Donald Trump and the Stars and Stripes were born today

President Donald Trump was born on June 14th, 1946, and turns 73 today. The United States Second Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as its flag, replacing the Grand Union flag, on June 14th, 1777, making it 142 years old. It substituted stars for the old British flag at the top left, and has seen more stars added as more states were admitted to the Union over the years. The most recent additions were Alaska, then Hawaii, in 1959. The stripes, representing the original British colonies, remain at 13.

Many peoples have been saved from oppression under that flag. It provided forces that helped liberate Europe in two World Wars, and led the UN forces that brought freedom to South Korea. It led the coalition that freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's conquest. It was the backbone of NATO over the years in which it confronted Soviet aggression until victory in the Cold War and the liberation of the captive peoples of Eastern and Central Europe.

Donald Trump is symbolic of a movement that has gained strength in other countries. It is a disenchantment with conventional politics, and a rejection of political élites. People in many countries have come to the view that the political establishments no longer represent their attitudes and their values, and are neither interested in their problems, not capable of addressing them. Several undercurrents are behind this. Some of it might be the Financial Crisis of 2008-09, and the sluggish growth or real wage rises that followed. It has to be said, though, that the turning away from political élites was evident before the crisis. Part of it is because government has become increasingly bureaucratized and remote from the people it should be serving. This has been particularly apparent in EU countries.

Part of it has been the widening gulf between the priorities of the ruling class and those of ordinary citizens. In the UK we speak of "the Westminster bubble," a part of the country cut off from the outside, and with little knowledge of it or concern for it. Those in "the bubble," (which is much broader than Westminster since it includes academics and media people), share a set of attitudes with those who move in the same circles, and recoil with disdain at those who do not share them.

In the US they talk of "the Beltway," meaning the ring that encloses Washington DC, the company town whose business is government. It includes the urban élites of the "wet" states, the coasties of New York and Los Angeles who sneer at the rest of America as "the flyover states." I saw someone from one of those belittled states being interviewed at the time of the last Presidential election.

“I’m trying to keep my job and feed my family,” he said, “but all I ever hear from them is transgender this and transgender that. When are they going to do something about my problems?”

It is part of a wider feeling that those in the bubble and the Beltway are more concerned with virtue signalling and proving their political correctness than in solving the everyday problems of the people they are supposed to represent. They have become a new class, a self-perpetuating élite who tell everyone else how to live, rather than letting them choose how to. Their children’s fizzy drinks are taxed, and they are told how many grams of bacon to eat per week, but the problems are that rents and house prices are too high and it’s a struggle to get to work in the morning, or home safe at night.

In the UK this dissatisfaction expressed itself in the EU referendum of 2016, when Parliament delegated to the people the choice of remaining in the EU or leaving it. The people voted leave, and many of those in the bubble have been trying thwart that decision ever since, believing that the people who voted against their own mindset are wrong and stupid. The popular disgust at the political class expressed itself again in the 2019 Euro elections, when the new Brexit Party topped the polls.

It is a fault of the EU that most of those who go there turn native, and adopt its anti-democratic values. It is similarly a fault of the UK and the US that those whom people send to represent them go native and end up representing only themselves and their fellow élite. Trump and Brexit showed that breaking point had been reached. So, on June 14th we wish a happy birthday to the President of the United States, and to the flag that for so many years has prevented anyone other than our own people from oppressing us.

There's nothing innumerate about Hammond's £1 trillion bill for climate change avoidance

There’s a not so subtle important detail to the arguments about the costs of avoiding climate change. Between whether that avoidance is worth it and whether it will have costs. That detail being the thing that is being glossed over here by Ambrose Evans Pritchard:

Hammond's £1 trillion bill for hitting net zero is innumerate nonsense

As ever we’re just assuming that the standard science here is correct. Stern, Nordhaus, that the economics of the situation is as they say - and we’re not getting into discussions of whether the underlying climate part of climate science is right or wrong.

We’ve two entirely different points to consider here. The first is whether there are costs to trying to avoid climate change? Yes, obviously and of course there are. Stern himself tells us we need to spend 1 or 2% of GDP on that avoidance. That’s a cost. Pulling down extant coal fired power stations to replace with windmills has a cost. Throwing out every gas boiler and space heater - there’s even an insistence out there that every cooker must go - to replace with electric has a cost.

There simply are costs here.

