It's Monday so it must be sneer at Will Hutton day

My own antipathy to the European Union is, I think, reasonably well known. But I do acknowledge that there are people who like the institution, the ideas and ideals behind it and that at least some of those people are also being both realistic and also expressing their real views. But I can't help but feel that Will Hutton might be able to manage a better defence than this:

Yet Europe’s peoples are shaped by its Christian past, however secular we have now become, and by the Enlightenment, with its commitment to rationality, rule of law and democracy. Industrialisation and urbanisation in Europe forged a powerful commitment to social solidarity. Common underlying values bind us.

Rationality? When monetary policy in the eurozone is resolutely following exactly the mistakes of the Federal Reserve in plunging the US into the Great Depression? As everyone from Milton Friedman though Ben Bernanke to Scott Sumner, with our own Eddie George and Mark Carney in the middle, has been telling us? Rationality when even the creation of the euro was pointed out to be a non-optimal currency area before it was even formed?

Rule of law when the Commission insists that the UK must include prostitution in the measurement of GDP and then charges the country £1.7 billion for having done so? Or the way that the agreed upon rules and laws concerning referenda rather suddenly got changed when people voted the "wrong way" as several countries have done?

And as for democracy I do hope that someone, somewhere, can point to the elections that we've just had for that new European Commission.

There might even be valid defences for the EU but a supporter and protector of rationality, the rule of law and democracy doesn't really seem to fit. Many of us might be rather more favourably disposed to it if it were.

There's a reason why we have farming you know

There are those out there who think that we should return rather to our hunter gatherer roots. Simply pick from nature's bounty rather than intensively farm the planet. There's really only one problem with this delightful idea: we'd all starve within months having stripped the Earth of everything edible:

Epping Forest, an ancient woodland straddling the border of greater London and Essex, is one of the best fungi sites in the country, with over 1,600 different species. But, like other fungi-rich sites such as the New Forest, it is being stripped out by illegal picking by gangs believed to sell the wild mushrooms to restaurants and markets.

“They leave a trail of destruction,” says Dagley, who has been head of conservation for 20 years at the 6,000 acres wood. “It has stepped up over the last five years. Sometimes people run away when they are challenged, but we have been threatened too. People pick using knives so they feel armed.”

He says pickers often take everything away and sort the edible from the poisonous later: “You can find people with 40kg of fungi, which is huge” but much is just thrown away.

Dagley says it is distressing to see the destruction, and it prevents the forest’s 4.5 million annual visitors enjoying the spectacular variety of fungi. The weird and wonderful shapes and colours of the fungi he points out revives his enthusiasm. “You have gills, frills and pores and the puffballs, they are like things from outer space,” he says.

The growing popularity of foraging for wild food may be part of the problem, says Sue Ireland, director of green spaces for the City of London Corporation, which manages Epping forest: “In rural areas, foraging is fine if you are picking for your own personal use.”

Quite: there's no problem at all with a couple of people going off for some ceps: nor with a bit of picking the hedgerow for some blackberries of the sloes for the Christmas Gin. But as soon as many people do it it becomes unsupportable. This is why we have mushroom farms of course. And farms for cows, because hunting the aurochs to extinction has already been done. And farms for what and so on. The truth is that, other than as a very marginal leisure activity, we just cannot live off nature's bounty. There's just too many of us to be able to do so.

Yes, the public health people are lying to us again

It would be useful if they could manage to keep their stories straight:

A landmark report by Public Health England (PHE) says lack of exercise is as dangerous as smoking - directly contributing to one in six deaths.

Officials warned that the UK population is now 20 per cent less active than it was in the 1960s, with half of women and one third of men damaging their health through lack of physical activity.

Given that weight is a straight function of calories consumed to calories expended we've the cause of our obesity epidemic right there. Calories consumed have fallen in that timescale but calories expended has fallen faster. We can thus junk 90% of the current public health programs over addictive sugar, trans-fats and all the rest as simply being nonsense. This part of the public health sector has told us what is really happening.

