Matt Ridley's Blog, page 27

The exoneration of dietary fat

I have published two articles this week on the crumbing of the dogma that fat is bad for you. This was in the Times:

Britain’s obesity tsar, Susan Jebb, says that it is not fair to blame fat people for their failure to lose weight. Genetically predisposed, many people cannot realistically lose weight by eating less, especially when the food industry tempts them with snacks. Meanwhile, George Osborne is slapping a tax on sugar to tackle obesity.

The new obsession with sugar definitely makes more sense than the low-fat sermons we have heard for decades. And the prevailing idea in the public-health industry that you get fat simply by eating more calories than you burn is misleading to say the least. While of course that’s true, it says nothing about what causes appetite to exceed need by the tiny amount each day that can turn you obese.

The crucial thing is satiety. If some foods make you feel full quicker or for longer, then they will prevent you over-eating. Moreover it is easily possible, indeed likely, that people are less satiated when they eat carbohydrate than fat.

As I argued in these pages two years ago in respect of heart disease, scientists are performing a screeching U-turn on dietary advice, away from demonising fats and towards demonising carbohydrates. In the case of obesity, they cannot quite bring themselves to admit it. They want to tell us not to eat sugars, yet they won’t exonerate fat.

This is typical in science. When paradigms break, you rarely hear scientists say: “We were wrong.” They tiptoe away from their previous position. Yet this has been a costly mistake. “Getting the wrong answer on such a huge and tragic scale borders on the inexcusable,” the writer and diet critic Gary Taubes has written.

Taubes and the investigative journalist Nina Teicholz have catalogued not just the emptiness of the evidence linking dietary fat with health problems, but the politicking and jealousy that has kept heretic researchers off the key committees in the world of dietary advice. They are still treated as pariahs, even as more and more scientists quietly adopt their position. This month, Teicholz was disinvited at the insistence of fellow speakers from a slot speaking at America’s National Food Policy conference. They don’t want her argument heard that too many scientific findings are being systematically ignored in the US Dietary Guidelines, which still recommend replacing fat with carbohydrates.

In the science behind food advice it is mad simply to put both sugar and fat in the “bad” category. Telling people to eat less sugar and refined carbohydrates, while still telling them to eat less fat, is not going to work. You cannot eat less of both without eating too much protein, which is not affordable, practical — or healthy. The shelves of supermarkets are still groaning with low-fat foods; the websites of diet preachers are still calling for people to eat less saturated fat as well as less sugar. Fast food, so hated by the kale-and-quinoa crowd, is often described as full of “fat and sugar”.

Yet the science is now crystal clear that eating lots of fat is actually less likely to make you fat than eating lots of carbohydrates. Around 1980 much of Britain, following America, started to cut saturated fat out of the diet — and a few years later, obesity, far from declining, suddenly began increasing. There is a good physiological reason for this. The pancreas reacts to high levels of glucose in the blood by secreting more insulin to regulate the blood glucose level. Insulin encourages the body to burn sugar rather than fat for energy. But insulin also orders fat cells to accumulate fat (made from sugar in the liver) for later use. So the more sugar you eat, the more fat gets laid down and the less gets burnt off.

Eventually, having too much fat reduces the sensitivity of the body to insulin. The body reacts by making more insulin. High insulin levels for longer mean more fat being laid down and eventually type 2 diabetes. As Gary Taubes has argued, we knew all this in the 1930s — or at least German-speaking scientists did — and saw obesity as a consequence of hormonal defects. The idea that it was just about eating too much came later. Yet to this day the World Health Organisation opines: “The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.”

We probably know enough to justify discouraging the consumption of sugar through the tax system. That should be accompanied by re-encouraging fat eating. We must also take care not to declare premature certainty about sugar. A bit of humility would not come amiss.

Let’s face it: we do not know for certain why some people are obese and others not. The easy availability of plentiful food, especially sugars, is part of the story, as is less exercise. Yet we all know people who stay thin whatever they eat or do. The rise of high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener coincides well with the upsurge of obesity in the 1980s, and fructose is digested in the liver, where it possibly interferes with insulin sensitivity even more than glucose. Do we know for sure that fructose is especially bad? No.

There could be all sorts of reasons why some people are more susceptible to obesity than others. Consider an extraordinary experiment conducted at Washington University in St Louis a few years ago. A pair of genetically identical twins, one of whom was obese and one of was not, donated samples of their gut contents to some genetically clonal mice whose guts had been stripped of all bacteria. The mice that received the fat twin’s gut flora grew fatter than the ones that received the thin twin’s gut flora. Perhaps some people have a mixture of gut bacteria that alters their appetite or their insulin reactions, and perhaps something about our lifestyles or the medicines we take has altered our gut flora.

Whether obesity is caused by unbalanced gut flora, or susceptible genetics, or the effects of fructose, or something else, there is every chance that Susan Jebb is right that we should not blame lack of willpower. Meanwhile it is worth remembering that obesity is nothing like as bad as it was forecast to be by now, and is not currently getting worse. The prevalence of obesity in Britain doubled in the 1990s. For the past ten years, in defiance of predictions, it has remained about the same — roughly a quarter of adults are obese.

 

This was in the Sun:

I live on a dairy farm. I love full-fat milk, butter and, above all, double cream. As a child I drank milk unpasteurised, straight from the cow — and I grew to be almost 6ft 6in, so it cannot have been all bad.

Nonetheless, I believed fat was bad for me because the medical establishment said so again and again. From time to time I made ineffectual efforts to take up margarine and even that watery stuff they call skimmed milk.

But cream remains a guilty pleasure.

I assumed that behind the advice to cut out the cream lay hard evidence from well-controlled trials.

Yet it turns out I have often been lied to by the diet police over the years.

There is no evidence that dietary fat is a big cause of heart disease, or obesity — and we have actually had the facts on this for decades.

It’s a shocking miscarriage of scientific justice.

Professor Christopher Ramsden, of the US National Institutes Of Health, has gone back and re-analysed a randomised controlled trial from 45 years ago in Minnesota that was never published fully.

It showed that people who switched from butter to vegetable oils were at a HIGHER — not lower — risk of death.

In the trial, 9,423 patients in mental hospitals and a nursing home were fed on diets containing either meat, butter and shortening, or corn oil rich in polyunsaturated fats. The scientists who organised the trial expected the corn-oil eaters to survive better, but after more than four years it was the fat eaters who were more likely to be still living.

So inconvenient was this finding that the scientists who did the study took 16 years to publish it and then concealed their results in caveats.

Only now are we able to learn the full truth.

Prof Ramsden finds much the same is true for other studies that used randomised controlled trials (the gold standard of medical proof). There is zero evidence that vegetable oils can prevent heart disease and only a small hint that cutting out all fats from the diet can help — albeit bringing other risks.

