Reasons for optimism - housing

That anyone in the UK could be optimistic about the future of housing there would be remarkable if it were not in the process of change and with a high likelihood of more changes to come. The problem is that there isn’t enough of it, and that causes it to be unaffordable to large chunks of the population.

The villain of the piece is the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which was ostensibly designed to protect green spaces around towns and cities. What it achieved in practice was never envisaged. It empowered home owners against would-be home-owners. It empowered incumbents against newcomers, residents against immigrants, the haves against the have-nots, and the old against the young.

It enabled those who owned homes to restrict the building of new ones, and thus to raise the value of their own homes, year upon year. Housing, instead of being about somewhere to live, became an investment, one almost guaranteed to rise in value more steadily and more surely than most other investments. It is not housing that is unaffordable to new buyers, it is the land which can be built upon, often 70 percent of the cost of a new home, that is unaffordable.

Although the talk is of countryside and green spaces, much of the land designated as green belt is by no means green. It conjures up images of fields, woods and meadows, but the reality includes much damaged and distressed land such as former industrial sites, abandoned and decaying factories, gravel pits, quarries and the like. Much of it is used for intensively farmed agriculture, with featureless landscapes of monoculture crops onto which pesticides and fertilizers are deployed, often running off to pollute local streams and rivers.

The enforcement of a rigid green belt ban on new build has placed not a protective ring around towns and cities, but a noose that constricts their development in ways advantageous to their inhabitants.

The reason for optimism is that policies are changing. Development within cities has relaxed to allow conversion of unused office spaces into residential units, and to allow existing homes to expand upwards with extra floors. The trend towards more online purchasing has left surplus retail spaces in urban areas that can now be sympathetically developed into housing.

The big change, however, is the change in attitude toward the land at the edge of cities classified as green belt. There are increased signs of an acceptance that more housing is needed in places where people want to live, and of a type that people want to live in. The cost of building land has led British housing to be the smallest in Europe, often with insufficient space and unsuitable for raising families.

This attitude change could be accelerated by a reclassification of the green belt into its three types: verdant land, damaged land and agricultural land. Those concerned for the environment could be assured that the green fields, meadows and woods need not be touched, while the building on non-green land within the designated belt could easily meet all the housing needs for the foreseeable future.

Provisions against development contained in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 could be replaced by a presumption in favour of development, subject to protections against nuisance.

The solution to the UK housing problem does not lie with helping people to buy by making loans easier, nor does it lie with the construction of more affordable social housing. It lies with the building of more houses so that they become more affordable. It is not the finance that needs to be easier; it is the supply. More homes equals more affordable homes.

The reason for optimism is that this is gradually coming to be appreciated, and opposition to new building is diminishing year by year. Older people want their children to become home owners, and are becoming aware of the limits the present restrictions impose on their aspirations. It will be a bold step to neutralize the Town and Country Planning Act, but it will create an unprecedented economic boom at just the time one is needed, which is one reason for supposing that it will happen.

A New Northern Ireland Protocol

It is easy enough to find fault with the existing Northern Ireland Protocol, but how should it be revised? The objective was, and remains, to obviate the need for a customs and regulatory land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. When the Protocol was first drafted, it was not certain the EU and the UK would agree to duty-free trading.  When that happened, many in the UK naively believed it would remove the need for more than token checks at the border.  They had forgotten that the EU is besotted with regulation but that is where the problem mostly lies, and not just in Ireland.

The alignment of regulations is the nub of the whole problem, followed by the need for a pragmatic approach to paperwork and inspections. The EU is demanding all kinds of bureaucracy, paperwork and veterinary inspections, and even the colour of ink used on forms, which some believe to be punitive rather than businesslike. 

The problem concerns goods, not services, traded from Northern Ireland to the Republic, i.e. the EU.  The UK should not be bothered by imports and it is bizarre that the UK is creating blockages from, as well as to, Ireland. The problem can be divided into two: goods from Great Britain and goods created in the Province, both intended for the Republic. 

An earlier blog suggested that the blockages to GB shipments to Northern Ireland could be resolved by demarcating them “north” or “south” according to their final destination, with the former needing no paperwork or customs formalities, and only the latter receiving the customary checks by EU officials. There is a simpler solution: ship the latter goods direct to the Republic.  That would only leave the question of goods becoming part of products made in the Province and then destined for the Republic.  They could be treated in the same way as other goods made in the Province. As the Province is part of the UK, no Irish Sea border would then be required, thereby honouring Boris Johnson’s promise. 