But it is, of course, worse than that. Our public health people do not seem to understand the economics, nor even the accounting, of public health:

Officials say that without major changes in the way people live their lives, the welfare state in Britain could collapse under the burden of self-inflicted diseases, which are fuelled by obesity, alcohol and smoking.

This simply isn't true. As we've pointed out many a time in these pages, fatties, boozers and puffers save the welfare system money.

Yes, there are public costs associated with the treatments for the diseases all three bring on. But in terms of medical care those costs are lower than the public costs of treating someone who does not die early. There are thus savings in public costs if someone pops an artery in their 60s rather than needing, a little later, a decade's worth of Alzheimer's treatment. When we include things like pensions savings the numbers are even starker. From the point of view of the finances of the welfare state we should be encouraging everyone to stuff themselves and to puff away and imbibe as they do so.

On the other hand of course there are substantial private costs to such early deaths: so we don't in fact go around doing that but just, if we've any liberality left at all, tell people so that they are informed of those costs: the benefits they already know of as it is pleasurable to eat, drink and smoke.

This does not mean therefore that there should be no information campaigns, no attempts to inform people that their health should be better if they stagger up off the couch for a walk for 30 minutes a day. That's all just fine. But what it does mean is that none of these campaigns or actions can be justified by reference to the costs to the welfare state or the public purse. It just ain't true that fatty, puffing boozers impose costs upon said welfare state: thus reducing the number of fatty, puffing boozers isn't going to save that welfare state any money.

Isn't it EUronic

I actually can’t tell if they’re kidding or not. From the BBC:

The UK has been told it must pay an extra £1.7bn (2.1bn euros) towards the European Union's budget because the economy has performed better than expected in recent years.

Replace ‘UK’ with ‘worker’, slot in a different extremely high number, change ‘EU budget’ to ‘UK budget,’ and the system starts to resemble something quite similar to tax law in the UK.

The article continues:

The payment follows new calculations by the EU that determine how much each member state should contribute.

It would add about a fifth to the UK's annual net contribution of £8.6bn.

A government source said the demand was "not acceptable" while one Tory MP said the UK should simply refuse to pay it.

“UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the UK had been "hammered again" while Labour said it was imperative that the European Commission must reconsider the "backdated bill".

It appears UK politicians are in complete shock that hard work and serious efforts to pull out of the recession are being threatened by a big, bureaucratic government body that feels it’s entitled to some of those earnings.

This is priceless.

On the issue itself, I agree it’s “not acceptable”, and I dearly hope the UK “simply refuse(s) to pay it.” What a wonderful precedent that would set for next year’s tax season, when hard-working taxpayers (who, according to this year’s stats, will have been working for the Chancellor for 148 days to pay off their obligations), decide that they, too, don't want to be penalised for working harder and being a bit better-off financially.

Politicians can be slow on the uptake, so I guess there’s no deep surprise that it took them this long to understand the mechanics of ‘hard work = rewards.’ I just hope they whistle the same tune come next tax season.

To Polly the populace are just the milch cows of the State

Polly Toynbee is bemoaning the manner in which UK wages aren't rising:

On Wednesday Steve Machin, research director at the LSE’s centre for economic performance, laid out to a meeting of economists the collected evidence on the nature of falling pay – and warned that this is beginning to look not like a slow recovery in wages, but a permanent, structural feature of the UK economy. He showed how the group-think of economic forecasters has consistently and wildly over-estimated an expected increase in wages: the OBR forecast for March this year was a wage rise of 4.3%. What happened has been a continuing real fall.

“There has been a startling and unprecedented lack of wage growth as unemployment falls,” Machin says. The “herd mentality” of forecasters is always to expect things to improve, but there is no sign they are right. This begins to look like the new permanent, as flatlining real median pay began back in 2003, long before the crash. Nor, finds Machin, is immigration a cause of falling pay: areas with high or low immigration saw pay fall equally.

