Matt Ridley's Blog, page 21

How tastes evolve

My Times column on meat eating:

A few years ago I had a conversation at Harvard with Steven Pinker, the bestselling evolutionary psychologist. We were both writing optimistic books at the time, his being The Better Angels of Our Nature, about the decline in violence over recent centuries. I asked him: if all sorts of violence and cruelty were considered acceptable a century or two ago and are now beyond the pale — slavery, child labour, bear-baiting, wife-beating and so forth — then what routine habits do we practise today that we will look back on with horror in two or three generations’ time?

That’s easy, he replied: meat-eating. Don’t get me wrong, he added, I like meat, but the trend of history is clear, that one day in the future people may well look back on the rearing of animals for slaughter as barbaric. The number of animals killed for food each year — about 60 billion chickens, 1.5 billion pigs, a billion sheep and goats and 300 million cows — continues to rise.

Yet perhaps the early signs of Pinker’s coming change are already there: rising vegetarianism, growing disapproval of factory farming, boycotts of foie gras, opposition to hunting, more emphasis on the ethical treatment of farm animals. History has a way of driving these trends inexorably forwards, without anybody being in charge of them. I thought of this when I read last week that the government plans to introduce new rules after Brexit to restrict the export of live animals for slaughter. EU law currently prevents Britain from banning the practice. It would be a small change, but one of many that all trend in the direction of greater empathy.

This and other examples suggest that the animal welfare lobby is now scraping the barrel for causes to take up, without tackling the big but hard one of meat eating. An organisation called Crustacean Compassion is campaigning to add lobsters and crabs to the list of species protected by the Animal Welfare Act 2006. The House of Lords recently debated the banning of animals in circuses, even though there are just 16 such creatures in the UK: six reindeer, three camels, three zebras, one fox, a macaw, a racoon and a zebu.

The treatment of animals has generally been on one-way travel to compassion, albeit slowly, for centuries. In the Middle Ages, according to the historian Barbara Tuchman, a popular spectator sport was to nail a cat to a tree and then take turns trying to batter it to death with your head, with your hands tied behind your back, while trying to avoid being scratched by the terrified animal. Cock fighting is now unacceptable almost everywhere. Britain made it illegal as long ago as 1835; Louisiana was the last American state to ban it in 2008. Bull fighting will probably not last long.

Yet the evolution of morals can go the other way too. Things that were once disgraceful can become acceptable, even admirable. Take homosexuality, thoroughly disapproved of by almost everybody (including some gay people) little more than half a century ago, but today — quite rightly in my view — treated by many governments, some religions, most people and (despite his born-again beliefs) the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, as something to be respected, even celebrated. Was that shift in attitudes inevitable?

Consider this startling coincidence of timing. The computer pioneer and mathematician Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted and chemically treated for his illegal and (at the time) disgraceful homosexuality. About a year later Vladimir Nabokov published a book about a middle-aged man’s unusual lust for a very young girl. He shot to fame, wealth and literary celebrity. Today paedophilia is even more of a crime and a sin than it was then, homosexuality not at all.

My point is that one has evolved towards tolerance; the other towards intolerance. Don’t get me wrong: I approve of both trends. But I wonder if they were inevitable, or fortuitous. Even more strikingly, the regime that came to power in Germany in 1933 passed and enforced unprecedented laws against cruelty to animals while actively promoting vegetarianism, conservation and respect for nature. Yet it also rediscovered and normalised depths of cruelty to human beings that had long been dropped from social acceptability. Who could have predicted that bizarre combination of trends?

The idea that we are gradually and inevitably becoming nicer, more tolerant and more compassionate, spreading our morality to more kinds of people and more species of animal, is not necessarily right. These things can evolve in various directions.

Still, I think the general drift of culture is heading very slowly towards disapproval of killing animals for meat, however humanely it is done. Nonetheless, if you suggest, as I have done occasionally, that the answer is to breed animals without much in the way of brains, so they cannot suffer, then you arouse an even more horrified “yuk” reaction. Yet cows and sheep already have much smaller brains than their wild relatives. Why not go further and breed an animal that can do little more than eat and grow, and is literally too “stupid” even to feel pain?

Perhaps artificial meat will get there first. It probably is not beyond the wit of modern science to devise a reactor in which grass enters at one end and burgers pop out at the other end. That’s what a cow does anyway, so it must be possible. A Californian company called Perfect Day is marketing “milk” made from fermented yeast to which it adds plant-based sugars, fats, and minerals; the company claims it tastes like cow’s milk. Beware, cattle, robots are coming to take your jobs.

For the moment the barriers to the introduction of “in-vitro meat” (IVM) are technical and economic. A synthetic hamburger can be made from beef muscle stem cells, but at huge expense. Some in the industry are forecasting supermarket-priced meat within ten years. However, there is a further problem. Earlier this month a psychologist and a vet published a survey of people’s attitudes. They found that although vegans approved of the idea of lab-grown meat, they were unwilling to try it. “These results demonstrate an apparent paradox: those who are already meat restrictive appear less willing to engage with IVM; however, along with pescatarians, these groups generally reported more positive views of IVM compared to farmed meat.”

European Commission buries science on bees

My Times column on a shocking case of European policy cover-up over bees and insecticides:

 

Is the European Commission determined to dim the Enlightenment? I ask this because its behaviour in one specific instance goes so utterly with dogma and against evidence as to suggest that there is no longer even a pretence of respect for reason left in Brussels. It concerns bees.

In 2013, you may recall, the European Union banned some uses of neonicotinoid insecticides to save bees. The verdict on this policy has now come in, from the commission’s own Joint Research Centre (JRC), whose job is to provide independent scientific advice to support EU policy. I have seen the commission’s internal report plus a PowerPoint summary that was shown privately to MEPs. Its conclusion is that the ban has been disastrously counterproductive, resulting in an increased use throughout the continent of more damaging pesticides, mainly pyrethroids, which are sprayed on rather than seed-treated (worse for non-pests) and are especially harmful to aquatic life. It finds the ban has had no benefit at all for bees.

In Britain, for example, the study finds that farmers have more than quadrupled the number of insecticide applications on oil-seed rape (from 0.7 to 3.4 per growing season), but pest pressure has increased. Meanwhile, recent studies have demonstrated that declines among wild bees are driven mostly by land use changes and have not increased since neonics were introduced in the 1990s. In fact, a 2015 study published in Nature Communications found that those wild bees most often found in agricultural areas — and probably most exposed to neonics — are “common” and “dominant”.

This makes sense because neonics are mostly used as seed dressings, absorbed into the plant from germination, rather than sprayed on a growing crop. This makes them more lethal to pests such as flea beetles that eat the crop but less dangerous to innocent bystanders, including bees that collect pollen and encounter lower doses. (To declare an interest, I own a farm, which does not grow oil-seed rape but does use neonics to protect wheat. My pride and joy is to have created a new 40-acre wildflower meadow, which is buzzing with bees all summer.)

