Steve Hemingway

This article is about how American laws which explicitly forbid buyers and sellers transacting with each other at a price which is agreeable to both of them.

It is a bit polemical but it makes the case very powerfully. High prices signal shortages, and these signals are received by suppliers who act on them to exploit them, and in doing so bring down those prices.

There does seem a deep-seated human instinctive resentment of traders. I recall a study in experimental economics where traders who did a lot of work determining the state of supply and demand in some institution in conditions of shortage (a prison?) were resented by the non-traders, even though the effort the traders expended exceeded the spread they made on the items they were trading. I wish I had a reference for this study.

I heard an Econtalk podcast by Russ Roberts in which he interviewed Gregg Easterbrook. The interview is about his book 'The Progress Paradox'. You can read about the book here.

The core message of the book is that we are hugely better off than our ancestors were. We are, on average, better off than we were ten years ago. Productivity is the key to this, as by being more productive we are able to consume more stuff than we used to.

Stuff doesn't just mean more TVs. It also means more health care, education, personal care, leisure, travel, heating, air conditioning, food, culture. The extent to which we are better off is much greater than most people imagine. Our standard of living is hundreds or thousands of times higher now than a hundred years ago. It is either being bad at maths (not understanding how even a few percent improvement per year when compounded over a century can add up to a huge aggregate increase in welfare.

There is a romanticism about the past. We mainly remember the chroniclers of the evils of the Industrial Revolution, but must be remembered is that urbanisation happened in the UK because the towns were better places to live than the country: otherwise there would not have been a huge migration to them. This is equally true throughout the world now, but especially in China.

There is a lot of fuss in the UK about the fact that private equity masters-of-the-universe pay a lower tax rate than their cleaners, who, it is implied are paid around the level of the minimum wage. There are similar concerns in the USA that very rich people, again private equity managing partners and hedge fund equivalents are paying very low tax rates.

In the UK many anomalies of taxation have been carefully preserved by Gordon Brown, for example:

1. variable but low tax rates on trusts,
   
2. very low tax rate on capital gains,
   
3. very high payroll taxes (employer's and employee's national insurance contributions) resulting in earned income being taxed at a much higher rate than unearned income,
   
4. special low rates for income from odd activities indulged in by the very rich, such as owning forests,
   
5. the notorious non-domiciliary rule that allows those with some pretext to argue they may not be permanently resident to escape all tax on their un-remitted income,
   
6. an inheritance tax law with threshold so low that most home owners in London are likely to pay it, but is so full of loopholes that anyone who is prepared to pay a decent tax lawyer can avoid it entirely,
   
7. very high marginal rates of tax with a very narrow tax base.
   

There are many press articles on the unfairness of these laws, but nobody seems to point to the reasons behind the existence of such blatantly unfair laws. Politicians want to win elections. If we assume they are rational and with to win elections, how could it be that laws such as these which are unpopular, and economically damaging remain on the statute book. Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that the rich people who the senior politicians depend on to keep their parties solvent like these laws very much indeed?

Regulation and other interference with the operation of the free market harms economic growth and leads to non-optimal allocation of resources. Capitalism as proved the most effective means of organising the means of production. There is a grudging recognition of this in the UK even by many Labour Party MPs although, sadly, not Gordon Brown.

Probably the market which is least free is the market in land. The Town and Country Planning act functions like the Soviet five year plan. Production targets for housing and commercial space are settled on by unelected committees and imposed on the building industry without any regard for price signals. A system like this creates some winners. I must admit to being a winner myself: because the price elasticity for the supply of housing in the UK is virtually zero it is possible to make money by investing in the existing housing stock safe in the knowledge that market forces will not increase the supply of housing and drive down its price, as would happen in other asset markets, such as the stockmarket. This effect, plus the incredible savings ratio of East Asia, and China in particular, which leads to a global glut of credit, has lead to UK house prices being higher than anywhere else on the planet - especially in London where supply constraints are greatest.

Unfortunately the system creates many more losers than winners. The English live in the worst houses in the developed world. UK interest rates are amongst the highest in the developed world, at least partly to constrain the rate of house price inflation. UK labour mobility is very low by international standards. There are many bad consequences of a planned economy approach to land use.

This is all presented, compellingly, by Alan W. Evans and Oliver Marc Hartwich in a paper for the Policy Exchange, the latest in a series pointing out the great damage created by the UK planning system. Sadly, no party is likely to make any significant changes to the current system. This is partly because it has widespread popular support. The authors of the report try to understand why voters support a policy that impoverishes them. It is possibly because voters enormously over-estimate the extent of urbansation in England as a whole and in the South East (including London). The figures are ten percent for England as a whole, and twenty percent for the South East. For the South as a whole the density is quite low as East Anglia and the South West have a low level of urbanisation.

I strongly urge you to read Evans and Hartwich's latest report, which is free to download. It is not a market fundamentalist polemic, but a balanced analysis of a severe but undiagnosed problem facing Britain today.

The best laid plans - How planning prevents economic growth

I enjoy listening to Russ Roberts podcasts on my phone. I heard a particularly good one, an interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. He has a unifying theory of political power, that encompasses democracy and autocracy. The wonderful thing about his theory is that it does not require dictators like Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il to behave irrationally. In fact their behaviour, including the complete impoverishment of their population by maintaining a black market in their destroyed currency.

Prof. Bueno de Medquita clearly understands the Nomenklatura system, and I fear, expects his listeners to as well. Apparently it is the most perfect system for preserving the power of the person at the top of the pyramid, and for extending power down the chain of command.

The podcast on Econblog.

Selectorate Theory on Wikipedia - just a general idea, do not judge it from this.

All about the Nomeklatura.

It has always seemed to me that the current land planning system in the UK is about as effective in providing us with the housing and commercial built environment, and infrastructure, as the old Soviet system was in building high quality motor cars for the average Soviet citizen. My latest rant on this matter was written very recently and can be read here.

The omniscient Martin Wolf has already, of course, fully solved this problem with an auction-based system that uses the price that developers are prepared to pay to develop land to determine where the need for building is greatest. Unfortunately, doubtless because Mr Wolf thought it would be an easy exercise for the reader, the details of how such an auction process were omitted from his article on the subject.

Fortunately Edward Davey and Tim Leunig of the Liberal party have filled in the details and have set out their proposals in today's FT, the key elements of which are as follows:

In stage one, the council asks any local landowners to submit sealed-bid letters stating the price at which they are willing to sell their land. Without existing planning permission – which would make the land more valuable – many landowners would be delighted to sell for five times current value. The landowners’ price would be binding , giving the council a call option for, say, one year.

In stage two, the council, in consultation with the local community, decides which land, if any, should be granted planning permission. It then auctions the call options to developers, thus capturing almost all of the increase in the land-value created by allowing development. With agricultural land averaging £10,000 and residential land about £3.2m a hectare, the council could potentially reap a profit of £3.1m a hectare from, in effect, selling its planning permission. Similar margins are available in urban areas. The council can spend these profits in any way, from subsidies for affordable housing, better local services to lower council tax.

The procedure described above seems to meet the requirements of

1. giving local control of development,
   
2. allowing local communities to capture the increase in land values that arises from the grant of planning permission,
   
3. removing planners from the allocation mechanism of allocating resources, thereby putting production of homes on a par with the production of bread or of motor cars.

I have always been puzzled about estimates of GDP. We regularly get told that GDP figures for China cannot be relied on, but by implication, figures produced by our own noble ONS will be accurate to the second decimal place. There are the known problems like the problem of non-monetary transactions being excluded from GDP altogether - such as the drop of GDP when a man marries his housekeeper. But the problem is much bigger than this.

This article by an FT staffer gives an insight into the scale of heroic guesswork are must be needed to get any sort of figure for GDP at all. It has often occurred to me, when involved in some transaction or investment or other that it is inconceivable that the state could possibly account for it as a part of the sum total of output or input that we label GDP. Most economics books talk a lot about the components of GDP and how they relate to each other but take the figure as an exogenous variable that may be measured as easily as we take the temperature inside a room.

This wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the attention that is always focussed on this number, not least by GB in his mantra about continued avoidance of recession, defined in terms of changes in GDP, over his stint as chancellor.

It is quite astonishing that any attention is paid at all to the number, let alone the droning on of the Clunking Fist about how we've survived another quarter where this number has narrowly escaped going down again.

There was a fashion about a decade ago to measure inflation by looking at the GDP deflator - the number required to convert (real) GDP to nominal GDP. This went hand-in-hand with the idea that monetary and fiscal policy should target nominal GDP growth, rather than inflation. My own preference would be to target productivity, but as far as I can see, this suffers from all the difficulties of measurement as GDP and a few more.

In the same edition of the FT is this article by Martin Weald which again points out the distorting effects the very low rate of tax on real estate, especially owner-occupied real estate, compared to that on other assets.

Regular readers will remember my obsessive interest in reforming the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which, you will recall, is, in my opinion, one of the most economically damaging laws on the statute book. This article by Edward Davey and Tim Leunig offers what appears to me a clean mechanism for allocating land for development. Martin Wolfe has written about this in the past, but the article by Davey and Leunig gives an explicit market mechanism, which solves many of the problems of valuation that other proposals suffer from. The wonderful thing is that it entirely gets rid of the need for planners and valuers!

