Here’s my brief to myself.

I think the document Of Equal Value: Poverty and Inequality in the United Kingdom makes some important mistakes, and in particular it makes the mistakes common to the leftish poverty campaigning of the socialists and the churches.

Here’s a core statement from it:
“It is entirely uncontroversial that being at the bottom end of a highly unequal society is much worse than being at the bottom end of a more equal society, ie that equality is better for the poor.”

This is claptrap. It rehashes The Spirit Level argument which is wrong in several ways. (And which I reviewed at the Social Affairs Unit site.)

Try this test: Pakistan and Australia are about as unequal as each other. Bangladesh is a little less unequal than the UK. China is a little less unequal than the US. So we are supposed to be indifferent whether we are poor Pakistan or Australia and positively to prefer to be poor in Bangladesh or China than in the UK or the US. Right. Tell that to the poor people who long to emigrate to the unequal Anglosphere West. (See below for a link to the CIA Factbook evidence.)

I agree that most very unequal societies are horrible: many are in Africa. I agree that some equal societies are very nice: but some of them are in Scandinavia. I wouldn’t want to live in either class of society.

Do not be blinded by the happiness of the egalitarian Nordics and Scandinavians. They are fairly cheerful because they are rich, not because they are equal. They do pride themselves on their equality, but they are losing some of it and anyway take far more tranquilisers than the apparently uncheerful Brits. (See below RDN mini-essays which over some of this.)

The document assumes that poverty is bad and that inequality must be bad because it increases poverty. I think there is the additional thought that inequality is bad because it is a sign of the indifference of the rich toward the poor.

Actually, in Western societies poverty is not necessarily all that awful since it is defined (as the document notes) as having less than 60 percent of the median wage. When the median wage rises, lots more poor people may be created, but these “new poor” are no worse off materially than they ever were.

The document makes what is surely the mistake of linking poverty and inequality without spelling out the terms of the link. There is certainly a correlation between inequality and poverty in some Western countries. But that there is a causal link is way less sure and certainly not proved. I mean: the link is not remotely proved. We have no evidence whatever that increasing inequality increases poverty in any real way. Indeed, the poor generally benefit from economic growth, and if inequality is a stimulus to growth, then the poor may well benefit from it.

It is generally assumed by the left (and the document) that a very unequal society ought to be balanced up so the rich get less rich and the poor get more, generally in a straight swap. But it is already the case that the rich pay a hugely disproportionate of the nation’s tax and it is not clear how wise it would be to tax them more, even from the point of view of the poor.

It’s worth noting that in the UK the top 10 per cent earn 15 times as much as the bottom 10 per cent. But after tax and benefits are taken into account, that shrinks to about a five times difference.

It is sometimes argued that there is less social mobility in unequal societies, almost by definition. This seems absurd. The US was once the capital both of inequality and social mobility. This was always much more true of England than the left likes to admit. Nowadays, the US and the UK are famous for becoming less socially mobile.

This may be the case, in the sense that we may have lost the key to educating and motivating the working class and especially the underclass to success. This may have many causes: liberal education has made schools pretty hopeless as launching pads; the cream has already floated out of the lower classes; modern job demands are far greater than they were; benefit dependency has lead to what amounts to a moral erosion; deteriorating parental skills and standards have become endemics; and so on. (There’s a very good account of  these processes – more PC than mine – in the New Statesman, under the title “It’s not all bad news on social mobility.”)

It is important to stress that the modern world has made social mobility demanding: not policy; not the malevolence of the rich and their class interests. Anybody, from anywhere, can acquire the skills and get the luck the modern world needs. Indeed, people from good and bad backgrounds probably share about the same amount, but not type, of advantages.

I am struck by the poverty of policy recommendations made in the document. It’s more about soup kitchens than about motivating the poor to rise above their circumstances. I think this flows from an attitude which is more old-left than spiritual, or religious. It risks casting the poor as victims; as not spiritually the equal of the better-off.

I should perhaps add that the right is not necessarily indifferent to human suffering, but it is committed to the view that the state is not likely to do much good when it tries to do good. So there are tense and interesting issues for the right in all this.

Useful resources:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html
http://www.ifs.org.uk/comms/comm118.pdf
http://www.ifs.org.uk/projects/347
which leads us to:
http://www.ifs.org.uk/budgets/gb2011/11chap12.pdf
http://richarddnorth.com/2010/03/rdn-on-affluence-and-envy-on-bbc-news-channel/

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There are three set piece questions and here they are, more or less:

(1) Should Galliano go to gaol?

