Minimum alcohol pricing is empirically and philosophically wrong

If you want to see the "conservative" in the Conservative Party and see how little "liberal" there is in the Liberal Democrats then you only need consider that the UK Government is about to announce plans to introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol in England and Wales (the Nationalist Socialist People's republic of Scotland has already announced similar plans, but half of the population there is probably so sloshed it hasn't noticed yet).

According to the Daily Telegraph:

- 45p per unit of alcohol will be the minimum price set;

- BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) offers with alcohol will be banned.

Of course the plan is motivated (isn't it always) by a desire to do good.  It is to save alcoholics from themselves, to save binge drinkers from themselves, to put a price barrier upon behaviour that politicians and bureaucrats have deemed to be bad for people (and of course, drinking to excess your entire life can kill you).  It is also being sold, absurdly, as an antidote to anti-social behaviour in evenings, because it is believed that people wont be drunk and obnoxious in any serious number any more.

Few policies can show such a direct distinct gap between the general public and what they perceive as a ruling elite of politicians and health do-gooders who believe they know what is good for others.

Of course, it punishes everyone who drinks alcohol, particularly the poor.  Of course retailers agree, because it will obvious reduce sales, even though minimum pricing raising their revenue per product, they obviously know that this isn't market pricing, so wont be revenue maximising.   Those on the left and health do-gooders  of course have no time for the retailers, as they profit from high levels of consumption, but unlike them the retailers are actually making two sets of people happy - themselves and their employees, and the people buying the products, who health do-gooders want to treat like children.

It is easy to picture the average pensioner who likes a wee dram in the evenings, now having to pay more, because highly paid health do-gooders want her treated no differently than a lager lout.

How dare they?

The two public policy problems identified are:

- Criminal behaviour whilst drunk; and

- Diseases due to excessive alcohol consumption.

In both cases it is grossly unfair to target all those who drink alcohol.  Only a small minority of people who drink alcohol get drunk and assault, vandalise or threaten others.   That is where the state has a role.  At the places and times where such behaviour becomes an issue, the Police should be present as a deterrent and to take away those creating danger to others and their property.   More could be done if the public areas where this happens were privatised, and placed under the control of adjoining property owners - who could then choose to ban drinking outside, they could choose to hire their own security staff who could order people to leave if they are causing trouble.   Bear in mind that shopping malls don't tend to have this behaviour, because of that reason.   

On the health concerns, there is already taxation on alcohol that is meant to reflect this, but the bigger issue is that the vast bulk of people in the UK (and in most Western countries) have decided that the costs of health care are to be socialised, and so everyone pays in proportion to the taxes collected from them.  If you accept this then part of accepting it is that some people will not look after their own health, others will do so, and it will seem very unfair that some impose enormous costs upon taxpayers and others do not.   Yet if you want to fix this, the only fair way to do so is to have people pay either directly or to an insurer that assesses risk.  Fiddling with alcohol pricing becomes the thin end of a wedge that already includes tobacco, and should also target foods high in saturated fat, salty foods, foods high in sugar, adventure sports and contact sports (for injuries), sunbeds, holidays in the sun, sedentary jobs, driving or riding buses short distances, etc. 

The potential scope for health do-gooders to tax and regulate everyone's lives to protect a few is substantial, and it is philosophically ground in the view that some adults not only know best what is good for other adults (which objectively may be true in some circumstances), but that they have the right to force them to do what we want or force others to penalise or reward them, whether by regulation, taxation or subsidy.

Furthermore, the Adam Smith Institute has released a study that demonstrates that the empirical evidence for the value of minimum alcohol pricing is flawed.  It argues that "the estimates of how minimum pricing will affect health outcomes have overwhelmingly come from a single computer model—the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model." the study "argues that the model is based on unreasonable assumptions which render its figures meaningless."

The executive summary states it as follows:

"Amongst the problems with the Sheffield model is its false assumption that heavy drinkers are more likely to reduce their consumption of alcohol as a result of a price rise. Its calculations are based on controversial beliefs about the relationship between per capita alcohol consumption and rates of alcohol related harm. Its assumptions about the relationship between price and consumption have frequently been refuted by real world evidence."

The Sheffield model provides figures without estimates of error and ignores statistical error in the alcohol-harm relationship. Data is drawn from different populations and applied to England and Scotland as if patterns of consumption and harm are the same in all countries. When data is not available, the model resorts to what is essentially numerology. Insufficient data is provided for the model to be recreated and tested by third parties.

The model ignores the likely effects of minimum pricing on the illicit alcohol trade, it disregards the health benefits of moderate drinking and fails to take account of the secondary poverty created by regressive price rises. The decline in alcohol consumption seen in Britain in recent years has not led to the outcomes predicted by the model.

We conclude that predictions based on the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model are entirely speculative and do not deserve the exalted status they have been afforded in the policy debate.

Minimum alcohol pricing may have a modest effect on alcohol consumption, but it will have that effect disproportionately on the poor, and disproportionately on people who do no harm to others.   As such it is a grotesquely regressive measure that should be opposed not just by libertarians, but those on the left who purport to care for the poor.

It will have a negligible effect on alcohol abuse, and a negligible effect on health, but will look as if "something has been done", which is the pressure that the predominantly statist media puts on politicians.

It should not be implemented.  If the concern of government is about behaviour, then it should undertake its core function and police the streets, and change welfare from being a handout of cash to being another form of payment that can't be used for alcohol, at least directly.   If its concern is about health, it should challenge the state religion of the NHS.  

Of course what it really cares about are small groups of feral welfare dependent chavs being drunk and obnoxious to middle class restaurant and theatre goers on Friday and Saturday nights.   That's a matter for the Police, but also to note that the welfare state is funding many of those people to drink.   The left wont tackle that, because it will see the idea that welfare recipients drink away their benefits as being a generalisation and unfair on those who don't - which is correct - yet the fact remains that taxpayers do pay for the alcohol consumed by those on welfare.

Meanwhile, it should emphasise that alcohol consumption is a matter for adults to decide for themselves, and get off their backs.

UKIP membership makes you unfit to raise children?

Think of where in the world belonging to a political party is enough reason for a government official to take children off of you.  That place is Rotherham in the UK.

The story goes like this:

- A couple, who have fostered over a dozen children successfully over seven years with no controversy, get to foster three others from a troubled family;

- The report appears yesterday that after a tip off to the Council that the couple are members of UKIP (UK Independence Party), that the Council decided it was better for the children to remove them.  The report in the Daily Telegraph, which broke the story, said that the parents were told that UKIP is a "racist party"

The civil servant responsible is one Joyce Thacker, the six figure sum earning Head of Childrens' Services from Rotherham Council, who has had a disastrous day with several shocking interviews, including this one on the BBC, where she claims she was protecting the children from "strong views".  She backed off from claiming they got legal advice to do this, but implied that the children's "cultural needs" wont be met by parents with such political views.

The couple were told by the person removing the children that UKIP is "racist".  They have since claimed that not only did they let the children speak their own language, but they encouraged them to teach the couple the language (the children range from a baby to a girl of adolescent age).

In other words, the Council decided it was in the best interest of the children's "cultural needs" to not be fostered by people who belong to a political party.