What has the commission decided to do in response to the news that its policy has been bad for wildlife? Suppress the JRC report and double down, of course. It is refusing to release the report and has (I hear) told the JRC that the centre will have to publish it itself in a journal, which would take months and, crucially, delay publication until after an appeal against the ban at the European Court of Justice is concluded. The commission fears it will lose the case, so it has leaked to friendly reporters at The Guardian and Politico (via the activist Pesticide Action Network) that it intends to push forward with a full ban on neonics, except in greenhouses. The original 2013 ban was on seed treatments and other uses on bee-attractive crops. The leak suggests the full ban would be imposed in May — months before the final decision was to be made this autumn. It apparently wants to get the ban in place before the evidence that it is mistaken reaches the public. The leak was probably intended to keep pressure on the ECJ to rule in the commission’s favour.

Last week Bernhard Url, executive director of the European Food Safety Authority, appeared before the European parliament’s agriculture committee and said that “on the request of the European Commission”, the neonic policy would be based instead on the so-called Bee Guidance Document, even though he admitted this has not been adopted by EU countries. This was a bizarrely one-sided piece of politicised science, written mainly by activist researchers with a conflict of interest, that forces regulators to rely on lab studies often using absurdly high doses of the pesticides while ignoring the many large field studies that overwhelmingly concluded that neonics had no hive-level effect on bees. The document has been reputationally shredded in court.

As background, the German MEP Markus Pieper recently drafted a report for the European parliament budgetary committee calling for more transparency about what is sometimes called sock-puppet commission funding of NGOs. He was gobsmacked by the realisation that the commission pays wealthy green NGOs to lobby the parliament. “I can’t get my head around that sort of thing,” he said. Revealingly, Bart Staes, a Belgian Green MEP, responded with fury to his draft.

David Zaruk, a Brussels-based academic, has been documenting the extent to which Europe has become a playground for American green NGOs. European policy is based on hazard, not risk; it measures whether something can cause harm no matter what the exposure. That, along with an extreme interpretation of the precautionary principle (to consider the hazard, but not the benefit, of any innovation), makes it much easier to get things banned in Europe than in America, where lawyers put up a fight. Hence the way US activists now start their campaigns in Europe. Zaruk says: “If you can ban your target substances (glyphosate and certain neonicotinoids are the flavours of the month) in the influence-rich but lawyer-weak left-leaning European Commission, you then take that feather in your cap back to DC and try to build regulatory momentum.”

Perhaps the European Food Safety Agency should drop the pretence that its regulatory decisions are based on science and admit that EU regulations on the environment and health are political determinations driven by whoever can create the most pressure on bureaucrats and politicians, which is almost always these days anti-science NGOs with their vast and subsidised budgets. For those who would prefer we do without insecticides altogether: great idea, but we missed that bus 20 years ago when we turned our back on genetically modified crops. Insect-resistant GM cotton and maize have boomed elsewhere, but work on European crops largely ceased at the behest of the environmentalists.

It is tragic that this is happening in Europe, home of the Enlightenment, birthplace of the scientific method, where the human race began to climb out of its solitary, brutish and short-lived natural state. The fact that the commission is using a corrupt document and suppressing its own report showing that the ban has been a counterproductive failure — and that few in Brussels appear to give a damn — suggests that Brexit cannot come soon enough.

 

Post script:

The following letter appeared in the Times the next day from a farmer:

Sir, Matt Ridley (“Europe’s age of unreason harms its wildlife”, Comment, Apr 17) perfectly sets out the facts surrounding the scandalous suppression of scientific evidence and the pandering to illogical non-governmental organisation pressures, by the EU, and how this has led to a ban on the use of the use of neonicotinoid seed dressings in oil seed rape crops. On my farm this environmentally friendly technique prevented the use of any insecticide sprays on any of the farm for more than ten years. This enabled me to encourage a wide spectrum of insects in crops and specially created habitat areas. It is a vital part of the food chain for a multitude of wildlife species.

The ban on the neonic seed dressing has now forced me to spray my rape crops, three times, with broad-spectrum insecticide, so as to achieve the same insect control. Sadly, we have undone ten years of environmentally friendly work. It is infuriating that this outcome should have been brought about by pressure and distorted information from so-called environmental groups and against the wishes and better judgment of bee keepers and farmers alike.

Richard Harvey

Owston, Rutland

Faddy fashions in foods conceal a real nutritional problem

My Times column on dietary intolerance:

 

I suggest you finish your breakfast before reading this column.

When the National Health Service announced last month that it would no longer prescribe gluten-free food, it surprised me that it had been doing so in the first place. Whether you have genuine gluten intolerance — such as those with coeliac disease — or are merely following the fad, why should the taxpayer subsidise your diet, when the shops are groaning with gluten-free products? As I shall explain, perhaps the NHS should prescribe worms instead.

Where nutrition is concerned, the line between medical disorder and dietary preference has blurred. There are genuine medical issues relating to food, but they are hidden under a heap of fads. The recent news that milk consumption is dramatically down among young people seems to be because of a large amount of fashion with a small amount of disease.

It is the medical issue that concerns me here, but before I get to that, a word about fads. Lucrative obsessions among the wealthy with “clean” food, raw food, “detox” diets and “superfood” are pseudoscience, shamelessly exploiting gullible people and worsening the epidemic of eating disorders. Much of anorexia starts with “orthorexia”, or fussy eating, driven by irresponsible advice from celebrities who should know better. Nutrition education should be a priority, and public heath authorities need to get over their monomania about the sugar industry and start thinking about the damage being done by food fads.

At the heart of the problem is a misunderstanding of the concept of dose. Any kind of food is bad for you in excess, but that does not mean it is bad for you in small doses. Likewise, if something is harmful when missing from the diet, it does not mean it is good for you when supplied in overabundance. Vitamin C is vital for people with scurvy, but of zero benefit for people who are getting enough vegetables and fruit in their diet.

However, with that off my chest, there is nonetheless a growing food and health problem. Beneath the nonsense fads, beneath the worship of kale and goji berries and the absurd detox mythology, there clearly is increasing food intolerance among a smaller number of people. It urgently needs attention, because otherwise we might find in a few decades that more and more lives are ruined by allergies and illnesses.

This is a global issue. The menu in the restaurant in Guatemala City where I dined on Friday was sprinkled with symbols: gluten-free, dairy-free or peanut-free. These are real dangers for some people, who must avoid wheat, milk and nuts, three of mankind’s oldest staple foods. In a world where almost everything has been getting better, allergies have got steadily worse. Why?

I reckon the cause is now pretty clear: a lack of worms. The allergic reaction to these foods is caused by immunoglobulin E, a component of the immune system whose day job in the past was to combat parasitic worms. A recent study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that key proteins from 31 species of parasites are very similar to allergenic proteins. A protein in birch pollen that triggers hay fever is very similar to a protein found in parasitic worms that causes the infection schistosomiasis, for example.

It’s not that the immune system is “bored” now we have got rid of worms. The theory is more persuasive than that: worms have the capacity to damp down inflammatory immune reactions in their hosts, the better to survive. So human immune systems evolved to “expect” suppression by parasites; without it they overreact. To put it another way, we outsourced part of the regulation of our immune system to parasites.