Polly does at least pay lip service to the idea of being a Keynesian but I'm sure she would be surprised to find that Keynes would have been fully supportive of all of this happening. If people are unemployed then those people have to be priced back into work: and it was exactly Keynes who pointed out that people get very touchy indeed about falls in nominal wages but will put up with falls in real wages if they're lightly disguised by a bit of inflation. Further, the Phillips Curve comes out of very much the same sort of thinking. That there's a trade off between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. We reach NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) and if unemployment dips below that then inflation will rise. If it's above it then inflation will fall. And if we're seeing ever-falling unemployment and no sign of wages rises then we can conclude that NAIRU has fallen: which is absolutely great, for it means fewer people have to be consigned the the scrap heap of unemployment in order to keep inflation at bay in the future. We've had a favourable change in the basic structure of the economy.

However, the real shocker to us here is this:

Low pay is not just unjust, it’s crippling the country’s finances.

That's dangerously close to insisting that the populace are just the milch cows there to pay for the State, the sheep to be shorn of their incomes to pay for public employees. Actually, given that it's Polly saying it that's not dangerously close, that's what she means.

UK politicians' ignorance towards immigration gives Juncker credit he probably doesn't deserve

It’s a tough day when you have to agree with Jean-Claude Juncker. After all, I tend not to see eye-to-eye with those who think the European Commission needs “to be an even more political body.” But today, Juncker came out strong against Cameron’s proposed cap on EU migration to the UK; which is good, important even:

From The Telegraph:

Mr Juncker said: "I am not prepared to change [freedom of movement]. If we are destroying the freedom of movement other freedoms will fall. I am not willing to compromise."

He said that any attempts to address the issue of the amount of benefits being claimed by foreigners would have to be in line with current EU treaties.

“Member states are free to take the initiatives they want as long as these initiatives are line with the treaties," Mr Juncker said.

Here's the problem - I don't think I do agree with Juncker; in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he and I hold the opinion that free movement in the EU should remain uncapped for fundamentally different reasons. I, for one, don’t think migration is complimented by mandates to ensure a universal ‘minimum social wage’ throughout the EU.

Rather, I see free movement as an integral and necessary component of UK economic prosperity, not to mention a huge benefit for communities that both migrants and natives come in inhabit.

Yet on this particular topic, Mr Juncker and I have the same end goal. And his commitment to protecting free movement—rejecting Cameron’s migration negotiations—has taken us another step towards a full-blown referendum in 2017. Such a referendum, described in the most positive light, would be an opportunity for Britons to discuss and debate the implications EU regulations have on the UK (the specifics of trade agreements and vacuum cleaner bans are two topics that immediately spring to mind…). But there is a deep worry on the part of pro-immigration advocates such as myself that many will use the referendum to lock migrants out of the UK as best they can.

The majority of Juncker’s policies fall short of promoting freedom and prosperity—but on migration, at least his end goals are right. And until UK politicians (all of them really, Conservatives and Labour across the board) stop trying to halt the overwhelming benefits migrants bring to the UK, I find myself in unfamiliar waters, with Mr Juncker as my ally.

Northern Ireland does something very stupid about prostitution

It's always a little difficult for an Englishman, even one with an extra Irish citizenship (as your author does), to criticise an Irishman for being stupid. That century or more of their being the butt of bad jokes about imbecility creates a certain sensitivity to such an accusation. But this is still flat out a stupid thing to be doing:

Paying for sex is to be banned in Northern Ireland after members at the Stormont assembly members backed the move in a landmark late-night vote.

The proposal to outlaw purchasing sex is among a number of clauses contained in a bill aimed at amending Northern Ireland’s laws on trafficking and prostitution.

Paid-for consensual sex is currently legal in Northern Ireland though activities such as kerb crawling, brothel keeping and pimping are against the law. The proposed ban is similar to the model operating in Sweden.

The human trafficking and exploitation bill was tabled before the assembly by Democratic Unionist peer Lord Morrow.

Trafficking and exploitation are already illegal: making voluntary transactions between consenting adults illegal will not make their incidence any less. Far from it, driving currently legal activity underground will produce more of those already illegal activities rather than less.

