Trusting the John Muir Trust - again

Almost exactly two years ago I posted the following -

"I told you so" are said to be the most unattractive four words in the English language. You might want to bear them in mind however when you read the following.

The John Muir Trust 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. 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. 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.

A few years ago the JMT sent out a glossy circular appealing for money to - ostensibly - buy the Glencanisp Estate in Sutherland, then being sold by its owners, the wealthy Vestey family, beef barons and vendors of the infamous Vesta dried dinners so familiar from youthful camping trips. I have known the area for more than forty years and the idea of the JMT getting its hands on the Estate had a powerful appeal. However when you read the leaflet carefully, two things became apparent. Firstly, that the Trust had already parted with the money and was looking to refill its coffers, and secondly, that the Trust was not going to be the owner after all. The Estate had been bought by a local community foundation, and all the JMT would be getting was a seat on the foundation board.

I wrote to the Trust's then director, Nigel Hawkins, pointing out that since the JMT's relationship with its members was based on trust, it might have been better to be more open about why it was asking for money; that the JMT had taken a decision to put a lot of money into the Assynt Foundation without asking its own members; and that the JMT was making an assumption about the future conduct of the Foundation which might well turn out to be wrong. That is to say, the Vestey family, whilst not doing anything noticeable to restore the land to pristine condition, had at least not done anything to make it worse, whereas the Foundation was set up to act in the interests of local people, and their interests - jobs, amenities - might well turn out to conflict with those of this magnificent hundred thousand acre wilderness. A seat on the board could only offer advice and influence - things which could be ignored and overruled. A new private owner might well serve the interests of the landscape - which is irreplaceable - better.

To his credit, Mr Hawkins wrote back. His letter was emollient and reassuring, but ultimately unpersuasive. I still disagreed with the way the Trust had behaved, but there wasn't actually much else I could do. I can't say for sure when this correspondence took place, and I regret now that I don't have either my email or Hawkins's reply. Hawkins has now stepped down as director.

Every now and then JMT sends out copies of its Journal. In the most recent, something caught my eye.

"As (JMT and the Assynt Foundation) admit, it is a partnership that has not always run entirely smoothly, with differences of opinion on some of the Foundation's more commercially-minded plans for economic development. This led to the John Muir Trust stepping away from its seat on the Board of Directors."

Well who would have thought that might happen?

See first para for details.

__________________________________

Now almost exactly two years later p.15 of the JMT's Spring 2013 Journal includes the following paragraph: "An unhappy consequence of imbalance between conservation bodies and communities has been occasional conflicts, and occasions (sic) when with hindsight one might say that land has ended up with the wrong ownership".

I can't argue with this; except to say that in the Assynt case no hindsight was necessary.

Thatcher and the Miners' Strike

As so often with a political event - and Margaret Thatcher's death is nothing if not political - it's not so much the event itself that fascinates as the reaction to it amongst friends and in the media.

Of course there is a good deal of hagiography in the Torygraph (I came away from its coverage with the impression that their heroine had discovered penicillin and been the first man - sorry, woman - on the moon), but elsewhere a lot of visceral hatred.  The Guardian celebrated the event by a prominent piece from its former leader writer Hugo Young, a strange thing to do when Young has been dead ten years and, whatever else you can say, events have rather tended to confirm the endurance of Thatcher's Weltanschauung rather than the reverse.  Certainly Young's prediction following the 1997 election that the Tories would never govern again looks beyond daft.

As I've written elsewhere, both these reactions seem overdone.  Nothing is ever as good or bad as it appears at first sight.

I've also been thinking in the days since Thatcher's death about the Miners' Strike.  To repeat, I supported it financially in a modest way without ever actually thinking it was a good idea.  Many people apparently regard the defeat of the Strike, even more than the Poll Tax, as either Thatcher's finest hour or the apotheosis of evil.  I have come to a surprising conclusion about the Strike, which I'll come to in a moment.

It's surprisingly hard to find information about pit closures on the internet.  The BBC website has a list of pits from 1984 onwards, but nothing about pre-1984 closures.  This is a shame because it is widely suggested that in fact more pits closed under Harold Wilson's governments than in the Thatcher years.  The BBC suggests that during the Maggie era the number was in the mid-80s; another internet source suggests that under Wilson it was 93, although that same source puts the Thatcher number at 22.

