End the attacks on our free press

In the 6th Century BC the Greek poet Theognis of Megara, writing of the myth of Pandora’s box, detailed how awful mankind had become, how far we had fallen:

"Trust, a mighty god has gone, Restraint has gone from men,
and the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth.
Men's judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone
revere the immortal gods; the race of pious men has perished and
men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety."

It’s a tale as old as time, that we’re on a recent fall from grace, but it somehow still draws in supporters. And the same arguments made in the 6th Century against the failings of mankind are made today of the press by its detractors. They argue while the press was once a true and noble force it now can’t be trusted, that it has overstepped the mark with our precious celebrities, that it no longer recognises the old noble ways and must now be reigned in. 

No; No; and No again.

The Leveson Inquiry looks to have been a pandora’s box for the fight for press freedom. After the initial multi million pound inquiry (estimated to have cost taxpayers £5.4m and the industry £43.7m), leftover sections of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 continue to threaten our free press. 

Mrs Thatcher was onto something when she said “you may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” And perhaps we should all expect sly politicians to use a wholly separate bill on data protection to sneak in the old proposal for papers to bear the cost of all legal cases brought against them (even when they win, and no matter how spurious the allegation). 

The other option open to papers, under the amendment that sees implementation of Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, would mean papers forced to sign up to a state-recognised regulator of the press. One of the regulators licensed by the state is Impress, set up and bankrolled by the backers of the legislation and anti-press campaigner Max Mosley.

The press has been free of licensing by the crown since 1695, free of a secretary of state issuing warrant against authors or papers they accuse of libel and free of duties payable since 1870. That this is being brought up as an idea again now is both sad and worrying. 

Those in the Commons and Lords should know the public are well aware of the benefits of a free press and also know the stifling effects this law could have on it. A public consultation on the issue in 2016 saw 174,730 responses, with 79% wanting Section 40 to be repealed in full and just 7% wanting it implemented. The most common reason given to repeal it was the worry of the ‘chilling effect’ it would have on the freedom of the press. 

We’ve argued before of the value of a free press that prints with neither fear nor favour, that keeps the powerful honest and all of us in the loop. None of that has changed, its importance to us grows as more and more consume media in more and more varied forms. 

While we can never put the evils of the world back in Pandora’s Box, this is not true of MP’s actions on the press. They can begin by shooting down Tom Watson and Ed Miliband’s amendments today, and then by repealing Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. If politicians fail to act this will keep being snuck in by those that hold vendettas against the press. They only need to win once to snuff out our free press. 

Update: MPs narrowly defeated Ed Miliband's amendment and, after the SNP said they would abstain, Watsons withdrew his. This is a temporary win though, until Section 40 is repealed the press remains under threat. 

Adult Social Care: Let’s Get On With It

Adult social care, with one sixth of the NHS budget, is the poor relation in terms of government oversight. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has 19 quangos to help it run the NHS and none for adult social care – not that quango deprivation is a bad thing.  Nor does it manage the funding; the department for Local Communities does that.

It has had no shortage of advice: a Royal Commission in 1999, an influential King’s Fund report in 2005, and the Dilnot Commission in 2011. An untrailed and untried proposal for funding adult care introduced during the last general election campaign nearly cost the Prime Minister her job. A green paper is expected in 2018 but no date has been announced and there are few clues when it might be due. The section concerned is apparently too short of staff to clarify the time-line.

However, the relevant two Commons’ Select Committees have decided to press ahead with their own initiative. Good for them. They have set up a 45–50 person focus group, rather grandly called a “Citizens’ Assembly”, to devote two weekends to listening to alternative proposals for funding adult social care, and then making their recommendations. Citizens’ Assemblies have been used in Canada, The Netherlands, Ireland and Poland but this is the first time the UK government has adopted the idea.

The idea is one that the left proposed and saw its heyday in 2015 when the Greens, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats were all pushing for a 'citizen-led constitutional convention' on the future of the UK constitution. There's perhaps a reason why the left is so keen. After all, 45 people are easier to steer over a weekend than a whole electorate. But whatever the conclusions may be, what comes out of the consultation must be a valuable stimulus – whether government action follows or not.

