Next Year Is Likely To Be Memorable For The Wrong Reason....

Some elections are predictable (The Conservatives' triumph in 1983 and Labour's in 1997 are two cases in point), whereas others are unpredictable (The Conservatives' narrow victory in 1992, and the last election that produced the Con-Lib coalition are two cases in point). Next year's election in 2015 is more like the former than the latter - it seems likely that Labour will win the most seats (and I say that with a huge frown). The only thing in the balance is whether they obtain a majority or not.

 

The reason Labour will win is not much to do with any of their political qualities. In fact, I've argued before that this is perhaps the worst bunch of party politicians I've ever seen in this country - Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander, Tristam Hunt, Chuka Umunna, Caroline Flint, Sadiq Khan, Emily Thornberry and Margarat Curran, to name just some of the worst of the frontbenchers. Others like Yvette Cooper, Rachel Reeves, Vernon Coaker, Liz Kendall and Jon Cruddas aren't quite such insufferable characters, but by association they still carry around the same stench of counterfactual party politics.  

 

The only possible way the party could be worse right now is if Diane Abbott had won her leadership campaign in 2010. In fact, consigning Abbott to the backbenches is about the only credible thing this current bunch of leftist buffoons have done since their shadow cabinet inception.

 

Some may argue that the 1970s Labour party was worse than this bunch - but I don't tend to agree; they had more of an excuse back then in that the economic left was nowhere near as discredited as it is now.

 

If the worst bunch of party politicians I've ever seen can be succesful in obtaining enough seats for government, one ought to ask how on earth such a thing can happen. My perception of the political landscape is that the conditions that have led to Labour's imminent success are principally down to a three factors, and that's aside from the constituency border biases that favour Labour.  

 

Firstly, the Conservatives are far less popular than Labour with ethnic minority voters - and with the mass influx of immigration in the past 20 years, there are more Labour voters in that demographic (the cynic in me suggests that that's why Labour weren't too upset at underestimating the rate of immigration by a huge number). In 2001, one in ten voters were ethnic minority voters. By 2050, it is forecasted that ethnic minority voters will constitute one in five of the population. With many ethnic minority voters spreading into what used to be Tory safe seats, it is a change that the Conservatives are probably going to have trouble coping with.

 

Secondly, UKIP is attracting lots of Tories who are fed up with the way Cameron's party has leant so far to the left. For good or ill, issues such as immigration, the EU and same-sex marriage have divided the right, and UKIP's rhetoric is just the sort of music to which the far right Tories have pledged their allegiance. To put it bluntly, UKIP is the Conservative Party that many Tories used to vote for. Just as the slightly more right-leaning SDP handed Thatcher two substantive majorities in the eighties by splitting the left, the Tory defectors to UKIP look likely to hand victory to Ed Miliband's Labour Party in 2015.

 

Thirdly, and in the converse to the last observation, the Left are assembling a pretty unified body of opposition at the moment. Don't misunderstand, it's a ramshackle of half-truths and falsehoods, but it's a pretty unified ramshackle for those that have been duped by it. With the death of some of the hard left fringe groups, and with the disenchanted Liberal Democrats decamping to Labour, Ed Miliband's party has been reaping the benefits.

 

So not only will next year probably see in power the lowest standard of politicians in living memory - it will be yet another, but even more extreme example, of how you don't need to do well in politics, you only need to do less-bad than those in opposition to you, or in Labour's case, be a receptacle for other parties' disenchanted voters.

 

 

 

The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

It is ridiculous to claim that the UK is overcrowded, as many people are eager to claim in this current political climate. Crowded cities are popular because people like to live in them.  They like crowds because crowds have more people, and more people bring greater benefits to society.

Consider it from the perspective of what your being born brings to the world by way of benefits to others. Apart from all the obvious benefits you bring to your closest family, consider all the other good things you bring to the people in your city; you contribute skills, you work and earn money, you are a friend to many, a caring neighbour, a parent, a lover, you think up new ideas, you bring a unique perspective based on a unique experience of the world, you bring help and support in people's tough situations, and conversation, and with that comes anecdotes, wisdom, retrospective prudence, humour, and many more things. The reason why your existence is a blessing to others in your city is the same reason why increased population has made the world more prosperous; you have brought much more into the world than you have drained from it*.  

Regarding overcrowdedness, the upshot is, rural areas are quieter because fewer people like to live in them - and house prices are very expensive in Central London and Manhattan because more people want to live there.  Its simple logic - the reason London has 8.6 million people and rural towns have only a few thousand is because more people prefer to live in London than they do rural towns. The reason being, not only is there is a greater abundance of the aforementioned benefits in more populous areas, there are also better career prospects, higher salaries, better nightlife, greater choices of restaurants, a richer choice of entertainment, more tourist attractions, better public transport, greater diversity of people – the list goes on. 

So what I wonder is this: of all its citizens, who is statistically more likely to complain that the UK is over-crowded – people in crowded places or people in non-crowded places having a perception that other busier places are overcrowded? If it’s the former then they would do well to read this Blog post because it should show them that they don’t know how good they have it. If it’s the latter then I don’t get their complaint because life is not overcrowded for them in their rural provenances.

In terms of probability, the highest number of complainers will most likely come from a highly populated area, which probably explains why to them the UK feels overcrowded. Most people who pontificate on overcrowding are likely to be pontificating from a vantage point of high population density. The people with the highest probability of feeling an intense population density are those who live in the densely populated areas. For example, if city x has 7 million people and a village y has 1000 people, and only x and y exist, there is only a 1 in 7000 probability that you don't live in city x.

Let's get one thing straight, though - the UK is not overcrowded. The mistake people are making is that they are trying to average population density of people instead of averaging over square miles. You can't get a proper picture of the UK's people to area ratio by counting how densely populated a populated area is - the only way is to assess how densely populated the average square mile would be when considering each square mile as a weighted average of total population and total area. A tube station in the rush hour can be overcrowded; so can a concert venue without proper door control - but take a trip around the UK by plane and look down, and for the most part you won't see crowds of people, you'll see fields and woodlands.

The rate of urban areas in relation to square miles is vanishingly small - there is potential for literally millions more people living in the UK. Of course, just like all sensible immigration policies, a nation must ensure it has the schools, hospitals, roads, etc to support more people, but given the myriad qualities and benefits one distils from living in places like London, that ought to be something that's greatly encouraged.

