David Boyle's Blog, page 55

Why Farage won

I was giving a presentation on choice in the NHS last night (thank you, Darzi alumni fellows) between the crucial hours of 7 and 8 in the evening, so I have had to watch the Clegg-Farage clash this morning – or as much of it as I could.

My impression was very different to the polls which have handed the victory so spectacularly to Farage.

I thought that Clegg was effective, articulate, passionate and authentic. He took on Farage’s populism in a way that neither Cameron nor Miliband would have been able to do. It was a ferocious performance and an important moment, I thought, in our political history.

But the polls are not to be ignored, which means that the important moment may also be a worrying moment for the nation.

It is also tremendously important, for the forces of light, that we can be as honest as possible about why Farage was widely seen to have won, and I have three thoughts about this.

Thought #1. Clegg was emotional, but Farage was emotionally connected.
There was a controlled leak from the Clegg camp in the Guardian before the second debate which suggested that Clegg was going to be “more emotional”. He was, and it was effective. The trouble was, that wasn’t precisely what was required.

What Farage managed to do was not to be emotional – a scary prospect – but to draw on the emotions of those watching in his arguments. He was able to appeal to gut emotions and gut values in the way that Drew Westen showed that George W. Bush managed to against Al Gore’s statistics in his book The Political Brain.

It isn’t emotions in the politicians that we need; it is their ability to conjure emotional commitment in the voters. That is a very different matter and, as far as I can see, Clegg’s party has given very little thought to it.

Worse, all three of the big Westminster parties regard this sort of consideration with lofty disdain, bordering on fear, as if any involvement of the emotions in the electorate will conjure up the Gordon Riots all over again.

Thought #2. Farage has the time to think; Clegg doesn’t
The irony is that Clegg is precisely the kind of gut politician who is capable of doing this, but he suffers from a major disadvantage now. He is deputy prime minister. He is imprisoned in the system in 70 Whitehall where he is given no time to think for himself.

His every moment is concerned with detail and immediate response and he has surrounded himself with brilliant people who are extremely good at helping him with these immediate problems. But when it comes to drawing on new thinking, outside the prevailing and – let’s face it – rather tired and therefore vulnerable assumptions of the establishment, he has had to put it off for the last four years.

He is forced to draw on the old arguments, the assumptions that trade negotiations will result in widespread jobs and well-being, for example – which a dwindling number of us believe – because he exists in a Whitehall bubble that starves his creativity. Farage doesn’t. It puts him at a major advantage.

Thought #3. If Farage is allowed to be the only outsider, he will win.
Farage has shifted his position. He is now explicitly against “big business”, though it is hard to see anything substantive which he has ever said on the subject. But this is a significant widening of his message

If that means the banking scandal, the Libor scandal, the scandal of executive pay, and the way the manipulation of the world’s economic system in favour of a tiny elite has failed to trickle down – then so am I. So is nearly everyone.

Farage has realised how the barrage of statistics used by the establishment to defend EU membership, and the union with Scotland come to that, alienates as much as it enlightens. We know, after all, the limits of their applicability.

Let’s be personal about this. I have been a Liberal since 1979. I absolutely deny that this makes me some kind of insider or beneficiary.

I deny that Lib Dems in government, and Nick Clegg in particular, are Whitehall insiders. Quite the reverse, every step forward is an exhausting struggle against vested interests.  I deny that the progress the party has made in government means we now have to defend the status quo.

As a Lib Dem, I don’t have to defend the lazy short-termism of the biggest businesses. I don’t have to pretend that backing enterprise means backing multi-million pound salaries for those who corrode the economy. I don’t have to defend the status quo, and – if I try to – I will lose the debate.

There is a clue here. If Liberals are able to see the world clearly, how the economic structures funnel wealth upwards, then we will sound like populists. But it is right that we should, but Liberal populists.

The difficulty is that it is hard to construct a new political language which is both tolerant and internationalist – but also furious at the way the world is currently arranged. That does not advertise our intention to tinker, but proclaims our determination to reform.

But that is what we have to do.