Unfortunately, it could have been better planned.  The weaknesses are fourfold:

1. It is widely agreed that adult care services should, in future, be better coordinated with the NHS. We're still not at the point where we know what the funding arrangement between NHS and social care will be. Citizens' Assembly members should be considering how to fund adult care as it will be, not as it is.

2. The research and analysis has been delegated to Involve which is “a public participation charity that aims to put people at the heart of decision-making”. A more fatuous claim to fame is hard to imagine: in this pre-AI age, who else can be “at heart of decision-making”? Involve is actually a sub-quango, i.e. part of, and funded by, the National Institute for Health Research, one of the half dozen quangos within the DHSC umbrella which sponsor research activities. This project is not in their usual line of work and an independent professional market research firm would have been better placed to conduct it. Cost may have played a part in that decision: this arrangement uses DHSC funds, along with two outside charities, to finance the work. Perhaps a false economy.

3. A 45 - 50 person sample is too small to produce reliable results for the analyses envisioned: “The members are being recruited with the help of ICM to be representative of the English population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic group, place of residence, and attitudes towards a small/large state. They will include people with direct experience of social care for both working age adults and older people.”  Contrast that with a much less fundamental (in terms of the numbers and costs involved) research project into why ethnic/faith groups are reluctant to donate organs for transplantation: “A total of 22 focus groups were held in six multiethnic areas of London with 228 participants from six ethnic/faith groups (who identified as West African Christian, black Caribbean Christian, Indian Sikh, Indian Hindu, Pakistani Islamic and Bangladeshi Islamic). There were separate focus groups for older people (> 40 years) and younger (18–40 years), and for men and women among older South Asian people.”

4. We are not told if this work was put out to public tender. Quangos all too rarely encounter competition and so all too often quality is found lacking. There is little here to suggest Involve will break this rule. And there is a worry that a quango, which is not a professional market research firm, would not be so strictly impartial. 

In short, the Select Committees should be congratulated on putting their shoulders to this slow moving wheel.  It is just a pity the research is not being more professionally conducted.

Which is more important: cat videos or investment?

The House of Commons is in the middle of one of its fits of inconsistent moralising.

They are creating a panic about data protection; worried that our private information is being sold and must be protected. Facebook can somehow tell what we might be persuaded to buy based on which cat videos we like; more amazingly, people believe that Cambridge Analytica used the same information to change how we voted (Cambridge boffins joining with Russia to subvert Western democracy?! It’s like being back in the ‘70s).

The House of Commons is in full “something must be done” mode, trying to force Mark Zuckerberg to appear before its committee to answer questions. More strongly, later this month the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) comes into force; a new expensive, bureaucratic and complex system to protect our data and ensure that it is not used without our permission.

The principle behind all of this is that our personal information should remain private, used only for authorised purposes, and this is apparently so important that it must be protected by law.

Yet the same month that this is happening, the same House of Commons voted to force the UK-linked Overseas Territories (such as the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar) to publish their registers of the beneficial owners of shares in all companies registered there.

This is said to be necessary to combat tax evasion, but that is simply not true; the shareholder registers already exist, and are available for inspection by tax authorities around the world. All this will do is force the same information to be made available to the public.

Rather than helping stop tax evasion, public registers will make the tax authorities’ job more difficult. People will be less willing to have their personal information made public, and so will either hide their ownership or shift their investments to jurisdictions where such information is not available to anyone. The wide ranging and accurate information currently available privately to tax authorities will be reduced by this reform.

The only people who are pushing for this information to be made public are tax campaigners. But from what we have seen of previous data leaks (the Panama Papers and so on), there will be little careful analysis of the information, to see who might be engaged in tax evasion, but lots of searching for famous names to smear people who are in the public eye.

The last round of media investigation into “offshore” companies attacked David Cameron over his father’s investment company, despite the fact that Cameron had paid his tax in full. It also outed actress Emma Watson for using an offshore structure to hide her London address from obsessive fans (due to the government’s tough laws against offshore investment in the housing market her scheme would probably have increased her tax bill, not reduced it).

