who are 'anti-Israel' or 'anti-Zionist'. For a Jew to be acceptable in the salons of the left, he has to reject the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination, the right to a home. As the writer of that quotation observed, many of the promoters of anti-Jew violence are no longer sad worshippers of Adolf Hitler but radical and extremist Islamist organisations linked to the long conflict in Palestine. And the left wing folk who have long supported Palestinian rights now find themselves associating with people who are, without any question or doubt, anti-semitic.

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'

How can an organisation committed to the extermination of Jews be called friends? Yet this - and much else besides (including reference to the anti-semitic libel 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion') is in the founding charter of Hamas. Somehow we are supposed to push aside this advocacy of genocide, this violent anti-semitism, in the cause of Palestinian nationhood. Indeed, so long as so many of the Palestine's leaders reject any solution other than a 'one nation' solution - from the river to the sea, as it's put by those Palestinian advocates - it's hard to see it as anything other than anti-semitism.

The left's problem isn't that there are no grounds for criticising Israel and Israel's government but that this criticism has blinded them to the anti-semitism of Hamas and other representatives of Palestinian nationhood. Above all those on the left feel able to condemn Israel but unable to see the dark side of Palestinian liberation:

If calls from those on the Left in the UK for the obliteration of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic Palestinian state and the sheer violence and blood lust in some comments were not surreal and disturbing enough, my wife and I have noticed something else. Silence. From friends on Facebook when my wife posts anything that acknowledges the very existence of Israel or the random horror that is being enacted on its streets.

In the last year, the number of anti-semitic incidents in the UK reached record levels - 1,168 incidents against Britain’s Jewish population in 2014, more than double that of the previous year and the rate hasn't slackened off. Yet beyond the ritual mouthing of concern, the left fails to realise that it's indulgence of anti-semitic organisations and the language of anti-zionism has played a part in this increase. It shouldn't be like this and doesn't have to be like this:

The Bradford Council for Mosques recently began working together with the local authority to raise funds for the Bradford Synagogue, to ensure the building remains a sacred space for future generations, the Telegraph reported on March 5.

“When the chair of the Bradford synagogue approached the Muslim community for help and assistance towards the maintenance of this building, it was a challenge which didn’t take us long to decide on,” Zulfi Karim, secretary of Bradford Council for Mosques, said.

So my friends, give some hope to Saul Freeman and his wife. Call out anti-semitism just as you would other forms of hatred. And say to your friends in the Palestinian movement that the first step they need to take is to accept Israel's right to be there and to take a lesson from fellow muslims in Bradford on how to respect Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

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Friday 16 October 2015

Nope, 'food porn' isn't making us fat.


Some 'food porn' what I made
Salivate, dear reader. Salivate. Look at the oil, the cheese. Imagine the flavours as they explode in you mouth, savour the thought of that yolk as it bursts open running down onto the plate. You're hungry now aren't you?

The argument is that, when we see an attractive image of food, blood rushes to the parts of our brain associated with taste. We experience the desire to eat, even if we’re not hungry. According to one of the authors of the review, Professor Charles Spence of Oxford University, this has been measured in brain scans.

“The taste cortex lights up,” he says. “There’s an increase in blood-flow and, depending on the state of the person, or how realistic the image is, it might be triggering restraint mechanisms. You’re seeing it and thinking: ‘I shouldn’t be eating that.’

Apparently the proliferation of food images - each one lighting up the 'taste cortex' - is one of the things making us fat. Or so says Dr Spence:

“What we’re trying to say in this paper is that there are consequences from food porn. It’s a term that hints at the way that it depletes our resources of self-restraint. When we sit down for a meal at home after watching a cookery programme maybe we eat more than we would otherwise have done.”

And so on in this vein culminating in an orgasm of nannying fussbucketry:

Should we be protected, then, from over-exposure to “food porn”? “Should OFM, Delicious and all those food magazines be moved to the top shelf? I don’t think it’ll go that far,” he says, “but I do think government agencies should think seriously about our exposure to visual food cues."

