The Pin Factory Blog

Boris Johnson has created a committee of high profile bankers and financiers to help London maintain its competitive edge as a world financial centre. Johnson said,

I am keen this group finds out exactly what the leading industry players think and makes clear recommendations to all those concerned with upholding one the UK’s most important economic sectors.

As New York and London slip, Dubai is quickly becoming the hot-spot for financial services—and oil does not have as much to do with it as one might think. Dubai has the world’s lowest tax rate, between 10 and 25 percent lower than in the United Kingdom. Living away from home in a Middle-Eastern desert may not be ideal, but for many it is a difference of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of pounds, euros, yen, or dollars. That should be enough to appease any homesickness.

If London wants to maintain its edge, it needs to be a friendlier place for business. This means drastically cutting the heavy taxes—both for individuals and corporations—and giving British and international corporations strong incentives to come, stay, or return.

It has been a vital safeguard of English liberties that a subject shall not be detained without trial. The normal time police could hold someone without charging them was 24 hours, with powers to apply for extension to 96 hours. The writ of Habeas Corpus could require the state to produce a prisoner in open court to prove its detention of them was legal. This right has been modified or suspended in national emergencies, including internment in World War II and during the Northern Ireland conflict.

Now, in the name of combating terrorism, the House of Commons has passed a bill allowing suspects to be detained for 42 days without being charged. It means the police can imprison someone for up to 6 weeks without having to show good cause. It runs counter to the liberties enshrined in English law to protect the citizen from arbitrary state power. Although terrorism is given as the pretext, it is not named in the act, nor are the new powers specifically limited to such cases. It should be remembered that powers already granted to resist terrorism have been used to detain a heckler and someone who walked along a designated cycle path. It is also significant that the police and government originally pushed for 90 days, without the caveats built into the 42 day law to appease some critics.

Our laws have hitherto prevented the police from holding people incommunicado, or imprisoning them for long periods without charges or trial for specific offences. In giving the state the ability to do this, yet another vital prop of our liberties has been eroded.
 

Tom Harris has created a stir with a recent post on his blog, titled, "Heaven knows we’re miserable now". Comparing the optimism of the post war years with today’s society he concludes that, despite the access we have to the technological gains of recent times, the overall increase in wealth and the greater levels of security, we are miserable, cynical and pessimistic.

You could be fairly certain that speaking to people in the 1970s, especially during the economic crises synonymous with that era, most would be miserable about what the future held. The same could be said of those that lived through the recessions of the 80s and 90s. In hard times it’s difficult to be optimistic.

But I think what Mr Harris is perceiving is merely the public reflecting on the fact that belts need to be tightened as hard times are at hand.  When there's money to spare, and we can spend it on luxuries, we will, of course, be optimistic of the future, believing that these times will continue in perpetuity. As the money dries up life takes on more of a grey wash with few fleeting moments of colour, and the negative feelings rise.

Mr Harris asks: "But what happened to that post-war optimism and commitment to common values? Are they gone forever and if so, why? If not, how can we bring them back?" Yes, the common values of the post war years have gone, and, yes, we are becoming more cynical.

Most of the blame, however, can be placed at the door of big government. By attempting to replace the institutions of civil society with top-down state bureaucracy, they have destroyed the things we hold in common and left nothing in their place. They are also to partly to blame for the rising prices of food and oil through their incorrectly held moral interference in the market place.

Is it any wonder we become miserable when times get tough?

A forty-five year old Englishman, now living in Perth, Australia, has auctioned his entire life on eBay. He decided he needed a clean break after his marriage ended, telling shoppers: "Hi there, my name is Ian Usher, and I have had enough of my life! I don't want it any more!

You can have it if you like!" You get his house, his car, all of his possessions, his job, his lifestyle, and even introductions to his friends. His goal?

I intend to walk out of my front door with my wallet in one pocket and my passport in the other, nothing else at all, and get on the train, with no idea where I am going or what the future holds for me.

At the time of writing, bidding had reached AUS $1m.

The Institute of Economic Affairs has just launched a great new book by the Director of Nurses for Reform: ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’

Researched and written by senior nurse and health economist, Dr. Helen Evans, the study lays out the private opinions of the country’s top 100 health opinion formers. According to the author:

This groundbreaking new study shows that although politicians do not feel confident in proposing radical new models of healthcare, elite opinion in the media, in political circles, in academia and in policy think tanks has fallen out of love with the idea of a centrally planned health service providing and financed by government.

Indeed. The results this work presents show that the world has moved on in profound and important ways since the late 1940s. Crucially it shows that on the eve of its sixtieth anniversary, the NHS is no longer a much loved British institution. For the political class, as for the rest of us, it has become an embarrassment and a national disgrace.

How wonderful: we now have the reason that inadequates get chosen as political leaders. It's all to do with "reverse dominance hierarchies"

Iain Dale's new political magazine launches. The question now becomes, are there enough political obsessives who wish to purchase it?

Well, yes, it is an interesting question. What if Adam Smith really was right about poverty?

