Is Net Neutrality good for permission-less innovation?
Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should treat all content (from Netflix and YouTube to this very blog) equally. Advocates of Net Neutrality typically back regulations that ban ISPs from charging companies like Netflix extra for access to fast lanes.
There’s a number of reasons that Net Neutrality advocates back additional regulations, but probably the most important is the idea that a ‘neutral’ net will lead to more innovation. For example, take this op-ed in Wired magazine. The author argues for Net Neutrality on the grounds it will support permission-less innovation, he writes “the neutral and level playing field provided by permission-less innovation has empowered all of us with the freedom to express ourselves and innovate online without having to seek the permission of a remote telecom executive.”
But this argument confuses permission-less innovation, the idea that creators shouldn’t have to ask for permission from gatekeepers (regulators, ISPs, etc.), before launching a new product, with the idea of paying gatekeepers from a publicly available menu of prices. It’s true you couldn’t launch a Netflix competitor without access to broadband subscribers but it’s equally true that you couldn’t reach consumers without electricity. Yet we typically don’t act as if Google has to seek the permission of British Gas or EDF.
It’s true that vertically integrated ISPs could hurt innovation by blocking access to competing services (e.g. Sky forcing Netflix to pay a big fee to access end users). But two things should work against this.
First, if an ISP blocked Netflix or Amazon or any other service they would lose customers to rival ISPs. According to OfCom 95% of UK premises have a choice of 3 or more ISPs. It’s not clear that ISPs have the market power in the first place to block a rival service.
Second, competition law exists for a reason. If an ISP were to pursue such a nakedly anti-competitive move, they would soon be censured by the Competition and Markets Authority.
We shouldn’t ban a practice simply because it could be used for anti-competitive ends. After all, cutting prices can be used to drive out competition. We should only restrict practices if they are almost always likely to restrict competition, otherwise we would end up restricting business practices that have real benefits to consumers.
It is just as easy to see how a practice of charging Netflix, Amazon or Google for access to fast lanes could help consumers. ISPs could use the extra-revenue from web services to cut prices for broadband subscribers allowing them to expand market share. It might also encourage greater investment in under-served rural areas. Economist Hal Singer notes that capital expenditure from ISPs fell in the US the year after the Open Internet Order was passed.
Tim Wu, the legal scholar who first coined the term, argues that Net Neutrality is a subsidy to creators from consumers.
“A more accurate description of a ban on payments from content providers to Internet intermediaries is this: it is a subsidy to the creative and entrepreneurial at the expense of the passive and consumptive.”
Wu, accepts that Net Neutrality likely raises prices for broadband subscribers but argues that is a price worth paying for the innovation created by tech companies launching new and exciting services online.
But I think this view is mistaken for three reasons:
- Even if it were effectively a subsidy, it doesn’t seem obvious why the best way to finance that subsidy is a tax on internet use. It seems to go against the principle that the most efficient way to raise revenue is from a broad base.
- Broadband subscribers are creators too. It’s weird to highlight YouTube and Facebook as examples of the success of net neutrality when the reason for its success is broadband subscribers creating and submitting their own videos. Expanding internet access through lower prices (funded by revenue from companies like Netflix) would also expand the pool of creators for companies like YouTube.
- If lower prices mean more people accessing the internet that also increases the size of the market for web services encouraging more innovation at the margin.
Innovation is important, but enforcing Net Neutrality rules that will push up broadband prices isn’t the way to encourage it.
We shouldn't fear automation
Recently a report from Future Advocacy on who will suffer the most under automation came out. The report concludes that around all the constituencies between 21.8 percent and 39.3 percent of jobs are at risk of being automated. Generally, this causes some to freak out because what is going to happen to them once their jobs are automated.
However, the fear of automation is far from new. It has been around since before the Industrial Revolution. Some of you might already have heard of Ned Ludd and the movement he inspired called the Luddites. He supposedly encouraged his followers to destroy textile machines because the machines facilitated more textiles to be produced with fewer workers. Reducing prices is terrible, right? A Luddite has later become synonymous with a person afraid of automation and technology.
Luckily as the report shows, the UK population doesn’t share this view with the Luddites and they shouldn’t.
The logic behind this movement, that is still present in today’s debate, is that in order to save jobs, you have to be as inefficient and unproductive as possible. This logic insinuates that the Luddites were after all right when they decided to destroy the textile machines.