The EU is concerned with the potential for GB goods going to the Province and then entering the Republic notwithstanding any commitments that they will not do so.  This would be smuggling and smuggling is not dealt with by paperwork, but by detection and severe penalties when it is discovered. Smuggling is a matter for each country’s customs agency, in this case the Republic’s.  The Republic may well ask for goods destined for the Province and the Republic to be labelled differently which would make prosecution easier.  No doubt exporters from Great Britain would be glad to comply, if it avoided the current paperwork.    

We are left with how to ensure the Province’s exports to the Republic comply with EU regulations and directives. The starting point should be EU recognition of Mrs May’s legislation that swept all EU regulations into British law: “retained EU legislation” is “set out in sections 2 and 3 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (c. 16). Section 4 of the 2018 Act ensures that any remaining EU rights and obligations, including directly effective rights within EU treaties, continue to be recognised and available in domestic law after exit.” Northern Ireland legislation is therefore now compatible with EU regulations and all the attention given to that by the Protocol is redundant – along with the paperwork and bureaucracy. The EU’s interpretation of the legal situation is the problem, not the reality.  

Of course, one of the reasons given for Brexit was the UK’s freedom to change regulations in the future and the UK will not be bound by future EU directives and regulations.  The word “future” is only used six times in the Protocol, mostly to do with agricultural financial support and twice in terms of the general relationship: “The Union and the United Kingdom shall use their best endeavours, in good faith and in full respect of their respective legal orders, to take the necessary steps to negotiate expeditiously the agreements governing their future relationship.” (Article 184) 

Article 13, however, gives the EU the right to propose that any new law of theirs that “falls within the scope of this Protocol” should also be adopted for Northern Ireland. If the Joint Committee fails to reach agreement, whether for or against, “within a reasonable time, the Union shall be entitled, after giving notice to the United Kingdom, to take appropriate remedial measures.” There is no reciprocal right for the UK. 

If a new EU law affects a product sector which is a major export category for Northern Ireland to the Republic, agri-food or machinery for example, Northern Ireland will have to comply with it for those exports. It should be free to adopt it for the Province’s internal use, as the Protocol envisages, but that should not prohibit goods conforming to UK regulations being sold within the Province as well.  Northern Ireland can be a member of both common markets at once. Likewise, if Westminster wishes to change or adopt a new regulation, it may, for the same pragmatic reasons exempt Northern Ireland which is, after all, a devolved nation. The existing Protocol does not mention this right but neither does it prohibit it. 

In short, if both parties intend really to cooperate, as distinct from pretending to, a new Protocol which meets all the objectives of the original but does not involve delays, wasteful paperwork and bureaucracy or an Irish Sea border, is perfectly possible. 

We now know from Irish diplomats that background talks are inching towards a revised agreement.  This has been confirmed, off the record, by a UK minister. The most useful progress appears to be a proposal from the EU for “a joint EU UK veterinary agreement which, officials say, could do away with up to 90% of the checks and controls on the Irish Sea.” On the other hand, the EU’s attitude remains high-handed: “EU diplomats say that if London continues to show it is implementing the protocol, then flexibility would be forthcoming.” In other words, comply and then we will consider being flexible. It is possible that a fresh joint agreement will be announced by early May. 

The lack of openness by the UK government is worrying. The Irish diplomats claim that the UK government proposals were delivered to Brussels on 31st March but we do not know if politicians in Northern Ireland would find them acceptable even in the unlikely event that Brussels did. If Dublin is fully involved in the negotiations but Belfast is not, that would be a grave error. Lewis and Frost could be getting us into another fine mess.

Universities might not be quite where to abandon spelling as a requirement

We can forsee the occasional problem here:

University tutors are being told not to dock marks for spelling mistakes because requiring good English could be seen as “homogenous north European, white, male, elite”.

Several universities are adopting “inclusive assessments” as part of an effort to narrow the attainment gap between white and black, Asian and minority ethnic students and to reduce higher dropout rates among those from poorer backgrounds.

We even think the reasoning itself is wrong. Having the one standard language that all must learn and communicate in means that all, of any background - or race, ethnicity, skin colour and so on - have an equal chance to show their knowledge and skill.

