So whenever the details of his first kid’s death and second kid’s illness [*] appeared in the Sun, it genuinely made me think less of him. After all, it’s a perfect NewLab, Alastair Campbell media strategy to humanise the dude.

But it turns out that Brown never leaked to the Sun at all, and that this – like, apparently, every other story News International has won – was obtained by thievery.

Either from an insider, or from hacking Gordo’s voicemail; it doesn’t really matter. They stole the details of two upset parents, made them into news, and we’re all so cynical we thought it was leaked by the parents anyway.

But it wasn’t.

Worse, whenever the Sun first published the story, it ran a giant “no bugger can diss us” claim, “in partnership with the Cystic Fibrosis Trust“.

Having spoken to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust today, this is bullshit – the Sun told the CFT that it had the story, and asked them for some quotes on CF. At no point was the CFT aware that the original story was stolen, rather than the Browns seeking public sympathy.

So, the News Of The World is rightly dead. But the Sun has done exactly the same thing as the NOTW, and on at least one well-documented occasion it’s lied that a charity was on its side and happy with its coverage.

Let’s not rest until the weekday paper is set to rest with its naughty sister, eh?

—
[*] Sorry, I got confused between Gordon Brown’s kids. This has been corrected. I don’t think it makes any difference to the main point.

You can donate money to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust here.

So Johann Hari has written a fairly boilerplate piece about the monarchy, and why the UK shouldn’t have one. He sensibly and rapidly deals with the fatuous points that monarchists make about tourism and ‘defenders of democracy’.

But there’s also this:

In most countries, parents can tell their kids that if they work hard and do everything right, they could grow up to be the head of state and symbol of their nation. Not us. Our head of state is decided by one factor, and one factor alone: did he pass through the womb of one aristocratic Windsor woman living in a golden palace?

The US head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps. The British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps. Is that a contrast that fills you with pride?

Not pride exactly, no: but I prefer the honesty of the UK’s system. In order to be President of the USA, you have to be immensely wealthy, successful and lucky. In order to be immensely wealthy and successful in the USA, you pretty much have to be born to a wealthy and successful family.

President Obama is no exception: his parents both had postgraduate degrees, and his maternal grandmother was Vice President of a bank. Obama’s mum did technically live on food stamps while finishing her PhD, but he was living with his banker grandma at the time. His is not a rags-to-riches American Dream story.

The pretence of meritocracy in the US, based on the belief that anyone can become President, breeds a society in which people who end up poor are treated incredibly badly, because they are perceived as having failed. I’d far rather a system that’s honest, under which we accept that someone who’s born in a slum will never have the same chances in life as someone born with a silver spoon, but try and narrow the inequalities in outcome that this creates as much as we possibly can.

Despite the Thatcherites’ and post-Thatcherites’ best efforts, the UK is far better than the US at doing this. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that the countries which are best at equality overall (e.g. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) also tend to be monarchies.

The monarch is a permanent symbol that life is unfair, and that if you take credit for your own success – rather than accepting that it’s primarily down to luck and that you owe a duty of care to the less fortunate in society – then you’re an arrogant prick.

Various people of various ideologies have reacted to this disclosure, some by blockading Barclays branches, some by making fairly irrelevant points about tax losses.

But the truth, found in Barclay’s 2009 annual report – is a bit more complicated.

Before I start: I’m not a qualified tax accountant, but I’ve got a qualification in interpreting financial statements. I’ve checked all the assertions that I’ve made about tax treatments of different items with real tax accountants, who’ve confirmed that they believe my interpretation is correct, but I’m open to corrections from anyone who genuinely knows more about this than me and has an alternative explanation.

So where’s the beef?

The Notes To The Accounts line on tax (note 10, page 216) shows that Barclays incurred tax liabilities of GBP1,074m in 2009. That doesn’t mean the company paid GBP1,074m in tax – it means that, when looking at all the business that it did in 2009, it expects to end up paying GBP1,074m in tax for it when all the sums are done and all the cheques are written.

The table shows that the “fair UK” tax charge for Barclays, multiplying profit of £4,585m by 28%, would’ve been £1,284m. Various other items – tax miscalculated for other years, gains that aren’t liable for tax, and expenses that aren’t tax-deductible but which are offset against accounting profit – take this figure to £1,074m.

The offsets net off against each other – the difference between the first figure and the second figure comes down to “adjustment for prior years”, which means in normal-person-speak that Barclays overestimated how much tax it owed in the past. Aside from that figure, the numbers balance out.

But that isn’t the real tax paid, of course – it’s the money the company thinks it’ll have to pay. Hence why blogland has been rife with conjecture about how this £1,074m figure is so different from the £113m figure listed by the Guardian. Unfortunately, most of this conjecture is about as worthwhile as you’d expect conjecture to be.

We got the flow

We do, however, have the real data: page 208 features Barclays’ cash flow statement.

This is the basis of any company’s accounts – it’s about the actual cash-money that Barclays has actually paid to people or been paid by people over the year.

The cash flow statement says, clearly, that Barclays paid £1177m in tax in 2009. That’s real cheques and bank payments sent to real tax offices worldwide. And, before you ask – it doesn’t include PAYE and national insurance, or local equivalents in foreign countries.

The tax figure here is solely on tax paid that’s corporation tax attributable to the bank, not tax that’s collected by the bank on other people’s behalf.

As far as I understand it, and as far as the people I’ve spoken to understand it, there’s only one explanation for this that fits with the numbers in the annual report and the tax paid to HMRC as disclosed by the Guardian: Barclays paid £113m in tax to HMRC, and £1,064m in tax to other countries’ tax offices.

There is no other explanation for the divergence in the two figures (Barclays hasn’t denied the Guardian’s number).

Paid, just not to the UK

In other words, Barclays made a profit of £4.6bn from its total operations everywhere last year, and ended up paying cash-money tax of £1.2bn on them. That’s a small rounding error away from the Tax Research UK figure of what it ought to have paid if it were being fully ethical and awesome. It’s just that most of the money didn’t go to the UK taxman.

And since we’re liberals who believe in a fair go for everyone, and since Barclays makes most of its money in countries outside the UK, then so what? Their billion quid didn’t go to our taxman, but it paid for schools in Botswana and Ghana; it paid for healthcare in the US; it paid for essential services in the countries that Barclays operates in.

Which is a good thing: there’s no particular reason why, just because Barclays is headquartered in London, that the relatively (by world standards) well-off people of the UK should get the benefits of the tax on all the money that it makes.

The piece, written by veteran home affairs correspondent Jamie Doward, says – as a reported fact in the piece, not as a quote from a pressure group:

The European parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee (LIBE) will meet in Strasbourg tomorrow, when it is expected to approve a controversial measure that would compel EU member states to inform publishers of child pornography that their images are to be deleted from the internet or blocked. Child pornographers will also have to be informed of their right to appeal against any removal or blocking

Do you see the problem here? If so, excellent; have a biscuit.

If not, then let’s try this rephrasing:

The European parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee (LIBE) will meet in Strasbourg tomorrow, when it is expected to approve a controversial measure that would compel EU member states to inform publishers of libelous material that their articles are to be deleted from the internet or blocked. Libellers will also have to be informed of their right to appeal against any removal or blocking

Yes, that’s right, well done.

Just as with libel laws, the only way of determining whether or not a particular piece of material is child pornography (or, let’s use the correct legal term, “indecent images of children”) is via the judicial system. It completely subverts the rule of law, irrespective of the charge, if you allow extra-judicial bodies to act as judge, jury and executioner without the right to appeal or even notification. And it’s absolutely disgraceful for a reporter – especially one from a nominally-liberal newspaper – to imply in a news piece that people who are accused of an offence are unequivocally guilty of it.

The correct way of phrasing the piece would be:

The European parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee (LIBE) will meet in Strasbourg tomorrow, when it is expected to approve a controversial measure that would compel EU member states to inform people accused of publishing indecent images of children that their images are to be deleted from the internet or blocked. People accused of publishing indecent images of children will also have to be informed of their right to appeal against any removal or blocking.

Whether LIBE’s amendments are a good idea is a side note – I was primarily appalled by the Observer’s reporting, as I’m appalled by anyone who conflates “is accused of” with “is guilty of”. I’d note, though, that the practical implications of the changes will be as follows:

1) the procedure for publishers of sites that unequivocally feature child abuse images will not change. They will attempt to remain anonymous, until hopefully some combination of Interpol and their local police force hunt them down and throw them in jail for a very long time. Organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation will not be able to contact them, because they’ll be anonymous, and they certainly won’t appeal against the ban, because duh. Instead, their sites will be blocked and remain blocked just as they are now.

