Remembering Stalin

March 5th is a day that will forever be associated with Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin. It was on this day in 1940 that he and 5 other members of the Soviet Politburo signed an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 military officers in what would later be called the Katyn massacre. It was a brutal attempt to suppress Polish culture in the land acquired through the Nazi-Soviet pact.

When Germany broke that pact and invaded Soviet territory, they found some of the victims' remains and told the world of the crime. After the war the Soviets claimed the Nazis had perpetrated the massacre, but the date confirmed it had been done under Soviet, not Nazi, occupation, and documents that emerged when the Soviet empire collapsed have confirmed their guilt.

It was also on March 5th, but in 1946, that Churchill made a speech in Fulton, Missouri, telling the world that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Many Americans had been sympathetic to their wartime Russian allies who had borne such suffering, but President Truman wanted to alert them to what the Soviets were really like, and thought that they would take it better if it came from the man they regarded as a hero, Winston Churchill.

In that speech Churchill alerted them to the fact that half of Europe was now, in effect, a Soviet prison, with its peoples unable to leave, and forced to act in accordance with the instructions of their masters. Undemocratic puppet regimes, sustained by Soviet military might, stamped out free speech, a free press, and the rule of law. Furthermore, the failures of socialism doomed them to decades of want and poverty while the West streaked ahead in freedom and prosperity.

That "iron curtain" remained in place for decades, and marked the graveyard of thousands who tried to flee through it. No-one was ever killed trying to break into the Soviet bloc countries.

It was also on March 5th, this time in 1953, that Stalin died, having ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. Nearly 3 years after his death, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech in secret to a closed session of the 20th Communist Party Congress, a speech that denounced Stalin, detailing some of Stalin's crimes and the "conditions of insecurity, fear, and even desperation" he had created. Stalin's mummified body, which had lain alongside that of Lenin in the Kremlin's wall, was subsequently removed and buried.

While some people today affect a respect for Stalin and his socialist system, most do so without any inkling of the utter evil he personified, or of the crimes he perpetrated that matched Hitler in their scale and savagery. A large part of the world lay under his thumb for decades, with its peoples denied the basic right to express themselves and to better their lives. Like Hitler and Mao, he is remembered as a monster, and when he died on March 5th, 66 years ago, the world started to become a better place.

Talking shops or Government

Adam Smith dismissed the idea in the Wealth of Nations that international success could be achieved by a “nation of shopkeepers”.  Instead, government should be “influenced by shopkeepers”, i.e. business people. His point was that government should back practical business people to get on with what they do well and not indulge in talking shops producing “strategies” that never happen.

A fine example of that distinction is the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announcement on 27th February of “a new National Genomic Healthcare Strategy”. Clearly mapping genomes to detect inherited (potential) health problems and finding ways to treat them even before the symptoms arise, is a great idea.  The government is right to support promising research in this area.  So what, you may wonder is this “strategy”?  Read down to the end of the press release and it turns out that no such strategy yet exists.  The Minister said: “In order to make this a reality, I am delighted to announce that we will be working with the National Genomics Board and the broader genomics community to develop a National Genomic Healthcare Strategy.”

The National Genomics Board has 26 great and good members albeit not great and good enough to report directly to the DHSC: “The National Genomics Board will report to the Life Sciences Council via the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy Implementation Board.” The Genomics Board has its own advisory panel and then , there is the Genomics England Board which also “has several independent advisory committees that report to the board.”

And one must not forget the also recently created UK Rare Disease Policy Board and Forum. Genomics and rare diseases are intimately bound up since the former is expected to provide the solution to the latter.  The UK Strategy for Rare Diseases reads as follows: “Each country in the UK will take action and develop plans to implement the strategy that best meets their own health and care systems, but will work together where it makes sense to do so.”

While the DHSC has been busy building all these new talking shops, NHS England has actually been doing something. Last July, the Chairman of NHS England reported, inter alia: “The design of the new phase of roll-out of a genomic medicine service in the NHS in England, following the successful conclusion of the 100,000 Genomes Programme. We have been undertaking a procurement process to establish seven genomic laboratory hubs, building on the 13 Genomic Medicine Centres that we set up under the 100k Genomes programme, with a view to transforming the highly fragmented pattern of genetic testing in the NHS into a national network of regional provision, with standardisation of testing through the roll-out of a National Genomic Test Directory. Genomics England Ltd., a wholly Government-owned company, is our partner in procuring sequencing and analytics.”

