Just what should a good progressive do here?

We just note, with modest glee*, the problems that can arise from being a good little progressive these days. Who is it that should be supported here on those banners when the march takes place to Trafalgar Square?

Indigenous protesters have paralyzed roads around Ecuador and blocked a main highway into the capital in a fifth day of action against government austerity measures that have sparked the worst unrest in years, resulting in 477 arrests.

The umbrella indigenous organization Conaie said demonstrations would continue until President Lenín Moreno withdraws last week’s measure to eliminate fuel subsidies.

The problem being that protests against austerity are, from that progressive standpoint, obviously to be supported. Protests by the indigenous - which never does seem to include Morris Dancers - are equally to be approved of. And the imposition of IMF strictures upon democratically decided policies is to be abhorred.

Great, so the woke will be as one with the protests.

Except it is also true that subsidies to the boiling of Gaia are to be entirely anathematised. It may be that the people doing the pressuring - the international capitalist regime - are to be opposed as with the over-riding of the peoples’ will. But the elimination of fossil fuels subsidies is the first demand of that church of St Greta.

For us there is no problem here. We do agree that at times subsidies to the poor are necessary. But they should always be subsidies to people not to products. Thus housing benefit not social rents, cash welfare not fuel subsidies. Thus the elimination proposed here is entirely sensible before we even get to the climate change issue.

But you see the problem for those who wish to continue to be right on?

There is a rather larger point here too, other than just donning the intellectual Doc Martens. The abolition of those fuel subsidies is, as the IEA, IMF, World Bank and all insist, one of the things that needs to be done to beat that climate change. But what if the people don’t want those policies or perhaps don’t want the results of that primal policy?

And what does that mean for whatever else it is that is proposed to deal with that heating globe? When the demands of Extinction Rebellion are that industrial civilisation must be shut down and then the people insist that actually, they rather like being able to eat, heat themselves, come in out of the wet and generally live high on the hog? Who gets arrested then? And who will the marches support?

*Actually, no, we’re gleefully putting the boot in.

Microwave makes life better

In 1945, Percy Spencer, employed by Raytheon, was working on a radar unit when he noticed that it had somehow melted a bar of chocolate in his pocket. He was lucky it didn’t melt him. He used it next to cook popcorn, and then an egg - which exploded in the face of the engineers. On October 8th of 1945, 74 years ago, Raytheon filed a US patent for the new cooking process that Spencer had discovered, and the microwave oven was born.

The invention had British origins, in that it owed its existence to the cavity magnetron, developed to make shortwave radar possible in World War II. In 1940 Sir John Randall and Harry Boot invented a valve that could produce microwaves with a wavelength of 10cm. The magnetron was taken to the US by Sir Henry Tizard, a wartime scientific adviser, in exchange for wartime help. The US historian James Baxter later described it as “the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".

Raytheon originally called their cooker a “Radarange,” and produced early models weighing 750 lb and costing $5,000 (£56,000 in today’s money). Over the years the weight and the price came down, especially after the Japanese firm Sharp entered the market in 1961. Now the table-top device is ubiquitous, used for cooking and for reheating previously cooked foods. They have pluses and minuses. Microwave cooking does not normally brown or caramelize food, lacking the high temperatures that do this, and therefore does not produce the flavours that browning or frying impart.

On the other hand, they are healthier in some respects. Microwaved food does not lose the nutrients lost to the water in boiling, and vegetables in particular retain more of their nutrients. Spinach, which loses 77% of its foliate when boiled, retains nearly all of it when microwaved. Bacon cooked in this way has significantly lower levels of carcinogenic nitrosamines than conventionally cooked bacon.

The story of the microwave oven illustrates a fact about free market capitalism that many commentators overlook. If you measure improvements in living standards by looking simply at wage rises over time, you are missing out on the fact that the wages buy more, and they buy better. If you measure the price of early colour televisions against today’s prices, adjusted for inflation, you achieve a comparison. But the real one is that it takes far fewer hours of work to pay for a colour TV today than it did then, and a modern colour TV is far better in many respects.