The second and different question is whether those costs are worth it? It could be that we agree with Stern’s reading of what the discount rate should be, what we now owe that future, could be we don’t. That is though a very different question.

There simply is no doubt that there’s a bill to be paid now to avoid climate change while the benefits of having avoided it come later. Actually, those benefits not only come later they come to other and richer people.

Do note that this distinction still allows of any answer that pleases you to the second question. But the answer to the first is clearly and obviously yes.

Think the logic through for a moment. Buying a house now on a 30 year mortgage means that in 2049 we’ll be living rent free - a benefit. That doesn’t change the fact that handing over the cash now, or financing the loan over those decades, is a cost now, does it?

The importance of the distinction being as Stern himself has pointed out. If we decide to use expensive means of gaining that future benefit then we will do less of that avoidance. Simply because that’s what we humans do, less of more expensive things. Which is the argument in favour of not having grand plans to replace everything, overturn the structure of society and so on. These things are more expensive than just dealing with the specific problem to hand. Therefore if we try them then we’ll do less of that actual aim, avoidance of climate change.

Another way to put this is that of course there are costs to avoiding climate change. If it was all painless then we’d not have the original problem, would we? And that people are arguing that the law must be changed to force us to change our behaviour is all the evidence we need that avoidance is not a zero cost path of action. Because if it were that lowest cost path then we’d all be doing it without compulsion, wouldn’t we?

Luis Alvarez and the dinosaurs

Luis Alvarez, born on June 13th, 1911, was described by the American Journal of Physics as, "One of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century.” He received the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his work on the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that enabled photographs of particle interactions which led to the discovery of a range of new particles. Before then he’d played a major role in aviation radar, helping to develop the Ground Controlled Approach that proved so valuable in the Berlin Airlift.

He is more famous in popular scientific culture for the paper that proposed an extra-terrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of the dinosaurs. He’d observed a thin layer of clay exactly at the boundary, a clay later found to contain materials and minerals that could only have been formed under the shock and stress of extreme temperatures and pressures. In 1980, Alvarez and his son published a paper, jointly with Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel, proposing that an asteroid impact had caused the mass extinction. The impact point was later identified as Chicxulub, on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and this is now generally accepted as the explanation for the demise of the dinosaurs after their 200 million years of dominance.

There is some concern that it could happen again, with an asteroid or comet causing an extinction level event that could wipe out humanity after only 3 million years of dominance. Funds are now spent on cataloguing bodies whose trajectories might intersect Earth’s orbit, and in populist culture the movies “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” have depicted attempts to thwart such a calamity.

Indeed, the calamity that threatens life on Earth has been a staple of popular literature. In the 1970s it was the notion of an impending new ice age. The geological cycle put us coming to the close of an interglacial period, about to undergo a new big freeze. Popular scientific articles depicted its likelihood and its effects. Similar, but man-made rather than geological or solar, was the fear of a nuclear winter caused by the atmospheric debris of a nuclear war obscuring the sun for years and killing first vegetation, then animals. It was hailed as a warning to insist on nuclear disarmament.

Currently the big threat is seen not as cooling, but as warming, with greenhouse gases heating up the planet and altering its eco-systems, perhaps melting its ice cover and raising ocean levels. All of these hypotheses are not seen simply as harbingers of doom, but as things that humanity can do something about. We are seen as creatures that can use the technology that has established their dominance to change their circumstances and their vulnerability to nature. We might alter the orbit of incoming extra-terrestrial incoming objects, or build vast nuclear power stations to stave off the effects of a new ice age. Or we might switch from fossil fuels to electricity generated by sources, including renewables and nuclear, that cause much less atmospheric pollution, in order to mitigate global warming.

Some biologists claim that we are hard-wired from our primitive past to detect and avoid danger, and that in consequence we are risk averse, rating dangers more prominently than opportunities. It has long been a staple of economics that we rate the avoidance of loss more importantly than the prospect of gain. It could explain why we constantly stress the dangers that might afflict us, and why we revel at a popular level in impending catastrophes. Fortunately, as Julian Simon pointed out, human creativity is the ultimate resource, one that will never run out, and one that equips us to meet any such dangers and to surmount them. We are most unlikely to meet the fate that befell the dinosaurs, the fate whose cause identified by Alvarez. We will not go quietly.

George Monbiot's argument in favour of a free market economy

George Monbiot tells us that the sort of people who get to the top in politics aren’t the ones we want to have there.

