Thursday 30 July 2015
Brian Rushton London is working
WHEN workers on the London Underground go on strike, Britain’s capital becomes an odd cocktail of the miserable and the carnivalesque. Blitz-era double-decker buses are drafted back into service. Queues for taxis wind around buildings. Hospital emergency departments fill with out-of-practice cyclists and rollerbladers. For the wobbly, a strike day is a chance for exercise; for the ostentatious, an opportunity to preen (unicyclists mingling with pedestrians in the hairier quarters of the capital). Some even break the habit of a lifetime and venture a conversation with those into whose armpits they are pressed, daily, in the morning crush.
The disruption is immense—a stoppage on July 9th reportedly sapped London’s economy by £300m ($470m)—and strangely reminiscent of Britain’s past, when industrial action by hard-left unions claimed tens of thousands of working days every year. With another shutdown looming on August 5th, Bagehot is tempted to join his fellow commuters in tutting about outfits like the militant National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), whose Marxist leadership exploits its monopolistic power to extract for its...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton At Her Majesty’s pleasure
Spicing up life behind barsALEX CAVENDISH first encountered Spice, a synthetic drug that imitates cannabis, in prison in 2012 when a sleepy looking Dutch man, serving a sentence for drug offences, started trading it. By 2014, Mr Cavendish says, half his fellow prisoners would “literally stagger” down the hall to roll-call each day, high on the drug, varying their routine only so far as to pass out in the grounds, be violently sick in a washroom, or urinate in a six-man dormitory.
New synthetic drugs are on the rise in prisons, and Spice—which in practice refers to several chemical variants—dominates the market. Prison seizures of Spice increased from 15 in 2010 to 430 in the first seven months of last year. In March a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a think-tank, quoted the head of substance misuse at one prison as saying that about 60% of inmates were regularly taking it; some prisoners estimated that the figure was nearer 90%. By contrast, outside prison walls the drug market contains just a sprinkling of Spice: a Europe-wide survey in 2014 found only 4% of those aged 15-24 had used new synthetic drugs...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton The rotters’ club
IN JUNE Lord Sewel, a deputy speaker of the House of Lords, wrote to The Economist to complain about “wearied caricatures” in an article about Britain’s doddery, shambolic upper house of Parliament. But on July 26th it seemed that the same peer had fallen for an even hoarier old cliché of politics: a tabloid sting involving two prostitutes, some lines of unidentified white powder and a hidden camera.
After the Sun on Sunday released its video, in which the peer snorts lines of what he calls “Coca-Cola—forget the cola” from the breasts of a sex worker while whingeing about his expenses and outlining faintly racist fantasies about Asian women, Lord Sewel stood down from his various parliamentary roles, including the chairmanship of an ethics committee. But he indicated that he had no plans to leave the Lords altogether, and would merely take a “leave of absence”. That remained his position as police searched his London flat, the Labour Party suspended him and David Cameron hinted heavily that it was time for the peer to hang up his ermine robe. On Tuesday, at last, he...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Frailer
BRITONS are living to a riper age—but not without help. As the population greys, more people are needing assistance with washing, dressing and other aspects of their daily care. The King’s Fund, a health think-tank, predicts that over the next 15 years the number requiring such help will rise by 61%. Yet funding for it is shrinking. Between 2010-11 and 2014-15, 15% was sliced off local-authority spending on social care. Pressure is building as the government seeks a further £20 billion ($31 billion) in departmental cuts ahead of a spending review in November.
The squeeze comes as costs are rising. The Local Government Association has calculated that in order to pay all care workers the new £9 minimum wage by 2020, an extra £1 billion will be needed (for context, last year’s entire adult social-care bill was £14 billion). The final straw could be a national shortage of nurses, which is forcing care homes to pay through the nose for agency staff, who charge double the amount of a regular nurse.
Local authorities have responded by tightening eligibility for services, pushing more of the burden onto private purses and unpaid...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Dirty dens
“THERE is no place for dirty money in Britain…London is not a place to stash your dodgy cash,” thundered David Cameron in a speech this week. The prime minister’s particular focus was the rampant foreign investment in recent years in the capital’s fanciest properties, much of it through offshore companies cloaked in a “shroud of secrecy”.
The polemic contained proposals. Mr Cameron will call for the Land Registry to publish data on which foreign companies own which land and property titles in England and Wales. The government will also consult on whether any foreign company bidding on a government contract should be made to reveal its “beneficial” (ie real as opposed to legally registered) owners. The World Bank recently made a similar commitment for contracts it finances.
London is a popular destination for money launderers, especially those from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. (Latin Americans still prefer Miami.) A penthouse with a view of Hyde Park adds a touch of class to a kleptocrat’s property portfolio. Lawyers and estate agents are supposed to ask hard questions, but are barely policed. A chunk of the Qaddafis’ ill-gotten gains flowed into the capital’s housing stock. Global Witness, an NGO, recently unearthed a network of shell companies whose directors had links to a former chief of Kazakhstan’s secret...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Bombing along
Just the thing for St James’s StreetTHE perils of London’s roads do not usually extend beyond potholes and traffic jams. But a new car showroom due to open on July 30th in the city’s West End will offer the capital’s ultra-wealthy residents luxury vehicles that will protect them from deadlier threats: bombs, gunfire and kidnapping. The venture, jointly run by Ares, an Italian firm that fits out fancy cars to make them even more sumptuous, and Streit, a Canadian armoured-car company, hopes to tap a global trend for armouring the smartest motors. Its arrival also says something about London’s new residents.