RDN says no, of course not. Like Von Trier, he’s a motormouth whose celebration of Hitler has no meaning beyond – maybe – being an attempt to free-fall through the politically-incorrect. Anyone who takes this sort of thing seriously needs to get a life. These intemperate people are twerps, not thugs, and it seems very unlikely that the really vicious amongst us take their cue from such scions of the arts.

(2) Should women cover up?

I would almost prefer to see more burqa and less thong on our high street. And there is something in that poor Toronto policeman’s view that women ought to consider dressing modestly. They have of course a right to dress like sluts, and there’s no evidence that I know of that tarty dressing gets people raped. Still, whether in dress, drink or general deportment, women would be sensible to be, er, sensible.

(3) Should we bin the Human Rights Act because it allows the “wrong” immigrants to live here?

I say no, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Convention is a pretty good expression of civilised values. Our judges usually interpret it about right, which is hardly surprising since their grandfathers (as it were) more or less framed it.

(4) I was asked whether I’d had a “moral moment” during the week. I offered up six news-orientated thoughts:

Put the lost penguin out if its misery
Rescue  the just-discovered Amazonian tribe from its sad dentition and bigotry
Maintain the right of circus animals to enjoy their performance art
Enjoin strict diets on fat diabetics so they don’t need medication
Celebrate the right of schools not to teach the competing mumbo-jumbos of religions

I think the production team picked the circus issue. Below (in case you’re interested) are some leads.

An informed account, surprisingly sympathetic to keeping ciricus animals.
Animals in Circuses and Zoos: Chiron’s World? by Dr Marthe Kiley-Worthington, 1990, OOP

And various useful documents which are much less antogonistic than one might suppose:
http://archive.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/welfare/act/documents/circus-feasibility-study.pdf
http://www.north-herts.gov.uk/aksnherts/images/att318.pdf
http://archive.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/welfare/documents/circus-report.pdf

The most seriously argued case against circus animals:
http://www.helpelephants.com/pdf/WILD%20ANIMALS%20IN%20CIRCUS.pdf

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The challenge seems to be something like “Can the West be fussy what countries it does business with?”

In a word, “No”.

(1)

As President Obama has said recently, we have our ideals but we have our interests too.

(2)

But suppose we stuck to our Western liberal ideals, where would not our trading with China get the Chinese peasant? (Never mind that the houses of our less-well-off would be emptied of goods.) And if we don’t trade with Africa, we’d merely buy even more African raw materials as they arrive in Chinese and African goods.

(3)

More positively I am mildly confident that the worse people we trade with, the more good we do in the world. This paradox is unpicked thus: trade enriches people and creates a middle class. In the end, and sometimes sooner rather than later, that process can be rapid and benign and leads to responsive government.

(4)

I have a good deal of faith that sanctions usually backfire. I was not a fan of South African sanctions and am not even persuaded that sanctions against Burma are all that clever. Sanctions against Saddam Hussein were seriously flawed.

(5)

The Middle East looks like a hard case. This is partly because of the complications of schismatic Islam and partly because it involves raw material trading, which is often a sort of non-commercial trading. (I mean that it is a stitch-up between small numbers of people on either side of the deals.) Even so, I am not remotely convinced that Saudi Arabia, for instance, would be a better influence in the world if we didn’t buy its oil.

(6)

To those who say we shouldn’t buy oil from, say Nigeria, I would reply that I would rather see Western companies involved than to see that oil reach the market some other way.

(7)

On Libya, it’s worth saying that the country – ruled by a dicator as it has been - ranked 53 out of 167 countries in the UNDP Human Development Index, and ahead of Trinidad and Mauritius in those tables. I am with those many informed voices who say that the Arab Spring ought to be celebrated, but that it may be very ugly for a while. I think this sort of view flows from a general Whig History view that affluence and development lead to responsive governments.

The point here, though, is whether involvement and trade helped. Well, if affluence and education and information lie behind the Arab Spring, I would say that we were right to have traded with these countries, and that – a little contradictorily – we have now to be on the side of “the rebels”.

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(1) I am very interested in the Military Covenant, as you can see here.

(2) The public used to think that the Public Sector was special. It was “official”, it was somehow oathed to the Crown; it was underpaid but well-pensioned; it had a special sense of duty.

