Brian Rushton Local motion

Brian Rushton,

All change, pet

MORE people in England travel to work by bus than by all other forms of public transport combined—about 12% of the working population. Bus passengers make 5 billion journeys a year, three times as many as train passengers. And yet English buses are spluttering.

Outside booming London, bus passenger journeys have fallen by 37% over the past three decades. Critics believe that deregulation has played a part in the decline: in 1986 Margaret Thatcher privatised the then publicly run bus networks outside the capital. Several commercial bus companies have come to dominate parts of England and Wales, and their fares have increased by at least 35% more than inflation between 1995 and 2013. “There can be few business sectors where profits continue to rise while customer numbers fall so significantly,” says Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle city council.

So he, and others, are trying to re-regulate their regional networks. The aim is not renationalisation but taking control of the franchising of routes run by commercial operators. Recent commitments by the government to regional devolution have...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Little Satan leverages hell

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Satan’s little helper

ON AUGUST 23rd Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, reopened Britain’s sumptuous embassy in Tehran. It was a highly symbolic act. The embassy had remained closed since 2011, when it was stormed by angry protesters demonstrating against sanctions. Now Britain, like other Western countries, is anxious to resume relations, after a deal was reached curbing Iran’s nuclear programme six weeks ago in Vienna. Most sanctions are expected to be lifted in a few months, after the first stages of the deal are completed and verified. There was much talk of starting new chapters in Anglo-Iranian relations, both in Tehran and London, where the Iranian embassy to the Court of St James’s was also reopened.

Yet no one is under any illusion that relations will just return to normal, as they might do for other European countries. The embassy in Tehran abounds with reminders of this abnormality, such as the graffiti on the wall left behind from four years ago, including “Death to England” scrawled above a portrait of the queen. The main road outside is named after Bobby Sands, an IRA member who died on hunger...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Too good to be true

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WITH his promises to introduce a “maximum wage”, nationalise energy companies and even reopen coal mines, one might not expect Jeremy Corbyn to enjoy much support among economists, at least this side of Moscow. But the socialist MP, who looks likely to be elected leader of the Labour Party on September 12th, has been shoring up his economic credentials. His team has produced a letter from “leading economists” (including a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary-policy committee) backing his anti-austerity stance. Some of his less bombastic policies—including reforming the tax system and printing money to boost investment—sound plausible. Should people take Corbynomics more seriously?

Mr Corbyn is not alone in questioning the priority given to cutting the budget deficit, which stands at 5% of GDP. Many economists accept that five years of budget cutting have acted as a straitjacket on growth. Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University reckons that a conservative estimate for the cumulative cost of austerity would be 5% of GDP, or nearly £100 billion (about $150 billion). Debate rumbles on as to whether it was, nonetheless, necessary.

Mr Corbyn’s emphasis on boosting investment also meets with approval from many analysts. As a percentage of GDP, Britain’s government investment is the seventh-lowest of 26 countries tracked by Eurostat...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Pouring in

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In the summer when it drizzles

ON A gloomy Wednesday morning, the threat of yet another torrential downpour does little to halt the flow of tourists into the British Museum, the country’s most popular attraction. Visitors march in, a mass of fluorescent waterproof jackets huddled under flimsy umbrellas. It is on such fortitude that the British travel industry runs.

Despite the near certainty of inclement weather, tourism is in rude health. Following four years of growing visitor numbers, 16.8m people journeyed to Britain in the first six months of 2015, the best first half of a year on record. Domestic holidays have also become more common. Since the recession, which encouraged people to save money by heading to Torquay rather than Tuscany, holidaymakers have developed a taste for staying in Britain, says Louise Stewart of VisitEngland, the national tourist board. Hotels are making the most of the extra demand: the average price of a room is 3.4% higher than last year, according to STR Global, a research firm.

But things could be better still, claim critics. Although the number of global tourists has grown by an...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The statecraft of Davela Merkeron

Brian Rushton,

WHILE wandering in the Peloponnesian countryside, Philopoemen, an Achaean general, would gesture to folds in the landscape and ask his friends: “If the enemy should be upon that hill, and we should find ourselves here with our army, with whom would be the advantage?” Machiavelli cites this in “The Prince”, his treatise on power, to support his argument that a leader should remain on a war footing during peacetime. Without acting as if an enemy is always over the next hill, he argues, the prince will lose the discipline and loyalty of his sergeants and people. He will lose his edge.

