A dull thud in the distance
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The Hail Mary Pass

May 11th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Economics | General | Politics | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

That’s how Stephanie Flanders describes the €750bn bailout for Greece and the other troubled economies of Club Med: it looks impressive, and it buys the Europeans some crucial time. But they may not like where the ball eventually ends up.


Europe’s leaders have wedged their heads firmly in the sand.

I think that’s wrong – I think that Europe has a very good idea of where this is going, but is trying to pretend that it doesn’t, so when it happens they can look as surprised as the rest of us.

Is the bailout itself good news? Undoubtedly. The shock-and-awe action, forcefully advocated against a resistant Europe by government economists from America, Japan and the UK, probably saved the Euro and prevented the trashing of the continental economy, as well as ensuring the domestic stability of Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy. There’s pretty much no question that strong action was required to prevent a global fiscal collapse, of the kind that would erase the precarious recovery that the world economy has enjoyed over the last six months.

The intent is not in question, then. But the manner is somewhat more dubious. The Freethinking Economist does a better job of explaining the perverse incentives that the bailout has created than I could – politics is my writ, economics is really just a hobby – but political questions about the process that underlies the action remain. To whit: why would the EU have pursued such a knuckleheaded approach when a better, simpler alternative was on the table?

Sadly, it seems to be a result of weak government, both of individual member states and of the EU apparatus of agreement by consensus. As Simon Johnson and Peter Boone give us a flavour of the problems that afflict the governance of the Euro in today’s FT:

Given the incentive problems in the eurozone, it is no wonder more nations want to join – the requirement is just to appear prudent for a few years. No wonder also that it blew up. Nations with profligate governments or weak financial systems have a bonanza; overall, this system encourages a “race to the bottom” – led by governments in smaller countries, which relax fiscal and credit standards to win re-election (or just to enjoy a boom). They borrowed funds from the (unnaturally) less profligate in the eurozone. The Germans were austere; the periphery enjoyed the boom.

The Germans were the only parties to the carve-up who had an interest in arguing for more a sensibly constructed bailout, but – not to put too fine a point on it – Angela Merkel botched it. She failed to prepare Germany for the necessity of a bailout, spinning from cool, popular disdain to agreement in a manner that bewildered and alienated her government and her country. She failed to articulate why the bailout was necessary for Germany and the Eurozone to support the Mediterranean’s failing economies. Many of Germany’s voters believed, and still believe, that clause 125 of the Lisbon Treaty – the one which mandates that there will be no bailouts for members who pursue reckless fiscal policy – was binding and should have been adhered to.

So Ms. Merkel has done the only politically expedient thing: joined the rest of her European collegues in pretending that the package’s obvious failings aren’t there. Germany has become a truly European state. Few are fooled; as Sunday’s result in North-Rhine Westphalia shows, Germany’s voters are inclined to punish their government for its prevarication, lack of leadership and deceit.

This bailout may have stopped the immediate contagion from spreading beyond Greece. But it has driven the longer-term rot deeper into the heart of the single currency, by reinforcing the system of perverse incentives and by undermining the will of Germany, the currency’s salward defender and balwark, to resist the excesses of its neighbours. More worrying is that Germany’s governing CDU is only one year into its term, and will likely not be replaced until 2013.

A bit of good news though: apparently UK manufacturing a booming, albeit from a low base. So that’s nice.

Finally, for those in the UK expecting a government to emerge soon, the chart below may prove instructive. Click for bigger.

#ge2010 – Prognostication

May 5th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Politics | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (1 Comments)

I PREDICT that the Tories will edge a tiny majority – 4-5 seats tops.*

I PREDICT that the Lib Dems will do well but nowhere near the giddy heights of mid April – 25% or thereabouts seems fair. Labour will come second by a thread.

I PREDICT that the next government, no matter what the outcome tomorrow, will have collapsed or been wound up within 18 months.

I PREDICT that the winner of this election will make themselves so unpopular that they will not win another election this decade.

*If they don’t, then I’d be prepared to bet that they still govern – either minority or in exchange for electoral reform.

#ge2010 – Endorsements

April 29th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Ephemera | Politics | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (2 Comments)

I’m working up the energy to make my final two long posts on the parties, their policies and their manifesto pledges – we have foreign policy, my personal pet peeve, and social policy, which promises to be highly subjective. I’ll get around to those, hopefully over the weekend, but first I’d like to speculate about endorsements.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Newspaper election endorsements – Murdoch
Newspaper 1997 2001 2005
The Sun Labour Labour Labour
The Times No party Labour Labour

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

Newspaper election endorsements – right-wing
Newspaper 1997 2001 2005
Daily Express Conservative Labour Conservative
Daily Mail Conservative Conservative Conservative
Daily Telegraph Conservative Conservative Conservative

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

Newspaper election endorsements – left-wing
Newspaper 1997 2001 2005
Daily Mirror Labour Labour Labour
The Guardian Labour Labour Labour
The Independent No party Labour Undecided

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

Newspaper election endorsements – specialist
Newspaper 1997 2001 2005
The Economist Conservative Labour Labour
Financial Times

Labour Labour Labour

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.

#ge2010 – Services: Education and NHS

April 21st, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (2 Comments)

A poster for the Frontline Service Club from the Korean War, showing a small map of the Injin River where it meets the DMZ and the surrounding area.

When a politician refers to “front-line services,” they are talking about a wide array of things. Firefighting, the Post Office, jobcentres, and embassies all qualify. But in truth, the politician is probably talking about something much more narrow. In politicianese, the term “front-line service” is really shorthand for two things: schools and hospitals.

If immigration is Britain’s equivalent to the bitter cultural clashes of America’s bipolar body politic, then schools and hospitals are more like the First Amendment: although arguments as to details may get heated, there remains a consensus across the political spectrum as to the overall direction of travel. If Britain is to succeed in the 21st Century, then education needs to be strengthened and broadened; and the NHS is part of our political and social heritage, and should remain well-funded and widely accessible. This level of broad agreement means that the debates surrounding school and hospital reform tend to be somewhat more advanced than those surrounding crime or migration – which can make “correct” outcomes hard to judge.

Schools
Despite the very best of intentions, schools have not done well under Labour. It’s a stark statement but not an unfair one; results have declined over the past decade. In studies by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, British 15-year-olds came well above the average in 2000, at eighth in mathematics and seventh in reading out of 27 countries. In 2006 they scored below the average in both, at joint 18th and 13th respectively. In science, at least, they remained above-average—but fell from fourth to ninth. The 2009 data are due but there is little evidence to suggest that they will to buck the trend.

One thing that the Labour years have clearly demonstrated is that this isn’t a spending problem. Real spending per student has doubled since 1997, to an average of £5,900 per student per year. School buildings have been improved and facilities extended; teacher pay has risen above inflation; teacher shortages, barring a few persistently problematic areas like mathematics and physics, are mostly receding, although tough schools in poorer areas can face a fearful struggle to attract a capable and qualified faculty. A lot of money has been spend on classroom assistants; a recent report (pdf) was critical of the impact that this influx of support staff has had.