One of the biggest problems with this axiom is that people concentrate only on the immediate effects. They focus on the fact that some people whose jobs are in danger of being automated will lose their jobs and think that they are basically done for. The narrative they subscribe to is one that describes how people moved from agriculture to manufacturing and then later on to service industry as automation happened over the last 100 years. “Where are people supposed to move to now?”, they think.
This argument is flawed because of the assumption that there are no more jobs to be created once further automation happens - the so called lump of labour. But human imagination is infinite and so are jobs. Imagine telling your granddaughter or grandson a 100 years ago that they could become an app designer or social media manager. There is no way they would have any clue about what you are talking about and once you told them they certainly wouldn’t believe you.
As David Autor notes in this article, the concerns about eg. self driving cars’ impact today is similar to those a century ago when we shifted from horses to cars. However, we shouldn’t worry because this shift will create new demands:
Similarly, just as people worry about the potential impact of self-driving vehicles today, a century ago there was much concern about the impact of the switch from horses to cars, notes Mr Autor. Horse-related jobs declined, but entirely new jobs were created in the motel and fast-food industries that arose to serve motorists and truck drivers. As those industries decline, new ones will emerge.
Thus, as Henry Hazlitt taught us in Economics in One Lesson, it’s important that we not only look at the immediate effects of automation but also look to the succeeding effects over the long run:
Joe Smith is thrown out of a job by the introduction of some new machine. “Keep your eye on Joe Smith,” these writers insist. “Never lose track of Joe Smith.” But what they then proceed to do is to keep their eyes only on Joe Smith, and to forget Tom Jones, who has just got a new job in making the new machine, and Ted Brown, who has just got a job operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what it used to cost her. And because they think only of Joe Smith, they end by advocating reactionary and nonsensical policies.
But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother to do anything to help ease the transition. We therefore ought to focus on creating a better educational system that is suited for the future awaiting us. In addition, a universal basic income or negative income tax could be introduced to help people in this transition, as the ASI have championed for many years. (You can read the report on NIT here)
Nonetheless, the great benefits that automation brings with it shouldn’t be neglected. Everyone will in the end be able to reap the fruits of several decades of innovation. Just look at your smartphones. With all the benefits these tiny phones bring with them, you are probably richer than the richest person in the beginning of the 20th century.
Apple's head of diversity is actually correct here
It's somewhere between worrying and amusing to see someone being hoist by their own petard while actually speaking the truth, as is the case here with Apple's head of diversity:
The first ever vice-president of diversity for Apple has apologised for saying that a room full of “white, blue-eyed, blonde men” can be as diverse as a team which includes women and people of colour.
Denise Young Smith, who is herself African American, told a conference in Colombia that diversity did not necessarily mean a range of skin colours or gender.
“Diversity is the human experience,” she said. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of colour, or the women, or the LGBT.
“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”
But she later apologised for her remarks.
“I regret the choice of words I used to make this point,” she wrote in an email to colleagues, leaked over the weekend.
The point being of course that she's entirely correct. Diversity moves along varied axes, as was pointed out a decade back in The Trouble With Diversity. Melanin contents, gender, sexuality, certainly, those are some of them. But so also are life experiences - our prototypical blue eyed blond male from the Finnish backwoods is going to have an interestingly different view of life from that of the equally melanin deficient Bondi Beach surfing dude.
Further, as the book itself points out, those who have gone through the same classes at the same universities have, whatever their diversity along some axes, near none along those relating to intellectual variation. Groupthink, however the group is created, is a real and important thing.
Which brings us to the underlying justification of the insistence upon diversity. For this is what the argument itself is. We want to incorporate in decision making processes as many as possible of the different human experiences and viewpoints as we can. Excellent, we should do so. But that does indeed mean diversity, not monothink.
Which group will be showing more of the important form of diversity? The multi-hued and multi-gendered graduates of a recent degree in Gender and Critical Studies? Or an appallingly monoethnic grouping of, say, one or two of us, Paul Mason, Owen Jones, a sprinkling from Trots'R'Us and a pairing from the more fundamentalist arm of the Southern Baptists insisting upon Biblical absolute truth?
It's certainly not going to be true that the second lot will suffer from groupthink, is it?
Apparently Brexit isn't a problem for venture capital
Much has been made of the manner in which as we leave the European Union we'll leave behind all those lovely things the EU does for us. Something that's true, obviously, but we'd also like to know whether this is important.
