Why we shouldn't be happy about the Stirling Prize

Of course we’re unlikely to enjoy the results of an award for new architecture given those standards of new architecture. There’s far too much still of the machines for living than there is of desirable homes. Still, perhaps this year’s winner of the Stirling Prize is different?

One hundred years since the 1919 Addison Act paved the way for the country’s programme of mass council housing, the prize for the best new building in the UK has been awarded to one of the first new council housing projects in a generation.

Goldsmith Street in Norwich represents what has become a rare breed: streets of terraced homes built directly by the council, rented with secure tenancies at fixed social rents. And it’s an architectural marvel, too.

This ticks so many fashionable boxes. Council owned and built! Social rent! Secure! Passivhaus even!

And yet, and yet. We Britons live in some of the smallest dwellings in Europe:

US home size has fallen a little since the recession, to 201 m2 (2,164 ft2) in 2009. UK house size is relatively small at 76 m2 (818 ft2) while Canadian houses are quite big at 181 m2 (1,948 ft2).

We don’t have a shortage of land to build upon whatever people say. Only 3% of the country has housing on it and that includes the gardens.

The problem that we see:

Internal area 8,056 m²

That’s for 105 dwellings. Yes, some of them are flats and others are houses. And yet that is still only that 80 square metres or so for each dwelling.

That is, we’re giving architectural prizes now to those who cram the poor into hovels. We can’t help but think that this isn’t the way to be doing it. Free the planning system so that houses able to swing that proverbial cat can actually be built….

Don't railroad through HS2

This morning the Adam Smith Institute launched our latest report by rail expert Adrian Quine, calling out HS2 as the money pit of a project that it is and suggesting alternatives that the government could go for that would deliver extra capacity at a much reduced cost.

Coming as the government reviews whether to go ahead with the venture whose costs are rapidly spiralling, it’s timely to look at the economic case of number of substantially less costly alternatives to current HS2 plans that could increase capacity. These include:

1. Upgrading existing routes with new signalling, doubling the number of tracks, reopening mothballed lines, and timetable redesigns;

2. Building new sections of conventional high speed, including between the mainlines and Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and upgrading northern sections of the mainlines;

3. Maximising current infrastructure by targeting bottlenecks on conventional lines, including building flyovers at key junctions, upgrading the Chiltern route to Birmingham or reopening the southern section of the Great Central railway, raising line speeds to at least 125mph;

4. Upgrading stations in London, Birmingham and Manchester;

5. Updating train facilities like wifi, seat quality, and charging points to improve passenger experience.

The ASI report were picked up by BBC news services over radio, on Heart , talkRadio, and LBC, as well as featuring in print in The Times, City AM, the Daily Mail, the National, as well as over 120 local titles.

Now let’s see if the politicians listen.

Protectionist Navigation Acts

An “Act for increase of Shipping, and Encouragement of the Navigation of this Nation” was passed on 9 October 1651 by Oliver Cromwell’s Rump Parliament. It was mercantilism in spades, the start of a series of laws to regulate international trade to the advantage of British ships and British goods. Those Navigation Acts also regulated English fisheries and sought to prevent the access of foreign vessels to colonial trade. This was protectionism writ large, the desire to accumulate ‘wealth’ to Britain by selling more overseas than it bought. It was the start of a series of regulatory Navigation Acts, with an Act of 1660 that was developed and tightened by the Navigation Acts of 1663, 1673, and 1696

The acts sought to shut out foreign ships from England’s colonial trade, banning their ships, and insisting that British ships should be manned by three-quarters of their crews being British or colonial, and this included East India Company ships. Colonies were banned from exporting a detailed list of specific goods to non-British countries and colonies, and it was made compulsory for imports into them to be sourced through Britain.

The thinking was that the colonies would be forced to export raw materials only to Britain, and would be forced to buy only British manufactured goods in return. This would mean that Britain accumulated the wealth of trade, bringing in more gold and silver than it had to pay out to other countries. The acts were designed to keep Britain and its colonies as a self-contained trading bloc, insulated from the rest of the world.