If only it were that easy. The government has missed such targets for years. There is no reason to think that Britain will build 240,000 houses next year. It may even fail to hit the previous target of 190,000 houses. The reason is simple: central government has created a planning system that gives local authorities no incentive to grant planning permission. Local people generally oppose new housing and the gains councils make from “section 106” payments – made by developers to help offset the cost of local infrastructure created by a new project – are tiny.

The government has proposed a planning supplement to give councils a “modest” proportion of the rise in land values from development. Yet when this was tried before, it failed. When one company owns the land continuously its value is hard to ascertain. Further, landowners can sit on the land until the planning supplement is abolished. This policy could mean less, not more, housebuilding. No wonder Monday’s green paper promises not to introduce the supplement until at least 2009 and then only if government is unable to come up with a better plan.

Ecuador is an interesting place. The president and congress are considered corrupt. Presidents last a short time, usually displaced by popular discontent to be replaced by someone even worse.

Most corrupt regimes are fairly long-lasting. Dictators the world over, once they work out who to bribe, usually manage to remain in power for decades. Just think of Fidel Castrol, Kim Jong Il, Robert Mugabe and, sadly, the new regime in South Africa.

Ecuador, in contrast, seems to change presidents as often as most people change their underpants. The last one seems to have been displaced by some kind of popular uprising, which makes the place a lot more democratic than, say, China. The current president seems to be some kind of disciple of Hugo Chavez, and is proposing to abandon the dollarisation of the economy, settling instead for some kind of Mercosurian version of the Euro. He has hardly has been elected before he was caught on some kind of videotape planning to manipulate the government bond market, renege on sovereign debt etc. etc.

In fact the country, although poor by European standards, seems to be getting on with things. There are plenty of cars on the roads, I didn't see any Brazilian-style shanty towns, the population, especially of Guayquil, seemed egregiously well-fed. I can imagine that the local branch of Weight Watchers is pretty busy.

I would guess that there is a an extreme inequality of distribution of income. I warned recently that I could be robbed at any time. There are innumerable guards with sub-machine guns hanging around the doorways to the banks. Guards are paid to mind motor cars overnight. People's drives have heavy railings to stop people stealing their vehicles.

From the point of view of the tourist, Ecuador has a lot going for it. Friendly people, cheap food and accommodation, familiar currency, familiar language. From the point of view of the investor, or of the average citizen, I'm not so sure.

There have been a number of articles recently announcing a drop in the number of divorces, and a drop in the marriage rate (e.g. this UK Legal News story).

I went to a wedding last week. The bride and groom were both from the UK, and intended to live in the UK. But they got married in Cyprus, and have no intention of registering their marriage in the UK. A lot of people seem to want to get married abroad these days. They can guarantee good weather, and a much cheaper venue. By choosing the right location they can save the cost of travelling to their honeymoon. There is a lot going for the decision, as far as the bride and groom are concerned.

I am not sure about the benefits for the guests, particularly the poor, elderly and younger guests. Travelling abroad requires a considerably bigger committment than simply getting up a bit earlier on a Saturday, especially if the wedding is in the school holidays, as this was.

The newlyweds insist that their marriage is fully recognised in British law, but I know that overseas weddings are not always recognised in UK law (particularly immigration law). Also it is certainly not the case that lesbian marriage, recognised in Canada, for example, is equally recognised in UK law.

I am not entirely sure that the law should get involved in a private relationship between two individuals, unless they want it to, but there is certainly a long history of the state being the third party in any marriage contract.

We no longer need to elect the people who will make laws for us. The latest, greatest idea from Gordon Brown is to have Citizens' Juries to make policy. 'Dave' Cameron has decided that the solution is to invite celebrities like Zac Goldsmith to perform essentially the same function. The common theme is that parties no longer stand for any coherent philosophy.

I can understand that this is appealing to the electorate. Politicians have been avoiding ideology for a long time now. Gordon Brown has never recovered from mentioning Post Neoclassical endogenous growth theory in a speech. With good sense the British have always been a nation of anti-intellectuals. Samuel Johnson is celebrated for supposedly demolishing the the solipsism of Bishop Berkeley by kicking a kerbstone.

There is a particular distrust of economics, the science labelled as 'dismal' by Carlyle. Central bankers usually hit the headlines when things go slightly wrong, as when Northern Rock had problems paying its depositors recently. I fact the management of the economy in western countries is exemplary.

My fear is that as politics increasingly becomes a branch of marketing, we will end up being governed by estate agents. This will not be an improvement. Believe me: I'm an estate agent.

I have never really before seen the environmentalists' argument against Bjorn Lomborg. In a nutshell, he argues that there are many better ways of spending our money than trying to bring down carbon dioxide emissions. Rather than just having an emotional reaction to the latest perceived environmental problem, he argues, we should analyze what impact on the earth, and on human society, it will have, and spend money controlling it only if it is cost effective to do so. It is very interesting that the line is attack is not to challenge any of his figures, which encourages me to think that his analysis is perfectly sound, but to argue that the problem of climate change is so serious that any attempt to quantify the magnitude of the problem, and to scientifically assess the damage it is likely to cause and to look at dealing with this damage directly is some kind of sacrilege.

Some of Mr Burke's argument are truly extraordinary, especially from a Green. One is that if the costs of invading Iraq were properly computed and compared to the benefits of removing Saddam then we and the US would never have gone to war in the first place, but that because decisions like this are taken by some process called 'politics' the fact that we did indeed take this action proves that the 'economic' analysis is somehow flawed.

Oddly enough, later in the article, Burke accuses Lomborg of practising politics, rather than sticking to economics, even though politics was previously asserted to be a somehow superior means of arriving at big decisions.

But the most extraordinary part of the article comes at the end where Burke lays into the Economist magazine for giving a platform for Lomborg. He states Until it chose to give a Danish lecturer in politics of no academic distinction whatsoever the rare accolade of a named essay, the world had remained in peaceful ignorance of Lomborg's opinions.. This actually shows how close the environmental movement is to a religion. Burke says: But its heavy promotion of Lomborg's faith-based approach to the future suggests that its current editors have changed sides. They should be ashamed.. I have no doubt which side is faith-based, and it is not Lomborg's.

References

There is an amazing amount of stuff about this on the web. Much of it biased. Wikipedia is a good place to start.

I think that the government doesn't care much about our personal liberties. I think it is the instinct of all those in power to control those of us who are not. The government doesn't really need an excuse to do this, but when one is available, such as the perceived terrorist threat, they seize it for all they are worth.

Thus the ID card scheme was born. It seems to me that this is a classic case of IT mission creep. As a one-time programmer I know in my bones that a lean, spare, flexible system with proper interfaces is much more powerful than one which is cross-braced with a myriad of special bells and whistles added too early in the design cycle. Most government IT systems seem to be of this latter type, particularly the computerisation of the NHS.

David Birch, in the current edition of Prospect Magazine, has proposed a brilliant design sketch (intro here). This provides a means of associating an individual, defined by an appropriate biometric signature, with a number. This is really all that is needed, and addresses all the problems about security and confidentiality at a stroke. The essential idea is that we are simply allocated a unique number (a classic database primary key) by an iris scanning machine. The first time we use this machine we are allocated a new number. The next time we simply get that originally-allocated number back. These machines could be installed widely in public places. The database backing this system would be extremely compact - just the biometric signature and the key.

Other systems which required positive identification could then use this key. Perfect!

Pensions seem a great thing. The government encourages pension savings by allowing us to save out of our gross income and by exempting pension savings from income and capital gains taxes.

So far so good. However, pension saving bears a huge burden of regulatory compliance. There are high costs associated with employing armies of actuaries to administer and oversee pension savings, and there are heavy opportunity costs of restricting savings to those areas the government deems suitable for pension investment.

I don't think that anybody really knows every rule that governs pensions. There are, as Google puts it 'about 11,200 pages' on the HMRC website that mention the word 'pension' or 'pensions'. I understand that early drafts of the overview of the so-called pensions simplification that came into force in April last year ran to over 3000 small-type pages.

It is not permitted for pensions to invest in residential property, and it is not permitted for pension equity to benefit from significant gearing, and it is not permitted for pension savings in close companies (fewer than ten shareholders). As far as I am concerned, these are not minor restrictions.

It is, it seems possible to invest in overseas companies, and these companies can invest in anything they like, including residential property. They are also permitted to borrow. It has been suggested to me that if I can 'round up' ten investors who would be interested in investing alongside me in a company, for example in the IoM, we can gear up this company and invest our capital in some suitable investment. These investors could invest some of their pension savings, as I plan to, or invest any other savings.

My preference would be for one of the offshore development vehicles set up by Chinese companies to benefit from a reduced Chinese tax charge. These are typically registered in the BVI or similar tax-haven countries, but investing in any Chinese property exposure seems good to me.

If you are interested in joining such a syndicate, please get in touch. I am not offering total democracy, but I will certainly be happy to discuss exactly what the moneys are invested in. As you have probably guessed, I have been in discussion with a pensions specialist about this kind of structure.

I have also discovered that, in principle, the requirement to liquidate the pension investment and purchase an annuity can be deferred at least until age 85. This removes one of the other major reservations I have about increased pension savings.

Whether the not James Watson's expanation of Africa's underperformance is right or not, it is surely worth asking the question. It has been suggested that the relative underperformance of Africa is that economic failure in the nation states on the continent have not resulted in military failure and invasion by a neighbour, as it did through most of the history of Europe. Because it suited America and the Soviet Union to have client states throughout the continent from the end of the colonial era until today, failed states with deeply corrupt and economically suicidal governments have been propped up by military and humanitarian aid.

