Responding to the riots

We’re in the third day of riots now, with few predicting that they will end anytime soon. Even cities that haven’t experienced them yet are preparing for them. On an anecdotal level, the presence of police cars and vans in Cardiff today is particularly noticeable.

That said, three days in, we still have very little understanding of their true cause. Our ignorance however is not matched by commentators. Prominent left-wingers such as Ken Livingstone are claiming they are caused by the cuts; others, like Darcus Howe, are claiming they are caused by anti-black racism. On the right, Damian Thompson blames social networking, (which in turn somehow means that UK Uncut are morally culpable), whereas Christine Odone puts the blame solely on single parent families. Brendan O'Neill knows that everybody else is wrong and blames the welfare state. Other causes espoused are muslims (somehow), as well as the lack of ice-ages in sub-saharan Africa (no, really).

We can't say how much this is caused by political issues (if at all), how much of this caused by general sociological trend or trends (and if so, which), how much is the product of local issues, how much is the result of very recent events, how much of it is maximised by media coverage (and what type) or how much it is simply criminal looting.

In short, we simply don’t know.

About the only thing we can be certain is that it is highly unlikely to be caused by One Big Thing. Declarations to the contrary – which are frequently couched in visionary-victimhood terms ‘but the establishment will strike down anyone [i.e. them] who’s brave enough to admit the truth’ – are not only baseless, but tell us nothing other than what their political agendas and prejudices are.

These riots – and our knowledge is so lacking, that it’s far from certain that that’s the correct term for them – will surely end. They will end by a mixture of sensible, effective responses by police and especially the public – the latter of which is hearteningly coming out in real force and numbers. The powers that the police have are perfectly sufficient, as the numbers of police available. After all, 5000 police officers were on hand for the Royal Wedding.

Demands to bring in the army are ludicrous, as David Allen Green pointed out. There are no grounds for thinking that they will be better informed or better trained to deal with social disturbances in urban Britain compared to the police, and far more grounds for thinking that the reverse is true.

Demands to bring more violent and martial responses, and to return to a more fear-based relationship between the police and the public,  (which is what one former Lib Dem candidate from rural Wales called for today) are also badly informed. It's not as if there were no riots in the eighties, seventies, sixties or fifties. These demands become particularly bizarre when justified on the grounds that they’re used in Northern Ireland – as if that is the sort of community-police model we wish to replicate.

Knee-jerk reactions, claiming certainty when there is ignorance, won’t help us. Let the police do their job, let the public come out in social solidarity against the rioters, and once this wave is over, let’s try to understand it properly.

In all probability, the causes won’t fit neatly into an exclusively Left/Right or traditional/modern framework, nor will the solutions to prevent such riots in future.

But whatever we lose in certainty and neatness, we will surely gain in clarity, accuracy and effectiveness.

'Political Correctness Gone Mad' - gone mad

 Last week, the editor of Spiked Magazine and Telegraph contributor Brendan O’Neill gave a speech on the tyranny of political correctness, subsequently published on Spiked here.

The title and conclusion of the piece seems to be that political correctness is not something enforced by the elites but something internal. However, this thesis doesn’t last very long, as argues that ‘the new elites clamp down on and closely govern what were previously considered to be normal interactions’.

This swivelling confusion aside, O’Neill argued that the rise of PC is down to the ‘internal moral rot amongst more traditional sections of society’, highlighting how 15 years ago the Girl Guides (apparently ‘suddenly’) rewrote their constitution. Girl Guides no longer promised to respect their ‘duty to God’, but instead to ‘love my God’ and the oath of loyalty to the Queen was removed. Changes caused because ‘in our relativistic times, when both Truth and Christianity are no longer untarnished values, there are many gods’.

For those who don’t know O’Neill, or Spiked, it might be worth pointing out here that he and his magazine are passionate republicans, and the general ‘shtick’ of the magazine is to oppose the prevailing consensus, or as Nick Cohen put it, ‘the willingness to fill space and generate controversy by saying the opposite of what everyone else is saying just because everyone else is saying it – an affectation most people get over around puberty.’