The right wing blog The Commentator should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this summary of the industry's decline sounds pretty authoratative to me and clearly shows both that the process began long before Thatcher, and that successive governments struggled to reverse it -

"264 pits closed between 1957 and 1963. 346,000 miners left the industry between 1963 and 1968. In 1967 alone there were 12,900 forced redundancies. Under Harold Wilson one pit closed every week. 1969 was the last year when coal accounted for more than half of Britain’s energy consumption. By 1970, when the Conservatives were elected, there were just 300 pits left – a fall of two thirds in 25 years. 

By 1974 coal accounted for less than one third of energy consumption in Britain. Wilson’s incoming Labour government published a new Plan for Coal which predicted an increase in production from 110 million tonnes to 135 million tonnes a year by 1985. This was never achieved. Margaret Thatcher’s government inherited a coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years. Nevertheless, it made attempts to rescue it. 

In 1981 a subsidy of £50million was given to industries which switched from cheap oil to expensive British coal. So decrepit had the industry become that taxpayers were paying people to buy British coal. The Thatcher government injected a further £200million into the industry. Companies who had gone abroad to buy coal, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, were banned from bringing it in and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost to the British taxpayer of £30 million per year. By now the industry was losing £1.2 million per day. Its interest payments amounted to £467 million for the year and the National Coal Board needed a grant of £875 million from the taxpayer. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that 75 percent of British pits were losing money. 

The reason was obvious. By 1984 it cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling it on the world market for £32 a metric ton. Productivity increases had come in at 20 percent below the level set in the 1974 Plan for Coal. Taxpayers were subsidising the mining industry to the tune of £1.3 billion annually. This figure doesn’t include the vast cost to taxpayer-funded industries such as steel and electricity which were obliged to buy British coal. But when Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.”

I think it's probably fair to say that the British coal industry was massively loss making; indeed even Thatcher's opponents seem to accept this.  Their argument runs firstly, that pit closures wrecked entire communities, and this is undoubtedly true.  It is a world portrayed surprisingly well in Brassed Off.  Secondly, the social cost of propping up those communities was so enormous that it outstripped the cost of coal subsidies.  I have never seen any figure put on this, but it seems at least possible; certainly it was an argument I heard put persuasively by a South Wales GP on the radio yesterday.

The Commentator's statement of the plight of the coal industry doesn't touch on the Miners' Strikes of 1972 and 1974.  The first of these strikes occurred when the NCB rejected a demand for a pay increase of 43% (yes, that's 43%).  The second strike brought down the Heath government, and after Labour was elected instead, Harold Wilson settled the dispute with a pay offer of 35% (yes, that's 35%).  These figures do not lie.  Another Welshman on the radio yesterday bemoaning the waste that The Valleys have become said, "And these were top dollar jobs which went".  Indeed they were.  And that's why the industry was uneconomic.

Which brings me to my surprising conclusion.  The Miners' Strike would never have happened today.  Why not?  The 1970s and 80s were the high water mark of the assumption that the government was made of money.  If you worked in an industry of national importance you could twist the government's arm and it would cough up.  In their hearts I don't really believe the miners thought they could lose; not in the beginning anyway.

If you told miners today they were going to lose their jobs because their pits were uneconomic, they would fall over themselves to agree productivity changes; even a pay cut.  Anything to keep their jobs.

That's the measure of Thatcher's victory.  She didn't just beat the miners.  For good or ill she made everyone see the world differently.  This is why the revellers celebrating her demise misunderstand its significance.  Thatcher is dead; Thatcherism lives robustly on.

RIP Margaret Thatcher

In keeping with this blog's tradition of being bang up to date with cultural events, I have finally got round to seeing The Iron Lady, two years after its release.  And I began writing this blog having no idea that its subject had died the same day.

Watched with my wife and daughters, The Iron Lady provided a prime opportunity for a family row, thankfully averted by all parties' disinclination to have one - we were on holiday and, after all, a debate about whether Mrs Thatcher cut spending or raised it is hardly incendiary when compared to arguments about putting the loo seat down or leaving off the top of the toothbrush.

(Mrs Thatcher in fact raised public spending by about 1.4% p.a. per year in real terms, although in some years there were cuts, and some of the rise was attributable to the recessions at the beginning and end of her term.)