So what is UKIP's policy on multiculturalism?  The website says this:

End the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism by local and national government and all publicly funded bodies

The party manifesto from the last election says:

UKIP believes in civic nationalism, which is open and inclusive to anyone who wishes to identify with Britain, regardless of ethnic or religious background. We reject the “blood and soil” ethnic nationalism of extremist parties. UKIP opposes multiculturalism and political correctness, and promotes uniculturalism - aiming to create a single British culture embracing all races and religions. UKIP will: 

· Recognise the numerous threats to British identity and culture · Restore British values, scrap quotas and political correctness and return to meritocratic principles

Essentially it is a view of integration, that those who migrate to Britain can bring whatever culture they wish, but should be loyal to Britain.

But so bloody what?

Does it mean that people who are members of UKIP will treat children of a non-British ethnic background differently?  What is more important?  That children needing fostering are part of a loving family or are in care, but "culturally safe"?

The response from politicians has been predictable with UKIP leader Nigel Farage understandably "appalled", Education Secretary Michael Gove saying this is "indefensible" and Labour Leader Ed Miliband wanting a review - of course he's concerned because there is a by-election in Rotherham next Thursday.  Rotherham is a safe Labour seat, with the by-election triggered by the resignation of MP Denis McShane because of the scandal of him falsifying receipts to claim expenses fraudulently (just another piggy in the trough).

It isn't a coincidence that the local authority (Rotherham) is strongly Labour holding 50 of the 63 seats on Council.  Why?  Because this scandal is a direct result of the embrace of the philosophy of cultural relativism, the post-modernist worshipping of neo-Marxist identity politics which has been propagated through the far from liberal (so-called progressive) mainstream left for decades.

It takes the view that whilst avowedly anti-racist and ultra-sensitive to being accused of racism, that people who do not belong to the dominant culture/ethnicity (i.e. white British) are automatically at a disadvantage, and that society must accommodate all other identities equally, and that there should be a positive discouragement of claims of achievement or pride of the dominant culture.  In other words, pure cultural relativism.

There is a lot that can be said about that view, but in essence it doesn't treat people as individuals, but as ethnicities.  That makes identifying those who are victims and who are with power easy.  White British = powerful,  Black = victim, Pakistani Muslim = victim, indeed even white European non-British are victims.

However, it is more than that.  In this case it is a Maoist view of those who don't share this mindset.  Consider for a moment the political and philosophical structure of the people who work for Rotherham Council and especially social workers.  Do you really think that it is a place where people who think that Britain should leave the EU, that immigration should be constrained will be working or welcome?  

You see that is behind Joyce Thacker's belief that it is actually ok to discriminate against people because they belong to the "wrong" political party with the "wrong" beliefs.  It is a world whereby she grudgingly accepts that not everyone votes Labour, but treats with utter disdain those who express views she and her ilk find wrong.

In other words, she and the management of Childrens' Services at Rotherham neither believe in liberal democracy nor believe that people can hold views on immigration that differ from them.  It is not far removed from the attitude of Chairman Mao's Red Guards who defined political correctness.  Being a member of UKIP is not Politically Correct.

They cannot even tell that what they have done is akin to actions of a totalitarian state, to remove children because the parents have implied political views deemed to be contrary to their interests.  

Who cares if UKIP wants an end to open immigration from the EU?  Who cares if UKIP believes in celebrating British culture in Britain?  It doesn't want to deny children from other ancestries their cultures or language or would even remotely advocate foster parents telling children from say Poland, that they can't speak their language or they are unwelcome.  At best such a view would be a parody of reality.  At worst it reflects the kind of gutter politics and malignant attitude to those with other political views that is exactly parallel to the Maoist absolutist view of political correctness.

It has been exacerbated by an official from Rotherham Council saying that the couple concerned can foster other children, as they are otherwise good foster parents, but only white British children.

Why, by any objective measure, it is better tonight for these children to be in care with the state in preference to a couple who would foster them, just because the parents hold the wrong political affiliation?  Why are the children at less risk being in care with the state than they would be with successful and well loved foster parents?

Only in the twisted subjectivist world of neo-Marxist identity politics based cultural relativists, who think it is more important that children have people of similar ancestry look after them, or with the right political views,  or to be looked after the state, than to be loved and appreciated as individuals.  

The right response by government should be clear.

Joyce Thacker should go, her views and philosophy are contrary to the interests of children she purports to care about, and her and her team "who thought carefully about the issues" are more closely aligned to the former Stasi, than people who should have any power over others.

Rotherham Council should be put under administration and be declared unfit for purpose.

This very council has already been found wanting by being aware of, and with the Police not acting against gangs of Pakistani and other ethnic minority men enslaving and sexually exploiting underage girls - because it didn't want to "cause offence".  A failing even admitted by Labour.   It refused to act on criminality because it didn't want to be seen to be targeting offenders who happen to not be of backgrounds they, no doubt see, as being "powerless" and "victims" in the identity politics the men who raped young girls.

Well offence has been caused.  This Council has harmed children, it has harmed adults and has been negligent in fulfilling its responsibilities towards those in its care.   It is infected by its own racism, so that it sees racism everywhere and lazily treats those who don't fit its narrow view of the world as being racist.

It should go, and the people of Rotherham should wake up and vote UKIP next Thursday, to give Labour a shock (for it has been the party that, despite Ed Miliband's protestations today, has been the conduit for such views), and to declare that it IS ok to hold views contrary to the establishment.

It isn't just UKIP supporters who should be appalled, but everyone who believes that government should not judge individuals on the basis of their political party affiliations, but on their actions and deeds.

Meanwhile, there isn't a profanity I know of that is sufficiently critical of Joyce Thacker that I can think of, but I hope her next job involves clearing tables at a UKIP conference.

oh and David Cameron can carry his small share of the blame, having called UKIP a party of closet racists... so really, how much better is he?

Guido Fawkes says it is the "progressive agenda" of Common Purpose (a leftwing charity) that Joyce Thacker is expressing.

Sick jokes are a crime in the UK

Today, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, spoke at the Conservative Party conference and said:

Do we want to see the internet become an unpoliced space? No. Do we want to see terrorists, criminals and paedophiles get away scot-free? No. We are the Conservative Party, not the Libertarian Party. As Conservatives, we believe the first duty of government is to protect the public. That is why the Conservative Party will always be the party of law and order.

She's right of course.  Law and order is about protecting people's freedoms, but she mentioned the word "freedom" once by saying We need to give the police the freedom to use their judgement.

Yes, well if you want the difference between conservatives and libertarians then this case is one of them.

Matthew Woods is a rather vile young man.  He posted a joke that the Police deemed to be grossly offensive, on the website Sickipedia.  The joke was about April Jones, the 5 year old girl who went missing 11 days, and now presumed murdered.  I don't care what the joke was, because it is likely to be grossly offensive to me.  However, that's not the point.

The Guardian reported:

He pleaded guilty at Chorley magistrates court to sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive. The chairman of the bench, Bill Hudson, said Woods's comments were so "abhorrent" he deserved the longest sentence the court could hand down.

He is getting 12 weeks in prison.  

Is this really a matter for the criminal law?  Would he have faced a conviction if he had simply said it to another person?  How about if he wrote it on a piece of paper?  If not, why is an electronic communication so bad that it is time to be precious about vile jokes?