This is just the latest of many strikes against the butter bashers and cream critics.

The whole theory that saturated fats from animals cause heart disease by upping cholesterol is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

The vegetable oil industry poured money into the American Heart Association

It always has been, we can now see.

Right from the start, in the 1950s, those laying the blame on diet for the epidemic of heart disease got it wrong.

The scientist who championed the fat theory, Ancel Keys, was a political bully who ostracised and silenced his critics, while basing his argument on a flawed study of seven selected countries, which left out countries such as France that inconveniently had high-fat diets and low levels of heart disease.

Even then, his results only produced a weak correlation.

Journalist Nina Teicholz, in her book The Big Fat Surprise, documents how the anti-fat fanatics reviewed each other’s papers, funded each other’s projects and drove the doubters out of dietary science.

The vegetable oil industry poured money into the American Heart Association, which became a powerful lobby for the message that saturated fats were bad.

The American government first issued low-fat diet guidelines in 1978 and Britain soon followed suit.

Journalist Nina Teicholz says children in New York aren't even allowed to bring full-fat milk to school

Heart disease has declined but that’s largely because of the decline in smoking. Meanwhile, obesity and diabetes increased, largely because we switched to eating more carbohydrates, especially sugar, which made us hungrier.

As I like to put it, the liver does not shunt butter directly from your stomach to your thighs. Insulin tells the human body to lay down fat mostly from sugar in the diet, not from fat. Although it is possible to gain weight by eating lots of fat, on the whole fat makes you feel fuller and stops you eating more.

But the anti-fat message became entrenched.

Supermarket shelves are chock-full of low-fat foods falsely claiming they are especially good for you.

Of course, eating too much of anything is risky. But a little humility from the diet police would not go amiss.

The World Health Organisation still tells us to “shift fat consumption away from saturated fats to unsaturated fats”.

In New York, Nina reports that children are not even allowed to bring full-fat milk to school.

Here, the NHS Choices website advises that “A diet high in saturated fat . . . can put you at increased risk of heart attack”.

No it can’t. Eat butter if you want to.

 

 

Wild Kingdom

My review of Stephen Moss's book Wild Kingdom from the Times:

The wildlife of the River Tyne, near where I live, has been transformed in my lifetime. When I went pike fishing on the Tyne as a bird-watching-obsessed boy, it was empty of salmon, sea trout and otters. It had no ospreys, peregrine falcons or kites overhead. Buzzards, goosanders and herons were scarce. All are now regular or common residents.

The Tyne is one of the examples used by Stephen Moss in his book Wild Kingdom of the progress we have made bringing back much of Britain’s wildlife. He watches an otter right in the middle of Newcastle, while listening to the kittiwakes that nest on the Tyne bridge. Elsewhere in the country he documents the extraordinary revival, arrival or return of many species: bitterns, little egrets, great white egrets, avocets, cranes, beavers, marsh harriers, cetti’s warblers, ring-necked parakeets.

He also celebrates the colonisation of our cities by foxes, hedgehogs and myriad species of birds. Just last week, as I took a ten-minute walk through a busy part of central London at seven in the morning to catch a train, I decided to note the species of birds whose songs I heard: wren, goldcrest, goldfinch, greenfinch, dunnock, great tit, blue tit, robin, blackbird, song thrush, wood pigeon, magpie, parakeet, carrion crow and herring gull.

Once there were just town pigeons, starlings and sparrows in our cities. Now these pioneers have been joined by far more species (and it may be no coincidence that sparrows and starlings have declined), with new ones arriving every year. Herring gulls are now largely city birds, not seaside birds. Birds are “learning” through natural selection that cities provide a rich mosaic of habitats, while urban human beings are no threat, as rural human beings were for centuries — and still are if you are a pigeon or a fox.

Lichens too were largely absent from towns and even from much of the countryside in the 1960s, poisoned by the sulphur in coal smoke. Today lichens grow everywhere; those pale blotches on the roads and pavements that people think are chewing gum are actually often lichens — the “chewing gum lichen”, Lecanora muralis.

So we live in a golden age for wildlife? Well, despite the optimistic tones of parts of his book, Moss, a writer, wildlife TV producer and broadcaster, cannot quite shake the pessimism that has so long been the reflex attitude of many naturalists. He is relentlessly rude about farmers chasing “cheaper and cheaper food”, as if that was a bad thing in a world where famine has gone from commonplace to very rare.

Moss also neglects the way improvements in farming technology have helped wildlife: safer pesticides, wild field margins, and above all the fact that higher yields mean less land is needed, releasing large areas for wildlife. This “sustainable intensification”, most ecologists conclude, is vital to the recovery of wildlife populations in rich countries.

He rightly yearns for land management that is good for wildlife yet not confined to small-scale nature reserves. However, when he comes across exactly that he wants it banned. I am referring to grouse shooting, which dominates the economy and ecology of parts of the Pennines.

Unsubsidised, grouse shooting has preserved heather moorland, a habitat rich in plants and insects. It has stopped it from being turned into subsidised intensive sheep grazing, or being buried beneath a subsidised monoculture of sitka spruce trees for commercial timber, or being developed for subsidised wind farms. Instead these moors resound to the cackle of Britain’s only endemic subspecies of bird, a creature found nowhere else in the world and with a unique ecological symbiosis with the heather plant — the red grouse.

And that’s not all. Managed Pennine grouse moors are far richer in birds such as curlews, golden plover, ring ouzel, merlin and black grouse than equivalent upland areas in Wales or Cumbria because in the Pennines gamekeepers control the foxes and crows that otherwise devastate such ground-nesting species. Foxes and crows live at unnatural densities in this country because of road-kill, garbage and a lack of apex predators, so human control of their numbers is vital for other wildlife, as every nature reserve warden knows.

Yet Moss cannot forgive gamekeepers for allegedly persecuting hen harriers, even though he surely knows that they too, as ground-nesting birds, cannot thrive without fox control, which is why their strongholds are fox-free islands such as the Orkneys and the Isle of Man. The hen harrier debate is far more nuanced than Moss realises. According to the government’s answer to a parliamentary question, of 12 hen harrier nests in England last year the seven monitored solely by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (which disapproves of grouse shooting) reared one chick; the five on private land, Forestry Commission or Natural England land reared 17 young. That shocking statistic reflects badly on the RSPB.

Moss has a blind spot when it comes to competition and predation. It is bizarre to blame the decline of the hedgehog on things such as “the destruction of woodland” — when Britain is rapidly increasing its woodland cover, especially the deciduous woodland that hedgehogs like — and not even mention the role of badgers. The huge increase in the badger population coincides perfectly in time and space and detail (and the link is powerfully supported by experimental study) with the decline in hedgehogs.