But the media’s gleeful publicity is only part of the problem. Once public, this data can be abused. Of course it has been before.

Scammers already use publicly available information about shareholders to target people who may be tricked into investing in fraudulent schemes; increase the data available and you make their life easier, increasing the risk of people losing their savings.

But worse, there are many places in the world where public registers risk much more than a ‘phone call from a dodgy investment scammer'. Countries where being known to have money makes you, and your family, a target for thieves, kidnappers and extortionists. There is a good reason why a lot of South American money, for example, is kept in the Caribbean; it is simply not safe to keep it at home.

The House of Commons is being very parochial, viewing the rest of the world by British standards and forgetting that many of our Overseas Territories have a much more internationalist approach than our MPs do. Public registers will mean that people from dangerous countries will be pushed out of the British overseas territories. Their need for confidentiality, for personal safety, will mean that they will instead have to put their assets into less regulated jurisdictions where it will be more difficult, not easier, for tax authorities to get the information they need. 

Do our politicians never think through their demands in a joined-up manner? They say that data protection is important. But which is more important: that our financial details are confidential (open to tax inspectors, yes, they have been for years, but not made public for anyone to see), or hiding our social media likes?
 

Surprise, the National Farmers' Union wants more of our money post-Brexit

We've mentioned before that we've a vision for what the government and taxpayer support for British farming should be post-Brexit. Nothing. To go the full New Zealand option and thereby lower the cost of land and thus the costs of doing or going into farming.

Not to anyone's surprise the National Farmers' Union doesn't agree:

The NFU has released its vision for a sustainable, profitable and progressive future for farm businesses in response to Defra’s consultation on a domestic agriculture policy which closes today.

What follows there is a page of the usual corporate blatherspeak. What they're actually suggesting is:

For a consultation on the potential reforms that closes on Tuesday, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is submitting proposals that suggest the NHS, schools, the government and other publicly run services that use government buying standards should be “wherever possible, sourcing British assured ingredients”, except for products not grown in the UK.

If followed through, this would ensure a market of tens of billions of pounds a year to British farming and food production and secure millions of jobs.

Instead of picking out pockets directly with subsidies they will do so indirectly through higher prices paid by the taxpayer. No, we still prefer our solution.

Get the farmers off the public teat as we first did in 1846 and watch as, as they did then, the costs of food fall to the benefit of us all.

Happy Birthday Hayek!

On this day in 1899, in Vienna, Friedrich Hayek was born. He would go on to write about economics, philosophy, politics, psychology, and the history of ideas, and win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His 1944 wartime book The Road To Serfdom, which showed how easily social democracy could morph into totalitarianism, brought him fame.

The young Hayek was hired as an economist by Ludwig von Mises, and in 1927 the pair set up an institute to explore boom-bust cycles. They concluded that these cycles were caused by central banks setting interest rates too low—encouraging excessive borrowing, investment and spending. But low rates also discouraged saving, and when funds dried up, investments had to be abandoned and people were thrown out of work. 

In the 1930s, Hayek came to Britain, where he fought a long intellectual duel with John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). But Keynes’s ideas prevailed, and Hayek turned more to social and political philosophy. His key insight here was the concept of spontaneous order. Human and animal societies, he observed, show obvious regularities. Yet nobody planned the society of bees or the operations of markets. They came about naturally, and grew and persisted simply because they were useful. Spontaneous orders (e.g. language) emerged when we followed certain regularities of action (e.g. grammar). We might not be able to articulate these ‘rules', but they contained the ‘wisdom’ that allowed us to thrive.

We did not design this system, but simply stumbled upon it. When people first started bartering and swapping goods, they did not know it would grow into a worldwide system of cooperation through trade and commerce. But when they did barter and exchange, prices began to emerge: and prices contain all the information needed for the system to work. High prices induce customers to economise and suppliers to look for new ways to satisfy them; low prices tell suppliers they should train their effort in some more useful direction. 