The problem here is that while it seems entirely reasonable for our brains to light up at 'food porn', Dr Spence and his colleagues really don't show any direct link between "eating with our eyes" and obesity. Here from the conclusions to the original article in Brain and Cognition:

Crucially, the question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is just what the impact of all those appealing food images is having on the consumption behaviour of those in the Western world who are both flooded with opportunities to eat, and at the same time bombarded with gastroporn.

So all that research hasn't answered the question? Probably because there isn't much of a link. It seems reasonable to use tests of links between food advertising and obesity as a proxy for what Dr Spence and his colleagues are saying:

Based on a reading of the literature, it appears clear that there is no evidence for a direct causal relationship between food advertising and obesity levels.

or:

Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children's food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates. Again, Hastings et al. appear to concur with this judgment: 'there is no prima facie reason to assume that promotion will undermine children's dietary health; it can influence it, but this influence could just as easily be positive as negative.'

It's true that there's also a great deal of research that sort of says "children watch more TV food advertising, children are fatter, therefore food advertising is causing obesity". Some of this research has very precise numbers as to the amount of obesity that banning food advertising would prevent even though each time it fails to demonstrate any actual link between the pictures of food and the fat children.

This whole idea - sometimes (and unattractively) called the 'obesogenic environment' - is very convenient if you are an adherent of the church of public health or an enthusiastic nannying fussbucket. This is because is suggests that fatties aren't to blame for their fatness but are victims of wicked advertisers, manufacturers and retailers with their cunning marketing tricks. So instead of sending a message to the obese that perhaps it might be a good idea for them to eat less and move more (and maybe even helping them do this), we send them a message that the reason they're fat is the food industry and its agents in advertising or retailing. Unsurprisingly that message works all too well with calls for bans matched only by an ever more intense panic about an epidemic of obesity.

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Quote of the day - on the (not really so) 'Good Right'

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On a few occasions I've set down to write something explaining my problems with Tim Montgomerie's 'Good Right' grouping and others who want to turn conservatism into some sort of moral crusade or worse still something 'progressive'. Some how I've never quite got to the core of the problem without then stumbling into grumbling about Fabianism or worse still Fascism.So I'm grateful to Jamie Whyte for this quotation (and the accompanying article):

Whereas moral certainty is the foundation of progressive politics, humility is the foundation of political conservatism. The institutions we have inherited, from private property to the nuclear family, are the result of centuries of adaptation to complex forces that no one can fully comprehend.

It's not simply that Tim Montgomerie's 'Good Right' automatically categorises all the rest of the right as somehow 'bad' or 'wrong', but also that the policy prescriptions give credence to an interventionist approach to personal conduct. The result is that a speech from Ruth Davidson saying that Conservatives need to be about more than good services is held up as an illustration of how the party should proceed. For me, as a born again 'soft loo paper' conservative I don't want to sign up to some sort of mission that places people into pigeonholes of rightness and wrongness, goodness and badness.

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Wednesday 14 October 2015

The NHS is not "ours"

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I sit on Bradford's Health and Wellbeing Board. This observation is pretty much spot on:

Dear NHS worshippers, sorry to be a killjoy, but look, the NHS is not ‘yours’, and never has been. You have no control over it. You feel like you are in control when you spin your little toy wheel, but try steering the car in any direction other than the one where it is already heading, and see what happens. The ones who really drive the car are the political class and the medical establishment. ‘Democratic accountability’ is a mirage. All it really means is that healthcare managers answer to bureaucrats, who answer to other bureaucrats, who also answer to other bureaucrats, who, after some more detours, answer to some politician. That’s democratic accountability. Feel powerful now?

The result is that healthcare delivery planning becomes an academic exercise. Nobody sat round the table in Bradford - yours truly included - feels remotely challenged, let alone worried about the decisions we might make (assuming we actually make any). We won't be held to account for those choices. The same is true for the boards of Clinical Commissioning Groups, the senior management of Hospital Trusts or any of the many other 'pseudo-business' structures and systems of accountability that litter the NHS landscape.

The result, of course, is that decisions are made very slowly. And when they are made the default is to indulge either the prejudice or the convenience of clinicians or managers. This doesn't mean every decision is wrong but it does mean that the organisation is deeply conservative preferring to sustain the structures, systems and operational principles developed for a paper-based (and smaller) 1950s NHS. It wouldn't surprise us if Sir Lancelott Spratt were to appear in the hospital corridor attended by clucking nurses and stressed looking junior doctors.