Our toxic political system rewards all the wrong traits and produces the worst possible leaders

The argument then becomes twofold. Those who would aspire must go through psychotherapy before they’re allowed to. And we must change the system of politics so that those wrong ‘uns don’t get there anyway:

In designing an effective politics, it could be useful to work backwards: to decide what kind of people we would like to see representing us, then create a system that would bring them to the fore. I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?

Our answer to this question being that we limit, to that irreducible minimum, the areas of life that politics - and thus politicians - gets to influence. For we’ve not noted any form of political system that does end up with only the virtuous at the head of it. Our very strong suspicion being that the only people who will aspire to power in any system at all being those who would misuse - as Monbiot says - whatever power came to them.

The answer thus is to decentralise the power to the individual, not the collective, so that there is no position of power which can be occupied by those who would misuse it.

After all, if politics doesn’t control the economy then there will be no desire to be in politics to gain economic position, will there?

Uber literally saves lives

Dangers of Traditional Taxis

Driving a taxi is dangerous—taxi drivers are more likely to be murdered than any other profession. Since taxi services began the murder rate for taxi drivers, who pick up strangers, sometimes in isolated areas, has been several times greater than that of police officers. Of course, the danger is double-edged; passengers are also jumping into a car with a stranger. There is no comprehensive data available on crimes committed by cabbies but at least three serial killers worked as taxi drivers, including Derrick Bird, "The Cumbria Killer," a cabbie in Whitehaven. More commonly, sexual assaults against female passengers have been an ongoing taxi problem.

The taxi industry has generally been heavily regulated around the world. But these government regulatory bodies have done essentially nothing to improve safety, though that was supposedly their main purpose. Most regulators did not even keep statistics on taxi safety or even have any systematic way of reporting problems. So, what did these regulators do? Economists have long recognized a tendency for regulatory bureaucracies to be “captured” by the industry they regulate. The average voter pays little attention to most regulatory details so the pressure on politicians and bureaucrats comes mainly from the industry; regulations often end up being shaped to suit the industry. Taxi companies commonly got regulators to severely limit the number of taxis operating in an area in order to suppress competition. This kept fares high without any need for taxi operators to improve safety, keep their cabs clean, make sure drivers were courteous or anything else that a firm would normally have to do in a competitive environment. Regulators created local taxi cartels, the industry operated as monopolists. With the government prohibiting or severely limiting new entry and controlling prices so that competitive price cuts were impossible, the industry lazily coasted along for decades. The suppression of new entry via licensing was particularly obvious in New York City where taxi operating licenses are transferable, making it possible to judge about how powerful the entry barrier is by observing the price paid for a license. In pre-Uber 2013, a New York taxi license (“medallion”) cost $1.3 million.

The relatively few consumers who understood the sham of regulation were not numerous enough to pressure politicians toward reform. Most accepted the government propaganda that the regulation, if not ideally efficient, was actually promoting safety and making sure prices weren’t raised too high.

Confronting the empire of taxi cartels Uber faced the same problem that often plagues honest entrepreneurs around the world. How do you compete against an industry cartel protected by the brute force of government? How do you bring a superior product to consumers when a corrupt government has unjustly defined your product as “unsafe” and illegal?

Civil Disobedience in the Uber Revolution

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s controversial founding CEO lead the way in defeating the powerful and dangerous taxi cartels. Other ride-share companies played small parts but it was Uber, whatever its faults, that rescued consumers from the corrupt taxi empire. Kalanick’s intrepid strategy was simply to enter markets without the government permission he knew would be either denied or extortionately expensive. Uber boldly stormed into markets and established as much customer (and driver) goodwill as they possibly could before the local taxi cartel empire could work through the legal system’s bureaucracy to strike back. When the taxi regulatory empire did eventually strike back, usually beginning with a “cease and desist” legal order, Uber’s standard procedure was to completely ignore the order, continuing business as usual. Government regulators, accustomed to easily winning by intimidation, and winning quickly, took time to process and respond to Uber’s quiet rebellion. Uber drivers’ cars were unmarked so it wasn’t easy to catch them with conventional techniques, especially since they often would have passengers ride in the front seat.