Even if you don’t agree with Cohen criticism, to lament the loss of monarchism and homogenous thought which being contrarian republicans is gloriously inconsistent. Later on, O’Neill does concede that this weakening ‘did not have to be a bad thing’, provided that it was replaced by a ‘more progressive, human-centred moral outlook’. Quite what this outlook should be is unsaid, but I’m guessing it’s the type of agenda that Spike’s advocates. It's fair enough to call for such an agenda, but to complain about the tyranny of PC because the Girl Guides added the word ‘my’ fifteen years ago, whilst then calling for the Girl Guides to reground itself on entirely new philosophy amenable to the good people of spiked magazine is chutzpah indeed.

Given the scale of PC tyranny that worries O’Neill however, it’s worth looking at the specific examples he cites as to its domination.

He highlights how teachers are no longer allowed to use the word blackboard; a five second Google search however, would show that this ‘story’ was nothing but a media fabrication.

He refers to a case of ‘a book of children’s ditties refashioned the old classic ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’, replacing ‘drunken sailor’ with ‘grumpy pirate’. The old song said ‘Stick him in a bag and beat him senseless’; the new one says ‘Tickle him till he starts to giggle’. O’Neill rhetorically askes, ‘What kind of society takes such an Orwellian, Ministry of Truth approach?. What indeed.

Again, a five second google search would have taken him to a BBC article where the authors explicitly state that the changes had "absolutely nothing to do with political correctness." Furthermore, "the shift from drunken sailor to "grumpy pirate" was to make the rhyme fit a pirate theme, rather than censorship” and that "The inclusion of action lyrics like 'wiggle' and 'tickle' offer parents and small children an opportunity to interact, have fun and enjoy acting out the rhyme together."

The worst excesses of PC tyranny therefore is the Girl Guides introducing the word ‘my’ into a sentence fifteen years ago, and two claims which are demonstrably bogus. When people have to base their arguments on such flimsy  grounds, it’s no wonder that they eventually collapse

Most articles of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ type are based on entirely distorted or just simply fabricated, and O'Neill follows in that dishonorable tradition. PC critics frequently cry out that nowadays ‘you can’t say this, you can’t say that’. In truth, they’re perfectly free to say whatever they like (obtuse libel laws aside). What infuriates them is the speech of others who criticise them for calling people faggots, pakis and niggers. They want the freedom to criticise without being criticised in turn. 

In fairness, O’Neill is close to being right on the point that PC is overwhelmingly internally generated rather than externally controlled (that is, when he doesn’t make the opposite point in the same piece), though this is caused more by an atmosphere – essentially media fabricated – that PC controls everything. It’s this that causes the few entirely ludicrous but actually true cases of ‘political correctness gone mad’ which appear in the media – almost none of which are caused by pressure ‘on high’. It’s this febrile atmosphere also which contributes towards some idiots becoming so enraged by political correctness as to take literally invocations such as O’Neill’s, to ‘pull your socks up and get your guns out.’

Contrary to their comforting delusions, criticising political correctness isn’t brave, dangerous or a sure path to social martyrdom. It’s routine, usually boorish, and so conventional that any myth can be invented in its name and it will be swallowed whole, to be endlessly regurgitated ad nauseum in the media and pseudo-critical web alike.

Plaid's economic report: Wales saved?

Plaid’s report claiming that Wales would be 40% richer if it were independent has received considerable coverage. Even the UK media’s picked up on it. It’s likely to be a base for the party’s belief in independent so it’s worth looking at it in detail.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the report isn’t really about Wales at all, at least not directly. The first 62 pages out of 70 merely make the case that smaller countries can be just as prosperous as larger ones. Essentially, what they lose from economies of scale and an extensive domestic market, they benefit from having closer relationship between state and business, and from that, greater nimbleness and responsiveness.

On the whole, it’s a largely convincing argument, though the need for near-autarky model of a corporatist state, rather than a more pure ‘free-market’ model relying on international capital should have been made more explicit. Ireland and Scotland used to be Plaid’s models. Their over-reliance on finance meant that Ireland (and Iceland) crashed harder than almost any country. Had Scotland been independent, the bailouts of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS would have buried its economy. This implicit mea culpa on Plaid’s behalf goes unacknowledged.