The Iron Lady occupied two hours pleasantly enough, without providing much political insight.  It focused instead on Thatcher's increasing dementia and her conviction that her deceased husband Denis was in fact still in the land of the living.  This was poignant, but of course speculative.  I doubt very much whether the director, Phyllida Lloyd, knew much more about Thatcher's mental health than you or I, but even if she knew a lot more, it was bound to be wrong in parts.  Moreover, Mrs Thatcher was still alive when the film was made, as were her children, one of whom, Carol, features heavily in it.

It strikes me a being intrusive and distasteful to show on screen someone living suffering from a mental illness, all the more so since her kids were still having to deal with its consequences.  It's a small point perhaps - the Thatcher children don't have to watch it, and the subject may well have been insufficiently compos mentis - but I thought the skill with which the film was made (Meryl Streep fantastic, and Olivia Coleman as Carol very nearly as good) couldn't disguise its essential tawdriness.

What about Thatcher herself?  I hated her while she was in office, like almost everyone of my class and politics did.  I suppose my feelings have softened somewhat since.  Mrs Thatcher demonstrated that the Government runs the country, rather than the Trades Unions, which strikes me as an unequivocally good thing.  The Unions have their members' interests at heart, which is fair enough, but those don't coincide with the interests of the country as a whole.

Thatcher did her best to demonstrate that the UK needed to pay its own way by encouraging business (a message just as relevant today), but faced with competition from the Far East there was precious little she could do about it.  The high interest rates she used to strangle inflation pushed up the value of the pound and wrecked British exports.  I think the worst thing she did was run a government which presided over two severe recessions.  The poll tax was unfair and a political disaster, but it wasn't exactly the slaughtering of the first-born.

The tragedy of the miners strike was that although other taxpayers couldn't realistically be expected to subsidise coal production indefinitely, the closure of the pits had the effect of wrecking whole communities. Brassed Off doesn't lie. These were terribly hard choices, but much easier to make when they weren't your communities or your voters.  I regularly gave money to the miners, but felt the strike was probably wrong.  Ultimately no country can afford to keep uncompetitive industries going forever.

So farewell Maggie T.  Like her or loathe her, she was a conviction politician who had a shrewd grasp of the direction industrial decline was leading the country; and moreover had a far better understanding of the lives of ordinary people than today's brillcreemed PR puppets.

Hugh Grant and Hacked Off

Next time you watch Notting Hill, enjoy the ironies of the scene where Hugh Grant masquerades as a reporter from Horse and Hound to gain access to Julia Roberts's Hollywood star.

Grant, like Steve Coogan and other Hacked Off celebrities, is trying to shackle the mass-circulation press at the same time as enjoy the benefits it brings him.  I doubt he has ever signed a contract for a movie which didn't require him to undergo a tedious pre-release publicity tour of precisely the sort lampooned in Notting Hill.  He wants to have it both ways.  He wants the lucrative and glamorous film work while wanting rid of the attentions of the mass-circulation press which helps plug the produce and fill the multiplexes.

Moreover, both Coogan and Grant have taken the Murdoch (and therefore the News International) shilling.  There is a limit to the number of hours in the day, but a very brief excursion to the University of Google reveals that Grant worked on Nine Months, a Twentieth Century Fox film, and much more recently Coogan has appeared in Fox's Night at the Museum films.  Grant says he regrets it now.  Easy to say once you've pocketed the money.

There is something deeply unattractive about this, but none of it would matter if these self-regarding people had not succeeded in persuading the leaders of all three major parties into doing their bidding on the press regulation front.

Clegg, Cameron and Miliband must be living in cloud cuckoo land.  The case for the new regulator rests on the proposition that the new regulator will succeed where the combination of the PCC and the criminal law previously failed.  But if the prospect of going to prison did not deter the phone hackers, nothing will.  Actually the hackers behaved as they did because it never occurred to them in a million years that people like them might end up in jail.

You can see something of their incredulity - what? us? - in the outraged reaction of Rebekah Brooks to the notion that she might face criminal charges.  There is a pleasing symmetry with Chris Huhne's attempt to get his prosecution struck out - how dare they prosecute a cabinet minister!  Don't they know who I am?  These prosecutions will do ten times the good the new regulator will.

