We'd better abolish social housing then
The problem with far too much economic, even social, commentary is that near no one asks Thomas Sowell’s important question, “Compared to what?”
We’ve been told that privately owned, owner occupied, housing is bad, terrible, no good. For some set of complex reasons rooted in the idea that property is theft perhaps. We’ve also been told, and policy has acted upon, the idea that private rentals are bad, terrible, no good. Why should anyone be able to profit from something as essential as another’s need for a roof over their head?
There’s not really much left as an alternative except for the idea of some sort of socially owned housing which is then rented. But this is now being described as terrible, bad, no good:
This squalor was supposed to be her fresh start. After some hard years, the 38-year-old had just got remarried and fancied a new life in the suburbs of London. On viewing, she’d had some worries, but the family were assured that central heating and double glazing would arrive at the property before they did. They were even asked to pick a colour for the new door. And since those promises came from the country’s biggest housing association, Clarion, Sultan believed them.
Bad move.
The thrust of the piece is indeed that this communal, charitable, model is also terrible, no good, bad. As with Awaab Ishak, where the two year old’s death was laid at the door of a social housing provider.
At which point the argument seems to have rather boxed itself into a corner. All housing models - private ownership, private rental, social rental - are terrible, no good, bad.
So what do we do now then? Ask Sowell’s question - compared to what?
Not, what is the housing system that produces no bad outcomes because as the complaint is there isn’t one of those. Which is the system which produces the least horrors and the most benefits? That is, compare the models to each other, not against some list of impossibilities.
We’re not, here, about to insist upon any one of the three. That’s not the point we wish to make, even though we’ve clearly got views. The point we do insist upon though is that we’ve got to be asking the right question.
Which is not what is a theoretically perfect housing system? Rather, among the systems that are possible which is, while comparing the real world results against each other, the best we can do?
We do tend to think that at least a modicum of capitalist and market rigour would be a more than useful ingredient of such a better system. That people lose money, jobs, for being bad at housing management seems to us to be an incentivising ingredient of any system. But that’s just us projecting our more general tendencies onto this one specific problem.
The standard analysis of British housing is now moving to the idea that all three possible systems are terrible, bad, no good. Shrug, OK, which is the least bad then?
Who guards the guards?
The Carillion collapse in 2016 prompted widespread agreement that UK auditors needed more effective regulation. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is supposed to do that but it has come under much criticism, for example in December 2018:
“Two major Select Committees have accused it, in the strongest terms, of timidity, a lack of pace and excessive closeness to those it regulates.”
My own experience testifies to that. Brands are the most valuable assets many companies own. In the 1990s, we tried to persuade the FRC to recommend that companies placed their values on their balance sheets. After all, if balance sheets do not inform people about their most valuable assets, what are balance sheets for?
We were wasting our breath. The FRC was totally unable to grasp what a “brand” is? 30 years on, a company can put the price paid for a brand on the balance sheet, but not its value (unless it has declined), still less the value of any brand the company already owns.
In short, we can all agree that UK auditors need better regulation, that the FRC, despite recent improvements, is dominated by the Big Four auditors, and should be removed, not reformed. Six years on, what was formerly BEIS announced that the:
“Government will revamp the UK’s corporate reporting and audit regime through a new regulator, greater accountability for big business and by addressing the dominance of the main audit firms.”
The FRC was to be replaced by a new, stronger regulator – the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA) – with tougher enforcement powers. But where in all this is the professional body?
The government does not tell doctors how to practice medicine nor solicitors how to practice law. And regulators are proving a mixed blessing: Ofgem has presided over a huge transfer of money from impoverished consumers to Centrica, Shell, BP and other fat cat energy providers, whilst Ofwat sanctions sewage filling our rivers. Ofcom allows price rises well above inflation.
For a start, it is absurd that the auditors, whose job to is ensure the company’s directors are behaving themselves, are hired, fired and have their remunerations set by those same directors. Hang on, you may say, surely large companies have audit committees. They do:
“An audit committee is made of members of a company's board of directors and oversees its financial statements and reporting.”
The solution is simple: audit committees should be mandatory for all large or listed companies but they should comprise members elected directly by shareholders, not directors, and should have responsibility for hiring, firing and remunerating auditors.
Secondly, the professional body should set auditing standards and police their adherence in a similar way to other professions. In this case, what is the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), with its 165,119 members and, according to its 2021 accounts, £53.6M membership fees and £33.7M net surplus after tax doing with all that money? Similar comments apply to Chartered Accountants in Scotland and Ireland.