2) the procedure for sites such as art galleries, artists, parents with Flickr albums, Wikipedia, Amazon and suchlike will change. Instead of a legally unaccountable official deciding to block the entire UK population’s access to a respectable website because they think it’s noncey, they’ll have to notify the proprietor of the website of their decision and give them a right to an independent appeal.

This doesn’t strike me as problematic, and I’m perplexed as to why (apart from generic paedo-hysteria under which won’t somebody think of the children? trumps all other concerns) anyone could see it as anything other than a sensible way of balancing the need to prevent child abuse with the right to due process.

The Guardian’s reporting of David Lammy’s data on ethnic minority admissions of domestic Oxbridge undergraduates is a good example: some of the underlying data is good, but many of the factoids are wrong or misleading.

For example, one particular college apparently admitted no black domestic undergraduate students for three years. Cue: a deluge of commenters and tweeters rising up in outrage… which was completely misplaced. The college in question has an annual intake of 100 students, and the black population of the UK is 2%. That’s six missing people compared to the ‘expected’ number.

Even assuming the goal of university admissions was to completely ignore people’s academic credentials of any kind in favour of achieving ethnic balance, this would be statistical noise, equivalent to accidentally missing out on people called Smith for a few years.

So once we ignore the headlines, what are we left with? Frustratingly, the Guardian haven’t done what they often do and made the whole dataset available, so some of the analysis I’d like to do is impossible. But here we go, anyway…

Not too much to see here

Helpfully, the lack of relevance of the headline data in itself is given away by the quote from the University of Cambridge at the end of the piece:

15% of students accepted last year were from minority ethnic backgrounds. Over the five years to 2009 entry black students accounted for 1.5% of admissions to Cambridge, compared with 1.2% of degree applicants nationally who secure AAA at A-level.

I’ve sourced the same data for Oxford from their website (as an aside, I don’t know why Lammy felt the need to issue a FoI request and pretend that “you will not find these figures on the Oxford or Cambridge websites” – actually, you will…). 13% of acceptances were from minority ethnic backgrounds. 1.2% of all students that get AAA are black, and 1% of Oxford’s 2009 admission are black.

Now, we know that ethnic minorities make up somewhere around 10% of the population (it was 8% in 2001, but this is generally believed to have risen – roll on the new census!). So Oxford and Cambridge are taking slightly more ethnic minority students than their prevalence in the total population would suggest, far fewer black students than their prevalence in the total population would suggest – but about the same proportion of black students as white students with the same A-level results.

So where does that take us?

Well, the only minority group that’s singled out in this report as seriously underrepresented is black, and we know that this is largely due to the very low representation of the black Caribbean group. We know that minority groups in total are overrepresented.

We know that Oxbridge admissions massively underrepresent working class kids (indeed, the article picks up on this point only to throw it away and concentrate on anecdotes – it notes that Oxford’s social profile is 89% upper- and middle-class, as is 88% of Cambridge’s),

And we also know that the worst performing groups educationally in the UK overall are white working class and black Caribbean working class kids, and that those two groups perform much more similarly to each other than any of the other minority groups.

From that, we can draw two main conclusions.

One is that, much as it would be fun to assume the ivory towers were filled with sneering bigots and old colonial caricatures, there isn’t any real evidence of racial discrimination or lack of racial diversity in the Oxbridge recruitment process. The other is that there is plenty of evidence for lack of class diversity, and that this catches working-class black kids in its net.

Tipping the scales to make them fairer

Some of the solution to the problem falls on the universities. They need to ensure their admissions process ensures a selection that is inclusive when compared to the share of kids who get the top grades in A-levels (ie not just share of applicants) – at the moment, even when working class kids do manage to get three As, they’re still less likely to end up in Oxbridge.

But the system should go beyond this – not in terms of lowering overall standards, which would defeat the point, but rather in selecting which kids of the same standard to pick. This is simply because it’s likely that a working-class kid from a comprehensive school in south London with four predicted As has far more aptitude to perform at uni than a middle-class public school kid from Surrey with four predicted As.

The former has already proved herself to be a motivated, self-starting and able to succeed despite frequently bad teaching, by reading to make up the gaps and getting the most from the good teachers she does encounter. Her school has no particular institutional interest in her excelling at A-level or going to Oxbridge: they’ll be delighted if she gets 3 Cs, and would much rather focus on the borderline kids who might not even pass.

The latter, on the other hand, has been educated in an environment where the school’s institutional incentives are based on maximising the number of kids who get four As and an Oxbridge place. If she starts performing poorly, the school will intervene and ensure that she improves. And all her class-based teaching will be of a standard that should allow her to achieve four As at A-level without additional self-driven work.

A mirror, not a lens

However, while taking the steps above would certainly be positive (and should be applied to all Russell Group universities – many others have an even worse record of class diversity than Oxbridge), it amounts to tinkering at the margins.

Even if the ratios at the university end were adjusted to allow social disadvantage to be taken more clearly into account when taking candidates with identical predictions, black Caribbean kids and white working class kids would still be grossly underrepresented, not only at Oxbridge but at university overall, in the proportions of kids taking A-levels, and in the proportion of kids living school with any kind of qualification.

No matter what the elite university system does, it can’t solve the problems the Guardian flags in the headline. It needs to do a better job of selecting from the people available, but it also has to reflect the skewed selection of kids who get good A-levels in the first place. And that’s down to the educational system in general, and its wider place in society.

I’m buggered if I know how to change it, but it isn’t by shouting at Oxbridge, or even at the elite universities in general.

It’s become a prevalent meme across the western media – who, completely coincidentally, hate Wikileaks – that Julian Assange is currently being sought by the Swedish police on rape charges.

He isn’t. He’s sought on made-up-weird-charges that aren’t a crime in the UK, or anywhere else sensible.

Killer line:

The consent of both women to sex with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors.

Assange is being prosecuted for having sex without a condom, with someone who didn’t mind the lack of condom at the time, but who subsequently was cross about the fact that he didn’t use a condom.

—

[Editor's update: it seems it is more complicated than that. See this blog post too. Either way, it is not an allegation of sex without consent at the time of the act.

It's also worth re-stating that the opinion that this is not 'rape' refers to the English legal definition rather than the Swedish legal definition.

update 2: It now turns out, he is accused of rape by authorities, within Sweden's definition of the case. According to this report, it is being alleged that Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when (the condom) was no longer in use.]

—

Swedish law on this sort of thing is, actually so deranged that nobody in Angloland could comprehend it (except for people who’ve read Steig Larssen’s books, at which point various plotlines start making more sense: yes, that whole thing about Salander being held as a ward of the state for no discernible reason, which would have be overturned in a second in any Anglophone jurisdiction, was based on reality. Larssen’s early death? Well, I wouldn’t put money on natural causes…).

So why do the non-Swedish press keep lying he’s accused of rape, rather than something which isn’t a crime (and so which isn’t extraditable) outside of Sweden?

Well, that’d be the “Wikileaks being an massive embarrassment to polite political society” thing. Mr Assange is a threat to the comfy order of international lying, various mad Americans want him dead, and so complying with international pressure to lie that poor bedroom etiquette is the same thing as rape fits in.

Which is pretty revolting and sick, when you come to think of it.

The tabloid press creates an impression, by sensationalising the trials of those few women who make proveably-false fake rape claims, that lying about rape is a common thing. It isn’t, and the impression that lying about rape is common hurts rape victims and poisons the discourse about the whole subject.

But, in terms of ‘ways to trivialise the experience of rape victims’, the tabloid’s crass misreporting pales into insignificance when compared with a country taking laws that were (one would assume) drafted to ensure that more rapists came to justice, and using them to conveniently brand a whistleblower who’s inconvenient to the global establishment as a sex criminal.

It’s not just an affront to free speech, which you’d expect from pretty much all governments on the Wikileaks case, but it utterly demeans the ordeal of women who are actually the victims of sex crime. And it’s a cold and cynical way of exploiting the horror that sex crime understandably provokes in the eyes of bystanders to silence someone who is very clearly not a rapist, and very clearly not guilty of anything that’s illegal in the UK.

The fact that he isn’t actually guilty of anything that’s a crime here is also why, one might surmise, despite the UK police knowing his whereabouts, Mr Assange hasn’t been arrested…

Especially when populist demagogues blame immigration for all our ills, with more success than anyone in their right mind would like.

1) For sheer economic reasons, which can only be avoided by sacrificing the massive economic gains associated with them, the unskilled working class have been screwed over since the 1970s.

Cheap global transport has eroded the wage differentials between unskilled labour in the UK and unskilled labour overseas. This is, predominantly, a good thing for the UK: labour here shouldn’t primarily be unskilled, because we’re wealthy enough to educate or train everyone. And the fact that you can buy a suit for £50 is a good thing.