It certainly is the case that in some areas of the UK the infrastructure hasn't quite kept up with population demand, but once you accept the general maxim that more people means more cultural and social benefits, it's easy to see that inadequate facilities does not mean the nation is overcrowded, it simply means that the UK infrastructure has not progressed conterminously to facilitate the social and cultural benefits that come with an increased diversity of people.

* For a much more comprehensive analysis of this, see my blog post Why The World Is Not Overpopulated. 

Why Jesus Was Probably Not A Socialist

A lot of people claim that Jesus was a socialist. They justify this by talking about His instructions to give away wealth and follow Him, and alluding to our being commanded to do our bit for the poor by giving charitably.  As well, we find in Timothy's first letter that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil". And let's be reminded that although we have Jesus' call to ‘Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’, there is clearly no repudiation of State as a mechanism for governance.

So it's all pretty clear, right? Jesus endorses a system in which the means of production and distribution are owned by the State, but where the common welfare for everyone is to be achieved through the establishment of a socialist redistributive system.  

People who think this way must be reading a different Bible to me. They think it's obvious that Jesus would have rejected capitalism and been a staunch proponent of socialism. It may be obvious to Christians and atheists alike. Nevertheless, it isn't true.

While I hold the view that scripture is too low-resolution to distil any explicit political or economic framework applicable to the modern age - if people would take Christ's teachings as He instructed, and not as they want them to be, they would see more of an endorsement of laissez-faire monetary exchanges and voluntary giving than they would a heavy State-controlled command economy.

Clearly God sees a world full of suffering, and calls for us to work hard to earn the money* to be charitable, influential, and campaigners for social justice. But by its very definition, being generous means giving away something of your own accord. It doesn't mean being forced to give away something over which you have no control. If I draw out a quarter of my month's earnings and give it to WaterAid, I have been generous - but I have been generous because I wanted to do my bit to help out some desperate people. If, however, the government taxes me with the threat of imprisonment and gives the money to WaterAid on my behalf then I have not been generous, because I had no say in the matter.

Charitable foreign aid donations obtained from taxpayers' money are something to endorse, but foreign aid is not the same as voluntary giving, because foreign aid involves the government giving away other people's money, not their own. If the UK actually was full of Christian charity then it'd be full of people giving of their own accord.

I remember a couple of years ago when David Cameron was defending the governmental increase in the foreign aid budget because 'Britons are generous people'. I'm all for greatly increasing the foreign aid budget and helping the world's neediest more than we currently do, but David Cameron had his reasoning backwards there. The governmental increase in the foreign aid budget must have been necessary because too many Britons are not that generous of their own volition. Giving to the world's neediest of your own accord is more generous than the government giving to them on your behalf after taxing it from you. If Britons were increasingly generous people it would lessen the need for governmental foreign aid, not increase it.

Compulsory aid transference through enforced taxation subverts God's desire that people are generous of their volition. If the government is having to take our money and give to the poor then that's every suggestion that we are not being Christian enough in our generosity, and that others are having to be generous on our behalf. Given that the market of supply and demand and the efficiency of price theory have been proven to be the primary vehicles that will enable us to earn the money with which to be generous, I'm confident that God, being omniscient, supports things that yield to logic and empirical evidence.

EDIT TO ADD: At the risk of this article getting misrepresented, I want to reiterate what I said above - that the Bible is too low-resolution for water-tight contemporary political theory, so we must not speak beyond our station. But as the book of Proverbs (and John for that matter) evinces - accounts of truth are favourable with God. Moreover, Jesus being God means He isn't confined to the past - He is an active personality in the current age too, so cares deeply about how we do things.

Empirical evidence is one of those qualities. Empirical evidence shows that the Smithian invisible hand acts as a social mechanism that channels collective objectives toward meeting the needs of the people that make up a society, by ensuring competition between buyers and suppliers, which channels the profit motive of individuals into providing products that society desires at prices which are rarely above cost.

This is what makes laissez-faire economic philosophy (with light regulation) so compelling - it is that markets automatically channel self-interest toward socially desirable ends. Where there is still poverty and need, it is not because of the markets, it is because they haven't been able to partake in the qualities the market facilitates. Or to use a simple illustration I often use:

A) Inequality occurs not because trade is bad but because some cannot participate in trade.

B) Hunger occurs not because food is bad but because some cannot participate in eating food.

Finally, on Christians in the political arena - in the wake of the recent elections, I've been hugely disappointed by the Christian parties trying to gain some political ground. Instead of seeing refreshing calls to do more for the poor, engender social justice, and generally promote kindness and tolerance, we've seen only prejudice and passive-aggressive spiritual intimidation - which means a whole lot of 'my way or the wrong way' proclamations. No wonder they remain outside of the periphery of mainstream politics.

* You'll note the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-27

** Photo courtesy of http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/libertarian-jesus

The Badly Needed Ripples That UKIP Has Caused In British Politics

Well, as you've probably read now, after the European Election UKIP has the most MEPs and has taken over 27% of the votes.

A lot of people seem genuinely shocked that a party so rife with scandal could accumulate such a large percentage of the votes. I don't find it at all surprising that UKIP members kept cropping up in scandal (it happens to the other parties to, but they are not so well publicised). The UKIP members that call themselves a party aren't really a party in the traditional sense - they are a collection of people who've become disenchanted with the parties they used to support. Nigel Farage is a dejected Tory who can't bear to see the Conservatives become so left wing on issues like economics, Europe, immigration and homosexuality.

Whatever else we can say about the results, one thing ought to be crystal clear now for the other two main parties (I say two because hopefully the ramshackled Lib Dems will fall off the political radar in the coming years) - their tactic of insulting, trivialising and pretty much dismissing UKIP's sound-bytes has not only been a mistake, it has been rather dishonourable too.

A few weeks ago I wrote this…

As you've probably gathered, I can't help but think that the way many people are simply writing off UKIP as a bunch of bigoted racists with nothing worth hearing is an exaggeration too far. There' s disagreement, and rational arguments in opposition, which are all fair game - but as for lobbing an egg on Nigel Farage's head, and sending bricks and faeces through the post, well I'm afraid that's ignoble, and to be guilty of sinking to a level way below the party they're supposed to be repudiating.