Freedom was critical to the working of these spontaneous economic and social orders. They needed new ideas in order to evolve and adapt—which is why free societies advance more rapidly.

Hayek saw justice as the framework that enabled social life to work. We do not invent the rules of justice: we discover them through trial and error. But while justice facilitates an evolving social order, what people call ‘social justice’ instead aims to deliver a preconceived social outcome. It required us to treat individuals differently; and once we began to do that, we were on the road to serfdom, with no obvious end point. A liberal government would merely create the conditions needed for the social order to function. Socialism—trying to design a social order—was a dangerous mistake. No socialist planner could ever match the creative genius of a free people.

Food and drink production is a trivial portion of the economy

One of our regular complaints around here is that people tend not to have a useful sense of proportion. Despite Douglas Adams' injunction that this is something a human cannot have in the face of the size of the universe we're insistent that, at least when designing public policy, it's essential.

Take this from The Guardian:

Food and farming is one of the biggest economic sectors in the world. We are no longer in the 14th century, when as much as 76% of the population worked in agriculture – but farming still employs more than 26% of all workers globally. And that does not include the people who work along the meat supply chain: the slaughterers, packagers, retailers and chefs.

In 2016, the world’s meat production was estimated at 317m metric tons, and that is expected to continue to grow. Figures for the value of the global meat industry vary wildly from $90bn to as much as $741bn.

Although the number of people directly employed by farming is currently less than 2% in the UK, the food chain now includes the agribusiness companies, the retailers, and the entertainment sector. According to the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in 2014 the food and drink manufacturing sector contributed £27bn to the economy, and employed 3.8 million people.

We agree that food and drink production is important of course. Without the first we'd be dead and without some forms of the second we'd be unable to be merry. However, we still need to examine that biggest economic sector claim.

Global GDP is of the order of $80 trillion (nominal). Global meat production is therefore under 1% of the economy even at that largest valuation. And 0.1% or so at that lower. The UK's GDP is of the order of £1.8 trillion, meaning that the food and drink manufacturing sector is some 1.3% of our own economic activity.

Again, we insist that these are important things but they're not a large economic sector, certainly not one of the largest, in this modern world. Thus any changes to them at the margin are of marginal importance to that economy as a whole, aren't they?

So this is the way they're going to play the Greek economic story, is it?

Expect to see a great deal more of this nonsense in the coming months. The Greek economy is recovering and so that makes all that happened worth it. It's ghastly rubbish and needs to be called out as such, repeatedly:

Yet now Tsipras is preparing to exit the bailout programmes completely, the country’s economic prospects apparently utterly transformed.

The gushing praise in the quote came from Angel Gurria, head of the OECD, last week – the leader of a pro-capitalist group, cheering the work of the leader of Greece’s radical leftists. “I would like to congratulate you, your administration and the whole of Greece for an impressive stabilisation effort and one of the most ambitious reform packages we have seen at the OECD in recent times,” said Gurria. “This is starting to bear fruit.”

Everyone knows, or at least should know, that an economy will, eventually, recover entirely on its own. Even some 30 years of Maoist Madness didn't leave China unable to grow once it ended.

Thus the arrival of growth again is not a vindication of what happened in Greece. The fact that it is only just returning is instead a condemnation of what was done to that poor benighted populace.

Given the situation at the time Greece could do one of two things. It could leave the euro and thus devalue just the one price, that of the currency. That also meaning defaulting on all that debt. Or it could stay in and have to go through an internal devaluation, all prices being forced down individually. Given the sacrosanct nature of the euro the second was forced upon them.

This was and is a disaster, the effect has been as bad as the Great Depression upon the United States and it's lasted for longer too. The correct answer was default and devaluation, the correct answer to what they should have done is still default and devaluation. 

Don't let them convince us all that now growth is returning that the correct decision was made back then. It wasn't and we shouldn't forget that.