That the Navigation Acts created tensions would be an understatement. They created friction in international relations, and were an endless source of disputes and discontents, occasionally playing a key factor in instigating armed conflicts. This was particularly true of the America colonies that chafed under their yoke and wanted to pursue more lucrative trades outside of their scope. They contributed substantially to the American War of Independence.

Their protectionist nature meant that both the British and their colonies had to pay more for imports than would otherwise have been the case. And the colonies were isolated by law from markets they could profitably have exploited.

The Navigation Acts were not to last. An industrializing Britain of the Industrial Revolution sought wider trade, and manufacturers wanted food to be cheaper for their workers, to relieve upward pressure on wages. Free trade was in the air in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and the Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849, shortly after the protectionist Corn Laws went the same way. Under free trade, Britain prospered as never before.

Now protectionism has reared its head again, with the folly of trying to secure domestic jobs at the cost of higher prices for imports, and more expensive raw materials for manufacturing that make exports less competitive. It’s a beggar-my-neighbour approach that beggars the instigators more than it beggars their neighbours. The Navigation Acts were acts of folly, and were swept away when the realization came that free trade creates the wealth that protectionism inhibits. It’s a pity the lesson has to be learned again.

Just what should a good progressive do here?

We just note, with modest glee*, the problems that can arise from being a good little progressive these days. Who is it that should be supported here on those banners when the march takes place to Trafalgar Square?

Indigenous protesters have paralyzed roads around Ecuador and blocked a main highway into the capital in a fifth day of action against government austerity measures that have sparked the worst unrest in years, resulting in 477 arrests.

The umbrella indigenous organization Conaie said demonstrations would continue until President Lenín Moreno withdraws last week’s measure to eliminate fuel subsidies.

The problem being that protests against austerity are, from that progressive standpoint, obviously to be supported. Protests by the indigenous - which never does seem to include Morris Dancers - are equally to be approved of. And the imposition of IMF strictures upon democratically decided policies is to be abhorred.

Great, so the woke will be as one with the protests.

Except it is also true that subsidies to the boiling of Gaia are to be entirely anathematised. It may be that the people doing the pressuring - the international capitalist regime - are to be opposed as with the over-riding of the peoples’ will. But the elimination of fossil fuels subsidies is the first demand of that church of St Greta.

For us there is no problem here. We do agree that at times subsidies to the poor are necessary. But they should always be subsidies to people not to products. Thus housing benefit not social rents, cash welfare not fuel subsidies. Thus the elimination proposed here is entirely sensible before we even get to the climate change issue.

But you see the problem for those who wish to continue to be right on?

There is a rather larger point here too, other than just donning the intellectual Doc Martens. The abolition of those fuel subsidies is, as the IEA, IMF, World Bank and all insist, one of the things that needs to be done to beat that climate change. But what if the people don’t want those policies or perhaps don’t want the results of that primal policy?

And what does that mean for whatever else it is that is proposed to deal with that heating globe? When the demands of Extinction Rebellion are that industrial civilisation must be shut down and then the people insist that actually, they rather like being able to eat, heat themselves, come in out of the wet and generally live high on the hog? Who gets arrested then? And who will the marches support?

*Actually, no, we’re gleefully putting the boot in.

Microwave makes life better

In 1945, Percy Spencer, employed by Raytheon, was working on a radar unit when he noticed that it had somehow melted a bar of chocolate in his pocket. He was lucky it didn’t melt him. He used it next to cook popcorn, and then an egg - which exploded in the face of the engineers. On October 8th of 1945, 74 years ago, Raytheon filed a US patent for the new cooking process that Spencer had discovered, and the microwave oven was born.

The invention had British origins, in that it owed its existence to the cavity magnetron, developed to make shortwave radar possible in World War II. In 1940 Sir John Randall and Harry Boot invented a valve that could produce microwaves with a wavelength of 10cm. The magnetron was taken to the US by Sir Henry Tizard, a wartime scientific adviser, in exchange for wartime help. The US historian James Baxter later described it as “the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".

Raytheon originally called their cooker a “Radarange,” and produced early models weighing 750 lb and costing $5,000 (£56,000 in today’s money). Over the years the weight and the price came down, especially after the Japanese firm Sharp entered the market in 1961. Now the table-top device is ubiquitous, used for cooking and for reheating previously cooked foods. They have pluses and minuses. Microwave cooking does not normally brown or caramelize food, lacking the high temperatures that do this, and therefore does not produce the flavours that browning or frying impart.