Bagehot commends the example to David Cameron, whose Conservative party is without significant external foe. On August 25th a poll by ComRes put it on 42%, its best result since 2010. The Labour Party is tearing itself apart and will imminently make Jeremy Corbyn, an unelectable albatross, its leader. Even the right-populists of UKIP are mired in infighting. For the first time in his decade-old leadership of the Tories, Mr Cameron is experiencing something that only two other recent prime ministers (Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair) have known: hegemony.

Yet political dominance is...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Turned out not so nice

Brian Rushton,

No silver linings

SOME partnerships are regarded as so sacrosanct that they are expected to survive hurricanes, tsunamis and other acts of God. And so it was with two venerable British institutions—the BBC and the national meteorological office. The Met Office, founded in 1854, has provided every forecast on the Beeb since the first one in 1922, giving British people the information they need each day to avoid talking about anything meaningful with people of other social classes.

But on August 23rd the BBC announced that the Met Office had not made it to the final round of the tendering process to provide forecasts from next year. Reports suggest the finalists are a Dutch and a New Zealand company.

The BBC says it is “legally required to go through an open tender process” to secure the best value for money for its licence fee, the tax levied on television owners to fund it. “This is disappointing news,” said Steve Noyes of the Met Office, with understatement.

Experts were less restrained. “It’s terrible news. The Met Office predictions are among the most accurate in the world,” says Grant Allen...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Pay-as-you-go government

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IN A court in Highbury, north London, a resigned-looking 59-year-old with a thick beard and alcohol on his breath pleads guilty to assault. The judge hands down a fine of £65 ($100), but waives the offender’s obligation to contribute to prosecution costs: his weekly disposable income is just £40 in welfare payments, after he pays the rent in the supervised hostel where he lives. But the judge has no discretion over a “criminal courts surcharge” of £150, an innovation introduced in April. Had the man pleaded not guilty and then been convicted, the charge would have risen to £520, or £1,000 had the crime been a more serious offence. The Ministry of Justice expects the new charge to bring in up to £85m a year.

Strapped for funds, central government departments and local councils are scrabbling to find new ways to balance their books. Ministries outside the departments for health and education have seen their budgets cut by an average of nearly one-quarter since 2010–11. Local councils have seen 37% of their central government funding disappear. And that is just the beginning: departments have been asked to find further savings of up to 40%, as...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The consequences of a killing

Brian Rushton,

NORTHERN IRELAND’S peace process, which has for more than a year been stumbling uncertainly along, was dealt a destabilising blow on August 26th when a unionist party signalled its imminent withdrawal from the region’s power-sharing executive. The Ulster Unionist Party announced that it intended to pull out of office following a gangland murder in Belfast. Should other parties follow, Northern Ireland’s fragile devolved government could collapse.

The trigger for the upset was the backstreets killing on August 12th of Kevin McGuigan, a former member of the IRA, which disarmed in 2005. Police say that members of the IRA were involved in the murder, though there is no evidence the killing was sanctioned at senior levels. George Hamilton, Northern Ireland’s chief policeman, said the IRA remained in existence, but that it had radically changed: “It is our assessment that [the IRA] is committed to following a political path and is no longer engaged in terrorism,” he said.

Nonetheless, the Ulster Unionists’ leader, Mike Nesbitt, said the confirmation that the IRA was still around had shattered his party’s trust in Sinn Fein, the one-time political wing of the IRA with whom it now shares office.

The Ulster Unionists’ proposed exit presents a serious test for the administration, which for nearly a year has been bogged down in disagreement...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Immigration breaks a record

Brian Rushton,

In 2010 David Cameron promised to reduce net migration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands”. He failed. Earlier this year the prime minister restated the ambition. Figures published on August 27th showed that his goal is more distant than ever: net migration was 330,000 in the year to March, the highest on record.

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Brian Rushton Hiding in plain sight

Brian Rushton,

NOT much happens in South Shields at nine o’clock on a weekday morning. The high street is mostly empty, with just a handful of commuters at the metro station. The exception is the job centre, bustling with men and women searching for work as forklift drivers, industrial painters and at call-centres. Many have been looking for months, if not years, for paid employment.

Compared with much of continental Europe, Britain is doing quite well. Last year its economy grew faster than that of any other G7 country. Unemployment is 5.6%, next to 10% in France. Although high at 16%, youth unemployment has fallen. The share of youths not in employment, education or training (NEET) is 12%, around the rich-world average. Crime and teenage pregnancies are at record lows.