Let's be clear, I'm not affiliated to any political party - but what should be evidently clear by now is that what's making UKIP popular relates to issues that the other main parties have not been, and are still not, satisfactorily addressing. I don't want to get into those issues now, but suffice to say that if UKIP can obtain over 4,350,000 votes in a 34% turn out, then crass dismissals of them amounts to, at the very least, crass dismissals of the issues the main parties are not addressing, and one might also say crass dismissals of the current concerns of an awful lot of people in the UK - like the efficacy of the current EU set-up, and like our ability to control immigration in ways that mutually benefits all concerned

Looking to next year, I still don't imagine UKIP will obtain any seats at the 2015 General Election (the first past the post system disadvantages them there), although they might be able to pick up one or two if they focus all their attentions on the small minority of potentially winnable constituencies. And it is astonishing to me that this current Labour party - probably the worst bunch of political buffoons since the Labour party of the late seventies, or maybe even ever - looks set to get the most votes in next year's election (either obtaining a majority, or at the least acquiring the most votes).

Of course, this is more to do with disenchanted voters floating away from other parties (primarily the Lib Dems) than it is anything they've done of their own merit. But if it turns out that way then David Cameron will surely look back and realise that his biggest mistake was in not re-claiming the territory lost to the best parts of UKIP - most notably the libertarian values of free-enterprise and global trade, small State regulation, and standing up to the charmless, un-democratic bureaucrats in the European Union, many of whose laws are stultifying, economically inefficient and nannified. Here's a prime example of what I mean; the EU's dreadful tariffs on non-EU agriculture dampens the price signals of agriculture and creates trade barriers that hurt much poorer non-EU countries like those in Africa. The result is not only an unnecessary disadvantage for those who desperately need more traded, it is a wasteful misallocation of agricultural adaptation as it effectively subsidies EU farming against those whose goods are more cost-efficient.

For all its ills, what UKIP has done successfully is focus on a few of those few key issues on which David Cameron will regret not doing better in the last four years. The Conservatives, the Lib Dems and Labour have too often behaved like petulant children, throwing slurs at a party they should have instead pre-empted, on issues they should have addressed more intelligently and perspicaciously.

As someone with no party affiliation, I'm glad to see the political scenery changing in the way it currently is. As things stand UKIP are doing just well enough to give greater illumination to the way the smug, sententious, out of touch muttonhead politicians (and the prostrating media) need to do an awful lot better.

And now that they have shown their popularity and forced the Con-Lib-Labs to address some of these issues, it exposes all the more the likelihood that the main parties, and their sycophantically loyal media hucksters, never really believed UKIP were racist, they just employed those tactics as a slur to dissuade voters from putting UKIP in a position they (as it turned out, justifiably) feared they would obtain.   

As things stand, UKIP have lobbed in a bus-sized boulder into the stagnant lake of British politics, while at the same time remaining far away from having any direct influence in Parliamentary policies. It's probably going to turn out that, in the long run, that'll be a good thing for the political landscape in the UK, particularly if, as looks likely, the ugly racist, xenophobic BNP thugs disappear into oblivion, and the Lib Dems become a tiny fringe party again that does much of its good work at the hands of their many decent local councillors.

* Photo courtesy of The Independent.

Vince Cable's Bubble Muddle

This week Vince Cable claimed that increased property prices justifies capital gains tax because rent profits that come from investment make price rises unsustainable. Vince Cable and his Lib Dem cronies want to tax capital gains on people making lots of money from property rental.

Regrettably, Vince Cable is so focused on the mote of capital gains in the far distance that he’s failing to see the beam of regulation right in front of him. Here’s what he’s missing. Under normal market conditions investment in property should bring prices down, not up. If renting property is hugely profitable then investors will look to build more property in order to generate more profits. If lots of investors do this then housing supplies will increase, demand will lessen, and prices will be brought down. Vince Cable should ask himself what it is that is preventing this normal market chain of events. The answer, he'd find, is the huge restrictions placed on where (and how) property can be built.

The supposed ‘wisdom’ coming from Westminster is as follows: meddle in the markets to interrupt a natural flow that would increase supply and bring down prices, and then impose a capital gains tax on people who are beneficiaries of the short housing supply, disincentivising investment in property investment.

This is all preposterous and harmful to the UK, and yet another example of why the State should not try to dictate the industries we pursue. According to Paul Chesire's research on price differentials from the LSE, we find:

"Relative to other prices, house prices have gone up five-fold since 1955. In less than 20 years the price of houses has doubled relative to incomes; since 1997 lower quartile house prices have increased 80% relative to lower quartile earnings – even despite the crash of 2007-09”.

The logical corollary, then, according to natural market forces, is that demand for housing is high. If demand is high and supplies scarce enough to cause a drastic shortage, the obvious solution is to deregulate some of the green land prohibitions and allow the natural forces of the market to bring supplies closer to demand.

So we should just expand cities like London by keep building more houses on green land?

I didn't say yes or no to that – I merely pointed out that it's a bit rich politicians complaining about a housing shortage when it's the artificial restrictions by councils on the supply of land that creates the shortage. The economic answer is that we should expand cities like London where demand calls for it, and preserve green areas where demand calls for that.

That’s all very well, but even if they start to lift some of the restrictions we still have the problem of lots of foreigners buying our houses in London and leaving them sitting empty while UK folk struggle to find housing.

Careful now, that sounds very xenophobic, as well as being factually inaccurate.

Xenophobic and factually inaccurate?

Yes, there are no foreigners 'buying our houses' - we (whoever we is supposed to be) don't own those houses, so they are not ours to buy or sell. Any property sold to foreigners is sold willingly by the owner of that property. To adopt an aversion to that based on the principle that the buyers are foreigners smacks of xenophobia.

One of the few good things a government can do is ensure that its public spending makes the country a better place. Keeping more up to speed on the social housing need is a good place to start. And for the private market, diminish the housing shortage by lifting land regulations, which will the enable the building of more private homes in a market that badly needs them.

** Point of note: this article by the LSE’s Paul Cheshire contains the following finding: “Most privately owned Greenbelt land is intensively farmed with limited rights of access and has no amenity value at all. Recent studies have shown that its value is captured only by those who own houses within it, and that intensively farmed land has a negative environmental value.”

Taking Socialism To A New Level - A World Without Money

Take a look at this guy Daniel Lambert - I saw him on the Daily Politics pre-election show a couple of days ago - he's one heck of a socialist, and quite a charismatic and likeable guy too. He wants to go one stage further than most socialists - he wants to abolish money altogether, which means abolishing the very units that make price theory work.

To see how efficient the utility of price theory is, let's humour Mr. Lambert and imagine a world without money. Some people do live this way - the Anuta tribe in the Solomon Islands have a society based on a gift economy as their currency, but they haven't advanced very far materially (an observation which itself has pluses and minuses).