Well of course the ICAEW does do regulation but that is delegated to its Regulatory Board (IRB) which in turn has delegated that to the Professional Standards Department (PSD). That again is delegated to the Regulatory Practice & Policy (RPP) and the Quality Assurance (QAD) teams.
Then there is the important role played by the Professional Conduct Department (PCD) which ensures there is an effective deterrent against poor conduct or poor-quality work. And, lest we forget the IRB also has general oversight of the performance of Professional Standards committees. Is it any wonder that this bureaucracy does not want to tangle with the big players?
The government should abandon its plan to replace the FRC with another, almost certainly useless, regulator but put the ICAEW on notice to become the tough professional body it should be or lose its Royal Charter. That was given in 1880 by Queen Victoria, left intact for 68 years and fiddled about with ever since, most recently 1994.
The relevance here is that solving the Carillion, or quis custodiet, problem does not require legislation, just a quick decision by the Privy Council.
No, no, really, this is not how the economy works
Please, do try to get this right:
One of the central premises of net zero is that the resulting job destruction in old industries such as car-making, but also oil and gas exploration, construction and farming, will be more than offset by the job creation in green industries such as renewable energy
No. Or at least anyone thinking that is hopelessly misinformed.
We do not hope that any replacement technology produces as many jobs as we had supplying that same thing before. Precisely and exactly the opposite. We desire, insist upon in fact, precisely the opposite. We want there to be fewer jobs in this new way of doing things than there were in the old.
Think on it. Before tractors (or perhaps that whole agricultural revolution thing) we had 90% of all people standing in muddy fields wondering how the green grass grows. Then we got tractors and we ended up with 2% of the population as farmers. We did not then move 88% of the people, of the jobs, into making tractors - nor other bits of the agricultural revolution. We moved 1 or 2% into supplying that new agricultural technology, sure. But 86% of the people went off and did other things. Danced ballet, staffed the NHS, taught kids to read, built computers and so on. Tractors made us richer not by the amount of food we got, but by the ballet, NHS, literacy and computers we got as a result of tractors.
We do not want the replacement tech to produce as many jobs. We want the replacement tech to require less human labour so we can be made richer by the labour of humans at sating other desires.
We’re afraid that it gets worse. If the jobs lost are to be more than offset then that means productivity falls.
No, really. Imagine we kill off fossil fuels and replace with renewables. Renewables create more jobs than fossil fuels - The Green Party has crowed about this in every election manifesto for decades now. But what is the product, production, here? The energy required to power society. And if we say that the energy to power society now requires more human labour then we’ve just insisted upon lowering productivity. Because that’s what productivity is, value of output by the hours of human labour it takes to create that output.
The entire political world shouts about how British labour productivity isn’t rising, or not fast enough. Then everyone insists that we must lower it by having renewables? Well, yes, actually that is what is happening. Because far too few actually grasp the basics of economics. Note that the above isn’t neoliberal, it’s not even neoclassical. It’s simply a statement of fact. If we start to employ more people in gaining our energy then we’ve just lowered labour productivity in energy production. Because that’s what productivity means, requiring how much labour to gain how much output?
No wonder we’ve economic problems if the ruling class think that we want new techs to produce more jobs than the old they replace. That’s entirely and wholly wrong. The entire point of new techs is to require less human labour so that other needs and desires can be addressed by that newly freed up scarce resource, human labour.
It's not the capitalism or socialism that matters so much, it's the markets and competition
A useful definition of capitalism is that it’s the capitalists who own the assets. Of socialism that those same assets are owned socially. Therefore things like workers’ co-ops are socialist, capitalist owned corporations are capitalist. It may well be that some have a preference for one or the other, could well be that one model or t’other works better in certain circumstances. But it’s not actually the vital division in economic or societal thinking:
Waitrose is to cut prices across hundreds of grocery staples as it battles to win back cash-strapped middle class shoppers.
The supermarket chain said it had invested a record £100m in cheaper items with nearly a quarter of price cuts being lowered by 20pc.
Fresh vegetables, meats and cheese are among the 300 Waitrose own-brand items getting cheaper, with a 1kg bag of carrots falling from 60p to 50p and Savoy cabbages dropping from 90p each to 70p.
