The wurst is yet to come...

It seems that ever since the Greggs vegan roll had the honour of being spat out by Piers Morgan on national television, Britain has been gripped by meat substitutes.

Now the EU has caught on to this centuries-old phenomenon by attempting to ban ‘meat-like’ names for vegetarian or vegan products.

Veggie burger on the menu? Ha, fools! We could never expect halfwits such as yourself to realise that veggie burgers are vegetarian and achieve this God-tier grasp of the English language. This is why we ought to use the word ‘disc’ to describe what everyone else accepts as a meat-free burger.

Under Article 17 of EU food consumer regulation, names currently used for meat products and meat preparations will be reserved exclusively for products containing meat. In normal people-speak, this means veggie burgers are to be called the more unpalatable name ‘veggie disc’. The measures will now be voted on by the European Parliament after May’s European elections, before being put to member states and the European Commission.

Proponents argue for this regulation under the pretence of clarity. Not only is this measure unnecessary in principle, but it is also patronising. They claim consumers will be ‘misled’. But the history of meat substitutes dates back to 595 BC where the Chinese discovered Seitan - wheat gluten, meat-like in texture. And when the Chinese discovered tofu in 965 we have been on an absolute (bacon) roll ever since.

The proposal is also hilariously ironic. I wouldn’t be surprised if vegans insisted the rest of us meat eaters were banned from using misleading names such as ‘beef’ or ‘milk’ and instead were forced to use labels such as ‘dead cow flesh’ or ‘bovine mammary secretion’.

What’s more, this also bears the mark  of rent-seeking from the meat industry lobbying politicians. While French socialist MEP Éric Andrieu claims that  “the meat lobby is not involved in this,” it certainly has their fingerprints on it. Andrieu, who is responsible for overseeing the legislation, may denounce the affiliation with the meat lobby all he wants but in effect, it is obvious that those with a ‘steak’ in the meat industry will benefit from this crony capitalist move. So, to everyone’s surprise, the ban introduced in France this time last year was by entirely neutral farmer and MP, Jean-Baptiste Moreau.

This measure will also hinder the worldwide trend toward meat substitutes for ethical, environmental and economic reasons. Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP, hopes the ban could lead to food producers giving up on trying to emulate the meat-eating world, but as previously mentioned, meat substitutes have been enjoyed for millennia.

Cato says “I think this could unlock a lot of creativity. My personal favourite is ‘nomato’ soup, which is a tomato-tasting soup made of peppers.” Regardless of the absurdity in substituting tomatoes for peppers (as if the tomato is some endangered animal), real creativity is evident in the alternative meat industry. Meat-free innovations like the ‘Impossible burger’ have the potential to revolutionise how we view the tradeoff between meat consumption and the environment, making meat healthier and more widely available.

It seems that the EU has caught a case of Jamie-Oliver-itis and can’t keep their big state mitts off our grub. There is a cure however, if the UK is outside the EU by the time the labelling rule is applied, we ought not to follow Brussels’ lead.

Victor Gollancz, an architect of the Left

Sir Victor Gollancz was born on April 9th, 1893. Although he never taught at a university, and never entered Parliament, he was one of the UK Left’s most influential figures. He became a teacher and a publisher, and a leading left-wing activist of the inter-war years.

He flirted between humanitarianism, liberalism and communism, but his sympathies were mainly with communism, even though he never joined the party. His eponymous publishing house promoted socialist and pacifist works, but his greatest achievement was the founding of the Left Book Club. It was the UK’s first book club, and lasted from 1936 to 1948. It published six million books, and prior to World War II it had 57,000 members, each guaranteed a new book a month for 2s 6d, published in lurid covers, orange for paperback (later yellow) and red for hardback.

He was a fellow traveller, one of Lenin’s “useful idiots.” He made Stalin his man of the year in 1937. Paul Foot described him as “completely captive to the Communist Party,” and who “conceded almost everything to them.” Of the Left Book Club’s first 15 choices, 12 were vetted and approved by the Communist Party, and described by Foot as “quite unreadable.”