Protecting the rides of presidents and other VIPs is nothing new. Franklin Roosevelt’s limousine was fitted with armour plating and bullet-proof tyres in 1941 after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Nor is it novel to modify expensive vehicles fresh off the production line. The mega-rich have long sought to personalise new cars with a fresh paint job or interior. But with the exception of the Aston Martin driven by James Bond in “Goldfinger” in 1964, which sported a retractable bulletproof screen, marrying...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Britain restricts “criminal” Ai Weiwei’s visa request
IT IS little more than a week since Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and perpetual irritant to his country’s authorities, was given back his passport, marking the end of a four-year travel ban. Mr Ai has already made arrangements to visit Europe, stopping first in Germany. But on July 30th it emerged that the visa for his proposed onward trip to Britain would be unexpectedly limited, after Mr Ai received a letter from a bureaucrat saying that his travel would be restricted because of a failure to own up to his “criminal” past. Mr Ai is used to such interference. The surprise was that the letter came not from the Chinese authorities, but from the British.
In a letter from the UK Visas and Immigration authority dated July 29th, which Mr Ai uploaded to his Instagram account, a Beijing-based “entry clearance manager” writes: “You have applied for a six month business visit visa, but on this occasion your visa has been restricted to the requested dates of travel on your visa application form”. The reason given is that Mr Ai answered “No” to a question asking whether he had...Continue reading
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Wednesday 29 July 2015
Brian Rushton Dirty dens
“THERE is no place for dirty money in Britain...London is not a place to stash your dodgy cash,” thundered David Cameron in a speech this week. The prime minister’s particular focus was the rampant foreign investment in recent years in the capital’s fanciest properties, much of it through offshore companies cloaked in a “shroud of secrecy”.
The polemic contained proposals. Mr Cameron will call for the Land Registry to publish data on which foreign companies own which land and property titles in England and Wales. The government will also consult on whether any foreign company bidding on a government contract should be made to reveal its “beneficial” (ie real as opposed to legally registered) owners. The World Bank recently made a similar commitment for contracts it finances.
London is a popular destination for money launderers, especially those from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. (Latin Americans still prefer Miami.) A penthouse with a view of Hyde Park adds a touch of class to a kleptocrat’s property portfolio. Lawyers and estate agents are supposed to ask hard questions, but are barely policed. A chunk of...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton A sombre summer
WORRIES about terrorism increased sharply this month in The Economist/Ipsos MORI issues index. The poll, conducted the week after an Islamic militant attacked a beach in Tunisia killing 38 people, most of whom were British, recorded a jump of 12 percentage points on the issue. This marks the highest level of concern on terrorism since Islamic State rose to prominence in the summer of 2014, though there is a big split along party lines: twice as many Conservative voters fret about the subject than Labour supporters. It is not the only topic on which those who identify with the two main parties differ significantly.
Immigration has been at the forefront of most voters’ minds this year, but it is an issue that vexes Tories much more than Labour people. Poverty and inequality is one of the greatest areas of concern for Labour voters, whereas Conservatives don’t see it as much of a problem at all. Labour identifiers are also much more worked up about unemployment, low pay and inequality, which is perhaps one factor explaining why Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed left-winger, is polling so well in the Labour Party...Continue reading
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Tuesday 28 July 2015
Brian Rushton David Cameron seeks markets in South-East Asia
“WHEN I visited [South-East Asia] three years ago, it was the 12th-largest economy in the world,” said David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, from a stage at the National University of Singapore on July 28th. “Now it’s the seventh, and it’s predicted to be the fourth-largest single market by 2030.” Longtime South-East Asia watchers may struggle to suppress a cynical smile at Mr Cameron’s mention of a “single market”: making the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) into a single market is one of those political goals that has been just around the corner for years. But the fundamental point is true enough. ASEAN is a large and growing market, with which Britain does surprisingly little business. Mr Cameron noted that Britain trades more with Belgium than it does with the four countries on his itinerary (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam) combined.
He has come partly to talk up British business. Accompanying him are the business secretary, Sajid Javid, and representatives of British firms such as Aviva, an insurance company, Lloyd’s bank and Balfour Beatty, a construction firm. He finds...Continue reading
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Monday 27 July 2015
Thursday 23 July 2015
Brian Rushton The psychology of a peninsula
IN THE 1380s, half a century after King Edward II’s painful demise—rectally impaled on a red-hot poker—John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar, was trying to translate a Latin account of the incident into plain English. He settled on a delicate formulation (“sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale”) but as he did so was troubled by his reliance on French loan words. English, he fretted, was under threat from such terms, because ordinary folk were copying the speech of their Norman masters. But as time went by, Trevisa changed his tune. He later wrote that “schoolchildren are turning from French, and this is a harm for them if they should cross the sea and travel”.
His volte-face on French, and with it the importance of Britain’s links to the continent, recently popped up in a spat between two groups of academics. “Historians for Britain” is the smaller but has more stardust, counting among its supporters the likes of David Starkey, a dyspeptic television personality. Looking ahead to Britain’s referendum on its EU membership and citing its global links, its legal system and its “milder...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Going for bronze
THREE years ago London held a huge party. From July 27th to September 9th 2012 the Olympic and then the Paralympic games took place in a brand new park in the East End. Despite the fears of many sceptics—including this newspaper—the transport system did not collapse under the influx of spectators. Even the weather was unusually bright. The events, boasted David Cameron, the prime minister, “demonstrated that you should never ever count Team GB down and out”.
Compared with previous Olympic games in Athens and Montreal, where budgets overran wildly and stadiums were left to fester afterwards, the events in London were a success. Although the final budget, at £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion), was more than double the original bid, the building works were finished on time and just about within the revised budget. But aside from being a tremendous spectacle—the opening and closing ceremonies included J.K. Rowling, The Who and hundreds of dancing nurses—the Olympics were meant to boost sport and to transform part of London.