If the hacking saga reveals anything, it is that the press will always ignore any regulator when it suits them, and that the most serious failings lie with the police, who were disinclined to investigate journalists for reasons which might well not be above suspicion.  As so often in public life, applying existing laws effectively, rather than dreaming up new ones, might be the way forward.

And the new regulator might do some harm.  Having a Royal Charter is better than primary legislation; but requiring a two thirds majority in parliament doesn't mean parliament can't interfere.  Recall that leaders of all three parties have connived to put us in this position - there's nothing to stop future parliamentarians tinkering about with it; in fact I hope the new body will be tinkered with if it doesn't work - but by then the question of regulation will be firmly in the domain of politicians.  Once there it will be impossible to remove.

And what of the papers that say they won't join in?  The Spectator has refused, and I would be quite surprised if Private Eye didn't follow suit.  It appears they will face exemplary damages if they lose libel actions.  That means facing closure.  Can anyone truly say, faced with exemplary damages which it will fall to the machinery of the state to enforce, that politicians haven't got their grubby fingers in this issue?

This is a fine example of Simpson's Law, which states that anything celebrities campaign for will almost certainly be A Bad Idea.  Horse and Hound probably won't suffer, but just about everybody else will.

The BBC's class calculator

It's official.  According to the BBC's Great British Class Calculator, I am one of Britain's elite.

I have filled in the online questionnaire (the Corporation has apparently "teamed up" with "sociologists from leading universities") and it turns out that I am one of the 6% that has some savings, listens to classical music and so on.

These surveys are easy to disparage, so here goes.

Firstly, if you want to tell the nation that the old three-class system is redundant, all you apparently have to do is think of some categories - fewer than three is difficult, obviously, so better plump for more - decide what people have to do to fit in them, and hey presto you have redrawn the class map of Britain.  The BBC is willing to "team up" with you, securing publicity and no doubt future funding for your "leading university".  So far so predictable.

What about the quiz itself?  There are only five questions, and it asks you things about money and leisure.  The question about money is ludicrously simplistic. It asks if you are a property owner, but not how big your mortgage is.  You could live in a small house with no mortgage or a bloody great mansion mortgaged up to the hilt.  A question about pension savings ignores the fact the average person, perhaps on a modest salary after a lifetime working in the public sector, is nevertheless sitting on a notional pension pot of about £500,000, way beyond the dreams even of most of the so-called "elite".

Other questions ask "Do you know any accountants?" and "Do you listen to hip-hop?"  Assuming for the moment that knowing accountants is socially desirable, and that hip-hop is less classy than classical music (it's different, but not necessarily worse), the survey nevertheless utterly misses the nuance which is at the heart of the British class system.  At its heart class isn't all, or even mostly, about money.

My wife, on whose coat tails I have slalomed into Britain's top 6%, drives a nine year old Vauxhall Zafira which requires the hands of an artist (me) to get going on a cold morning; our children go to a comprehensive school; she would rather cut her own leg off than vote Tory; she is an unreconstructed fan of brass band music; she tends the shared allotment of a weekend; and yet I would blush to list the legal honours which she now holds.  She is irredeemably middle-class, and yet lives a life style which in some respects is congruent with a much less affluent person.

It's that phrase "in some respects" which is the tell-tale.  The point about class is that the bare facts are complex and in any event only tell you so much.  Yes, it's partly about money; partly about lifestyle and interests; but it's also partly about attitudes, language and education (all ignored altogether in the survey).  It tells you something about how difficult class is to pin down when the poshest person I know, by a distance, has a black skin and was born on a Caribbean island.  But the compilers of surveys aren't interested in nuance - they want to put people in pigeon holes.

Quite a few of my friends are in the top 6%.  They are almost without exception ordinary people, some middle-class, some not, who happen to have good jobs.

A footling survey like this one might not even be worth the half an hour required to post about it, were it not for the fact that it gets column inches in the press and reportage in the broadcast media.  Politicians and the bien-pensant fulminate about Britain's inequality gap, as if they didn't help to create it.  The idea of a tiny minority creaming in the money at the expense of everyone else settles in the public imagination, like grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup.

It's an absurd over-simplification; and one I'll remember next time I can't get the car started.