The Book Club was immensely influential in giving intellectual weight to the Left, and is thought to have paved the way to the postwar Labour landslide. Today it is more famous for the books it didn’t publish than for the ones it did. Gollancz, who had published Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier,” declined to publish his “Homage to Catalonia” because of its criticism of the Communists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell took it to Secker and Warburg, who went on to publish his “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” two of the most powerful anti-Communist books ever written. Orwell wrote that "Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket."

Gollancz broke with Communism at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, but never renounced his hard-left ideas. His contribution rather reminds us today of the gullible idealists who latch onto and laud every regime that proclaims itself Socialist, turning a blind eye to the repressions, the political imprisonments and murders, and the cronyism of leaders who live in luxury while the common people starve. Orwell would have seen Venezuela for what it is, through the cold eyes of realism, but Gollancz, like his latter-day descendants, would only have seen it through rosy pink spectacles that admit the light of idealism, but not that of harsh reality.

Social workers on agency rates - we need to abolish national pay scales

The Guardian tells us that local councils just can’t find the staff these days. Social workers are being hired through agencies, on locum conditions, rather than being directly employed by the correct social services. We don’t doubt their data but they do seem remarkably uninterested in the reason why this is occurring, that essential precondition to being able to design an answer:

Local authorities are having to spend millions of pounds on social work agencies as they struggle to recruit permanent staff, with some authorities employing nearly half of their children’s social workers through private companies, a Guardian investigation has found.

Data obtained through freedom of information requests shows that many English councils are routinely spending tens of millions of pounds – a total of at least £335m in 2017/18 – hiring agency social workers.

Experts said the difficulty experienced by councils in attracting permanent staff meant vulnerable children and families were often seeing multiple social workers in a single year, making it harder for them to engage with services.

They said the large-scale use of agency social workers was a poor use of dwindling local authority funds, as locums received a higher hourly rate than permanent staff, on top of the fee paid to the company they were employed through.

As of September last year, 26 local authorities got more than 30% of their children’s social work staff from agencies.

The important word in all of that is “some”. Well, which? Even a casual eyeballing of their data shows that it is expensive areas - rich if you prefer - in the South, SE and London that do.

This reminds of that study of nursing wages - national pay scales kill:

In many sectors, pay is regulated to be equal across heterogeneous geographical labor markets. When the competitive outside wage is higher than the regulated wage, there are likely to be falls in quality. We exploit panel data from the population of English hospitals in which regulated pay for nurses is essentially flat across the country. Higher outside wages significantly worsen hospital quality as measured by hospital deaths for emergency heart attacks. A 10 percent increase in the outside wage is associated with a 7 percent increase in death rates. Furthermore, the regulation increases aggregate death rates in the public health care system.

To invent numbers just as examples, if the national pay for a senior nurse is £30,000 a year and we’ve two different labour markets, one where pay is, on average, £40,000 a year, the other £20,000, then we’re going to have a different labour supply of nurses in the two areas. One will find it easy enough to gain the staff required to run a hospital, the other won’t. Which is indeed what we do find. Hospitals in higher pay areas - aka richer areas - tend to be understaffed and use more agency workers than those in lower pay - aka poorer - areas.

This is exactly what we’re seeing with social workers. For note what isn’t being claimed - that there’s a national shortage. Only that certain locations cannot, at current national (yes, we know there’s a London weighting but it’s small) pay rates gain the staff they desire. The solution is thus obvious, abolish the national pay scale and make wages whatever they need to be to gain the required staff in the desired location.

Government figures show there were 5,810 children’s social worker vacancies in England in September last year, with rates ranging from 6% in Yorkshire and Humber to 26% in London.

Quite. Localise wages then.

All freedom-loving people should oppose the online harms white paper

Today we were presented with the Online Harms White Paper, a document which proposes to add a new bill to the existing cornucopia of laws – ss. 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, ss. 1(a)(1) and 1(b) of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, s. 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, s. 127 of the Communications Act 2003, and ss. 1-2 of the Terrorism Act 2006, among others – that regulate political speech in the United Kingdom which is legal in much of the rest of the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States.

As the digital space increasingly supplants physical space as the preferred venue for the exchange of ideas, smaller jurisdictions – in particular, the Commonwealth jurisdictions – have begun to consider and in some cases enact draconian speech controls that would have seemed very alien to our grandfathers who stormed the beaches at Normandy, and very familiar to the soldiers attempting to repel our campaign.