For example, an inability to distinguish between homoiousian, homoousion and homoian is going to make theology of any Christian tincture rather difficult. So too much history of the first millennium AD.

However, we’re intensely relaxed about the attempt. For this is the very point of a market in higher education, as with other things. It is market experimentation that drives the world forward and that, inevitably, will include trying all the mistakes, all the things that don’t work. The trick is making sure we learn from them, not attempting to prevent their happening.

Some economic findings are simply obvious

Or at least, some economic findings are obvious if one takes a mere moment to think about them. Take this for example:

Wealth gaps are bigger. Black home-ownership rates are under half those of white. Bangladeshi adults have a quarter of the wealth held by white adults on average. With evidence of such inequalities, it’s beyond me how anyone thinks it’s job done.

Wealth inequality is greater than income inequality. Well, that’s not just a common finding it’s one that holds for everywhere, everywhen. But with respect to ethnic disparities in the Britain of today we can and should go further.

Some 35% of household wealth, the thing being measured, is property equity. That people on lower incomes have less of this is not greatly a surprise. The further being, well, we subsidise rents to the tune of some £23 billion a year through housing benefit. Using the Saez and Zucman capitalisation technique this is some £400 billion or so of wealth. That’s £400 billion of wealth largely transferred from richer to poorer - something we don’t include in our calculation of the wealth distribution.

We can and should go further than this too. A lifetime tenancy - often enough an inheritable one, therefore lasting for more than just the one generation - at below market rent as with council, social or affordable housing is also wealth. Except we don’t count it as such when measuring the wealth distribution.

Again, to go further. It’s not just that we are not measuring wealth properly - by including the things we already do to make that distribution more equal - we are also deliberately subsidising people into =not having wealth by our usual standards of measurement. One reason that the poorer among us don’t have housing equity is because we specifically and deliberately subsidise rents so that they don’t attempt to gain any housing equity. This is going to affect the ethnic wealth distribution because, as we’ve already noted, the ethnic income distribution is skewed.

No, we don’t recommend the absence of housing subsidies for the poor. As should be well known we recommend making housing cheaper for everyone. But we would insist that the effect is most definitely there. One reason why the wealth distribution is so skewed is that we subsidise people not to amass wealth by the measurement yardstick we use.

The greatest portion of household wealth is of course pensions and there the situation is similar - we don’t include the effects of the state old age pension. Exactly the thing which by existing reduces the incentive for the income poor to create their own pension wealth.

Why is wealth inequality in Britain so great? Because we have a welfare state which reduces wealth inequality but we don’t count the effects of this. Why is the ethnic wealth distribution so skewed? Because the income distribution is - that welfare state specifically and deliberately reducing the incentives of the income poor to amass wealth in the forms we measure.

That camel that's a horse designed by a committee

This is about a monument to slavery in France:

Setting aside the obvious practical difficulties that a memorial containing such a vast roll-call would pose, this is also a perfect example of how art cannot be devised by administrative bodies. A memorial should be entrusted to the vision of one artist, not determined by bureaucrats. The problem with steering committees and orientation committees is that they’re all too willing to impose their political or ideological agendas onto an artist’s design – which is a threat to the creative freedom that powerful work requires.

It has rather wider application. Change the words specific to art - memorial, art, design - and it’s a useful description of getting anything done. Particularly anything new in either business or product design.

We can even, just for the sake or argument, accept Ms. Mazzucato’s idea that Steve Jobs didn’t really create the iPhone. All the component parts existed, often government funded, all he did was just put them together. Well, yes, quite, Jobs was the one, the driving, tyrannical, force that did put them together. No government nor committee did so nor has done in the 15 years since.

You know, as with the artists and the memorial. Stone exists and has done for some time, so too drafting tables, paper, pencils all the required components. Yet without the individual driving the project there is no memorial, no art.

Which does rather give us our answer to Ms. Mazzucato’s insistence. By definition an entrepreneur is someone who takes extant economic resources to do something not being done by others. Someone who invents a new thing is an inventor, someone who owns an asset that is used is a capitalist, someone who works on the project is a worker supplying labour. The entrepreneur is the vision, the tyrant, that combines them to make it happen.

As with the creation of great art, to be an entrepreneur is a rare skill which is why it is highly rewarded. Whoever and whatever created the assets which are employed in the scheme.