Meanwhile, the Economist, amongst others, alleges that young talent has been ineffectively managed:

Able pupils have also been shortchanged. Labour has started and then wound down three schemes to stretch students in the top 5%, whether academically (“gifted”, in the parlance) or in music or sport (“talented”). Attempts to find some sort of talent in everyone, and teachers opposed to giving anything extra to those already doing well, scuppered each in turn.

While this feels like more of a political or philosophical point than one based in fact-based evidence, it’s noticeable that while all three parties have pledged to do more to support struggling students, there’s a general lack of willingness to engage with the question of how best to stretch those students whose capabilities exceed the necessary restrictions of classroom teaching.

That notwithstanding, the proposals for how to best support struggling students are mostly weak; Labour do promise to provide individual tuition for children who fall far behind their peers in primary school, but this is uncosted; the manifesto claims that:

This will include up to 40,000 six and seven year olds benefiting from extra tuition in English and Maths through ‘Every Child a Reader’ and ‘Every Child Counts’

but it’s unclear who would be delivering the extra tuition: existing teachers, classroom assistants, or additional resource. The Tories, however, seem to have a fairly narrow idea of what education needs; the manifesto devotes a measly 3 pages to it, mostly advocating a return to the 1920s – “better teachers and tougher discipline” seems to be the unifying theme. (Especially entertaining is the Troops to Teachers programme, in which the Tories envision ex-service personnel being retrained for the classroom – presumably to instil some barracks-yard drill-sergeant discipline into the youth of Peckham.) The Lib Dems are favouring the approach that they seem to have gone with in most of their manifesto promises – reach into the magic pot of Trident money and chuck it at the problem:

• Increase the funding of the most disadvantaged pupils, around one million children. We will invest £2.5 billion in this ‘Pupil Premium’ to boost education opportunities for every child. This is additional money going into the schools budget, and headteachers will be free to spend it in the best interests of children.

• The extra money could be used to cut class sizes, attract the best teachers, offer extra one-to-one tuition and provide for after-school and holiday support. This will allow an average primary school to cut classes to 20 and an average secondary school to introduce catch-up classes for 160 pupils.

The approach of targeting investment at schools that are struggling is welcome, especially after Tory and Labour proposals to link performance to results (apparently with the logical understanding that the way to fix schools with poor results is to give them less money), but it doesn’t hide the fact that the Lib Dems don’t really have any concrete proposals for actually improving performance: their manifesto contains such well-meaning emptiness as “improve discipline by early intervention to tackle the poor basic education of those children who are otherwise most likely to misbehave and become demotivated” – hard to disagree with but a long way from being an actual policy.

Having said that, both the Tories and the Lib Dems offer suggestions on how to recalibrate the curriculum (all Labour do in this field is promise to add a teacher training qualification for Mandarin). The Tories proposals are muddled (they promise a primary curriculum organised around subjects like English, Maths, Science and History; the current primary curriculum is organised around English, Maths, and Science) but they explicitly state a desire to make exams, particularly Key Stage 2 exams, harder. One interesting proposal is the suggestion that public schools would be free to offer international exams, similar to those offered by private schools, although one would hope that the governing principle would be a desire to ensure that GCSEs are competitive against these fancy international baccalaureates. The Lib Dems’ proposals are bolder. They would establish an independent body to regulate standards, incorporating OFSTED and replacing the existing (toothless) Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency. They would scale back Key Stage 2 examination, relying on teacher checking and ongoing assessment. They would remove the arbitrary distinction between academic and vocational education, and echo the Tory policy of allowing a broader range of courses and examinations to be offered in schools. Perhaps most radically, they would axe the National Curriculum, replacing it with a “minimum curriculum” upon which teachers can embellish. This last is bold, but probably problematic, as it raises questions of how testing will be standardised and whether tougher schools, with less experienced and qualified teaching staff, or smaller schools, in which the teachers already bear a greater burden for lesson design, will be able to offer as well-tailored a product as more affluent and better-resourced schools.

Teaching is not the sole driver of results, however. The way that schools are created, closed and run is also important. The Tories have their much-mooted Swedish policy, under which the decision on who gets to open new schools will be removed from the dead hand of local government. Parents, charities and other not-for-profit groups will be encouraged to create new schools that could be open by September. Funded by the state according to the number of children who attend, they will stand or fall according to their popularity with parents. Smaller, more expensive schools that local councils are ready to abandon could be rescued by a committed citizenry.

There are costs to this. Like the (existing, mostly popular) City Academies, this scheme will be expensive and will sit alongside the existing state school infrastructure, possibly to its determent. Discouraging well-intentioned and not-so-well-intentioned groups with agendas would be more of a burden here than in small, liberal Sweden. But the truth is that until it’s trailed, it’s hard to say how effective this will be. The one place where this will certainly be unpopular is the teaching unions, whose political power would be sharply reduced.

The Lib Dems are also keen on supply-side reforms but have no idea how to go about it; their policies mostly leave schools still dependent on local government, which means that they would struggle to seriously change how schools are instituted and funded. The manifesto speaks of well-meaning platitudes, such as an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day-to-day running of schools, but little of any concrete worth.

On higher ed, the picture in Britain still looks mostly positive. As discussed in a previous post, however, the Tories have policies in place that would dissuade lucrative foreign students from gracing Britain’s elite universities. Meanwhile, The Lib Dems have reinstituted their long-held policy of scrapping tuition fees, which is still a terribly policy that seriously undermines their credibility when it comes to universities. The Tories and Labour go the other way, and both parties are likely to back a raise in the cap it tuition fees from £3,000 to £5,000 per year.

This will be unpopular but may be necessary, given the lean years which are ahead. Labour argue that they missed their target, under which they aimed to send 50% of young people to University, by a whisker despite raising the levy to £3,000 in 2003; the UK’s system of student loans and grants meant that the raise actually affected admissions very little. And, to be fair, the higher education participation rate for young people from the most disadvantaged areas has increased every year since 2004. Labour have also intimated that funding for expansion of university places will linked to course types – science, tech, engineering and maths will all be promoted.

Conclusion
I have used my last two posts to talk down the importance of some major electoral issues – the economy and crime in particular. But education is genuinely important – probably the most important single issue at stake in the UK right now, and our long-term economic and cultural vitality is dependent on the right mixture of policy, infrastructure and regulation.

All three manifestos have some merit, as well as some obvious deficiencies. The Lib Dems’ approach to primary and secondary curriculum reform are probably the strongest; not just by default (Labour barely even have a policy on curriculum reform, and the Tories’ policy boils down to “whip them with nettles”) but because it contains ideas that are genuinely worth exploring, such as the flexible funding for school budgets. The Tories’ Swedish school commissioning model is interesting despite it’s potential pitfalls; although potentially expensive it could inspire some excellent results if implemented properly (neither Labour nor the Lib Dems showed up to this event). And Labour generally seem to have the strongest thinking on higher education and universities.

On the grounds that universities are generally doing reasonably well at the moment, I’m going to discount Labour on education; their manifesto reads more like a defence of their record than a serious or credible plan for reform at the mandatory levels. On education, then, it depends which area you think is important and what you’re prepared to hold your nose over. If you want a better commissioning model vote Tory; they probably won’t get their illiberal primary curriculum changes through parliament without a significant majority anyway. If you want better funded schools and a more rational approach to struggling children, vote Lib Dem – again, a tuition fee ban would never make it to law. I’ll probably do the latter but I don’t see the former as an entirely indefensible choice.