For most people, though, a world without money would be a disaster for commercial transactions. It would also bring about a world of hunger, neglect and social unrest. Consider Frank who owns a garage. In an economy with currency Frank sells his services to a range of customers - people who need their car services, MOTs, brakes changed, cam belt replacements, and so forth. Their common goal is that they need Frank to perform mechanical operations that they cannot.

 

Frank exchanges his services for money so he can buy things he wants - clothes, food, DVDs, holidays, DIY goods, and so forth. If money didn't exist then Frank's world of selling and buying would be up in the air. Rather than exchanging his mechanical skills for the right amount of money, he would have to find people who had clothes, food, DVDs, holidays and DIY goods and make a mutually beneficial exchange. Suppose Frank wants seven DVDs - he'd have to seek out a DVD salesman who had something wrong with his car in order to offer to trade seven DVDs in exchange for a car repair. Or if he wanted a holiday he'd have to find someone selling a holiday who happened to need car repairs to the same value. It sounds like hell.

 

But it gets worse. Suppose the DVD salesman needs a head gasket replacement. That's going to cost him quite a few dozen DVDs - far more than Frank wants. So Frank and the DVD salesman must strike a deal; an annual supply of DVDs that Frank wants until the bill is paid over a number of years, or a few hundred DVDs which Frank can then sell on. The trouble is, Frank is now a garage mechanic and a DVD salesman. He wants a new suit - but the suit salesman only wants a new exhaust - so Frank has to offer him a new exhaust and six DVDs. Multiply that by everyone in the country and, as you can see, the whole thing would be a nightmare for all concerned.

 

A world without money would be a truly miserable world for everyone trying to make a living. Rather than a world with specialised skills exchangeable for monetary currency, everyone might as well become like Tom and Barbara Good in The Good Life - self-sufficient vegetable growers knitting sweaters out of old ragged garments.

 

It would not be impossible to live without money - but its absence would limit us all to performing only the basic tasks necessary for survival. If there'd never been any money, we'd live in a world with no Internet, no telephones, no television, no cars, no trains, no ships, no holidays, no global travel, no space exploration, no Manhattan skyline, and not much science and knowledge either. Daniel Lambert is a nice guy - and his party seems full of well-meaning individuals (they are a party that, for good or ill, works on a no leadership basis) - but they should be careful what they wish for.

 

 

On Farage’s ‘Romanian Neighbours’, And Why The Worst Thing He Said Went Unnoticed

A whole host of renowned political twits have come forward to condemn Nigel Farage's 'Romanian neighbours' comment as racist – most notably David Lammy, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, and Diane Abbott (whose own history of closet racist utterings makes her an ideal candidate to look for it in others).  

While he has lots of odious ideas, technically Nigel Farage is right when he says that if a group of Romanian men moved next door to you, you would be a bit concerned (I stress the point that he said ‘men’, not ‘people’). Clearly that comment needn't mean that all Romanians are a threat - but given the ever-expanding number of male crime gangs in this country, you wouldn't be human if you didn't at least consider that a group of men moving in next door does involve at least a small chance that they might be a crime gang. This is a natural reaction that just about anyone might feel, without being the slightest bit racist about it. Your house is one of the primary assets in which you've invested hugely, so to expect people to be devoid of alert in gauging potential dangers is a rather unrealistic expectation.

Nigel Farage may well have it in for most of the UK's immigrants, or he may just be genuinely concerned about what he thinks is a too-relaxed border policy that sees too many undesirable criminals enter the UK (make your mind up which it is) - or maybe it's a bit of both - but simply stating that most people would be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door isn't factually incorrect, particularly in the initial stage before they had got to know them a bit.

Personally I think Nigel Farage would have been better trying to vindicate himself the next day along those lines rather than following it up by saying: "Any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door" – which, when you substitute ‘men’ for ‘people’, does sound a bit dodgier. Green Party leader Natalie Bennett certainly seems to think so, saying:

“That is a statement that can only be described as bigoted, racist and disgusting. Those Romanian people might be doctors, or IT professionals or care workers, or Roma seeking a better life away from prejudice and as likely as any other people to be good neighbours, who'll feed the cat or lend you a cup of sugar.”

Well yes, quite – but that’s trivially obvious, and beside the main thrust of Farage’s point. If you’ve arrived at the knowledge that your new Romanian neighbours are doctors, IT professionals or care workers, and you’ve already engaged in sugar swapping and pet-feeding, you no longer are in the position where you are concerned that they might be a dangerous crime gang, so the point is somewhat academic.

I’m perfectly willing to agree that Nigel Farage is not the most desirable of politicians – it just seems surprising that the “Romanian neighbour” point was the one for which everyone is choosing to vilify him when there are so many more indictments to which he could be subjected.

Speaking of which, I said in the title that the worst thing Nigel Farage said went unnoticed. The comment to which I'm referring is when he said on Newsnight last night that 'foreign aid should be cut'. Let’s get this straight – Mr Farage thinks the piddling support we currently offer to the poorest people in the world should be even less than what it is? It's shameful that politicians are trying to score political points with Romania-Gate, but yet lack the discernment to see why suggestions to cut the already miniscule foreign aid is actually a far worse form of discrimination than being concerned about the probability of a Romanian gang moving next door to you.

Foreign aid helps the world’s neediest people – not enough – but it is recognition that outside of our comparably comfy UK surroundings, there are people out there still dying through lack of access to fresh drinking water. When Nigel Farage says ‘cut foreign aid’ he’s asking us to champion even further neglect towards people far far worse off than us in favour of people who happen to share the same nationality as him. Of course, we understand why he says it – there are no votes to be won from foreigners who lack drinking water, and there are plenty to be won from British people who’d be the beneficiaries of a foreign aid cut – but I’d have much more respect for a politician if he or she was brave enough to castigate Farage for that comment, and show that they could put integrity and solicitude before popularity-mongering.

Finally Nigel Farage’s comment that he was uncomfortable hearing foreigners speaking their own language on a train was a stupid thing to say, and does rather fuel the flames of racist accusations against him. Farage strikes me as a mess of contradictions, half-truths and unreasonable prejudices - but him and his UKIP members have clearly got the other parties worried, which is why they are targeting him with anything they can find. They've got it wrong, though, with Romania-Gate, because to target him with that involves indirectly targeting just about everyone else in the country too.  

* It seems, though, that Farage felt the outside pressure to the extent that he later disassociated himself from his original terminology - "Do you know what, in life sometimes people get things wrong. I regret the fact that I was completely tired out and I didn't use the form of words in response that I would have liked to have used."