The first aim has not been achieved: according to Sport England, a quango, the number of Britons exerting...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton The force is with Pinewood
Booming in every senseGOODBYE Mr Bond, hello Darth Vader. Two of the most successful franchises in film history have been following each other in and out of Pinewood Studios, just west of London, for decades now, and the tradition remains in rude health. All but two of the 24 Bond movies were shot at Pinewood; the latest one, “Spectre”, will be released in the autumn. “Star Wars: Episode VII” was filmed at Pinewood last year, and Episode VIII will start shooting there in 2016. In honour of Bond’s contribution to Pinewood, its (and Europe’s) largest film studio is named after the super-spy.
Just as Bond is more popular than ever at the box office, so Pinewood is on the up. Pinewood Group, which owns both the eponymous studios at Iver Heath and a similar set-up at Shepperton, recently announced record annual revenues, of £75m ($117m), up by £11m on the previous year, and record profits. Such is the demand for Pinewood’s services that it has just started a £200m expansion that will see it almost double in size, building ten new stages after years of wrangling with local planning...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Athens-upon-Clyde
THOUGH the United Kingdom holds together, just, its four member countries form an ever-looser union. The Scotland Bill, currently before Parliament, is likely to adopt many of the proposals of the Smith Commission, set up following the independence referendum last September, and stipulate that the Scottish Parliament control 60% of public spending in Scotland (up from 50% now) and 40% of taxation (up from 15%). Northern Ireland and Wales may be granted similar privileges. Meanwhile David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, argues that English MPs should have exclusive say over fiscal matters that affect only England.
Much about fiscal devolution is appealing. There is some evidence that it lifts productivity—worryingly stagnant in Britain—since regional governments make better investments in local infrastructure. It is consistent with the idea that representation and taxation should be closely linked: if Scottish voters want a higher-tax, higher-spending system, should they not get it? And it has political appeal, too. Mr Cameron hopes that fiscal devolution will weaken the case for independence made by the Scottish National Party.
A paper presented on July 21st at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research makes an economic counter-argument. Like the euro zone, Britain is a monetary union: one central bank, the Bank of England, sets a...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Wheatley, cropped
“BRITAIN needs a tough, strong financial-conduct regulator,” said George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, on July 17th as he announced that he had effectively ousted Martin Wheatley, the City’s tough, strong financial-conduct regulator. Financiers quietly toasted the departure of the figure they had come to see as Britain’s bank-basher-in-chief since his appointment in 2013. Whom Mr Osborne selects to replace Mr Wheatley at the helm of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be a strong indicator of how much more lenient he is prepared to be towards the country’s bruised bankers.
Regulating conduct in an industry whose behavioural problems rival those of a sugared-up toddler was never going to make Mr Wheatley popular. A mission to go after bad bankers and a self-confessed “shoot first and ask questions later” approach made him few friends in the City. But in the years following the financial crisis his fierce independence appeared to be just what the industry needed—and what the public demanded.
His successes included whacking investment banks for rigging currencies and interest rates, and punishing...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Truancy pays
MOST schools in England and Wales broke up for the summer holidays only this week, but some pupils were already on the beach. Airlines and hotels jack up their prices when the school holidays begin, tempting some parents to pull their children out of class a week early to take advantage of lower fares. To deter such truanting, schools can slap families with a £60 ($95) fine per child, per parent (so a couple with two children would forfeit £240).
Research by The Economist suggests the fee is not much of a deterrent. We compared the prices of 230 holidays for a family of four during the summer break and during term time (see chart). Unsurprisingly, almost all were cheaper outside the school holidays. But more than half were cheaper even accounting for the fine. On July 19th Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, suggested beefing up the penalty. Yet even if the levy doubled, it would be cheaper to play truant 14% of the time. The fine would have to treble before nearly all term-time vacations were as dear as breaks taken during the school holidays.
This suggests that fines may not be the...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Royally embarrassed
So that won’t be Sir RupertTHE tabloid Sun newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has form when it comes to tweaking the noses of the royal family. On July 18th, however, the paper surpassed itself by publishing a film clip that showed the queen as a seven-year-old girl apparently giving the Nazi salute, egged on by her mother and uncle Edward, who was briefly king before he abdicated over his wish to marry the divorced Wallis Simpson.
Her majesty’s more loyal subjects were outraged, and Buckingham Palace instigated an inquiry into how the Sun got hold of the 1933 home movie. The paper, meanwhile, pointed to the public interest in further exposing the nefarious ways of Edward VIII, a known Nazi sympathiser, who does indeed seem to be orchestrating the little family hand-stretching routine at Balmoral.
The queen herself has scarcely been ruffled by the brouhaha. Historians have queued up to exonerate her. She was too young to know better, let alone gainsay her wicked uncle. And anyway at this time Hitler was still a bit of a Chaplinesque joke in Britain, so the...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton We’ll be with you in Syria
BY APPEARING on last weekend’s Meet the Press, an American current-affairs programme, David Cameron was sending a message to his local audience that Britain was back as America’s closest and most reliable ally. Although much of the interview was about the prime minister’s support for the nuclear deal with Iran, what Mr Cameron really wanted to convey was that Britain would “step up and do more” in the fight against Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. “Be in no doubt,” he said, “we are committed to working with you to destroy the caliphate in both countries.” He acknowledged that he would still need to persuade Parliament to extend Britain’s bombing campaign to Syria, but left little doubt over his intentions.