Clegg was quite right when he said that, as a nation, we are better when we are open-minded and work with other countries and peoples. That had resonance but it isn’t enough to win.  Nor was the revelation that Farage wants to dig up the north of England for fracking.

And the next generation depends on us winning.

Why Hullcoin is so irritating, and other adventures in a multi-currency world

For getting on for two decades now, I’ve been predicting a multiple currency world and multiple currency lives.
There is evidence here and there – euros in phone boxes, the rise of local currencies – but, generally speaking, it steadfastly refuses to happen.  Though I’m still convinced that it will.
It doesn’t help that I happen to live in the most boneheadedly conservative nation on earth when it comes to thinking about money.  Most English people seem to feel it was created by God around Day Six of the Genesis and hasn't changed much since.
Then along came bitcoin.  It was clear evidence that I had been on the right track, but I’m afraid I found it almost as irritating as it did before.
Not only is bitcoin doomed to be an inflationary speculative flash in the pan (I humbly submit) but its origins and structure and means of creation are the very opposite of transparent.  Its inventor remains secret, for goodness sake.
But most irritating of all, it seems to have prodded a whole rage of misunderstandings to emerge, and there was another one on Monday in the Daily Telegraph, which I've just been shown (thanks, Jock).
It says that Hull City Council has started ‘mining’ their own digital currency in order to pay to volunteers, on the grounds that HMRC doesn't recognise digital currencies until they get converted into cash.
It is quite difficult to know where to start on this one, but let's have a go.
1.     It isn't true that HMRC doesn't recognise digital currencies.  For years, they have reserved the right to tax air miles and a range of other local currencies, if they are a major source of income.  In fact, the Fininish government began taxing time credits to volunteers last September.
2.     There are already very successful means of paying volunteers, in the form of time banks and time credits operating all over the country without the need to resort to complex 'mining'.
3.    Paying volunteers is anyway a ticklish business.  You have to make sure that it doesn't dampen their basic altruistic motivation, which means that credits need to be mere recognition of people’s efforts, and in no way exchangeable for any other kind of cash - because that would undermine their motivation in the medium term.
4.    Hullcoin will find that the existing tax and benefits regulations apply to them, which means that – if their currency just recognises volunteering – then earnings will not be subject to tax and benefits, unless they are used to buy goods and except in the case of incapacity benefit.  Nothing to do with digital disregarding digital money.
5.  In fact, it comes under the EU e-money directive, and has done for years.
This is irritating partly because it is another example of a local authority which seems not to have asked advice before getting involved in new kinds of money (Isle of Wight County Council was prosecuted in 1997 for minting its own ecu coins).
I might be wrong: the Telegraph report might be wholly inaccurate.
But it is mainly irritating because it encourages the fantasy that some digital currencies are an unregulated area, a virgin territory ripe for exploitation.
My fear is that this will encourage the great Napoleonic controllers (Bank de France, Bundesbank spring to mind) to clamp down on what is a vital area of innovation: new kinds of money.
Because there is no area of modern life where we need innovative thinking than in money, and there is a long way to go.  Where we are heading is unknown but I would be prepared to lay a bet that bitcoin will not be there.
Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blog subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

Truancy, slavery and private peonage

I've been feeling a little cross at the way parents are being treated by schools. I have to confess an interest here.  In short, I am a parent.

I am therefore on the receiving end of a number of rather patronising and threatening letters from my children's school, warning me how much I might be fined for taking them out without permission.

Of course, I'm not in favour of parents just taking children out of school on a whim.  I know, I know, school is important.  My children need their education and - even more important - the school needs to meet their attendance targets.  I know what's what.

What I find unacceptable is that, by tying parents to the school term dates in such a draconian way, they fling us into the embrace of the travel companies - who have no compunction about the massive hike in their prices during the school holidays.

This is fine if you can afford it, but if you can't - and most of us can't - then there is a kind of licensed extraction involved.

It has set me thinking about the way governments lend their authority to companies that want to rake money in from us.

There is a long tradition of this kind of thing.  The Romans, Columbus and the Conquistadores and the British in India all forced the discipline of working hours on their new subjects by taxing them - so that they had to work to earn the money.