The problem isn't fat cat salaries or a glut of managers but rather than the managers getting those salaries aren't accountable for the decisions they make. So long, of course, as those decisions are made within the comfort zone of the NHS system. As a result, when really hard decisions have to be taken - closing a hospital, moving a specialist unit - they are made in a manner that absolves management from any negative consequences. Or not made at all.

Right now the NHS is busy talking up its financial problems. It has run a deficit (one that's slightly less than 1% of its budget but a deficit nonetheless). Senior managers and 'clinical leaders' are talking sternly about burning platforms, which apparently is jargon for a financially-mismanaged hospital rather than the consequence of an explosion at an off-shore oil well. And endless reams of unintelligible documentation clog up the in-boxes of those who perhaps have to make a decision at some point. These don't talk about what we actually need to have to deliver a great health system but instead consider "whole system thinking" and "effective governance". Then we're asked what a "remodelled system" would involve without having any coherent picture of the current system.

That the NHS delivers for most of us most of the time is a credit to the front line staff - those doctors, nurses and so forth that we think of as "Our NHS". But beyond this front there is an impenetrable jungle of non-accountability - that bureaucratic paperchase described in the quotation above. The primary purpose of that bureaucracy is to ensure that the 'whole system' is accountable meaning. of course, that no individual is accountable when things go badly wrong. In truth system accountability means there is no accountability.

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Tuesday 13 October 2015

When will the Big Lottery Fund start serving the whole country not just carefully selected bits?

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It's always great to see Bradford organisations getting funding from the Big Lottery Fund to do great work so this is brilliant:

A project called Improving Your Life, run by Reach Beyond, received £746,345 to convert the empty ground floor of its building in Grattan Street, Bradford, into a community services centre.

The venue, run by the Christian charity, will provide support for vulnerable members of society, including working with charities on homelessness, addiction and mental health problems.

The biggest chunk of this cash is going towards creating the centre with the rest being a couple of years worth of running costs. There's also a welcome cash donation to Bradford Woman's Aid and Cafe West on Allerton estate. Again this is great.

However, there's a problem and has been for a long time. For all the fantastic work funded by the lottery, perhaps 90% of voluntary organisations simply cannot access the funding. This isn't for want of trying or asking but rather because the priorities of the Big Lottery Fund's large grant programmes exclude support for most places and most communities in the UK. It doesn't tell you this, of course:

The Big Lottery Fund is responsible for distributing 40 per cent of all funds raised for good causes (about 11 pence of every pound spent on a Lottery ticket) by the National Lottery - around £670 million last year.

Since June 2004 we have awarded over £9 billion to projects supporting health, education, environment and charitable purposes, from early years intervention to commemorative travel funding for World War Two veterans.

Our funding supports the aspirations of people who want to make life better for their communities. We deliver funding throughout the UK, mostly through programmes tailored specifically to the needs of communities in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland as well as some programmes that cover the whole UK.

Whenever I'm talking about raising funds for projects in the places I represent, we always start with the lottery. And, when we get to the larger grant programmes like Reaching Communities, it's clear that there is no chance at all of the communities of Bingley Rural getting anywhere near a decent sized grant. So when Cullingworth Village Hall took a look at these programmes, it was quickly clear that the focus on "disadvantage" will rule the community out from access to the lottery. We need a new hall but the Reaching Communities Buildings theme says this for projects over £100,000:

More than £100,000 if supporting particularly deprived communities (see eligibility checker and exceptions process)

Doesn't look promising does it? Still let's check - there's an 'eligibility checker' into which you just pop the hall's postcode. It says this:

Sorry, your area is not eligible to apply for Reaching Communities funding

And that's it. The idea of a lottery fund supporting voluntary groups the length and breadth of the country is a lie. OK, it's fine that some emphasis is placed on areas with greater need. But to completely exclude a place like Cullingworth from being able to get some lottery cash is wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Let me explain. For reasons I won't detail, the hall has about £500,000 towards a new hall. We know the cost of a new hall - a minimum of £750,000. If the lottery was available to places like our village, that money might be there to make that new hall a reality. A hall that won't cost the lottery another farthing but will serve our community for decades. Isn't that what the lottery was created to do?