The Guardian also notes there is a long list of similar cases:

- A 56 day sentence for a racist comment about a footballer who collapsed;

- A community order for saying "all soldiers should die and go to hell" on Facebook;

- A teenager visited by the Police for being disgustingly rude to Olympic diver Tom Daley on Twitter;

- A man convicted (later quashed) for jokingly saying on Twitter that he'd blow up Doncaster/Sheffield Airport if it closed for the snow.

Now the last case probably justified a query, given fear of terrorism, but the rest?  Has British society become so precious that people who offend others deserve a criminal record?  Or is there genuine fear that if there isn't a criminal law against it, that people will throw ever more disgusting insults around in a snowball of nihilism and vileness?  If so, is the right response to offensive speech not simply to insult the person saying it, or to ignore it?

As John Kampfer in the Guardian said:

Direct incitement to violence is one thing. But we cannot and should not sentence people for bad jokes, poor taste and terrible manners. That is an issue for parents, teachers and, most importantly, peer groups.

Quite.

Most people in their lives will encounter bores, bullies and a range of rude pricks who will call you names, who will be offensive to you and seek to upset you.  It isn't a crime to insult someone, except it is, now.

I don't blame the Conservatives any more than the other parties.  Labour introduced this law, and both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have happily let it be.  However it is wrong.

Free speech is for those who offend as well as those who inspire.  The state should not be policing what offends people, for when will it stop?  Will you be able to call the Police if someone calls you a name?  Will books and songs be banned for offending Christians or Muslims?  Will politicians get people arrested for calling them lying corrupt pricks?

I don't doubt that the latest example of using this law is about someone who has been vile, but then comedian Frankie Boyle is vile, the lowlifes who sell t-shirts to celebrate dancing on Margaret Thatcher's grave are vile, but I don't want the state arresting them.  I don't want the state arresting me because I blaspheme against Islam, or call Russel Norman a prick, or call Sue Kedgley a hysterical control freak, etc etc.

It is time to speak up for free speech, including the free speech of that which offends, for no one should have a conviction because they said or wrote something that upset someone else.

UPDATE:  Peter Cresswell has written about people getting offended by what some politicians say.  He uses a quote I nearly used, which is Stephen Fry's about people thinking that when they are offended, they gain some sort of new right to "something".  No you don't.

Hobsbawm - influential yes, deserving veneration? Hardly

The death of Eric Hobsbawm at 95 has provoked outpourings of paeans to his legacy, glorifying his undoubted significant contribution to the scholarship of history and in being influential, especially to Labour politicians in the UK. He has many fans, it includes Labour leader Ed Miliband, former NZ leftwing Prime Minister Helen Clark and a virtual who's who of leftwing activists in the UK today.

It is right for those who knew him personally to commemorate him on that level, as a friend or family member.  However, he is also presented as being more than that, as a great historian, but also with a moral fibre that was impeccable. 

Almost universally he was described as gentle, Tony Blair said "He wrote history that was intellectually of the highest order but combined with a profound sense of compassion and justice. And he was a tireless agitator for a better world".

Really?

I am not going to dismiss claims he was a nice man in person, nor will I criticise his works, because I am not a scholar of history and I have not read them.  However, Hobsbawm has his own history, that lasted to his final years, of being an apologist for the most blood thirsty regimes of the 20th century.

He wasn't just a Marxist historian, he was a member of the British Communist Party until its dissolution and he turned his back on the mass murders, starvation and atrocities his comrades committed for the cause, even recently effectively claiming that the ends would justify the means.  

Take this review of his works from historian Michael Burleigh. He describes his four "great" books on history as:

A synthetic quartet, from Age of Revolution to Age of Extremes, dazzles readers with the author’s apparent fluency as he zigzags from First to Third World contexts – unless you happen to be an expert on Cuba, Mexico or Venezuela.Throughout, there was a dogmatic refusal to accept that the Bolshevik Revolution had been a murderous failure. Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR – not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward – might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.

Why is it that people who would, to a man or woman, claim they believe in compassion, even free speech and human rights, choose to have an enormous blind spot about a man who gave succour to those who created rivers of blood for the communist utopia?  

Imagine, for example, if he had embraced National Socialism, and had grudgingly accepted that the Holocaust would have been justified if a greater Europa run by Germany had been a happy, healthy, strong, fully employed economy of aryan people with order, wealth, equality and peace?  I can barely bring myself to write such nonsense, but he would have been vilified and ignored.  However, he embraced Stalin, he stuck with the Communist Party ever after the USSR crushed the revolutions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.  The various genuine claims about his compassion and character seem awfully cold when there is a calculated lack of passion about those crushed under the machine of "actually existing socialism".

Journalist Bryan Appleyard describes this peculiar blind spot:

I came across this when I asked Ben Pimlott if he regarded the atrocities of Soviets somehow less vile than those of the Nazis. He said he did but could not or would not offer an explanation. The explanation probably would have been something like: the Soviets were well-meaning, attempting to build a better world and the Nazis were simply evil. This is barely worthy of consideration. Both Stalin and Hitler appealed to better world ideologies built on absurd theories of history and both thought they were justified in killing millions and imposing suffering on a scale never before seen. Even if we give some moral credibility to communism, the character of Stalin is enough to detonate any notion that he was pursuing some great cause.

Cobden Centre fellow John Phelan says that he is no more worthy of acclaim than the pseudo-intellectual David Irving, which seems rather unfair, as Irving has spent his life denying reality explicitly, whereas Hobsbawm simply chose to be wilfully blind:

Time and again Eric Hobsbawm was faced with the full scale of the horror visited by the regime he supported and time and again he remained loyal. As he wrote in 2002“The Party . . . had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it . . . We did what it ordered us to do . . . Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed . . . If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so”Hobsbawm pleaded for “historical understanding”; he isn’t hard to understand. He was a man who failed to see that the choice of one murderous regime over another was no choice at all, who lacked the humility to admit it, and who was possessed of an incredible ability to blind himself to realities, no matter how bloody, which didn’t fit his view of the world.

Observer columnist Nick Cohen says of his work:

If you need convincing, look at Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes The most brilliant analysis of the 20th century sits alongside the most abject apologias for tyranny. For all his contradictions, I’ll miss the better side of his intellect.

He notes about how Hobsbawm defended Stalin's Pact with Hitler:

I expect we will hear one excuse tomorrow that ought to have been buried with the Soviet Union: “communists excused Stalin because they were consumed by the laudable desire to fight fascism”. It is a half truth at best. The far left of the 1930s did indeed fight fascism. But in 1939 Stalin stood on his head and signed a pact with Hitler. For two years, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, western communists and their sympathisers stood on their heads too and became the Nazis’ de factoallies. I have always been fascinated by ‘the midnight of the century’, when far left and right united against the middle, because it echoes our own time when liberal leftists excuse and indulge the radical Islamist right. 

Quite.  Right now we see again and again, the willingness to gloss over someone who had a blindspot, if not quite a denier for the atrocities his comrades committed.

Hobsbawm seemed like an old man who could never face up to the fact that he backed the wrong horse, it saw men and women murder, starve and torture on a scale unheard of in history.   That lack of contrition, lack of strength of character to admit he was wrong, means his memory will forever be darkened.