Milk intolerance may be different because in most parts of the world it is caused by a sugar, lactose, whose indigestibility is a genetic trait. The gene for lactase, the enzyme that tackles lactose, is switched off in mammals when they are weaned. Only in Europe and parts of Africa, where people began milking cows a few thousand years ago, did mutations spread that kept the gene for digesting lactose switched on during adulthood.

But much milk intolerance in westerners is probably not lactose intolerance, but an allergic reaction to a protein called beta casein A1. Hence the growing popularity of “A2 milk”, a product pioneered in New Zealand from cows that don’t make A1. So milk intolerance, too, may be about proteins and may also be related to wormlessness.

As recounted in a fascinating book, An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the correlation between the disappearance of worms and the appearance of asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes and dietary intolerances is remarkably precise in time and place. In and around the Ethiopian town of Jimma asthma suddenly became common in the 1990s only in the places and at the time that hookworm was eradicated. No other factor — air pollution, dust mites, pesticides, viral epidemics — could explain the change. In Karelia, a region divided between Finland and Russia, very similar people had far more coeliac disease and allergies on the Finnish side, where sanitation was much better and parasites fewer.

Moreover, experiments have now been done to give allergic people hookworms or whipworms. Sure enough, their allergic symptoms — from asthma to irritable bowel disease — often clear up fast. A whole industry of “helminth hackers” has emerged in the United States supplying worm eggs through the post for people with intolerances. Be warned that it is not necessarily worth it.

Ideally, we would now work out how the worms regulate the immune system and replicate the effect with safe pharmaceuticals. That should not be beyond the wit of 21st-century science.

It is probably not just worms. The impoverishment of our gut flora — the bacteria in our intestines — in the modern world, as a result of excessive hygiene and antibiotics, looks increasingly likely to be the cause of various other health issues, including obesity and possibly autism, though early experiments on the latter are inconclusive. Open Biome is a “stool bank” that will supply you with faecal transplants from healthy people to enrich your gut garden. It will also pay good money for faecal donations from healthy people. Now there’s a tip you did not expect to read in The Times.

I do hope you enjoy your lunch.

When populism falters and the elite strikes back

My Times column on Douglas Carswell's book Rebel:

 

I am writing this from the Netherlands, where one of the most gruesome paintings in the Rijksmuseum, by Jan de Baen, depicts the eviscerated bodies of the de Witt brothers, hanging upside down after the mob had killed them and then roasted and eaten their livers in 1672. It is an episode mentioned in a new book published this week by Douglas Carswell, MP, called Rebel, in which he wrestles with an eternal dilemma: why populist revolutions sometimes bring tyranny.

The republics of Rome, Venice and the Netherlands all experienced the same thing: an inept populist revolt against the growing power of an oligarchy — by Tiberius Gracchus, Bajamonte Tiepolo and Johan de Witt respectively — followed by a counter-revolution that resulted in an even worse oligarchy that throttled prosperity, in the form of Sulla, the Council of Ten and William of Orange respectively. The coups that killed the French and Russian revolutions were similar, but more about new forms of tyranny than returns to old ones.

Carswell sees parallels in today’s populism. Despite a hundred commentators saying so, Donald Trump is not like Nero or Hitler, but he may be like Gracchus (“a cross between Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump”): an anti-oligarch insurgent who soon makes oligarchy look preferable. After Trump, Americans may fall back in love with the bicoastal elite. Faced with Le Pen, many French will feel that énarques are not so bad after all. Prime Minister Farage would have made us appreciate PPE graduates again.

It is the Dutch parallel that is perhaps most instructive. Mr Trump has seen off a Bush and a Clinton, just as Johan de Witt tried to prevent the stadtholder of the Netherlands becoming a hereditary position, owned by the House of Orange. The similarities perhaps end there. De Witt was a cultured doctor of law with a fascination for Roman history who believed in free trade, free speech and republicanism. Yet in the end he ushered in monarchy, bankruptcy and decline.

That decline was not, Carswell says, because the Dutch lost their entrepreneurial spirit, as historians sometimes lazily assert, but because the Orangist elite became closed and parasitical, living off the spoils of conquest and investing their regressively raised taxes in bonds issued by overborrowed government, rather than in ships and shops. By 1713, 70 per cent of tax revenue went on servicing debt. “A free-wheeling republic had become a restrictionist, rentier state,” as Carswell puts it.

There is a lesson here. Europe as a whole is heading down the same path: slow growth and far too many people living off redistribution rather than enterprise — in private, public and voluntary sectors. The goose that always lays the golden eggs of prosperity is the habit of exchange and specialisation: people doing what they are good at, and getting better at it with innovation, while swapping the results freely with others through commerce. (Disclosure: here Carswell draws on my own recent books to buttress his case, and he showed me the text before publication.)

Carswell reminds us that “every society that ever managed to sustain intensive economic growth did so by staying close to the free-exchange end of the spectrum”. Like a rainforest ecosystem, commerce is a self-organising system that results in spontaneous order and complexity. For instance, nobody has planned or is in charge of the job of feeding ten million people for lunch in London today, but this incredibly complex task will be achieved smoothly.

Yet history shows that free exchange is constantly at risk of being infected and captured by parasites and predators who live off productive people through taxes, tithes, rents, slavery, subsidy, war and theft. This is what killed the goose in ancient Greece and Rome, in Renaissance Italy and Holland’s golden age. From time to time anti-oligarch insurgents are needed to purge the parasites, expel the predators and free the economy from their burden.

Now, says Carswell, is such a time. Forget the Ukip debacle: he is as genuine a rebel as parliament contains, who wants to “rein back the emerging oligarchy”. One of the problems with most of the new radicals, whether a Trump, a Farage, a Wilders or a Le Pen, is that they seem to be in thrall to the myth of the big (wo)man, who will lead the people to the promised land. Carswell wants to challenge the myth of the Big Man who knows everything. Instead he would allow the organisation of society along bottom-up lines.

He would end the power of central bank bureaucrats, allowing customers to decide banks’ reserve ratios by choosing among different options with different risks and rewards.

In place of debased fiat currencies, he would have self-regulating currencies controlled by competition, not by officials, along the lines of Bitcoin. He would have corporations regulated by those who own them and those who buy from them, rather than by easily lobbied crony regulators and subsidy providers. He would have public services controlled by members of the public.

All easier said than done, of course. And in politics he would undermine the power and privilege of the cartel of the main political parties with their public subsidies, access to patronage and ability to gerrymander constituencies to preserve safe seats: “In Clacton, I have twice taken on and defeated the established parties by doing for myself, often on a laptop, what political parties spend millions failing to do well.” It is now possible to do politics without party. Trump, Bernie Sanders and Emmanuel Macron all ran almost independently of their parties.

Carswell is right that the left does not get this. He cheered when Corbyn was elected, but says that radicals on the left do not understand how free exchange has elevated the human condition or the way that redistribution ultimately sustains oligarchy. We end up with the spectacle of left-wing activists such as Owen Jones and Paul Mason campaigning alongside Goldman Sachs and Christine Lagarde on behalf of the oligarchs of Brussels.

You might ask what a low-grade oligarch like me is doing endorsing this insurgent philosophy against my interests. The truth is I spend most of my time exchanging prose for profit, or speaking up in parliament for innovation and free exchange, and against cronyism and subsidy, usually ineffectively.