2) For sheer political reasons, the skilled working class have been screwed over since the 1980s. This has followed deliberate decisions by the Thatcher government, and passive-complicit decisions by its successors (both Major and Blair/Brown) to focus on the UK as an economy based on financial services and home ownership, and set economic policy solely to benefit those two parts of society. This hasn’t helped the unskilled working class either, as the massive investment in training for skilled working class jobs that would have benefited both sectors of society hasn’t occurred.

Instead, we squandered a 20-year resources boom by spending the money on keeping people in Wales, Northern England and Scotland on the sick, with enough cash that they wouldn’t complain too much about the absence of job or training opportunities. And, at the same time, kept the currency artificially too high so that industry withered on the vine (but posted excellent 3-monthly results, which is obviously far more important).

3) Immigration is completely irrelevant to any of the above, except in a few towns where the population was (literally) swamped by industry and government in the 1960s and 1970s colluding to import massive quantities of migrant labour from specific overseas regions with no plans for social integration into the community. This is the only time the UK has ever experienced mass immigration, and it was a terrible idea. It might not have worked out so terribly if points 1 or 2 above hadn’t taken place, however.

4) because admitting 1 and 2 above would be tantamount to declaring socialist revolution, moderate or right-leaning working class people, skilled or unskilled, who’ve found themselves or their friends and families screwed by a combination of global pressures and deliberate policies, are easy to persuade to go for facile remedies proposed by evil demagogues who claim the problem is to do with foreigners.

But foreigners go where the jobs are, and there are many jobs; the areas with no jobs, apart from the Bolton-style towns that have been the victims of disastrous economic experiments, don’t attract foreigners. And thanks to the EU’s sensible rules on free migration, EU migrants have reacted to the recession by, err, going home.

Which was all, sort-of, OK. But now that we don’t have the money to throw at them any more, the people who were formerly bribed into silence are righteously pissed off. And since Labour were almost as complicit as the Conservatives in their shafting, it’s not surprising that people are turning to anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s complete bollocks, but it’s compelling bollocks for someone who’s lost his job, whose dad’s just been denied disability benefit and whose son can’t get a decent technical education.

Sadly, I’ve always been better at understanding problems than creating solutions. So – it’s open to you all. How can a Labour opposition to a Tory party that’s successfully shaped the debate so much that people don’t even believe we’ve had 30 years of primarily-Thatcherist government possibly deal with the facts above, let alone turn them into an election-winning narrative?

Not a single trading team from Tullett Prebon, the London-based broker which told employees they cold move abroad for tax reasons in one of the clearest signals of an exodus from London has moved, almost a year after the offer was made.

It is the second development in a week that suggests fears over core talent leaving the City were overblown.

So *nobody at all* at Tullett thought that they would be better off paying less tax to work somewhere that wasn’t in London.

I suppose some people might argue that although not emigrating, Tullett’s brokers are working-to-rule and deliberately ensuring they aren’t eligible for big bonuses, because they’d rather have 100% of nothing than 50% of a lot.

This doesn’t seem entirely convincing, given the personality traits of the trader-y types that I’ve encountered…

Nonetheless, the often-missed point about the drinks industry, is that we’re an interesting, jolly, fun and indispensable part of society. A wedding without some champers, or a night out with the boys without a few beers would be shit.

This is good, and people who appreciate the value of FUN understand the importance of the drinks industry to the world of FUN. It’s almost certain that without the existence of the drinks industry, the world would be much less FUN, and indeed it’d be like Saudi Arabia, which is NO FUN AT ALL.

Alcohol can obviously be harmful. For example, if you consume your recommended 2,500 calories a day through the medium of drinking alcohol forever, then you’ll probably die.

But I’m a libertarian when it comes to drugs. The concept of throwing people in jail so that their lives won’t get fucked up strikes me as even more ridiculous than screwing for virginity.

However, all that down, I’ve been arguing this week with my libertarian friends. They suggest that the British Government’s former advisor on drink and drugs, Professor David Nutt, who’s suggested a whole load of new alcohol marketing restrictions that all Western countries would do well to follow, is a mad idiot.

Which is fine, except that when the same chap suggested that ‘bad drugs’ like hash and ecstasy did no more harm than booze, and so we probably ought ought to be able to smoke a reefer or two and pop the occasional pill without being thrown in jail, he was feted by libertarians and slated by right-wingers. It’s almost as if there was some kind of conspiracy…

Yet there really isn’t one. David Nutt’s views on alcohol are a ridiculous and extreme way of dealing with a non-problem… and yet at the same time, compared to the way in which people who wish to ingest drugs that aren’t alcohol are treated, they’re as liberal as liberal can be.

The odd part of problem is that his views are completely sensible and consistent. Because he’s a doctor rather than a tabloid polemicist, he believes that compromising your health with booze is just as bad as compromising your health with MDMA.

But also, because he’s a doctor rather than a philosopher, he believes the correct solution is to make the law Minimise Medical Harm, rather than to allow people to live freely.

In real life, the correct solution is to minimise non-consensual harm to third parties – which would best be done by getting rid of all drugs restrictions, but enforcing laws against harm done.

And so, much as I love evidence-based policymaking, we shouldn’t ever listen to them on this front. So viva booze, weed, pills, Valium, poppers, and anything else that makes life more fun. And sod anyone who tries to ban them.

On the one hand, the Catholic Church is one of the most revolting institutions ever to have existed, second only to the USSR in terms of ‘well-meaning ideas invented by a nice chap that you could have enjoyed a cup of tea with, taken up by insane evil egomaniacs and turned into an excuse for tyranny and genocide’.

For my money Jesus was nicer but Karl was smarter – either way, they’d both have been equally revolted by what people did in their names.

And indeed, the best thing the UK ever did – both for itself and for the development of the world as a civilised place – was to rebel from the vile leadership of the Catholic Church to form an independent state that became the cradle of liberalism, atheism and philosophy other than a branch of theology.

The Enlightenment happened over 200 years after England left Catholicism and over 100 years after the English and Scottish crowns were united, but could never conceivably have have happened in the Catholic theocracies that prevailed elsewhere at the time.

However, there is a significant other point.

Due to a combination of racial hatred and lack of zeal, the successful conversion of the rest of the British Isles to sensible religion failed to encompass Ireland.

Instead of saying, “yeah, that idiot the Pope, fuck him, support us”, Oliver Cromwell decided that the Irish were subhuman and proceeded to slaughter, enslave and oppress them. And then import Protestants from Scotland to the northeasterly bits of Ireland, just to make a point.

Given that Ireland was supposed to be an integral part of the UK, the way Ireland was treated right up to the civil war was about as disgraceful as it gets.

However, the one thing that was granted to the Irish [*] was the unequivocal right to take shitty jobs in the rest of the UK and work yourself to death for money (now, we make the same thing much less obvious, by ensuring the things in question are made in Asia by people we can’t see and therefore pretend aren’t suffering in the same way. Yay progress). And as a result, Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester and North London developed a substantial Irish Catholic, population.

Which is where the problem lies. If you’re not from those parts of the UK, Catholics are simply crazy posh Evelyn Waugh types, who’ve decided that pointless treachery would be better than just admitting that an evil foreign overlord wasn’t really worth following.

But if you’re from Northern Ireland, Liverpool or Glasgow, then anti-Catholicism is primarily about hating the (southern) Irish. And we can all agree that hating the Irish is racism, rather than merely ‘not being an idiot’-ism. Indeed, it’s exactly the same as pretending to hate Muslims when you really hate brown people.

What does this show? Overall: if you hate Catholics, you’re a dick. In exactly the same way that there’s a great deal of idiocy in many branches of Islam, but if you hate Muslims, you’re a dick.

But if you hate the Roman Catholic Church, that’s no more insane than hating Wahabbi clerics who advocate stoning, or hating Southern Baptists who want to kill gays. Like Jesus said, before the RCC turned him from the first ever socialist into some kind of weird fetish cult, “hate the sin, love the sinner”.

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[*] and indeed, to everyone else. Until 1947, anyone from anywhere in the Empire had the right to settle in the UK, or anywhere else in the Empire, if they could afford the trip. It’s always good to point out ways in which things have got noticeably more bigoted, racist and fuckwitted since the end of the Empire. That’s not a defence of the Empire, it’s a criticism of the evil, bigoted and moronic immigration policies that have been introduced subsequently to please stupid ignorant bastards.

As usual, the Littlejohn Rule applies here: if the story sounds like something you “really couldn’t make up” (thanks, Mr Dale), then somebody doubtless has made it up.

The main thrust of the Daily Mail’s story is that under proposed EU legislation, it will be illegal to print “six eggs” on a box of six eggs. Instead, the quantity of eggage will have to be listed solely in kilogrammes.

This is simply – and really really obviously – false, and if you believe it then you’re doubtless someone who’s checked whether the word ‘gullible’ is really in the dictionary.