Regulators eventually figured out they needed to impersonate honest customers, summon a driver through Uber’s App and then finally arrest them. However, Uber frequently anticipated this scheme and thwarted it. Uber used sophisticated software to identify the cartel’s enforcers and evade them. Uber altered the apps on the phones of the cartel’s would-be enforcers’ so that drivers appeared to be unavailable, with their true locations hidden. Actual cars were replaced with non-existent ghost cars in these apps! Thus, the Uber “underground” rebels could conduct operations right under the regulators’ noses yet still slip away. Sometimes the undercover taxi police would create false identities on a new cell phone number. Even then, Uber quickly adapted. They would deduce (or perhaps be informed, since satisfied Uber customers were turning up everywhere in the growing Uber underground) where the batch of phones had been purchased and eventually identify them. When cartel enforcers did manage to catch a driver. Uber would pay all fines and legal costs.

However, operating illegally forever was too expensive to be viable. The idea was to first educate the public through positive experiences with Uber, then next harness the legions of satisfied customers and drivers to pressure politicians to reform unjust laws to eliminate, or at least moderate, the excessive barriers to entry. Uber marshalled their supporters to pressure politicians, who were often besieged by emails from many thousands of satisfied Uber customers. The political battles were ferocious. Some in the taxi cartels even resorted to violence against Uber drivers as they fought to suppress competition and keep high taxi prices viable. In some places, the cartels still won. Some consumers with perhaps a bit too much faith in politicians were reluctant to support a company that “broke the law.” Sometimes Uber could only compromise, agree not to price too low and take other measures to protect the local taxi cartel. Even so, more often than not, Uber won (at least partially). The fight is ongoing, battles continue but corrupt laws were often reformed; a superior product at more reasonable prices was at last legally available in many places.

Uber’s Safety Innovations

The key safety innovation is that drivers, unlike traditional cabbies, do not pick up strangers. There is a clear electronic “paper trail” identifying pre-approved passengers. Online reputations are also crucial, drivers rate passengers and vice versa. Each driver chooses whether or not to accept a passenger pickup—if either the passenger or the pickup location seems too risky a particular driver need not respond. The same protections are there for riders—they can refuse one driver and choose another. Each driver is essentially an independent entrepreneur, rather than a faceless cog in a large corporation. Thus drivers are held strictly accountable for their actions. Bad customer ratings will destroy their business; great ratings build it up. If you’re old enough to have extensive experience with taxis in pre-Uber days you probably remember smelly cabs with sometimes rude drivers who nevertheless felt entitled to a tip. What a difference from today’s Uber drivers. They truly are, as Uber terms them, driver-partners.

However, there is still useful corporate oversight by Uber. Problematic drivers or badly misbehaving passengers can be banned. Drivers are pre-screened thrice and generally held to higher standards than the government regulations that apply to taxi drivers. For example, anyone convicted of drunk driving in the prior seven years is ineligible to drive for Uber, while the government cut-off for cabbies is more commonly only five years. If a passenger charges an Uber driver with assault the driver is suspended and quickly investigated. Taxi companies often, in contrast, suspend drivers only after they have been arrested.

Safety is also enhanced in that riders, including stranded motorists, can readily summon Uber far more quickly than the traditional taxi. This has saved lives, reducing drunk driving for example. Sometimes, Uber even substitutes for ambulances.

What’s Next?

Politicians aligned with the taxi cartels generally lost the battle to convince riders that government licensed taxis were in any way superior to Uber; “Uber is unsafe” prattle was correctly seen as dishonest propaganda. But, after their stinging defeat, politicians have changed strategies in their attacks against Uber. The primary attempt at sabotage nowadays is to destroy Uber’s innovative driver-entrepreneur structure by legally forcing drivers to become employees. At the very least this will end entrepreneurial service, drive up costs and ride prices, destroy some work opportunities, while greatly reducing the flexible labour supply that allows an influx of drivers to keep wait times short. At worst, it could eventually end the company’s existence, especially in smaller markets.

It is important to mention that Uber and other ride-share companies have never yet been profitable. There is no ready profit margin to reduce in order to bear higher costs. Many drivers have unwittingly allied themselves with politicians bent on the destruction of their livelihood, attempting to get something (such as paid vacations) for nothing. But those vacations would be paid for in lower wages, less freedom to choose hours and customers, and fewer customers (hence, fewer jobs) as quality declines. Beware politicians promising something for nothing.

Thomas Tacker is a Professor of Economics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, Florida) and the author of Rethinking Consumer Protection: Escaping Death by Regulation, forthcoming this fall from Lexington Books.