So there is a disappointing naivety about ecology in this book. Another example is that he blames the decline of puffins on warmer temperatures driving the sand eels they prey on farther north in the North Sea. Yet two paragraphs earlier he admits that the most southerly colonies in the North Sea, off the Northumberland coast, are in rude health, with four times as many puffins as half a century ago. It is the northernmost colonies that have declined.

Still, I should not carp. Wild Kingdom is not a scientific treatise but a personal reflection on Britain’s wildlife and as such it is an easy read, rich with examples of what can be done to help Britain’s wildlife thrive. He ends with the hope that we might one day see pelicans here. He’s right that we should think such ambitious thoughts. Increasingly, a prosperous country can have wildlife that also prospers.

Green costs are killing heavy industry in Britain

My Times column on the role of UK emissions policies in driving aluminium, steel and other industries abroad:

 

Before Redcar and Port Talbot, remember Lynemouth, where Britain’s last large aluminium smelter closed in 2012. In aluminium, as in steel, China is now by far the largest producer, smelting five times as much as any other continent, let alone country. The chief reason aluminium left (though a small plant survives at Lochaber) was the sky-high electricity prices paid in Britain: electrolysis is how you make aluminium. For extra-large industrial users, British electricity prices are the highest in Europe, twice the average, and far higher than in Asia and America.

Britain has the highest electricity prices because it has the most draconian climate policies. Despite promises not to do so, the government insists on going faster than other countries in emissions reduction. As Lord Deben, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, put it recently, apparently without intended irony, the British approach to climate legislation is the envy of most countries in the world. At green conferences maybe.

As well as paying huge and growing bills to subsidise those futile playthings of the rich, the wind and solar industries, energy-intensive industry also picks up the cost of the “carbon price floor”, a tax on fossil fuels used to generate electricity, which was introduced in 2013 and doubled last year to £18.08 per tonne of carbon, or more than four times the cost of the European emissions trading scheme, of £4 a tonne. This can have little impact on climate, however, not only because Britain’s emissions are less than 2 per cent of global emissions, but because it merely exports jobs and emissions.

Port Talbot’s blast furnace is less dependent on electricity than aluminium smelters, but those who say that high electricity prices are not contributing to steel’s collapse are missing three key points. First, downstream processes in the steel industry such as galvanising use a lot of electricity; second, steel production elsewhere is increasingly shifting to electric-arc furnaces, which recycle scrap steel — and generate fewer emissions. That’s not likely at Port Talbot because of Britain’s high electricity prices. The country’s one electric-arc furnace, run by Celsa in Cardiff, is struggling, and we mostly export rather than melt our mountains of scrap.

And third, as the Global Warming Policy Forum points out, climate policies affect the cost of all goods and services purchased by industry, including labour. According to government estimates, by 2030 medium-sized businesses would see prices 114 per cent higher than they would be in the absence of climate policies, and they would need to pass those costs on to customers.

So aluminium and steel are mere harbingers of heavy industry doom because of our costly energy. As the think tank Civitas reported at the time of Lynemouth’s closure, “There are still many other energy-intensive industries left in the UK, such as glass, chemical and ceramic manufacturing. Together these are worth £75 billion and employ 700,000 people and they are just as vulnerable to the future rises in energy costs.”

Lord Deben’s committee is tasked by Ed Miliband’s 2008 Climate Change Act with giving the government impartial advice on how to meet that act’s targets. No other EU member state has yet set a legally binding 2030 target, but the committee announced in November its recommendation for a fifth “carbon budget”, that by 2030, Britain should generate 57 per cent fewer carbon dioxide emissions (from heat, transport, electricity and industry) than in 1990. The government must respond by the end of June.

 

That’s awkward because, as Peter Lilley, MP, has spotted, the deadline is likely to precede any decision by the EU about how to share the burden of meeting the promise it made at the Paris climate conference in December to reduce European emissions by 40 per cent by 2030. If Britain is already committed to reductions of 57 per cent, it can hardly complain if the European Council agrees lesser reductions for other countries, so as to hit the target of 40 per cent for the union as a whole. It is, in effect, a unilateral gift of jobs to other countries — if we stay in the EU.

Speaking at the Institute of Public Policy Research shortly before the launch of his committee’s latest report, the impartial Lord Deben was asked about the impact on energy-intensive industry. He replied that “heavy energy users will have to find ways of being less heavy users”. Charming. This they are indeed doing, by putting steelworkers on benefits, where they emit less. But shifting the work to China may actually increase emissions since China gets more of its energy from coal. Lord Deben added, incredibly, that there is “no evidence at all of offshoring due to climate policy”. I wonder if he dares say that in Wales.

It is true that the immediate Welsh crisis is caused more by China’s dumping of cheap steel on world markets than by energy costs per se. But this issue is also related to climate policy. China has been massively increasing its emissions in recent years as it expands its heavy industries. Last year’s climate conference in Paris effectively gave a green light for it to continue to do so.

Requiring countries to make only non-binding promises of emissions reduction, the Paris agreement let China off even that. As David Campbell, a professor at Lancaster University law school, put it: “The implicit, though categorical enough, permission to increase emissions under Article 4 (7) of the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] is strengthened by a provision under Article 4 (4) of the Paris Agreement that China and India cannot be required to make reductions.”

The first of those clauses says that the extent to which a developing country — a category which includes China — has to implement its promises can take fully into account the need for social development and poverty eradication “as an overriding priority”. The second merely says that developing countries should be “encouraged to move over time” towards emission reduction “or limitation” but only “in the light of different national circumstances”.

Britain’s unilateral climate policies are a green version of what the writer James Bartholomew calls virtue signalling. They make people in suits feel good at conferences, while people in boiler suits at factories lose their jobs. If the government really wants to save energy-intensive industries, it must delay setting new emissions targets for the fifth carbon budget, as the climate change act entitles it to do.

How not to protect great crested newts

My Times column on the sensible proposal to reform the way protected species are helped during development:

 

Natural England, the government body charged with protecting Britain’s wildlife, is currently consulting on reforming the way protected species are rescued from bulldozers. The rethink is focused on the great crested newt, the bane of developers everywhere, and it sensibly suggests giving the newts new ponds so their populations can expand, rather than the futile gesture of surveying, trapping, deporting and excluding them from development sites one by one.

This might seem a trivial tale to disturb your bank-holiday breakfast with, but don’t be fooled. Newts are big business and very, very controversial. There are about 1,200 licences issued each year to fence newts out of development sites and then trap those inside and remove them to safety, though they hate being moved and often don’t survive. Such fencing and trapping directly costs business about £60 million a year. The actual cost is much higher if you add in the delays that newts regularly cause, because a developer must trap newts on a development site for at least 30 days after the newt-exclusion fence goes in and then for five clear days of zero catches, which might take weeks or months to achieve.