But in one area Britain still does especially badly. According to the OECD club of mostly rich countries, using data from 2012 and 2013, one in seven British youngsters leaves school early. Those dropouts are also the most likely to be unemployed in the rich world (see chart 1). Britain has the third-highest share of youngsters with poor literacy and numeracy skills, and the fourth-highest...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Runway robbery

Brian Rushton,

DUTY-FREE shopping at the airport used to be something most Britons liked as it saved them money. Yet airports are now exploiting their captive market—those trapped between security and the boarding gates—to lure people to spend as much as possible in shops. And in a scam publicised this month, they turn out to be ripping their customers off as well. Rather than passing the 20% saved in VAT to shoppers with a boarding card to somewhere outside the European Union, many airport retailers have been charging the same price for all and pocketing the tax rebate themselves. The revelation prompted a public backlash, with many people refusing to show boarding cards at the cash till. David Gauke, a treasury minister, declared that the VAT rebate should be passed to consumers, not kept by airport concessions.

Dual pricing for EU and non-EU travellers could be introduced to ensure this, but retailers and airports are resisting the idea. Instead they are trying to rake in ever more from their passengers. Many airports now charge for services that used to be free, or have invented new ones, to boost revenues. No fewer than 18 of Britain’s 24 busiest airports...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton A new beat

Brian Rushton,

“HOW does ambiguity affect others?” After a moment’s hesitation, the new recruits propose answers—it leads to “cynicism”, “isolation” and “a loss of trust”. Such questions are not normal fare in police training, which focuses more on procedure than on abstract theorising. But this is the first Police Now summer academy. It represents, says Dave Spencer, the co-founder, “the future of police training.”

In an east London school, 70 participants are taught the basics of policing, but also such things as ethics, interaction with local politics and how to be more resilient. After a six-week course, they will emerge as dedicated ward officers, ready to spend two years as the acceptable face of London’s Metropolitan Police.

Although Police Now offers a new style of police training, it apes other methods of public-sector recruitment. As Mr Spencer puts it, Police Now “stole everything from Teach First,” a scheme to send bright graduates into tough schools. It joins Frontline (for children’s social work), launched two years ago, and Think Ahead (for mental-health social work), which begins recruiting next month. The theft includes marketing to stress the challenges of the job, a short training period and the chance to work elsewhere after a few years.

Teach First has been a considerable success in schools. Some 99% of Teach...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Getting to Cambridge

Brian Rushton,

“IT WAS just a bit of fun at the weekend,” shrugs Toby Norman, almost apologetically. Bagehot stifles a laugh at the understatement. The two are sitting in a 14th-century rectory, looking at three gizmos. Mr Norman’s team built the first, a brick of plastic and circuitry known as “The Hulk”, for a competition hosted by ARM, a Cambridge-based electronics firm. This attempt to create a device to help doctors and aid workers in poor countries store and retrieve patient data (along with a second, smaller version), attracted mentors and over $1m of investment. The third, all moulded plastic and contours, resembles the slick product that Mr Norman’s startup, SimPrints, will take to market in January. Its success story—a marriage of academia, private money and entrepreneurial savvy—exemplifies that of Cambridge.

It is hard to live in the city (as your columnist does) and not sense that one is amid something special. What began with the creation of business parks to host enterprising dons and their doctoral students in the 1970s has grown into the most exciting technology cluster in Europe. Microsoft probes the edges of its understanding in...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Tunnel vision

Brian Rushton,

 

According to The Economist’s latest monthly issues poll, conducted by Ipsos MORI, immigration is now one of the main concerns for Conservative and Labour voters alike. Indeed, it is now singled out by 42% of respondents as the most important matter worrying them. But if colourful reports of a “swarm” of African migrants “marauding” across Europe heading for Calais in hopes of reaching England have raised the heat over immigration, they shouldn’t have. Asylum seekers and plans to send British police to Calais dominate headlines and imaginations, but not the migration figures. Although the public thinks that asylum seekers make up the largest share of Britain’s immigrants (after workers), the biggest group is in fact students. Just 8% of the country’s immigrants are asylum seekers. Calais is largely a red herring: it may be full of stories, but they do not say much about immigration into Britain.