The NHS.
The health service has consistently been one of the three most important issues to voters since it was implemented over sixty years ago. This year is no different. What is different, however, is that broadly speaking there is consensus between the parties. There are no major policy objectives in this field; even the Lib Dems are saving their huge stack of Trident money for other areas.

The engine-tinkering is mostly minor stuff – all three parties have ideas about procurement, for example. The Liberal Democrats would have the Primary Care Trusts, which do the buying for hospitals, locally elected to give them more clout. The Conservatives would give GPs much more of a say by reviving the 1990s system of fund-holding, in which many GP practices had their own budgets for elective care done by hospitals. Both opposition parties would also drop or gimp performance targets; the government has been moving away from them of late suggesting that Labour would do the same. The Lib Dems would go farthest here, offering to cut the Department of Health by 50% (fun fact: I’m currently engaged in a downsizing project for a major Department, and cutting an organisation like that in half is much harder than you’d think). Labour and the Tories are also pursuing their bizarre world of perverse incentives here, threatening to use the payments system of the internal market to reward quality and penalise poor care – effectively taking money away from hospitals that are struggling.

One thing that is noticeably absent from the manifestos is closures and cuts. But some scaling back is not just demanded by the state of the economic climate, but also desirable. David Nicholson, who runs the NHS in England, thinks that by 2013 the service could wring 15% out of its budget, meeting increased demand with the same real resources. But pay would have to be held down and the workforce cut by around 10%. Some district hospitals would have to close, or do less. This will be unpopular but isn’t really a political issue. Expect whichever two parties don’t win to oppose it bitterly, and for constituency MPs of all strips to fume at length on local news programmes.

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Aside #1: On Typography
The Tories and Labour manifestos are both hideous on screen. They are clearly meant to be held and read in the hand; both go with dense, serifed fonts (Times New Roman for the Tories – suggesting that CCHQ doesn’t know how to change its defaults – and Book Antiqua for Labour). The Lib Dems’ manifesto is in a much more aesthetically pleasing Helvetica Neau. I may have mentioned in the past that there are good reasons and bad reasons for voting for or against a party. Typography is a good reason, and I look forward to punishing the Labservatives at the ballot box.

Aside #2: In Which I Discover Google Analytics
To the person who googled their way to this site asking “cet school tyumen good school?” the answer is: yes, as is the school in Nizhnevartovsk, or at least they were when I was there a year ago. On the other hand, the person who googled “did hassan steal the rubaiyaat from omar khayyam” – the answer to that is no, I’m afraid. It’s one of many narrative details that Amin Maalouf invented for Samarkand to make it a better story; the truth is that there probably never was an “original” Rubaiyaat – just a corpus of work that Edward FitzGerald pulled together and published, much of which is questionably attributable to Khayyam at best. Although Sabbah seems to have regarded Khayyam as an intellectual inspiration of sorts, it’s not entirely clear that they ever actually met in person, and there’s certainly no evidence to suggest that he was obsessed with Khayyam once Alamut became firmly established.

Push-polling

April 20th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Ephemera | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (1 Comments)

There’s been some chatting about a push-poll that YouGov allegedly put out as part of its daily tracker for News International. It was a quiet weekend so I can forgive that but it’s not plausible for any number of reasons.

Here’s the question:

Nick Cleggs says the other parties are to blame for the MP scandals, he has taken money from a criminal on the run, many of his MPs have been found guilty of breaking the rules and his own party issued guidance on how to fiddle the expenses system?

Firstly, that’s not a question. It’s a statement that has had a question mark stuck to the end. Secondly, YouGov would be out of their mind to publish such a flagrantly misleading question – it would trash their reputation and shut down their main competitive advantage: that they are the only firm posting daily poll results, which has gained them a phenomenal amount of publicity in this cycle. The key to this story is in today’s Guardian, where one of YouGov’s top brass have come out and stated that the question’s not actually from the tracker poll:

Anthony Wells, the YouGov political analyst running the poll over the weekend, said: “We test lots of messages and ask people in different ways to see which are the most effective ways to sell an idea. I cannot say who the client is but this was not part of the work we do for News International.”

The key point there is that YouGov (like every pollster) tests messages for whoever pays them to do so. This is part of their commercial business and is perfectly legitimate; they usually go out to small samples and are designed to see what happens to a generic voting intendion question when it is prefaced with the message in question that is to be tested. Polling firms are commercial businesses and political polls are usually posted at a significant loss; they are done as a form of advertising, to enhance the prestige of the firm doing the polling (especially if the polls turn out to be accurate) and to attract message testing work of exactly this sort. It’s not unreasonable to expect that all three parties are doing it, or have done it in the recent past; the Tories were just deeply unlucky to get caught out. I seem to recall that an episode of the West Wing dealt with this exact scenario.

Why the Tories? Well, whoever wants to test the message is testing the ground for a smear attack on the Lib Dems, and Labour don’t have any money. Another helpful clue is that the Tories have already overtly stated that they are using YouGov for message testing. It doesn’t take a genius to thus ascertain that someone in CCHQ is planning an assault on the Lib Dems’ change credentials. Whether this leak will deter them or not remains to be seen.

#ge2010 – Crime and migration

April 16th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - UK | Thorough Wonkiness - (2 Comments)

Immigration
Migration is Britain’s abortion. Nothing divides right from left in the UK in the way that immigration policy does; it engenders anger in more or less anyone who has an opinion on it. Polling data on the subject is surprisingly sketchy. One thing that we know for sure was that the Tory party ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket in 2005 and got thumped. Beyond that, the best I can do is a poll commissioned by the BBC in 2007. (You can use the hand to drag about, and the magnifying glass to zoom into and out of, the results table of the poll below.)

While Labour’s policies on immigration were heavily negative (72% against to 24% for), a slender majority thought that immigration helps the UK rather than harming it. A clearer plurality (37% to 27%) believed that immigration was specifically good for their community, although most respondents thought that it actually had no effect at all.

The idea that immigrants might pose a threat to public order and safety met with very low agreement (36%). On the ideas of immigration posing a threat to employment 52% agreed, 48% agreed that a lack of immigration might damage the economy. The most widespread agreement (62%) was with the idea that immigration might lead to Britain losing its identity. The young are far more pro-migration than the old; possibly reflecting any one, or a mixture of, the arguments that the young will need increased migration to pay for their pensions, the young have a markedly higher admiration for cultural diversity and a lack of investment in existing community structures, and the experience of the young shows that the idea of migration threatening employment is increasingly hollow.

So broadly speaking, the gap between left and right seems slight. Howard lost not necessarily because he argued for restricting immigration, but because he ran on an explicitly anti-immigration ticket; the position he occupied was fringe by the standards of Britain’s benignly migration-sceptic population. The positions of the three main parties are now broadly aligned with the will of the electorate: some migration, enough to keep the economy at a light simmer, just not too much.

This frothy summary masks deep divides.