The murder on June 26th of 30 British holidaymakers on a Tunisian beach by a jihadist gunman with links to IS has had a galvanising effect on Mr Cameron. He believes that the atrocity has reminded voters that what he sees as the “poison” of Islamism has to be confronted militarily as well as ideologically. In a speech on July 20th he declared that “passive tolerance” of extremism and jihadist...Continue reading
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Wednesday 22 July 2015
Brian Rushton Forward, comrades!
IF EVER there were a time for the Labour Party to take a reality check, it would be now. Its share of the vote in May’s general election was its third-worst since 1918. The new Conservative government will soon redraw constituency boundaries to its own advantage and is moving onto Labour’s traditional ground, increasing the minimum wage and wooing northern cities. To win the next election, in 2020, Labour must make deep inroads into Tory England, producing a swing away from the Conservatives on the scale of its landslide victory under Tony Blair in 1997.
Instead the party is hurtling into the wilderness. Of the four candidates for its leadership, vacated by Ed Miliband hours after the election defeat, three—Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn—have concentrated less on dissecting its quandary than on telling members what they want to hear. The result has been a lacklustre, self-indulgent contest and a stark illustration of Labour’s leftward shift during Mr Miliband’s five years in charge.
The myopia is not universal. The fourth candidate, Liz Kendall, a shadow health minister, has urged her party to claw back the economic...Continue reading
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Monday 20 July 2015
Brian Rushton David Cameron opens a new front in the war on Islamist extremism
SINCE 2012 hundreds of Britons have travelled to Syria to fight alongside—or, in some cases, marry—the jihadists of Islamic State (IS). Some, such as Talha Asmal (pictured) become suicide bombers. Others come back: by some estimates as many as half return to Britain, where they may pose a domestic terror threat. With these and other worries in mind, on July 20th David Cameron, the prime minister, laid out a five-year plan to counter Islamist extremism, which he described as “the struggle of our generation”.
Under new proposals, parents will be able to apply to have their children’s passports confiscated if they fear they will travel to the Middle East to join a terrorist group. Ofcom, the communications regulator, will be given new powers to clamp down on cable-television channels broadcasting “hate preachers and extremist content”. The government will try to allocate social housing in a way that prevents ethnic segregation. And schools will be encouraged to promote integration: for example, “integrated” free schools will be set up in particularly segregated areas, and schools will be...Continue reading
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Friday 17 July 2015
Brian Rushton Britain’s bank-basher-in-chief is toppled
“BRITAIN needs a tough, strong financial conduct regulator,” said George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor, on July 17th as he announced that he had effectively ousted Martin Wheatley, the City’s tough, strong financial conduct regulator since 2013. Financiers quietly toasted the departure, due in September, of the figure they had come to see as the bank-basher-in-chief. Whom Mr Osborne appoints to replace him at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will be a strong indication of whether a “new settlement” with banks is in the offing.
Regulating conduct in an industry whose behavioural problems rival those of a sugared-up toddler was never going to make Mr Wheatley a popular man. And popular he was not. Aggressively, and often clumsily, the FCA pursued wrongdoing and levied fines of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Successes included whacking investment banks for rigging currencies and interest rates, as well as high-street banks for mis-selling complex financial products to the public. Failures included a media briefing so botched it sent life insurance firms’ shares plummeting for no good reason. Mr Wheatley...Continue reading
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Thursday 16 July 2015
Brian Rushton But what is it for?
WHEREVER Tim Farron leads the Liberal Democrats, he will struggle to leave the party in a worse electoral state than the one in which he found it. The party conducted its leadership contest, which culminated today with the announcement that the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale had taken 56.5% of the votes, in something of a daze. At the polls on May 7th Lib Dems lost 49 of their 57 parliamentary seats; roughly one for every five weeks of the coalition’s five-year duration. Nick Clegg, the architect of that electorally catastrophic gambit, resigned immediately. Whether Mr Farron or his rival, Norman Lamb, won the contest, either would now face the hard task of recovery and reconstruction.
Mr Farron, an amiable former university administrator on his party’s left-wing, divides opinions among Lib Dems. There are two main schools of thought on what his leadership means. His fans start by arguing that Mr Clegg was disastrously close to the Tories in government and picked too few fights with them. The party, they argue, needs shock therapy: a highly charismatic leadership concentrated resolutely on reviving its campaigning ability. Mr Farron,...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Two birds with one stone
One down, three million to goBRITAIN’S measly productivity growth gives politicians sleepless nights. Since 2007 output per hour has hardly budged, while in America it has jumped by 9%. Unless productivity picks up, wages cannot grow: small wonder that Sajid Javid, the business secretary, calls it “the economic challenge of our age”. Standard remedies to boost productivity include investing in education, health care and technology. But Britain’s government thinks that by tackling another big problem—the bubbly housing market—it will make productivity soar. Is it right?
Britain is crying out for new homes. The country needs to add about 250,000 per year to satisfy demand; in 2014 it built probably 150,000. As part of a 15-point “productivity plan”, on July 10th George Osborne, the chancellor, announced big changes to planning regulations, in a bid to stimulate housebuilding. A much-hyped “zonal” system will grant automatic planning permission on suitable brownfield sites, a policy borrowed from American cities. Londoners will be able to add extra storeys onto their houses up to the height of adjoining...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton No milk, less honey
HASAN fled Syria across the Turkish border in March, the night before his young son’s birthday. A brush with people close to the authorities had convinced the 38-year-old that his days as a free man were numbered. An open boat took him from Turkey to Greece, where he acquired false papers. He made his way to Germany and then to France, arriving three months later in the northern port of Calais.