This is a form of slavery, and - although I'm not accusing the education authorities of enslaving parents - it is a related form of abuse.

It is related also to the way that local authorities used to hand us over to the tender mercies of private clampers, allowed to extract almost whatever they liked.  This was also a kind of licensed extortion, and I'm not sure that forcing parents into the higher price brackets - allowing the travel industry to put a premium on fares outside term-time - is that different.

But the reason I've been thinking along these lines is that I have just read the most terrifying article in the American magazine The Nation, about an extreme version of this phenomenon.  It involves handing over poor people accused of minor offences to private companies, who then charge them for their own imprisonment and probation.

They charge them so much, in fact, that they can never pay off the debts.  It is a kind of peonage and, although the abuses by a probation company called JCS in Harpersville, Alabama, have been struck down by a local judge (he called it a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket"), similar abuses are going on in other parts of the USA.

This is how the article ends:

"Meanwhile, even as the Harpersville case wound its way through the courts, a prison healthcare corporation called Correctional Healthcare Companies bought JCS, allowing its new parent company to expand into the supervision and enforcement industry. And six months after Judge Harrington’s ruling, GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm, bought Correctional Healthcare Companies, including its wholly owned subsidiary JCS. It was a sign that the finance world believed criminal justice would remain good business..."

It is also a sign that the new kind of narrow efficiency practiced by the finance and private equity companies is quite happy to involve peonage if the option is open to them.
But this isn't just about privatised services; the link between state schools and travel costs is another example of the state holding us down while someone - public or private - rifles our pockets.  
It is now a century since Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton claimed that both capitalism and socialism would tend towards slavery.  It increasingly looks as though they were right.

The vital importance of thinking in politics

Like everybody else, I have no idea what will happen at the next general election.  As a Lib Dem, and therefore congenitally optimistic, I believe the party will do a great deal better than most commentators expect.

I realise this is wishful thinking, but it is at least what usually happens.

Looking back on these peculiar years when the Lib Dems were so unexpectedly in government, three things occur to me.  One is that it has been a traumatic experience for the party as a whole, managing to hold together in the face of intense pressure, and doing so rather better than our coalition partners.

Two, it has also been staggeringly frustrating.  But that is the prevailing experience of government these days - things are unexpectedly difficult to achieve.

Three, I have personally learned an enormous amount. I've only been on the very fringes of government, apart from the half year I spent in the Cabinet Office doing an independent review on choice, but - perhaps even despite myself - I have found myself looking very intensely at a handful of policy areas.

I have felt myself shifting from a broad wishlist of progressive ideas, all somewhat vague, to a much deeper knowledge about what might be possible and how.
This is rather a smug thing to say, I'm afraid.  But it was a discipline I badly needed.
It has also made me think about the absolutely critical role played by thinking about policy, in detail and in depth, over a long period of time.
Lib Dem policy-makers had barely thought at all about the two most contentious areas in the coalition government's programme in its first year - the economy and the NHS.  As a result, they found themselves largely powerless in the face of detailed policy positions, well-rehearsed and well-considered.
Because there were effective Lib Dem ministers at the Treasury and Department of Health, they have clawed themselves back to a position where there could be a genuinely shared policy - quite different, for example, to what the Conservatives would do governing alone.
The Green Investment Bank has been a Lib Dem achievement, but it was also an extraordinary struggle.  And for the same reason: the details had not been worked out and the policy was vulnerable to obstruction from Treasury insiders.
But there are counter-examples too.  Steve Webb is a kind of walking think-tank, and you can see exactly what can be achieved when you have really considered an issue by the transformation he has wrought to a pensions industry which has kept their customers lazily captive for decades.
It also helped perhaps that he was happy not too take the personal credit for it.
So here is the problem.  One place it is almost impossible to think is in government.  It is particularly hard to see outside the Whitehall tramlines when you are in an office in Whitehall.
The Liberal Democrat party barely has any resources for detailed thinking, though the Liberal Voices project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd has certainly provided some.  I've found myself working in detail about how a local banking infrastructure might be created quickly to rebalance the UK economy.
But there is a great deal more thinking to do.  Including by me.  
The Cabinet Office is trying to revolutionise policy-making with their Open Policymaking project.  I have been wondering whether the Lib Dems ought to attempt something along similar lines - experimenting with much more open policy-making processes, on very narrow issues, bringing in the wealth of experience from the frontline and doing it as transparently as possible.
I have a feeling you could do more in-depth thinking in a a two-hour round table than you can in months of struggle by party insiders.  But it has to be an intense and practical focus on a very narrow area.
But the party ought to do it soon, before they are flung unprepared into another five years in coalition government.