Empires like Britain's arose because market-based reforms allowed more efficient logistics, and a broader tax-base to finance military expansion. Now to the extent that African countries have armies they are used against their own citizens, or at least vunerable citizens of neighbouring countries.

Maybe this is all crap, but the idea that Zimbabweans are starving because of something the Brits did fifty years ago seems utterly implausible.

It is handy to have some crunchy stats on the current state of British Education:

* 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school curriculum.
* 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
* 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
* After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled:
* 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.
* Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
* 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
* The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the level of Germany or the USA.

(see this page). I always believed that in a world of the internet, in a country with a free press, statistics like these would be widely known. Unfortunately neither parents nor politicians wish to face the reality of the British education system today. The Labour Party has a visceral hate of private education to the extent that a politician like Charlie Falconer was told that he could never be selected for a winnable seat because he had chosen to have his children privately educated. The Liberal Party, trying to position themselves to the left of Labour have a broadly similar position.

The Conservative Party is subtly different. Mavericks like Boris Johnson occasionally point out the nakedness of the emperor, but generally they are too timid to take on the Education establishment. Any discussion of the failings of state schools tends to end up looking at the relative success of private schools, and it is an article of faith in the Conservative that to support private anything is to throw away votes. I think that the Cameroons secretly like to have a failing state system, because this means that their own offspring, privately educated, have huge advantages over the rest of their cohort in the job market. Politicians may look to their own jobs first, but the jobs of their offspring are not far behind.

Maybe I am being too cynical. Certainly many people realise that state schools fail not only bright kids, but average ones too. But as the main parties agree to keep any radical reform of Education off the agenda things will remain dismal. No wonder that nearly all new jobs created in the economy have gone to foreigners. As the Economist points out "in the two years from the spring of 2005, 540,000 foreigners have found jobs in Britain while 270,000 British workers have lost them." (here).

One of these days a politician will speak out about this subject without hypocrisy. I am not going to hold my breath.

I urge you to read this article and to give thanks to God for not being at the mercy of People who run Housing Benefit Departments.

In my day-job as a letting agent have a very limited contact with Housing Benefit Offices. My experience is not as negative as that of Intrepid Carpet, but I can well imagine what it is like for him. Generally Herts Lettings will not let to any tenants on Housing Benefit, not because we think that they will be bad tenants, but because we don't want to have to deal with Housing Benefit. Random amounts of rent are paid in an irregular stream, generally at intervals of one week or four weeks. Strange gaps appear around the end of the fiscal year. Generally the benefit is not sufficient to cover the rent and the tenant has to pay a supplement, usually via a monthly standing order, to compensate. Without a very good accounting system it is virtually impossible to keep track of arrears.

The bigger problem is that there really is no mechanism through which claimants are ever going to receive anything other than the most unsatisfactory treatment from the authorities. There is no economic incentive for councils to employ staff who are remotely efficient and so benefit offices, I am sure, will attract the most useless sorts. Failing to reply to written communication is no unheard of in business, but it is inconceivable that anyone ever loses his job in the state sector for this kind of failure.

Part of the problem is that benefits are impossibly complicated. There are hundreds of benefits that may be claimed and neither claimants nor staff are likely to be able to understand them. Nobody loses except the taxpayer, but since they are such a diffuse group they can never overcome the power of the vested interest.

Intrepid Carpet thinks that things might be a bit better under the Conservatives. I think this is unlikely although it is conceivable that some simplification might be attempted.

I had never previously heard of The Corner House. It has today succeeded in challenging the government's decision to drop the investigation into the Al Yamanah arms contract on the grounds that failure to do so would result in Saudi Arabia refusing to cooperate with the UK in anti-terror activity. Read more here. The Corner House challenged the govt. under the OECD's Anti-Bribery Convention, which the UK signed in 1997.

I wish them well.

This article, and, more interestingly, this podcast give argue that the consequences of Global Warming on species extinction will be modest. The basic argument is that only when populations are unable to migrate north (in the northern hemisphere) because of natural or man-made barriers, will extinctions occur.

The interesting thing is that the author of these views is not a political hack who is a professional climate-change denier, but rather an academic biologist who has been studying the impact of climate change on animal species since 1968. Interestingly, a major tool used by Prof. Botkin has been computer modelling, which he modestly admits is capable of serious errors. Given that so much of the argument for the potential damage to be caused is based around the interpretation of computer models, this warning is very salutary.

I went to a meeting at the village hall in Knebworth to hear about the so-called Knebworth Options Report.

I wanted to refer to my previous post, probably on livejournal, where I commented on the planning meeting where the Parish Council attempted to free themselves from the mandate they received at a meeting in 1996 binding them to oppose unconditionally any application for planning permission to develop on the Green Belt on the edge of the current village. As far as I can recall there was no enthusiasm for permitting development on the Green Belt at that meeting, nor has the Survey and resulting Knebworth Parish Plan.

However, once again the Knebworth Parish Council convened this meeting to push the idea of developing on the Green Belt. This time the Trojan Horse was the relocation of Lowe's, which they somehow believe they must help to fund. There is some concern about the congestion caused by delivery lorries coming to Lowe's, and it is equally clear from remarks made by Peter Lowe that they recognise that they have outgrown the site. Of course Peter would be delighted with the idea that he can get financial help from local government.

The plan involves, perhaps unsurprisingly, Henry Lytton-Cobbold selling off a considerable amount of his land for development. At 1.8 million pounds per acre net of planning gain costs this suits him very well. My doubt is that there is anything in this for the ordinary resident of Knebworth.

It was all conveniently ignored that in the NHDC Local Development Framework it was considered that further development of Knebworth was undesirable.

You are urged to view the evidence yourself at the following websites:

knebworthoptionsreport.org

A site to promote the idea, created by Knebworth House

Another site that Knebworth House wishes to develop

My views on the Knebworth Options proposals are as follows:

Greenfield development would involve 35-40% of 'affordable homes' which would bring hundreds of housing benefits claimants into the village.

I do not believe that it is the job of the Parish Council to get involved in subsidising the relocation of a commercial enterprise such as Chas Lowe's.

I strongly believe that it is not the job of the Parish Council to support the development of Green Belt land in order to benefit the Lytton Cobbold family to the tune of possibly tens of millions of pounds, whether paid to the Knebworth House Educational and Preservation Trust or not.

I believe that the Lowes site, which is on a main road that will become busier and busier with every passing year is the right place to locate community facilities.

I believe that with the government paying each GP in the UK more than a quarter of a million pounds a year they can jolly well pay for their own surgery. I cannot see that Knebworth really needs a GP's surgery anyway.

If you are a Knebworth resident I strongly urge you to register your 'vote' at the options report website.

Gordon Brown has been accused of wasting £9bn of public money on his flagship tax credit policy, after official figures showed the Revenue made huge overpayments in the first three years of the scheme.

The latest data, produced by the Office for National Statistics, revealed that tax administrators wrongly handed out £1.7bn to families in 2005-06, bringing to £5.7bn the total amount overpaid since 2003. Much of it will be irrecoverable.

The Liberal Democrats said that their own research showed the true scale of the money wasted was much greater, and equivalent to one pound in every five paid out by the Revenue.

Why is it that this sort of thing, when it was discovered as recently ago as May, attracted such little opprobium?

The Tax Credit idea is that the payments mechanisms of PAYE can be used to pay benefits. Entitlements to benefits are roughly related to income. It also depends on a complicated slew of other life circumstances. A straightforward mechanism for helping people on low incomes would be to simply use their taxable income, which they have to declare to the Inland Revenue. This could be used to compute a cash sum to be paid. This system would be essentially foolproof, assuming that the system of collecting income tax works. It doesn't even require the PAYE system to work, which provides for collecting tax over the course of the year by withholding a proportion of income. But because of a few shortcomings - the need to vary the level of benefit over the course of the year, Gordon Brown chose the current system, with a complexity so great it is impossible in practice to operate it. Of course if one is on a low income, having to wait until the end of the tax year for benefit could be rather painful. Wealthier individuals don't worry about this because they can borrow. This is one of the many areas where the inability to access credit is a problem for low income people. I wish I knew the best solution, but it is hard to imagine that it could be more expensive, or unsatisfactory, than the Tax Benefit system.

From the FT, possibly only with a subscription, here.

This is a very interesting post, and almost more interesting are the comments that follow it. My instincts are libertarian, but the commenters on this post make some very strong arguments that a capitalist free market approach is simply not viable for providing an acceptable spread of health care.

A Duoist makes an interesting point, which I feel was rather neglected by the other commenters.

Defra's Environmental Contract pages are a masterpiece of woolly-thinking nonsense. Take a look at this:

Who are the parties to the environmental contract?

All are welcome to take part but it is too late to wait for the unconvinced. Action must begin today and from this action it is hoped that others will be inspired to play their part in the process.

The contract a very over-extended analogy. The idea seems to be to avoid giving the impression that the government is forcing 'green' behaviour on individuals and firms, but is instead somehow entering into a contract with them, doing it's part in return for green behaviour on the part of them.

The problem is that the essential nature of a contract is that both sides enter into it willingly. But it is quite clear that the government will prosecute citizens who fail to carry out some (or possibly all) of their obligations under the 'contract'.