The Big Lottery Fund's blurb tells us it "supports the aspirations of people who want to make life better for their communities" - except it's only some communities, some places. That blurb also says the Fund delivers "throughout the UK" - I'm guessing that, in the bizarre world of the Big Lottery Fund's board, Cullingworth isn't in the UK. That's the only explanation.

It's time the Fund, and its board, started serving the whole country and every community - started living up to the flim-flam on its website. It's time it changed to doing the job it was actually set up to do all those years ago.

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Sunday 11 October 2015

The elimination of poverty will be the triumph of neoliberalism

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We are well on our way to eliminating the sort of awful, grinding, absolute poverty that was a feature of human society for most of history:




And check out that World Bank data - from 1980 through to today the rate has dropped from 4 in10 of the world's population to 1 in 10 of the world's population. This is the age of what got called neoliberalism, sometimes 'The Washington Consensus' - over half of the world's absolute poverty ended through sound fiscal policies, property rights and open trade.

Yet the left -or much of it - would have us believe that the very policies that have helped with that spectacular decline in poverty are the reason for us having poverty. This isn't about different rates of tax, it's not about welfare or national health systems - it's about the left's complete failure to recognise what's in front of their eyes. Neoliberalism doesn't create poverty but does the complete opposite - it destroys poverty at a rate never seen before in human history. We need more of it not less.

All the left offer us is a combination of dirigiste protectionism, the portrayal of consumer rights as inferior to workers' rights, and a lowest common denominator approach to the economy. It's not just that neoliberalism's opponents contradict themselves but that they refuse to recognise that, in large part, we are rich because of those 'corporations' they despise not in spite of them. These arguments are trapped in a desire - almost a fervent belief - that there's somehow a better, fairer, less hard way of organising the economy. One like this:

Jobs are in teaching, healthcare and public service – professions that contribute meaningfully to society and directly improve the quality of our lives. All energy production is renewable. Industrial districts are zoned for agriculture and forestry. There are no offices, no shops, and no landfill sites.

The problem is that this group hug sort of idea is fine in utopian fiction but, in the real world, results in economic collapse (although we may get the cuddly world because of all those robots that will do everything for us thereby making us even richer and happier). This doesn't stop people working in "professions that contribute meaningfully to society" getting all hoity-toity about people who work in private businesses. Obviously such folk are exploitative with their shops, offices and factories.

Meanwhile - and often in the teeth of opposition from those in "meaningful professions" - the folk who run those shops, have businesses in those offices and who operate those factories get on with the prosaic business of meeting consumer demand. And in doing so these private business create and innovate with the result that the world around them improves. The application of technology reduces costs, the efforts of entrepreneurs bring new things to ordinary people and folk who once were poor are no longer poor.

Just take that phone in your hand. You probably think of it as a thing of the decadent west. Well think again:

Across the seven countries surveyed, roughly two-thirds or more say they own a cell phone. Ownership is especially high in South Africa and Nigeria, where about nine-in-ten have a cell phone. Since 2002, cell phone ownership has exploded in the countries where trends are available. In 2002, only 8% of Ghanaians said they owned a mobile phone, while that figure stands at 83% today, a more than tenfold increase. Similar growth in mobile penetration is seen in all African countries where survey data are available.

This penetration isn't the consequence of government mandation (although government's have a role) but rather of private business delivering, at an ever lower cost, an essential communications device. And this device and the networks it opens up is central to Africa's economic growth. More so than all the aid money, it's business investment, trade and commerce - capitalism and neoliberalism if you must - that is raising the living standards of ordinary Africans. That economic model, dismissed by libertarian right and Marxist left as ineffective, is delivering for Africa just as it did everywhere else it was tried. Neoliberalism isn't perfect, there's corruption, unhealthy relationships between big business and big government, and environmental exploitation. But these are things that we invented democracy and open government to deal with - throwing the development baby out with the autocracy bathwater only results, as Venezuelans and Zimbabweans have discovered, in more poverty.