The real fault line in the Lib Dems

Well, people say to me with conviction: the Liberal Democrats are hopelessly split – between libertarian free marketeers and socialists.

I protest in vain that I've never met either in the party, and I've been a member since 1979.

I tell them, that rather against everyone's expectations, the party has been staggeringly united through the trauma of coalition.

But it is too late to complain.  The Great Division is now part of political mythology. It is said that a group of 'economic liberals’ – not a term I recognise – gathered around The Orange Book to wrest the party away from the wispy idealists.

It is all so terribly reminiscent of the early 1980s, when a group of worldly and sophisticated social democrats were supposed to have stolen the centre ground of politics from the wispy-bearded idealists in the Liberal Party.

These were both supposed to be victories by the realists over the idealists.  But it didn't happen then and it hasn't happened since, and there is nothing I can do to prevent people from believing it.

Yet there is a division, and it isn't a very comfortable one, so we should be honest about it.

It is between the Whigs and the Technocrats.

The Whigs are the radical constitutionalists, but they are not free marketeers - at least not in the sense that they are free market fundamentalists.  They just have such a conservative idea about economics that they have become blind to it. Human rights, new settlements with local government, yes, bring it on - but economics?  Well, perhaps it is terribly important but ... what was it again?

The great disadvantage of having Whigs at one end of the party is that they are not actually interested in economics at all and are blind to the tyrannical effects when our economic institutions are faulty.

Then there are the Technocrats, drawing as much from the social democratic tradition as they do from the liberal one, but a social democratic tradition that seems terribly old-fashioned – and which leads them to identify uncritically with the great welfare institutions, and the frontline professionals, the teachers and doctors, who serve in them, believing that it is the workforce which needs defending more than the punters who use them.

The great disadvantage of having Technocrats at the other end of the party is that they are strangely stuck in the 1970s, and desperately need releasing from their exhausted Fabian dream.

Of course, most party members are somewhere in the middle.  Nor is this somehow the result of the 1988 merger between the Liberals and SDP - these have been fault lines inside the old Liberal Party since its founders met in an upper room in St James' to launch it in 1859.

The old Liberals were an alliance between the old Whigs and the Utilitarians or Radicals, who were Technocrats each and every one of then (except John Stuart Mill, who I hereby forgive).

But there was a third element in the old mix that seems now to be missing: the old non-conformists who brought the radical traditions, drawn from the English Civil War, and added the reforming zeal to Liberalism.  They also brought it a fierce spiritual edge too.
Where are they now? Are they the greens, the community politicians, the community activists?  I'm inclined to think so, because I feel instinctively that I'm on their side.  I don't think I'm a Whig - I'm too interested in economic change - and, heavens, I'm certainly not a Technocrat.

So there is my solution to healing the rift.  Forget about the division, both the real one and the imaginary one, and re-discover the fierce Liberalism that still aches to give real power to people - and does so without ignoring the need to shift economics, and without ignoring people either.
There we are.  You read it here first.  But the new Green Manifesto, which I am proud to have my name attached to rather more prominently than I expected (that's what happens when your name begins with a B), is a good place to start.

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blog subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

Why I don't think Farage won

The history of England over the past thousand years can be divided neatly in two, it seems to me.  For the first five centuries, there was a lurking sense that we were being pushed around by the bureaucrats in Rome.

For most of the next five centuries, England was pretty much alone, living by her wits - sometimes winning, sometimes not, always haunted by the ghost of continental authority.

Then the place of Rome in the national psyche was neatly swapped with Brussels.

And there we are today: UKIP is a form of extreme protestantism, in revolt against the authority of the Pope and his successors.  You can't vanquish that kind of thing in debate.