This plethora of DHSC talking shops, many created recently, interferes with the ability of the NHS to do its job.  Judging by the variety of figures it cites, one wonders whether the DHSC even knows how many it has.  Take Health Education England, for example.  It has 2,000 staff and a Chairman paid more than the Prime Minister.  It claims to create new clinical staff and train the existing staff but in reality it does neither: it simply hands out the NHS’s money to the universities and professional trainers who do. 

The NHS, like any other large organisation, would be perfectly capable of doing that for itself and the taxpayer would save £5bn. a year if it did. That’s a healthy sum to save.

Dating apps and the terrible difficulty of planning an economy

To an economist everything is substituitable. The implication of this is that everything we use is a substitute for something else. Where it all gets rather tricky is that technology marches on, what can be used as a substitute for whicht is an ever changing feast. It is this which makes any form of planning of the economy so difficult.

Dating apps are partly responsible for a significant decrease in 24-hour alcohol licences, new research has suggested.

The number of pubs, bars and nightclubs granted permission to serve alcohol round-the-clock has fallen by a fifth over the past year, according to commercial law firm EMW.

The company said expected demand for nightlife had failed to materialise, leaving 742 late night alcohol licences in 2018, down from 919 in 2013.

The increasing popularity of Netflix and dating apps has contributed to a "cultural" shift in how people socialise, thereby affecting demand of drinking in late night venues, the research suggests.

We don’t know whether this link is true or not but let us take it as so for the moment. The argument is that late night drinking and dating apps are substitutes for each other. Possibly substituitable methods of meeting the partner of your dreams, possibly simply of a rather more earthy form of leisure pursuit.

But think of the difficulty this provides for the planner. Sure, one could be Taliban in outlook and insist that cross gender contact should simply never happen outside arranged marriage. The Southern Baptist view that sex is to be abhorred because dancing may break out has its adherents. But in general the idea that consenting adults should get on with being consenting is how society works.

So, as that planner, one might in a technologically static society think that the provision of more late night drinking places will aid in this project. But when one does so it’s necessary to take account of simply everything else too. The military invented GPS to know where to drop the bombs - who knew that this would lead to proximity dating apps? Steve Jobs thought a touchscreen on a phone was a pretty neat idea - who knew this would lead to so much touching?

Yes, we could indeed predict that humans will use any new technology, at least test it out for its usefulness concerning, for sex because that’s what humans do. We’re all descended from those who found sex interesting after all. But how can that rational planner looking at opening hours hope to consider and predict the results of dateless nerds playing with code in San Francisco upon pub usage in Brentwood?

It’s not possible to consider all of these things which is why that planning is simply too difficult to actually do. We’re left with the chaotic experimentation of the market to sort it all out for us.

A red-letter day for liberty

On March 4th in 1789, one of the most significant events in the history of liberty occurred. The first Congress of the United States met in New York City to give effect to the US Constitution and to propose the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Largely crafted by James Madison, the amendments add guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, limits on government powers, and specify that all powers not given to Congress by the Constitution are to be held by the states or the people. They were done largely to meet reservations by anti-federalists.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, free speech and a free press, and the right to peaceful demonstration.

The Second upholds the right to bear arms.

The Third bans soldiers being quartered in private homes.

The Fourth rules out unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fifth protects against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, the one often claimed by gangsters. It also guarantees due process and compensation for any property seized.

The Sixth establishes the right to a speedy and public trial, to trial by an impartial jury, to be informed of criminal charges, to confront witnesses, to compel witnesses to appear in court, and to the assistance of counsel.

The Seventh guarantees jury trials in Federal cases involving over 20 dollars.

The Eighth prohibits excessive bail and fines, and "cruel and unusual punishments."

The Ninth states that there are basic rights that lie outside the Constitution.

The Tenth Amendment says that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.

This is the one that is sometimes abused by withholding Federal funds from states that refuse to comply with Federal rules. This device was used to make them set universal 55mph speed limits until these were modified under President Reagan before their abolition in 1995, and is used to enforce a national minimum 21-year drinking age.

Taken together, the Bill of Rights amendments give written guarantees that US citizens can appeal to in court, and can be taken to the Supreme Court itself for interpretation. They have many times been used to strike down Federal or state laws that are judged to be in violation of them. They thus provide a model of written fundamental laws that protect the liberty of citizens from arbitrary abuse. They also protect individuals from new laws that would restrict hem, even if these enjoy widespread popular support. They put liberty ahead of democracy, which is where it should be.