Yet, despite this, Natural England is frequently taken to court both domestically and in Europe by people in the green movement who have too much money and not enough to do, for not being zealous enough in enforcing the law on newts. Greens see newts, precisely because they are so common, as a useful weapon to stop people engaging in economic activity. (I tell you, compared with newty politics, party politics is tame.) Until recently, Natural England itself was split down the middle between the pragmatists and the dogmatists. Aided by new DNA technology, allowing ponds to be tested for newts without trapping, the pragmatists may now have the upper hand.

Great crested newts are common. You find them in every part of England, as well as much of Wales and Scotland. They inhabit Northern Europe as far east as the Urals, but are scarcer on the continent, which is where these things are decided. (Yes, we are being punished for success again.) In 1994, Britain implemented a European directive defining great crested newts as a “European protected species” (EPS), meaning that you can go to prison for six months for harming them. This means, because they are so widespread, that housebuilders and other developers go to great lengths to ensure that any newt living on or near their development is excluded or rescued so that it is not run over by a bulldozer.

Developers live in terror of breaking this rule. In one case in Milton Keynes, a housebuilder incurred £1 million in costs and a year’s delay just to remove 150 newts from a site. There’s a vigorous industry selling “solutions” to developers. These include fences lined with heavy plastic sheets partly buried in the ground to prevent newts entering sites. The fences can be miles in length and are often cruel barriers to the movement of wildlife. When lapwing mothers are calling plaintively to their babies that are stuck on the wrong side of a fence, you have to wonder if we have our priorities right. Lapwings are of much more urgent conservation concern than newts.

The incentives from this policy are perverse. One water company spent tens of thousands of pounds on newt fencing to keep newts out of a natural habitat. No wonder similar legislation is known in the United States as the “shoot, shovel and shut up” act. Nothing has done more to alienate businesspeople from wildlife than this sort of newty-statism.

Suppose, Natural England says, that a minerals company wants to extend a quarry into what is now farmland, but the extension comes within 200 metres of a newt-infested pond. The pond will not be affected and the farmland is currently useless for newts, so what’s the problem? Indeed, the quarry extension will turn the farmland into something much more attractive to newts: with scattered ponds to breed in and heaps of rocks to hibernate in, so the newt population might rise despite the odd bulldozer accident. Yet if newts move in, the quarry owner faces a choice between going bust and going to jail. So he keeps them out.

Natural England’s four proposals in the current consultation (which closes next week) suggest: reducing the need to exclude and relocate newts so long as compensatory habitat is provided elsewhere; allowing that habitat to be built off site rather than immediately nearby; allowing newts to use temporary habitats on site that will be developed at a later date; and reducing the cost of, and need for, surveys for newts and other EPSs. All very sensible ideas.

 

Newts are to be the pioneers, Natural England explicitly hoping that these measures will also help with other EPSs. In the case of the surveys, Natural England gives the example of somebody trying to add an extension to a house. To get planning permission the owner has to do a bat survey. Bat surveys are expensive and can only be done at certain times of year. If the survey is inconclusive, you may have to wait another year and get another survey. The incentive is strong for the bat surveyor to suck his teeth like a costly plumber and say, as he takes his fee: “Looks like soprano pipistrelle droppings, squire. Might be just using it as a day roost, but I can’t rule out that they might be hibernating here too. See you next year.”

Instead, suggests Natural England, the house owner should be allowed to go ahead and build his extension so long as he does the right thing by the bats that might or might not turn up for hibernation: providing bat boxes, say, and making sure the work is not started in hibernating season. Common sense, in other words.

But common sense does not always prevail in the countryside. The green pressure groups, the newt-fencing industry and the dogmatists within officialdom all have vested interest in the current system. The Department of the Environment even formed a great crested newt “taskforce”, boasting (and this is beyond parody) “several parallel workstreams, each involving a committee to deliberate and progress aspects of policy and capacity”.

Meanwhile, British industry is hobbled by a wholly unnecessary source of cost, delay and uncertainty — wearing a yellow waistcoat, a jagged crest and a pointy tail.

Protecting the sea

My Times column on the growing movement for marine protected areas in British overseas territories:

 

Britain may no longer have an empire, but it still rules a heck of a lot of waves. One of the manifesto commitments of the Conservative party in the last election was to create a “blue belt” of marine protected zones around the 14 overseas territories that still belong to this country. It has started fulfilling the promise and is already protecting more of the sea than any other nation.

How best to conserve marine life? No-take zones, where all fishing is banned, are hard to police and generate little income for locals or to support enforcement of the protection. Yet exploitation of the seas risks causing great damage.

Our home waters are just under 300,000 square miles. The exclusive economic zones of the overseas territories cover nine times as much sea, making the United Kingdom the fifth largest owner of watery real estate, after America, France (which owns big chunks of Polynesia), Australia and Russia. The largest expanses are around South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands, Pitcairn, Tristan da Cunha, the Chagos Archipelago, Bermuda, Ascension Island and St Helena. Most of the rest is in the Caribbean, around the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, British Virgins and Anguilla.

In terms of natural history, these islands and their surrounding seas are 20 times richer in biodiversity than the glacier-scraped lump of rock on which most of us live. The British Isles have just 90 or so endemic species — ones found nowhere else. St Helena alone has more than 500 endemic species, Bermuda 300.

In managing its 2.5 million square miles of sea, the government has a fairly free hand. Take Ascension Island, a young volcano halfway between Africa and South America and the site of the latest marine protected area. There are no Ascension natives. The bulk of the population, known as Saints, come from St Helena but are denied right of abode: that is to say, even if born on Ascension, they must “return” to St Helena if they have no job.

Ascension’s government has already done much to protect the wildlife that depends on the surrounding seas. The green turtle population has increased by 700 per cent in recent decades thanks to strict protection; the main turtle beaches are pockmarked with nesting holes at certain times of the year, as I saw in January. Likewise, the eradication of all feral cats and the neutering of domestic ones has enabled frigatebirds to recolonise the main island in the past four years.

So why not make Ascension’s territorial waters into a pure marine reserve? As a precedent in 2010 the government established a huge no-take zone in the British Indian Ocean territory around the Chagos Archipelago, with the aim of protecting its uniquely pristine and exceptionally rich coral reefs from depredation by shark-finning boats from Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Because the Chagos islanders were controversially removed decades ago, there was no indigenous fishing industry to protest. Likewise last year the government designated a huge marine protected area around the Pitcairn islands in the Pacific, with the support of the 50 or so descendants of the mutiny on the Bounty who inhabit Pitcairn. It is intended to be a no-take zone except for local fishing needs.