For the past four weeks he has been sleeping on dirt under plastic in the migrants’ encampment in the dunes known as “the Jungle” as he tries to travel the final 20 miles (32 kilometres) to England. His hands bear the scars of daily failed attempts to scramble onto trains and lorries. But at least he lived to try again. On July 7th French authorities announced the second death in as many weeks in or near the Eurotunnel that runs under the English Channel. On July 13th, three migrants received severe electric shocks there.
Is the journey really worth it? France and Britain are comparably rich countries with broadly similar approaches to human rights and welfare. Yet charities say more than 1,000 people have made the risky crossing in recent...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Identity crisis
Another forensic mess you’ve gotten me intoTHE more that is known about a science, the more uses tend to be found for it. But in the case of forensics—the discipline through which villains are identified by stray fingerprints, stands of hair or other giveaways—it seems that the more is discovered about the field, the more courts are losing faith in it.
Advances in forensic science have led to spectacular breakthroughs in justice. In 2009 Sean Hodgson, who had spent 27 years in jail for the 1979 murder of a Southampton barmaid, had his conviction quashed after DNA tests proved that blood found at the crime scene could not have been his. But in other cases faulty forensic evidence has led police and prosecutors astray. In 2012 a man spent five months in jail awaiting trial for a rape committed in a city he had never visited, after a police lab confused his DNA with samples taken from the victim. In 2014, after spending 12 years in jail, Dwaine George had his murder conviction overturned after a retrial established that the tiny quantity of gunshot residue found on a coat in his house could have been picked up...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Mean streets
WITHOUT roofs over their heads, certain households can appeal to be put up by their local authority. Families with children, expectant mothers and those escaping domestic violence all have a legal right to emergency accommodation. After the Labour government imposed a target on councils to reduce these numbers in 2004, the number of households in this position fell to a record low at the end of the decade. But lately it has been creeping back up. At the end of March, 64,610 households in England were living in council-provided temporary housing, a quarter more than in 2010 (see chart).
A growing proportion are being put up in the private sector. In the past, councils would lease homes from private landlords for periods of up to five years, subletting them to tenants and providing the landlord with a guaranteed rental income of about 70% of the market rate. But as demand for housing has boomed and rents have soared, that sort of arrangement has become less attractive to landlords. So councils have begun to send applicants directly to private providers.
A change to the law has made this easier. Previously, those entitled to...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton This house is falling
THE Palace of Westminster is crumbling. Strolling through its jumbled quadrangles and spiky porticos, Bagehot often marvels at the confidence, ambition and Victorian creepiness they exude. He also notes, spreading like sweat-patches through the damp masonry, from rusted Victorian pipework and bodged Victorian stonework, innumerable black stains, caused by rainwater, air pollution, or worse. The vaulted ceiling of the members’ entrance, one of the palace’s finest carved chambers, is becoming discoloured and rotted by effluent from a leaky toilet above it.
Are the fates conspiring to dump excrement, as a tabloid newspaper editor once promised John Major, onto the heads of Britain’s elected representatives? It seems they are. To restore the palace, according to a recent report, could cost £7 billion ($11 billion) which, in a time of welfare cuts and no love for politicians, is unavailable. Even if it were, it is hard to imagine the Conservative government, whose leader, David Cameron, shares his party’s aversion to grand solutions, embracing the project. And yet, plead the report’s authors, Tory make-do and muddle-through, which has served the...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton A foxing question
THEY came with their placards, their chants and their furry fox costumes. Brian May, the guitarist from the band “Queen”, even made an appearance. And all for nothing. Just as the protest in Westminster against government plans to relax the ban on fox hunting was in full swing, news came through that the vote in Parliament had been cancelled.
The last-minute change on July 14th followed an announcement by the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) that it would vote with other opposition parties against the amendment. This was unexpected: the ban applies only in England and Wales, and the SNP claims to avoid votes not affecting Scotland. The about-turn put the Conservatives—their slender majority eliminated by rebels on their own benches—on track for a defeat.
The drama intensified the debate about the “West Lothian question” first asked in 1977 by Tam Dalyell, a Scottish MP who wondered why, if powers were devolved to Scotland, he should vote on things affecting West Bromwich, in England, but not his own constituents in West Lothian. Coincidentally, the day after the protest MPs were due to discuss a government...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Some measures are more equal than others
Is inequality rising or falling? Both, according to a report published on July 16th by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank. In the 1980s a big gap between rich and poor opened up. Since the early 1990s, however, the difference between the incomes of the top and bottom deciles (the “90:10 ratio”) has diminished; the ratio is now at its lowest in more than 25 years. But that is not the whole story. The share of income held by the richest 1%, another measure of inequality, has continued to grow. The 1% now receive more than double the share they took home 30 years ago. The gap between rich and poor has narrowed. But the gulf between the mega-rich and the rest continues to widen.
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Tuesday 14 July 2015
Brian Rushton Softly does it
HOW many rankings of global power have put Britain at the top and China at the bottom? Not many, at least in the past hundred years or so. But on July 15th an index of “soft power”—the ability to coax and persuade—ranked Britain as the mightiest country on Earth. If that was unexpected, there was another surprise at the foot of the 30-country index: China, three times as wealthy as Britain, 20 times as populous and 40 times as large, came dead last.
Diplomats in Beijing won’t lose too much sleep over the index, compiled by Portland, a London-based PR firm, together with Facebook, which provided data on governments’ online impact, and ComRes, which ran opinion polls on international attitudes to different countries. But the ranking gathered some useful data showing where Britain still has outsized global clout.