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Brian Rushton Cowed

Brian Rushton,

From Friesian to freezer

THE past few years have seen a desperate fight for market share among Britain’s supermarkets, sharpened by the relentless rise of Aldi and Lidl, two successful German-owned discounters. Tesco, the biggest, Asda, Morrisons and others have reported some of their largest-ever losses. They might have been hoping for a period of relative calm to restructure their businesses and repair their balance-sheets. No such luck.

Thanks to a string of changes affecting the world dairy industry, most significantly the end of European Union quotas on milk production, falling demand in China and Russian sanctions against EU dairy producers, there is a glut of milk. That has led to falling prices everywhere. Britain’s dairy farmers, says Phil Bicknell, head of food and farming at the National Farmers’ Union, have experienced brief price drops before, but nothing on this scale. Except for a brief respite in February, prices have been falling every month for well over a year. And it could get worse.

Milk producers have been venting their anger and frustration on the supermarkets, where most of the stuff is...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Seeing red

Brian Rushton,

Corbyn before the fall

IT IS hard to exaggerate the chaos of the Labour Party in the 1980s. It once held a press conference to announce that Michael Foot was still party leader. Visitors to Walworth Road, recalls Tom Watson, now a party grandee, were “met at the front door by two striking miners and their table full of Davy lamps and buckets of shrapnel” and treated to harmonica recitals of “The Red Flag”. On Peter Mandelson’s first day as head of communications one colleague tried to kill another with poison.

This was a time when the party strayed far into the electoral wilderness, then succumbed to years of infighting as modernisers like Mr Mandelson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wrenched it away from the loony left and led it back to power after 18 years in opposition. Three decades on, however, one of the losers in that battle—Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left MP for Islington North—is on the verge of winning the party leadership. Once more a period of introspection and infighting looms.

This is unexpected. In May bookmakers put the odds of Mr Corbyn winning at 100/1. He struggled to gather the 35...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton How falling oil prices have affected Aberdeen

Brian Rushton,

WHEN the oil price collapsed in the late 1990s, so did the capital of Europe’s oil-and-gas industry. Thousands of foreign workers had been flown to Aberdeen, on Scotland's north-east coast, to work on North Sea rigs. They left in droves and the local economy entered a mini-depression. How has the city responded to the latest oil crash? 

When oil prices plunged again last summer the omens did not look good: 40,000 jobs in Aberdeen (about a third of total employment) are dependent on oil and gas. Worse, getting oil out of North Sea reserves is expensive because much of it is difficult to extract. But in addition, the industry had grown fat on meaty oil prices over the past few years. Workers who weren't especially skilled commanded six-figure salaries. By 2012 Aberdeen had the most millionaires per person of any place in Britain, including London. Aberdeen’s high costs means that it struggles to cope with cheaper oil more than, say, Saudi Arabia.

Walk around the Granite City—which, even in midsummer, can be a soggy experience—and it is clear that the oilmen have seen better days. Aberdeen’s fancy restaurants are two-thirds empty. The hotels—which...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Can we fix it? No we can’t

Brian Rushton,

Where have all the builders gone?

THE great British builder may not be getting as much time for his hallowed teabreak these days. The government has announced plans to increase the pace of housebuilding, which has failed to keep up with demand in recent years. Yet there are not many brickies around to do the job. Since the financial crash of 2008, which saw many small building firms go to the wall, the construction workforce has shrunk from 2.5m to 2.2m. This shortage of manpower, combined with a lack of materials, could undermine efforts to build the houses Britain needs. “Either we need more people or we need to construct homes in a different way,” says Mark Farmer of EC Harris, a property consultancy.

To meet current demand, about 250,000 new homes are needed each year. Yet last year only about 150,000 were built. Increasing annual housebuilding even to 230,000 would require an extra 120,000 or so people in the industry, Mr Farmer estimates. Finding those workers is proving tricky. The number of bricklayers and masons working in Britain has fallen from 100,000 to 70,000 since 2008, according to the Office for National...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton From grammars to crammers

Brian Rushton,

CHEERS and sobs met the publication on August 13th of A-level results, the school-leaving scorecards that tell British 18-year-olds whether they have made the grades required to get into university. As ever, many of the most successful schools in the state sector were grammars, which select pupils on the basis of their academic ability. Grammars’ supporters see them as engines of social mobility, pointing out that they educated five consecutive prime ministers between 1964 and 1997. Detractors argue that their benefits accrue mainly to the middle class, rather than the poor (less than 3% of grammar-school students are hard-up enough to get free school meals, compared with 16% of pupils across the state sector).