It beggars belief that Milliband when he was at Defra could have agreed this complete rubbish being published. One dispairs of the thought that his is not in charge of foreign policy for this country.

read Go here to read about this pile of utter rubbish.

The idea is that the local community is consulted about what development will take place in their district. The idea is, presumably, to allow local residents to decide how the district where they live will evolve in terms of development. The problem is that there is not the remotest chance that by asking a random unrepresentative sample of local residents questions like:

• Q 18 - What design features and characteristics would you like to see in the new neighbourhoods?
• Q 14 - Would you support building at densities higher than 30 dph [dwellings per hectare] in certain locations?
• Q 6 - should the release of employment land be phased? ['employment land presumably means areas zoned for commercial and industrial use']
• Q 3 - What features of the existing natural environment should be retained during and after the new growth takes place?

I could go on, and on, and on. But the reality is that this exercise serves only to create employment for consultants and council employees. Q3 is interesting. Most people would like some large mature trees in a residential neighbourhood, but they are virtually always removed, because insurers won't take the risk of root growth disrupting drains and foundations.

The Ford Motor Company doesn't send a questionnaire out to the population of the country asking them what they'd like to see in the next version of the Mondeo. They get an idea of what people are prepared to pay for. What people do, and what they say, are two very different things.

"Does Education Matter?" is the title of a book by Prof. Alison Wolf of Kings College, London. It is a wonderful book.

Oddly enough I just read this profile of Marcus Ospel, chairman and previously CEO of UBS. He left school at 17 and this didn't prevent him from rising to the top and hanging on there for a very long time.

A lot of the book is concerned with the business of vocational training in the UK and the baleful influence of the CBI on government policy. The internal contradictions in the system that lead to uncountable NVQs ('No Value Qualifications') the training courses of many of which were developed at large cost never to be gained by a single employer.

Alison Wolf what seems to be a unique combination of an economist's outlook and an education professional's deep understanding of how the education industry is structured. She points out the existence of tradeoffs that politicians seem compelled to turn a blind eye to, such as the impossibility of having a nationalised higher education industry with soviet tractor factory style targets which is nevertheless expected to deliver excellence.

Her survey of the international scene is very good, and even better is her analysis of why aspects of an education policy that is successful in one country cannot be easily imported into the UK. Not least is her explanation of why the German system of apprenticeships, which has been so successful, cannot be transferred successfully to the UK. As usual the point is that there is competition to get an apprenticeship in Germany, and therefore employers accept apprentices, not because of the skills they have acquired (e.g. BMW employs a lot of qualified bakers) but because the qualification has value as a positional good.

Unfortunately the book is not recent enough to talk about the Swedish system, the great white hope for UK primary and secondary schools. The book is eloquent in explaining why bureaucrats react to personal incentives, just like the rest of us, and not purely to achieve the goals of their organisations. I learned that there is a whole discipline dedicated to understanding this divergence (between public and private incentives) called public choice theory.

I have failed to do justice to this book. It is full of insights. You should read it, and not partial and distorted summaries, such as this.

This article on Building is pretty astonishing. It explains that houses built for sale to private individuals are of too low a quality to be offered to the poor. The idea that it is not acceptable for poor indigenous Brits to be offered sub-standard social housing has moved to a different level. What we now have it the assertion that it is unacceptable for low-income tenants to have to put up with private sector standards.

Words fail me.

This is from David Cameron's supposedly triumphant conference speech yesterday.

"My values are Conservative values. Many people wrongly believe that the Conservative Party is all about freedom. Of course we care passionately about freedom from oppression and state control. That’s why we stood up for Georgia and wasn’t it great to have the Georgian Prime Minister with us here, speaking today? But freedom can too easily turn into the idea that we all have the right to do whatever we want, regardless of the effect on others. That is libertarian, not Conservative - and it is certainly not me.

For me, the most important word is responsibility. Personal responsibility. Professional responsibility. Civic responsibility. Corporate responsibility. Our responsibility to our family, to our neighbourhood, our country. Our responsibility to behave in a decent and civilised way. To help others. That is what this Party is all about. Every big decision; every big judgment I make: I ask myself some simple questions. Does this encourage responsibility and discourage irresponsibility? Does this make us a more or less responsible society? Social responsibility, not state control. Because we know that we will only be a strong society if we are a responsible society. "

You can read the full speech here.

It is very sad that David Cameron creates a aunt sally of Libertarianism. Libertarianism is based on not causing harming to others and to describe it as some kind of anarchistic free for all is a travesty.

The speech is big on identifying problems - too many quangos, too many (five million) working age adults living on benefits, a dysfunctional NHS, rubbish schools. But it really only talks about a single solution: the Swedish solution. Infinitely light on details, I somehow think that the independence of these new schools is not something that the headmaster of David's old school would recognise as meaningful freedom from the interference of the state.

Conspicuous by its absence is the EU. The elephant in the room, the body responsible for 84% of new legislation in the UK is not mentioned on a single occasion. And the environment, David's initial choice of fluffy policy area with which to rehabilitate the Tories with the electorate was on this occasion also totally absent.

At about the time I was born, two US professors looked at how gearing affects the value of a firm. They discovered that like a lot of "businessman's economics" the idea that shareholder value could be improved by the firm taking on any particular amount of debt was flawed. This is a blindingly simple insight as the discussion in Wikipedia makes clear. The two professors' names were Miller and Modigliani. Imagine two firms, identical except in respect of their capital structure. One geared, the other one not. The returns to an investor will be the same given that an investor can choose to gear his own investment in the ungeared firm by forming a portfolio composed of the equity combined with the appropriate number of bonds.

Of course governments continue to incentivise firms to gear by giving special tax advantages to debt finance relative to equity finance for reasons which are quite incomprehensible to me and clearly didn't help in creating the current fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. In principle an investing company (e.g. an investment trust) could itself benefit from the interest payments it makes on debt finance so presumably the theory actually may be valid in the presence of taxes.

The idea that risk is a knob that can be twiddled by the investor is one of the key insights which go into Modern Portfolio Theory which concludes that the market portfolio gives the best tradeoff of risk and return, and that any desired level of risk can be obtained by simply gearing it up.

The funny thing is that both these theorems, which seem pretty watertight to me, are dismissed by most real world practitioners of investment, because if market professionals behaved as if both of them were true there would be a lot less in the way of fees paid to the financial sector, both for those who arrange debt finance for companies and those who manage investments for clients.

To my mind this shows that the insights of Public Choice Theory are applicable to the financial sector. The sector behaves the way it does because of the strong incentives felt by the relatively small number of practitioners in it, even those incentives result in a net cost to the large number of savers and borrowers that the financial sector intermediates between. It seems clear that these perverse incentives have resulted in major misallocations of capital in the economy, e.g. from savers to unbankable US and UK housebuyers.

Politicians talk about new regulations so that this crisis will never happen again. I think it is pretty clear that they will miss the true cause of the crisis, because the lobbying group that benefits from the current structure of the industry is much better financed and organised than any group that ordinary providers and consumers of capital could possibly be. Committees will be set up which employ the very professionals who caused this crisis, do not understand why it arose, and who will propose the kind of detailed procedural regulation that creates large barriers to entry (and therefore ensures large economic rents to the financial sector) just like the mass or financial sector regulation that has been enacted in the past.

John Kay understands all these things and has recently written about Miller and Modigliani in the FT: Surplus Capital Not for Wimps After All. So does his former co-author Mervyn King, I'm sure. Kay also understands that regulation will simply not work, so he's definitely not going to get a call from Alistair Darling.

This article explains how it came to pass that we know what Rupert and Elizabeth Murdoch, Oleg Deripaska, George Osborne, Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and Nat Rothschild were doing on and in the sea around Corfu during the summer.

It's interesting that the press gave the impression of David Cameron enjoying a rain-drenched and wind-blown holiday in Cornwall for his summer break, but more importantly it shows whose company our leading politicians choose to keep. It could hardly be otherwise. The population now takes very little interest in politics. They accept what they are told in The Sun and The Times, and what the various press offices of the main parties choose to communicate to the press. This all requires them to be on good terms with the media and with people who can give them money. No longer is it sufficient to get your wife to drive you around the village halls of England to get your message across. You must now, at the very least, set up WebCameron.

It's quite clear why politicians behave like this. People imagined that Tony Blair was some kind of aberration for being so obsessed with raising money for his party and himself, but really he, like the rest, is a creature of his environment. The unhappy thing is that it will inevitably lead to what we see in the USA: that is the systematic skewing of policies in favour of the selectorate - the people who actually choose the leaders. This selectorate is not exclusively wealthy businessmen. Certainly the unions remain powerful in the USA and in the UK. We will never see any kind of voucher system or realistic choice of schools because the teaching unions are opposed to it and they give a lot of money to the Democrats and to the Labour Party in their respective countries.

I am not a socialist, but do look for a level playing field in society. There will always be a conflict of interest between the haves and have nots (or maybe it is now the 'haves and have yachts'). Generally, a liberal economic agenda will result in a better outcome for everyone in society, but if the wealthy are seen to hijack decision making and tilt the playing field to their short-term advantage we will forever be bound into an economically inefficient organised society. It doesn't seem to me that there is a natural 'thermodynamic equilibrium' to which societies tend. If we allow the likes of Deripaska to exert the political influence they seek we will end in the UK like most of the pseudo-democracies of South East Asia or Latin America or, indeed, Deripaska's own Russia. I am not entirely sure that America, where democracy is more worshipped than practised is safe from going down this route.