Britain scored highly in its “engagement” with the world, its citizens enjoying visa-free travel to 174 countries—the joint-highest of any nation—and its diplomats staffing the largest number of permanent missions to multilateral organisations, tied with France. Britain’s cultural power was also highly...Continue reading
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Friday 10 July 2015
Brian Rushton Unleash the builders
BRITAIN’S housing market is bubbling over. Over the past five years residential property prices have risen by 30%, making the average homeowner feel around £65,000 ($100,000) better off. The frothy prices are in part down to a lack of supply relative to growing demand. Population growth has sped up since the 1980s, and there are more single-person households, but house construction has not kept up (see chart at foot of story). Housebuilding has been far slower than that recommended by Kate Barker, an economist, in an official review of housing in 2004.
On July 10th George Osborne, the chancellor, announced a plan that he hopes will get Britain building again. The proposal has two main strands. One is introducing a new “zonal system” to the planning process. The government has already committed to setting up a statutory register of brownfield land suitable for housing in England. It now promises to go further by legislating to grant automatic planning permission on those sites.
The second strand aims to make it easier for the government to force through planning proposals that get bogged down in bureaucracy or controversy....Continue reading
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Thursday 9 July 2015
Brian Rushton A promise honoured (sort of)
AMONG the surprises George Osborne managed to conjure up in his budget speech was a commitment that Britain would continue to meet its NATO pledge to spend at least 2% of its GDP on defence for the rest of this decade. Rather than facing another round of severe cuts—the fate of other so-called “unprotected departments”—defence spending will now grow by 0.5% a year, reaching £47.7 billion in 2020, up from £38 billion this year. An additional joint security fund of £1.5bn a year will be established, to be shared between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the intelligence agencies on a contingency basis.
According to Malcolm Chalmers of RUSI, a think-tank, under the previous planning assumptions and projected GDP growth figures spending would have fallen to 1.7% of GDP by 2020/21. The move was met with delight both by Washington, which has been lobbying heavily from the president downwards for Britain to stick with the totemic figure, and the armed forces. The chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, declared that it was “a great day for the country”. He added that it would “change the whole dynamic” of the forthcoming...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton All must have prizes
EIMEAR MCBRIDE, an Irish writer, did not expect her first novel, “A Girl is a Half-formed Thing”, to be a runaway success. After being rejected by publishers for nine years, her manuscript was finally printed by a small publishing house in a run of 1,000 copies in 2013. But when the novel won a series of book prizes everything “got out of control”, she says. It has now sold 80,000 copies, and Ms McBride’s quiet existence has become much busier. “It sort of ruined my personal life for 18 months,” she laughs.
Book prizes are proliferating. This year over 300 will be handed out in Britain alone, according to Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles, a small chain of bookshops in London. More seem to appear each year, he says; small prizes, for experimental fiction or short stories, have blossomed.
Publishers rely more heavily than ever on these awards as a way to get books noticed. Partly this is because the way that people get recommendations has changed: there are fewer erudite booksellers on the high street, and newspaper column inches given over to literary critics have shrunk. Prizes are also important in a market which is bursting with choice: each year around 180,000 books are published in Britain. Most first novels “just disappear”, says Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape. For some books, being shortlisted is the “only way to...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton The battle for the ruins
On the left, Tim Farron...GALLOWS humour prevails among Liberal Democrats. “I didn’t expect it to be a wondrous romp to 325 seats and an overall Liberal Democrat majority,” jokes Tim Farron, the party’s former president and now a candidate for its leadership, of its collapse from 56 to just eight MPs at the general election. Norman Lamb, his rival, observes that the leadership race, which ends on July 16th, “is an election which at last a Liberal Democrat is going to win”. Neither man struggled to obtain the nominations of 10% of his parliamentary colleagues required to make the ballot paper—which, as party staff grimly note, meant each needed the support of fully 0.8 MPs.
If the Lib Dems seem punch drunk, that is understandable: after five difficult years as junior coalition partners to the Conservatives, on May 7th the party lost two-thirds of its votes and many parliamentary seats that it had held for decades. On the verge of tears, Nick Clegg, its leader, resigned on the morning after the election.
But the race to replace him matters despite the scale of the party’s defeat,...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton A raid on the future
BRITONS ought to save more, George Osborne has often said. So it might seem strange that in his budget speech on July 8th the chancellor removed some big incentives for people to squirrel money away. Those earning over £150,000 ($230,000) will now be able to save less towards their retirement without paying tax. The policy is popular with voters, who don’t see why the rich should get tax relief, and it brings valuable revenues into the exchequer. So why are the technocrats shaking their heads?
Two simple principles are behind the current pensions tax system. First, if you tax people on their income and then again on their savings, they will be reluctant to put as much money in the kitty. Second, people with lumpy incomes—from entrepreneurs to sports stars—should be able to save as much into a pension as those with steadier income streams. At the moment, people can make pension contributions up to £40,000 a year free of tax. At the other end, once the contributions have been turned into a pension and start to pay out, the tax man pounces.
The system is not perfect. It has some oddly generous features, such as the option to take...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Master of all he surveys
Boris, bestedDURING the last parliament George Osborne took to slipping sardonic jokes about the opposition Labour Party into his annual budget statements. On July 8th, however, in his first such speech since the election, the chancellor of the exchequer took aim at his own side. Announcing that he would fund the restoration of a command centre used by the Royal Air Force during the second world war, he talked of “the days when aeroplanes flew freely over the skies of west London”—a dig at Boris Johnson, the local Conservative MP and the city’s mayor, who opposes the expansion of Heathrow airport.