The critics had the better of the argument in the 1960s and 70s, when most grammar schools were converted to non-selective comprehensives. From a peak of 1,298 in England and Wales in 1964, only 163 grammars remain, all in England, with a high concentration in the south-east. (Northern Ireland has a further 69.) No new one has opened since Labour banned their creation in 1998, a position that the ruling Conservatives support, albeit with some...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Running on empty

Brian Rushton,

ON A street in London’s East End, among art galleries and upmarket gyms, lies what looks like a filling station. Yet beneath its rickety forecourt roof, the pumps have been replaced by vendors offering a range of faddish foods, including Japanese hot dogs and fish-finger sandwiches devised by a celebrity chef. One thing not on the menu is petrol. The firm that used to run the filling station left the site in 2013; the space is now home to businesses that sell food rather than fuel.

This is a familiar tale. Although combined petrol and diesel consumption has grown by over 75% since 1970, the number of petrol stations has fallen by nearly 80% (see chart). The decline has been especially steep in cities. London has nearly half as many petrol stations per car as the Scottish Highlands; only four remain within the central congestion-charge zone.

The collapse came in two waves. Between the peak in 1966 and the end of the 1980s, independent village petrol stores were put out of business by oil companies offering self-service and low prices. Then, from the early 1990s, oil firms were undercut by supermarkets, which sold petrol at...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Where truth and myth collide

Brian Rushton,

IT IS not hard to see why “Paedogeddon” attracted more complaints than any British television programme to date. In this spoof documentary, broadcast by Channel 4 in 2001, a presenter reported that a paedophile had disguised himself as a school, activists belonging to “Milit-pede”, a militant pro-paedophile group, stormed the studio and gullible celebrities claimed that paedophiles shared more DNA with crabs than with other humans. It was over-the-top, in terrible taste and a vehicle for the attention-seeking programme-makers.

And yet it served a purpose. At the time, Britain was in a panic following the rape and murder of a schoolgirl. The News of the World, a now-defunct tabloid, had named dozens of alleged paedophiles. A mob in Portsmouth had pelted a block of flats with stones and set fire to a car outside. “Paedo” was daubed on a paediatrician’s house. “Paedogeddon” merely held up a fairground mirror to a society losing its grip. The popular response to the programme was disgusted (the “sickest TV show ever”, ran one headline), but it rather proved the programme-makers’ points. One newspaper ran an...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Silver linings

Brian Rushton,

SINCE the recovery gained speed, opposition politicians in Britain have taken pleasure in accusing the government of overseeing an economy based on long hours and low pay. Between 2008 and 2014, the number of Britons in work rose by 2m. But average weekly earnings fell by 8% in real terms, in spite of a rise in working hours. Economists have labelled this the “productivity puzzle”, referring to the fact that, in spite of an otherwise strong recovery, output per worker per hour has fallen.

But there are now signs that these job-market trends are going into reverse. At first glance this may not appear to be unalloyed good news. After several years of rapidly falling joblessness, figures published by the Office for National Statistics on August 12th showed that unemployment grew by 25,000 in the three months to the end of June, to 1.85m. Worse, the number of people in work fell by 63,000 over the same period. That decline, which started in January, has lasted longer than any since the recovery began.

Yet there was better news on the wages front. After years of stagnant earnings, Britons are now getting a pay rise. Wages rose by 2.4% year-on-year in the second quarter. That appears to be fuelled by productivity rising overall, says Michael Saunders at Citi, a bank. During that period GDP rose by 2.6%, while Britons spent 0.2% less time working. This...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Suffering little children

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Batmanghelidjh, broke

BUSINESSES fail every day, usually for mundane cashflow reasons not negligent management. Yet the insolvency on August 5th of Kids Company, a big charity that has for almost 20 years worked with some of Britain’s most awkward and deprived children, has become a matter of sensational scandal. That partly reflects the charity’s flamboyant founder and chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, an Iranian-born Briton with a penchant for colourful dresses and turbans and a remarkable ability to extract cash from politicians and pop stars.

Why did Kids Company fail? The short answer is that Ms Batmanghelidjh was better at raising money than at management. The charity was growing fast (its income rose by over three-quarters between 2009 and 2013, and it claims to have been helping as many as 36,000 children and young adults in London, Bristol and Liverpool). Yet it failed to create reserves against the risk of interruptions in fundraising.