So when the revolution comes, metaphorically at least, I will join Douglas at the barricades.

Stand up for the right to criticise Islam

"It is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism. It is a perversion of a great faith.” This is what the prime minister said in parliament after the attack on Westminster Bridge that killed three tourists and a policeman. While I completely accept that the sins of extremists should never be visited on the vast majority of moderate believers, I am increasingly uneasy about how we handle the connection between religion and extremism. The ideology to which Khalid Masood was converted in prison may indeed be a perversion of Islam, but it is a version of it. We should not shy away from saying so.

After Nice, Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation wrote that saying such terrorism has nothing to do with Islam (as some do) is as dangerous as stating that it has everything to do with Islam. The terrorists in London, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Munich, Berlin, Würzburg, Ansbach, Orlando, San Bernardino, Sydney, Bali, New York, Bombay and many other places have been white, black and brown, rich, poor and middle class, male and female, gay and straight, immigrant and native, young and (now) older. The one thing they have in common is that they had been radicalised by religious preachers claiming to interpret the Koran.

Moreover, while a few sick individuals find within Islam justification for murder and terror, a far larger number find justification for misogyny and intolerance. We must be allowed to say this without being thought to criticise Muslims as people.

Islamist terrorism has become more frequent, but criticism of the faith of Islam, and of religion in general, seems to be becoming less acceptable, as if it were equivalent to racism or blasphemy. The charge of Islamophobia is too quickly levelled. Friday’s press release from Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, is a case in point. It failed to mention by name the murdered policeman Keith Palmer, and highlighted how Muslims “will be especially fearful of racism”. Race and religion are very different things.

I admire many religious people. I am prepared to accept that being religious can make some individuals better people, though, as a humanist, I also think it is possible and actually preferable to be moral without having faith. I am even open to the possibility that the best defence against extremism is a gentler version of religion rather than none at all — though I need to be convinced. But I think that, rather than there being good religion and bad religion, there is a spectrum of religious belief from virtuous, individualist morality at one end to collectivist, politicised violent terror at the other.

At one end are people who are inspired by faith to think only of how to help those in need. At the other are people who kill policemen and tourists, throw homosexuals off buildings, punish apostasy with death, carry out female genital mutilation and throw acid in the face of women who have stood up against the male code (there were 431 acid attacks in Britain last year).

In between, though, are positions that also contain dangers, albeit more subtle ones. There are people who would not commit violence themselves, but think women should be the chattels of men, wearing of veils is mandatory and that Sharia should reign. Then there are people (and here I include those in other Abrahamic faiths) who think homosexuality is sinful, contraception is wrong, evolution could not have happened and slaughtering animals by cutting their throats is more moral than stunning them. I do not condemn such beliefs as evil, but nor do I respect them.

On LBC radio last week the journalist James O’Brien said of those, like Masood, who have made the journey from faith to extremism: “Don’t we have to start mocking the early stages of that journey? People who believe that chopping off a child’s foreskin is going to make it easier for them to get into heaven. People who believe that eating fish on Fridays is somehow going to please their god.”

In 1979, some Christians took offence at Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a witty if mordant satire on the phenomenon of cults (and Romans). The Christians were angry but the Pythons did not go into hiding.Two years ago, in the wake of the murder of his fellow satirists at Charlie Hebdo, the late Australian cartoonist Bill Leak went further than simply saying “Je suis Charlie” and drew cartoons of the Prophet. As a result he was forced to sell his house and move to a secret location. That does not feel like progress to me.

In 2004, after the media was filled with discussion of how the Boxing Day tsunami was an “act of God”, I said to a friend, in all seriousness: the tsunami was not an act of God, but 9/11 was. I was consciously echoing Voltaire’s mockery of the argument that the destruction of Lisbon in an earthquake must be a punishment for the sins of its inhabitants. Would I dare say the same today about the events of last week, or would I pause now to consider how it would get me into trouble?

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali wrote recently of the “creeping Islamisation of communities” and called for an Islamic reformation to respect freedom of religion, abjure legal punishment for blasphemy or apostasy and agree that women should be free and equal in law. Yet, despite two decades of partly religion-inspired violence, those who call for an Islamic reformation, such as Mr Nawaz, or the ex-Muslim campaigners Sarah Haider, Taslima Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are increasingly vilified by many on the left.

Three days before the Westminster attack, the BBC’s Asian Network quite rightly apologised for asking “what is the right punishment for blasphemy?” shortly after an outspoken atheist had been hacked to death in Coimbatore, India, for expressing his views. There have been 48 murders of atheists in Bangladesh in recent years. Yet it is now more acceptable to attack “militant atheists” than militant theists. Blasphemy is back.

We can and must make an offer to the fundamentalist Muslims: abandon your political ambitions and become a religion as this has come to be understood elsewhere in an increasingly diverse and tolerant world — a private moral code, a way of life, a philosophy — and you will find the rest of us to be friends. But threaten the hard-won political, intellectual and physical freedoms now accorded to every man and woman, yes even and especially women, in our essentially secular society and you will be resisted and, pray god, defeated.

Atoning for the Raj

My Times column on Britain and India:

 

By 2022, India will have overtaken China to become the most populous country in the world and, growing fast, will be rapidly returning towards the dominant position it held in the world economy for centuries. It was the world’s economic superpower when imperial Rome and Han China were its junior trading partners. It still represented one quarter of the world economy when Britain began to conquer it in 1757.

And it was we British who impoverished it. So argues Inglorious Empire, a remarkable new book by the Indian MP Shashi Tharoor, a former candidate for secretary general of the United Nations who is being touted as a potential leader of the Congress Party. The book is savagely critical of 200 years of the British in India. It makes very uncomfortable reading for Brits, especially those like me who had a parent brought up partly in India.

It left me wondering why Indians are generally so well disposed towards their former imperial mistress. Post-Brexit, reaching out to the fast-growing economies of the world, we will need that goodwill, but we are currently doing too little to continue earning it. We are squandering our soft power.

The number of Indian students coming to Britain has fallen sharply in recent years, deterred by hurdles to getting visas, a ban on staying after study unless they have a graduate level job or an internship, the requirement to post a costly bond for a visitor’s visa [correction: this policy was not adopted but applicants are asked to prove they have enough funds to cover their whole visit]. Indians, such as my friend Reuben Abraham, chief executive of IDFC Institute, a Mumbai-based think tank, find this baffling. Whereas six years ago there were twice as many Indian as American students in Britain, today there are more Americans.

The result not only annoys Indians, who see Chinese students getting into Britain more easily, but diverts them to rival countries such as America, where 16 per cent of Silicon Valley’s start-ups were co-founded by Indians, and the chief executives of both Google and Microsoft are Indian born. And it is not as if our tough line towards Indians is what British people want: all the evidence suggests that people welcome students from Asia; it is unskilled job seekers from Europe that they worry about.

We know that (perhaps inexplicably in view of our weather) studying here nearly always leaves Indians with a dose of Anglophilia. As the new film Viceroy’s House reminds us, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (Trinity, Cambridge, and Inner Temple), remained eloquently fond of British culture despite imprisonment and political betrayal.