This is a way of saying that Nigel Farage's brand of nationalism has a long tradition.  It isn't really a Little Englander mentality - it is far more gradiose than that - but it certainly isn't new.

Scratch most of us English types and, somewhere inside, there is an irritable Saxon, raging on about foreign busy-bodies.

So when Nick Clegg challenged Farage last night, it seemed to me to be not just a courageous political risk, but one that he was never likely to actually win.  Sure enough, the polls showed the two debaters scoring in line with most polls about whether Britain should leave the EU.  In that respect, 36 per cent is a result.

On the other hand, I gather that those watching it on TV felt - rather like Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 - that Clegg won after all, mainly I believe because of the changing colour of Farage's face.

I listened to the debate - which was never less than compelling - from the point of view of someone who is certainly not an enthusiastic Europhile.  It seemed to me that Clegg won the exchange on crime but didn't quite overcome his opponent on the key message: jobs.

I've been wondering why.  Perhaps it is because politicians always talk about jobs, so much so that it grates - as any appeal to self-interest tends to grate against appeals to principle, which is what UKIP claims to be.

Perhaps also because of the constant repeat of the second person plural - 'your jobs' - which can feel direct, but can also sound patronising (that was the traditional critique of the 1939 war poster about 'your fortitude' bringing 'us victory').

But the main problem with Farage's message is that all these bilateral trade negotiations he wants, instead of the EU ones, will bring about exactly the same range of bureaucratic hocus-pocus that we have from the EU.

Because the great irony of the European debate, in the UK, is that what irritates the English most - the pettyfogging regulations deriving from the Single Market and opening EU membership to Eastern Europe - were both initiatives of successive British governments.  The most infuriating elements of EU membership for UKIP were both UK inventions.

National self-determination in a world of global trade, and global regulation, is a peculiar, amorphous business.  It is very far from being cut-and-dried.  It can be uncomfortable.  That is the heart of the UKIP revolt, and it's at that level that their appeal makes no sense.

There is no such thing as independence these days, and certainly not if you have to go cap in hand to the Chinese - as everybody seems to do these days.

Worse, UKIP's failure to recognise this element of the modern world may plunge us into a more powerless relationship with the USA, where we have no democratic room for manoeuvre at all.

For all the failures of the EU, which are legion, we do at least have constitutional means of getting our own way.  The alternative is a world where trade deals are settled between the technocratic elite with no veto or right of appeal.

There is the irony of Farage's message.  It looks like independence, smells like independence, but in fact it leads to a kind of powerlessness - of exactly the kind he claims to fear.

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blog subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

The problem with the banks is often the politicians

Over the past six months, and thanks to Baroness Kramer, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and some others, I’ve immersed myself in the issue of local banks.

I’ve always been interested in why, almost uniquely, the UK has such an over-centralised banking system.

The answer is largely Barclays, because they led the extraordinary process of consolidation between 1870 and 1920. Only in 1919 did the government step in and say the last big five banks standing must stay.

We still have a Big Five, and they have 85 per cent of the current account market, but they are a different Big Five to the one that Montagu Norman kept in place in the 1920s and 30s.

But then, Norman’s therapist – the great Carl Jung – said later that he was insane. We shall never know...

The real question is whether this over-concentration serves the UK economy or not, and here there is a new factor.

The politicians and banks have been squabbling since 2008 about whether or not there are enough opportunities to lend to small business.

Recent figures confirm there has actually been a change. The total stock of money lent to SMEs – over 99 per cent of the businesses in the economy – is still falling.

In every other nation in Europe, small business lending has returned to pre-2008 levels. Here the rate of the reduction has slowed down, but it is still going down.

This isn’t the fault of the banks. It is a logical response to the new Basel regulations and to global competition.

The real change is required, not from the banks, but from the politicians. They need to stop beating up the big banks but to accept that small business lending is difficult yet critical to the economy. It must be done by someone.

That is the first shift that is required, and nothing else will happen until it does.  It is too convenient for politicians to keep the banks to blame, without actually realising the basic problem.