Prince Philip and the power of personal choice

The world marked the passing of The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh yesterday at the grand old age of 99. It truly was the world too, born a Prince of Greece and Denmark he died a Prince of sixteen realms over which quite literally the sun never sets. 

The Prince’s life was an extraordinary one. So much of which was buffeted by world events not of his choice and defined by others. In that respect his titles belie a sense of control that was not his, and is not ours in many cases. But it is his choices that shine out, a reminder that what matters is not what you are given or where you are from, but what you choose to do when you are asked or the time demands that you rise to the occasion.

Born in Corfu as a minor royal of the Greek ruling family to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Philip would see in his lifetime his family’s exile, estrangement, the rise of Nazism, his mother’s incarceration in a mental asylum, her joining a nunnery, her sheltering of Jewish refugees, his sister’s marriage to a Nazi official and her early death in an aircraft accident. His wider family would be forced from office, suffer communist oppression and purges across the continent, fascism again in Spain, and even restoration (as King Felipe and his wife Queen Letizia’s letter to “Dear Aunt Lilibet” attests).

Philip’s formal education began in Germany but left when the German Jewish educator Kurt Hahn (who founded the Schule Schloss Salem at which Philip studied) was forced out of the country and came to the UK — setting up Gordonstoun School with the belief that freedom and discipline were "not enemies."

The education he received was one of practical bulwark against the ‘societal ills’ that Hahn identified as the lack of physical fitness and the declines of: initiative and enterprise, imagination, craftsmanship, self-discipline, and compassion. The Prince’s move to Scotland was by free choice, a brave choice to follow the ideas of the man and an active one to reject the rise of identitarian and national socialist politics driving Germany at the time. 

Britain gained an exceptional man. He came top of the class in officer training for the Navy and saw service throughout the world. Many of the tributes yesterday by Commonwealth leaders began by remarking his first arrival in their countries aboard numerous of His Majesty’s Ships. He saw active service in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific — and was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered. 

His service to our Crown and Country, and to a world free from fascism, was by free choice. It reminds me of the exchange between Milton Friedman and General William Westmoreland over whether the US draft should be replaced by volunteerism:

“In the course of his [General Westmoreland’s] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.”

The Battenbergs were one of Europe’s great mercenary Houses, with many of their number adorned by the crowns of many separate states over the centuries. Prince Philip chose Britain and with it a new name: Mountbatten. This came from his uncle, the Earl Mountbatten, own decision to choose Britain too — service for which Philip’s uncle was rewarded with both the Supreme Allied Command of SouthEast Asia during the war, the last Viceroyship of India after it, and death by the IRA. 

Philip’s choice of Britain multiplied after the war. His correspondence with the young Princess Elizabeth that had begun before the war, survived the many months at sea and at port, became marriage and a lifetime of dedicated service to both the woman and the Crown. His role was to be ever in the spotlight but to ensure he never stole the show. 

A man’s man and a lady’s man the Duke has had his fair share of enjoying the finer things in life. The front page of the Times today carries a picture of the Duke playing polo on a bike at Windsor Great Park catching a woman in a short skirt and a camera in hand off guard gleefully in 1964. The obituary carries a wonderful quote from his cousin Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia of his bachelor days: “Blondes, brunettes and red-headed charmers, Philip gallantly, and I think impartially, squired them all.”

Yet for seven decades the Palace and the Queen have been his paramount choice. Decades were spent standing in her service in driving rain, in snow and sand and at sea, honouring the war dead, patronising charities and famously offering a range of witty (and sometimes condescending) remarks. Little by choice but all by choice at the same time. Family first, family at the heart of every decision. Offered the choice to meet President Trump or to attend the Christening of a godchild, it is telling he chose the Christening. 

Freedom of religion is a practical as well as academic matter in the Duke’s life. Two of his aunts are martyrs of the Orthodox Church, murdered by Bolsheviks. His mother as a nun of that Church is venerated at Yad Vashem in Israel as “righteous among the nations.” He himself converted to Anglicanism in order to reflect his loyalty to his wife as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

But while choice over belief in the otherworldly is important, the everyday here and now takes precedence in his deeds. It was his choice to use his office and his role to launch the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme that best reflects that he is aware that his title confers the ability to offer advantage to others as much as it did give reward and responsibilities to himself. 