I contributed a couple of mini-reviews to Amazon about books that made an impact on me. You should be able to read them here and here. These links may not work - Amazon doesn't make it particularly easy to link to a particular review. I think you can probably find them via my page as a customer on Amazon.

These are both books about China. I have quite a collection, but these are among the best. I plan to write another one about 'The China Dream' by Joe Studwell, which I'm currently reading. I have learned quite a lot from travelling to China, probably more by talking to Chinese people here in the UK and in Singapore, but probably most by reading books and newspapers/the internet. I am a firm subscriber to the theory that travel narrows the mind, and that travelling once to a country more or less guarantees that the traveller will never have a deep insight into that country. I am reminded of a relative of mine who travelled to the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos was in power. She came back from the visit with an unshakable belief in the benevolence of Ferdinand and his then wife Imelda, dismissing my comments that he was a complete kleptocrat.

The title of this entry is not likely to entice the casual visitor to read on. I don't suppose that 0.05% of the population of the EU have ever thought about carbon steel fastenings, let alone how many are imported from China, let alone what the EU Trade Commission decide about the pricing of these things.

I didn't until I discovered that no Chinese factory will quote for fastenings to be supplied to the EU. Even plasterboard kits, with the board itself, channelling and fastenings, are impossible to obtain quotes for. It is remotely plausible that the Chinese really are seeking to destroy EU factories making nails, but it's hard to imagine that this is a more plausible explanation than that Chinese factories have such a huge advantage in terms of currency exchange rate and the costs of all factors of production that they can indeed sell for less than the marginal cost of production in EU factories, especially in high-cost economies such as Germany, France, Italy and the UK.

The result is that competition is destroyed and we have all ended up paying more for everything that is produced using these fastenings. Maybe this was a price worth paying for the jobs that have been 'saved'. But undoubtedly the finished goods manufacturers who had to bear these higher costs of fastenings will have laboured under the disadvantage of a higher input cost and a reduced competitiveness. Who can really say whether the consequent reduced production in these industries will have been less, in terms of employment, than the higher employment in the fastenings business?

Maybe I'm missing something. I am certainly no economist. Maybe the inscrutable Chinese really have a cunning plan to flood the EU with cheap screws and nails, then, when all the West Midland nail factories have gone under, suddenly increase the price of nails and bring our economy to its knees. From what I can tell, borrowing from our banks would have been a much more effective way of doing that.

Of course, the Commission, in its infinite wisdom, have seen fit to keep the proposal out of the public view. It is possible that an email to trade-ad-fasteners@ec.europa.eu requesting a copy will produce one. Why this might be possible when the document has not been posted on a website will remain a mystery to me until the day I die, I'm sure.

Downing Street are taking the unusually brave step of actually engaging with the public, albeit only through YouTube. The idea of "Ask The PM" is this: think of a question you would like Gordon Brown to answer, then post it on YouTube and the most popular entries will be answered by the Prime Minister himself. The above short clip is designed to force GB to justify his policy.

Note that I am not necessarily opposed to a wealth transfer from my generation to later ones.

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2008/11/another-poke-in-the-eye-for-freedom/

Willem Buiter is fast becoming my favourite blogger. This post is outstanding. His European perspective is a wonderful antidote to the UK-centric line that most columnists take.

It is very sad that no opposition party has taken this issue with more force. As Buiter says, all governments have form. It would be wonderful if a serious politician could write the following, or even something approximating its sentiment but in less eloquent terms.

Soon after gaining office, the joys of secrecy, suppressing information and denying access to information are discovered. An awareness grows that openness and accountability are nuisances which can be avoided or made more tolerable to government ministers by restricting the public's information. It also becomes apparent to government ministers that the defence of the national interest and the safeguarding of national security surprisingly often (and no doubt regrettably!) require that information be kept secret that would be politically embarrassing to the government or the ruling party or personally embarrassing to individual members of government, were it to come out. This miraculous congruence of personal, private, party-political, public and national interests becomes a self-evident fact to politicians of any ilk, soon after their party gains office.

This post on the TPA website is one of the many about the raid on Damian Green's office. It makes the point that a huge amount of legislation has been passed which makes this kind of thing more likely, but it is only now that MPs seem to be remotely concerned about this kind of thing.

This post is typical of the excellent stuff that the TPA put out.

All these posts to me are a consequence of one thing: that without an incentive to do something, humans will not do it. We react to physical immediate demands. No MEP is remotely inconvenienced by the ludicrous processing from Brussels to Strasbourg, and so they "can't be arsed", in the modern idiom, even to press a button or mark a cross or whatever to vote against it. You can bet that they are not so lethargic when it comes to getting press coverage.

Strasbourg

I have just read "Digital Britain - the Interim Report" by Lord Carter and a bunch of the usual suspects. It makes deeply depressing reading, and illustrates, to me, the futility of having reports like this.

It's hard to know where to begin criticising it. It is written in the most contorted language:for example, "In the final Digital Britain Report, we will establish whether a long-term and sustainable second public service organisation providing competition for quality to the BBC can be defined and designed, drawing in part on Channel 4's assets and a re-cast remit. It would be a body with public service at its heart, but one which is able to develop flexible and innovative partnerships with the wider private and public sector. While it makes sense to begin by looking at public sector bodies- Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide- the Government is currently evaluating a range of options and organisational solutions for achieving such an outcome. "

It is fairly obsessed with the BBC, which it mentions 65 times, almost once per page, even though clearly this is at its heart an analogue organisation. It seems to take the view that the internet has grown in the UK largely without needing any help from the government, now it is large and important it will have to be closely regulated, controlled, restricted and managed by the public sector if it is to survive. One of the most outrageous parts of the report concerns net neutrality, which bizarrely it decides would be a barrier to the growth of the net: "Internet Service Providers can take action to manage the flow of data - the traffic - on their networks to retain levels of service to users or for other reasons. The concept of so-called 'net neutrality', requires those managing a network to refrain from taking action to manage traffic on that network. It also prevents giving to the delivery of any one service preference over the delivery of others. Net neutrality is sometimes cited by various parties in defence of internet freedom, innovation and consumer choice. The debate over possible legislation in pursuit of this goal has been stronger in the US than in the UK. Ofcom has in the past acknowledged the claims in the debate but have also acknowledged that ISPs might in future wish to offer guaranteed service levels to content providers in exchange for increased fees. In turn this could lead to differentiation of offers and promote investment in higher-speed access networks. Net neutrality regulation might prevent this sort of innovation. "

As Eric Raymond has pointed out the real problem is the monopoly position that the telco's have of controlling the local loop, which, of course, as you'd expect from a monopoly situation, very low investment.

I wrote to my MP, and in order to pad this first post in ages, I thought I'd copy the letter here:

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Barbara Follett MP

Stevenage

Thursday 5 February 2009 Stephen Hemingway

[my address removed]

stephen.hemingway@gmail.com

01438 221370

Dear Barbara Follett,

I was appalled at the decision of the authors of the Digital Britain Interim Report to oppose enforcement of net neutrality. It seems to me quite clear that allowing ISP's to charge content providers as well as content consumers will damage the essential "level playing field" environment that the internet currently offers to content providers. I strongly urge you to support legal enforcement of net neutrality and oppose the recommendation of the report.

Net neutrality may not be a big political issue in the UK right now, but it certainly is in the USA. Barack Obama's clear and unequivocal support for net neutrality was, in my view, a major reason why he had overwhelming support from bloggers and the "digerati" who are becoming increasingly influential in forming political opinion, whatever Hazel Blears might think. 

To my mind it's a clear choice: allow BT, Virgin Media and their ilk to set the agenda or support something that will, when it understands the issues, be overwhelmingly supported by the electorate.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Hemingway.

Slightly amazingly, 10 Downing St. decided to approve my proposed petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Allow comments to be made on all YouTube videos uploaded by 10 Downing Street.". You can see it on the Downing St. website.

Basically I decided to see what all the fuss was about when Gordon put his famous Youtube video up explaining what he was going to do about expenses. It's actually quite hard to find this video because it has such a low Page Rank compared to the countless video clips edited from this and other GB clips to mock him.

I'm sure if Gordon hadn't suffered a terminal shrivelling of his power the slaves in the back rooms of No. 10 would never have dared to allow my proposal to go through. They probably thought that the PM had more important things on his mind.

I genuinely think that allowing comments on YouTube is a good way of opening up a dialog, and allowing the Common Man to speak unto power. The rhetoric of politicians endlessly talks about the need to do this, but the actions show that they rarely care what ordinary voters think, especially young ones who are very unlikely to vote.

I'm sorry, I can rarely build up enough enthusiasm to write more than 140 chars in a post these days.

Every year or so the Knebworth Parish Council organises a public meeting to discuss the one political issue that local people are prepared to give up an evening to discuss: development on the Green Belt surrounding the village.

I am of a generation that has largely missed out on any participation in a public political process. Poltics, which is, at its heart, about how groups make decisions, now proceeds without those groups ever assembling. A top-down process involving spin doctors, focus groups and lobbying by well-funded special interest groups seems to have taken its place. This is a sad loss.