His willingness to tease his main rival for the leadership of the party betokened Mr Osborne’s new swagger. Tory MPs roared with approval as he set out his economic programme. Mr Johnson grinned uncomfortably. Even Iain Duncan Smith, the welfare secretary, who has sparred with the chancellor, bellowed “fantastic”, pumping his fists in giddy delight.
It was not always thus. Three years ago Mr Osborne was the face of a wave of public spending cuts deemed not just harsh but also ineffective. Crowds at the...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton A case of imperial overstretch?
Too many cuts spoil the BeebCONSERVATIVE governments often find a reason to take pot shots at the BBC. Usually, it is the supposed left-wing bias of the publicly funded broadcaster that gets it into trouble. Now, however, it’s cooking recipes.
These are the offending items on the BBC’s website that George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, singled out in an interview on July 5th as evidence of the corporation’s “imperial” ambitions. His wider argument was that the BBC needs to trim its activities outside of its public-service remit, particularly in areas where it competes directly with commercial newspapers and broadcasters.
The chancellor’s purpose was to warm viewers up for cuts to the BBC’s funding, which were duly announced the next day. Reached after fraught negotiations between the Treasury and BBC executives, the deal involves the BBC covering the approximately £650m ($1 billion) annual cost of free television licences for the over-75s, a tab that until now has been picked up by the Department for Work and Pensions. The transfer of responsibility for the subsidy helped Mr Osborne...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton South-western powerhouse
The path to autonomyIT IS not often that Cornwall gets a mention in a chancellor of the exchequer’s budget. But on July 8th, as George Osborne laid out his vision for all levels of the economy and all corners of the nation, he promised more say in local decision-making for England’s most southerly county.
Mr Osborne’s nod to Cornwall was in the context of his continued efforts to devolve power to mostly Labour-run, post-industrial northern cities and regions. “Let’s put the power into the northern powerhouse,” he urged, to jeers from opposition MPs who have seen the plan run into problems in recent weeks. The chancellor promised more powers to the ten councils that make up the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which is leading the push for devolution, and said he was working on deals with Sheffield, Liverpool and Leeds. And then he mentioned Cornwall, which is neither northern, nor post-industrial, nor Labour-run.
The immediate reason for the inclusion of a county more famous for its beaches and Liberal politics is to broaden the offer of devolution beyond those northern cities, and show that any...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton George Osborne’s sad triumph
“WHERE is the fairness,” asked George Osborne, “for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?” With that snarling exhortation, in 2012, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer brandished an axe at Britain’s welfare state. Yet, due to the moderating exigencies of coalition rule, he was unable to swing it to his satisfaction until July 8th—when he delivered the first true-blue budget for almost two decades. To test the chancellor’s analysis, as he was whetting his blade beforehand, Bagehot paid a visit to the Tulse Hill public housing estate, a little after dawn, searching for resentful workers, layabout scroungers and closed blinds.
He found none of the last; residents of the estate, one of the toughest in south London, are more likely to shut out the light with sheets, patched with beloved national flags, of Portugal, Nigeria, Brazil. And though there were, by 6am, a lot of these drapes still in place, the residents flowing out to the nearest bus-stop paid them no heed. They were hurrying to clean offices, guard...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Fix, then fiddle
FOR five years George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, has focused on fixing Britain’s public finances. Since 2010, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office, he has cut the budget deficit in half, from 10% of GDP to 5% last year. But now that the Tories govern alone, Mr Osborne is ramping up his ambitions. When on July 8th he delivered the first purely Conservative budget since 1996, he set out a new plan to finish the book-balancing job. On the way, he hopes to reshape Britain’s welfare state.
In March, in the last budget before the election, Mr Osborne promised to steer the public finances to surplus by 2018-19. His plan for doing so required very steep cuts to government departments for three years. That looked unrealistic; outside a ring-fence protecting health, international aid and schools, budgets had already been slashed by an average of 20%. The plan was also strange: having inflicted harsh cuts, Mr Osborne would then reverse many of them the next year.
The new budget restored some sanity. Mr Osborne, who has been more flexible than his rhetoric promised, delayed the return to surplus by a year, and...Continue reading
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Wednesday 8 July 2015
Brian Rushton Bingo!
ON JULY 8th, at 12:30pm, George Osborne will deliver his first budget as chancellor under a Tory-only government. Over the last five years the public has become very familiar with the policy enthusiasms of the chancellor of the exchequer, and of the particular turns of phrase he prefers when describing them. Use the interactive below to track them all...
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Tuesday 7 July 2015
Thursday 2 July 2015
Brian Rushton Doctorpreneurs
THE National Health Service (NHS) faces a funding crisis: already short of money, it said it will find £22 billion ($35 billion) in efficiency savings by 2020. But as emergency services creak and politicians shudder at the thought of closing more hospitals, within the system lies an untapped source of wealth.
The government first came up with the idea of making money from NHS employees’ inventions in 2002. More than a million people, it realised, were spending their days thinking about better ways to treat people. Innovation might save money, and hospitals could help their staff sell their ideas in exchange for a share in the profits. To make the plan work, the government allowed hospital trusts to buy shares in companies set up to develop an invention.
American hospitals have made vast sums from such arrangements: in 2014 Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston made $68.9m in licensing fees. But the British model is a less healthy specimen. According to Harry Quilter-Pinner at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think-tank, British hospitals are often baffled as to how they are supposed to make any profits at all.
Although in theory the NHS is keen to exploit innovation, in practice the path is often blocked. One problem is that there is no clear process for pitching an idea: doctors who do must tout their wares...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Seismic
FracktiousIN AMERICA shale-gas extraction has been creating jobs and transforming energy markets. In Britain, by contrast, the shale-gas revolution promised by the prime minister, David Cameron, has run up against a familiar foe: NIMBYism.