For example, there are various EU funds which invest in varied things and we'll not be able to tap those funds:
Draper Esprit has backed two venture capital firms that missed out on EU funding after the UK issued its formal notification to leave the bloc, as part of a new strategy of investing in funds as well as companies. Draper, a publicly listed venture capital firm, has committed money to Seedcamp and Episode1, seed funds that back early-stage start-ups. They are the first of 20 investors to which Draper plans to commit $100m over the next five years. The move is a sign that UK investors are attempting to fill the large hole left by a pause in funding from the European Investment Fund following the UK’s Article 50 notification in March.
We think that's rather interesting. The EU isn't providing the funds but private capital is. That would mean that the EU provision in the first place was simple crowding out. That is, if government doing something stops the private sector doing it, there is no argument in favour of the government doing it in the first place. In the absence of that intervention it would still get done.
Precisely that - this applies to only this instance of course but it would be interesting to see how far this is true of other matters - the private sector manages this unadorned means that not having the EU doing it is trivially unimportant. And all of that before we point out that the UK has long been a net contributor, meaning that even if the intervention were necessary it would be more efficient for the UK to do it itself, rather than paying into a common pot and getting less than 100% of contributions back.
Just ignore the people who say Uber is a monopoly
Here’s a piece in the Financial Times that claims that Britain has lots of monopolies and that a state that believes in “private business and free markets … would bust more trusts”. The FT has a long-running vendetta against Uber (about half of its Alphaville blog is devoted to posts about it being financially unviable, overvalued, exploitative, and useless) and this adds to that pile.
Its big mistake, in my mind, is to confuse market share with market power. Market power means a firm being able to price its products above the level that would emerge in a competitive system – it requires quite a bit of speculation about what the ‘true’ competitive price should be, but maybe you know it when you see it (if this seems a bit loose to you, read Ford’s article to see the sort of approach he takes). Market share is what portion of a given market’s total revenue goes to a particular firm.
The two are related, but different, and if you get them mixed up you’ll go awry. That’s because a firm that has a large market share might still be in a precarious position and need to price its products highly competitively to maintain its share of the market. Tesco, for example, has a large share of the grocery market – around 28%. But it has been forced to engage in a fierce price war with stores like Aldi and Lidl over the last ten years, cutting prices by 1.8% in the past year despite positive CPI inflation throughout that period. Ryanair is by some measures the largest airline in Europe, but who thinks that would stay the same if it suddenly raised its prices to British Airways levels?
The shakiness of using market share as a stand-in for market power is made clear by some of the other markets Ford says are ‘concentrated’ – mobile networks, groceries and banking. None of these really pass the smell test. You can get mobile plans that give you nearly unlimited 4G, minutes and texts for £14/month, and the big firms are investing heavily in 5G. The grocery market, as already discussed, has been getting more competitive over the last decade, and my guess is that the biggest barrier to this is the difficulty of Lidl and Aldi in getting planning permission for new stores. I admit that I am not even convinced that banking, dysfunctional in so many other ways, is uncompetitive when it comes to current accounts for ordinary consumers – many accounts will literally pay you to move and switching is easy (I’ve done it three times in the past two years). The biggest problem, as with the energy market, is that most people do not realise the benefits and easiness of switching.
So when Ford writes that “the real scandal here is the way Uber has been allowed to hoover up the London taxi market” (although he doesn’t even have data about Uber’s market share in London), the question is whether this actually harms consumers or not – and it having a large-ish market share is not proof of that. It seems very difficult to claim that Uber has any market power yet – it is barely profitable and may subsidise large parts of its service. And consumers mostly seem to love it – for example, 850,000 people have signed the petition to ‘Save Uber in London’ – which is evidence that it has not harmed them yet.
Ford doesn’t actually claim that Uber is harming consumers, merely that it might do so in future once it’s established a dominant position. But pre-emptive trust-busting is a strange idea. It asks us to prosecute businesses solely on the basis that, someday, they might do something wrong.
Got that? You’ve come up with a great idea that gets people from point A to B quicker than anyone else, and you’re making a profit while doing it. You’re making money and you’re winning customers – indeed you’re so popular that some Financial Times writers think you need to be stopped now, before someday you raise your prices. They don’t have any evidence that you can raise your prices without new competitors coming in, and they don’t have any evidence that you’ve done anything to harm consumers yet. But they don’t like the cut of your jib.