Existing British laws that criminalize speech have failed, so far, to turn the Internet into a civil and gentle place. The Internet, of course, isn’t the problem; speech online is nasty because people are nasty. So the Government now wants to enlist tech platforms as de facto morality police to achieve with algorithms what the Government could not achieve with legislation: controlling thought on the Internet.

The Government proposes to do so by borrowing a concept from tort law, the “duty of care,” and saying that social media platforms owe such a duty to their customers.

Of course, the duty of care in tort usually means that there are “such close and direct relations” between the victim of harm and the person inflicting it – teacher-pupil, road users, client-solicitor, doctor-patient – "that the act complained of directly affects a person whom the person alleged to be bound to take care would know would be directly affected by his careless act."

Where such a proximate relationship exists, if a failure to discharge the duty would cause harm which is reasonably foreseeable, and it is fair, just and reasonable to impose liability on the service provider, a duty of care may be said to exist. Caparo v. Dickman, 1990 UKHL 2. Where such a breach is committed, damage is caused, and the breach is a proximate cause of the damage, the law recognizes a private cause of action in negligence in favour of the damaged party against the tortfeasor.

That’s not what the government proposes here. In the Online Harms White Paper, the phrase “Duty of Care” is used as a pleasant-sounding, but legally hollow, punch line rather than as a description of a 90-year-old bedrock principle of English law.

The proposed bill would require any company “that provide(s) services or tools that allow, enable, or facilitate users to share or discover user-generated content, or interact with each other online,” i.e. any company that operates an interactive application, to “keep their users safe and tackle illegal and harmful activity on their services.” Proposed penalties would be up to 4% of the offending company’s worldwide turnover.

But what does this mean? “Illegal” of course, has a certain definition and can be understood. “Harmful” is a wider term which encompasses prima facie lawful activity, under which the government includes “cyberbullying and trolling,” i.e., discourse.

What about the term “safe?” Recalling the playground proverb that “sticks and stones may break my bones; but words will never hurt me,” the Government appears to believe that exposure to harmful ideas is itself harmful. Maybe it is, to a political agenda. But it certainly isn’t in terms of any category of civil wrong recognized by English law up to today.

Furthermore, if we were looking at the traditional "duty of care," it would be worth noting that the law of negligence which creates the duty of care tells us that knowing and voluntary assumption of risk is an absolute defense to a negligence action. Users who log on to the Internet are not helpless lemmings. They know what they’re getting themselves into. They consent to being there. They can log off at any time. Nobody is forcing them to read this content.

This shows us that the Online Harms White Paper really isn’t about a “duty of care” at all, because no duty of care actually exists and even if it did, social media companies have an absolute defense. This proposal is about preventing Internet users from engaging in knowing and voluntary speech, and it's about recruiting vast armies of private sector policemen to patrol their thoughts, even if those thoughts are perfectly legal.

There are other measures – improving free speech protections to permit data sharing with the United States, or banning under-13s from use of social media – which would be more effective in preventing serious crime, more proportional to the stated aims of the white paper, and directed at actual, physical, actionable “harm” that could possibly arise from social media, without affecting one whit the ability of adult Britons to engage in legitimate political discourse.

The Online Harms White Paper is, at its core, illiberal, and incompatible with English ideas of harm and of freedom. As presently conceived, it would give the Government – not only this Government, but also any Government that might succeed it in the near or distant future – almost unlimited power to use large tech companies as proxies to control expression online, anywhere in the world. Existing controls on speech and enforcement mechanisms are more than adequate; indeed, if anything, Britain’s speech laws are too restrictive and many should be repealed or reformed.

All freedom-loving people should oppose this proposal.

Lady Thatcher died six years ago

Lady Thatcher died on April 8th, 2013. I was at lunch with friends in the Old Monk Exchange in Westminster, when a news flash appeared on the (silent) TV screen. In some ways it was a relief, in that she had suffered poor health and memory loss in her later years. On April 27th she was honoured with a ceremonial (public) funeral. To untrained eyes this looks like the pomp and ceremony of a state funeral, but the hearse was drawn by horses instead of troops, and there was no riderless horse with boots revered in stirrups. The late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had been similarly honoured, unlike Churchill, who had received a full state funeral.