** Photo courtesy of the BBC

Surrey Seems To Be The Hardest Word

There are myriad reasons why I'm not affiliated to any political party, and elaborating on them will be worthy of a Blog post of its own one day. But for now, one significant reason - the one that's relevant here - is that I abhor the political ethos that ensnares politicians so much on vote-winning and popularity mongering that they are all but forced to dispense with any sincere apologies or admissions of being wrong.

Sadly, politicians are handcuffed and gagged by popularity pressure to the extent that they cannot be seen to admit to past mistakes or concede to being wrong. A really embarrassing instance of this occurred in a recent episode of Prime Minister's Questions on BBC Parliament, with Ed Miliband and David Cameron going head to head over the Royal Mail share price fiasco. Clearly the coalition government (largely in this case Vince Cable and Michael Fallon) underestimated the share price (although I have my suspicions that there was 'do or die' pressure from investors to sell low). Ed Miliband tried his hardest to get David Cameron to concede the under-valuation, and Cameron kept ducking the issue, instead criticising Labour for their time in power - in particular Gordon Brown's under-valuation of the gold he sold off. The whole tit-for-tat exchange was as transparent as a piece of cling film.

I picked the Royal Mail shares example because it is a perfect example of an error for which the coalition government could easily be forgiven*, and thus an error for which Vince Cable and Michael Fallon could easily plead contrition. Instead we had Vince Cable on Question Time with Labour's smug twit of a Shadow Secretary for Business Chuka Umunna enjoying the benefit of hindsight to let rip into him. It would have been much more impressive if Umunna, or any detractors, had had the foresight to say all this before the sale - but as far as I know no one predicted the boom, not even the experts. In fact, the soundest advice at the time was to not pitch at too high a price.

It was daft of the government to promise that shareholders would be in for the long haul, as profit-seekers would fairly obviously be likely to cash in when the price surge flooded in double quick time. But aside from that, this was one of those unpredictable events, and, as it turned out, mistakes, for which the government could have covered itself in more glory by showing regret and being publicly contrite.

What goes on with the price of a stamp?

Despite its privatisation, Royal Mail is still not free to run as it wishes - it is regulated by the government through Ofcom to ensure what's called a 'Universal Service' for customers, which guarantees that service standards (affordability and deliverability) must be available to all addresses in the UK. This regulation acts as a guarantee that now privatised there will not be the issue of whether Royal Mail carries on delivering to and collecting from more rural properties. The coalition government fears that without regulation Royal Mail would be tempted to stop all services that were not cost-effective, and that naturally rural folk would be more displeased than urban folk, as many would miss out on vital deliveries and collections. They needn't worry.

Because not every place of residence or business is in the same geographical proximity to a city or town centre, Royal Mail operates under a system in which there is potentially an involuntary cost on a quite large segment of society (urban folk) for the benefits of small segment of society (rural folk). For example, suppose for simplicity sake that it costs £1 to provide postal collections and deliveries to rural folk, and 50p to provide to urban folk (including a Royal Mail profit margin). If everyone paid the same for a stamp then all customers would pay 75p. Were that the case then such a pricing policy would provide the minority rural customers with a subsidy of 25p, which would be borne entirely by the majority of urban folk.

This would leave room for competing forces. If a rival firm like TNT decides to target urban customers by charging, say, urban-rate fees of 65p then a lot of urban folk will switch to TNT which will take a lot of business away from Royal Mail and lave them with high-cost rural customers, which will then see even further price hikes for rural folk who are stuck with Royal mail.

All this sounds fine except for one problem - a privately run postal services is not like, say, a privately run waste disposal service. In the case of the latter, if it proves too costly to go all the way out to rural Surrey to pick up residents' rubbish, the waste disposal company can simply stop all collections from there and stick with more profitable built up routes. But unlike waste disposal where everything that needs to be collected is generated at source, correspondence that Royal Mail transports goes from urban to rural as well as rural to urban. That is to say, a postal service cannot discontinue rural stops without hurting urban custom, because there will be many letters generated in Norwich, Nottingham, London, Cambridge, and so forth that need to get to places like those in rural Surry scattered all around the country.

A price system which tried to factor in price per mile on top of the already existent price variables in weight and size would be prohibitively time-consuming for customers, which would hand the advantage to competing firms who could set single delivery prices. 

* Save for (perhaps) the nepotism going on with share sales to certain individuals not too far away from certain Cabinet members - but that's a separate issue from the valuation.


 

 

 

What Really Motivates Our Lawfulness Isn't The Law

In my last Blog post I pointed out a Home Office error of reasoning about prison deterrence. I wanted to say something else about deterrence, but felt it would be better in a separate Blog post. Despite what I said about prison being mainly a deterrent against first time offences, it's also the case that the law is not the strong motivational, incentivising device many think it is - human rationality is the real motivational, incentivising device that enables us to have the relatively peaceable co-existence we have in places like the UK.

Imagine a man in the ancient Assyrian empire living in 1200 BC - a time of sieges, cross-border invasions, sanguinary conflicts and relative lawlessness. Suppose he gets transported to modern day Britain. As well as marvelling at the technological advances, the thing that will strike him most would probably be how peaceful, tolerant and stable it is.

Anyone who has studied history knows that peace and good order are far from the natural condition of human beings. The freedom, liberty, stability and security we have in the UK would probably strike our Assyrian man as being as marvellous as all the modern day technology (of course, if you transported him to present day Syria, or Ukraine, or Burma - or London during the 2011 riots - he'd soon feel more at home).

How have we become so ordered? Clearly not just by authority. If the majority of UK citizens decided to seize control over the authorities, they would have more than enough numbers to do so. Suppose you were asked to form an allegiance with an ever-expanding majority group who wanted to take control of the UK, and had the power to do so. Under this power you could join them in running riot - stealing from banks and shops, raping whomever you fancied, commandeering rich people's houses, swim in their pools, drive their Aston Martins around, and generally take advantage of being able to do what you wanted. I think you know straight away that you'd be prohibitively reluctant to join - in fact, you'd probably be on your knees praying that they don't go through with it.