What naughty boys and girls Facebook are

A quite wondrous complaint about Facebook from Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer here. If laws are not to Facebook’s liking then Facebook might not invest in those places where laws are not to Facebook’s liking. Isn’t that just the most horribly undemocratic thing for a private sector organisation to be doing?

Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook:

...

Threatened to withhold investment from countries unless they supported or passed Facebook-friendly laws.

The complaint betrays an interesting mindset, doesn’t it? Investment is simply something that companies do. Ought to do in fact, it’s a right that sovereign nations have that foreigners should come and spend their money. To then be regulated and taxed and to threaten to withhold said investment as a result of the regulation or tax is some horror to be protested about.

Except, of course, every economic actor responds to the incentives in front of them. Change the incentives and you’ll change the behaviour. Set corporation tax at 120% and watch as no foreigner at all ever invests in that newly poorer country. Insist that a CEO is criminally liable for a racist joke made by a social media user and you’ll limit the amount of social media CEOs willing to enter that market.

This should be obvious to all and yet that very complaint shows that the logic has completely passed by. What our laws are, how welcoming or not we are of foreign investment, is going to determine how much foreign investment there is. How could it ever be different?

It might well be true that we should - or perhaps should not - regulate social media more or less. But to whine that doing so might have implications concerning the amount of social media we then get is ludicrous.

Venezuela Campaign: An environmental disaster

Venezuela is one of earth’s 18 megadiverse countries, home to many rare and unique species. It’s little known, but in 2016 Nicolás Maduro began to threaten that by designating around 112,000 square kilometres of pristine tropical rain forest as a mining belt.

The ‘Orinoco Mining Arc’ is home to 198 indigenous communities, jaguars, giant anteaters, 850 bird species, and a great many more species. All are now threatened by mining activity.

This plan was originally conceived by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. As Venezuela’s oil industry slowly collapsed from the pressures of corruption and mismanagement, the regime sought alternative sources of funding. Venezuela is extremely rich in natural resources like gold, nickel, iron ore, diamonds, alumina, and coal, so mining was an attractive option for the cash-strapped regime. The environmental damage of mining operations was completely disregarded, indeed no environmental impact assessment was ever done.

Venezuela’s National Assembly explicitly voted against the plan, making the activity unconstitutional and illegal. Although Maduro proposed that the mining would be done by state enterprises in partnership with foreign investors, the latter have understandably declined to participate. In reality, criminal gangs and Colombian guerrilla groups carry out the mining under the protection of the Venezuelan military.

Dutch journalist Bram Ebus was financed by the Pulitzer Centre to investigate. He concluded that the official government policy was meant to “put a legal jacket on illegal mining called Arco Minero... run by illegal armed troops and state forces.”  The International Crisis Group has reported that top military officers in Amazonas state receive $800,000 each in bribes each month to facilitate the illegal mining.  This explains both why military postings in the region are so popular and why some officers are keen to perpetuate the Maduro dictatorship.

The subsoil and rivers have been heavily polluted by the mercury used in the mills to extract gold from soil. The effects on the indigenous populations have been very severe. A 2017 survey found that indigenous people living along the Guaina, Inirida and Atabapo rivers had 60 times the maximum recommended level of mercury in their blood. 92 percent of the indigenous women surveyed in the Caura river basin had mercury levels above WHO limits and 37 percent of Ye’kuana and Sanema people had childbirth problems due to mercury. This has led to some children being born with missing limbs.  

The impact of mercury runoff on aquatic life can be felt throughout the Orinoco basin. Latin American scientists have highlighted the “evidence of the bioaccumulation of these toxins in fish and shellfish sampled thousands of kilometres away from the nearest mine”, and warned of the “larger regional threat” to the South-eastern Caribbean in particular.

Because the Chavistas have destroyed all independent institutions and centralised all power, there are no environmental regulatory agencies in Venezuela to prevent or limit the destruction of the Orinoco basin. Nor are the proceeds from the mining being used for any socially useful purpose. According to Ebus, “It’s stolen, absolutely stolen. The Government is not interested in cash for the good of the country. It is a kleptocracy. They are going to be thieving what’s left until they’re not in power anymore.”