Waitrose is owned by the John Lewis partnership, itself a workers’ co-operative. They are not slicing prices - and thereby raising consumer real incomes and living standards - because they are lovely and touchy feely, nor because they are socialists. But because they face competition from those markedly capitalist organisations Aldi, Lidl, Sainsburys, Morrisons and so on (respectively, family owned, family owned, stock market listed, private equity). Aldi, Lidl, Sainsburys, Morrisons, all also have to compete against the Waitrose price cuts in order to keep their own customers.
The thing that increases those living standards of the population is the competition between the varied organisations, not the ownership structure of the organisations. The thing to monitor and preserve is thus the competition, not the ownership.
Entirely true that monopoly capitalism would not be a happy place but fortunately we’ve never had that. We have been able to observe monopoly socialism and that was entirely dire as the 20th century experience showed us.
As long as those ownership structures are voluntarily entered into we’re intensely relaxed about those ownership structures. It’s monopoly, the absence of competition in markets, which is the thing to be abjured.
Government should stick to its knitting
Back in the 1980s, Sir Robin Ibbs got the Thatcher Cabinet to recognise that good civil servants were not usually good managers and vice versa. He persuaded them, with some difficulty, that there should be only two types of units in future:
A core unit - responsible for policy and money.
The executive agencies - responsible for delivering the required objectives, i.e. the managers.
Unfortunately, they both continued to be called “civil servants” which rather blurred the distinction. Quangos, i.e. non-departmental public bodies staffed by public, not civil, servants, would cease to exist. The revolution never happened partly because the civil service number 1 skill is resisting change and also because incoming ministers are completely untrained and never understood it. They still don’t.
Now would be a good time, with cross-party agreement, to follow Ibbs’ logic. Government should fund public services but that does not mean it should provide them. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) routinely makes a mess of managing the NHS and fails to fund social care. The solution is obvious enough: abolish the DHSC. The Levelling Up department already funds social care; it might as well fund the NHS too. The NHS would become a public corporation, like the Bank of England, and it would no longer be managed by civil servants.
Evidence of the government’s managerial incompetence is provided by this winter of discontent. Strikes are bad news for employers, employees and customers/users alike. There are many variations on Napoleon’s observation that problems are never down to bad soldiers; their leaders will be to blame. The problems are exacerbated by government’s tendency to want to find national standard solutions rather than allowing natural units, e.g. hospital trusts, to find their own.
Further evidence is routinely provided by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). When I was a 2nd lieutenant in Singapore in charge of supplies, the MoD was, mercifully, so far away we mostly had to look after ourselves. No trouble. Today MoD-purchased materiel is over budget, years late and defective. We need, maybe, a few hundred in an MoD core to design policy and fight the Treasury for money but, beyond that, the armed forces should be seen as a public corporation staffed by professionals, not civil servants.
Arts Council England employs (using the word loosely) 639 people when all it should do is pass on the money it receives to arts providers according to a set of criteria. That should not need more than 39 people, and not the other 600 who spend their time telling arts deliverers what they should do.
Over 40 museums and galleries were part of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2022 and are a classic example of public services that should be funded, but not provided, by government. Why should ministers designate who sits on their boards? The February 2023 reshuffle has broken up the DCMS but added departments when they should be reduced.
The bottom line here is that those functions which should not be part of government at all should become independent public corporations, notably the NHS, the armed forces and delivering public services or returned to the judiciary if that is where they belong, e.g. managing law courts.
That would allow government, following Ibbs, to focus on policy and financial matters in its core departments, staffed by civil servants, and executive agencies, staffed by public servants, for delivering those policies. A better focused government would do a better job.
Patrick Minford and going bananas about trade
At the heart of Patrick Minford’s analysis of Brexit is the very Smithian observation that it’s the imports part of trade which makes us rich. This is derived from Smith’s point that consumption is the purpose of all production. If we get to consume more, more cheaply, then we are richer - more consumption, cheaper, being what buying from the most efficient global producers allows us to do. It’s imports that make us rich.
Therefore now that we have the freedom to set our own trade rules again we should simply state that we are free traders. As with the Britain of 1846. We will impose no trade barriers to anything from anywhere, no quotas, no tariffs, only the same product consistency and safety laws that we apply to domestic production.
Then things go bananas:
Bananas could be more expensive in Northern Ireland than the rest of the UK when a deal is struck on the Protocol, Brexiteers have warned.
The Government is considering slashing UK tariffs on bananas from Peru, Colombia and Ecuador next year, which will make them cheaper.