The first big problem is the question of how much is too much. Britain once had one of the most liberal migration policies in the rich world, and migrants responded in kind – 5.6 million have entered Britain for a year or more over the last 13 years, and 1.6 million of them have been granted permanent residence. The population of the UK is set to rise to 70 million in the next two decades, and that worries many of those who already live in crowded, congested cities and have to cope with stuttery underfunded public services.

There is some irony to the effects that this has had. Recent curbs on migration have made truth of a lie. One of the earliest complaints against migrants was that the influx was causing British people to lose out on jobs, driving wages down and inflating unemployment. At the time this was a gross distortion, masking more deep-seated prejudices; most migrants were unskilled labourers, and Britain had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. There seems to have been some downward pressure on wages at the bottom end of the job market, but on one estimate they have fallen by less than 1%: the national minimum wage means that pay for people over 22 cannot legally go below £5.93 per hour, and many of these jobs were on that baseline already. The low-paid, outdoor, tiring jobs that Poles and Lithuanians have often taken are not ones that the long-term unemployed in Britain seemed wild about turning out for. Had Britain not imported the workers, it might have had to export the jobs. It became an issue regardless, however, and Labour reacted reflexively. The immigration controls that they implemented had the unintended consequence of making the criticisms that inspired them true, at least to a limited extent. By implementing curbs on unskilled migrants, Labour encouraged skilled migrants to arrive in the UK in greater numbers – most of whom settled down in congested London and rather than the parts of Britain that actually lacked labour.

That’s the preamble; what about the policy? Well, the Tories have proposed a tighter cap on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK annually, while Labour want another crack at implementing a points-based system (which would effectively also function as a cap, but with a more rigorous process of selection). The Lib Dems agree, but go further still, saying that they will have regional points-based schemes in which each part of the country will be able to calibrate its own priorities, ensuring that migrants are sent to the areas where they are most needed. While EU law reduces the flexibility that the parties have when dealing European migration, the Tories have stated that they would place an absolute limit on annual non-EU inflows, although this is a task made near-impossible by the time-lag in the publication of reliable statistics on migration. The Tories would also force foreign students to pay a “bond” upon entering the country, to be repaid when they leave. This is a deeply stupid idea that borders on the criminally negligent; Britain’s universities are almost entirely propped up by these students’ lucrative tuition fees, and disincentivising these students from coming to the UK can only have a negative impact on our education system and thus all aspects of our social and economic future.

A large part of the UK’s problems with migration is that much of the legislation has been knee-jerk, riddled with unintended consequences; and this is partly because the information that the UK generates and gathers about migration have historically been lacking. The Lib Dems have pledged to improve border recording. Labour’s ID cards, regardless of their other demerits, would have the effect of enhancing the information available on migratory trends. Labour also want to insist upon harder English tests for entrants and promise to ensure that all customer-facing public service workers have an “appropriate” level of English, acknowledging that the problem is as much one of perception as fact. The Lib Dems will use some of their Trident / Mansion Tax money to bolster the border guard.

Advantage? Still not the Tories, who stubbornly refuse to accept that a problem this complex needs a solution that is more nuance than “squeeze harder”. Not Labour, who really have no new ideas beyond the ID cards, which are troublesome for other reasons. The Lib Dems have an interesting suite of proposals; the regional points-based system, the enhanced border guards and the greater focus on data-gathering seem like a sensible half-step in the right direction, if implemented correctly. But in truth, all three parties deserve a lot of the blame for the fact that it’s impossible to have a sensible debate about migration policy in the UK. Some level of migration is clearly needed, but wanting to manage the way in which our economy handles that migration makes good tactical sense. All three parties need to abandon the more extremist elements of their rhetoric and devote some serious attention to the actual effects of immigration policy, and come up with a suite that meets the needs of the country. At present, none of them do.

Crime and policing
There are three issues at stake when talking about crime. The first is how to deter them, the second is how to catch those who won’t be deterred, and the third is what to do with them after that. Britain is average at the first, very good at the second, and lousy at the third.

First, I’ll look at the second part, because some errors in the electoral propaganda of both the Tories and Labour need to be straightened out. Crime has been falling in the UK uninterrupted for the last 15 years. It’s currently at its lowest rate since before World War 2, and is some 45% lower than it was when Labour took power. Violent crime, the crime that tends to excise, is at its lowest rate since 1991. Labour deserve a lot of credit for that, as do the police forces of the UK – particularly the Metropolitan Police in London – who have modernised their methods, drastically reduced the corruption in their own ranks, and increased the level to which their communities support them. People are generally much happier about the level of criminality in the UK than they were twenty years ago. However: crime is an election issue, because crime is always an election issue. ‘Twas ever thus.

The parties are thus fixing their sights downwards, at what is termed “anti-social behaviour”. The Tories plans are pretty anaemic; they want to crack down on bars that sell alcohol to children, increasing fines and making it easier to shut down repeat offenders. Labour have more teeth, but their policies remain avowedly statist; more benchmarks for chief constables to meet, including the power to sack police heads if they don’t “improve standards”. On the other hand, they have a stated policy to allow “restorative justice” – ‘where they are able to tell offenders directly how their actions affected them and accept an apology’ – which is a bit bewildering. The Lib Dems will put more police on the streets (that pot of Trident and Mansion Money is going to run out soon, guys), and will put prisoners to work in a policy that may just contravene several key facets of existing human rights legislation. Punishments for anti-social behaviour may also be devolved to local Justice Panels under Lib Dem proposals.

All parties agree that the paperwork and centrally-imposed targets designed by Labour to drive up standards must be reduced, to eliminate the perverse incentives that they created. The Tories would like to abolish the form that officers must fill in when they stop someone to search or question him; details would be speedily radioed back to the station instead. The police themselves are making some efforts to get a bit leaner: the head of Scotland Yard recently announced that officers in London would walk the beat alone, rather than in pairs, in order to increase the number of patrols.

Incarceration remains the big problem, however.

Britain’s prisons are underfunded and wildly overcrowded. Labour are taking an amusing shot at corporate fraudsters, insisting that high-earning offenders will need to foot the bill for their own incarceration. But the party that has done the most to come up with creative solutions to the problem is the Tories, who would sell off old prisons (which often occupy prime real estate) to finance the building of new, modern, larger prisons in more remote areas. The credit crunch may affect that policy but it still seems reasonable to expect that selling off Wandsworth Prison would easily finance a larger, more effective construction somewhere outside of the Home Counties. This should create a virtuous cycle; more space means better resourcing for rehabilitation, which means reduced recidivism.

The Tories are also planning, however, to initiate some upheaval in the current sentencing regime. They propose to scrap the automatic release on parole that many prisoners enjoy after service half of their sentence, forcing them to “earn” their early escape instead. What form this “earning” will take remains opaque, but it seems clear that this will drastically increase the prison population. Given the financial pressure the next government will experience, this policy seems unlikely ever to see the light of day.

When it comes to preventing crime and recidivism, all three parties are clearly constrained by budgetary priorities. All parties agree that more needs to be done to treat drug addicts rather than imprisoning them; Labour will support “family interventions” rather than implementing new policies. The Lib Dems and the Tories have both made vague promises about enhancing rehabilitation policies but there are no new ideas here.