The reason is obvious - despite some possible temporary gains, the losses are greater, as no one wants to live in such a society. Clearly, then, we are ordered not primarily out of fear of the law, but because we want to be ordered and want to live in a stable and safe society. Some moral philosophers will tell you that we are ordered because we all share the same views about what is right and wrong.  One careful look at society shows that this is moonshine - we differ greatly on all kinds of moral views. Therefore I would suggest that the moral philosophers who postulate this view have got their reasoning backwards - it is precisely because we have little chance of agreeing if all left to our own devices that we leave it to the devices of an elected government instead, and volunteer our active part in ensuring that those State-run devices are used as little as possible.

In all likelihood, until the past few decades a great many people had been brought up on a diet of people like Thomas Hobbes' and his portents in the Leviathan, according to which the benefit of the State is that it helps engender the kind of order of which we'd be devoid without a heavy authority in place. Without it life would be "nasty, brutish and short" according to Hobbes - which, as we know from history and from present day places without a stable State and rule of law, can be the case.

What Hobbes underestimated is the extent to which people have an incentive to adhere to the law if it is consistently enforced and that the State has an easier time policing a nation whose citizens adhere to the law, as well as an incentive to create laws that best incentivise. Hobbes got this part wrong - he believed that our natural brutishness necessitated a strict authoritarian State that could keep us in good order. He failed to appreciate the true strength of the symbiosis between willing citizens and willing State to work together to constrain us only to the extent to which our willingness to be co-operative was realised.

* Photo courtesy of hurstpublishers.com

The Prison Deterrence Fallacy

Now it's fairly obvious that there are a number of factors behind this difference between Sweden and the USA; things like number of laws, population size, levels of diversity, and varying levels of cultural tolerance on things like social behaviour, drugs, and so forth. On the last one, which is a big determiner of crime, apparently - "The drug policy of Sweden is based on zero tolerance focusing on prevention, treatment, and control, aiming to reduce both the supply of and demand for illegal drugs".

 

I won't comment any further on the prison situation in Sweden or the USA, because I'm not extensively researched on either. But I do have something to say on UK prisons, as there seems to be a fundamental error of understanding that I can hardly believe is uttered by our Home Office representatives. Here's what led me to witness this strange piece of logical foolishness.

 

Apparently, the story goes like this: after Vicky Pryce emerged from her period of incarceration and publicly claimed that prison is 'not fit for purpose', our Home Office team have been working hard to address the reasons why. Guess what their conclusion was? They concluded that it is primarily due to the high re-offending rate that prison is not fit for purpose as a deterrent against crime.

They base this on the fact that, according to Home Office statistics, 3/4 of criminals are recidivists. What that means is that 75 out of every 100 criminals released from prison re-offend. Actually, that's how many are convicted - and given that not all crimes result in a conviction, it's a fairly safe bet that more than 3/4 of criminals end up reoffending.

 

But saying that prison isn't fit for purpose because of high re-offending rates is an absurd complaint, and a peculiar error of reasoning. It's a bit like complaining that sea defences aren't fit for purpose because occasionally there are extreme coastal conditions that break those barriers. It would be good if the sea defences prevented all flooding, but their primary job is to protect the land from the ordinary thrust of the sea on a daily basis. Similarly, prison's primary function is to reduce offending (by deterrence and by keeping criminals out of society), not re-offending. If it reduces re-offending then all well and good, but that is not its primary function.

It's preposterous to consider whether prison is fit for purpose by only considering the recidivism rates. It's as preposterous as considering how many men in the UK take steroids by only interviewing weight-trainers in gymnasiums. Such a biased research method would drastically skew the overall figures, and this is what is going on with the Home Office's consideration of prison's success rate. Recidivists are people who've already been convicted of a crime, so they are people for whom the threat of prison was no real deterrent first time out. Therefore they are the biased sample of the population for whom prison is the least likely to be a deterrent second time around.

The only proper way to enquire whether prison is fit for purpose is to ask how much of a deterrent it is for the vast majority of people in the UK - those who haven't found themselves outside of the orbit of the law. As far as we can gather, the threat of prison, loss of liberty, loss of employment, and so forth has been a very successful deterrent for a majority of the population.

 

This is compounded by the fact that when it comes to the change in social status from being an ordinary citizen to a convicted criminal, the first cut really is the deepest. That is to say, the first time a recidivist became a criminal was the worst time for him (or her). It was on that first occasion that he became incarcerated, when up until then he had only been used to freedom, and it was then that he first experienced the change in status that would give him a social stigma and make him harder to employ. If that wasn't a sufficient deterrent, we shouldn't be too surprised that criminals are even less likely to be deterred second time around.

 

Now, it's here that we must mention perhaps the most important word - 'rehabilitation'. A prison system works if it successfully rehabilitates offenders. And, alas, high re-offending rates in the UK shows that prison is not working as well as it could in its quest for rehabilitation. I think that's a better argument for prison 'not being fit for purpose' than saying it's failing as a deterrent - but there is a caveat.

 

I fully support the notion that rehabilitation is a primary goal in the judicial system, but unless deterrence and incapacitation are part of that process, a strong rehabilitation ethos might by itself actually increase crime instead of reduce it. Here's why. If rehabilitation is made a primacy at the cost of diminishing deterrence and incapacitation, would-be criminals will see the cost of committing crimes diminish, and this would likely increase their desire to take risks and commit crimes. Yet equally, I don't actually like the notion of punishment for punishment's sake at all - I don't think it has the desired effect on the individual, even if it does stop would-be criminals trivialising the risks by seeing rehabilitation as a too softly-softly measure. If there is to be punishment, let it be part of the overall effect of incapacitation and a strong focus on rehabilitation.

* Picture courtesy of Facebook

God, Evolution, Genes, Morality, Altruism, Grace & Sacrifice

This Thursday just gone I attended an interesting talk by Professor Sarah Coakley at Norwich Cathedral (see her details at bottom of page). The primary focus of the talk involved the extent to which evolution can engender co-operative behaviours, and whether qualities like altruism need to be more aptly characterised in what she calls 'supernormal terms' once God is brought into consideration (in evolutionary biology, altruism means individual behaviour that increases the fitness of an organism while decreasing the actor's fitness).

The talk was broad enough to ensure that one blog post won't do it justice, so I'll just concentrate on the central thesis here, which is that Professor Coakley wants to depart from strict genetic determinism and propound the hypothesis that proper altruism in human form takes its cue from Christ's injunction to 'love our enemies'.

To frame human altruism in its proper context, let's first consider altruism in its precursory stage occurring in other species. In doing this I'm going to lead you to the central thesis in one of the books I've (nearly) written - that things like altruism, sacrifice, generosity, kindness, charity, even human goodness itself are all engaged with by our limited capacity in terms of ethics and morality, but are, in fact, subsets of some kind of supra-goodness emanating from God Himself.