144 countries now operate the scheme started in 1956, six million people in the UK and eight million across the world have a personal link to the Duke via awards — whose focuses on skill acquisition, independent expedition, physicality and volunteerism have clear foundations in the educational thought of Hahn and the wartime experience of the Duke.

The message here is an important one. Pass on and expand opportunities, help others to expand their own horizons, and use what advantage you have to give advantage to others. Doing so is in your own interests, the free exchange of opportunities engenders obligations that provide surety to your own position. Loyalty begotten by kinship. It is a remarkable application of the principle of the monarchical appeal that I think mirrors Smith’s explanation of what we need to deliver prosperity. 

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Constitutional monarchies have a habit of achieving that stability and limiting the excesses of political overreach that enables the tolerable administration and thus the promotion of prosperity. Mauro Guillen of the University of Pennsylvania found that over the 110 years between 1900 and 2010, monarchies had a better record than republics in protecting property rights of businesses and individuals.  

While most of the Royal Family’s politics are kept unknown we do know something of the late Duke’s. In 1984 he told Thames Television what he thought of communitarian ideologies:

“the individual shouldn’t be lost in the bureaucracy of state”

and that

“the consequences of dictatorships… that individuals are there for the sake of the state, and I think that seems to be wrong to me, the state should be there for the sake of the individual.”

He spoke of Sacred Cows, things that you cannot speak about, and he named explicitly the NHS as something that is elevated beyond its status and to the detriment of those that have no choice other than its provision. 

In 1977 the Duke warned in a speech to Radio Clyde that unless a sea change would occur in Britain the declinism that dominated at the time would mean a:

“gradual reduction in the freedom of choice and individual responsibility, particularly in such things as housing, the education of children, healthcare, the ability to acquire or inherit personal property, to hand on commercial enterprises, and the ability to provide for old age through personal savings, and, perhaps most important of all, the freedom of the individual to exploit his skills or talents as suits him best.”

He went on to echo the words of Adam Smith in saying that we should

“trust individuals to pursue their own interests to the benefit of their fellow citizens and the state as a whole.”

The country got a reprieve from statism under Thatcher but it feels like a timely warning today. For decades we’ve lost growing amounts of our incomes to rents thanks to a democratised housing market that favours incumbents over new entrants and which rewards landlordism. My generation is locked out of home ownership, we cannot save for old age, and we’re storing up inequalities of inheritance that’ll be tied to race issues within a decade. This year we saw the Conservatives choose to bow to public pressure to say that taxpayers and not parents should pay for the lunch of kids even when not in school. The NHS, quite literally in the middle of rationing care that left a great many of our countrymen dead, was clapped ahead of the actual nurses and doctors doing all they could to save as many as possible being let down by a system that couldn’t cope. We have higher taxes apparently incoming from a Tory government, and we’ve had Conservatives define what skills and jobs are deemed essential or otherwise.

Perhaps then you can start to understand the Prince through both his actions and his words as a materialist and instinctive conservative. A man for whom institutions are designed to provide stability and loyalty in a virtuous circle but require reform if they’re enforcing the opposite. For whom practical things are done for purpose and (as he wrote in a letter to the IEA) which should be judged against facts and not fashions. And for whom above all else, and from whom is demanded most, is kith and kin. 

It marries well the 1792 cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson (the Duke was a renowned lover of political cartoons, owning several works by the Express cartoonist Carl Giles and opened the capital’s Cartoon Museum) that satirised French and English liberties and emphasised the importance of judging outcomes over intentions.

The individual took a back seat in the final year of his life as we collectively worked to defeat a viral threat, but politicians that are keen to take the credit for the victories while ignoring the losses should be reminded that it was individuals and private businesses that delivered both the literal goods to millions of us and the development of vaccines — and not the state monopolies or rationing services. 

It was our politicians’ jobs to ensure that we had sufficient credit and cash available to us that would enable us freely to avoid interactions with others while those interactions led to deaths. To enable the economy to actively not adapt to a non-normal situation and survive until now when we can have it adapt to changed circumstances. Too much has been lost of the individual choice, right and responsibility, and I worry that a balance has been tipped in the wrong direction with the absurdity of bans on the ability to leave the country without giving due reason. It is upon us all to ensure that as the viral threat recedes, so too wholesale the restrictions on our lives — perhaps even to make the case that a deficit of freedom requires an expansion of our rights beyond what we had before.