At the grander level this is horribly illiberal: the touchstone of any possible liberal society being that consenting adults, when their activities do not harm any non-consenting people, animals or things, get to do what they want. A society that decides to regulate adult sexual activity is not and cannot be described as liberal. It can be anything from Puritan to authoritarian but liberal it cannot be. And we've made hugely welcome strides in the direction of that liberality over the decades: for example, from the illegality of homosexual activity to the widespread acceptance societally of same sex civil partnerships. Plus, of course, the more general idea that what people do in their sex lives is up to them. Quite why anyone thinks that the intercession of a £50 note into the proceedings makes any difference is extremely difficult to fathom. It's still the entirely voluntary playing out of the Tab A and Slot B scenario that we all agree consenting adults are entirely at liberty to perform as they wish.

At the more detailed public policy level there will obviously now be calls that England should follow suit. To which the correct answer is, as above, no it shouldn't. But even if you don't find a defence of adults being allowed to be adults convincing there is another. Which is that we really should take advantage of this devolved administration stuff to wait and see what happens. It'll take a few years for this change in the law to filter through to human behaviour. Time which could usefully be spent actually looking at what happens. Only after we've done that will we know what does actually happen: and only once we do know what happens that's the first time that we can or could usefully discuss whether it's a good idea or not.

It's definitional that of course consenting adults should be allowed to consent. But even if you don't believe that let's wait and see what actually happens here, eh?

Is Gamergate a classic case of left-wing infighting?

I published a 'think piece' on gamergate over at the research side of the website yesterday. I argued that the pro-gamergate side was likely to lose because the left usually wins (for good or bad) on cultural issues:

Gamergate is one of the most interesting cultural issues that has appeared in years. It is a rare time that the losing side of the culture war has put up a good fight. But the anti-gamergate side will win, because Progress always wins. I’ll try and give a concise guide to gamergate, what’s at stake, where it came from, and why exactly it is that it will lose.

I read another good post on it from Cathy Young over at realclearpolitics—she made a different point to mine, trying to stress how it was not reasonable to characterise much of the movement as anti-women or misogynist, but simply taking an alternative (and she believes, valid) approach to improving the lot of women in gaming:

There are valid concerns, shared by at least some GamerGate supporters, about sex-based harassment in gaming groups and stereotypical portrayal of female characters in videogames. Unfortunately, critics of sexism in videogame culture tend to embrace a toxic brand of feminism that promotes antagonism, grievance, and intolerance of dissent, not equality or empowerment.

When I posted my piece on twitter I asked for constructive criticism, and one good point that was made is that, at least according to their own views of themselves and their results on political compass tests, gamergaters tend to lean left.

This makes me think that gamergate might be best characterised as a case of leftist infighting, but this time between Murray & Herrnstein's 'cognitive elites' that make up social justice anti-gamergate journalism and the broader constituency of more 'normal' pro-gamergate leftists holding more traditional leftist views. An open front in the war between New and old versions of what justice consists in.

This fits with my anecdotal experience that it is those (like Richard Dawkins) who are or have been associated with the left that experience most of their ire when they state or are suspected of having unacceptable views. As ever it's interesting to look at the parallel with religion, which abhors apostates much more zealously than infidels.

And it also fits with the modern left's de facto focus on race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability as opposed to their previously overwhelming concern with economic exploitation or justice. As I said in the think piece:

Bear in mind that although social justice advocates do care about wealth disparities, this is far from their main concern, at least in terms of how they allocate their time. For example, insufficiently pro-transgender feminists will arouse large campaigns stopping them from giving lectures at many universities, while libertarian capitalists can speak freely. This is why I have argued that social justice is (a) a facet of neoliberalism, and (b) an artefact of the cognitive elite’s takeover of society. This is what makes the modern social justice movement so different.

This ends up working quite well for the ASI: we are quite comfortable with social progress as long as it allows for liberal economic policy, and only tend to object when social progress conflicts with more important goals such as free speech.