This environmental spoilage will continue as long as Maduro and his cronies remain in power. The international community has turned a blind eye to years of human rights abuses and totalitarianism, and it seems determined to also ignore environmental abuse. Greenpeace and the WWF’s UK websites have only one search result apiece for Venezuela, a staggering lack of coverage of the despoliation of one of the precious few megadiverse countries on earth. It will be a tragedy of enormous proportions if Maduro is allowed to continue the environmental destruction of this precious global resource.

More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website. 

The miners' strike that ended an era

On March 3rd, 1985, the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthurs Scargill, voted to return to work after a year-long strike, the longest and most bitter strike, and one that finished without an agreement. The NUM members put on a brave face, many marching back behind colliery brass bands, but they and everyone else knew that Britain's strongest union, the NUM, had been beaten.

There were many reasons why the 1984-5 miners' strike failed where previous ones had succeeded. Margaret Thatcher has seen how the 1974 strike had brought down the Heath government by shutting down power stations through picketing and secondary support by other unions, and was determined not to let this happen again. When a strike was threatened over proposed pit closures in 1981, she had backed down because she wasn't ready, with only six weeks of coal stocks.

By 1984 she was ready. Her union reforms had introduced secret ballots for leadership elections and before strike action, and secondary picketing had been made illegal, with the threat that court action could seize union funds. She had built up six months of coal stocks, made arrangements to hire non-unionized lorry drivers to move coal to power stations, converted some coal-fired power stations to heavy fuel oil, and ramped up the nuclear contribution to the energy supply.

NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, a hardline Marxist, was itching for a showdown to humiliate and bring down the government, as in 1974. The union had balloted its members for strike action in 1982 and 1983, but had failed to win a majority, let alone the 55% the rules required. In 1984, to avoid another ballot defeat, the NUM executive voted 69-54 not to hold a ballot, but to have some areas strike and picket others to stop them mining. The result was that some efficient and profitable pits, led by the Nottinghamshire ones, decided to keep working. Violent confrontations occurred as pickets tried to stop them, and mobile police units were established to bring in police from outside to thwart the flying pickets.

Nottinghamshire and South Leicestershire miners still working set up a new union, the Democratic Union of Mineworkers, and as the year wore on, increasing numbers of strikers began to drift back to work. Scargill drew fire for accepting a £1.5 million donation from the Soviet Union, and for opposing the Polish Union, Solidarity, as an "anti-socialist organization which desires the overthrow of a socialist state". The result was that Polish coal continued to be exported to Britain throughout the strike.

The defeat of the strike, on this day in 1985, ended the era of militant union domination in the UK. The political power of the NUM and other unions was much diminished, and union membership fell. It plunged from roughly 40% of Britain's workforce to barely 20%, and today barely 14% of private sector workers are union members.

That historic defeat help turn round Britain's economy. In 1984 the UK lost 27 million days of work to industrial action, the highest in Europe. By 2017 this had fallen to 276,000, about 1% of the number, putting the UK among the lowest. It severely damaged the unions' prestige and morale, as well as their influence. On the cultural front, it did inspire some movies, including "Billy Elliot" in 2000, "Brassed Off" in 1996, and "Pride" in 2014, based on the real-life LGBT group that raised money for the strikers. Funniest was "Strike" in 1998, which used the strike as backdrop to a savage satire on Hollywood.

Toilet paper and Milton Friedman's four ways of spending money

As we all recall Milton Friedman said there are four ways of spending money:

“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.”

Neatly illustrated here in this little tale of toilet paper:

We’re all becoming more aware about the damage single-use plastics and fast fashion has on the environment. Yet there is one product we all throw away every single day that, so far, has not been a major part of conversations about sustainability: toilet paper.

But America’s heavy use of toilet paper – particularly the pillowy soft kind – is worsening climate change and taking “a dramatic and irreversible toll” on forests, especially the Canadian boreal forest, according to a new report by two major environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Stand.earth.

We appear to have a fundamental conflict here between those who would wipe and those who prefer Canada to have forests. Not that there is such a conflict, Canada’s large enough, with enough forests, that they regenerate faster than they’re cut down but still, that’s what we’re told. Leading to:

Major toilet paper brands have refused to use more sustainable materials, the report says, because Americans tend to more concerned than the rest of the world about ideal toilet paper texture in their homes, largely due to decades of marketing around toilet paper softness.

In Churchill’s letters there’s a part where he luxuriates in the soft stuff available on an American battleship compared to that of wartime Britain - this isn’t a new issue.