Prince Philip’s was an extraordinary life, made up of extraordinary choices but it is all the more remarkable for the fact that he used those choices and circumstances to expand the choices and opportunities of those with fewer and less than himself. With your support we try and do just that too, whether it’s our books and research (the latest of which is very applicable!), our podcasts and webinars, or Freedom Week (applications open on April 12th!). We thank you for that, it changes the next generation’s lives and that means the world. 

My condolences to the Queen, to the whole of the Royal Family, and to the realms’ peoples. We have lost a man who really did get it.

This is the way economic recoveries happen

Covid lockdowns have caused more than a few businesses to crumble - airlines among them. So, what will happen after covid with airlines? This:

MESA, AZ — Avelo Airlines, which launched Thursday at Hollywood Burbank Airport, offers $19 flights to and from Mesa Gateway Airport.

Avelo’s only flight option from Mesa Gateway as of now is Burbank, but the price tag of only $19 after taxes and fees is pretty enticing.

Not that we’re backing, in any manner, this particular adventure into the soaring skies. Rather, that it’s an excellent example of how economic recovery happens.

People who desire to fly still exist. ‘Planes and airports still exist. People capable of flying ‘planes still exist. What might have failed in the recent hard times are particular organisations which employ the people to fly the planes which people desire to travel upon. So, the solution is that new organisations arise to employ the extant people to fly the existing ‘planes to services that revived desire.

That is, the Austrian view of recessions and the recovery from them is at least partially true. Assets don’t disappear, it’s the form of their ownership that might change. Once the hard times are past then entrepreneurs will and do pick up the assets and use them, again, to satiate consumer demand.

And, of course, if no one can work out how to usefully utilise such assets then clearly they’re not in fact assets anyway.

The point being of rather wider application than just short haul jollies of course. Take, just as an example, a business built of the scrag ends of the steel and aluminium industry worldwide which now finds itself desperately short of working capital. No names, no pack drill you understand.

That the organisation itself goes bust will be painful to those who currently own it. Other than that, well, not much. The assets that are worth reemploying will be reemployed. Those that aren’t then we shouldn’t be trying to save them anyway.

Liquidationism as a reaction to recession has a bad name, mostly because people don’t seem to understand that what is liquidated is the current structure of ownership, not the underlying valuable assets.

Here's the difficulty with investing our way out of debt

The IMF tells us how to get out of this problem of there both being a massive debt mountain and also slack in the economy:

The IMF tries to square the policy circle by advocating investment in infrastructure projects with a fiscal multiplier of 1.0 to 2.0, meaning that they pay for themselves through higher GDP growth, and ultimately lower the debt ratio over time.

Well, yes, but does anyone know of a manner of ensuring an actually existing political system makes such investments?

We have a certain logical problem which is that if past governments had been investing only in such a manner then we wouldn’t have a national debt whizzing through 100% of GDP in the first place. For the growth from those past investments would have arrived and paid off the debt.

We’ve also little to suggest that current plans pass such a test. HS2 appears to cost £100 billion by now and that doesn’t even pass its own internal cost benefit analysis let alone anything more general. Or perhaps it should be more directly about greenery, one idea being the mass installation of heat pumps. This would seem to involve “investing” £450 billion for a £3 billion a year reduction in emissions costs. That’s not a set of numbers to pay off the national debt now, is it?

It is conceptually obvious that it is possible to spend now to reap more in the future - that’s how all investment works after all. It is conceptually possible that government can spend money that performs this trick. It is not obvious, to say the least, that politics - that thing which defines what government does - leads to this result in practice.

The answer here - such as there is one other than abandoning the whole idea as unworkable - would be to insist that any such government “investment” pass a rigorous cost benefit analysis. A proper financial one, not just vague hand waving about intangible benefits at some point. For the aim here is to pay off the national debt, something determinedly financial. The problem with this as a solution is that some to many of the things already being spent upon would fail such a test.

That is, we could only know that the government is being serious about investing to cut debt levels when they cancel HS2. Which isn’t, as we know, going to happen. Therefore the idea itself doesn’t work, does it?

In short, politics cannot invest its way out of a wet paper bag - therefore government investment isn’t going to pay off the national debt.