Over the next couple of decades absolute poverty will be eliminated. And, at the same time the gap between the developing world and our advanced economies will close. This won't just make the world richer, it will make it fairer too and more equal. Add healthier, longer-lived and happier to that mix and you'll see why carrying on with that "neoliberal agenda" is so important and why dumping it in the face of all the evidence that it works is stupid. Given a chance the elimination of poverty will be the triumph of neoliberalism.

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Saturday 10 October 2015

Time to rethink courts?

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The Police & Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire is moaning about plans to close magistrates courts in Wakefield and Halifax with the 'business' transferred to Bradford:

“I disagree with these planned closures. Victims and witnesses come first, but by reducing the number of courts available you reduce their access to local justice.

“Going to court can be a difficult experience for victims and witnesses. If the courts in Calderdale and Wakefield close, where would a victim or witness local to those buildings go? A trip to Bradford, Leeds or Huddersfield could be expensive and time consuming and put people off going through the criminal justice system.

I rather get Mark's point. Expecting witnesses to spend time and money travelling across the county may put a few off (although most of the business of these courts is taken up with stuff that doesn't involve a lot of witnesses other than those from authorities - motoring offences, council tax non-payment, TV licensing and so forth). But the answer is to consider whether to rethink how we organise our courts.

Instead of travelling all the way to Bradford, why not set up video suites in local police stations, council offices or even a shop on the high street. And then use skype or similar for witnesses to present evidence. After this we can replace all the presenting of documents, all that rushing about to no real purpose that junior barristers do, and a whole load of process that clogs up the current system, with on-line systems. There's no real reason why we need to get three magistrates, a clerk, a policeman and the accused into one place just to decide on the evidence and issue (or not issue) a fine.

Finally there's no reason for courts to occupy expensive town centre property when huge savings will come from moving to a shed in a business estate on the edge of town. It sometimes seems that it's only the self-importance of judges and the game of civic willy-wagging that sustains us having courts in town centres doing a thoroughly inefficient job.

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How to patronise older people Mhairi Black style

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Too often we treat older people as if they are incapable of independent thought. And nowhere is this worse than among left-leaning politicians. Here's SNP wunderkind Mhairi Black patronising the hell out of old people under the heading: "We need to help our elderly see through the Tories' scare stories":

Too many of them were on an information diet of fear and scaremongering from Better Together; force-fed Unionist spin by a biased establishment and a host of questionable reporting. And it worked. Analysis of the referendum vote revealed it was older voters who significantly voted No.

The inference here is that old people are incapable of independent thought and analysis, that their desire to remain in the United Kingdom they've spent their lives in is somehow the consequence of ignorance, of an inability to understand things unless they're guided by their youngers and betters.

It really is about time politicians like Ms Black started treating older people as intelligent human beings capable of thinking for themselves and making up their own minds. They're not "our elderly" to be patronised but John, Sid, Mary and Sylvia - men and women with stories to tell and lessons they can teach us.

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Friday 9 October 2015

Do public health scare stories lag behind people's actual behaviour?



From Reason here's a quote about the decline in soda (that's pop to us Brits) consumption:

"Over the last 20 years," Sanger-Katz reports, "sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent." In other words, the downward trend began more than a decade before the soda tax debates in New York state (2009), Washington state (2010), and Philadelphia (2010). Americans began drinking less soda nearly two decades before Berkeley approved a soda tax and San Francisco rejected one, both of which happened last year.

So the great debates we see about sugar loaded fizzy drinks have been presaged by a profound shift in consumer behaviour. Yet this doesn't stop the public health scare story:

It will help explain why childhood obesity rates have risen so dramatically within a generation: in the US, where a third of children are overweight or obese, the average weight of a child has risen by more than 5kg in three decades.

Put those two quotes together and you get a "just a second, are you sure?" response to one or the other. On the face of it both can't be true.

So a question - are the scare stories about diet, about drinking or other choice behaviours a reflection of behavioural changes that are already happening? The great scares about alcohol in the UK - "Binge-drinking is getting out of control in Britain" or whatever - started flooding the newspapers and airwaves during a time when alcohol consumption was falling rapidly. It's almost as if these scares simply reflect people's changing habits - almost a means of society dealing with cognitive dissonance.