But Brussels could insist that bananas sent to Northern Ireland from Great Britain pay a higher EU tariff if it deems them at risk of crossing into the Republic.
Now, what the EU insists upon for Northern Ireland is another matter. The question is why do we have any tariffs upon Peru, Ecuador and Colombia at all? Further, why in heck did we raise them upon Brexit?
Banana importers, distributors and retailers in the UK face a period of major uncertainty after it was confirmed that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit where continuity agreements have not yet been signed with key Latin American suppliers, the UK will lift its banana import tariff rate to €114 per tonne.
We don’t need a free trade agreement to not make ourselves poorer in that manner. Just insist that we’re not going to tax ourselves on our consumption of that waxy yellowness. There, we’re done. Instead we have this sort of silliness:
The UK has a standard tariff of 12 per cent on all imported goods which are not covered by trade agreements.
This means that products like oranges and bananas are hit with a tax of 12 per cent even though there are no orange or banana farmers in the UK to protect.
We just don’t need trade agreements in order to not make ourselves poorer. The imports are the thing we desire, the imports are what make us richer, why are we putting barriers in the way of us getting what we want? After all, the entire point of Brexit is that this is all now, again, under our own control.
We do now have the political power to abolish all tariffs and quotas upon imports. We should do so, obviously, anything else is just bananas.
Flatpack Pathogens deadlier than Smallpox and the Plague
At a glance
The experience of COVID-19 seems to have provided some valuable institutional lessons for the UK Government.
But pathogens engineered at home by malicious actors may be even deadlier and harder to stop than COVID-19. These Flatpack Pathogens could kill billions.
The Government has important policy levers at its disposal. Solving issues such as lack of lab space, vaccine development and deployment, and reinforcing international commitments on pandemic preparedness, is vital to making sure Flatpack Pathogens do not become the new normal.
Pathogens brought armies of men down to their knees, whole countries to an early grave, and put our world in frantic disarray. Variola major (Smallpox) and Yersinia pestis (the Plague) inflicted untold suffering and the death of 300 million and 50 million people, respectively. COVID-19 alone killed over 15 million people according to the WHO. Numbers nor words can express the pain and loss incurred.
Supposedly we are more prepared for the next pandemic, having gone through the antifragility-inducing mistakes of the last. The argument goes that the UK’s development of vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutics used to battle COVID-19 can be repurposed, or at least help us in the next pandemic. But what if our next pandemic is nothing like the first?
Naturally-occurring pathogens have a key weakness, though: they are susceptible to natural conditions and man-made vaccines. What would happen if a pathogen is adapted to no longer have these deficiencies? You can now edit these pathogens for gain-of-function - making them more infectious, deadly, and robust in the face of vaccines and lockdowns alike. These engineered microbes may surpass the destructive potential of anything we’ve ever seen before. And this can already be done in the laboratory. But surely these Frankenstein’s monsters will stay in the lab? Surely..?
There are fears that the next pandemic may stem not from a lab, but from a secret hideout, or mum and dad’s basement. What happens when pathogen-making is democratised and everyone from terrorists to overeager chemistry students can order their pandemic kits online and create the next killer germ?
No pain no gain-of-function
Millions died and billions was spent in the successful fight against Smallpox. Bringing it back would probably take a small team with basic specialised knowledge half a year and cost about $100,000, says virologist Dr. David Evans of the University of Alberta.
As our gene-editing powers increase, so does this risk of new, designer pathogens being engineered ‘at-home’. A ‘Flatpack Pathogen’ could be made by a (take a breath) clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology that can be used to edit genomes in any way they like - giving humans the power of altering biological matter.
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which prohibits biological weapons, entered into force on 26 March 1975, has over 183 countries signed up. But how do we police those pathogens which won’t be made by states? Because it is likely that bioterrorists are already looking at ways to bring about an engineered attack on their enemies. Such an attack, at $100,000 for a smallpox reintroduction, is not necessarily past the resources of many well-funded terrorist groups.
David Evans discovered this fact in 2017. 6 years on and, as the technology continues to improve, the skills necessary to put together a Flatpack Pathogen decreases:
‘Whereas only state actors historically had the resources to develop and employ biological weapons, SynBio is changing the threat paradigm.’ (Wickiser et al, 2020)
How can the United Kingdom counteract this?