The challenge is how to police a remote marine sanctuary. Around Pitcairn the government announced this month that it hopes to solve this problem with satellites and “wave-glider” drones, controlled from Oxfordshire, to track down and identify fishing boats that breach the rules, but this is still very much an experiment.

In January the government announced an Ascension marine protected area. Since the big-eye tuna and marlin that swim past Ascension are ocean nomads spending much of the time on the unprotected high seas, there is still a question mark over how effective a protection zone would be. The exact boundaries have yet to be announced, but the plan is to allow commercial fishing only in an outer zone to the north of the island. Yet that will mean much less revenue for Ascension and the island desperately needs investment in its infrastructure: it has limited ways to generate revenue.

Some local fishing is usually a good thing, rather than bad, because it provides eyes and ears on the water to spot interlopers as well as income for the islanders and revenue to support fishery protection patrols. On Tristan da Cunha, lobsters provide virtually all the island’s income. The local people all down tools and go lobster fishing whenever the sea is calm enough, filling freezers with lobsters for when the next ship calls to export them. They regulate the fishery sustainably, taking only lobsters over a certain size and never with eggs. But international trawlers do raid the nearby seamounts, doing serious damage to isolated populations of fish, and there is little to deter them.

Farther south, around the Falkland Islands, the sustainable exploitation model is working well and the pirates have largely been driven out. In 1986 the government began to regulate what had been a free-for-all squid fishery around the islands, and in 2007 introduced a system of property rights known as “transferable quotas”, whereby each fishing boat has a percentage share of the total quota, which it can buy or sell. This gives fishermen skin in the game and an incentive to make sure there are as many squid as possible, so the total quota is large. They therefore partly police the fishery themselves and it remains highly productive and sustainable.

The vast marine protected area around South Georgia and the South Sandwich islands, established in 2012, has also been a success thanks to well-regulated quotas for fishing Patagonian toothfish while protecting albatross from fishing hooks. Each boat has a radio transponder, carries a government observer, and uses unique hooks so that if birds get caught the culprit can be identified.

In short, there is a quiet revolution going on in the vast blue expanses of Britain’s overseas territories, with the gradual development of policies and technologies to protect and restore populations of fish, birds and coral reefs. America, France and other countries are now beginning to emulate us.

The case against mercantilism

My Times column on free trade the European Union:

 

The late Sir George Martin created substantial British exports. Had the import of his music to America been banned to save the jobs of US musicians, Britain would have missed out on some revenue but the American consumer would have been the biggest loser, missing out on the music. Trade benefits the importing country: that’s why it happens.

Frankly, we might as well be living in the 17th century, so antiquated are our current debates over trade, both here over Brexit and in America over the presidential nominations. Many current assumptions about trade were debunked more than two hundred years ago and then tested to destruction in the mid-19th century.

In the 17th and 18th centuries European governments were in thrall to “mercantilism”, the belief that the purpose of trade was (roughly) to push exports on to other countries in exchange for cash and so build up a surplus of treasure with which to pay armies to fight wars. So they sought to restrain imports with tariffs and bans, while encouraging exports with monopolies and gunboats. Britain’s Navigation Acts after 1651, and the chartering of companies such as the East India Company, were part of this policy.

Along came Adam Smith and made a different argument, that mercantilism punished consumers and the poor, while rewarding producers and the rich; that imports were a good thing because they raised people’s standard of living by giving them what they wanted at lower prices. With money to spare, consumers bought more things from producers, creating jobs and generating prosperity. If bread was cheaper, people could afford more textiles. Gradually, with the help of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Britain was persuaded of this and by the time Robert Peel, William Ewart Gladstone and Richard Cobden were in charge, Britain had declared unilateral free trade and dared the world to follow.

France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Spain, Austria and the Hanseatic cities followed suit and dismantled their tariffs. Prosperity followed, but after the Franco-Prussian war Bismarck and others began rebuilding competitive tariffs. Ever since, we’ve been in thrall to the idea — anathema to Cobden — that a country disadvantages itself by dismantling barriers to imports without demanding reciprocal favours. Yet, unlike unilateral disarmament, unilateral free trade works.

For much of the postwar period, mercantilism was kept in check by the insistence on multilateral trade agreements, and the most-favoured nation principle (invented by Cobden): that if you offer low tariffs to one partner you must offer them to others. But with the stalling of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation negotiations, we are increasingly back to a world of regional trading treaties, like Nafta, TPP and TTIP (if this ever happens).

The debate is increasingly dominated by zero-sum mercantilist noises, again. You would think, listening to the Remain campaign bleating on about whether Britain would need a trade deal like Canada’s or Switzerland’s when it left the EU, that trade is something arranged by governments; that it is illegal without a trade treaty; that exports count more than imports; and above all that the European single market is a free trade area. It’s not: it’s a customs union — a fortress protected by an external tariff. And it’s shrinking as a share of world trade.

Within that fortress there is free trade, but at inflated prices, in things we do not have much comparative advantage in — food and manufactures — and no free trade in the things we do have a comparative advantage in: services. That’s why we have a large, and growing trade deficit with the rest of the EU.

Increasingly the cheapest and best manufactures are made in Asia, and the cheapest and best food grown in South America and Africa, so if we stepped outside the fortress, outside the external tariff, British consumers would see an immediate and growing dividend. Our producers, on the other hand, would see little change because the services we sell to the rest of the continent are not covered by the single market anyway.

Professor Patrick Minford of Cardiff Business School argues in a recent study that the single market distorts Britain’s economy, making us “produce more of what we are worst at and less of what we are best at, while our consumers have to pay excessive prices”. If Britain left the EU it would gain about 4 per cent of GDP as a result, he calculates.

Contrast this with some of the things pro-Remain people are saying. Professor Tim Lang of City University argues that if people vote for Brexit, “there’ll need to be a ‘dig for victory’ on an unprecedented scale”. He’s imagining, bizarrely, that we would have to grow our own food. No, we could have free trade in food with the rest of the world. More than 70 per cent of the rice we eat is imported from outside the EU, yet an Indian rice farmer faces a high tariff barrier if he tries to export here (import duty on basmati rice is 9 per cent), while we subsidise Italian and Spanish farmers to grow expensive rice.

It is true that unilateral declarations of free trade, while benefiting everyone as consumers, can hurt those producers who have previously been protected from competition by tariffs and other barriers. Because the pain is more concentrated than the gain, their voice is louder, and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been amplifying it. (America has never been as convinced by the free trade case as Britain: its infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s worsened the depression and hastened war.)

Yet the effect of trade on jobs is no different from the effect of innovation. Just as imported Chinese goods have destroyed the jobs of British manufacturers, so threshing machines destroyed the jobs of farm labourers, washing machines destroyed jobs in laundries and Uber will destroy the jobs of taxi drivers, yet everybody was net better off. As the economist Professor Don Boudreaux wrote last week: “The case for free trade is simply part of the case for consumer sovereignty and competition.” Governments should certainly compensate people for locally destructive effects of changing trade or technology, but not by raising barriers against imports. That just punishes consumers and stifles economic growth. So forget treaties: almost three quarters of British trade is already conducted without treaties, anyway, under WTO rules.