He was one of those academics that universities, and the politicians and bureaucrats who they spawned, forgave, glossing over these inconvenient black spots in his beliefs, to embrace his thoughts and writings.

Like the umpteen leftwing writers, especially feminists, today who treat Islam and Islamists with kit gloves, because, to them, it represents an attack on capitalism, sexualisation of women and conservative Christianity, those who today praise him - who did not actually know the man - are guilty of the same moral blind spot.

It isn't being nasty or mean to question the legacy of a man who happily sat on the side of murderers, indeed it is morally vacuous to do anything but that.

Douglas Murray writes as if a Nazi sympathising equivalent had died.

More below

A comment on the Daily Telegraph wrote of Hobsbawm and his utopianism and his abject refusal to see the evidence that the results of his philosophical beliefs were misery and horror. I thought it was worthy of repeating:

That Hobsbawm has learned nothing from living in England and that he has failed to grasp the fact that ideologies dedicated to remaking man and transforming him into some gruesome socialist robot have failed, and were doomed to fail, is demonstrated by his admiration of the Communist Manifesto. There are only two types of person that can admire such a hideous manifesto: those who want to exercise power over all other people; and those who are willing to submit to such power provided that their material needs are met, slaves in other words, people born for the whip (but at least they know they are slaves and they enjoy the kiss of the whip). I assume that Hobsbawm sees himself as some kind of Marxist Grand Inquisitor ruling over the dumb proletariat and wielding his whip for their benefit in between sequestering the assets of the hated middle classes and so reducing them to servitude and penury. It goes without saying that no serious Marxist could or would ever derive any envious pleasure from expropriating and defiling the hated expropriators. It is done out of a sense of duty to History (really). 

Some 36 minutes into an interview with Hobsbawm (Life in History, BBC Radio 4, repeated tonight) and I have still not picked up any mention of Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot or any reference to the genocide carried out by communist regimes in the 20th century. Finally, in the 45th minute, we reach the question for which I had been waiting. Hobsbawm is asked why he stayed in the Communist Party. Ever solicitous and unctuous, Schama and the programme editor avoid posing any awkward questions by the expedient of citing part of an earlier interview with Sue Lawley on 5th March 1995 (I am sure it is pure coincidence but Stalin died on 5th March 1953). When asked about mass murder in the Soviet Union by Lawley, Hobsbawm says that he did not know; he says he did not believe the details, perhaps, he says, he did not want to believe them (so much for evidence then and the reliability of Marxist historians). 

He says: ‘We did not know the extent of it’ [communist mass murder]. Lawley then asks whether such was his dedication to the dream of communism that any kind of sacrifice was worth the price:

Hobsbawm: “Yes, I think so”

Lawley: “Even the sacrifice of millions of lives?”

Hobsbawm: “Well that’s what we felt we had fought WWII for, didn’t we?”

Lawley: “Is there a difference between killing someone in war and killing your own?”

Hobsbawm: “We didn’t know that”

.As Hobsbawm says ‘We didn’t know that’ you can detect the utter fear and panic in his voice. This is the question he has known would come and has dreaded. Hobsbawm clumsily dodges the question and Lawley lacks the killer instinct to press the point of the knife to his throat. No listener can be convinced by Hobsbawm’s repulsive denial. There is, of course, a universe of difference between killing the enemy in war for survival and butchering millions of kulaks, so-called class enemies in the 1930s (circa 11,000,000) in order to build socialism. The fact that Hobsbawm claims not to see any difference between communist class war and a national fight for survival denigrates the struggle that Britain waged against Nazi Germany. According to Hobsbawm’s perverted view there is no difference between British soldiers killing German soldiers and Communist Party activists murdering millions of unarmed and innocent peasants in Ukraine by shooting and mass starvation.When Hobsbawm says ‘We didn’t know that’, one has to ask when he did finally know THAT, that being the real nature of the totalitarian Soviet Union and its imitators. Why did Lenin create the most brutal and long-lasting system of censorship in the twentieth century? What was Hobsbawm’s reaction to the news of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)? What did he make of the publication of Doktor Zhivago? Why did the Red Army invade and rape Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and threaten to invade Poland in 1981? What did he make of Solzhenitsyn, the Truth Teller? Why did the Soviet state kill and imprison writers? Why did the KGB arrest the manuscript of Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate? Why did Stalin judicially murder some of his most talented army commanders at the moment when the threat posed by National-Socialist Germany was all too clear? How does Hobsbawm explain and justify Order № 00447? 

 When did he realise that the massacre of 21,857 Polish prisoners at Katyn and other sites in 1940 was a Soviet crime not a Nazi one? When did he finally accept that the full scale of the Ukrainian genocide, the Holodomor, with its 6,000,000 dead from genocide by starvation and another 5,000,000 dead from cold, disease and shooting? Does Hobsbawm even accept that the Holodomor took place? Hobsbawm says that his continuing membership of the Communist Party is a Cold War question and is irrelevant. This is a self-serving, cowardly evasion and Hobsbawm knows it. If a 95 year old former member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was asked about his continuing loyalty to National Socialism would Hobsbawm be satisfied with an answer along the lines that ‘this is a WWII question and is irrelevant’? Thousands of questions that historians ask about the Soviet regime are Cold War questions: are they irrelevant as well? Recall Hobsbawm’s views on chronology: ‘without chronology there can be no history’. That is true of an individual as well and in a BBC programme dedicated to a ‘life in history’, questions about Hobsbawm’s membership of the most genocidal political institution in man’s history are utterly relevant. 

There is another Cold War question that requires an answer: was Hobsbawm ever recruited by any Eastern European intelligence agency, say, the KGB or Stasi, with the aim of spying on academics and students known to be hostile to socialism? Hobsbawm could remove all doubt and speculation by stating unequivocally that he was not recruited by any Soviet bloc intelligence agency and that he never provided any information to any intelligence agency. Hobsbawm should also ask himself whether an academic, let us say the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who remained a committed National Socialist until his death in 1976, would have found employment in a British university. Hobsbawm’s continuing belief in Marxism in 2012 reflects a state of mind that, despite all the earlier, reasonable talk about evidence and reason, is one that is demonstrably impervious to evidence and reason: the hallmark of the true revolutionary-believer slave.Hobsbawm’s position on Soviet genocide is nauseating and hypocritical even by the standards of British academics that played down Stalin’s crimes. 

Why does Schama not press the case about genocide committed in the name of communism to the point of destruction? In fact, a more aggressive and less easily deflected interviewer than Lawley could easily have brought about Hobsbawm’s psychological collapse on air. Hobsbawm sounded very close to breaking: he knows that Marxism is repulsive and he knows that for all his adopting the pose of the learned academic that his support of Marxism and his failure to acknowledge the full scope of communism’s hideous crimes against humanity, far worse than anything committed by the Nazis, is disgusting, cowardly and immoral. There is no difference between the person that denies National-Socialist crimes against Jews, the Holocaust, and communist propagandists like Hobsbawm who deny the Holodomor and other crimes committed by communist regimes. Schama’s role here is also disgraceful and shameful since by failing to ask and to press home the forensic questions that should have been pressed home he allows Hobsbawm’s prevarication and mendacity to pass unchallenged.