The funeral was described by Owen Jones as “a £10m party political broadcast for the Conservative Party,” but it cost only £3.6m, of which £3.1m was for security. This was thought necessary because the Left had demonized her into a hate figure, though the moment the Queen announced she would attend the service in St Paul’s, the prospect of anti-Thatcher demonstrations diminished. In the event, a tiny number of people turned their backs as the cortege passed, and were angrily harangued by the huge crowds of supporters.

Ordinary people, whose lives had been uplifted by her policies, gathered in their thousands to pay their respects and say farewell. Some had bought their own homes, thanks to her right-to-buy. Others had seen much-needed improvements in now-privatized but previously ailing state industries and utilities. Some had become first-time share buyers during her privatization issues. Many more were simply there to say thanks for the pride she had given them once again in their nation. She had turned around a desperate and bankrupt nation and enabled it to walk proudly again on the world stage.

The Left made her a hate figure because she helped kill off Socialism for a generation, not only in the UK, but on a global scale. Those who had dreamed that one day Socialism would encompass the world found their future taken away from them, and they hated her for it.

They claimed she “destroyed manufacturing,” but in fact manufacturing increased during her terms. They say she destroyed the coal-mining industry, but in fact more pits closed under Harold Wilson than under her. UK coal-mining had been in long-term decline because it was uncompetitive. They claim she increased poverty and cut welfare pending, but in fact living standards rose dramatically over her terms, and welfare spending increased. And far from “laying waste public services,“ they all improved after they were privatized.

The fact is that she was a successful Prime Minister. one who turned her country around and left it improved beyond recognition. The hundreds of thousands of well-wishers who turned out to pay their respects knew that, and cheered as she passed on her final journey.

Well done to the unions, entirely missing the point of contracting out

The complaint here is that NHS pay is at one level. Because, you know, Our Angels in Blue and all that. But those who are cleaners and washers up in the NHS doesn’t get these rates of pay because they’re contracted out. Yes, this is the point of the contracting out:

Tens of thousands of NHS workers are struggling to get by on the minimum wage because their private sector employers are failing to match public sector pay rises.

The estimated 100,000 low-paid cleaners, porters, security guards and catering staff who work for private contractors in hospitals across England are being treated as “second-class employees”, thanks to a growing pay divide between public and private sector workers, according to the country’s leading health union.

...

The union wants everyone employed within the NHS to be on at least £9.03 an hour. Currently, Unison says, many staff employed by private contractors are on the minimum wage, which is £8.21, equating to an annual salary of £16,052, or £1,600 a year less than what the lowest-paid worker in the public sector is paid.

“All hospital workers are part of the NHS team and should be paid fairly for the important jobs they do,” said Sara Gorton, Unison’s head of health. “The days of treating them as second-class employees must end.”

We want to pay cleaners what it is necessary to pay people to come and clean. We want to pay pot washers what it is that will gain us an adequate supply of pot washers. That’s simply how labour allocation and wages work in a market economy.

One of the points about contracting out was precisely to be able to distinguish between those hard to find skills necessary for the NHS to function and those that can be found out just in the general economy at whatever pay rates.

To claim that non-medical staff are paid the general economy rate, not the NHS one, because they are contracted out is to miss the very point of having contracting out in the first place. We’re trying to make that distinction, that’s the justification of the idea in the first place.

Venezuela Campaign: Chavez' enrichment was for the few, not the many

There is a myth that Chavez reduced poverty in Venezuela. That he helped the poorest at the expense of the rich. It is untrue. Venezuela has, under his and his successor’s policies now become the most unequal society in the Americas, with income inequality even worse than Haiti’s. 91% of Venezuelans live in poverty, with 61% living in extreme poverty (less than $1.9 per day).

A tiny Chavista elite, who have made fortunes from rampant corruption, dominate the rest of the population, 90% of whom don’t have enough money to meet their nutritional needs. A recent survey on poverty carried out by UCAB University showed that more than 8 million Venezuelans don’t get enough to eat. Meanwhile, Venezuela is seventh in the world in numbers of quantity of private jets, just behind the UK, with the Chavista elite jet setting around the world to visit their various luxury homes.