Quite a long way away from political philosophy: how violence actually seems to be policed in the real world.

A depressing summary of the state of civil liberties.

The effects of that smoking ban so far: 6,000 lose their jobs.

And finally, good advice and something both bizarre and wonderful.

Yes, we've just had the figures out for the number of teenage pregnancies and yes, that's still something that Britain tops the European leagues in. Various ideas are, as they are every year when the results come in, put forward as to why this might be so. We don't do enough sex education, we do too much, not enough of the right type, we're naturally promiscuous and I'm sure there's someone out there who will blame the alienation of capitalism and the anomie of modern life. We're also often compared to our close neighbours, the Dutch, who have a much lower rate of such pregnancies:

Everyone’s always going on about the Dutch and their marvellous approaches to this subject – sex ed from kindergarten basically and few unwanted teen pregnancies. What nobody ever says is that the Dutch aren’t hung up about sex and consider it a normal part of life, to be discussed en famille.

Could be of course, but quite how to change the entire British culture is another matter. It's also true that this might be something to do with the difference:

Teenage parents in the Netherlands receive little financial support from the state until they are 18, and even then still depend partially on their parents’ support until they are 21. Babies born to teenage mothers are assigned a legal guardian (usually a parent of the mother) to whom child benefit is paid. The website of a local government-sponsored youth-work organisation explicitly states that: ‘If you are a teenage mother and younger than 18 and living at home, you will not qualify for benefits’.8 Mothers aged under 18 rarely qualify for housing benefits and are generally expected to continue to live with their parents.

Now, no, I don't regard the Family Education Trust as an entirely unbaised source on this matter, but that does indeed seem to be what the benefits system in Holland is. Further, no I don't think that that is the only reason (or reasons) for the difference: I'm sure that there is something in the cultural DNA over and above the differences in how the welfare state works.

But we do know very well that the more you subsidise of something the more you get of it: clearly we believe this to be true with farming, with education, with green and ecological behaviour, for that is indeed the reason that we give for the subsidies, that we desire more of such things (umm, to be accurate, that politically powerful groups use this as their argument for their subsidies perhaps). So why should we be at all surprised that if we subsidise behaviour that we don't particularly desire (for everyone does indeed say that teenage pregnancy is undesirable, even if that isn't my own view) that we get more of that behaviour that we don't desire?

As I imply above, I'm not particularly against (nor particularly in favour) of teenage pregnancy, but I would be in favour of people realising that we have, by creating a subsidy system for it, increased the liklihood of it happening.

After all, incentives do matter.

There are a number of big projects being mooted to improve life in London. Crossrail, a new train line linking Heathrow Airport with Central and East London, has already been approved and is set to cost £16bn. The proposed route for the long-awaited Chelsea-Hackney underground line was safeguarded again earlier this year. And Boris Johnson is said to be very keen on building a new (privately-financed) international airport in the Thames Estuary. Better transport, it is argued, would bring economic benefits to London.

A number of other ideas were mentioned in a Sunday Times article last week. One was a tree-lined pedestrian boulevard running from Primrose Hill to Embankment via Oxford Circus and Trafalgar, which would be modelled on Barcelona's Las Ramblas. Another was sinking the road between Blackfriars and Westminster bridges into an underground tunnel, and turning Victoria Embankment into a new park. And then there are plans to raise London's 'hidden rivers' to give a bit of respite from all the concrete and tarmac. The rationale here is that London must improve the 'quality of life' it offers in order to compete with other global cities.

As a Londoner, all of that sounds wonderful. But as a taxpayer (and a libertarian one at that) I'm rather more ambivalent about such 'public works', not least because they invariably go over-budget. On the other hand, if the government really must take so much of my money, I'd rather they spent on things like this than give it to the work-shy or waste it on questionable wars.

But government should remember what Adam Smith himself said about public works. Although some things may require tax funding, he said, at least part of the cost should be recovered by tolls on those who use them. Likewise, if the benefits are local and a toll is not practical, then a local tax is best, rather than one on the whole nation.

How remarkable: a defense of MPs who fiddle the expenses system. Difficult to say that it's an entirely convincing defense, but it is a good attempt.

Another "advance" in the cause of human rights. According to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, religion is no longer a suitable subject for their discussion.

Switching to civil liberties at home, it appears that the law will be changed to allow anonymous witnesses. Silly old Romans, silly Americans, silly Common Law itself for insisting that this is not justice.

An engineer crunches the numbers: it appears that windmills are ten times more expensive than nuclear power plants per unit of installed capacity. That can't be right, can it? No government would advocate something ten times more expensive than it needs to be would they.....oh, wait a minute....

There seems also to be some doubt in the collective mind of the general public as to whether this climate change thing is all it's cracked up to be anyway.

Something to think about: "no personal transportation industry has ever sustained profitability without monopoly power after it ceases to be a luxury good."

And finally, the reason you don't understand the newspapers is because they're written by those who speak another language....and the reason you don't understand politicians is because they don't tell the whole, unvarnished, truth.