The Lib Dems are generally not to be found on the issue of crime. Their claim of 3,000 more police is eye-catching but given the fall in crime, and the fact that the number of police officers has risen by nearly 30% in the last decade, suggest that it may even be overkill. Labour have some smart policies but their lack of ideas on prison reform is distressing. For that reason it seem to me that the Tories have the strongest suite of crime-related proposals.

#ge2010 – Leader’s Debate

April 16th, 2010 | Posted by Aosher in Ephemera | Thorough Wonkiness - (1 Comments)

Sadly I missed the debate last night – I was busy being wined and dined at Gary Rhodes’ swanky restaurant in Tower 41 – but it looks to have had as much impact as its advocated hoped.

There were quite a load of sketchy push-polls from various media outlets after the debate last night which will reflect the bias of their readership – the Sun, the Mail and Sky News all have particularly egregious entries. Happily, three proper polling outfits also took the temperature last night: YouGov, whose daily tracker has been the default for the election thus far, ComRes and Angus Reid. A slightly incredible poll from Populus also appeared in the Times – Populus are a legit outfit but their claim of a 61% Clegg victory just isn’t credible. That Clegg carried the night isn’t really in question but that lead is just a bit too fantastic.

The top-lines are as follows: YouGov has NC51, DC29, GB19. ComRes has NC 46, DC 26, GB 20. Angus Reid has NC48, DC20, GB18. Over the span of the three pollsters that’s probably strong enough to take with a degree of confidence – it’s worth noting that the YouGov panel didn’t allow for respondents to select “Undecided” or “None”, which is why Clegg and Cameron have slightly higher scores (and which suggests that Brown’s 20% is pretty much stable).

Angus Reid has released its table – which is still being updated so you’ll have to excuse me if the numbers have shifted slightly in the interim, although I’m fairly confident that the themes will prove to be static. You’ll immediately see that Clegg has by far the most support from his own party – 81% of Lib Dems got behind their leader, while the Labour faithful backed Brown only 51% of the time. What should really worry Cameron is that he only kept 46% of Tories with him. Conservative panel members were slightly more likely to approve of none of them than Lib Dems or Labourites, but couldn’t match the skepticism of those who went into the debate undecided. Clegg drew over 30% of each of the other major parties’ support, suggesting that any poll bump will be drawn equally from both sources. He also hoovered up over 50% of the independents on the panel.

All in all, 43% said that they would be more likely to vote for Clegg in the aftermath of the debate. The post-debate analysis may push that number up, especially if a dominant media narrative springs up and starts to drive some momentum in the Lib Dem’s direction. The Dems can also probably expect a bit of a funding boost off of the back of this. There’s talk this morning of the Lib Dems having a credible shot at second place; at the moment I think that’s fanciful, but there are still two more debates and plenty of events ‘twixt cup and lip.

November 13th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (1 Comments)

The nature of the activity that the term “political correctness” describes is difficult to neatly define. The term “political correctness” is, of course, deeply unhelpful; it is a process that is neither directed nor overseen by politics or political bodies, although laws and legal institutions may respond reactively to it. Furthermore, it seems to me that it describes a correctness, or an orthodoxy, only insofar as it casts a shape by opposition. It is a social process, and one that is concerned primarily with ruling out that which is unacceptable in its midst, not with carving commandments into graven slabs on the mount.

Broadly speaking, political correctness is the process by which society is currently re-evaluating the extent to which it finds certain acts and ideas tolerable and permissible. The term “Culture of Tolerance” has been suggested in its place, despite it not always being particularly tolerant; was the headscarf ban in France an act of toleration? Anne Applebaum dubbed it the “European Project”, which is only somewhat satisfying, as it is not a process that is necessarily bound to Europe. Its roots, however, most certainly do lie in that continent, and its impulse to both forget and atone for its past. In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West,Christopher Cadwell writes:

Avoiding another European explosion meant, above all, purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with “nationalism” understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism and cultural chauvinism – but also patriotism, pride and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans”.

Cadwell’s thesis is that it was this traumatised recoil from the close, bloody proximity to history that Europe had enjoyed in the early 20th Century that became the foundation upon which millions of Muslims came to build their lives in Europe, bringing with them, unchallenged, many of the exigencies that have come to define the inter-communal friction that has afflicted Europe over the last half-century. And he has a point. In no other location at any other time would the migration of so many people, from so many radically different cultures, have been permitted as it has here. The Europe that shunned the stark divisions of colonialism and cultural absolutism could not allow itself to deny migration on the basis of cultural difference, any more than it could bring itself to apply a standard upon those who it had enticed.

While it does Cadwell a disservice to reduce his nuanced, well-considered arguments in such a fashion, this does hint at the roots of what we today call “political correctness”. The problem is not, and has never been, one of illegal or illegitimate migration; the Home Office accounts for maybe 400,000 illegal migrants at large in the UK, but the number of legitimate refugees in the UK has recently crested 3 million, and the number of legal migrants is greater still. This rapid rebalancing of the cultural mix cause a friction to develop within Europe; not just between the newcomers and the hosts, but within the host cultures themselves – between those who clung to the European Project, and worked to embody its principles of inclusively and cultural relativism, and those who espoused a new (or a return of the old) nationalism, demanding that those who arrived, integrate. It was this duality of response that led to refugees becoming, as Georgio Agamben would have it, homo sacer*; in a society which could not agree upon a consistent response to the issues raised by migration and political asylum, these lives became politically untouchable.

Attempts to resolve the issues arising from this dichotomy have been incoherent. The aforementioned headscarf ban was notorious in Europe but elicited interest beyond not for its severity but for the haphazard way in which it was implemented. To ban a scrap of cloth is clearly illiberal, which is why the French authorities argued that it was being banned as the symbol of an aggressive international political movement. Instead of simply banning on that basis, however, the French government felt the need to make the law inclusive – and thus banned religious paraphernalia across the spectrum, including “large crosses” and yarmulkes. There was never any illusion or doubt that the law was directed at, or intended to target, anything other than the Islamic headscarf. But the European project mandated that any action against one group must be carried out against all others, in equal measure. The irony here is that the law worked; even though the law has been in effect for only a short while, integration is perceived to have improved significantly. But the cautiously inclusive way in which the law was framed was completely ineffective at muting Islamic resentment against it, which was still – naturally – regarded as a hostile move specifically targeting France’s substantial Muslim population (which is effectively what it was) – meaning that the rights of the Christian and Jewish populations were curtailed for no worthwhile reason.

But for all its frequent stupidity, incoherence and hypocrisy, the European Project remains a worthwhile pursuit. For all the cultural and social tension it may have caused, it has undoubtedly prevented far worse; a those chauvinists who have argued for a responsive rise in European Christianity unwittingly demonstrate. A religious revival may be good for the souls of Europe’s flocks, administered as they are by a faith that is both fragmented and bloated, and hamstrung by a society fixated on cultural passivity; but what virtues it may have in its own right do not even begin to account for its value as a “response” to the rise of Europe’s Muslim influx. Who would seriously argue for a renewal of religion conflict in Europe?