The same is true of many, if not most, of personal and household consumer goods. They take fewer man hours to afford, and they are much better than what was available before. Even if wages had stagnated, their buying power increases, and the goods they can buy bring increased convenience and opportunities. The iPhone in my pocket replaces the roomful of junk it would have taken 20 years earlier to perform everything it does, and it takes far fewer hours of work to buy it than it did to buy the junk.

Those who affect to sneer at consumer goods are missing out on what they now enable us to do, and the choices and opportunities they present. The microwave cooker enables us to spend less time cooking, if we wish, and more time in doing something we value more instead. That represents a gain in satisfaction.

A puzzling thing to worry about

We’re told, in The Times, that there’s a certain gender segregation online:

Online, men and women are often segregated, leading to regressive cultural views and threatening hard-won equality

It’s also obvious that this is thought to be a bad idea. Which is ever such a little problematic.

We’re back to that old economic point about expressed preferences and revealed. That point being that when we wish to know how people value something - anything - we should not be looking at what they say, rather what they do. It is only the second that reveals that true valuation.

So, here. When able to freely associate by interest and style of conversation men and women tend to - always tend, this is never about an individual but averages - sort into different groups:

YouTube and Reddit are mainly male environments — almost 70 per cent of the user base of both sites is reportedly made up of men. Instagram is skewed towards women, as is the image-sharing site Pinterest (a reported 80 per cent of its users are female). Even on those sites men and women are segregated; YouTube is host to a massive, overwhelmingly male gamer community but also to the female-dominated world of lifestyle and beauty vloggers.

It’s possible to decry this, clearly, for it is being decried. But the obvious question becomes well, what should we do about it?

The useful answer would be nothing. For the task is not to make us all conform to some ideology but to find the arrangements which enable us all to be human. This is the argument in favour of the market economy of course, that innate propensity to truck and barter meaning that this is just what homo sapiens does.

Gender equality, of course and we’ll not have a word said against it. But that insistence upon an equality of outcome doesn’t work. The entire point of a liberal polity is that consenting adults get to do as they wish. If that doesn’t meet with the stricture of some plan then it’s the liberty and the consenting which should, and does, win.

Russia’s new Tsar

Vladimir Putin was born in what was then called Leningrad and is now St Petersburg on October 7th, 1952. After graduating in law he became a spook, a KGB officer for 16 years, eventually Lieutenant Colonel, stationed in East Germany until it collapsed in 1989. He then went into St Petersburg politics in 1991, and five years later moved to Moscow to join President Yeltsin.

He became acting President on the last day of the 20th Century and has been President from 2000-2008, Prime Minister from 2008-2012, and President again since 2012. Assuming the interlude with Dmitry Medvedev as President was simply a subterfuge to get around term limits, Putin has been in power for just short of 20 years, and has announced he will not seek a further term when his present one expires in 2024.

In his first two terms he was credited with rescuing Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, enjoying the benefits of a boom in commodity prices, combined with prudent fiscal and economic policies. The purchasing power of Russians went up by 72% during this period, though the world financial crisis and retrenchment has produced more uneven and less prosperous times since. As principally a commodity economy, rather than a modern industrial one, Russia’s economic performance has been tied to world growth. They have benefitted in particular from supplying the raw materials to supply China’s rapid economic expansion.

After the humiliation of their collapse as a world power, most Russians welcomed a President who could reassert their country’s importance and take steps to protect its interests. Putin cultivated the ‘strong man’ image to emphasize his role as a strong leader, appearing in a variety of tough, macho roles, often bare-chested, as he rode bareback, swam in icy waters, tranquilized polar bears and tigers, went scuba diving, drove race cars, and demonstrated his martial arts skills. Many in the West mocked these contrived and staged exploits, but they resonated in Russia.

Although nominally a democracy, Russia curbs its media, arrests and even murders political opponents, and clamps down on opposition parties and demonstrations. It is neither free nor democratic. People have shown in several countries, including China, that many of them will trade political freedoms for economic prosperity. When the economy falters, leaders often turn to whipping up nationalism by confronting ‘opposing’ powers and asserting their country’s might and importance. Putin has done this, asserting its right to control the ‘near abroad,’ and the EU has unwittingly helped him do this by attempting to move its influence close to Russia’s borders. Russia’s interference in and annexation of parts of Georgia and Ukraine is part and parcel of this.