(3) A lot of that has changed. The big difference is that many nurses, teachers, cleaners, binmen, “civil servants” now work for the private sector. They serve the public as well as ever, but not by virtue of being public servants per se.

(4) It is understood that the private sector serves the public too, whether as fuel-tanker drivers or behind the till in Tesco.

(5) The public sector is paid better than it used to be. (It is disputed whether it has parity with the private sector and hard numbers are hard to come by.)

(6) Now that most private sector workers are not unionised and many public sector workers are, there is a sense that Public Choice economics and Producer Capture (both of which speak to the undue political muscle of the well-represented) cushions the public sector from the rigours of the private sector, including during recessions.

(7) There is less tolerance now that a sector of the economy should be patronised by having their pensions organised for them by the state on preferential terms rather than being paid better and buying into their own pensions. 

(8) There is an increased awareness that it is peculiar that public sector pensions should be paid for by the taxpayer at the time of pay-out rather than paid for during the workers’ careers.

(9) We need to understand that we should accord trust and gratitude to people all over society rather than somehow ghettoise the public sector as especially deserving (especially in the degree to which the public sector has, in Tom Winsor’s words, “secured indolence”). 

(10) None of this is to undermine the special role of people who specially swear allegiance to the Crown. That may properly be required of (and an honour for) those who apply force, whether employed by the state or not.

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In a nutshell, here were the pieces of the argument: 

(1) Aid has often been wasted. The Coalition ought to be defining and delivering a hard-headed aid regime.

(2) The middle and upper classes pay most of the UK’s taxes: if they want an aid package, that’s fine.

(3) The UK needs a widespread global footprint: our soldiers, diplomats and aid workers make a great presence.

(4) Aid should help private education in India; build civil society in Cambodia; fund government in Lesotho.

(5) UK kids should be shamed about what they do with £5000 pa of schooling against Africans with £10′s.

(6) Lots of us are too mean to give to charity, but we don’t mind paying a bit on our tax bills.

(7) The UK can maintain a canny aid department, and deal with governments around the world.

(8) DFID ought to be robust and unsentimental and accountable (unlike charities).

(9) The world is becoming more asymmetrical: an aid programme keeps us in touch.

(10) DFID is a Guardian-reading outfit: it needs more Times readers.

It”s interesting to unpick the argument that aid is a matter of poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries.

For a start, the IFS say that the bottom fifth of earners in the UK are net beneficiaries of the tax system to the tune of about £2,000 a year whilst the top fifth are net contributors to the tune of about £24,000. So it is possible to argue that the poor ought to shut their traps on tax matters and leave them to those who really cough up. I know: you can pick holes in that logic, but it’s not awful and needs to be on the table.

Secondly, whilst it’s true that much aid is pilfered by elites, not all is. And anyway, the alternative approach (concentrate on poverty reduction and the poorest of the poor) can be curiously wasteful, too. The very poor are hard to reach and the best good in poor countries may come in empowering the middle and capitalist classes.

Thirdly, whilst many people seem to tell pollsters that aid is not a priority, the politics of the matter suggests that it remains attractive to voters. It is in the manifesto of all mainstream parties. I think this means that “nudge economics”, or “nudge politics”, is at work here. (A reminder: Save the Children reminded us that in 2010 the UK gave about 1 percent of tax income to aid. Labour doubled our commitment to aid and it’s on track to be about 0.7 percent of GNI in 2013, as in line with UN commitments.)

Fourthly, aid may be attractive to the poor. After all, it is widely reported that the poor give a higher percentage of their earnings to charities than do the rich. (Of course, the poors’ mite adds up to much less in absolute terms, and the rich may well feel well-tapped by the state anyway). Point is: the poor may be as keen on aid as the rich.

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I know: if I say I enjoyed myself it’s like saying that I enjoy throwing librarians on the dole. I don’t have to bring to mind the nice librarians in my local library to feel quite strongly that the loss of librarians is sad. But it’s still fun to point out that (quite beyond the Luddism of local libraries) this is the class of issue which brings out the absurdity of middle class statism.

The middle class are the very people who will in the less-statist world create and dispense culture. They cling to the hope that it can be a matter of professionals and taxes, but I am pretty sure it shouldn’t and won’t be. Besides, I very much doubt that many of the present middle class protestors themselves use libraries much or that libraries are a very clever way of  addressing the pressing matter of civilising the underclass.

Anywhere, here’s a crib I prepared for my appearance.