Altruism in the animal kingdom
The animal kingdom consists of what could be referred to as ethological altruism in which animals are simply passing on their genetic information, despite a rich spectrum of emotional variances. There are lots of well known examples of altruism in animals which passed through because they conferred advantage to the group. The sting and consequent death of a honeybee is a good example. It is a form of self-sacrifice because the bee's genes survive and are shared in the colony of relatives. Also, various termites evolved a mechanism for releasing a sticky secretion which causes their own death by fatally rupturing a neck gland; but the autothysis creates a tar baby effect which defends against invading ants. Further, there are numerous examples where animals adopt orphaned animals of a different species.

It is particularly interesting that many behavioural patterns that we used to think were purely human have been observed in other animals that do not possess our fecundity. When dolphins are injured or suffering from malaise, others dolphins will swim under them for hours at a time helping them to the surface to enable them to breathe. Many of the ape groups will put themselves at risk to help other ape groups with food sharing, aiding injured group members, and with defense against predators. Some birds become "helper birds" and assist other breeding pairs in raising their young, and in some cases they will protect an unrelated bird's young from external threats. There are also a number of animals that give alarm calls to warn their kin of the presence of predators, and attract attention to themselves, which, of course brings about self-endangerment. Meerkats leave one member of their group on sentry duty to willingly act to warn others as the rest feed themselves. Finally, there are even cases of animals who will infiltrate a group of rival predators and rescue a herd member who has been captured (American buffalos are one example, and there are others).

The material distinction between humans and other animals is that we are not wholly subservient to mere biological stimuli - we can override our biology, with evolution of ideas being a big driver of many things in our species now. Unlike other creatures, our interaction with the world can adapt without ‘requiring’ a genetic evolution (although genetic evolution is still occurring, of course). Humans take generations to evolve; bacteria evolve during a routine sickness if the antibiotic isn't used correctly. With greater cognitive complexity and lifespan we see safeguards which slow evolution; yet paradoxically we have seen a driven need for increase in good acts and the avoidance of the over emphasis on self-centredness and parochialism (which is psychologically damaging). Moreover, the greater intellection associated with being human puts greater pressure on the complexities of altruism, because emotional factors are involved that are not involved with the same degree of complexity in any other animal.

In God's image

The Biblical distinction between humans and other animals is that humans are made 'in God's image', and that, as a consequence, we have qualitative superiority in terms of the relationship we can have with God and with each other. But even so, it is perfectly compatible to say that humans are made in God's image, yet also a repertoire of traits, components and qualities that find their legacy in biological evolution. In fact, this is precisely what we'd expect if morality and ethics are humanly evolved phenomena, and God's love, grace and goodness the very things to which our ethics and morality are leading us. In my book of the same name I've called this "The Ecstasy of a New Morality"

The whole purpose of moral thinking is that for every action there is a consideration related to the concepts of right and wrong - but in terms of assenting to God, there probably are concepts with explanations that are more closely identified with the ecstasy of a new morality than the evolutionary origins of ordinary ethical history. In the Sermon on the Mount we see in Christ’s words something that hints (stress 'hints') at more than just ordinary morality. I notice that His teachings on the human heart are not expressed with the consequences of failing in mind – it is not a ‘You must do this, or else!’ expression – it is more of a set of teachings that speak truths about what it is to be human, and the best state of mind that we can create for ourselves when trying to master God's wisdom given to us. Rather than being mere binary systems of right and wrong, the teachings seem to be hints of concepts greater than what mere morality can accomplish. 

The instruction to 'Love your neighbour as yourself' is sometimes taken to impose an automatic cost on the person doing the loving - but while sometimes costs can be incurred, it isn't a necessary component in the expression. Loving your neighbour reaps huge psycho-spiritual benefits on the individual - and as St Paul reminds us, love never fails the person doing the loving - so it's not good to think of loving your neighbour in terms of costs - the whole process is hugely beneficial to the giver as well as the recipient. 

Goodness for goodness sake

The relationship between being Christ-like and engendering self-interested rewards is an interesting one. When considering the idea of goodness, we find that the concept of goodness for goodness sake is quite obscure.  When pondering whether or not there is such a thing as a pure act of human goodness unrelated to self-interest, I find that I lean towards the view that there is not such a thing.  We are able to perform kind and heroic acts, but I doubt whether any pure form of selflessness can be attributed to them, for it seems true to say that while all acts are not governed by self-interest they certainly have a cosy relationship with self-interest. 

I once set a challenge to a group of people to think of a positive, kind or generous act that confers no benefits on the self. Everyone struggled to think of one. Even seeming acts of pure generosity naturally confer emotional benefits which stroke our ego, and give us satisfaction and moral worth. I ended up contending that it is impossible to act beneficently without some form of self-interest coming into the equation.

Volunteers give up their time to do socially beneficial work, but studies have indicated that the warm glow of looking good is hard to resist. Two economists, Jeffrey Carpenter and Caitlin Knowles-Myers, put this to the test by analysing voluntary firefighters. They found that when offered modest financial incentives, some took them, but many did not. While this isn't watertight general evidence by any stretch of the imagination, what Carpenter and Knowles-Myers found was that many who turned down financial incentives were also the volunteers who had purchased vanity plates exhibiting their volunteer status. Presumably cash incentives would have undermined the warm glow they wanted to retain from being explicit about their volunteering status.

There may be a correlation between knowing more about the beneficiaries of one's charity rather than giving to 'eradicate poverty'. For example, being asked to donate to help a particular village in Cambodia get drinking water probably would be a different proposition to being asked to give generally to assist with WaterAid. In terms of how they make you feel, I suspect there are differences too. Those who just want to give to charity to feel good about themselves are less likely to do research into the best charity to give to, or whether theirs is doing as much good as others. Just the fact that they 'are' giving may often be enough for them.

Naturally this warm glow of satisfaction effect comes with further consideration in relation to the gospel. If our goodness brings with an automatic sense of self-satisfaction, and possible evolutionary legacies capable of inducing automatic pleasure in response to our decency, we may always be under a cloud of self-doubt with regards the pure intentionality of our actions.