The planning delusion again - this time it's electric cars

In the grand and larger sense we've Hayek's injunction, that we do not and cannot have enough knowledge to plan the economy in any detail. In a narrower sense we've the same point made by Lord Stern in his review of climate change. Given the externality of emissions then crowbar the costs into the price system and, as Hayek insists, use the only calculating engine we've got, the economy itself. Stern is really very certain, adamant even, that we should not be trying to deal with matters through plans, regulations and in detail.

At which point we get this:

Cars unable to travel 50 miles on battery power would be banned from sale from 2040 under plans being considered by the Government to improve Britain’s air quality.

The move is one of the proposals in an internal government review aimed at making transport in the UK more environmentally friendly bydriving motorists into electric vehicles.

However, the idea has been met with fury by the car industry, which called it “unrealistic” and based “on neither fact nor substance”.

If enacted, virtually all cars currently on sale would be outlawed – including hybrids such as the bestselling Toyota Prius which has a combined petrol engine and battery drive train.

No, no, and thrice no. Our third coming from the fact that we simply do not know the emissions of the various possible solutions here. What are the lifetime emissions of a battery powered car? How often does that battery need to be replaced, remanufactured? What are the production emissions of any car? Are we sure that lower emissions in use - if such is true - cover the emissions in manufacture? 

Even, are we certain that moving emissions from the tailpipe to the electricity plant aids in any manner? If we're burning wood in Drax it probably doesn't for example.

As ever when we're discussing climate change here leave aside any thoughts that it's not happening and all that. Engage with the discussion on their terms - and we still find out that they're doing the wrong thing.

We just don't know enough about the various possible technologies to know what will be the solution. Hybrids? Fuel cells? Batteries? Flywheels? Probably not that last but who knows? We also only have the one manner of finding out what that answer is. We can include the externality into market prices and see what happens. For the solution is something emergent from market processes, not something that can be known or calculated in advance.

Hayek tells us this, Stern tells us this, basic common sense about technology tells us this and yet they still try to plan.

Why?

Voter ID may or may not be a good idea - but what's the evidence we have a problem?

Whether or not voter ID should be demanded isn't our point here. Rather, we want to point to the illogic being used. Here's a Labour MP:

The introduction of voter ID is intended to help reduce electoral fraud. However, In 2017 there was only one convicted case of electoral fraud based on impersonation. Furthermore, the UK’s official statistics watchdog, the ‘UK statistics authority’ condemned the Government’s argument that voter fraud has more than doubled in two years as misleading.

That there was only one conviction for impersonation doesn't tell us much about the prevalence of it. You know, given that there are near no checks upon it in the first place. Which is why the tests of course:

More than one in FIVE polling stations turned away voters for not having ID during a hated Tory trial, a volunteer group says.

The astonishing claim would suggest more people were turned away in five areas than ALL last year's in-person voter fraud cases in the entire country put together.

When we do start checking we then find many more problems. Whatever else we might say we cannot then insist that before we started checking the absence of cases means that there's no problem, can we? Precisely because checking reveals problems that we might want to deal with.

Obviously enough there are different potential explanations for the problems. We Brits - thankfully and rightly - don't carry nor have an ID card so we've often not got a manner of proving who we are. It's also possible - possible note - that impersonation is very much more common than our previous system of not checking led us to think. The point being here that we are getting a different result by checking. That's new information that we've got to consider, not a time for us to be insisting that we've historically not prosecuted many.

The very fact that checking produces more cases means that what we believed before may well be wrong, doesn't it? 

Unhealthy Statistics in the Darzi Report

The Darzi Interim Report, published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research, sets out to provide a reliable forecast of the financial gap between the health and care services the country will need by 2030 and what current financial policies will provide. In the most generous scenario it is estimated an additional £60 billion of funding must be allocated to health and social care by 2029/30.

But just how healthy is the statistical analysis that generates the £60bn? 

Unfortunately it seems to be flawed in two main respects: 

1. No account is taken of managing demand; 
2. Acute hospitals, the most expensive sector of the NHS, are the basis for the projections – this despite the report itself saying provision will shift from acute to chronic conditions.