Here’s the actual legislation, proposed by the European Parliament. The quote that the press have misunderstood (or, more likely, lied about) is:

1. The net quantity of a food shall be expressed, using litres, centilitres, millilitres, kilograms or grams, as appropriate:

(a) in units of liquid in the case of liquids within the meaning of Council Directive 85/339/EEC of 27 June 1985 on containers of liquids for human consumption ;

(b) in units of mass in the case of other products.

In other words, all food that is sold in the EU will need to list either its volume (for liquids) or its mass (for solids) in metric units on the pack. Note the absence of anything banning the use of other indicators on the pack, such as “number of eggs”, “mass in pounds”, “number of moles of hydrogen atoms in the packet”, etc. Anyone who wishes to do so can advertise any or all of the above, as long as the metric unit of volume or mass is clearly marked. See: a pint of milk.

So the more outlandish claim, that the legislation would ban the sale of eggs in packs labelled as ’six’ or ‘12′, is obvious, total nonsense.

The only thing substantiating the piece at all is the Mail’s quote from an unnamed source at the UK’s Food Standards Agency, “Retailers would not be allowed to put ‘Six eggs’ on the front of the box.“. Whether the Mail has grossly misquoted the FSA spokesman, or whether the FSA spokesman is an idiot, is not clear. Either way, the quote is wrong.

A more sensible criticism of the proposed rule comes from The Devil’s Knife – that the change would cost food packagers money for very little benefit, wasting everyone’s time and resources:

Well, I would imagine that selling a 500g box of eggs that does not, in fact, contain 500g of produce is illegal under Trading Standards. So now the egg producers are going to have to weigh each and every box, and stamp the exact weight on each box. Not only will they have to buy the stamping equipment (because you can bet your bottom dollar that just writing the weight on is not legal: they even have to stamp each individual egg now, for fuck’s sake) but it is also labour-intensive.

Well, this would be true, except that eggs are already graded by weight – e.g. a ‘large’ egg weighs 63-73g – which requires them to be weighed. And under EU labelling rules, positive errors are allowed on packaging, as are negative errors of 3% (for a package that weighs 300-500g, like six large eggs).

So if the new rules do come in, an egg producer who wished to comply with them at zero cost could just add ‘weight 385g’ to all their boxes of large eggs, and otherwise carry on as before.

Meanwhile, an egg producer who wanted to emphasise the fact that their large eggs were super-large could put the actual weight if they chose, based on the grading by weight that they would have done anyway.

Obviously, this would require more complicated software for labelling; whether the producer views it as worthwhile or not depends on whether they reckon it’ll help them make money. Like, erm, most commercial decisions…

Much of this is for sensible reasons (broadly “the only one of the candidates who isn’t a dull clone has no experience of managing anything ever, and David Miliband is a war criminal”).

However, there’s also a fair amount that’s come for the stupidest reason possible: “they all went to Oxbridge, so they aren’t representative”.

If you replace “Oxbridge” with “public school”, and “the Labour party” with “the Tory party”, this is definitely a fair point: you get to public school solely by having relatives who have large quantities of disposable cash, and therefore anyone who has been to public school has had at the very least an upper-middle-class upbringing*.

For reasons to do both with a lack of state-school applications and variations in actual acceptance rates, Oxbridge still has a private school bias in its admissions. So it’s fair to say that a randomly picked Oxbridge person is probably from a privileged background, and is not particularly likely to be a good person to represent the working class.

But that isn’t what we’re being faced with here.

We know that Diane Abbott’s parents were working-class immigrants, and that she grew up as a black working-class girl in 1950s and 1960s London. We know that Andy Burnham’s parents were working-class Scousers, and that (while he doubtless faced less adversity than Abbott while growing up) he also had a working-class upbringing in 1970s and 1980s Warrington.

In other words, we know that two of the candidates for the Labour leadership are people who come from unequivocally working-class families and areas, and who – despite the fact that Oxbridge admissions tilt towards the middle- and upper-middle-classes – were good enough to beat the bias in the system and get in anyway.

Isn’t the correct response to that fact “it’s fantastic that two of the candidates for the Labour leadership are people who are that academically able and motivated whilst at the same time having a very strong understanding of what growing up without a silver spoon is like – this is exactly what we want from our political leaders”, rather than “meh, Oxbridge wankers, unrepresentative, blah blah”?

Well, unless you’re a jealous petulant inverse snob, that is.

[*] before we get any bleeding heart middle-class sob stories, yes, many parents spend a huge proportion of their disposable incomes on school fees and go without holidays, ponies, etc – but in order to for their disposable income to cover a couple of kids’ school fees they still need to be reliably making a lot more than the median wage, which makes them upper-middle-class.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the ability of ambitious people to sell out their supporters for a massive dollop of bugger all, in cases where personal rewards are on the table. This was a textbook example of analytical failure; of course I should have been looking at the incentives for the agents rather than the incentives for the principals…

Birthrights, pottage, etc

So Nick Clegg gets to be John Prescott, and four other Lib Dems get cabinet roles (not confirmed at time of writing, but probably the poisoned-chalice ones – Home Secretary, Foreign Aid, Scotland… you get the idea). And when the Liberal Democrats lose all their seats next Parliament, I wonder if the Tories will reward him with a candidacy somewhere rural and blue where they weigh the vote…?

Meanwhile, as far as policy programmes go, the Lib Dems have basically acquiesced to the Tory manifesto. We’re still going to give the US tens of billions of pounds for the sheer love of the American military-industrial complex. We’re still going to put a cap on visas for filthy furriners. We’re still going to rig the tax system to bribe married Tory voters.

In exchange, schools in deprived areas will get a bit more money, the Tories will drop their plans to leave enormously rich people’s heirs completely untaxed, and we’ll have a referendum on Alternative Vote (remember, AV isn’t PR, it’s just “the current electoral system if it were designed by someone who wasn’t clinically insane”) at some point, which will probably fail when the Tories spend vast sums campaigning against it.

The only way this could possibly not be a terrible outcome for the Liberal Democrats is if Cameron has pledged not only to allow a referendum on AV, but that the Conservatives will support the “Yes” campaign. If that’s the case – which I haven’t seen any evidence for yet, and which would surprise me – then the collapse in the Lib Dem vote share at the next election will partly be offset and the party will at least survive.

What next?

The country will benefit in the short term. While the Tory government isn’t going to drop any of its core commitments, it’ll be deterred from doing anything really socially nasty by the need to keep the Liberals onside (equally, a lot of the socially nasty Tory PPCs who we all feared would get in last year were denied seats by the Labour resurgence in core marginals).

I don’t think that’s worth the long-term damage to the country caused by destroying the one viable alternative option for the non-authoritarian left, but heigh ho.

But the big winners, in a funny sort of way, are Labour. Who d’you think centre-left people looking for a change are going to vote for next time round, following five years of brinksmanship and savage cuts? Yup, that’d be the one.

I’ve made this point here before, but especially with this defeat (oh, come on, yes, I know, but it really was in the end, wasn’t it?)  and Gordon Brown’s departure, it’s time for lefties to join the party and lobby to get the Blairites out and the non-warmongering, non-civil-liberties-hating left in.

I’d also expect an influx of left-liberal former LD supporters into Labour (if I still lived in the country, I’d be signing up today) – join now, and you’ll have a say in who stands next time, and what platform they stand on. And in five years, or whenever the coalition collapses, it’s the duty of everyone left-leaning to get out there and flyer for Labour.

And if, by some miracle, AV does get passed, it’ll also be good news for the smaller parties of the left. Not great news – AV still won’t allow any of the 5-10% parties any seats, unlike STV – but it means that next time round you’ll be able to put Green first, Labour second and not risk letting in the Tories.

So overall, as a traditional Lib Dem supporter, I’m absolutely livid. As a liberal, I’m in two minds. At least the country’s not solely ruled by the Tebbit/Dorries party, at least there’s some hope for a left-Labour future, and at least there’s a tiny amount of hope for a multi-left future…

The suggestion is that, if we don’t have a strong, firm hand on the economy wielded by, erm, an ex-PR man and a scary manchild, then The Markets will punish us. In this sense, The Markets are rather like God: if they do exist, it’s certainly not in the kind of interventionist form that the tossers who invoke them to bolster their own political power claim they do.

The evidence for my claim is simple: none of the events of the UK political campaign or the election’s aftermath have had a significant impact on the value of the UK pound against the two other most important global currencies.

The chart below shows exchange rates (ie the value of a pound; higher is ‘better’ in the eyes of the sort of people who rant about this sort of thing, which is debatable but an argument for another day) from the start of 2010 onwards – i.e., the period when the expected election outcome shifted from a Tory majority government to “meh, don’t ask me, I only work here”:

In words, the only noticeable trend is that the GBP lost ground against the EUR up to mid-February (still pre-Cleggmania) and then stayed more or less flat, while there was no impact at all of the uncertainty on the US$ rate. So, what about the election itself? Well, this chart runs from April 21 to today:

Yup, that’s right: bugger all against the dollar, a tiny fall against the EUR (which was mostly driven by the vague agreement on Greece’s bailout, but that’s another story that’lll keep). There’s nothing that reflects any serious concerns by The Markets about the value of the UK’s currency.