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No, nationalisation is not social enterprise scaled up

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Some people really don't understand the 'enterprise' thing at all do they. Here's a chap called Robert Ashton (who describes himself as a "social entrepreneur"):

I happened to be meeting a local MP who had read the blog that morning. He said that whilst he largely agreed, and knowing Jeremy Corbyn felt he was a decent chap, he said that on one thing I was wrong: Corbyn he said doesn’t champion social enterprise, he champions nationalisation.

I’ve been reflecting on that comment ever since and conclude that the only difference, in an ideal world, between nationalisation and social enterprise is scale.

This is, of course, manifestly untrue. The point about social enterprise is that it is a business that, in providing a valued service or product, also makes a wider social contribution. Indeed Robert describes such a thing:

Yet now that school campus is managed by community cooperative organisation. Led by local people, the site now hosts a wide range of community groups; the canteen is now a thriving cafe and new organisations are moving in to the town, renting space, creating jobs and making a lasting difference to the lives of those who live there.

Nationalisation isn't anything like this. It is the forced creation of a state-owned monopoly designed primarilty to promote and protect the interests of that monopoly. The reason why socialists are so keen on nationalisation isn't because it leads to better business or makes a lasting difference to people's lives - it's because nationalisation allows the government to organise business and industry in the interests of the workers (i.e. those who are employed in the nationalised business).

Robert's question as to whether government is a social enterprise is more interesting. But nationalisation is a different matter - its main impact is to destroy social value rather than create it.

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If we're not planning for 'robocars', we are planning wrongly.

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OK we're talking about America here but the point remains a strong one:

The rise of robocars may accelerate metro area decentralization. Congestion will be reduced, and the greater safety of driverless cars may permit higher speeds on metro area beltways and cross-town freeways. Once taxi drivers are replaced by robot taxis, the cost of taxis will plummet and the greater convenience of point-to-point personal travel anywhere in a sprawling metro area will make rail-based mass transit obsolete except in places like airports and tourist-haven downtowns. As in the past, most working-class families with children will probably prefer a combination of a longer commute with a bigger single-family house and yard to a shorter commute and life in a cramped apartment or condo.

We need to understand that this will happen and it will make all our debate about the negatives of personal transport obsolete. This also - with the need to travel also reduced by technology - rather undermines the idea that we will cram ourselves into enormous, dense core cities while the wilderness is recreated as that technology reduces farmland acreage.

Our debate about housing, transport and much else is stale and limited so long as our long-term planning is predicated on urban densification to reduce the impact of the private car. Driverless vehicles as a mass transit solution may be 30 years ago but this is not a massive planning horizon and the places that design themselves to meet this world will be the winners.

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Thursday 8 October 2015

On hearing from a guru...



Went to a seminar today. Well rather a sort of round table with this incredibly famous and important man who was going to impart his wisdom, show us the way forward, direct us to the sunlit uplands of Elysium.

I was tardy so when I arrived most folk were sat and were, one after another, introducing themselves. I'd missed most of this so most of the attendees fell into the category of "familiar faces but have to dredge the deeper recesses of the mind to remember how I know them". I introduced myself.

The event took the form of the incredibly famous and important man telling us how he came to be incredibly important and famous. He gushed with positivity, with witty self-deprecation and with little asides demonstrating how he was so much more insightful than the usual run-of-the-mill sort of person you'd encounter. He spoke the fluid language of the guru all mish-mashed with the jargon of the professional in his line of business. It was a tour de force delivered at breakneck speed that demonstrated that us mere mortals were in the presence of genius.

Amongst all this our guru dropped names, spewed contacts and indicated that he had the ear of ministers, engagement with policy-makers and, for all we knew, a direct telephone line to god. He managed to condemn government policies with one rhetorical flick of his hand implying that if only they'd asked him first it would all be so much better. He dismissed one urbane and worldly-wise politician as a "right wing bastard" and then slightly sniggered at what he called "Tory words".

In all this we got no facts. No evidence. No substantiation to his claims of unique insight into the solutions in this area of policy-making. Oh it was good and there were some things - most tactical things - that cried out to be stolen for the benefit of our town. But the impression wasn't of shared experience but rather the implication that we were some clumping centre-back to be dazzled and bemused by his Lionel Messi. It was, in short, a master class in oh-so-modest self-celebration rather than something to be learned from.