This is all wrong. We don’t punish people because they might break the law some day, and we should ignore newspaper columnists who want to prosecute businesses because they might act monopolistically someday too.
Some say that Uber’s business model only works if it has a monopoly and that it must be engaged in ‘predatory pricing’ – it intends to keep prices artificially low until all rivals are eliminated, after which it will raise prices. The case in favour mostly rests on the fact that Uber is loss-making – why would they burn money if they didn’t expect to have some powerful position in the future?
Firstly, Uber does not seem to need to exploit consumers to make a profit. It is (apparently) profitable in London and the United States already without causing harm to consumers, and although it might like to have a monopoly until it does there is no case for prosecuting it as one. Lots of businesses, including tech firms and brick-and-mortar firms like restaurants, lose money for many years before they become profitable.
But maybe getting bigger gives Uber market power. This idea relies on the concept of network effects – when a business gets better the more customers it has, so the market gives a big advantage to whichever product manages to get a critical mass of users first. Think Facebook, for instance, where a large part of the appeal is simply the fact that everyone you know is on it.
Does, or could, Uber benefit from network effects in a monopolistic way? Consumers are betters off the more drivers there are, and more consumers means more drivers, but the costs of using two or more different services (Uber, Kabbee or black cabs, say) are very low and, in practice, the benefits of having the choice are very high to an individual. On the supply side, drivers can (and in cities with multiple Uber-like services, do) have multiple ride-hailing apps running at the same time, so ‘lock-in’ even on a single evening seems unlikely.
For the claims of predatory pricing to work (and I stress that Ford does not say this, I am making the best possible version of his argument for him here) Uber would have to have some unchallengeable position once the minicab and black cab drivers went out of business. The fact that Lyft and other services are looking to get into the London market long after Uber has established itself as the dominant app suggests that, if present at all, network effects are not very strong. If someone can show me an example of a single city where Uber, once eliminating more expensive rivals, has raised prices above what its rivals’ prices used to be, I’ll change my mind.
Maybe Uber really is fundamentally unviable, as Ford and others at the FT insist. A lot of investors disagree, but if they're wrong, then Uber is a giant voluntary wealth transfer from investors to consumers and drivers. Who cares?
In the end, I'm pretty sceptical about armchair entrepreneurs who claim to know how Uber can and can't make money. Anyone who claims to know what these markets will look like in the future is selling baloney. Unless they knew ten years ago that taxis, of all things, were going to be a huge market for tech, why should I listen to them now? The best thing we – and regulators – can do is wait and see how Uber and similar firms end up making money, and see whether they're hurting consumers in doing so.
There’s one point that Ford makes that I think does stand up. Regulatory barriers to entry to the London taxi market may be holding competition back – not only are would-be rivals to Uber, like Taxify, being kept out by the difficulty of getting a license, even Uber itself faces the risk of being regulated out of existence in London. Removing barriers to competition to prevent monopolies is smart. Breaking up firms that are giving consumers a good deal isn't.
Why do people care about inequality?
We are often told that inequality is a big problem. Perhaps it doesn't itself slow economic growth, cause social and political instability, or set off damaging "path dependence". Perhaps CEO pay is actually reasonable! Whether or not that's true, the argument runs, people just dislike it, and since preferences are what matter, we should cut it. But it turns out people don't really dislike inequality, they just dislike unfairness.
Or so say three recent papers—two economic experiments and a review in Nature: Human Behaviour. The first (pdf) finds that people in lab experiments have a tendency, when given the option, to burn others' income when inequality rises. As an egalitarian might predict, it is low income subjects who are the burners, and high income subjects who are the burnees. But burning is substantially higher when the inequality is down to unfair rule tweaking, and lower when it's down to extra effort.
So far, so arcane, an egalitarian might argue. Fair enough. But a second study, this time conducted in India, and accepted for publication in the QJE, finds precisely the same thing. This time the authors conduct a month-long experiment with manufacturing workers. People don't like inequality when it doesn't seem to come from unequal productivity: they don't turn up for work and they work less hard. But when it clearly comes from higher output the workers don't seem to mind.
Finally, the Nature paper:
Drawing upon laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children, we argue that humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.