On June 29th crowds of people who do not want fracking, the process by which shale gas is extracted, gathered outside the offices of Lancashire County Council. Most of them expected the council’s development-control committee—more used to analysing planning-permission applications than geology—to accept an application by Cuadrilla, an energy company, to start fracking in north-west England. The council’s own legal and planning departments had advised them to approve it.
But the councillors surprised everyone by voting nine to three, with two abstentions, to reject the application, citing not geology but “unacceptable noise impact” and “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape”. Protesters rejoiced with some noise impact of their own. Daisy Sands, a Greenpeace campaigner, called the decision “a Waterloo for the fracking industry”.
Fracking in Britain...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton The bat and the daffodil
Anyone for cricket?ON July 8th England plays the first Test of a new Ashes series against Australia—in Cardiff. The Welsh capital often hosts England matches, but that is as close as Wales gets to international cricket. It is the only nation in the British Isles not to have a recognised national team (even the Isle of Man and Guernsey do), and the best Welsh cricketers, such as the Ashes-winning fast bowler Simon Jones, therefore play for England.
If Matthew Ford gets his way, however, that could change. The 31-year-old from Montgomeryshire leads the campaign to create a Welsh national team. He petitioned the country’s National Assembly two years ago, and in its last general election manifesto Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, backed the idea. Bethan Jenkins, Plaid Cymru’s spokeswoman for sport, argues that Wales could follow the leads of Scotland, which severed its links with the England team in 1992 and Ireland, which joined the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 1993 and has since beaten several front-rank teams, including the West Indies earlier this year. Indeed, Ireland (with a population of 6.4m)...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Petrolhead revisited
AS youthful music fans headed to Glastonbury for the last weekend in June, older and more well-heeled festival-goers keyed a different destination into their satnavs. The Goodwood Festival of Speed, held annually since 1993 in the grounds of a stately home in West Sussex, is petrolhead heaven. Hundreds of racing cars spanning the decades are on display and noisily burn rubber on the “hill climb” course, a racetrack. But alongside the supercars and classic vehicles are more humdrum machines, for Goodwood has inadvertently assumed the role of hosting Britain’s national motor show.
Cavernous venues in London, at Olympia and Earl’s Court, and later Birmingham, used to host the more traditional event in the mould of the big international shows staged in Geneva or Detroit. But the last of these biannual gatherings took place in London’s Docklands in 2008. The next was a victim of belt-tightening in the wake of the financial crisis, and although only Germans buy more cars in Europe and production in the UK is set to hit a record high in 2017 an “official” British motor show has failed to get back on the road. One reason for this is that...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton The Brexit ramp
THE moment had been over two years in the making. Under pressure from his backbenchers, in 2013 David Cameron, the prime minister, had promised that he would reform Britain’s membership of the EU and put the outcome to an in-out referendum if he won another term in office. Fresh from his general election triumph, on June 25th he duly arrived in Brussels to present his wish list to the European Council. But fellow heads of government did not share the prime minister’s sense of occasion. Clashes over Greece and Europe’s migration crisis forced him to shorten his talk to ten minutes. Only Charles Michel, the Belgian premier, deigned to respond to it. Meanwhile François Hollande, France’s president, reportedly nipped to the toilet.
Mr Cameron is attacking on two fronts. One is Brussels, where he seeks concessions to Tory gripes about the EU. His renegotiation aims to make the union more economically liberal and fairer to non-integrationist members like Britain. Yet the summit showed how, with the EU grappling with multiple crises, these demands (however calculatedly modest) are a low priority. The second front is the domestic one, where he seeks to heal his party’s deep divides over Europe and rally most of it behind an “in” vote. There, too, recent events hint at the difficulties ahead.
Critics crowed on June 26th when Downing Street...Continue reading
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Brian Rushton Death on the beach
AS THE shots got louder and the gunman appeared, moving methodically along a row of sunloungers, killing every sunburnt, cowering European holidaymaker he could find, Stephen and Cheryl Mellor, a middle-aged couple from Cornwall, clung to one another, saying, “I love you, I love you”. Seconds later, on the afternoon of June 26th, both had been shot, he fatally, as he lurched to save his wife, who lay, playing dead, in the sand.
Up and down the beach in Sousse, a north Tunisian resort town, similar scenes of panic and intimacy were taking place. By the time police marksmen caught up with Seifeddine Rezgui, a radicalised engineering student, he had scoured the beach, a hotel and its swimming-pool, then doubled back to cover the hotel reception area twice. Of the 38 he killed, perhaps 30 were British, making this Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity since the bomb blasts on the London Underground a decade ago. It was also, in its savage indiscriminateness, particularly difficult to comprehend.
Those bombings in 2005 were carried out by similarly indoctrinated British Muslims. Yet they were not a random assault on Westerners, as the Sousse...Continue reading
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Wednesday 1 July 2015
Brian Rushton Decision time
WHEN Heathrow airport first opened in 1946 it was little more than a muddy airfield. A few thousand passengers waited in freezing-cold marquees. Since then the hub, now the third busiest in the world, has changed dramatically. Each day a small town of 200,000 people travel through its gleaming terminals. But as the airport has grown, so too has opposition towards it expanding further. This means that the recommendation on July 1st by Sir Howard Davies, an economist, to the government to build another runway there will not happen without a fight.
Few doubt that London, Britain’s financial centre, needs more airport capacity. Last year its three main airports (Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted), with four runways between them, handled 130m passengers, 10m more than New York’s main three, which have nine. Heathrow is operating at full capacity, and has been for at least five years. Gatwick, Britain’s second-busiest airport,...Continue reading
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