Dr Tharoor himself is as accomplished a user of the English language and British ideas as anybody alive. The Raj, rather than leaving a nasty taste in the mouth, often left Indians fond of Britain: how much more could that be true today?

In 2015 Dr Tharoor criticised British rule in a powerful speech to the Oxford Union, which quickly went viral. His book is an expanded version of the speech, which one by one addresses and demolishes the arguments that the British were benign imperialists. Many of his arguments are well known. The British were often brutal and corrupt, plundered vast wealth from India, destroyed traditions of education, enlisted millions of Indians to fight in its wars for British freedom, sowed discord between Muslims and Hindus by insisting on a form of what we would now call identity politics, and far from unifying the country, left it permanently partitioned, after encouraging the Muslim League to undermine the influence of the secular Congress party.

Other points are less well known. One viceroy, Lord Lytton, deliberately opposed alleviation of a terrible famine in the 1870s, arguing that “humanitarian humbug” would only worsen a Malthusian problem. In 1943, on the instructions of Winston Churchill, Britain diverted grain ships heading to Calcutta to Europe, when four million people were dying of starvation in Bengal.

What was new to me in Dr Tharoor’s book was the detailed evidence of deliberate economic destruction — the demolition at the behest of British business of India’s world-leading textile industry in the 18th century, its world-leading ship-building industry in the 19th and its world-leading locomotive-manufacturing industry in the 20th. British businesses built India’s railways at cartel-fixed prices far higher per mile than those Americans paid. The critics of empire at home, from Adam Smith to John Ruskin, were right that empire was a predatory racket.

It is undeniable that Britain systematically kept India poor. In the last 50 years of British rule, India achieved zero per-capita economic growth. We left India, a wealthy nation when we arrived, with 90 per cent poverty, 16 per cent literacy and life expectancy of 27. The loot we took enriched the British elite more than the masses, for whom the technology unleashed by the industrial revolution mattered more. But India could just as easily have quickly followed such a revolution. Without colonial rule, and with its rich commercial history, India would probably have advanced at least as fast as Japan did in the 19th century, let alone the 20th.

It is true, as Dr Tharoor concedes, that any imperial rulers, Hindu, Muslim or other, would probably have been cruel and parasitical too. But at least Mughals and Rajputs spent their plunder within India rather than sending it abroad.

In his Oxford speech, Dr Tharoor argued for symbolic reparations of £1 a year for 200 years. For those who say it is too late for an apology, and that the current generation of Brits should not carry guilt or Indians a grudge, he points out that Willy Brandt, as chancellor of West Germany and a man who had opposed the Nazis, spontaneously knelt at the site of the Warsaw ghetto in 1970. Perhaps in 2019, on the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, where British soldiers fired 1,650 bullets at a crowd of unarmed families gathering for a festival, before refusing to let relatives tend to the wounded, the British prime minister should do the same.

After 1947, despite having a language rich in Indian words, from shampoo to hullabaloo, from juggernaut to jamboree, Britain all but forgot about India, turned its back on empire, rewrote its story as that of a plucky underdog standing up to the Nazi bully, and eventually reached out to Europe instead. Brexit could be another turning point. More than almost any other country, India will matter to Britain in the coming years: as a market, an ally, an innovator, a source of talent and — despite everything — a friend.

Free trade agreements are easier if you keep them simple

An expanded and updated version of my Times column on free trade agreements and Brexit:

 

The prime minister will soon press the button and launch Article 50 on its inexorable, ballistic trajectory towards impact in March 2019. From the political class here, let alone in Brussels, comes incessant pessimism about those two years: it will be fractious, we are not ready to negotiate, a trade agreement is all but impossible, the timetable is too tight, we’re going over a cliff.

This is mostly wishful thinking by those who want us to fail. A conversation last week with the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott brought this home to me. When he became prime minister, Mr Abbott did something unusual. Noticing that his country’s trade negotiators had spent years meandering towards deals with China, Japan and other countries – enjoying room service in five-star hotels in different cities as they did so – he set them deadlines.

Within six months Australia had signed a trade deal with South Korea; Japan took eight months, China 13. There were just 150 people or so involved on the Australian side. As Mr Abbott says, trade deals are simple – if (shock!) you make them about trade. It’s only when you make them about standards, regulations, legal disputes and corporate interests that they get difficult. The Legatum Trade Commission, assembled to advise on Brexit under the chairmanship of Shanker Singham and consisting of senior trade negotiators from America, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, has said much the same: these deals are as hard as you make them.

[Here is Mr Abbott's own account from his Australian Spectator diary: 

Obviously, Australia’s deals with China, Japan and Korea owed much to the indefatigability of our then trade minister, Andrew Robb; and the skills of our official negotiators, ably led by Jan Adams, now our ambassador in Beijing. My contribution to our success was first, to set a deadline to conclude discussions that had been meandering along for a decade; second, to ensure that we weren’t side-tracked by peripheral issues such as labour and environmental standards; and third, to ensure the focus and drive from the top without which these deals never come to fruition. Our insight was to grasp that free trade deals are too important to leave to the officials. If you leave it to the negotiators, the negotiations never end. Some of them had already involved up to 20 rounds of talks. Goodwill had been established, issues had been clarified and problems had been crystallised but all that had ever really been decided was the need for another meeting at a suitable venue. ]

The European Union makes them very hard. It began negotiating a trade agreement with America 27 years ago. The resulting TTIP leviathan is barely about trade at all, but about the rights of multinationals in the courts and other such matters. As the financier and philanthropist Miles Morland put it: “Even the EU politicians gagged on that. Great negotiating, Pierre. The TTIP is never going to be signed. It’s loo-paper.”

[Here is a longer extract from Mr Morland's essay: 

“Never mind,” say the Doomies, “Once the UK has left it will have no Trade Agreements. We’re lost without them. And, as the EU has been doing all the trade negotiating for its members England doesn’t even have any trained trade negotiators. We’re doomed. How can we trade without Trade Agreements?” So runs the mantra repeated daily in the EU Pravdas as the Guardian and FT advise Mr Davis which knee he should bend to Mr Juncker as he begs for Access.

Scary stuff. I was worried too by this dandruff of doom and so I did a bit of nosing around to find out which of these important EU Trade Agreements we will be missing out on after we leave. In the forty-three years that we have been an EU member they must have negotiated some great deals on our behalf.

The EU’s biggest trade partner is the US. Well, thank God for the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and the EU. The EU’s super-skilled negotiators have now been negotiating this for, er, 26 years, having started in 1990. Is it signed? No. Will it ever be? No. Why not? Because Brussels’ super-skilled technocrats have allowed the Americans to write an agreement which lets US multinationals do what they want in Europe without being answerable to European courts. Even the EU politicians gagged on that. Great negotiating, Pierre. The TTIP is never going to be signed. It’s loo-paper. When Mr Obama says the UK is at the back of the queue we could tell him that there is no room left as it already has 28 EU countries standing there sucking their thumbs knowing that they will never have a trade agreement with the US.