The meeting yesterday was officially to discuss which of the seven sites around Knebworth that had been identified were most suitable. A proposal to build a secondary school to the south of the village was presented by Mrs Pomerance, the leader of the We Need a School campaign. This site is not one of those identified for development around Knebworth, but seemed to have strong support from Henry Lytton-Cobbold (Lord Lytton) on whose land it would be built.

The debate was lively and informed. Many ordinary individuals spoke passionately from the floor. Sadly few of the elected officials seemed prepared to take a strong lead, although District Councillor Thomas Brindley, from Codicote, did make some spirited interventions from the floor.

According to John Bantick, leader of the Parish Council, representations to them cannot be forwarded to NHDC. The recommended way of responding to the proposals is via
the NHDC website (click through the link marked 'Online Consultation Software'. This is a fairly clunky process and requires one to register with the NHDC website, although it is possible to send an email to ldfconsultations@north-herts.gov.uk or even write a letter to:

LDF Team

North Hertfordshire District Council

Gernon Road

Letchworth Garden City

Hertfordshire

SG6 3JF

The Copenhagen summit on climate change is taking place. There is a lot of discussion about climate change, with a strong message coming out of the summit that there is a consensus that climate change is real (even though, like many assertions of religions it cannot be directly, unambiguously experienced) and that it is caused by man's activities. The conclusion is then drawn that governments will have to take drastic, and very expensive, action to decrease the use of fossil fuels.

My concern is scientists are portrayed as some kind of homogeneous group, a 'community', like believers in Islam or Wiccan. Apart from a belief that an experiment can falsify a theory, I don't think that scientists really have any shared beliefs. I studied science at university for six years, and worked in a research establishment after leaving university, but I cannot come to any conclusions about the reality of politically important scientific questions which are any more informed than the average voter.

Since scientists agree that CO₂
temperatures might rise by around 2 degrees C, and that this is due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world's governments must immediately take steps to stop the man-made activity that is causing this.

Politicians sometimes have to take decisions that depend on understanding science. This is very worrying, since the rigour of the physical scientist would seem to call from a quite different character to that which is needed by the politician. Climate change is an area where this is needed. It is important that politicians take the right decision, but they seem worryingly fixated on whether or not scientists agree on whether or not climate change is even real, or certainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels. This would not matter so much except that the decision seems to be to spend an incredible amount of money, both in actual money and, much more importantly in the opportunity cost of lost growth, reducing the effects of burning fossil fuels.

A lot of the justification for this seems to hinge on the assertion that a majority of scientists agree with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Leaving aside the evidence that the people running this unit are not exactly the dispassionate searchers after truth that we imagine scientists to be, the idea that correctness in scientific theory is dependent on a kind of vote taken amongst the scientific community is, surely, very wrong. When Einstein published his theory of General Relativity, nobody asked botanists for their opinion on the correctness of the theory.

Whenever so much money is involved in policy, as it now is in Climate Change, lots of very strong incentives are created for people to capture some of it, without regard for the future of the planet, or the economic well-being of its inhabitants. Politicians who are hungry for power hijack the scientists work for their own ends (remember Cameron posing with huskies in Greenland a few years back?). Policy gets a momentum of its own, which can result in ruinous policies down the line, always supported by 'independent' reports of experts who happen to produce the kind of recommendations that the government ministers require.

Of course, as the defenestration of Andrew Nutt shows, when politicians find it expedient to ignore science they will always do so.

Obviously, I'm an old cynic. Maybe this time the momentum and the green movement will turn out to have no unintended consequences, will cost much less than initially envisaged, will not divert resources from other less photogenic causes, and really have the effect of increasing productivity and growth and wealth. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Update: 56 papers are printing an identical editorial. I think that, on the whole, that makes me more inclined to disbelieve its message.

Headmasters have targets. One of the many targets is to minimise the number of pupils' unauthorised absences. This seems fairly desirable. The problem is that when there is a snowfall and public transport grinds to a halt, lots of pupils decide to give up the unequal struggle and simply not turn up at school. This causes a problem for the head teacher, since if only 25% of pupils are likely not to turn up for a day or three, the impact on unauthorised absences will be severe.

There is a solution to this problem, however: close the school. This eliminates all unauthorised absences during the period the school is closed and improves the stats enormously. Of course it does nothing to improve the quantity or quality of education delivered. The problem could be solved, I suppose, by having another target for minimising school closures.

The problem is that this approach leads to an exponential increase in targets which, inevitably, have less and less to do with the core objectives of the organisation. The alternative way of delivering education is simply to let anyone start a school and let pupils and parents decide which ones work best. This is an approach that politicians instinctively recoil against. Before you decide to agree with them, think about whether you are happier about the education received by you or your children and compare it with the transport experience you get from your car, or the entertainment experience you get from your TV, or the food experience you get from your supermarket.

We all loved The West Wing. Apart from anything else it was a wonderful change from police procedurals, whodunnits, and the staples of TV drama. The dialogue was fast-paced and funny, and you felt that you got a glimpse of what really went on behind the scenes - the horse-trading and log-rolling and kow-towing to lobbyists.

But as the sainted Juliette points out in this blog entry, the TV series paints a wholly implausible picture of what goes on in the real whitehouse. The character of Josh Bartlett owes more to The Waltons than any real-life president of the modern era.

I suppose that TWW is entertainment, not education, and that on balance it's better to have an idealised image of what happens in the White House than none at all, but I fear that, as always, youngsters who decide to go into politics because they imagine that it's like TWW are destined for a terrible disappointment. I suppose this is a common fate for politicians and explains why they so often turn to drink. At least there are a lot of nice, subsidized bars in the Houses of Parliament.

There is a predictable outcry for banning Islam4UK, a bunch of nutcases who want to draw attention to the number of good Muslims who are killed by Our Boys in Afghanistan. What on earth would we gain by banning this organisation? I think we lose a lot by publicising it heavily, especially on the BBC. It must have a lot of name recognition now, and by facing a ban it will attract the sympathy of those who distrust the state.

It will be impossible to ban a march specifically by this organisation. Therefore if a ban is to be enacted it will have to be drafted in more generic terms. This inevitably opens up the possibility that the ban will apply to another protest, about a cause which hasn't even arisen yet, which you and I will support strongly.

This is always the problem with opposing laws which restrict freedom. Very often the freedom that is being lost applies to actions that we haven't even conceived of yet. It is hard to organise a rally to support the right to do something we haven't even thought of doing yet, but little by little the sorts of authoritarian laws that recent governments love enacting are eroding fundamental freedoms.

Americans are more aware of the dangers posed, and always hope that their constitution will protect them. Their problem is that the framers of their constitution never conceived of the things that are being banned now, leaving unelected lawyers and supreme court judges to make these vital decisions.

There are a lot of articles around saying how scandalous the behaviour of bankers has been. This is one of the better ones.

There is a massive barrier to entry into banking, erected largely by the FSA and similar regulatory agencies around the world. Although bankers complain in public about these agencies, in private they congratulate themselves and their politician stooges for enacting the legislation that give rise to these agencies. Ostensibly these agencies exist to protect the public. In practice they exist to make it prohibitively expensive for entrepreneurs to start up new banks and break into the industry.

The result of this barrier to entry is supranormal profits. Profits beyond the normal costs, including the cost of capital. These supranormal profits accrue to the scarce resource. Normally this would be the shareholders, the owners. Increasingly these are not rewarded, because the gatekeepers to these profits are the managers. In theory the board is the agent of the shareholders, but since they face essentially no incentive to provide more return than shareholders can get investing in other similarly risky assets, the residue is kept by them.

Financing costs for banks are in any case much lower than any other firm because of their special relationship with the central bank, and because savers have few choices when it comes to finding an investment that guarantees (courtesy of the government) a full return of capital.

Sadly the only solution to this problem of excess rewards to bank boards is to treat banks no differently to other enterprises, as described here. Unfortunately our leaders, and the population as a whole, have been mesmerized, to use the apposite word coined by Simon Jenkins, into thinking that such an approach to regulating banks would be suicidally reckless.

Until we resolve the problem of the power of the bankers we are, I fear, doomed to follow the exact path trodden by Japan, in the two decades since it's financial crisis of 1992.

I have always wondered about the relationship between Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown. Why on earth did Tony, who had the power to sack Brown, put up with this maniac for so long? How did an unelected tabloid hack come to have such a Rasputin-like power over the prime minister for so long?

Somebody, who shall remain nameless, explained it to me last night. He said that the problem was that (i) Tony had such shallow roots in the Labour party he felt obligated to Brown who a native-born member of the Labour tribe and that (ii) Tony was a brilliant public face of the party, but basically was incapable of imposing his will on colleagues and therefore was completely dependent on Campbell to do it for him.

This is consistent with the portrayal I've seen in 'The Thick of It' and will explain why Blair repeatedly gave power to people like John Prescott despite any evidence of an ability to run a department or communicate effectively. I suppose most of you are wondering why on earth it has taken me so long to understand this. Well, I have always found it very hard to understand why politicians behave as they do, and, in particular why their observed behaviour is so often at odds with their stated goals.

This article by Jamie Whyte explains why it is such a bad idea for the state to interpose itself between willing producers and consumers, but also why the structure of politics makes it impossible for politicians not do exactly that. As Whyte says Alas, there is no prospect of an end to this waste, even if politicians understood it. When invisible costs are incurred for the sake of visible benefits, a politician will never consider them too great..