Against the fact of Venezuela’s failed economy today, some claim that when he was President Hugo Chavez made advances against poverty. But this is not true. Although there was a splurge of state spending in the early years of Chavez’s rule, no sustainable reduction in poverty ever occurred.

In itself, reducing poverty was never an objective for Chavez.  His aim was to use state spending to secure loyalty to his regime.

Direct cash transfers and subsidies were used to buy short-term political support from the poor and middle class.  No effort was made to address the structural conditions that were actually causing poverty. When the cash transfers and the subsidies ceased, the situation of the poor became much worse as the surrounding economy had been destroyed by Chavista economic policies.

Most of Chavez’s public spending initiatives took the form of so-called “missions,” programmes that were quite separate from public sector institutions such as state schools or public hospitals. The funding of these institutions took second place to “missions” and “campaigns.” As many of these missions were largely staffed by Cubans they could not build the capacity of Venezuelan public sector staff. The missions gave Chavez a rationale to transfer huge sums to the Cuban regime in return for what he truly desired – their military and intelligence support.

The health programme, Barrio Adentro, was delivered by imported Cuban staff in separate facilities that were built wastefully, with billions lost to corruption.  It went into immediate decline, from reaching 11.7 million people in 2005 to 6.7 million in 2011, to virtually zero today. Throughout this period, Venezuela’s public hospitals were neglected and today they have so little equipment and available medicines that they can barely function at all. Even when it was operating, over 90% of the people who received support from the Cuban-run Barrio Adentro health programme were not poor.  Loyalty to the regime dictated whether you would be treated or not.

The picture regarding the educational missions, such as Mission Robinson, is similar. Even back in 2013 traditional education covered 99.4% of students, with missions benefiting only 0.6% of students.  According to a 2011 Central Bank study, traditional Venezuelan poverty reduction programmes that were put into place long before Chavez came to power – such as subsidised school meals and transport, scholarships and vaccinations – were much more effective than Chavez’s missions, which have now collapsed.

The missions were supplemented by programmes which directly transferred goods and cash to government supporters, with recipients were selected by regime officials with the intention of securing their loyalty. Such spending increased in election years with, for example, a 74% increase in these transfers prior to the 2012 election. Now that the economy has collapsed and there are shortages of food and essentials, it is easier for the regime to buy loyalty, even though it has fewer resources available.  While Chavez used to hand out flat-screen TVs to supporters, the regime has since 2016 been handing out toilet paper to loyal soldiers.

It is simply a fact that Chavez’s so-called ‘efforts’ to reduce poverty ended up hugely increasing poverty. Chavez instead enriched a tiny elite. State spending in Chavez and Maduro’s Venezuela was always designed to buy support for a corrupt, dictatorial and ineffective regime, one that has that has created more poverty more quickly than any other country in Latin American history. The short termism and corruption of the Chavistas should never be praised or considered as any type of model for lifting nations out of poverty.

More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website. 

When Sir Winston bowed out

On April 7th, 1955, Sir Winston Churchill resigned as Prime Minister. His second term in office, from 1951-1955, was not as dramatic or as prestigious as his wartime stint from 1940-1945, but it witnessed major and beneficial changes to his country.

In 1950, exhausted by continued deprivation and rationing, the voters had cut the Labour majority of 146 down to 5. Twenty months later when Atlee called a snap election to improve his majority, they returned Churchill’s Conservatives instead, with a majority of 17.

There were many foreign policy issues to contend with, such as the Mau Mau terrorism in Kenya and the Communist insurgency in Malaya. And Churchill was determined to retain and strengthen the US-UK partnership. In 1947 he’d said "let Europe arise" but "we shall allow no wedge to be driven between Britain and the United States". He supported a European unity with the UK and US as friendly sponsors outside it.

On the domestic front his government finally ended rationing and licensing, and the shortages also ended. More of the wartime regulations were removed, including the much-disliked Identity Cards. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of his administration came in house building. Churchill was pragmatic. The country needed new houses to replace those destroyed in the war, and the Labour government had failed to build enough. Macmillan was appointed to deliver an announced target of building 300,000 houses a year. The target was met a year early.

