John Lanchester, the Left's go-to guy when it comes to economics, has been writing again in the London Review of Books. Lanchester is an engaging novelist and undoubtedly a well-meaning man, but unfortunately his writings on the dismal science reveal a grasp some way short of competence.
My wife has chucked the LRB into the recycling, so I am going to have to do this from memory.
The thrust of the two pages the editor gives Lanchester are that the economy is not growing, and that therefore George Osborne's policies are not working. Osborne doesn't realise, writes Lanchester, that if you cut public spending then GDP goes down as well, possibly by more than the amount you've actually cut. "This", Lanchester intones, surveying the scene, "is what failure looks like".
Well, not necessarily. Lanchester is guilty of assuming that the success of Osborne's policies should be measured purely in terms of growth. But growth isn't the only criterion. Sure, Osborne would be delighted if the economy were growing. But what he'll be really concerned about is the deficit. As long as he can tell the world the deficit is shrinking in real terms, Osborne will be able to say that he is putting the nation's finances in order. And he'll be right. As long as the gilt markets - who don't have to lend to us, remember - believe in the direction of travel, it will be cheap for Britain to borrow the billions we need every week just to keep going.
To put it the other way round, GDP is not the same as tax revenue. If GDP falls because the government has spent less, that doesn't mean the government doesn't gain. If the tax revenue HMG loses and the extra money it has to pay out in benefits are in combination smaller than the savings from the spending cut, the government wins. That is Osborne's calculation, and that is partly why the deficit is going down. I think Osborne will be quietly pleased with the situation.
Here is a list of other considerations that are strangely absent from Lanchester's article. If you haven't read it, you'll just have to take my word for it.
One, there's no acknowledgement of the headwinds Osborne is facing from a Eurozone economy gripped by an existential crisis.
Two, there's no attempt at suggesting an alternative strategy to Osborne's.
Third, although I think we're entitled to assume that Lanchester thinks there is such a strategy, he shows no sign of understanding that this might just be one of those problems to which there is no solution at all. I think it is not stretching matters to say that no-one really knows what to do now, and that Osborne's way is likely to be as good as any. At least, by enabling us to afford current borrowing, it is enabling us to keep going.
Fourth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the wider context in which the economic crisis is taking place, which is that Western governments and individuals, helped along by the finance industry, borrowed for decades to sustain a lifestyle their income did not justify.
Fifth, there is no acknowledgement that in the long run, states, like individuals, must live within their means. The policies of Balls and Miliband merely pretend that this isn't true, but it is.
Sixth, Lanchester displays no understanding of the consequences of this fact for Western Social Democratic parties. The soft Left is dedicated to the creation of societies with high welfare spending to help those at the bottom end. The events of the last few years demonstrate that this isn't fiscally possible at current levels of general taxation, and may not be politically possible at any level.
Seventh, to look at the biggest picture of all, Lanchester doesn't seem to grasp that, at heart, our problems are a consequence of loss of competitiveness to Far Eastern economies. Until that loss can be restored to some extent, the kind of big state solutions Lanchester favours will never be affordable again in Britain.
If John Lanchester really wants to know what failure looks like, he might want to imagine a room containing these seven rather large elephants.
Does any of this matter? If I still counted myself amongst the denizens of the Centre Left I would be exasperated at the failure of my peers to get to grips with the cause of the UK's problems. I would be appalled by their lazy acceptance of the seductive alternative narrative, one which says it was all the bankers' fault, but never asks what exactly it was the bankers were doing (lending us all money) and why (because otherwise we couldn't afford to live the way we wanted).
It may well be that Labour will win the next election anyway - as long as the Eurozone continues to be a zombie economy it's hard to see the UK's fortunes improving markedly or at all. But if they don't, it'll be because they have failed to put before the public a believable economic case. The task of doing so starts further back, with a clear-headed analysis of how we ended up where we are and what the consequences are for Labour's vision of a good society. That's partly the responsibility of the politicians, but also partly a responsibility of Labour's public intellectuals like Lanchester.