I’m not going to go into bond yields, because they’re complicated. But what we do know is that the UK’s debt is denominated in pounds, so there is no prospect of default – instead, the government can always print more money. So any perceived risk to UK bonds solely consists of currency risk (you’ll always get GBP10 million back from your GBP10 million bond, but GBP10 million just might only be worth USD2.50 at the time).

So if The Markets believed that the current election bargaining meant that there was a serious risk the UK wouldn’t pass a budget, make the required cuts to bring the deficit down over a reasonable time period, and so on – in short, if there were any real financial risk posed by any of the possible electoral combinations – then the pound would have fallen rapidly already, both because it’d hit the economy and because the only way to deal with the debt without cuts is devaluation.

Now, let’s get back to the politics.

The system is completely and utterly unstable, as unstable as it could possibly be, anyone staking more than they can afford to lose on the identity of the next PM would be a raving idiot – and The Markets couldn’t give a rat’s arse. They know that, whatever happens (my money’s on a minority Tory government, but not very confidently), the leaders of the main parties will instruct their MPs to vote in favour of a budget that allows the debt to be serviced, and enough of them will agree to get some kind of budget bill passed that keeps us from going Greek.

So anyone using The Markets as a justification for a Lib-Con pact, or indeed as justification for anything other than enjoying the current glorious Westminster farce, is doing so for political reasons. Now, why might the kind of people who’re normally taken seriously as commenters on The Markets talk up the Tories for political reasons…?

Look away now if you don’t want to know the shocking, unexpected answer.

Because if you work in financial markets, you have a much higher than average propensity to be a rich selfish bastard; and if you’re a rich selfish bastard, you have a much higher than average propensity to support the Tories.

This has been another round of Simple Answers To Simple Questions; see you next election (which, I’m estimating, will be when the Tory party tears itself apart over Europe in about 18 months’ time).

This isn’t surprising. Of course alcohol marketing makes people drink more of the brand being marketed, otherwise people wouldn’t do it. But we need people to research things that seem obvious from time to time, because sometimes we find out that what we think we know is wrong. So, decent study, worth funding, all good.

But:

There’s always been a link made between alcohol and sport… the detrimental effects of that, in the same way as there was previously between cigarettes and sport,” Professor Kolt said.

Err, no. The difference is that smoking, full stop, is harmful. Alcohol consumption below 30 units (300ml of alcohol; 15 pints of bitter) a week has not been demonstrated to do harm, even compared to not drinking at all, and you need to get up to 50+ units before the risks of morbidity or mortality are substantially higher than for non-drinkers.

Unless the study shows that the impact of alcohol marketing is to encourage people aged 18-22 to drink more than 30 units a week, then it’s only of interest to alcohol marketers, and not to policymakers. And if they had found that, they’d most certainly have put it in the press release…

The problem with this kind of alcohol research (i.e. social science on consumption behaviour, rather than epidemiological science on health outcomes) is that nearly all the work commissioned and published by public bodies is carried out by miserable puritans who hate the concept of anyone ever having any kind of fun. This is because researchers who don’t hate the concept of anyone ever having any kind of fun work for drinks companies instead: they pay better, you get a free bar after work, and you don’t have to hang out with people from the first group.

But drinks companies tend to keep their studies private, because they don’t want their rivals to see them…

Therefore, the general pattern in the public arena is that some people will create a report which actually shows mildly interesting things about how people like to consume alcohol – but because of the prejudices of the people who’re writing it, the abstract and the PR make groundless accusations about negative impacts on disorder and health. And then the media reports the groundless accusations as “a study has concluded that”, and the public debate is ratcheted slightly further towards miserable puritanism.

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[*] I have no idea what the study says. The above is what the press release says; the press release features quotes from and has been approved by the study’s main authors, and is what will shape the public debate.

Ignoring the far-right hangers and floggers who believe Ms Bowman’s views are a well-needed dose of common sense (rather than, say, a scary combination of 12th century barbarism with Orwellian database fetishism), the main objection to the piece seems to be that she has suffered an appalling tragedy and therefore shouldn’t be slated, mocked or otherwise criticised.

This seems misplaced.

The appalling tragedy of losing a child is one that Linda Bowman shares with both Gordon Brown and David Cameron. The suggestion that, because of their personal suffering, we should avoid labelling Mr Brown a pompous Presbyterian prig and Mr Cameron a vacuous, PR-friendly puppet of the far right, seems odd.

So that can’t be the reason why people are edgy about following the same convention, and accurately describing Ms Bowman as a barbaric, vindictive person [*]. What, then?

The defenders seem to think it’s about feelings. Ms Bowman can’t help feeling like she wants to tear Mark Dixie limb-from-limb, making him suffer until he “squeals like a pig” (her words). Therefore, if we say that that’s a horrible thing for a person to choose to go on record as saying, then we’re disrespectful, and that’s bad.

This is also rubbish.

Ms Bowman can’t help her desire to watch Mark Dixie suffer – that’s a natural reaction. However, one of the great things about being sentient human beings rather than animals is that we have the capacity for rationality, and hence don’t actually have to do everything that we feel or desire. Especially when it’s something obviously wrong, like wanting a person tortured to death.

Of course, if someone murdered someone I loved, then on a base level I’d want that person tortured to death. And if someone thought worse of me for having that desire, then they’d be an idiot.

However, I’d also be aware on a rational level that that desire was wrong and beneath me, and therefore wouldn’t base any public statements or political campaigns on it. If I did, that would no longer be feelings I couldn’t help – it would be an active, intellectual choice to let those feelings shape my worldview.

This may seem like a digression, but I have a great deal of sympathy for non-active paedophiles who realise that their desire is wrong, seek help countering it, don’t abuse children, and don’t lobby to legalise it. They’re stuck in a horrible situation and they’re trying to live the best life they can.

However, I have nothing but contempt and loathing for paedophile groups like NAMBLA or PIE. Whilst they don’t actively abuse children at the moment, they don’t accept that their desire is wrong and instead lobby to change the law so that they can act on it.

So what? Well, as far as I can see, there’s not much difference between Linda Bowman’s position and NAMBLA’s position. Both have been placed in a horrible starting point, with desires that they can’t help.

Both should be trying to get over those desires. But instead, both revel in them – and both seek to change the law so that they can get their sick kicks.

[*] language gender-neutralised following Cath’s comment – I don’t give a monkey’s what gender someone is if they hold abhorrent views, but I accept that using a female-specific term wasn’t helpful.

Another popular one is “we’d love to take more people, but we’re full”.

An obvious retort to the definitely-not-racist [*] person raising this point is “err, the UK has the 51st highest population density in the world at 255 people/square km, behind Belgium, India, the Netherlands and the Philippines, and barely any higher than Germany or Italy”. This can be suffixed with “, you dolt” if required.

This is unlikely to convince most not-racist types.

In many cases, this will be because your use of kilometres will have driven them to dive out of the nearest window to escape your EVIL EU STASI COMMUNIST PLOT. In other cases, it’ll be because complex mathematical concepts such as ‘population density’ are, somewhat ironically, beyond them. But in the eyes of an impartial observer, you’ve basically won versus those guys.

However, a response currently beloved among the cleverer end of the not-racist spectrum requires a bit more busting. For they’ll claim “aha, yes, the UK’s not very populated, but England is – it’s got a population density of 390 people/square km, which would put it just between the Netherlands and Rwanda at number 29 on the world rankings”.

The response to this is pretty obvious: it consists of “we don’t let immigrants into England, we let them into the UK. My flat’s got an area of 50 square metres and two people live in it, giving it a higher population density than any sovereign state in the world. If we were discussing giving immigrants entry solely to my flat, then this would be a relevant statistic. But we aren’t.”

They’ll probably counter with “ah, but the majority of immigrants into the UK choose to live in England”. To which the obvious response is twofold:

1) “yes, and they also mostly go to London, where the population density is 4,761 people per square km, and other cities with similarly high densitites. Since you’re a retired colonel living in Tunbridge Wells, this has bugger all effect on you”.

2) “note the use of the word ‘choose’, indicating that despite the fact that you reckon England is practically the Black Hole of Calcutta, new arrivals to our country would rather go to it than to glorious empty Celtic wastelands. It’s the free market at work, my good fellow.”

While the “England is full” argument is ridiculous, it’s easy to see why it’s become popular. There’s a strong overlap between the not-racists who oppose immigration and the not-racists who wave white-cross flags, mumble incoherently about Scottish cliques bankrupting our country, and campaign for a completely pointless English parliament.