The second is this. The big bankers get very considerable privileges for their role in the economy, personally and professionally. If their banks are no longer able to lend in that market, then they must create an infrastructure that can.

Why has small business lending recovered in other European countries? Because they have a local banking infrastructure, and an infrastructure that takes deposits rather than just lending other people’s money.

It isn’t just going to appear magically, via the hidden hand. Of the 30 new banks now awaiting approval from the regulator, only one plans to provide current accounts.

There is no way we can rebalance the economy without these in the UK. That is the big shift that is required – but the politicians have to move first.

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word blog subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

Services which try to go beyond caring

I had the great pleasure listening yesterday to the NHS blogger Roy Lilley demolishing the vacuous research by Portsmouth University for Panorama on the PM programme yesterday (40 mins in).

The research suggests that there is around £5bn a year lost to fraud in the NHS every year, and another £2bn lost to financial errors.  But there is a irritating circularity about the argument that appears to have gone over the heads of BBC producers.

It suggests that we don't know how much fraud there is in the NHS, but can perhaps estimate it by looking at fraud in other health systems in other countries.  The result is that, for an organisation the size of the NHS, it would be around £5bn.

That is potentially interesting.  But then to be shocked at the high figure is really taking the story round full circle, since it is only an estimate based on other countries.  Quite how they manage to weave a Panorama report around this is beyond me.

And so the redoubtable Lilley explained on PM, much the irritation of the man behind the study.

From my point of view, the real losses we need to worry about in the NHS are those that fall into the nether world between fraud and financial errors - the manipulation of definitions used in gaming payment targets and treatment categories.  The amount of energy that goes into this in the border between providers and commissioners make my hair stand on end.

I mention this really because I wanted to write about Roy Lilley, who is a phenomenon, so well-read in NHS circles that he is now almost a national treasure, like Alan Bennett.

Not everyone agrees with him and he certainly flusters people in and around the many conflicting top posts and overlapping agencies in the NHS.  But he manages both to be trenchant and thoughtful at the same time.  A rare thing.

This morning he wrote about the word 'compassion' and the real meaning of the word, before it became an NHS management slogan, and how it is, strictly speaking, too much to expect compassion from ordinary mortals.  This is what he said:

"Can we cultivate compassion? Probably not. You can create an atmosphere of calm, you can encourage people who love their job to do their job. You can create the time and space for good people doing good things, to do even better things. Change, instability, unpredictability and volatility are the enemies of calm and constancy. Both of which are the foundation of a good workplace."
Quite right.  But there is another problem here that Roy only hints at.  Care and compassion may be the right stance for someone taken into hospital, but the vast majority of the money spent by the NHS goes on continuing chronic conditions - eczema, back paid, depression, diabetes - for which compassion is not really appropriate.
I know charities which have also realised that, if they really want to help support people to turn their lives around, they don't want to employ compassionate people - or, if they are compassionate, they will have to leave their compassion with their coats at work.
They need something far more hard-headed than that.  In the early days of time banks, many of the people we employed to run them were so compassionate they ended up trying to do all the mutual support themselves - when the whole purpose was to find ways of encouraging people who are always volunteered to that they can find a new role in life.
It is worse than this.  For too long, our public services have been supposed to be about oozing care, wearing down the staff, until care got abolished in favour of targets.  
When all the time, it might have been more effective for them to use their position as frontline public service staff, not to be more compassionate, but to provide an equal relationship that can challenge and support people to live their own lives.
Relationships, yes: people need those.  But it isn't the need that's important - the relationships are potentially a means to an end, so that frontline staff are no longer just wallowing in what people need - they are also asking them what they can do, and to challenge them to be the heroes of their own life.
The emphasis on compassion has led to public services that emphasise a corrosive dependence.  We need a more equal relationship with people.  That may require compassion in its broadest sense, but it requires something quite different which services are only now beginning to think about.
Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

The great fantasy of defunct economics

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences," said the great economist John Maynard Keynes, "are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

He meant, of course, the English who are about as bone-headed when it comes to economics as it is possible to be.  And sometimes, I must admit, the blindest of the blind when it comes to economics can often be Keynes' fellow party members, the Liberals.