In 1948, the NHS was created with three core principles, to which was added, in 2011, a constitution of seven more principles and a set of values. With exceptions for teeth, specs and prescriptions, healthcare is unpaid for at the point of use for all who do not wish to, or cannot, pay for private treatment. 

Strangely, there is no mention of what the NHS should actually provide. One cannot buy health or longevity so it cannot be either of those. The unstated offer seems to be that the state would pay for the time, facilities, technology and dedication of UK health care professionals. Does that include cosmetic surgery? Aromatherapists? Osteopathy? Treating gender dysphoria through psychiatry and/or surgical reassignment? No boundary has ever been set for what the NHS should provide, apart from medicines and devices quangos deem poor value for money. Instead we’re governed by convention. This has made restraining demand more than difficult.

This is not a big surprise.  If ice cream had to be supplied at ever increasing levels of quality but free to all, ice cream factories would have long waiting times and reluctant financial backers.  The reason other countries have more efficient and better suited health systems is their use of copayment to manage demand– as indeed we have done for teeth, specs and prescriptions and they do through insurance and low level charges.  

Sadly the Darzi Report makes no mention of managing demand and it sets the definition of health very wide: “Health is much more than the absence of illness or disease. The World Health Organisation defines it is “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing” (p.10).

The report claims, based solely on Grossman 1972: “Better health is an investment in ourselves and each other: this means an individual’s capabilities and assets, which in turn determine their economic potential” (p.9).  One wonders if the Report’s authors actually read the article they cite.  It was a purely theoretical model with no empirical validation.  

And it leads to an opposite conclusion, one which the report contradictorily comes to as well inciting Licchetta and Stelmach: “Each generation expects more from their health and care system than their predecessors. Indeed, there is significant evidence that rising expectations has been one of the biggest drivers of health and care costs in the last century” (p.46). These two positions can’t be held together. We need to address demand as well as supply. 

If we are to address demand, we need to understand the impact of the scale of demand is likely to be coming our way. Yet the report worryingly fails to do so. Beyond simply asserting that “social care which, if anything, is facing an even larger funding gap” and that “as a bare minimum the system will require an extra £10bn.; and that is just to maintain the existing level of provision” there is nothing to suggest the report’s authors have understood the problem they’re facing in the real world.   

The projections grow demand pro rata to life expectancy, i.e. every year of life is assumed to have the same cost. But this is not true.  As the report itself noted, the last years of life are far more expensive, for the NHS, than the previous ones. The last year is usually the most expensive of all.  

Lord Darzi should be aware that each of us has only one last year of life no matter how long we live. Longer healthy life expectancy actually reduces NHS costs solely by deferring the expensive final years.

The Report subscribes to the current wisdom that bad habits, such as smoking and obesity, contribute massively to NHS costs even though the reverse is probably true for smoking and excessive drinking which feature high taxation followed by reduced calls on the pensions pot. Snowden and Tover calculated the smokers’ net contribution, after the additional health costs, to the public purse of £14.7bn a year. Mark Tovey showed that obesity accounts for less than 2% of the NHS budget for similar life-shortening reasons.

Treatment is increasingly shifting away from acute hospitals towards the more cost-effective care now possible in the community. The report itself says that medical care will switch to treating chronic rather than acute conditions: “This transformation – part of the shift from acute to chronic illness” (p.10) and “This shift [to chronic] will require us to get better at preventing these chronic conditions, shifting their onset as late as possible into life. Once people have them we will need to make sure care is community based and led by the patient rather than clinician led in the acute setting. It will also mean valuing care – not just formal social care but also the huge army of informal carers – more highly” (p.45).

Thus the central plank of the projected needs does not support the arithmetic. Instead the report relies emotively on the word “care” as can be seen in its concluding paragraph: “And, most important of all, it must build on the progress we have seen over the last decade in terms of the quality of care in health and care. This is after all, what people care about most.” (p.50). It is a political polemic designed to lobby for more NHS funding as distinct from reliable research into how the NHS books can best be balanced.  “The model” we are told “has been peer-reviewed by experts” (p.46) which makes one wonder who these “experts” might be.