When Russia violates international law, as it has done in using internationally banned agents to murder Alexander Litvinenko in Britain, and to attempt to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, this is done at Putin’s instigation and with his approval. The West quite rightly imposes sanctions and expels diplomats. Russia has to be taught that there will be costs to behaving in so reckless and lawless a manner. Whether sanctions should be imposed for its internal policies, suppression of freedom and human rights violations, is a separate issue. The West is certainly entitled to express its disapproval, and to remonstrate with Putin on such issues, but a certain degree of realpolitik has to prevail.

The days when neoconservatives blithely assumed that liberal democracy would work everywhere, regardless of history and traditions, are gone. Many in the West assumed that Arab Spring would usher in peace and liberal values, overlooking the centuries of hostility between different tribes and religious factions. In some countries it might take an authoritarian ruler to keep communities from attacking each other. In some countries a democratic vote might result in the election of a religious zealot intolerant of minorities and hostile to their rights.

In the real world some countries can enjoy internal peace and stability, plus economic advancement, without the civil liberties that accompany those things in the Western democracies. It is a rather sad fact of life that Putin reminds us of.

What, exactly, do we expect about bank branches?

The Sunday Times tells us that as bank branches close they do so disproportionately in poorer areas of the country. Or among poorer people perhaps.

Well, yes, we suppose so. What would anyone expect to be happening?

Abandoned: how the poor lost bank branches but the rich kept theirs

There has been a shocking rate of bank closures in Britain’s hard-up and less well-connected areas.

We have a new technology which is a substitute for the old. True, internet banking isn’t exactly the same as the physical kind but then no substitutes are perfectly so.

Some part of the old way of doing things will give way to the new. Obviously enough it’ll be the less profitable part of the old which switches over to that new.

That banking to those with little money is less profitable than banking to those with more is not, hugely, a surprise. So, what would we expect in a time of technological change? That the banking system closes expensive branches in poorer areas more than it does so in richer.

That is, matters are panning out just as even a cursory consideration of the issues would predict. Which leaves just the one interesting question.

And?

Barbara Castle - remembered for what she didn’t do

Barbara Castle, born in October 6th, 1910, was one of the most successful female Labour politicians of the 20th Century. She served in the Department of Transport, overseeing the introduction of permanent speed limits, alcohol breath tests and compulsory seat belts. In the Employment Department she brought in he Equal Pay Act, and she also served in Overseas Development and Health and Social Security.

However, it is probably something she didn’t do that will be recorded in the history books. In an attempt to bring the trade unions within the law, she proposed to limit their powers in her 1969 white paper, “In Place of Strife.” Union bosses were bringing the country to its knees by exercising industrial power with arrogant, bullying tactics that were beyond the rule of law. They rebelled against her plans, and found a ready friend in James Callaghan, who fought against her proposals in Cabinet. The Cabinet was split, resignations were threatened, and the Labour paper, Tribune, campaigned publicly against her for attacking workers rather than bosses. She was forced to climb down as the bill was diluted to ineffectiveness. The unions had won.

She began a hate-hate relationship with James Callaghan, who dismissed her from an otherwise little-changed Cabinet when he became PM. His excuse that he wanted to lower its average age looked thin, since he was himself 4 years older than Harold Wilson, the PM he replaced. Castle became an MEP, and in 1990, a life peer.

She had failed to tame the unions, as did Edward Heath when he unexpectedly won the 1970 general election and introduced his “Industrial Relations Act.” The unions fought back bitterly with a series of strikes that brought power cuts and a three-day working week. Heath called an election in 1974, asking “Who runs the country?” The electorate replied, “Not you,” and booted him out. The unions had won again, and Heath was demoted to sulk for years on the back benches.

Margaret Thatcher did bring the unions to heel, where both Castle and Heath had failed. There were three elements to her success. Firstly, she didn’t initially confiscate union power, but redistributed it from the union leaders to their members. Thus there were now secret postal ballots for members to elect their leaders, in place of a show of hands at the workplace under the eye of shop stewards. Workers voting at home began to elect more moderate leaders. There were postal ballots, too, as workers won the right to be consulted before strikes could be called. This deprived their leaders of the ability to call instant walk-outs.