Liberal Democrats deserve obliteration at next general election

I have a naive fondness for a few elements of the Liberal Democrats in the UK.  It solely comes from the era during which it actually did advocate for less government, less intrusion of the state in both economic and personal lives and it was - at the time the Liberal Party - a real choice compared to the comatose Stalinist-lite economics of Labour and the "slowing down the inevitable trip to socialism" of pre-Thatcher Conservatives.

However, those days are long gone.  The Liberal Party made a convenient alliance with the breakaway Social Democratic Party, which left Labour at a time when its policies included neutrality in the Cold War and economic planning that was, seriously, barely one step removed from that of the like of East Germany.  However, Labour abandoned that under Blair and the Liberal Democrats stayed still becoming a party to the left of Labour, opposing military action against Iraq and calling for higher taxes and at one point for Britain to join the Euro.

Few would doubt today that the party was wrong about that, and although Nick Clegg, to his credit, decided that a coalition with the Conservatives was a better move than trying to prop up the spendthrift remains of Gordon Brown, the party has continued to show itself to be little more than the electable version of the Green Party.  The one area where it could add real value, which is to reduce the surveillance state, the party has proven to be impotent and incompetent.  It has defended the extension of surveillance powers to now require all telcos and ISPs to keep records of every website everyone in the UK visits, every email address they send emails to, on the basis that they already are forced to keep records of every phone call and it is just about keeping up with technology.   So the British state now gets to require records kept of what you're reading, what you're looking at, what you're searching for, but don't worry - if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to fear right?

That alone should disqualify this lot from being a party with any liberal credentials at all.

Its passionate love of the European Union, obsession over climate change and the "need" for unilateral British action regardless of cost and who pays that cost, and wet attitude to foreign policy and defence are little compared to the latest ramblings - which is that everyone earning over £50,000 should pay more tax because it is "fair".

The Liberal Democrat's main contribution to discussion over reducing the budget deficit is not liberal in that there is no interest at all in shrinking the state.  This party believes that the current 45% of GDP dedicated to state spending is about right, and the way to reduce the deficit is to increase taxes (whilst reducing taxes on the very poorest).  It is pure redistributionist socialism, and it is envy mongering.

Whilst early talk was of a "mansion tax" which would simply be an annual tax on the value of homes over a certain value, this has now become a tax on homes worth over £1 million.  In London there are tens of thousands of such properties, more than a few owned by families or retired people who wouldn't consider themselves wealthy per se.  

The latest talk of those earning over £50,000 paying more should be electoral suicide.  This comprises the top 10% of income earners in the UK, but notably in London it is worth saying that this is far from being wealthy.  A decent two bedroom flat in middle class parts of London can cost £1500 a month in rent.  Try feeling rich with £60,000 a year, after tax (which takes away 31% of that with a marginal rate of 42% on each additional pound).

The Liberal Democrats constantly tout the cliche "fairness", yet that 10% earns 30% of income and already pays 50% of income tax.  How fair is that?

The Liberal Democrats are social democrats, and are, as advocates of the status quo and more tax, simply socialists.  They are where Labour now is, under "red" Ed Miliband, the unions' choice, and given the party is keeping the Conservatives in power, deserves to be obliterated at the next general election.

The big debate in 21st century politics is, once again, the role of the state.  On economic policy, there is nothing liberal about the Liberal Democrats, with no interest in abolishing the absurd shop trading laws that keep London's Oxford Street closed before 11am and after 5pm on a Sunday, no interest in liberalising planning laws that mean planning permission is needed in most boroughs for the smallest of works on your own land, and a religious opposition to more airport capacity.  On social policy the Liberal Democrats are uninterested in talking about laws on drugs, laws on censorship and as we have seen, are incapable of understanding state surveillance.  Finally, their attempts at reform of the "constitution" consisted of trying to adopt a version of the Australian voting system and making most of the House of Lords elected with 15 year terms.

Pointless and counter-productive.

The socialists of the Liberal Democrats should go to the Labour Party where they will find the usual interfering busybodies keen to create new laws, spend more money, invent new taxes and be forever committed to thinking that they are uniquely placed to know better how to spend other people's money.   The liberals, wherever they may be, should go to the Conservative Party, and help it dry up and become, once again, the party of less government and more individual responsibility.   For the SDP part of the Liberal Democrats have no raison d'être given Labour is no longer the home of Erich Honecker like economics, and the Liberal part has largely evaporated, in part because the Conservatives are no longer out to bully homosexuals, scaremonger about dark skinned people and fear ambitious women.

Not that I have time for either of them, Labour set the scene for the current recession and for years kept a delusional paranoid megalomaniac in charge of the public finances (so deluded he boasted that he had abolished boom and bust), the Conservatives are now in the thrall of Whitehall and are led by an indecisive whim and poll worshipping pragmatist.  

However, the Liberal Democrats have no purpose anymore.  Voters, who once saw them as a protest vote whenever Labour disappointed them, know this.  In 2015 opponents of the government will mostly vote Labour, supporters will vote Conservative, there is no point in voting for a version of Labour that keeps the Conservatives in power.

It's just a matter of time.

Only white people can be racist

Labour, Greens, Maori Party and Mana all share this view of racism.

The post-modernist structuralist view of reality is that which carries the mainstream of academia in universities in the English speaking world.  It is what most of our leftwing politicians were raised on, and it is what causes them to believe that a fairly simple concept - racism - is not simple at all.

Racism is, from a classical liberal definition, the belief that another person is inferior (or superior) purely because of that person's racial heritage.  It is taking those physical characteristics to judge that person.

Racism is irrational and has been the source of countless bloodbaths in history, and remains a primal drive within humans that overrides the rational faculty with fear and loathing of "the other".  

Objectivists consider it antithetical to individualism, which judges people on their behaviour and ideas, not their heritage.  Ayn Rand said as much herself.

Yet why do some say that non-white people can't be racist?  Well it has been eloquently explained by the Socialist Worker - the British Marxist newspaper which demonstrates that once you have put everyone into silos - then you can label them any way you wish.  Consider for a moment the irony of those who claim to be against racism using the very same techniques as those they oppose to classify others and then to seek to initiate force against them on that basis.

" the idea that black and Asian people can be racist towards white people is wrong. It confuses a reaction to a racist society with racism itself.

It is true that black and Asian people sometimes respond to racial discrimination by saying that all white people are part of the problem. Some say all whites are inherently racist. They may even make crude jokes to this effect.

These ideas can impede the fight against racism. But they are not themselves racist.

Racism is more than simple prejudice, no matter how ugly or unpleasant. It is the combination of prejudice with power. It occurs when a group of people are discriminated against because they are seen as inferior."

There you understand it, you are not racist if you are black and treat someone who isn't black in a negative way purely because of that person's race.  Why?  Because the racism isn't expressed by individuals' reactions, but by those actions with power.   

Power from the Marxist structuralist perspective is purely binary and is extracted from the bourgeoisie-prolertariat dichotomy that Marx and Engels propounded, but adjusted to fit the post-colonial narrative invented by academics.

It goes like this and it is worth deconstructing to see what it really means:

"The vast majority of people, black or white, aren’t in positions of power. Yet most of those who hire and fire staff, and make and implement policies that affect the lives of millions are white.

This, in the British context, is deemed to be because of racism.  Not to deny that it didn't exist officially and unofficially on a considerable scale when most of those migrants' ancestors arrived, but it is taken as given that position that this is the sole reason.  