It's so immensely annoying when George Monbiot almost gets there

Monbiot tells us that:

The central premise of neoliberalism is that the locus of decision-making can be shifted from democratic government to the individual, working through “the market”. Rather than using politics to change the world for the better, we can do it through our purchases. If neoliberals even half-believed this nonsense, you’d expect them to ensure we were as knowledgable as possible, so that we could exercise effective decision-making in their great consumer democracy. Instead, the media keeps us in a state of almost total ignorance about the impacts of our consumption.

Given that we are neoliberals we do indeed put our hands up to that prejudice. We’d shade it a bit of course. Even among those who insist that fewer pints must be sunk, less soda pop consumed, everyone does agree that precisely which flavour be consumed by which person is to be left to individual choice, not democratic government. So we all agree, at one end of the possible range, in the liberal ideal.

We neoliberals just disagree about the other end of that range, where is it that individual choice and markets stop working so well and government becomes the solution? We think it extends much further than Monbiot does.

We even run this site and write books and make speeches and run conferences and produce position papers pointing out to the public at large how far that spectrum of market efficiency reaches - to then blame us for how the BBC doesn’t pick up the story is just that little tad unfair perhaps. It’s not us limiting the knowledge available to the public that is.

This has its importance with the specific that George wants to talk about:

Many “marine reserves” are a total farce, as industrial fishing is still allowed inside them. In the EU, the intensity of trawling in so-called protected areas is greater than in unprotected places. “Sustainable seafood” is often nothing of the kind. Commercial fishing is the greatest cause of the death and decline of marine animals. It can also be extremely cruel to humans: slavery and other gross exploitations of labour are rampant.

Only 6.2% of the world’s marine fish populations, according to the latest assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, are neither “fully fished” nor “overfished”, and they continue to decline. “Fully fished” means that fish are being caught at their “maximum sustainable yield”: the most that can be taken without crashing the stock.

This is a central aim of fisheries management. But from the ecologist’s perspective, it often means grossly overexploited.

From the neoliberal’s point of view such stocks are grossly overexploited. Blaming us for the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy moves well beyond unkind to a calumny. We have been, for many years now, pointing out the foolishness of the policy.

Backed by considerable evidence too. The base problem is that described by Garrett Hardin, the commons problem. Revised by Elinor Ostrom who gained the Nobel for her work. What actually is the management system that should be imposed upon a commons that actually needs a management system? As Hardin pointed out - Ostrom’s revision being that in smaller groups of humans communal management also works - it needs to be either government regulation or private property ownership with markets. Which depends - depends upon the specifics of the resource under discussion.

Coase, another Nobel Laureate, pointed out that mining spoils can be privately dealt with - can be, not must be. Widespread air pollution is going to need at least some regulatory interference, a result that conforms to Ostrom.

So, what is it that works with fisheries? Yes to marine reserves, then private ownership of the stocks outside them. We’ve seen this work in situations as diverse as salmon netting off Scottish rivers, orange roughy off New Zealand, the Alaskan halibut fisheries. The Icelandic and Norwegian fisheries are near entirely built upon individual transferable quotas, ITQs, a best approximation to such a system.

The reason these work is because profit is maximised where the fish stock is well - and it is well - above sustainable levels. It being easier to catch fish if there are more of them to catch.

That is, this is not a knee-jerk reaction, this idea that individual choice and action within markets works better than politics, government and democracy. It’s a result of direct observation of the world around us. The CFP is vile and governmental, more market and private property based fishing systems work better.

That is, the only neoliberal knee-jerk that exists is a propensity to believe that “the market” works better than the alternatives. A propensity that we’re entirely willing to see disproven as it is in the case of, say, nuclear weapons, the price regulation of a natural monopoly - it was us who insisted that the national grid and the like needed price regulation - and public goods.

That is, the neoliberal reaction to a proposal that government solve a problem is not to run from the room shrieking in horror, it is to insist upon “Prove it, Sunshine”. Something that doesn’t in fact work with fishing, as Monbiot complains. Which is why we support more market based solutions to the agreed problems of fishing.