Oh OK, forget the US. We need to trade with China. That’s where the action is. China is the EU’s second biggest partner. How can we trade with them without the benefit of the famous EU-China Trade Agreement? Ah yes. Would that be the one that the EU’s super-skilled negotiators have been working on for ten years? Yup. How many summit trade meetings have they had in that time? Sixteen. And how close are they to signing an agreement? Well, put it this way, the Labour Party is more likely to win an election first.

Well, India, then. They’ve just falsified their numbers to show they are growing even faster than China these days. The EU is India’s largest trade partner. Must be because of the EU-India accord. Ah, that accord, the one the Brussels and Delhi bureaucrats have been negotiating since 2007 and are nowhere close to agreeing. Mr Modi seems keener on signing an agreement with the UK than he is with the EU. At least we speak the same language.

Wow, Puzzling. Does that mean the EU has never succeeded in signing a trade agreement with any of its major trading partners? It does. Never, and not in sight of doing so. One hates to think where they would be without their “skilled negotiators”. It’s true that the EU does have some agreements with other European countries and trade associations, like Switzerland, Norway and the EEA, and a number of agreements with countries that used to belong to the Europeans’ various empires, like Algeria and South Africa, but, as far as actual signed trade agreements with non-Europeans are concerned, the EU has signed a “customs union” with those nice Turks and has agreements with Chile and Mexico. No idea if drugs are included in that one.

And, since you ask, the EU has no free trade agreement with Japan, the world’s third biggest economy, nor with Russia. Nor Canada. Nor Singapore. Nor Australia. In fact, South Korea is the only major economy with which it does have an agreement. But, wait, the EU is close to finalising an agreement with Zimbabwe.

Our betters in Notting and Primrose Hills tell us though that “without access” to the market of the soon-to-be-bankrupt EU we are doomed. Free access is the only thing that will save the UK, say they. We must go on our knees to Mr Juncker and pay him bribes for “access” while he “punishes” us, his words, for voting the wrong way.

The funny thing is that the EU does a huge amount of bilateral trade with the US, China, India, Canada, Japan, Russia, Australia, Brazil and many more. None of these countries has “free access” to the EU yet they don’t seem to be doing too badly at trading with them. In fact, no country of consequence apart from South Korea has free access to the EU. If we don’t either, is that going to kill us? We’ll be in good company, along with the US, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, and Australia. And, somehow, I suspect our civil servants will get by without the help of the skilled EU trade negotiators who, in the seventy years since the founding of the EU, have yet to sign a free trade agreement with any of the world’s top five economies. http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2016-056-well-written-article-on-post-brexit-by-miles-morland/]

The European Union has spent ten years negotiating trade agreements with China and India, with no agreement in sight. So when you hear the usual Sir Humphreys babbling on to the BBC about how it takes at least seven years to negotiate a trade deal, and the usual m’learned friends licking their lips as they talk of the thousands of lines of detail appended to such deals, remember there is another way of doing things. Countries like Australia and Iceland did quick trade deals with China that were about…trade.

Besides, there seems to be a growing misapprehension that you need trade deals to trade, as if they were licences to trade. America, China and India, with which the European Union has no deals, are among its biggest trading partners. The EU is actually the best organization to join if you don’t want trade deals. It has remarkably few and they are mostly with small countries: Mexico and South Korea are the biggest. This is not surprising, because getting 28 countries to agree the terms of a trade deal is not easy.

None the less, there is a big reason that getting a special UK-EU trade deal by 2019 is actually easier than it looks. It is unlike any other trade negotiation, because at the start there are no existing tariffs, or differences in regulation and standards between Britain and the EU. We would like to keep it that way as far as possible, and so would most European commercial interests and consumers. We will have to discuss introducing trade barriers from scratch. In every other case, it’s a matter of “We’ll remove tariffs and barriers to your exports if you’ll remove the barriers to ours”.

(Note in passing that this the wrong way round. Imports are what we want; exports are what we are prepared to give to get them. After all, we impose sanctions on evil regimes to deprive them of imports. If we ran our lives the way politicians talk about trade, we would insist on giving a shopkeeper as much money as possible, then reluctantly accepting some of his goods.)

The UK-EU trade talks could therefore conclude quickly with good will. Good will, however, is lacking on the other side and the EU may indeed want to impose barriers from scratch. If that happens we should not retaliate. As Patrick Minford and Edgar Miller of Economists for Free Trade, put it, retaliation “will lose half the gain from achieving global free trade, will disrupt manufacturing supply chains, and is likely to harden the EU’s resolve not to climb down over the long-term.”

So we should sign a one-sided deal anyway. The only reason not to is that £50 billion bill. If they insist on that, then we can leave the EU on World Trade Organisation terms. WTO tariffs are a low barrier to trade with the single market, as China, America and others show every day – and if we abolish the EU’s external tariff when we leave we will see huge gains from trade. In any case, the fall in the pound more than compensates for such tariffs. I talked to a British manufacturer last week who said with the pound at $1.20, he can barely keep up with global demand on WTO terms from the rest of the world.

Diehard remainers who liken that outcome to crashing off a cliff edge into catastrophe are wrong for two reasons. First, under the WTO’s Most-Favoured Nation principle, the EU cannot raise tariffs on our goods higher than they impose on other countries. It cannot discriminate against us.

Second, under the WTO’s National Treatment Principle, the EU cannot use non-tariff barriers, such as regulations and standards, to discriminate against British goods and services to favour domestic businesses instead. [Patrick Minford put it this way in an email to me: Since plainly we satisfy all the regulative requirements, being currently subject to them, it cannot apply discriminative treatment against our products, claiming they do not satisfy the EU standards required for sale in the EU. We have consistently assumed this in our calculations. Similarly for anti-dumping duties or threats of them. Any EU attempts to apply such ntbs to us would create grounds for WTO court action.]

So there is no cliff. The EU negotiators can make a cliff if their want, but only for their own consumers. Imposing tariffs is like blockading your own ports in wartime, says Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute.Tim Worstall tells me that Joan Robinson paraphrased Frederic Bastiat when she said: 

"Even if your trading partner dumps rocks into his harbor to obstruct arriving cargo ships, you do not make yourself better off by dumping rocks into your own harbor."

The prime minister is quite right to insist that no deal is better than a bad deal.

Ask yourself, for a change, what could go right. As Daniel Hannan MEP put it when introducing Tony Abbott at an event last week, only two countries – Hongkong and Singapore – have tried unilateral free trade and eschewed retaliation recently, with spectacular results. If a major economy like Britain did it, the world could be transformed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A menagerie of fallacies

My Times column on the frequent statistical reasoning mistakes that lead to bad policies: 

Budget week might be a good time to remind ourselves of the fallacies on which bad policies feed. Last year the University of Michigan’s Professor Richard Nisbett wrote a short book called Mindware, about the ways in which people deceive themselves and others about statistical reasoning. Since reading it, I have been noticing examples of the art everywhere.

Think of Nisbett’s book as a field guide to a nature reserve. Keep an eye out for the Sunk Cost fallacy, wherein you argue that a nuclear power station or a supersonic airliner must be built because you have spent a fortune on it already. It should never matter how much cost has already been sunk into a project: it is only worth spending more if it is cost-effective.