However, the headline story – and the political purpose of the report – that Wales would be much richer being independent is on far shakier ground.

Firstly, no mention is made of the fiscal subsidy that Wales has effectively received over the past generation (and more), whereby it’s received considerably more government spending than it’s contributed in tax. This gap remains extensive in relative terms even if you account for deficit expenditure.

The claim that Wales would be 40% richer is derived from higher growth from 1990. For it to be credible, it should subtract this subsidy from the running baseline from 1990 onwards. In other words, a credible ‘40% richer from independence’ claim would have to add this subsidy. It does not. I don’t know how much it is, though over the past 21 years, it could easily amount to an extra 20% on GDP – especially it you include the multiplier effect – and it could very well be more.

That this hasn’t been factored in, or at least acknowledged, is either exceptionally sloppy, or deliberately misleading.

Even if we accept their 40% figure however, the question then comes to how have they achieved it. Remember, most of the report makes the case that smallness has advantages that cancel out the disadvantages. Assuming this is credible, is there clear evidence that smallness is actually much more advantageous? Here the evidence in far thinner. 

One graph (p12) does show that the highest performing economies in Europe are predominantly smaller countries, though to the authors’ credit, they accept that Luxemburg should be ignored as a peculiar outlier due to its special circumstances. They also point out that smaller countries are predominantly amongst the ‘misery index’ (p14) as well. It explains this by the fact that 2 out of three countries could be described as small, so being the majority in any category isn’t particularly surprising. The argument that there isn’t a clear intrinsic cost to smallness is credible. The argument that there is a clear advantage to it however, isn’t even made, let alone proven.

So where does the 40% comes from? It only comes in at the very end of the report, and its logic is pretty astonishing. It says that there is ‘hard empirical data’ that there is a smallness premium, and this evidence is the comparison between Luxemburg and Saarland, as the former chose to be independent and the latter did not. (p63)

Here, objective inquiry seems to go out of the window. One case obviously does not prove a general trend. Particularly if that case is not only a clear outlier to be removed from the equation, but is accepted as such in the very same report.

Luxemburg is virtually a city-state of only 200,000 people, with many of its economic elites working in ‘foreign’ countries across the border. Every such job is essentially an import into the economy. Wales, with a population fifteen times greater, is to Luxemburg what Italy is to Wales. In short, very, very different. Certainly far too different to extrapolate a replicable trend, and assume Wales would have received an equal growth differential had it been independent in 1990.

Aside from the frankly absurd replication, there is the key point that if Wales was to receive the benefits of being a small corporatist state, the report would have to prove that Wales would have had both the corporations, and the effective governance, to provide this growth – not only if, but because – it was independent. Needless to say, Wales has not seen an explosion of home-made multinational corporations created since devolution, nor is the Assembly widely seen as the most efficient, effective nor dynamic of governing bodies. The assumption that independence in 1990 would have created these things is ludicrously shaky.  (As an aside, one wonders what George Monbiot – one of the party’s highest-profile supporters – makes of this urge for corporatism).

Furthermore, Plaid’s economic policy for the past two decades has not been based on turning Wales into a small corporatist state, but trying to emulate Ireland – a model this report disowns. If they had been in charge on an independent Wales since 1990, it’s clear that they would not have provided the type of economic management that this report assumes would have taken place. Neither Plaid, nor the report, comes out well from this.

Conclusion

The Welsh economy clearly needs to be rethought – radically so. There is no intrinsic reason why it cannot be a much wealthier country, and it is also clear that the prevailing thinking has failed over the past generation. This report may well spark others from different perspectives; if so, that would not only be welcomed but be its primary achievement. In its aim of proving that Wales would have been much wealthier if it was independent, it clearly doesn’t have the intellectual coherence or consistency. If Plaid – let alone Wales – was to try and build the Welsh economy on the back of it, it will surely collapse.