The recent turn against inequality may not be evidence against this trend. Recent rises in wealth inequality seem to be driven by gaps in housing wealth, exaggerated by strict rules on housing supply. If this is true, then inequality is coming from unfair rules that rig things against one group and in favour of another. If that in turn is true then the "solution" to inequality really is just to fix the problem rules that cause some of it, but leave the bits that come from fair rules and uneven inputs alone. And, who knows, this might have some pretty nice side benefits...
Strengthen the commonwealth of nations, as well as neoliberalism
In my earlier post, Strengthen Neoliberalism and Change the World, I argued that proponents of neoliberalism should encourage societies to share experiences of different policies. No trying thing, you might think: get some people in a room and away you go.
But how do we make sharing effective? By its nature, sharing’s most useful when it’s between people in similar situations: how could we ensure that citizens of countries with similar values and systems of government to the UK that are sharing with us? What would help is a network that the UK is already a part of: the Commonwealth of Nations.
The Commonwealth is a global organisation with 52 member-states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire. Citizens of its members amount to nearly a third of the world’s population. It’s voluntary by nature: members have no responsibilities to each other. Their shared British legacy mean they are united by language, history, culture and values.
A funny basis to group countries by, some might say. Indeed, Commonwealth members put special effort into strengthening their bonds, particularly their shared values. In 2011, members signed the Commonwealth Charter signed: it sets out sixteen core beliefs for members, including democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The Commonwealth has seen success promoting the values in its Charter. Its biggest ‘win’ was the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the Commonwealth’s role was underlined when the country rejoined in 1994.
However, the Commonwealth hasn’t always been great at promoting liberalism. Major failures include permitting the 2013 CHOGM to be held in Sri Lanka, even though its government had been accused of major war crimes at the end of its civil war. Moreover, homosexual acts between consenting adults remain illegal in a majority of Commonwealth members. Finally, the Commonwealth hasn’t succeeded in other areas like trade: there’s no Commonwealth free trade agreement, for example. This inability to find ways to contribute has caused some to question the Commonwealth’s relevance in the modern world.
I started this post by asking what would make sharing of policy experiences more effective at strengthening neoliberalism. The Commonwealth of Nations provides a network of countries that could underpin worthwhile sharing. However, questions about its relevance suggest we should look more closely at its record. If sharing policy experiences strengthens neoliberalism; perhaps it would strengthen the Commonwealth, as well.
If only we could get Jeremy Corbyn to understand about capital
Jeremy Corbyn has suggested that all those gig economy companies should be replaced by cooperatives. Which some will applaud as a no doubt lovely idea - except to do so is to entirely misunderstand the role of capital in these things.
Jeremy Corbyn has suggested that 'gig economy' contracts should be replaced by cooperatives as he accused the Conservatives of presiding over a "broken" economic model.
We don't suggest that our current model is entirely peachy, that there's nothing to be one to improve the structure of the economy. We do insist though that some attention has to be paid to reality:
Mr Corbyn suggested "gig economy" firms like ride-hailing service Uber or food delivery firm Deliveroo could be replaced by co-operatives, in which drivers collectively set pay and conditions and share or reinvest the profits from their work.
We're entirely fine with cooperatives - if that's how you wish to organise yourself then great, you do that. We are indeed liberals after all. We're entirely fine with the existence of John Lewis, with farmers' cooperatives, with any method of organisation that it pleases people to partake in. We only insist that those different forms of organisation must compete against the others in the market.
However, that reality bit. Firstly, there's that slightly worrying idea that what Jezza means is a forcible change in that structure. Even in the absence of that we come to the second objection. Why aren't these firms cooperatives, why is it that they've adopted that capitalist model?
Because they've all been making great gaping losses as they start up, meaning that they've needed capital to exist. And that's the problem with cooperatives, the only capital, by definition, that is available to them is what the workers are bringing to the table themselves. Uber has swallowed however many billions it is and still makes gargantuan losses. Deliveroo being smaller has consumed less of that capital but it's still rather more than we expect a grouping of would be bicycle couriers to be able to chip in.
All of which is what the capital part of capitalism is about, allows. The ability for a new business to build itself by using outside capital, not just what the workers themselves can provide. This is true whether we look to government to provide the capital or private markets.It's still an outside source of that necessary capital and there is and should be a price for the provision of it.