Outside the EU, Britain could buy what it needs more cheaply and sell what it’s good at making.

Time to cancel this nuclear white elephant

My Times column on Britain's delayed and every more expensive EPR nuclear power station

Last week the British and French governments announced that they remained confident that the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset will be built. But EDF, the company that wishes to build it, declined again to say when a “final investment decision” will be made. That decision, originally intended for 2012, was then expected last October, when the Chinese president was in London — a third of the finance is coming from China. Then it was expected in November, then December, then at the February board meeting of the company, then last week. Still no sign of Godot.

It is time to pull the plug. EDF cannot afford to build it and we cannot afford to buy its premium-price electricity. At two other sites, in Finland and France, the European pressurised reactor (EPR) design is beset by technical problems, many years behind schedule and several times over budget. The Chinese are building two and have also encountered technical obstacles. Apart from Hinkley, the order book is empty, so ours would probably be the last EPR to be built.

The cost of building it has roughly trebled before a brick has been laid. At £18 billion, or more like £24 billion including finance costs, Hinkley Point C would be the most expensive power station ever built. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is its nearest rival and that generates ten times more electricity than Hinkley’s planned 3.2 gigawatts. If we spent that much on gas-fired power stations, we would get roughly 48 gigawatts of dependable capacity, or 15 times more — and each unit of electricity would cost one third as much.

When Hinkley was first considered it was going to charge about £45 per megawatt-hour, a cost comparable with gas or coal. The strike price eventually agreed by the coalition government with EDF was £92.50 per MWh, comparable with onshore wind. Even that was not the end of the negotiation; the government has agreed to index-link that price so that by the time Hinkley opens in the mid-2020s, it might charge not much less than offshore wind, about £120 per MWh.

This was all fine, explained the clever folk in charge of our energy policy at the time, because by the time Hinkley opens the price of gas and oil will have gone through the roof as they start to run out. Even £120 will seem a reasonable price. Those of us who said otherwise, who saw the American shale-gas glut coming and worried that industries such as steel, chemicals and aluminium would be unable to keep operating here if our energy prices went too high, were dismissed as simpletons. As it is, the price of gas-fired electricity, far from shooting up, has plunged and looks likely to stay low for a long while yet. The Hinkley deal looks worse and worse.

Yes, said Hinkley’s supporters, but we need it to keep the lights on when our supply margin gets low in 2017. Well, the supply crunch has come sooner than expected thanks to the closures of coal-fired stations and is here now, while the start date for Hinkley has slipped back from 2017 to 2025, if then. We are going to need other ways to keep the lights on.

Pause briefly to note just what a rip off this “strike price” thing is. It is an agreement between your government and a foreign-owned company that it can charge you almost three times the going rate for electricity for 35 years. It’s a huge subsidy to the company — and remember that EDF is 84.5 per cent owned by the French government — but it is off-balance sheet as far as the government is concerned. As far as a poor pensioner in a draughty cottage is concerned, for whom electricity is a disproportionately high percentage of her cost of living, it is very much on-balance sheet: it’s added to the electricity bill. There is a whiff of interest-group capture of government at our expense.

EDF ought, of course, to be happy with this licence to print money. So why is it hesitating to announce a final decision? Because it cannot get the capital together. It had hoped to sell a 49 per cent stake, to others, but the Chinese alone were interested and they only took 33.5 per cent. It has to fund big losses and huge cost over-runs at the French site in Flamanville while rescuing the reactor manufacturer Areva at a time when its own share price has tanked by 89 per cent since 2007, taking EDF’s market capitalisation below the value of the Hinkley contract. Its credit rating may be downgraded if Hinkley goes ahead.

The only way to finance the project is for EDF to sell off other assets, a plan that has not gone down well with the unions represented on EDF’s board. That is one of the main causes of the delay. The British government should seize the opportunity and cancel the project. As one representative of an energy-intensive business told me: “If even the EDF board is now concerned, despite the treasure on offer, it must surely be time for a rethink.” The political embarrassment would be short-lived: after all, the deal was done by a Liberal Democrat minister.

Don’t get me wrong: I am pro-nuclear (though I have no financial interest in it). But Hinkley risks doing to British nuclear power what Monsanto did to genetically modified crops: killing it for a generation. There is reluctant acceptance of nuclear power in this country; a financial or technical failure at Hinkley C would hit public confidence and investers, threatening the nuclear renaissance.

There are better options. Only just behind Hinkley in the queue, but proceeding much more smoothly through the regulatory process, are two proven technologies. NuGen (60 per cent owned by Toshiba under their Westinghouse brand and 40 per cent by Engie, the French company formerly called GDF Suez) is planning three AP1000 reactors at Moorside near Sellafield. Horizon, owned by Hitachi, is planning to build up to three advanced boiling water reactors at Wylfa and Oldbury. Rumour has it that they reckon they could cope with a far lower strike price, of about £70.

The long-run answer is that smaller is more beautiful. With the right political push, and some streamlining of the regulations, small modular reactors could be rolling off production lines, needing less up-front financing and shorter lead times while generating economies of scale through repeat orders. We have to get away from these behemoth schemes, built like one-off moon-shots, and harness the cost-cutting benefits of the mass production of smaller units.

For EU but not for US

My Spectator article on what it would be like for the United States to join the American Union:

o the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, thinks his country has a ‘profound interest… in a very strong United Kingdom staying in a strong EU’, and President Obama is planning to join in campaigning for the Remainders too. They say this not because they think it is good for us, but because it is in their interests that we influence Europe in a free-trading, Atlanticist direction.

Well, two can play at that game. How would Americans like it if we argued that it is in our interests that the United States should forthwith be united with all the countries in their continent north of the Panama Canal — Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Panama — into a vast customs union governed by a trans-national, unelected civil service. Let’s call it the American Union, or AU.

Imagine that Britain’s Foreign Secretary has just made a speech in Toronto saying he thinks America should join the AU in order to influence Mexico in the direction of free trade. The great and the good in America agree, because they think being part of the ten-country AU will prevent war, boost trade, help smaller nations compete with the behemoths of Europe and China, enable free movement of people, stand up to Russia, encourage scientific co-operation and ensure environmental protection.