“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

On June 12th, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and before a huge crowd sent a personal message to the Soviet leader, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

When the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, it had left Berlin as an enclave, administered by four powers. Because subway trains ran across, it provided East Germans an avenue of escape through East Berlin. By 1961, 3.5 million of them had left, comprising approximately 20% of the entire East German population. They tended to be young and well-educated, constituting a brain drain from East Germany.

On August 13th 1961, the border was closed and fenced with barbed wire, and four days later the first concrete blocks were laid to begin the construction of the physical wall. There were in addition chain fences, other walls, minefields, watch-towerrs and other obstacles along the border, and a huge no man's land was cleared to provide a clear line of fire at would-be escapers. The Berlin Wall became a visible symbol of Communist oppression. It served as a prison wall to keep in a captive population.

I went through it once at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing where US tanks had faced down Soviet ones in a tense stand-off. It felt like entering a bleak and drab prison, which it was. Many people were killed trying to escape through the wall, perhaps 150-200. Ingenious methods were sometimes used, including tunnels, hot air balloons and cars equipped as ram-raiders to smash through weaker parts of it.

On that June 12th day in 1987 President Reagan was 12 minutes into his speech when he uttered the electrifying words:

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It was music to the huge crowd. Just over two years later the wall came down, but it was not done by Mr Gorbachev, but by young people from East and West Berlin. Following months of escape by East Germans to the West via Hungary, crowds in East Berlin began to gather demanding the right to cross. At a press conference, Günter Schabowski, the party boss in East Berlin, misread instructions and mistakenly told the press that permitted access through the wall would take effect immediately. Thousands gathered there and no-one in the East would take the authority to stop them. They surged through, to be greeted with flowers and champagne, and young Berliners from both sides climbed the wall to celebrate together and began to take it down. The rest, as they say, is history.

How excellent then, fast fashion is a problem that is solved

We do rather wish that people would grasp the implications of what they themselves are saying. Life would just be so much simpler if all did understand that if you say x then y ineluctably follows.

But it is entirely unsustainable. We send £140m of clothing to landfill every year in the UK, much of it made by workers scratching a subsistence wage in poor conditions in countries such as Cambodia and Sri Lanka. And the environmental cost is ruinous: the fashion industry is the world’s second biggest polluter, after the oil industry.

There is, however, evidence that this era may be drawing to a close. It is estimated that the secondhand or resale market could be bigger than fast fashion within a decade as we become more aware of the social and environmental impact of cheap clothes.

There are those obvious errors. Things that we’re throwing into landfill aren’t worth £140 million. We’d not be throwing them into landfill if they were worth money. And if we were then there would be eager supplicants at the gates of the rubbish dumps insisting that we proffer these things worth money to them. Why, they might even, under the impetus of competition, offer to pay us for them. The absence of those importunates does indeed tell us there’s no value there.

The scratching of a subsistence wage - that is to forget, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, that the sweatshops are very much better than the alternative employments on offer. Most lives are better than one spent watching the south end of a north moving water buffalo.

But to theimplication of what is being asserted. The era is drawing to a close, fast fashion is just so over as we consumers all change our habits.

OK, great, so there’s no need to do anything is there? We’re done here. The only argument in favour of restricting, or taxing, or even exhorting, is that we’re not all changing our behaviour. Which means we’d like to carry on doing it - so, why restrict, tax or even exhort us to stop doing what we clearly desire to do?

How to turn around loss making rural rail lines

From the north of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall loss-making rural railway lines are embedded in the landscape. Epitomised by slow, infrequent clapped out trains often carrying just a handful of passengers they wind their way from somewhere to nowhere. Inefficient, unappealing and ultimately underused it’s understandable why many question why such lines continue to be a ‘drain on the public purse’.

However, the reason for these lines survival is complex. Most of these routes are purely ‘social’; to even suggest closure would be political suicide. So successive governments have simply given up and have resorted to instructing franchise operators to provide the bare minimum level of service.

However, such a negative approach is short sighted. Private companies might run the services but with the regulatory brief so restrictive and narrow focused there is no ability for the  companies to show entrepreneurial flair. If the state can’t or won’t make a go of it then it needs to allow the private sector – or at least a partnership between the two – to have a go.

Conventional wisdom dictates that rural lines are loss making basket cases. But such narrow focused ideology is to miss a trick. After three months of painstaking forensic analysis of the Settle to Carlisle route, what was widely assumed to be a loss making liability in fact turns out to make a small profit.