The economy boomed as exports soared and new factories were built. This led to near full employment, and rising consumer demand. Living standards improved, and people felt better off and put the war behind them. When Churchill’s failing health finally led him to leave office on this day 64 years ago, he could do so confident that his government had done much to “set the people free,” - words from an election speech that still resonates:

“The Socialist planners have miscalculated and mismanaged everything they have touched. By their restrictions they make scarcity; and when scarcity comes they call for more restrictions to cure it. They keep the British bulldog running round after his own tail till he is dizzy and then wonder that he cannot keep the wolf from the door."

Compare and contrast with Freakonomics

The Times tells us that those estate agents which charge a higher commission tend to overvalue properties. This is so as to gain the contract to sell said property of course.

Estate agent chains are overvaluing properties by up to a fifth in a practice that can mislead sellers into paying higher rates of commission, an investigation by The Times has found.

Analysis of more than 200,000 properties listed online reveals that overvaluations are rife, with the biggest agents the worst offenders.

The data suggests that agents with the highest commissions are over-valuing properties the most to attract homeowners. The properties then sell at lower prices, but the agents take big fees. Nearly two thirds of homes listed by Foxtons, the biggest agent in London, have to be reduced from their initial price before they can be sold, almost double the national average. Foxtons charges a commission of 3 per cent, which is more than twice the average.

There’s a certain amusement here as one of the interesting bits in Freakonomics was the research into the principal/agent problem in real estate - to distinguish American from British - markets. The point being that real estate agents seemed to gain higher prices when selling their own properties than they did when acting on commission for more normal sales. The answer being of course that when selling your own property you’ve rather more skin in the game. It’s worth being aggressive with price on the up side at the cost of perhaps a longer time to sell. In a manner that it isn’t when 6% (an American average) in commission doesn’t quite provide.

Here the complaint is that those gaining higher commission rates seem to be more aggressive upon price asked. Which is much the same point, isn’t it? Those with more skin in the game will indeed be more aggressive on price asked than those just looking for a smaller commission slice and thus interested most in the transaction taking place rather than the price at which it does.

Data from surveyors and the independent consultancy TwentyCi shows that on average Foxtons is able to achieve a 6.3 per cent price premium after fees

Whether we believe that or not - come along now, it’s marketing speak after all - it is the correct measure to be thinking about. Does being aggressive in asking price lead to a rise in price received? If so then what is the problem here?

Some old salesmans’ wisdom might aid here, when selling you can always lower your price but you can’t raise it.

No more docker "jobs for life"

On April 6th, 1989, 40 years ago, the Employment Secretary, Norman Fowler, stood up in the House of Commons and announced that the government would introduce a bill to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) which guaranteed jobs for life for over 9,000 dockworkers.

The National Dock Labour Board, which administered the scheme, had been established by the Atlee government in 1947. The local boards under it were made up of 50% dockworkers and 50% employers of same. Registered dockers laid off by any of the 150 firms bound by the scheme had to be taken on by another or be paid £25,000. The scheme was financed by a levy on employers. The government had promised dockers to introduce it if they ended an earlier strike.

Astonishingly it guaranteed them jobs for life. They could not be sacked, were paid way above the rates for non-scheme dockworkers, and their jobs went to their sons when they retired. Not surprisingly, 42 years later Norman Fowler described the scheme as “a total anachronism.” The 60 ports in the scheme had been losing trade to non-scheme and foreign ports because of the high costs the scheme imposed. Despite the eye-watering generosity of the scheme, its dockworkers were led by militants such as Communist Jack Dash, and were notoriously strike-prone.

Margaret Thatcher had already seen off a challenge from the miners, and the dockers were not confident of success. They went in strike in July, after the NDLS had been abolished, but returned to work in August. The strike was ineffective because the employers were now free to hire casual labour to replace the strikers. Liverpool dockers held out, but 500 of them were simply sacked.

The abolition of the NDLS should perhaps be seen against the background of increased container use, including refrigerated containers, dramatically reducing the dockers’ industrial muscle. The fact that compensation of up to £35,000 was offered to men laid off by the scheme’s abolition probably also weakened their resolve.

The NDLS illustrates the producer capture that takes place in centrally planned and directed industries. The ports were in effect run for the benefit of dockworkers, rather than for their contribution to the economy, and government had both enabled and connived in this. It was indeed an anachronism, but it took a bold government, sure of its authority, to end it.