The authors offer a scorecard system to rate the brands that have the biggest environmental impact. It’s mostly the big brands of quilted paper that score badly, with Charmin Ultra Soft, Kirkland Signature and Angel Soft all receiving F grades because they contain little or no recycled material. Brands that use recycled paper, such as Seventh Generation and Natural Value, received an A grade.

Notably they say that “recycled materials are more commonly used in away-from-home tissue brands, like those found at offices or airports, where marketing for softness is less crucial”. So next time you’re greeted at the departure gate by toilet paper with a texture similar to a handful of gravel, you can take solace in the fact you’re saving the forests.

Or, as we might put it, those stocking the public toilets are spending other peoples’ money on other people, leading to not much concern about what is got…..

When Concorde first took flight

On March 2nd, the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde took to the air for the first time. Its maiden flight lasted 27 minutes, never exceeding 300 mph. The plane was later to fly at Mach 2.2, or 1,354 mph at an altitude of over 60,000 feet, nearly twice the height of conventional passenger jets. It could carry 92 – 128 passengers.

Backed by the British and French government, the costs were estimated at £70m. With delays and cost overruns not uncommon in government-backed projects, they eventually came to £1.3bn. The plane was a technological marvel, but an economic disaster because so few were sold. British Airways and Air France each operated seven aircraft, and there were six prototype and development aircraft built, making 20 in all. British Airways and Air France both ran it profitably only when development costs were written off.

It is rather typical of big government projects. Legislators and civil servants are not as cautious with taxpayers’ money as investors tend to be with their own. If government undertakes a big commercial project, it is a good bet that real commercial interests will not touch it. A popular phrase in the 60s and 70s was ”picking winners,” in which government was supposed to back projects that would pay off. Alas, “picking losers” would have described the policy more accurately. From DeLorean cars to the Meriden Motorcycles Cooperative, government always seemed to end up writing off the loans or investments it had made.

It is conceivable that Concorde might have worked if the development costs had been spread through several later derivatives, as Boeing did with its jetliners. A stretched version that carried more passengers, and other spin-offs that used the now-developed technology might have succeeded. But it was not to be. A fatal crash at Paris was reckoned to have been the beginning of the end for Concorde, and in 2003 it was retired.

It was undoubtedly a technological marvel. I flew it five times, and never tired of the thrill when the Mach-meter on the front bulkhead clicked up 2.0 in big red numbers. Otherwise there was no sensation of speed, even though it flew faster than a rifle bullet. I did take photos of a black sky and curved Earth seen though its small windows.

Several private firms are working on supersonic passenger or business jets, with the first prototypes due to fly later this year or early next. New technology on the airframe shape is expected to reduce or eliminate the supersonic boom that limited Concorde to breaking the sound barrier only over oceans. It did establish, at vast expense to British and French taxpayers, that there is a demand for faster air transport at premium prices, and no doubt more level headed private firms will develop aircraft that can tap into that demand and make the money from it that government failed to do.

The privatisation of probation - or a change in probation

A report out that recent changes to the probation service didn’t work. Or were costly, Or that privatisation was to blame. That last not being quite what was found although it will undoubtedly be what is said about it.

The thing being how the probation service worked was changed at the same time as who did the probation was. It therefore being more than a little difficult to blame anything on just the who.

Problems with the partial privatisation of the probation system in England and Wales have cost taxpayers almost £500m, the government spending watchdog says.

That’s what will be the political football, obviously enough. Privatisation, costs. Reality being just that tad bit more complex:

Prior to the reforms, which were designed to drive down re-offending rates, convicts who had served less than one year did not have to be supervised by probation services.

But from 2015 every criminal given a custodial sentence became subject to statutory supervision and rehabilitation upon release into the community.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said this meant an extra 40,000 offenders were being supported each year.

The NAO report said that between January 2015 and September 2018, the number of offenders recalled to prison for breaching their licence condition increased by almost half, from 4,240 to 6,240.

Over the same period, the percentage of offenders recalled to custody who had received sentences of less than 12 months increased from 3% to 36%.

Checking more people led to more people being found in violation of their terms. Given that we’d rather like people not to be in violation of those terms this might be regarded as an increase in the efficiency or effectiveness of the service. And yes, obviously enough, a rise in the cost of the system. Banging up the criminals does indeed have a cost.

What we want to know about the privatisation or not is whether a not-privatised service would have cost more or less under the same terms and conditions. The one thing we don’t know - and the one thing that just about no one is going to discuss here either. But, you know, politics, just blame the privatisation.