The route was once described by the late Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Rev. Eric Treacy as “the 8th wonder of the world”. While this exuberant ecclesiastical accolade might be over egging the pudding, there is no denying that the line has oodles of untapped potential. Had private sector nous been allowed to flourish earlier the route could by now be a major visitor attraction.

Tourism is set to be worth £257bn to the UK economy by 2025. The Yorkshire and Cumbria Dales are major players yet are hampered by poor roads. The Settle to Carlisle route runs right through the middle of the Dales national park, it even has nine intermediate stations where today only a handful of people join or alight. If ever there was an example of supply so mismatched to potential demand through lack of vision this must surely be it.  

The line is currently run by the Northern Rail franchise, a vast short distance inter-urban provider of largely commuter trains serving conurbations such as Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. ‘No frills’ trains of distinctly utilitarian ambience shuttle back and forth between city and suburb all day with the average fare less than a Starbucks latte. The Settle-Carlisle line is about as mismatched from Northern’s core business as Ryanair would be from providing a bespoke limo service to ‘Fortnum and Mason’ shoppers.

Over a drink recently, a friend who is the Finance Director for one of the leading industry players told me: “The model for rural lines is all about delivering the status quo as cheaply as possible. There’s barely a budget for marketing let along doing anything entrepreneurial.”

As I identified in my recent ASI policy paper, How to Make Long-Distance Work: Fixing Britain’s railways with open access, rail is not a ‘one size fits all’ model. Different routes have strengths, weaknesses and potential, whether its long distance business travellers, commuters, rural locals or tourists. What is needed is a visionary new approach that looks at the assets individually and then adopts a bespoke plan. This approach would stimulate growth, generate additional revenue, support the wider economy and provide a better return on investment for the taxpayer.

With a focused service offering, improved rolling stock and targeted marketing there is huge potential for the Settle to Carlisle line to become a thriving niche business. The route can act as a foundation where other businesses can thrive off the back. The private sector is extraordinary adept as making a go of things with other Cinderella businesses having been turned around into successful ventures.

For too long the railway industry languishes near the bottom of both innovation and creating thinking. Other businesses such as aviation, hospitality and retail have thrived largely as a result of a free market but also because there is a genuine desire to think outside the box and do things differently.

It is widely accepted across the political spectrum that the current franchising model is broken. We need a consumer rather than government led railway where innovation is allowed to flourish. Only by adopting a broad and flexible approach will patronage increase, jobs be created, local economies strengthened and hard pressed taxpayers, at last, seeing more bang for their hard earned buck.

Adrian Quine is a Non-Executive Director of the Settle to Carlisle Development Company Ltd and the author of a submission to the Williams Rail Review on turning around loss making rural lines. Twitter: @adrianquine

The man who created the spitfire

On June 11th 1937, an aircraft designer named R J Mitchell died of cancer at the age of 42. By then he had done something that proved vital to Britain’s survival and to the eventual World War II victory of the Allies. He had designed the Supermarine Spitfire.

Working for Supermarine, Mitchell had designed several of the seaplanes that had won the prestigious annual Schneider Trophy events. He feared the rise of Nazi Germany, especially of its growing air power, and wanted a high-speed monoplane fighter for Britain that could stand up to the best in the world.

Supermarine authorized him to go ahead, on a private basis, but the RAF soon became interested and funded them to build a prototype. Mitchell’s genius was to meld developments that had taken place elsewhere, including elliptical wings and underwing radiators, into a radically new aircraft. The prototype flew in 1936, achieving 349mph, and even before it completed its tests, the RAF ordered 350 of them. They called it the “Spitfire,” which Mitchell thought was “a bloody silly name.”

Mitchell never lived to see it in combat, though in the throes of his final illness he used to watch it be put through its paces. It proved its worth in the Battle of Britain, which could not have been won without it. Its superior performance made it a match for the German ME109 fighter escorts, while the Hurricanes took on the bombers. Has Britain not won that battle, it would not have been still in the war as a base for the build-up of supplies and troops that launched the D-Day landings.

It was the UK’s most produced WWII aircraft, with 22,685 built of its different versions. In 1943, a Spitfire XI reached 606mph in a 45-degree dive, and in the following year it achieved Mach 0.92, a record for a propeller aircraft. During its dive the propeller and reduction gear broke off, making the plane now tail heavy. Its pilot, Squadron Leader Martindale of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, blacked out with the 11g forces of its climb, and came to at 40,000 feet to find the plane now had slightly sweptback wings (originally straight). Martindale successfully glided it 20 miles to a safe landing at the airfield, and won the Air Force Cross for his exploits.