Many among them hold racist views and they are given a chance to put their prejudices into action. And it’s not just racist individuals who discriminate—the capitalist state does too.

So it is now asserted that "many" who hold power, who are managers in business hold racist views.  No need for proof, it is "fact" and recirculated as such.  Then the state does so too.  Again, who would deny there are always a number in the Police and other institutions who act this way, but then the "capitalist state" disproportionately hires people of minorities as well - yet if they acted in an objectively racist manner in hiring, that would be "ok".

It is for these reasons that darker-skinned people are more likely to be out of work, in poor housing and the victims of racist policing. They are at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.

Again, just a bold assertion.  If a manager doesn't hire the black candidate for a job it is racism, not because the candidate might not be the best candidate available.  Another assertion is this "racial hierarchy".  It isn't one created by the state, or even businesses, but one that is created to fit the post-modernist Marxist view of race.

If a white person argues that all black people are illegal immigrants they are using racist ideas to side with the powerful against the oppressed.

Really?  Which of the powerful argue that all black people are illegal immigrants?  Who outside the nutty fraternity of the National Front claim such nonsense?  It's just an inane racist comment.

Racism runs deep in capitalist society because it is such a crucial component of the system. That’s why black and Asian people can accept racist ideas about themselves and other oppressed people. 

Now we are really into the fantasyland thinking.  If you think racism is a critical component of capitalism, you'll hate capitalism, yet racism isn't only irrelevant to capitalism it is antithetical to it.  For racism is fundamentally irrational, and it involves treating individuals not on their talent, intelligence and abilities, but their backgrounds.  Businesses that write off people on that basis are losing opportunities for talented staff and management, but would also be incapable of developing and marketing products for people, because of racism. The most systematically racist states in the world have been fascist-socialist constructions that have had capitalism under their jackboots.  

What does this all mean?

Leftwing parties almost universally advocate the state undertaking activities based on the "affirmative action" model following the philosophical contortions expressed above.  

If you are Maori, Black, etc, you are deemed to automatically fall into the oppressed proletariat category, so state sponsored scholarships, loans, grants and programmes, including quotas for employment, are deemed to be "correcting" the racism you have endured.  Blank out if you are actually a high income professional or son/daughter of such a professional (the people typically most able to take advantage of such programmes).  

Statistics of poor economic, health or educational performance are deemed to be "because" of racism, for any other explanation is inconvenient (and it is racist to even search for alternative explanations).

If you seek "one law for all" or to end racially determined institutions or programmes, you are "racist", because you don't understand that the state is racist and needs to be racist to counteract its own racism.

Yes, the racist state needs to be racist (which isn't racist unless it is expressed by the powerful, which the state is) to not be racist.

Of course in the 1930s in Germany, the state saw that there was vast racism in the management of business and government in the form of one race that ran everything and was seeking to dominate and enslave the race it saw as inferior.  That was swiftly addressed of course, and naturally few today would claim that the success of Jews in pre-war Germany was because of racism (indeed to some extent, in spite of it).

So is it not time to intelligently take on the post-modernist structuralist view of racism and the state in the developed world, and to do so by identifying exactly what are the sources of the disparities in outcomes that get labelled as racist by the baying mob of power hungry politicians on the left?

Could it be that cultural attitudes among communities regarding education, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, esteem, individualism, violence, the value of tight safe secure family structures, saving and aspiration are really what matters?

The Olympic honeymoon period is over

I've spent the last month or so basking in what truly was a magnificent time to be in London.  It was, on two occasions, a centre not of banal cultural emptiness, not of history shrines and hoards of tourists eager to look backwards, not of a sub-culture of misogynistic violent no-hopers eager to pillage and destroy in anger at their own uselessness, not a centre for Islamist horror, but of individuals as elite athletes, whether Olympic or Paralympic, striving and winning, and in a culture that truly glorified and celebrated them.  Whilst Team GB got by far the greatest attention, there was never an ounce of resentment or denial of the wondrous successes of those from other countries, the remaining malignant nationalism that comes with the Olympics (and which China still pushes), was not apparent. 

It was truly a celebration of the achievements and efforts of thousands of individuals, it saw a mood of benevolence and patience, as both the cost and the draconian approach to branding were largely ignored, and people celebrated.  Yes, I wish it hadn't happened because it was destructive of wealth (proven also by July seeing a drop of around 200,000 overseas visitors and drop of spending by visitors of around £120 million compared to the previous year) and a travesty of a waste of money, but it did come with that beautiful element of human beings striving, succeeding, proud of success in any form (whether it be medals or personal bests), and others genuinely celebrating in their success. 

The bubble of that culture has been well and truly popped.  One minor event was at the Trade Union Congress, where t-shirts were being sold that said that when Thatcher dies a generation of trade unionists will be dancing on her grave.  It was being sold by the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers' Centre, which itself is part funded by three local authorities. All of the nastiness of Marxism epitomised in one product, and whilst the TUC condemned it, Labour leader Ed Miliband chose to remain silent.

However, that minor piece of disgusting behaviour is nothing compared to the true travesty of justice over Hillsborough.  David Cameron has apologised for the vile behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police and the emergency services, not just for their grotesque negligence that apparently allowed as many as 42 of the 96 who died in that tragedy to die unnecessarily, but their lies, manufacturing of evidence and perverting the course of justice to cover up their own ineptness.  This conspiracy by agents of the state to cover up their own failings is not just disgusting, but criminal.  There should be people charged for acts which, if they were private citizens, would see them in prison for many years.   Altering statements and editing evidence to conceal failings is palpably inexcusable.  

Many in police forces wonder why people don't trust them, why they are antagonistic or obstructive, it is because of this sort of activity.  The willingness to flagrantly act without good faith.

Finally, it looks like a badly made film lampooning Islam and making it out to be a religion of violent bigots, has incited lots of groups of Muslims to act as violent bigots.   Those who think that the act of private citizens in a country is the act of a state, those who believe that the appropriate response to being offended is violence.

Meanwhile, the US is led by an Administration which has as its first response is to sympathise with those offended, whose Secretary of State condemns the film as disgusting and reprehensible (as well as condemning the violent reaction to it).   

Yet there is hope.  Mitt Romney, who is easy to criticise for so many reasons, gets it right by saying:

America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and against our embassies. We will defend also our constitutional rights of speech and assembly and religion. We have confidence in our cause in America. We respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our Constitution protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles of our Constitution because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.

“I also believe the Administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead of condemning their actions. It’s never too early for the United States Government to condemn attacks on Americans, and to defend our values. The White House distanced itself last night from the statement, saying it wasn’t ‘cleared by Washington.’ That reflects the mixed signals they’re sending to the world.

When was the last time you heard a major party US Presidential candidate standing explicitly behind free speech and freedom of religion? When was the last time that you heard one talk about those principles being a source of freedom for individuals around the world?  Where is the stereotypical theocratic authoritarian that is the caricature that Democrats want to paint him to be? 

What exactly could anyone of a classically liberal (not socialist liberal) bent oppose of that statement?

Tax stops Usain Bolt from bothering more with Britain

It was telling that in a live BBC interview during the Olympics that Usain Bolt said that he would love to spend more time in the UK, but the tax laws make it not worth his while.