On the other hand, they are healthier in some respects. Microwaved food does not lose the nutrients lost to the water in boiling, and vegetables in particular retain more of their nutrients. Spinach, which loses 77% of its foliate when boiled, retains nearly all of it when microwaved. Bacon cooked in this way has significantly lower levels of carcinogenic nitrosamines than conventionally cooked bacon.

The story of the microwave oven illustrates a fact about free market capitalism that many commentators overlook. If you measure improvements in living standards by looking simply at wage rises over time, you are missing out on the fact that the wages buy more, and they buy better. If you measure the price of early colour televisions against today’s prices, adjusted for inflation, you achieve a comparison. But the real one is that it takes far fewer hours of work to pay for a colour TV today than it did then, and a modern colour TV is far better in many respects.

The same is true of many, if not most, of personal and household consumer goods. They take fewer man hours to afford, and they are much better than what was available before. Even if wages had stagnated, their buying power increases, and the goods they can buy bring increased convenience and opportunities. The iPhone in my pocket replaces the roomful of junk it would have taken 20 years earlier to perform everything it does, and it takes far fewer hours of work to buy it than it did to buy the junk.

Those who affect to sneer at consumer goods are missing out on what they now enable us to do, and the choices and opportunities they present. The microwave cooker enables us to spend less time cooking, if we wish, and more time in doing something we value more instead. That represents a gain in satisfaction.

A puzzling thing to worry about

We’re told, in The Times, that there’s a certain gender segregation online:

Online, men and women are often segregated, leading to regressive cultural views and threatening hard-won equality

It’s also obvious that this is thought to be a bad idea. Which is ever such a little problematic.

We’re back to that old economic point about expressed preferences and revealed. That point being that when we wish to know how people value something - anything - we should not be looking at what they say, rather what they do. It is only the second that reveals that true valuation.

So, here. When able to freely associate by interest and style of conversation men and women tend to - always tend, this is never about an individual but averages - sort into different groups:

YouTube and Reddit are mainly male environments — almost 70 per cent of the user base of both sites is reportedly made up of men. Instagram is skewed towards women, as is the image-sharing site Pinterest (a reported 80 per cent of its users are female). Even on those sites men and women are segregated; YouTube is host to a massive, overwhelmingly male gamer community but also to the female-dominated world of lifestyle and beauty vloggers.

It’s possible to decry this, clearly, for it is being decried. But the obvious question becomes well, what should we do about it?

The useful answer would be nothing. For the task is not to make us all conform to some ideology but to find the arrangements which enable us all to be human. This is the argument in favour of the market economy of course, that innate propensity to truck and barter meaning that this is just what homo sapiens does.

Gender equality, of course and we’ll not have a word said against it. But that insistence upon an equality of outcome doesn’t work. The entire point of a liberal polity is that consenting adults get to do as they wish. If that doesn’t meet with the stricture of some plan then it’s the liberty and the consenting which should, and does, win.

Russia’s new Tsar

Vladimir Putin was born in what was then called Leningrad and is now St Petersburg on October 7th, 1952. After graduating in law he became a spook, a KGB officer for 16 years, eventually Lieutenant Colonel, stationed in East Germany until it collapsed in 1989. He then went into St Petersburg politics in 1991, and five years later moved to Moscow to join President Yeltsin.

He became acting President on the last day of the 20th Century and has been President from 2000-2008, Prime Minister from 2008-2012, and President again since 2012. Assuming the interlude with Dmitry Medvedev as President was simply a subterfuge to get around term limits, Putin has been in power for just short of 20 years, and has announced he will not seek a further term when his present one expires in 2024.

In his first two terms he was credited with rescuing Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin years, enjoying the benefits of a boom in commodity prices, combined with prudent fiscal and economic policies. The purchasing power of Russians went up by 72% during this period, though the world financial crisis and retrenchment has produced more uneven and less prosperous times since. As principally a commodity economy, rather than a modern industrial one, Russia’s economic performance has been tied to world growth. They have benefitted in particular from supplying the raw materials to supply China’s rapid economic expansion.