The budget: the pimpernel of growth

Wherever you look for comment about the economy, the pundits tell you that George Osborne's policy is failing because there is next to no growth.  The impression given is that growth is out there, and it's just Osborne's wilful stupidity which is preventing us from getting any.

Leaving aside a consideration I've often mentioned previously (that growth isn't the only measure of economic success), this is wrong: actually all the evidence suggests that there probably isn't going to be much in the way of growth any time soon, no matter what the Chancellor does.

During the Gordon Brown boom, the main drivers of growth were borrowing by consumers, borrowing to buy houses and, after about 2001, government borrowing.  All these debt drivers are more or less exhausted.  Government spending is flat, consumers are retrenching and the housing market is stagnant.  Even if there were no other considerations, it would be irrational to look for pre-Credit Crunch growth levels.

But there are other considerations.  The EU is flat on its back.  How are we going to export our way out of trouble when one of our biggest trading partners isn't buying?

And yet despite all that, the commentariat generally assumes that if only the Chancellor could press the right buttons, pre-2007 levels of growth would return (incidentally, those levels of growth were distinctly modest - the trend rate was about 2.5%).  They remind me of those fabled South Sea cargo cultists, forever waving at passing aeroplanes from their balsa wood control towers, planes perhaps towing banners marked "Economic Nirvana".

What to make of this?  It seems to me that journalists reflect to some degree the views of the population at large, perhaps better informed in some cases but blinkered, prejudiced and lazy in others.

Most people in Britain know bugger all about economics.  Most people think "it was all the bankers' fault" without asking themselves what the bankers were doing (finding more and more ingenious ways to lend money to people that couldn't repay it).  Most people think we could return to pre-2007 levels of growth without asking themselves where that growth came from and whether the forces that drove it can be repeated.

Most people, in other words, don't understand that 2007 represented a watershed in the West's economic history.  We exported our wealth creating capacity to the Far East and the Credit Crunch represents a crisis in our ability to paper over the resulting funding gaps by borrowing from Far Eastern economies.

I worry what will happen when people work out the true significance of what has happened; and I worry a little more about what will happen if they carry on deluding themselves.

So, growth, the elusive pimpernel.  Elusive pimple, more like.

The budget: George Osborne serenades Fanny Mae

Nearly ten years ago, when the world was young, when Gordon Brown's boom sailed serenely on, when banning me from Comment is Free was just a gleam in Guardian moderators' eyes, I used to post on www.housepricecrash.co.uk.  A haven for fellow nutters, HPC did at least get one thing right - one of their top threads was entitled something like "Signs of credit tightening": for they thought that at some point it would become harder to get mortgages, and then property armageddon would take place.

And partly this was true.  Credit tightening, aka The Credit Crunch, did happen.  And the property market did stall, although it hasn't gone crashing to the floor in the UK - rising population levels have seen to that.

My own take was slightly more cautious.  I thought that people would always need houses, and that it was unlikely there'd be an outright crash.  But given how much economic activity flowed from the property market - solicitors, estate agents, surveyors, builders, decorators, DIY stores and so on - it did occur to me that a slowdown would hit GDP badly.

Not surprising then that George Osborne has cobbled together a cunning plan to kickstart the market, hoping that will get some growth going again.  There will be two schemes as far as I can see, to guarantee deposits for first time buyers and those trapped by negative equity. The cunning aspect is that the aim is to support new-build property, helping the construction sector, and because the Government isn't providing the loans, the money is off balance sheet.

Is it a good idea?  Well yes and no.  There might be some knock on into economic activity, but firstly, mortgage guarantee schemes can go badly wrong.  Does anyone remember Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac?  The Credit Crunch did for them.  US banks, knowing that the government would foot the bill if anything went wrong, lent indiscriminately.  Effectively UK taxpayers will be backstopping loans to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them.  This has an ominously familiar ring.

The second thing is that the effect will probably be to push house prices up, and house prices are too high anyway.  In the 2000s there was a massive misallocation of capital into property.  Gordon Brown took house prices out of the measure used to calculate inflation, with the result that their rocketing value was never reflected in the higher interest rates which would have dampened their ascent.  Ideally, some of the value needs to seep out of property and be better allocated elsewhere.  I have no doubt that day will come - in fact it's happening gradually everywhere apart from the South East - but Osborne's plan will slow it in and some places perhaps even reverse it.