Mitchell himself was the subject of a biopic movie, “The First of the Few,” starring Leslie Howard, and is honoured today as one of the men whose dedication and patriotism saved the nation. His story is a timely correction to those who claim that history is shaped by impenetrable forces, and that the lives of individuals have no significance. He made his life matter.

Adult Health and Social Care

Jeremy Hunt kept telling us, when he was Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, that an adult social care green paper was about to be published.  Matt Hancock has been repeating the mantra since he took over the job.  Both are now vying to be the next PM but if neither of them can deliver a green paper, neither of them is likely to deliver Brexit.  On 6th June Hancock announced a “prevention green paper, which we will publish soon,” (here we go again) which “will give people an opportunity to let us know their views on how we achieve this [the commissioning of care services] and build on the excellent local practice happening across the country.”

He is saying, in effect, that the government has no idea what to do. Furthermore it muddles prevention, i.e. the avoidance of the need for health care, with the provision of adult care services which is what the missing green paper was supposed to be about.

In what fantasy land is the DHSC living to believe that the need for adult care can be removed by some magic formula which only the general public knows how to construct? Is it credible that the general public have the answers when the DHSC and its myriad consultants do not? Why are we paying them? We have already had plenty of expert reports, notably from the King’s Fund, Sir Andrew Dilnot, the Local Government Association and the Care Quality Commission. The central reason for declining care is the shortage of cash available to local authorities to provide it. Inept ministers have failed to address the problem or even to propose possible solutions in a green paper. Of course imposing new taxes and/or making old people pay more towards their upkeep are electorally unpopular, as Mrs May discovered in 2017. And opposition parties are irresponsible in calling such things death or dementia taxes or the like but proposing no solutions. Failing to address difficult issues will not make them go away.

Whether the NHS has more money than is good for it is open to debate. It certainly does not use its resources optimally but, even if it did, that may not be enough to meet growing future demands. On the other hand, the shortage of funds available to local authorities for adult social care is universally acknowledged. “Spending on adult social care in England has fallen by 3% since 2009/10.” The Institute for Government’s 2018 report showed that of nine major public services, the public were most concerned about the support for adult social care and prisons.

In his June 6th announcement of the green paper to come, Hancock concluded that the answer was that the “NHS work much more closely with local authorities on public health so that commissioning is more joined-up and prevention is embedded into a wider range of health services.” The reality is that no amount of joint, with the NHS, commissioning will solve the adult social care cash shortage. It is more likely to distract the NHS from its own business. The senior partner of a Norfolk primary care practice put it like this: “Every minute spent working with/for local authorities is a minute NOT spent doing our core NHS medical work.”

A further example of kicking the adult care can down the road was the creation, two months ago, of the “Health Foundation’s new Health and Social Care Sustainability Research Centre” which “will find and undertake research on the long-term demand and cost trends affecting health and social care in the UK with the aim of improving the evidence base to inform policy.” Sir Andrew Dilnot is the Chairman of the Oversight Board. No one doubts his expertise but do we need new research to recognise that all the local English authorities simply need more money for social care?

How much more? The Local Government Association “said funding pressure and increasing demand for services like adult and children’s social care and support for homeless people, would leave English local services facing a £3.9bn funding deficit in 2019.” In order words, adult social care needs a £3bn top-up immediately – chicken feed compared to the £20bn given last year to the NHS – and probably a lot more thereafter.

The truth is that their relative funding is distorted by politics: the Tories give money to the NHS to keep the Labour Party at bay. There is no similar benefit from giving more to local authorities. Sir Andrew Dilnot, and another other ten members of the expert group the DHSC created to advise on the social care green paper, published a letter in the 8th June Daily Telegraph saying: “we are united in our despair at the failure of governments for the last 20 years to deal with the critically important issue of the funding of social care. The system is underfunded, unsustainable and unfair.”

We regularly hear calls for “politicians on all sides with the courage” to come together and address the problem. Nice words but it will not happen without a formal cross party commission finally to determine how much money is needed, what for, howit should be scrutinised, and how that money should be raised through progressive taxation and optional contributions from those who can afford them — and to mitigate tail risk in any private sector provision. Any of the major three political parties that refuses to participate should be held up to public ridicule by the other two. It would be a vote loser.

In the meantime the DHSC should stop pretending it is doing something.