Harder to spot is the Opportunity Cost. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. The US Department of Homeland Security assesses the cost of Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border at $21.6 billion, which could buy quite a few bridge repairs, warships, or tax cuts instead – just to name the president’s own priorities. In the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, the British government deferred strategic road schemes with an average benefit-cost ratio of 6.8, while pressing ahead with High-Speed 2, whose estimated benefit-cost ratio at the time was 1.2.

A common but shy animal is Loss Aversion. This is the peculiar fact that people mind more about losing something than they are pleased by gaining something of equal value. If you suggest tossing a coin with the result that your friend has to give you £100 if it is heads, while you will give him £101 if it is tails, you’ll find he is not very interested. In general the reward has to be twice as great as the loss before people are keen to take on such risks. The beneficiaries of business rate changes [or National Insurance changes!] are more numerous than the losers, but we hear from the latter.

A close cousin is the Endowment Effect – that you are reluctant to give up something you already have. The misery of many Remainers about leaving the European Union is partly explained thus: the loss of membership looms larger in their minds than the possible opportunities outside. The average Leave voter perhaps never felt that the European Union was much of an endowment anyway.

In the same habitat lives the Status Quo Bias: our reluctance to embrace change. The MEP Daniel Hannan tells me that he could find few hedge fund or private-equity firms in the city of London that thought the Alternative Investment Fund Management Directive of 2011 was a good idea before it came into force. Now it exists, there are many that say they would be reluctant to lose AIFMD’s clammy embrace. Clever public policy can exploit this. In Germany only 12% of people are organ donors, while in Austria 99% are – because Germans have to opt in to organ donation, while Austrians opt out.

Over there is Confirmation Bias – the tendency to look only for evidence that supports your hunch and ignore that which challenges it. We’re all guilty. And try to spot the Availability Heuristic (first identified by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky): the more easily an example comes to mind, the more frequent or plausible the phenomenon seems.

Listen for the call of the Spurious Correlation, so beloved of university press officers. The idea that second-hand smoke bans could drastically reduce heart attacks started with a study in Helena, Montana, which saw a 60% reduction in six months when it banned smoking in 2003 and a rebound when the law was struck down. No such dramatic effect has ever been seen since and the vast majority of studies find no evidence that second-hand smoke causes heart attacks. The Helena effect was a fluke (I favour smoking bans but on other grounds, that smoke is unpleasant). A website called Spurious Correlations has fun with this: did you know America’s crude oil imports eerily track its consumption of chickens?

In the grassland, keep an eye out for the False Positive. A 99%-accurate way of identifying terrorists in London will find 100,000 people, all but (say) ten of whom are innocent. In the swamp live two species of Hoc, Ad and Post Ergo Propter. Justifying the failure of predictions with new excuses is a favourite of climate science (ad). Nisbett overheard somebody urging a friend not to quit smoking on the advice of a doctor, because he knew of two people who did just that and died (post).

The nature reserve contains Hippos. This is the fallacy that the best way of deciding what to do within a business or a government is to take the Highest-paid Person’s Opinion. Firms like Google, and political campaigns beginning with Barack Obama in 2008, use a different and much more effective approach, called A/B testing. Try pairs of options and see which one work best.

When Dan Siroker of Google joined Candidate Obama’s campaign, instead of guessing whether to put “learn more”, “sign up now” or “join us now” on the button to be clicked, he tested the various options. “Learn more” was the clear winner. Thanks to the internet, this is a lot easier than it used to be, though of course it is not practical for choosing the designs of nuclear power stations.

It need not be confined to internet operations. Supermarkets use it to try out different store lay-outs. One of the coalition government’s best initiatives, from its “nudge unit”, was the plan to do randomized control trials of policies, based on Ben Goldacre’s argument that the efficacy of a policy was rarely tested with the same rigour as the efficacy of a drug. Sadly, since the departure of Sir Oliver Letwin from government and the privatization of the nudge unit, not much more has been heard of this idea.

One intriguing suggestion in Professor Nisbett’s book is that there is evidence people can be fairly easily taught about these fallacies, so they learn to avoid them or call them out. Perhaps in a world where there’s less need to teach people much mental arithmetic, because of calculators, or facts because of Google, or Latin, because it’s a waste of time (that’ll get the letters coming!), then room could be found in the curriculum for teaching people how to handle statistical reasoning with less naivety. 

The possibilities opened up by gene editing

 

My recent Times column on gene editing's possibilities:

Scientists at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, said last week that they had edited the genomes of pigs, rendering them immune to a dangerous virus. The announcement is extraordinary precisely because it sounds almost routine these days. Gene editing is already starting to save the lives of human cancer patients and generate healthier crops. Yet the battle to ensure it gains favour with public opinion must be urgently addressed. The usual suspects are already trying to blacken its name.

Pause first to admire the breathtaking ingenuity of modern biotechnology. Today we know the shape, structure and genetic code of the pig virus, we know which cells in the pig’s immune system it attacks and we know which pig gene encodes the protein on the cell surface that the virus uses to gain entry to the cell.

With the new gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9, the Roslin scientists sliced out a short section from this gene in the fertilised egg of a pig. They then grew pigs from these eggs that turned out healthy and entirely normal in every way, including the functioning of the gene, but which denied the virus entry to the cell.

Crispr is the newest, fastest and most precise way to edit a genome yet invented, but it comes on the heels of others — Talens and zinc-finger nucleases among them — all just a few years old. A different technique, gene silencing by RNA interference, is also bearing fruit. This diverse toolkit now allows scientists to improve the genome with precise changes.

Cue an outbreak of horror about the risks of (cliché alert) designer babies. One newspaper has been blathering about “Frankenstein pigs”. But a similar technique is already being used to treat leukaemia in children: are they Frankenstein kids? Cellectis, a French company, is using Talens to remove the small section of DNA that causes cells from donors to attack recipients. These donor cells are then used to treat the children with cancer and appear, in early trials, to be saving lives.

What will be the public reaction to the release of gene-edited animals or plants? Bring it on and cure us, or how dare you try to poison us? We have been here before, twice. In the 1970s, “genetic engineering” came along: the idea of putting human genes into bacteria and thereby mass-producing medicines for conditions such as diabetes and haemophilia. A few worried cities banned the technique briefly, but it is now universally available, even in Catholic countries, and saves thousands of lives every day without a peep of protest.

In the 1990s, “genetic modification” of plants arrived: putting genes from other species into crops to make them insect resistant, herbicide resistant, or healthier. Europe reacted with horror and, though the technique rapidly caught on in the Americas and parts of Asia and proved good for the environment, a rearguard action by environmentalists has gradually tied down such genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in regulatory red tape and lucrative (for activists) political feuds.

Gene editing in crops is the next such battle. There are three reasons to think it is bound to be safer than anything that went before. First, gene editing comes after genetic engineering and modification proved wholly safe. There have been no unpleasant surprises. Second, it involves no “foreign” DNA. The big objection to GMOs, we were told, was that they “crossed the species barrier”, though Mother Nature does so at will, we now know. This doesn’t.

Third, the process is indistinguishable in outcome from much older techniques, such as cross breeding, that have never been regulated, yet it is far more precise. How many people are aware that hundreds — yes, hundreds — of organic — yes, organic — varieties of crops were generated by “mutagenesis”, the random scrambling of DNA by gamma rays or carcinogenic chemicals?