Obviously pathogens, much like flying birds, do not respect borders… but it is nonetheless essential that the UK’s regulatory frameworks still seeks to address emerging biosecurity concerns. The following policies would be a good start:
Make sure ‘customers’ are appropriately screened before they can buy gene-editing materials.
Commit to funding and delivering on the 2022 Biosecurity Strategy Refresh.
Establish the UK as a global leader in technological innovation by directing R&D funds to explore technologies with the potential to mitigate biological risks.
Increase lab space availability to help the UK become a technological innovation leader.
Update regulatory process to enable rapid approval of vaccine updates every time there is a new pathogen of concern.
Invest in vaccine platforms and proactively assess viral threats on an ongoing basis, developing fast-moving responses.
Avoiding the next pandemic like the Plague
As well as the huge amount of life lost, the education years lost by our youngest and most vulnerable in society, businesses ruined, the COVID-19 pandemic wrought economic damage on the UK’s finances. We spent hundreds of billions on a plan which we seemed to make up on the fly. We need to be better equipped come the next naturally-occurring pandemic or Flatpack pathogen.
Bibliography
Nelson, C., (2019), Engineered pathogens: the opportunities, risks and challenges, Future of Humanity Institute, (pg. 34-39).
Almosara, J., (2010), Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens, Counterproliferation Paper, No. (53).
Wickiser, J. K., et al, (2020), Engineered Pathogens and Unnatural Biological Weapons: The Future Threat of Synthetic Biology, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Vol. (13,) Issue. (8).
Centre for Long-Term Resilience, (2022), Biosecurity: The Opportunity to Transform the UK’s Resilience to Extreme Risks.
Lawson, J., and Lesh, M., (2021), Life with COVID: Boosting Vaccines, Injecting Resilience and Protecting Liberty, Adam Smith Institute.
Not quite getting the point about regulation
It’s not that this view of regulation is wrong, it’s that it’s incomplete:
The hi-tech startup with a new drug that, say, relieves Parkinson’s disease or a piece of kit that diminishes the toxicity of car exhausts will grow faster if the company can assure its buyers that its products have been tested and have passed the regulatory standard. They will grow even faster if they can assure European and American buyers they conform to European and American standards.
This is true as far as it goes. Assuming that there is a new piece of kit then being able to sell it into wider markets is of benefit.
But the basic insight of economics is that there are no solutions, there are only trade offs of varying levels of desirability. What’s being missed here is that regulation at the earlier stages of that development process will lead to less development of new kit.
From a project that has been floating around for some time - a new method of separating rare earths. Something that would be fairly useful in the present industrial environment. To test - using modern tech and knowledge - a supposition from the 1950s. No, don’t worry exactly what it is, but one of those things that in theory will work, has been shown to work on a lab bench and now needs to be tested in the tens of to hundreds of kilos at a time. So-called “pilot-plant” stage.
The cost of buying the kit to do the testing, running the test, about £250,000. The cost of gaining the relevant permissions to be allowed to run the test? About £250,000. Under certain interpretations of the REACH regulations it’s not possible to faff about in a lab, to that pilot-stage, to see what happens. Instead it is necessary to gain full environmental permissions for every experiment that is done.
This undoubtedly reduces the amount of interesting experimentation that is done on things that might work out, might not. For we’ve just doubled the cost of doing that experimentation.
Yes, regulation has a value. So does the absence of regulation. Any flat-out statement that regulation is worth it is wrong. As is any flat-out statement that regulation is not worth it. It depends upon which regulation, stating what, then a calculation of what is not happening as a result of the regulation. Yes, of course, less pollution has a value - but so also does experimentation into what can be done. It’s the balance - as with everything else in a world as complex as this one - which matters, not the insistence that “this” or “that” is good all on its lonesome.
That one of the examples used by Willy Hutton - for of course it is he - is a new pharmaceutical adds to the piquancy of the statement. For it not only costs some $2 billion to get a new drug to market these days it is also true that America’s FDA adamantly refuses to allow approval elsewhere, to other standards, to influence its decision. Each and every drug must be separately approved by they themselves. It’s one of the major proposals to make the world a better place that the Americans actually accept European - or UK, or Japanese etc - drug licensing rather than insisting upon their own system.
If only those who would rule our world actually understood our world.
Those darn supply curves
From the British point of view this is just another of those oddities we must observe. From the American it is more important than that:
Under the NHS’s Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access (VPAS), pharmaceutical companies agree to help subsidise the cost of the health service’s drugs bill if it rises by more than 2pc. The rate of how much companies are charged ultimately depends on how big the NHS’s medicines’ bill is and how fast it rises.