The European Project is not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. It simply needs to hold the ring until the still-unhealed fractures in Europe’s post-war psyche finally knit together. Migrant societies cannot be held accountable for the divisions that have existed in this post-war continent; for every Abu Hamza there are multiples, many multiples of examples of Muslim migrants who have migrated seamlessly into secular European culture: the sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani entrepreneurs of London, and individuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Europe’s ills are self-inflicted; they are the ailments of a culture that has lost its sense of self. Politicising migration in response to this is a straw man. To paraphrase The West Wing, the culture which gave us Shakespeare doesn’t need defending, any more than the cultures that gave us Balzac, Hesse or Calvino.

There are historical precedents for our migratory state; the habit of importing spouses from the old country was practiced by American immigrants (Jewish, Irish, Italian), many of whom remained in isolated, internally cohesive communities for three or more generations. The fingerprints of those communities remain still, but they nevertheless integrated, and the reasons for this should give Europe hope. The integration of America’s subcultures came about through a shared dream of prosperity – a dream that required a firm grasp of English to realise. Europe may lack the more deeply conformist aspects of American society, but it certainly has no lack of wealth or culture to entice the young and dissatisfied members of migrant communities – and history has shown that, once assimilated, it’s very hard for a community to un-assimilate. It is this structural strength, borne of working through the issues of migration the hard way, that have allowed America to bring its true demons to light. 8 years may seem like a long time, but the institutional paralysis that Europe would have encountered in similar circumstances hardly bears thinking about.

But if I appear to optimist in asserting that Europe’s migratory issues will resolve themselves, given enough time, then let me temper that with some pessimism. The abrasive rift within European culture caused by the implementation of the European Project is a real problem, and cries of “political correctness” from disaffected Daily Mail editorialists cannot be simply dismissed as the belated death-throes of a class dreaming of defunct colonial privilege. If they are to succeed in preserving the bedrock of European unity for future generations to build upon, then those who carry the flag of the European Project need to change some of the ways in which they operate.

First, there is a need for objectives to be debated, discussed, clarified and understood. Awkward kludges like the French burka ban help no-one; either ban the burka or do not, but do not allow the ideals of equality of temperance to resolve into incoherence or trivial platitude. It is from this farcical, maniacal adherence to principle in the face of situational reality that fuels dissatisfaction with political correctness, as much as the erosion of civil liberties or the shame of a national identity in perceived retreat.

Second, common ground needs to be established and understood. It is not impossible to be nationalist and still tolerant; it is not contradictory to support a national team and still oppose chauvinism and racial hatred. The rhetoric of national pride and competitiveness still needs to change; the Lord knows that I roll my eyes when French- or German-baiting is indulged in by those of my kin who follow English football or European politics. But sarcastically supporting the Scottish team is not an appropriate or helpful response to that. The middle ground is a field of dreams; if you build it, they will come.

And finally, it needs to be understood that the questions of race and migration are a battlefield that has been played out. The conflict over the future of the soul of Europe is not between the indigenous populations and their immigrant guests; it is an internecine dispute and not one that needs to be mortal. The migrants are here and their fate is their own, and, with luck, they will add to the richness of the future of Europe. What kind of future that is remains to be seen.

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As an aside; my good friend Charly has joined myself and Kate as bloggers of distinction. Charly makes cakes that are both edible and incredible, and Kate’s design blog is the kind of site that gives you the warm happies when you’re stuck at work on a miserable November afternoon. Go; read; enjoy.

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*In Ancient Rome there existed the legal concept of homo sacer, the sacred life – an entity legally defined as an exile under the law, someone to whom no law applied and who could claim the protection of no rights. The law applied to them only insofar as it was forbidden to use them as a ritual sacrifice; any other act against them – including killing them – was permitted.

To be rendered homo sacer was a punishment; the sacred nature of this mode of life was cast as a disparagement. Clearly, there are benefits to choosing to live outside of society, but for the Ancient Romans, they were outweighed by the determents of being stripped of all rights conferred by a system of law and a social compact.

Agamben argued, quite successfully, that refugees enjoyed a similar status in modern Western society.

It’s been a while since I posted…

August 19th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

And I’ve been thinking largely about historic truth.

If you ask most people to give as detailed a history of humanity as they can, most would go: monkey, caveman, cradle o’ civilization, ancient Egypt, China over there, blurblelug, GreeceRomeMiddleAgesBritishEmpireAmerica. And that’s fair enough, because it’s our history; the history of the “civilised west”. The Eurocentric version of history won, or at least has ascendancy at the moment, because Eurocentric version of society won, because Eurocentricism won its wars and now gets to teach  the students who go on to write the history books. The victor’s justice of history: an obvious point but one that occasionally deserves to be revisited.

But when we talk about historic victor’s justice, we tend to think about in in limited terms. We think about Neuremberg, and whether we’d like the Nazis more if they’d won; we think about Charles Taylor and the ICC; we think about America and whether it truly understands the cultures of the countries it invades, and whether history will accord Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay the weight they deserve. But history’s bias towards victory is much more far-reaching than that; it affects our entire world view. Michael Hastings at True/Slant gives a demonstration of this in his review of District 9, in which he expounds on the nature of English language political and social discourse on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Our government’s language is teeming with condescension when discussing Iraqis and Afghans, as if they’re not quite complete humans, child-like, and certainly not really civilized. Their lives are not valued as much as Western life–in economic terms (the families of Iraqis or Afghan who get accidentally killed during get a payout of around $3000; the family of a Westerner, military or civilian, who gets killed will get around $500,000) and in how we process the daily death totals. (Politicians always mention the 4,500 Americans who’ve died in Iraq, but rarely give more than perfunctory acknowledgment to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.)

The very metaphor for our strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is so casually offensive that it’s somewhat astounding that it passes through our lips without comment. Usually it’s summed up by American officials like so: “The Iraqis are on a bicycle and we’re holding the bicycle seat until they’re ready, so we can let go.” Or: “It’s like we have training wheels on their bicycles, and we can leave once we take the training wheels off.”

This echoes the way that we often refer to people from “hot places” – and by minimising them in this manner we pave the way for an oversight of the historical worth of their culture. It is somewhat true that all history is, to some extent, ‘-centric’;  it has to be, as a history can never really be comprehensive, the scale of the task is too big. So we narrow it down, by region and era, and take it from there. You can ask, “What would a Native American-centric explanation look like? What would an Afro-centric explanation look like?” but the answer would be too obvious: they would tell the story of the development of the civilisations of Africa or Latin America, and only deal with Europe when it impacts those stories; after all, we don’t have to simply focus on history’s winners. And it’s legitimate to ask whether, given that all history is at least slightly -centric, and that the story of European history has to be told, why Eurocentricism has to be classified as a criticism. After all, a large part of the justification for the idea of the nation-state is that it preserves the culture, identity, language and history of the nation it serves. Insofar as an obligation to record Latin American and African history exists, it lies with Latin America and Africa; the duty of European scholars to record that history extends only so far as it takes to explain its impact on our own history. So long as we can do that respectfully and without jingoism then we have done all that is required of us.