The second element of the Thatcher government’s approach was that it was piecemeal. Instead of one big act that would provoke total opposition, there were a series of measures, each fairly small, but cumulatively they gradually brought the unions under control. It was a salami slicer approach.

Her third element was privatization. Putting the big state industries into private hands changed the attitude of their workforce. Strike action now could threaten their own jobs, and their company’s long term survival. Britain went from having the highest number of days in Europe lost through strike action, to having the lowest. Such industrial unrest as remained was now mainly confined to industries and services that remained in the public sector.

Thatcher succeeded where Castle and Heath had failed, by adopting a gradualist, Fabian, approach. Jeremy Corbyn’s policy of reintroducing those lost union powers shows how effective their abolition was in curbing extremist left wing militancy.

Barbara Castle was 87 when she sat in the front VIP row in Cambridge’s Senate House when I graduated with my Master’s degree in 1997. I don’t think she knew she was watching the President of the Adam Smith Institute. Had she done so, she might well have walked out.

It's only ever the excuse that changes

We’ve another of those calls for global economic management and control. For the transfer of rich country resources to poor. A reminder that it’s only the excuse that changes in this matter:

As our climate emergency unfolds with the economic and ecological instability that it wreaks, we need to again consider a host of new pan-national institutions to tackle this threat. The effects of the climate crisis will be most extreme for people in the global south. It requires massive investments, as much as an additional $2.5tr per year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which current financing and institutional arrangements appear unable to fulfil.

We would need to ensure financial stability and a mechanism for the transfer of resources through an international climate stabilisation fund – a sort of IMF targeting the climate crisis. This agency would put in place new fiscal arrangements to regulate global financial markets and corporate elites, especially those that have made vulnerable island and developing countries into tax havens or exploited natural resources. These nations now require the means to transform their futures. This body could seek to coordinate tax policies and disburse lost taxes to provide direct support to climate-exposed territories: encouraging productive diversification and tackling interconnecting inequality and displacement caused by climate change.

The argument being that post-WWII we put in place those global economic regulators. Bretton Woods, the IMF, the World Bank and so on. Now we should do so again. Simply because it’s obvious that there should be global economic regulation from the centre.

Obviously.

Except that’s to miss the point of the past 40 years. We did indeed have those global institutions. And the poor countries didn’t grow. Then we started - this global neoliberalism - to use market processes and the poor countries did grow. We are enjoying that delight of falling global inequality as a result. The progressive eradication of absolute poverty. We actually have, in place right now, the correct economic policies that is.

But, obviously, because it is just obvious that there must be a Fat Controller, we must reinstitute the failed policies we’ve proven wrong just because. Thus this current call. Climate change is only the excuse here.

It’s also an appallingly bad excuse as the IPCC’s own economic models show. Whatever it is that we do about the point, even if we do nothing, those models insist that doing it within a globalised and free market economy produces better results than inside a more regional and planned - socially democratic even - one.

But, you know, that urge to plan everything just never does leave some people. Thus the flailing casting around for an excuse for it. Even when the very idea has been proven to be empirically, let alone theoretically, wrong.

The ill-fated R101

It was a major blow to British aviation when the airship R101 crashed and burned in France on October 5th, 1930, on its maiden overseas voyage. It was headed to Karachi, then part of the British Empire as part of a project to serve long-distance imperial routes. Two rigid airships were authorized in this programme, both publicly funded, and effectively in competition with each other.

The R01 was designed and built by an air ministry-appointed team under Lord Thomson, the Labour Secretary of State for Air in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, whereas the R100 was designed and built by private industry, by a team headed by Barnes Wallis, later to design the dambuster bouncing bomb and the swing wing aircraft design.

The R101’s trials had not met expectations. Its lift was nearly 3.5 tons lighter than anticipated, and its weight was over 8.5 tons heavier. Moreover, because of much heavier than expected tail surfaces, the ship was nose heavy. The ship was modified as a result, lengthened by 45 ft to add another gasbag, making it the world’s largest aircraft at 731 ft in length. The modifications caused new problems. The hydrogen-filled gasbags could rub against the frame, with risk of tearing, and there were problems with the covering skin.