The Daily Mail's actually right about NHS Wales here

It's ever so slightly uncomfortable top be agreeing with the Daily Mail here as they're being so nakedly politically partisan about the NHS, the Labour Party and Wales. However, it should be said that they're actually correct in what they're saying:

Today this paper publishes the first part of an explosive investigation which blows away Ed Miliband’s claim that his party can be trusted with the NHS.

Indeed, there is no need to imagine how the service might perform under Labour. For the evidence is before us in Wales, where the party has had full control of the funding and management of health care since devolution 15 years ago.

As Guy Adams exposes on Pages 8 and 9, a picture emerges of a Welsh NHS on the point of meltdown, in which the wellbeing and often the lives of patients are routinely sacrificed on an altar of Socialist ideology.

The Welsh NHS has of course complained and the Mail's response to those complaints is here.

We here at the ASI might not have put all of this into quite such politically loaded terms but the basic critique is correct, in that NHS Wales performs less well than NHS England. And we also know why this is so: NHS Wales has not adopted the last few rounds of a more market based structure as NHS England has. We've also known this for some years:

Some would argue that the drops in waiting times were driven by increased spending, rather than targets, patient choice and hospital competition. Hence the fears sparked by the McKinsey report of the possibility of massive cuts in services. However, money alone cannot explain why waiting times have dropped and equity has improved in England. During the same period that we examined waiting times in England in our study, Scotland and Wales, which both explicitly rejected market-driven reforms, have spent more per patient but have seen much smaller decreases in waiting times.

The more market orientated NHS England is both more equitable and more efficient than the less market orientated NHS Wales and NHS Scotland. Indicating that market based reforms are a pretty good idea: whatever that socialist ideology (although to be fair about it, it's really just an innate conservatism allied with the traditional British dislike of anything that smacks of trade rather than a principled socialism) might have to say about it.

The tax system is the biggest barrier to growth

Outside of academic papers that too rarely see the light of day, most "research" is unremarkable in its optimism about the state of entrepreneurship in the UK. That’s why the RSA’s Growing Pains: How the UK became a nation of “micropreneurs” caught my eye. It paints a stark picture. The UK, according to the report, has become a nation of micro businesses, while the proportion of high-growth businesses has plummeted: “UK businesses are becoming increasingly micro in size – reducing the overall potential for economic output and future growth, and increasing the economy’s reliance on a relatively small number of larger businesses.”

Since 2000, the proportion of businesses classified as micro (0-9 employees), as a share of all UK businesses has grown from 94.3 per cent of all private sector companies to 95.4%. This represents an additional 1.4 million micro firms and an increase over the same period of 43%.

“At the same time, the proportion of high-growth enterprises has declined sharply, falling by more than a fifth in the majority of regions since 2005.”

Although the number of high-growth firms is expected to rise over the coming years, the report cautions optimism: “performance is expected to remain below 2005 levels in all regions except London”.

So how can we solve the problem? According the entrepreneurs, the tax system (44%) is the biggest barrier to growth – ahead of a lack of bank lending (38%) and the cost of running a business (36%).

Another problem highlighted by the report is that entrepreneurs don't know what the government is up to:

“Around three-quarters (73%) of small business leaders also say the Government must make it easier for SMEs to access the right information and support for growth. While several of the Government’s recent incentives to support SMEs are designed to address the top-cited barriers, perhaps this information is not reaching the people who need it the most.”

Two polices are put forward in the conclusion to help entrepreneurs. First, “continued reform of the apprenticeship scheme could help micro firms to grow out of this business size category”. Second, “more tax relief like the National Insurance holiday could also pay real dividends.” It would be worth exploring the former in detail (something I plan to work on), but I don’t think another NI holiday goes nearly far enough: Employers' National Insurance should be scrapped entirely. And no just for small businesses.

Being an entrepreneur is tough. As the report points out, “the majority (55%) of new businesses don’t survive beyond five years.” Scrapping Employers' NI is the logical place to start.

Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.