Alan Yentob, a BBC executive who is chairman of the charity’s trustees, rejects claims of financial mismanagement; but he accepts that some warning signs were...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Corbyn’s cohort

Brian Rushton,

Labour’s summer leadership election has entered its final month; ballot papers go out to members and registered supporters from August 14th. The latest polling by YouGov suggests that—even under the party’s fiddly, multi-stage electoral system—the far-left candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, is on track to win. Where is his support coming from? Party members, after all, voted for the moderate David Miliband in 2010 (over his more left-wing brother, Ed, who won thanks to union votes). The poll sheds some light on the mystery: although the party’s membership as a whole supports Mr Corbyn, different generations vary starkly. Those who joined before Mr Miliband became leader would back Yvette Cooper, a relative centrist. Those who signed up under his leadership prefer Mr Corbyn; those who have arrived since the election on May 7th even more so. In other words, the Labour Party is tilting to the left. That should worry moderate MPs, who are already plotting to overthrow their hard-left comrade if he wins on September 12th. They can oust him fairly easily. Less so the membership that elected him.

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Brian Rushton The battle of ideas

Brian Rushton,

BY THE time a video of a British man beheading an American journalist on behalf of Islamic State (IS) surfaced in August 2014, Britons had for three years been travelling overseas to join the terrorist group. They have gone mostly to Syria and Iraq; once there, they have not lingered on the sidelines. Instead they have become suicide-bombers, executioners and, perhaps most valuably to their handlers, propagandists. The British government estimates that around 700 Britons have gone to wage jihad as members of IS.

Britain is producing a new kind of terrorist. Those who left its shores to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan after September 11th 2001 were overwhelmingly male, mostly 25-35 and motivated by fellow-feeling for Muslim civilians killed abroad, according to Hanif Qadir, who runs an anti-radicalisation youth programme in east London. Many did “humanitarian” work, away from the front lines.

Since then, and especially in the past seven months, the typical age of the British jihadist has dropped, to around 14-25. Women make up about 10% of the group. Some are white, some previously Christian or atheist. And the...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton The thistle and the crescent

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Scottish from head to toe

WHEN Glasgow Central Mosque was commissioned in the early 1980s, the architect received an important instruction: “Make it Scottish”. It ended up sharing a feature of many Glaswegian public buildings (but not many mosques): large panels of glass, creating long shafts of natural light inside. Now, facing renovation, it will get more Scottish still: there are plans to remodel it in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow’s favourite architect. Inside, people marry in kilts (the hem let down an inch, in keeping with the dress code for Muslim men) to the sound of bagpipes. Halal haggis is sold nearby, and across the River Clyde is the council office where in 2012 a new tartan was launched: blue for the Saltire, green for Islam.

The relationship between Scottish nationalism and the Muslim community seems unusually harmonious. Six out of ten Scots believe Muslims are integrated into everyday Scottish life, according to a poll in 2010 by Ipsos Mori. A survey in 2011 by the Scottish government found Muslims in Scotland felt that being Scottish was an important part of their identity, and that for...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Generation Jeremy

Brian Rushton,

IN LABOUR'S leadership election in 2010, the party's overall electorate may have picked the soft-left Ed Miliband, but its membership—one of the three parts of the college of voters—backed his brother, David, the most centrist of the five candidates. Yet five years and another crushing election defeat later, as another Labour leadership contest approaches its culmination, the opposite seems to be happening. The party's members and affiliated supporters—which dominate the new one-member-one-vote electoral system—appear overwhelmingly to prefer Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing of the four candidates, to his rivals. That much was clear from polling by YouGov published by The Times today. The new data also shed some light on the question puzzling Labour insiders: why has Mr Corbyn done so well among a group that backed the "Blairite" elder Miliband only five years earlier?

To replicate Labour's fiddly electoral system, YouGov asked respondents to list the candidates in order of preference. Liz Kendall, the ideological heir to David Miliband's campaign in 2010, received the fewest "first preference" voters, so was knocked out. In...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Jeremy Corbyn: closet conservative

Brian Rushton,

ALTHOUGH Tony Blair heaved the Labour Party back to the political centre—and electability—in the 1990s, he never entirely finished off its hard-left wing. It lived quietly on in pub corners, in parts of declining trade unions, among MPs on the party’s eccentric fringes; a mostly male, white and increasingly aged world slipping slowly into irrelevance.