So for the not-racist movement, anything which combines the form of “argument against immigration” and “excuse to pretend England exists as a political entity” is practically a Holy Grail of the not-racist movement (I haven’t checked, and thankfully am out of the country at the moment [**], but if there isn’t some mention of England being full in UKIP’s election literature, I’ll eat my hat-with-corks-on-it).
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[*] for the rest of the post, I’ll refer to anti-immigration types who claim not to be racist as ‘not-racists’, in an attempt to redress their history of unfairly being called rude names by liberal types.

[**] no, it’s not hypocritical of me to write this post having moved to Australia. I left the UK because it was cold and I was bored there, not because it was full – either in general of of migrants. I also think everyone in the world deserves the opportunity that I’ve had to choose where they get to live, rather than being sacrificed on the altar of idiots’ prejudices and lies.

1) The democratically elected Icelandic government, under EU/EFTA financial regulation equivalence rules, agreed long before the crisis even began that it would guarantee compensation of the first EUR20887 of deposit to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries.

2) The Icelandic banks, with explicit permission from the democratically elected Icelandic government (as part of the economic boom that vastly enriched Icelanders for many years), actively marketed their savings accounts to depositors from other EU/EFTA countries.

3) The Icelandic banks then went bust and lost their depositors’ money.

4) This means that, unequivocally and in every possible sense, the Icelandic government is responsible for paying the first EUR20887 of compensation to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries. They agreed to take on that debt, and retail depositors in the Icelandic banks made the deposits on the basis that the Icelandic government weren’t a bunch of ropey shysters who’d refuse to pay debt that they owed.

5) For understandable reasons of domestic harmony, the governments of the UK and Netherlands (where the majority of Iceland’s victims were located) agreed to pay the compensation themselves, and subsequently chase the Icelandic government for the money it owed.

6) Today’s populist refusal by Iceland’s president to pay the UK and Netherlands government the US$5bn it owes as a result, despite the extremely generous payment terms they’d been offered, represents every single Icelandic person nicking more than US$10,000 from British and Dutch taxpayers.

If that’s democracy, screw it.

Update: Dsquared in the comments has a good summary of the Iceland situation:

The basic story here is that a small and wildly self-regarding Nordic nation, with a history of electing right-wing governments on the back of get-rich quick schemes, did so. Then that right-wing government proceeded to deal with its creditors in an amazingly stupid and dishonest manner because it wanted to pretend that something close to boom levels of consumption could be sustained. Then it all fell apart and a left-wing government was elected and started trying to clean up the mess. Then the elected President (from the same party as said right-wing government) decided to veto the solution. And this is, in some way, Gordon Brown’s fault.

He’s also written the whole, erm, saga up as a morality play. Well worth a read.

Obviously, like nearly all right-wing frothers nearly all the time, they’re talking complete and utter bollocks.

US culture site the Awl nails it on why:

Goldman Sachs “is understood to be considering its options in the wake of the UK’s windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses, a new 50pc top income tax rate, and increased banking regulations” is hilarious, and it is also a dead giveaway that the Telegraph uses the phrasing “is understood” to introduce this idea. Let’s see: here’s an incredibly-secretive, super-private financial institution of which it can be “understood” that they’re going directly to the papers as the first volley in a bargaining plan. But: hilarious! They’re going to pretend that they’re willing to leave London? They’re going to offshore the London office? To where? Glamorous downtown Sofia? Belfast? Tallinn or Toronto?

Think it through, boys. Nobody who works in that office will leave London! What’s the point of being rich if you have to live somewhere crappy? It just doesn’t work like that. You can near-shore and off-shore the jobs no one wants to Salt Lake City or wherever—but you can’t move the income producers to a town where they can’t get a cab and a fat steak. If you give Goldman Sachs anything at all to stay put, it means you both are huge morons, just like New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg was when GS pretended it was going to move from downtown Manhattan to more expensive quarters in midtown, and they wouldn’t even have done that. Ever.

Word.

Let’s also assume that one side consists of crooks, cheats and liars, and the other side of bold seekers for truth – but we don’t know which one.

What happens if you try and deduce which side is lying from how the world has acted, based on every actor’s incentives?

Who’s in it to win it?

If AGW is false and people are lying to try and show that it’s true, who benefits? To start with, some geeks who get money to build computer models, some hippies who get to feel less silly about 50 years of veganism and hair-shirt-wearing, and some companies selling turbines and carbon filters.

The nuclear industry is the obvious big potential money-draw, and has form on extorting enormous quantities of state cash – but almost the entire environmentalist establishment hates them and rails against their product, and nuclear currently isn’t counted as ‘renewable’ by any major standards. Still, they’re the ones to watch if there were a conspiracy.

On the other hand, if AGW is true and people are lying to try and show that it’s false, who benefits?

That’d be everyone who does anything energy-intensive, then. Oil companies. Gas companies. Most of the world’s 500 leading companies, who between them disclose 10 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions (that’s a good report, by the way – written from a business and not a hippy perspective, and I’m not just saying that because I came up with the methodology and wrote last year’s edition). People who will directly lose significant amounts of money if caps, quotas or permits for emissions are made mandatory.

Poor, powerless Exxon

Now, out of those groups – scientists, hippies and turbine-makers, plus EDF, Areva and Westinghouse [*], or every other major company that there is, which has the most power? Which is the largest donor to governments? Which provides the most jobs?

Which advertises the most in newspapers and on TV? Which spends the most on PR? If the head of BP and the head of the WWF are both on hold waiting for Gordon Brown, which call will he take?

In short, which group has the power easily to spread its message to absolutely everyone who wants to listen, and to write governments’ industrial policy? Which group has the power to, erm, talk to people and try and persuade them that it’s right, whilst having pretty much no influence on anybody that isn’t conferred by the fact that it appears to be right?

The powerful group here isn’t going to be the hippies or the windmill dudes. Hell, they can’t even save the whale, even though everybody loves whales, they taste revolting, and nobody even makes any money out of hunting them.

But let’s be charitable: let’s assume the nuclear guys have teamed up with their 50-year worst-arch-enemies to play the ‘fake AGW conspiracy’ game too. So EDF has revenues of about $90bn; Areva of $20bn, and Westinghouse of about $4bn. Let’s (generously) double that for the alternative energy industry. Let’s assume they’re lobbying and PRing as flagrantly as the nuclear industry notoriously does.

Meanwhile, BP – just one oil company – has revenues of $361bn. The top 10 oil companies have revenues of more than $3trn (and market caps of over $1.5trn, just in case you dispute revenue as a valid measure). The top 10 electricity companies, excluding EDF, take in another $250bn between them.

And that’s before you get on to miners, steelworks, manufacturers, shippers, airlines, construction companies. Every business that doesn’t consist of Frenchmen toting uranium or chaps in braces pretending they understand money has masses to gain in the short-to-medium term if they can falsely persuade the public that AGW is a myth.

France: perfidious, but not that perfidious

For Anthropogenic Global Warming to be an evil conspiracy, it would have to be a conspiracy invented by people with no power and no shot at power, paid for primarily by the French government which they hate and which hates them, and which had somehow managed to bribe and corrupt every serious scientist in the relevant field.

On the other hand, if AGW were correct, then you might expect that almost every scientist in the field would accept it, that lay-people with an interest in science would accept it, and that even companies affected by it wouldn’t compromise their credibility in the eyes of everyone who actually understood the debate by actively, on-the-record, pretending it didn’t exist.

However, you’d also expect that the companies with enormous amounts of money to lose in the short term from AGW being accepted would try every trick in the book to take the debate from the realms of science to the realms of political soundbiting, churnalism, paid shilling, and stirring up the worst instincts of the worst idiots in the blogosphere.

Now, which one of those sounds like a more plausible scenario for where we are today…?

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[*] all other big nuclear generators have even larger coal operations, and all other big engineering firms are equally happy to dig mines, make aeroplane engines or build coal stations, so swings-and-roundabouts rules apply.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not an extremist or a terrorist or any kind (neither white supremacist nor Islamist fundamentalist) – he’s just mentally ill with an odd relationship with society:

With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence – a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

RIPA was sold to the public as a law that would protect us from terrorist threats, organised crime and evil paedos, by preventing them from using evil Bond-villain-y encryption to cover their nefarious tracks. The media, being craven, lapped this up: c’mon, who’s going to stick their neck out for Osama Bin Laden and Gary Glitter?

However, the actual legislation said absolutely nothing about terrorists, organised criminals, or paedophiles. Being legislation, it simply said that people who committed certain acts would be breaking the law and would be eligible for certain punishments.