Sadly this sort of event is legion. We troop to the feet of the guru, suck up their pronouncements and seldom - if ever - ask whether the guru could use a dressing gown. Today I learnt nothing about how we might actually meet the challenges we face in the famous man's area of 'expertise' but I also know that some of those colleagues present will hark back to the seminar, eye-sparkling with excitement as they recount the sage words of our guru.

It is a reminder why we have politicians. Not because we're immune to being self-appointed experts or to showing off - we're some of the worst offenders here. But rather because you lot have the ability to deflate the balloon of our ego by kicking us out at the ballot box.

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Friday 2 October 2015

Taking Charlotte Church's comments on Syria seriously (for a minute or two)

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Miss Church appeared on the BBC's Question Time. Presumably because it was in Wales and she's got herself a new reputation as a left wing activist. During the debate Miss Church had this to say:

‘Another interesting thing with Syria actually, lots of people don’t seem to know about it, is there is evidence to suggest that climate change was a big factor in how the Syrian conflict came about, because from 2006-2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history.

This of course meant that there were water shortages and crops weren’t growing so there was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria in the urban centres which put more strain and resources were scarce etc which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today, and so no issue is an island, so I also think we need to look at what we’re doing to the planet and how that might actually cause more conflict in the world.’

On the face of it, this is nonsense. It's not exactly like there's never been a drought before in the middle east:

Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.”

But there's a lot of support for the idea that the drought beginning in 2007 was a factor in creating the Syrian civil war:

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend.

It doesn't really matter whether the reason for the drought is long-term (i.e. global warming or climate change) or short-term (simply a bad run of dry weather) but it does seem plausible that the impact of that drought on a rural population will be considerable. This doesn't mean that the consequence of drought need necessarily be violent upheaval - it's clear that this hasn't occurred in the wider Fertile Crescent (and that there's some doubt about the data).

More interesting here is that idea that it is urban-rural migration that's the culprit rather than the climate. Miss Church says that there was a 'mass migration' of this sort in Syria. But this may simply reflect the world-wide trend for people in rural areas to move to cities.

Today, the words rif and medina have developed not just geographic connotations, but social ones as well. The rif not only describes village farmers but those urban poor living in the slums sprouting up around Syria’s cities. This “village-izing” of Syria’s ancient cities has changed the complexion of urban space with the growth of large unplanned, parallel communities of urban poor.

There's nothing peculiar about this pattern - it's repeated in developing countries across the world (despite the best efforts of the development industry to stop people in poor rural communities exercising this liberty). And, given that we're talking about the growth of violent revolutionary forces - in this case Islamist forces - perhaps this upheaval has contributed? It does seem that these marginal communities contributed to the rise of Islamist parties in Turkey and to the challenges in Egypt:

Shrinking opportunities in the countryside have led to a steady rural-urban migration. Cities have grown at twice the rate of the general population in the last two centuries. This has led to overurbanization, this is, more people in the cities than can be properly housed, educated, or gainfully employed...it is estimated that the population of Greater Cairo has grown from about three hundred thousand in 1800 to over twelve million in 1995. With this phenomenal demographic growth have come serious problems. Much of the discontent that has been channeled into militant Islamic activism is a direct or indirect outcome of population pressures and overurbanisation.

I've no doubt at all that the five year drought may have accelerated the movement from country to town in Syria and indeed that, as we've seen in other places, this dislocated new urban community provides a place for a radical, non-traditional and violent version of Islam to thrive. It's too simplistic - and therefore wrong - to try and claim that it's climate change that did it but, if climatic alteration contributed to an accelerated rate of internal migration, then we are equally wrong to dismiss what Charlotte Church said as complete nonsense.

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No, Germany doesn't have a better housing system that the UK

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Not if this is anything to go by:

Gabrielle Keller has been given until the end of the year to leave her flat in the small southern town of Eschbach, near the border with France.

The flat belongs to the local municipality, which says it is needed to house refugees.

Imagine a UK local council evicting a resident so as to house refugees. You can't can you for the simple reason that our laws don't allow the Council to do this (it's not clear whether German law allows this either).

So perhaps we can stop saying how splendid and super-duper Germany's housing market is? It isn't, it never has been and we really should stop pretending otherwise.

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