Terry Arthur, the author of an IEA estimate of the magnitude of this deadweight cost puts it at two-thirds of the value of tax collected, or, well over half a trillion pounds by my calculations. It seems astonishing that the bulk of those commenting on this article seem to think that this is a price well worth paying to avoid the cash nexus. This is typical of the responses:Human life has many "irrational" qualities that you ignore at your peril. Wives don't "pay" husbands to remain loyal fathers, Children don't "pay" parents to cook their meals for them. Friends don't "pay" each other for their company. Surely given the recent calamities it is clear that the gross simplification and standardization that has been brought into the understanding of human society needs to be radically changed, and that the "science" of economics needs to redefine what it can and cannot do. Then again, asking for humility and depth from a economists is like asking for an apology from a banker: a little futile..

So far so familiar. What is deeply depressing are the comments on Whyte's article. Even though this is the Times, not the Guardian or even the Morning Star the authors of the comments seem to believe that what is right and appropriate in a family environment (providing for other family members without the promise or receipt of payment) can be scaled up to work at the level of the state. Hayek called this "The Fatal Conceit". Sadly it appears to be as widespread and strongly held as ever.

The triumph of the Median Voter Theorem means that politicians no longer attempt to capture our votes by offering distinctive policies. They are therefore forced to distinguish themselves in other ways, by presenting themselves as less dishonest, better looking, more empathetic, or more sexually athletic for example.

Now we are into the an election campaign we are getting the same old tricks. Gordon Brown has captured the headlines by crying in the middle of his carefully scripted interview with Piers Morgan. Presumably Gordon was persuaded about this cynical act of exploitation of his dead child by none other than Alistair Campbell, who has been doing a bit of prime-time crying himself although presumably in his case it's just so that he can keep his name and face in the headlines to maximize his future income as a pundit, rather than in an attempt to get himself elected.

As in any branch of showbusiness, publicity is everything, which is why politicians need to spend so much of their energy on keeping the press on board. Piers Morgan himself, in his autobiography, was astonished at how often he was invited to lunch by Tony Blair when he was prime minister, and speculated how often his counterpart in the politically more important Sun would have been invited around to 10 Downing Street for tea and biscuits. It somehow seems very appropriate that Morgan's background is as a showbiz correspondent.

The result of all this is that we'll end up with more and more politicians that look and sound good delivering sound bites on TV, and less and less good at understanding the economy. I am not hopeful, but there are a lot of mordant bloggers around who have seen through this charade who, eventually, might have an impact on how people vote. I am not holding my breath though!

Nobody can be a reader of Private Eye for as long as I have and think that UK libel law is anything other than an abominatio. There is now an organised campaign to get it reformed. I urge you to sign now here.

This post by the brilliant Charles Crawford says it all better than I can and has links to background info, if you are interested.

This post should be X-rated as this is truly the scariest man to have lived in Britain in the last 100 years. I stole the image from this post, which is from a blog written by someone who is probably certifiable, but just might have spotted something that the rest of us have missed. Thanks for Jackart for the lead.

Austin Mitchell is the only Labour MP whose blog is in my blogroll. He's old and ill, and held in complete contempt by NuLab and its acolytes. His blogging is less frequent and scrappier now, but he does continue to speak truth unto The Net.

This post makes a very valid point: that if Tony had got his way and we entered the Eurozone ten years ago, our economy would now be completely screwed. What he does not say, however, is that in order to get out of this mess we're going to have devalue the currency and have a raging dose of inflation. This will save the economy, but only by sacrificing the savings of the old and the middle class, but since when did Gordan care a damn about them?

The experience of Sweden with free schools is positive, in spite of attempts by the BBC to claim the opposite.

Stevenage has some rubbishy schools. The New Schools Network is a new charity which is being set up to take advantage of the Gove proposals. Maybe, just maybe, now is the time to establish a decent school for Knebworth kids, other than the appalling proposals put forward by Judith Pomeroy.

This might happen, but clearly there are a lot of vested interests which will be opposed to it.

This article is well worth careful reading. There are plenty of exegeses of this around, e.g. this one by Andrew Green of Migration Watch.

I suppose the official line is that this is a nonsensical conspiracy theory. However, nobody has refuted it. It certainly seems plausible-enough to me, although even I am reluctant to accept the Green explanation at face value.

This story is hardly covered in the MSM, and, when it is, is treated with kid gloves, as you'd expect this kind of topic to be treated. As opposed to this article which dives in with both feet.

The Olympic movement has noble origins, and undoubtedly gives some good publicity to minor sports that otherwise would get very little. When else would we be glued to the TV to watch a curling event?

However, the cost has been getting alarmingly out of control. The cost of the Beijing games is of course a state secret, but has been estimated at around $50 billion. This is a lot of money even for a country as rich as China, and translates into a lot of rice that could otherwise be eaten by starving peasants.

Of course, nobody likes to be heard saying at the Olympic Games are rubbish. It's even as unacceptable as saying that the Paralympic Games are an embarrassment. The games are a perfect event for politicians, national and local, and media types, to get a free holiday at the taxpayers expense. Martin Lewis would definitely approve because, because of the extraordinary sums spent on preparations and security, the games are stage micro-managed to ensure that they produce only Good News.

Politicians always argue that the games bring in extra revenue in the form of tourism, even though the evidence is that real tourists actively avoid going to a country at the time that the games are taking place. Certainly the games are a perfect excuse for hotels and airlines to hugely increase their prices, but their windfall must be largely offset by low numbers. I was actually in Beijing at the time of the last games and the cost of accommodation had indeed increased around tenfold compared to normal. What I found amazing though was that hotel occupancy in the city was, during the period of the games, less than forty percent of normal. I am confident that during the London games we'll see a similar exodus of normal tourists from the City, to be replaced by a smaller, but infinitely better funded, members of the political class.

It is interesting to consider what long-term benefits accrued to Greece after its hosting of the Olympics in 2004. This article, written at the time, predicted that it would all end in tears: how prescient this now seems as we watch the collapse of the Greek economy brought about by its government's inability to get control of costs. One thing that is a racing certainty is that the London Olympics will cost many times more than the original budget, e.g. here. Don't forget that the original forecast cost to the public purse was a mere 3.4 billion pounds!

There is clearly a lot of resentment about 'Dave' Cameron following closely in the footsteps of his hero, 'Tony' Blair. His 'A List' of candidates which are imposed on local constituency associations shows that his support for the idea that MPs should be representatives of the local constituencies is only skin deep.

As ever, the Telegraph can be relied upon to dig the dirt. You can read all about it here.

The Conservative Home article written by Cash defending AWS (all women shortlists) is here. It is a dismally weak argument, and unites Cash with Blair in an implicit assumption that meritocracy, a word invented by Michael Young, is a desirable thing. What is encouraging is that the mass of comments on this mediocre essay are strongly opposed to Ms Cash's view. It is ironic that she calls for meritocracy but, clearly, is a candidate only because her husband was a school friend of 'Dave'.

John Naughton's excellent article explains why we don't want more of our data on government-run databases. Unfortunately the famous NHS Spine is now being populated. At huge expense everyone in this are is being sent a letter about what are now called 'Summary Care Records'. Basically these are the initial attributes to be populated in what is destined to be a comprehensive, centrally-held medical record.

The system is appallingly designed, lacking even a mechanism to delete a wrong record.

Predictably my PCT is making it as difficult as possible for patients to exercise their legal right to opt out of the system. They vaguely say that the form for opting out from the system can be downloaded from their website, but the search facility in the website itself, and google fails to locate any reference to any opt-out of the summary care record. I did find the relevant form on the Stock NHS PCT site (here). The form itself needs to be downloaded, printed out, filled in with a pen and posted to your local GP. An natural and elegant solution that you would expect to find in a state-of-the-art database system.

Seriously, please at least think carefully whether you wish to express your passive support for one of the gleaming jewels in Tony Blair's legacy.

View Locations of Democracy Club events TONIGHT. All welcome in a larger map

Read all about it here.

Three white-collar convicts are chatting over their daily prison meal.

"What are you guys in for?" asks convict one.

"I set my prices too low and was convicted of predatory pricing" says convict two.

"Funny, my prices were higher then my competition and they hit me with monopoly pricing" says convict three.

"Ha! My prices were exactly the same as my competitors and they threw the book at me for collusion" says convict one in response.

This is a joke shamelessly stolen from the What the Hell do I Know? blog.

Basically, the argument is that there is no evidence that "competition authorities" have ever actually done any good in terms of levelling the playing field between producer and consumer. The reason is that cartels and monopolies naturally implode as economic rents attract the interest of firms in different industries, and different countries. Of course trade barriers in the form of tariffs slow down this process, and heavy regulation of the industry within a country also does. Clearly, in the case of services that Google provides, neither of these factors apply.

The political class of course is much more comfortable launching this kind of investigation than one into competition, say, in banking services, or utilities, or telecommunications services, fixed or mobile, or broadband provision, because the management of companies in these industries have taken great care to develop strong relationships with politicians. Did I really say that?

I occasionally went to a bar in Singapore. Its walls were heavily nicotine stained because people frequently smoked there. The interesting thing is that it was, and I have no doubt still is, to smoke indoors in a public place in Singapore. However, even with the draconian approach to enforcement for which Singapore is famous, the barman felt perfectly relaxed about allowing people to smoke because he knew that everyone who drank there was aware of what was going on and had a huge choice of bars nearby where they could drink in a smoke-free atmosphere. How sad it is that the UK health fascists cannot tolerate such an approach.