The ministerial team had made bad decisions in introducing new and untried technology. The diesel engines and the frame were too heavy, and the servo motors that steered the rudder were excessively complicated. The R100 designers used a simple hand-operated steering wheel and cables instead. There were too many untested features, and to meet political pressures, the ship was making VIP joyrides before it had been properly tested, and before it had gained an airworthiness certificate.

The privately-built R100 relied for the most part on proven technology and was a success. It made a return test flight to Canada in 1930, a trip taking 78 hours, and passed with flying colours. The R101’s tragic crash in France killed 48 of the 54 people it carried, including many VIPs. Lord Thomson, the Air Minister, died along with senior government officials and most of the Air Ministry’s design team.

The subsequent Enquiry concluded that one or more of the forward gasbags had probably torn, leaking hydrogen and making the ship too nose-heavy for its elevators to correct. On impact the escaping hydrogen had ignited, possibly from a spark, or perhaps from a fire in one of the engine cars that carried petrol for the starter engines. The death toll exceeded that of the later Hindenburg disaster of 1937, and was among the highest of the decade.

It effectively ended Britain’s airship programme. The R100 was grounded and retired, and work was stopped on the planned R102. The Air Ministry concluded, somewhat belatedly, that hydrogen was just too dangerous a material for airships, and stopped all subsequent development, just as the Germans later did after the Hindenburg disaster.

The R101 provided a classic, and in this case, tragic example of how public projects can become bloated, with new additions being included until they become overburdened, and respond to political pressures rather than design needs. The R100 team, by contrast, kept it simple, with a clear goal in sight and incorporating established working technology rather than loading it with untried and problematic innovations.

It was an unhappy episode, costly in lives, but it ultimately led to safer and less weather-vulnerable passenger aircraft. Airships may make a comeback, probably as heavy lifters for such things as transformers within city construction. They may carry passengers across oceans for luxury flights with bedrooms, restaurants and glittering ballrooms, as zeppelins once did, and just as the Orient Express takes passengers on nostalgic train journeys across Europe. If this happens, it is to be hoped that they will be designed and constructed by private firms rather than by government committees.

Pecunia non olet laddie

The BP-funded scheme provided 16 to 25-year-olds with £5 tickets to RSC productions. That’s a noble cause but in 2019 BP looked like an odd sponsor. Why should young people accept free theatre tickets from a company that is contributing to the destruction of their futures?

One answer being that pecunia non olet - money has no smell. If cheap tickets are of value then it doesn’t matter where the money is coming from.

But rather more important is that it’s not BP doing the damage. It’s the people using BP’s products that are - whatever damage that may be. It is not the person who extracted the petrol responsible for the emissions of my driving to the shops. It’s me, the person doing the driving to the shops.

The youngsters taking a diesel powered bus - a fossil fuel produced electricity powered Tube, Shank’s Pony or bicycle fed on fossil fuel derived foods - to the theatre are the people producing the emissions being complained of.

Climate change isn’t an imposition upon us all by some capitalistic ogre, it’s us causing whatever the problem is.

ASI at Liberal Democrat and Labour Party Conferences

As well as our programme of events at the Conservative Party conference, the ASI also travelled to Brighton and Bournemouth for panel discussions at the Liberal Democrat and Labour conferences.

Our joint panel at the Lib Dem conference with Volteface focused on the case for legalising cannabis. It was absolutely packed (and baking hot), with Lib Dem mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita making the case for a regulated cannabis market in London on the back of Evening Standard polling that showed majority support for legalisation in the city.

Siobhan was joined by former Met special constable Joseph Kaz and ex-drug dealer Niko Vorobyov, with the Standard’s David Cohen chairing. You can catch up on the full discussion via the Volteface podcast here.

I travelled to Brighton and the Labour Party conference last week for a debate on what Brexit means for vaping, hosted by Prospect Magazine. It seems as though there is a meeting of the minds from all corners of the political spectrum, as I found myself espousing similar views on the topic to Labour’s Sir Kevin Barron MP. We both agreed on the huge success of e-cigarettes and other reduced-risk nicotine products in giving smokers safer choices, and saw Brexit as a potential opportunity to change some of the wrong-headed regulations that hamper efforts at encouraging more smokers to switch.