After the humiliation of their collapse as a world power, most Russians welcomed a President who could reassert their country’s importance and take steps to protect its interests. Putin cultivated the ‘strong man’ image to emphasize his role as a strong leader, appearing in a variety of tough, macho roles, often bare-chested, as he rode bareback, swam in icy waters, tranquilized polar bears and tigers, went scuba diving, drove race cars, and demonstrated his martial arts skills. Many in the West mocked these contrived and staged exploits, but they resonated in Russia.

Although nominally a democracy, Russia curbs its media, arrests and even murders political opponents, and clamps down on opposition parties and demonstrations. It is neither free nor democratic. People have shown in several countries, including China, that many of them will trade political freedoms for economic prosperity. When the economy falters, leaders often turn to whipping up nationalism by confronting ‘opposing’ powers and asserting their country’s might and importance. Putin has done this, asserting its right to control the ‘near abroad,’ and the EU has unwittingly helped him do this by attempting to move its influence close to Russia’s borders. Russia’s interference in and annexation of parts of Georgia and Ukraine is part and parcel of this.

When Russia violates international law, as it has done in using internationally banned agents to murder Alexander Litvinenko in Britain, and to attempt to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, this is done at Putin’s instigation and with his approval. The West quite rightly imposes sanctions and expels diplomats. Russia has to be taught that there will be costs to behaving in so reckless and lawless a manner. Whether sanctions should be imposed for its internal policies, suppression of freedom and human rights violations, is a separate issue. The West is certainly entitled to express its disapproval, and to remonstrate with Putin on such issues, but a certain degree of realpolitik has to prevail.

The days when neoconservatives blithely assumed that liberal democracy would work everywhere, regardless of history and traditions, are gone. Many in the West assumed that Arab Spring would usher in peace and liberal values, overlooking the centuries of hostility between different tribes and religious factions. In some countries it might take an authoritarian ruler to keep communities from attacking each other. In some countries a democratic vote might result in the election of a religious zealot intolerant of minorities and hostile to their rights.

In the real world some countries can enjoy internal peace and stability, plus economic advancement, without the civil liberties that accompany those things in the Western democracies. It is a rather sad fact of life that Putin reminds us of.

What, exactly, do we expect about bank branches?

The Sunday Times tells us that as bank branches close they do so disproportionately in poorer areas of the country. Or among poorer people perhaps.

Well, yes, we suppose so. What would anyone expect to be happening?

Abandoned: how the poor lost bank branches but the rich kept theirs

There has been a shocking rate of bank closures in Britain’s hard-up and less well-connected areas.

We have a new technology which is a substitute for the old. True, internet banking isn’t exactly the same as the physical kind but then no substitutes are perfectly so.

Some part of the old way of doing things will give way to the new. Obviously enough it’ll be the less profitable part of the old which switches over to that new.

That banking to those with little money is less profitable than banking to those with more is not, hugely, a surprise. So, what would we expect in a time of technological change? That the banking system closes expensive branches in poorer areas more than it does so in richer.

That is, matters are panning out just as even a cursory consideration of the issues would predict. Which leaves just the one interesting question.

And?

Barbara Castle - remembered for what she didn’t do

Barbara Castle, born in October 6th, 1910, was one of the most successful female Labour politicians of the 20th Century. She served in the Department of Transport, overseeing the introduction of permanent speed limits, alcohol breath tests and compulsory seat belts. In the Employment Department she brought in he Equal Pay Act, and she also served in Overseas Development and Health and Social Security.

However, it is probably something she didn’t do that will be recorded in the history books. In an attempt to bring the trade unions within the law, she proposed to limit their powers in her 1969 white paper, “In Place of Strife.” Union bosses were bringing the country to its knees by exercising industrial power with arrogant, bullying tactics that were beyond the rule of law. They rebelled against her plans, and found a ready friend in James Callaghan, who fought against her proposals in Cabinet. The Cabinet was split, resignations were threatened, and the Labour paper, Tribune, campaigned publicly against her for attacking workers rather than bosses. She was forced to climb down as the bill was diluted to ineffectiveness. The unions had won.