As above, we're fine with cooperatives. But it's just one of those reflections of reality that the model isn't going to work with anything which is capital hungry. Precisely because capital in large quantities is not something which the workforce can bring to the table. Capital light projects like three building a new app, sure, that can and is done. But businesses which swallow hundreds of million to billion to grow just cannot be financed on the cooperative model.
Which is rather the point of this very capital part of capitalism. It's the only way we've got to mobilise the savings and investments of thousands and millions of people into large scale organisations.
Amazingly, sometimes government isn't very good at doing things
We agree that we are biased upon this point but even so it is still true that at times government isn't very good at doing things. As with this between the Coastguard and the RNLI:
Lives are being put at risk at sea because of a delay in launching lifeboats after emergency calls to the coastguard, according to senior RNLI crew. They believe a shortage of experienced staff and poor operating procedures at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) are leading to slow responses and potentially fatal decisions.
Delays and inefficiencies between two arms of the State aren't going to surprise anyone rich in years or experience of dealing with said State. However, in what will be a surprise to non-Britons, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a private sector, entirely charity supported, organisation. The Coastguard is government in its glory.
There is a larger point than just to point to inefficiency. Which is that of public goods. No one does negotiate their rescue from peril on the sea (although there is much private and Admiralty law on the rescuing of assets, such as ships abandoned etc) at the time they need rescuing. The network of those able to perform rescues is a public good. The normal reaction to which is that if it's a public good, non-excludable and non-rivalrous, then government must provide it.
Which isn't, as we can see here, true. The existence of a public good is certainly a time when we should think about whether government can or should be involved. But that is not to then make that leap to State provision.
In parts of the literature you will see that lighthouses are the obvious example of when government must. No one can charge for lights, therefore in the absence of the ability of private provision government must perform the task. Which is to entirely miss that the lighthouse system for the British Isles was and is (it's a little more complex today but only recently) a private not for profit organisation, Trinity House. Enter a British or Irish port and you pay dues, some for the port, some for "lights." Those who pass by get the guidance for free, those who dock pay. Whatever else we might think about it it does in fact work.
The existence of a public good is a very good time to start thinking about government involvement, entirely so. But that is not a sufficient reason for government to either be involved nor to provide the good or service. As with the herd immunity provided by general vaccination, there are different ways to achieve the goal. The NHS performs and pays for all child vaccinations, the US systems insist they must be performed privately before a child enters school. Both work in that sense of producing that herd immunity.
As to which system is used where and when we think a large part of it is due to historical happenstance. Lifeboats and lighthouses really got organised in Britain during the near laissez faire times of the Victorian era. Thus we've a private system of provision. The NHS was the nationalisation of the previously extant medical care system (the NHS completed its first new hospital in 1963, 15 years after NHS creation) just because post-war Britain did seem to think that government should and could do everything. Thus much of how we provide these various public goods is dependent upon just what was the idea du jour of the time we started to address that problem.
Leading to the thought that we might profitably have a proper rethink of exactly how we do address these problems. Many are insisting today that the State should be doing more - all those calls for nationalisation - but we could equally, perhaps more in fact, profitably be pondering what is it that government does do but shouldn't be?
Here's an interesting historical rewrite
We do note that there's often enough an attempt to rewrite history. Or, perhaps, to emphasise one aspect rather than another. The New York Times recently ran a piece insisting that communism had its good parts as women had more orgasms. Female sexual pleasure is indeed important but we're deeply unsure that it's a justification for the Holodomor.
Similarly there's been a long running insistence that Britain was at its best in 1976, for that's when we were most equal. Not a view that's likely to be shared by anyone who was there at that time nor was it sustainable as the subsequent years showed.
And then there're those who wish to trample over the basic facts, not just polish certain facets of reality:
For too long, people in social housing were forgotten and denigrated, and estates were left to disintegrate under the last Labour government and every Conservative government since the 1980s.
Well, no Ms. Foster, that isn't actually what happened, is it? As Polly tells us in the same newspaper:
Labour's extra spending went mostly on improving services – hiring doctors and nurses, more and better qualified teachers, rebuilding leaking schools and aged hospitals, free nurseries and 3,500 Sure Start centres. Too few homes were built, but 90% of social housing was brought up to "decent homes" standard, rescuing estates from chronic disrepair.
As The Guardian itself insists, comment is free but facts are sacred. Not too much to ask that a publication lives up to its own tagline, is it?