This is a point I touched on here last year, when there was a nonsensical fuss about ‘anti-terror legislation’ being used against Iceland. Again, the legislation that was used against Iceland, although sold as essential to combat the likes of Mr Bin Laden, made absolutely no mention to terrorism – it was targetted against anything that posed a threat to the UK.

Why does any of this matter? Simply because, among well-meaning people on all sides, there’s a strong tempation to back laws that seem sensible and sound like they’d have nice outcomes even though the actual effect is far worse… so as we saw last week, the combination of strict liability for possession of certain illegal weapons plus minimum sentencing can create ridiculous results, despite the fact that locking up people who carry guns for five years is generally fair enough.

Or, perhaps more directly relevant to left-leaning discussions: nobody aside from the truly vile could oppose locking up more rapists – but when people start to suggest that a good way to do this would be by reversing the burden of proof in criminal cases, that rapidly takes us somewhere very unpleasant indeed.

In a similar vein, violent rape pornography is pretty revolting, and people who use it are best avoided – but the letter of the law banning it makes it legal to jail BDSM couples (who aren’t crossing the line into GBH) for photographing themselves in completely consensual and legal activities. The government assured queer communities at the time that they wouldn’t be targeted – but that’s not what the law says, and if the police and CPS fancied a clampdown at any time then they’d be perfectly entitled to do so.

What ties this all together?

Well, remember that what politicians say is irrelevant: what matters is what the laws they pass say.

…aand if a politician reassures you that the laws they’re passing would never be used against someone like you (or your autistic child, or your kinky friend), or something that you don’t disapprove of, then they’re either lying to you or they don’t understand their own job.

…and if that’s the case for a particular politician or party, you probably shouldn’t vote for them.

In the same Guardian comedy special, Brian Logan wrote a bad, and not very funny, column about the ‘new offenders’ of comedy. It’s made worse by the fact that his initial thesis that sexism and racism are back, wearing an Irony Cloak that makes their attackers manifest themselves as Humourless Sandal Wearers, isn’t a bad one at all.

After all, Jimmy Carr could easily (dis)grace the end of a pier in the 1970s; the Top Gear cast seem to be in a permanent remake of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads without the self-awareness… and James Horne and Matthew Corden appeared in a Carry On-style dollybird pic that failed because it was too stupid (yes, too stupid to be a Carry On film. That takes elite skills). But it’s OK, because the racism, sexism and homophobia are ironic. Even though they aren’t actually being used to make a point about society at all, they’re ironic, because the people saying them are on TV and not in the BNP.

Meanwhile, the genuinely subversive and intelligent men’s magazine that introduced a new generation to Howard Marx, Hunter Thompson, excessive booze and drug consumption as a prerequisite to good writing, and the importance of trying to annoy everyone in the whole world all the time ever,  got overtaken by the halfwitted, porn-for-boys-too-daft-to-get-it-online brainfodder that real Humourless Sandal Wearers thought the original was. Worse, it turned into them. But it’s OK, because the witless sexist objectification is ironic. Even though it’s the only point of the magazines, and isn’t being used to make a point about society at all, it’s ironic, because it’s a magazine and looks a bit like Loaded did.

There’s a lot more out there that, although not as inexcusably witlessly bigoted as Carr and Clarkson, treads on dodgy ground without appearing to engage in much subversion of authority or of ingrained attitudes. Little Britain’s a good example: its treatment of race and sexuality has been hotly debated, but its treatment of class is painfully, obviously and one-dimensionally dodgy. And the fact that it’s seen as a kids show complicates matters, in that the race and sex aspects are capable of being misunderstood by children and idiots.

So, in theory, it’s a good time for a writer like Brian Logan to pull off some Irony Cloaks and show us the dribbling shrivelled sexists lurking inside.

Unfortunately, his finely honed journalistic skills, or possibly his lunch of pure gin, lead him to completely the wrong targets – Scott Capurro, Richard Herring and Brendon Burns, or the ones who, in front of generally-liberal adult audiences, assault lazy thinking and unconsciously bigoted attitudes (although he does, in passing, throw in a Jimmy Carr one-liner to tar all the others with the same brush).

This is the point where my article risks collapsing under the iron law of ‘trying to explain why things are funny’. But let’s start with a joke:

Q: What d’you call a Muslim flying a plane?
A: The pilot, now piss off you horrible bigot

If you think that’s actively funny, then you’re easily amused and should market yourself to insecure standups (i.e. all of them) as a readymade audience member.

But hopefully, you can see it makes a point about a type of comedy: it’s based on your perceptions as a listener, either of Muslims, of the comedian you’re listening to, of your fellow listeners, or all three. It’s a joke about racism, but it’s not a racist joke – it’s calling your listener out on the fact that they’ve been complicit in your apparently-racist feed line.

On the other hand, if you tell a racist joke about Muslims, and your audience laugh, and then you move on to talk about something else, and then you get accused of being a racist, and you say ‘but I’m being ironic’, then you’re either a racist and a liar, or someone who’s happy to make racist jokes to get a cheap laugh and a liar.

Capurro, Herring and Burns are about the first kind of routine. It’s a given that they’re performing to liberal centre-left educated audiences (if there’s a more liberal, centre-left, educated place than the natural habitat of the modern standup alternative British comedian – Edinburgh in August – then a black hole of Guardian G2s may actually have formed there) – and that’s why they’ve taken over the clever end of comedy from the earnest callers-out of Racist Are Bad, M’kay.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream politicans (and no, the BNP are not mainstream politicians: if the Daily Mail hates you for being too racist, you are not mainstream) would still make explicitly bigoted statements. Now, they don’t, which is a victory for all that’s good and decent – but an awful lot of the attitudes that could previously be justified explicitly are coded and internalised. While the worst offenders for this are obviously on the right (‘are you thinking what we’re thinking?’), it’s easy for anyone to take on coded-bigot views without being consciously racist, sexist or homophobic [*].

So Logan’s conclusion, that these people take liberal audiences, perform “comedy that sneers at the vulnerable and the under-represented” at them, and hence should be opposed, is as off-base as is humanly possible. Opposing outright rednecks wouldn’t be relevant, because anyone who goes to a standup gig (aside from Al Murray and Little Britain Live, perhaps) does so as a definition. Mocking assorted far-right loons is briefly funny, which is why Sadly No! is a must-blog, but is pretty cheap, not that difficult, and gets wearing after an hour onstage.

But helping people realise and think about unpleasant truths concerning their own views is precisely what comedy is for… well, to the extent that it has any moral purpose at all beyond making you laugh. And whilst I’ve deliberately avoided the I-word in the setup because it’s been so tarnished by wankers, that’s precisely what actual irony in standup is about.

…and that is why heterosexual males should watch, at the very least, 3:20 to 4:40 of this video. Other demographic groups are welcome to do so, as in my opinion it’s quite funny, but heterosexual males actively should.

Related reading:
Herring’s blog on the subject
Shakesville: someone who, by not only not getting it, but not even getting the concept of not getting it, inspired this post.

[*] I’m fully aware that some of my attitudes and ways of thinking can be racist, sexist and homophobic, try to avoid them professionally and on most social occasions, consciously play around with them in some of my writing, and sometimes really offend people when drunk in the wrong company. If you think you’re free of bigoted thinking, then it’s pretty much certain that you’re even more bigoted than me.

One of the questions asked in the poll is “% who agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together”. If the theory that BNP voters are driven by fear of gangs of steaming Somalis, murderous mullahs and crack-dealing Caribbeans were correct, then you might expect there to be some kind of negative correlation between Nick Griffin’s multi-ethnic nightmares and the belief that ’round here things are pretty much OK’.

So I dug up my trusty ethnicity-by-local-authority dataset, and plotted a graph of minority population (meaning ‘not white British’) versus happy-with-race-relations-round-here:

Pleasingly, r^2 here is zero, which means there is absolutely no correlation at all, not even a tiny bit, just none whatsoever between quality of race relations and proportion of immigrants.

The rest of the data’s here, if you want to download it – the general trend is a slight (r^2~ 0.1) negative correlation between minority population and most happiness statistics. At some point I’ll control by income and deprivation:  but based on the work I’ve already done on this, the uncorrected correlation is so small that I’d be amazed if minority population had any substantial impact on any of the above.

Returning to the BNP vote question, the data also shows that Barking & Dagenham and Newham are the most miserable places in the country, based on “% who are satisfied with their local area as a place to live”. Newham has a 66% minority population; Barking has a 19% minority population. About 15% of Newham’s white British voters voted BNP [*], as did about 15% of Barking’s white British voters.

This is reasonable evidence for the proposition ‘people vote BNP if their life is extremely miserable, irrespective of whether or not this has anything to do with immigrants’ – which strongly implies the best way to combat the BNP is to help make people’s lives less miserable rather than to kick out immigrants…

[*] I’m assuming that ‘people who aren’t white British won’t vote BNP’ is a reasonable generalisation.