If you'll recall, altruism means individual behaviour that increases the fitness of an organism while decreasing the actor's fitness. In Robert Triver's "Social Evolution", for an act to be called altruistic it must be demonstrated that the actor is incurring a cost. We've said that although there are occasions when we do something with seemingly no ulterior motive or assent towards outward self-interest, there is always the concomitant pleasure and satisfaction that such acts confer on the self. If it is the case that the benefits to the self always exceed the cost of the beneficent act (and that's by no means a certainty), this means it is nigh on impossible for a human to be altruistic.

Neuroscientific studies give possible indicators too. Using fMRIs (which stands for 'functional magnetic resonance imaging'), neuroscientists can map the activity of the various parts of the brain. Jordan Grafman and his team found that the area of the brain that was active when a beneficent act was undertaken was the mesolimbic pathway (which is the cognitive area associated with rewards, and has the same dompamine-based distributive properties as we have with sex, money, food and drugs. Beneficent acts also engaged the part of the brain that doles out oxytocin, which is also associated with love (both the romantic kind and parental/familial love). So in terms of neuroscience, beneficence is inextricable from pleasure, love and self-satisfaction - there is virtually no way to avoid the conferring of pleasure on one's decency. Also, fMRI brain scans show that making decisions to donate to charity lights up the same region of the brain that reacts to other rewards like sex and money, which means that giving generously is inherently rewarding at a neuro-psychological level.

Evolution has been the stage on which the creation story has unfolded, and it is our biological legacies that give us the foundation to try to be Christ-like. That's why those who value the merits of others and take pleasure in their joy are better off than those who cannot. At this stage in our human evolution we have the ability to be expressly thoughtful, empathetic, generous, charitable, and improve ourselves by keeping our mind on realities that transcend self-centeredness. Cognition that knows others in all levels of their need motivates service for them on varying levels of their need, and this is played out in economic and the political systems too. Anything that can hold others in their deepest potential of value and goodness and purpose helps with our humanity. In being the sort of person who helps an old lady across the road, your act serves two dialectical purposes – both of which are not unrelated to self-interest. Just like being honest when a shopkeeper has undercharged you, helping the lady across the road positively benefits both individuals (the actor and the beneficiary) and it contributes to the overall good effect of society in net terms.

In terms of our nature in relation to God, all that we have covered seems to lead us towards the question and answer being part of the same equation; yes we are capable of great goodness and horrible badness, and each of us to different extents - but what we share in common is that we are all internally fraught, and thus all equally under grace. Even Isaiah was frank enough to point out to his fellow Israelites that "all of our righteousness are as filthy rags". One of the reproaches towards the Israelites was that they had turned their back on God and worshipped false gods (Isaiah 42:7). In the broader context I'm sure we can acknowledge that that applies to us too - self-aggrandisement being one of the primary tools for this fault. Thank God that Divine love, grace and goodness are far more powerful than human deeds.

* Photo courtesy of www.guernseywalker.me.uk

 

 

 

Racism! But Not In The Form You're Used To Seeing

I’m sure you’ll agree it’s high time we kicked racism out of football. But on this occasion I’m not just talking about Dani Alves having a banana thrown at him while taking a corner, or the monkey chants sometimes heard from crowds across Europe, I’m talking about FA Chairman Greg Dyke’s desire to artificially reduce or ban non-European Union players outside of the UK top-flight, and reduce non-home grown players in Premier League squads*

To see why that’s a prejudiced claim that sounds a lot like racism – replace “non-European Union” with “black” and “non-home grown” with “non-white”, and you’ll find it’s the sort of statement for which you’d rightly receive widespread condemnation. One is a prejudice based on geography, the other is a prejudice based on skin colour – and both exhibit vile human discrimination.

The reason Greg Dyke can get away with such tripe is by appealing to national prejudice in a way that couches his language. This seems to be something that’s tolerated in sport but not in politics. Nigel Farage can’t get away with it without being egged, and his UKIP members can’t get away with it without having bricks and faeces sent to them through the post (and whether you like or dislike UKIP, I want to add that I’m pretty unimpressed by those acts, by the way).

That such language is still accepted when the subject is sport says a lot about how humans are apt at taking prejudices a la carte. Even if we put aside the fact that foreigners have brought an immense amount of quality and entertainment to the Premier League - discriminating against prospective league players based on the fact that they are not indigenous to the UK is morally repugnant and economically foolish, as well as being short-sighted. Moreover, if the FA restricts the number of non-UK players coming in, will they also restrict the number of UK players who can leave to play abroad? If they do then that’s bad for UK players; if they don’t then it smacks of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

Greg Dyke has in the past claimed to recognise unfair prejudice in institutions – he was once outspoken about the BBC being ‘hideously white’. It’s quite ironic, then, that over a decade later his complaints are tantamount to saying that the English Premier League is ‘hideously foreign’.

It just shouldn’t be tolerated – neither in terms of ethicality, nor with regard to what’s good for the sport. In a footballing market that thrives on freedom of mutually beneficial player transfers, being prejudiced on factors outside of ability artificially impedes the standard of UK football, and engenders a pretty abhorrent bias under the pretext of trying to improve the quality of the national team.

As well as ignoble prejudices, it looks as though Greg Dyke hasn’t understood the people he claims to represent either. Looking to improve the national team by lowering the overall standard of UK football sounds exactly like something the vast majority of fans would reject, because it’s quite evident that people care more about their annual domestic club season than they do bi-annual international tournaments. This only goes to show that the FA Director doesn’t really understand what supporters actually prioritise. Furthermore, no club should want to entertain this preposterous pro-UK discrimination, because markets punish unfair discriminators – and no club wants to be hit in their pockets by being forced to buy players they wouldn’t voluntarily choose to sign.

Strange accusations

Finally, on a similarly related topic today, UKIP are being taken to task over their apparent decision to employ Europeans to hand out their leaflets because ‘they are cheapest’.

Critics are suggesting this is ‘hypocritical’ and inconsistent with UKIP’s central ethos. This ought to strike you as strange. Regardless of how you feel about UKIP, that particular criticism is unfounded. Employing Europeans because they offer the most competitive prices is wholly consistent with their free market endorsement; and employing immigrants already within our borders is not in any way inconsistent with UKIP's complaint that stricter border controls are needed. In fact, if they want immigrants to be able to contribute to our society and earn a wage, then their decision to employ some of them actually seems pretty consistent with the party's aims, particularly given that it was under Labour’s super lax immigration and border policies that most of them got in anyway. And ironically, of course, if they had employed only Brits, that would have led to accusations that their anti-immigrant prejudice was compounded – so in this case UKIP were somewhat damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.

* See here for full Greg Dyke story.

** Picture courtesy of bbc.co.uk