10 Propositions on cutting Public Libraries
 
Books are now too cheap to be a matter for state intervention
 
We can get “books” to the poor in many digital forms
 
We can send books to the poor from central depots
 
Many spend half their year in “reading” environments: schools and universities
 
In the holidays, teachers could open up school and university libraries for all-comers
 
The informed middle class could help the ignorant access online information
 
Libraries could be closed but re-opened as community centres
 
Community Centres could extend their role to including reading, etc
 
Charity shops could improve their already excellent role as booksellers
 
Specialist books are already sent from depots to the inquisitive

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(1) This being a state visit, in which a leader is invited by the state (the nation, the country), the Pope is entitled to be treated with a particular dignity (as was President Zuma or the Chinese head of state). Any talk of arrest (in the manner of Pinochet) is plainly absurd. The idea of a citizen’s arrest is almost worse, and anyway rendered very difficult by the levels of security which rightly surround the pontiff.

(2) If they disrupt papal events, protestors will be abusing the right of thousands of people to celebrate and worship along with the leader of their faith. This ought to affront the liberal principles the protestors insist are so dear to them. This is especially so granted that the religious followers of Catholicism are themselves rather liberal and kindly. The Pope and his followers are not some extremist (say, fascist or crypto-Nazi) group who need challenging in some especially robust way.

(3) The Pope and his followers do not need to be subject to protest on the basis that otherwise they would not know the arguments against them. The protestors’ freedom of speech has been evident in the oceans of media coverage given to their arguments.

(4) It is not remotely self-evident that public protest will somehow be more convincing than media argument, so any argument by the protestors that efficacy commends their right to public protest is flawed.

(5) These arguments do not dispute the right of protestors to be evident on the street during the visit. They do, however, question the value and merit of such protest. One shouldn’t protest merely for the sake of exercising the right to protest, in the manner of Koran-burning or (on one interpretation) insolent mosque-building.

(6) Any Pope is a focus for protest, but this Pope is a target not least because he hasn’t built up the (rather irrational) fan-base which adored Pope John-Paul III. JPIII was not especially liberal, but he was the Beatle Pope, he ski-ed, he was the first Pope to go on tour, and he was associated with the Polish freedom-fighters. He had the Nelson Mandela dimension, even the JFK dimension. He hadn’t been head of the Inquisition. Priestly child-abuse was not much (or at all?) in the news on his watch. Benedict is a more complicated figure than he seems (as was JP), but the public imagination does not always grasp that sort of nuance.

(7) In general, it is important to say that almost all direct action, even “peaceful direct action”, is either silly or wrong. We are in a muddle about that, and I have written a lot on the theme. 

 (8) There is a lot to be said for wit in protest, and for bearing witness. The point being that outlawing disruption and confrontation, say, does not mean that more effective protest cannot be designed and implemented.

(9) There was nothing to stop protestors mounting an event of quite enormous scale, perhaps before the visit or away from Papal events. The issue about direct action, or about the style of on-the-scene protest, is not about any judgement as to the merit of the Pope’s visit versus that of the protestors’ cases.

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Having killed 11 workers, the event is already a human tragedy. Time will tell whether it emerges as a case of widespread, serious, persistent ecological damage. I am the first to admit it may.

But it is striking how the Amoco Cadiz (1978), Exxon Valdez (1989), Saddam Hussein’s Gulf War spill into the Persian Gulf (1991), Braer (1993) and Sea Empress (1996) were all widely advertised as potentially huge disasters, but were mostly seen to have had serious effects only for a year or so, if at all. My point (though I didn’t make this on-air) is that the anticipatory buzz got translated into a false history. People end up believing that these events did turn out to be as bad as was predicted as possible. (See details at my Life On A Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress, Manchester University Press, 1995, free download.)

[See below for some updated links for recent Exxon-Valdez and Prince William Sound research.]

Similarly, Chernobyl has for 25 years been characterised as having had massive consequences in cancer and birth defects. (See my www.chernobyllegacy.com.) The reality is sad enough, but much less powerful. Genetic modification of crops has so far failed to deliver the disasters which were predicted for it a decade ago. (See perhaps my pamphlet on the subject, GMOs: The troubled beginning of the 21st Century, IEA, 2000, free download).  BSE has proved horrible for a few hundred families, but not cataclysmic for the rest of us.