But there is an untruth to that, and in that untruth lurks an imperative. In our military and political worlds, we have a concept called the “Responsibility to Protect”. This (admittedly contested) doctorine states that a nation has the right to intervene on behalf of a people whose government either will not protect them from grevious need, or which is directly oppressing them. Why is there no comparable ideal in history? During the Early Middle Ages, learning in Europe was a complete bust. The intellectual and social rout was complete, and all of Europe’s history was profoundly lost. The only reason why we know anything of Europe pre-1200 or so is because there was an external superpower who was minding our business better than we were. The scholars of the Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate painstakingly transcribed and preserved the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates; they kept and treasured the history of Europe, even though it had had almost no direct influence on the development of the Caliphate itself. Our entire knowledge of the world exited Europe via Byzantium and spent centuries making its way around the Mediterranean, through Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Carthage and finally back into Europe through Cordoba.

By enshrining European knowledge, the Caliphate did the entire world a courtesy, one which Europe and, later, America have been tepid in returning.

Take Africa. A cat may look at a king; but the poorest, bloodiest, most corrupt and least densely populated continent by a long margin cannot fairly be compared to Europe. They seem to be worlds apart. Why is that? In the short term, we talk about colonialism, but that’s a code, because we still think of the European invaders rounding up chieftains in grass huts full of yams. There is a reason for this: it is because sub-Saharan African history is virtually unknown to us except as an extension of European history. The history of an entire continent is basically lost to us – not just because modern historians have been more interested in Louis XIV (aka the most awesome king in history) but because history throughout the ages has been homocentric, and Africa has never had a chance to record Africa’s history. The earliest we can go with confidence is the Kingdom of Mutapa, which was founded in 1450 in the area that is now Zimbabwe and which was attacked by the Portuguese – pre-guns – who were trying to establish a trade route to India. The history that has been preserved for us is the Eurocentric ideal: it has no context beyond what our historians have given it.

Which gets to my second point: Eurocentricity is one thing, but our obsession with our victor’s history has caused us to reflexively overlook another cause. The Caliphate was not restricted to the Mediterranean coast. The main reason why Portugal and Mupata clashed, rather than coming to a peaceful trading agreement, is because the Mupatanese government was Muslim. We have no idea what the southern extent of the Caliphate was, and even if we did, we would have no idea how its influence had spread within Africa, because those historical records don’t exist. When we talk about the Caliphate, we fixate on the geography of the empire itself, and this grossly overlooks the human and cultural dimensions of what it achieved.

Thirdly, these two misunderstandings – Eurocentricism and geography-fixation – have led to you a conclusion that is false. Because we do have a little bit of pre-European knowledge of Africa, mostly thanks to Caliphate historians and architectural digs. In the aftermath of the Bantu expansion, the Monomatapa kings (the precursors to the Mutapa Kingdom) built a city called Great Zimbabwe. It stood for 300 years, covered seven square kilometres and has a population of around 20,000 at its peak, making it significantly larger than London was at the time. It was the centre of a trade network that stretched from China to Arabia and possibly even to South America. With Great Zimbabwe, we can prove that as of 1400 AD, sub-Saharan Africa was as technologically advanced as Europe – not ‘noble savages’, not victims of geography, but genuine contenders for the mantle of future leaders of the free world. Portugal could not beat Mupata. Portugal’s generals are recorded as having described it as “invulnerable”. Mupata collapsed through infighting and domestic politiking, and so thrust sub-Saharan Africa into its present dark age.

Europe is not alone in having suffered dark ages; Latin America is only decades removed from its own, and Africa is still deep in its clutches. The reason why Eurocentricism is a criticism is because European history doesn’t need protecting. It is as complete as it possibly can be, but for lucky finds and interpretation; but more African, Middle Eastern and Latin American history is being lost by the day. History is written by the victor, but only because the losers have a few other things on their hands, so under the circumstances, it surely doesn’t hurt us to be a bit more magnanimous with our resources.

Food and trade

March 10th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

In the mid fifteenth century, the Venetians were the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean. Following the sacking of Genoa, they had no meaningful rivals when it came to the sea’s lucrative trade routes, and the Ottoman overthrow of Byzantium and the destruction of Armenia meant that overland trade with Asia Minor was all but impossible. Operating mainly through Beirut and Alexandria, Venetian ships more or less single-handedly represented Europe’s market to the old world.

In these two ports, everything was traded – the goods brought overland from India and China along the Silk Road – Persian gums, precious stones – copper and incense from the south of the Arabian peninsula, ivory, pearls, fruit and cloth from north Africa. But one commodity stood above the rest, commanding prices put all of the others to shame, and that was spice – more specifically, pepper.

What the spice trade meant to Europe can be read upon the pages of any medieval account or cookery book. In spite of the perverse vagaries of the Mameluke Sultans – whose greed could send prices soaring on a whim, and whose uncertain tempers and squalls of fury could inflict upon a patrician Venetian a flogging, as if he were a slave – to the Republic, the rewards were well worth the costs. German, French and English consumers would pay whatever prices were demanded for as much spice as Venice could supply.

But, in 1487, Batholomew Diaz became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and before the end of the century Vasco de Gama proved the viability of a sea route to Calicut. This was apocalyptic for the Venetians; a pilgrim’s journal of the time notes that “all the city of Venice was greatly impressed and alarmed, and the wisest men held that this was the worst news that could ever come to the city.” Sure enough, by 1502, the Venetians found that there was no spice to be found in Alexandria. The Portuguese had stolen the trade, although the English would later steal it from them in turn, and Venice’s star was on the wane.

I find this interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I think that cooking – the desire to source new, exciting ingredients and have them delivered fresh – is underrated as a motivator when it comes to understanding geopolitics. It only recently that, for the first time in human history, the most commonly internationally traded resource had not been a foodstuff; coffee, the erstwhile leader, still accounts for phenomenal quantities of shipping every year. To those who say that the current banking crisis somehow proves the inviability of capitalism as model, that this is the end of the supremacy of the market, I can only say: human behaviour is economic behaviour. As long as people need to eat, international trade will be at the forefront of or politics, our society, and our world. A few fewer banks and a few fewer bankers won’t change that; there still will be banks and traders and investors, because at the end of the day, people will always need pepper, and that’s the bedrock upon which international trade is built, not mortgages. The mortgage trade may seem like a lot when your fate is directly linked to interest rates, but it’s peanuts compared to how the peanut sellers roll.

Secondly, it illustrates what a harsh mistress that very market is. Both Venice and Portugal had their dreams of glory dashed on the spice trade; then, as now, the Middle East proved to be an unreliable trading ground. In the context of this history, it makes sense for America to pursue their ethanol dream. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the rest of the world is allowing them to do so. If the Brazilians have developed, in sugar cane ethanol, a fuel that is four times more efficient than America’s corn ethanol at the same cost, a fuel which many believe has the potential to be as efficient as gasoline, and a fuel which impacts global food supplies in no way at all, then why isn’t China, or Russia, or the EU, investing in it?

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The food crisis

November 11th, 2008 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (3 Comments)

It is reasonably clear that the world is in the grip of a prolonged and aggressive food crisis. Since 2005, there have already been food riots in more than 30 different countries. Paul Collier, a Professor of Economics at Oxford, claims that the price of food has jumped by 83% in that time – a price rise that the rich world has largely absorbed, but which has had horrific ramifications on the inhabitants of less developed nations.