Above all, we argue, it would show the world that America is not small-minded, xenophobic, protectionist and isolationist. To this end we think the AU should — er — agree a common tariff against imports from the poorer countries of South America and have free movement of peoples within but not from outside the union. We also think the United States should give up the dollar and use a common currency issued in central America, called the auro, sometimes known as the oreo, or if it is not ready to do that, should encourage others to use the auro, even though there is limited fiscal harmonisation, which bodes ill for the single currency. Oh, and the flag of the AU, consisting of ten radial yellow stripes on a blue background, should be prominently displayed alongside the Stars and Stripes.

Unfortunately, in the current political climate, it turns out that these manifest advantages, deliciously attractive though they might be to the American elite, because they offer an escape from having to think about people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, apparently do not have quite the same appeal to the American electorate. People are worried about Mexicans taking their jobs, using their health care and drawing upon their welfare if they join the AU. And about Panamanians running up deficits, Guatemalans passing laws that affect Americans and Nicaraguans sharing a common foreign policy.

The average Trump voter might not like Congress much, but he likes the idea of an expensive international parliament that shuttles between Mexico City and Vancouver even less, and of an international executive whose directives pass automatically into law still less, let alone one whose corridors of power are positively seething with lobbyists from big business and big pressure groups (funded by the AU to lobby it). As for the idea that the US Supreme Court could be overruled by judges sitting in Toronto or Managua…

Yes, yes, but not to worry. Mr Kerry and Mr Obama agree the AU is not perfect and should be reformed before America joins. Indeed, let’s suppose they have spent the past few months shuttling between the capitals of North and Central America to achieve this. The results have been disappointing and tend to show just how hard it is to get agreement to change anything as unwieldy as the AU, but no matter, we would advise the Americans to go ahead and join anyway. It’s in our interest that they do so.

Perhaps you think my analogy unfair? We are already in the EU, whereas I am suggesting that America joins the — currently fictional — AU. So what? Surely the decision is identical. If the AU/EU is worth joining, then it’s not worth leaving, and vice versa. Perhaps you feel the cultural and economic differences between Seattle and Tegucigalpa are greater than between Manchester and Athens. I don’t agree. Perhaps you think it unrealistic to expect such a big country as America to subsume itself into such an arrangement. Well, Britain is vastly bigger than many very successful, independent countries and has the fifth largest economy in the world. America could expect to boss the AU far more than we get our way in the EU.

Perhaps you think America should be more concerned with building free trade and good relations with people on other continents, rather than the countries that happen to be next door: that is, with China, Russia, Brazil, Europe. In which case, don’t you think the same is true for Britain? Silicon Valley has benefited from a flow of talent from the Indian subcontinent — precisely what we have denied our creative industries here as we struggle to control immigration overall but are not allowed to restrict numbers from one particular landmass.

There is a serious point here. Most Americans I know think Britain would be mad to leave the EU, but that’s because they think the EU is like Nato or Nafta or the Organisation of American States — a club of nations bound by a treaty. They think it is a trading bloc. They do not appreciate that it is a common government, run by a common bureaucracy and answerable to a common court system. Once you explain this, by using the analogy I just used, they get it immediately. They would never join the AU in a million years.

And then pause to consider the irony of America, a country born in rebellion against being governed by others through a democratic deficit, lecturing the British on how we should stay inside the EU. The chairman of Conservatives for Britain, Steve Baker MP had this to say about John Kerry’s remarks: ‘I refer Mr Kerry to the US Declaration of Independence. We will do peacefully at the ballot box that for which his nation fought a war of bloody insurrection. If the USA must express a view on the UK’s right to the separate and equal status among the nations of the world to which many of us feel entitled, perhaps they might consider whether they wish to discuss their back taxes.’

Put your money where your mouth is, Mr Kerry. Unite your own continent into a superstate first before you tell us to do the same.

 

Harm reduction

My Times column on harm reduction

The UN General Assembly is holding a special meeting on drug policy in April, its first since 1998. The mood of member states, as well as many international agencies, is now much less focused on law enforcement and abstinence, and much more favourably disposed to treating drugs as a public health issue, to be tackled by “harm reduction”, a phrase that was actually banned from use within publications of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime ten years ago. Harm reduction means offering safer alternatives, as the lesser of two evils.

When people behave in harmful ways, how do you stop them? You can punish them in the hope of deterrence, as we do murder, theft and fraud. You can hector them, as we do with tobacco, alcohol and sugar. Or you can try to offer safer alternatives, which is how we tackled HIV infection and heroin addiction in this country in particular, and is how we should deal with tobacco.

In the mid-1980s, confronted with the start of an epidemic of Aids among heroin addicts, Margaret Thatcher’s government, with Norman Fowler in the lead, decided on a pragmatic, rather than moralistic response. They rolled out needle exchanges throughout the country, overruling those who said this condoned drug use, undermined calls for abstinence and sent the wrong message to young people. Aids among injecting drug users was, if not halted, dramatically slowed: there were just 131 new cases of HIV infection among injecting drug users in 2014. Ninety countries now have such needle and syringe exchange programmes.

Belatedly, the United States followed Britain’s example. In New York City, HIV infection rates have halved (to a still high 2,832 in 2013) since needle exchange programmes were started at around the turn of the century. This difference between the two countries goes back a long way. Following the Rolleston report of 1926, Britain adopted widespread opiate prescription, and later methadone treatment, for morphine and heroin addicts. In 1922 the Behrman case in the United States confirmed the illegality of prescribed drug treatment; by 1938 25,000 American doctors had been prosecuted and 3,000 had served prison sentences. Yet America had the bigger drug problem.

About the same time, America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition was a disaster, fuelling crime and leading to the growth of stronger (and more dangerous) spirits at the expense of beer. Drug prohibition has had the same effects. There is little doubt that if the world had followed a decriminalise-and-discourage strategy for the likes of cannabis, it would now be less lethally strong as well as less lucrative to dealers. The only thing that makes me hesitate about advocating wholesale decriminalisation of drugs today is that they are now so powerful. But even when it comes to heroin addiction, methadone or buprenorphine treatment (used in 80 countries now) has proved a success, albeit one with continuing risks and costs.

Harm reduction is now being tried for drugs and alcohol in various other ways. Probably the most controversial are safe injecting facilities for heroin users, pioneered in Vancouver and now copied in 92 places in Canada, Europe and Australia, but not America. They have been successful in reducing crime and saving lives. On the same principle, in Toronto and Ottawa homeless shelters offer hourly glasses of wine, because otherwise homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets. The result has been lower alcohol consumption among the homeless and fewer emergency department visits.

The custom of the “designated driver” and the provision of “free rides home” by some bars are examples of harm reduction. So are driver-awareness courses. So, for that matter, is sex education in schools. The encouragement of condom use, rather than sexual abstinence, to fight the HIV epidemic was another example of harm reduction in action. Again, it was resisted by some, Pope Benedict being one of the last to criticise it, saying in 2009 that Aids “cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”.