I do think things are improving. I mean that the media is slightly less prone to wind us all up nowadays, and the environmentalists have much less traction than they used to. I am also fairly sure that academics (especially at the universities of Lancaster and East Anglia) have failed in their bid of the 1990s to induce a sort of generalised anxietyabout industrial and ecological horrors, which they characterised as Risk Society (in which they followed some dreary germanic lines of thought). (See perhaps my Risk: The human adventure, ESEF, 2001, free download.)

I should have said that one of the pernicious tropes of media and campaign work is to say that such and such a disaster “may” happen, or has the potential to happen. The point here is that this is an unaccountable remark: just logically nothing would ever prove it wrong. It’s a safe and even cowardly class of remark.  

I notice that in the Obama administration anti-corporate riffs remain popular (“Our job basically is to keep our boot on BP’s neck” was Interior Secretary’s Ken Salazar’s charmless remark), and that is low rent stuff. Of course, it happens that BP’s back story is ripe with ironies, from its Beyond Petroleum smugness to its accident-prone recent US record. But anyone whose heart does not go out to the firm in its present crisis almost deserves to be on the receiving end of this kind of bad luck themselves, just for a chastening taste of what the fates can dole out.

Additional note

Updates on Exxon-Valdez and Prince William Sound:

Rather cheerful accounts:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/stories/oilymess/welcome.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16280-is-the-exxon-valdez-spill-site-finally-clean.html
 
Rather less cheerful account:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090323-exxon-anniversary.html

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I produced a letter on this which the FT were good enough to run, letters, 28 August 2009.

What I love about the issue is that it brings every kind of motivation into play. The Scots Nats apparently hate London’s New Labour machine. So did that influence their decision? Apparently the decision would always have been a Scottish one, even before devolution. But has devolution added a dimension to London’s pain (if any) at the compassionate release of Mr al-Megrahi? What does Gordon Brown or Jack Straw or Ed Milliband really think about any of this? Is oil the only really big issue, or is Libya’s approach to terrorism also very important? Which government – Scottish, UK or US – stood to suffer most if Mr al-Megrahi’s appeal had gone ahead? Isn’t it delicious that we have no real idea how to unravel the complicated and conflicted reactions all the players must have?

As I told Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine Show (on Tuesday, 1 September 2009), I don’t think it matters that we are not necessarily being told the truth. A Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman said that my view was quite wrong and that British people had died for the right to be told the truth. I only slightly agree. I think they died for the right to democratically elect the politicians whom we sometimes require to lie to foreigners and even to ourselves.

Of course, in the end – after 10, 20 or 30 years – everything ought to come out. Interestingly, in our new age of transparency and accountability I imagine much of what really matters will be kept totally privvy, never to be disclosed. After all, we’re getting to the point where anything in writing may be demanded, leaked, stolen, or mislaid.

We can expect to be misled now by politicians who know that the public is more and more cynical but less and less robust. It’s almost as though we insist they deceive us.

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If the protestors really could save the planet, I imagine everyone would turn a blind eye to a bit of law-breaking.

Of course they can’t and the fault is not business or politicians. It’s us. We would not let any democratic administration act too fiercely on climate change. Yet almost all protest pretends it believes The People are OK, but the Establishment is wrecking things.

As it is, it is hard to see any reason why the “nice” (theatrical, stunting) protestors should continue to allow themselves to be used by the “nasty” (violent, anarchist) protestors as a cover. But then – and this is the difficult bit – many of the thousands who flock to set-piece direct action events seem to think a bit of bother is of the essence of what they do.

By what right do the protestors think they can camp out in the streets or interfere with businesses – not to say aim to invade and occupy, or damage, them? I imagine they are pretending that there’s no other way to be heard.

This is nonsense. The police and law will bend over backwards to facilitate big, peaceful demonstrations. Maybe not in The City on a day when the world’s leaders are in town, as in the G20 protests, but the weekend before, sure, as happened earlier this year. I think we ought at least aim to explain to protestors why most kinds of direct action really are much more problematic.

Especially, we should remind them that they do not have the same sorts of claim on our sympathy as did the slaves, the women, the disenfranchised, the American blacks, the black South Africans and all the other protest movements environmental protestors compare themselves to. Many of those causes never did mass direct actions, at least one used violence in an appalling way, all faced the problem of not being accorded a full place in their country’s democracies.

I wish Parliament would get its brain round this issue and try to talk sense. Instead, the authorities seem determined that almost all protest has to be respected as though it was serious.

It’s time we all grew up.

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