At least, so Bagehot thought—until, one recent evening, he found himself in Camden Town Hall in London, at a rally in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Labour leadership. There they were on the platform: the lefties from the public bar, those for whom no dog-eared old cause is too sentimental, no tax too high, no anti-American autocrat too distasteful. But where once there was a bored landlord wiping glasses, they now faced a fizzing throng of supporters. These booed Mr Blair’s name and roared their approval as a slightly stooped man, sporting a white beard, a crumpled shirt and a bemused expression, bustled up to the stage: Mr Corbyn, a political footnote suddenly turned headline.

Strange events are abroad in British politics. In May the Labour Party lost an election in which,...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Foals rush in

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On the verge of an accident

LATE on Christmas Eve in 2012, a young man was fatally injured in a car accident while driving home to see his family. Thomas Allen was neither drunk nor distracted by his phone; instead, he had ploughed into one of five horses that had wandered onto the road at Sproughton, in Suffolk. The horses had come loose after being left to graze on nearby land without the permission of the landowner, a practice known as “fly-grazing”.

Ten or more incidents of fly-grazing horses getting loose had been reported locally before the accident, the coroner noted. Since then, the problem has grown: animal-welfare charities and rural groups reported last year that “on a conservative estimate” at least 3,000 horses were being fly-grazed in England.

Over-breeding and the collapse of the horse market are behind the problem. The recession, exacerbated by a scandal in 2013 when it emerged that some supermarkets had been mislabelling horsemeat as beef, led to a drop in demand for horses. Ponies have since been sold for as little as £5 ($8) in some markets. A horse can cost up to £100 a week to look...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Well-fed men v mavericks

Brian Rushton,

AS BEFITS Europe’s awkward partner, Britain’s forthcoming referendum on its relationship with the continent will not be its first. In 1975, only two years after Britain acceded to the European Economic Community, the Labour government of Harold Wilson held an in/out referendum, as it had promised during the previous year’s election campaign. Then, as now, the prime minister pledged to renegotiate the country’s terms of membership, and put the new deal to the electorate. The result was a resounding two-to-one vote to stay in.

If opinion polls are to be believed, the next referendum—due to take place before the end of 2017—will be much tighter. The 1975 vote offers some useful hints as to how both sides might prepare their cases. It also points to some of the political consequences that could flow from such an unusual event.

The politics of the 1975 vote were a mirror image of how the Europhiles and Eurosceptics line up today. Then, the issue divided the Labour Party down the middle, whereas the Tories and a small Liberal Party were almost unanimously pro-European. Now, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are broadly Europhile...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton British taxpayers lose £1 billion

Brian Rushton,

DEPENDING on your point of view, Britain’s taxpayers either made £2 billion or lost £1 billion on August 3rd. The larger figure (equivalent to $3.1 billion) is the amount netted by selling off a 5.4% sliver of the government’s shareholding in Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which it bailed out in 2008. The lower figure is the difference between the 502p per share it paid back then and the 330p it received this week.

The Treasury, unsurprisingly, played up the £2 billion cash boost to the public finances. But its desire to avoid headlines like the one above has mistakenly guided its thinking on what to do with RBS. For years it dithered on selling down its 78% stake—now 73%, and set to dwindle in the coming years—in the vain hope that the troubled lender’s shares would resurface above the price it paid for them, so engendering a profit. That hasn’t happened in five years. Worse, the stock has dipped from 400p earlier this year, even as that of other banks soared.

The focus on profit is misguided: RBS was not taken into public ownership, at a cost of over £45 billion, so that the government could make a surplus when it sold its shareholding. Rather, the aim was to fend off an implosion of the financial system and the damage to the economy that would ensue. The costs avoided—soaring unemployment benefits, for instance—could have been much...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Where hope and history rhyme

Brian Rushton,

IT IS the sort of colourful pageant that ought to bring visitors from all over the world, and already attracts a sprinkling. On August 8th thousands of men and boys bearing banners, drums and flutes will drill, march and play their way over the stone battlements of this ancient port in a ritualised but passionate re-enactment of the longest siege in British history. They will mark the relief in August 1689 of the starving Protestant townspeople who had been penned in by the forces of a Catholic, French-backed king for 105 days. And in utter contrast with the situation only a few years ago, the Protestant marchers will be received peacefully and even warmly by the city’s authorities, who come from the locally dominant Catholic and Irish-nationalist community.