We are surrounded by policies designed not to stop us doing things, or stigmatise us, but to encourage us to do them more safely. In the case of addictions, where people find it genuinely very difficult to resist temptation, this surely makes sense.

Which is what makes the attitude of so many public health professionals to vaping so baffling. So ingrained is the view that tobacco smoking — probably the most widespread and harmful of all drug addictions — must be fought with condemnation, that many medics and public policy officials cannot stand the thought that a far less harmful way of satisfying nicotine cravings has emerged from outside the public-health realm, through a consumer product.

Britain is once again leading the way, with more people having quit smoking by taking up vaping than in other countries of the same size. Of the roughly three million vapers, nearly all are smokers or ex-smokers who have drastically reduced their intake of tar, carbon monoxide and all the other harmful constituents of smoke (nicotine is nothing like as harmful). If you value each success in stopping smoking at £74,000, as the government does, that’s tens or hundreds of billions of pounds of benefit to the British economy. All at no cost to the taxpayer.

Yet instead of encouraging vaping, the government is about to implement an idiotic clause in the European tobacco products directive, which will ban stronger e-cigs, the very ones heavy smokers start with if they quit, and burden new vaping products with extra regulation, stifling innovation. Unless very much watered down, this is certain to slow or reverse the rate at which people quit smoking, while encouraging a black market — and might also energise furious vapers to vote “leave” in the referendum.

If public health experts can see the success of exchanging dirty for clean needles in the fight against HIV and hepatitis C, why can so few of them see the benefits of exchanging dirty tobacco smoke for clean nicotine vapour?

It is true that Public Health England said last year that vaping is 95 per cent safer than smoking, but the World Health Organisation remains hostile, so potential vapers still get confused messages. Many public health officials and academics, perhaps irritated that the private sector has made such an impact without their help, seem committed to urging abstinence — an approach as impractical as it would be with sex or drugs.

 

Leaving the European Union would be a leap into the light

My Times column on why the EU is bad for innovation:

For me, in the end, it’s all about innovation. The European Union is bad at doing it, good at discouraging it, repeatedly sides with those who have vested interests in resisting it, and holds Britain back from achieving it.

This may not be a fashionable reason for voting to leave. Pollsters tell us that safety is the first wish of most voters, not exciting change, and it’s clear that both sides are playing to that rule book: one side arguing for us to take control by leaving, the other saying we are more secure if we stay in. But if history teaches us anything it is that enterprise is the father of peace, that innovation brings not just economic but ethical improvements: it demonstrably makes us kinder and safer as well as richer. There is no security in stagnation.

The leaders of the Leave campaign are mostly people who get this. Boris included, they are radicals who want to see change, who think the world is a vale of tears compared with what we could make it: people such as Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, who want to create digital politics, to Frank Field, who thought the unthinkable about welfare reform, to Sir James Dyson who repeatedly causes creative destruction in established industries. Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove are Tory radicals, the two ministers who achieved most reform during the coalition years (and therefore incurred the most fury from the vested interests). The same would have been true of Owen Paterson if the vested interests had not managed to get him fired.

Sure, there may be some leavers who think out means a return to the 1950s, but the cautious conservatives are mostly on the Remain side, comically arguing, as Sajid Javid did yesterday, that the European Union is “a failing project, an overblown bureaucracy in need of wide-ranging and urgent reform” — but we’d better stay in all the same. The most powerful section of Mr Gove’s explosive manifesto, published on Saturday after he left the cabinet meeting, was this:

“The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time. It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date. The EU tries to standardise and regulate rather than encourage diversity and innovation. It is an analogue union in a digital age.”

This is a serious charge, but fair. Europe is the only continent without significant economic growth since 2008. Italy’s GDP is lower than it was then; while India’s, China’s and even Ethiopia’s have roughly doubled. Then think about where the innovations that transform our lives are coming from: America and Asia, even Africa, more than from Europe.

There is a reason for this. The way Brussels works is fundamentally antithetical to innovation. It is top down, with regulation promulgated by officials behind closed doors in meetings with lobbyists. There are about 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels, representing the likes of Big Pharma and Big Green, and they are often in the room when rules get written that erect barriers to entry against irritating new competitors.

The way in which Volkswagen, using carbon-dioxide emissions as a cover, got the rules rewritten to suit diesel engines and discriminate against petrol engines, despite the fact that nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions from diesel were far higher and more dangerous, was only the most visible such scandal.

Sir James Dyson was amazed to find that Brussels set energy ratings for vacuum cleaners without testing them filled with dust, because this suited the German bagged vacuum cleaner manufacturers that he threatened: “Washing machines are tested with washing in them, cars are tested with people in them, and fridges are tested with food in them. But when it came to our request to test vacuum cleaners with dust in them, the big German block of manufacturers complained.”

Then there’s the need to get agreement among 28 member nations, which leads to agonisingly slow convergence on lowest common denominators. Look at how the use of biotechnology in agriculture, 

with its proven ability to cut pesticide use, has been stymied by green politicians from certain implacably conservative countries.

Then there’s the “precautionary principle”, formally written into EU thinking and widely interpreted to mean that only the harms, not the benefits, of new technologies must be considered. This has repeatedly prevented the displacement of bad technologies by better ones.

In any case, as Mr Gove says, for innovation you need diversity. It is abundantly clear that trial and error is the story of almost all change. Different people come up with different ideas, try them out and many fail. Those that succeed then recombine their ideas with those of others to produce new ideas. The EU’s obsession with harmonisation militates against such experiment.

In encouraging innovation, there is a role for international standard-setting, for sure. But not at the level of one continent. Standards in finance, the internet, food or cars are increasingly decided at the global level. The EU is little more than a substation of the process and a foot-dragging one at that.

The EU says it favours innovation, but what it means by this is not encouraging a ferment of new start-ups à la Silicon Valley, but top-down spending of taxpayers’ money on pet projects in science and technology. Yet even here there is no justification for an officious European Commission. The flagship science collaborations of Europe are not confined to the EU at all: they include countries such as Israel, Switzerland and Turkey. CERN’s accelerator crosses an EU border.

The prime minister wants us to stay in a “reformed Europe”. But the one thing we can all agree on is that — in sharp contrast to what he aimed for in his fine Bloomberg speech three years ago — his renegotiation has not “reformed Europe” at all, just Britain’s relationship with the EU, and that in minor and easily reversible ways.

In the 1950s, you could just about make the case that Britain’s destiny lay in a regional trading bloc. But now? When container shipping has collapsed the cost of intercontinental trade? When the internet and budget airlines and Skype have made it as easy to do business in Asia and America and Africa as in Europe?

Let’s take a leap into the light, rejoin the world and become its leading innovators again. Incidentally, the film Independence Day 2 opens in Britain on June 24. Tee hee.