The Taxpayer's Alliance explains why:

Under current rules, athletes competing in the UK are liable to pay tax on their winnings in addition to paying levies on any of their passive income such as marketing, sponsorship and image rights deals. Athletes often have to pay a 50 per cent tax rate on their appearance fee as well as a proportion of their total worldwide earnings. 

No wonder he can't be bothered.

Of course, neither the supposedly "pro low tax" Conservative Party, nor the Liberal Democrat or "opposition in name only" Labour Party agreed with him, largely because all three parties have been embarking on a cannibalistic feeding frenzy on tax for months. How did he compete in the Olympics then? Simple. The UK Government was told it had to suspend these provisions for the extent of the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee insisted that HMRC suspended its normal tax regime for those competing in the London 2012 Olympics. London simply wouldn’t have been able to host the Games otherwise. And the Government has also said that tax breaks will be available to the Commonwealth Games and those taking part in the 2017 World Athletics Championships in London. They've all been claiming how moral it is for people to pay taxes, and how tax avoidance (i.e. legally acting in ways to not pay more tax than you are required to) is immoral. It's been a Marxist orgy of claims that tax avoidance "costs the UK" money, when what is actually meant is that it costs the government - when in fact people with more of their own money tend to invest it or spend it, benefiting them and the people who gain the investment or sell them goods and services. The classical Marxist bogey of tax avoidance is the stereotype of some rich businessman sitting in a suit with a cigar laughing as he appears to do nothing whilst gaining more and more money. He's probably a banker, or someone who earned lots of money in ways that are "not honourable" to socialists (remember earning a six-figure sum as a politician or unionist is ok though). Usain Bolt doesn't fit that stereotype. He's loved by millions of fans. Nobody dare utter a criticism of him or the substantial earnings he gets from promotional deals. See it is ok to make money running fast and being attached to ad campaigns, but not to run an advertising company, or manage his investments, or own a hotel he stays at. Yet the political silence of this issue is palpable. Clearly the tax laws as they stand not only deter the UK from hosting athletics events (when they get hosted they do so with exemptions), but stop people from living and working in the UK as athletes. It is completely self defeating, it means there is less money in the economy and indeed if Bolt lived in the UK and paid no income tax, the UK would still be better off. This is a man who wouldn't be claiming public housing or welfare benefits, he would be almost certainly never using the NHS (when he can afford private healthcare) and would be paying plenty of VAT on his consumption (and fuel tax and air passenger duty on travelling) to cover a decent contribution to defence, law and order and other state spending. However, to argue that, Red Ed Miliband, his new sycophants in the Liberal Democrats and the sellout Conservatives would have to admit that, actually, most wealthy people don't cost the state very much at all. They pay their own way, pay for their own housing, education, health care, pensions and by and large only have a role for the state in defence, law and order and the provision of roads. Because, you see, the underlying reason for the clamour for tax is to take from the rich to give to everyone else. Now if you were Usain Bolt, earning for a relatively short period of your life, enormous sums of money for promotional campaigns, why would you decide that middle class and low income British deserve to get half of all your earnings, when you can stick to Jamaica?

Don't come to London - it will be too busy

They didn't, so it isn't.

The economic story of the Olympics is increasingly damning as it has become abundantly clear to many businesses in London that the net effect has been to scare off tourists from the city and to scare away the locals. The first thing that is noticed is that the public transport system and the roads are quieter than usual. The expected huge delays and overcrowding haven’t happened, in fact it is the other way round. On Monday I retimed my own commute to deal with the expected chaos, but on Tuesday found it quiet. It’s busy around Olympic venues yes, and there was awful weekend traffic in no small order because of the cycling road race both closing a whole series of roads and encouraging hundreds of thousands to head that way to watch.  Otherwise it’s grim for businesses (but a delight to walk around).

 Look at these figures: 

- 50% reduction in foreign visitors to London in July 2012 compared to July 2011 (European Tour Operators’ Association) 

- 4.5% reduction in retail footfall in the West End in July 2012 compared to July 2011

 - 2.6% reduction in retail footfall in the East End (where the games are) in the first few days of the Olympics compared to last year 

- 25% reduction in visitors to the British Museum in July 2012 compared to July 2011 

- Traffic counts in central London are down 17% on previous weeks 

- Major retailer NeXT estimates sales are down 10% in its central London shops.

-  The Licensed Taxi Drivers' Association estimates business is down 20-40%.

In short, it has been pretty much what I and others predicted. The Olympics deters as many as it attracts, as many presume prices will be inflated (and they were) and everything will be too busy. However, given that government agencies such as Transport for London have been constantly telling Londoners to make different plans and businesses were told to encourage people to work from home, take leave or avoid unnecessary travel, it shouldn’t be a surprise. People have done what they were told. 

However, politicians are in denial. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that such figures were nonsense saying that “restaurants, theatres and even cabbies who are out of pocket today will reap benefits for years to come.” according to the Evening Standard.  Yet how come the media can't find businesses outside the mall adjacent to the site that are doing well?  He's touting the obvious manufactured claim of his bureaucrats that "businesses who marketed well are doing well", yet how does he realistically think this can make up for the reduced visitor numbers?  Having taken taxes from all of these businesses to pay for these games and told many businesses to effectively cut travel to London or staff commuting in London, how dare he tell off the people who are paying for the games without the credit for it.

In a parallel story, traders at Greenwich market reported a 60% decline in trading, even though the market is located between the nearest Docklands Light Railway station and the Olympics venue, because of a huge barrier placed on the road to shepherd people from public transport to the venue. It has since been removed.

Of course a small business that takes risks based on a government funded project is always going to be taking a gamble, it doesn't help that Transport for London is still telling motorists to avoid Greenwich altogether and warning people of overcrowding stations in the area.

This follows rude prick and Sports Minister Hugh Robertson saying that businesses had “years” to plan, as if a restaurant in the West End can somehow woo hundreds of thousands of people that have been put off by constant taxpayer funded warnings to stay away. The Prime Minister continues to spout the empty delusion that the Games will generate £13 billion of benefits for the economy. 

Of course not one politician will come out and say the obvious. Hosting the Olympics never made economic sense. The Blair Government had advice at the time that said this. However Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone and their minions, and since then David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, have all gone along with this delusion. The money for the games came from taxpayers. The majority of whom don’t live in London so will have seen no net benefit at all. If the businesses that were meant to benefit, by and large don’t, then you’ve been wrong. You’ve all gambled away £9 billion of other people’s money on a fun party. 

Yes the Olympic Games are a great time, and offer fantastic spectacles of people truly achieving their best through effort and training. Yes it’s nice for Team GB athletes to compete on home soil, but if you asked them if it was worth £9 billion of other people’s money for just that, I doubt they would agree. 

However, don’t bother pretending they are an “investment”. Don’t pretend that there are real economic benefits for anyone, beyond the construction companies for the facilities you paid for with other people’s money. London is already one of the world’s most popular tourist destination, it has no shortage of visitors. It was inevitable that a city as crowded and congested as London would need to chase some people away to allow others to come in.   The same thing happened in Sydney.   A study by James Giesecke and John Madden of Monash University indicated that the Sydney games generated a net loss of A$2.1 billion in economic activity.

Well done. 