Judging by this article, he still can't see the zoo for the elephants.
Sunday 6 January 2013
Friday 4 January 2013
Fiscal cliff? - fiscal kerbstone more like . . .
This morning's Graun reprints a handy guide to the Fiscal Cliff currently going round the City. It takes some numbers from the US financial situation so mind-numbingly large that the intellects of ordinary chaps like me reel at the prospect, and removes eight noughts from the end of each. To illuminating effect.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
Here's the relevant bit (just add eight noughts, if your brain is up to it):
"Annual family income - $21,700
Money the family spent - $38,200
New debt on the credit card - $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance - $142,710
Total household budget cuts so far - $38.50"
Yes, you read that right. Thirty eight dollars and fifty cents.
Thursday 3 January 2013
John Muir Trust - destroying wilderness's head space?
Once again the arrival of the The John Muir Trust's Journal prompts the thought that the £15 or so I spend on membership every year might be better put to use elsewhere in the economy.
The JMT is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity.
It's partly this transformation that worries me, but I'll come back to that. According to its Journal, the JMT now considers that its role should include creating "new opportunities for enjoying outdoor learning". You may think - I do - that there are myriad charities and government funded groups better suited to doing that, but I guess you might also say that, amidst Scotlands millions of empty acres, what harm can it do? Except it's not in Scotland. The Trust is "now able to support groups in Carlisle, West Cumbria and Barrow" and the groups "will be supported to explore, connect with and care for" inter alia the Lake District National Park.
That's right: a Trust set up essentially to preserve wilderness areas, optimally by buying them, is now engaged in the business of encouraging people to go to a place whose landscape management problems are best characterised by relentlessly excessive footfall. That environmental point aside, what is wilderness when you are there on your own, ceases, paradoxically, do be so when I turn up as well. More people = less wilderness. Why is the JMT contributing to the process of reducing Britain's wilderness?
Elsewhere in the Journal there is news and a photograph of the new footpath on Schiehallion. Now the old path on Schiehallion was bad enough in winter; it must have been a quagmire in summer. But why did the Trust buy Schiehallion in the first place? It is a small conical mountain near the road, easily accessible from Scotland's Central Belt. As long as Britain's post-Industrial society continues in its current form, Schiehallion will never be a wilderness again. The Trust should have saved its money (sorry - our money) until some more suitable property turned up.
The feeling that the Trust has fallen into the hands of those who don't understand its mission is underscored on p.11 of the Journal, where one Chris Goodman, apparently overseer of the Trust's wider footpath management (because after all the Trust has now got to the point where it can afford an overseer of footpath management) is quoted as saying, "We want to bring every stretch of footpath on Trust property up to a wild land standard". This sentence is actually used as a headline.
There is no sign that Goodman or the writer have any sense of the ironies at work here. The Trust's role is not to question the idea of footpaths in wilderness per se, it is merely to make them better, thus encouraging more people to walk into that wilderness. Because it's obviously vital that in wilderness areas, the footpaths are up to standard!
I'd like to think that at this point anyone from the Trust reading this might go, "Oh, hang on . . . ". But then if they can print Goodman's comment unquestioningly, they really aren't going to get it, are they?
I said I would remark on the Trust's transformation from a few beardy blokes clubbing together to buy wild land to an organisation with a glossy journal, a "footpath project officer" and offices in Edinburgh and Pitlochry.
Aside from the bad decisions it seems to me the Trust sometimes makes, its staff seem blithely unaware that wilderness is a conceptual as much as a physical thing. John Muir, and his disciples who set up the Trust, were sick of industrial society's tendency to commodify and package everything. Wilderness was needed as an antidote to this.
But with its corporate sponsors, its merchandising, its compulsive tidying, with the bland management speak that characterises its official utterances, the JMT is in danger of contributing to the commodification and therefore destruction of wilderness's head space, at the same time as it often does useful work to safeguard wilderness's physical reality.
The JMT is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity.