Stefan Jansson, from Umea University in Sweden, put it this way: “Common sense and scientific logic says that it is impossible to have two identical plants where growth of one is, in reality, forbidden while the other can be grown with no restrictions; how would a court be able to decide if the cultivation was a crime or not?”

Last April, the US Department of Agriculture declined to regulate a gene-edited mushroom and a gene-edited maize variety as if they were GMOs, arguing, sensibly, that there was no way to distinguish them from new varieties produced in an old-fashioned way. So America can press ahead with new soybeans with healthier omega-3 fatty acids in them, cattle that their horns removed, and herbicide-resistant oilseed rape that can be grown without ploughing.

Europeans, meanwhile, are stuck in permanent, pathetic indecision. As Nature magazine put it in an editorial last week, the EU is “habitually paralysed whenever genetic modification is discussed. Two years ago the European Commission requested all member states to hold back on giving the all-clear on gene editing while it considered its options. Now its hand is being forced, ever so slowly, by the referral of the issue by France to the European Court of Justice last October.” A decision is not expected before 2018.

Broadly speaking, and characteristically, the French are against the new technique, the Germans are split, while the Dutch and Swedes want to go ahead. The British government is saying nothing. This is pusillanimous. We are pioneers in the use of gene editing in research, even on human embryos, and on gene-editing therapy of the kind used in the leukaemia trials and the pig experiments. We have none of the Roman Catholic hang-ups that stop some European countries tampering with nature even when nature is cruel.

We should get out there and say: gene editing is the most exciting new tool in our kit. It promises ways of improving human and animal health and reducing the environmental impact of agriculture. The technique itself cannot be considered dangerous though, of course, regulation should prevent its use for products that are thought dangerous, just as we would with any other technique. And since the European Union has not made up its mind about gene editing in farming and will not for another year, we should boldly state publicly that we are clear to press ahead with approvals, and welcome further research here.

How Europe deliberately made air pollution worse

My Times column on Britain's self-inflicted diesel scandal:

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, is right to try to switch the capital away from diesel engines as fast as possible, even if this is tough on those duped into buying diesel cars by years of government incentives and propaganda. Diesel engines do make for worse air quality than petrol engines, and air pollution does almost certainly kill people in significant numbers.

In 2010, the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (Comeap) found that in Britain poor air quality “may have made some contribution to the earlier deaths of up to 200,000 people in 2008, with an average loss of life of about two years per death affected”.

Diesel engines produce more particulates, which damage lungs. Being hotter, they also burn more of the nitrogen in the air to create nitrogen oxides, mainly nitrogen dioxide. Whether nitrogen dioxide is harmful is less certain, but it probably is. Comeap says that “on the balance of probability, nitrogen dioxide itself is responsible for some of the health impact found to be associated with it in epidemiological studies”, rather than simply being a marker for the general impact of traffic on health.

Nonetheless, it is worth getting a bit of perspective. Do you think London’s air quality is better or worse than 20 years ago? I am willing to bet that most people would answer “worse”. They would be wrong. London’s air quality, though bad, has been getting steadily better. The average concentration of particles 10 microns or smaller (known as PM10) is about 20 per cent less than it was 20 years ago and the average concentration of nitrogen dioxide is 30 per cent less.

Going back still further, the coal-smoke pea soupers in the 1950s, the petrol-leak photochemical smogs of Los Angeles in the 1960s, when fuel tanks were far less well sealed, and the leaded petrol fumes of the 1970s were worse. This is not to dismiss today’s complaints: it’s a sign of how high our standards are that air quality is improving, yet we are still unhappy with it. Human beings take progress for granted and demand more of it, as they should.

It is true that the improvement in air quality in London has slowed, even reversing at some roadsides, and that it would have been much faster if diesel had not gone from below 10 per cent to nearly 50 per cent of the new car market over the past ten years. That shift was driven — ironically — by other environmental concerns. In 1993, for example, Peugeot was claiming in adverts that “diesel cars traditionally save fuels, save cash and do their bit to help save the planet”. It was rapped on the knuckles by the Advertising Standards Authority even then.

Minutes of a European Council meeting from 1998, with John Prescott in the chair and Neil Kinnock attending as transport commissioner, emphasised that if the European Union were to meet the targets of the Kyoto treaty on climate change, then emissions of carbon dioxide from transport must start falling. The 1998 agreement between the European Commission and the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (the Acea agreement) was “practically an order to switch to diesel”, according to one observer. Diesel engines, burning hotter, are more efficient and so generate less carbon dioxide for each mile driven than petrol engines, though the gap has been shrinking.

Moreover, a decade later in 2009, diesel was seen as a way to deliver the only mandatory target in the EU Renewable Energy Directive, namely that 10 per cent of final energy consumption in the transport sector should be renewable in 2020. EU subsidies for producing diesel from crops are now about £4 billion a year, and two thirds of rapeseed is used to make diesel. Thus switching to diesel in the name of combatting climate change benefited both German carmakers and French farmers.

By contrast, Japan’s government actively discouraged diesel passenger vehicles from the early 2000s, while American government officials privately expressed astonishment at our diesel dash. A senior American diplomat told a friend of mine in 2009: “Your cities are densely populated, and traffic is heavy and slow moving. Dieselisation will cause a public health problem. Why are you doing this?”

European governments were well aware that in pushing diesel they were risking air quality. Gordon Brown’s budget of 1998 said it “recognises the adverse effect that the use of diesel has on local air quality” even as he shifted incentives towards diesel. Perhaps civil servants were cornered by the logic of their self-inflicted climate targets, and the health problems were regarded as necessary collateral damage; if you have decided to pay almost any financial price to reduce emissions, it follows that practically any other price must also be paid.

Still, there is no point in demonising diesel altogether. World trade depends entirely on giant diesel engines turning the propellers of container ships, with no practical alternatives at present. Similarly, diesels are more or less unavoidable for the road transport of heavy loads. There are some real benefits here. The key problem is urban passenger transport in congested cities such as London. Petrol engines would be better, especially if they switch off automatically at traffic lights, but is the future of urban transport electric? Eventually, yes. Electric vehicles certainly produce less smog, though not none: as traffic increases, a rising proportion of the PM10s in the London air comes from “non-combustion”. This means things such as the smoke of skidding tyres, and dust particles churned up by vehicles.

Because of the battery, electric vehicles are generally heavier for a given vehicle size, and so actually produce slightly more of this stuff. But electrification will take time and cost a lot. Natural gas engines could make a difference sooner. New drilling technologies have made gas abundant and cheap. Cities and towns around the world, including Reading, are running buses on compressed natural gas (CNG), which generates very little nitrogen oxide and virtually no particulates from combustion. The leading countries for natural-gas vehicles are Iran, Pakistan and Argentina, with ten million between them. Delhi started forcing all buses and taxis to use CNG almost 20 years ago, though the huge rise in dirty-diesel trucks has overwhelmed any gains in air quality. It’s scarcely believable that because of EU membership buses and taxis in London still rely almost entirely on diesel.