Now first prize for the UK politician who stands up, after the OIympics I expect, and says “it wasn’t worth it”. 

and no, unlike the grumpy failed politician Gore Vidal, I don't get that much pleasure from "I told you so" when so much money has been wasted.

Second prize if someone simply pointed out that if London wants more visitors, allowing its busiest airport and only hub airport to build a third runway, a project the airport's Spanish owner is able to fully finance itself, would have been a far more effective and enduring way of attracting visitors that building a stadium that still doesn’t have a long term user. 

However, Olympics are a bigger spectacle and far more exciting than a permanent piece of infrastructure, especially when the latter is opposed by hoards of angry environmentalists (the ones who can't and wont protest the extra runway a month being built in China for new airports) and NIMBYs (who wish that 60 year old airport would go away so their property values would go up).

Which is why the government shouldn't be involved with either!

Meanwhile, DO come to London.  There are massive discounts at hotels, flights are cheap and it's easy to get around, and there are sales on if you avoid the crowded Stratford Westfield Mall (and why would you come to London to go to a mall full of eastenders on school holidays?).

What's wrong with the Olympics? Part one - the economics

You’re going to see more and more hype in the next few weeks, as the world’s most political sporting event is held in London, and a vast wave of positive support will infiltrate the media, politicians and the event itself.

There is one good thing about the Olympics. It provides a showcase for the best in world athletics to compete and demonstrate the results of their hard work and training and be achievers. That is a good thing. The recurrence of this again and again, is a reason to smile. Opportunities to do this are special and remarkable.

Yet there is a lot wrong with it, so much I’m going to dedicate three articles about it.

• The first is on the economic cost
• The second is in the cost to individual freedom (and surrender to an authoritarian corporatist approach to sponsorship to fund the Games by "any means possible")
• And thirdly is a lesser important point, it is how the transport infrastructure in London has not been upgraded to cope, despite seven years of warning.

No business case

From an economic point of view, there was no “business case” for the British government to support the Olympics being held in London. It comes with a direct financial cost to British taxpayers including future taxpayers, a direct economic cost imposed on much of London, a subsidised platform for sponsorship and the self-aggrandisement and glory claimed by politicians.

The Olympics are political, they are a statement to the world by a country seeking to show off. I need not go through the list of recent hosts to demonstrate that. The previous Labour government bid for this event to try to show off, it didn’t do it for the economy.

£11 billion is the total cost of the infrastructure, hosting and the “regeneration” work undertaken related to the London Olympics. £2 billion is expected to be recovered from sponsorship, ticket sales and broadcasting rights, the rest is a transfer from taxpayers to contractors. Nearly £2 billion of the expenditure is in “regeneration”, code for government subsidised property development. The goal being to make Stratford (the main games site) into a desirable place to live and for businesses to locate (it now has three railway, two underground and two light railway lines serving it).  With the exception of Canary Wharf/Docklands, the evidence of government sponsored regeneration actually providing a catalyst to economic growth and jobs in the UK, is scant.

So financially, it will lose money.

What about the economy? Some economists would claim that this money will be returned in bucketloads because of the increased tourism and investment it will bring, except that this doesn’t bear close scrutiny.

I heard a story of someone in UK Treasury who told then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, that the Olympics would not create a net economic contribution to the UK economy. Gordon allegedly said “don’t worry, we wont win”.

London is already one of the most popular cities in the world for tourism. Indeed it bulges at the seams with tourists. There is evidence that the Olympics deter visitors who may otherwise have come. It brings athletes, who by and large, are not particularly high yielding tourists. It brings coaches, trainers, broadcasters and the like. It brings some spectators. However, it also scares off many others.

Moody’s produced a report saying it was unlikely that the Olympics will boost the UK’s economy. It claims the main sector to benefit will be hoteliers, with 90% occupancy estimated, although at this time of year London typically achieves 80% anyway. Given it was Diamond Jubilee year anyway it seems difficult to imagine that the extra numbers, if they turn up, will actually compensate for the for the taxpayer subsidy. In fact there is some anecdotal evidence that the numbers expected are NOT turning up. A quick look at Wotif.com for London in the next two weeks shows ample availability for hotel rooms with considerable discounts.


This is despite rather weak analysis from Lloyd's regarding the multiplier effect of spending, ignoring what people would have invested or spent the money on had they had it in their own pockets - (it isn't relevant that Lloyd's is a bank that was bailed out by the state and is now majority state owned).   Goldman Sachs says:

Goldman expects the Olympics will boost UK economic output in the third quarter of 2013 by around 0.3 - 0.4 ppt quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) (+1.2-1.6%qoq annualized), but this will be largely reversed in the fourth quarter.

Noting that the economic impacts of the Sydney Olympics were negative compared to the forecasts.

Economic impacts of the Sydney Olympics

The effect is more serious than that when you consider that London hardly has any spare capacity in its transport infrastructure to cope with the deluge of people for major events. The result is that thousands of businesses are telling staff to take leave or to work from home during the Olympics. The reason being that significant parts of the public transport and road networks will be close to gridlock. Business trips are being deferred because of anticipated queues at immigration entering Heathrow. With business likely to be deferred over this period, and those undertaking business facing real increases in cost due to overcrowding on roads and public transport, it’s notable none of this was taken into account in the glowing self-justifying “business case” for the Olympics from the previous government.

The so-called “legacy” is also grossly exaggerated. The Olympic stadium is likely to be offered to a football team (yet to be selected) to be used at a price less than the cost it took to build it, effectively destroying some taxpayers’ wealth. The regeneration of the Stratford area will be seen in property values, but this remains a fraction of the total cost to taxpayers.

Unfortunately, what’s insidious is that it is completely politically incorrect for the media to talk about this now – in the run up to the Olympics. Any major newspaper publishing articles about it would be seen as churlish and spoiling something great. No major politician dare say that which millions of people are saying – how can a country with public debt expected to reach 92% of GDP, which is overspending to the tune of 8.3% of GDP, with a PM who talks about a decade of austerity, justify pouring billions of pounds into a two week celebratory event.

Yes most people will watch some of it, and enjoy that. However, they would’ve done so anyway. Yes, there will be a sense of national pride (except from some Scots and Ulster nationalists) about the event, and some London pride as well, but didn’t the Diamond Jubilee provide that too? Wouldn’t there have been pride if the British Olympic team competed and won elsewhere?

So I’m not celebrating. My money has gone into this event (more than the average, given my income). I am betting the net GDP effect, in the long term, will be negative, as it has taken money out of taxpayers’ hands. People who would otherwise have invested or spent it better, and will have deterred almost as many visitors as it will have attracted. It will have imposed significant costs on London businesses unrelated to the games, by almost gridlocking the transport network.

In short, a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.  It is a massive vanity project, and who really believes it will result in more than a short term boost to participation in athletics? Wishful thinking.

The Olympics should be left to profligate semi-authoritarian developing countries, willing to squander their national wealth on showing off, or by seriously commercially minded bids from cities that can demonstrate they can make money out of it, financially, without taking from taxpayers.

Let’s stop pretending the Olympics is an investment, it’s a legacy from a profligate, image obsessed former Labour Government, that is a commitment now. All that can be hoped for is that it goes off without a hitch, shows London in a positive light and that the property developed can be sold for the best possible price – and a lesson learnt to never ever do this again.