It's partly this transformation that worries me, but I'll come back to that. According to its Journal, the JMT now considers that its role should include creating "new opportunities for enjoying outdoor learning". You may think - I do - that there are myriad charities and government funded groups better suited to doing that, but I guess you might also say that, amidst Scotlands millions of empty acres, what harm can it do? Except it's not in Scotland. The Trust is "now able to support groups in Carlisle, West Cumbria and Barrow" and the groups "will be supported to explore, connect with and care for" inter alia the Lake District National Park.
That's right: a Trust set up essentially to preserve wilderness areas, optimally by buying them, is now engaged in the business of encouraging people to go to a place whose landscape management problems are best characterised by relentlessly excessive footfall. That environmental point aside, what is wilderness when you are there on your own, ceases, paradoxically, do be so when I turn up as well. More people = less wilderness. Why is the JMT contributing to the process of reducing Britain's wilderness?
Elsewhere in the Journal there is news and a photograph of the new footpath on Schiehallion. Now the old path on Schiehallion was bad enough in winter; it must have been a quagmire in summer. But why did the Trust buy Schiehallion in the first place? It is a small conical mountain near the road, easily accessible from Scotland's Central Belt. As long as Britain's post-Industrial society continues in its current form, Schiehallion will never be a wilderness again. The Trust should have saved its money (sorry - our money) until some more suitable property turned up.
The feeling that the Trust has fallen into the hands of those who don't understand its mission is underscored on p.11 of the Journal, where one Chris Goodman, apparently overseer of the Trust's wider footpath management (because after all the Trust has now got to the point where it can afford an overseer of footpath management) is quoted as saying, "We want to bring every stretch of footpath on Trust property up to a wild land standard". This sentence is actually used as a headline.
There is no sign that Goodman or the writer have any sense of the ironies at work here. The Trust's role is not to question the idea of footpaths in wilderness per se, it is merely to make them better, thus encouraging more people to walk into that wilderness. Because it's obviously vital that in wilderness areas, the footpaths are up to standard!
I'd like to think that at this point anyone from the Trust reading this might go, "Oh, hang on . . . ". But then if they can print Goodman's comment unquestioningly, they really aren't going to get it, are they?
I said I would remark on the Trust's transformation from a few beardy blokes clubbing together to buy wild land to an organisation with a glossy journal, a "footpath project officer" and offices in Edinburgh and Pitlochry.
Aside from the bad decisions it seems to me the Trust sometimes makes, its staff seem blithely unaware that wilderness is a conceptual as much as a physical thing. John Muir, and his disciples who set up the Trust, were sick of industrial society's tendency to commodify and package everything. Wilderness was needed as an antidote to this.
But with its corporate sponsors, its merchandising, its compulsive tidying, with the bland management speak that characterises its official utterances, the JMT is in danger of contributing to the commodification and therefore destruction of wilderness's head space, at the same time as it often does useful work to safeguard wilderness's physical reality.
Sunday 30 December 2012
Why I love . . . #4 Marquee Moon
There are some aspects of parenthood which are a disappointment; it so happens that I married someone even worse than sport than I was, and so I have never had the pleasure of standing beside a windswept football/cricket/rugby/hockey etc pitch and shouted enthusiastically while one of my children scored a hat trick or a brisk half century before lunch. My how the tears would have flowed though.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
Wednesday 19 December 2012
Andrew Mitchell, the police and the press
The Andrew Mitchell case has now become a very sticky soup indeed, with the arrest of a serving police officer on suspicion of leaking the Downing Street incident log to the press. At the same time comes the allegation that an officer - possibly the same one - emailed his MP (a colleague of Mitchell's in the Whip's Office with whom he did not get on) posing as a member of the public. This email apparently states that passers-by and tourists were upset by Mitchell's behaviour during the confrontation.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
Monday 17 December 2012
Ed Miliband, immigration and inequality
A day or so after I posted about Frank Field and immigration, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said.
Now that the leader of the Labour party is admitting unrestricted immigration might not have been such a good idea after all, perhaps the bien pensant will stop calling those of us with reservations about it racists.