A Formula of Diplomatic Etiquette

When my great-grandfather was deputy head of the Royal Irish Constabulary during the troubles at the dawn of the 20th century, he considered Whitehall to be the main obstacle. Were he alive today, his views would probably not have changed. The Northern Ireland Protocol is an example.  It all started from a good idea. The Irish land border is 499 km long, about 10% longer than that between France and Germany. Nearly 300 public roads cross it.  Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, border posts and customs checks existed along it, albeit not very effectively, for the 70 years up to the UK and Ireland joining the Single Market in 1993. Brexit meant that there had to be a border with customs checks between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. As the land border was not really enforceable, moving one in the Irish Sea would be more practical. 

The UK was not too bothered about goods moving south to north but the EU was very exercised about goods moving from the UK into the Republic. So far, so good but, at this point, Whitehall lost the plot. What should have happened was that goods coming into Northern Ireland were demarcated “north” or “south” with the former needing no paperwork or customs formalities and only the latter receiving the customary checks by EU officials.  The problem was that the EU were only prepared to give a free pass to goods originating in Northern Ireland if it remained, in effect, in the EU with all its rules and regulations.  They ignored the reality that Mrs May’s government had already adopted all the EU’s rules and regulations to smooth the transition.  

The EU therefore insisted that shipments from Britain to Northern Ireland would, after all, be required to meet the full bureaucracy.  In effect the EU would annex Northern Ireland and, contrary to Boris Johnson’s “over my dead body” claims, there would be a full not-quite-so-Great Britain/EU border in the Irish Sea. 

The EU’s interpretation of this was enshrined in the Protocol which, in order to get the main deal through, the UK government signed and Parliament endorsed. The EU Parliament has yet to do so which may prove helpful.  “Protocol” is a French word meaning a “formula of diplomatic etiquette”. In other words, it specifies polite behaviour.  Its wording is indeed polite with much emphasis on the need to cooperate, but the substance is all take by the EU and give by the UK.  For example: “Accordingly, nothing in this Protocol shall prevent the United Kingdom from including Northern Ireland in the territorial scope of any agreements it may conclude with third countries, provided that those agreements do not prejudice the application of this Protocol.” (Article 4).  In other words, the Protocol takes precedence over any international deals the UK might do. Some doubt that Mr Johnson, never a man for detail, has ever read it cover to cover. 

VAT is a minefield.  So far as VAT on goods is concerned: “Northern Ireland is treated as if it were a Member State.” (p.5) I am not clear whether this means that the part of the VAT take known as the “VAT-based own resources" is handed over to Brussels as it is by other member states.  On the other hand, Northern Ireland is treated as part of the UK for VAT on services. 

So, having got into this mess, how should the UK now proceed? 

The three alternatives are firstly to tear it up and face the consequences. Secondly, having unilaterally postponed the worst of the paperwork until September, the government could keep doing that until the Belfast government can legally reject the Protocol in 2024. Finally, it could be renegotiated. The first of these would be unlikely to bring the whole Brexit treaty crashing down and it would have the advantage of dumping the hard border problem on the EU. The Good Friday agreement, finalised long before Brexit was envisaged, has nothing to do with the border issues. 

The main problem with the first two is that the UK is developing a reputation for reneging on EU agreements and they would make that worse.  This damages the UK’s international new dealings and ability to pressure others into conformity.  The Protocol allows for independent arbitration but unilateral UK action makes that less likely to be favourable. 

The reality is that the priority for all three options is to restore the UK’s reputation for compliance and create a climate where the UK is seen as the victim, not the transgressor.  The EU has blocked any attempt to make the Protocol workable but this intransigence is not widely appreciated. As it stands, the Protocol is costly for the UK without any financial benefit for the EU.  This lies behind the intransigence: streamlining it has no financial benefit for the EU either. 

There are wider reasons why genuine cooperation would benefit the EU and the Republic of Ireland in particular.  They need to be formulated and marketed but this has not happened. 

Since the current postponement of much of the paperwork was announced in March, the UK government has been entirely silent on the matter.  Discussions may be going on behind the scenes and a secret plan may be evolving but, if so, they are symptomatic of the lack of openness that has persisted since the Protocol was first mooted.  The House of Commons Select Committee has done its best to help but all the evidence to date, bar one, has been about the problems caused by the Protocol, not potential solutions.  

The Protocol requires that the minutes of the meetings of the joint committees remain confidential but that does not prevent the UK publicising the problems, sensible solutions and the obstinance and intransigence of the EU which is failing to cooperate.  This publicity campaign is needed in the USA, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the EU in particular.