I actually think that in some ways the longer Nick stays in jail the better, because it will highlight how bad this act is, but I feel sorry for the guy, so perhaps you'd better cough up. I have done so. At least your money will do no harm, unlike the money raised by that useful idiot Bob Geldorf in Live Aid, which, like so much aid money and charity that is given to Africa, principally was used to buy guns.

NHS doctors, like doctors everywhere, are not infallible. They make mistakes. In the USA they are damn careful to avoid making mistakes because they could be sued for millions and then find that they are uninsurable, and hence unemployable, for ever afterwards.

The NHS is not like that because, generally speaking, the doctors are part of the state apparatus that should ensure good practice. It's in nobody's interest to rock the boat, especially politicians who want us to believe that the NHS is the envy of the world (and of course fantastic value: a snip at a mere 110 billion pounds per year).

It's "the closest thing that the British have to a national religion" (N Lawson), so newspapers are loath to criticise it. However, the fact is that people die every day through bad decisions and diagnoses made by NHS employees. We should at least be told, because I believe that we are grown-up to be told the truth. It is quite possible that these errors are an acceptable price. I would be that last to suggest that it is worth spending enough to ensure that not a single life is lost or ruined through NHS failure, but we do need the debate.

Before you make up your mind, you might like to look at the National Death Service, a blog devoted to pointing out the cases when the NHS screws up.

I should declare an interest. My mother had bad abdominal pains, loss of appetite and a feeling of nausea. She went to a local GP and was diagnosed as having indigestion and prescribed an anti-emetic and Gaviscon. A few days later she collapsed, was admitted to hospital where she was found to have a tumour the size of a grapefruit blocking her colon. Fortunately, because she was operated on immediately, she survived and is now symptom-free. But only because she had a lucky break.

This letter written by the hyperactive Don Boudreaux suggests an explanation of why democracy seems so difficult to get going, and why all attempts to impose it seem to fail.

Boudreaux writes:

Mr. Stephens is mistaken. Democracy neither brings modernity nor is an essential element of it. The fountainhead of the western freedoms and institutions that Mr. Stephens rightly admires was the fractured and overlapping jurisdictions that emerged in western Europe following the collapse of the Roman empire. The happy, if unintended, result was an inability of any one authority (say, a prince or a pope) to exercise complete sovereignty over the populace. From this fractured sovereignty the rights of man slowly sprung, and only much later did democracy as we know it develop.

I am no historian, but this explanation seems promising. It is quite clear how those in power will never willingly give it away. In the UK we have the perennial spectacle of the opposition party promising to reform the electoral system whenever they are out of power, only to think better of this once they seize the reins of power whereupon reform suddenly seems altogether less urgent. In the same way, referenda, promised while in opposition, suddenly are undemocratic as they might bind the hand of a 'democratically' elected government.

Libertarians are frequently misrepresented and misunderstood. The contributors at Cafe Hayek try to make the case. Take a look. You will not see mainstream politicians or media putting the libertarian case. Ever.

Read This article by Simon Jenkins.

He points out that banks and bankers have done very well indeed out of the bailouts that have characterised the response to the 2007 credit crunch.

I agree with everything that Simon Jenkins says, but I think we have to examine how we got into this mess. We have given quantities of money to the banks that are enough to bankrupt the country. This is because banks have huge influence, which is linked to the fact that they get such favourable treatment from the government. From the banks' point of view this is a virtuous circle. From the point of view of the rest of us, it is a disaster. The massive regulatory burden makes it very difficult for new startups to challenge the banks, which lead to their supranormal profits. These excess profits do not need to be paid to shareholders, because they have nowhere else to go: they are captured by the employees, who individually become enormously powerful. It was not entirely a coincidence that Gordon Brown just happened to be at a cocktail party with Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds TSB, when he was told that HBOS needed rescuing.

This would not matter so much except in that the state has developed taxation to an extraordinary degree, so that now it is quite feasible for the government to hand over about a tenth of the UK GDP just to prop up a few banks that should have failed. One hundred and thirty-one billion pounds is a lot of money in anyone's language: more even than it costs to run the NHS for a year!

Most governments live in a kind of parallel universe where there are no tradeoffs. They seem to believe that taxes can be increased without limit without compromising the ability of the productive sector to pay. Just listen to Peter Mandelson talking about all the jobs he is creating by increasing government spending on this and that, and try to catch the point where he admits that by increasing taxes and reducing the post-tax income of individuals, he will inevitably destroy jobs, now or in the future.

The problem with democracies is that they work by bribing electors with their own money. Or in the case of the Greeks, the taxes of of rich neighbouring states. The problem is that, eventually, this state-sponsored Ponzi scheme collapses in sovereign default or rampant inflation.

Darling's budget was the usual politics-as-theatre show that so damages politics as a means of deciding about things in a grown-up way. As usual it comes down to individual bloggers like Wat Tyler and independent pressure groups like the Taxpayers Alliance to make sense of what is happening.

The major problem is that we, like Greece, cannot run up debts indefinitely without suffering the consequences. That is, we, the taxpayers, cannot dodge the consequences, but of course the politicians can, with their 'resettlement allowances' and consultancy fees.

Amazingly the BBC put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the deficit for this year will actually come in slightly below the forecast £178 billion. No mention, naturally, was made of the off-balance-sheet liabilities that mean that the public sector debt of £1.4 trillion is actually only around half of the true figure. Yes, we are talking about £2.8 billion here. Just to put that in context, that means around £47,000 for every man woman and child in the UK. According to the ONS there are 22.76 million people employed in the private sector, which means that out of their taxes, and the taxes of their private-sector children they are going to have to come up with a sum of £120,000 each.

But it's actually a lot worse than that, because before long interest payments on the national debt alone will be costing 10% of GDP. The unfunded liabilities held off the balance sheet will also be growing at some inflationary rate, so will increase the burden just as much as the on-balance sheet liabilities. The end result is a huge, utterly huge, burden of debt for the country for a generation or two.

I know that Gids rambles on about how serious the deficit is, but I think that most voters just think 'yeah, yeah, yeah, but we can just introduce a caviar tax, or stamp duty on Rolexes and everything will be fine'. I suppose this is a rational response to the fact that there are around 40 million people in the UK who are either not working, or working in the public sector. Of these, approx 14 million are under 18, leaving 26 million voters who may well be dependent on the generosity of the government (i.e. the taxpayer) for their income. Obviously there will be some non-working spouses and people with private income in there somewhere. However, what we are left with is around twenty six million out of a total of 48 million voters who, on balance, will prefer to see taxes go up than go down. This is about 54%. No wonder all parties are being economical with the truth.

I have heard a theory that, actually, David Cameron would prefer to see Gordon Brown win the next election, on the basis that the pain and suffering that is going to be inflicted on the population, through 'cuts' and increased taxes is going to be so severe that whichever government is in power when this is happening will be then unelectable for a generation: the so-called 'poisoned chalice election' theory.

There is, of course, an alternative to all this pain. We look to that master of economic theory, Robert Mugabe, and let the pound take the strain, stitching up those nice Chinese lenders, but, as an unfortunate side effect, wiping out the savings and pensions of a vast swathe of the population through rampant inflation. Currently the gilts markets don't buy into this theory, but Bill Gross, who has made more than his fair share of good calls on government bond markets in his long career is not so convinced.

Grant Shapps is the MP for the constituency immediately to the south of Knebworth. It's interesting to see how this is put together. Note that there is plent of coverage of hospital (preventing the closure of), post offices (ditto), ethnic minorities (showing interaction with), public services and homelessness. There is even a little 'Dave' magic dust sprinkled on the video, and the MP looking authoritative. Sadly there is no mention of deficits, taxes, planning, bad public services, or the private sector (apart from retail). This, like all recent elections, is one fought on Labour's home turf.

The Tories are having a go at the other lot for putting up NICs, again. The other lot point out that the Tories did it when they had a chance. They also point out that unemployment does not seem to go up when the tax is levied.

As Chris Dillow points out, both sides are being characteristically economical with the truth about NICs: because in fact, the incidence of this tax, like all the others, is not born by the intermediaries. Obviously there are questions of whether or not employers can pass on costs, and whether this is in the long run or the short run, but basically corporates do not pay taxes themselves: they pass them on to shareholders, or employees, or suppliers, or someone else. After all, a company is just a formalized scheme of arrangement between various classes of creditor.

I'm too lazy to write anything, so I cribbed this from the Taxpayers Alliance site.

Another widget from the TPA (aka 'debt clock'):

Ubervu allows comparison of mentions of a pair of terms on social media sites. You can see the comparison of Gordon Brown and David Cameron here. I'm not sure what it tells anyone.

David and Gordon seem to be level pegging on Twitter, but all but invisible on Facebook in comparison, whereas discussions about Gordon dominate the pair on intensedebate which seems to be a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site).

On the whole, I don't think that people often blog or twitter lines to the effect of "What a brilliant job David Cameron is making of presenting the Conservative Party's policies" (except by people who are paid to do so), so I would guess that on balance David has won the war of the social media sites so far.

Andrew Calvert wants to kick Balls out of his constituency.