Incidentally, when Miliband implies the economy has successfully absorbed migrants he's only half right - most of them got jobs, but that was at the expense of unemployed British people, a disproportionate number of whom have black or brown skins.
Actually that's one of the strangest ironies of the issue - cheerleaders for immigration have always enjoyed the see-I'm-not-a-racist glow which comes with it, deploring us provincials for their alienation from metrocentric multiculturalism. But actually most of the immigrants were white, and many of the people who suffered, either because they were shut out of the jobs market or because their pay levels languished as the liberal middle-classes forged ahead, were black. More bizarrely still, the people most enthusiastic about immigration tended to be the same people jumping up and down most frenetically about the rise in inequality under the Blair / Brown governments.
To return to Miliband, some of the "communities" (oh Lord) who couldn't "adapt" were the out-of-work community, who found themselves competing with migrants for jobs. Then there was the low-paid community, who found that an increase in the supply of labour meant that employers didn't have to compete for staff by raising wages.
Yes, immigration increases inequality and is bad for black British people. Who knew?
Thursday 13 December 2012
Why I love . . . #3 Frank Field
In the last ten years the British population has increased by 3.7 million (2011 census).
More than 500,000 Polish people now live in the UK (2011 census).
In the period of the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born overseas (HMG figures).
UK unemployment figures are currently about 2.5 million. Young black men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as young white men. More than 50% of young black men are unemployed (Guardian, March 2012).
Fewer than 2 million new homes have been built in last ten years (my rough calculation from NHBC figures).
RIBA calls for an extra 300,000 homes to be built every year (Independent, 26 Oct 2012) to deal with the housing crisis.
Nick Boles, housing minister, calls for 1,500 square miles of greenfield sites to be built on (Telegraph, 27 November).
"The main threat to biodiversity, the variety of species alive on earth, is human activity . . . One of the biggest problems that human activity causes is habitat loss, the physical environment that provides a homes to populations of different species" (Merci, Environmental pressure group).
The UK population is now over 57 million. The population density of the South East is about 450 residents per square km (ONS report), third amongst major countries behind only Bangladesh (1,045 per sq km) and South Korea (498 per sq km).
Most of Britain's population growth in the last ten years has come from immigration (2011 census).
Frank Field, the former Labour minister, said (Telegraph, today 13th December) the population increase should now be treated as a "state of emergency . . . This is not so much a wake up call, it is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen". He accused his own party of lacking "humility" over its role in allowing immigration to go unchecked.
That's Frank. Fearless. Even handed. And better still, usually right.
PS A day or so after I posted this, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said. I suppose I should be relieved to find that I am no longer confined to the lunatic fringe. I'm going to post more fully on this in a minute.
More than 500,000 Polish people now live in the UK (2011 census).
In the period of the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born overseas (HMG figures).
Fewer than 2 million new homes have been built in last ten years (my rough calculation from NHBC figures).
RIBA calls for an extra 300,000 homes to be built every year (Independent, 26 Oct 2012) to deal with the housing crisis.
Nick Boles, housing minister, calls for 1,500 square miles of greenfield sites to be built on (Telegraph, 27 November).
"The main threat to biodiversity, the variety of species alive on earth, is human activity . . . One of the biggest problems that human activity causes is habitat loss, the physical environment that provides a homes to populations of different species" (Merci, Environmental pressure group).
The UK population is now over 57 million. The population density of the South East is about 450 residents per square km (ONS report), third amongst major countries behind only Bangladesh (1,045 per sq km) and South Korea (498 per sq km).
Most of Britain's population growth in the last ten years has come from immigration (2011 census).
Frank Field, the former Labour minister, said (Telegraph, today 13th December) the population increase should now be treated as a "state of emergency . . . This is not so much a wake up call, it is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen". He accused his own party of lacking "humility" over its role in allowing immigration to go unchecked.
That's Frank. Fearless. Even handed. And better still, usually right.
PS A day or so after I posted this, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said. I suppose I should be relieved to find that I am no longer confined to the lunatic fringe. I'm going to post more fully on this in a minute.
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