Here’s a chart comparing white British versus ethnic minority population and educational attainment (using the fairly standard-at-lower-end measure of five GCSE passes including English and Maths) for London [**]:

The net result: there is a negligible correlation (r^2 is 0.12; ‘total correlation’ means an r^2 of 1; ‘no correlation’ means an r^2 of 0) between minority populations and educational attainment. If I’d controlled for poverty, given that wealthy white Sutton, Kingston and Kensington & Chelsea skew the data upwards, the correlation would’ve been even lower.

This point is worth making, and the hour and a half I spent putting the data together worthwhile, because it exposes the lie that the reason for white-working-class kids’ low educational attainment is too much time spent dealing with illiterate minorities.

The reason why the emergence of the BNP is so pernicious is because it makes well-meaning people, like many of the commenters on this site, focus on immigration as a source of rather than a scapegoat for the white working class’s problems. But it just isn’t one. People stuck in that situation might believe that it’s a source of their problems, but they’re wrong.

BNP voters are wrong because they went to crap schools, didn’t learn anything, can barely read, and hence believe any old shite they’re told (have you been to any BNP forums? ‘king hell, the levels of educational attainment on display make Terry Kelly sound like Terry Eagleton). But we, as ‘people who’re bothering to go online and read, comment or at least troll LC’, did learn something, can read, and don’t believe any old shite we’re told – so we’re fucking right when we say that they’re either bigots or have fallen for other people’s lies.

How we get that message out to BNP voters is another question. Maybe we can’t, this generation. Maybe we need to fix education among the least academic quartile of the population – it’s the one thing that British people across all four nations have always been crap at compared to our neighbours, but perhaps it’s time to give it ago. And maybe rigging the system so that the current crop of BNPists are just ignored is the right thing to do, this generation.

Or maybe we can change the current BNP voters’ minds, in which case awesome, but I’m fairly sure we don’t do it by telling them the lying shite they’ve fallen for is fine, true and jolly and we’re doing Real Things to address their Very Genuine Concerns about too many foreigners.

[*] obviously there’s good cause to be concerned about black kids’ GCSE results. My suspicion is that they’ve taken on traditional working-class British values more substantially than other minority groups, but this hasn’t been tested by data.

[**] education data from 2008, from here. Race data from Census 2001, via here. Yes, 2001 was a while ago. Yes, it’s only London; this is because this is a blog post not an academic treatise. The data for the whole country is available on the National Statistics neighbourhood website, as is 2006 data for London, but it’d take a few hours to input it. If you think there’ll be a radical difference on either front, do the calculation; I’ll happily update the post if it’s significantly different. Yes, I also know that ‘non-white’ is an extremely blunt instrument for the calculation – but again, I’m willing to bet sizeable sums that ‘areas with large non-English-speaking communities’ and ‘areas with large non-white populations’ are strongly correlated (r^2 > 0.5), and I’ll happily update the post if you show otherwise. Data on NatStats, again.

1) the economy is shafted
2) everyone hates the leadership

All the other factors being claimed as reasons for the impending defeat are a subset of the points here (indeed, arguably 1 is a subset of 2 – it’s a lot easier to excuse the government’s other failures if you aren’t being thrown out of work and having your house repossessed at the time).

And together, they lay the foundations for the defeat of the New Labour project and the resurgence of the Labour left.

But first, a couple of clarifications on why these are the reasons for the defeat.

The government is no more corrupt and sleazy than previous governments, or indeed the current opposition: it’s just that ‘sleaze’ scandals get manufactured, and capture public interest, when they happen to people who are already unpopular. For example, MPs’ expenses have been large and unmonitored since the 1980s, when MPs across all parties agreed to accept minimal pay rises in exchange for more generous allowances… ironically, as a way of deflecting the jealous public rage levelled at pay rises. [*]

Another factor some consider to exist in its own right is immigration. But this isn’t right either: people in the mainstream only worry about immigration when they think they might lose their jobs to immigrants. Prior to the downturn, the people worried about immigration were crazy bigots and the underclass (who sort-of compete [**] with immigrants for houses and benefits even when times are good) – hence the abject failure of the Tories’ 2005 anti-immigration platform. So if opposition to immigration becomes an issue this time round, this will be directly due to the downturn.

And finally, the idea that a significant proportion of people are opposed to the government’s authoritarian policies is refuted by the fact that, err, they aren’t. Liberals and libertarians, as always, represent a minority of the population; the groundswell of public opinion still holds that locking more Bad People up for longer is a Good Thing That Will Help Us Sleep Safe In Our Beds. If anyone ever gets elected to dog-catcher, never mind MP, never mind PM, primarily on a civil liberties manifesto, then I’ll eat a hat made of other hats. And no, David Davis doesn’t count.

Less hated, not more liked

So the election collapse is solely down to the-economy-stupid factor and the We Hate Gordon Clown And ZaNuLiebore factor. But so what?

Well, it means that whatever happens in 2010 – even if it’s a Conservative majority government – can’t be seen as an ideological Tory victory. Tory policy would have left us in exactly the same state… because it was the same in all significant respects. This is the reason why it took so long for the Tory lead to emerge, despite the government being widely perceived as unpopular and the economy tanking pretty much from the start of Brown’s premiership.

And when polled, people still dislike Cameron and Osborne, it’s just they currently dislike Brown and Darling even more. You could only claim that the Tories were ‘popular’ if you defined popular as ‘less hated than Gordon Brown’, a definition that would leave tabloid journalists, estate agents, double glaziers and paedophiles celebrating their new ‘popularity’.

The ideas that are actually popular among real people in the UK – those that people would actually vote for if the election weren’t framed in the media and the popular conscious as a choice between one extremely unpopular centre-right mildly authoritarian party and one slightly less unpopular centre-right mildly authoritarian party – have absolutely nothing to do with the Conservative manifesto.

Far more important is the international drift to the old-school left, from casino capitalism and demented military interventionism towards re-regulation and dis-intervention. People want their jobs protected, they want fat-cats punished, they want spending to mitigate the recession, they want benefits if they are laid off… these are not things that an incoming Tory government could push, even if Cameron wanted to [***].

The Tories don’t have to last long

Starting from that position, and with Tory economic policy marginally worse than Labour’s, the recession likely to continue through 2010 anyway, and the impact of public sector borrowing likely to dampen the recovery [****], the incoming Tory government will rapidly become extremely unpopular. Think 1982, when Mrs Thatcher’s government appeared certain to lose the following year’s election, and was only saved by the intervention of a mad fascist dictator. Absent a Belorussian invasion of the Isle of Man, the Tories’ levels of popularity by the time of the 2014/15 election will be limited.

The centre of gravity of UK politics is unlikely to shift far enough over those four or five years that the Liberals, or some currently unknown leftist party, have reached ‘leading opposition party’ status. This means that whoever’s running the Labour party at that point, as long as they’re not hated by the entire population, will be in a good position to win power.

But who’ll be running the Labour party then? Well, there will never be a better opportunity than 2010 to change the direction of the party away from the New Labour ethos. Labour will just have suffered a major electoral defeat driven by 1) New Labour’s economic policies and 2) New Labour’s personalities. With centre-right economics, Blair-ish personalities, and winning elections, being the only defining features of New Labour, this is the best chance since 1983 for activists to shift the party’s centre of gravity significantly leftwards. Possibly the last chance, as old-school leftist MPs die out.

On the other hand, if everyone who is left-wing quits in fits of pique to spend more time with their pure hearts, untainted egos, and George Galloway commemorative mugs, then the current bastards will stay in charge of the party, because there won’t be anyone left to oppose them. And they’ll probably lose, because everyone will still hate them, and we’ll get a second term of reviled Tory government, and the poor and minorities will get screwed even more, and people will hate politics even more.

So if you want to see a serious left-wing party standing in 2014-15, your only chance of achieving this is to join Labour now and become an activist as soon as possible. Don’t worry, you don’t have to vote for them in the upcoming election – just lobby as hard as you can for leftist candidates in every party post that comes up, local, NEC and Westminster. Don’t even wait until the defeat – the writing is already on the wall, and you need to establish this narrative sooner rather than later.

[*] And so an MP’s base salary is now at the dizzy heights of a 27-year-old solicitor at a London commercial practice, and made up to roughly the level of a 35-year-old solicitor at a London commercial practice by the allowances.

[**] really, immigrants and the underclass both get screwed over by the ruling classes, who could build more social housing, allocate it more sensibly, and impose less silly benefit systems if they chose. But if you see a Bangladeshi getting a house when you don’t have one, then this is a conceptual leap too far.

[***] many of them aren’t things that I support, either. This post is about what the socialist-left should do, not about whether they’re right.

[****] it’s worth trading slower growth in 2011-2014 for a less precipitous decline now, obviously, but it won’t feel that way at the time.