I've been wondering about this in parallel to another problem.  Because I believe it may also be an explanation for the peculiar parallel between the business of how to feed the planet, and the business of how to put roofs over our heads in the UK?

In both cases, the chattering classes and the BBC - often one and the same - believe the only possible answer worth discussing is to produce more food and build more homes.

The idea that there might be other forces at work than simple scarcity seems not to occur to them, and - if it does occur - it is very rapidly dismissed as a rather over-intellectual, over-complicated explanation.  The English are clearly, as Keynes saw, practical men one and all.

This is not to suggest that more houses and more food would have no impact on the situation.  Of course they would.

The question here is whether they would tackle the causes of the problem, whether they might solve looming shortages of food or homes, because they very definitely wouldn't.

In both cases, something else is going on.

In the case of food, the reason we appear not to have enough food in the right places is not that we don't produce enough.  It is because of the way we allow speculators on the global markets to push up the prices, and because we allow just three companies (DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto) to control half the world's seeds - and just five companies to control 95 per cent of the seeds sold in the EU.

We also allow ourselves to be deluded by measuring systems that count only the predominant crop in any area in developing countries, deliberately blinding ourselves to the power of diverse local production.

The answer in this case is not to produce more on the failed model; it is to break up the oligopoly and to stop the speculative money flowing in.

In the case of homes, the reason we appear not to have enough houses in the right places is not that we don't build enough (though we don't).  It is because we sell the homes we do build to speculators in the Far East and we allow too much money to flood into the mortgage market - the classic recipe for inflation.

The answer in this case is not to build more on the failed model; it is to reduce the money flooding into the mortgage market and stop the speculative money flowing in.

Building more, producing more, is the practical man solution.  It isn't that it would have no effect on the basic problem, but it provides us with no long-term solution.

Anyone who has read my book Broke will know that I think ratcheting property prices down slowly in the UK is the way to save civilisation, so for goodness sake don't let me spell that out again.

In any case, behind both mistakes lies one big error.  It is the idea that global prices somehow represent one eternal, God-given standard of objective truth.

As if somehow the price of tulip bulbs at the height of the great Dutch tulip bubble represented something real and meaningful.

That was the terrible, destructive fantasy of the years of the Howe and Lawson chancellorship (far more influential than the hazy phantasm called 'Thatcherism').

I am as convinced about the critical importance of free and open markets, and the creative power of enterprise, as anyone else.  But if you really think that prices will always be real, then you are a fundamentalist, and fundamentalism and civilisation can't live happily side by side.

Subscribe to this blog on email; send me a message with the word subscribe to dcboyle@gmail.com. When you want to stop, you can email me the word unsubscribe.

Why Grant Shapps is laughing all the way to the bingo

How do you get your adverts talked about when you have little or no budget for actually posting them on billboards?

I was asked a similar question some years ago by a friend of mine at a development charity, who had been given the money to make a short TV advert about development aid, but no money to buy the  space to show it.

I suggested he try to get it censored.

This turned out to be quite simple.  The TV companies refused to show it on the grounds that it was 'political' (these were the days before YouTube).  As a result, people queued up to watch it in special showings in cinemas, thrilled at the idea that merely watching the thing was flying in the face of an uncaring establishment.

Now, when Grant Shapps published his notorious and much maligned poster about beer and bingo, he couldn't really get it banned.  Nor could he reasonably get it reviled by fundamentalists or puritans.  So he did the next best thing - he got it reviled by the Labour Party.

This has got it noticed and talked about and, while people are talking about it, they are internalising exactly the message Shapps wanted: that the costs of wasting money have been going down.

I know he has also been ridiculed for using the word 'they', and maybe it is revealing, but it is also hard to see how any other word would have worked with the grammar.

Still, I share the exasperation with the beer-and-bingo aspect of the budget.  It is one thing to cut the costs of people playing bingo if they want to, but quite another to reduce the costs of air travel so that people can flood Somerset again.

I'm not defending the poster, which has spawned some brilliant spoofs.  But somehow it does demonstrate that the Labour Party is far from the sophisticated campaigning machine it takes itself for.