When compared with the ugly, tourist-repelling riots that can still be triggered by similar marches in other parts of Northern Ireland, especially the grimy streets of North Belfast, consensus over the main annual celebration by the Apprentice Boys of Derry ranks as an impressive success. It was, after all, this very event which in August 1969 plunged the city into a spate of uncontrollable rioting, and hence Northern Ireland into a quarter-century of conflict. Years of delicate diplomacy have been needed to get this point, involving some risk-taking on all sides: the leaders of the Irish-nationalist camp, of the...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Crisis mismanagement

Brian Rushton,

A bad policy in any language

HAVING diagnosed the problem—a “swarm” of migrants attempting to gain access to Britain at the French port of Calais—David Cameron required a cure. So, on August 3rd, his government announced two measures. First, it would seek to extend across the country a pilot scheme that holds landlords responsible for checking tenants’ right to rent, and thus their right to be in Britain, while threatening to jail those caught failing to uphold their new duties. Second, it would consider removing financial support for rejected asylum seekers with children. This, said James Brokenshire, the immigration minister, would send a message “that Britain is not a soft touch on asylum” and, in doing so, help halt the flow at Calais.

Evidence from a pilot of the first proposal suggests there is reason to doubt such claims. Since December 2014 landlords in five council areas across the Black Country have been required to obtain from new tenants original documents proving their right to rent, to check the documents’ validity and to retain copies. Failure to do so results in a fine of up to £3,000...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton See no evil

Brian Rushton,

Edward Heath: malign or maligned?

THOSE following the news would be forgiven for thinking that a few decades ago the British establishment was run entirely by paedophiles. They are said to have held places in the cabinet, the BBC and the intelligence services, while the rest of Britain—police, social workers, hoteliers—covered their tracks. In the past four years over half-a-dozen major inquiries into past child sex abuse have been opened: five television personalities have been convicted; four former politicians have been named as under investigation. On August 3rd a former prime minister joined the list of the accused.

At least four police forces are investigating claims that Edward Heath, the prime minister in 1970-74, who died in 2005, sexually abused children. A retired policeman claims that in 1992 a prosecution against a brothel-keeper was dropped after she threatened to expose Heath’s alleged crimes. (The madam, now retired, denies this.) A 65-year-old man says that Heath raped him in the 1960s. Police on the island of Jersey are pursuing claims that Heath sexually abused boys from Haut de la Garenne, a now-closed...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton Correction: The rotters’ club

Brian Rushton,

Correction A rogues’ gallery accompanying last week’s story on the House of Lords (“The rotters’ club”) included Charles Nall-Cain, Third Baron Brocket. He is indeed a convicted fraudster, as we said, but is no longer a member of the Lords. Sorry.

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Brian Rushton The only way is up

Brian Rushton,

WHEN the Bank of England last raised interest rates, most people had never heard of subprime mortgages; the Chinese economy was half its current size; and the iPhone was only a month old. Since July 2007 the only changes to the base rate of interest have been downward, and since March 2009 the bank has made no adjustments at all, keeping rates at 0.5% for 77 consecutive months, the longest period of stasis since the second world war (though things were even quieter in the 18th century—see chart 1). On August 6th the bank’s monetary-policy committee (MPC) voted to hold rates steady again. But with more of its members striking a hawkish tone, many pundits expect an increase by the turn of the year. What will it mean when rates rise at last?

It strikes many as odd that rates rises are on the cards. Inflation is stuck at zero, far below the bank’s target of 2%. Wages are growing faster than at any time since 2010, but it is far from certain that such...Continue reading

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Brian Rushton See no evil

Brian Rushton,

THOSE following the news would be forgiven for thinking that a few decades ago there was no corner of the British establishment where paedophiles did not lurk. They are said to have held places in the cabinet, the BBC and the intelligence services, while the rest of Britain—police, social workers, hoteliers—covered their tracks. In the past four years over half-a-dozen major inquiries into past child sex-abuse have been opened: five television personalities have been convicted; four former politicians have been named as under investigation. On August 3rd a former prime minister joined the list of the accused.

At least four police forces are investigating claims that Edward Heath, the prime minister from 1970-74, who died in 2005, sexually abused children. A retired policeman claims that in 1992 a prosecution against a brothel-keeper was dropped after she threatened to expose Heath’s alleged crimes. (The madam, now retired, denies this.) A 65-year-old man says that Heath raped him in the 1960s. Police on the island of Jersey are pursuing claims that Heath sexually abused boys from Haut de la Garenne, a now-closed children’s home notorious for...Continue reading

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