 

While this is a severe problem, it is in fact less complex than many problems of similar scale; however, it is beset by misunderstanding. Effective solutions to world hunger exist, but they are impeded by a mixture of ignorance, romanticism, populism and cynicism. Tackling the issue requires a candid look at the effects of food prices, and an understanding of the mechanisms that can be used to control them.

 

Firstly, it is necessary to look beyond root causes. There is a general ignorance surrounding the question of how food prices have risen so high, so quickly, but the answer is actually relatively straightforward. This drive in food prices was caused by the rapid pace of economic develolment in Asia, which houses over half of the worlds population. Although still poor (the average resident of Asia devotes over half of their budget to food), this population is rapidly getting richer, and thus their demand for food is increasing. Not only that, but it is becoming more intensive; grain-based carbohydrate diets are being upgraded to protein-rich habits, and as it takes six kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, this is having a significant effect on demand. The solution to the problem of food prices can thus be effectively uncoupled from its cause; short of making Asia poor and malnutriated again, food prices cannot be controlled by reversing the stimulus that caused them to rise. 

Secondly, we need to look at who actually suffers the most from high food prices. Causes such as Fair Trade and Red have become popular in the rich world over the last decade, mostly as a result of the famines that struck Africa in the later part of the twentieth century and thus off of the back of movements such as LiveAid. However, they operate on an underlying assumption that is broadly incorrect: the Africans in agrarian communities are the real losers of the world food lottery. Admittedly, African farmers tend to do rather less well out of high food prices than their Western counterparts, mostly because the markets that they serve are unresponsive to global food prices. However, farmers do have two rather large advantages when it comes to surviving food crises. Firstly, they are growing their own crops. Regardless of what happens to the food market, they can always ensure that they themselves have something to eat. And secondly, they have the World Food Program, a buyer of last resort in famine years who can prevent a failed crop from being a catastrophe. Now, the World Food Program is not a prefect institution. Its budget is set in dollars, not bushels, so it is less capable of responding when food prices are high (as they are now) – ironically making it much less effective during times of global food shortage. Farmers are still vulnerable to famine, drought, and crop failure. But they are still comparatively well off; provided that they manage to eke out a crop, the current food market actually works in their favour.

 

Comparatively well off, that is, to the urban poor, who are the real losers when it comes to high global food prices. In the cities of the developing world (typically ports), the slum-dwellers and underpriviliged must spend on food a proportion of their income five times greater than that of their wealthier neighbours. Because they have no recorse to their own subsistence farming, they are accutely vulnerable to price shocks. Ironically, it is these urban workers who have the greatest economic impact; keeping them fed will have a far greater impact on the relative wealth of nations than proping even agrarian sectors. This is the problem that I’ve always had with Fair Trade; it seems to me to be a vehicle for exporting western agrarian romanticism, when what the developing world needs is a more pragmatic look at what is required, and accordingly targetted stimulus to make the most difference. 

 

Sadly, the victim’s victim in this case is the children, who are by far the most likely to go hungry. If a child remains malnourished for more than two years, the concequence is almost always stunted growth – an uncurable lifetime of physical and mental disability, and potentially a genetic factor for the next generation. The food market has been tight for three years already; a short-term solution is clearly needed.

 

Solutions are possible – no, it would be better to say that solutions are already potentially present. The world already produces more food than it requires. Supply needs to be boosted, as the population will keep growing, but the economic mechanisms that control the matching of supply and demand for food need to be reformed. The impediments are threefold: public romanticism, political populism and economic cynicism.

 

I’ve already touched on western agrarian romanticism, but to make my point more explicit here: the West needs to end its love affair with farmers, both its own and those in the third world. The “buy locally” movement in Europe and America is commendable, but Britain, America, France and countries like it all produce radically more food than it could ever consume, largely thanks to government subsidies and farmers union pressure on quotas, each of which have broad appeal amongst the population at large. This, however, is special treatment, and it is distortative. If these policies were being put in place for houses instead of grain, then the outcome would be ruinous. Subsidising grain is more acceptable than subsidising houses, for two reasons; firstly, because of the rural idyll; and secondly, because subsidised surplus grain can always be dumped – unsubsidised surplus grain, of course, would have to be sold, overseas if need be, thus easing the pressure on global prices. Farming in the west is not a competitive business; it is not exposed to normal market forces. It needs to be; small farmers are inefficient, while larger organisations, with better investment and more robust defenses against the vagiaries of the market, will help to lower prices at home and thus around the world. There will always be demand for local produce, free-range chickens and organic vegetables; and thus, there will almost certainly always be supply. However, small-scale farming in the rich world is an increasingly harmful anachronism. 

 

Public fetishisation of farmers leads to political populism – always a baleful influence but especially malign in the farming sector. From corn subsidies for ethanol in the US to the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe, governments throughout the rich world are responsible for some deeply flawed policy-making in the name of fuelling agrarian romanticism. Worse than that is the pandering that is offered to those afraid of agricultural science. Some 300m acres of the world’s crop area, a full 10%, house genetically modified crops. There is still no evidence of any kind to suggest that it may have any negative effects at all, a decade after the science was globally introduced. But still, almost none of that land is in Europe or Africa. Needless to say, this has had a profound effect on supply, in the continent that would benefit from increased supply the most. 

 

Economic cynicism is fuelled by those bodies that benefit the most from the status quo – governments that put export caps on domestic grain, for example, forcing crops to be dumped in order to keep international prices high, or lobbying groups that keep markets restricted and subsidies in place. It is this behaviour that has led to Brazilian sugar ethanol – far more efficient than corn ethanol and significantly cheaper, and greener, to produce – being restricted for import into the US. This, however, is not an area that is likely to change. Economic cynicism will always exist and is essentially uncombatable. It can, however, be worked around.

 

Paul Collier suggests three immediate policy changes that would reverse the trend in food prices quickly: expand large commercial farms, end the ban on GM crops and do away with US subsidies on ethanol. The end of ethanol subsidy would hopefully sharply reduce the rate at which crop prices rise, due to the influx of American corn that would be swiftly re-inserted into the global market. The expansion of farms and the wider imposition of GM crops would increase production over the course of the next decade to ensure that prices stay controllable. I would add three more: ending the CAP in Europe and liberalising trade agreements between Europe and Africa, allowing more food to come into Africa from outside but not so artificially priced that it destroys the local markets, and reforming the World Food Program, allowing it to buy and sell food with greater and more targetted efficiency.

 

Politically, all of these propositions are difficult, especially in these times of economic crisis; old industries, such as farming and manufacture, gain significant lustre when banks and house-prices start to take a tumble. However, the arguments for all of them are rational and sound, while the arguments against them tend to be emotional and easily countered. I await a politican with the principle to do the necessary – John McCain looked useful on ethanol subsidies, but I severely doubt that Barack Obama will step to the plate. If the mark of a good politician is the ability to guide citizens away from populism, then I hope that a good politican emerges soon, because there are a few romantic illusions that urgently need shattering.