She began a hate-hate relationship with James Callaghan, who dismissed her from an otherwise little-changed Cabinet when he became PM. His excuse that he wanted to lower its average age looked thin, since he was himself 4 years older than Harold Wilson, the PM he replaced. Castle became an MEP, and in 1990, a life peer.

She had failed to tame the unions, as did Edward Heath when he unexpectedly won the 1970 general election and introduced his “Industrial Relations Act.” The unions fought back bitterly with a series of strikes that brought power cuts and a three-day working week. Heath called an election in 1974, asking “Who runs the country?” The electorate replied, “Not you,” and booted him out. The unions had won again, and Heath was demoted to sulk for years on the back benches.

Margaret Thatcher did bring the unions to heel, where both Castle and Heath had failed. There were three elements to her success. Firstly, she didn’t initially confiscate union power, but redistributed it from the union leaders to their members. Thus there were now secret postal ballots for members to elect their leaders, in place of a show of hands at the workplace under the eye of shop stewards. Workers voting at home began to elect more moderate leaders. There were postal ballots, too, as workers won the right to be consulted before strikes could be called. This deprived their leaders of the ability to call instant walk-outs.

The second element of the Thatcher government’s approach was that it was piecemeal. Instead of one big act that would provoke total opposition, there were a series of measures, each fairly small, but cumulatively they gradually brought the unions under control. It was a salami slicer approach.

Her third element was privatization. Putting the big state industries into private hands changed the attitude of their workforce. Strike action now could threaten their own jobs, and their company’s long term survival. Britain went from having the highest number of days in Europe lost through strike action, to having the lowest. Such industrial unrest as remained was now mainly confined to industries and services that remained in the public sector.

Thatcher succeeded where Castle and Heath had failed, by adopting a gradualist, Fabian, approach. Jeremy Corbyn’s policy of reintroducing those lost union powers shows how effective their abolition was in curbing extremist left wing militancy.

Barbara Castle was 87 when she sat in the front VIP row in Cambridge’s Senate House when I graduated with my Master’s degree in 1997. I don’t think she knew she was watching the President of the Adam Smith Institute. Had she done so, she might well have walked out.

It's only ever the excuse that changes

We’ve another of those calls for global economic management and control. For the transfer of rich country resources to poor. A reminder that it’s only the excuse that changes in this matter:

As our climate emergency unfolds with the economic and ecological instability that it wreaks, we need to again consider a host of new pan-national institutions to tackle this threat. The effects of the climate crisis will be most extreme for people in the global south. It requires massive investments, as much as an additional $2.5tr per year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which current financing and institutional arrangements appear unable to fulfil.

We would need to ensure financial stability and a mechanism for the transfer of resources through an international climate stabilisation fund – a sort of IMF targeting the climate crisis. This agency would put in place new fiscal arrangements to regulate global financial markets and corporate elites, especially those that have made vulnerable island and developing countries into tax havens or exploited natural resources. These nations now require the means to transform their futures. This body could seek to coordinate tax policies and disburse lost taxes to provide direct support to climate-exposed territories: encouraging productive diversification and tackling interconnecting inequality and displacement caused by climate change.

The argument being that post-WWII we put in place those global economic regulators. Bretton Woods, the IMF, the World Bank and so on. Now we should do so again. Simply because it’s obvious that there should be global economic regulation from the centre.

Obviously.

Except that’s to miss the point of the past 40 years. We did indeed have those global institutions. And the poor countries didn’t grow. Then we started - this global neoliberalism - to use market processes and the poor countries did grow. We are enjoying that delight of falling global inequality as a result. The progressive eradication of absolute poverty. We actually have, in place right now, the correct economic policies that is.

But, obviously, because it is just obvious that there must be a Fat Controller, we must reinstitute the failed policies we’ve proven wrong just because. Thus this current call. Climate change is only the excuse here.

It’s also an appallingly bad excuse as the IPCC’s own economic models show. Whatever it is that we do about the point, even if we do nothing, those models insist that doing it within a globalised and free market economy produces better results than inside a more regional and planned - socially democratic even - one.

But, you know, that urge to plan everything just never does leave some people. Thus the flailing casting around for an excuse for it. Even when the very idea has been proven to be empirically, let alone theoretically, wrong.