If drug prices rise then the drug manufacturers must “compensate” the NHS for those price rises. Or, if prices rise then prices must not rise. This has logical effects:
The repercussions of a sharp spike in these levies are prompting some less well known manufacturers to pull out of supplying Britain altogether.
This is particularly the case for companies manufacturing so-called “generic” drugs – medicines no longer protected by patents and so made and sold for far less. Generic medicines account for four out of every five prescription medicines used by the NHS and four in every 10 of them fall under the VPAS scheme.
“These companies run on very thin margins, so when the costs increase, including VPAS, it does make some products loss making,” says the British Generic Manufacturers Association’s chief executive Mark Samuels.
“At that point, companies will really look at whether that can supply the NHS, because no business can sustain supply of products at a loss for very long.”
We’re deliberately reducing the prices suppliers can charge. This moves us along the supply curve to where we get shortages of drugs. Oh well, there’s that basic economics shouting at us again. Shrug.
The Americans though, it’s long been an insistence that the Feds should be able to bargain with the drug companies over drug pricing. The NHS is offered as the justification, see, they do it therefore so can we.
Well, yes, the NHS does do it and see? Just like economics 101 states, reduce the prices to be paid and move along that supply curve. This might not be something that you want to do therefore. You know, don’t copy one of the - many - things the NHS gets wrong?
ASH is just gasping at trivia here over single use vapes
We would, obviously, prefer defiant teenagers to vape their way into coolness rather than smoke. At which point ASH decides that this should be taxed out of existence, this lower damage method of teenage rebellion:
Add £4 to the price of every vape to put off children from buying them, campaigners have said.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) are calling for an excise tax on disposable vapes to stop children from being able to buy them for less than £5.
The charity said adding £4 to each single-use vape, which currently cost around £4.99, would make them significantly less affordable for children while still less expensive than tobacco.
One of the justifications put forward is:
It argued such a tax would also have an environmental benefit, with discarded single-use vapes equating to 10 tonnes of lithium being thrown away a year.
10 tonnes of lithium is worth perhaps £800,000 these days. In a more rational market - when the planned mines open - perhaps more like £80,000. That’s the input price, not the value as scrap.
10 tonnes of lithium is also a trivial amount. A world class mine might produce anything from 10,000 to 100,000 tonnes. So, the “waste” here is of the order of one thousandth to one ten thousandth of the output of the one mine.
Not that it is wasted of course - humans have had the use of that lithium so what is the waste?
The single use vape market appears to be worth some £750 million a year. At a fiver a piece that’s 150 million units. Oh, and when we run the numbers back the other way each vape contains half a penny’s worth of lithium. At today’s very high valuation that is.
Ten tonnes of lithium - despite the fact that this is becoming one of those little factoids that is doing the rounds - is trivia.
It’s also true that there is that Pigou Tax idea to think about. That there are externalities, not properly contained in market prices and a tax should be used to correct that. But that idea does insist that the tax should - must - be equal to the size of the problem. It’s not in fact true that this is an externality, that ha’penny of lithium is already included in the market price. But imagine it isn’t, the tax should be that half penny. £4 is overdoing it by only 800 times.
People are losing their minds here. This is like trying to judge the overall health of British sport by concentrating on the question of Sheffield Wednesday’s B Team left fullback. Something of interest to perhaps five people - the manager, the two potential fullbacks and their Mums.
As further proof of the insanity:
It comes as major supermarkets have pulled one of the most popular e-cigarettes from shelves after they were found to contain 50 per cent more nicotine than the legal limit.
Watermelon flavour Elf Bar 600s have been removed from shelves in Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, with some chains stopping sale of the whole Elf Bar 600 range.
The move came after an investigation by the Daily Mail found between 3ml and 3.2ml of nicotine liquid in some e-cigarettes, while the legal limit is 2ml.
A spokesman for Elf Bar told the paper that some batches in the UK had been “inadvertently” overfilled.
Note that the claim isn’t that the vapes are too strong - it’s that they’re too good a deal. The naughty, naughty, people have been offering a 3 lb loaf of bread for only the price of a 2lb loaf. Terrors, eh?
There are indeed problems in this world but perhaps we should raise our sights and try to deal with them, not this sort of trivia.
So, who you reckon? Sam Reed or Jaden Brown, maybe Reece James for the A team then?